Interview with Alma Guillermoprieto

Interview with Mexican author Alma Guillermoprieto.

There were other reasons as well that Samba was infinitely interesting to me. For a year I'd been making my way through the hall of mirrors that is inter-American history. On one side, I'd found many books by well-informed Latin Americans, describing a United States that knew nothing of Latin America, and still knows nothing about those books. On the other side were books by U.S. travelers to Latin America, which were often quickly translated into Spanish or Portuguese and avidly read in the places they described. Travel writers, like foreign correspondents, almost invariably write for an audience back home that is tacitly assumed to share their perspective, but U.S. travel writing about Latin America often had its greatest impact on the residents of the places it described, so eager were Latin Americans to see themselves through the eyes of the Metropolis.

Samba broke those categories wide open. It's a description of a Latin American reality-Rio de Janeiro, its carnival, its samba schools-by a writer whose perspective is that of a Latin American (she's Mexican) but who clearly intends the book for an audience in the United States and who has achieved an impressive command of English. Fascinated, I wrote her to ask for an interview and find out if she was related to my nineteenth-century traveler.

She wrote back right away, and yes, she is a descendant of Guillermo Prieto. She gently put me off my idea of an interview, but we found when we met that we had lots to say to each other, and our conversation continues. I was intrigued to learn that although, like me, she spent part of her childhood in the desolate sprawl of suburban Southern California, Spanish is her native language.

In Guillermoprieto's career as a journalist covering Latin America for Newsweek and the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, she's faced a lot of dangerous situations, but going back to write in her first language after having built a long career in English was, I think, one of the most courageous things she's ever done. When I read the original Spanish of Dancing with Cuba, her most recent book, a memoir about teaching dance at the Escuela de Danza Moderna in Havana in 1970-which just came out from Pantheon in my translation-I began to understand more clearly why she did it.

You can find the interview here

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Vidas Secas directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos

A cinematic career that dates back to the 1950s, dos Santos is considered the heart and conscience of Cinema Novo, the Brazilian New Wave of the 1960s that included filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra and Carlos Diegues. In the DVD’s liner notes, dos Santos states: "Cinema Novo was never a monolithic or one-dimensional film movement. Rather, each director brought his own style, thematic concerns, and social vision to play in his films, resulting in a diverse and heterogeneous movement with a common-core belief in the need to transform Brazilian society and the important role that cinema could play in that process."

Indeed, Vidas Secas does not spare in its hatred of a cold-blooded social order that inflicts a misery so fierce it leads Vitória to plead at the film’s end, "Could not we be real people some day?"

The filmmaker explains, "In Brazil there is a permanent struggle to reduce poverty. Obviously, poverty in Brazil is a political question, because the Brazilian elites, ‘the lords of power,’ have to be aware of the threat of poverty because interests combine to make this situation permanent." He describes film "as a form of expression" and attributes his attraction to Italian neorealism in the aftermath of World War II to its belief that filmmaking must bypass "the world of high finance."

Dos Santos explains that he was drawn to neorealism not for its themes, which he felt considered social issues separate from their social context (a somewhat questionable criticism), but to its methods of production, best articulated by the phrase of one of Cinema Novo’s initiators, Glauber Rocha (1938-1981): "A camera in the hand and an idea in the head."

In Rocha’s famous 1965 manifesto, "The Aesthetics of Hunger," the filmmaker argued that the originality of Cinema Novo lay in its insistence that "violence is a normal behavior for the starving" and "the moment of violence is the moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the existence of the colonized."

About Rocha, the WSWS wrote in May 2003: "Rocha emerged from the political-cultural radicalization that swept Latin America. He advocated a break with ‘European bourgeois film’ and an indigenous Brazilian approach to cinema, making use of folk culture, local rhythms and symbols. Such ambitions were common at the time in the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Latin America and Africa. Various national schools of cinema and theater ‘of the oppressed’ appeared at the time. Often with the best of intentions, these efforts, which remained trapped within a radical bourgeois nationalism-encouraged by various Stalinist, Maoist and Castroite currents-rarely went further than populist explosions of anger and despair." (It is worth noting that Dos Santos, who was active in the Brazilian Communist Party from his youth, broke with the CP after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.)

Vidas Secas is one such effort that does partially go beyond the artistic and ideological constraints of a nationalist, populist cinema by virtue of its extraordinary humanism. Entirely lacking in sensationalism, the film’s transcendental and poetic quality means that each moment is treated with care and intelligence, thereby carrying the spirit of neorealism into deeper waters.

The camera lingers on dignified but battered and troubled faces, worn and torn by intolerable pressures (Vitória: "These eyes have only seen misery"). The children-beings still open to the world-are treated harshly by the parents. After a while, one senses that Fabiano and Vitória’s hardness veils an acute, unimaginable pain and also functions as a lesson in self-protection for their children. In general, the family’s chronic state of anguish is evocative of a reality far more encompassing than the film’s immediate physical and historical terrain. It is a generalized agony. The film presents the family’s specific run-ins with the cattle rancher, the local police and village officials, the cruelty inflicted on them from every quarter-including nature-in such a way as to point to their generic quality as a basic feature of class society. No small achievement!

With sparse dialogue, the film succeeds in communicating viscerally the feeling of a universal poverty. Fabiano’s family is at the bottom of the social rung, but his immediate abusers are not much better off, which accounts for their viciousness. Crushed from the top, they in turn stomp on those beneath them. The struggle for survival is all too raw and primitive, a fact that deeply motivates dos Santos to protest through his art, "It’s inadmissible for a man of the twentieth century to live alongside poverty."

Artistically, the film’s elements work to illuminate this sensation of privation and its subsidiary horrors.

In the DVD’s notes, dos Santos reveals that Vidas Secas was the first film in which he was able to convey that the film’s lighting was "the clear result of an aesthetic position." His attributes this to his cinematographer, Luiz Carlos Barreto, who was a "follower of the Cartier-Bresson school of thought." Says dos Santos: "It was a shocking experience, revolutionary radical, to film without a filter, with naked lens, to shine the light directly on the characters’ faces." The effect is both moving and chilling.

In fact, the film was banned after Brazil’s 1964 military coup for its depiction of horrific poverty and police brutality. In March of that year, the military junta under Humberto Castello Branco overthrew the bourgeois government of João Goulart. A second coup in 1968 brought stronger censorship and harsher repression. It was in this period between the coups that Rocha penned his polemic, in essence, calling for a cinematic style that would express the "real" Brazil as a paradigm of failure of hope.

In Vidas Secas, hope remains intact with a revolutionism, although embryonic, contained in the iron will of dos Santos’s characters. At some point, as consciousness emerges, the human forces to which they belong will be welded into an indestructible force.

You can find the review here

Interview with Laura Esquivel

And in a twist as strange (or magical) as fiction, Esquivel is launching in Miami her new novel, Malinche -- an imaginary account of the life of Malinalli, the native woman who was conquistador Hernán Cortés' translator and lover during the conquest of Mexico -- before she does so in her beloved Mexico.
''Así es,'' Esquivel says.
So it is in this multicultural world.
Simon & Schuster's Atria Books is publishing Esquivel's novel in both Spanish and English before Santillana -- the Spanish publisher who approached Esquivel with the idea of fictionalizing the life of one of Mexico's most controversial characters -- does so in Mexico and the rest of Latin America later this year. (The U.S. Spanish-language edition is out; the English, translated by Ernesto Mestre-Reed, will arrive in May).
In Miami, where Esquivel was welcomed last month by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts and given a book signing party by the Mexican high-art Coral Gables boutique Pineda Covalin, the 55-year-old novelist's book and message has been well received.
A TRAITOR IN MEXICO
But it remains to be seen what will happen in Mexico, where ''La Malinche'' is widely considered a traitor for helping Cortés, and as an Eve of sorts, the perpetrator of Mexico's original sin. Malinchismo is a term used to express disdain against someone who sides with foreigners, who joins ``the enemy.''
Esquivel's sympathetic characterization and her call to revise history and embrace the Conquest as ''the beginning of a new and wonderful culture'' may not fare as well.
Esquivel portrays Malinche as an intelligent woman, who after being sold by her mother into slavery as child, took on the job of being ''The Tongue'' to save her people from slaughter -- and from Montezuma's practice of sacrificing humans to the Gods.
''She was convinced that it was necessary to overthrow the Aztec Empire, which had betrayed the spiritual legacy of her Mayan ancestors, and most of all, the worship of Quetzalcóatl,'' Esquivel says.
At first Malinalli also believes Cortés is the reincarnation of Quetzalcóatl.
``She saw in Cortés the hope of liberation.''
Esquivel says she's not fearful of negative reaction.
''Leaving fear behind is what this project is all about,'' she says.
She spent two years researching Malinche's life with the help of her husband Javier Valdés. The only original documents about Malinche's life are a few pages from Conquest diaries, Esquivel said, but she didn't stop there, embarking on extensive investigation of ancient Mayan culture, history and religion.
''My job was to imagine Malinalli's personality and how she interpreted what she saw and experienced,'' Esquivel says. ``Before you judge a person's behavior you have to analyze their beliefs.''
Esquivel also invented one of the book's most extraordinary characters -- Malinalli's grandmother, who guides her when her widowed mother abandons her to live with a younger man. The old woman represents ''the wisdom of the indigenous culture and their powerful vision of the spiritual world,'' Esquivel says.

You can find the interview here

But Malinche at Amazon.com

Buy Malinche at Amazon.com (in Spanish)

'Myth, Magic, History: Contemporary Fiction in Latin America and India' seminar

The 'Myth, Magic, History: Contemporary Fiction in Latin America and India' seminar bemused writers and scholars from Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Peru and India as exotic names routinely appeared in the air - Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Jose Arreola, Miguel Angel Asturias and, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Mexican author Jorge Volpi, whose novel 'En Busca de Klingsor' won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1999 and was translated into English as 'In Search of Klingsor', did inject a prosaic note by likening novels to parasites.
'A novel is a collection of ideas transmitted from one mind to another through reading. When someone decides to write a novel, he visits his personal library, rummages through the ideas that bubble in his mind and create his own personal story,' said Volpi.
'Since the publication of the first part of 'Don Quijote' in 1605, the novel has gone through a great evolution. Cervantes' masterpiece was not appreciated as such, but was seen merely as a parody of the novel of chivalry,' said Volpi, who has written nine books of fiction.
He also warned against the plague of banal novels that 'invades us on a daily basis' and raised his voice in the fight for complex novels - those that are not satisfied with simple imitation, that defy conventions and seek to rise above themselves.
While Akademi secretary K. Satchidanandan championed against the 'monolithic, stereotypical concept of the Latin American novel', Chilean critic Jaime Collyer asserted: 'The myth and the hoax, this magic-religious interpretation of the world are as much a part of Spanish America as its actual discovery.'
The Sahitya Akademi, which is publishing Spanish-Hindi bilingual editions of Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and contemporary poets, has sought help from other publishers in this mammoth task.


You can find the review here

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Why isn't Spanish writer Javier Marias more well known in this country? Although he has published 29 books that have been translated into over 40 languages, American readers have been slow to embrace the work of the witty and stylish writer.
New Directions, Mr. Marias' American publisher, knows this and has begun a campaign that may finally win him the following he deserves. Last year they brought out "Your Face Tomorrow," the first installment of a three-volume tour de force in which the author has added espionage to his signature explorations of love and marriage.
Now comes "Written Lives," a book that contains 26 mini-biographies of famous writers from around the world. The idea, Mr. Marias writes in the introduction, "was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated."
He notes that he offers "snippets" of their lives, adding slyly "Far from being a hagiography, and far too from the solemnity with which authors are frequently treated, these Written Lives are told, I think, with a mixture of affection and humour. The latter is doubtless present in every case; the former, I must admit, is lacking in the case of Joyce, Mann and Mishima."
Though he reckons that all of his subjects were "fairly disastrous" individuals, he notes that what he feels about them as individuals "does not necessarily correspond to any admiration or scorn I might actually feel for their writing."

You can find the review here

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Reading initiative in Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl - Mexico

In their struggle to keep poorly paid officers on the right side of the law Neza’s authorities are employing an unlikely weapon: literature. Earlier this year the municipal president, Luis Sanchez, launched an initiative aimed at making Neza’s policemen better citizens. One of its cornerstones is to stimulate reading among them. Although book groups and programmes to encourage reading in jails are not uncommon, this is one of the rare schemes aimed at the people in charge of law enforcement.

To begin with, a list of "suggested books" was circulated. It included Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century classic, Don Quixote de la Mancha, as well as 20th-century Mexican novels such as Juan Rulfo’s unsurpassable Pedro Paramo and Carlos Fuentes’ gothic novella, Aura; it listed such highbrow texts as Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture, "The Labyrinth of Solitude", alongside modern classics including One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Among other "recommended authors" were Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mexican detective fiction writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Behind the surprising initiative lies an assumption that has been at the heart of western thinking about the arts since the Enlightenment: that literature, somehow, improves people. It is an idea that has been questioned by critics such as John Carey, whose recent polemic What Good are the Arts? casts doubt on the argument that art can make us better in any way.

Neza’s chief of police, however, believes that reading will improve his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. "A policeman is responsible for communicating fluently. He must be able to speak well, even with delinquents. As his use of language improves, so will his efficiency." Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. "A police officer must be worldly, and books enrich people’s experience indirectly." Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend."

You can find the article here

Francisco Ayala prepares for his 100th birthday

The world-renowned Granada-born novelist, Francisco Ayala, has attended the official ceremony in Madrid to set up a National Commission for his centenary celebrations, just 14 days away.

Born in 1906, Ayala says that his 100th birthday will mean a ‘complete change of perspective’ for him, as, he said, ‘I only live in the present, and I only have a past. I am a man at the end of life, and that has brought me to reflect, which means a complete change of perspective, as I no longer make any plans... I live the past, and I return to the past time and time again. I want everyone to be able to enjoy that experience,’ he said.

You can find the article here

Find Francisco Ayala's Books at Amazon.com

La Fiesta del Chivo - Trailer

A trailer of Feast of the Goat

Santiago Roncagliolo wins Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo won Spain's Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize on Monday for his novel Abril rojo, or Red April, which tells of life in his country under the government of former president Alberto Fujimori.

The novel, a detective story set within a political background, unfolds in the Peru of the early 2000s when the government, led by Japanese-born Fujimori, clashed with the hard left Shining Path guerrilla insurgency.

"I grew up during a war that no-one talked about, our windows were taped to avoid them rattling or shattering when bombs went off and we knew better than to park outside military installations for fear of having our car blown up by accident," Roncagliolo told journalists.

The novel was chosen from 510 entries, of which 141 came from Spain and 369 from Latin American authors.

The award, worth $175,000 US, also included a work by Spanish sculptor Martin Chirino.

"In Peru, many of those who disappeared and were tortured did so at the mercy of a government that we elected democratically, so to some extent we were all responsible for the deaths and torture," Roncagliolo said.

The prize is organized by the Alfaguara publishing house. Argentine authors Graciela Montes and Ema Wolf won the award last year, and Colombia's Laura Restrepo the year before.

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.

You can find the review here

Buy The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo at Amazon.com

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

Buy Purity of Blood at Amazon.com

Buy Limpieza de sangre at Amazon.com