Carmen Boullosa

Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa presents her new novel in Madrid.

El Velázquez de París is the second part of the trilogy started with La otra mano de Lepanto, were she approaches the disappearance of a linen cloth of the Spanish painter and the ethics of the artist as a witness of his time.

Los atentados del 11-S dieron pie a Carmen Boullosa a escribir "La otra mano de Lepanto" , donde ofrece su visión del nuevo mundo y los conflictos religiosos que se perfilaron tras esa fecha.

Así enfrenta la nueva coyuntura mundial a aquella otra "guerra religiosa" que fue la Batalla de Lepanto.

Ahora, en El velázquez de París, la autora se sirve de "La expulsión de los moriscos" , el lienzo que consagró a Velázquez como uno de los grandes artistas de su época, para ahondar sobre si el arte tiene que tener "signo moral" .

La novela relata la historia del cuadro Diego Velázquez sobre la expulsión por parte de los Reyes Católicos de los moros o moriscos, como se les denominaba en la España de la época.

El lienzo fue dado por perdido durante el incendio del Alcázar de Madrid en 1734, y la novela plantea su posible salvación.

Pero Boullosa además de fabular sobre la vida y la obra del clásico español, se adentra en la moralidad de un parisino maduro, que acompañado de dos jovencitas, asegura ser propietario de la codiciada obra de arte.

En El velázquez de París, asegura su autora, la "realidad, el arte y la ficción" están en el mismo plano. Así, Boullosa trata desde la literatura "voltear" la vida desde la función "antisocial" del escritor "irreverente" que observa la inutilidad del arte. Read More

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Mexican Literature

Javier Cercas - Interview

Richard Lea interviews Spanish novelist Javier Cercas.

An interview with a writer as artful as Javier Cercas is filled with traps for the unwary, beset by pitfalls for the unprepared. The literary interview is a territory the Spanish novelist explores at length in his international bestseller, Soldiers of Salamis, in which he drives the plot with a pair of fictional interviews considerably more colourful than many of their real-life counterparts.

The story, which won the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2004, begins when the narrator, a journalist and author named Javier Cercas, stumbles across the story of a minor poet's brush with death in the Spanish civil war during the course of an extended interview with a garrulous and evasive Spanish novelist - an interview which the fictional Cercas finally manages to "salvage", or perhaps makes up. The climactic third section of this "true tale" is set in motion by an interview with a bohemian Chilean novelist, who first tells the narrator that he doesn't need any imagination to write a novel, and later tells him to "make up" an encounter with the book's central figure - a tactic which the fictional Cercas rejects.

Meanwhile, the real Javier Cercas's latest book, The Speed of Light, follows an unnamed novelist, who has recently found success with a "true tale" about the Spanish civil war, as he grapples with the story of a Vietnam veteran whom he met while teaching at the University of Illinois - where Cercas himself spent two years in the 1980s. In the world of Javier Cercas, fact and fiction are never far apart, although this interview is at least grounded to some pretty tangible details: across the table from me is a short, compact man with jet black hair in a leather jacket. He seems a little on edge, but I presume it's the real him.

His self-reflexive technique, he explains, came out of a series of experimental columns for the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, which continues to this day. "I began to write some weird stuff in El Pais, using the 'I'," he says, "and then I became aware that this 'I' was fictional, even in a newspaper. They were experimental, crazy columns, and I began to write in a different way, that some people describe as 'self-fiction'."

So the books aren't true tales? "Of course not," he smiles. "These narrators in the books are not myself, even though in the case of Soldiers of Salamis the name is my name." Read More

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Horacio Castellanos Moya reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

Nine years ago publication of "The Savage Detectives" catapulted Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano into literary prominence both in Spain and Latin America.

That year Bolano also received the major Spanish language literary awards, the Herralde Prize in Barcelona, and the Romulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas.

Now, thanks to the same novel and positive reviews in major American magazines and newspapers, the late writer has become the "Latin American phenomenon" in the United States. He died in 2003 at age 50.

Some reviewers claim that since 1970, with the publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," no other novel translated from Spanish has created such commotion in the United States.

The novel opens as the adventures of a group of young Mexican poets, known as the "visceral realists," and their leaders, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a quixotic, challenging, provoking and errant pair who live on the fringes of society. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Latin American Bibliography #2

Paradiso by José Lezama Lima
First published in Cuba in 1966, where its the publication caused huge controversy. Paradiso was hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary literature. Paradiso is the coming-of-age story of Jose Cemi at the turn of the century Cuba.

José Lezama Lima born in Havana, Cuba, on December 19, 1910, is a major Latin-American literary figure.





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Latin American Literature

Latin American Bibliography #1

Los Arrieros del Agua by Carlos Navarrete.

His 1985 novel Los Arrieros del Agua (The Water Carriers) tells the story of Reinaldo, a men with a thousand skills, cruising the plateau that between Chiapas with Guatemala.
This novel is often compared to Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo.

Carlos Navarrete was born in January 29, 1931 in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and lives in Mexico since 1952.
He was awarded the "Prémio Nacional de Literatura Miguel Angel Asturias" in 2005.



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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Three new reviews of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.
By Adrian Jiménez,

Roberto Bolaño’s first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, begins with the invitation to join a dying group of Mexican poets. First published in Spanish in 1998, the alluring novel has finally been published in English, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Bolaño, who died in 2003 in Spain at the age of fifty, is only now gaining in the United States the reputation that he has held for more than a decade throughout Latin America and Europe. Susan Sontag dubbed Bolaño, “the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.”

The 577-page novel is written in three parts, the first and last being the stark journal entries of a young poet named Juan Garcîa Madero in Mexico, 1976. Madero is a know-it-all student who falls prey to the traps of young women and the admiration of the two main and mysterious characters of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter-ego). Consisting of 400 pages, the second part is the bulk of the novel and uses more than thirty narrators; it is told over twenty years and crosses Mexico, France, Spain, Israel and Liberia. Read More

Michael Redhill,

Back before the Marquess of Queensberry's rules came into effect, boxing was a sport of pure brawn and brutality. The fighters went at it bare-knuckled, and the fight wasn't over until one man couldn't get up. So, in that spirit, picture this novel, The Savage Detectives, in one corner, its oiled biceps gleaming, and you in the other, with your reading glasses slipping down your nose. This one's scheduled for 577 pages aaannd ... there's the bell.

Not to push the boxing metaphor too far (Roberto Bolaño would have, but I've only got 1,000 words), the author of The Savage Detectives was a literary heavyweight in Mexico whose early death guaranteed immortality, although his books would have been enough. The fame of this novel greatly precedes its appearance in English, and it's likely you've already read about it; reviewing it at this stage makes me feel like a lighter swaying in a stadium. It's a massive, sprawling, romantic cauldron of a book: a self-portrait of the artist (refracted through dozens of literary mirrors), a history of his times, a cultural and political manifesto, a mystery novel and a game. Although not necessarily in that order. Half George Perec's Life: A User's Manual, half Don Quixote, half Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, The Savage Detectives is a strange journey. And if you did the math just now, you'll have a sense of the kind of excesses and impossibilities the novel contains. Read More

and Chris Beha

Bolano always considered himself primarily a poet, and he didn't begin the prose writing on which his reputation rests until the last decade of his life, when he knew his health was failing. In other words, if Granta had ever taken it upon itself to produce a Best of Young Peripatetic Chilean-born Novelists issue, Bolano would not have been eligible. The decades before he turned to fiction writing Bolano spent writing poetry, traveling throughout Latin America and Europe, working odd jobs, taking heroin, and losing his teeth. This period in Bolano's life calls to mind some lines from his haunting novella, Amulet:

"Maybe it was madness that impelled me to travel. It could have been madness. I used to say it was culture. Of course culture sometimes is, or involves, a kind of madness. Maybe it was lack of love that impelled me to travel. Or an overwhelming abundance of love. Maybe it was madness."

Those years of travel and madness and culture and love and madness are the subject of The Savage Detectives, the big book, just out in the States, on which Bolano's reputation in the Spanish- speaking world mostly rests. The book's dual center is Bolano's fictional alter ego, Arturo Belano, and his friend, Ulises Lima. At the same time, the novel comprises what the folks at Granta might call a "provisional and partial portrait of who was young and wrote bad poetry in Latin America in the early years of the nineteen-seventies." It's also a study of what the political and social upheavals of the last century wrought on Bolano's generation in Chile and Mexico. Their plight is rendered with none of the sentimentalizing gloss of magical realism; in this way, The Savage Detectives is the kind of book that makes everything that came before it look momentarily shallow by comparison. It's a dirty book in almost every sense of the word -- smutty, and grimy, and occasionally even underhanded. It's funny and sad. Bolano has the ability, unmatched perhaps since Beckett, to bring his readers to the very edge of tedium, only to meet them there with a gesture of transcendent sublimity. Read More

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Latin American Literature

What's waiting to be translated. Rebecca Milzoff has some suggestions.
Special attention to Mexican Daniel Sada’s Porque Parece Mentira la Verdad Nunca Se Sabe, Argentine Marcelo Cohen’s El Fin de lo Mismo and Cuban and Ena Lucía Portela’s Cien Botellas en una Pared.





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Latin American Literature

Alberto Manguel - Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books

Jane Sullivan reviews Alberto Manguel's Reading Diary.

The essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel is one of those increasingly rare beings who live their lives steeped in books. What is even rarer is that he has the gift of passing on his enthusiasm.

A few years ago, he re-read a few of his favourite books and was struck by the way their worlds of the past seemed to reflect the "dismal chaos" of the world he was living in. He decided to keep a record of those moments by reading one favourite book every month for a year, and writing notes elicited by his reading.

The result is a curiously enchanting book, A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books. It is a book of fragments, but in an eerie way the fragments come together and hint at something momentous that lies just out of reach. It's also a wonderful reminder of why we read at all.

Much of this is due to the choice of books, which is somewhat eccentric. There are the classics that boys used to read - Kipling's Kim, Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau, Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four. There are classics of world literature - Don Quixote, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. And then there are books of almost wilful obscurity, such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, that most English-speaking readers have never heard of. Read More

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Argentine Literature

Edmundo Paz Soldán - Interview

Los Tiempos interviews Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán on his new novel Palacio Quemado.

Palacio Quemado puede no ser lo que verdaderamente ocurrió en el gobierno de Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, pero es ese el reto, el que al leer la novela uno pueda decir esto pudo haber sido así.

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Bolivian Literature

Alejandro Zambra - Interview

Página/12 interviews Alejandro Zambra, one of the Bogotá 39 writers, about Bonsái, his first novel.

Quería escribir un libro que se llamara así porque tenía esa imagen en la cabeza, la de un hombre que se encierra en un cuarto a cuidar un bonsái y se enajena; prefiere cuidar un bonsái a escribir, prefiere cuidar un bonsái a vivir

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño - El Secreto del Mal and La Universidad Desconocida

Rodrigo Fresán reviews Roberto Bolaño's El secreto del mal and La Universidad Desconocida.

“La literatura se parece mucho a la pelea de los samuráis, pero un samurái no pelea contra otro samurái: pelea contra un monstruo. Generalmente sabe, además, que va a ser derrotado. Tener el valor, sabiendo previamente que vas a ser derrotado, y salir a pelear: eso es la literatura”, definió Roberto Bolaño en una entrevista.
Y, en otra, agregó: “A la literatura nunca se llega por azar. Nunca, nunca. Que te quede bien claro. Es, digamos, el destino, ¿sí? Un destino oscuro, una serie de circunstancias que te hacen escoger. Y tú siempre has sabido que ése es tu camino.”
Y una más: “El viaje de la literatura, como el de Ulises, no tiene retorno.”
Y para concluir: “Lo brutal siempre es la muerte. Ahora y hace años y dentro de unos años: lo brutal siempre es la muerte.”
Todas estas opiniones o respuestas o, mejor dicho, todas estas sentencias (reunidas y editadas por Andrés Braithwaite en el revelador y gracioso Bolaño por sí mismo: entrevistas escogida) resultan no sólo útiles como introducción a esta reseña sino que, además, creo, ayudan a una más adecuada lectura y mejor comprensión de El secreto del mal y La Universidad Desconocida, así como del resto de la obra de Bolaño. Es decir: samurái + destino + viaje + no retorno + muerte remiten al bushido o “camino del guerrero” (el arte de vivir y combatir, como si uno ya estuviera muerto, de los grandes espadachines japoneses; la habilidad de mirar hacia atrás, al presente, como si uno lo hiciera ya desde el otro lado) y a una actitud paradójicamente hipervital. Mirar al núcleo creativo, el centro del que se desprende la ficción y la no ficción de Bolaño, alumbrada y oscurecida, siempre, por la sombra de la enfermedad y de la muerte que podía llegar –y llegó, puñal en alto– a vuelta de página.
¿Y qué es lo que lleva a uno –apenas terminados de leer estos dos últimos libros de Bolaño– a ponerse a enhebrar respuestas de viejas entrevistas y a aventurar teorías más líricas que exactas? La respuesta sólida a tan leve enigma no la tengo clara, pero aventuro una sospecha: Bolaño es uno de los escritores más románticos en el mejor sentido de la palabra. Y un acercamiento a él y a lo que escribió contagia, casi instantáneamente, una cierta idea romántica de la literatura y de su práctica como utopía realizable. Unas ganas feroces de que todo sea escritura y que la tinta sea igual de importante que la sangre. En este sentido, la obra de Bolaño, ahora inevitablemente acompañada de la leyenda de Bolaño, para bien o para mal, es una de las que más y mejor obliga –me atrevo a afirmar que es la más poderosa en este sentido dentro de las letras latinoamericanas– a una casi irrefrenable necesidad de leer y de escribir y de entender el oficio como un combate postrero, un viaje definitivo, una aventura de la que no hay regreso porque sólo concluye cuando se exhala el último aliento y se registra la última palabra. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa - The Temptation of the Impossible

Diane Scharper reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's essay book The Temptation of the Impossible.

Known to Americans primarily as the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is considered France's greatest poet and one of its greatest prose writers. Hugo's stature, according to The Temptation of the Impossible by Mario Vargas Llosa, is due mainly to the impact of Les Miserables.

Why did the novel exert such a profound influence on Hugo's literary status? And what does the story tell us about Victor Hugo himself? Vargas Llosa, a prolific Latin American novelist, journalist and scholar, grapples with the two questions. But he never actually answers them because Hugo, like Les Miserables - which in the unabridged version consists of 10 volumes - is super-sized. And as Vargas Llosa admits, it is impossible to know this great author of the Romantic period - even after spending "two years totally immersed" in his books.

As Vargas Llosa explains it in these essays (originally lectures that he delivered as a visiting professor at Oxford University), Hugo began Les Miserables after one of his plays bombed. The audience had laughed at the wrong places; the critics panned the performance, and Hugo became the butt of jokes. Not to be stopped, he continued to write, putting much of his dramatic energy into the novel, which became a larger-than-life narrative - noted for its theatricality. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Mayra Montero - Dancing to 'Almendra'

Lois D. Atwood reviews Cecilia Samartin's Broken Paradise and Mayra Montero's Dancing to 'Almendra'.

In these two novels, life in the tropical paradise of Cuba has fallen apart under either totalitarian or communist rule. Dancing to ‘Almendra’ is set in Batista’s Havana, where gangsters run all the casinos; Broken Paradise on the idyllic island whose society Castro is restructuring.

Dancing . . . is a thriller about mobsters, zoo keepers, casino and carnival performers, pimps — and Joaquin Porrata, a clueless young journalist. Sent to cover the killing of a hippopotamus, he meets Juan Bulgado, a lion keeper who also runs the zoo’s slaughterhouse, and learns that the killing was a warning to Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia. When Joaquin makes the connection in a news story, he becomes a danger to those in power. Read More

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Cuban Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa - Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics

Ian Thomson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics.

With this marvellous new collection of essays, Touchstones, Vargas Llosa takes his place alongside the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez as a Latin with a civic conscience. The book gathers an impressive array of articles on Latin American politics, European writers and painters, as well as sections of a diary the author kept during a visit to Iraq shortly after Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003.

Not surprisingly, 'Iraq Diary' presents Hussein as a dictator in the megalomaniac lineage of Tamerlane (and about as cruel). Vargas Llosa declares himself reluctantly in favour of the invasion; only an author with experience of South American dictatorship, perhaps, could do as much.

Throughout these essays, Vargas Llosa is drawn to writers who enter wholeheartedly into public affairs; André Malraux, Gunter Grass and Thomas Mann are among his heroes. Busybody commentators in the Rushdie vein are not always to British tastes. Yet Vargas Llosa is not afraid to champion literature as indispensable to what he calls the 'culture of freedom' and the formation of free individuals. Read More

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Peruvian Literature