French Literature Reviews - 2026

C. Fernandes, Écritures du mal. La boîte de Pandore
Comparative and World Literature

Carla Fernandes, Écritures du mal. La boîte de Pandore

Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll. "CNED", 2010

192 p. - 19 €

ISBN : 978-2-13-058183-3

Viewed by Ernesto Sábato as one of the driving forces of history, evil is a central concept in his fictional work and runs through several of his essays. This notion is also present in the narratives of the Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos, ranging from his most realistic tales to those undertaking a formal exploration deeply rooted in a socio-political context. In the novel by the young Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán, rooted in a local news event, evil takes the form of sudden and repeated disappearances, while a fragmented writing style echoes a "meditation on loss".
It is within the tension between evil and vulnerability that each of these three literary approaches finds and pushes the boundaries imposed by its own discourse, thereby contributing to the continuities and ruptures that have shaped Latin American literature over the past sixty years.

Carla Fernandes, a specialist in Latin American literature, is a professor at Université Lumière-Lyon 2.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One — Ernesto Sábato, El túnel. "A Fly in the Ointment"
I. The Universe of Sábato and El túnel
II. Tensions and Passions
III. Fictional Universe and Literary Devices

Part Two — Augusto Roa Bastos, Cuentos completos. Vulnerability and the Curse of Language
I. An Author, a Country, a Body of Work
II. El trueno entre las hojas (1953): Violence and Suffering
III. El baldío (1966): Otherness and Evil
IV. Los pies sobre el agua (1967): Of Earth and Water
V. Moriencia (1969): Endless Dying and Rebirth
VI. The Genesis of Evil

Part Three — Edmundo Paz Soldán, Los vivos y los muertos. Death, Mourning
I. Contexts of the Author and the Text
II. Narrative and Voice
III. Madison and Its Curse: The Spatialization of Evil
IV. Identity, Otherness, and Evil

Conclusion

Selective General Bibliography
Index

The exploration of evil as a central thematic and structural element has a long lineage in Latin American literature, intersecting with political trauma, historical violence, and metaphysical inquiry. Carla Fernandes examines how specific authors construct their fictional universes around the tension between malevolence and human vulnerability, positioning these texts within the broader landscape of twentieth-century Hispanic literature.

Readers interested in Latin American narrative traditions and thematic criticism may find this study relevant. The volume discusses Ernesto Sábato's novel El túnel, selected short fiction by Augusto Roa Bastos, and Edmundo Paz Soldán's Los vivos y los muertos, analyzing the distinct literary devices each writer employs to address the presence of evil and loss within their respective cultural and historical contexts.