Style
Roa Bastos was an exponent of the Neobaroque style that brought Latin American literature to the fore internationally in the mid-20th century. Among others, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is also associated with this school of writing. The style uses a complex system of metaphors that are often very closely tied to the land, flora and culture of the particular writer, especially in the case of Roa Bastos. Magic realism is a Neobaroque concept that applies such systems of metaphor to otherwise realistic settings (Yo, el Supremo being a notable example of the form). The Neobaroque style was used by many Paraguayan writers in exile after 1947 and until the 1980s. At the core of much of the work from this group are ideas of political freedom and the emancipation of their homeland.
Roa Bastos started out writing poetry in the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque traditions. Later he took on "a new sensibility" in response to the poetry of Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and García Lorca. However, it is as a prose-fiction writer Roa Bastos has built his considerable reputation, through his novels and numerous short stories. Roa Bastos' novels blend the present and past by creating scenes with myths from pre-colonial times and Christian legends, developing a special kind of Magic Realism, although there are significant stylistic variations between his major novels.
Read more about this topic: Augusto Roa Bastos
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We think it is the richest prose style we know of.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)