Literary Leader Emerges in a Culturally Fused World

Not long ago, fusion cuisine and music seemed daring and exotic. Now, both are unremarked-upon staples of American life.

Fusion literature is the next new thing. Think of it as aesthetic blow-back the unlooked-for but delicious consequence of American popular culture’s globalization.

Rayo--an imprint of HarperCollins--is one of the publishers in the movement’s forefront, and this week it signed the edgy young Chilean author Alberto Fuguet to a two-book deal. Fuguet’s new novel, “The Movies of My Life,” which Rayo will publish in both English and Spanish, chronicles the family life of Beltran Niemeyer, an Encino-raised Chilean seismologist whose sense of reality derives from American B-movies such as “Earthquake!” and “Jaws 2.” Fuguet’s second book will collect a cycle of linked short stories titled “Hecho in the USA.”

“Fuguet is a leader in the new wave of young Latin American authors,” said Rene Alegria, Rayo’s founder and editorial director. “Together, they are breaking the long-held stereotypes of what Latin American literature is. Fuguet demonstrates perfectly the bizarre cultural union which has only recently begun to weld together the aesthetics of North and South America.”

One of the hallmarks of this new wave, according to Alegria, is its recognition “of American popular culture’s amazing power to infiltrate all parts of the world.” Fuguet is a particularly knowledgeable spokesman for that viewpoint, since he spent his childhood and early adolescence in the San Fernando Valley until his family returned to Chile. “Growing up in Encino and then going back to Santiago, he comprehends pop culture’s American origins,” said Alegria. “He also understands how it is imported into other societies and then transformed there in wildly unique ways. McDonald’s, Nike, Michael Jordan in all their complexity are now amazing global presences. This fact has the power to elevate or depress, depending on your viewpoint.”

Editorially, Rayo’s own point of view represents a Latino-inflected synthesis of cutting-edge writing from both hemispheres. Among its American authors is Los Angeles’ Yxta Maya Murray, whose forthcoming novel “The Conquest” already is gaining unusual attention.

“We’re not even a year old yet,” said Alegria. “The first of the 20 books we’ve published so far went into the stores last September, but we’ve already had two national bestsellers. I think our long invisibility as Americans created a kind of creative trench in which so many of our writers blossomed and from which they’re now emerging fully formed and ready. We’re trying to publish them in the way they should be published. That is to say, without losing sight of the fact that Latino American writing is, in the end, very American.”

Fuguet is well known in Latin America as the editor of “Se Habla Espanol: Voces Latinas en U.S.A,” an anthology of young writers from throughout Latin America who identify themselves as members of “McOndo,” a playful conflation of the fast-food chain and Macondo, the fictional city in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realist classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The anthology collects nonfiction pieces on the authors’ experience of the United States and, in some cases, their view of U.S. Latinos.

The Chilean writer “has been anointed by many of these writers as the leader of their movement,” said Alegria. “Alberto certainly has been the most vocal among them. Their influence already is being felt among the young Mexican writers, who call themselves the Crack school--for its position on cultural fault lines--and who have adopted the same literary ideology as McOndo. Basically, they are trying to capture what is real in contemporary South America and to bring its literature out of the shadow of magic realism. There’s a great deal of joy in their writing. They understand that the globalization of art and culture destroys, and yet is so much fun.

“Alberto is an apt example of this school, which is the first to capture what the world of letters is really going through,” Alegria said. “It is an experience that has not been focused upon, this creation of a new sensibility by the merging of North and South in the Western Hemisphere. The truth is that, today, you can travel from Santiago to Encino and--whether you speak English or Spanish--feel at home.”

California Coast’s Got

Another Steinbeck

Few names exert quite so powerful a claim on California letters as that of John Steinbeck.

It is testimony to his books’ enduring power that, when we think of him, we mentally identify Steinbeck first as author of “The Grapes of Wrath” rather than as “the Nobel laureate.”

His first published book, “The Pastures of Heaven,” which appeared in 1932, was a closely linked collection of short stories. So too is the first published fiction by his eldest son, 58-year-old Thomas Steinbeck. Forthcoming from Ballantine in the fall, the book is titled “Down to a Soundless Sea.” It is a volume of seven vigorous and artful stories whose common theme is life in and around the Monterey Peninsula during the early 1900s.

Thomas Steinbeck, who lives with his wife, Gail, on the Central California coast, is a longtime screenwriter, cinematographer and photojournalist, who began his career reporting from Vietnam.

“I never wanted anyone to think I was in any way trying to compete with my father,” he said. “He was such a large figure and cast such a deep shadow. But about 2 1/2 years ago, I began writing these stories in earnest. Then, I had to turn back to screenplays, which I hate, since it’s like writing the directions for a VCR--and about as much fun to read.”

When the stories finally were finished, Steinbeck said, “I told my agent, ‘This is never going to sell.’ The stuff is just so regional I still can’t imagine that anybody from north of San Jose or south of San Luis Obispo will want to read it. But one thing led to another and I got a two-book deal. This is the first, and I’m already at work on a novel to follow.”

It too is set mainly on the Central Coast, though this time in Big Sur. “It’s the chronicle of several generations of an Irish family that repeatedly tries to come to America, but is frustrated by various historical events until the last generation, whose members arrive on the Central Coast at the turn of the century,” Steinbeck said. “In those years, it was a very remote place. Big Sur might as well have been an island in the middle of the Pacific.

“It also was a period in which the last of California’s real innocence was passing away. The story ends at the time of the anti-Japanese riots in San Francisco in 1901. In the largest sense, the book’s theme is that the joy is in the wanting, because when the family arrives in Big Sur and takes up ranching, they find their struggle is much more than they expected.

“I spent most of my youth hanging around the Big Sur, and I understand the ranching life there. ‘Men break and boys bounce,’ they used to say. It’s the roughest cowboying in the world. So, this novel is about the joys and trials of freedom.”

Work in Progress:

An Ancient Love Story

Nicaraguan writer Giocanda Belli is author of three novels, five poetry collections and of “Country Under My Skin,” a memoir, forthcoming from Knopf, of her part in the Sandinista movement. She lives in Santa Monica.

“I am quite at the beginning of a new novel. I have found an interesting story, a love story that takes place in the Middle Ages. It involves the Spanish queen, Juana la Loca [Juana the Mad], daughter of the king of Castile. Her husband was Filipe the Fair, who was the son of Maximillian of Austria. They have a torrid love affair in which jealousy plays an important part. This jealousy, in fact, is supposedly the cause of her madness.

“So, I have been doing a lot of research on the Middle Ages, reading and listening to lectures. It is a fascinating plunge into that time period. You can really see how so many aspects of modernity were slowly coming into being in those times. Politically, it is a very interesting period. I also have become quite fascinated with the Catholic queen, Isabella of Castile. She was an amazing woman.”