Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa

Review of Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist

On first encountering Letters to A Young Novelist's table of contents one gets the impression that the work is written as an elementary guide to non-literary initiates. In reality nothing as simple as that is the case. The book reads like a free flowing conversation between people of a similar aesthetic bent or preoccupation. Rather than developing extraneously conceived and fashionably limiting theories, he illustrates and supports his reasoning by citing a diverse list of traditional writers and their respective works. Vargas Llosa is as well read as he is prolific. Amongst his better known works one finds The Time of the Hero, Conversations in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, In Praise of the Stepmother, and The Feast of the Goat. Vargas Llosa's literary ability and experience as a writer coupled with his erudition as a reader makes for a very eloquent work. A good example of this in Letters to A Young Novelist' comes when the author explores problems of time in writing fiction. He enquires into the possibility that both literary notions of time and narrative point of view jointly account for the believability or degree of persuasive power that a work of fiction conveys.

Even though the main concentration of Letters to A Young Novelist' is the modern novel, the author manages to trace a suitable lineage to some of the techniques and literary styles that have impacted the form in its current stage of development. Another striking aspect of the book is Vargas Llosa's reverence for reading classical works of literature and his humanistic respect for thought.

Another notable angle of this book is Vargas Llosa's respectful and sensitive showcasing or augmentation of the work of European, North American and Latin American writers. His knowledge of the latter is a particularly interesting aspect in that it serves as a short literary history of Latin American writers and the status of literature in the Spanish-speaking world. In this respect alone Letters to A Young Novelist' is essential reading for anyone interested in the development and contribution of Latin American writers to world literature. Vargas Llosa is very objective and even gracious in acknowledging the work of notable and established Spanish and Latin American writers such as: Barroja, Borges, Cervantes and Garcia Marquez. Yet, he is also instrumental in introducing other great writers, some whom are only now beginning to gain respect in translation. Of the latter, he offers insightful comments on the work of Bioy Casares, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuente, Jose Lezama Lima and Juan Carlos Onetti. Of all the writers that he could have included, perhaps the omission of a fellow Londoner, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, author of Three Trapped Tigers (1971), View of the Dawn in the Tropics (1976), and Infante's Inferno (1984) is the most notable oversight.

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In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi

A review of Jorge Volpi's In Search of Klingsor

The narrative is based on Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, which Volpi uses to pull the tension tight. In bleak lodgings Bacon encounters the slinky Irene, who arouses not only his passion but our suspicion that she is acting under alien orders. In interviews with crestfallen German scientists (this is the most sedentary of thrillers) we also learn that physics is just as fallible as fiction, never provable, only probable. But happily physicists work in rage or envy, putting one another's egos as well as theories under the microscope, so there is no shortage of psychological melodrama in these refreshing pages.

Volpi explores the deeper hinterland of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, sharing his concern over the "moral irreconcilables" of wartime. If the characters are somewhat robotic, they are fuelled by high-octane content. Rarely in popular fiction are you paid the compliment of possessing a mind; here the brain-cells tingle for the first time since giving up science at school.

Anyone hoping to feast on language will go hungry, yet Volpi's imagery has its charms. To choose a day for a wedding will be "as agonising as determining the quadrature of a circle", while an orgasm is "just the logical, necessary consequence of the calculations he had mapped out earlier". Meanwhile try applying a lesser-known Einstein formula (a = x + y + z) to the book. If a is success, x is work and y is luck. So what is z? asks a journalist. Keeping your mouth shut, replies Einstein. As does this highly successful story to the very last secret.

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The McOndo Movement

Alberto Fuguet's article "I am not a magic realist!"

Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call "McOndo" -- a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape. Julian Barnes echoes this feeling in his novel "Flaubert's Parrot," where his scholarly narrator declares that the entire genre of magical realism should be banished: "A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America," he says. The example he gives speaks for itself. "Ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tip of its branches, and whose fibers assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner ..." Writers today who mold themselves after the Latin American "boom" writers of the 1960s (García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few) have transformed fiction writing into the fairy-tale business, cranking out shamelessly folkloric novels that cater to the imaginations of politically correct readers -- readers who, at present, aren't even aware of Latino cultural realism. David Gallagher, writing from Chile for the London Times Literary Supplement, considers this obscurity an asset: "These writers don't have an international reputation to protect. Nor do they feel the necessity of submerging themselves in the waters of the politically correct. Since they don't have the advantage of living abroad, they wouldn't even know how to write a PC novel ... they aren't writing for an international audience, and therefore, have no need to maintain the status quo of the stereotypical Latin America that is packaged up for export." I feel the great literary theme of Latin American identity (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of personal identity (who am I?). The McOndo writers -- such as Rodrigo Fresán and Martin Rejtman of Argentina, Jaime Bayly of Peru, Sergio Gómez of Chile, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia and Naief Yeyha of Mexico, to name a few -- base their stories on individual lives, instead of collective epics. This new genre may be one of the byproducts of a free-market economy and the privatization craze that has swept South America. I don't deny that there exists a colorful, exotic aspect to Latin America, but in my opinion, life on this continent is far too complex to be so simply categorized. It is an injustice to reduce the essence of Latin America to men in ponchos and sombreros, gun-toting drug lords and sensual salsa-swinging señoritas. As a character from my second book said: "I want to write a saga, but without falling into the trap of magical realism. Pure virtual realism, pure McOndo literature. Kind of like 'The House of the Spirits,' only without the spirits."

You can find the article here

A 2004 article about the McOndo authors

Call it the curse of Macondo. Since the emergence in the late 1960s of writers such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, Latino literature - at least that which you can find on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble - has been dominated by the magical realism embodied by the mythical village at the heart of García Márquez's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo, where it rains butterflies, grandmothers fly, and the air smells like ripe mangoes, remains a tropical paradise that readers clamor to. It is our personification of the exotic world south of the border.

The only problem is, the average middle class kid growing up in Santiago or Bogotá has about as much chance of witnessing a storm of yellow flowers as you or I, and is more likely to identify with a character who flies in airplanes than one who levitates of his own volition. "My own world," wrote Fuguet in the 1997 piece, "is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' - a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes, and condos." And so a movement was born.

The writers who form McOndo - most notably Fuguet, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia, and Jaime Bayly of Peru, and Jorge Franco of Colombia - are realists of the cultural rather than the magical. Characters speak Spanglish, eat fast-food, surf the Web, and travel easily between Latin America and the United States.

If there is a common thread in the most recent crop of works to be published in translation by McOndo writers, it is the search for a personal identity in a postmodern, globalized world in which boundaries - between countries, histories, and customs - have been thoroughly blurred.


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The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

A review of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat

In those heady days in 1967 when Gabriel García Márquez and his fellow writers of the Latin American literary "boom" regularly descended on Havana to attend Fidel’s shrimp barbecues -- in an age when Che still dashed about the globe on behalf of the Marxist millennium to come -- two of "Gabo’s" most illustrious companions, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and his Mexican counterpart Carlos Fuentes, met in a London pub to hatch a grand literary enterprise. Together they projected an ambitious artistic project tentatively titled Los padres de las patrias (The Fathers of the Nations).

To this collective undertaking a number of the foremost contemporary Latin American writers were each to contribute a novel about a dictator from their respective countries: Fuentes was to write about Santa Ana, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier about Gerardo Machado, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos about José Rodríguez de Francia, and the Argentine Julio Cortázar about Evita Perón. Like many centrally planned enterprises of the era, the project never quite materialized as envisioned. But during the long decades that followed that meeting, years that saw Castro transformed from the hemisphere’s great emancipator into one of its last old-style caudillos and tyrants, and Vargas Llosa from a literary wunderkind and left-wing firebrand into the éminence grise of Latin American neoliberalism, a good many memorable examples of the Latin American dictator novel were published to considerable acclaim.

The most recent novel by the 66-year-old Vargas Llosa is The Feast of the Goat (La Fiesta del Chivo), which was published in Spanish in 2000 and in an admirable English translation by Edith Grossman in 2001. It is a work that recounts with gruesome detail and dramatic intensity the last days of the dictatorship of the Dominican tyrant Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. The Feast of the Goat now takes its place with the finest novels to come out of Latin America in the last 50 years, joining such famous Latin American dictator novels as Miguel Angel Asturias’ The President (El señor Presidente, 1946), Roa Basto’s I the Supreme (Yo el Supremo, 1974), Carpentier’s Reasons of State (El recurso de método, 1975), García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975), and Tomás Eloy Martínez’s The Perón Novel (La novela de Perón, 1985).

The Latin American dictator novel would seem to possess staying power as preternatural as that of "el Macho," the fictional dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch who lives to be over 200 years old and, in a career coextensive with the history of modern Latin America, tyrannizes his island nation for what seems to his abject countrymen an eternity.

You can find the full review here

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Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo

A review of Francisco Rebolledo's Rasero

We live in an age when information is often prized over knowledge, high-tech weaponry and toxic chemicals are destroying the earth, and the culture of reality, because it seems more relevant to us than literature, has usurped the culture of storytelling. This, at any rate, is the thesis of Rasero, a mature first novel by Mexican author Francisco Rebolledo. A roman fleuve descendent from such distinguished forebears as Tolstoi, Dickens or James, Rasero almost seems an anachronism in form, yet it is fundamentally subversive because it challenges our notion of history.

Rebolledo, a former teacher of science and chemistry at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, cleverly juxtaposes Reality versus Truth by showing the reader that interpretation is everything.

First published in Mexico in 1993, Rasero was chosen out of 427 entries from seven Latin American countries for last year's Pegasus Prize. It appears in an excellent English translation by Helen R. Lane. Ms. Lane has previously done justice to such long narratives as Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme and Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World.

The eponymous hero, Fausto Rasero, is an 18th-century Andalusian who has the unusual distinction of having known many of the key figures of the Enlightenment. A resident of Paris throughout much of the book, Rasero hobnobs with Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and philosopher David Hume. He befriends the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen and formulated the modern chemical dictum, "Nothing is lost, nothing is created." Rasero even loans a young Mozart his piano.

You can find the full review here

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

Review of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat and Jean Franco's The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold

All long-term dictators are alike: all short-term dictators vanish in their own short way. This at least is the assumption of many writers and readers, and in Latin America it amounts to something like a political faith. Of course there is nothing peculiarly Latin American about dictators of any kind; but Latin Americans often believe, with feelings ranging from outrage to fascination to resignation and back, that their culture has a special ability to beget and abet these creatures, so that they look at them - or at pictures of them - with the stubborn, unavertable gaze of someone looking into a magic mirror. Hence the tradition of dictator novels, a minor genre with major members: Augusto Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme (1974), Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974), Gabriel García Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and now Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000). The time lag is probably significant, since the latest book is the most literal and least hypnotised of the four. This is a virtue, but not entirely a virtue.

On the last page of I the Supreme the fictional compiler of the text tells us, adapting a sentence from Musil's The Man Without Qualities, that 'the story contained in these Notes consists in the fact that the story which should have been told in it has not been told.' Or as the Supremo himself says (a version of Dr Francia, the ruler of Paraguay from 1814 to 1840), 'one cannot tell stories about absolute power.' The same could be said, with variations, for the Carpentier and García Márquez novels. They caught the myth but not the monster, and they strongly suggest that the monster can't be caught, that perhaps there is no monster, only the undying myth. For Vargas Llosa the monster is easily inspected, and the myth has been dead for years.

The Feast of the Goat concentrates on the last day of the life of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, long-term dictator of the Dominican Republic, and on the aftermath of his assassination on 30 May 1961. Trujillo, trained as an American marine, had been in power since 1930. He was President more than once, and when he wasn't he ran the country through a puppet President he nominated. He modernised agriculture and industry, sharpened up the Army, and put an end, through a gruesome massacre, to immigration from Haiti, which occupies the other half of the island known as Hispaniola. The Americans supported him because, as Cordell Hull said, in a phrase since used countless times of other unappealing figures, 'he was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.' But by 1961 he wasn't their son of a bitch any more. He had fallen foul of the Catholic Church, which had issued a Pastoral Letter against the atrocities of his regime; and his Latin American policies, including an attempt on the life of Rómulo Betancourt, the President of Venezuela, had become too wayward for the American Congress, even after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, or perhaps especially after that. The Americans therefore looked kindly on a conspiracy to assassinate Trujillo, but don't seem to have provided much help beyond a few guns.

You can find the full review here

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‘The Feast of the Goat’ to be screened at Berlin Film Festival

Luis Llosa’s film La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat) will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, as part of the Berlinale’s official program.

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Osvaldo Golijov in New York

Lincoln Center celebrates Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov

Everybody loves Osvaldo Golijov right now, especially Lincoln Center, which is in the midst of a monthlong celebration of the Argentine composer and his work. In the carefully curated world of classical music, this is a pretty extraordinary tribute, usually extended only to such high-profile names as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, or John Adams, prolific senior composers with a proven track record. At 45, Golijov has just one smash hit to his credit: the genre-busting oratorio La Pasión Según San Marcos, an updated, streetwise Crucifixion drama drenched in the heady sounds and rhythms of Latin America and the Caribbean. The work, first heard six years ago, closes Lincoln Center’s festival with performances on February 20 and 21, and will surely intoxicate many more listeners with its sheer theatrical extravagance.
After the St. Mark Passion, Golijov composed nothing of comparable size and ambition until his first opera, Ainadamar, which opened Lincoln Center’s salute at the Rose Theater in the production staged last summer in Santa Fe. This is a revised version of the score premiered at the 2003 Tanglewood Festival, where it received a rather muted reception. Perhaps, after the extroverted drama of the Passion, audiences were not expecting this subdued, brooding meditation on the Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, executed in 1936 by Fascist soldiers at Ainadamar, the "fountain of tears," in Granada. Whatever problems the opera might have had, they now appear to be solved. This 80-minute piece of music theater is a quiet spellbinder, an astonishing demonstration of how an opera can sound completely contemporary yet still convey its message in very potent lyrical song.

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Finalists of the Salambó prize

Writers Marcos Giralt Torrente, Luisgé Martín, Rosa Montero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Alvaro Pombo and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón finalists of the fifth edition of the Salambó Prize of narrative in Castilian.

The jury of this fifth edition of the Salambó in Castilian is formed by Núria Amat, Andrés Barba, Lázaro Covadlo, Lucía Etxebarría, Alejandro Gándara, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Ismael Grasa, Enrique de Hériz, Juan Miñana, Vicente Molina Foix, Andrés Neumann, Isaac Rosa, Jordi Soler, Zoe Valdés and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

The finalist titles are Marcos Giralt Torrente's "Los seres felices"; Luisgé Martín's "Los amores confiados"; Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's "Enterrar a los muertos"; Rosa Montero's "Historia del rey transparente"; Alvaro Pombo's "Contra natura" and Enrique Vila-Matas' "Doctor Pasavento".

Alfredo Bryce Echenique presents "Entre la soledad y el amor".

Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique presented in Lima his new book, "Entre la soledad y el amor", a collection of essays on solitude, love, depression and happiness, subjects in his literary work.

'Escribir un ensayo requiere de mucha seriedad, rigor, y que los textos sean breves, por eso he luchado para que no se me dispare la pluma', aseveró entre risas.

Bryce Echenique relató que al escribir sobre la felicidad intentó refutar a un amigo que decía que 'la felicidad es una frivolidad'.

Es 'algo de lo que discrepo porque él se refería a la felicidad que se grita y yo encuentro que la felicidad es un estado mas pleno donde se realiza cada ser humano al final de la vida', subrayó.

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Hay festival in Cartagena

A report on the Hay festival in Cartagena

Cartagena is still a world apart. A melting pot of African, Amerindian and Iberian cultures, it belongs to the Caribbean, not the Andean or Amazonian landscapes further south. A Unesco world heritage site since 1984, this walled city on South America's northern coast, with its cobbled squares and galleried arcades, is also a place to which Colombians came to escape the troubles: the 40-year civil war, the kidnappings and narco-trafficking, the Left-wing guerrillas and Right-wing paramilitaries.

For the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, "Cartagena is separate from national politics - free of drugs and violence. It's a window on Latin America, but it's also a symbol of the independence of culture from politics."

García Márquez, now approaching 78, has a house within these 16th-century city walls; and the man who nearly six decades ago was being run in by the police was last weekend guest of honour at the inaugural Hay festival in Cartagena. Conceived by the director Peter Florence as a "Hispanic version of Hay-on-Wye" - alongside other Hay festivals in Majorca, Segovia and, from 2007, China - it is to be an annual celebration of Spanish-language writers. But it has also drawn English-language authors - this year, Hanif Kureishi, Vikram Seth and Owen Sheers - hoping to spur interest abroad in the younger generation of Latin American writers; writers who, 40 years on from "El Boom", still fret in the shadow of their literary grandfathers.

The idea for the festival was Fuentes's, though a "commitment to Nadine Gordimer" in South Africa kept him attending, and García Márquez - Gabo, as he is known here - rose graciously in his black-and-white checked jacket to take a bow, but declined to speak. His friend Jaime Abello Banfi says he was "very enthusiastic", but that his status as a living monument can be trying. Harassed on his way to hear Vikram Seth, for instance, the Nobel laureate retreated to the writers' room in a former Carmelite nunnery, to watch the talk on a screen.

So the festival belonged, in a sense, to those younger writers. And at the 1911 Heredia theatre, a rich wedding cake of marble and chandeliers named after the colonial city's founder, audiences were packed. The glamorously well-heeled draped themselves in the lower balconies, while students - some of whom had endured 36 hours in buses or jalopies - craned from the gods.

Not long ago, roads linking Colombia's cities would have been more dangerous, but security is seen to have improved under the conservative president Álvaro Uribe, and there is already an embryonic drive to re-brand the country for tourism. Military police with automatic weapons were stationed on streets and roofs, but according to the culture minister Elvira Cuervo de Jaramillo, "Colombia has two faces: perception and reality."

Writers, of course, have a habit of contesting reality, and it was here in the Caribbean that magical realism - which was, wrongly, conflated with "the boom" - was born, presaged by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier's "lo real maravilloso" in the 1940s. For García Márquez, the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) - the banana plantation he fashioned into a continent's mythic genesis - had deep affinities with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha country in the Deep South. For the Nicaraguan writer and former Sandinista vice-president Sergio Ramírez, a shared African culture is key. "To be from the Caribbean is more an idea, or a sentiment, than a geographical space; it's part of your soul," he says.

For Jorge Franco, a writer in his early forties based in the Colombian capital Bogotá, the boom authors may have been an inspiration but their roots were mainly rural. "Nowadays, we're urban, and our cities are very similar - Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Mexico City, even Madrid. That changes the language." Yet "readers abroad still wanted flying grandmothers; we had a hard time telling them there's a new voice in Latin American writing".

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Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco

They are all around us and yet much of the time we don't even really see them: the army of illegal immigrants who wait tables, deliver groceries, and scrub floors. Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco, however, has the power to change that for its readers. After picking up this book, it's hard not to wonder at every subsequent encounter with a nonnative: "What did this person sacrifice to get here?"
But heightened awareness of the plight of the alien (illegal or otherwise) is not the only reason to pick up this compact and compulsively readable novel, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.

Jorge Franco is a Colombian novelist on the rise, a leader of what is being called the "McOndo" school of fiction, a group of writers seemingly intent on upending the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. (McOndo is a play on words that fuses García Márquez's fictional town of Macondo with McDonalds - denoting a gritty, noirish writing style that one critic has labeled "magical realism dragged into Burger King.")

"Paradise Travel" (Franco's fourth novel and his second to be published in the United States) tells the story of Marlon Cruz, a guileless young Colombian dragged into the world of illegal border crossings by his troubled and wilful girlfriend, Reina. The two live in Medellín, where Marlon entertains no higher ambitions than hanging onto his girlfriend and gaining admission to the university (a hope rendered virtually futile by his lack of connections).


You can find the full review here

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