| Juan Carlos Mendez Guédez | |
| Birth Date: | 2 March 1967 |
| Birth Place: | Barquisimeto, Lara, Venezuela |
| Alma Mater: | University of Salamanca |
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (born March 2, 1967, in Barquisimeto, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan writer. From an early age, he and his family moved to Caracas, where he lived in the popular area of Los Jardines del Valle, but always kept a close connection with his native hometown. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Central University of Venezuela with a thesis on poetry groups "Traffic" and "Guaire". Later, he earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic American Literature from the University of Salamanca with a thesis on the Venezuelan writer José Balza.
He has published fifteen books including novels, volumes of short stories and essays. He lives in Spain, a country where he has written and published most of his work. His work has been included in several anthologies in Spanish as Líneas aéreas and Pequeñas resistencias and some of his stories have been published in Switzerland, France, Bulgaria, Italy, Slovenia and the United States.
In Venezuela, his texts are part of two recent short story anthologies: Las voces secretas, published by Alfaguara, and 21 del XXI, that was commercially released by Ediciones B.
He has been invited to several important international literary events such as the International Guadalajara Book Fair, the Fair of Santiago de Chile, the Madrid eñe Festival, and has lectured at universities and institutions in Algeria, Colombia, Croatia, Spain, France, Switzerland, Venezuela, etc.
In April 2013 his novel Arena Negra was awarded Book of the Year by booksellers in Venezuela.
Topics such as the uprooting of exiles, travel, love, sentimentality, are part of the narrative interests of Méndez Guédez, a work characterized by multiple records that are moved from the use of orality, to the development of sound prose, embedded with a deep lyricism.
Méndez Guédez's work has been placed by many literary scholars — such as Chiara Bolognese (Autonomous University of Madrid), Fabiola Fernandez (Andrés Bello Catholic University), Vega Sánchez (University of Salamanca), or Maartje Vranken (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) — in the orbit of the Spanish-American romantic and sentimental narrative. A line of writing that comes from authors like Manuel Puig or Alfredo Bryce Echenique, in which the humor, relationships with popular culture, and the emphasis on the emotional dramas of male characterized by their fragility, define the general discourse of its narrative. But, as the writer Ignacio Sanz argues, in Méndez Guédez one sees a sense of dual belonging, on one side to the Peninsular Spanish cultural register and, on the other, to the Hispanic American worldview, which is evident in the construction of his prose style, full of winks and lexical features that constitute a sort of mestizo language in itself.[1]
This circumstance of intense attachment to two countries — two realities — places Méndez Guédez in a particular creative line of 21st-century Spanish language fiction that also involves authors such as Fernando Iwasaki, Jorge Eduardo Benavides, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Andrés Neuman, etc.; writers whose fictions embodies a nostalgic look at the place of origin, combined with a critical outlook of the place of residence, all which confers their narratives with an expressive mixture of universal character.
As stated by critic Marco Kunz (University of Lausanne): "The migrant narrative of Méndez Guédez demonstrates the possibility of a new Latin American literature that is not enclosed in the obliguismo that explores the hallmarks of local, regional or national, nor chooses a staunch internationalism ".[2]
Notably, Méndez Guédez is one of the authors who started fictionalizing the immigration of 21st-century Spain with his novel Una tarde con campanas, published in 2004. A topic that has been followed up by authors such as Joseph Shepherd, Carmen Jiménez, Pablo Aranda, Donato Ndongo, Najat El Hachmi, James Roncagliolo and Angels Case, among others.
In a way, his books incorporate into its narrative a sense of both the spatial and cultural diversity that is characteristic of his country, together with that of the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands, as to conform a larger and richer fictional universe. This element, according to German critic Burkhard Pohl,[3] constitutes a feature of a certain segment of the current Latin American narrative, in which the style of authors such as Méndez Guédez and Jorge Volpi serve as a parody of the exchange between different realities, highlighting the absurd literary notion that attached preconceived worldviews to certain writers from different regions of the planet.
Méndez Guédez is considered by many a renovator of the romantic tradition in Latin American narrative.[4] Some of Méndez Guédez's works also have stylistic features that go back to the English comic novel — such as certain strain of vulgar eroticism — but that nonetheless remain within the influence of more contemporary and experimental trends in story construction — all that is without forgetting the passion for the power of anecdote and the seduction of the reader, and exploring expressive tools that break with classical linearity. Thus, each of Méndez Guédez texts can be a literary universe in itself; one that answers common themes but that is also able to expose a diverse scriptural development.
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