Brazilian Cinema in the Hamburg Film Festival

The 15th edition of the Hamburg Film Festival will include four new Brazilian films.
"Baixio das Bestas" - Directed by Cláudio Assis.

"O Cheiro do Ralo" - Directed by Heiter Dhalia

"A Via Láctea" - Directed by Lina Chamie

and "Fabricando Tom Zé", a documentary directed by Décio Matos Jr.






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Brazilian Cinema

Interview with Junot Diaz

Understanding the immigration experience may be impossible if you haven't been through it. But it helps to hear Junot Díaz talk about classified ads.

Díaz is the author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a novel published early this month to immediate acclaim. He's sitting in the lobby of the venerable Algonquin Hotel trying to describe how it felt to be a 6-year-old kid from the Dominican Republic plunked down in New Jersey in 1974, at "the end of one world, the beginning of another."

He didn't speak much English for years -- out of stubborn-mindedness, perhaps, or a child's sensitivity to ridicule -- but he started reading it pretty much right away. By the time he was 9, he was compulsively consuming newspaper classified pages. They were, he says, "a window into a world I had no access to."

One day that window opened just a crack.

Someone had placed an ad offering free books. Díaz called and reached an elderly woman who lived maybe four miles from his house. "I have 500 books and I don't want to throw them away," she told him. "If you can get over here and get them, you can have them."

No adult in his life would have cared that he wanted those books, so being driven to pick them up was out. But he realized that if he took a shopping cart and made three or four trips, he could get them all.

"That was the first time I found 'The Borrowers,' " he says, referring to Mary Norton's children's classic about unseen, Lilliputian-scale people who live by "borrowing" from normal-size humans. Other favorites from this unlikely trove were titles by explorer and naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, "the guy who went to Mongolia and found the dinosaur eggs" -- Díaz still dreams of traveling to Mongolia himself -- and a variety of "books for young people, like 'On Hygiene.' Great stuff!"

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Latin American Literature

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Johnny Diaz reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Diaz is relieved.

It has taken him 11 years to produce the follow-up novel to "Drown," his collection of short stories about growing up Dominican-American that was published to critical success in 1996. His new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," follows the loves and losses (mostly losses) of a Dominican-American family back on the island and in New Jersey.

Throughout the book, Diaz points out that the family may be living under a curse, "a high-level fuku" that has doomed them to eternal unhappiness. But that curse may describe Diaz's temporary loss for words, the writer's block that paralyzed him sporadically over the years.

He managed to unlock his writer's block, and he seems at ease during an interview, although his leg pumps up and down like a car piston as he talks about his new novel and life after "Drown."

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Dominican Literature

Eça de Queirós - The Maias

Benjamin Lytal reviews Eça de Queirós' The Maias.

It is not simple to read a virtually unknown book that, suddenly, is supposed to be one of the greatest 19th-century novels. Margaret Jull Costa, translator of José Saramago and Javier Marías, has recently turned to José Maria Eça de Queirós, reputedly the great national author of Portugal. And the resulting translation, of Eça's masterpiece "The Maias" (New Directions, 628 pages, $17.95) wants entry into our closed canons.

For a few hundred pages, I was disappointed. Hoping for a family epic, I found a fin-de-siècle morality tale of thin ambitions treading on thick, luxuriant carpets. Lisbon is not Paris or London; it did not corrupt Eça's young men with suitable dazzling force. Like Flaubert, Eça skewers the pretentiousness of 19th-century social climbers, but Portuguese pretentiousness looked like small fry in comparison: The follies of a few well-meaning dandies did not immediately justify the roomy designs of Eça's monumental novel.

But as I read on, into the long straightaway that, comprising only two years of the novel's 70-year narrative, takes up the majority of its pages, I began to appreciate Eça's emotional point. WhereacharactersuchasHomais, Flaubert's pedantic pharmacist, stays face up, a fool, in reader's minds, Eça's aristocratic fools have a flip side: Their civic and national damnation. Ridiculous as they may be, they always have the excuse of whistling in the darkness. In Eça's hands, a Flaubertian fool becomes a tragic symbol.

"The Maias" begins with the renovation of a house. A grandfather and his grandson are all that remain of the great Maia family. Afonso, the grandfather, was once a Voltaire-reading exile, living in England, but by 1875 he has become an eagle of the Ancien Régime: Venerated by his own peers, he stands throughout the novel for passive power. When his own, melancholic son commits suicide, Afonso consoles himself with his infant grandson, whose boyish good cheer promises the regeneration of the family line, and by analogy, Portugal. But instead of growing up to be a national leader, the young Carlos graduates from the University of Coimbra a diletantish doctor, and, when he and Afonso agree to move in together in Lisbon, it is house decoration that most excites him.

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Portuguese Literature

Belle Toujours, written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira

Jeff Shannon reviews Belle Toujours directed by Manoel de Oliveira.

What do you get when the world's oldest working filmmaker pays homage to one of the most controversial films of the 1960s? In the case of "Belle Toujours," 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's tip-of-the-hat "sequel" to Luis Buñuel's scandalous "Belle de Jour," you get a slight little curio that honors Buñuel while casting off most of what made "Belle de Jour" (in which a bourgeois newlywed becomes a prostitute) the art-house sensation of 1967.

We can only speculate about what the late, great Buñuel might have made of this gently incongruous tribute, in which the tantalizing ambiguities of "Belle de Jour" are exchanged for a comparatively transparent reunion, set (like Buñuel's film) in contemporary Paris. It's here that we find the gracefully aged M. Husson (Michel Piccoli, reprising his role from Buñuel's film) still obsessing over women, especially the much-different Severine (Bulle Ogier, in the role originated by Catherine Deneuve), whom he chases around Paris before tricking her into a candlelit dinner of one-sided nostalgia and cruel manipulation.

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Portuguese Cinema

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth and Amulet

Benjamin Kunkel reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth and Amulet.

Bolaño’s desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk they entailed, the movement he founded, his poverty, exile and addiction, his death in his prime: the combination of these elements is foreign to the increasingly professionalised career of the contemporary writer. Bolaño’s dishevelled, wandering characters are, more profoundly than they are left-wing, anti-bourgeois, which is to say disdainful of comfort, security and success: an attitude more than a politics, but the attitude is deeply felt. Even to write ‘marvellously well’, Bolaño declared, was not enough; ‘the quality of the writing’ depended on the author’s understanding ‘that literature is basically a dangerous calling’.

But Bolaño would not be so strange or significant a writer if he had not found a way of handling his dangerous calling with simultaneous reverence and irony. And ‘calling’ is the word: there is never any question in Bolaño of another vocation. He is a writer for whom what Nietzsche said about music would seem to go without saying about literature: without it, life would be a mistake. But there is also an important sense – as Bolaño demonstrates again and again – in which both he and his narrators are without literature, in the desolate way that a religious person might find himself without God. Part of this is simply that these stories and novels narrated almost exclusively by and about poets don’t contain (with one notable exception) any examples of the poets’ verse, and Bolaño often invites us to doubt how much a poet writes or how well. But it’s not just that his fiction about poets excludes their poetry; his fiction excludes many of the familiar components of fiction. Sponsored and sustained by devotion to literature, these books nevertheless abstain from what we think of as literary writing. In Bolaño’s fiction, it is as if – but only as if – literature were what he was writing about, but not what he was doing.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Cristóbal Valderrama

An interview with Cristóbal Valderrama director of "Malta con Huevo".

"El ánimo era hacer una película que a nosotros nos gustaría ver y que sentíamos que no se había hecho. Ése fue el espíritu para escribir la historia para que fuese un poco distinto a lo que uno está acostumbrado a ver... en Chile, porque en el mundo hay muchas películas parecidas"

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Chilean Cinema

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Michiko Kakutani reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.

Mr. Díaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 (“Drown”), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.

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Dominican Literature

FIL Prize 2007

Mexican writer Fernando del Paso won the FIL Prize 2007, formerly known as the Latin American and the Caribbean Literature Juan Rulfo, granted annually in the Guadalajara International Book Fair.
Del Paso was born in 1935 in the Federal District, although he has been residing for more than one decade in the capital of Jalisco. Publicist, speaker, journalist, sketcher, painter and diplomat the author of "Noticias del Imperio" (News of the Empire) has received other awards as the Xavier Villaurrutia, in 1966; the Rómulo Gallegos, in 1982; the Casa de las Américas, in 1985; and the Premio Nacional de Letras y Artes, in 1991.


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Latin American Literature

César Vallejo - The Complete Poetry

John Timpane reviews César Vallejo's The Complete Poetry.

What a year was 1922. That year, T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land was published. So was James Joyce's Ulysses. So was Jean Toomer's Cane. Whatever "modernism" means, 1922 was one of its peaks.

Also that year, a poet from Peru published a book called Trilce - to complete silence at home and abroad. Too different, a departure too far.

The intervening 85 years have made clear that Trilce deserves to stand among the most original and startling productions of 20th-century literature. Its author, César Vallejo (1892-1938), stood out even among Peruvian poets - he was of indigenous blood, with two grandmothers from the Chimú people of the Andes. Today he has a place among the finest of his century's poets. And now we have this spectacular edition of his complete poetry, edited and translated, also spectacularly, by poet Clayton Eshleman. A priceless window opens on a poet who is by turns invigorating, incomprehensible, and inimitable.

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Peruvian Literature

Antonio Muñoz Molina - In Her Absence

Three reviews of Antonio Muñoz Molina's In Her Absence.

Several years ago Antonio Muñoz Molina was described as "a Spanish writer laden with prizes and so far scandalously unknown in English." His awards include not one but two Spanish National Narrative Prizes, and he is the youngest-ever member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Despite these honors from his native country and 13 books published in Spanish, not much has happened to bring him American readers. Sepharad won the 2004 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club translation award for Margaret Sayers Peden, but since then nothing else by him had appeared for us Anglophones. Now, we are getting another chance. He is back with a new translator and a short novel published in 1999 as En Ausencia de Blanca.

Molina is a fearless writer. He is not afraid of making demands on his reader's imagination. In Her Absence is no passive entertainment. This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely and solely on Mario López, a not-quite-middle-aged civil servant working as a draftsman in the small city of Jaén, and his passionate yet painful relationship with Blanca, his wife of six years.

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You'd have to be pretty jaded not to get hooked by a book with these opening lines:

"The woman who was not Blanca came down the hall toward Mario wearing Blanca's green silk blouse, Blanca's jeans, and Blanca's ballet flats, her eyes narrowing into a smile as she reached him - eyes the same color and shape as Blanca's, but not Blanca's eyes."

What is going on here?

Mario Lopez is a civil servant in a provincial town in southern Spain. His wife, Blanca, is a sometime translator and convention hostess with artistic aspirations. In this marriage of opposites, he is from a working-class background, she from a wealthy family; he is plodding and meticulous, she is mercurial and reckless; he wants to start a family, she doesn't.

Still, having rescued Blanca from a life of druggy dissolution, Mario remains besotted with her. "Six years after meeting her, he was still moved each time he re-entered her presence."

But when Blanca falls under the sway of an artsy crowd that hangs out in places with names like the "Center for New Theatrical Tendencies," Mario senses that his life is slipping away from him, "that someone had assigned him a biography that wasn't really his." He plunges into despair and isolation, obsessing over the tiniest of details, fearing that Blanca has left him for good.

Has she? Or has she killed herself? Has an impostor actually taken her place? Or is Mario just hallucinating?

Antonio Munoz Molina leaves enough hints for us to figure out who has lost a grip on reality here. But it is the nature of that loss, haunting and obsessional, that makes this slim novella compelling.

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Spanish Literature

Edmundo Paz Soldán - Turing's Delirium

Olga Lorenzo reviews Edmundo Paz Soldán's Turing's Delirium.

In 1967, the world received Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, set in an unspecified country in the mythical town of Macondo. For many Latin American writers, the result has been 40 years of feeling pressured to produce and reproduce magic realism of the decades-of-tiresome-rain and grandmother-stored-in-the-closet variety.

The Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet wrote, "Unlike the ethereal world of Garcia Marquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' - a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicised, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences.

"Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en Espanol), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeno-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape."

Part of the McOndo movement, Edmundo Paz Soldan's Turing's Delirium explores themes of human responsibility and morality, using the premise that technology can be used for good and evil and that often things are not what they seem. Computer hackers may be code-breakers in the war against the exploitation of the poor by multinationals.

Paz Soldan's cast is large and the opening chapters require concentration, as the reader is introduced to protagonists who each have their own forms of narrative. Miguel Saenz's sections are narrated in the second person - the reader is effectively asked to imagine that "you" are Miguel, a cryptanalyst working for the Bolivian Government's code-breaking agency, the Black Chamber.

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Bolivian Literature