Childhood is the age of discovery. Some kids fall in love with horses, some with dolls, others toy cars or butterfly collections. But Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, in Marie Arana's captivating new novel, Cellophane, isn't like other little girls and boys.
"He had always wanted to be an engineer," Arana writes, "a builder of mills, a virtuoso of machinery, a maestro of paper."
Victor grows up in Lima, Peru, at the end of the 19th century. To make his dreams of paper production come true, he sets off along a branch of the Amazon in search of a factory site. He is accompanied by his beautiful wife, Doa Mariana. Don Victor is drawn deeper and deeper not only into his quest to bring modern industry to the wild rain forest but also into an involvement with the supernatural beliefs of the tribes who live there.
Arana's writing is influenced by the magic realism of Latin American fiction, so that even Don Victor's manufacture of boring brown paper has an element of witchcraft to it. And when he sets his sights on the translucent, shimmering new invention cellophane, all sorts of strange things start to happen.
You can find the review here
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa
BEIRUT: In Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "The Feast of the Goat," the aging Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is driven to fits by an inability to control his bladder. In one tense scene the generalissimo, fearing that he has wet himself at an official banquet, sits stiffly in his chair, silently cursing the incompetence of whoever failed to seat next to him the usual aide who could be counted on to spill a drink in his lap when necessary. After dinner, it seems, somebody is going to be fed to the sharks.
"Well, probably it was not like that, you know," says Vargas Llosa, sitting in a hotel in Downtown Beirut after giving a lecture in the Lebanese capital last week. "Probably the details that are in my book are not exactly the details that were in Trujillo's life. But he had this problem with his bladder, as many old people have ... Not everything that happens in my book happened during the Trujillo regime, but it all could have happened."
This embroidering of history, this coloring of panoramic canvases with human details - incontinence, banal embarrassments, secret desires, petty jealousies - is performed to beautiful effect in the Peruvian writer's major works, notably "The War of the End of the World" (published in English in 1984).
You can find the interview here
"Well, probably it was not like that, you know," says Vargas Llosa, sitting in a hotel in Downtown Beirut after giving a lecture in the Lebanese capital last week. "Probably the details that are in my book are not exactly the details that were in Trujillo's life. But he had this problem with his bladder, as many old people have ... Not everything that happens in my book happened during the Trujillo regime, but it all could have happened."
This embroidering of history, this coloring of panoramic canvases with human details - incontinence, banal embarrassments, secret desires, petty jealousies - is performed to beautiful effect in the Peruvian writer's major works, notably "The War of the End of the World" (published in English in 1984).
You can find the interview here
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
If I had to come up with some basic texts in political science for college freshmen, I'd probably include "The Eagle's Throne" along with its companions in amoral realism: Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Carl von Clausewitz's "On War." It emulates them in refusing all forms of idealism and their attendant pieties. It prefers the nasty wisdom of corruption to the smiling platitudes of democracy. An example: "Corruption makes the system fluid and effective, unbothered by utopian hopes regarding justice or its lack thereof."
For all that, "The Eagle's Throne" can't be described as a cynical book so much as an unromantic one that rolls away the rock of Mexican politics and uncovers a pit of treacheries, deceits, maneuvers, stratagems, and the scurrying tarantulas of personal ambition. "The Eagle's Throne" itself is the Presidency of Mexico, a title that is roughly equivalent to our West Wing or The Oval Office.
You can find the review here
For all that, "The Eagle's Throne" can't be described as a cynical book so much as an unromantic one that rolls away the rock of Mexican politics and uncovers a pit of treacheries, deceits, maneuvers, stratagems, and the scurrying tarantulas of personal ambition. "The Eagle's Throne" itself is the Presidency of Mexico, a title that is roughly equivalent to our West Wing or The Oval Office.
You can find the review here
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes, a longtime critic of American imperialism and economic policies in Latin America, is best known for his 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz. A lawyer and Mexican dissident, Fuentes has had a political career that runs the gamut: assistant head of the press section of Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, head of the Department of Cultural Relations and, after a period of exile in Paris, Mexican ambassador to France.
Fuentes wrote The Eagle's Throne, originally published in Spanish in 2002, after he was asked by President Bill Clinton why Mexico had no vice presidents and what would happen if the Mexican president died in office. In such a situation, the Mexican Congress appoints an acting president; but, as Fuentes shows us, there are enough contenders for the office of president -- the eagle's throne of the title -- without adding a vice president to the mix.
You can find the review here
Fuentes wrote The Eagle's Throne, originally published in Spanish in 2002, after he was asked by President Bill Clinton why Mexico had no vice presidents and what would happen if the Mexican president died in office. In such a situation, the Mexican Congress appoints an acting president; but, as Fuentes shows us, there are enough contenders for the office of president -- the eagle's throne of the title -- without adding a vice president to the mix.
You can find the review here
Kensington Gardens by Rodrigo Fresán
Some novels grab you from the first page; you begin insisting on quoting line after line to anyone who will listen. Then there are those very few novels that make you quiet, selfish even, and quoting from them begins to seem a violation of the book's wondrous delight. You feel a growing dismay as the number of pages remaining dwindles. "Kensington Gardens," the first of Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán's 10 books to be translated into English, is one of these rare, exhilarating and hypnotic novels.
The opening lines dare you to read on: "It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man's suicide and a boy's death, and ends with a boy's death and a man's suicide. Or with various deaths and various suicides at varying ages. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter."
You can find the review here
The opening lines dare you to read on: "It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man's suicide and a boy's death, and ends with a boy's death and a man's suicide. Or with various deaths and various suicides at varying ages. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter."
You can find the review here
Cabot Prize Winners for Latin American Journalism Announced
Four journalists and writers were announced as winners the 2006 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for coverage of Latin American Affairs this morning at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. The awards are given to journalists whose coverage of Latin America “demonstrated a commitment to freedom of the press and inter-American understanding”; it is the oldest international award for journalism.
This year's recipients were independent journalist/writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Ginger Thompson, the Mexico City Bureau Chief for The New York Times; Jose Hamilton Ribeiro, a special reporter for TV Globo, Brazil; and Matt Moffett, the South American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Each winner will receive the Cabot medal and a $5,000 honorarium at a dinner ceremony at Columbia University in October.
You can find the full article here
This year's recipients were independent journalist/writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Ginger Thompson, the Mexico City Bureau Chief for The New York Times; Jose Hamilton Ribeiro, a special reporter for TV Globo, Brazil; and Matt Moffett, the South American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Each winner will receive the Cabot medal and a $5,000 honorarium at a dinner ceremony at Columbia University in October.
You can find the full article here
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Teatro Real de Madrid to Premiere Opera Based on Juan Goytisolo Novel
Catalan painter Frederic Amat and Andalucian composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú are collaborating on a new work that will premiere next spring at the Teatro Real de Madrid.
Europa Press reports that the opera, called Viaje a Simor ("Trip to Simor"), is inspired by the independent and dispossessed thinkers in Juan Goytisolo's 1988 novel The Virtues of the Solitary Bird. Goytisolo, a gay Spanish writer, voluntarily exiled himself from Franco's Spain in the late 1950s and still lives in Morocco.
The opera is also inspired by other works by "writers and poets who have undergone exile or torture" according to Sánchez-Verdú. The opera will use poems of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and the Syrian poet Adonis, among others, and each will be sung in its original language.
You can find the article here
Europa Press reports that the opera, called Viaje a Simor ("Trip to Simor"), is inspired by the independent and dispossessed thinkers in Juan Goytisolo's 1988 novel The Virtues of the Solitary Bird. Goytisolo, a gay Spanish writer, voluntarily exiled himself from Franco's Spain in the late 1950s and still lives in Morocco.
The opera is also inspired by other works by "writers and poets who have undergone exile or torture" according to Sánchez-Verdú. The opera will use poems of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and the Syrian poet Adonis, among others, and each will be sung in its original language.
You can find the article here
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
If "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace," didn't turn you away from political science fiction forever, you might enjoy a trip to the not-too-distant future, to a country not too far away, where the political intrigues are as convoluted as one of Princess Amidala's hairdos.
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico's communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)
The conceit, which involves a satellite, works best if you don't squint at it too closely. I wasted several pages wondering why the secretaries were bothering to haul out the old Remington typewriters: With the electricity still on, the computers should have worked just fine. Nor could I figure out why the phones or TVs were dead: Alexander Graham Bell's little invention, in particular, had a pretty good track record for decades before the first satellite hit outer space.
You can find the review here
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico's communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)
The conceit, which involves a satellite, works best if you don't squint at it too closely. I wasted several pages wondering why the secretaries were bothering to haul out the old Remington typewriters: With the electricity still on, the computers should have worked just fine. Nor could I figure out why the phones or TVs were dead: Alexander Graham Bell's little invention, in particular, had a pretty good track record for decades before the first satellite hit outer space.
You can find the review here
Jose Saramago has cancelled his appearence at the Rome Festival delle Letterature
Nobel prize winner José Saramago has cancelled his scheduled appearance at the Rome Festival delle Letterature on 22 June due to “serious and unforeseen personal problems”. The Portuguese author was due to close the fifth edition of the literature festival, which this year has seen over a dozen writers from across the globe read from their works in the Basilica di Massenzio in Via dei Fori Imperiali. Elisabetta Rasy and Zadie Smith will perform as planned on 20 June, but American writer Gore Vidal will now end the festival on 21 June.
You can find the article here
You can find the article here
Carlos Fuentes receives the keys to L.A.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa invited Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes to his home in Hancock Park. Fuentes, the author of many novels, including "The Death of Artemio Cruz" (1962), "A Change of Skin" (1967), "The Old Gringo" (1985) and "The Eagle's Throne" (2006), was given the keys to the city. What follows is an excerpt from the speech Fuentes gave.
"Some people might think you have taken a major risk in offering the keys to the city of Los Angeles to a Mexican citizen.
Not to worry. I will use these marvelous keys judiciously. But I will use them, fear not. I will open the gates to this magnificent metropolis — Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula — with confidence and generosity.
With generosity because Los Angeles means so many things. This is a city of global significance. A city sustained by Native and Afro and Anglo Americans. The meeting point of the Orient and the Americas, North and South. A city that is re-created daily by the energy of its multicultural environment.
With confidence because Los Angeles proves that California is not the slide area but the solid area of solidarity among all its cultural and racial constituencies. The city by the sea where all the peoples of the world arrive in order to recognize and share each other's values.
The City of the Angels is also the city of its citizens: confident, generous, fraternal in its conviction that we can and must all live together. Latinos and Asians, Anglo and Afro Americans, linked by the values of work and mutual respect."
You can find the article here
"Some people might think you have taken a major risk in offering the keys to the city of Los Angeles to a Mexican citizen.
Not to worry. I will use these marvelous keys judiciously. But I will use them, fear not. I will open the gates to this magnificent metropolis — Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula — with confidence and generosity.
With generosity because Los Angeles means so many things. This is a city of global significance. A city sustained by Native and Afro and Anglo Americans. The meeting point of the Orient and the Americas, North and South. A city that is re-created daily by the energy of its multicultural environment.
With confidence because Los Angeles proves that California is not the slide area but the solid area of solidarity among all its cultural and racial constituencies. The city by the sea where all the peoples of the world arrive in order to recognize and share each other's values.
The City of the Angels is also the city of its citizens: confident, generous, fraternal in its conviction that we can and must all live together. Latinos and Asians, Anglo and Afro Americans, linked by the values of work and mutual respect."
You can find the article here
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
IN his latest novel, Carlos Fuentes flashes forward — using literary conventions of the 18th century — to construct an epistolary novel that chronicles a tumultuous Mexican future. In the 2020s, the U.S. government, headed by President Condoleezza Rice, orchestrates an embargo against Mexico that cuts off the country's access to satellites and every other form of communication technology. In the absence of telephones and the Internet, the characters of Fuentes' novel vie for the Mexican presidency, recording their affairs and political maneuverings with ink and paper and relying on hand deliveries as their only means of transmission.
The initial impression, and the one the jacket copy wants the reader to believe, is that this is a political novel. Fuentes' conceit isolates Mexico from the rest of the world and focuses on the presidential palace and the contest for the Eagle's Throne, which is what the presidential seat is called. Fuentes is primed to wax prophetic about the approaching political dystopia, critique Mexico's political corruption and lament Latin America's dependency on the United States.
You can find the review here
The initial impression, and the one the jacket copy wants the reader to believe, is that this is a political novel. Fuentes' conceit isolates Mexico from the rest of the world and focuses on the presidential palace and the contest for the Eagle's Throne, which is what the presidential seat is called. Fuentes is primed to wax prophetic about the approaching political dystopia, critique Mexico's political corruption and lament Latin America's dependency on the United States.
You can find the review here
Malinche by Laura Esquivel
Some writers learn early in their careers to find a niche, then it’s up to readers to decide if they will embrace it. Such is the case with Laura Esquivel.
She set the tone for a highly respected career in the early 1990s with her first book, “Like Water for Chocolate,” detailing a young girl’s expression of passion through cooking.
That novel sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide, was made into a movie and earned an award from the American Booksellers Association.
Above all, “Chocolate” 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.
“Malinche” is a historical novel about Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes and his translator. The story is a lyrical interpretation of their relationship during Cortes’ destruction of Montezuma’s 16th-century Mexicas empire.
Mallinalli, also called Malinche in the book, is sold into slavery as a child and later becomes Cortes’ interpreter. Cortes and Mallinalli share an intimate relationship that leads to the birth of a child and lends itself to vibrantly written scenes by Esquivel.
You can find the review here
Displaying ambition bordering on recklessness, Laura Esquivel (``Like Water for Chocolate") revisits a tale infamous in her native Mexico but little known north of the border, the story of the slave woman who accompanied Cortés as his concubine and interpreter on his bloody march of conquest across Montezuma's kingdom.
In ``Malinche," Esquivel puts imaginative flesh on the bones of legend. Her Malinalli is not a traitor but an Edenic innocent, an artist and a mystic who believes that the Spaniard Cortés is the reincarnation of the god Quetzalc ó atl, come to rescue her people from their Aztec oppressors.
You can find the review here
She set the tone for a highly respected career in the early 1990s with her first book, “Like Water for Chocolate,” detailing a young girl’s expression of passion through cooking.
That novel sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide, was made into a movie and earned an award from the American Booksellers Association.
Above all, “Chocolate” 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.
“Malinche” is a historical novel about Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes and his translator. The story is a lyrical interpretation of their relationship during Cortes’ destruction of Montezuma’s 16th-century Mexicas empire.
Mallinalli, also called Malinche in the book, is sold into slavery as a child and later becomes Cortes’ interpreter. Cortes and Mallinalli share an intimate relationship that leads to the birth of a child and lends itself to vibrantly written scenes by Esquivel.
You can find the review here
Displaying ambition bordering on recklessness, Laura Esquivel (``Like Water for Chocolate") revisits a tale infamous in her native Mexico but little known north of the border, the story of the slave woman who accompanied Cortés as his concubine and interpreter on his bloody march of conquest across Montezuma's kingdom.
In ``Malinche," Esquivel puts imaginative flesh on the bones of legend. Her Malinalli is not a traitor but an Edenic innocent, an artist and a mystic who believes that the Spaniard Cortés is the reincarnation of the god Quetzalc ó atl, come to rescue her people from their Aztec oppressors.
You can find the review here
The Heretic: A Novel of the Inquisition by Miguel Delibes
If there is one characteristic symbol that sparked the great German Protestant Reformation, it is that of Martin Luther nailing his Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. Appalled by the conviction of purchasing God's pardon for sins, Luther's determined defense of his 95 Theses, which he was willing to debate, led to an investigation by the Roman Catholic Church. His principles were reviled and he was excommunicated in January 1521.
Readers familiar with the Protestant Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition will find the beginning and end of Miguel Delibes' novel The Heretic to their taste. The opening Prelude, set in 1557, begins the book with the title character, Cipriano Salcedo, returning from Germany. He was to meet with Luther's friend and supporter Phillip Melanchthon and other leaders of the reform church and bring back outlawed books.
What follows is not a continuation of this story. Instead, Delibes takes us back to the beginning. We follow Cipriano's birth, childhood and career before heresy and the Inquisition are mentioned again after almost 300 pages. This in-between story takes place in the Spanish city of Valladolid, where the author was born in 1920 and to which the novel is dedicated.
You can find the review here
Readers familiar with the Protestant Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition will find the beginning and end of Miguel Delibes' novel The Heretic to their taste. The opening Prelude, set in 1557, begins the book with the title character, Cipriano Salcedo, returning from Germany. He was to meet with Luther's friend and supporter Phillip Melanchthon and other leaders of the reform church and bring back outlawed books.
What follows is not a continuation of this story. Instead, Delibes takes us back to the beginning. We follow Cipriano's birth, childhood and career before heresy and the Inquisition are mentioned again after almost 300 pages. This in-between story takes place in the Spanish city of Valladolid, where the author was born in 1920 and to which the novel is dedicated.
You can find the review here
Sergio Pitol translated to Chinese
Outstanding Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, 2005 Cervantes Literature Prize winner, is in Beijing to present two of his works translated into Chinese.
During his two-week stay in China, the prestigious writer will launch the Chinese versions of his novels "La vida Conyugal" (Married Life, 1991) and "El arte de la Fuga" (The Art of Escape, 1996), and attend related cultural events.
Pitol, also winner of the 1999 Juan Rulfo Prize, told Prensa Latina, that apart from the two novels launching here, Chinese publishers plan to translate and print a series of his literary works.
You can find the article here
During his two-week stay in China, the prestigious writer will launch the Chinese versions of his novels "La vida Conyugal" (Married Life, 1991) and "El arte de la Fuga" (The Art of Escape, 1996), and attend related cultural events.
Pitol, also winner of the 1999 Juan Rulfo Prize, told Prensa Latina, that apart from the two novels launching here, Chinese publishers plan to translate and print a series of his literary works.
You can find the article here
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Lower City directed by Sergio Machado
With his first fiction feature, Walter Salles protégé Sergio Machado makes a thorough study of the Brazilian bas-fonds, from a bloody cockfight with a knife-fight coda to strip clubs, whorehouses, sweat-stained flops, low-rent boxing gyms, rusty cargo ships filled with slobbering gobs, back-alley sex, late-night holdups—everything, it seems, but a crack den. You may well wonder if Machado's protagonists—a pair of boat-owning buddies and the young hooker who triangulates them—ever just go to the movies, or watch a soccer match in a bar not filled with sweaty women and drooling criminals. The ambience resonates off the walls—in what has become the proto-professional template for exportable Brazilian films, Machado's imagery is saturated with the high-contrast colors of rotten fruit, and the grungy lowlife is never less than convincing.
You can find the review here
You can find the review here
Interview with Guillermo Arriaga
Best known in the United States for writing the screenplays to "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" - films centered around dramatic car accidents - Arriaga published three novels in Spanish before turning to cinema.
Arriaga now is on tour to promote "The Night Buffalo" (Atria Books), which is the first of his novels to be released in the United States. Originally published in Spanish in 1999, it features Arriaga's distinct storytelling style - a disjointed puzzle of flashbacks woven into layers of dreams and conversations that add up to a love affair in the aftermath of a suicide.
You can find the interview here
Arriaga now is on tour to promote "The Night Buffalo" (Atria Books), which is the first of his novels to be released in the United States. Originally published in Spanish in 1999, it features Arriaga's distinct storytelling style - a disjointed puzzle of flashbacks woven into layers of dreams and conversations that add up to a love affair in the aftermath of a suicide.
You can find the interview here
Don Quixote translated to Quechua
The version of the classic “Don Quijote de la Mancha” in the indigenous language of Quechua makes this book, marking the birth of the modern novel as a literature genre, now available in a language spoken by nearly 20 million people in seven South American countries.
Symbol of the powerful Incan culture, Quechua is a common language of ethnic groups in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, contributing to keep it alive.
Presented Thursday in Spain by Tupac Yupanqui, member of the Peruvian Academy of the Quechua Language, the volume is enriched by the reproduction of illustrations made by farmers of the San Juan de Salua region.
You can find the article here
Symbol of the powerful Incan culture, Quechua is a common language of ethnic groups in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, contributing to keep it alive.
Presented Thursday in Spain by Tupac Yupanqui, member of the Peruvian Academy of the Quechua Language, the volume is enriched by the reproduction of illustrations made by farmers of the San Juan de Salua region.
You can find the article here
Interview with Isabel Allende
Among the bright lights and celebrities gracing our valley for last weekend's big wine auction, none shine so vividly on the international stage as the provocative author, Isabel Allende.
Her fans are passionate and legion, and Allende is a platinum-selling, bona fide "rock star" of the literary world. Yet Allende slipped quietly into St. Helena Saturday evening, without entourage, in the company of her hosts Agustin and Valeria Huneeus, the proprietors of Rutherford's Quintessa, to make her contribution to the fund-raising and festivities.
The three have been close friends for nearly 20 years, bonding in San Francisco through the shared experience of being transplanted ex-pats -- exiles from the turbulent politics of 1970s Chile who now count themselves Californians. But beyond this, the three share an indomitable joie de vivre, perhaps more appropriately rendered in Spanish, gozo de la vida, and an appreciation of the necessity of wine and food and conversation to enliven the soul.
Both this alegria and the California-Chilean connection sparkled unpretentiously in Quintessa's live auction lot Saturday which offered up an intimate dinner party with the irrepressible Allende at the Huneeus' winery home -- a "quintessential fiesta" of Latin music, food and Isabel's spicy storytelling. The lot included a bonus of signed first editions of her latest bestseller and California historical novel, "Zorro." Ann Colgin's winning bid brought $130,000 to the Napa Valley Vintners' funds benefiting local health care, housing and youth development programs.
You can find the interview here
Her fans are passionate and legion, and Allende is a platinum-selling, bona fide "rock star" of the literary world. Yet Allende slipped quietly into St. Helena Saturday evening, without entourage, in the company of her hosts Agustin and Valeria Huneeus, the proprietors of Rutherford's Quintessa, to make her contribution to the fund-raising and festivities.
The three have been close friends for nearly 20 years, bonding in San Francisco through the shared experience of being transplanted ex-pats -- exiles from the turbulent politics of 1970s Chile who now count themselves Californians. But beyond this, the three share an indomitable joie de vivre, perhaps more appropriately rendered in Spanish, gozo de la vida, and an appreciation of the necessity of wine and food and conversation to enliven the soul.
Both this alegria and the California-Chilean connection sparkled unpretentiously in Quintessa's live auction lot Saturday which offered up an intimate dinner party with the irrepressible Allende at the Huneeus' winery home -- a "quintessential fiesta" of Latin music, food and Isabel's spicy storytelling. The lot included a bonus of signed first editions of her latest bestseller and California historical novel, "Zorro." Ann Colgin's winning bid brought $130,000 to the Napa Valley Vintners' funds benefiting local health care, housing and youth development programs.
You can find the interview here
Monday, June 12, 2006
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes, a longtime critic of American imperialism and economic policies in Latin America, is best known for his 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz. A lawyer and Mexican dissident, Fuentes has had a political career that runs the gamut: assistant head of the press section of Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, head of the Department of Cultural Relations and, after a period of exile in Paris, Mexican ambassador to France. Fuentes wrote The Eagle's Throne, originally published in Spanish in 2002, after he was asked by President Bill Clinton why Mexico had no vice presidents and what would happen if the Mexican president died in office. In such a situation, the Mexican Congress appoints an acting president, but, as Fuentes shows us, there are enough contenders for the office of president - the eagle's throne of the title - without adding a vice president to the mix.
The Eagle's Throne starts in the not-too-distant future of January 2020, and President Lorenzo Teran of Mexico has called for the withdrawal of American occupation forces from Colombia and a ban on Mexican oil exports to the United States unless Washington agrees to abide by OPEC pricing. The U.S. responds by blacking out the international communications satellite for Mexico, leaving the country without phone, fax or e-mail service. But this is only back story to allow for the novel's epistolary form as the characters are forced to communicate via letters. The Eagle's Throne is a political Dangerous Liaisons, with all the intrigue, blackmail, backstabbing and seduction of a telenovela.
Fuentes' politicians aren't particularly upset by their current rupture with the U.S., because they have other concerns: The 2023 presidential election is looming, and the current president has yet to anoint a candidate as his successor. The behind-the-scenes jockeying for power begins, with Cabinet members pitted against each other and using every possible tactic to gain the advantage.
You can find the review here
The Eagle's Throne starts in the not-too-distant future of January 2020, and President Lorenzo Teran of Mexico has called for the withdrawal of American occupation forces from Colombia and a ban on Mexican oil exports to the United States unless Washington agrees to abide by OPEC pricing. The U.S. responds by blacking out the international communications satellite for Mexico, leaving the country without phone, fax or e-mail service. But this is only back story to allow for the novel's epistolary form as the characters are forced to communicate via letters. The Eagle's Throne is a political Dangerous Liaisons, with all the intrigue, blackmail, backstabbing and seduction of a telenovela.
Fuentes' politicians aren't particularly upset by their current rupture with the U.S., because they have other concerns: The 2023 presidential election is looming, and the current president has yet to anoint a candidate as his successor. The behind-the-scenes jockeying for power begins, with Cabinet members pitted against each other and using every possible tactic to gain the advantage.
You can find the review here
La Malinche by Laura Esquivel
Nearly five centuries after she helped Hernan Cortes conquer the Aztec Empire, Malinche is still a controversial figure in Mexican history.
A noble-born child sold into slavery by her mother, she used her unusual ability as a linguist to enable the Spanish to negotiate alliances with the native tribes against the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. As a result, she's reviled as a traitor to her people and, because she was Cortes' mistress and bore him a son, regarded as the symbolic mother of the Mexican people.
In "Malinche," Laura Esquivel, known best for her 1992 best seller "Like Water for Chocolate," reimagines her in this latter role, as a deeply devout woman caught in a clash of civilizations and attempting to make sense of what she experiences.
You can find the review here
A noble-born child sold into slavery by her mother, she used her unusual ability as a linguist to enable the Spanish to negotiate alliances with the native tribes against the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. As a result, she's reviled as a traitor to her people and, because she was Cortes' mistress and bore him a son, regarded as the symbolic mother of the Mexican people.
In "Malinche," Laura Esquivel, known best for her 1992 best seller "Like Water for Chocolate," reimagines her in this latter role, as a deeply devout woman caught in a clash of civilizations and attempting to make sense of what she experiences.
You can find the review here
La Malinche by Laura Esquivel
It ought to be difficult, if not impossible, to make the Spanish conquest of Mexico lyrical, but Laura Esquivel comes close in her fifth novel. This is not a good thing either for history or for literature.
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her debut novel, Like Water for Chocolate, the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments, using recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th century Mexico. In Malinche, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as Cortes' translator helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica (Aztec) people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin, the first true mestizo Mexican.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists argue that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate with words instead of swords.
It's unclear whether Esquivel shares this particular revisionist point of view, but then many things in this novel are unclear. We get a few scenes of pillage and massacre, fever dreams that interrupt the story that Esquivel really cares about: one woman's spiritual journey.
The novelist treats her heroine with refreshing sympathy. How can you not feel for a 5-year-old girl whose mother, eager to remarry after the death of her first husband, gives her away to slave-traders? All the young Malinalli has to hold on to are memories of her grandmother, a loving woman rich in the spirituality of Mexica culture. But by the time Malinalli travels with Cortes to Tenochtitlan, Montezuma's capital, her grandmother's indigenous lyricism has given way to self-aggrandizing, almost New Age escapism.
You can find the review here
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her debut novel, Like Water for Chocolate, the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments, using recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th century Mexico. In Malinche, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as Cortes' translator helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica (Aztec) people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin, the first true mestizo Mexican.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists argue that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate with words instead of swords.
It's unclear whether Esquivel shares this particular revisionist point of view, but then many things in this novel are unclear. We get a few scenes of pillage and massacre, fever dreams that interrupt the story that Esquivel really cares about: one woman's spiritual journey.
The novelist treats her heroine with refreshing sympathy. How can you not feel for a 5-year-old girl whose mother, eager to remarry after the death of her first husband, gives her away to slave-traders? All the young Malinalli has to hold on to are memories of her grandmother, a loving woman rich in the spirituality of Mexica culture. But by the time Malinalli travels with Cortes to Tenochtitlan, Montezuma's capital, her grandmother's indigenous lyricism has given way to self-aggrandizing, almost New Age escapism.
You can find the review here
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano
At the time of his death at age 50 in 2003, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was already considered one of the great talents of his generation, and since then his reputation has only increased. With the posthumous publication of the novel "2666," his place within Latin American letters is indisputable. But Bolaño has until fairly recently remained somewhat obscure outside the Spanish-speaking world. Thankfully, this is changing: New Directions (the same visionary house that introduced W.G. Sebald to the United States.) has published two Bolaño novels to date: "By Night in Chile" in 2003 and the stunning "Distant Star," last year. His work has begun appearing in some of the United States' better literary journals, and the prestigious publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is preparing the release of "2666" for next year.
Now New Directions is offering Bolaño's short fictions, and for those who are unfamiliar with this author, "Last Evenings on Earth" is a fine place to begin. It is a powerful introduction to the exquisite sadness of Bolaño's world, gathering texts from his two story collections, "Llamadas Telefonicas" ("Phone Calls," 1997) and "Putas Asesinas" ("Murderous Whores," 2001). Both were published to wide acclaim, and neither has been translated in full: "Last Evenings on Earth," despite being a sort of greatest hits compilation, comes together remarkably well, with 14 mostly autobiographical tales, all imbued with a helpless devotion to writing as the only potential means of redemption.
The finest pieces here come from Bolaño's second collection, "Putas Asesinas." "Gomez Palacio" and the title story, both of which first appeared in the New Yorker, are masterpieces of restraint: the latter, ostensibly about a father-son vacation in Acapulco, tackles the psychological aftermath of Chile's traumatic recent political history. The protagonist, identified only as B, has survived the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power and cannot bring himself to explain to his father what it was like. The two men talk past each other, each impossibly isolated in his own world. "Dentist," the penultimate story, exists as if on the edge of an unsettling dream: 15 pages in, after a few false starts, the narrator and a friend wind up in a shack at the edge of a provincial Mexican city, reading the hallucinatory fiction of an unlikely 16-year-old prodigy. This moment, when it arrives, is wondrous, strange, dizzying, and no one-sentence explanation can do it justice. The final piece, "Dance Card," is a perfect summation of Bolaño and his literary ethic: a harrowing mash-up of fact and fiction, biography and fantasy, with appearances by the ghosts of Adolf Hitler and Pablo Neruda, nods to Zen meditation, a recognition of the inevitability of smoking, and the specter of political failure -- shot through with the memory of "those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell."
You can find the review here
Now New Directions is offering Bolaño's short fictions, and for those who are unfamiliar with this author, "Last Evenings on Earth" is a fine place to begin. It is a powerful introduction to the exquisite sadness of Bolaño's world, gathering texts from his two story collections, "Llamadas Telefonicas" ("Phone Calls," 1997) and "Putas Asesinas" ("Murderous Whores," 2001). Both were published to wide acclaim, and neither has been translated in full: "Last Evenings on Earth," despite being a sort of greatest hits compilation, comes together remarkably well, with 14 mostly autobiographical tales, all imbued with a helpless devotion to writing as the only potential means of redemption.
The finest pieces here come from Bolaño's second collection, "Putas Asesinas." "Gomez Palacio" and the title story, both of which first appeared in the New Yorker, are masterpieces of restraint: the latter, ostensibly about a father-son vacation in Acapulco, tackles the psychological aftermath of Chile's traumatic recent political history. The protagonist, identified only as B, has survived the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power and cannot bring himself to explain to his father what it was like. The two men talk past each other, each impossibly isolated in his own world. "Dentist," the penultimate story, exists as if on the edge of an unsettling dream: 15 pages in, after a few false starts, the narrator and a friend wind up in a shack at the edge of a provincial Mexican city, reading the hallucinatory fiction of an unlikely 16-year-old prodigy. This moment, when it arrives, is wondrous, strange, dizzying, and no one-sentence explanation can do it justice. The final piece, "Dance Card," is a perfect summation of Bolaño and his literary ethic: a harrowing mash-up of fact and fiction, biography and fantasy, with appearances by the ghosts of Adolf Hitler and Pablo Neruda, nods to Zen meditation, a recognition of the inevitability of smoking, and the specter of political failure -- shot through with the memory of "those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell."
You can find the review here
La Malinche by Laura Esquivel
It ought to be difficult, if not impossible, to make the Spanish conquest of Mexico lyrical, but Laura Esquivel comes close in her fifth novel, "Malinche." This is not a good thing either for history or for literature.
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her first novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments. That book used recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th-century Mexico. In Esquivel's new book, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica (Aztec) woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as "The Tongue" — Cortes' translator — helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin — the first true mestizo Mexican, or at least the most famous one — before the conquistador married her off to a much nicer man named Juan Jaramillo, with whom, according to Esquivel's account, she had a daughter.
As far as I can tell — one of the many shortcomings of Esquivel's book is that it leaves the reader grasping for details — Malinche was one of the names by which Cortes was sometimes known. It means something like captain, so the captain's translating mistress became La Malinche. Esquivel gives her the birth name of Malinalli, which refers to a sacred grass and also seems to have associations with death.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists have argued that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate (sometimes) with words instead of swords — not that he was afraid to use those.
You can find the review here
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her first novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments. That book used recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th-century Mexico. In Esquivel's new book, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica (Aztec) woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as "The Tongue" — Cortes' translator — helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin — the first true mestizo Mexican, or at least the most famous one — before the conquistador married her off to a much nicer man named Juan Jaramillo, with whom, according to Esquivel's account, she had a daughter.
As far as I can tell — one of the many shortcomings of Esquivel's book is that it leaves the reader grasping for details — Malinche was one of the names by which Cortes was sometimes known. It means something like captain, so the captain's translating mistress became La Malinche. Esquivel gives her the birth name of Malinalli, which refers to a sacred grass and also seems to have associations with death.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists have argued that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate (sometimes) with words instead of swords — not that he was afraid to use those.
You can find the review here
Malinche by Laura Esquivel
Malinche, the Amerindian slave who accompanied Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés through his invasion of Mexico, serving as both his translator and lover, has long been reviled by the Mexicans. In a country where the "feminine" is divided very clearly along the virgin-whore polarity, the much revered Virgen de Guadalupe is often starkly juxtaposed against the traitorous Malinche, who, in giving herself to Cortés, not only facilitated the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, but also helped to found the new mestizo or mixed-blood race through the son she had with the conquistador.
The psychological dimensions of this rejection in a country where more than 90 per cent of the people are mestizos have been extensively and fascinatingly explored by Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. Malinche herself, though, remains an enigma. Little is known about her, and that little does not allow us any insight into her motivations. Now, Paz's compatriot, Laura Esquivel, best known for her popular novel Like Water for Chocolate, has attempted to bring this controversial figure to life in a new novel, Malinche.
You can find the review here
The psychological dimensions of this rejection in a country where more than 90 per cent of the people are mestizos have been extensively and fascinatingly explored by Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. Malinche herself, though, remains an enigma. Little is known about her, and that little does not allow us any insight into her motivations. Now, Paz's compatriot, Laura Esquivel, best known for her popular novel Like Water for Chocolate, has attempted to bring this controversial figure to life in a new novel, Malinche.
You can find the review here
Cuban Author Wins Italian Poetry Award
The prestigious Camaiore de Poesia international poetry award for 2006 was given to the Cuban writer Miguel Barnet for his book Il poeta nell’isola (The poet in the island), published last year by Campanotto.
You can find the article here
You can find the article here
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
The year is 2020. Condoleezza Rice is president of the United States, and neighboring Mexico is grappling with internal political tensions and external pressures to revise the strongholds of current Mexican President Lorenzo Terán.
After Terán demands the removal of U.S. troops from Colombia and insists on keeping the price of Mexican oil high, the United States cuts off Mexico's satellite communications system, leaving Mexico with no phones, e-mail, or faxes. Terán's downfall is inevitable, and Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, paints an epistolary portrait of the ensuing scramble for political power.
Named for the presidential seat itself, The Eagle's Throne is a political thriller of sorts, toying with our preconceived notions of how we communicate, who's in charge, and how much power an individual truly has when standing up against sometimes-long-established political machinery.
You can find the review here
After Terán demands the removal of U.S. troops from Colombia and insists on keeping the price of Mexican oil high, the United States cuts off Mexico's satellite communications system, leaving Mexico with no phones, e-mail, or faxes. Terán's downfall is inevitable, and Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, paints an epistolary portrait of the ensuing scramble for political power.
Named for the presidential seat itself, The Eagle's Throne is a political thriller of sorts, toying with our preconceived notions of how we communicate, who's in charge, and how much power an individual truly has when standing up against sometimes-long-established political machinery.
You can find the review here
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez
The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.
New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.
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
New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.
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
The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez
The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.
New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.
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
New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.
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
Monday, June 05, 2006
Our Lives Are the Rivers by Jaime Manrique
Manrique's novel is full of stories: how the teenage Manuela ran off with an amorous lieutenant, destroying her reputation; how she helped Bolívar dodge an ambush at the Presidential Palace in Bogotá, then met his intended assassins, saber in hand, earning her the honorific "liberator of the Liberator"; how in a letter she dispensed with James Thorne, her pasty English husband ("I have an idea: in heaven we will marry again; but no more on this earth. . . . Everything will be done in the English style in heaven, where a perfectly monotonous life is reserved for the people of your nation").
Yet Manrique doesn't always make these tales as vivid and convincing as they should be; it's as if he's holding his imagination in check. We hear about Bolívar's "perturbing maleness," but can't quite visualize the tiny, brooding conqueror in the flesh. And Manrique's Manuela can be a bore, especially when she pummels the reader with allusions to Don Quixote, or with trite revelations ("Had I fallen in love with a man whose true mistress was war?"). Her passions make her an engaging heroine, but it's not until she goes into exile and her spirit, liberated from her plague-ridden body, swirls above the lush volcanic wilderness of the Andes that Manuela — and Manrique's prose — begin to soar, freed perhaps from the clutches of history.
You can find the review here
Yet Manrique doesn't always make these tales as vivid and convincing as they should be; it's as if he's holding his imagination in check. We hear about Bolívar's "perturbing maleness," but can't quite visualize the tiny, brooding conqueror in the flesh. And Manrique's Manuela can be a bore, especially when she pummels the reader with allusions to Don Quixote, or with trite revelations ("Had I fallen in love with a man whose true mistress was war?"). Her passions make her an engaging heroine, but it's not until she goes into exile and her spirit, liberated from her plague-ridden body, swirls above the lush volcanic wilderness of the Andes that Manuela — and Manrique's prose — begin to soar, freed perhaps from the clutches of history.
You can find the review here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)