Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Wyatt Mason reviews Roberto Bolañops The Skating Rink.

In the apparently inexhaustible post­humous career of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, a significant second act will soon be upon us, leaving some readers to clap excitedly while others throw up their hands in submission: the large number of books by Bolaño already available is soon to double. In addition to the eight that have swiftly and ably arrived in translation in the six years since his death in 2003 at age 50, four new books by Bolaño are scheduled to appear in 2010 (two novels, two story collections) with three others promised for 2011. What’s more, according to recent reports out of Spain, another two finished novels have been found among Bolaño’s papers, as well as a sixth, unknown part of his already abundant 900-page novel “2666.”

While such a mountain of new material is bound to make literary hearts flutter, a little red flag waves at its summit: when it comes to publishing the dead, the best isn’t often saved for last. Given the nearly uniform excellence of Bolaño’s writing to date, it seems unlikely that any of the looming titles could equal the exceptional “By Night in Chile” (translated in 2003), “The Savage Detectives” (2007) or last year’s “2666,” which already compete for consideration as Bolaño’s masterpiece. At the very least, readers yet to experience Bolaño’s writing — its narrative variety and verve, its linguistic resourcefulness, its unusual combination of gravity and playfulness, brutality and tenderness — increasingly face the very practical problem of having to divine which book on the widening shelf of Bolaños should be read first.

“The Skating Rink,” the only new Bolaño appearing this year, won’t make the decision any easier: this short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. Originally published in Spanish in 1993 and the first of Bolaño’s novels to see print, “The Skating Rink” could seem, in thumbnail, little more than a modest whodunit. A crime, the brutal murder of a woman, is committed in the Spanish seaside town of Z. As the corpse-and-culprit genre dictates, the novel establishes the sequence of events that sets the crime in motion and follows the bloody trail until, in the final pages, the killer’s surprising identity is revealed.

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Latin American Literature

Manuel Mujica Láinez

Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910 - 1984), Argentine fiction writer and art critic



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Latin American Literature

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (1914 – 1984), Argentine writer



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Latin American Literature

Augusto Roa Bastos

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917 – 2005), Paraguayan novelist.



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Latin American Literature

Mario Bellatin: Beauty Salon

Mario Bellatín, Beauty Salon (City Lights)




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Latin American Literature

César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry

César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (University of California)




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Latin American Literature

Antero de Quental

Antero de Quental, Portuguese Poet (1814-1873) painted by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro.




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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet (Picador)




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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

David Flusfeder reviews Roberto Bolaño's Amulet.

The Chilean poet, novelist and provocateur Roberto Bolaño died in Spain in 2003. He was 50 years old and had already gathered a wide readership in the Spanish-speaking world. Death, though, can be a great career move. The response to the 2007 publication in the United States of his 1998 novel The Savage Detectives, followed by 2666, which was almost finished at the time of his death, has brought him into the international literary front rank. Both are large books, celebrations of poetry and a battered kind of urban heroism, written in Bolaño’s beguiling combination of concision and wordiness. But now, with the success of those, his smaller books are being translated into English for the first time.

Bolaño’s work is a roman-fleuve: characters and situations recur throughout his writings, and time is a watery element that the characters drift through. Amulet has its origin in a 10-page episode in The Savage Detectives. That novel was centred on two provocative young poets living in Mexico City in 1976: Ulises Lima and the author’s alter-ego, Arturo Bolaño. In one of the most striking episodes, a woman, Auxilio Lacoutre, “the mother of Mexican poetry” (and a “mother” is, in this context, a woman who sweeps and shops and listens and adores), is in a fourth-floor lavatory cubicle when the army occupies the campus of the Mexico City Universidad. She is stuck there for 12 days. In the original episode, the emphasis was on Auxilio’s physical predicament. She drank water from the tap, ate loo paper and lived in a state of fear and heightened memory.

In Amulet, the emphasis is on the remembering rather than the predicament. Auxilio suffers from the blessing of being able to “remember” the future as well as the past. There are feverish prophecies about literary destinies: “For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033… Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045… Louis-Ferdinand Céline shall enter Purgatory in the year 2094… Witold Gombrowicz shall enjoy great prestige in the environs of the Rio de la Plata around the year 2098… Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.”

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Latin American Literature

Junot Diáz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diáz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Trade)




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Latin American Literature

Jorge Volpi: Bolivar’s Insomnia

Jorge Volpi, introduced his essay “Bolivar’s insomnia” at the XXII International Book Fair in Bogota, where power will find controversial issues as “the evolution of democracy, leaders of the region, drug trafficking and local issues that transcend borders. ”

He made statements about his work related to Latin America:
“Latin America has disappeared for the world because it is not the place of dictatorships and guerrillas, except for the dramatic case of Colombia, nor of the fantastic stories portrayed in the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez.”

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño is an example of dead authors sucess. A new market trend?

Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano was highly acclaimed in Latin America, but his work wasn't published in English until 2003, the year he died. "The Savage Detectives" finally got him noticed here when it was published in English in 2007, and his final novel, the enigmatic 900-page "2666," earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year.

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Latin American Literature

José Saramago's new novel

José Saramago's new novel "Cain" will be presented in October.
A return to biblical themes almost 20 years after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ(1991).

Portuguese author Jose Saramago takes an irreverent look at the Old Testament in his new novel, “Cain,” in which he absolves that Biblical villain of the killing of his brother and puts the blame squarely on God.

His Portuguese-language publisher, Zeferino Coelho, will present the novel at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and the title is scheduled for release in bookstores in Portugal, Latin America and Spain by the end of that month.

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Latin American Literature

Benjamin Moser: Why This World - A Biography of Clarice Lispector

Fernanda Eberstadt reviews Benjamin Moser's "Why This World - A Biography of Clarice Lispector".

Here's a riddle for literary sleuths. Which 20th-century writer was described by the eminent French critic Hélène Cixous as being what Rilke might have been, if he were a "Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine"? By the poet Elizabeth Bishop as "better than J. L. Borges"? And by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso as one of the chief revelations of his adolescence, along with sex and love and bossa nova? The answer is Clarice Lispector, a Portuguese-language novelist who died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977, and who, despite a cult following of artists and scholars, has yet to gain her rightful place in the literary canon.
During her lifetime, Lispector, a catlike blond beauty with movie-star magnetism and an indefinably foreign accent, enjoyed an enormous succès d'estime in Brazil. Her fiction, which combines jewel-like language, deadpan humor, philosophical profundity and an almost psychotically lucid understanding of the human condition, was lauded for having introduced European modernism to a national literature felt to be pretty parochial.

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Carlos Fuentes Lemus: La palabra sobrevive; poemas 1986-1999

Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) presented a new edition of "La palabra sobrevive; poemas 1986-1999" a collection of poems of Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999) son of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.

La obra contiene el epílogo de escritor español Julián Ríos escrito en marzo de 2000, para su primera edición, en la que considera que la muerte está "agazapada en cada poema" de la obra de Fuentes Lemus.

Para el editor Omegar Martínez el "valor intrínseco" de la reedición estriba en que "muestra la posibilidad de la gama que hubiese alcanzado el autor de haber seguido vivo".

A su juicio, el poemario "tiene una profundidad muy intensa y a veces se desdibuja, como los primeros intentos de un adolescente que escribe, pero con una intensidad muy valiosa, casi inusitada para autores de su generación, de su edad".

"Como editor veo la capacidad de un lenguaje de superponerse al mismo sufrimiento y crecimiento de un adulto joven, y la capacidad de la poesía para sobrevivir a pesar de la pesadumbre", concluye.

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Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Recomended reading by Books Inc.

The Skating Rink
by Roberto Bolaño: If you were dazzled by "2666," you'll be gasping at the scandalous suspense in this part mystery, part love story.

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Benjamin Moser: Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

A review of Benjamin Moser's "Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector".

"PREHUMAN divine life is a life of singeing nowness." Clarice Lispector, who wrote these words, was as enigmatic as they are. Benjamin Moser sets out to crack the enigma. One finishes his new biography largely persuaded by his solution while wishing that he had gone at the task a little less strenuously.

Lispector, the "princess of the Portuguese language" and perhaps the first Latin American writer to be identified as a practitioner of magic realism, is one of the more obscure geniuses of modern letters. A Brazilian Jew, she fashioned strange, experimental novels and stories in elemental settings that seem only tangentially related either to Brazil or to Judaism. She proclaimed her Brazilianness more often and more forcefully than her Jewishness. But Mr Moser believes that her work is profoundly Jewish. He makes the case that her tragedies and philosophical concerns led her to create a body of work that belongs within the tradition of Jewish mysticism.

Lispector was born in Ukraine to a family still reeling from the pogroms and plagues that followed the first world war and the creation of the Soviet Union. Her feet never touched Ukrainian soil, she insisted—she was a year old when the family fled. Her intellectually ambitious father turned to peddling in Brazil's poor north-east. Her mother, a secret writer herself, died slowly from syphilis caught from rape in the old country.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Informers

Bojan Louis reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez' The Informers.

Has Gabriel García Márquez really given up writing fiction? If so, there's an upside-other Colombian writers will finally get the attention they deserve. The Bogotá-born Vásquez is one of them, with a fresh, exciting voice and an elegantly written debut.
The Informers' narrator, Gabriel Santoro, seeks to confront his father, an esteemed professor and lawyer who's written a scathing review of Gabriel's new book, a biography about a lifelong Jewish friend exiled to Colombia after escaping Nazi Germany. Santoro discovers the history of a blacklist for Nazi sympathizers and his father's involvement. The revelation leads to an act of betrayal and to desires for clarity and forgiveness.

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The World's Largest Flower

A Maior Flor do Mundo (The World's Largest Flower) is a short film directed by Juan Pablo Etcheverry based on the children book written by José Samarago.

A Maior Flor do Mundo from Fundação Jose Saramago on Vimeo.

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Latin American Literature

Mentiras Piadosas

Rodrigo Fresán writes about Mentiras Piadosas, a film directed by Diego Sabanés, based on a short story by Julio Cortázar "La salud de los enfermos". You can find the text in Pagina 12.

 

Cesário Verde Translated to English

Richard Zenith translated one of Cesário Verde's most known poems "O Sentimento de um Ocidental", the english version, titled "The Feeling of a Westerner" can be found here.

You can also found a brief article on Cesário Verde's life and work, with some context for the poem.








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Latin American Literature

Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Informers

Adam Mansbach reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez' The Informers

The past is a shadow-bound, elusive creature in Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez's "The Informers." When pursued it may flee, or, if cornered, it may unleash terrible truths. Disturb it even slightly and it can subsume the present, as a journalist learns when his memoir of a family friend inadvertently illuminates events his father -- and his country -- would prefer remained forgotten.

"The Informers" is narrated by Gabriel Santoro, a Bogotá reporter and author of a book that recounts the life story of a Jewish German immigrant named Sara Guterman whose family was one of many to escape to Colombia during the early years of Nazism. The primary distinction of "A Life in Exile," this book within a book, is the review it receives from Santoro's identically named father. The elder Santoro, a professor with a reputation as the moral conscience of the embattled nation, inexplicably savages the book in a prominent newspaper.

When his son confronts him, the scholar elaborates on his dismissal: "Memory isn't public. . . . [T]hose who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. . . . you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things . . . you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book."

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Guillermo Rosales: The Halfway House

Beatriz Terrazas reviews Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House

The Halfway House is a violent tale about a mentally ill Cuban exile. Though fiction, the book is based on the author's own life.

Guillermo Rosales fled Cuba in 1979 and, due to severe schizophrenia, spent much time in what were called boarding homes or halfway houses in Miami. Ostensibly for people who needed psychiatric help, they were dumping grounds for those considered unfit for society.

The book is narrated by William Figueras, a writer who by 15 "had read the great Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Miller, Mann," and who claims to have been driven mad by Cuba's communist regime.

The halfway house, he says, is where the "desperate and hopeless go – crazy ones for the most part, with a smattering of old people abandoned by their families to die of loneliness so they won't screw up life for the winners."

Though in Miami just six months, he has been in three psych wards. The boarding home is his last stop. There, meals are served raw, and the toilets are "always clogged since some of the residents stick in them old shirts, sheets, curtains and other cloth materials that they use to wipe their behinds."

In less than 24 hours he witnesses a rape and becomes complicit in the many crimes, large and small, committed in the house.

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Guillermo Rosales: The Halfway House

Beatriz Terrazas reviews Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House

The Halfway House is a violent tale about a mentally ill Cuban exile. Though fiction, the book is based on the author's own life.

Guillermo Rosales fled Cuba in 1979 and, due to severe schizophrenia, spent much time in what were called boarding homes or halfway houses in Miami. Ostensibly for people who needed psychiatric help, they were dumping grounds for those considered unfit for society.

The book is narrated by William Figueras, a writer who by 15 "had read the great Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Miller, Mann," and who claims to have been driven mad by Cuba's communist regime.

The halfway house, he says, is where the "desperate and hopeless go – crazy ones for the most part, with a smattering of old people abandoned by their families to die of loneliness so they won't screw up life for the winners."

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Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo is Suhayl Saadi's book of a lifetime.

For me, reading Pedro Páramo is like opening a small mosaïque box, only to discover that it is empty, save for the whispers of those who had opened the box in the past. The novel is set in the post-revolutionary dustbowls of early 20th-century Mexico, when rapid industrialisation left hundreds of ghost villages scattered across the rural south. Urged by his dying mother to reclaim his patrimony, Juan Preciado arrives at Comala, and finds that things are not as they seem.

Written by immigration agent Juan Rulfo with state funding and published in Mexico in 1955, this psychotic novel does everything one could never dream of if limited by contemporary creative-writing dogma. The book's structure fragments and its protagonist fades out of the narrative, there is no clear plot-line, no hooks, no character development arcs, no climax, no epilogue, and one is left with an existential sense of dislocation and uncertainty. If this novel were to have been written today, there is little possibility that it would have been published.

Yet without Pedro Páramo (translated into English by Margaret Sayers Peden), there would not have been One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hopscotch or Midnight's Children. The literature of the past 50 years, our conception of the relationship between the word and reality, would have been measurably poorer.

Redolent of the hallucinatory work of Poe, Lovecraft, Bulgakov, Laxness, Burroughs and perhaps Faulkner, this fluid, Dantean "Mexican Gothic" tale is part socio-historical commentary, part transformative song. Rulfo's immigration job took him all over southern Mexico. He was an excellent photographer and later he became publishing director of the National Indigenist Institute. His is a text in which meaning is subsumed into an architecture of shadows and whispers, and into the ebb and flow of the vernacular. The prose is spare, vivid, luminous and yet evokes a pernicious sense of gloom. While his iconic novel draws on booze, folk Catholicism and the peculiar Mexican relationship with death, unlike more fêted Latin American writers, Rulfo does not dance exotic.

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Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Scott Esposito reviews  "The Skating Rink" by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews)

In his famous (if rather ungainly titled) essay "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Roland Barthes differentiated between two kinds of statements found in novels. One he called nuclei, saying that these "constitute real hinge-points of the narrative"; the other kind he called "catalyzers," and these "merely 'fill in' the narrative space" around the nuclei. The Skating Rink, Roberto Bolaño's most recently translated novel and his first published in Spanish, is a book in which it is difficult to tell which is which.

For those who are up on their Bolaño, Rink reads like a stripped-down version of The Savage Detectives' middle section, where over fifty narrators reconstruct events that occurred over the course of decades. By contrast, rather than decades The Skating Rink concerns just one summer; rather than fifty-some narrators Bolaño here gives us three; and rather than ranging all over the world, The Skating Rink roots itself in a town known as Z, a beachside resort located close to Barcelona.

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Jose Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

José Saramago's "The Elephant's Journey" to be published in 2010.

On the heels of the runaway success of the Sara Gruen novel "Water for Elephants," another writer is about to take aim at the best-seller list with a novel populated with elephants — only this time it's the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, who we assume will have a slightly different take on the subject.

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