The Chilean novel
Literature and society

This book by Grínor Rojo reports on the various moments through which the development of the formal complexity of narrative discourse in our country has passed, or rather, it distinguishes the variations that occur in different eras, but without this meaning that it is granting greater value to the works of the present than to those of the past or vice versa. Formal complexity is historical, it changes with the passage of time and without such changes necessarily bringing progress with them. From Martin Rivas, the best-known and best of Alberto Blest Gana's novels, which dates from 1862, until The tactile system by Alejandra Costamagna from 2018, the selection includes eleven novels and spans a little over a century and a half of Chilean literary production. It highlights the distance between popular mass-market novels, whose mission is to entertain, and those that aim to go further and provide us with entertainment, aesthetic pleasure, and knowledge all at once.