Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez

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.

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 ".

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.

[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.