The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

A review Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Tango Singer

Tomás Eloy Martínez, who was shortlisted for last year's inaugural International Man Booker Prize, was born in Argentina in 1934. His writing is satisfyingly sharp and eccentric. He casts Eva Perón as one of those women "whose lives were so excessive that, like the inconvenient facts of history, they were left without a real place of their own. Only in novels could they find the place they belonged, as always happens in Argentina to people who have the arrogance to exist too much."

But The Tango Singer is much more than a card-sharp's showy sleight of hand. Ultimately it's a testament to man's desire to transcend death. No one does it more eloquently than the tango singer himself. Martel's haunting performances, sung in seemingly unconnected locations all over Buenos Aires, follow the contours of a map. Read the map and the city's shameful past is revealed.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that a man fills the space around him with images of mountains, stars, kingdoms and people, only to discover shortly before his death that "the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face". Borges would have adored the tango singer's audacious map. And, given that Borges often reviewed books which were never written and profiled writers who never existed, I suspect he would have loved the fact that not only is this glittering homage to him a work of fiction, but it concludes with the words: "all the characters in this novel are imaginary, even those who seem real."

You can find the full review here

Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com

Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com

Hay festival - Cartagena

A report from the Hay festival Cartagena

Deckchairs, umbrellas, bookshops at every corner, people stuffed into marquees apologising profusely as they bump the elbows of their tweed jackets into one other. The Hay festival is a special literary event, a place for readers and writers to come together, to relax in the picture-postcard village of Hay-on-Wye in the hills of the Welsh countryside.
The Hay festival Cartagena is an altogether different proposition. Long-eared donkeys pull carts through the 16th-century walled city. Vendors shout at the inhabitants of the burnt ochre houses. At every corner stand armed police. Rumour has it that for every one in uniform, two more in plainclothes stand idly watching over the city. For this week Cartagena - or Cartagena de Indias to give it its full name, known as La Heroica - has special visitors. Authors from Britain, Europe, and North and South America have converged on the dank, narrow streets of this Colombian city for the four-day festival.
There are the new writers of Latin America such as Colombia's Jorge Franco, who places Romeo and Juliet in the mean streets of Medellín. There is Francisco Goldman, born in the US, who writes in the Spanish of his Guatemalan parents. There is the waspish intellect of Spain's Enrique Vila-Matas. And then there are the British. Hanif Kureishi sits in a hotel lobby receiving visitors with surly charm; Vikram Seth plops himself down in a chair, almost disappearing.

You can find the article here

Casa de Las Americas Awards

Chilean Raul Zurita, Dominican Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, and Portuguese Boaventura de Sousa Santos won on Friday the 2006 extraordinary Casa de Las Americas award in poetry, narration, and essay.

The winners of Jose Lezama Lima (poetry), Ezequiel Martinez Estrada (essay) and Jose Maria Arguedas (narration) awards were announced at a ceremony in the Che Guevara Hall of that cultural institution.

Raul Zurita won the Lezama Lima award for his INRI book of poems, which the jury praised.

Marcio Veloz Maggiolo won the award for his La Mosca Soldado (The Soldier Fly) novel.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos was awarded for raising a universal issue in a controversial way, abridging some of the most acute conflicts in current public policies.

The extraordinary Casa de Las Americas honorary awards have been granted for six years to the best books in the mentioned genres.

You can find the article here

Selected Writings by Ruben Dario

A review of Rubén Darío's Selected Writings

In Spanish, there is poetry before and after Rubén Darío. The Nicaraguan (1867-1916) was the first major poet in the language since the seventeenth century, the end of the Golden Age whose masters included Garcilaso, Saint John of the Cross, Fray Luis, Góngora, Quevedo and Sor Juana. And despite an abundance of great poets in the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic--García Lorca, Alberti, Salinas, Cernuda, Neruda, Vallejo, Paz, Palés Matos, Lezama Lima, to name a few--his stature remains unequaled. The poetic revolution led by Darío spread across the Spanish-speaking world and extended to all of literature, not just poetry. He ushered Spanish-language poetry into the modern era by incorporating the aesthetic ideals and modern anxieties of Parnassianism and Symbolism, as Garcilaso had infused Castilian verse with Italianate forms and spirit in the sixteenth century, transforming it forever. Darío and Garcilaso led the two most profound poetic revolutions in Spanish, yet neither is known abroad, except by Hispanists. They have not traveled well, particularly in English-speaking countries, where they are all but unknown.

Darío's case is the most baffling because he is nearly our contemporary, whereas Garcilaso, who lived from 1501 to 1536, can today be safely left on library shelves along with Petrarch, Ronsard and Spenser. Besides, Garcilaso has by now been so thoroughly assimilated into Spanish poetic discourse that it is easy to overlook his presence in the poetry of Neruda and Paz. Darío's innovations, style and even manner are still contemporary, however, as are the polemics that his poetry provoked among other poets, professors and critics. What is more, his influence penetrated all levels of Latin American and Spanish society, where his voice is still audible in the lyrics of popular love songs; the artistic movement that he founded, Modernismo, had a tremendous impact on everything from ornaments to interior design, from furniture to fashion. Darío, more than a Nicaraguan poet or a Latin American poet, was a poet of the Spanish language--and its first literary celebrity, embraced throughout Latin America and Spain as the most original and modern of poetic voices.

You can find the full review here

Crime fiction in Cuba

The genre has pushed its limits, both aesthetically and politically, in the Mario Conde series of Leonardo Padura, Cuba's best known and most popular crime writer. And it has also crossed the language barrier, with bilingual authors in and out of Cuba who pen their books in English and enjoy a broader market than writers who depend on the vicissitudes of translation.
In her 2004 book on Cuban and Mexican crime fiction, Crimes Against the State Crimes Against Persons (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95), Persephone Braham identifies the genre as neopoliciacos. The Spanish policiaco, like the French policier, is the name for what in English goes by "detective" fiction. The difference is telling. Where the English and American genre stresses the private investigator (Sherlock Holmes), Latin countries focus on the policeman (Inspector Maigret), reflecting societies that privilege the individual or the state, respectively. Of course, the attitudes converge in the figure of the maverick cop (Dirty Harry), an important anti-hero role model for societies like Cuba, and to some extent Mexico, that are or have been run by one-party governments intolerant of dissent.
Policiacos from the early years of the Cuban Revolution, according to Braham, were naively schematic, with the policía as the good revolutionary battling the dastardly plots of exiles and the CIA. But two forces pushed the genre in a different direction.

You can find the full article here

The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez

A review of Guillermo Martinez' The Oxford Murders.

Nothing could be more English than a murder mystery set in Oxford, but Argentinian writer Guillermo Martinez manages to appropriate Morseland with surprisingly assured results. As in all good detective stories, the novel features an unlikely sleuthing twosome - in this case, a young mathematical student from Buenos Aires and his mentor, the fusty Oxford logician Arthur Seldom. The contrast between old and new-world sensibilities is what lends the novel its low-key charm.


You can find the full review here

Guillermo Martinez was born the 29th of July 1962 in Bahia Blanca, Argentina.
He has made a dual career in mathematics and literature.
Martinez' work has been translated into 25 languages.

In praise of the novel

Carlos Fuentes' inaugural speech at the International Literature Festival Berlin, on 6 September 2005.

Carlos Fuentes celebrates the democratic revolution set in motion by Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, and the dialogue of civilisations created by "world literature".

Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: name the novel that you consider the best ever written.

Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and García Márquez, in that order.

The results of this consultation pose the interesting question of the long-seller versus the best-seller. There is, of course, no answer that fits all cases: why does a best-seller sell, why does a long-seller last?

Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605 and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meagre sales of Absalom, Absalom (1936) to those of the really big-seller of the year, Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade.

Which means that there is no actual thermometer in these matters, even if time will not only tell: time will sell.

You can find the full article here

Gabriel Garcia Marquez admits to one year of writer's block

The Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, pioneer of the school of magical realism and probably the best known contemporary author in the Spanish-speaking world, has confessed to suffering from that most humble of literary problems: writer's block.

"I've stopped writing. 2005 has been the first year of my life when I haven't written a line," the Colombian storyteller who revolutionised Latin American literature said in a rare interview with a newspaper at his home in Mexico City.

Garcia Marquez, who galvanised the world with his 1967 epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to be guest of honour at Britain's Hay on Wye international literary festival, which opens today in Colombia's Caribbean port of Cartagena, the writer's birthplace. "In practice, with the experience I have, I could write a new novel without any problem, but people would realise that I hadn't put my heart into it," he told Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper, which will publish the interview on Sunday.

You can find the full article here

Find Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Books at Amazon.com

Curfew by Jose Donoso

Review of José Donoso's Curfew

The exile's return to his native land is the subject of some of the best writing from Latin America in recent years. Julio Cortazar in ''Hopscotch'' and Alejo Carpentier in ''The Lost Steps'' have played brilliant variations on the theme ''you can't go home again.'' Jose Donoso returned to Chile in 1980 after 15 years in Europe. He now lives in Santiago. In ''Curfew'' he has created a small masterpiece in the familiar genre. The book's protagonist is a famous singer of protest songs named Manungo Vera, just returned to Chile after 13 years in Paris. He hasn't been off the plane an hour when someone asks him the inevitable question: ''How does it feel to be living under a dictatorship?'' We already know by then that ''Curfew'' is both the story of a man's search for his roots and a portrait of Chile in the second decade of a military dictatorship no one knows how to get rid of.

You can find the full review here

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Latin american literature

Fernando Meirelles' film gets 10 nominations for the British Academy Film Awards

Socially conscious spy yarn "The Constant Gardener" led the nominations Thursday for the British Academy Film Awards, with 10 nods including best picture.
The film's stars, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, both received acting nominations. The film's Brazilian director, Fernando Meirelles, also is up for an award.

You can find the full article here

Jose Saramago (Portugal)

Biography:
José Saramago, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Azinhaga on 18 November 1922.
For financial reasons he abandoned his high-school studies and worked as a mechanic. After trying different jobs in the civil service, he worked for a publishing company for twelve years and then for newspapers, at one time as assistant editor of "Diário de Notícias".Between 1975/ 80 Saramago supported himself as a translator but since his literary successes in the 1980s he has devoted himself to his own writing. His international breakthrough came in 1982 with Baltasar and Blimunda. Since 1992 he has been living on Lanzarote.

Works:
1947 - Terra do pecado
1966 - Os poemas possíveis
1970 - Provavelmente alegria
1971 - Deste mundo e do outro
1973 - A bagagem do viajante
1974 - As opiniões que o D.L. teve
1975 - O ano de 1993
1976 - Os apontamentos
1977 - Manual de pintura e caligrafia (Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel)
1978 - Objecto quase
1979 - A noite
1980 - Levantado do chão
1980 - Que farei com este livro
1981 - Viagem a Portugal (Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture)
1982 - Memorial do convento (Baltasar and Blimunda)
1984 - O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis)
1986 - A jangada de pedra (The Stone Raft)
1987 - A segunda vida de Francisco de Assis
1989 - História do cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon)
1992 - O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ)
1993 - In nomine Dei
1994 - Cadernos de Lanzarote I
1995 - Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness)
1995 - Cadernos de Lanzarote II
1996 - Cadernos de Lanzarote III
1997 - Todos os nomes (All the Names)
1997 - Cadernos de Lanzarote IV
1998 - Cadernos de Lanzarote V
1999 - O conto da ilha desconhecida (The Tale of the Unknown Island)
1999 - Discursos de Estocolmo
1999 - Folhas políticas (1976-1998)
2000 - A caverna (The Cave)
2000 - A face de Saramago
2001 - A maior flor do mundo
2002 - O homem duplicado (The Double)
2004 - Ensaio sobre a lucidez (Seeing)
2005 - Don Giovanni ou o dissoluto absolvido
2005 - As intermitências da morte

Awards:

1980 - Prémio Cidade de Lisboa
1983 and 1984 - Prémio PEN Club Português
1986 - Prémio da Crítica da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores
1991 - Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela
1993 - Prémio Vida Literária
1995 - Prémio Camões
1998 - Nobel Prize for Literature

Related Posts:

Three Nobel prizes and six other writers ask for the end of the process against Orhan Pamuk
Blindness by Jose Saramago (Review)
The Double by Jose Saramago (Review)

Francisco Goya on Film

Czech director Milos Forman's movie about 18th-century Spanish artist Francisco Goya, Goya's Ghosts, looks as if it could be ready for release this summer. Forman completed filming at the end of December and is now starting post-production. The movie, which stars actors Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman (who plays Goya's teenage muse), should receive its world première in Prague.

You can find the full article here.