Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Michael Jacobs reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende's memoir begins with the author lying wide awake on an exceptionally stormy Californian night. She is disturbed not, by the ferocious wind or the rain but, by a superstitious fear. For it is the eve of 8 January, the day on which for the past 25 years she has always begun the writing of a new book. She feels that if she starts on any other day, the work will be a failure.

All this is very typical of Allende, who,, by her own admission, inhabits a world full of melodrama, premonitions, omens and spiritual encounters. Her family history is so extraordinary that she needed to look little further for inspiration for the characters that make up such a fantastical saga as her first, most successful novel, The House of Spirits. Unsurprisingly, as she confesses, such a legacy made her unable for much of her life to separate fantasy from reality.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

The 19th century British scholar John Willis Clark once defined a library as a "gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present." Clark also regarded libraries as museums in the sense that each is "a temple or haunt of the muses," a sanctuary for the intellect where inspiration issues forth in myriad forms by way of countless sources.

These thoughts came to mind as I was reading "The Library at Night," Alberto Manguel's latest reflection on the miracle of the written word, especially the sections in which the Argentine-born author pays tribute to the 30,000 books he has assembled so painstakingly over the last five decades. "My books," he writes, "hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Jason Wilson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

"You turn me into a character in a soap opera," says Ricardo to the bad girl.

But it's the bad girl who is the soap's femme fatale in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel. She first appears in 1950 in the narrator's teens in Miraflores, a smart Lima suburb, during the mambo craze, with her "mischievous laugh and mocking glance". There is no delicate exploration of character, just that laugh, that glance and an unfolding chain of erotic encounters, in which she is passive and elusive.

Vargas Llosa's subtly crafted novels divide into deeply serious ones, like the recent The Feast of the Goat, and more light-hearted, teasing ones, sometimes combining both as in his brilliant Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Here, the bad girl tantalises her absurdly loyal romantic lover in different guises. She is Comrade Arlette, guerrilla fighter in Paris and Havana, then Madame Arnoux in Paris, then Mrs Richardson in Newmarket, and Kuriko, shady businessman's moll in Tokyo. We appreciate Vargas Llosa's skill in delaying her dramatic entrances and latest mutation, although she remains the same.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Chris Andrews reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

The writers in this early work by Roberto Bolaño have poetry in their veins and small swastikas in their hearts. And yet, despite the bluntness of the title, the quick sketches of these fictional lives don't constitute a literary Nuremberg trial. With the cool pose of an academic reference work, Bolaño portrays the politics here as almost beside the point, something dragging from the bumper of literature's runaway car - or maybe thumping in its trunk.

"Nazi Literature in the Americas" poses as an academic reference work on a disturbing subgroup of reactionary writers. The 30 writers portrayed range across the Western Hemisphere, from a wealthy Argentine salon hostess visiting Hitler in Europe (her baby gets "dandled by the Führer") to a Haitian plagiarist "excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet while continuing to espouse a certain kind of négritude." Two Colombian writers volunteer to fight with the Germans on the Russian front; another poet heads a gang of soccer thugs. The entries scroll on with obituary calm.

But for all the objectivity of the prose, Bolaño unleashes blistering, dark comedy. Despite the layers of protective irony, despite the fact that the writers never seem as grotesque as we imagine fascist writers will be, the humor remains tense, even disorienting. In this sense, the book becomes a kind of ethical dare: Is it possible to play with the Nazi sympathies even of made-up writers rather than face them more soberly? Isn't there a moral pressure at certain depths that makes too much lightness frivolous? Surely it's one thing for Borges to fool around with Don Quixote, and another thing to play it cool about Auschwitz.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño

The Nation features three articles on Roberto Bolaño.
A Review of "Nazi Literature in the Americas" by Carmen Boullosa.

When Nazi Literature in the Americas was published in Spain in 1996, Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño captured the attention of Latin American and Spanish critics for the first time. The book consists of thirty entries, ranging from one to twenty-seven pages, each devoted to assessing a writer who has some relation to fascism. These include not just contemporaries of Hitler and Mussolini but members of subsequent generations, down to that of Pinochet. In addition, there is some important back matter: a bibliography of all the works produced by the authors examined, a list of the publishing houses and magazines that brought them out and a quasi glossary that provides snippet descriptions of personalities referred to in the major pieces (and, as well, some who have not been previously mentioned in the book).

Read More

A review of "Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos" a collection of non-fiction by Marcela Valdes.

Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolaño dropped out of high school shortly after he decided to become a poet at age 15. The year was 1968, a time as wild in Mexico City, where Bolaño and his parents were living, as it was in the United States--but much more dangerous. There, student protests, rock 'n' roll and sexual liberation were the pursuits not only of poets but also of activists and leftist guerrillas, and the Mexican government greeted them with a dirty war. Four unlucky students died at Kent State in 1970; some 300 were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Yet for Bolaño, who'd just arrived from a small country town in Chile, the atmosphere of the big city was intoxicating. Years later he recalled that the capital had seemed to him "like the Frontier, that vast, nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are the spectacles of every day."

Bolaño's own transformation began with a five-year period of isolation. Rather than join the party, he shut himself in his bedroom to consume book after book after book. The poet Jaime Quezada, who came to visit the family when Bolaño was 18, recalls that the young writer was living like a hermit. "He didn't come out of his bed-living-dining-room," Quezada has said, "except to go to the toilet or to comment out loud, pulling on his hair, about some passage in the book he was reading."

Young and broke, Bolaño stocked his shelves by shoplifting from bookstores all over Mexico City. His captures included volumes by Pierre Louÿs, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Pepys, Alphonse Daudet, Juan Rulfo, Amado Nuevo and Vachel Lindsay. But the book that changed his life was Albert Camus's The Fall, in which a lawyer who hangs out at an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City resigns himself to a life of calculated hypocrisy. Bolaño explains in his essay "Who's the Brave One?" that after reading it, he was possessed by a desire "to read everything, which, in my simplicity, was the same as wanting to or intending to discover the mechanism of chance that had led Camus's character to accept his atrocious fate." Bolaño's library was his own private Frontier.

Unlike many passionate young readers--who knock off two books a week when they're in high school but slow down to three or four a year once adulthood hems them in--Bolaño kept reading all his life. Most authors, Bolaño's editor Jorge Herralde observed in his book For Roberto Bolaño (2006), bury themselves in their own work, losing sight of the larger field. But Bolaño loved reading the works of his contemporaries--and he loved talking about what he was reading with his friends. According to Herralde, he was that rare and beautiful animal: "an insatiable reader." This lifelong compulsion, and its fleeting gratifications, formed the foundation of Bolaño's critical rulings, many of which can be found in his posthumous collection Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003) (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches).

Read More

And the article Un Lio Bestial by Forrest Gander (not fully avalable online).




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell

Andrew Ervin reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell.

Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of Hell will not be surprised to learn that its author, António Lobo Antunes, is also a practicing psychiatrist. It's difficult to name another artist who better understands the subtle ways in which memory constantly affects our conscious, in-the-present thought processes. W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust are obvious choices, but not entirely accurate ones. At his best, Antunes can make even those madeleine-induced, temporal cross-fades of In Search of Lost Time look like choppy edits in a bad home movie. If we're to look for influences on Antunes' lush, dreamy novel, admirers of Dante's epic will want to note that the Portuguese title Conhecimento do inferno could have been literally translated as Understanding the Inferno.

Knowledge of Hell follows an aging psychiatrist named -- go figure -- António Lobo Antunes as he drives home to Lisbon after a vacation in southern Portugal. During the journey, his thoughts glide back and forth between the present narration (in which he dreads going back to work) and memories of his youth (including his participation in Portugal's war with Angola). The tension of the novel grows quietly in the space between then and now.

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Todd Shy reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

The writers in this early work by Roberto Bolaño have poetry in their veins and small swastikas in their hearts. And yet, despite the bluntness of the title, the quick sketches of these fictional lives don't constitute a literary Nuremberg trial. With the cool pose of an academic reference work, Bolaño portrays the politics here as almost beside the point, something dragging from the bumper of literature's runaway car - or maybe thumping in its trunk.

"Nazi Literature in the Americas" poses as an academic reference work on a disturbing subgroup of reactionary writers. The 30 writers portrayed range across the Western Hemisphere, from a wealthy Argentine salon hostess visiting Hitler in Europe (her baby gets "dandled by the Führer") to a Haitian plagiarist "excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet while continuing to espouse a certain kind of négritude." Two Colombian writers volunteer to fight with the Germans on the Russian front; another poet heads a gang of soccer thugs. The entries scroll on with obituary calm.

But for all the objectivity of the prose, Bolaño unleashes blistering, dark comedy. Despite the layers of protective irony, despite the fact that the writers never seem as grotesque as we imagine fascist writers will be, the humor remains tense, even disorienting. In this sense, the book becomes a kind of ethical dare: Is it possible to play with the Nazi sympathies even of made-up writers rather than face them more soberly? Isn't there a moral pressure at certain depths that makes too much lightness frivolous? Surely it's one thing for Borges to fool around with Don Quixote, and another thing to play it cool about Auschwitz.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Tomas Eloy Martinez: The Tango Singer

John Brzezinski reviews Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Tango Singer.




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Literature

Juan Rulfo: Pedro Paramo

Jim Lewis reviews Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo.

It's a very strange book; let me admit that at the outset. It's as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machine—one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja.

When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few tepid notices and sold poorly. Its author was 37 at the time, or 38. (No one seems to know for sure when he was born.) He was from Jalisco, near Guadalajara, and he'd published one mildly interesting collection of short stories a few years earlier. I suspect no one knew what to make of the new book, since it was entirely unlike—well—anything else. Perhaps the critics were astounded into silence; more likely, they were puzzled and a little bit blind. As for the author, he went silent and never wrote another book, though he lived on for more than 30 years, long enough to see himself credited with the invention of an entire movement, to see his only novel sell millions of copies, to receive mash notes from Nobel Prize winners.

In Latin America, he eventually came to be considered canonical, a master of modernism, but here in the United States, his reputation remains curiously split between those few who adore him and the many who have never heard of him. When I mention to people that I'm reading his book again (I've read it five or six times in the past few years), I invariably get one of two responses. A few will announce that it's one of their favorite books, but the majority will say, "Pedro …what? By Juan … who?" And to these latter I'll explain: Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. A very great novel.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Melissa Katsoulis reviews Junot Díaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Díaz is the youngish, Dominican-born American writer whose first collection of stories dazzled critics on both sides of the Atlantic. This, his debut novel, promotes itself as 'an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas'. It is that, and much more (although readers unaccustomed to being addressed as 'Nigger' may need a while to acclimatise).

Junoz Diaz tells the story of a Dominican American boy who is lured back to the island
A Dominican American boy is lured back to the island

It tells the story of a fat, sci-fi-obsessed Dominican-American boy (known as Oscar Wao due to the Wildean size of his girth, his writing habit and his supply of snooty aphorisms) who lives in a poor New Jersey suburb with his older sister and frazzled mother and spends his days watching less wrong-looking teens live their lives while he plans his masterwork - a Lord of the Rings-style epic that might just be the best book in the world.

Read More



Please visit SPLALit aStore
Dominican Literature

Jose Saramago: Seeing

Chiron reviews José Saramago's Seeing.



Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Marcela Valdes reviews Junot Díaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Dominican Literature

Santiago Gamboa: Los Impostores

Nathalie Vuillemin [fr] reviews Santiago Gamboa's Los Impostores (Les Captifs du Lys Blanc in the french edition).




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Colombian Literature

José Carlos Somoza: La caverna de las ideas

AnthivS [ES] writes about José Carlos Somoza's La caverna de las ideas (The Athenian Murders).




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Premio Antonin Artaud en México

Mexican writer Juan Villoro was awarded the "Premio Antonin Artaud en México" for his book "Los culpables".

Por el libro "Los culpables", el escritor mexicano Juan Villoro recibió anoche el V Premio de Narrativa "Antonin Artaud en México", dotado de 80 mil pesos, la traducción al francés de la obra y una escultura elaborada por los artistas plásticos Arturo Guerrero y Marisa Lara.

Poco antes de recibir el reconocimiento, en la residencia de Francia en México de manos del embajador galo, Alain Le Gourriérec, el novelista y dramaturgo explicó que la publicación ganadora está integrada por siete historias que hablan sobre la deslealtad y las corrientes subterráneas que desata.

El también autor de "El disparo de Argón" y la obra teatral "Muerte parcial" aseguró que quien vive con un engaño es como tener un doble porque significa guardar un secreto que lo obliga a vivir con un estándar difuso, es alguien distinto que pasa su vida representando al que era antes.

Read More



Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Literature

Manoel de Oliveira

Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira.

When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase "world's oldest active filmmaker." The operative word is "active." Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies preconceptions of what an artist's twilight period should be. Oliveira's undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Cinema

Federico García Lorca

Murali RamaVarma writes about Federico García Lorca's poem Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)



Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Juan Eslava Galan: The Mule

Kristina Lindgren reviews Juan Eslava Galán's The Mule.

Ah, the romance of fighting for a cause. Remember the Spanish Civil War, that heroic conflict between leftists and fascists that so entranced the 1930s mass media and served as an opening act for the great European clash to come?

But as Spanish writer Juan Eslava Galán shows in his sly, Fellini-esque novel, "The Mule" (Bantam: 294 pp., $12 paper), war is a decidedly different experience for conscripts on the ground. Consider Juan Castro Pérez, a stable boy drafted by the Republican government to fight Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his nacionales. A year into the fighting, Castro switches sides and is pressed into service as a "muleteer," shuttling munitions and other supplies across rocky terrain to the ever-shifting front line.

Read More



Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Michael Dirda reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Let me admit, straight off, that any reviewer might feel hesitant before recommending a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas. At the checkout, the bookstore clerk will almost certainly look twice at the title -- and then avoid looking at you. Certainly, it would be politic to leave the dust jacket at home if you like to read on the subway; and even then, you might want to invest in one of those anonymous wrap-around opaque covers. When friends casually ask the title of the book you're carrying, you'll want to have an explanation prepared in advance.

Why? Because Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas very much deserves reading: It is imaginative, full of a love for literature, and, unlikely as it may seem, exceptionally entertaining. The book purports to be a biographical dictionary gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. While several meet violent ends, most are simply deluded sentimentalists and frustrated litterateurs. They come from all the Latin American countries, but at least a half-dozen are citizens of these United States, including the fanatical preacher Rory Long, the poet and football player Jim O'Bannon, the science fiction writer J.M.S. Hill and the founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, Thomas R. Murchison, alias The Texan.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Sameer Rahim reviews Junot Díaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

What distinguishes Junot Díaz's debut from other precocious-geek novels is its historical backdrop. Oscar's story is intercut with that of his family's life in the Dominican Republic - in particular the troubles they faced under the dictator Rafael Trujillo.

"For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history," writes Díaz in a witty footnote, Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, set the standard for third-world dictators. He used violence to enforce his will, re-named all the landmarks in the country after himself and raped any woman - even wives of subordinates - that took his fancy. The novel takes us into the violent world he created.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Dominican Literature