Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Memories of my Melancholy Whores

Angelique P. Manalad reviews Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

A concept that would make everyone react in disgust: a 90-year-old retiring journalist who finds himself in the eve of his birthday wanting to feel his youth through a night of passion with a 14-year-old virgin drugged into service by a whorehouse.

Delivered by the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s in his trademark magic realism and translated in English by Edith Grossman, Memories of my Melancholy Whores challenges readers to sympathize with the narrator. It is a tribute to his lyricism and humanity that Marquez succeeds.

In a twist of fate, the narrator falls into a pattern of sleeping with the young girl in the literal sense of the word, finding love instead of lust in each night that he slumbers beside the child.

He recounts of his previous escapades with women as well as the horror of finding himself in love for the very first time at eve of his life. The narrator illustrates his inner conflict. Describing his passion for the child in letters written in his weekly column, readers are able to empathize with the joys and disappointments of finding love in the wrong stage of one’s life.

Said to be a close comparison to Vladimir Nabokonov’s Lolita, Garcia weaves his own words with a different pattern of exulting other obsessions more powerful than lust itself. Delgadina, the name given by the narrator to the child, was more of a symbol of hope, love and failure all rolled into one, rather than a whore as presented by the book. A young girl robbed off her adolescence was beautifully and intricately described in Marquez’s flow of words.

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Colombian Literature

Antonio Muñoz Molina: A Manuscript of Ashes

Tim Rutten reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes.

"A Manuscript of Ashes" was Muñoz Molina's first novel, published in Spain in 1986, although he reportedly began it shortly after the death of Franco, more than a decade earlier. It's now clear that his preoccupation with the civil war and its aftermath -- a heritage of violence and betrayal, of loyalty and accommodation -- has been with Muñoz Molina from the start. So too a fearless willingness to let the influences of popular culture work their way through his novels -- a characteristic of so much of Spain's superb contemporary literary fiction. (It's interesting that the best Spanish writers avoid the obvious temptations to respond to history as their Latin American colleagues have with the cinematic impulse into magic realism. One suspects the Spaniards' deep and authentic sense of tragedy forecloses that option.)

Take this passage from Muñoz Molina's novel "Winter in Lisbon," which borrows fruitfully from film noir and jazz: "On the Gran Vía, by the cold gleaming windows of the Telefónica building, he went over to a kiosk to buy cigarettes. As I watched him walk back, tall, swaying, hands sunk in the pockets of his large open overcoat with the collar turned up, I realized that he had that strong air of character one always finds in people who carry a past, as in those who carry a gun. These aren't vague literary comparisons: he did have a past, and he kept a gun."

On one level, "A Manuscript of Ashes" follows the conventions of a detective story, though less those of the hard-boiled Raymond Chandler -- whom Muñoz Molina admires -- than the older, more ruminative and atmospheric Wilkie Collins. The novel's callow protagonist is Minaya, a university student arrested for political activism in the waning years of Franco's sclerotic dictatorship. He is released from jail through family connections after a rough interrogation and finds himself beset by an emotional condition common to those who believe they have no choice but to accommodate themselves to tyranny: "An unpleasant sensation of impotence and helpless solitude . . . forever denied the right to salvation, rebelliousness, or pride."

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Spanish Literature

José Luís Peixoto: The Implacable Order of Things

Tatyana Gershkovich reviews José Luís Peixoto's The Implacable Order of Things.

Translation gets a bad rap. At one point or another, every reader has soured on a book in translation after some pompous polyglot declares, "Ah, but you should read the original!" No doubt, much can be lost. But a book's journey around the world also offers an occasion to re-examine and refine its most remarkable attributes, attributes that might have been obscured by an initial choice of words, or - in the case of José Luís Peixoto's splendidly demanding novel - a title.

Published originally in Portuguese as "Blank Gaze" (2001), the book is set in an unnamed town in the arid, sun-bleached Alentejo region of Portugal. It's an austere name for an austere place. Peixoto - in Richard Zenith's translation - weaves together stories of the town's inhabitants, some told from their own perspectives and others related by an unknown and detached observer. A shepherd learns of his wife's infidelity and confronts her lover. Conjoined twin brothers marry the town cook and lose each other. A deformed child is born to a blind prostitute and a crippled carpenter, confronting them with the grotesque consequences of their love. The brutality of nature permeates each tale. "The sun shows us our own desperateness," says Old Gabriel, the town's 120-year-old wise man. "For those with understanding, this sun is the hand that caresses us and crushes us."

Dialogue is nearly absent from the novel. Peixoto's characters speak in streams of consciousness and only to themselves. They have a deeply rooted distrust of language, perhaps because they can neither read nor write. But what a marvelous chance for the author to display his own linguistic virtuosity! The images Peixoto evokes in helping his characters communicate without words are singular and unforgettable. The cook tells her husband, Moisés, that she's sick of eating the same old thing by preparing "a platter with shapely, wide-open potato legs and an open, steaming vagina made of collard greens which, by a trick of her culinary art, slowly contracted ... until it became a collard-green vagina that was irrevocably closed and dried up."

The cook adheres faithfully to the principle "Show, don't tell," but elsewhere, Peixoto occasionally falters. The author is too blunt in conveying his notion that a look succeeds where language fails. The shepherd José realizes he has always been a stranger to his wife, but he is granted one moment of communion with her when they exchange glances: "Wife, I don't know what we were, but I know this day that you are mine. ... Your gaze and your silence are my own." The eye as window to the soul is a well-worn notion, one made less bearable by the allusion to it in the original title. "Blank Gaze" reveals a blemish instead of pointing to the bountiful originality in Peixoto's work.

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Portuguese Literature

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: Tattoo

Laura Wilson reviews Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Tattoo.

This month sees a welcome reissue of many of Spanish author Vázquez Montalbán's titles, although this particular book, which first appeared in 1976, is being published here for the first time. His Barcelona-based private eye is Pepe Carvalho, an arresting combination of machismo and an old-womanish fussiness about comestibles: a bit like James Bond, without all those irritating gadgets. A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to discover the identity of a young man whose body is pulled out of the sea, heavily disfigured but bearing a tattoo. The plot is slight but enjoyable, and the picture of post-Franco Spain subtly drawn. Although the text is lumbered with an unwieldy translation, it is easy to see why Vázquez Montalbán was recently named one of the 50 best crime writers of all time.

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Spanish Literature

Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"

Benjamin Lytal reviews Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs.

Novels that show the sordid side of war are not scarce. Classics abound, but they do not glut; each book is as distinct as its war. Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs" (Penguin Classics, 148 pages, $8) realizes a war that we often forget, though it is relatively near at hand in time and space. Azuela (1873-1952) participated in the Mexican Revolution (1911-17), serving as a doctor in the army of Pancho Villa, before the fortunes of war sent him packing across the border to El Paso, Texas. Beginning in 1915, he serialized his novel in one of El Paso's Spanish-language newspapers, El Paso del Norte.

"The Underdogs" was not published in Mexico until 1920, and it did not receive much attention until about 1925. But it now stands for the Mexican Revolution as "The Red Badge of Courage" stands for the American Civil War, and it represents a turning point in Latin-American literature itself. Because the revolution brought a host of regional armies together against a central government, Azuela's novel necessarily undertook the portrayal of regional Mexican culture as meaningful territory, overturning decades of Eurocentric prejudice in intellectual Mexico.

Sergio Waisman's new translation of "The Underdogs" therefore faces its biggest challenge in its treatment of Mexican dialects. Demetrio Macias, a local hero in the Sierras who becomes a general in Pancho Villa's army, terrorizing the villages and cities of the plains, sometimes sounds like an American lug: "God willin', ... tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight, we will get another close-up of the Federales. What do you say, muchachos? Ready to show 'em 'round these paths and trails?"

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Mexican Literature

Mayra Montero: Dancing to Almendra

Margaret Barno reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to Almendra.

The “Almendra”, translated “almond”, is a slow-paced, sad Latin musical piece popular beginning in the 1950s throughout Central South America and Cuba. It’s rhythmic accents match well with the mambo, a dramatic, beautifully seductive dance.

This tempo is the background music of nightclubs, casinos and backdrop of this intriguing, multifaceted story of the under layers in Havana society in 1957.

Tensions, building among power brokers with links to organized crime figures locally and in the United States, were felt in unusual places: a circus and a zoo.

Lives of people, seemingly disconnected, would forever be entwined and affected.

Add an offbeat, frustrated young news reporter assigned to cover less than newsworthy events, sent to report the death of a hippopotamus at a local zoo, and the stage is set for a dramatic, pulsating novel that is as intense as it is intoxicating.

There is another significant factor, one that is usually somewhere in a book about people: love. When people break accepted mores, all is well. Stray into the territory of another, outside the unwritten “family” rules, and there can be deadly or at least memorable results designed to reinforce the consequences of going astray in affairs of the heart.

Edith Grossman, the 2006 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation winner, does an excellent job at capturing the bawdy language and atmosphere of Havana in the immediate era before the Cuban Revolution.

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Cuban Literature

Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

A review of Carlos Fuentes' Happy Families.

This collection by celebrated Mexican author Fuentes (The Eagle’s Throne) treks a wide swath of Mexican history, encompassing revolutions won and brutally suppressed, evolving sexual mores and economic upheaval. While all kinds of relationships are explored—lovers and friends, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers—the most revealing of Fuentes’s work are father-son stories. In “The Disobedient Son,” a father demands that his sons become priests to honor their dead mother; “The Official Family” posits a fictional president of Mexico who controls fiercely his own passions by imposing limits on his wayward boy; and in “The Star’s Son,” a fading movie star takes belated responsibility for a son with a crippling disability. Interspersed with short chapters of free-form poetry that turn an unflinching eye on homelessness, sexual abuse, gangs and drugs, Fuentes’s urgent stories make clear that Mexico is too full of life and tragedy to be controlled or constrained. Desperately holding the turbulence still for a moment, Fuentes examines closely hard lives in an unforgiving place.

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Mexican Literature

Antonio Muñoz Molina: A Manuscript of Ashes

Adam Kirsch reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes.

Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "Sepharad" was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" had a new European writer so powerfully seized the imagination of American readers. "Sepharad" was, in fact, a kind of transposition, into Spanish history and language, of Sebald's masterpiece — with its blending of fact and fiction, its obsession with the horrors of the 20th century, and its deeply ethical insistence on retrieving individual stories obliterated by history. In a fluid, even slippery narrative, Mr. Muñoz Molina braided the stories of Sephardic Jews, exiled from Spain in the 15th century, with the experiences of Spaniards during that country's civil war, and the more public lives of figures such as Franz Kafka. I'm not sure how many people read "Sepharad" — it was not the kind of book that makes a best seller — but it helped to give Mr. Muñoz Molina the literary stature in America that he has long enjoyed in Spain, where the 52-year-old is one of the leading writers of his generation.

Now, with the publication of "A Manuscript of Ashes" (Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), we have the chance to read the book that launched Mr. Muñoz Molina's career as a novelist. First published in Spain in 1986 under the title "Beatus ille," now translated into English by Edith Grossman, "A Manuscript of Ashes" shows that some of Mr. Muñoz Molina's central concerns were with him from the very beginning. Once again we find him investigating Spain's damaged past — in particular, the violence and betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, and the fear and tedium of the Franco dictatorship that succeeded it. Again he is tormented by the pastness of the past, which makes it impossible to know reliably, as well as by its continuing presence, which makes our own lives seem like mere sequels to great events that happened long ago. And already in his first novel, we can now see, Mr. Muñoz Molina was experimenting with a narrative technique adequate to these perceptions. "A Manuscript of Ashes" is divided between two narrators and at least three time frames, and the reader must be constantly on the alert for multiple shifts of perspective, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph.

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Spanish Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Katie Toms reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

In 1950, 15-year-old Ricardo becomes obsessed with an exotic, mysterious girl. Over 40 years he continually chances upon her; each time, she sleeps with him despite having a new husband for each city in which they meet. The only crime of the 'bad' girl in question seems to be that she asks for what she wants when it comes to sex and refuses to say she loves him. Her punishment? Near death and permanent vaginal damage at the hands of her brutal Japanese husband. The final reckoning involves cancer, a double mastectomy and painful death. There are some vivid passages here, but on the whole this novel is a glib, disjointed monologue. Sadistic pornography may prove titillating for some, but it makes for dull reading.

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Peruvian Literature