In Chapter 3, Iván Thays was introduced as the most successful and prominent Peruvian alternative to the mass cultural marketing of Jaime Bayly since the mid-1990s, and it was argued that Thays’ central exploration of the relationship between history and literature focuses on the idea that narrative can build on and challenge versions of social, political and cultural events and ‘facts’: ‘narrar es suplantar […] es hacer paréntesis ahí donde no hay un texto oficial’. With the publication of Los años inútiles in 2002, Jorge Eduardo Benavides challenges Thays’ prominence and success (especially outside Peru) and offers an aesthetically challenging and explicitly politicized alternative both to the mass-marketed baylyboom and to Thays’ vision of individualized, ‘high’ cultural narrative. With Los años inútiles and El año que rompí contigo (2003) Benavides provides a wide spectrum of alternative interpretations of events that took place during the García government, for which there is little official text or clear answers, and his questioning is also applicable to the governments of Fujimori and Toledo, which form part of a continuing narrative of Peruvian politics. Born in Arequipa in 1964, Benavides moved to Tenerife in 1991, where he founded and ran a literary workshop (Entrelíneas), worked as a cultural commentator and journalist (for the newspaper Diario de avisos) and taught at the local university (Universidad de La Laguna). Benavides moved to Madrid in 2002, after securing a publishing contract with Spanish market leader Alfaguara and following the success of Los años inútiles. Like Bayly, Benavides has thus achieved financial success with a major Spanish publishing company and, at the same time, like Thays, he also claims the ‘high’ cultural ground by mentioning his work as a cultural commentator and university lecturer on the covers of both his novels.

The fact that Benavides found it necessary to move to Spain in order to establish himself as a novelist and that it took him six years to secure a publishing contract for Los años inútiles correlates with the discussion in the last chapter of what García Canclini (1999, 153) has termed ‘una política de bestsellerización’, whereby the decline in Latin American publishing companies has been counterpointed by the growing strength of Spanish publishers, who in turn have been taken over by multinational companies who publish fewer writers in greater numbers.