No se solicitan gringos

In a discussion of the Tempest challenge over in nihilistic_kid's journal, I was musing on how my current focus on non-Anglophone writers makes it even more challenging. A couple days ago, a bookstore-owner friend with a Germanicist background proudly showed me his shelf of untranslated works from "contemporary German authors". They were almost entirely white and male and mostly dead. Then today I was at another bookstore and my eyes fell on a compilation of five "modern Latin American writers". These turned out to be Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, García Márquez, Rulfo. Can't argue with any of those choices from a quality standpoint, yet once again we have five dead White males (albeit one [closeted] homo).

I understand that the challenge is a crude instrument whose ultimate purpose is just to (in Nick's words) "make people think a little bit about what they stuff into their eye-holes". So I have people reassuring me that, given the international juggernaut which is the Anglo-American publishing establishment, I get points just for reading something that didn't appear originally in English. But I don't get the feeling of encountring a significant challenge to my worldview from reading something like Carlos Fuentes' La cabeza de la hidra, as I am now. Believe it or not, this was a "lesser" choice, something closer to pure pleasure to get me reading again after the lengthy hiatus that was monshu's hospital stay. (You think it's hard to concentrate when you're in the bed, let me tell you it's not much better when you're in the chair and braced at any moment for a request from your husband or an unannounced visit from some physician, nurse, or tech.)