Pueblos, comunidades y municipios frente a los proyectos modernizadores en America Latina, siglo XIX (review)
century were projected onto the past. In part 2, these Boom writers speak out against the perceived inequities of the contemporary era through interviews or features for newspapers and magazines. Nunn suggests that, in a manner echoing William Faulkner’s assessment of the Southern past as not even passed, these writers claimed the past portrayed in their revisionist prose is “omnipresent” (p. 119). In part 3, Nunn moves from the interviews and expository prose of the Boom novelists to the investigations of Latin American social scientists. In this genre, history becomes “constricted” or even disguised (p. 184), but the tenor of criticism remains sharp. The defects that Boom writers portrayed in their fictional history are the dysfunctions that the region’s social scientists reveal in the charts and graphs of today’s academic journals. Nunn interprets all this as corresponding to the corsi and ricorsi (flux and reflux) that Giambattista Vico argued is the character of history. Having said that he finds evidence that the Boon writers have a familiarity with Vico’s theory, Nunn issues another disclaimer: that his book is not one about Vico and Latin America. Although I remain a bit puzzled by what exactly Nunn is up to, I appreciate his pleasant, relaxed prose, with its occasional smile here and there. I suggest the book deserves your attention, especially to the manner in which El Boom collides with its past to produce cataclysmic history.