Chilean author Alberto Fuguet never really wanted to be South American. Born in Santiago, he spent the first 13 years of his childhood in Encino, California, the backyard of the Los Angeles movie industry, expecting to grow up as a first-generation American. When his family moved back to Chile in the mid-1970s, after Pinochet's military dictatorship deposed Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government, the experience traumatized him. "Coming to Chile as an immigrant was going down in every sense of the word for me," he explains to Críticas. "From democracy to dictatorship, from first world to third world, from English to Spanish. Spanish wasn't so cool then as it is now. It wasn't the second language of the world."

It may seem strange for a Latin American novelist to admit such reservations about his mother country, much less his language, but in Fuguet's case, it's par for the course. Ever since McOndo, the ground-breaking anthology he co-edited with Sergio Gómez, came out in 1996, the 39-year-old author has made a career of thumbing his nose at literary conventions, chief among them the idea that all novelists south of the border should be magical realists.

McOndo made headlines by showcasing young Latin American writers who believed that the fantastical elements that characterized so many Latin American novels in the '60s and '70s ought to be exorcised from their contemporary literature. Unlike Macondo, the rural village at the center of Gabriel García Márquez's famous novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), their hometowns are gritty and urban—full of McDonald's and smog and Amores Perros—and they need a more realistic fiction, they say, to account for its contradictions.

"I had a ball with Cien años de soledad," Fuguet explains, "but I never felt it was my experience or the experience of the people around me or the Chilean experience. After years went by, I realized that that was the paradigm: To be a Latin American you had to be like García Márquez, and for me it was really difficult to be like him because I couldn't even relate on an emotional level. It wasn't my world."

Fuguet's new novel, Las películas de mi vida (The Movies of My Life), gives a stirring account of what his world actually was. The book, which will be published simultaneously in Spanish and English by Rayo-HarperCollins in October (Santillana's Alfaguara has the rights for Latin America and Spain), portrays the childhood and adolescence of one Beltrán Soler, a seismologist who, like Fuguet, grew up in Encino and was forced to move back to Santiago shortly after Pinochet's 1973 coup. Although Fuguet says the novel mirrors his own life only in its "main points," he's cagey about revealing exactly what those points are. And no wonder—the book, after all, presents a story of loss and disintegration. Soler's Chile is a place where spouses cheat, siblings pass each other in silence, and right-wing grandmothers gloat over the assassinations of left-wing activists. When the novelopens, Beltrán isn't even on speaking terms with any of his relatives: His father lives in California, his mother lives in El Salvador, his sister and her family live in a Santiago neighborhood he doesn't like to visit. The whole fabric of the Soler's family life has come undone.

It's to Fuguet's credit that he manages to turn a sorrowful plot into a humorous and engaging story. It took him five years to write Las películas de mi vida. Most of that time he spent devising the book's ingenious structure, which presents Beltrán's memories in a series of e-mailed movie descriptions. The film Bullitt, for example, reminds him how his father shucked all the Chilean "vestiges of ambition, class, manners, intelligence, and good breeding" for a tough, motor-head posture that resembles the style of the movie's star, Steve McQueen. Fiddler on the Roof reminds him of his own boyish desire to "stop being Latino.

"I always wanted to do a movie book," Fuguet says, but he was never interested in catering to film buffs; his goal was to capture the way movies affect the general public. Thus, Beltrán's film journal leans more toward Carrie and It's a Wonderful Life than toward Rashomon or Breathless, and his reactions to what he sees on the silver screen are more emotional than technical. Fuguet himself, however, is more than just a movie aficionado. Since the publication of his last novel, Tinta roja (Red Ink), in 1996, he has written several screenplays and produced a film, En un lugar de la noche (Somewhere in the Night), which he humbly admits flopped. (The video and screenplay versions are titled Dos hermanos.) The idea for Las películas de mi vida came to him partly as a practical compromise between his two great interests. Writing it, he says, "I could be in the cold literary world but not far removed from the movies."

The cold literary world was not a place young Fuguet had ever expected to make his home. Throughout his childhood, he says, he had no desire to become a novelist—what he wanted to be was a newspaperman. Although he completed a journalism degree at the Universidad de Chile and continues to work as a reporter and film critic, as a college student he realized that the AP–style rules of newspaper writing were too constricting to allow for all the prose he wanted to unleash. As he recalls, "A teacher basically told me if you want to write weird, write your own things." So Fuguet began to read and write fiction. He read the classic Boom authors, of course, developing a particular taste for the early political novels of Mario Vargas Llosa and the books of Manuel Puig. For Fuguet, Puig still remains one of the most important writers in Latin America. "He always knew that pop culture is very important and that it's very much part of your Latin identity."

Not surprisingly, Fuguet's tastes extended beyond Latin America. He began by rescuing the castoff books of American diplomats and CIA people—Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace. Richard Price, he says, "totally blew me away" because he portrayed the real world of the streets and not some literary fantasy. Charles Bukowski taught him that "you could write without being very flowery." And Bukowski led to Hemingway, who paved the road for Salinger.

Soon Fuguet began sending short stories to contests; a few wins there boosted his literary confidence. He took workshops with José Donoso, author of El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night), and with Antonio Skarmeta, of Il Postino fame. Skarmeta later championed Fuguet's first book of short stories and helped it find an editor.

By the time Fuguet traveled to Iowa for the International Writers Program in 1994, his story collection Sobredosis (Overdose) had already been published, as had his first novel, Mala onda (Bad Vibes). His second novel, Por favor, rebobinar (Rewind, Please), came out while he was in the middle of his three-month U.S. stay. Why would an author with three books under his belt want to travel to another country to take a series of writing courses?

Perhaps it goes back to those early years in Encino. "It's a mythical thing," Fuguet says. "To be with everybody big, part of the U.S. tradition, for me, was exciting." He laughs, "It was also more fun than to just stay in my own room writing."

Fuguet won't be spending much time in his own room this fall. In October, Rayo-HarperCollins and Alfaguara Santillana plan to publish Las películas de mi vida simultaneously in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. His most popular novel, Mala onda, sold a modest 30,000 copies worldwide (20,000 in Chile). Although HarperCollins did not want to release the figure for its planned print run of Las películas de mi vida, Santillana will print 25,000 copies for the Spanish and Latin American markets.

Fuguet isn't a best-selling author yet, but it's clear he has already mastered the media. In May 2002, his face appeared on the cover of Newsweek International and in January 2003 McOndo was the subject of a lead article in The New York Times. After Spain's book fair Liber in early October, Rayo plans to bring Fuguet back to the States for an eight-city author tour, as well as for appearances at the Miami and Texas book fairs.

Fuguet is a natural match for Rayo, the three-year-old HarperCollins imprint started by editorial director René Alegria, with support from HarperCollins's president and CEO Jane Friedman. As Alegria explains, "Rayo's entire mission is for us to publish books that reflect the Hispanic experience in the U.S. Fuguet fits into it perfectly. His experience [moving back and forth between countries] is one that many American Hispanics have had."

"For me, this American experience is new," Fuguet says. Although he has appeared at book fairs in Los Angeles and Miami (where he met his agent, Leylha Ahuile) and although Mala onda was translated into English by St. Martin's in 1997, this is Fuguet's first experience with the coordinated production schedules and splashy debut plans of simultaneous publication.

Nonetheless, the combined Rayo-Alfaguara publication seems to fit this bicultural writer. After living in Santiago for almost three decades, Fuguet rightly declares himself to be much more Chilean than American, but it's clear he has always had a foot in both worlds. Encino-Santiago. Bukowski-Puig. English-Spanish. Sitting in the middle of the most unmagical urban milieu of Santiago, Fuguet has no regrets. "I'm not able to sell toucans or jungles or beautiful beaches. I'm here talking to you from Santiago," he tells Críticas. And in New York, we're listening.

Valdes is an associate editor at Publishers Weekly and an editorial contributor at Críticas