The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo - Review

Frida Kahlo was the first Mexican modern artist to have her work hung in the Louvre, but the price she paid for her achievement was one of crushing emotional torment and lifelong physical pain. She was a vibrant 19-year-old university student in 1926 when a trolley car accident left her body crippled for life; she began painting during her convalescence as a way of passing time. A few years later she fell in love with the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, 21 years her senior; the two married and embarked on a passionate, tempestuous relationship that would last until Kahlo's death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Until the end, despite countless well-publicized infidelities on both their parts, Rivera remained the one great love of Kahlo's life. Amy Stechler's documentary biography, shot in the style of Ken Burns' renowned PBS documentaries on Major League Baseball and the Civil War (Burns served as a consultant on the film), recounts Kahlo's artistic, romantic and medical ups and downs through vintage still photographs, interviews with former students and art experts and snippets of contemporary newsreel footage. Celebrated for her scandalously unconventional lifestyle as much as for the startling originality of her images, of which she was both subject and author, Kahlo carved out a place for herself as a thoroughly modern woman against the background of the political violence and artistic turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Despite her physical frailty, everything she did seemed larger than life. Writer Carlos Fuentes, whom Stechler interviewed, recalls Kahlo's dramatic arrival at the Mexico City opera one night as unforgettable: dressed in a fantastic costume of her own invention and resplendent in an array of tinkling jewels, the artist's every step "sounded like a cathedral with all its bells ringing." Stechler's biography manages to capture the music as well as the drama of Kahlo's brief but brilliant career in this film that lovingly recalls the artist's outsized, operatic heroism and her touching personal vulnerability.

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Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco

A review of Jorge Franco's Paradise Travel

The novel's characters are Colombian, but most of the action is in New York, and one gathers that this is supposed to speak truth in a societal as well as a narrative sense. Colombia, to Marlon's eye, is "a country where a tragedy was lurking around every corner, just waiting to put you into mourning," where Colombians "carried in their expressions all the despair and fatigue of having used up every possible option in this country," one in particular wearing "that guilty, apologetic look on her face, like all Colombians do, especially in foreign airports."

Franco's New York, for its part, projects rightly unequal parts menace and generosity. Early on, Marlon visualizes the city as a beast to be tamed. He luckily has a companion to correct his misimpression.

This author and this book are presented as leading representatives of Colombian literature's "McOndo" movement, which seems, on this lean evidence, to stress the curtly descriptive, the contemporary and the experiential, with an eye toward the uglier truths. There's a hardboiled vibe that recalls midcentury American detective fiction, if midcentury American detective fiction took as its hero the dog that got kicked on the detective's way out the door.

McOndo is a globalized play on the name of the village of Macondo, of One Hundred Years of Solitude lore. That knowledge helps very little in understanding this book, but it does let an average American reader, who hasn't read a page of Colombian fiction since One Hundred Years of Solitude in college, off the hook; thankfully one hasn't missed some crucial, juicy middle in the intervening three-plus decades since Gabriel García Márquez - and magic realism with him - entered North American mass consciousness.

Such an accessible back story, of course, is a large part of how an awkwardly titled (it's the name of the smuggling agency) and conventionally literary and (horror of unmarketable horrors) foreign book like Paradise Travel gets published in the United States at all these days.

But the inevitably misleading hook, however necessary to the book's chance in the marketplace, is purely incidental to its pleasures. When Marlon hits the streets of New York, he emerges almost literally a babe among his countrymen already there, themselves only tenuously acculturated. And even as he achieves small plateaus of guarded comfort, he finds himself faced with "the immigrant's curse: you don't want to stay, but you don't want to go back, either."

You can't, in fact, go back, as many others have written, of countries and of homes, and that's apparently the hell of it. It's as if when you leave, what you put behind you goes away, too. And what's left when that's gone is someplace you've never been, where you might easily lose yourself. As universal fears go, and as truthful fictions follow, this one feels distinctly, if not magically, real.

You can find the review here

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Purity of Blood Arturo Perez-Reverte

Review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Purity of Blood

The world of men - real men, men's men, macho men - has a down-these-mean-streets melancholy in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's sleek swashbuckler "Purity of Blood," whose action takes place in the "turbulent, ruined, but still proud Spain" of 1623, and whose hero, Diego Alatriste, carries sadness in his very name.
"Purity of Blood" is the second installment to be translated (last year's "Captain Alatriste" was the first) in a series that cheekily attempts to do for 17th-century Spain what one of Pérez-Reverte's literary heroes, Alexandre Dumas, did for 17th-century France in the "The Three Musketeers" and its sequels. The formula is roughly the same - swordplay plus political intrigue plus male camaraderie - but the mood here is distinctly darker: like an end-of-the-trail Peckinpah western or one of those noble, tragic Japanese pictures about the masterless samurai known as ronin.

The crepuscular atmosphere of these books might surprise readers whose experience of the historical-swashbuckler genre is limited to old Errol Flynn movies and campy postmodern variants like "Pirates of the Caribbean." Flynn, exuberant and perpetually grinning, would not have been well cast as Pérez-Reverte's Hispano-ronin protagonist, a many-scarred veteran of his nation's imperial wars who, we're told, "could show respect for a God who did not matter to him, fight for a cause in which he did not believe, get drunk with an enemy, or die for an officer or a king he scorned." Despite such hyperbolic prose - it's clear that Pérez-Reverte is entertaining himself hugely - there's nothing remotely camp about this approach to the blood-and-thunder material. Pérez-Reverte's romantic fatalism is pure.

The beauty of popular fiction always lies in that sort of whole-hearted conviction, a writer's faith in courage, honor, integrity, love, whatever - a faith that's impossible to fake, difficult even to acquire. Pérez-Reverte obviously came by his through books and movies - the postmodern way - but he has remained determined, stubbornly and admirably, not to be overly ironic about the secondhandedness of his literary creations. So what if his belief is willed rather than instinctual? So what if he seems to feel he lived more vividly in his childhood reading than he has in his day-to-day existence as an adult? I suspect he's not alone.

You can find the full review here

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Havana Best Friends by José Latour

A review of José Latour's novel Havana Best Friends

Cuba, it seems, is the perfect location for a crime novel: Committees of "volunteers" are encouraged to spy on their neighbours, distrust is rife in everyday life, and there is a constant veneer that hides the truth. Havana Best Friends is José Latour's most recent novel, and he knows of what he speaks. He wrote several successful novels in his native land, winning his first award at the age of 13. Life changed when his fifth book was said to be counter-revolutionary and he became an enemy of the state. Dogged relentlessly by government agents, he left for Spain in 2002 and moved to Canada in 2004.

After he fell out of favour in Cuba, Latour began writing in English, debuting in 1999 with Outcast, nominated for an Edgar Award. He is one of those rare and wonderful beings: a true bilingual. Although occasional odd turns of phrase in Havana Best Friends hint at non-native speech, I was impressed by the novel's fluency of expression and nuance, qualities that are very hard to achieve in a second language.

This is the story of unlikely pairs. Elena and Pablo are estranged siblings who share a spacious apartment in Havana. Sean and Marina, a Canadian couple on holidays, befriend the Cuban brother and sister under what we will discover are false pretences. They have come to Cuba not as tourists, but at the request of their friend Carlos, to scout out a possible $10-million treasure in diamonds that Carlos's father supposedly left behind when the family fled the country after the dictator Batista was overthrown. Are the diamonds still in what is now Elena and Pablo's home? Will Sean and Marina make it out of the country with the loot? I leave that for you to discover.

You can find the full review here

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Guillermo Arriaga - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" seems like just the kind of weird Western Tommy Lee Jones would choose to direct - dark, ghoulishly comic, very intelligent, relentless in driving its point home and perhaps most important, starring Tommy Lee Jones.

Jones was named best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Pete Perkins, a west Texas ranch foreman who becomes best friends and a kind of father figure to Melquiades "Mel" Estrada, a young illegal immigrant from Mexico. Then Mel is killed by a border patrolman (Barry Pepper). The killing is an accident, but would not have happened if the border guard were not so headstrong and prone to violence, particularly against Mexicans.

When it appears that the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam, who invests the role with complex humanity) is going to let the killing slide, Pete takes matters into his own hands. He kidnaps the border patrolman at gunpoint and forces him to dig up Mel's body. With the body slung over a pack horse and decaying by the day, the men head south over the arid mountains and across the Rio Grande, taking Mel home to Mexico to be buried.

It's a long way, and the border guard keeps trying to escape and Pete keeps banging him around and both the border guard and the body get to be in pretty sorry shape. When the corpse becomes infested with ants and the border guard is bitten by a rattlesnake you may find yourself wondering just how much grim comedy you will have to endure. On the other hand, there's something perversely fascinating about this whole epic voyage through hell, in part because the script by Mexican writer Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores Perros") is unpredictable and brilliantly constructed, slipping easily through time and space.

You can find the full review here

Drown by Junot Diaz

Junot Díaz's Drown aims to define the Latin-American hombre and the forces that create him, whether in the Dominican Republic or New Jersey. Simple relationships are examined as young men accompany their mothers to the mall, pine for their missing girlfriends, or discuss the unspoken rules between older and younger brothers.
Although Díaz has spent most of his life in the States, his text reveals a constant state of translation - between languages and cultures - often dropping Spanish slang for which there is no true English equivalent. The author juxtaposes the Third World with the Northeastern Corridor, as adolescents attempt to filter their new environment through their outmoded understanding of life as it had been, constantly comparing new experiences from one place to another. But beware: these are not sugarcoated, coming-of-age tales. Drown takes us on a tour through crack dens with lost youth and leaves us in a living room with a child as his father disappears upstairs with a mistress.

You can find the review here

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The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro by Antonio Tabucchi

Headless bodies are a great opener for a novel. And they're even better when cops fake crucial details -- like the cigarette burns on the flesh. Some young reporter is just the type to identify the body and then the killer, who might be a fretful cop, a former war hero with some weird nickname (the Green Cricket will do nicely), who cut up a kid who interfered with his drug operation. There's nothing wrong, either, with introducing a grand lawyer doing penance for his family's abuse of power or a matron who was once the town's favorite barmaid and still hears the occasional confession. In an ordinary thriller, you might take all these characters at face value.

But Antonio Tabucchi doesn't write that sort of thriller. He's an Italian academic, theoretician and translator, a devotee of Portuguese literature. He's fascinated by the region of Portugal in which his story is set -- Oporto, a northern town of fishwives, the newly rich, corpse hunters, gypsies and memories. He also follows the crime reports in Portugal; this book is close enough to a true scandal of the 90's to have caused a sensation when the killer confessed after the book was published in Italy. But the story is also being told by a writer who seems almost nostalgic for the days when Portugal had a dictator and an infamous secret police -- a time when everyone saw the links between thuggish cops and the nature of the state.

So in "The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro," the body, the journalist, the cop, the lawyer and the barmaid operate in the service of a very complicated sensibility -- literary, philosophical, political. The reporter is simply fed the story; even the crooked cop talks to him. The drug dens are as safe and velvet-curtained as anything in Raymond Chandler. Even the big trial scene is a lesson in moral philosophy. All the mechanisms of a thriller are pushed onstage and left with nothing much to do.

Yet this is still a vivid book, for the oddest of reasons. For a start, Tabucchi keeps a proper notebook: he writes with all his senses. Unusually, he also sees the high economic value of a cliche: his grand old lawyer, known as Loton, is a dead ringer for Charles Laughton playing a grand old lawyer. Once we have that detail, we have the second-hand charm of remembered performances to bring alive Loton's philosophic rumblings.

You can find the review here

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The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance). 'Heteronyms', as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as 'everything that Pessoa is not and more'.

He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuoso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterise Pessoa's 'own' intimate verse.

Other masks followed, notably one 'Bernardo Soares'. At some complex generative level, Pessoa's genius as a polyglot underlies, is mirrored by, his self-dispersal into diverse and contrasting personae. He spent nine of his childhood years in Durban. His first writings were in English with a South African tincture. He turned to Portuguese only in 1910 (there are significant analogies with Borges).

Pessoa earned his living as a translator. His legacy, enormous and in large part unpublished, comports philosophy, literary criticism, linguistic theory, writings on politics in Portuguese, English and French. Like Borges, Beckett or Nabokov, Pessoa shows up the naive, malignant falsehood still current in certain Fenland English faculties whereby only the monoglot and native speaker is inward with style and literary insight.

The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.

It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his The Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.

You can find the review here

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Carlos Ruiz Zafon shortlisted for the British Book Awards

Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón is shortlisted for the British Book Awards with is book The Shadow of the Wind, facing John Banville, Alan Bennett and Kazuo Ishiguro for author of the year.

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27th International Book Fair - Mexico City

Today marks the opening of the 27th International Book Fair at the Palacio de Minería in Mexico City´s Historic Center. Doors will open to the public today at 11 a.m. Books will be available for purchase through March 5.

Last year´s book fair drew over 113,000 visitors. In anticipation of big crowds, event organizers have doubled the number of ticket booths in Plaza Tolsá across the street from the Palacio de Minería in an effort to avoid long entrance lines.

The fair will boast a record number of over 750 cultural events including lectures, round tables, book presentations, readings, concerts, videos, and expositions.

As Chiapas is the state of honor at this year´s fair, there will be a room of books dedicated to the state with exhibits on photography and coffee. There will also be over 30 cultural events related to Chiapas, including a marimba concert.

Ferrando also said the fair will include special events to commemorate the anniversaries - specifically the births and deaths - of famous authors and historic personalities including: Wolfgang Mozart, Sigmund Freud, Benito Juárez, Jaime Sabines, André Breton, Juan Rulfo, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.

The book fair, which is the oldest in Mexico, has long been linked to the Palacio de Minería building which was built in the late 18th century. The historic building hosted its first book fair as early as 1924, and the International Book Fair in its current form has been held there annually since 1980.

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Guillermo Arriaga - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Guillermo Arriaga is the Mexican novelist turned screenwriter who gained international attention with his script for Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2000). Reportedly, Jones admired that film and invited Arriaga to visit his West Texas ranch. The two men became friends, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, Arriaga had been commissioned to write a script that's not only a tribute to an American-Mexican friendship somewhat like his and Jones', but that also stems from an incident that had stuck in Tommy Lee's craw.
(...)
Arriaga's screenplay for Amores Perros contained a great deal of compelling surface energy and grit along with a tricky, Tarantino-like use of scrambled chronology, a device that further devolved into annoying mannerism in his and Iñárritu's next film, 21 Grams (where the narrative logic seemed to be: If you have a boring story, try jumbling the time sequence so thoroughly that the audience will be so busy figuring out what's going on that it won't have the chance to realize how banal the material is). Three Burials starts out in much the same mode, opening with the discovery of Estrada's corpse, then hopscotching backward in time to sketch the prior relationships of the main characters, and forward to follow Perkins' initial reactions to the crime. Thankfully, once the rancher sets off on his morbid odyssey, the time-shifting ceases and we're treated to a fairly straightforward story.

You can find the full review here

The first half of the movie is mostly shrewd, laconic character study. The script by Guillermo Arriaga, the great Mexican writer responsible for "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," lets the characters collide into one another: Pete, nearly weeping with unmanly frustration; Mike, bored and frightened, with "a face like a white rat," in the words of one border jumper unlucky enough to come up against him; Mike's wife, Lou Ann (January Jones), young and blond and not quite as empty as everyone assumes; Rachel, whom Leo plays as a sort of evolved floozy; Melquiades, who haunts those who meet him even while he's alive.
The second half of the movie crosses into Mexico and metaphor. Having pledged to return Melquiades's body to the tiny village from which he came, Pete pistol-whips Mike into coming along for the ride, and the byplay between the cowboy, his handcuffed captive, and the rapidly decaying corpse is grimly comic.

You can find the full review here

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Two reviews of Javier Marías' Written Lives.

For many of the 25 writers Javier Marías includes in this blissful little book of biographical sketches, nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of it. Robert Louis Stevenson, on returning from the cellar with his customary bottle of Burgundy, enquired of his wife, 'Do I look strange?', before collapsing from a brain haemorrhage.

His friend Henry James was rather more rehearsed, hearing a voice not his own announce: 'So it has come at last - the Distinguished Thing!', which appears to have been a polished rewrite of Laurence Sterne's 'Now it is come', before putting up his hand as if to ward off a blow.

Joseph Conrad was heard by his wife to shout, 'Here...!', before falling off his chair. Oscar Wilde called for champagne on his deathbed, if only as a cue for his final bon mot: 'I am dying beyond my means.'

The prize for epitaphs must go to Lowry: 'Malcolm Lowry/Late of Bowery/ His prose was flowery/ And often glowery/ He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,/ And died playing the ukelele.' As for the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, his death was 'so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life...' (For full details of Mishima's last breath, buy the book.)

The ludicrous Mishima aside, it becomes quickly apparent from these pages that the reason most writers choose to write rather than, say, work in an office, school or hospital is because they are incapable of leading anything like a life which might involve moments of sobriety, modesty or basic politeness.

Taking for granted a state of permanent drunkenness, let's have a look at modesty. Most of the writers described in these thumbnail sketches believed absolutely in their genius. 'Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since - ahem - I appeared,' wrote Stevenson to Henry James.

You can find the full review here

Not that I don't revere the ground that Javier Marías walks on, but I do think him distinctly lucky to have been able to persuade anyone to publish this volume. Of course, on the continent there is no kind of interest in formal biography to match our own. In Spain, readers might welcome a volume of short biographical essays. Here, despite Marías's occasional wit and elegance, I can't see who would see the point.

What we have are 26 essays which, on the whole, run through a few famous stories about writers: the one about Nora not reading Ulysses; the one about Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in Brussels; Emily Brontë's comb; Nabokov's butterfly net.

Some of these stories just aren't to be trusted. In the chapter on Henry James, two long-discredited stories from the notoriously unreliable memoirs of Ford Madox Ford are included: the one about his being entangled in his dachshund's lead (too good to be true); the other about being received by Flaubert in a dressing gown and always "hating him" thereafter. That last story was disproved 60 years ago by Simon Nowell-Smith.

This book would certainly have been improved by some more extensive reading. It is slightly shocking to read an essay on Thomas Mann, for instance, which reveals not just so little sympathy with the novelist, but apparently so little acquaintance with his novels; it seems to Marías a telling point to claim that there is only one Spaniard who has ever read Joseph and His Brothers from beginning to end. I admit that is fairly amusing, but probably more amusing about Spanish readers than about Mann. And someone who says that Mann's talking about his own irony displayed "a rather extraordinary belief " can't, I think, have read The Magic Mountain with much attention.

A lot of this comes from a distinctly peculiar insistence on gathering information about writers only from their own writings, and from the writings of their contemporaries. In many cases, these are not to be trusted, as with Ford Madox Ford's often fantastical reminiscences. Where Marías has backed his reading up with a good biography - the essay on Lampedusa draws heavily on David Gilmour's classic biography - the result is noticeably better.

You can find the full review here

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