Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco

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).
(...)The narration cuts continually from past to present, with the tale of the couple's humiliating voyage to New York twinned with the story of Marlon fighting for survival in the underbelly of New York. At the same time, the novel's emotional center neatly fuses the drama of Marlon's struggle for life with his absurd drive (absurd, that is, to everyone but him) to find Reina.

It's all quite slickly done and (warning!) readers of this slim volume will most likely refuse to put it down until they discover where fate will lead Marlon.

However, despite its readability and Franco's obvious skill as a narrator, there is something disappointingly empty at the core of this tale. For one thing, it's hard to sustain belief in Marlon's naive passion for Reina throughout the course of his harsh adventures. (The boy gets treated to a crash course in Life on the Mean Streets 101 and yet learns almost nothing about who can or cannot be trusted?)

But it's not just Reina who fails to convince. All the women in this story fall a bit too neatly into basic categories (sexy saint, sexy sinner, unsexy saint, unsexy sinner, etc.) and the scenes that include them too quickly ring hollow. Unfortunately, that includes the encounters with the restaurant owner's wife who is Marlon's savior in New York - interjecting an awkward and not terribly credible scenario into a plot that up until then had been spinning like a top.

And then, a second warning about this novel: There's sensitivity in the writing, but this is not a story for the sensitive. The novel is, after all, billed as urban realism and there is some ugly language and gritty detail to match. (If you don't really want to have to think too much about what it would be like to clean toilets in a restaurant, don't read this book.)

However, for readers who want to dip into the dark urban currents emerging in Latin literature as well as to enjoy a survival tale (and the love story here is a survival tale as well), this tight and skillfully plotted novel would be the book.

You can find the review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Javier Marias, one of Spain’s leading novelists, turns his hand to literary mini-biography in these short sketches of writers’ lives, supposedly written "as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated". In practice his method is more conventional. While admitting to having "embellished" certain stories from his subjects’ lives, he assures us that nothing is invented. The result shuns the equivocations of the more careful sort of biographer without straying into outright fantasy.

The line-up of writers is mainly Anglophone, and includes several whom Marias has worked on as a translator, such as Laurence Sterne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Vladimir Nabokov. Each is approached via a particular viewpoint or characteristic: Joseph Conrad on land, for instance, or Thomas Mann and suffering.

You can find the full review here

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Javier Bardem is set to star in the adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera

Javier Bardem is set to star in the big-screen adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's much-loved book, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Bardem, a Spanish actor, starred in The Sea Inside, which won best foreign language film at the 2005 Oscars. He also received an Oscar nomination for Before Night Falls, in which he played Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Bardem played in The Dancer Upstairs and just completed filming Goya's Ghosts, directed by Milos Forman.

Garcia Marquez had long resisted allowing a film version of Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985. The book was an international bestseller, but he feared a big-budget English adaptation of his novel would ruin its spirit.

He was pursued for two years by Scott Steindorff of Stone Village Entertainment, before they reached an agreement in 2004. The Nobel-prize winning novelist lives in Mexico and is now battling cancer.

Mike Newell, who helmed romances such as Four Weddings and A Funeral and Mona Lisa Smile, is directing Cholera with a script by Ronald Harwood, who wrote The Pianist.

You can find the full article here

The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes is Mexico’s pre-eminent intellectual. When a Harvard academic rails against Hispanic immigrants, Fuentes trashes him in the international press. When the Spanish language is in need of an apologist, he steps up to the lectern. Now Fuentes, who dabbled in speculative fiction for his novel Christopher Unborn, reprises his role as soothsayer to offer a glimpse of Mexican democracy’s darkly comic future.

The Eagle’s Throne is set in 2020, as Mexico enters the run-up to a presidential election. As politicians grapple with the usual mix of student revolts, workers’ strikes and peasant unrest they must face a greater crisis. In retaliation for Mexican opposition to armed intervention in Colombia by the US, the US president (one Condoleezza Rice) has cut off Mexico from all forms of electronic communication - "the globalised world’s equivalent of a desert".

Forced to overcome a distrust of putting thoughts on paper, the Mexican ruling class is reduced to writing letters. The model is Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. An 18th-century template sits uneasily with 21st century conditions - but let us suspend our disbelief for the sake of entertainment and read on.

In a succession of letters we are introduced to the colourful dramatis personae: Maria del Rosario Galvan, a scheming beauty with an appetite for king-making; young Nicolas Valdivia, a handsome, French-schooled political debutant; Bernal Herrera, the reliable Interior Secretary; Xavier "Seneca" Zaragoza, the President’s trusted adviser; Defence Secretary Mondragon von Bertrab, who swears "loyalty to the President, as long as the President remains loyal to the institutions of the Republic"; the stolidly brutal police chief Cicero Arruza; the President’s fawning, lecherous Chief of Staff, Tacito de la Canal; a wizened former president who speaks in riddles and harbours a secret that could undo all the players’ expectations.

"With me everything is political, even sex," Maria del Rosario warns Nicolas early on. This cues a deluge of references to Clausewitz, Lampedusa, Hitler, Stendhal, Dumas, Humboldt, Dickens, Conrad, Shakespeare, Kafka and other worthies. Fuentes does not wear his considerable erudition lightly. His characters have mastered Machiavelli, are au fait with French philosophes, know the classics by heart.

As they lock antlers with each other, they unburden themselves in letters that distil Mexican politics’ conventional wisdom. Platitudes are plentiful ("to be a politician you must be a hypocrite"), as are local coinages: "If you don’t deceive you don’t achieve," or "He who isn’t living off the public purse is living in error."

The most noteworthy observations come from the pen of plotting former presidents. "Before becoming president, a man has to suffer and learn. If not, he’ll suffer and learn during his presidency, at the country’s expense," a former occupant of the presidential chair - the Eagle’s Throne of the title - warns the incumbent.


You can find the review here

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Carlos Fuentes in South Africa II

Delivering the second Nadine Gordimer lecture at Wits University and extending the transatlantic dialogue programme at Brown University -- where Fuentes is professor at large -- are key to that hemispherical interchange. "Transatlantic culture must include South Africa," he says. "So this is a north-south visit, or south-north, if you prefer."

Trim, deploying vigorous hand gestures and mobile eyebrows, Fuentes belies his 77 years. He’s dressed in simple, writerly fashion: slightly rumpled white shirt with pen and spectacles peeking out from the pocket, coal-grey slacks, blue socks and light-brown shoes. Hair is brushed back from his forehead and the peppery moustache is neatly trimmed.

Quixote forms the basis for his Gordimer lecture, so I ask about the Tobias Smollett translation of 1755 and the 2003 Edith Grossman version. Fuentes is on record as saying that Smollett’s is "the one where the feeling and the tone both come through ... the homage of a novelist to a novelist."

"Every translation reflects the taste and style of the time," Fuentes begins. "The Smollett hadn’t been published since the 18th century. I discovered a copy in the library of the University of Virginia, and took it to my publishers.

"The translation is in the style of Smollett’s own work, a picaresque novel of the 18th century; it is contemporaneous. The merit of the Grossman translation is that it does not pretend to be cute. It’s a straightforward, very readable version in contemporary English."

He doesn’t agree with literary theories that the second half of the 20th century belonged to Latin-American writers. "That’s right and wrong, because there were also others. The community of writers and novelists creates a special sense of belonging. I don’t feel alone reading Pamuk, Gordimer, Grass. This is the positive aspect of globalisation."

What is he reading? "Writers have periscopes! But I don’t get enough time to read everything I want to. Coming to South Africa, I am reading Nadine’s books again, and others. But I don’t like making lists, only of the bad. I read for inspiration, or to escape from what I am writing."

He learned English at the age of four in Washington, DC, where his father, a career diplomat, was posted. But whatever the vagaries of the peripatetic life of a diplomat’s son -- he was also raised in Buenos Aires and Santiago -- he was sent home, each June to September, to his grandmothers.

"I write novels thanks to my grand-mothers. They are the novelists. They kept alive my love of the Spanish language. I dream in Spanish, I insult in Spanish, I make love in Spanish, which causes complications."

Don Quixote and Carlos Fuentes are inextricably entwined. In his novel, The Old Gringo (1985), Fuentes has the title character (based on legendary American journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce) set off for Mexico with a copy of Cervantes, saying, "All my life I’ve wanted to read the Quixote. I’d like to do it before I die. I’ve given up writing forever."

Not so Fuentes. His new book, The Eagle’s Throne, both revives the epistolary novel and pays homage to Machiavelli’s The Prince. It is set in 2020, when Condoleezza Rice is president of the United States, Mick Jagger is still touring and Fidel Castro is going strong. America has cut off all electronic communication to and from Mexico and so people have to be in touch by letter (or cassette tape).

You can find the article here

Find Carlos Fuentes' Books at Amazon.com

Alatriste - The Movie

"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

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

A first hand impression of Carlos Fuentes

From El Blog Diablogico

For some reason I had always imagined that Fuentes would present a more solemn and patrician figure, like an austerely bookish version of your typical ranch-owning 'Don', but up close in person last night he appeared more pocket-sized and fragile, more paperback than hardback, and a tone or two darker than he had from back in row R in the Purcell Room. But the twinkle in his eye was unmistakeable.

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

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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

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

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