In his 2006 novel La Gruta del Toscano, Mexican author Ignacio Padilla demonstrates the tendency among the Crack writers to “embrace and contest” their uneven access to world literature as writers from a peripheral culture. This under studied novel refuses to engage in privileging Latin American literature to establish truths about the non-West in Asia. The uneven power dynamic of East and West is embodied by Sherpa Pasang Nuru’s oral tales about lost Western explorers searching for the bottom of a cave they believe to be Dante’s Inferno. Nuru controls the narrative about the terrain and its literary connections. Padilla’s gesture of reaching out and appropriating source texts from the European literary canon and from Alpinist narrative embraces the power of their human drama, but also contests their Eurocentrism and imperialistic worldview. Rather than speaking for someone else in the Himalayan contact zone, Padilla’s inscrutable protagonist Nuru demonstrates sympathy for the situation of the local Sherpa population. As a “strategic Occidentalist,” to use the theory of Ignacio Sánchez Prado about the Crack authors, Padilla approaches Mexican narrative from a variety of foreign inspirations, and like in Borges’ view, his work demonstrates that there are no geographic limits to the scope of Latin American literary invention.
