Saturday, March 13, 2010

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão - Anonymous Celebrity

Anonymous Celebrity (Latin American Literature) 
Bill Marx reviews Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Anonymous Celebrity.
I mentioned Nabokov earlier, but “Anonymous Celebrity”’s energetic chaser-after-the-high-life, his over-the-top desires conveyed via high-octane language and elaborately jokey fantasies, also reminds me of the manic over-reachers in the dark comedies of Stanley Elkin. But Elkin knew that obsession, once it flips into madness, becomes considerably less compelling, which is why his egomaniacs keep a tight hold on the real. Once “Anonymous Celebrity” suggests that the protagonist may be crazy, that all of his claims are nothing but batty ruminations, the novel runs out of stream, even though it is filled with the names of real life brands and contemporary celebrities. In his earlier books Brandão plays, as he does here, with typeface and line spacing; this time around the various big-little fonts may be signs that the protagonist is nuts.
Despite all of his attempts to give his demented narrator humanity, Brandão ends up ringing variations on a commonplace — the vapidity of celebrity. But the imaginative gusto of his burlesque makes something pretty funny out of nothing.
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Three Percent review of  Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Anonymous Celebrity.
In many ways, Anonymous Celebrity reads like a looseleaf collection of fragments from the mind of a potentially insane, definitely obsessed man. The prose is snappy (thanks in part to Nelson Vieira’s translation) and buzzes, with each section revealing a different facet of his obsession/insanity. And taken in bits, this is an incredibly fun, incredibly varied read. And out of the layered piles of ideas and lists, conspiracies and obsessions, something pretty amazing emerges. Definitely worth checking out.
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Saturday, March 06, 2010

Temporada de zopilotes


Paco Ignacio Taibo II presented recently his new book "Temporada de zopilotes", the story of the La Decena Trágica (Ten tragic days) of the Mexican Revolution, a series of events, occurred in 1913,  that culminated with the assassination of President Francisco I. Madero and the deposition of the goverment.

Taibo II dijo que la historia debe ser rescatada y volverla a contar, y por ello definió a su más reciente obra como un mero accidente que surgió de una conversación con amigos, en la que se habló de los golpes de Estado latinoamericanos.

"Me decían que tenían todas las pruebas sobre el golpe de Estado que dio (Augusto) Pinochet en Chile, pero no tenían ningún antecedente oficial de lo que ocurrió durante la traición de Victoriano Huerta a Madero", anotó.

Entonces, continuó, el escritor y biógrafo contactó a una de las herederas de Manuel Mondragón, el artífice del golpe de Estado contra Madero, y de ahí surgieron muchos datos que lo hicieron buscar más en los archivos nacionales, "donde existen verdaderos tesoros que nos dan una perspectiva de nuestra historia"
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More information on the La Decena Trágica (Wikipedia).

Borges’s Lectures

Seven Nights (Revised Edition) (New Directions Paperbook)
Daniel Pritchard reviews Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights.
In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest personal eternity.” It is a beautiful phrase. With it, Borges could have just as well been describing déjà vu, because in suddenly recalling a scene or event that has not yet happened, the experience is as close to a waking sense of eternity—that discomforting vertigo against a centering prescience—that a person might ever achieve.

Reading the seven pieces collected in Seven Nights was, for me, an intense and prolonged sensation of déjà vu. At each turn, the phrases felt familiar yet new, as if they had been written for me by someone who knew all that I know about Borges.
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Writing a novel is like building a Mecano

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Friday, March 05, 2010

The construction of memory process in Roberto Bolaño's Amulet in an essay by María José Schamun.
La construcción de la memoria se efectúa sobre la base de la búsqueda de los jóvenes perdidos de Latinoamérica. Se los busca en los tiempos y lugares que se tiene su núcleo en Tlatelolco -1968, pues es el gran crimen, es ese símbolo de lo innombrable hacia lo cual esos jóvenes que se intenta encontrar, marchan inexorablemente. De esta forma son los jóvenes mexicanos representantes de todos los jóvenes latinoamericanos, por lo que se transforma Tlatelolco y el año 1968 (el atroz crimen), en el horror hacia el cual los jóvenes de todo un continente se precipitaron.
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Only art can prevent gaps from turning into blanks

 Monsieur Pain
Stephen Henighan reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.
Monsieur Pain, precise and dramatic yet suffused with a dreamy suggestiveness, is a real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolaño library in English. Many of Bolaño’s central themes appear: the hovering shadow of fascism, and its complicated relationships with art; conspiracies, cults, and secret societies; loneliness, illness, and exile; and the errant lives of men who think they are going to be artists but drift into mediocrity, eccentricity, or complicity with dictatorship.
Click to read the article

Related Posts:
Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Monica Szurmuk
Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Carolina de Robertis
Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Will Blythe
Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Adam Mansbach and Craig Morgan Teicher

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The Last Latin American Writer

For Jorge Volpi, Roberto Bolaño was the last true latin american writer.
Bolaño fue el último que respondió conscientemente a una tradición que se pretendía continental. Conocía de cerca la literatura de cada país, y se enfrentó a ella con ahínco. Pero su mirada escapa ya de lo nacional
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Related Posts:
Jorge Volpi: El insomnio de Bolívar
Interview with Jorge Volpi

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Juan Gelman: The Poems of Sidney West

The Poems of Sidney West (Earthworks) 
aquileana writes about The Poems of Sidney West a translation of fictional North American Poet written by Argentine poet Juan Gelman in 1969 .

Click to read the post (in Spanish)

Interview with Júlio Cortázar

Interview with Júlio Cortázar to a Spanish Television Channel, in 13 parts.


Part 2/13 of the interview
Part 3/13 of the interview
Part 4/13 of the interview
Part 5/13 of the interview
Part 6/13 of the interview
Part 7/13 of the interview
Part 8/13 of the interview
Part 9/13 of the interview
Part 10/13 of the interview
Part 11/13 of the interview
Part 12/13 of the interview
Part 13/13 of the interview

Spanish fiction in the XXI century

Javier Cercas, Agustín Fernández Mallo and Almudena Grandes draw a literary map of the spanish fiction in the XXI century.

Mezcla, legado, lengua, España, Latinoamérica, pop, Internet, unidad, exploración. Nueve son las palabras con las que se empezaría a escribir el destino de la narrativa de España en el siglo XXI. O mejor hablar desde ya de la narrativa en español como de una lengua común que involucra a 19 países más en América Latina para borrar las fronteras geopolíticas en literatura. Es el gran territorio de La Mancha, como lo llama Carlos Fuentes, con 400 millones de hispanohablantes, que comparten un mismo idioma y herencia literaria que cada día aumenta su presencia e interés internacional.

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Monday, March 01, 2010

La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow)



La teta asustada is the first Peruvian film to be nominated for an Oscar.
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Blogging Roberto Bolaño

Page247 comments Roberto Bolaño's The Last Interview & Other Conversations.
A small book, containing four interviews and explanatory notes on Hispanic and Latino authors and book titles that may be unfamiliar to English readers.
Scott Timberg on Roberto Bolaño.
But what Bolano does well, he does better than almost anybody I know. My book group -- who I led in the novella Distant Star a few years back -- is now reading what's considered his masterpiece, 2666, and I look forward to digging in deeper.