The Blog

Of all the attributes that set Latin America apart from its northern neighbors, perhaps none captivates quite like the regional tendency to put community before the individual. Few visitors to Latin America fail to observe the way the lives of so many Latin Americans interweave, and the way that interweaving expresses itself socially. If you’ve ever shared an afternoon meal in a Latin American home or enjoyed a dinner out until five in the morning, you’ve witnessed the way Latin Americans appreciate one another’s company. This spirit of camaraderie suffuses all levels of society, expressing itself in social customs, economics, and politics. It’s fair to wonder: is the communal spirit that keeps an Epiphany celebration going all night long the same that makes the region so resistant to globalization?

In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novella La Jalousie (1957), the unnamed narrator, whose presence is delineated only by the arrangement of exterior objects, relays his observations from behind a slatted window. Meticulous attention is paid to every nuance of gesture and tone in an intimate relationship, thus producing a composite portrait of an environment. No drastic event occurs but the robotic details of human behavior are revealed for their immense importance as the signifiers of emotion. Marc Rahe’s recent poetry collection, The Smaller Half, operates in much the same manner, but with one difference: the speaker’s shrewd surveillance is part of a human warmth that suffuses the entire collection.