José Donoso's Historia personal del "boom" [The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History] provides readers of English with information about the so-called Boom in Latin American fiction of the 1960s as well as some insights into the life of Chile's best-known living writer. In this slim volume Donoso makes no pretense of serious scholarship, but rather evokes personal recollections of major events between 1955 and 1970. The most important of these are: the Cuban Revolution, which served to unify Latin American intellectuals; the publication by Seix Barral of Mario Vargas Llosa's experimental novel La ciudad y los perros (1962); the founding of the literary journal Mundo Nuevo; and the resounding success of García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967), which brought the Boom to its peak. The end of the euphoric period came with the arrest of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, an act that shattered the...