Theodore McDermott: The Obstacles is, in a lot of ways, a coming-of-age story, but it’s also an incredibly ambitious-and achieved-book. How old were you when you wrote it?
Eloy Urroz: I started The Obstacles after finishing Las leyes que el amor elige (1993), my first novel. So I wrote it between ‘93 and ‘95, more or less, while I was getting my BA at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). It was first published in 1996 in Mexico and then reissued in Spain in 2002. For the second edition, I polished it a lot. I guess I was 26 or 27 years old when I first wrote it.
And yes, in a lot of ways it is a coming-of-age story. It resembles, for example, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in that the search for love is a central theme, and-again like Flaubert’s novel, as well as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man-one of the central rites of passage a protagonist undergoes concerns his love for a prostitute who becomes, through that love, the object of a desperate desire. The characters Federico Ross, Ricardo Urrutia, and Elias are all seeking love and not getting it.
TM: I ask because while the book is very close to youth thematically, it’s very mature formally and stylistically. Was this deliberate? An attempt to complicate youth and the concept of "coming-of-age," things that are often treated quite straightforwardly in literature?
EU: I don’t think it was deliberate in that sense. I’ve always loved Vargas Llosa’s The Green House. To me, it’s the best Latin American novel of the twentieth century. I’ve always been captivated by its complex structure. What I wanted in The Obstacles was to have different narrators mixing up their stories, complicating the novel’s narrative. I wanted there to be different voices, and, if possible, different styles for each voice. So each one has a different style, more or less. In total there are five narrators if you look carefully: four are young men (Ricardo, Elias, Solon, and Federico Ross), and then there’s the old priest, August Roldan.
Don Quixote’s intertwined stories and the many narrators who interrupt the main story influenced me greatly. Stylistically, Onetti was very important for me; formally, Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers pushed me toward that kind of innovation. But, above anything else, Don Quixote and The Green House stand out.
You can find the interview here
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Interview With Chilean Filmmaker Raúl Ruiz
Question: Where do you imagine your tomb?
Raúl Ruiz: In a satellite, circling the earth.
Q: What do you recall of the military junta?
RR: The sound of a helicopter. It was permanent sound. I always think of the scene when Henry Hill is being chased by the police in the Marin Scorsese movie "Goodfellas."
Q: What was your relationship with Nicanor Parra like? Are you familiar with all of his work?
RR: Yes, I have read everything. At one time I was very good friends with him because he came every Sunday, sometimes every day, to have breakfast at my mother’s house. She was from Mulchén and he was from Chillán, so they had a lot in common.
Q: Is Nicanor a good candidate for the Nobel Prize?
RR: What does the Nobel Prize matter? No one even remembers the names of the majority of past winners. He has had recognition and he deserves more. But I am against prizes in general, and I am allowed to be against them since I have won some. I don’t know. To believe in prizes is to believe in the importance of the number 10. Prizes let people compare, but an artist is characterized by not being comparable.
You can find the article here
Raúl Ruiz: In a satellite, circling the earth.
Q: What do you recall of the military junta?
RR: The sound of a helicopter. It was permanent sound. I always think of the scene when Henry Hill is being chased by the police in the Marin Scorsese movie "Goodfellas."
Q: What was your relationship with Nicanor Parra like? Are you familiar with all of his work?
RR: Yes, I have read everything. At one time I was very good friends with him because he came every Sunday, sometimes every day, to have breakfast at my mother’s house. She was from Mulchén and he was from Chillán, so they had a lot in common.
Q: Is Nicanor a good candidate for the Nobel Prize?
RR: What does the Nobel Prize matter? No one even remembers the names of the majority of past winners. He has had recognition and he deserves more. But I am against prizes in general, and I am allowed to be against them since I have won some. I don’t know. To believe in prizes is to believe in the importance of the number 10. Prizes let people compare, but an artist is characterized by not being comparable.
You can find the article here
Gabriela Mistral
Gabriela Mistral
SILENT DIMENSIONS OF GABRIELA MISTRAL: A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIMES
Of all the poets who have sprung from the dramatic Chilean landscape, few have achieved the worldwide recognition of the country’s first Nobel laureate, Gabriela Mistral. In spite of all the honors given her work, the person behind the poetry remains distant and somewhat mysterious to the majority of the Chileans who grow up reading her work in school. Verses such as "Todas Ibamos a Ser Reinas" (We Were All Going to be Queens) and "Dame la Mano" (Give Me Your Hand) are still widely enjoyed, but few people are aware of the more complex side of the poet’s personality, or of the difficult relationship she had with her country of birth.
Born Lucila Godoy in 1889 in the rural community of Vicuña, her early school days were marked by an episode of public humiliation which resulted in a group of classmates demeaning and ostracizing her. Teachers advised Mistral’s mother that she was mentally incapacitated and should be removed from school. Despite this advice, however, she was able to continue her education and began working as a teacher’s assistant at the age of 15.
She began writing under the pseudonym of Gabriela Mistral and was awarded the highest distinction in the Santiago Floral Games of 1914. Working as a school director in Temuco during the 1920s, she applauded the first, shy verses of a boy named Pablo Neruda.
Biographer Volodia Teitelboim (National Literature Prize 2002) speaks of her passion on the subject of the condition of women in Chile and her belief that the most effective and liberating weapon is education. Because of Mistral’s outspokenness on subjects such as the stratification of social classes and the stigmatization of single mothers, together with her provincial background, she clashed with local intellectual circles, making her an unpopular figure while she lived in Chile.
You can find the article here
SILENT DIMENSIONS OF GABRIELA MISTRAL: A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIMES
Of all the poets who have sprung from the dramatic Chilean landscape, few have achieved the worldwide recognition of the country’s first Nobel laureate, Gabriela Mistral. In spite of all the honors given her work, the person behind the poetry remains distant and somewhat mysterious to the majority of the Chileans who grow up reading her work in school. Verses such as "Todas Ibamos a Ser Reinas" (We Were All Going to be Queens) and "Dame la Mano" (Give Me Your Hand) are still widely enjoyed, but few people are aware of the more complex side of the poet’s personality, or of the difficult relationship she had with her country of birth.
Born Lucila Godoy in 1889 in the rural community of Vicuña, her early school days were marked by an episode of public humiliation which resulted in a group of classmates demeaning and ostracizing her. Teachers advised Mistral’s mother that she was mentally incapacitated and should be removed from school. Despite this advice, however, she was able to continue her education and began working as a teacher’s assistant at the age of 15.
She began writing under the pseudonym of Gabriela Mistral and was awarded the highest distinction in the Santiago Floral Games of 1914. Working as a school director in Temuco during the 1920s, she applauded the first, shy verses of a boy named Pablo Neruda.
Biographer Volodia Teitelboim (National Literature Prize 2002) speaks of her passion on the subject of the condition of women in Chile and her belief that the most effective and liberating weapon is education. Because of Mistral’s outspokenness on subjects such as the stratification of social classes and the stigmatization of single mothers, together with her provincial background, she clashed with local intellectual circles, making her an unpopular figure while she lived in Chile.
You can find the article here
Monday, February 20, 2006
The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes
The year is 2020. The setting is a Mexico bubbling with corruption, injustice and social unrest. President Lorenzo Teran has just demanded that the U.S. pay more for Mexican oil and withdraw its troops from Colombia. So begins Carlos Fuentes's novel, "The Eagle's Throne".
The day after Teran's tirade, the "gringos," now led by a woman president, retaliate by sabotaging a satellite system that controls Mexico's communications, robbing the country of phone calls, e-mail and faxes, and driving it back to pen and paper.
The politicians fear to put anything on record. Yet communication is essential if they are to exploit a wave of protests, including a student sit-in, a strike and a march by peasants. The novel consists of letters among the president's friends and foes. We hear from the finance minister, two creepy generals and a shady former president known as ``The Old Man.''
Fuentes, 77, handles this material with a skill born of experience. In addition to being Mexico's leading man of letters, he once served his country as a diplomat.
You can find the review here
Buy The Eagle's Throne at Amazon.com
Interview with Francisco Goldman
Interview with the Author of The Divine Husband
Francisco Goldman's heritage stems from his American Jewish father and his Guatemalan mother. He was raised in Eastern Massachusetts and began his writing career covering the Central American wars in the 1980s, first for Esquire and later for Harper's. He is the author of three novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman and recently The Divine Husband (September 2004). His first two novels have won numerous awards, and Goldman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as other accolades. He teaches at Trinity College, and his writings have appeared in major publications too numerous to list. Francisco Goldman divides his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City.
The Divine Husband, as you will learn in the conversation that follows, was inspired by the legendary Cuban cultural patriarch Jose Martí's famous love poem, "La Niña de Guatemala." Martí spent only a little more than a year in Guatemala, where much of this novel takes place. But that time affected his life and most certainly affected Guatemala. Goldman's rich tapestry of history and fiction is a splendid tale with vital and spirited characters: Maria de las Nieves, whose relationship with Great Man Martí as well as the paternity of her child are the engine of this narrative; Mack Chinchilla, described as a Yankee-Indio entrepreneur who courts Maria; Wellesley Bludyar, a British diplomat and an another of Maria’s suitors; and Don Jose, the Jewish umbrella repairman, her closest confidante and The Mysterious Muchacho.
Here is novelist Claire Messud's take on The Divine Husband: "For all its considerable length, tightly compacted. No paragraph is extraneous, or ignorable, as the account--occasionally breathless--doubles back on itself, takes up and reworks strands like a Bach invention, all the while providing distinct narrative tenors for its three central characters, María, and Martí, and Mack. The book offers frames within frames, tour-de-force descriptions, grand set pieces. It is replete with idiosyncratic details and strange historical facts. The prose slides from lyrical to practical, the diction from august to mundane. Goldman echoes Flaubert, Garciá Marquez, and even DeLillo, as well as biography and newspaper journalism, but he remains his own literary master, and in this book succeeds in making the novel new. He has produced a work of ambition, seriousness, passion, and seething life. The Divine Husband confirms Goldman as one of America's most significant living novelists, a voice of audacity and gravitas that serves as inspiration to writers and readers alike."
You can find the article here
Francisco Goldman's heritage stems from his American Jewish father and his Guatemalan mother. He was raised in Eastern Massachusetts and began his writing career covering the Central American wars in the 1980s, first for Esquire and later for Harper's. He is the author of three novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman and recently The Divine Husband (September 2004). His first two novels have won numerous awards, and Goldman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as other accolades. He teaches at Trinity College, and his writings have appeared in major publications too numerous to list. Francisco Goldman divides his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City.
The Divine Husband, as you will learn in the conversation that follows, was inspired by the legendary Cuban cultural patriarch Jose Martí's famous love poem, "La Niña de Guatemala." Martí spent only a little more than a year in Guatemala, where much of this novel takes place. But that time affected his life and most certainly affected Guatemala. Goldman's rich tapestry of history and fiction is a splendid tale with vital and spirited characters: Maria de las Nieves, whose relationship with Great Man Martí as well as the paternity of her child are the engine of this narrative; Mack Chinchilla, described as a Yankee-Indio entrepreneur who courts Maria; Wellesley Bludyar, a British diplomat and an another of Maria’s suitors; and Don Jose, the Jewish umbrella repairman, her closest confidante and The Mysterious Muchacho.
Here is novelist Claire Messud's take on The Divine Husband: "For all its considerable length, tightly compacted. No paragraph is extraneous, or ignorable, as the account--occasionally breathless--doubles back on itself, takes up and reworks strands like a Bach invention, all the while providing distinct narrative tenors for its three central characters, María, and Martí, and Mack. The book offers frames within frames, tour-de-force descriptions, grand set pieces. It is replete with idiosyncratic details and strange historical facts. The prose slides from lyrical to practical, the diction from august to mundane. Goldman echoes Flaubert, Garciá Marquez, and even DeLillo, as well as biography and newspaper journalism, but he remains his own literary master, and in this book succeeds in making the novel new. He has produced a work of ambition, seriousness, passion, and seething life. The Divine Husband confirms Goldman as one of America's most significant living novelists, a voice of audacity and gravitas that serves as inspiration to writers and readers alike."
You can find the article here
The Crack Manifesto
In July 1996, five Mexican novelists (Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Jorge Volpi) published "The Crack Manifesto" deciding to break the tradition of Magical Realism and return to, what they called an "aesthetic of dislocation", multiplicity and more or less deterministic chaos.
You can find these five texts: The Crack’s Fair by Pedro Ángel Palou, Crack’s Genealogy by Eloy Urroz, A Pocket Septet by Ignacio Padilla, The Risks of Form: The Structure of the Crack Novels by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Where Was the End of the World? by Jorge Volpi here
You can find these five texts: The Crack’s Fair by Pedro Ángel Palou, Crack’s Genealogy by Eloy Urroz, A Pocket Septet by Ignacio Padilla, The Risks of Form: The Structure of the Crack Novels by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Where Was the End of the World? by Jorge Volpi here
Carlos Fuentes in South Africa III
Fuentes endorsed the writer's right to militate when his own come into power. "The writer must be the voice that rankles."
He spoke of the silent, insidious violence of television and the media. Writing literature offered other possibilities to human beings, he said.
Fuentes said he grew up listening to radio in Washington in the 1930s. "When Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling, I imagined the fight through what the radio announcer said. Baseball was also an aural experience. We no longer listen, we see; we do not care about the bombing we see on television. It robs us of our capacity to judge our thinking; knowledge is more important than information, but knowledge requires us to be well informed."
Napoleon invaded Russia in 1810, said Fuentes. Then Tolstoy came along and wrote War and Peace. If Tolstoy had not existed, the Napoleonic invasion of Russia would not be part of our reality today.
War and Peace is a deep examination of the psychological phenomenon of war and how it related to power, Gordimer said. It relates also to the present psychology of war:
"The idea that God must help us because we are on the right side; the people on the other side are also calling their gods, which brings the question of who the gods should answer.
"Can you think of a time when writers have been a force in changing policies?" she asked. "Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir wrote about France's withdrawal from Algeria, but did they have any influence on ordinary people?" And in South Africa, she asked, did writers have any influence on the mass of people?
We were left with this: illiteracy and semi-literacy, shockingly prevalent, continue to deprive the masses of the stimulation provided by these and other writers, and to deprive these writers of readers.
You can find the article here
Find Carlos Fuentes' Books at Amazon.com
He spoke of the silent, insidious violence of television and the media. Writing literature offered other possibilities to human beings, he said.
Fuentes said he grew up listening to radio in Washington in the 1930s. "When Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling, I imagined the fight through what the radio announcer said. Baseball was also an aural experience. We no longer listen, we see; we do not care about the bombing we see on television. It robs us of our capacity to judge our thinking; knowledge is more important than information, but knowledge requires us to be well informed."
Napoleon invaded Russia in 1810, said Fuentes. Then Tolstoy came along and wrote War and Peace. If Tolstoy had not existed, the Napoleonic invasion of Russia would not be part of our reality today.
War and Peace is a deep examination of the psychological phenomenon of war and how it related to power, Gordimer said. It relates also to the present psychology of war:
"The idea that God must help us because we are on the right side; the people on the other side are also calling their gods, which brings the question of who the gods should answer.
"Can you think of a time when writers have been a force in changing policies?" she asked. "Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir wrote about France's withdrawal from Algeria, but did they have any influence on ordinary people?" And in South Africa, she asked, did writers have any influence on the mass of people?
We were left with this: illiteracy and semi-literacy, shockingly prevalent, continue to deprive the masses of the stimulation provided by these and other writers, and to deprive these writers of readers.
You can find the article here
Find Carlos Fuentes' Books at Amazon.com
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
In my present state of what may be termed retirement, increasingly have I sought solace in books. Thus it was that my hand fell on a small volume titled The Alchemist by the Brazilian, Paulo Coelho. It failed to remind me where and when it had been acquired, facts that usually are routinely recorded before a book is shelved.
For two days, unable to put it down, I fell under the charm of this strange little book (just over 170 pages), whose back cover blurb reads: "Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever."
A rather too dramatic pronouncement, one might say, for, when I thought about it, I had to admit that it had not so much changed my life as it had convinced me that the worth of a work of fiction need not be judged purely on its large size, resulting from the writer's desire to hold the reader enraptured through a depiction of the lives of three or four generations; nor on the many action events chasing others through the pages; and certainly not on the appeal of torrid love scenes, nor the clever clues as to who had committed the murder(s).
As a matter of fact, although ostensibly a work of fiction, being (to return to the blurb) the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a treasure, the book seemed to me to fit quite neatly into the category of philosophical or even motivational musings. With a final lean on the blurb (for now), this novel is about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path and following our dreams.
Of the people the boy meets on his journey, the first, apart from his own father who advised him to become a shepherd if he desired to travel, is an old man whom his first instinct is to ignore, so caught up is he in his latest book. "The boy was tempted to be rude, and move to another bench, but his father had taught him to be respectful of the elderly".
To his huge surprise, after only a cursory glance at the cover (not the blurb) the old man pronounces the book important, if irritating. "It's a book that says the same thing almost all the books in the world say", continued the old man. "It describes people's inability to choose their own destinies. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world's greatest lie."
You can find the review here
Buy The Alchemist at Amazon.com
For two days, unable to put it down, I fell under the charm of this strange little book (just over 170 pages), whose back cover blurb reads: "Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever."
A rather too dramatic pronouncement, one might say, for, when I thought about it, I had to admit that it had not so much changed my life as it had convinced me that the worth of a work of fiction need not be judged purely on its large size, resulting from the writer's desire to hold the reader enraptured through a depiction of the lives of three or four generations; nor on the many action events chasing others through the pages; and certainly not on the appeal of torrid love scenes, nor the clever clues as to who had committed the murder(s).
As a matter of fact, although ostensibly a work of fiction, being (to return to the blurb) the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a treasure, the book seemed to me to fit quite neatly into the category of philosophical or even motivational musings. With a final lean on the blurb (for now), this novel is about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path and following our dreams.
Of the people the boy meets on his journey, the first, apart from his own father who advised him to become a shepherd if he desired to travel, is an old man whom his first instinct is to ignore, so caught up is he in his latest book. "The boy was tempted to be rude, and move to another bench, but his father had taught him to be respectful of the elderly".
To his huge surprise, after only a cursory glance at the cover (not the blurb) the old man pronounces the book important, if irritating. "It's a book that says the same thing almost all the books in the world say", continued the old man. "It describes people's inability to choose their own destinies. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world's greatest lie."
You can find the review here
Buy The Alchemist at Amazon.com
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - Review
Once it crosses the Rio Grande, the movie shifts into more overtly allegorical territory without losing its bearings. When Pete and Mike encounter an old blind man living in the middle of nowhere, the scene recalls a host of filmic precedents, including "Frankenstein" and Hitchcock's "Saboteur." Under a baking sun, in a stunning variety of scenery captured, splendidly, by cinematographer Chris Menges, the rancher/border cop odd couple trade murderous glances, not so different from Bogart, Huston and Holt in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."
More sparingly than he did in the compelling "Amores Perros" or the pointlessly fractured "21 Grams," screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga juggles flashbacks with present-tense action, particularly in this film's early stretches. Some of it may be confusing in terms of chronology. Other notions strain credulity. At one point Estrada and Norton's restless, unloved wife, Lou Ann, meet for a motel room assignation, while Pete and waitress Rachel enjoy each other a few rooms away; later, Norton comes face-to-face with another undocumented Mexican woman he brutalized during a sweep. Yet the acting is so good throughout, and Texas native Jones does such a sharp, unforced job of directing a story dear to his geographical and spiritual heart, "The Three Burials" is the rare film that gets better and better as it goes.
In essence it's a story about two guys hauling a rapidly decaying dead man across a line on the map--"Bring Me the Corpse of Melquiades Estrada." But as Arriaga and Jones prove, a lot happens on either side of any divide.
You can find the review here
More sparingly than he did in the compelling "Amores Perros" or the pointlessly fractured "21 Grams," screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga juggles flashbacks with present-tense action, particularly in this film's early stretches. Some of it may be confusing in terms of chronology. Other notions strain credulity. At one point Estrada and Norton's restless, unloved wife, Lou Ann, meet for a motel room assignation, while Pete and waitress Rachel enjoy each other a few rooms away; later, Norton comes face-to-face with another undocumented Mexican woman he brutalized during a sweep. Yet the acting is so good throughout, and Texas native Jones does such a sharp, unforced job of directing a story dear to his geographical and spiritual heart, "The Three Burials" is the rare film that gets better and better as it goes.
In essence it's a story about two guys hauling a rapidly decaying dead man across a line on the map--"Bring Me the Corpse of Melquiades Estrada." But as Arriaga and Jones prove, a lot happens on either side of any divide.
You can find the review here
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
Buy Paradise Travel at Amazon.com
Saturday, February 18, 2006
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
Buy Written Lives at Amazon.com
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
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
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