The Years with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes

Review of Carlos Fuentes's Los Años Con Laura Díaz (The Years with Laura Díaz)

I've been trying to figure out what makes a novel "great." One of the criteria, I think, is easily identified: A great novel forces us to rethink history as more than just a long story told to younger and shorter people. But when a novelist knows this too well, and rethinks history for us programmatically -- as though there were a checklist lurking beneath the story -- the results can be mind-dulling: greatness contrived.

Such is the case with Carlos Fuentes' "The Years With Laura Díaz," a sweeping historical saga that falls prey to its ambitions. Laura Díaz is the novel's main character, protagonist, heroine and measure of Mexican identity. From her early years in Catemaco to her adolescence in Veracruz, and then throughout her adult life in Mexico City, Díaz's biography serves as a kind of screen upon which Fuentes projects his version of the Mexican past. She comes into glancing contact with all sorts of 20th century luminaries -- in her case Latin American and Mexican celebrities such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo -- along with numerous bit players. The historical figures Díaz comes to know best are mostly minor political radicals, but their proximity to power allows Fuentes to explore the Mexican past through its revolutions, from the workers' revolts to the coups and crackdowns. Ultimately, the stories of these revolutions (as seen by Díaz) constitute a critique of the left: The novel presents revolution as an essential instrument of progress, despite its leaders' failures to imagine their country's future. And yes, here we see Fuentes' slip showing.


You can find the full review here.

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The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen is set in Buenos Aires in the then-present-time of 1929 and opens with main character, Remo Erdosain, a self-described "hollow man, a shell moved simply by the force of habit" being accused of embezzling by his employer. That accusation sets loose a chain of events in his life, which ultimately lead him to a gathering of other discontents that make ruthless, detailed plans to set up a "bandit aristocracy." Erdosain is an anguished, pained man whose diatribes portray him as one of the madmen of the title. Nothing goes right for him: his wife, Elsa, leaves him for another man and he?s a failed inventor. Darkness pervades his very being. In The Seven Madmen Erdosain is surrounded by various other characters, richly described by Arlt: Ergueta the pharmacist, a gambler with a religious side and his wife, Hipolita, a former prostitute; Gregorio Barsut, Elsa's cousin, a boorish moneyed man who's the focus of the madmen's kidnap plot.

The madmen, headed by one called the Astrologer, believe it is "magnificent lies" that drive people on. As explained to Erdosain: "Men only respond to lies. (The Astrologer) gives lies the consistency of truth; people who never have so much as budged to get anything, guys who have become totally cynical and desperate, come to life again in the truth of his lies." What happens to Erdosain and his cohorts is continued in Arlt's third novel, The Flamethrowers (Los Lanzallamas), which followed in 1931.

You can find the review here

Gabriel Garcia Marquez nominated for Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction

Along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores", where nominated "The March" by E.L. Doctorow, "Veronica" by Mary Gaitskill, Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" and "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami.

Battle in Heaven directed by Carlos Reygadas

On the surface, “Battle in Heaven” has everything necessary to make an intriguing film: sex, kidnapping, nationalism, religion, and more sex. Yet Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas steadfastly drains his sophomore effort of any emotion and context, turning it into a dull, meditative exercise. Shot with non-professional actors, the film links one series of banal events to another through long tracking shots. He pays little regard to a cohesive narrative structure and even less to developing three-dimensional characters. Reygadas asks for his audience to consider the moral dilemmas that play out in the consciousness of his characters and offers little in return for the effort.

You can find the review here

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer of short, elegant metaphysical fictional pieces, wrote in 1957 A Manual of Fantastic Zoology. In 1967 an expanded version was published under the title The Book of Imaginary Beings. Two years later a further, expanded edition appeared, an edition that Andrew Hurley, the translator of the present edition, criticizes for getting Borges’s collaborator Margarita Guerrero’s name wrong and for bad translation. Hurley excises the four extra "beings" included in that version, consistent with the last Spanish edition that appeared while Borges was still alive.

Borges (1899-1986) was educated in English in Geneva and had a varied career as a critic, literary writer and editor, teacher, lecturer and librarian ("I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness," he wrote, referring to the blindness that overtook him in his 50’s). His vast reading in religion, literature (especially Poe, Kafka, Kipling and Chesterton) and philosophy (especially Berkeley) heavily influenced his fiction, which often focuses on books in a self-referential way, yet not in the smirking style of much modern meta-fiction. This is because his fiction is about ultimate reality, not art itself.

One can see this even in The Book of Imaginary Beings, a modern bestiary (not limited to beasts), a trip (in Borges’s words) to "that zoological garden whose fauna is comprised not of lions but of sphinxes and gryphons and centaurs." Here are 116 such fantastical beings collected, arranged in alphabetical order, including the following well-known creatures: "The Behemoth," "The Brownies," "The Double," "Elves," "Gnomes," "The Golem," "The Harpies," "Lilith," "The Pelican," "Trolls" and "The Unicorn." In describing these beings Borges finds ample opportunity to speculate on the nature of the universe.

You can find the review here

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

The Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías has lived so long in other countries and other languages that, by his own account, some of his compatriots have come to deny his own "Spanishness." It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that no Spanish writers are among the "fairly disastrous individuals" Marías has honored in "Written Lives," a collection of short and scintillating portraits deftly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and inspired more by intriguing anecdotes and details than by a determination to capture basic biographical facts. While he claims that his selections are "entirely arbitrary," it can't be coincidental that most of these writers, with a few exceptions like Faulkner, lived for extended periods abroad, either as exiles or expatriates.

You can find the full review here

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In Evil Hour directed by Ruy Guerra

Shown as part of the Miami International Film Festival, "In Evil Hour," is a cinematic masterpiece that envisions the literary mind of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Brazilian director, Ruy Guerra, bases In Evil Hour on one of Marquez’s earlier works, "La Mala Hora." Guerra encompasses all the telltale signs of a Marquez story in the film, such as a small town in South America, Mysticism, and plenty of colorful wacky characters.

You can find the review here

Duck Season directed by Fernando Eimbcke

Not a whole lot happens in Duck Season, the debut feature from Mexican writer/director Fernando Eimbcke. But then, that's largely by design. After all, it is a movie about a lazy Sunday afternoon. But there's another reason for Eimbcke's lackadaisical approach-he's making a clear homage to the early films of Jim Jarmusch. With its black-and-white photography, static camerawork, deadpan sense of humor, and blackouts in between scenes, Duck Seasonaspires to be nothing less than Stranger than Paradise 2: South of the Border. Needless to say, the film doesn't have the freshness of Jarmusch's debut, but taken on its own terms, it's an amusing comedy enhanced by appealing performances from its four leads.

Set almost entirely in one apartment in a Mexico City housing complex, Duck Season follows the wholly ordinary adventures of two 14-year-old boys, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and his best friend Moko (Diego Cataño). Flama's mother has a party to attend, so she leaves the two kids at home to look after themselves. No sooner have plopped down in front of the TV for a rousing round of video games when there's a knock at the door. It's Rita (Danny Perea), the cute 16-year-old girl from down the hall, asking to use their stove to bake a cake. She's reluctantly granted admittance and Flama and Moko return to their game, only to be interrupted again, this time by a poorly-timed power failure. Deciding to break for lunch, they call the local pizza place and break out the stopwatch to make sure the pie arrives within the 30-minute guarantee. The pizza delivery guy Ulises (Enrique Arreola) reaches the door one minute past the deadline. The boys refuse to pay and Ulises refuses to leave without his money. So for the rest of the afternoon, these four oddballs hang out in Flama's apartment, swapping stories, contemplating their lives and getting stoned on a batch of marijuana-laced brownies.

You can find the review here

Fernando Schwartz won the Primavera Prize for 'Vichy, 1940'

Fernando Schwartz won the 10th edition of the primavera Prize with its work ' Vichy, 1940', "a cosmopolitan story, of victims and of what it takes for a hero to become villain and to a villain to become hero", according to the winner.

Brownsville by Oscar Casares

For the most part, Casares is writing about blue-collar guys -- Hispanic guys -- dealing with neighborhoods that are going to hell, wives who inexplicably want to get educated, and the general need to defend oneself against wily Anglo strategies. "Yolanda," a story that concerns a man remembering the time when he was 15 and the neighbor's beautiful wife took refuge from his jealousy in his bedroom, begins with a long passage that goes like this: "I'm talking about more than 20 years ago now. I'm talking about before some drunk spent all afternoon in one of the cantinas on 14th Street, then drove his car straight into the Rivas' front yard and ran over the baby Jesus that was still lying in the manger ... This was before Pete Zuniga was riding his brand new ten-speed from Western Auto and, next to the Friendship Garden, saw a white dude who'd been knifed a couple of dozen times and was floating in the green water of the resaca." Etc. The world goes to hell in a handbasket, paradise is lost: Now the story can begin.

Since Chekhov invented understatement, the great modern short stories have compulsively shown what doesn't happen, the adventure that's aborted. In "Yolanda," the narrator never has sex specifically with his beautiful neighbor. In "Chango," Bony does obey his dad and throw away the monkey head, and in "Charro," Marcelo does give up trying to kill the neighbor's dog. But don't mistake Brownsville for something like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Casares is no facile distributor of small-town epiphanies. As Bony thinks, dropping Chango's head in a canal, "sometimes he listened, but most times he didn't. He was just living. That's the best explanation he could give. Living."

You can find the review here

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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