Infinite Influence

Manuel Antonio Córdoba examines the never-ending quest for a Spanish-language David Foster Wallace.

By Manuel Antonio CórdobaMarch 2, 2025

• Fiction

• Literary Criticism

THE YEAR IS 2008. David Foster Wallace has just died by suicide and every Spanish-language writer is rushing to their blog to post a heartfelt obituary for their favorite North American novelist. Vicente Luis Mora: “I wonder if Wallace will become the Kurt Kobain of North American fiction.” Alberto Fuguet: “Perhaps being a writer is, in fact, a dangerous profession.” Luna Miguel: “Today I mourn my boyfriend’s favorite writer. I have never read him.” In the days and months that followed, David Foster Wallace’s dour face monopolized half a dozen Spanish literary supplements, the journal Quimera devoted a dossier to his legacy, Rodrigo Fresán multiplied his condolences between two countries and their respective cultural magazines (Página 12 and Letras Libres), and Random House Mondadori reprinted and sold several runs of their translation of Infinite Jest (1996). 

It was the start of a hunt for the Spanish-language David Foster Wallace. All through the late 2000s and the 2010s, a litany of authors tried to write long, cerebral, postmodern novels that summed up the zeitgeist and boredom of late-stage capitalism, racking up innumerable reviews along the way where critics described the works of these youngish footnote novelists as promising descendants of Infinite Jest.

In 2002, the DFW craze started a little earlier when Spanish became the second language (after Italian) to feature a translation of his thousand-page novel. The date is significant and speaks to the early and singular adoption that the author enjoyed in the Spanish-speaking world. The novel was translated into German in 2009, Portuguese in 2012, and French in 2015 (some 20 years after the original English-language publication). But it’s not exclusively a question of timing: from the moment it was translated, Infinite Jest (and DFW) began to operate as the measuring stick against which all vaguely avant-garde Spanish writers were evaluated. In Italy, meanwhile, with the exception of Antonio Moresco, DFW ’s influence seems to have barely registered on the local literary landscape. And while Ulrich Blumenbach’s six-year-long translation was celebrated in Germany, the book had an indifferent reception in France, Brazil, and Portugal. Several French reviewers dismissed the novel’s logorrhea, with one particular critic labeling Infinite Jest “a schoolboy’s gag.”

There is, in fact, no other Western language where David Foster Wallace has had as much impact as Spanish. In 2008, when he died, the publishing industry was facing the collapse of the financial market. In the years leading up to the crash, there had been a boom of independent Spanish-language publishers, including Libros del Asteroide, Sexto Piso, Periférica, and Alpha Decay, whose series Héroes Modernos did much to spread the American alt-lit movement among Spanish audiences. At Random House Mondadori, the late editor Claudio López Lamadrid assembled a group of younger writers, translators, and early influencers and began to publish all the remaining celebrities of the American avant-garde. In 2007, there had been the first mention of a “Nocilla Generation,” led by Agustín Fernández Mallo, and advertised as a group of “Afterpop” essayists, cross-genre novelists, and post-poetic poets. Around that time, Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie was busy rescuing Roberto Bolaño from the relative obscurity in which he had existed up to his death, and the Chilean’s influence was blending with that of his North American counterpart. In the early 2010s, the publishing industry began to search for “The Great Novel of the Crisis” (this was an actual and frequently used term); however, pace Rafael Chirbes, this dream was never quite realized. Presiding over that decade, inescapably on the stands of the expanding bookstore chain La Central, a saint and model to the hordes of writers who flooded the blogosphere, an acronym needing no explanation: There was DFW.

One could mention many Spanish-language writers who, from the mid-2000s onward, began to shamelessly or indirectly imitate him: Eloy Fernández Porta, Vicente Luis Mora, Mario Levrero, Jorge Carrión, Carlos Fonseca, Alberto Fuguet. The two more enduring authors from this cohort are the Spanish Agustín Fernández Mallo and the Argentinian Rodrigo Fresán. Mallo was in his forties when he sired a whole generation of allegedly groundbreaking writers by publishing Nocilla Dream (2006). It was a text of fragments, citations, and rehearsals, which later expanded into a trilogy. The last volume closed with a comic strip where a cartoonified Enrique Vila-Matas reminisces about two stories written by Mallo. When it came out, the trilogy was celebrated as the greatest printed achievement of the blogosphere. Its author has since graduated as one of the most persistent Spanish postmodernists in a landscape where many early DFW-philes have folded into the confessional or autofictional mode. Fresán, meanwhile, had always wanted to be a Great American Novelist. No other person in Spanish-speaking history has used the Jamesian acronym for Great American Novel (GAN) so fervently across so many reviews, conferences, and fireside chats about US fiction. In a 2003 symposium held in Seville about the future of the Latin American novel, he sat next to an ailing Bolaño and was reprimanded by his peers in attendance (Cristina Rivera Garza, Fernando Iwasaki, Edmundo Paz Soldán) for wanting to write GANs. And that’s exactly what he went on to do, brilliantly in the case of his Parts trilogy, which showcase all the swimming pools, seven-part structures, F. Scott Fitzgerald sections, and corny Anglicisms he has been trademarking for the last 20 years. A critic as much as a writer, he remains the Prologist in Chief, writing introductions to every American export from Carson McCullers to Joseph Heller and Don Winslow.

What did DFW mean to these writers? In a word, he was seen as Spanish literature’s last chance to jump on the train of postmodernism. Even if the Spanish-language tradition includes some of the founders of metafiction (Cervantes, Borges) and still maintains some of its most interesting living representatives (César Aira, Vila-Matas), it was believed that Spanish literature had missed the chance to participate in the heyday of the American avant-garde. Then there was DFW’s “maximalist” style, his supermarket prose, which was adopted as an alternative to the tradition of baroque Spanish. An option that allowed writers to disavow the lineage of 20th-century excess (Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Francisco Umbral, the Boom) while also indulging in the language’s addiction to stylistic play. Why the DFW school wanted to disavow this lineage is psychologically complex and speaks to what Mexicans call “malinchismo” (a Hispanic variety of the national inferiority complex). To this day, more than 50 percent of all translated literature in Spanish comes from English. The early push to bring DFW to Spanish contrasts with Bolaño’s miserable, readerless run while alive. Ultimately, we are talking about the cultural dominance of the Anglosphere. In that sense, the fascination with Infinite Jest is only a subset of Spanish literature’s worship of North American “experimentalism.” Of all the authors and editors mentioned above, none is more responsible for this fad than Javier Calvo, one of the most influential Spanish-language writers of his generation. I’m using the term “writer” loosely: it’s his ubiquitous translations that are influential. 

Calvo had his start in the early 2000s and struck gold by translating a yet unknown David Foster Wallace. Early reviews made perfunctory nods to Calvo’s versatility; by sheer insistence and output, he became the dean of English-language translators and the ambassador of American fiction in Spanish. He has since retained that title, having authored some 200 translations, at a rate of 10 novels per year, with a roster of writers including Don DeLillo, Mark Z. Danielewski, Chuck Palahniuk, Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Michael Chabon, Joshua Cohen, Peter Matthiessen, and a long etcetera. In short: If you’ve read any North American literature published in Spanish over the last two decades, chances are you’ve read and learned to write from Javier Calvo. 

What concept of translation does he have? Disinclined as he is to any kind of up-front theorizing, you have to read between the lines of El fantasma en el libro (“The Ghost in the Book”), his 2016 essay on the subject. The book charts the history and demise of the creatively incorrect translation (think Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights, “les belles infidèles,” or Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur), dwelling on some of its 20th-century practitioners (Borges, Jorge Guillén), and then proceeds to survey the state of literary translation today. It’s not looking good: he describes the rise of the literalist editor, who demands exactness and smoothness, and contemplates any interpretation or diverting reading of a text as belonging to the purview of creative writing, like Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961) or Octavio Paz’s versions of Japanese poetry. The editor mistrusts the translator as a volatile and mischievous agent with an agenda of their own, at cross-purposes with that of the publishing house: to introduce, even if microscopically, some of their own writing into that of the original; to intrude upon the text they are ostensibly conveying. From a marketing perspective, the guideline is to promote translations written in a neutral and accentless Spanish, which is most often a sanitized version of Castilian Spanish. (Spanish publishers still think this is the best way to sell translated literature to Latin American audiences.) The result is a paradigm where the translator is a service provider, like a book distributor, and not an agent within the literary and cultural system.

For a writer who has so vehemently inveighed against the flattening practices of contemporary translation, it is strange to read through Calvo’s sometimes flat renderings of English-language fiction. In translating The Silence (2020), he removes Don DeLillo’s characteristic lapses into the present tense. His version of Joy Williams is formal to the point of tonelessness (a “scrimshawed vehicle” becomes “[un] vehículo cubierto de dibujos” when it could have been “pintarrajeado”). The slight archaisms of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2011), both lexically and syntactically, are streamlined into average contemporary prose. This is not always the case—the Spanish edition of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), translated in collaboration with Cuban poet Wendy Guerra, has plenty of Latin American colloquialisms. 

Still, Calvo is one of the best translators working in any language today, and certainly the most accomplished translator of North American literature in Spanish. If he does not manage to rise to the tradition of auteur translation, this probably has to do with the very editing practices that he spoke against in El fantasma en el libro. Whatever the case, in his translations of DFW he finds the freedom to be “faithful” to the English text and is particularly brilliant at rendering the original’s cumulative and overstuffed sentences. This is also his greatest contribution to Spanish-language prose through the conduit of DFW: the supermarket lexicon, the bloated gift catalog style. Take the “medical attaché” section from Infinite Jest, a nightmare for any conscientious translator, which he survives without curtailing the showboaty jargon of the original:

The living room’s lavish TP receives also the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from the service are so technologically and cryptographically complex that the attaché has always left the whole business to his wife.

El munífico teleordenador del salón también recibe las diseminaciones espontáneas de la Matriz de Pulsaciones por Suscripción de InterLace, pero los procedimientos para encargar pulsaciones espontáneas específicas son tan tecnológica y criptográficamente complejos que el agregado siempre ha dejado todo este asunto en manos de su cónyuge.

¤

Some 23 years after these sentences were translated, the Spanish publishing industry is still on the lookout for a DFW of their own. Enter Sara Barquinero (Zaragoza, Spain, b. 1994), whose third publication, The Scorpions, was released with unusual hubbub in Spain last year. From the generous blurbs that cinch this 800-page tome, we learn that the author has culled the best of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Bolaño, et al. into a plot about depression, addiction, and conspiracies. Across a dozen reviews, we are told that The Scorpions is easily the best novel of 2024. In the author’s proliferating interviews, she says that—as a student of US fiction—she inevitably wrote her own kind of Great American Novel. The Spanish writer Alberto Olmos compared The Scorpions to Infinite Jest in his foreseeably scathing takedown: “It is a book people will talk about all the time without reading it.” There hasn’t been such a hyped-up novel in the Spanish-speaking world since the release of Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night (2019). 

Fellow translators tell me that Barquinero’s book is already looking for an English-language publisher, and I am hoping it will have more English readers than reviewers and commentators. The novel deserves it. The Scorpions is a long, somewhat cerebral postmodern novel featuring online forums, sexting, inverted music scores, spadefuls of anxiolytics, and Ubers that arrive all too late. It contains five books, three interludes, a prologue, and an epilogue, along with an actual continuous plot. It’s an internet novel and a thriller about El lamento de Orión (“Orion’s Lament”), an urban-legend video game that subjects its players to a death-inducing bliss. This is the novel’s online version of James O. Incandenza’s “Entertainment” in Infinite Jest. 

At heart, this is a story about the paranoia of connectedness. Sara, Thomas, Manuel, Martin, Seymour, Samantha, Javier, and virtually everybody else in this novel are constantly bumping into the Scorpions, the malefic Italian syndicate running the show all throughout Barquinero’s narrative architecture. Behind every online forum and harmless piece of music, behind every classmate and potential one-night stand, there is a centuries-old conspiracy that wants these characters high and dead. At times, the novel reads like a protracted, 800-page version of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), where the point of Martin, Seymour, Samantha, et al. is to dramatize, once again, how one falls into the rabbit hole. To her credit, Barquinero has carefully plotted all possible roads to hell. Sanctioned Suicide, binaural music, a diary from 1920s Rome, inverted epsilons, the soundtrack from Pokémon’s “Lavender Town,” and anybody who speaks a shred of Italian—these are some of the many entertaining gateways that lead to the Scorpions. At the same time, the internet often operates as some kind of fee-fi-fo-fum decor, casting its supposedly menacing shadows over the narrative. The dark web, HiddenWiki, iDoser, and Pizzagate are the haunted houses, dim-lit attics, and substanceless props of 19th-century literature. Call it “internet gothic.”

Everywhere the prose dissects the internet without being polluted or nuanced by the textual modes of digital discourse. This is a way of saying that there are no memes, none of the wit, stylistics, and verbal personae we’ve all come to embrace online. Forum threads are neatly punctuated and accented. Texts have no typos or emojis. Tinder matches place a period at the end of their one-liners. Every netizen is faultlessly grammatical. Similarly, the plot is carried by this jejune and storytelly voice, heavy on exposition and omniscience, trundling from scene to scene with the aid of copious cliff-hangers—what Spanish-language critics have labeled and reviled for the last three decades as “el realismo.” The only lapse of “experimentalism” is a stream of consciousness section towards the end of “El perro mexicano” (“The Mexican Dog”) that features a two-column layout, wholly or partially italicized paragraphs, and no punctuation. It’s Barquinero’s “Look Ma No Hands!” moment.

Style and structure are not the novel’s forte—so, why am I recommending The Scorpions? It has to do with what happens in chapter IX of the fifth and final book. The protagonists are closing in on the Scorpions, who are putting on a fashion show in New York through one of their many fronts. The collection basically doubles down on Balenciaga’s alleged pedophilia: latex, chains, and rape imagery. Thomas, the novel’s male lead, is invited by a friend of the brand’s creative director to participate in one of the ancillary attractions of the event, an audiovisual experience purporting to transmit the frequency of the universe. They walk down a black corridor into an oval space where a screen covers the walls, the ceiling, and the floor (translation my own):

The light stops being light and becomes a heartbeat. The body rises, pixels in a sidereal flight, starless sky. His own body vibrates. Alan’s too, he is no longer holding him. Each his own planet with his own gravitational system. Panic or ecstasy? Good question. The way the heart behaves when you are afraid or excited is too similar. A face. The screen is a face or the interior of a face, a mouth opening its own jaws and swallowing. Thomas imitates it. It is bacteria. A biological residue that slips into a human mouth and penetrates the respiratory system the digestive system the lungs’ limbic system. Like that evil bacteria that makes insects walk when they no longer have a brain or a heart. That’s the idea, to be a worm on a New Earth.

The idea of DFW, we saw, meant all kinds of things in Spanish. For the marketing departments of publishing houses, it meant something long, cerebral, and postmodern. For the authors of the DFW school, it meant the mirage of the Great American Novel, a horizon of literary ambition, and a chance at a postmodernity that Spanish-language literature had allegedly missed. In connection to Barquinero, if she belongs to the Infinite Jest school at all, it’s by inheriting a set of problems that DFW handed down to 21st-century literature through his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” I am referring here to the central concerns of “image-fiction”—fiction that accosts and interrogates and wishes to impose some accountability over the screen. Literature that makes screen-watching, screen-scrolling, and screen-swiping its problem. This is the subject of The Scorpions: the ubiquitousness and inescapability of the screen. 

And so, after a dozen suicides, Reddit threads, sketchy nightclubs, and innumerable boy-meets-girl scenarios, Barquinero lands right back at square one. Today’s great conspiracy is the oval-shaped world of the screen: a face, a bacterium, a worm on a New Earth. When we go online, chances are that we’ll end up bumping into a global plot that’s trying to kill us. Not necessarily orchestrated by stylish mobsters and manicured game devs, but by the architects and legislators of the internet. There’s no “hidden truth.” There are just too many notifications. Such an obvious allegory doesn’t justify some 800 pages of tiny font, but the novel’s ambition cannot be denied. Despite its longueurs and slipshod lineaments, and even if it is not quite the Great American Novel her promoters want it to be, The Scorpions is an important chapter in the history of the screen.