Carmen Boullosa

Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa presents her new novel in Madrid.

El Velázquez de París is the second part of the trilogy started with La otra mano de Lepanto, were she approaches the disappearance of a linen cloth of the Spanish painter and the ethics of the artist as a witness of his time.

Los atentados del 11-S dieron pie a Carmen Boullosa a escribir "La otra mano de Lepanto" , donde ofrece su visión del nuevo mundo y los conflictos religiosos que se perfilaron tras esa fecha.

Así enfrenta la nueva coyuntura mundial a aquella otra "guerra religiosa" que fue la Batalla de Lepanto.

Ahora, en El velázquez de París, la autora se sirve de "La expulsión de los moriscos" , el lienzo que consagró a Velázquez como uno de los grandes artistas de su época, para ahondar sobre si el arte tiene que tener "signo moral" .

La novela relata la historia del cuadro Diego Velázquez sobre la expulsión por parte de los Reyes Católicos de los moros o moriscos, como se les denominaba en la España de la época.

El lienzo fue dado por perdido durante el incendio del Alcázar de Madrid en 1734, y la novela plantea su posible salvación.

Pero Boullosa además de fabular sobre la vida y la obra del clásico español, se adentra en la moralidad de un parisino maduro, que acompañado de dos jovencitas, asegura ser propietario de la codiciada obra de arte.

En El velázquez de París, asegura su autora, la "realidad, el arte y la ficción" están en el mismo plano. Así, Boullosa trata desde la literatura "voltear" la vida desde la función "antisocial" del escritor "irreverente" que observa la inutilidad del arte. Read More

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Mexican Literature

Carmen Boullosa recalls Roberto Bolaño.

We were formally introduced, twenty years after he left Mexico, in Vienna (which, like Mexico City in reverse, has shrunk to two-thirds of its former population). We had been invited to speak on a theme that was relevant to Roberto's work, not mine: exile. I said what I felt like saying, and so did he, disregarding the theme. There was a fraternal complicity between us from the start; I took him along to the dinner organized for me at the Embassy, and in exchange he took me to the outskirts of the city to see what must be the least appealing stretch of the Danube, in which some charmless ducks were swimming with a curious clumsiness. Roberto showed me a Vienna that was uncannily similar to Mexico City. He refused to go to museums or the kind of picturesque spots I love to visit; he was sure we'd be attacked by neo-Nazis.

That was the beginning of an uninterrupted correspondence. We wrote to each other almost every day. I don't think we ever discussed our relation to "magic realism," although we did say exactly what we thought of many writers. We also crossed paths at other literary events, or almost. I once read in Nîmes, then took a train to Blanes, where we ate by the sea: myself; Roberto; his wife, Carolina; and Lautaro, his son (the "little spark," as he called Alexandra, had not yet arrived). When my novel about Cleopatra was published, he was kind enough to travel to Madrid and launch it. It was such an anomalous novel--neither realist nor fantastic and yet both at once--that Roberto, who read it in manuscript, was immediately charmed.

On July 2, 2003, I wrote scolding him for not having replied to my e-mail of a few days before. On the third, Carolina wrote back: "Dear Carmen, Roberto asked me to reply to your message and tell you that he's gone into hospital... he'll be back at the keyboard soon. Love, Carolina." He died on the fifteenth of that month.

I spent months trying to get used to the idea that Roberto had died. When his collection of stories, El gaucho insufrible, came out, I couldn't bring myself to open it. Then came the monumental 2666, which he had mentioned so often in conversations and e-mails; it was irresistible. It is one of the great novels of my language, a raging monster of a book; the rest of Bolaño's work pales by comparison. After reading 2666, I went back to the book of stories: uneven exercises by a master of narrative acrobatics. Some are simply indulgent, written in the manner of Bolaño's character Sensini, to win prizes, or worse still, to recruit disciples. All bear the trace of his hand, it's true, but Roberto Bolaño didn't write with his hand. He wrote with the teeth he had left along the way (as had Auxilio Lacouture), the molars he lost when he had no money to pay a proper dentist or simply didn't care.

Paz, Huerta, Arreola, Cortázar: Bolaño took the best from them all. When he left Mexico he wasn't fleeing the masters: He was running to catch the ball they had flung high into the air.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Carmen Boullosa

Carmen Boullosa, the Mexican novelist, poet and playwright, lives in central Brooklyn. A student of Juan Rulfo, she is now a professor at the City College, a host of the CUNY TV program New York; she has also been a fellow at New York Public Library and the Guggenheim Foundation. Boullosa’s Brooklyn house and neighborhood provide the setting for her new fantastic novel, La Novela Perfecta.
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Boullosa says that La Novela Perfecta is an homage to the neighborhood where she has lived for two years, as well as to the “heroes” of her youth, the Argentineans Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, the foremost exponents of Latin American fantastic literature. “This is my Brooklyn novel. This neighborhood fascinates me as an almost prototypical city, with people from all over the world living together in a small place,” explains Boullosa, whose previous novels include Antes and La Otra Mano de Lepanto. “I’m right next to a mosque, and nearby stores with Al-Jazeera propaganda as well as Jewish shoe repair shops. These are cultures that are obliged to make a pact of coexistence. When one takes the subway in Brooklyn you reach another space, marked by different limits, because there is always a border zone with other cultures.”

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