Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey d'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel “The Savage Detectives,” two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella “By Night in Chile,” that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Maya Jaggi interviews Junot Díaz.

Like the "ghetto nerd" Oscar Wao of his latest fiction, Junot Díaz was an avid consumer of SF and fantasy. Wrested from the Dominican Republic aged six, and brought with his family to New Jersey, he found that only such fiction captured his experience. There are "historical extremes in the Americas that are difficult for the mind to grasp: it's hard to convince people the Caribbean was a 300-year-long Auschwitz. Migration is like having your house burn down with everything in it, and only whispers left of what went before. Yet in genres I found descriptions of these very extremes: endless genetic breeding; time travel; leaving one world and being miraculously teleported to another."

Still on the move and with a gym bag over his shoulder, Díaz is speaking in a coffee shop near his London publishers. He has an apartment in East Harlem, teaches creative writing at MIT (for which post he thanks a mentor, Anita Desai), and is spending a year at the American Academy in Rome, grateful for the cuisine, but homesick for his fiancée, a "big-time lawyer" in New York. Yet he returns every month to New Jersey, to the same childhood friends. "I've travelled far from where I grew up, but I'm still stubbornly attached to it," he says. "Migration was so hard for me; I felt I'd lost so many worlds that I didn't want to lose another."

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Dominican Literature

Carmen Laforet: Nada

Emma Hagestadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.

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Spanish Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Benjamin Lytal reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Put briefly, "Nazi Literature" is a fictional encyclopedia of far right-wing authors who, to varying degrees, did or would have supported Hitler's party. It's his most Borgesian work, but unlike his literary ancestor, Bolaño cares more for the real world than for the library. His is not the account of a concerted movement or school, but the taxonomy of a wide-ranging sensibility. All of the writers are fictitious, but they do not inhabit an alternate universe; instead, they and their work are, case by case, just plausible.

Bolaño has imagined Boca Junior soccer thugs whose fanzines and mock-allegorical victory poems sell out hundreds of mimeographed copies; he has imagined bad painters who make alliances with bored widows, and end up shopping for antiques mentioned in Edgar Allen Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture"; he has even imagined an American youth who as a child overheard Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and his father discussing "Projective Verse," took it too seriously, and started a cult.

The voluminousness of this creativity would be one thing, but Bolaño is also — simultaneously — overachieving tonally. He constantly has to come up with titles for fictional books, and each title has to sound like it distinctly belongs to its one author. Sometimes this is fun — and Bolaño is clearly enjoying himself — as when "a Mexican poet inclined to mysticism and tormented phraseology" publishes her first collection, "A Voice You Withered." But "Nazi Literature" would grow tiring if its stories did not resonate with wider human problems: futility, obscurity, and fatal disorientation. Even had they existed, most of these writers would be forgotten, and for very good reason. But Bolaño makes us care about a few of them, and introduces a larger compass: that of the Americas, "ever fecund in enterprises verging on insanity, illegality and idiocy."

This kind of self-confident despair always makes Bolaño loquacious, and in his later work he uses the likes of Nazism to set the pitch for his own, brave voice. Having read "Nazi Literature," it is also possible to see how the dense networks of young poets in, say, "The Savage Detectives" repeat Mr. Bolaño's initial grand act of creative overdrive. And how would he have initially achieved it, isolating and embellishing a literature that really does not exist, except by founding it on a taboo? After "Nazi Literature," the idea of verboten doom worked as a kind of generative antimatter, setting off explosions in Bolaño's world and delineating it, just enough, from reality.

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Chilean Literature

Antonio Skármeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Joan Frank reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

"The Dancer and the Thief" is Skármeta's valentine for Chile's exhausted human capital, the lost, the loose, the marginalized. A shrewd awareness is at work here, one that does not preclude joy, but owes much to the bittersweet comprehensions of the tango. "Suicide was an undignified act," Gray muses, walking along the Mapocho. One cool nod is given to Chileans with money: "On Friday afternoons, the wealthy who own beach houses leave for the coast." Everyone else in this story is poor, hungry and cold; when food appears, it's embraced like a lover.

"[H]e knew he could devour at least two, maybe three, of those completos 'with everything' [...] hot dogs, nestled in fluted rolls [...] piled high with a leaning tower of mashed avocado, chopped tomatoes, a thin, long line of El Copihue hot sauce, a pile of pickled cabbage - German-style - and crowned with a feverish delight of mayonnaise and mustard. These sandwiches begged to be downed in two bites that left the front of your shirt covered with the unstable ingredients and your face smeared all the way up to your eyebrows with a voluptuous carnival of flavors."

"A voluptuous carnival of flavors" summarizes Skármeta's enterprise, with its now breathless, now sardonic sensibility; its deft jabs at bureaucracy and academic rigidity; impassioned invocations of art and artists; jubilant sex and sexuality. And its funny, solemn pronouncements: "I may be a thief, but I'm not a pimp," Gray sniffs. Shaping a fond, brave, modern fable from authentic, anguished history, Skármeta has cooked up a completo.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

John Brenkman reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer. But beyond that, it produces an unsettling mix of overt satire and covert elegy. The reductive force of summary after summary starts to have an effect that transcends the satire; the book begins to convey a sense of the vanity of human endeavor and the ease with which a lifetime's work might be flicked into oblivion by a witty remark. As the mocking of the imaginary writers' lives reverberates through one entry after the next, it comes back to mock the mockery itself; if the lives and works are in vain, the mocking of them is even more acutely in vain. So, too, does the satirized impulse to fuse a poetic project with a radical political vision lose its right-wing provenance: The conviction that reality will be utterly transformed "by novel, unexpected, marvelous means" is, Bolaño implies, a sickness of the left as well as the right. A masterful satirist, Bolaño wields a scalpel sharpened on both edges. Ultimately, his almost juvenile imaginative exuberance expresses just the opposite: a precocious world-weariness.

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Chilean Literature

Jose Saramago: Death At Intervals

Lindy Burleigh reviews José Saramago's Death At Intervals.

'Now life is truly beautiful,' proclaim the citizens of the unnamed fictional country in José Saramago's new novel, when suddenly, one New Year's Day, people stop dying. Granted, it's an implausible scenario, but we are asked to take nothing seriously, except for the author himself.

We know, too, that Saramago is not going to stick to the rules, because he doesn't use capital letters.

The big idea is that the 'absence of death' doesn't make for an earthly paradise. In fact, it causes bureaucratic chaos and societal breakdown.

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Portuguese Literature

Antonio Skarmeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Jonathan Yardley reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

Obviously the outcomes of both courtships must be left for the reader to discover, but The Dancer and the Thief is much more than an agreeable caper. Though Skarmeta scarcely ranks at the very top of Latin America's remarkably distinguished and varied literary elite, he is a serious writer to whom the death and rebirth of democracy in his native Chile is an endlessly compelling subject. Now in his late 60s, Sk¿rmeta fled Chile more than three decades ago as Pinochet clamped down -- he had practiced journalism and taught literature at the University of Chile -- and though he has lived in Germany on and off since 1975, his burning interest and literary preoccupation remain his home country.

His attitude toward it, as toward its capital of Santiago, is a mixture of exasperation and love. When Vergara Gray tells his son about a forebear who invented the telephone but lost the U.S. patent to Alexander Graham Bell, the boy replies: "You are so Chilean. Instead of commemorating victories, you celebrate defeats. Like our national hero, Arturo Prat: everybody remembers him with great affection because he lost the naval battle of Iquique against the Peruvians." Though in fairness Skarmeta really ought to acknowledge that Peru itself honors as "heroes" many leaders who lost battles in the same War of the Pacific, it is true that the self-deprecatory streak runs strong in Chile. It is scarcely anything to be ashamed of.

Skarmeta also is proud of Chile for rising above Pinochet and establishing what now is one of the few strong democracies in Latin America. Its president, Michelle Bachelet, is capable and widely respected in the international community, its economy is strong and its vino is maravilloso. Though the ending that Skarmeta gives his characters falls well short of happy, the Chile that he portrays herein is vibrant and strong.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Jackie McGlone interviews Junot Díaz.

So, Junot Díaz, how does it feel to be a literary sensation – again? I ask the hip-looking 39-year-old – almost-shaven head, neat manicured goatee, designer spectacles – who has been living in Rome since being awarded a Literature Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters last April, which is only one of many glittering prizes bestowed upon him.

"Well, us writers, we're just throwing words up into the wind, hoping that they will carry, and that someone, somewhere, sometime, will have a use for them," he replies.

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Dominican Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Steve Bennett reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novels have been translated into 29 languages in 50 countries. A longtime war correspondent, recently elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, he now concentrates on fiction: "The Queen of the South," whose title character is a resourceful Mexican woman caught in the world-wide web of drug trafficking, was on many best book lists of 2005, while his Capt. Alarista series, following the adventures of a 17th-century Spanish soldier of fortune, has been a swashbuckling success, with more than 4 million copies in print.

His latest novel, "The Painter of Battles," is a book-length parable of right vs. wrong, a meditation on the morality of man. Pérez-Reverte is nothing if not ambitious.

Translated from the Spanish by the master, Margaret Sayers Peden, who has brought the work of Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz to the English-speaking world, "The Painter of Battles" is an intoxicating mix blending philosophy, art history and treatises on the nature of love, the elusiveness of justice, man's inhumanity to man, human cruelty, the utility of war and the necessity of revenge. Pérez-Reverte is undoubtedly a very smart man and very deep thinker.

Trouble is, this cocktail is light on the essential ingredient: story.

Which, basically, is this: Andrés Faulques is an award-winning war photographer who has covered conflicts from Lebanon to Latin America for more than 25 years. He is tired, he is weary. So he retires to a life of solitude in an old tower on the Spanish coast.

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Spanish Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Andrew Ervin reviews Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Bolaño's genius then, lies not only in telling a series of compelling stories, nor even in piling those up to form a larger narrative about a particular and unfortunate (if make-believe) artistic movement, but also in gently prodding us to ask some important questions about our own literary establishment.

Readers new to Bolaño might consider starting with something more formally traditional, such as the novellas By Night in Chile or Distant Star, but don't be surprised to find yourself soon devouring everything he wrote. When you make your way to Nazi Literature in the Americas, you will discover that all-too-rare book that will read you just as much as you read it.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey D'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor.

In his novel "The Savage Detectives," two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hideout in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

"Nazi Literature in the Americas," a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, "Nazi Literature" is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

John Brenkman reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer. But beyond that, it produces an unsettling mix of overt satire and covert elegy. The reductive force of summary after summary starts to have an effect that transcends the satire; the book begins to convey a sense of the vanity of human endeavor and the ease with which a lifetime's work might be flicked into oblivion by a witty remark. As the mocking of the imaginary writers' lives reverberates through one entry after the next, it comes back to mock the mockery itself; if the lives and works are in vain, the mocking of them is even more acutely in vain. So, too, does the satirized impulse to fuse a poetic project with a radical political vision lose its right-wing provenance: The conviction that reality will be utterly transformed "by novel, unexpected, marvelous means" is, Bolaño implies, a sickness of the left as well as the right. A masterful satirist, Bolaño wields a scalpel sharpened on both edges. Ultimately, his almost juvenile imaginative exuberance expresses just the opposite: a precocious world-weariness.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey d'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

“Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible. Like Leni Riefenstahl, the artistes Bolaño invents share a certain Romantic aesthetic, a taste for the classic and nonvulgar, a dislike of “cacophony” and a lurking sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the modern world — that children, for instance, have been “stolen and raised by inferior races” and that a better world in the form of the Fourth Reich is imminent. There is little to no mention of Jews or other undesirables; there are no death camps; World War II is a passing reference at best. Instead, with a straight face, Bolaño narrates the Nazi writers’ tireless imaginations, their persistence in the face of a world history that goes against them, their contrarian determination as they continue to write books that go unread, unreviewed and largely unnoticed. They’re the losers but, with incredible passion, they remain steadfastly in denial of that fact, churning away at their refutations of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre; their verses vindicating Il Duce; their novels decrying the decline of piety; their Aryan literary societies. Like Riefenstahl, they find the highest beauty in a particular sort of symmetry and order that only in retrospect seems indubitably fascist. Horribly, persistently, they have a vision that they are incapable of giving up.

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Chilean Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Katie Goldstein reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Through a series of wartime memories, many including Olvido, Pérez-Reverte takes us to the burning oil fields of Kuwait, to the war-torn Balkans, to Lebanon, Somalia, Romania, Mozambique, Chad, and beyond. Meanwhile, he acquaints us with Faulques' mural, where ancient and modern war coexist, where everyone from Hector and Andromache to Bosch and Goya plays a role. Markovic, when not prodding Faulques with provocative questions, takes an interest in the painting, in Faulques' vision of war - the vision of an observer, not a participant.

Though Markovic at times seems nothing more than a pain in the painter's side, much like the one that visits the artist reliably every eight hours or so, his presence forces Faulques to face his demons. "Did you ever try to stop anything, señor Faulques?" Markovic asks. "Even once? A beating? A death?"

Both men have lived war, one from behind his camera lens, the other with an automatic weapon in his hands. "Is it chance that leaves an animal's tracks in the snow?" Markovic asks. "Was that what put me in front of your camera or did I walk toward it for subconscious reasons I can't explain?" The narrative development may sometimes move slowly or seem repetitive, but Pérez-Reverte is a skillful architect of the tension between the retired photographer and his former subject, of those who witness and take photographs and those who fight, kill, beat, and torture.

Throughout the course of The Painter of Battles, it becomes apparent that the painter and his former subject have more in common than initially appears. Both are ravaged by war, still living, years later, in its aftermath.

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Spainish Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Neel Mukherjee reviews Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

And through the tissue of the personal dramas of his characters, Díaz weaves the history of 20th-century Dominican Republic, both in its presence as a kind of scathing narrative unfolding through the footnotes, and in the more oblique way of how his characters come to get caught up in that history, participate in it, become its victims and survivors. This is a blistering novel, its language and style an effortless extension of the immense varieties of immigrant Englishes that have been appropriated for fiction, a high-octane, amphetamine-fuelled marriage of demotic Spanish and English that is equally at home with rough street slang and the domain of poetry.

Its characters are unforgettable, its emotional impact both crushing and liberating at the same time, and the voice in which it speaks, a rare, new, spellbinding sound altogether.

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Dominican Literature

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives

Alex Abramovich reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsize, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the "visceral realist" poets, pot dealers, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively—it was Bolaño's most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel's many surprises.

The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima across four continents and twenty-some years; it's framed by the journals of seventeen-year-old Juan García Madero. ("I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists," García Madero explains, by way of introduction. And the very next day: "I'm not really sure what visceral realism is.") But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all—jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others—and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author's own biography. (Among other things, visceral realism is an echo of infrarealism, a movement Bolaño helped launch in Mexico City around 1975, fusing elements of surrealism, shoplifting, and street theater in hopes of urging young Latin Americans to blur whatever lines remained between life and literature.) Even in translation, the effect is cumulative and fuguelike.

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Chilean Literature

José Saramago: The Double

Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double.

The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel Santa-Clara, whose job it apparently is to perform bit parts in a myriad of forgettable B-films. Beyond their professional differences, Tertuliano and Daniel (whose real name is António Claro) are otherwise completely identical, down to their date of birth, their moles, and even their scars. The course of the novel concerns Tertuliano's attempts to locate and meet Daniel/António, the bad blood that emerges from their meeting, and the fiendish plots they then initiate against each other. I won't ruin the end, which is quite moving and features at least one considerably surprising plot twist.

As it is with Saramago's best novels (in the United States, they are probably reckoned to be Blindness, a true masterpiece in my view, and The Cave), The Double seems to have a parabolic, or allegorical, layer, whereby it's possible to view the fabulism of the central conceit as standing in for something particular. Unlike in dream logic, in which the play of interpretation is imperative to arriving at understanding, in Saramago's parabolic world blindness tends to mean one or two things exactly, and the plight of the blind has a clearly representational, if not mimetic, flavor: The modern world, Blindness argues, exists as it does in this story. Saramago's work is not surreal, therefore, in the sense that we might understand it from Breton, or, to take a more recent case, Rikki Ducornet. Saramago is more like the poetry of Bunyan, or perhaps like Swift.

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Portuguese Literature

Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture

Damon Krukowski reviews "Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture".

The late-'60s Brazilian pop music movement known as Tropicália or Tropicalismo is—like Dylan's "Basement Tapes"—highly "overdetermined," as they say in grad school, and therefore a good candidate for a Geertz or Marcus-like "unpacking." But Christopher Dunn's book on the subject, Brutality Garden, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, never reaches those fanciful heights. This is not to say that Dunn isn't in possession of valuable knowledge for non-Brazilian fans of this music, just that the cautious and formal academic tone of his book obscures the fruits of his research. Countless asides, like "In Hegel's formulation, the slave could only comprehend his/her reality as a reflection of the master's will and therefore lacked historical subjectivity and agency," dull one's attention and weary the soul. Likewise the many scholarly tics in his writing, such as the use of "reference" as a verb or the closing of each chapter with a section called "Conclusion." His numerous allusions to Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Horkheimer, Jameson, et al. do not advance the argument of the book; rather they seem intended to justify its subject as worthy of study.

No such excuses are necessary. There is a dearth of information available about Tropicália in English, and I suspect there are many people who, like me, are hunting for more. Tropicália—characterized by a genre-bending passion for both low and high culture, colored by kitsch but also by political urgency, its youthful interest in outrageous costume and style countered by a maturity in its lyrics and melodies—has in recent years attracted the excited attention of a wide range of musicians and music fans in the US and UK.

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Brazilian Culture

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

Peter Bush interviews Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

My family was destroyed. My mother was killed. I was a child of the war, as I describe in Forbidden Territory, a war followed by more than thirty years of General Franco's dictatorship. By the age of eighteen I had decided to abandon a Spain where I knew work such as my novel Fiestas would never be published. Although I was part of a group of young writers opposed to the regime, I still found that writing critically of the regime meant you wrote with the censor looking over your shoulder. Spain was asphyxiating, and I was asphyxiated: From 1962 to 1976, none of my writing came out in Spain.

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Spanish Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat

Francisco Goldman reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat.

The Feast of the Goat, nearly documentary in tone, is a dense, dramatic, at times almost unbearably cruel and relentless political novel. It belongs to the illustrious tradition of the Latin American–dictator novel, in this case the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. But it is also a culmination of two searches that have characterized Vargas Llosa's writing since the beginning of his career: for what he has referred to as the "total novel"; and also for a Flaubertian perfection, a perfect fusion of style, form, and subject. A few years ago, in an essay on Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Vargas Llosa reflected on this idea of a "total" novel: "This is a desire to extend itself, to grow and multiply through descriptions, characters and incidents in order to exhaust all the possibilities, to represent its world on the largest, and also the most minute scale, at all levels and from all angles." Among the great works he lists that have achieved this is, of course, Madame Bovary. The "total" and Flaubertian idea, the "utopian design," is to create a novelistic reality so autonomous and whole that the reader feels convinced that this illusory reality is as true and durable as the reality it purports to describe, perhaps even more so.

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Peruvian Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Jason Weiss reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille—the last book published in Cortázar’s lifetime, it appeared in Spanish in 1983 and is now available in a fluid and felicitous English translation by Anne McLean—figures among his most playful works, its tone recalling, in a lighter vein, travelers’ tales from the age of discovery. Simultaneously, it offers another take on the collage aesthetic that underlies his novels and kaleidoscopic multigenre books, such as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967). After an extended preamble, which introduces the expedition’s protagonists, genesis, and preparations, the record itself comprises a daily log, photos, hand-drawn maps of the rest areas, and the authors’ many commentaries. In these, Cortázar and Dunlop dwell on physical surroundings, metaphysical speculations, cultural reflections, and encounters with truckers, highway workers, and other travelers, as well as observations of each other’s habits; they remark, too, on how their enchanted state has changed them, even sharpening the details in their dreams.

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

bookforum.com just published an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.

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Chilean Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Nicole Gluckstern reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista).

Certain travelogues can be likened to love letters to a destination, though rarely does actual romance play a part in their construction. But when acclaimed postmodern Argentine author Julio Cortázar took to the road with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, it was a journey precipitated by mutual fondness as much as a desire for discovery.

In Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago Books, 354 pages, $20) an author best known for his nonsequential opus Hopscotch and collections of surreal short stories approaches the task of travel with the same whimsy and contradiction that characterize his literary oeuvre. Setting out on a pseudoscientific expedition to map the freeway between Paris and Marseilles, a distance of approximately 500 miles, Cortázar (nicknamed El Lobo) and the Canadian Dunlop (La Osita) spend a full 33 days en route, confining themselves to two rest stops per day.

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Argentine Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Richard Zimler reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 2006 novel The Painter of Battles (El pintor de batallas).

Many of us who grew up during the Vietnam War remember one photograph in particular: a naked Vietnamese girl running down a country road, in flight from a napalm attack, her mouth open in abject terror and hands held out, desperately searching for comfort.

Inside the frozen time of the image, the girl will forever remain abandoned to her fate, ignored by the three uniformed soldiers walking behind her.

Over the years, I've often wondered whether the photographer offered protection to the desperate girl as she ran past him, though perhaps it's unfair of me to hope he did. After all, photographers are observers, not participants. Or are they? Isn't their choice of what subjects to frame inside their viewfinder a form of participation? Might snapping pictures of people in pain or imminent danger be an inhuman way to make a living?

Bestselling Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte explores such complex ethical questions in his novel "The Painter of Battles," and his narrative draws extensively on his experiences as a journalist covering conflicts in the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere.

Perez-Reverte's protagonist is Andres Faulques, a world-weary war photographer who has retired to a 300-year-old tower on an isolated bluff on a small island off the Spanish coast. No longer able to find meaning and purpose through his camera lens, he spends his days painting a mural on his tower walls of the atrocities he has witnessed, as well as horrific images gleaned from the battle paintings he most admires. He's convinced that it is in our nature to oppress, humiliate and kill, and his goal is to create a monumental fresco of human existence as he sees it.

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Spanish Literature

Tomás Eloy Martínez - The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón)

In June 20, 1973, General Juan Domingo Peron returns to Argentina after eighteen years of exile.
He's accompanied by his wife Isabel and a large entourage. In Madrid he leaves years of disregard for General Franco's regime and the memory of a triumphant Eva Perón whose mummified body rests in he's own home. With him he takes some unfinished memories where he wants to give an image of Napoleon for himself.
More than two million people, the largest crowd ever assembled, waits for him at the airport. Meanwhile, his followers are fighting fiercely to get hold of the symbol that still represents the old General.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Alfaguara Prize in 2002, summarizes in this novel, full of action and characters from last century's Argentine history, through the biography of a man who embodied the hope of his people, while inquires the multiple faces of truth and the power fiction has to create bridges between them.



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Argentine Literature

Héctor Aguilar Camín - La Guerra de Galio

La Guerra de Galio is one of the great Mexican novels of the late twentieth century.

This account of the turbulent years that followed the Mexican government's violent repression of the student uprising in 1968. However, as in any great literary work, the story goes beyond the obvious to draw a portrait of the generation that entered its adult life in 1968, its ideals, doubts and miseries.

Meanwhile there is still time to tell the love story of a history teacher and a student.



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Mexican Literature

Ángeles Mastretta - Tear This Heart Out (Arráncame la vida)

When Catalina knowns General Andrés Asensio, she is still a girl who knows little of life. However, he's a candidate for Governor of the State of Puebla, and knows very well what their goals as "cacique".
In a few weeks they marry. But Catalina, a passionate and imaginative woman, very soon discovers that she can not accept the way of life that imposed by the new situation and doesn't accept to live without love.

Biographical note from PenguinGroup

Ángeles Mastretta was born in Puebla, Mexico, in October 1949. She began her writing career as a journalist for such publications as Siete, a magazine published by the Ministry of Public Education, and the afternoon paper Ovaciones. In 1974 she was awarded a scholarship at the Mexican Writers’ Center, where she honed her skills among the writers Juan Rulfo, Salvador Elizondo, and Francisco Monterde. In 1975, La pájara pinta (Colorful Bird), a collection of Mastretta’s poetry, was published. However, the novel that she had been brainstorming for years did not reach fruition until an editor offered to pay her salary for six months so that she could quit her job and focus on writing. Six months turned into a year and in 1985 Arráncame la vida (Tear This Heart Out, Riverhead Books, 1997) was published, winning the Mazatlán Prize for Literature for the best book of the year. A stunning success both in Mexico and abroad, the novel quickly cleared a place for Mastretta in the canon of Mexican writers.

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Mexican Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Edward Marriott interviews Junot Díaz.

'I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.'

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Latin American Literature

Juan Carlos Onetti - Let the Wind Speak

Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski reviews Let the Wind Speak (Dejemos hablar al viento),a novel from Uruguayan novelist and short story author Juan Carlos Onetti written in 1979.

Onetti is famous for The Shipyard, published in Uruguay in 1961 – a dark story of how a man tries to save an ailing shipyard and fails ingloriously. Let the Wind Speak was written after the author's exile in Spain and is equally bleak, but without The Shipyard's poetry. It's hard to say what has changed, or even that the fault doesn't lie in the translation, but the writing here is portentous, contorted and very masculine.

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Uruguayan Literature

The director of the latest Spanish adaptation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, «Love and other Demons,» is hoping for a better reception than the critical panning of the English-language «Love in the Time of Cholera.
«I thought that «Love in the Time of Cholera» was a good film, even though the criticism of it was very tough,» said Costa Rican director, Hilda Hidalgo.

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Latin American Literature

Bernardo Atxaga - The Accordionist's Son

Michael Eaude reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

Atxaga, born in 1951, came to fame with Obabakoak (1988), a fresh voice in Basque and Spanish literature. The Lone Man, The Lone Woman and Two Brothers followed in the 1990s and are available in English. The Accordionist's Son, first published in the Basque language in 2003, is his most accomplished novel (the wonderful Obabakoak is more a collection of linked stories). It is also his most ambitious, as it embraces the history of the Basque Country from 1936 to 1999.

The novel works on at least three levels: as an adventure; as a public story about the history and politics of the Basque Country; and a personal dissection of shifting mood and feeling, with Atxaga's customary precision. It opens with the death of the protagonist, David, on his ranch in California. His wife Mary Ann and childhood friend Joseba talk in calm sadness about love, death and the past. Two of Atxaga's strengths are at once apparent: his fine storytelling, as he draws the reader expertly into David and Joseba's childhoods in Obaba, and the directness with which he talks about emotions. Subtleties of feeling about death and childhood are expressed in simple, elegant language.

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Spain Literature