Venezuela, the country featured as the guest of honor at the 15th Havana Book Fair to take place in the San Carlos de la Cabaña fortress, is presenting Cuban readers with 1,200 titles (plus one million copies) by classic and contemporary authors.(...)
Venezuelan writers present at the Fair, led by Minister of Culture Farruco Sesto, include authors Carlos Nogueras, Humberto Mata, Luis Britto, Laura Antillano and Stefanía Mosca; poets Tarek William and William Osuna, and filmmaker and poet Edmundo Aray, who will actively participate in the Culture in Defense of Humanity conferences, the Tribu de la Poesía (Poetry Tribe) poetry readings, and panel discussions on culture, national identity and spirituality, and Miranda, Bolívar and Martí: the historical foundations of Latin American integration.
Not forgotten was the deep-rooted relationship between two greats of Cuban and world literature, Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier, with discussion panels and the publication of their work. Several titles by Carpentier are being presented by CERLAG: Visión de América (Vision of America), The Kingdom of this World, The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral.
You can find the full article here
Friday, February 03, 2006
Granada Second International Festival of Poetry
Granada Second International Festival of Poetry will be attended by more than a hundred poets from 30 countries what makes it stands as the most important cultural event held in Nicaragua every year.
According to Francisco de Asis Fernandez, president of the organizing committee, the festival will take place on February 6-11 in the colonial city, south Managua.
More than 100 poets from Ireland, Taiwan, Latin American, the host country and other nations will provide a new opportunity to get in contact with the very best of contemporary poetry and read their texts in public squares and parks of the beautiful city.
You can find the full article here
According to Francisco de Asis Fernandez, president of the organizing committee, the festival will take place on February 6-11 in the colonial city, south Managua.
More than 100 poets from Ireland, Taiwan, Latin American, the host country and other nations will provide a new opportunity to get in contact with the very best of contemporary poetry and read their texts in public squares and parks of the beautiful city.
You can find the full article here
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Interview with Jose Saramago
An interview with Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago by Anna Klobucka (2002).
Saramago's long journey toward literary accomplishment and fame was anything but straightforward. Although he debuted as a novelist at an early age - his Terra do Pecado [Land of Sin] was published in 1947 - he then abandoned for nearly thirty years the genre that was to bring him worldwide recognition. When in 1976 Saramago published his second novel, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, it was subtitled "ensaio de romance," a label that can be translated as both "novel-essay" and "rehearsal for a novel." The latter meaning points to Saramago's notion of writing as an apprenticeship, a laborious process that must be faced with patience and humility.
Although both Saramago and his critics emphasize the formative importance and independent value of his earlier works, for a majority of his readers it was his 1982 historical novel Baltasar and Blimunda (entitled Memorial do Convento in Portuguese) that brought him critical acclaim and a wide readership. It is still perhaps the most widely read and studied of Saramago's novels. It was adapted for the stage by the Italian composer Azio Corghi as the opera Blimunda, which premiered in Milan in 1990. Saramago's unorthodox exploration of historical scenarios, begun with his revisitation of the Portuguese eighteenth century in Baltasar and Blimunda, continued throughout the 1980s and beyond, from the 1930s Portugal of Salazar's dictatorship in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) to ancient Galilee in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).
The official reaction to The Gospel - the Portuguese government vetoed its presentation for the European Literary Prize, claiming that it was offensive to Catholics - prompted Saramago and his wife, journalist Pilar del Río, to move to the Spanish island of Lanzarote in the Canaries, where they continue to reside. The 1990s also marked a change in Saramago's work: his novels Blindness (1995), All the Names (1997), and A Caverna [The Cave] (published in late 2000 and not yet available in English) are darkly philosophical parables that are peopled by frequently nameless characters and that unfold in an undefined but dystopian time and space. Their bleakness, however, is never absolute. They share with Saramago's earlier works an underlying affirmative belief in the dynamic, transformative potential of individual human activity, even as they also suggest an increasingly pessimistic vision of the future of the human race.
An unapologetic leftist and to this day a card-carrying Communist, Saramago has never shunned political involvement or controversy. For many decades, he staunchly defended the role of literature as public discourse and the responsibility of artists and intellectuals to take action in the public sphere. The scope of his engagement with the many causes that have attracted his interest and support has not diminished with age. For example, he contributed a foreword to Our Word Is Our Weapon by Subconmandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Front, the peasant movement in Chiapas, Mexico. If anything, Saramago's visibility as an international spokesperson for what he recently described as "the simple imperative of equal justice for all" has only increased in the years since his Nobel Prize.
You can find the interview here
Saramago's long journey toward literary accomplishment and fame was anything but straightforward. Although he debuted as a novelist at an early age - his Terra do Pecado [Land of Sin] was published in 1947 - he then abandoned for nearly thirty years the genre that was to bring him worldwide recognition. When in 1976 Saramago published his second novel, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, it was subtitled "ensaio de romance," a label that can be translated as both "novel-essay" and "rehearsal for a novel." The latter meaning points to Saramago's notion of writing as an apprenticeship, a laborious process that must be faced with patience and humility.
Although both Saramago and his critics emphasize the formative importance and independent value of his earlier works, for a majority of his readers it was his 1982 historical novel Baltasar and Blimunda (entitled Memorial do Convento in Portuguese) that brought him critical acclaim and a wide readership. It is still perhaps the most widely read and studied of Saramago's novels. It was adapted for the stage by the Italian composer Azio Corghi as the opera Blimunda, which premiered in Milan in 1990. Saramago's unorthodox exploration of historical scenarios, begun with his revisitation of the Portuguese eighteenth century in Baltasar and Blimunda, continued throughout the 1980s and beyond, from the 1930s Portugal of Salazar's dictatorship in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) to ancient Galilee in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).
The official reaction to The Gospel - the Portuguese government vetoed its presentation for the European Literary Prize, claiming that it was offensive to Catholics - prompted Saramago and his wife, journalist Pilar del Río, to move to the Spanish island of Lanzarote in the Canaries, where they continue to reside. The 1990s also marked a change in Saramago's work: his novels Blindness (1995), All the Names (1997), and A Caverna [The Cave] (published in late 2000 and not yet available in English) are darkly philosophical parables that are peopled by frequently nameless characters and that unfold in an undefined but dystopian time and space. Their bleakness, however, is never absolute. They share with Saramago's earlier works an underlying affirmative belief in the dynamic, transformative potential of individual human activity, even as they also suggest an increasingly pessimistic vision of the future of the human race.
An unapologetic leftist and to this day a card-carrying Communist, Saramago has never shunned political involvement or controversy. For many decades, he staunchly defended the role of literature as public discourse and the responsibility of artists and intellectuals to take action in the public sphere. The scope of his engagement with the many causes that have attracted his interest and support has not diminished with age. For example, he contributed a foreword to Our Word Is Our Weapon by Subconmandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Front, the peasant movement in Chiapas, Mexico. If anything, Saramago's visibility as an international spokesperson for what he recently described as "the simple imperative of equal justice for all" has only increased in the years since his Nobel Prize.
You can find the interview here
The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
A review of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's The Silence of the Rain
Inspector Espinosa of Rio de Janeiro's First Precinct, the chief protagonist and part-time narrator of Brazilian author Luiz Alfredo Garcia- Roza's engrossing and captivating novel "The Silence of the Rain," at first seems an unlikely police detective -- and he knows it.
Forty-two and divorced, Espinosa would rather hunt in used-book stores for works by Dickens or Melville or Conrad than hunt criminals. When he looks in the mirror, he sees not an action-film hero like Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford but "the melancholy vision of Harpo Marx." Much of the time, in his book- strewn apartment or in the rainy streets of Rio, Espinosa is lost in a fog of dreamy fantasy: "It seemed he was incapable of sustained rational thought -- a failing that, for a policeman, was embarrassing, to say the least."
A bookish and lonely man, Espinosa is given to whimsical, touching fantasies:
"Some people, when they get home, are welcomed by their wife, their kids, or by a happy dog wagging his tail. I'm greeted by the answering machine. I'm almost positive that it senses my arrival, hears my footsteps on the stairs, recognizes the noise of the keys, and, since it doesn't have a tail to wag, starts blinking frenetically."
You can find the full review here
Inspector Espinosa of Rio de Janeiro's First Precinct, the chief protagonist and part-time narrator of Brazilian author Luiz Alfredo Garcia- Roza's engrossing and captivating novel "The Silence of the Rain," at first seems an unlikely police detective -- and he knows it.
Forty-two and divorced, Espinosa would rather hunt in used-book stores for works by Dickens or Melville or Conrad than hunt criminals. When he looks in the mirror, he sees not an action-film hero like Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford but "the melancholy vision of Harpo Marx." Much of the time, in his book- strewn apartment or in the rainy streets of Rio, Espinosa is lost in a fog of dreamy fantasy: "It seemed he was incapable of sustained rational thought -- a failing that, for a policeman, was embarrassing, to say the least."
A bookish and lonely man, Espinosa is given to whimsical, touching fantasies:
"Some people, when they get home, are welcomed by their wife, their kids, or by a happy dog wagging his tail. I'm greeted by the answering machine. I'm almost positive that it senses my arrival, hears my footsteps on the stairs, recognizes the noise of the keys, and, since it doesn't have a tail to wag, starts blinking frenetically."
You can find the full review here
My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel
A review of Luis Buñuel's autobiography My Last Sigh
In an appropriately poetic end to a tirelessly creative life, Luis Buñuel (whose ashes, curiously enough, are still missing) finished this autobiography just before his death in 1983. Buñuel’s work was visionary, his approach was unique, and his films were incomparable. Beginning with the first surrealist movies he made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age D’Or (1930), Buñuel specialized in the unexpected. In later years, he created such brilliant left-field pieces on hypocrisy and society as Viridiana, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Without Buñuel, the dreamlike touch of horror films, the biting social humor of Almodóvar, and the psychological tension and depth of Hitchcock would not have been the same.
You can find the full review here
In an appropriately poetic end to a tirelessly creative life, Luis Buñuel (whose ashes, curiously enough, are still missing) finished this autobiography just before his death in 1983. Buñuel’s work was visionary, his approach was unique, and his films were incomparable. Beginning with the first surrealist movies he made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age D’Or (1930), Buñuel specialized in the unexpected. In later years, he created such brilliant left-field pieces on hypocrisy and society as Viridiana, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Without Buñuel, the dreamlike touch of horror films, the biting social humor of Almodóvar, and the psychological tension and depth of Hitchcock would not have been the same.
You can find the full review here
Sunday, January 29, 2006
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
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
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
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