Written Lives by Javier Marias

Javier Marias is perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences as the author of the novels All Souls and A Heart So White, winner of the 1997 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award.

Yet, in his native Spain, his weekly articles in El Pais are hugely popular and he is equally well known for his essays and translations. It is in this latter guise that we see him now in Written Lives.

Written Lives is an exquisite collection of miniatures, ironic and idiosyncratic portraits of 25 of the most famous (and infamous) writers of the past two centuries. Here Marias turns his affectionate (in most cases) and humorous gaze onto, among others, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, James Joyce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Emily Bronte.

You can find the review here

Interview with Isabel Allende

Isabelle Allende is the most affable diva of world literature. She is so direct and creates such an immediate sense of familiarity and trust that one wonders whether she has any flaws. The celebrated Chilean writer is a mixture of many different ingredients: a significant family heritage, political activism, roots in a country that is liked by the world and a home in California, where the citrus groves, she says, remind her of her homeland. She survived the death of her daughter, attracted the love and admiration of millions of readers around the globe and has been hailed as being a model wife and mother. She is the classic voice of Latin American literature. Her world is ruled by waves of nostalgia, fantasy, the awakening of female identity, eroticism, ecology and passion.

Allende has written many successful novels, but «The House of the Spirits,» published in 1982 and later made into a film, consolidated magical realism and launched the writer on an international scale.

Allende is currently in Greece, where she visited the book fair in Athens on Sunday, gave a lecture yesterday at the Athens Concert Hall and is scheduled for a book signing at the Papasotiriou bookshop (at 37 Panepistimiou Street) today at 8 p.m. Knowing that she has thousands of readers in Greece, she was happy to give an interview to Kathimerini.

You can find the interview here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

In Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, it is the year 2020. America has knocked out all of Mexico's communications – there are no phones, fax or e-mail. Washington made its move in a fit of pique over Mexico's refusal to lower oil prices and its demand that the United States end its military occupation of Colombia. This is the context for a story about presidential succession – a potentially timely subject, as Mexicans will elect a new president in July. This is a juicy setup for Mr. Fuentes, a chance for that sophisticated, passionate novel of the pasodoble between the United States and Mexico that he was born to write.

Mr. Fuentes, Mexico's most prominent novelist, is also an essayist, dramatist, professor and former student of international law. The son of a diplomat, he was raised partly in Washington and served as Mexican ambassador to Paris. He is a longtime, if not particularly original, critic of American ideas and influence, and in 2004 he published a book of essays called Contra Bush, which is just what you think it is.

Always a more interesting novelist than essayist, Mr. Fuentes could have used the situation he has imagined in The Eagle's Throne to probe the love-hate relationship Mexicans have with the United States.

Or, well-known proponent of Mexico's democratization that he is, he could have explored Mexico's second modern transformation as he dramatized the workings of presidential politics. In his best novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, written in 1962, Mr. Fuentes portrayed the gradual corruption of Mexico's revolution a century ago. Today, Mexico's emergence from 71 years of dictatorship – democratic, but hobbled by the habits of old – again offer him a rich subject.

Mr. Fuentes has chosen to do neither. Instead of rendering the transformation of electoral politics, he refuses to acknowledge it.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

Among North American readers, José Saramago is most famous for his novel Blindness, which was translated into English in 1997, a year before the Portuguese novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Blindness is both gripping and scary, a book one is tempted to read as quickly as possible just to break free of Saramago's manipulative if brilliantly conjured nightmare. The novel is about an unexplained plague that renders an entire city (with one exception) sightless. Saramago, an avowed pessimist and a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, uses this conceit to explore human cruelty and the corrupting force of power.

The first people in Blindness who lose their sight are rounded up like lepers and deposited at an old mental hospital. In the book's most queasy passage, a gang of bullies takes control of the food supply and demands sexual favours for rations. Ultimately, a reader is tempted to explain the blindness of the novel with a Kafka-like paradox: The people in Blindness are struck blind as punishment for the crimes they will later commit.

Saramago's new novel, Seeing, is a companion piece, a backhanded sequel to Blindness. Whereas the earlier book deals with cruelty among the powerless, Seeing concerns the viciousness of those who control the military, the media and the police.

Seeing is also a strange, markedly different, strangely divided book.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

There are no easy lessons to be drawn from this book. It stands more as an invitation to reflect and to be fundamentally disconcerted. Parallels to present democracies are easy to draw, yet conclusions are slippery and difficult to come by.

In Saramago's 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, the Iberian Peninsula breaks adrift from Europe. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an unnamed country fights a strange plague.

His fiction is ultimately impossible to classify and, for that reason, invaluable. Seeing is no exception; it should be read, and we should be afraid of what we see.

You can find the review here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

We don't usually hear literature and national politics spoken of in the same breath these days, but in the case of Carlos Fuentes the two often go naturally together. Ever since his debut as a novelist in the late 1950s, the prolific Mexican writer has attempted the Joycean feat of trying to put into prose, mostly novels and stories, the great uncreated conscience of his nation.
His latest effort in this regard came out four years ago in Mexico, and that book, translated as "The Eagle's Throne," has just been published in English. The bird of the title is part of the Mexican national emblem, and the seat in question is the presidency. Just recently a friend of mine, fresh from working in the Chilean presidential election campaign, told me that Michelle Bachelet, who was sworn in as Chile's president in March, had received from friends a number of copies of Fuentes' new book.

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In "The Tango Singer," as in his two previous novels, "Santa Evita" and "The Perón Novel," Martínez's locale is Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martínez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the "atrocious dictatorship" in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in "Tango."

You can find the review here

With Borges by Alberto Manguel

An excerpt of Alberto Manguel's "With Borges" can be found here.

La Malinche by Laura Esquivel

Another review of Esquivel's "La Malinche".

The Spanish encounter with Mexico was many things, but "confusing"? I'm tempted to blame the translator for some of the novel's more unfortunate moments, such as Malinalli's realization that "she was tired, extremely tired of Cortés and all his strategies." But the problem surely goes deeper than diction in whatever language. For instance, in an early scene when the hirsute Spaniard "takes" Malinalli for the first time -- on a riverbank, no less -- Esquivel tells us that the pair "looked into each other's eyes and found their destiny and their inevitable union." Are those literary terms for rape?

In its treatment of plot (sketchy) and character (sketchier) and its emphasis on wifty spirituality, Malinche feels half thought out, its heroine an excuse for the author to indulge her meditations on pre-Columbian (or pre-Cortésian) folkways. Esquivel hints that Malinalli is a kind of Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure in whom the blood of warring races mingles together, the mother of the Mexico that will be born out of the clash of cultures. That's a fascinating idea, but in this book it's only an idea. The more Malinalli retreats from history into spirituality, the more she melds into the universe and the vaguer she becomes as a character -- until she's lost entirely in the mists of myth. From conquistador's mouthpiece to author's is not a fate anyone should suffer.

You can find the review here

Captain Alatriste

Captain Alatriste is poised to become fiction's hottest international swashbuckler since the Scarlet Pimpernel. Already a cult hero in Spain, Alatriste is the star of five novels by former journalist Arturo Pérez-Reverte that have sold more than 4 million copies in 50 countries since the first volume appeared a decade ago. That book, Captain Alatriste, was finally published in English last year, and the second, Purity of Blood, came out in January. The captain has his own website, comic strip, board games and, in Madrid, guided tours of his fictional haunts. Alatriste, a feature film based largely on the first book and starring Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings), will open in Europe and the U.S. later this year. With a $28 million budget, it's the most expensive Spanish-language film ever made in Spain.

The protagonist of this franchise is perhaps the least dashing, most enigmatic hero ever to rattle a rapier. Alatriste speaks little, drinks alone, dresses badly and blunders into traps set by more cunning adversaries. But he is fearless, deadly with a blade and, beneath his armored persona, stubbornly loyal. Those qualities animate the newly translated Purity of Blood. Alatriste is hired to help an aging father free his daughter, a nun, from the clutches of a well-connected priest who is using the convent as his private seraglio. The old man and his family have a secret: as Christian descendants of a converted Jew in anti-Semitic times, they lack "purity of blood" and soon become targets of the Inquisition. Alatriste too comes under suspicion, and the blood, pure and otherwise, begins to flow.

You can find the article here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Sex, politics, Mexico and the enigmas of identity are the themes that have preoccupied — even, at times, obsessed — Carlos Fuentes for his entire writing life, and he brings them together once again, in full regalia, in his smashing new novel, "The Eagle's Throne." Here, though, they feel less like obsessions than like old friends, the trusted longtime companions of the novelist's working days. By now, they're so familiar to Fuentes, and to one another, that they mingle freely, casually, almost flirtatiously. Fuentes has gathered them all in one place many times before, usually for grave, summit-level meetings in ambitious novels like "The Death of Artemio Cruz," "The Old Gringo" and "The Years With Laura Díaz." This is the first time he's thrown them a party.

Which is not to say that "The Eagle's Throne" is unambitious. Fuentes doesn't put finger to keyboard without having at least one fairly large idea to get off his chest, and over the years he has managed to store up more than a couple of big ones about the subject he addresses here: the exercise of practical politics.


You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In his new novel, "The Tango Singer," Tomás Eloy Martínez ("The Péron Novel"), who was short-listed for the International Man Booker Prize, explores themes not unlike those found in tango music.

Bruno Cadogan, a New York academic, is writing a dissertation on the origins of tango. He hears of an extraordinary tango singer in Buenos Aires named Julio Martel, who is believed to be even more talented than the legendary Carlos Gardel, and journeys there to seek him out.

The year is 2001 and Argentina is undergoing an economic upheaval. Citizens have taken to the streets to protest unemployment. Crimes and betrayals are common. And Buenos Aires, once a majestic city compared to Paris and Madrid, has taken on a shabby appearance.

You can find the review here

Interview with Eduardo Galeano

Born in Uruguay in 1940, Eduardo Galeano began writing newspaper articles as a teenager. Though his dream was to become a soccer player, by the age of 20 he became Editor-in-Chief of LaMarcha. A few years later, he took the top post at Montevideo’s daily newspaper Epocha. At 31, Galeano wrote his most famous book, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

After the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, Galeano was imprisoned and forced to leave the country. He settled in Argentina where he founded and edited a cultural magazine, Crisis. After the 1976 military coup there, Galeano’s name was added to the lists of those condemned by the death squads. He moved to Spain where he began his classic work “Memory of Fire,” a three-volume narrative of the history of America, North and South. He eventually returned home to his native Uruguay where he now lives. His latest book is called “Voices of Time: A Life in Stories.” Eduado Galeano joins us today in our firehouse studio.

You can find the interview here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes has looked into the future of Mexico and seen a maelstrom of secrets that pulls in the entire political elite. Then, as if this apocalyptic vision weren't dark enough, he's found there can be no escape, no end to intrigue, plotting or murder for the crass and conniving bunch of Machiavellians reaching for the prized spot: "The Eagle's Throne."

Here, then, is a novel of pure (at its worst) politics, Fuentes readily agreed in a recent interview, but despite the steady march in his writing toward hard-hitting political realism he denies that he's calling for reform in Mexico or anywhere else. "I'm writing fiction, with all the freedom on the world," he said. "I'm not preaching to anybody, saying do this or do that. People can draw conclusions, moral or political, from reading the novel, but it is not my purpose to put on a Hyde Park speech." Instead, he wants the reader to sit back and enjoy the crazy roller-coaster ride that the Mexican presidency has in store for all those who get on and expect to survive.

The Eagle's Throne is the summit of power in Mexico. It's January 2020, Washington is angry with Mexico for demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Colombia and for backing the high oil prices set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and so with the flip of a switch, off goes the telecommunications network of its southern neighbor. The president of Mexico, Lorenzo Terán, three years into his reign, has suddenly sent Mexico down a path of resistance to the dictates of the United States.

Fuentes, the ever-sharper social critic, arrives naturally at the "The Eagle's Throne" to claim that politics is no less than the "public expression of private passions," as two of his sleep-your-way- to-power female politicos separately intone. And things private get quickly heated in this novel, once the power is off, as one of these kingmakers, María Rosario Galván, offers not only her connections but her desirable body as the ultimate prize to the young bureaucrat Nicolás Valdivia if he successfully makes the climb to the presidency with her help. But lies and secrets are the money of her trade, and she has no intention of seeing on the throne anyone other than her longtime friend and ex- lover, Bernal Herrera, the interior secretary, with whom she has had a child with Down's syndrome who is conveniently stored in a state institution.

From "The Crystal Frontier" (1997), which revealed the dark underside of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, to "Contra Bush" (2004), searing essays on the current U.S. administration, and another tome of essays about his views, "This I Believe" (2005), Fuentes has been landing his pen ever harder. His many other novels, including "The Old Gringo," "The Death of Artemio Cruz" and "The Years With Laura Díaz," have never shied from the base factor that guides all strivings: politics.

You can find the full review here

Malinche by Laura Esquivel

In the early 1990s, Laura Esquivel set the tone for a highly respected career with her first book, "Like Water for Chocolate," a supernatural tale that displayed Esquivel's knowledge and familiarity with her native Mexico and established her comfort level with magical realism. Her new book, "Malinche," doesn't stray from either of those expressions.

A historical novel that details the tragic relationship between Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and his translator Mallinalli, "Malinche" (a name by which Mallinalli was also known) is a lyrical interpretation of the timeline that follows the destruction of Montezuma's 16th-century empire by Cortes.


You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

To read José Saramago is to explore the frontiers of human nature. In his novels we encounter unthinkable evil and unspeakable goodness, baffling incompetence and stunning persistence, deep despair and unbounded hope. In ''Seeing," his heartwarming and heartbreaking new novel, Saramago revives his technique of tossing an allegorical dilemma at a group of people, then sifting through the chaos for the best nuggets of being.

In his 11th work of fiction, the 83-year-old Portuguese Nobel laureate guides us again to the city where, in his 1995 novel ''Blindness," every citizen went blind but one. ''Blindness" describes an ineffectual government-ordered quarantine and a city that falls into a bloody, animalistic melee. Its seeing heroine, referred to only as ''the doctor's wife," guides six companions to safety with courage.

The story in ''Seeing" is not as horrifying as its predecessor's. Its crisis is political. During the capital city's elections, four years after the blindness epidemic, 83 percent of the ballots cast are blank. The government, flabbergasted and embarrassed, places the city under siege and relocates, sure that chaos will ensue and teach the ''subversives" a lesson. But the freed masses live on in peace, despite the government's rhetorical and physical efforts to incite turmoil. When officials receive a letter revealing a long-kept secret of the doctor's wife and suggesting that she might be behind the blank-vote movement, they seize on her as a suspect and send in a police superintendent to investigate. Their relentless certainty of her guilt ignites yet another underground movement to prove her innocence.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

Sometimes a novel comes along that is terrifying only because the reader can't decide why he should be scared. Jose Saramago's latest political allegory Seeing is just such a tale.

The Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate has again produced a singular work of dark humour and near absurdity, one raising disturbing questions about the nature of democracy and the relationship between the government and the governed.

Taking place four years after the events in his novel Blindness, Saramago's Seeing opens on a rainy election day in the unnamed capital of an unnamed country.

The voting turns out badly for the incumbent party. Although it wins the elections, more than 70 per cent of the ballots cast are blank. After a second round of elections produces more than 80 per cent blanks, the government declares a state of emergency.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

Seeing is typical of Saramago’s recent fiction. The setting is deliberately vague (there are occasional hints that he has Portugal in mind), and not even the characters have distinct names. As in Blindness, The Double, The Cave and All the Names, Saramago has shunned realism to create a parable for our times.

In form, also, Seeing bears the novelist’s characteristic imprint: paragraphs running uninterrupted for pages, rambling and loosely punctuated sentences brimming with sub-clauses and digressions, no indicators of speech. It is a style that takes some getting used to, and that may defeat readers not willing to let themselves be carried away by the prose’s elliptical, almost oral rhythm. Saramago’s fiction cannot be easy to render into English, yet Margaret Jull Costa (awarded the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of All the Names) has once again done a remarkable job of making a verbose and convoluted text clear, precise and readable.

This moral fable, however, suffers by comparison to its predecessor. Whereas Blindness was compelling in its exploration of individual characters, and of the compassion and solidarity that can emerge from the depths of despair, Seeing feels like an over-long and ponderous attempt to ridicule the political system we deposit such faith in. Saramago’s novels have always been tinged by his political inclinations (he remains a card-carrying member of the Communist party), but his provocative swipe at electoral democracy does not quite take flight as a story. His characters are barely sketched in. It is hard to care much about them.

Saramago’s politicians are inept, paranoid or power-hungry caricatures for whom the preservation of status quo has become an end in itself: "Appoint a commission of inquiry at once, minister, To reach what conclusions, prime minister, Just set it to work, we’ll sort that out later."

His honest everymen, on the other hand, are heroic in their rectitude, and in their myriad acts of resistance to illegitimate authority. But, unlike the protagonists of Blindness, those of Seeing lack that essential ingredient of successful drama - moral ambiguity.

Saramago’s latest commentary about man in a state of nature may be worthy as political rhetoric, but it is decidedly disappointing as fiction.

You can find the review here

La Malinche by Laura Esquivel

The cover for Malinche describes the historical novel as a tale about the "tragic and passionate love affair" of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and his translator. The story is a lyrical interpretation of the timeline that follows the destruction of Montezuma’s 16th-century Mexicas empire by Cortes. Mallinalli, also called Malinche in the book, was sold into slavery as a child and later became Cortes’ interpreter.

But the term love affair should be accepted lightly.

Yes, Cortes and Mallinalli share an intimate relationship that leads to the birth of a child and lends itself to vibrantly written scenes by Esquivel. Their first encounter, a mere exchange between their eyes with no words, is depicted with vivid passion.

But to call their relationship - which frequently included Cortes being just as forceful with Mallinalli as he was in war - one of love is extreme. Still, the relationship between Cortes and Mallinalli, a woman who has often been deemed a traitor in Mexican history, is a good launching pad for a novel.

The problem, however, comes when Esquivel tries to pack too much information into just a few pages. The novel gets clouded with Esquivel’s heavy use of magical realism and her need to explain every innermost thought of her characters. This leads to superfluous paragraphs that take characters into back story and memories. The result is a sometimes disjointed narrative.

But all these things may seem like gravy to Esquivel’s loyal fans, because overall she sticks to her pattern of richly imagined detail. Readers who like her style will devour every word. Those who do not may get lost.

Esquivel does do a nice job of showing a sympathetic side to Mallinalli that may reveal that she was an innocent trapped in Cortes’ power-hungry world instead of a traitor. Esquivel’s development of Mallinalli’s character is strong.

With Malinche, Esquivel remains true to her magical realism ways. So, loyalists will be delighted; others should move on.


You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

"The Tango Singer" is not for everyone. It's not entertainment in the accepted sense. It is, rather, a perplexing intellectual puzzle that demands a considerable backlog of knowledge and a mind that's willing to work overtime. It also helps to have a burning and respectful love of Buenos Aires -- its geography, population and history.

The author, Tomás Eloy Martínez, was born in Argentina but fled the country during the years of military rule. He teaches now in the United States, but much of his work has been in the form of devotions and meditations on his native city -- an effort to recapture a past that often has been disgraceful or slippery or both. His earlier books, "The Perón Novel" and the terrific "Santa Evita," conformed to this plan, and so does "The Tango Singer."

The narrator here is an impecunious graduate student from New York City, Bruno Cadogan, who's been working on "Jorge Luis Borges' essays on the origins of the tango." Cadogan feels that he's mired in trivia, "just filling page after futile page." Besides, he's never even been to Argentina, but he doesn't worry too much about that aspect of things. He's read so many books and seen so many films about the country that he has a strong (if imaginative) idea of it in his head. Another academic, far more learned than he, tells him about a legendary tango singer -- a mysterious artist who's never recorded a note and never announces his appearances in nightclubs -- Julio Martel, better even than the godlike singer Carlos Gardel, "to whom all voices belonged."

You can find the review here

A brief biography of Portuguese poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro

Mário de Sá-Carneiro was born in May 19, 1890 in Lisbon. In 1911 enters the Law school of Coimbra and, in the following year, he moves to the University of Paris to proceed with his Law studies, which he didn't conclude. In 1912 he publishes the play "Amizade"(Friendship) and the short stories volume "Princípio" (Principle). At this time, he starts to correspond with Fernando Pessoa. In this correspondence we can see reflected the aggravation of its emotional problems and his ideas of death and suicide. In 1914 along with the publication of "Dispersão" (Dispersion) and "A Confissão de Lúcio" (The confession of Lúcio), Sá-Carneiro intensifies his correspondence with Fernando Pessoa, to whom he sends its poems and drafts, disclosing increasing signals of pessimism and desperation.
In 1915, as part of the modernist group in Portugal, he participates in the publication of the magazine "Orpheu". In the second volume of this magazine he publishes the futurist poem "Manucure" that, along with the poem "Ode Triunfal" by Alvaro De Campos (one of the alternate identities of the poet Fernando Pessoa) caused impact and controversy in the literary community. In the same year he returns to Paris, where he lives in constant depression crises, aggravated by his financial difficulties.
In 1916, in a letter to Fernando Pessoa, he announces his intention to commit suicide, thar effectively occurs in 26 April, in a room of the Nice Hotel, in Paris.
The work of Mário de Sá-Carneiro is intimately related with his personal experience, it discloses all its maladjustment to the world and the constant search for itself which lead to self-destruction.

Travesuras de la nina mala by Mario Vargas Llosa

Released a few weeks ago in Peru Travesuras de la niña mala the new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian critics have been unanimous this book is a ambitious novel that proposes diverse perspectives on love, a state next to sanctity that allows extravagance.

Travesuras de la niña mala narrates the misadventures of Ricardo Somocurcio - Frenchified interpreter and translator from Lima - to seduce the unattainable niña mala, that thru its continuous trips, adventures and distractions, usurps lives and names of different literary characters, forcing Ricardo Somocurcio to suffer metamorphoses closer to the ones of Ovid than the one of Kafka.

Semana Negra de Gijón Prizes

Spanish writers Lorenzo Silva, José Ovejero and José Ángel Mañas and Cuban Leonardo Padura are the four finalists for the International Dashiell Hammett Prize for Novel, that will be announced next July 14th in the XIX the edition of the Semana Negra de Gijón.

The prize for the best crime novel published in Spanish in 2005, where selected Las Vidas Ajenas (Other People's Lives) by José Ovejero; Las neblinas del ayer (The fogs of yesterday) by Leonardo Padura; El caso Karen (The Karen Case) by José Ángel Mañas, and La reina sin espejo (The Queen Without Mirror) by Lorenzo Silva.
For the International Rodolfo Walsh Prize for non-fiction for the best work of criminal subject written in Spanish in 2005, the finalists are the Argentinean Juan Gasparini with La fuga del Brujo (The Flight of the Wizard) and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Enterrar a los muertos (To Bury the Dead)

The Memorial Prize Silverio Cañada for best the first black novel written in Spanish where selected Tiempo de Alacranes (Time of the Scorpions) by Mexican Bernardine Fernandez; El manuscrito de Dios (The Manuscript of God) by Juan Biedma; Las neblinas de Almagro by Mexican Eduardo Monteverde and El tiempo escondido (The Hidden Time) by the Spanish Joaquín M. Barrero.

Semana Negra Official Website

Pedro Almodovar set to win Prince of Asturias of the Arts Prize

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is favorite to win this year's Prince of Asturias of the Arts Prize. The finalists are composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the violinist Anne Sophie Mutter and architect Tadao Ando.
Among the winners of the last editions are Santiago Calatrava, Sebastião Salgado, Vittorio Gassmann, Woody Allen, Paco of Lucía, Miquel Barceló and in the dancers Mayan Plisetskaya and Tamara Rojo.

Carlos Fuentes, Carmen Posadas, Rafael Reig and Jorge Franco at the Hay Festival

Carlos Fuentes, the acclaimed Mexican novelist and essayist, will be appearing at the Hay festival, heading up a line-up of treats for fans of Spanish-language literature. The former diplomat who spearheaded the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s will be talking about his latest book, The Eagle's Throne.
Fuentes is just one of a number of writers and thinkers who will be giving Hay a uniquely Spanish-speaking flavour this year. The festival will also welcome three writers at the forefront of the new wave of Spanish language fiction: Carmen Posadas, Rafael Reig and Jorge Franco. Introduced by the cultural editor of El Pais, they will discuss crime writing. Uruguayan-born Posadas is the author of Little Indiscretions, which has been described as Almodovar's take on Agatha Christie, Spaniard Reig's Blood on the Saddle is a crime fantasy set in Madrid and Colombian Franco is the author of a bestselling thriller, Rosario Tijeras.

You can find the article here

La Mujer de Mi Hermano directed by Ricardo de Montreuil

Director Ricardo de Montreuil and Peruvian screenwriter Jaime Bayly, who adapted his popular novel, have created an oddly unsexy melodrama in which every supposedly shocking revelation (rape, incest, homosexuality, pedophilia) is treated with the same blithe shrug of recognition. It's numbing, especially with the film's deadly serious mood.

American and Latin American soap operas and telenovelas do much with seriocomic tones and livelier acting. With Santiago, Chile, locations standing for the Mexico City setting and most of the action transpiring in Zoe and Ignacio's mausoleum-like house, an architectural showpiece made of gray cement and glass, ''La Mujer de Mi Hermano" seems to be happening not between a woman and two men, but between the pages of a shelter magazine.

You can find the review here

From their opening shots of floating insects and leaves in a lap pool, director Ricardo de Montreuil and his cinematographer give "La Mujer" a gloss intended to push against the muck of the onscreen emotions and also provide an alternative aesthetic to some of the grittier films coming from Mexico and Latin America.

What first-time Peruvian director Montreuil has delivered is a stylish soap opera that casts cultural dramas as melodrama.

Author Jaime Bayly, also Peruvian, adapted his novel and moved its steamy action to Mexico City. But geography doesn't much matter. "La Mujer's" characters are sealed in their habits, courting interpersonal disaster.

You can find the review here


Ricardo De Montreuil films Peruvian author Jaime Bayly's novel with his tongue half-in-cheek. The bombshells delivered here have the punch of BIG soap opera moments, but he tosses them off as if this is life-goes-on normal in this airless world of wealth and sex and unhappiness.

Cardona has the tricky job of playing a guy who could be Zoe's salvation, or her undoing. He's very good at maintaining the mystery of Gonzalo -- maybe he's a romantic, maybe he's a heel, or maybe he has motives we can't begin to fathom. Meier has the trickier job of playing a man who isn't as interested in the gorgeous Mori as we, quite naturally, think he should be.

And Mori underplays the victim/cheater/manipulator with a certain charm, if not cunning. The third act's surprises don't leave her with enough to play, frankly. Those surprises aren't fully explained or explored enough to give us a full idea of what they mean to the three leads.

The film's resolution feels abrupt in the extreme.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

Sometimes a novel comes along that is terrifying only because the reader can't decide why he should be scared. Jose Saramago's latest political allegory Seeing is just such a tale.

The Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate has again produced a singular work of dark humour and near absurdity, one that raises disturbing questions about the nature of democracy and the relationship between the government and the governed.

Taking place four years after the events described in his novel Blindness, Saramago's Seeing opens on a rainy election day in the unnamed capital of an unnamed country.

The voting turns out badly for the incumbent party. Although it wins the elections, more than 70 per cent of the ballots cast are blank. After a second round of elections produces more than 80 per cent blanks, the government declares a state of emergency.

Having lost its political legitimacy but without having been elected out of office, the government must decide how to deal with this paradoxical situation.

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Saramago's prose is still a wordslide, hardly any full stops or paragraphs to block its flow, with an energy that carries you through the curious asides, the bits of writerly intervention - usually. It demands constant attention; even in an interrogation scene, a mid-paragraph comma may be all that announces a quite new speaker. It's as though we were listening intently to a fireside performance, naive and wise all at once, which is a high moral claim: the fable maker, who sometimes mumbles and sometimes does voices. But we're also reading a text by a very self-conscious writer, who will break the spine of a book - this book, in fact - with a long reflection on how he's got no idea at all of how to end it.

This has produced wonderful stories where the written word is at least as powerful as anything mundane; Saramago was a literary critic, a cultural editor, long before he made a living out of novels. In All The Names we meet a bureaucrat who hoards documents, and who follows a paper trail to the woman who fascinates him. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, a proofreader has the power to change history. The central character in Saramago's glorious The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is one of the alternate identities of the poet Fernando Pessoa: so Saramago breathes life into someone else's literary invention. And in his gospel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the old atheist is playing with another book: the New Testament.

There's a context of the mind to all these books, and a sense of the physical which absorbs you: Saramago does rain like no other European writer. In many cases he's engaging with Portugal's very odd and sad history: what seems magical may be actual fact. But in the past decade or so, in book after book, he's been throwing all this away. The Saramago of the years since he won the Nobel has been hungry for followers, not just readers.

Me, I think the rot set in with the oddly old-fashioned fable, The Stone Raft, in which all of Iberia drifts away from Europe to find its own place in the world. The notion's worked out ingeniously, but it's all too obviously a big idea on which Saramago grafts some people and some action. He wants a Portugal which can afford to be separate, away from Europe and America, a notion which would have cheered the heart of the old dictator Salazar - as long as he didn't read too carefully.

Saramago was in exile by now, a cross old man in Lanzarote, distant from the Lisbon streets and the grand monuments of Portugal. The distance showed. In Blindness, a whole city slowly goes blind, only one woman left with sight, and the streets fill with crime and fear and anarchy; it's as high concept as any George Romero zombie movie, to which it comes embarrassingly close at times. But sometimes, when the story is anchored to streets you can imagine, ruins you know, you find yourself crying.

Now, in Seeing, we have the rest of that story. It's set in Lisbon, obviously, and in Portugal, more or less; but Saramago doesn't want to say so. He's gone away somewhere nameless, non-specific. The characters, if that's the word, are called Prime Minister and President and Interior Minister, Superintendent, Inspector and Sergeant. They make good abstract nouns.

There's no passion from a writer who was once most passionate. Saramago can't have heroes any more because he has no hope. He has a kind of heroine - the one woman who never went blind in Blindness, who did away with a rapist nobody else could see - but she's there to accept her victimhood in a proper, stoic way. And this is ironic since he's covertly arguing that others should do as his city does, follow Lenin to the barricades one more time against bourgeois democracy, and the only reason he can imagine is habit.

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Y de Repente un Angel by Jaime Bayly

Considered by some as controversial and contentious, Peruvian writer Jaime Bayly shed those adjectives Tuesday to present a socially committed story of friendship at Bogota Book Fair.

Under the title "Y de Repente un Angel", the outstanding writer makes literature of the personal story of an illiterate servant of his family who was sold by her mother into slavery.

Although she never read a book, Mercedes is a smart woman, the author assured. "When she told me about her life I felt she was a novel character and I decided to pay homage to her through literature," he added

The 244-page volume refers to the friendship between Mercedes and her new master, a young and rich writer who intends to change her life.

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La Mujer de Mi Hermano directed by Ricardo de Montreuil

Director Ricardo de Montreuil and screenwriter Jaime Bayly (working from his own novel) stress visuals: Zoe and Ignacio’s cold house, Gonzalo’s sloppy attire and artwork, and the life of routine Zoe and Ignacio have built together. The plot’s progression doesn’t go beyond this simplicity, emphasizing major plot points instead of showing what Zoe learns along the way. OK, so she has sex in a hotel room and goes skinny dipping in her pool. Well, so do a lot of people. What else is there? Well, nothing much. Revealing dialogue may be a relief from the opulent indifference that weighs the movie down like an anchor, but it doesn’t get us any closer to caring about these people.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

In Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, it is the year 2020. America has knocked out all of Mexico's communications—there are no phones, fax, or e-mail. Washington made its move in a fit of pique over Mexico's refusal to lower oil prices and its demand that the United States end its military occupation of Colombia. This is the context for a story about presidential succession—a potentially timely subject, as Mexicans will elect a new president in July.

This is a juicy setup for Fuentes, a chance for that sophisticated, passionate novel of the paso doble between the United States and Mexico that he was born to write. Fuentes, Mexico's most prominent novelist, is also an essayist, dramatist, professor, and former student of international law. The son of a diplomat, he was raised partly in Washington and served as Mexican ambassador to Paris. He is a longtime, if not particularly original, critic of American ideas and influence, and in 2004 he published a book of essays called Contra Bush, which is just what you think it is. Always a more interesting novelist than essayist, Fuentes could have used the situation he has imagined in The Eagle's Throne to probe the love/hate relationship Mexicans have with the United States. Or, well-known proponent of Mexico's democratization that he is, he could have explored Mexico's second modern transformation as he dramatized the workings of presidential politics. In his best novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, written in 1962, Fuentes portrayed the gradual corruption of Mexico's revolution a century ago. Today, Mexico's emergence from 71 years of dictatorship—democratic, but hobbled by the habits of old—again offer him a rich subject.

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Interview with Jose Saramago

The architecture of José Saramago's purpose-built library, as it rises from a parched hillside on his adopted island of Lanzarote, creates the impression of a modern cathedral. Sunlight splinters through high, narrow windows of opaque glass that stretch the full two storeys; the clean, white walls and cool flagstones contribute to a sense of hushed reverence in the presence of so many volumes, ancient and modern, in so many languages. Here is a shrine to literature, an alternative religion for a Portuguese Nobel laureate, who left his homeland 14 years ago in protest at the government's censorship of his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (it vetoed its submission for the European Literature Prize on the grounds that it was offensive to Catholics).
It takes some effort to believe that Saramago is about to turn 84 - not just because of his vivid physical presence, his barely-lined face and the quickness of his eyes and hands when he talks, but also because of his extraordinary productivity.

Although Seeing is published this week in English translation, he has produced another book in the meantime; Las Intermitencias de la Muerte was published last autumn in Portugal, Spain and Latin America (his Spanish wife, Pilar del Rio, translates his books as he goes along so that they can be published simultaneously for his large Spanish readership), and he is now working on an autobiography entitled Pequenas Memorias (Little Memories), about his childhood in rural Portugal.

But the image of the venerable novelist shut away in his island retreat, disengaged from the world, could not be further from the truth. Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak at conferences and presentations on politics and sociology. 'Most of it doesn't have much to do with literature,' he explains, 'but this is a part of my life that I consider very important, not to limit myself to literary work; I try to be involved in the world to the best of my strengths and abilities.' Still a member of the Communist party, Saramago is a vocal opponent of globalisation and many of his best known novels have taken the form of political allegory. Does he believe that the artist is obliged to take on a political role? 'It isn't a role,' he says, almost sharply.

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The Heretic by Miguel Delibes

Visitors to Valladolid, located north of Madrid, can follow a route through the city that is dedicated to sites associated with Cipriano Salcedo, a 16th-century merchant who was swept up in the fires of the Inquisition. Stations on the route include the old Jewish quarter, where the Salcedo family's warehouse would have been located, and the Plaza Mayor, where the auto-da-fé was held that condemned Salcedo and other presumed Protestant heretics. As they move among the remnants of Valladolid's former royal splendor, tourists can consider how Spain might have developed had the Counter-Reformation not been so successful in suppressing the nascent Protestant heresy--or what might have happened had there been more men like Salcedo.

There were people like Salcedo among those burned in Valladolid, but Salcedo himself is a fictional character in The Heretic, Miguel Delibes' 1998 novel, which was recently translated into English. Though little known in the U.S., Delibes is a member of Spain's Royal Academy and a winner, along with Vargas Lllosa, Cabrera Infante and Alvaro Mutis, of the Cervantes Prize.

Salcedo, born to wealth though not to the nobility, survives a loveless father, a mad wife and a liaison with his former wet nurse to develop into an astute and innovative businessman. Delibes' account of the Salcedo's vertical integration of the rabbit-coat industry--How many writers can boast of sustaining interest in a subject like that?--fleshes out Salcedo in much the same way that detailed manufacturing processes and financial transactions provide the background in Balzac's fictions. In terms of character, a contract can be as revealing as a seduction. Fortunately, this book has both.

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