Asturias was Rosario Castellanos’s friend (“What tiny little Mayan hands you have!” Elena Poniatowska once overheard him exclaim to her). She was very much aware of the technique he had devised to incorporate the world view of a pre-Columbian culture into a modern European literary genre. After all, she faced the same challenge in writing about the Maya of Chiapas, which shares more than just a border with Guatemala. She had to be aware, as well, of the ascendency of magic realism in Latin American literature, which would reach its apex with the 1967 publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s dazzling One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Though Asturias’s influence is detectable in the detached, hyperreal, and almost balletic depiction of violence in Castellanos’s 1962 novel The Book of Lamentations, (the machetes that whir through the air as if of their own accord), her book can be read as a virtual manifesto against magic realism. The only magic in the unrelieved starkness of its landscape is the all too familiar spell of one human being’s power over another. In his great poem, El Desdichado, the French poet Gerard de Nerval speaks of “the black sun of melancholy.” The Book of Lamentations was written by the cold light of that sun, and emphatically not out of Carpentier’s vision of the marvels of American reality, though the historical events it is based on are as staggering as any of the wonders Carpentier enumerates.

Its insistence on the minute specifics of a single area places The Book of Lamentations, instead, in the tradition of intensive regionalism that characterizes the nineteenth-century Latin American novel. This was the very literary tradition the Latin American writers of the generation that came to be known as the “Boom” had vehemently rejected. Castellanos, in turn, repudiated the trappings of magic realism (the blood that flows from the dead body through the village to stop at the murderer’s door, the human beings who transform themselves into animals at will) and of modernist narrative experimentation—the novel with chapters in a seemingly random arrangement, or that is a single endless paragraph—that were the predominant features of the Latin American novel of her time. Instead, she wrote what struck many as a curiously antiquated document—an anachronism.