"He was not the most honest or pious of men, but he was courageous." So begins the tale of Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, the dashing swordsman at the heart of best-selling Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte’s new series set in 17th- century Madrid, now coming to theaters.
Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, The Lord of the Rings) will bring the swashbuckling mercenary to the screen in Alatriste, a 20th Century Fox production due to hit U.S. screens later this year. The film, helmed by Agustín Díaz Yanes and based on a script by Díaz Yanes and Perez-Reverte, is Spain’s first entry in the international blockbuster sweepstakes. Mortensen’s costars include Elena Anaya (Van Helsing) and Javier Cámara (Talk To Her).
You can find the article here
Friday, February 17, 2006
Hector Babenco and Gael Garcia Bernal will team up for a film version of Alan Pauls' novel El Pasado
Gael Garcia Bernal is teaming up with Brazil's noted filmmaker Hector Babenco for a new feature. Daily Variety reports Bernal will star in O Pasado, or "The Past"...based on the Argentine novel by Alan Pauls.
The story concerns a married couple who breaks up...the man tries to move on...but the ex-wife hounds him, as well as the other women in his life. Shooting on the film is scheduled to being in early July in Argentina... on a budget of $5 million U.S.
You can find the article here
The story concerns a married couple who breaks up...the man tries to move on...but the ex-wife hounds him, as well as the other women in his life. Shooting on the film is scheduled to being in early July in Argentina... on a budget of $5 million U.S.
You can find the article here
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb
A review of Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil
Robb's time in Brazil is mostly spent in Recife, capital of Pernambuco, where the view is most often from his table at his favourite restaurant. Robb is such a good food writer that he makes even simple bar snacks sound sublime. The pleasure he takes in food is matched only by his inquisitiveness about its origins and social context, and these passages are some of the best in the book.
As well as dissecting Brazilian cuisine's tastiest morsels, Robb savours some of Brazil's greatest writers on his way to PC's demise. Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre are all expertly filleted and presented. He also digests landmark events in the country's history: its "discovery" in 1500, Zumbi's republic of escaped slaves and the war of Canudos. The book is as good a portrait of Brazil as anything else I have read.
The main narrative of A Death in Brazil concerns the Collor years. The book feels especially relevant because of the election, at the end of 2002, of Lula as Brazilian president. This is a blessing and a curse. Lula's victory - it was his fourth attempt - gives Robb a happy ending and neatly brings everything up to date. Yet it also reinforces a sense that the book is politically naïve.
Lula is over-romanticised as the perfect working-class hero. We learn of his impoverished upbringing in the Pernambuco drylands, his truck journey to the urban south as a child and his emergence as a union leader in the 1970s. Collor is a cardboard cutout of greed, incompetence and outrageous privilege. Yet Brazilian politics has more shades of grey than in Robb's bipolar world. Less than a year and a half into Lula's presidency, facts are emerging about the unscrupulous links between his own campaign finances and organised crime. North-eastern power structures may underpin Brazilian politics, but they are not the full account.
Still, it is very Brazilian to be passionate, idealistic and opinionated. This Robb does well. I found myself agreeing with almost all his insights into Brazilian life, such as when he remarks on the "avoidance of confrontation of any kind, an endless elasticity of evasion and spurious amiability". Robb, who wrote the successful Midnight in Sicily as well as M, a biography of Caravaggio, has a reputation as an Italy hand. His contact with Brazil has come from regular visits over the past two decades. Yet he has managed to capture the country's spirit and paradoxes in a way few other writers have.
You can find the article here
Buy A Death in Brazil at Amazon.com
Robb's time in Brazil is mostly spent in Recife, capital of Pernambuco, where the view is most often from his table at his favourite restaurant. Robb is such a good food writer that he makes even simple bar snacks sound sublime. The pleasure he takes in food is matched only by his inquisitiveness about its origins and social context, and these passages are some of the best in the book.
As well as dissecting Brazilian cuisine's tastiest morsels, Robb savours some of Brazil's greatest writers on his way to PC's demise. Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre are all expertly filleted and presented. He also digests landmark events in the country's history: its "discovery" in 1500, Zumbi's republic of escaped slaves and the war of Canudos. The book is as good a portrait of Brazil as anything else I have read.
The main narrative of A Death in Brazil concerns the Collor years. The book feels especially relevant because of the election, at the end of 2002, of Lula as Brazilian president. This is a blessing and a curse. Lula's victory - it was his fourth attempt - gives Robb a happy ending and neatly brings everything up to date. Yet it also reinforces a sense that the book is politically naïve.
Lula is over-romanticised as the perfect working-class hero. We learn of his impoverished upbringing in the Pernambuco drylands, his truck journey to the urban south as a child and his emergence as a union leader in the 1970s. Collor is a cardboard cutout of greed, incompetence and outrageous privilege. Yet Brazilian politics has more shades of grey than in Robb's bipolar world. Less than a year and a half into Lula's presidency, facts are emerging about the unscrupulous links between his own campaign finances and organised crime. North-eastern power structures may underpin Brazilian politics, but they are not the full account.
Still, it is very Brazilian to be passionate, idealistic and opinionated. This Robb does well. I found myself agreeing with almost all his insights into Brazilian life, such as when he remarks on the "avoidance of confrontation of any kind, an endless elasticity of evasion and spurious amiability". Robb, who wrote the successful Midnight in Sicily as well as M, a biography of Caravaggio, has a reputation as an Italy hand. His contact with Brazil has come from regular visits over the past two decades. Yet he has managed to capture the country's spirit and paradoxes in a way few other writers have.
You can find the article here
Buy A Death in Brazil at Amazon.com
Daniel Chavarria Featured at International Book Fair Cuba 2006
Internationally acclaimed Uruguayan author Daniel Chavarria drew hundreds of readers to the presentation of his new novel during the 15th International Book Fair, currently underway in Cuba.
"Priapus," an entertaining story filled with humor and eroticism, won Chavarria the important Camilo Jose Cela literature prize granted by Spain's Palma de Mallorca city hall.
The novel, set in a Cuban village, portrays a young doctor who finds a high occurrence of priapism (persistent and painful erection of the penis) among the local male population.
You can find the review here
Find Daniel Chavarria's books at Amazon.com
"Priapus," an entertaining story filled with humor and eroticism, won Chavarria the important Camilo Jose Cela literature prize granted by Spain's Palma de Mallorca city hall.
The novel, set in a Cuban village, portrays a young doctor who finds a high occurrence of priapism (persistent and painful erection of the penis) among the local male population.
You can find the review here
Find Daniel Chavarria's books at Amazon.com
The Man of My Life, by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Review of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's The Man of My Life
This is Montalbán's tone: disappointed melancholy. The same people who had lost the Civil War, then fought to defeat the dictatorship, lost the democracy. Not only were they still at the bottom of the heap, but now their memories were trashed: "The bulldozers had torn down his childhood cinemas, his childhood schools, his childhood neighbours".
Do not think that Montalbán's books are just gloomy, leftist treatises on defeat and a happier past. The Carvalho mix is funny, too: the detective is scathingly witty about the powerful. He is an original eccentric, burning books and cooking all night. The novels are peppered with recipes and descriptions of feasts.
The Man of My Life is a novel of the millennium, with murder now wrapped in religious passion and Satanic cults that have replaced Communist parties. However, the real Satanists are not the weird sects of lost children, but the same crooks as ever: capitalist society that ravages its victim-members for profit. Montalbán interweaves with the public story a deeply private tale of lost youth and love, an extended meditation on ageing and loneliness.
The Man of My Life tells the story of two women who love and pursue Carvalho. One is his long-time on-off lover, the ex-prostitute Charo. The other is Jessica, the teenage beauty of Southern Seas. Her return to the detective's life leads to the novel's most beautiful scenes.
Like other late Carvalhos, The Man of My Life rambles too much. To some degree, its digressions reflect how Carvalho has become the most passive of detectives, trapped between childhood memories and fearful old age. He finally does react, though, and more fiercely than ever before. Despite his sarcasm, Carvalho is no cynic. Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, he is the man of honour walking the mean streets of a sick society.
You can find the full review here
Buy The Man of My Life at Amazon.com
Buy El Hombre de Mi Vida at Amazon.com
Find other Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's books at Amazon.com
This is Montalbán's tone: disappointed melancholy. The same people who had lost the Civil War, then fought to defeat the dictatorship, lost the democracy. Not only were they still at the bottom of the heap, but now their memories were trashed: "The bulldozers had torn down his childhood cinemas, his childhood schools, his childhood neighbours".
Do not think that Montalbán's books are just gloomy, leftist treatises on defeat and a happier past. The Carvalho mix is funny, too: the detective is scathingly witty about the powerful. He is an original eccentric, burning books and cooking all night. The novels are peppered with recipes and descriptions of feasts.
The Man of My Life is a novel of the millennium, with murder now wrapped in religious passion and Satanic cults that have replaced Communist parties. However, the real Satanists are not the weird sects of lost children, but the same crooks as ever: capitalist society that ravages its victim-members for profit. Montalbán interweaves with the public story a deeply private tale of lost youth and love, an extended meditation on ageing and loneliness.
The Man of My Life tells the story of two women who love and pursue Carvalho. One is his long-time on-off lover, the ex-prostitute Charo. The other is Jessica, the teenage beauty of Southern Seas. Her return to the detective's life leads to the novel's most beautiful scenes.
Like other late Carvalhos, The Man of My Life rambles too much. To some degree, its digressions reflect how Carvalho has become the most passive of detectives, trapped between childhood memories and fearful old age. He finally does react, though, and more fiercely than ever before. Despite his sarcasm, Carvalho is no cynic. Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, he is the man of honour walking the mean streets of a sick society.
You can find the full review here
Buy The Man of My Life at Amazon.com
Buy El Hombre de Mi Vida at Amazon.com
Find other Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's books at Amazon.com
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Julio Cortazar - Argentina
Biography:
Julio Cortázar (sometimes called "Grandísimo Cronopio" in reference to a genus of fantastic creatures he created) was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1914, to Argentine parents. When he was four years old, his family returned to Buenos Aires to a section of town called Banfield. After completing his studies at the University of Buenos Aires, he became a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza, in the middle 1940s.
In 1951, in opposition to the Perón regime, Cortázar emigrated to France, where he lived until his death. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a translator. His translation projects included Spanish renderings of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and it is commonly noted that Poe's influence is recognizable in his work.
In his later years he underwent a political transformation, becoming actively engaged with leftist causes in Latin America, and openly supporting the Cuban Revolution and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
He was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez (in 1953), Ugné Karvelis and Carol Dunlop.
Julio Cortázar died of leukemia in Paris in 1984 and was interred there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. It has recently been suggested that AIDS (contracted through a blood transfusion before this disease was identified and given a name) may have been the cause of his death, though the fact not only reminds uncomfirmed, but is sometimes considered a urban myth.
You can find the full biography here
Related Posts:
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Diary of Andrés Fava by Julio Cortázar
Final Exam by Julio Cortázar
Works:
1938 - Presencía
1949 - Los Reyes
1951 - Bestiario
1956 - Final del juego
1959 - Las Armas Secretas
1960 - Los Premios - The Winners
1962 - Historias de Cronopios y de Famas - Cronopios and Famas
1963 - Rayuela - Hopscotch
1964 - Cuentos
1966 - Todos Los Fuegos El Fuego / All the Fires the Fire
1967 - El perseguidor y otros cuentos
1967 - Blow-Up And Other Stories
1967 - La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos - Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
1968 - Ceremonias
1968 - Buenos Aires
1968 - 62 / Modelo para armar - 62: A Model Kit
1969 - Último round
1970 - Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura (with Oscar Collazos and Mario Vargas Llosa)
1970 - Viaje alrededor de una mesa
1971 - La isla a mediodía y otros relatos
1971 - Pameos y meopas
1972 - Prosa del observatorio
1973 - Libro de Manuel
1973 - La casilla de los Morelli
1974 - Octaedro
1976 - Humanario
1976 - Los relatos (3 vols.)
1977 - Alguien Que Anda Por Ahi
1979 - Un Tal Lucas
1980 - A Change of Light and Other Stories
1981 - París: ritmos de una ciudad
1981 - Queremos Tanto a Glenda
1983 - Deshoras
1983 - Los autonautas de la cosmopista
1983 - Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce - Nicaraguan Sketches
1984 - Salvo El Crepusculo
1984 - Argentina: años de alambradas culturales
1984 - Nada a Pehuajó, y Adiós, Robinson
1985 - Cortázar
1986 - El Examen
1986 - Divertimento
1987 - Policrítica en la hora de los chacales
1987 - Diario de Andres Fava - Diary of Andres Fava
1989 - Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales
1990 - Cartas a una pelirroja
1994 - Cuentos completos (1945-1982)
1994 - Siete Cuentos
1994 - Obra crítica (3 vols.)
On film:
1966 - Blow-Up - Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Julio Cortázar (sometimes called "Grandísimo Cronopio" in reference to a genus of fantastic creatures he created) was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1914, to Argentine parents. When he was four years old, his family returned to Buenos Aires to a section of town called Banfield. After completing his studies at the University of Buenos Aires, he became a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza, in the middle 1940s.
In 1951, in opposition to the Perón regime, Cortázar emigrated to France, where he lived until his death. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a translator. His translation projects included Spanish renderings of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and it is commonly noted that Poe's influence is recognizable in his work.
In his later years he underwent a political transformation, becoming actively engaged with leftist causes in Latin America, and openly supporting the Cuban Revolution and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
He was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez (in 1953), Ugné Karvelis and Carol Dunlop.
Julio Cortázar died of leukemia in Paris in 1984 and was interred there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. It has recently been suggested that AIDS (contracted through a blood transfusion before this disease was identified and given a name) may have been the cause of his death, though the fact not only reminds uncomfirmed, but is sometimes considered a urban myth.
You can find the full biography here
Related Posts:
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Diary of Andrés Fava by Julio Cortázar
Final Exam by Julio Cortázar
Works:
1938 - Presencía
1949 - Los Reyes
1951 - Bestiario
1956 - Final del juego
1959 - Las Armas Secretas
1960 - Los Premios
- The Winners1962 - Historias de Cronopios y de Famas
- Cronopios and Famas1963 - Rayuela
- Hopscotch1964 - Cuentos
1966 - Todos Los Fuegos El Fuego / All the Fires the Fire
1967 - El perseguidor y otros cuentos
1967 - Blow-Up And Other Stories
1967 - La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos - Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
1968 - Ceremonias
1968 - Buenos Aires
1968 - 62 / Modelo para armar
- 62: A Model Kit 1969 - Último round
1970 - Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura (with Oscar Collazos and Mario Vargas Llosa)
1970 - Viaje alrededor de una mesa
1971 - La isla a mediodía y otros relatos
1971 - Pameos y meopas
1972 - Prosa del observatorio
1973 - Libro de Manuel
1973 - La casilla de los Morelli
1974 - Octaedro
1976 - Humanario
1976 - Los relatos (3 vols.)
1977 - Alguien Que Anda Por Ahi
1979 - Un Tal Lucas
1980 - A Change of Light and Other Stories
1981 - París: ritmos de una ciudad
1981 - Queremos Tanto a Glenda
1983 - Deshoras
1983 - Los autonautas de la cosmopista
1983 - Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce - Nicaraguan Sketches
1984 - Salvo El Crepusculo
1984 - Argentina: años de alambradas culturales
1984 - Nada a Pehuajó, y Adiós, Robinson
1985 - Cortázar
1986 - El Examen
1986 - Divertimento
1987 - Policrítica en la hora de los chacales
1987 - Diario de Andres Fava
- Diary of Andres Fava1989 - Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales
1990 - Cartas a una pelirroja
1994 - Cuentos completos (1945-1982)
1994 - Siete Cuentos
1994 - Obra crítica (3 vols.)
On film:
1966 - Blow-Up
- Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Purity of Blood
If the phrase "mission impossible" hadn't already been used elsewhere, it would have made a perfect title for Arturo Pérez-Reverte's second adventure featuring the lethal mercenary with a conscience known as Capt. Diego Alatriste. Instead, the renowned Spanish novelist has chosen "Purity of Blood" for this follow-up tale of intrigue and double-dealing in 17th century Madrid.
The title is an ominous reference to a delicate complication Alatriste must confront as he takes on a clandestine assignment that is doomed. The year is 1623, and the grizzled warrior is considering a return to active duty as a soldier in Flanders, where hostilities with the Dutch are flaring anew. It's also a place where his facility with knife and pistol might give him some needed distance from people in high places who are still annoyed at having been outmaneuvered in a previous encounter.
But as we learned in last year's "Captain Alatriste," the first novel in a five-part series (Pérez-Reverte wrote the series early in his career, but they are only now being translated into English), this is a man whose moral streak occasionally clouds his judgment. Last time around, his intended marks were allowed to escape by virtue of having displayed uncommon courage in the face of death. Now Alatriste is persuaded by a good friend, the notable poet-about-town Francisco de Quevedo, to rescue the daughter of a prominent patron from the clutches of a lascivious priest. The reason her father is unable to rescue her from the convent himself is out of fear that he will be exposed for a heritage that lacks "purity of blood" - in other words, for being of Jewish ancestry. This would be catastrophic for his family's name and fortune.
You can find the full review here
Buy Purity of Blood at Amazon.com
Buy Limpieza de sangre at Amazon.com
If the phrase "mission impossible" hadn't already been used elsewhere, it would have made a perfect title for Arturo Pérez-Reverte's second adventure featuring the lethal mercenary with a conscience known as Capt. Diego Alatriste. Instead, the renowned Spanish novelist has chosen "Purity of Blood" for this follow-up tale of intrigue and double-dealing in 17th century Madrid.
The title is an ominous reference to a delicate complication Alatriste must confront as he takes on a clandestine assignment that is doomed. The year is 1623, and the grizzled warrior is considering a return to active duty as a soldier in Flanders, where hostilities with the Dutch are flaring anew. It's also a place where his facility with knife and pistol might give him some needed distance from people in high places who are still annoyed at having been outmaneuvered in a previous encounter.
But as we learned in last year's "Captain Alatriste," the first novel in a five-part series (Pérez-Reverte wrote the series early in his career, but they are only now being translated into English), this is a man whose moral streak occasionally clouds his judgment. Last time around, his intended marks were allowed to escape by virtue of having displayed uncommon courage in the face of death. Now Alatriste is persuaded by a good friend, the notable poet-about-town Francisco de Quevedo, to rescue the daughter of a prominent patron from the clutches of a lascivious priest. The reason her father is unable to rescue her from the convent himself is out of fear that he will be exposed for a heritage that lacks "purity of blood" - in other words, for being of Jewish ancestry. This would be catastrophic for his family's name and fortune.
You can find the full review here
Buy Purity of Blood at Amazon.com
Buy Limpieza de sangre at Amazon.com
A Cock-Eyed Comedy by Juan Goytisolo
Ferlinghetti forever! Ginsberg rejoice! City Lights Books has done it again -- the bourgeois-bashing San Francisco publisher is stirring up trouble with the publication of Juan Goytisolo's religious gay sex farce, "A Cock-Eyed Comedy."
Goytisolo's new novel, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, is a fun, troubling, troublesome read. It's a tome of time travel -- Europe in the Middle Ages, the dark basement of a Parisian cinema house, Castro's Cuba, a 1980s gay bathhouse in Manhattan and more. It's also a jumble of literary forms: novel retold, poetry recalled, scraps of diary and news reports recaptured. As a collection of texts working to form a single narrative, it is, well, hard to follow.
"A Cock-Eyed Comedy" begins, really, as a picaresque novel with a Don Quixote-like protagonist, Father Trennes, who gets busy recounting a string of gay sexual encounters using the high language of Scripture: "After hallowing me, he'd stay on, insatiably ardent, searching for new hallelujahs steeped in indulgences." And further, "The only solution ... was to allow him to come up to my room for a quick prayer before breakfast. ... Prayer meetings thus continued for more than fifteen years." Father Trennes, later, transfigures himself from the itinerant Catholic cleric into the boorish leader of Opus Dei, a conservative present-day church organization.
You can find the full review here
Buy A Cock-Eyed Comedy at Amazon.com
Goytisolo's new novel, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, is a fun, troubling, troublesome read. It's a tome of time travel -- Europe in the Middle Ages, the dark basement of a Parisian cinema house, Castro's Cuba, a 1980s gay bathhouse in Manhattan and more. It's also a jumble of literary forms: novel retold, poetry recalled, scraps of diary and news reports recaptured. As a collection of texts working to form a single narrative, it is, well, hard to follow.
"A Cock-Eyed Comedy" begins, really, as a picaresque novel with a Don Quixote-like protagonist, Father Trennes, who gets busy recounting a string of gay sexual encounters using the high language of Scripture: "After hallowing me, he'd stay on, insatiably ardent, searching for new hallelujahs steeped in indulgences." And further, "The only solution ... was to allow him to come up to my room for a quick prayer before breakfast. ... Prayer meetings thus continued for more than fifteen years." Father Trennes, later, transfigures himself from the itinerant Catholic cleric into the boorish leader of Opus Dei, a conservative present-day church organization.
You can find the full review here
Buy A Cock-Eyed Comedy at Amazon.com
Written Lives by Javier Marias
Spanish writer Javier Marias has been celebrated around the world for decades as a master of fiction and non-fiction. His books have sold five million copies in more than 40 languages, and his weekly articles in El Pais, in which he muses on politics, art or wherever his thoughts take him, have an enormous following. This 'clandestine greatness' was profiled in the New Yorker last year, when Marias published the first volume of his tour de force of treachery and espionage, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, which is set in England. So why doesn't Marias have a larger audience in Britain? Indeed, why is comparatively little of his work (a mere eight, soon to be nine, of his 29 books) available in English? Marias's passionate readers feel exhilarated when a new title arrives, then hold their breath while his skilful translator, Margaret Jull Costa, tries to keep up with the backlog.
Written Lives, which contains essays on well-known literary figures, probably won't do much to broaden his reputation, but it does prove what a beguiling, clever and original writer Marias is, and may act as a taster for the next volume of Your Face Tomorrow, due here in June. In the introduction, Marias says that his selection of writers was 'arbitrary', the only stipulations being that they were dead and not Spanish. In fact, the book is more personal than that; quite a few of the writers he's translated into his native language. The result is a survey of 26 international authors, among them Conan Doyle, Madame du Deffand, Faulkner, Kipling, Nabokov, Rilke, Sterne and Wilde, who led illustrious but primarily tragic lives. Marias knows the dangers of taking on subjects who have been dissected many times over, and his solution is to treat them 'as if they were fictional characters'. As an observer-cum-biographer, he allows himself to embellish history, filter material, omit certain facts and dwell on others, stopping short of invention. He brings these well-known faces into the light by making them seem strange, even bizarre.
You can find the full review here
Buy Written Lives at Amazon.com
Written Lives, which contains essays on well-known literary figures, probably won't do much to broaden his reputation, but it does prove what a beguiling, clever and original writer Marias is, and may act as a taster for the next volume of Your Face Tomorrow, due here in June. In the introduction, Marias says that his selection of writers was 'arbitrary', the only stipulations being that they were dead and not Spanish. In fact, the book is more personal than that; quite a few of the writers he's translated into his native language. The result is a survey of 26 international authors, among them Conan Doyle, Madame du Deffand, Faulkner, Kipling, Nabokov, Rilke, Sterne and Wilde, who led illustrious but primarily tragic lives. Marias knows the dangers of taking on subjects who have been dissected many times over, and his solution is to treat them 'as if they were fictional characters'. As an observer-cum-biographer, he allows himself to embellish history, filter material, omit certain facts and dwell on others, stopping short of invention. He brings these well-known faces into the light by making them seem strange, even bizarre.
You can find the full review here
Buy Written Lives at Amazon.com
Carlos Fuentes in South Africa
The University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Literature and Language Studies is pleased to announce that the second Nadine Gordimer Lecture will be given by the distinguished Mexican writer and public intellectual, Carlos Fuentes.
Born in Panama in 1928, Fuentes has spent parts of his life in the United States, Switzerland, Chile, Argentina and France. Since the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University, he has adopted Mexico as his home country. A diplomat and public intellectual who speaks and writes with immense authority and range especially on Latin American history and cultural affairs, Fuentes has won major awards in Europe and Latin America, notably the National Prize for Literature in Mexico and the Miguel Cervantes Prize. Much of his early work, in novels such as 'The Death of Artemio Cruz', was concerned with Mexican national identity.
More recently, he said the following: "There are now 30-year old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned...You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don’t necessarily have to deal with Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity...We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican. Now the problem is to discover difference - not identity but difference: sexual difference, religious difference, political difference, moral differences, aesthetical differences..."
Gordimer has said of Fuentes: "He has brought up in his grasp with the rubble and uncut gems, the confusion of our human existence, something of the truth. And he has achieved the imaginative maturity of the intellect by which he has been able to give us, through his art, a share of the truth. That is all a writer can do."
More information here
Born in Panama in 1928, Fuentes has spent parts of his life in the United States, Switzerland, Chile, Argentina and France. Since the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University, he has adopted Mexico as his home country. A diplomat and public intellectual who speaks and writes with immense authority and range especially on Latin American history and cultural affairs, Fuentes has won major awards in Europe and Latin America, notably the National Prize for Literature in Mexico and the Miguel Cervantes Prize. Much of his early work, in novels such as 'The Death of Artemio Cruz', was concerned with Mexican national identity.
More recently, he said the following: "There are now 30-year old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned...You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don’t necessarily have to deal with Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity...We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican. Now the problem is to discover difference - not identity but difference: sexual difference, religious difference, political difference, moral differences, aesthetical differences..."
Gordimer has said of Fuentes: "He has brought up in his grasp with the rubble and uncut gems, the confusion of our human existence, something of the truth. And he has achieved the imaginative maturity of the intellect by which he has been able to give us, through his art, a share of the truth. That is all a writer can do."
More information here
The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez
A brief review of Tomas Eloy Martinez' The Tango Singer.
Tomas Eloy Martinez originally set out to write a book about Buenos Aires for Bloomsbury's "Writer in the City" series before his novelist's instincts took over. This explains why the Argentine capital is the real protagonist of The Tango Singer.
"I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third storey upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear," writes Bruno Cadogan, visiting the inflation-stricken city to research a thesis about Jorge Luis Borges' essays on tango.
You can find the full review here
Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com
Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com
Tomas Eloy Martinez originally set out to write a book about Buenos Aires for Bloomsbury's "Writer in the City" series before his novelist's instincts took over. This explains why the Argentine capital is the real protagonist of The Tango Singer.
"I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third storey upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear," writes Bruno Cadogan, visiting the inflation-stricken city to research a thesis about Jorge Luis Borges' essays on tango.
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Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com
Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com
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