Júlio Cortázar: El Perseguidor (The Pursuer)

El Perseguidor (The Pursuer) is one of Cortázar's greatest literary achievements, and a classic in the XX Century literature. With an existential background masterly build, the story describes the last days of a saxophone virtuoso, Johnny Carter, whose life runs between lucidity and self-destruction. El perseguidor gives us a vivid image of the bebop scene in 1950s Paris, as we get a glimpse of Johnny's personal life, from his severe drug addiction and psychological instability to his profound philosophical insights.
Since it was first published in 1959, this tribute to the genius of Charlie Parker, has seen along the years the enthusiasm of many readers, who consider it, as Hopscotch, an initiatory experience.

The Pursuer is included in End of the Game and Other Stories.

Related links: Júlio Cortázar reads an extract from his short story El Perseguidor

Premio de Narrativa Caja de Madrid 2010

Mexican writer Federico Guzmán Rubio, living in Madrid, just won the 2010 Premio de Narrativa Caja de Madrid with his novel Los Andantes. The winning novel will be published by Editorial Lengua de Trapo. The jury was composed by Gustavo Martín Garzo, Lola Beccaria and Felix Romeo. The award ceremony will take place on April 28 at La Casa Encendida in Madrid.

New Directions Pearl Series

New Directions launched its collection "New Directions Pearls" with works of César Aira, Federico García Lorca (In Search of Duende) and Javier Marias (Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico).
Of the latter publishes the English translation of the short story "Mala índole" that first appeared in 1999 in Granta.

Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Maybe Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the most ‘realistic’ work by Gabriel García Márquez, after all it’s based on a historical event that happened in hist the hometown.

When the novel begins, we know that the Vicario brothers are going to kill Santiago Nasar - in fact had already killed him, to avenge the outraged honor of their sister Angela, but the story ends precisely at the time of Santiago Nasar’s death.

Cyclical time, as used by García Márquez in his works, reappears here thoroughly decomposed in each moment, neatly and accurately reconstructed by the narrator, who starts by telling what happened long ago, then moves back and forth in his story and returns a long after the events to tell the fate of the survivors.

The action is at once collective and personal, clear and ambiguous, and grips you from the start, even knowing the outcome of the plot.

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Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

Monica Szurmuk reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

The late Roberto Bolaño’s slim but hypnotic “Monsieur Pain” is an antithriller, a work that proffers the nervy tension of the suspense genre but not its neat resolution. Against the background of the Civil War in Spain, the rise of Nazism, and the imminent breakout of World War II, Bolaño constructs a masterfully elegant narrative with deft touches of irony, dramatic tautness, and even a slightly painful humor, a trademark of his literary project.

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain(1)
Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain(2)
Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain(3)

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Tomás Eloy Martínez: La novela de Perón (The Peron Novel)

John J. Junieles reviews Tomás Eloy Martínez' La novela de Perón (The Peron Novel).

La novela de Perón logra acercar al lector a ver de manera real y crítica la vida de un hombre que representó tanto para Argentina. El texto le propone al lector de una manera clara un juego en el cual él es también el protagonista de la misma, en cuanto es parte de la historia y resulta casi imposible excluirse de ese “ser parte”.

La verosimilitud es parte crucial de la narración, ya que a pesar de la gran cantidad de memorias y testimonios a los que se recurre, ningunojavascript:void(0) anula a otro a pesar de que se confronten. La narración es impecable y la división por capítulos (20 y un epílogo) le da entrada a diversas maneras de ver a la historia.

Tomás Eloy Martínez convierte un hecho que podría únicamente terminar siendo una mitificación eterna, en una realidad que desmitifica a un hombre que ha sido visto como un baluarte, y quizá eso es lo más importante del texto, ya que posiblemente le ha quitado de los hombros a la Argentina, y hasta al mismo Perón, un peso que ahora la deja caminar más tranquila, dejando el pasado atrás y mirando hacia un futuro prometedor. Definitivamente, ya no volverían a ser los mismos.

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

Carolina De Robertis reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

What could be dangerous about a poet?

This question haunted Roberto Bolaño, the great Chilean novelist and poet who died in 2003 at age 50, leaving us a body of work that has rightfully earned him praise as the most dazzling, important and influential Latin American writer since the Boom generation.

In recent years, the torrent of English translations of his work - from the slim, devastating "Distant Star" to the soaring, unparalleled, 900-page masterpiece "2666" - has further catapulted his international literary stardom. Now, "Monsieur Pain," an early novella beautifully translated by Chris Andrews, joins Bolaño's other works in all its aching splendor.

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain (1)
Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain (2)


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Júlio Cortázar

Júlio Cortázar died 26 years ago on February 12, 1984.

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Jorge Volpi: El insomnio de Bolívar

Jorge Volpi presented his new novel "El insomnio de Bolívar" a reflexion on Latin America's last two centuries.

En El insomnio de Bolívar, Volpi acompaña al lector por la América Latina de los bicentenarios, en busca de respuestas para las preguntas fundamentales: qué ha llegado a ser y hacia dónde va el proyecto continental que un día soñó el referido libertador.
A partir de su experiencia personal como mexicano que descubre tardíamente su condición de latinoamericano, Volpi teje cuatro reflexiones en torno del último Bolívar, fracasado en su sueño de unidad.
En el primer rubro, el autor transita los cuatro puntos cardinales como testigo de huelgas, manifestaciones y homenajes, de donde surgen las múltiples facetas de la región, que le permiten meditar sobre el contenido y la vigencia del concepto mismo de América Latina.
En la segunda, aborda la historia política, desde las independencias hasta la dificultad de la democracia para consolidarse.
En la tercera se aproxima a la literatura reciente: los problemas de las divergentes expectativas del mercado editorial y de la crítica, así como las ambiciones de los escritores.
El cierre llega con un audaz ejercicio de futurología que anticipa, tras muchas tensiones y conflictos, la unificación del continente en las próximas décadas.
Sobre el texto, Salvador Beltrán del Río habló sobre las desigualdades que plantea Volpi en la obra, así como de los caudillos democráticos y su propensión al populismo.
Para el cubano, el libro desglosa el legado de la Revolución Mexicana y Cubana, el boom latinoamericano de la literatura y las estrategias poéticas y públicas de los grandes autores, como Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa y Juan Carlos Onetti, entre otros.
Al respecto, Jorge Volpi mencionó que el sueño de Simón Bolívar resultó el sueño de una quimera.

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Manuel Mujica Lainez

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Tomás Eloy Martínez

Ana Laura Lissardy remembers Tomás Eloy Martínez.

Conocí a Tomás Eloy en otoño, en un bar de una pequeña ciudad de luces tenues y carteles en inglés. Miraba hacia afuera y sus manos se unían a través de una taza de café humeante apoyada entre ellas. Lo vi desde la calle, mientras caminaba sin rumbo, y dudé de ese azar benévolo o distraído que nos cruzó. Pero era él, no había dudas. Lo delataban su mirada triste, de párpados caídos, y esas dos arrugas –ya canaletas– verticales en el entrecejo.

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Manuel Mujica Lainez: Bomarzo

Great novel about the Italian Renaissance, on classical culture, but at the same time is a novel about the psychology of his characters, especially his protagonist, Pier Francesco Orsini, who with his excesses and virtues drags us over this period of Italian history, where power was abble to support everything from corruption to murder, where leaders will do anything to be on top. The Duke of Renaissance, masterfully portrayed by Manuel Mujica Lainez, in his novel Bomarzo, whose personality is dual, he is an art lover, and yet he remains cruel and hateful, but we fell often closer to him than to other characters in the novel and he attracts us as a magnet, he's marked by his physical defect and that will affect him for life.
The construction of a spectacular garden, full of monstrous figures shows the closed and dark personality of Duke Orsini, it was a visit to this wonderful garden, in the Viterbo region, about 60 km from Rome, which inspired Mujica Lainez this superb historical novel. A great book that and one of the best novels on the Italian Renaissance period.

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Alberto Schommer

The Bilbao Art Museum is opennig a retrospective exibit of Spanish photographer Alberto Schommer.

Alberto Schommer was born in Vitoria in 1928. His early interests included painting, film and photography, which he first became acquainted with in the studio his father, German photographer Alberto Schommer Koch, had run since 1922 in the city. Since his initial links to movements working to revitalize Spanish photography in the 1950s, Schommer has enjoyed a long and prolific career replete with formal challenges and permanently informed, under the early influence of the work of Irving Penn and William Klein, by the desire to defend the artistic status of photography. His reports, still life photographs, landscapes, portraits and what he calls cascografías (loosely translated here as “cracklegraphs”) are now part of Spanish visual memory and the history of photography.

This exhibition provides an overview of the significance of Alberto Schommer’s work and his long career. One of the leading photographers the creative scene in Spain in recent decades, Schommer has always been acutely sensitive to the artistic trends of his time. After a brief foray into painting, which he abandoned definitively in the early 1960s, Schommer took on board all sorts of influences, from the post-Cubist landscapes of Benjamín Palencia and Surrealism to the realist still life paintings of Antonio López, art informel and the experimental avant-garde of the 1960s.

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Ariel Dorfman remembers Tomás Eloy Martínez.

Eran tiempos nefastos. Yo acababa de llegar de un Chile que le había prometido al mundo la revolución de Allende y nos había dado, en cambio, la asonada de Pinochet, y creo que se me notaba las muchas y recientes muertes, y Tomás lo entendió enseguida y me ofreció también de inmediato su cariño.

"Cualquier cosa que necesites", me dijo, y hallé en él una generosidad que nunca cesó hasta el día de su propia muerte. Me armaba reuniones en su casa con corresponsales holandeses y curas revolucionarios y montoneros esquivos y siempre bien regadas con vino y pasta y carnes.

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Junot Díaz receives the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award

Junot Díaz, Maxine Hong Kingston, and M. L. Liebler are the recipients of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. Read More


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Premio Biblioteca Breve

Argentine writer Guillermo Saccomanno won this years Biblioteca Breve prize with his novel "El oficinista".
Guillermo Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 and is the author of novels and short stories, such as "Situación de peligro", "Roberto y Eva", "El buen dolor", "El pibe" and the trilogy composed by "La lengua del malón", "Un amor argentino" and "77" wich won the Dashiell Hammett Prize in the "Semana Negra de Gijón".


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Another Day in Medellín

Nice review of Fernando Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins at Blographia Literaria by Andrew Seal.

Our Lady of the Assassins reads like the result of a brawl between Thomas Malthus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline after a night of heavy and surly drinking and reading Death in Venice in dramatic voices to each other.

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This novel was made into a full feature film in 2000 directed by Barbet Schroeder.


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Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: Tatoo

Ahmad Saidullah reviews Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Tatoo.

Tattoo, the second in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho murder mysteries, first appeared in Spanish as Tatuaje (Tattoos) in 1976. The lyrics from Tatuaje “bold and blond as beer was he / A heart tattooed on his chest,” by the Catalan artist Rafael de León, a friend of García Lorca’s and Antonio Machado’s, made famous by the singer Concha Piquer, appear as an epigraph and recur throughout the book. (...)
Fans of Pepe Carvalho will be pleased, nonetheless. While Tattoo will not satisfy most readers, it provides a brief, if uncomfortable, introduction to a writer and his detective who ought to be better known to English readers.

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El burro que metió la pata (The donkey who got stucked)

"El burro que metió la pata" is a short animation film directed by Felipe Haro, based on a children's story writen by Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska in the 1968.





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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

It’s a quick, propulsive read, and while quite funny–and at times scary–it’s most fascinating as a document that further fleshes out the Bolañoverse. Highly recommended.

biblioklept on Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas




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Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

It is a fine book for either those curious about current Mexican fiction or those simply in search of some good things to read.

Scott Esposito reviews Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction for The Quarterly Conversation. Read Here



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Júlio Cortázar: El perseguidor

Júlio Cortázar reads an extract from his short story "El Perseguidor" ("The Pursuer"), based on the life of the jazz musician Charlie Parker.

The soundtrack is Charlie Parker's "Out Of Nowhere".





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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Tim Martin reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, Nazi Literature in the Americas is the best and weirdest kind of literary game. Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003 and achieved fame posthumously, here presents what purports to be a survey of rightwing writers on the American continent between 1894 and 2021. He sets up a densely imagined alternate world populated by fictional poets and novelists, each comically in thrall to their own refracted versions of the fascist aesthetic. One plans a radical modernity that consists of a return to the Iron Age, while another is haunted by extraterrestrial Merovingians. One proudly becomes “the creator of the Gunther O’Connell saga, the Fourth Reich saga, and of the saga of Gunther O’Connell and the Fourth Reich, in which the previous sagas fuse into one”, while another devotes the last phase of her life to reconstructing Edgar Allen Poe’s ideal sitting-room, a symphony in dark furnishings, dim lamps and scarlet drapes. Meanwhile, characters such as Allen Ginsberg and José Lezama Lima criss-cross the flow of Bolaño’s mock-critical prose.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is not the first book to present a critique of imaginary works, but its single-mindedness makes it an oddity even in this rarefied sub-genre. Thomas Carlyle provided one of the best-known examples in his warped philosophical satire Sartor Resartus (1833), which pretended to analyse a “Theory of Clothes” put forward by a German philosopher called Teufelsdröch, or Devilcrap. Jorge Luis Borges built an entire corpus of work on books and writers who never existed, such as Herbert Quain, who wrote a recursive novel with nine different beginnings, or Pierre Menard, whose attempt to transcend translation results in a “re-authored” copy of Don Quixote. Vladimir Nabokov dreamed up an anagrammatic alter ego called Vivian Darkbloom to comment on his own work, while the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (1971) collected reviews of imaginary books, one of which featured a Nazi in postwar Argentina who is obsessed with the court of Louis XVI. (Bolaño, a fan of science fiction, may have been paying attention.)

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

The beauty of Roberto Bolaño’s slender mystery novel “Monsieur Pain,” originally published in 1999 and now translated from the Spanish by the estimable Chris Andrews, is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel. By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so.

That would be Monsieur Pierre Pain, a middle-aged veteran of the First World War, his lungs seared at Verdun, now scratching out a threadbare existence in Paris by virtue of a modest government pension. In a bachelor’s dusty, jumbled room, he occupies himself by studying the occult. He has gained a minor reputation for the exotic practices of acupuncture and mesmerism, the art of hypnosis.

In April 1938, a beautiful widow with whom Pain is shyly in love comes to him with an urgent request. Her friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet named Vallejo, appears on the verge of hiccuping himself to death from an undiagnosed illness. This, of course, is the same César Vallejo who will one day be famous as perhaps the greatest Latin American poet, but here he is merely one of the first of the failed revolutionary writer-heroes — anonymous, exiled and suffering — who will become the prime movers of Bolaño’s later fiction. The mystique of the down-at-the-heels author always quickens Bolaño’s imagination. What novelist has ever shown more love for writers as characters?

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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Alberto Manguel reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

When Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, aged 50, he could not have suspected that, a couple of years later, he would be hailed worldwide as both the prophet and redeemer of Spanish-language fiction. Prophet, his hagiographers declared, because his early books, which had come and gone unnoticed by critics and readers alike, prepared the way for a new kind of novel; redeemer, these same enthusiasts said, because Bolaño himself effected the change in his last books, notably 2666, which was hailed by the New York Times as "a landmark in what's possible for a novel".

And yet a reader coming upon Bolaño for the first time and opening Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published seven years before his death, might ask what all the fuss is about. A compendium of fictional literary lives that purports to trace major and minor examples of rightwing, conservative and reactionary literature in the Americas, Nazi Literature is at first mildly amusing but quickly becomes a tedious pastiche of itself. Like a joke whose punchline is given in the title, the humour is undermined, and all that is left is a series of names, dates and titles that, since they don't come across as funny, become merely irritating.

Fictional lives are something of a Latin American speciality. A history of Latin American literature could be compiled following that genre alone: the classic example is Jorge Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy, based on real characters and inspired by Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, in turn suggested by Aubrey's almost imaginary Brief Lives. Bolaño, no doubt aware of this illustrious ancestry, prefers to ignore it: not only the models, but their wit and discernment as well.

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