Contemporary Mexican Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

Poet and novelist Juvenal Acosta was born in Mexico City in 1961, and has lived in the
San Francisco Bay Area since 1986, where he teaches and is part of its literary community. San Francisco also serves as the atmospheric setting for his first novel El cazador de tatuajes (first published in 1998, reissued in 2004 as a “final version”). Acosta has also published two anthologies of Mexican poetry in translation, Light from a Nearby Window: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (1993) and Dawn of the Senses: Selected Poems of Alberto Blanco (1994), a number of short stories, and publishes criticism and essays. In 2004 Acosta finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Davis, entitled “Cuerpos violentos. Sexo, amor y muerte en tres poetas mexicanos: Ramón López Velarde, Xavier Villarutia y Octavio Paz.” Acosta is the founder of the Writing and Consciousness MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco.
His second novel, Terciopelo violento, came out in 2003 and with El cazador de
tatuajes forms part of the trilogy that Acosta calls “Vidas menores.” The third novel in the trilogy, La hora ciega, has yet to be published though he has written another novel,
Inmortal, that will be out in 2008. In El cazador de tatuajes, and to a lesser degree in
Terciopelo violento, the experience of physical exile combined with erotic encounters of great intensity leads to the reconfiguration, if not to the destruction of individual identity. Acosta’s first two novels have a quick rhythm that recalls the style of mystery novels and of thrillers, but also stand out due to their intertextuality and their intellectual tone, primarily in El cazador de tatuajes. The narrator of El cazador de tatuajes speaks directly about several authors and their philosophical meditations on seduction: Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera, The Marquis de Sade, and Soren Kierkegaard to mention the most important. The mixing of styles and genres produces very effective and peculiar characters, conflicts and atmospheres; one character in particular, Angela Cain, “the Countess,” is reminiscent not only of Julio Cortázar’s “La Maga” of Rayuela (more so for the challenge she represents for the Tattoo Hunter than for her psychological character), but also of the characters Madeleine Sprague and Elizabeth Short from James Ellroy’s The Black Dhalia. In this way Acosta’s prose generates an exciting hybrid style: eroticism, thriller, Noir, gothic literature and “highbrow” prose. Acosta has stated that through this hybrid style he wishes
to reach a wider reading public with stories that won’t insult the intelligence of a
sophisticated reader, but that can keep the interest of most people and at the same time “dance on the edge of that line that we vaguely define as ‘the erotic.’” In the following interview, the author discusses several topics: the importance of his
experience in the U.S. for his development as a writer, his views on writing, literary
eroticism, autobiography, the importance of a writer’s lineage. He also reveals new
directions in his writing, and shares his views on the younger generation of Mexican
writers. In many respects, Juvenal Acosta represents the resurgent cosmopolitanism of his generation of Latin American writers, a generation actively engaged with international popular culture and anxious to break the confines of their national identities.