Latin American Literature

This was written by Mario Vargos Llosa in regards to Men of Maize (The Modernist Epic of the Guatemalan Indians) but I think it sheds some light on why people have difficulties reading Latin American literature (Especially Asturias and Cortazar).

"[Latin American literature] constantly develops through unexpected comparisons and vertiginous litanies, word games and puns, poetic and musical pyrotechnics in which the narrative suddenly catches fire and turns to smoke, only to reappear, a few paragraphs or pages later, clothed in almost literal realism.

The error lies in thinking of these difficulties as doorways or walls that conceal the hidden treasures of [Latin American literature]. In reality the treasures are those very difficulties. In other words, it is precisely that mixture of reason and unreason, madness and logic, myth and history, waking and dreaming, educated speech, popular speech and invented speech, the poetic and the prosaic, that makes this [literature worth reading]."