Other faces of Bolivia: the Amazon as a laboratory in three current novels

Abstract

This work addresses the novels Manubiduyepe by Juan Pablo Piñeiro (2020), Sayonara Honey by Darwin Pinto (2022) and La mirada de las plantas by Edmundo Paz Soldán (2022), to analyze their ways of representing the Bolivian Amazon. We put the emphasis on the work of juxtaposition of images with which they create the portrait of this area. From the description of these modes and their narrative procedures, we remarks the explication of how this image of the country allows giving this geopolitically relevant area in the current literature.

In dialogue with the work of Ana Pizarro (2009), the hypothesis is that from this fictional area a critique of recent politics is being worked on, a counter-image of the Andean country and a series of scriptural bets that question the possibilities and challenges of fictional writing itself as a possibility (or not) of collective representation. In many ways, this production stages the value of a geopolitics conscious of its agendas and sites of enunciation as much as a display of scriptural potential. We understand that the creative and nominative is carrying an enormous responsibility for being a political exercise that inscribes or eliminates, or qualifies, or erases, or creates regional archetypes in the imaginaries. As well as for taking charge of the silences on maps designed by readings and positions never innocent or harmless.