John Manuel Arias is the author of Crocodilopolis, out this week from Bloomsbury. Below, he recommends three must-read Costa Rican writers.
Costa Rica is often described as lush—one pictures its forests housing 5% of the world’s biodiversity: orchids, monkeys, reefs with resplendent fish. But its literature is just as sprawling, as full of life as any tropical landscape. Publishers like La Universidad de Costa Rica or La Editorial de Costa Rica keep Costa Rica’s rich literary legacy thriving. Costa Rica’s National Book Festival graces San José on the final Saturday of August. When one needs a beach read, Costa Rica is the place to go. Here are some writers to get you started.
Yolanda Oreamuno
Yolanda Oreamuno was an author far ahead of her time. Of her beauty, it was said the sun stopped to gaze at her; yet her first and only novel contains large, imposing shadows, cast by Costa Rica’s inescapable patriarchy in the 1940’s. La ruta de su evasion (Her Way Out) documents a family under the violent rule of its despot patriarch—two sons fighting against their own replication of their father’s bitterness, and his wife, ill and bedridden, staring down death: the only way out of her loveless, brutal marriage. Revolutionary and illogically gorgeous, Her Way Out is a feminist tome that has inspired Costa Rican women for generations.
Eunice Odio
Yolanda Oreamuno sadly died at the age of 40, in the Mexico City home of her best friend and legendary poet Eunice Odio. Odio was neither of her time nor ahead of it—her poetry exists outside of our understanding of it, a world both expansive and tenderly interior. In her four-party collection El tránsito del fuego (The Fire’s Journey), Odio creates the world anew in an epic mythology, complete with gods, destruction, and an elemental fury that has made her work cult classics.
Quince Duncan
Traveling farther south to the province of Limón, Quince Duncan still graces the pages of Costa Rica. He is known as the first Afro-Caribbean writer to publish in Spanish in Costa Rica. With an impressive bibliography of 14 books over the past 50 years, including Los cuatro espejos (The Four Mirrors) to Las raíces vivientes (Living Roots), Duncan transformed and continues transforming the literary landscape of Costa Rica, focusing on Black characters and their experiences throughout the country, but especially in the rich culture and history of Limón.
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