Isabel Allende: Island Beneath the Sea

Gaiutra Bahadur reviews Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea.

In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her latest novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter’s wife who gradually goes mad. (The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from “Jane Eyre” onward.) Even before her mistress’s death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt.

The resulting canvas contains no less than the revolutionary history of the world’s first black republic as Allende portrays the island’s various factions: republicans versus monarchists, blacks versus mulattoes, abolitionists versus planters, slaves versus masters. She revels in period detail: ostrich-feathered hats, high-waisted gowns, meals featuring suckling pigs with cherries. Her cast is equally vibrant: a quadroon courtesan and the French officer who marries her; Valmorain’s second wife, a controlling Louisiana Creole; Zarité’s rebel lover, who joins Toussaint L’Ouverture in the hills. But for all its entertaining sweep, the story lacks complex characterization and originality. And its style is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men — or, in ­Allende’s case, headless women? Where is the magical realism?

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An excerpt of the book is available at harpercollins.com

Quim Monzó: Gasoline

Maria Campillo reviews Quim Monzó's Gasoline.

Benzina is the second novel and the fifth book by Quim Monzó, a writer who enjoys the unconditional admiration of many readers, thanks above all to the last two collections of short stories, Uf, va dir ell and Olivetti, Moulinex, Chaffoteaux et Maury (1978, 1980).

In the context of the Benzina, I would like to touch on two questions that seem important: the generic and what we might call the thematic. With regard to the first, it is worth noting that Monzó has come back to the novel marked, to some extent, by the experience of writing short stories during the last few years, and perhaps for this reason the book suffers from a kind of spinning-out of what we thought of (at one time) as the basic idea or single idea in the structuring of a short story. This technique (first adopted in Self-service and developed and rounded out in the last two collections) served to construct the narrative around a situation or gag 'initial, final or concentrically cumulative' that the author now resolves in the sum of situations less easily engaged than inside the structure 'concentrated and almost always rounded' of his short stories. We shall not take him to task for that, especially when we bear in mind that attempting this in a novel, from a far more mature literary position than he occupied when he wrote L'udol del griso al caire de les clavegueres, can only be to his advantage in terms of his acquisition of new forms and his manipulation of language, something I have always regarded as a particularly attractive feature of this writer.

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Javier Marías: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Eli S. Evans reviews  Javier Marías' Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico.

At first glance, Javier Marías’ short novella (or long short story) Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico—originally published serially in 1996 in Spain’s El País newspaper—appears little more than a put on, a dashed-off throwback by a Marías who had already reached literary maturity, if not yet the all but uncontested international reverence he enjoys today, to the pastiche of his early, adolescent novels: the absurdist tale of one Ruibérriz de Torres who, from an indeterminately contemporary present, recalls the trip he took to Mexico at the age of twenty-two (just past adolescence himself) to work as Spanish language consultant to Elvis Presley during shooting for the film Fun in Acapulco.

But what seems a mere literary inside joke initially, and perhaps even to the author himself—in the epigraph, Marías dedicates the short novella, or long short story, to “someone who’s laughing in my ear”—reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be a good deal more. Clocking in at fifty-seven rather diminutive pages in its recently released English translation, an elegant gold and white paperback the size of a folded napkin and nearly as slender, Bad Nature performs a virtually Borgesian distillation of, if not the entire literary universe—as is the case in some of the best of Borges’ stories—then at the very least the entirety of Marías’ personal literary universe: the “Yoknapatawpha of the mind,” as Wyatt Mason described it in 2005, that the Spanish novelist has been mapping, in a single voice, over years and across novels.

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Miguel A. Bretos: Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows

Fabiola Santiago reviews Miguel A. Bretos' Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows.

Long before I read his book, Bretos shared with me some of these stories because I also was born in Matanzas. Among so many who prefer to claim a stake in Havana, we proud matanceros in exile sometimes feel subversive, and whenever Bretos and I ran into each other at a cultural event, we shared a sense of complicity.

Bretos, who suffers from Parkinson's (with typical humor he calls it ``Dr. Parkinson's damned disease''), warns that his historical account is not complete. The history of post-Revolution Matanzas, he says, also merits research and analyses. With this book, Bretos has not only conferred on his beloved Matanzas its rightful place in history but he has provided students and fans of Cuban history with a significant launching point into the future.

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Yasei no tanteitachi

This fantastic cover belongs to Yasei no tanteitachi, the first Japanese edition of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.
 The book presented this week in the Instituto Cervantes Tokio was published by Hakusuisha Publishers and translated into Japanese by Kenji Matsumoto and Takaatsu Yanagihara.

Roberto Bolaño

Jose Saramago: The Notebook

 
Chris Dolan reviews José Saramago's The Notebook.

These notes, I found, are not simply a blog but contributions to the much more ambitious Saramago Foundation, which attempts, in its founder’s words, to “bring a new dynamic to cultural life in Portugal”. There are many more voices than Saramago’s given an airing in the site, and in The Notebook some of that desire for dialogue, that generosity of spirit, comes across, too. Saramago comments on events his foundation has organised – presentations by Baltasar Garzón, celebrations of the work of Carlos Fuentes and Fernando Pessoa. If nothing else, the English translations of these blogs might pique an Anglo-American interest in writers and thinkers from the Hispanic world.

At 87, Saramago leads a busy life, ­travelling, overseeing the publication of his novel (O Viagem do Elefante, available here next year) and putting the finishing touches to the one after that – Caim; he does radio talk-ins and hosts events at his Foundation and, it seems, almost any other organisation willing to let him talk about justice and writing and writers. The energy, passion and continuing political anger of the man glows brightly throughout the Notebook.

He signs off from his blog, saying he needs time to dedicate himself to yet another book – but I checked this morning, and he’s written several notes on the site since. There’s no stopping the man, thankfully.

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Júlio Cortázar

Manuel Rivas: Books Burn Badly

Ángel Gurría-Quintana reviews Manuel Rivas' Books Burn Badly.

Books Burn Badly is a demanding novel, artfully translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne. Its multiple narrative voices and unadvertised time shifts can be disorienting but it repays the reader’s persistence. Connections between characters and events become clearer as the various stories gradually bleed into each other.

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Manuel Rivas, born in La Coruña in 1957, is a novelist, poet, and essayist, and has worked as a journalist for both Spanish-language and Galician-language media in Spain, such as El País and Diario de Galicia. A key figure in the Galician literary renaissance, he has had enormous influence on contemporary Galician literature. He has published eight novels (which he writes in Galician), and was awarded two national prizes, the Premio de la Critica for Un millión de vacas (1989) and the Premio nacional de narrativa for his novel ¿Que me quieres, amor? (1996). His novel The Carpenter’s Pencil (1998), about the repression of dissidents during Franco’s rule, is the only that has been translated into English and was made into a film in 2003. The two-story work, A man dos pianos, first appeared in 2002, followed by Rivas’ own version, La Mano del emigrante, in Castilian (2002). Vermeer’s Milkmaid is his first short story collection to be published in English translation (2002).

Andrés Neuman: El viajero del siglo (Traveler of the Century)

Adriana Herrera reviews Andrés Neuman's El viajero del siglo (Traveler of the Century)

En 1999, Roberto Bolaño profetizó que la novela del siglo XXI le pertenecería a Andrés Neuman y a unos cuantos de sus hermanos de sangre en la literatura. En el acta de premiación de El viajero del siglo, ganador del premio de Novela Alfaguara 2009, presidido por Luis Goytisolo, el jurado confirmó su visión: destacó el asombro que produce esta historia, que ``recupera el aliento de la narrativa del siglo XIX, escrita con una visión actual y espléndidamente ambientada en la Alemania post-napoleónica''.

El viajero del siglo contiene los géneros del Siglo de las Luces --la novela epistolar, la novela de tesis, la novela romántica y las crónicas de viajes-- pero los revive con la consciencia del autor del siglo XXI que hace meta-literatura, escritura sobre la escritura, sin deslindarla de lo visceral, y que plantea una apuesta totalizadora. Neuman reconstruye en efecto los dilemas filosóficos y políticos esenciales de la Europa de la Restauración a partir de una historia con elementos de suspenso, e incluso policíacos, que entrevera con la literatura romántica de un modo insólito.

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Andrés Neuman, a novelist, poet and short story writer who was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires and is considered among the most promising Spanish-language authors in recent years.

Is works include the novels "Bariloche", "La vida en las ventanas" and "Una vez Argentina" and three short story collections, "El que espera", "El ultimo minuto" and "Alumbramiento".

El viajero del siglo won the Alfaguara's Novel Prize in 2009.

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations

 

William Skidelsky reviews Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.

This compilation of interviews seems destined to inflame the legend more than it will further the truth. Bolaño didn't often give interviews, and it is apparent from the ones featured here – including his last, to Mexican Playboy, months before he died – that he didn't take them too seriously. His answers tend to be playful, deflecting. Asked why he "always take(s) the opposite view of things", he responds: "I never take the opposite view of things." Asked what feelings "posthumous" works awaken in him, he replies: "Posthumous, it sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator." But Bolaño's often withering assessments of other writers and of the literary establishment ("The Royal Spanish Academy is a cave full of privileged cranums") are well worth reading, and there's an illuminating introduction by Marcela Valdes, which explains in detail how Bolaño came to find out about the killings in Ciudad Juarez that formed the basis of his masterpiece, 2666.

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Exile and Literature

Roberto Bolaño's Viena speech.

He sido invitado para hablar del exilio. La invitación me llegó escrita en inglés y yo no sé hablar inglés. Hubo una época en que sí sabía o creía que sabía, en cualquier caso hubo una época, cuando yo era adolescente, en que creía que podía leer el inglés casi tan bien, o tan mal, como el español. Esa época desdichadamente ya pasó. No sé leer inglés. Por lo que pude entender de la carta creo que tenía que hablar sobre el exilio. La literatura y el exilio. Pero es muy posible que esté absolutamente equivocado, lo cual, bien mirado, sería a la postre una ventaja, pues yo no creo en el exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta palabra va junto a la palabra literatura.

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