Malta con Huevo - Trailer

Malta con Huevo was directed by Cristóbal Valderrama and produced by Alberto Fuguet.





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Chilean Cinema

Interview with Alberto Fuguet

(Writer and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet appeared in the late 1990s as one of the most notable exponents of the so-called New Chilean Narrative. His style is a sarcastic response to the Latin American magical realism literature genre and it often portrays its characters as individuals who have suddenly lost all identity and self-assertiveness. By these means, Fuguet is able to summarize Chilean society’s biggest cultural dilemmas.

(In this interview with La Nación, Alberto Fuguet talks about his latest book, “Apuntes autistas (Autistic notes),” a collection of random notes made by the author since 1994, and his next steps in filmmaking.)

QUESTION: Do you still see writing as a form of salvation?
ALBERTO FUGUET: There is something of faith in this. I think all narrations-- books, music, records, movies, or TV series--are good for your balance. They help. They accompany you. They are like those emergency help phone lines. They are your best friends when you have no friends left or can’t go to them or you just don’t want to bother anyone.

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Chilean Literature

The Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet

Three reviews of Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life.

In a recent issue of Context, the Center for Book Culture's print forum, its publisher John O'Brien scrawled across the back page a passionate essay concerning the lack of literary translations in America. He claims it was not his intent to "argue whether there should be more translations," but rather to investigate why there are so few. Still, the former is as much a part of the argument as the latter, leading O'Brien to call the dearth of translations a "cultural travesty."

Soon after reading this essay I picked up the recently translated Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet, a purportedly somewhat autobiographical novel about a young boy born in Chile, raised through early childhood in Southern California, then returned to Chile for the rest of his years. Now a renowned seismologist, a brief but intense encounter with a female stranger on a plane has caused Beltran Soler to go on a manic writing spree. He sequesters himself in a Los Angeles hotel room when he's due in Japan, inditing essay upon essay about the movies he saw as a child. The essays uniformly end up being about his childhood, not the movies. Ostensibly, he is going to send these essays off to the woman from the plane. And, ostensibly, she is not going to be creeped out by all of this.

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Thirtysomething seismologist Beltrán Soler is en route from Santiago to Tokyo when geological and emotional tremors turn his LAX layover into a psychic archaeological dig. Back in movie-metropolis L.A., where he spent his first decade, he holes up in a Holiday Inn to compose an annotated inventory of the films that, so to speak, rocked his world—the ones he projected onto, slept through, or sought refuge in and has since come to idealize, live out, or simply forget. Title and Hornby-ish fanboy conceit notwithstanding, Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life is less about cinemania than family betrayal. Each film on Beltrán's list—viewed between age two and 16, in Nixon's SoCal or Pinochet's Chile—taps into a pungent nostalgia and a painful recovered memory; this associative exercise resolves into a faded snapshot of the Solers, a diasporic, quake-obsessed clan, itself riven with crevices.

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Chilean author Alberto Fuguet never really wanted to be South American. Born in Santiago, he spent the first 13 years of his childhood in Encino, California, the backyard of the Los Angeles movie industry, expecting to grow up as a first-generation American. When his family moved back to Chile in the mid-1970s, after Pinochet's military dictatorship deposed Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government, the experience traumatized him. 'Coming to Chile as an immigrant was going down in every sense of the word for me,' he explains to Críticas. 'From democracy to dictatorship, from first world to third world, from English to Spanish. Spanish wasn't so cool then as it is now. It wasn't the second language of the world.'

It may seem strange for a Latin American novelist to admit such reservations about his mother country, much less his language, but in Fuguet's case, it's par for the course. Ever since McOndo, the ground-breaking anthology he co-edited with Sergio Gómez, came out in 1996, the 39-year-old author has made a career of thumbing his nose at literary conventions, chief among them the idea that all novelists south of the border should be magical realists.

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Chilean Literature

Pacific Cinematheque's Cine Chile 2006

For the past decade, celebrated Chilean author Alberto Fuguet (The Movies of My Life, Bad Vibes, Shorts, Red Ink) has been a leader in the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo (a name that combines McDonald's with Macondo, the fictional setting of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude).

McOndo eschews mythical Hispanic villages in favour of condos, Spanglish and Mac computers. And Fuguet's characters are more likely to be disillusioned, globetrotting hipsters than grandmothers who can fly.

Last year, the 42-year-old writer took his revolt against magic realism to the big screen in his directorial debut, For Rent. The gentle drama concerns a failed, thirtysomething composer adrift in a Santiago powered by movers and shakers who were once his less-talented university pals.

The film lit up box offices in the slender republic, and tonight it kicks off the Pacific Cinematheque's Cine Chile 2006 -- a week-long spotlight of movies from that nation's youth wave.

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Latin American Film

Cesar Aira / Eloy Urroz

A review of César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Eloy Urroz's The Obstacles

After the Rabelaisian movement known as El Boom in Latin American letters there came along a period of exhaustion. And revolt, too. There was, for instance, a group of authors that included the Chilean Alberto Fuguet and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán who ascribed to the generation of McOndo. Their objective was to turn Magic Realism on its head. But their novels were flat and repetitive and, in most cases, D.O.A.

Then there were the five Mexicans responsible for the "Crack Manifesto." Their aesthetic was far more ambitious: to shape a novel in Spanish unburdened by language and geography. The results were interesting, among them Jorge Volpi's "In Search of Klingsor," about the Nazis and the making of the atomic bomb. Interesting, of course, is a demeaned word: It used to mean appealing but nowadays is a synonym of all right, maybe even tolerable.

Interesting is the last adjective I would use to describe the late Roberto Bolaño, by far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English, in renditions by Chris Andrews, released under the aegis of New Directions. (His collection of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth," has just appeared.) His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

More imaginative, although also less consistent, is the astonishingly prolific Argentine César Aira, whom Bolaño once described as the type of "eccentric" whose prose, "once you start reading [it], you don't want to stop." Bolaño's portrait isn't quite accurate: Born in 1949, Aira has published almost 60 books, from criticism on Edward Lear and Alejandra Pizarnik to editions of the poetry of Osvaldo Lamborghini to a vast number of novels. In the novels I've read, like the untranslated "El congreso de literatura," about a writer's conference where one of the participants decides to clone Carlos Fuentes, the premise is better than its execution. Aira's dreams are emblematic but never unconventional. When he's in top form -- and it's seldom the case -- he can be utterly astonishing, as in "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter," published in Spanish in 2000 and now translated into English by Andrews, too.
(...)
On the opposite end of the spectrum is "The Obstacles," a laborious novel by Eloy Urroz, one of the members who agglutinated around the Crack Manifesto. Published originally as "Las Rémoras" in 1996 and translated into English by the superb Ezra Fitz, it is a trite, self-obsessed novel-within-a-novel typical of the French Nouveau Roman.

Urroz was born in 1967. He came of age in Mexico City and spent summers in La Paz, Baja California. Infatuated by and aspiring to Xerox, at least structurally, Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Green House" -- which, oddly, is, in his view, "the best Latin American novel of the 20th century" -- Urroz has a series of narrators, all of them male, interrupting the narrative, three of them on a quest for unrequited love. Women are sheer objects of desire. The perspective shifts back and forth from Mexico's capital to the town of Las Rémoras. Unfortunately, he belongs to the school of fiction that believes in the reader's journey as a form of punishment. Suffer and ye shall be redeemed from the wretchedness of pop lit!

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Alberto Fuguet - Chile

Biography:
Alberto Fuguet, born in Santiago de Chile in 1964, he spent his early childhood in California. He is one of the most prominent Latin American authors of his generation and one of the leaders of the literary movement known as McOndo, which proclaims the end of magical realism. Besides his work as an author and playwriter, Fuguet has been a film critic and a police reporter. He lives in Santiago de Chile.

Related Posts:
The McOndo Movement
Interview with Alberto Fuguet
Shorts by Alberto Fuguet
The Movies Of My Life by Alberto Fuguet

Works:
1989 - Sobredosis
1990 - La azarosa y sobreexpuesta vida de Enrique Alekán
1991 - Mala Onda - Bad Vibes
1994 - Por favor, rebobinar
1993 - Cuentos con Walkman
1996 - McOndo
1996 - Tinta Roja
2000 - Se habla español
2003 - Las Peliculas de Mi Vida - The Movies of My Life
2005 - Cortos - Shorts

Other Links:

Alberto Fuguet's Weblog

Las Peliculas de Mi Vida Weblog

Interview with Alberto Fuguet

Alberto Fuguet talks about "The Movies of My Life"

The Movies of My Life uses a number of different genres -- emails, phone conversations, movie reviews/memories -- to transmit the personal history of Beltrán Soler. Why did you decide to tell the story of one man's life using these different media?

I guess that's just the way things are these days. In order to reflect the way people communicate today, one must use various forms of verbal and written communication. It's how we're wired.

I was also trying to imagine how Manuel Puig, the first "postmodern" and anti-magical realist of Latin American literature would have done it. Third-world countries are, by the way, even more media-dominated, and media-saturated, than the countries that invented those technologies. I wanted to show what life is like in Chile, how people empathize with one another, and how this, I think, is also very universal.

You can find the full interview here

Find Alberto Fuguet's Books at Amazon.com

The McOndo Movement

Alberto Fuguet's article "I am not a magic realist!"

Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call "McOndo" -- a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape. Julian Barnes echoes this feeling in his novel "Flaubert's Parrot," where his scholarly narrator declares that the entire genre of magical realism should be banished: "A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America," he says. The example he gives speaks for itself. "Ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tip of its branches, and whose fibers assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner ..." Writers today who mold themselves after the Latin American "boom" writers of the 1960s (García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few) have transformed fiction writing into the fairy-tale business, cranking out shamelessly folkloric novels that cater to the imaginations of politically correct readers -- readers who, at present, aren't even aware of Latino cultural realism. David Gallagher, writing from Chile for the London Times Literary Supplement, considers this obscurity an asset: "These writers don't have an international reputation to protect. Nor do they feel the necessity of submerging themselves in the waters of the politically correct. Since they don't have the advantage of living abroad, they wouldn't even know how to write a PC novel ... they aren't writing for an international audience, and therefore, have no need to maintain the status quo of the stereotypical Latin America that is packaged up for export." I feel the great literary theme of Latin American identity (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of personal identity (who am I?). The McOndo writers -- such as Rodrigo Fresán and Martin Rejtman of Argentina, Jaime Bayly of Peru, Sergio Gómez of Chile, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia and Naief Yeyha of Mexico, to name a few -- base their stories on individual lives, instead of collective epics. This new genre may be one of the byproducts of a free-market economy and the privatization craze that has swept South America. I don't deny that there exists a colorful, exotic aspect to Latin America, but in my opinion, life on this continent is far too complex to be so simply categorized. It is an injustice to reduce the essence of Latin America to men in ponchos and sombreros, gun-toting drug lords and sensual salsa-swinging señoritas. As a character from my second book said: "I want to write a saga, but without falling into the trap of magical realism. Pure virtual realism, pure McOndo literature. Kind of like 'The House of the Spirits,' only without the spirits."

You can find the article here

A 2004 article about the McOndo authors

Call it the curse of Macondo. Since the emergence in the late 1960s of writers such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, Latino literature - at least that which you can find on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble - has been dominated by the magical realism embodied by the mythical village at the heart of García Márquez's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo, where it rains butterflies, grandmothers fly, and the air smells like ripe mangoes, remains a tropical paradise that readers clamor to. It is our personification of the exotic world south of the border.

The only problem is, the average middle class kid growing up in Santiago or Bogotá has about as much chance of witnessing a storm of yellow flowers as you or I, and is more likely to identify with a character who flies in airplanes than one who levitates of his own volition. "My own world," wrote Fuguet in the 1997 piece, "is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' - a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes, and condos." And so a movement was born.

The writers who form McOndo - most notably Fuguet, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia, and Jaime Bayly of Peru, and Jorge Franco of Colombia - are realists of the cultural rather than the magical. Characters speak Spanglish, eat fast-food, surf the Web, and travel easily between Latin America and the United States.

If there is a common thread in the most recent crop of works to be published in translation by McOndo writers, it is the search for a personal identity in a postmodern, globalized world in which boundaries - between countries, histories, and customs - have been thoroughly blurred.


You can find the article here

Find Alberto Fuguet's Books at Amazon.com

The Movies Of My Life by Alberto Fuguet

Reviews of Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life : A Novel.

(..)a purportedly somewhat autobiographical novel about a young boy born in Chile, raised through early childhood in Southern California, then returned to Chile for the rest of his years. Now a renowned seismologist, a brief but intense encounter with a female stranger on a plane has caused Beltran Soler to go on a manic writing spree. He sequesters himself in a Los Angeles hotel room when he's due in Japan, inditing essay upon essay about the movies he saw as a child. The essays uniformly end up being about his childhood, not the movies. Ostensibly, he is going to send these essays off to the woman from the plane. And, ostensibly, she is not going to be creeped out by all of this.

You can find the full review here.

Fuguet, a central figure in a loose group of young Latin American writers who identify themselves in opposition to magical realism, is a fun writer to read. When writing about movies, he explores the fact that South America (and the world, for that matter) is inundated, drowning in the culture of America. Some, of course, would argue that America has no culture in and of itself; it is just a cobbling together of all the cultures of the people who live here. Movies though have a way of transcending all of this. They can be watched by Cubans and Swiss alike, and both parties can take whatever they want from them.

You can find the full review here.

Buy The Movies of My Life at Amazon.com

Shorts by Alberto Fuguet

A review of Alberto Fuguet's Shorts.

With "Shorts," we come to see clearly that Fuguet is not a magic realist, a martyr from Márquez mythical village of Macondo, but rather a self-proclaimed founding member of the literary gang of McOndo, the universe of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. Mostly, though, readers will find that Fuguet is a gifted and playful young writer with the interest, skill and ambition to tackle the most difficult and rewarding human questions: Who am I? Where am I from? Do you love me? Why?
A review by Joe Woodward from the San Francisco Chronicle.
You can find the full article here.

Buy Shorts at Amazon.com.