Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: Tattoo

Laura Wilson reviews Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Tattoo.

This month sees a welcome reissue of many of Spanish author Vázquez Montalbán's titles, although this particular book, which first appeared in 1976, is being published here for the first time. His Barcelona-based private eye is Pepe Carvalho, an arresting combination of machismo and an old-womanish fussiness about comestibles: a bit like James Bond, without all those irritating gadgets. A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to discover the identity of a young man whose body is pulled out of the sea, heavily disfigured but bearing a tattoo. The plot is slight but enjoyable, and the picture of post-Franco Spain subtly drawn. Although the text is lumbered with an unwieldy translation, it is easy to see why Vázquez Montalbán was recently named one of the 50 best crime writers of all time.

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Spanish Literature

Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"

Benjamin Lytal reviews Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs.

Novels that show the sordid side of war are not scarce. Classics abound, but they do not glut; each book is as distinct as its war. Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs" (Penguin Classics, 148 pages, $8) realizes a war that we often forget, though it is relatively near at hand in time and space. Azuela (1873-1952) participated in the Mexican Revolution (1911-17), serving as a doctor in the army of Pancho Villa, before the fortunes of war sent him packing across the border to El Paso, Texas. Beginning in 1915, he serialized his novel in one of El Paso's Spanish-language newspapers, El Paso del Norte.

"The Underdogs" was not published in Mexico until 1920, and it did not receive much attention until about 1925. But it now stands for the Mexican Revolution as "The Red Badge of Courage" stands for the American Civil War, and it represents a turning point in Latin-American literature itself. Because the revolution brought a host of regional armies together against a central government, Azuela's novel necessarily undertook the portrayal of regional Mexican culture as meaningful territory, overturning decades of Eurocentric prejudice in intellectual Mexico.

Sergio Waisman's new translation of "The Underdogs" therefore faces its biggest challenge in its treatment of Mexican dialects. Demetrio Macias, a local hero in the Sierras who becomes a general in Pancho Villa's army, terrorizing the villages and cities of the plains, sometimes sounds like an American lug: "God willin', ... tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight, we will get another close-up of the Federales. What do you say, muchachos? Ready to show 'em 'round these paths and trails?"

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Mexican Literature

Mayra Montero: Dancing to Almendra

Margaret Barno reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to Almendra.

The “Almendra”, translated “almond”, is a slow-paced, sad Latin musical piece popular beginning in the 1950s throughout Central South America and Cuba. It’s rhythmic accents match well with the mambo, a dramatic, beautifully seductive dance.

This tempo is the background music of nightclubs, casinos and backdrop of this intriguing, multifaceted story of the under layers in Havana society in 1957.

Tensions, building among power brokers with links to organized crime figures locally and in the United States, were felt in unusual places: a circus and a zoo.

Lives of people, seemingly disconnected, would forever be entwined and affected.

Add an offbeat, frustrated young news reporter assigned to cover less than newsworthy events, sent to report the death of a hippopotamus at a local zoo, and the stage is set for a dramatic, pulsating novel that is as intense as it is intoxicating.

There is another significant factor, one that is usually somewhere in a book about people: love. When people break accepted mores, all is well. Stray into the territory of another, outside the unwritten “family” rules, and there can be deadly or at least memorable results designed to reinforce the consequences of going astray in affairs of the heart.

Edith Grossman, the 2006 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation winner, does an excellent job at capturing the bawdy language and atmosphere of Havana in the immediate era before the Cuban Revolution.

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Cuban Literature

Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

A review of Carlos Fuentes' Happy Families.

This collection by celebrated Mexican author Fuentes (The Eagle’s Throne) treks a wide swath of Mexican history, encompassing revolutions won and brutally suppressed, evolving sexual mores and economic upheaval. While all kinds of relationships are explored—lovers and friends, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers—the most revealing of Fuentes’s work are father-son stories. In “The Disobedient Son,” a father demands that his sons become priests to honor their dead mother; “The Official Family” posits a fictional president of Mexico who controls fiercely his own passions by imposing limits on his wayward boy; and in “The Star’s Son,” a fading movie star takes belated responsibility for a son with a crippling disability. Interspersed with short chapters of free-form poetry that turn an unflinching eye on homelessness, sexual abuse, gangs and drugs, Fuentes’s urgent stories make clear that Mexico is too full of life and tragedy to be controlled or constrained. Desperately holding the turbulence still for a moment, Fuentes examines closely hard lives in an unforgiving place.

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Mexican Literature

Antonio Muñoz Molina: A Manuscript of Ashes

Adam Kirsch reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes.

Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "Sepharad" was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" had a new European writer so powerfully seized the imagination of American readers. "Sepharad" was, in fact, a kind of transposition, into Spanish history and language, of Sebald's masterpiece — with its blending of fact and fiction, its obsession with the horrors of the 20th century, and its deeply ethical insistence on retrieving individual stories obliterated by history. In a fluid, even slippery narrative, Mr. Muñoz Molina braided the stories of Sephardic Jews, exiled from Spain in the 15th century, with the experiences of Spaniards during that country's civil war, and the more public lives of figures such as Franz Kafka. I'm not sure how many people read "Sepharad" — it was not the kind of book that makes a best seller — but it helped to give Mr. Muñoz Molina the literary stature in America that he has long enjoyed in Spain, where the 52-year-old is one of the leading writers of his generation.

Now, with the publication of "A Manuscript of Ashes" (Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), we have the chance to read the book that launched Mr. Muñoz Molina's career as a novelist. First published in Spain in 1986 under the title "Beatus ille," now translated into English by Edith Grossman, "A Manuscript of Ashes" shows that some of Mr. Muñoz Molina's central concerns were with him from the very beginning. Once again we find him investigating Spain's damaged past — in particular, the violence and betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, and the fear and tedium of the Franco dictatorship that succeeded it. Again he is tormented by the pastness of the past, which makes it impossible to know reliably, as well as by its continuing presence, which makes our own lives seem like mere sequels to great events that happened long ago. And already in his first novel, we can now see, Mr. Muñoz Molina was experimenting with a narrative technique adequate to these perceptions. "A Manuscript of Ashes" is divided between two narrators and at least three time frames, and the reader must be constantly on the alert for multiple shifts of perspective, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph.

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Spanish Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Katie Toms reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

In 1950, 15-year-old Ricardo becomes obsessed with an exotic, mysterious girl. Over 40 years he continually chances upon her; each time, she sleeps with him despite having a new husband for each city in which they meet. The only crime of the 'bad' girl in question seems to be that she asks for what she wants when it comes to sex and refuses to say she loves him. Her punishment? Near death and permanent vaginal damage at the hands of her brutal Japanese husband. The final reckoning involves cancer, a double mastectomy and painful death. There are some vivid passages here, but on the whole this novel is a glib, disjointed monologue. Sadistic pornography may prove titillating for some, but it makes for dull reading.

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Peruvian Literature

Horacio Castellanos Moya: Senselessness

Jed Lipinski reviews Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness.

Senselessness is the eighth novel by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya and, remarkably, the first to appear in English. Moya has been hailed as El Salvador's foremost novelist, and Senselessness, published in Spanish in 2004, took only four years to arrive in the States—not a bad track record, considering that Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, released here last fall, was first published in 1998.

A chaptered but nearly paragraphless 142 pages, Senselessness reads like a vicious, novella-length rant by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard—had Bernhard spent his developmental years drinking mescal in a corrupt, oppressively Catholic Latin America and having sex with passionate Spanish women. Bernhard's influence is obvious, like Joyce's influence on Flann O'Brien and J.P. Donleavy, but never burdensome. By filtering Bernhard's addled consciousness through his own, and steeping it in the humidity of a thinly disguised Guatemala, the novel provides a kind of meta-analysis of the neurotic Austrian master—though it stands alone, too, as an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art.

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Salvadoran Literature

Felisberto Hernández: Lands of Memory

Jed Lipinski reviews Felisberto Hernández' Lands of Memory.

The Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964)—considered the father of magic realism for his influence on García Márquez, Cortázar, and Calvino—was fond of dimly lit rooms, veils, hats in general, and the way blind people strike matches. A virtuosic pianist, in his youth he worked as a "musical illustrator" for silent films. He required absolute silence to write and admired the way silence draws attention to a person's face. He liked to wander through unfamiliar houses. A friend claimed he lived "on a mountain in the moon."

The two novellas and four stories that make up Lands of Memory—most of them published in the 1940s, all of them first-person accounts and rigorously translated for the first time by Esther Allen—are summarized by the author as "commentaries on things." The main "thing" is Hernández's affection for certain moments, especially those that precede knowledge. Memories of his childhood, like the inexplicable sadness he felt after throwing a yellow banana peel into a green alfalfa field, were particularly important to him for having preceded adulthood, when thought begins to influence and corrupt feelings. Lands of Memory provides a kind of solution to n + 1 magazine's complaint with the "faux-naïf" sensibility of McSweeney's. Hernández is capable of writing with a child's sense of wonder, but he can also philosophically justify childhood's connection to the unknown ("With respect to the unknown, I want to define the vein more clearly by specifying that there is little thought in it"). The story "Mistaken Hands" consists of complex psychological letters to female strangers, in the hope they'll write back and describe what their day is like.

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Uruguayan Literature

Jose Eduardo Agualusa: The Book of Chameleons

Steven G. Kellman reviews José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons.

The Book of Chameleons begins with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine master of conceptual ficciones: “If I were to be born again, I’d like to be something completely different.” Agualusa’s book teases the reader with the fungibility of multiple identities. What Félix imagines for a client is what the client becomes. Declaring himself an animist, the salesman of selves explains: “The same thing happens to the soul as happens to water — it flows. Today it’s a river. Tomorrow, it will be the sea.”

Eulálio sees a procession of strangers enter the house in search of fresh identities. One, an itinerant photojournalist eager to be thought Angolan, ends up with a new name, José Buchmann, and a complicated family history. His mother, he is told, was an American painter who mysteriously abandoned the family. So “José Buchmann” goes off to New York to find this concocted woman and finds traces of her there and in Cape Town that Félix never imagined. Another client is a government minister who is intent on commissioning a personal genealogy that will endow him with heroic stature. Still another makes this uncommon request: “What I’m after is for you to arrange for me exactly the opposite of what you usually do for people — I want you to give me a modest past. A name with no luster to it whatsoever.”

Though he never reveals his original name, Eulálio, we learn, was once a human being, a librarian whose failure to love was probably the reason for his transformation into a gecko 15 years before. Now, in his saurian state, he is especially attentive to the relationship developing between Félix and a beautiful young visitor named Ângela Lúcia. Like José Buchmann, she, too, is a photographer, though she demurs: “I’m not even sure that I am a photographer. I collect light.” One of the finest sections in The Book of Chameleons consists of Ângela Lúcia’s comparative analysis of the quality of light in different locales, including Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Goa, Berlin, and Cairo.

Throughout the novel, which is composed of brief, terse chapters, a haze hovers over boundaries between identities, as well as states of being. In this Borgesian ether, dreams alternate with what passes for “reality,” and characters collide with their doubles. Agualusa situates his story within the context of the dictatorships and violence that have plagued Angola since Portugal began to pull out in 1975. If his novel has a fault, it comes at the end, when the author does not trust the reader’s imagination enough to refrain from explaining. Until that point, Agualusa is, like his character Félix, a consummate con. “I lie with joy!” the merchant of pasts exclaims. “Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance.” For the true lies of this novel, José Eduardo Agualusa deserves not just acceptance but acclaim.

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A few poems by Fernando Pessoa translated by George Monteiro.

Self-Analysis

The poet is a forger who forges so completely that he forges even the
feeling he truly feels as pain. And
those who read his poems feel absolutely, not his two separate pains,
but only the pain that they do not feel.
And thus, diverting the understanding, the wind-up train we call the
heart runs along its track.

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and the original:
Autopsicografia

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só a que eles não têm.

E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão,
Esse comboio de corda
Que se chama coração.



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Portuguese Literature

Jose Luis Peixoto: The Implacable Order of Things

Jack Shreve reviews José Luis Peixoto's The Implacable Order of Things.

Hailing from the worlds of the theater and poetry, award-winning Portuguese novelist Peixoto (b. 1974) writes straightforward prose that, with its incantatory cadence, brings readers to new heights of realization. Recommended.

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Portuguese Literature

Roberto Bolano: The Savage Detectives

Claire Buckland reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives".

Translated into English for the first time, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s prize-winning book portrays a lost generation. It opens in Mexico City in 1975 with the diary of Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old devotee of the “visceral-realist” movement championed by fictional poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.

The visceral realists spend their time reading, stealing and destroying books – and posturing outrageously: according to a gay friend of Juan’s, “novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual”.

Juan’s own writing is self-regarding, exuberant, naïve and charged with possibilities. The diary ends when Juan, Belano, Lima and a runaway prostitute set out on a road trip to trace the last recorded journey of a 1920s poet.

Bolaño’s intense monologues fragment into a series of interviews with just about anyone who came into contact with Lima and Belano between 1976 and 1996.

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Chilean Literature