Kids these days. They think they\u2019ve invented everything. The McOndo writers and Crack Generation, who so proudly buck the Magic Realist tendencies of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, who seek to find a place within Latin American letters sans spirits . . . they\u2019ve got their heads in the right place even if their books aren\u2019t always the best. But, having read the stories of Manuel Abreu Adorno, I have to wonder if the Crack and McOndo groups know that their battle was won in 1978.<\/p>\n
And the Hippies Came<\/em>, the collected stories of Abreu Adorno (not to be confused with the other Adorno, who is far less fun to read), is, as the translator\u2019s forward tell us, a neglected classic, a book that resonated with readers upon impact and caught the attention of Julio Cort\u00e1zar. No wonder: the book is daring, fun, utterly readable, and\u2014why not, let\u2019s use the term\u2014postmodern.<\/p>\n Abreu Adorno\u2019s stories, most of them one part of a conversation, boast a striking immediacy, so much that the experimentation of tales such as \u201cto please ourselves\u201d effectively draws the reader along through a string of references, piled up without punctuation, to an inevitable conclusion. The pop culture mingled with literary playfulness is surely what captivated initial readers, fusing music with literature and echoing the tastes of readers who love Oulipo and the Beats as well as the Allman Brothers and Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez. Riffing off of Raymond Queneau\u2019s Exercises in Style<\/em>, Abreu Adorno presents us with \u201cthe truth about farrah fawcett majors,\u201d a deconstruction and reconstruction of a sentence that reveals a number of ideas within one very famous source. \u201cwhat they said to each other for twenty-five dollars\u201d narrates a conversation between a Spanish-speaking prostitute and her john, a CIA<\/span> agent, neither speaking in the other\u2019s tongue, the Spanish here un-translated in order to effectively communicate the distance between these characters. But the jewel in the crown may be the title story, which celebrates the arrival of a rock festival on the beach of Vega Baja along the lines of Woodstock, an event that promises music, sex, and LSD\u2014but also brings horror:<\/p>\n \u201cI came and saw how some local boys beat up some blonde kids. I came and saw how some stole from the tents of others. I came and saw naked girls everywhere. I came and saw people were smoking and singing . . . . I came and saw colors multiply before my eyes. I came and saw a group of local boys masturbating behind some palm trees. I came and found out they had raped several girls. I came and I was told how some kid had been stabbed that afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Perhaps it is a disservice to highlight the grim moments of the story, but I feel the tale best exemplifies the reality behind the hippie illusion, the manner in which American celebrity manifests when exported, and the clash of dominant and subjugated cultures. This was the late 70s, well after the idealism of the hippies was shown to be, at best, a mixed bag. And for the shores of Vega Baja in tiny Puerto Rico, such a grand spectacle of American joyful excess could only end with an equal dose of pain.<\/p>\n Now that I\u2019ve spoken about the steak, let\u2019s talk about the sizzle: kudos to 7Vientos, the small press that resurrected this book. Published as a flip edition with the stories in their native Spanish along with the English translation, packaged with beautiful art printed directly on the hardcover, and loaded with author photos, the book feels like rock and roll albums used to feel in the days before iTunes. Kudos as well to Rafael Franco-Steeves for translating the book, a labor of love that has brought English speakers a neglected literary voice and reintroduced Spanish readers to a lost classic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kids these days. They think they\u2019ve invented everything. The McOndo writers and Crack Generation, who so proudly buck the Magic Realist tendencies of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, who seek to find a place within Latin American letters sans spirits . . . they\u2019ve got their heads in the right place even if their books aren\u2019t always the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[51876,51896,6786,51906,51866,51886,6516,22356],"class_list":["post-294356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-7vientos","tag-and-the-hippies-came","tag-latin-american-literature","tag-llegaron-los-hippies","tag-manuel-abreu-adorno","tag-sietevientos","tag-spanish-literature","tag-vincent-francone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339616,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294356\/revisions\/339616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n