http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/05/07/actualidad/1367948625_392945.

html In an interview, published by El Pais, with 20 Spanish speaking writers (includi ng the likes of Junot Diaz and Juan Gabriel Vasquez) about the future death or e volution of the novel, Chilean writer Rafael Gumucio made this very interesting comment: The novel, like the protest song or rock n roll has become an age appropriate ac tivity, something to be consumed with hunger between the ages of fifteen and thi rty, but which ceases to be relevant for those over thirty. This in not the case in the entire world. In China, South Africa, in Latin America (in some countrie s more so than in others) on immigrant enclaves in the suburbs of London, Paris, Berlin and New York, the novel is still the primary way to tell The Story. The latest list of Nobel Prize winners, almost all of them, still active novelists proves this point. Coetzee, Pamuk, Naipaul, Muller, Mo Yan, Vargas Llosa. Some of them Old glories, some of them arguable talents, but, for the most part, they represent living literatures that, for better or for worse, still engage in the writing of novels. Why is this the case in South Africa, in China, in Turkey and no longer in Paris ? Why Jamaicans and Desis in London and not the native English? The reason, I th ink, has to do with the nature of the novel. The novel is a grotesque art. It is like walking on a tightrope. For this task to be possible the string has to be tight enough. At one end of the rope are the legends told by parents, the myths of the people, the oral epic, in the other extreme are the sociological reports, university theses, religious sermons. The history of the novel is the road betw een these two points; it's the undertaking of those who have been inherently exc luded from these two worlds. Jews in new york, Normandy migrants to Paris (durin g the 19th Century). The novel needs communities of insecure doubters, subjects in flux. Those subjec ts, members of a middle class traveling from myth to report finding itself quest ioned, doubted, absolutely disintegrated. The resulting novels portray this perp lexity. In the middle of the tightrope trip the current European middle class, w hich used to believe in a number of safety nets that were abruptly removed, has been forced to look at the void underfoot. The result has been an infinite feeli ng of vertigo.