Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Reviews of Arturo Perez-Reverte's Purity of Blood.
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In Arturo Perez-Reverte’s captivating stories, the world of Alexandre Dumas’s musketeers is ingeniously transposed to 1620s Madrid. Inigo Balboa, their narrator, recalls his experiences at that time as the page and protégé of Captain Alatriste, a taciturn swordsman for hire. The Spain of Inigo’s youth is a superpower enjoying a cultural golden age, with the painter Velazquez, the playwright de Vega and the poet-politician Quevedo (a recurring character in the series) all working in a city that is "the capital of two worlds, old and new". But he looks back on this era from a time of decline: the setting of "a sun that for two centuries had inspired fear and respect throughout the world".

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The furtive figure slips quietly into the darkened house, dressed in mufti rather than in his usual swirling cape. He is armed lightly, with only oiled flintlock, sword and dagger. As he slips toward the bed of his sleeping prey, his aquiline profile and luxuriant mustache are visible by the shadowy light of an oil lamp. Holding a knife to the chin of his latest conquest, he asks: "Do you know who I am?"

You bet we do. He is Capt. Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, the brooding, charismatic hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's wildly successful Spanish swashbuckling novels. He is profoundly cynical yet quietly principled, weary of battle yet ready to duel if he must. He is a man of few words but many melancholy gazes into the void. He has pale, steely eyes and a face that, when glacially calm, delivers "fair notice that it is advisable to take three steps back." This cool, taciturn 17th-century dreamboat will be played by Viggo Mortensen in a large-scale screen adaptation later this year.

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Many historical novels are fluff: costume potboilers like ''The Dante Club." Some manage to be serious fiction that conveys something of the reality of life in another time and place, like Paul Scott's ''The Jewel in the Crown." ''Purity of Blood" is somewhere in between: It's vastly superior to the majority of what passes for historical fiction but doesn't approach the heights of the genre. It's great fun in the tradition of historical swashbucklers such as ''Three Musketeers" or ''The Scarlet Pimpernel," and yet it's not all sword fights and breakneck horseback rides. There's a sadness that gives the novel some depth: the sadness of Diego Alatriste. He spent his youth doing all the right things: He was brave, he served his king, and he was loyal to his comrades in arms. All he has to show for it is a rented room, a lot of old scars, and a line of work likely to kill him.

Pérez-Reverte made his name in the '90s with international bestsellers such as ''The Flanders Panel" (a hyperliterate murder mystery about art history and chess) and ''The Club Dumas" (a supernatural thriller about the antiquarian book trade). His detour into historical fiction became available to American readers last year with ''Captain Alatriste," which introduces Diego and Iñigo.


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The first of the novels, Captain Alatriste, was published in the United States last spring, after taking Europe by storm. It has been made into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen that might not make it to cineplexes: It's in Spanish.
Poor Alatriste, living in a corrupt and overripe Madrid caught between the failure of the Armada and the nightmare of the Inquisition. The gallant captain was wounded in the Thirty Years' War - I don't know what that was about, but never mind. He has no money to show for his courage and no trade except fighting, plus he drinks a lot and is generally melancholy in a heroic fashion.
Also, he has a lot of derring-do. Which he sorely needs in the series' second entry, Purity of Blood, after a friend gets him the job of breaking into a depraved convent and restoring a virtuous novice to her family.
Of course this doesn't go as planned, no thanks to Alatriste's teenage sidekick, Inigo. Let's see, how does it go? Keep your friends close, your enemies closer and your sidekicks at home where they belong.
Though thrilling in places, the Alatriste stories are not meant to be raced through. This is the culture that perfected the art of strolling. The men of Madrid saunter, they swagger, they pause to compose or recite a few lines of verse, then they resume strolling right up to the moment they draw their swords, forged of the finest Toledo steel, and slash away at each other.
Pérez-Reverte has obligingly already written the next three books, so all we have to do is persuade Putnam to release them as quickly as possible.

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Walden Acquires Film Rights to a Trilogy by Isabel Allende

Walden Media bought the rights to a children's book trilogy (City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, Forest of the Pygmies) by the Chilean author Isabel Allende.

Ms. Allende, a vigorous advocate of women's rights with a socialist background, seems like an odd match for Mr. Anschutz, a supporter of conservative causes who has been explicit in his desire to make what he considers moral movies. Cary Granat, a founder and the chief executive of Walden, said that Mr. Anschutz did not intervene in the decision-making at Walden Media. He said that to the company, Ms. Allende "is like a rock star." Her trilogy, which is about a boy and his archaeologist grandmother and their adventures in the Amazon, were a perfect fit for Walden Media.

"It gives an opportunity to tell something that is important to me, which is learning something from a grandparent," he went on. "And I think so many kids today have lost that ability to connect with the older generation."

Ms. Allende's books are published by HarperCollins, which also published the Narnia series. The first book in the trilogy, titled "City of the Beasts," will be produced by Barrie Osborne, who was also a producer of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

You can find the article here

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An interview with Guillermo Arriaga

An interview Mexican author Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter of 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada'

Even a brief reference to the titles and subject matter of Guillermo Arriaga’s work is enough to realize his raw material: death. It’s breath penetrates the screenplays, the novels, leaving an impression on the silver screen, whether its in 'Amores Perros,' '21 Grams,' or in 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,' the latter directed by Tommy Lee Jones.

Even when Arriaga ventured into directing with 'Rogelio' (2000), the dark inspiration was very much there: Rogelio cannot accept his death and carries on visiting his friends.

'Though I belong to a culture in which death is very prominent, I believe it’s some kind of personal obsession,' confessed the Mexican author, adding that what has determined his work so far, 'is an obsession with death and a passion for life.'

Indeed. Robust, with dark, piercing eyes, the 47-year-old Arriaga is full of life. A multifaceted man, Arriaga earned an award at the recent Cannes Film Festival for his screenplay 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,' while his works have been translated into a number of languages.

A guest at the 46th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Arriaga spoke to Kathimerini.


You can find the full interview here

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Novelist Garcia Marquez's birthplace to vote on adding his fictional 'Macondo' to its name

ARACATACA, Colombia - "Welcome to the magical world of Macondo," reads a giant billboard outside Aracataca, the down-on-its-heels town surrounded by banana plantations where Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born.
Macondo, as the Nobel laureate's fans well know, is the fictitious tropical hamlet made famous in his masterwork, "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Now Macondo and the author's birthplace near Colombia's Caribbean coast may become forever joined. To reverse a half-century of economic decline, town leaders hope to cash in on their favorite son's international fame by changing the town's name to "Aracataca-Macondo."


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Final Exam by Julio Cortazar

A review of Julio Cortazar's Examen

There is a reason why that novel, "Final Exam", written in 1949-1950, has taken so long to see print. In an introductory note, Cortazar (who died in 1984, not long before a Spanish edition was finally produced) says merely that "it was impossible to publish the book then".

But much of the responsibility must be placed on the text itself, which is dense, challenging, obscure, highly allusive and at times incoherent, and generally lacks the magic that characterizes the mature Cortazar. At the same time, it is an ambitious, innovative and revealing book, so it will be welcomed by all the Undoomed, members of the Cult of Julio (since "anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed", according to Pablo Neruda).

Cortazar always struggled with longer forms. His masterwork, "Hopscotch", overcomes this by piecing together stories, poems and essays, then allowing the reader to skip from one to another rather than reading them sequentially. But many of his other novels have a planned-out quality that diminishes the spontaneity found in his shorter prose. (Cortazar once wrote that he wanted his writing to be like a jazz ``take'': a single, continuous, improvisational riff.)

You can find the full article here.

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Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A review of Gabriel García Márquez's Vivir para contarla

Since the death of Jorge Luis Borges in 1986, the Spanish-speaking world's most celebrated living writer has been the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "Gabo", as he's almost universally known, found an international readership in the late 1960s, when One Hundred Years of Solitude consolidated "el boom" of Anglophone interest in Latin American fiction.

Since then, Garcia Marquez has been venerated around the world, and by the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1982, his influence on other writers was so pervasive that "magical realism" eventually became a term of abuse. As he has often said, however, the distinctive manner of his best-known books is as rooted in his famously colourful upbringing as it is in his reading of Kafka, Faulkner and Joyce.

You can't fake this stuff, in other words - although this didn't stop an enormous number of writers from trying to do just that in the 1980s. As a result, one of the main points of interest for English-language readers of his new memoir is the extent to which it presents el maestro's novels as springing more or less directly from his family history.

Vivir para contarla - translated by Edith Grossman as Living to Tell the Tale - was a worldwide best-seller when it was published in Spanish last year. The first volume of a projected trilogy, it tells the story of the author's early life until 1955, when death threats from conservative readers of his journalism encouraged him to accept an extended assignment in Europe.


You can find the full review here.

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The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

A review of Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos.

The Seven Madmen is set in Buenos Aires in the then-present-time of 1929 and opens with main character, Remo Erdosain, a self-described "hollow man, a shell moved simply by the force of habit" being accused of embezzling by his employer. That accusation sets loose a chain of events in his life, which ultimately lead him to a gathering of other discontents that make ruthless, detailed plans to set up a "bandit aristocracy." Erdosain is an anguished, pained man whose diatribes portray him as one of the madmen of the title. Nothing goes right for him: his wife, Elsa, leaves him for another man and he's a failed inventor. Darkness pervades his very being. In The Seven Madmen Erdosain is surrounded by various other characters, richly described by Arlt: Ergueta the pharmacist, a gambler with a religious side and his wife, Hipolita, a former prostitute; Gregorio Barsut, Elsa's cousin, a boorish moneyed man who's the focus of the madmen's kidnap plot.

You can find the full review here.

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Roberto Arlt (Argentina)

Argentinean novelist, short-story writer, dramatist and journalist.

Biography:

Roberto Arlt was born in April 2, 1900, in Buenos Aires.

He published El juguete rabioso, his first novel, in 1926. At that time he also began to write for the newspapers Crítica and El mundo. His daily column Aguafuertes Porteñas, appeared from 1928 to 1935 and later was compiled in the book of the same name. These articles are picaresque sketches of the people of Buenos Aires.

In 1935, he traveled to Spain and Africa sent by El Mundo, where he writes his Aguafuertes Españolas. But except for this trip and some escape to Chile and Brazil, he remained in Buenos Aires, as much in the real life as in his novels, Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas.
He died of a heart attack in Buenos Aires, in July 26, 1942.

Works:

1926 - El juguete rabioso (Mad Toy)
1929 - Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen)
1931 - Los lanzallamas
1932 - El amor brujo
1933 - Aguafuertes porteñas
1933 - El jorobadito
1936 - Aguafuertes españolas
1941 - El criador de gorilas
1960 - Nuevas aguafuertes españolas
1968 - Teatro completo
1997 - Cuentos Completos

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Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo

A review of Luis Fernando Verissimo's Borges e os orangotangos eternos (Borges and the Eternal Orangutans)

Most writers feel passionate about Borges, but few would have the temerity to put the enigmatic sage into their fiction. That's because evoking Borges's presence would likely overwhelm any meager thoughts of their own. Yet Brazilian novelist Luis Fernando Verissimo has such temerity, as well as the talent to pull it off. Borges and The Eternal Orangutans does the master proud. (...)

Everything from the details of the characters' biographies to elusive one-liners like "Geography is destiny" connect when the fictional Borges solves the mystery in a letter that weaves together threads unspooled at the beginning of the book. Of course, solutions engender their own questions, and Borges's final statement -- "Even the most fantastical of stories . . . requires a minimum of verisimilitude" -- makes one wonder whether the similarity of the book's last word and the author's last name is a further hint to further mysteries. In any case, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is an authentic whodunit as well as a loving homage to its eponymous detective and a serious meditation on the truths that Borges himself lived to reveal, intuit and invent.

You can find the full review here.

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Luis Fernando Verissimo was born in 1936 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the son of author Érico Verissimo. He is a journalist, humorist and novelist.

The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza

A review of José Carlos Somoza's La caverna de las ideas

Like Russian dolls hidden inside one another, "The Athenian Murders" is a puzzle swathed in a mystery contained inside an enigma. A self-reflexive, literary murder novel, the first of Jose Carlos Somoza's six books to be translated into English stakes its claim on nothing less than the truth: of words, ideas, writing, reading and existence. It's a heavy task but one Somoza executes brilliantly with consistent, graceful prose.

The book opens in ancient Greece, with the death of a student at Plato's Academy. The Decipherer of Enigmas is contacted to help solve the case, and we follow what appears to be a straightforward crime plot. Yet the presence of a fictional translator, whose comments appear in well-crafted footnotes (adding another layer to a book that itself is being read in translation), clues the reader into another dimension of the novel and to its major conceit: The story set in Athens is actually an ancient text in the process of being translated by the unnamed translator. (...)

"The Athenian Murders" is a seductive, captivating yet intellectual novel. Constantly shuffling through the truth along with the characters, the mind is compelled through the book in a most engaging and satisfying way, a combination that is not easy to achieve. Only in the last chapter are the mysteries revealed, and even then it is we alone who are left to decide what it all means. As one character says to the translator, "Writing is a strange business, my friend. In my opinion, it's one of the strangest, most terrible things a man can do. Reading is another."

You can find the full review here.

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Jose Carlos Somoza was born in Habana in 1959. A doctor of medicine, and specialist in psychiatry, he has been writing full-time since 1994.He has received, amongst other awards, the Cervantes Theatre Prize and the Café Gijon Prize, and in 2000 his novel Dafne Desvanecida was shortlisted for one of the most important Spanish literary prizes, the Nadal Prize. The Athenian Murders won the 2003 Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award.

Edition of Cuban poet Regino Eladio Boti's poems

British publisher releases english version of Cuban poet Regino Eladio Boti's poems.

A collection of the best literary works of Cuban poet Regino Eladio Boti was translated into English and published in the easternmost region of Cuba as an accord between the Cervantes Institution based in London and descendants of the writer.

With the edition of Spirit of Brotherhood -Espiritu de Hermandad-London-based Mango Publishing released the first translation into English of poems by the Cuban intellectual.

As held by many critics, Boti renewed Hispanic American poetry of the early 20th century. His poems had been translated before into German by Janheinz Jahn in 1954, and into Russian by Pavel Grushco, 18 years later. (...)

MP is a small, quality independent press, which focuses on publishing and promoting literary works by writers from British, Caribbean and Latin American literary traditions.

It has published translations of important Cuban writers such as world renowned Nicolas Gillen; Nancy Morejon, a winner of the National Literary Prize; among others.

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The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes

Reviews of Carlos Fuentes's Los Años con Laura Díaz (The Years with Laura Díaz)

Carlos Fuentes, occasionally dubbed the Mexican Balzac, makes no bones about the grand plans he has for this vast, panoramic novel. "The hell that is Mexico," says one of the characters named Santiago (there are four, they are all related to one another, and they all die miserably). "Are we predestined for crime, violence, corruption, poverty?" Throughout, rhetorical questions, impassioned speeches, fraught dialogues and urgent declarations dominate the book's spoken content; characters are far more likely to debate the heroic or treacherous qualities of Bukharin or the conduct of the Spanish civil war than they are to pass the time of day in idle pleasantries.

But Fuentes is aware that readers need human contact, and thus he gives us Laura Diaz, eye-witness, eavesdropper and occasional participant in the grand march of history - as well as daughter, wife, mother and, in order to give the novel some light entertainment, a rather racy lover of extraordinary stamina.

You can find the full review here.

Carlos Fuentes, perhaps the best-known representative of Mexico's scholarly and artistic community, decided to create his chronicle of the 20th century through fiction -- and through the eyes of a Mexican woman born at the dawn of that century, Laura Diaz. Nobody would wish to question Fuentes' choice of narrative focus. His character sees the whole century from a corner of the world where the view might be clearer -- think of a runner not in the lead of a race, able to see all the other competitors that a leader can't. Mexico, after all, is tucked in close to the boisterous United States, and women, though a rising force, have usually played the role of witness to history.
The epic begins in the spirit of a Zorro-style 19th century Mexican history.

You can find the full review here.

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