Tiempo malgastado. Sobre el aplazamiento de la escritura en tres novelas hispanoamericanas

In the last decades, many studies have proliferated on the different ways in which
a specific modality of consumer society, characterized by an unbridled acceleration of the
rhythms of production and work, affects the lives of millions of people, especially in highly
industrialized nations. These studies suggest that the individuals, under the pressure of an
increasingly accelerated and frenetic pace of life, are compelled to perform certain roles and
achieve certain goals that, if satisfactorily fulfilled, could guarantee success, or, at least, social
acceptance. But what happens when you cannot or do not want to perform and fulfil such
roles and expectations fast enough, when the individual prolongs or just abandons the entrusted
task? In the richly diverse world of Latin American fiction, many writers have tackled this
question. In base of three novels of different years: El libro vacío (1958), by the Mexican Josefina
Vicens, Wasabi (1994), by the Argentine Alan Pauls, and La novela luminosa (2005), by the Uruguayan
Mario Levrero, this paper comments the role played in contemporary fiction by the
figure of the apathic, indolent or just slow-moving writer. The main characters of those novels
seem to live in a slow-time dimension opposed to the fast one dominant in late modernity