Las auroras de sangre. Juan de Castellanos y el descubrimiento poético de América - William Ospina

Winston Manrique Sabogal reviews William Ospina's Las auroras de sangre. Juan de Castellanos y el descubrimiento poético de América.

El cielo empezó a reverberar de grises hasta soltar un océano que convirtió en mares la tierra para llevarse Cubagua, Nueva Cádiz, frente a las costas de Venezuela. Fue uno de los primeros episodios que embistió al joven Juan de Castellanos en el umbral del nuevo mundo. Era 1543. Y la vida allí no sabía de recatos.

"Me impactó su capacidad de asumir que la poesía existe para hacernos sentir lo abrumador del destino"

"Los latinoamericanos tenemos que reconciliarnos con esos otros mundos que se fusionaron en América"

Son las primeras luces que arroja William Ospina (Tolima, Colombia, 1954) en Las auroras de sangre (Belacqua) sobre la aventura de este sevillano (Alanís, 1522-Tunja, Colombia, 1607) que se orilló de la codicia y la crueldad de la conquista para ser testigo del deslumbramiento mutuo de dos mundos, que plasmó en Las elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, su particular descubrimiento y conquista de América a través del lenguaje, de la poesía:

"Salían a mirar nuestros navíos

Volvían a los bosques espantados,

Huían en canoas por los ríos,

No saben que hacerse de turbados".

Y así hasta 113.609 versos, que Juan de Castellanos escribió en cuatro partes durante los últimos 30 años de su vida en Colombia, y que se convirtieron en el poema más largo en español. Una especie de Ilíada que no fue entendida durante siglos en ningún lado del Atlántico, pero que en 1999 el escritor colombiano rescató de la incomprensión en uno de los ensayos literarios más importantes de América Latina en los últimos años.

"Él es el mejor ejemplo que España puede mostrar de que su labor en América no fue un mero saqueo, un exterminio y un acto de depredación. Saber que hubo hombres como él, llenos de la cultura del Renacimiento, llenos de lenguaje, nombrando como Adán el primer día toda la realidad de ese continente, enamorados de todo, celebrando las selvas y los lagos, la belleza de los indios del Caribe, su destreza, su fuerza, su ferocidad, tratando de contar todos esos hechos que no se repetirían, haciendo surgir un universo en el ámbito de la lengua, convirtiendo una lengua local en una lengua planetaria, sintiendo admiración y respeto; censurando a menudo los excesos de los guerreros: ¡qué grandeza de espíritu! España merecía saber todo eso: abandonar un poco la fascinación por el costado épico de su conquista y ver la magnitud de su diálogo con otro mundo, su capacidad de arraigar en él, la explicación de por qué un continente habla la lengua castellana. No fue por las espadas ahogadas en sangre, sino porque esta lengua fue capaz de amar a América y de cantarla".

"Porque decían ser estas naciones

Falta de los orgullos y los bríos

Que mueven los humanos corazones

A trastornar los mares y los ríos;

Y no pueden hacer navegaciones

A causa de estar faltos de navíos,

Y que canoas, balsas y piraguas

No podían arar prolijas aguas".

Es la forma como Castellanos va mostrando el nuevo mundo al mundo entero. Lo hace desde esa evocación donde sueños inimaginables cobraron vida. He ahí el impacto que causaron en William Ospina estas elegías: "Su fluidez, su nitidez, su capacidad de hacer surgir un mundo en el lenguaje, su capacidad, que es asombrosa para la época, de abandonar la idea de la poesía como un lenguaje ornamental, alejado del mundo, y de asumir que la poesía existe para hacernos sentir lo tremendo de la historia, lo abrumador de nuestro destino. Baudelaire dijo: "Lo feo puede ser hermoso, lo bonito nunca". Este poema no es bonito: es rudo, poderoso, cruel, deslumbrante, tremendamente humano y está fuera de toda correcta proporción: como lo estuvo la conquista de América. Casi parece imposible que un solo hombre lo haya escrito: tiene la magnitud de una cosmogonía oriental".

"Veréis muchos varones ir en una

Prosperidad que no temió caída,

Y en éstos esta misma ser ninguna,

De su primero ser desvanecida

Usando de sus mañas la fortuna

En los inciertos cambios desta vida;

Otros venir a tanta desventura

Que el suelo les negaba sepultura".

Belleza, sabiduría y temblor en tierras de miedos agazapados hechos palabras musicales. "El Descubrimiento y la Conquista fue un hecho de tales proporciones, que lo primero que produjo en la Península fue un gran silencio. El hecho más importante de la historia planetaria en los últimos siglos no parece haber sido advertido en su magnitud por los poetas del Siglo de Oro: tanto Quevedo como Lope de Vega y Góngora siguen en lo fundamental encerrados en el ámbito de la tradición europea, y si a veces aparecen los temas, la perspectiva es muy distante. Ello es natural, la literatura engendrada por América tenía que surgir inicialmente en el Nuevo Mundo, y no tenía por qué ser comprendida inmediatamente desde Europa. Pero una buena prueba de que España estaba a la altura de las tareas históricas que le correspondían es que detrás del avance, a menudo atroz, de los conquistadores, se dio el avance lleno de perplejidad, de curiosidad y de inspiración creadora de los cronistas".

"La tierra cubren venenosos tiros

Y golpes causadores de suspiros"

"La mayoría no eran inicialmente hombres de letras: la historia iba improvisando sus relatores, sus fabuladores y sus poetas. Pero al mismo tiempo la conciencia profunda de España iba rumiando sus descubrimientos. Tengo la convicción de que la aparición del Quijote es, entre tantas cosas, consecuencia de la aventura de España en el siglo XVI. Una aventura que excedió por sus peligros, por sus atrocidades y maravillas, a todo lo que soñaron "los ciclos de Rolando y de Bretaña", y no fue un hecho literario sino una aventura vital, una confrontación cotidiana durante un siglo de los aventureros con sus sueños, con sus delirios, una aventura de la carne y una aventura de la imaginación. Muchos conquistadores eran de algún modo una suerte de borradores de don Quijote: lectores de novelas de caballerías, buscando en el mundo lo que les habían dicho los libros y los cuentos".

"Mas si también deseas ver mujeres,

Direte dónde viven maniriguas,

Que son mujeres sueltas y flecheras,

Con fama de grandísimas guerreras (...) Pues en tan penitísimas regiones

Podría ser que vivan amazones".

Leyendas, mitos y realidades se trenzan en versos que cantan los mestizajes que formarán la identidad. El futuro. Según William Ospina, "para poder reconciliarnos plenamente con nuestra herencia europea, los latinoamericanos tenemos que reconciliarnos con esos otros mundos que se fusionaron en América: los nativos que vivieron allí treinta mil años, y los hijos de África, la parte más alegre y vigorosa de nuestra cultura".

Tierras de promisión donde un día hubo "dioses vivos que caían y dioses muertos que triunfaban". Pero que cinco siglos después ha pasado de ser puerto de llegada para convertirse en embarcadero hacia el resto del mundo. "El intercambio no ha cesado. Con Las auroras de sangre me interesa demostrar que desde muy temprano se dieron grandes aventuras del comienzo de la modernidad literaria. Castellanos hizo el primer poema verdaderamente americano en lengua castellana, y es el fundador de la poesía en diez países de América. Pero, claro, él vivió setenta años en las Indias, y se convirtió en un poeta americano". El que hoy, cuatro siglos después de su muerte, vuelve al haber atisbado con sus versos la manera de adentrarse futuro arriba.

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Colombian Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Heller McAlpin reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Bad Girl.

Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful new novel, "The Bad Girl," is about one man's persistent desire for a difficult woman. It is also, cunningly, about a broader persistence of hope for a better world. On one level a deliciously absorbing love story that details the eponymous bad girl's damaging lifelong hold on his narrator, Vargas Llosa's novel spans decades and continents - and, in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal.

Although less overtly political than such earlier novels as "Death in the Andes" and "The Feast of the Goat," Vargas Llosa sets his thwarted love story against a backdrop of social turmoil, revolutions and the recurrent heartbreak of failed democracy in his native Peru. "The Bad Girl" spans 1950s Lima, 1960s revolutionary Paris, 1970s hippie London, 1980s swinging Tokyo and 1990s theatrical Spain. Vargas Llosa's novel is more similar in tone to his 1977 dazzler, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," than to his last, quasi-historical novel, "The Way to Paradise" (2003), about Paul Gauguin and his socialist grandmother. Each of its seven long chapters, separated by years, relates a new episode in the lurching, on-again-off-again saga of Ricardo Somocurcio and the bad girl, who sports a new identity each time he encounters her.

Ricardo is an unusually sympathetic narrator - modest, bookish, utterly trustworthy. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a loving aunt in Miraflores, he has fixed on a simple ambition by the time he first meets the love of his life the summer he turns 15: to live in Paris. Posing as Lily, a Chilean newcomer to the neighborhood, the bad girl is flamboyant and gorgeous, "the incarnation of coquettishness." Ricardo writes, "I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times." In what is to become a lifelong pattern, Lily leads him on before rebuffing him - and then vanishes.

When she turns up again in Paris more than a decade later, it's as Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba for guerrilla training. Ricardo, meanwhile, is training as a simultaneous interpreter. She pretends they never met, then, with an insult, concedes that they have - "Even back then you had a sanctimonious look" - yet denies being Lily the Chilean girl. She accepts his advances passively, unresponsively, and keeps him dangling: "Never lose hope, good boy."

Comrade Arlette's political apathy is as obvious as her sexual indifference. Her outspoken credo is "to get what you want, anything goes." When she allows Ricardo to make love to her, it's clear that she's using him as a possible ticket to stay in Paris.

Three years later, she turns up as the elegant Mme. Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, where her husband is a diplomat and Ricardo works as a translator.

And so it goes. They resume their affair, abuse included. She's both a liar and brutally honest. "How naive you are, what a dreamer," she scolds when Ricardo asks her to marry him. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."

Ricardo is repeatedly taken in and left "a human wreck." He swears it's the last time when he falls into a trap arranged to excite the bad girl's creepy, voyeuristic Japanese lover, yet a few years later he goes into debt to finance her medical care. He retreats between episodes to a "fairly normal, though empty ... dull, flat life," throwing himself into the self-effacing interpreting business at international conferences and berating himself as a "failure ... imbecile."

This works, without trying our patience, because Vargas Llosa succeeds not only in conveying the bad girl's attraction but also in pulling us into Ricardo's cycle of hopefulness, eager to learn what will happen next between them. Is it love, masochism, fate or compulsion that keeps him coming back for more? Whatever it is, most of us have been there at one time or another.

Ricardo's friendships with doomed individuals - a revolutionary in Paris, a hippie artist in London, a fellow translator in Japan - and his unexpected but satisfying discovery of la niña mala's true identity further heighten the novel's considerable allure. (One wishes translator Edith Grossman had left a "niña mala" or two in Spanish for flavor.)

Most impressively, by mirroring Ricardo and the bad girl's tug-of-war with the tug-of-war between democracy and totalitarianism that concurrently roils the world, and especially their native Peru, Vargas Llosa's novel becomes an allegory for the undauntable desire not just for love but also for freedom. Over and over again, the world dashes our hopes just as the bad girl disappoints Vargas Llosa's narrator - and yet we love it and keep hoping for the best anyway.

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Peruvian Literature

Cautiva directed by Gastón Biraben

Boyd Williamson reviews Cautiva directed by Gastón Biraben.

Quietly angry and subtly polemical, Cautiva addresses Argentina’s long period of willful amnesia following military rule from 1976 to 1983 and the “disappearance” of thousands of student activists, union members, and other dissidents. First-time director Gastón Biraben creates a poignant allegory of this historical-political amnesia and the struggle to overcome it with the story of Cristina (Bárbara Lombardo), a teenager who, one day in 1994, finds that her parents are not who she thought they were and that neither is she.

The film announces it’s political intentions, and targets, immediately. It opens with a ghostly, staticky television image of a stadium full of ecstatic soccer fans chanting and waving the cheerful light-blue and white Argentine colors. As the image becomes clearer it reveals itself to be a broadcast of Argentina’s famous 1978 World Cup victory over the Netherlands. After the Argentines score the goal putting them over the top, the home-town crowd erupts and the television camera focuses on a couple of figures sitting close to the field: “President General Videla”, reads the yellow text under a shot of a mustachioed, aristocratic-looking man in a business suit; there’s also “Admiral Massera”, who has a grin on his concrete-block face; looking grimmer and wearing a grey trench coat against a light drizzle is “Ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger”. After the game has ended, nine men, including Videla and Massera, are brought onto the field. “Their Excellencies, the commanders of the nation’s Armed Forces; members of the Military Junta!” announces the sportscaster as the crowd is obscured by confetti and blue and white flags.

It’s the day of the ’78 World Cup, we find out later, that Cristina is born to a blindfolded and bruised woman in the dank, fluorescent-lit basement of a military prison. Fast forward 16 years and Cristina is celebrating her “Quinceañera” in a comfortable, loving, upper-middle class home outside of Buenos Aires. Cristina is a popular, pretty girl who does well in school and is adored by her parents and godparents—but there are early hints that she doesn’t quite belong, that she’s different. She has a sober, mostly unsmiling face—reflecting the tone of the movie—that contrasts with the gregariousness of her privileged classmates and friends. She also betrays a surprising amount of sympathy for Angélica (Mercedes Funes), a rebellious and angry girl who sits in the back of class and interrupts a lecture on Argentina’s constitution with an expletive-laden diatribe against the recent presidential pardon of ex-junta officials.

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Argentine Cinema

The Complete Poetry - César Vallejo

John Timpane reviews César Vallejo's 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 Chimu 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.

There are four Vallejos, four poetries.

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Peruvian Literature

Elite Squad directed by Jose Padilha

A Washington Post article on the latest sensation of Brazilian cinema.

After taking a phone call last week, director José Padilha stepped onto the patio of his studio and told a business partner that the intense discussion provoked by his latest film had spread to yet another sphere of Brazilian society.

"Now they're going to speak about it in Congress," Padilha said, looking at his watch. "In 20 minutes, someone is going to take the floor and start."

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The film, called "Elite Squad," centers on the police officers who wage war against the drug-dealing gangs that rule Rio's slums, called favelas. The movie has put almost everyone -- from the slums, to the penthouses, to the halls of government -- in the mood to talk about this city's violence.

Even before it was released in theaters this month, "Elite Squad" was Brazil's most-watched movie of the season: The country's leading polling firm estimated that about 11.5 million adults -- as well as an unknown number of children -- had seen the movie on pirated DVDs before its first screenings.

Police initially tried to keep the movie out of theaters, fearing that scenes depicting officers torturing slum dwellers portray their ranks in a bad light. Critics of the police argued that the movie was too sympathetic to corrupt officers, because it presents the action from their point of view. Some nongovernmental organizations objected to the film's suggestion that some activists have aligned themselves with the drug gangs to get access to the favelas.

To Padilha, rather than being controversial, such suggestions should ring true to anyone who has spent any time in a city with one of the world's highest murder rates.

For decades, most of Rio's 600-plus favelas have been ruled by drug-dealing gangs. The police, both military and civil, have waged war on those groups, and they are often criticized for being as brutal -- if not more so -- than the gangs. Shootouts are common, and favela residents are often caught in the crossfire.

On Wednesday, for example, a dozen people -- including a 4-year-old boy -- were killed during a battle between police and gang members in Rio. Local television showed images of residents running in fear as police helicopters circled overhead -- images that people here have been living with for years.

"None of this is rocket science," said Padilha, 40. "These are very simple concepts, and they are all here for everyone to see. Just look around. It's obvious. But just by stating it in a way that shows a little bit of everything in there, it is making this movie an object of social discussion."

Padilha said his intention was to show the drug war from the perspective of a cop and to let the audience judge whether the cop is good, bad or both. For those with firm opinions about Rio's violence, the movie's refusal to impose its own moral is offensive.

Arnaldo Bloch, a columnist for Rio's largest newspaper, O Globo, wrote that showing the unvarnished point of view of a member of the military police special favela units was the equivalent of apologizing for their actions. He labeled the movie "fascist."

The record turnout at theaters -- even though many viewers had already seen the movie at home on DVD -- indicates that a lot of people disagree. Enterprising street dealers have tried to latch on to the movie's success by throwing together footage of police operations and selling DVDs they claim to be sequels.

"I think it's a great movie, and it just shows things that really happen," said Cesar de Assis, 35, a resident of a favela called Chapeu Mangueira. "I've seen the police come into the community, and it happens exactly the way the movie shows."

Miguel Colker, 20, is a student at the Catholic University of Rio, the setting for a couple of scenes in the film. He viewed a pirated copy of "Elite Squad," and its effect on him, he said, has been sobering, literally.

"I haven't smoked pot since I saw the movie," said Colker, who described himself as an occasional user of drugs. "I always knew that of course the drugs here are controlled by the gangs, but seeing it in the movie shocked me a little."

Padilha is a Rio native whose previous film, a documentary called "Bus 174," told the life story of a man who hijacked a city bus, then was killed by the military police. "Elite Squad" was conceived as a companion piece to that film, showing the "other side of the same coin," Padilha said.

He started by trying to tell the story in documentary form. But he quickly realized that police officers wouldn't talk openly about their experiences, he said, so he interviewed about 20 officers and turned their off-the-record stories into fiction. Earlier this month, police officials ordered him to identify the officers who had helped him. Padilha did not appear for questioning after Rio's governor took his side, telling him not to be afraid to defy the police.

The film is fast-paced and hard around the edges, depicting violence unblinkingly. The aesthetic is intended to overwhelm the viewer, Padilha said, not allowing time to make analytical judgments until the film is over. He compares it to downloading a computer program that threatens to crash the system.

"It's creating a chaos of confusion, and that chaos is very interesting from my point of view," Padilha said. "I'm not involved in it now. I'm just sitting back and watching."

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Brazilian Cinema

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Chloë Schama reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel, "The Bad Girl" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 276 pages, $25) is a joyful romp through a torturous relationship. The novel traces the obsession of its narrator, Ricardo Somocurcio, from the inception of the affair in Peru to its last spasm in Spain, alighting in a Paris roiling with student ferment, a London filled with peace-loving hippies, and a sterile Tokyo flashing with neon.

Various incarnations of the bad girl of the title surface in all these places. She first appears as Lily, a 14-year-old girl who sinks her talons into the youthful narrator's heart while they roam the streets and cafes of Miraflores in Peru, and her grip lasts the entirety of her life. "Lily" reappears 10 years after their first meeting as "Comrade Arlette," the recipient of a scholarship to train for Castro's forces. Her ambition, however, is anything but revolutionary, and the scholarship is merely a means to escape the poverty of her upbringing. Just before she is scheduled to depart the training ground of Paris for Cuba she offers Ricardo an alternative: If he can get her out of her obligations, she will stay with him in Paris. Ricardo punts, unwilling to endanger his friend (a more active revolutionary) who has arranged the scholarship, and assures her that he will wait in Paris while she fulfills the conditions of her contract. The bad girl slips away and begins the elusive life that will bring her in and out of contact with the narrator for the rest of the novel.

She returns to Paris as "Madame Arnoux," the wife of a high-ranking Unesco official, absconds with Monsieur Arnoux's paltry fortune, and finally resurfaces in the country town of Newmarket outside London; now she is "Mrs. Richardson," the wife of a stuffy horse breeder. In a later life, she becomes "Kuriko," the mistress and employee of a shady Japanese businessman or gangster. Time after time, the narrator runs to the bad girl's side when she needs his attention and assistance, ready with declarations of his love, to which she responds with snide deprecations. His sentimental education is brutal and the lesson should be obvious, and yet he's incapable of changing his adulatory, punch-drunk response to her whims and fancies. How could he? The thing that pains him the most also brings him the greatest pleasure.

Allusions to Flaubert's "Sentimental Education" run throughout Mr. Vargas Llosa's novel. Madame Arnoux, of course, is the object of Frédéric Moreau's devotion and the narrator reads Flaubert's novels from time to time. But "The Bad Girl" is influenced by Flaubert beyond its offhand references. In an encomium to Flaubert, "Flaubert, our Contemporary," Mr. Vargas Llosa commends Flaubert for making his narrators "ghostly figures" — beings who "enjoy no special privileges of omniscience or ubiquity." Ricardo Somocurcio is a dramatic extension of this quality which, Mr. Vargas Llosa believes, has been one of the defining elements of modern literature. Ricardo makes his living as a translator and interpreter — "the professions of phantoms," as his colleague phrases it — voicing other people's opinions and thoughts before his own. His sole aspiration is to "die of old age in Paris" and, as he spends more and more time away from Peru, he gradually loses any sense of a national identity. No longer a true citizen of Peru, he is aware that he will also "never be integrated into the country where we had chosen to live."

In Flaubert's novels, Mr. Vargas Llosa writes, the spectral narrator allowed Flaubert to create a fictional reality that was undisturbed by an omniscient, judgmental, and external observer. It didn't have to be an entirely believable reality, just cohesive. Flaubert's great gift to modern novelists, according to Mr. Vargas Llosa, was to inform them that "between real reality and fictional reality there is no possible identification, but rather an unbridgeable distance." The fictional world of "The Bad Girl" is a world distant from the wars and poverty of "real" reality. Mr. Vargas Llosa doesn't ignore these things, but they take place on the periphery. What remains at the center, and what unifies the novel, is melodrama.

His characters — from Fukuda, the evil Japanese gangster, to Mrs. Stubard, the English guardian angel — are almost Dickensian in their dimensions, unabashed stereotypes of their native lands. The love affair is painful, perverse, and perpetual, relying entirely on unlikely coincidences. The sun always sets at the right moment; the waves always break dramatically. Small apartments in back alleys are horrifically squalid; large apartments on grand boulevards are lavishly sumptuous. These a aesthetic elements are not out of place; they fit within Mr. Vargas Llosa's world where polar emotions — extreme pain and extreme pleasure — are inextricably entwined. In a certain reality, this entangled dynamic would lead to sorrow, but in this novel the excess is entertaining. "The Bad Girl" is not without its quiet, more subdued moments but, for the most part, raucous sadomasochism has never been so much fun.

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Peruvian Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera - Trailer

New Line Cinema is bringing Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez' best-selling novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen with Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") writing the screenplay, and Mike Newell ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", "Four Weddings and a Funeral") directing. The cast includes Javier Bardem, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Hector Elizondo and Liev Schreiber.






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Latin American Literature

Enrique Vila-Matas - Interview

La escritura siempre parte de algo que falta. Y a veces lo que falta es el libro mismo.

An interview with Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas.





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Spanish Literature

Havana Noir

Carlos Rodríguez Martorell reviews "Havana Noir".

Novelist Achy Obejas has turned her native Havana into a crime scene — without shedding a drop of blood.

In "Havana Noir" (Akashic Books, $15.95), the author of "Days of Awe" has gathered 17 Cuban authors to write short crime stories set in the Caribbean island's capital.

The just-released compilation is part of Akashic's series of noir genre books — called in Spanish género negro — set in different cities and neighborhoods (the Bronx, Los Angeles, Miami), and Havana seemed like a natural fit.

"Noir has been always popular in Cuba," Obejas said on the phone from Chicago, where she lives. "Cuban TV pirates a lot of American TV. And probably the most popular show on the air right now I think is ‘Law & Order.' They are addicted to that stuff."

Among the contributing authors are Leonardo Padura Fuentes, internationally known for his Detective Mario Conde novels, and Arnaldo Correa, "one of the founders of Cuban noir," said Obejas.

Another highlight is young sensation Ena Lucía Portela, who has won literary prizes in Spain and France, but has barely been translated into English.

Her disturbing story "The Last Passenger" revolves around a woman infatuated with a serial killer, and portrays a class-divided Cuba where the nomenklatura enjoys vacations in the Bahamas and wears gold Rolexes.

"Cuba's upper class is invisible for most people," Portela, 34, said via e-mail from Havana. "Official propaganda insists that in communist countries all citizens live under the same economic conditions, which is a huge lie."

Portela's brash, raw style landed her on the Bogota 39 — the Colombian International Book Fair's list of the 39 most important writers in Latin America under the age of 39 — but the prestige doesn't extend to her own country.

"For now, this tale in particular will only have readers outside Cuba," she said. "Here, it's unpublishable because of political censorship."

Obejas edited and translated into English most of the stories and wrote "Zenzizenzic," in which she sheds light on the tiny Cuban community in Hawaii.

Cuban noir is a distinctive genre in itself, she says. "It tends not to have a detective. It's never the lone guy out there, but the collective working for the better good. It's almost an antithesis of what we know noir to be."

Although she won't name them, she says many "very well-known Cuban authors" wrote stories for the book, but they were discarded because the genre "completely defied them."

Others just adapted to it. "[Noir] was something I never set myself to do in a conscious manner," said author Mabel Cuesta, "but which may be underlying in some of my previous stories."

Cuesta, who lives in North Bergen, N.J., writes in "Virgins of Regla" about a brutal rape in a Havana neighborhood infused with Afro-Cuban culture.

"I would live intermittently in a predominantly black neighborhood," she said. "I would be la blanquita (the whitey), but that didn't prevent me from going to listen to their drums and see women and men bursting into screams because the saints were 'passing through' them."

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Cuban Literature

Malta con Huevo directed by Cristóbal Valderrama

Rob Bartlett reviews Cristóbal Valderrama's Malta con Huevo.

Imagine a hot Santiago day. The smog is cloying, stifling. Lethargy washes over you with every warm breath of wind. Your throat is parched. You need refreshment, an energy boost, a pick-me-up. You need Malta con Huevo.
This is how you get it: take 1 liter of cold Malta beer, 1 or 2 eggs and sugar to taste. Blend. Drink.

It is October in the city. The Papi Ricky soap opera has finished, you are bored and you don’t know what to do. You can’t face Transantiago, and anyway, your Metro Bip! card is out of funds. Yet an idle curiosity is beating back the anesthetizing effects of the office. You want stimulation, contentment, entertainment. You need Malta con Huevo - the movie.

Malta con Huevo is the first feature film from Chilean director Cristóbal Valderrama and looks set to be a big hit. It tells the story of Vladimir and Jorge, two former schoolmates who are diametrically opposed in almost every way, except in an affinity for the eponymous drink.

Vladimir is a waster, a scrounger, an artist. He lives for the moment and for women.
Jorge is a controlled, independent scientist. He plans for the future and for himself.
Following one chance meeting, the pair agrees to move in together, along with Jorge’s capricious, materialistic and sexually adventurous lover Rocío. The arrangement seems perfect for Jorge. The house satisfies the consumerist desires of his girlfriend, as well as helping him towards one of his own longed-for objectives.

The arrangement also seems perfect for Vladimir. He has just been kicked out of his flat for not paying his rent and his attempt to move back into the bed of a former girlfriend is thwarted by the current boyfriend. His bright yellow Citroën car, loaded with all his worldly possessions, does not make for an ideal home. And even better, during a house-warming party, some of Rocío’s sexual adventurousness starts to be directed his way.
Director Valderrama handles their shared story in a simple but highly effective and amusing way. He successfully blurs genre boundaries, not by merger, rather by juxtaposition.

Initially we see events from Vladimir’s point of view, sharing his prejudices and perspectives on the house party, on Jorge and Rocío, and on football results. As viewers we are therefore as confused as he is when things appear to come in the wrong order. We are seemingly traveling through time, entering the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. What is happening? We don’t know, he doesn’t know.

Vladimir wants to find out though, so he goes to meet the loner Fedora, an aspiring witch. Although she has never met him, he had previously found her threatening when they met for the second time at a liquor store they both frequent. When he accidentally kills her black cat, her enmity is assured. As ever, a Malta con Huevo helps to calm him down. Doesn’t it?

Then we see the same events from Jorge’s angle, with the disparity giving rise to plenty of amusement as well as ensuring the audience has a clear understanding of events. Still, Jorge’s mentality is not quite as rational as he would like to believe. His deluded opinion of himself as a dominant, forceful personality suffers from the constant subversive influence of his broken arm, sustained at the hands of Rocío and her emasculating, sadomasochistic sexuality. From his standpoint, events that were fantastical from Vladimir’s perspective morph into black comedy. And the suspense starts to build like any good thriller.

These are two people clearly on a collision course. The owner of the liquor store wants one of them dead and why is there so much cabling on the floor in the shared house? There is only one love interest, right? What about the shallow grave in Fedora’s back garden? And why do the eggs for the Malta con Huevo have holes in them?

The film has received a very positive critical response in Chile, winning an award at the Northern Chile International Film Festival and expected to gain further attention at the ongoing Valdivia festival. Even the normally reserved daily La Tercera told readers that the film “will make you laugh out loud.”

Indeed, laughter seems to have been a driving force in the production process. Director Valderrama, when questioned by El Mercurio as to any didactic message, rubbished the idea, saying “We are not trying to make a speech, change the world or establish a new morality. We were just having a bit of a laugh.”

But that does not mean the film should be seen as lightweight in an artistic sense. There is a very well thought out aesthetic to both the plot and the mise-en-scène, with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, particularly his 1986 work “Matador”, seemingly an important reference point.

On the other hand it would be wrong to overstate foreign influences, as Malta con Huevo has a very strong Chilean identity. The film is not only written and directed by a Chilean, funded by Chilean institutions, and produced by the Chilean company Cinepata, it was shot on the streets of Santiago, uses young Chilean actors and technicians and is peppered with “Chilenismos” (Chilean slang).

In common with much of Latin American Cinema, Chilean features are currently proving very popular. Films such as “La Casa de la Remolienda” have done well at the box-office and new releases, such as “Radio Corazón”, being well received.

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Chilean Cinema

Planeta Prize - 2007

Spanish Juan Jose Millas was awarded the 56th edition of the Planeta Prize for best Spanish-language novel for his work "El mundo" (The World).

The prize panel was made up of Alberto Blecua, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Soledad Puertolas, Rosa Regas and Carlos Pujol.

The 56th edition of the Planeta Prize was presented at the Convention Palace of Catalonia, with numerous personalities from political, social and cultural life in attendance.

A highly honored writer since he won the Sesamo Prize, in 1974, for best short novel with "Cerbero son las sombras," 61-year-old Millas is currently one of the icons of literary journalism thanks to his columns and his reporting for the Madrid daily El Pais.





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Spanish Literature

Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Peggy Barnett reviews Arturo Perez-Reverte's Purity of Blood

Arturo Perez-Reverte writes historical novels set in his homeland of Spain. This one, Purity of Blood, is the second in a series he is writing about characters in the early 17th century. (The Mary Willis Library also has the first book in the series, Captain Alatriste, if readers prefer to begin at the beginning.)

The narrator is Inigo Balboa, a 13-year-old whose father was killed in battle, fighting for the king. His mother has sent him into the care of his father's friend and fellow soldier, Captain Alatriste. Inigo admires and tries to imitate the courageous, skilled, and honorable captain. Unfortunately, in this corrupt and evil-haunted land, the captain is not paid for his wartime service, and must offer his sword for hire.

The purity of blood of the title refers to the historical fact that any taint of Jewish heritage may lead to the dreaded attention of the Inquisition. The daughter of a prosperous merchant is being held prisoner in a defiledconvent, and the villains of the story threaten to reveal his family history if he appeals to the king. He goes, instead, to a friend of Captain Alatriste, who agrees to help in a rescue attempt.

The "purity of blood" is also a metaphor for the honor of the captain and his friends in contrast to the dishonor and evil of their enemies, who are of influence in the Church and government. This struggle is the background for a tale of derring-do and breathtaking action. Because of treachery, the rescue attempt goes awry in a big way, and young Inigo becomes a prisoner.

"I had heard enough about the practices of the Inquisition -- that sinister shadow that had loomed over our lives for years and years and years -- to know my destination: the dreaded secret dungeons of the Holy Office,in Toledo." Though beaten and abused, Inigo's stubborn courage enables him not to give the captain away. He does not hope for rescue: "The fact is that later, life -- the passing years, adventures, loves, and the wars of our lord and king -- caused me to lose faith in many things. But I had already, young as I was at the time, ceased to believe in miracles."

Faith is a theme of the novel. The Church had become notoriously corrupt, but Perez-Reverte and his characters have faith in integrity and love, and we cheer them on through their turbulent adventures. The author is skillful. Foreshadowing is well-handles: "What I did not know -- God save me! -- was how I would come within a hair of losing my own [life.]" The outcome is not predictable, and though some will die in terrible ways, exactly who will survive is not clear until the end.

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Spanish Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Carlos Rodríguez Martorell interviews Dominican author Junot Díaz.

Junot Díaz is savoring the raving success of his debut novel — briefly.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" has made it to the New York Times Best Sellers list (a first for a Dominican author), Miramax Films bought the screen rights and a translation into Spanish is already in the works.

"This is just a temporary change after 11 years in silence and solitude," Díaz deadpans, referring to the time it took for the book to see the light after his acclaimed "Drown."

"All this stuff is really nice but nothing is gonna make me happy until I can figure out a way to write more easily than I write now."

Díaz is not very hopeful about the movie. "Hollywood is Hollywood," he says. "It would be wonderful if it was brilliant, and it would be wonderful if it was made. But that's not usually what happens."

The novel revolves about Oscar, an obese comics fan growing up in Paterson, N.J., and his dysfunctional Dominican family, going back to the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship.

The book is being translated by Cuban author Achy Obejas.

In the novel, Díaz takes on so many genres that it makes it almost impossible to imagine what the movie would look like. Comedy? Epic? Sci-fi?

"Structurally, the perfect director would be the director who made ‘Babel' and ‘Amores Perros' [Alejandro González Iñárritu], because he knows how to juggle different story lines," he said. "I also really love that director who did ‘Secuestro Express' [Jonathan Jakubowicz]."

As for the cast, he can't think of any actor to play Oscar, but ventures two options for his fierce "ghetto-punk" sister, Lola.

"Minimum, we have two Dominican actresses who are tall and beautiful and [a bit] morenita, and that's Dania Ramírez and, of course, Zoë Saldaña."

He has another sure pick: "A friend of mine wrote that the best Trujillo would be Oscar de la Renta, and I think she's right. I think it would be genius."

Díaz says he's working on a novel about a woman raised an orphan who goes back to her native city, which has been destroyed in a terrorist attack.

"Oscar didn't sound funny either when I first described him," he said. "My problem as a writer is that I always take the strangest route to my destination."

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Dominican Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Mary Jo Anderson interviews Chilean autor Alberto Manguel.

Alberto Manguel is a master of words and he doesn’t mince any of them.

How fitting that language is the subject of his newest book, The City of Words (Anansi, $18.95), comprising the 2007 Massey Lectures which Manguel will be delivering across Canada over the next few weeks.

"We are being infantilized daily. I believe we come into the world as intelligent creatures and we have to be taught to be stupid."

But against the culturally induced stupor, Manguel posits that story and literature have the capacity to make us more human.

Manguel spoke on the telephone from Toronto as he prepared to travel to Halifax to deliver the first in this series of lectures. (He was scheduled to speak on Friday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.)

Begun in 1961 for the purpose of stimulating public discussion of important social issues, the Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Every October the selected speaker/author/lecturer, travels to five Canadian cities to deliver one of the lectures. Every November, the CBC Radio program, Ideas, airs the lectures consecutively for one week. (For information visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey2007.ca)

Alberto Manguel is erudite, cosmopolitan, and vastly well read. He is a translator, author, editor, and literary critic. His book The History of Reading (Random House, $24), is full of fascinating information and resonant with the passion for reading.

In The City of Words, Manguel examines the concept of nationalism and the idea of "personal and social" identity from the perspective of story and language. As countries fracture and hostilities increase, Manguel asks how — given that "language is our common denominator" — words and story can save us. He also asks whether words will divide and destroy us.

In our conversation (and in the lectures), Manguel asserts that much depends on how language is used. And equally, it is crucial whether questions are posed or answers expounded. For Manguel believes that answers breed dogma and intolerance while questions nurture openness and possibility.

"Answers close us in and literature opens doors and windows for us. It forces us to look further, not be content with what seems like an easy answer," Manguel said.

"It is, I think, exactly what opposes the arts to the kind of society that we are building — in which the notion of value is of financial value and is therefore a closed notion. A closed notion, like a closed book, offers no exploration, no ambiguity, and no spaciousness in which to connect with others. And connection is what language, literature, and stories offer us."

Manguel provides innumerable examples gleaned from many centuries to illuminate the process by which language and art allows us to understand and empathize with people from different cultures while also enabling us to unite as a society.

While discussing the film The Fast Runner by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, Manguel says, "Like other communal tasks, storytelling has the function of lending expression and context to private experiences, so that under recognition by the whole of society, individual perceptions . . . can acquire a common, shared meaning on which to build learning."

Imagination and its off-spring, literature, is a "survival mechanism developed to grant us experiences (that) serve to educate" us, Manguel writes in the lecture, The Bricks of Babel. So what is it that stands in the way of this shared perception, this tolerance of others? How can language be at the heart of the conflicts between religions, cultures, and societies?

The problems arise when the rich language of literature is stripped and co-opted for the purposes of politics and commerce.

In his illuminating lecture in Chapter Five, entitled The Screen of Hal (a reference to the computer in Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey), Manguel states, "Distortions are the essence of demagogical and of commercial language, intent on ‘selling’ an idea or product . . ."

Subtly and gradually, the language of literature, which is "complex (and) infinitely capable of enrichment" is replaced by the "short, categorical, imperious" language of advertising or the "static" language of politics. It is an example of the tail wagging the dog as language is transformed into mere slogans and propaganda.

Manguel cites philosopher and literary critic George Lukacs to explain this "colonization of the world of experience" into "one-dimensional generalizations . . . granting value and identity not through imaginative stories but merely according to what something is said to cost."

And in our conversation, Manguel asserts "there is a deliberate effort made to render us stupid so that we become the consumers that are needed for this society to function."

This "co-opted" language is the language of "statements that cannot be explored without destruction. You cannot open up "Drink Coca Cola" and try to reflect upon it," Manguel says.

"You have to use your mind and on the basis of these words (in a book) that are here offered to you, build a reasoning and an emotion of your own. It is your responsibility. It is your task."

Maybe if we build a city of words, a culture of tolerance, we will not suffer as those who built the Tower of Babel. Maybe we will understand — even as we speak different languages.

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Chile Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Kathryn Harrison reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

The genius of “Madame Bovary,” as Vargas Llosa describes it in “The Perpetual Orgy,” is the “descriptive frenzy … the narrator uses to destroy reality and recreate it as a different reality.” In other words, Flaubert was a master of realism not because he reproduced the world around him, but because he used language to create an alternate existence, a distillate whose emotional gravity transcends that of life itself. Emma, Vargas Llosa reminds us, has survived countless readers. Not merely immortal but undiminished by time, her passions remain as keen as the day her ink was wet.

Vargas Llosa, too, is a master. Long one of the pre-eminent voices of postmodernism, he has transformed a revolutionary work of Western literature into a vibrant, contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s — and ’70s and ’80s — just as “Madame Bovary” did the provincial life of the 1830s. In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters. The trajectory of Emma’s yearning leads inexorably to her poisoning herself with arsenic, the torturous death of a woman who seizes freedoms allowed only to men. And if contemporary society appears less inclined to penalize a sexually liberated woman than did the rigidly censorious era of Emma Bovary, Vargas Llosa evinces a more dangerous postfeminist world, one in which misogyny flourishes under a veneer of progressive attitudes and token equalities.

“The Bad Girl” begins, like “Madame Bovary,” with boyhood scenes narrated in the first person, an “I” who becomes for a time “we,” echoing Flaubert’s chorus of schoolmates. But while Flaubert shifts into an exalted omniscience, Vargas Llosa allows the “good boy,” Ricardo, to claim his novel’s voice, recounting an erotic fixation that begins in 1950, in the Mira flores district of Lima, Peru, when Ricardo is just 15 and a new girl arrives in town. She calls herself Lily and, in clothes that cling “perversely,” dances the mambo like a “demonic whirlwind,” pulling Ricardo into her orbit, awakening his lust and enslaving him to the idea that she alone can answer his desire. Permanently intoxicated, Ricardo will recognize Lily’s essence no matter how she disguises herself, no matter how many years pass between their assignations, reunions whose power to devastate Ricardo drives him to the point of suicide, and which she dismisses as bland interludes between more compelling love affairs.

Blessed with an ability to enjoy simple pleasures, Ricardo achieves his life’s dream by the age of 25: he lives in Paris, where he makes a modest living as an interpreter for Unesco. The bad girl, his one complicated pleasure, with the capacity to ruin all the rest, seems securely fixed in his past, a peculiarly intense first crush, until she reappears. No longer a memory but a riveting presence, Lily, now “Comrade Arlette,” poses as a would-be revolutionary, “bold, spontaneous, provocative,” passing through the City of Light en route to Cuba for guerrilla training — arguably wasted on a woman to whom sneak attacks seem second nature.

Six months later, having seduced “one of the historic commandantes” of the Cuban revolution, the bad girl has embarked on a career of increasingly daring affairs. Ricardo, she makes clear, is unworthy of what little attention she gives him. Treating him as a plaything, she ignores the depth of his feelings and teases him sexually even as she leaves him, for a month, a year, three years: he never knows how long his loneliness will last. At the end of one such tryst, she waves goodbye with a “flowered parasol,” summoning the one “of rosy iridescent silk” Emma carries while seducing Charles Bovary. There are enough such alignments to amuse ardent admirers of the older novel, but it’s possible they won’t catch them. So complete and convincing is the spell cast by “The Bad Girl” that it doesn’t allow a reader’s attention to stray.

Ricardo’s work as an interpreter affords him ample opportunity to travel and reconnect with his jet-setting, selfreinventing love, who attaches herself like a succubus to one rich paramour after another, in one locale after another. Less welcome is the anxiety his job inspires about his identity. Paris of the 1960s, the culture in which Vargas Llosa came of intellectual age, witnessed the popularization of existential philosophy, and Ricardo judges himself not only deracinated, a perpetual foreigner, but also lacking in substance. He’s trapped in the moment of translating one person’s language into another’s, “of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

But what is identity? The bad girl sheds one mask only to try on the next. Driven by a need for excitement and riches only the most powerful and dangerous men can offer, she assumes whatever appearance might secure what she craves. Is her true self hidden from view, or does it, like the good boy’s, not really exist? Does only desire have the power to define us , Ricardo shaped by his love for the bad girl, who is herself the reflection of what she pursues? The reader knows that Ricardo and the girl who began as Lily will cross paths indefinitely, that she will allow him to possess her only long enough to rekindle his obsession, and that despite his intention to give her up for the toxic addiction she is, he will take her back the next time. Still, the novel possesses an intensifying, at points almost exhausting suspense, like that of a car being driven recklessly around hairpin turns, each more perilous than the one preceding. The bad girl demands attention from lovers and readers alike. Is she wicked, or admirable, or both? Where will she be the next time the good boy encounters her? What will she call herself? How long can he endure? Will she ever return his affection in kind?

“It is because she feels that society is fettering her imagination, her body, her dreams, her appetites,” Vargas Llosa writes in “The Perpetual Orgy,” “that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and in the end kills herself.” Vargas Llosa’s bad girl suffers, too, even as she makes those around her suffer. Though she tries to temper her restlessness and limit her aspirations, she cannot reconcile herself to the suffocation of petit- bourgeois existence any more than Emma can. “A man is free, at least,” Emma observes, praying the child she carries is a son, “free to range, … to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted.”

The heroism of both women is that they refuse to be diminished by modest, reasonable hopes or by respectable society. Creatures of appetite — for sex, money, excitement, life — bad girls serve their hunger first, and last. They are terrible and they are enviable, because they won’t settle for less than everything they want. Because, in the end, they accept not only their essential nature, but also the consequences of their choice to fulfill rather than deny it.

Source: NY Times





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Peruvian Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Carlos Fresneda interviews Junot Díaz.

"¡Diablo, este idioma es difícil!"... Seis años tenía Junot Díaz (Santo Domingo, 1968) cuando dio con sus huesos en Nueva Jersey, sin hablar "ni papa de inglés" y bregando con los molinos de viento de una cultura ajena: "Este país se nutre del silencio de los inmigrantes para mantener su imagen idílica...".

Sufrimiento, incomprensión, trabajo duro. Así se fue forjando su idea particular del sueño americano: leer y escribir a destajo en 'el idioma del diablo', que acabó superponiéndose con el tiempo a la lengua madre. Aunque por las noches, cuando todos callan, inglés y español siguen librando aún una tenaz batalla en su cabeza: "Todos mis sueños son bilingües. ¡Qué mierda, bro!".

Once años hace de la primera campanada de Junot Díaz, aquel 'Negocios' que le consagró como joven maestro del relato corto. Ahora rompe sonoramente el silencio con su primera novela, 'La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao', con la que se ha encaramado como "una de las voces más distinguidas e irresistibles de la ficción contemporánea norteamericana" ('The New York Times').

Junot Díaz recorre estos días en volandas su país adoptivo, agasajado por la crítica y aupado a la lista de los 'bestsellers' por un público cada vez más nutrido y variado. En plena gira tuvo el detalle de cumplir con su viejo amigo y traductor, Eduardo Lago, y llegar hasta el Instituto Cervantes con su peculiar visión de la lengua y del oficio: "No eres de verdad un novelista hasta que llegas al agujero más profundo de tu jodida vida, y desde ahí escribes".

Díaz estuvo a punto de morir ahogado bajo el éxito prematuro de 'Drown' (que así se tituló Negocios en su versión orginal). "Tuve que soportar mucha presión al inicio, y empecé a escribir al mismo tiempo dos novelas en las que avancé con la esperanza de que alguna de las dos entrara en ignición", confiesa. "Todos los caminos me llevaron a una zona muerta, pero perseveré en el intento: yo soy mi peor verdugo".

Hubo que esperar a una noche de excesos para que sus ojos se clavaran en las solapas de un libro de Oscar Wilde, y así nació en su mente el "maldito gordito ese", o sea Oscar Wao, y después vinieron la hermana Lola y la madre, Beli, mientras a pie de página fue ganando fuerza la presencia inquietante y monstruosa del infame dictador, Rafael Trujillo.

De La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao han escrito que es "una saga de inmigrantes para los que no leen sagas de inmigrantes". Con ayuda inestimable de Yunior, ese alter ego en el que vuelve a apoyarse "para que haga el trabajo sucio", Díaz tiende un puente imaginario entre dos mundos irreconciliables, con la brisa de Samaná y la lengua su infancia colándose como un viento peleón bajo de la puerta: "You are the most buenmoso man I know".
Idioma mixto

"Lo que yo escribo no es esa cosa desaliñada que llaman spanglish sino una especie de criollo, con palabras y expresiones intercaladas de español", admite Díaz.

Hay quienes acometen su libro con diccionario en mano, pero la mayoría se deja arrastrar por el río caudaloso su prosa vivaz, moteada con expresiones al alcance del americano medio: "Then you will be mi negra bella". Ahora trabaja mano a mano con una traductora cubana para la versión en español.

Junot Díaz cree que se le da demasiada importancia al "poder mítico" de lengua, ora el inglés o en español. "La gente está obsesionada con el sueño del idioma puro como una cosa uniformadora", admite. "Y ésa es una idea que fomentan mucho los políticos... Estados Unidos es el opuesto a España en el siglo XIV: los que tienen el poder hablan un idioma; los demás hablan, tú sabes, una lengua distinta. Aquí los moros son los gringos, encerrados en sus castillos, cuando la gente empieza a hablar otra cosa".

"Los gringos quieren negar el español, lo perciben como una amenaza", asegura Díaz, "pero lo cierto es que este país camina hacia el bilingüismo. Con el español pasa lo que nunca ha ocurrido aquí con otro idioma, que se va reforzando con la llegada de nuevos inmigrantes. Cada cinco o seis años viene aquí un nuevo draw, una extracción de dominicanos, y los mexicanos que no dejan de llegar, y los colombianos, los ecuatorianos, los argentinos... Yo lo veo como una piscina que a la luz del día se seca un poquito, pero que por la noche se vuelve a llenar de agua".

Admirador de Toni Morrison, comparado con David Foster Wallace, Díaz se siente más próximo a la narrativa norteamericana que a las letras hispanas. La fiesta del chivo de Vargas Llosa le parece "una biografía novelada y bidimensional". Su debilidad es Juan Rulfo, y su última obsesión, Martín Solares: "Los minutos negros es lo mejor que he leído en español en bastante tiempo".

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Dominican Literature

If you love love, this book is the best love story ever.

Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.





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Latin American Literature

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño's The Insufferable Gaucho in the New Yorker.

In the opinion of those who knew him well, Héctor Pereda had two outstanding virtues: he was a caring and affectionate father and an irreproachable lawyer with a record of honesty, in a time and place that were hardly conducive to such rectitude. As evidence of the first virtue, his son and daughter, Bebe and Cuca, whose childhood and adolescent years had been happy, later accused him of having sheltered them from the hard realities of life, focussing particularly on his handling of practical matters. Of his work as a lawyer, there is little to be said. He prospered and made more friends than enemies, which was no mean feat, and when he had the choice between becoming a judge or a candidate for a political party he chose the bench without hesitation, although it obviously meant passing up the opportunities for greater financial gain that would have been open to him in politics.

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Chilean Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

James Urquhart reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

With murderous intent, Croatian veteran Ivo Markovic tracks down former war photographer Andres Faulques to a derelict coastal tower. Inside, Faulques is trying to capture in a mural the true meaning of humanity that had always eluded his camera. Markovic’s life had been shattered because of appearing in a famous picture by Faulques of terrified, retreating Croatians – but he had also witnessed Faulques photographing the mangled corpse of his colleague and lover, Olvido Ferrara.

Perez-Reverte, himself a former war correspondent, makes a heroic stab at anatomising artistic responsibility in the grudging rapport between Faulques and Markovic. But their aesthetic ruminations smother the more exciting story of Faulques’s truncated affair.

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Spanish Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Jonathan Yardley reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl will do nothing to improve his lot in Stockholm, but somehow it seems unlikely that this much worries Vargas Llosa. Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -- the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it. It also obviously was written out of a deep nostalgia for the author's lost youth and for the Lima in which he then lived. He evokes it beautifully:

"In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses -- two at the most -- and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas, laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine. In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani, jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers in the gardens and the little D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks . . . that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. You could still hear birds singing in that Miraflores, where families cut a pine branch when their girls reached marriageable age because if they didn't, the poor things would become old maids like my aunt Alberta."

Into this paradise, during the "fabulous summer" of 1950, comes a 14- or 15-year-old girl who calls herself Lily and claims to be Chilean. Soon enough she is found out as an impostor and expelled from 15-year-old Ricardo's privileged set, but the damage has been done: He is madly in love with her, and her expulsion is "the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality." She has rejected his declarations of love, but she scarcely vanishes from his life. By the early 1960s he is in Paris, studying (successfully) to become a translator at UNESCO, when she appears as Comrade Arlette, ostensibly to bring Castroite revolution to Peru. She goes off to Cuba, but soon resurfaces as Madame Robert Arnoux, wife of a French diplomat. Ricardo craves her as ardently as ever, even as she blithely dismisses him: "What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito." She does permit him to make love to her but vanishes once more, reappearing as Mrs. Richardson, wife of a wealthy Englishman hooked on "the aristocratic passion par excellence: horses."

By now Ricardo has figured out that she has come a long way: "I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now." He understands that she is now "a grown woman, convinced that life was a jungle where only the worst triumphed, and ready to do anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher." And yet:

"Everything I told her was true: I was still crazy about her. It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism and disappearances. A cheap, sentimental thing, no doubt, but also true that I wouldn't do anything . . . but curse how slowly the hours went by until I could see her again."

Over and over again she tests him, never more so than in a bedroom in Tokyo, "an experience that had left a wound in my memory." He actually manages to persuade himself for a time that he does not love her, but the obsession is too powerful: "I was a hopeless imbecile to still be in love with a madwoman, an adventurer, an unscrupulous female with whom no man, I least of all, could maintain a stable relationship without eventually being stepped on." In time he tells his story to a friend, a woman, who calls it "a marvelous love story," and who later adds, "What luck that girl has, inspiring love like this." There is a moment when Ricardo wonders, "Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?" but in his heart he knows that's just what it is, and Vargas Llosa tells it as such.

Being Vargas Llosa, he takes care of plenty of other business as well. The novel touches on the full sweep of Peruvian history from the 1950s to the Shining Path terrorism, "which would last throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in Peruvian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared." He says a lament for the generation of Peruvians before his own "who, when they reached old age, saw their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of materialize."

He also, having made Ricardo a translator and interpreter, affords himself the opportunity to have a bit of fun. One interpreter remarks: "Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between," and when Ricardo himself turns to translation, he discovers that, "As I always suspected, literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than for commercial ones." Probably no one is more amused by this than the redoubtable Edith Grossman, who has translated The Bad Girl with her accustomed skill and grace, making this lovely novel wholly accessible to American readers.

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Peruvian Literature

Bogota Film Festival

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Latin American Literature

La señal, directed by Ricardo Darín

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Argentine Cinema

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Nowadays, there may be Hmong in Madison and Somalis in St. Paul, but some of us still have trouble keeping up with all the intense cultural mixing and melting going on amid our purple-mountained majesty. For example, mention the Dominicans among us to the average Tom, Dick or Andy Rooney, and he's liable to speak of a mythical Shortstop Island from which wing-footed infielders plot their takeover of America's pastime. As for the Dominican Republic's history, imports, exports, that sort of thing? Well, its national baseball team is one of the best in the world, right? Or is that Venezuela?

Junot Diaz has the cure for such woeful myopia. The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Diaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander -- a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as "the anguished diaspora."

Thus, that nation's bloody history, often detailed in Diaz's irreverent footnotes, intrudes periodically in Oscar Wao, as if to remind Dominicans that tragedy is never far from one's doorstep. Or maybe it emerges simply to instruct the rest of us, because Diaz's characters are already painfully certain that they are destined for misfortune.

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The hero of Junot Díaz’s first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a “ghetto nerd” from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls “the more speculative genres.” He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games — the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit.

But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Díaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called “Drown,” shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to “Dune,” “The Matrix” and (especially) “The Lord of the Rings” rub up against references to Melville and García Márquez. Oscar’s nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween.

“What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” Oscar wonders. And the question of how to take account of his ancestral homeland — its folklore, its politics, the diaspora that brought so many of its inhabitants to North Jersey and Upper Manhattan — is one that explicitly preoccupies Oscar’s creator. The way Díaz tells it, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Spanish-speaking half of the island where Columbus made landfall, is the kind of small country that suffers from a surfeit of history. From the start, it has been a breeding ground for outsize destinies and monstrous passions.

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Dominican Literature