Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Jorge Volpi

Mexican writer, and one of the founders the "Crack Movement", born in Mexico City in 1968.

Volpi graduated in law and mastered in Mexican Literature at the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and received a PhD in Spanish philology at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, with a thesis on the poet Jorge Cuesta.

With his most famous book, 'En busca de Klingsor' (In Search of Klingsor, 1999) he started a XX Century trilogy and obtained a few prizes, Biblioteca Breve, Deux Océans, Grinzane Cavour and best translation from Rome's Instituto Cervantes. This novel brought him international recognition, being translated in 19 languages.

Volpi completed his trilogy with El fin de la locura (2003) and No será la tierra (2006).

Bibliography
1991 - "Pieza en forma de sonata, para flauta, oboe, cello y arpa, Op. 1"
1993 - A pesar del oscuro silencio
1994 - Días de ira
1995 - La paz de los sepulcros
1996 - El temperamento melancólico
1997 - Sanar tu piel amarga
1998 - La imaginación y el poder. Una historia intelectual de 1968
1999 - En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor)
2000 - El juego del Apocalipsis
2003 - El fin de la locura
2004 - La guerra y las palabras. Una historia intelectual de 1994
2005 - Crack. Instrucciones de uso (with Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Estivill, Vicente Herrasti, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou and Eloy Urroz)
2006 - "Mexico: Lo que todo ciudadano quisiera (no) saber de su patria" (with Denise Dresser)
2006 - No será la tierra
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Monday, October 16, 2006

Jorge Volpi's new book

Jorge Volpi is one of the most successful Mexican writers of the Crack Generation. The Crack refers mainly a literary rupture and not the drug that colloquially is called crack. Its ideal is as they themselves say in their manifesto: "to shake the consciences of Mexican cultural establishment like a piñata", a debate between the indigenous tradition, the influence of the northern neighbor and the shade of writers like Paz, Fuentes or Rulfo, universal Mexicans. This group tries to analyze today's Mexico, asking the following questions: what Mexico? The one of the great companies, or the one of Chiapas? The one of maize tortillas, or the one that sighs because the border of the USA lowers in length? Thus, this way the authors of the Mexican Crack present their work persecuting a new aesthetic for writing in Mexico.
And although Volpi has come before to the Feria del Libro de Monterrey, in this occasion he comes to present its new book, No será la tierra. Volpi returns with this title that mixes some of its previously developed subjects in El fin de la locura or In search of Klingsor.

In his first success novel, Premio Biblioteca Breve 1999, In search of Klingsor, the author takes from a germanic legend related with the arthurian myth, where Klingsor is the declared enemy of king Amfortas. Volpi makes an analogy of this caracter with a supposed scientific advisor to Hitler on the atomic bomb.

In his more recent work, No será la tierra (Will not be the Earth), Volpi takes us to the history of the end of the Soviet Union: the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. But this is also a scientific novel, the protagonists of “No sera la tierra” include a Soviet biologist Irina Gránina, that contemplates the fall of the Comunism and, with him, the revolt of his daughter Oksana, first victim of the triumph of Capitalism; Jennifer Moore, a U.S. economist and IMF official; and Éva Halász, a Hungarian-born, U.S.-educated expert on artificial intelligence who is in charge of the software program used by a company working on the human genome. Thus, in this new project he conjugates all the aspects already seen before in his work.
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