I am delighted by that imagination without understanding completely where it comes from. Kafka? Certainly. For our century, it is he who gave legitimacy to the implausible in the art of the novel. Yet the Kafkan imagination is different from Rushdies or Garcia Marquez's; that teeming imagination seems rooted in the very specific culture of the South; for example, in its still living oral literature (Chamoiseau drawing inspiration from the Creole storytellers) or, as Fuentes likes to recall, in the Latin American Baroque, more exuberant, more "crazy," than Europe's.

Or another key to that imagination: the tropical-ization of the novel. I refer to Rushdie's fantasy: Farishta hovers above London and wishes to "tropical-ize" that hostile city. He lists the advantages of tropi-calization: "institution of a national siesta… new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards)… religious fervour, political ferment… friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family… spicier food… Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess."

("Culture of excess" is an excellent expression. The tendency of the novel in the last stages of its modernism: in Europe: the ordinary pursued to its utmost; sophisticated analysis of gray on gray; outside Europe: accumulation of the most extraordinary coincidences; colors on colors. The dangers: in Europe, tedium of gray; outside Europe, monotony of the picturesque.)

The novels created below the thirty-fifth parallel, though a bit. foreign to European taste, are the extension of the history of the European novel, of its form and of its spirit, and are even astonishingly close to its earliest beginnings; nowhere else today does the old Rabelaisian sap run so joyfully as in the work of these non-European writers.