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.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

100 best novels written in Spanish in the past 25 years post has been updated.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Reading others

a reader’s words on The Uncomfortable Dead by the Mexican Paco Ignacio Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos and Amulet by Chilean Roberto Bolaño.

1968 for Mexico, as for many countries around the world, marked a year of student protests, culminating in what has come to be known as the Tlatelolco massacres. Wishing to change the oppressive one party rule of the PRI students revolted in the backdrop of persistent, if not rising social inequalities.

Two recently published novels are on this theme: The Uncomfortable Dead by the Mexican writer of mysteries, Paco Ignacio Taibo and the leader of the Chiapas’ revolt, Subcommandante Marcos and the other one is by the Chilean writer who lived in Mexico in those years Roberto Bolaño- Amulet.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature, Mexican Literature, Chilean Literature

Book Review: How I Became a Nun by César Aira

Tom Roberge reviews César Aira "How I Became a Nun"

Many novels succeed by virtue of their authors' abilities to take a single event or moment and parse it into individual elements: background information, subtle details, motivations, consequences. The reader, in this model, is taken from a point of relative confusion to a point of clarity. This is a time-tested formula, but there are writers capable of succeeding by following a model that runs contrary to this one.

César Aira's How I Became a Nun starts with a small but not insignificant event: the day the narrator's father delivers on a long-standing promise to treat her (or him — Aira changes the child's gender every few pages) to an ice-cream cone. But the child hates the taste so much that she ends up sobbing violently at the thought of another mouthful. To reveal what happens next would spoil the tragic story, but it changes the child's life.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Literature

The 62,000 books commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude on sale since March 26 in Colombia sold out. Due to the demand a reprint of more 70,000 is predicted.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Buenos Aires doesn't live only on Tango. Borges' presence is a constant in the city.

When Jorge Luis Borges died, a distinguished Buenos Aires art collector, Jorge Helft, began a scholarly project, the assembling of little-known or unknown Borges material. That was in 1986, and so far he's gathered more than 15,000 items --private letters, unpublished manuscripts, long-forgotten pamphlets, obscure literary magazines carrying Borges poems that probably even Borges had forgotten. In recent years, scholars from around the world have quarried this mountain of words to produce 10 books.

No doubt many more will appear. The Borges reputation seems to grow even faster now than when he was alive. Helft's loving attention to every detail of the work typifies the attitude of intellectuals in Buenos Aires. As Helft says, "He has influenced every part of our culture."

In Argentina he's as much an emblem of national excellence as an author. Even those who haven't read his work find uses for him. Three years ago the maid who served his family for decades (without reading his books or any other books) put her name on a ghosted memoir, El Senor Borges. Among other revelations, she reported that (contrary to what he told the world at the time) Borges gravely regretted that he was never chosen as the Nobel laureate. She says that every year the announcement of someone else's triumph inaugurated a period of sadness for him, not at all lightened by journalists calling to ask for his comments. He joked about it, but the jokes were painful for him.

Today in Buenos Aires he's inescapable. Since the city now raises money by giving donors the right to put their logos on street signs, it's possible to turn a corner and find yourself looking up at "Telecom Jorge Luis Borges," a clever advertiser having simultaneously identified the corporation with both the street and the author for whom the street has been renamed.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Literature

Reading Others

On Alejandro González Iñárritu: A review of 21 Grams in Five Branch Tree and a review of Babel by Aditya.
A Daniel Alarcón read at City Lights bookstore by Favianna.
orshouldi on José Saramago's Blindness.
Daniel Stephens reviews Fernando Meirelles' City of God.

Book Review: Delirium by Laura Restrepo

Timothy Peters reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium.

The word "delirium," the title of Colombian writer Laura Restrepo's new novel (her sixth to be translated into English), comes from the Latin delirare, to be deranged, and it describes the state of Agustina, the book's central figure. The story opens when her lover, Aguilar, discovers her in a strange hotel room in Bogotá, suffering from some kind of psychotic break, "transformed into someone terrified and terrifying, a being I barely recognized." He later adds that her eyes "filled me with fear, something disturbing, an excessive vibration that brought to mind the word delirium." It's a powerful start to this compelling, often beautiful novel, which won Spain's Alfaguara Prize in 2004 and has been widely and effusively praised by the likes of José Saramago and Gabriel García Márquez.

The story seems at first to be about the search for the transformative event that destroyed Agustina's mind. But as the novel develops, it's clear that Aguilar should not have been surprised by her mental deterioration. Agustina, a woman from the upper echelons of the deeply hierarchical strata of Bogotán society, has suffered from delusional behavior since childhood. She has long believed she can foretell the future, and she believes she can cure her ills through obsessive rituals of cleansing.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Colombian Literature

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Vinnie Wilhelm reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

"The Savage Detectives" is ostensibly about a group of avant-garde poets in Mexico City in the mid-1970s, the so-called visceral realists, who have taken the name of another obscure avant-garde Mexican poetry movement from the 1920s. The tenets of visceral realism remain vague; its followers are young, broadly leftist and anti-establishment. They don't like Octavio Paz, and may or may not be planning to kidnap him. In the predawn hours of New Year's Day 1976, the group's enigmatic leaders, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, leave the capital in a borrowed Chevy Impala, heading north into the Sonoran Desert on a quest to find the lost mother of visceral realism, Cesárea Tinajero, who disappeared there 40 years before. Belano and Lima are accompanied by a hooker named Lupe and the teenage visceral realist poet Juan García Madero; they are pursued by a murderous pimp.

That's how it starts. From there the plot swings around and smashes itself to pieces, to borrow a phrase of Bolaño's. The book's opening section, which takes us up to the Impala's flight from Mexico City, is narrated by García Madero, and we return to his narration at the end of the novel for the denouement in Sonora. In between lies a 400-page assemblage of monologues, varying in length from a single, short paragraph to upward of 20 pages, delivered by the disparate cast of characters Belano and Lima encounter in 20 years of vagabond wandering after they leave Mexico in 1976. The monologues are presented as interviews conducted by an unnamed detective or detectives, for an unstated purpose, and the story they trace covers a lot of ground. This is a novel set in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala, Managua, Barcelona, Roussillon, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, New York, Luanda, Kigali and the war-torn countryside of Liberia, among other locations. It is a novel that features no fewer than 54 first-person narrators (I counted), who speak to us from parks and libraries, bars and dark apartments, from inside lunatic asylums, and from the hospitals in which they are dying. Many of them are poets, many are Latin American exiles and almost all are living in some kind of desperation on the margins of the late 20th century.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Literature

Reed Johnson interviews Mexican director Felipe Cazals.

A singular Mexican filmmaker has been getting lots of attention here lately. What's shocking is that his name isn't Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro or Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Back in the late 1970s, when the so-called Three Amigos were in high school, director Felipe Cazals was busy pushing cultural hot buttons and flaying cinematic sacred cows. He was part of a group of Young Turks, akin to the Coppola-Scorsese-Spielberg troika, that helped lift Mexican cinema from the slough of institutional mediocrity that had followed its Golden Age of the 1930s through the 1950s.

Along with such maverick colleagues as Arturo Ripstein, Jorge Fons, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and Paul Leduc, Cazals brought auteur-ship — the French New Wave ideal of the all-powerful, visionary director — to Mexican cinema.

In an interview, the still-active filmmaker, who will turn 70 in July, said he remains "very close" to his director brothers-in-arms whose careers took off at the same time as his. Many young Mexican directors such as Del Toro, whose "Pan's Labyrinth" won three Oscars this year, have acknowledged a debt to Cazals' generation of free-thinking, self-reliant filmmakers.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Cinema

Eduardo Lago won the "Premio Nacional de la Crítica" for his novel 'Llámame Brooklyn'.
'Llámame Brooklyn' is the story of a New York journalist that after the death of his friend Gal Ackerman, attempts to recover, among the hundreds of notebooks left by Ackerman in a Brooklyn motel, a half finished novel.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Colombian writers speak about violence in Colombia and in Colombian Literature. Óscar Collazos, Daniel Samper and William Ospina talk to Uruguayan writer and journalist Claudia Amengual.
From El Pais (in spanish, "translated")

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Colombian Literature