Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

Obabakoak is Bernardo Atxaga's best-known book, the one that brought him a small international reputation. Yet it's perhaps his least straightforward novel. It's a novel that operates on several different levels of reality.

Bernardo Atxaga is the pen name of a writer called Joseba Irazu Garmendia, from Asteasu, Gipuzkoa. (Not so long ago, it was not a smart move to write in Basque under one's own name). A storyteller from Asteasu has access to the world's treasure trove of stories. But he chooses to write his own Basque stories as well.

While Atxaga is definitely a novelist, Obabakoak may or may not be a novel. It may be just a collection of stories. Connected or unconnected. It doesn't matter. There are no characters that you can follow all the way through the book, not even the village of Obaba which only appears and reappears from time to time. Obaba is a dark, mysterious place. A place where both local and universal stories are told. People from the outside are out of place there, and they stay that way. Nor is it all about Obaba. Parts take place in Hamburg, Peru, Castile, Iraq, and China. This is a Basque book and it is an international book.

(The title Obabakoak may or may not mean: The things and people of the village of Obaba; It may be just that obaba is the sound a Basque baby makes. )

This is a brilliant, moving book. It does not exploit the reader. It is about storytelling. It is about storytelling in a language understood by a small group of people: a people that understand that if they were to choose not to use Basque, they would be complicit in the death of one of humanity's oldest and most distinct forms of speech. There is not a political word in the book; it is all political. When a writer chooses to write in a language that is marginalized, it is a political act. There are no literary signposts for such a writer.

You can find the review here

Interview with Bernardo Atxaga

A 2001 interview with Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga.

Bernardo Atxaga sent no address, just a piece of paper with crosses marking the pelota court, the church, the fountain, and then his house, in relation to the three basic components of any Basque village. He might just have easily have been describing Obaba, the imaginary setting of his most famous book Obabakoak.
"No," he laughs, "Obaba is an interior landscape. You don't remember all the places of the past, but what sticks in the memory is this window, that stone, the bridge. Obaba is the country of my past, a mixture of the real and the emotional."

Atxaga is, as one critic has pointed out, not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist: a writer charged, whether he likes it or not, with exporting a threatened culture around the world. Born in 1951, Atxaga grew up in a Basque-speaking valley of scattered houses and villages near San Sebastian. Basque is a rural language, with no relation to neighbouring Spanish or French, and spoken in Atxaga's infancy by less than half a million people. Franco sought to eliminate it after the civil war: tombstones in Basque were torn up, and the language was forbidden in schools.
In evoking this Basque heritage, Atxaga avoids nostalgia, often the curse of writers recreating lost rural childhood. "The look backwards can be very deceptive, a siren song that any time past was better. You have to be very disciplined about feelings. If you let a sense of nostalgia dominate, you only write false texts." he says.

Two Brothers, the most recent of his works to arrive in the UK, is a short novel with a long history. It was written in the mid-1970s and published in Basque in 1985; Atxaga himself translated it into Spanish for publication in 1995. The two brothers of the title are orphaned in their adolescence. Paulo inherits the sawmill and too much responsibility, because his brother, Daniel, has a mental age of three. Like all Atxaga's characters, they have little room for manoeuvre. They are trapped in their situation, which is in turn aggravated by their neighbours. "Village life is tough. People are often disagreeable and ignorant," Atxaga says.

You can find the review here

10th annual Kiriyama Prize

Luis Alberto Urrea won the Kiriyama fiction prize for "The Hummingbird's Daughter".

The Kiriyama Prize, is given to "literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia", and is sponsored by Pacific Rim Voices, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.

Mexico's documentary boom

When 23-year-old Tin Dirdamal decided to make his first documentary, he had no film experience to speak of, yet he was itching to tell a story about the hardships of Central American immigrants. So he grabbed a camcorder, rounded up about $7,000 and started shooting. This year, his picture "No One" won the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance for best documentary.

Much like many new Mexican directors, Dirdamal felt he had an important story to tell. All too often, he says, the most compelling stories about real people go untold in Mexican cinema.

That appears to be changing. After years of all but ignoring the nonfiction genre, the film industry here is showing growing interest in supporting these projects.

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The Tequila Worm by Viola Canales

Viola Canales has written a book that moves in a widening circle through Sofia's life. Every chapter in the book reflects a chapter in Sofia's life as she learns to understand both cultures she lives in. She learns to kick with her head instead of her feet when she comes up against prejudice. She excels in school and is offered a scholarship to an exclusive boarding school in Austin, where she finishes high school and goes on to graduate from a big university. It is while she is at school after her father dies that she truly learns the secret of the tequila worm. It is connected to rituals and traditions that support dreams while keeping connections to something higher. The Tequila Worm is filled with humor, and Sofia's life is never sentimentalized. It is a really good read.

You can find the review here

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Poet in New York (Stage Review)

Federico Garcia Lorca is best known to the English-speaking world as a playwright (The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding). He also was a poet, and his book, Poet in New York, a collection of the poems he wrote about the nine unhappy months he spent in New York in 1929, gives Pig Iron Theatre's "one-man biographical fantasia" its title.

This show, like Lorca's poetry, offers a fair helping of surreal symbolism. But, like any evocative poem, the dance-theater piece requires emotional engagement rather than exact analysis. Poet in New York is not intended as an accurate biography, but a suggestive one, full of movement as well as language. Flamenco segues into prayer that segues into bullfighting images that fly out of the poems, making a poem on the stage.

Dito van Reigersberg, trained as a dancer as well as an actor, plays all the characters - male and female, old and young, Spanish and American. Of the 11 scheduled performances, three will be in Spanish.

You can find the review here

Gurs by Jorge Semprun (Stage Review)

Gurs - a ghastly word "like a tear stuck in the throat", said the poet Louis Aragon - was the name of an internment camp for "undesirables" in the French Pyrenees. Inmates ranged from defeated Spanish republicans, German anti-fascists and Resistance fighters to Jews rounded up under the Vichy regime for onward transfer to concentration camps. It is chewy subject matter for a play commissioned by the European Theatre Convention as part of a series on refugees, exiles and displaced populations.

Author Jorge Semprun was himself exiled to France during the Spanish civil war and spent two years in Buchenwald camp for participating in the Resistance and many more engaged in efforts to overthrow General Franco. Writing in three languages for a multinational cast, he tackles Gurs as a melting pot of language, culture, politics and religion. Spaniards prepare a show alongside a Sephardic violinist and volunteers from the International Brigades, one being Ernst Busch, an actor from Brecht’s troupe who escaped from Gurs in 1941 after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Interwoven are modern-day scenes about actors preparing a show about Gurs inmates with earnest, rather thunderous arguments about relevance to contemporary audiences.

You can find the review here

Written Lives by Javier Marias

Spanish novelist Javier Marías' "Written Lives" is a collection of portraits in miniature of 20 writers, the choice of whom was "entirely arbitrary" but for two qualifications: the subject could neither be living nor hail from the author's native Spain. The book is notable for Marías' wit and charm but also for its unabashed and refreshing subjectivity.
Marías chooses one quirkily titled aspect of each writer -- "James Joyce in His Poses," "Joseph Conrad on Land," "Rudyard Kipling Without Jokes," "Rainer Maria Rilke in Waiting" -- and then, based on a few choice facts, lets his imagination loose on his topic for about five pages. Avoiding any controversy regarding his inventions, Marías states in his prologue that while "almost nothing in them is invented ... some episodes and anecdotes have been 'embellished.' "

You can find the review here

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Plan to turn Aracataca into a travel destination

The project is being financed by a Mexican cement company under the auspices of the Government of Mexico, where García Márquez has lived for more than two decades.

In the sculpture park, under the shade of almond and mango trees, the public will gather for lectures, readings and other cultural events while gazing at the towering Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta peaks rising to the east.

"We don't have any oil here, and we don't have any gold mines," said Fabian Marriaga, Aracataca's secretary of social development. "The only mine that we have is the exploitation of Gabo."

Yet for many Aracatacans, the dream of turning their city into a tourist destination seems as quixotic and fanciful as García Márquez's fiction, where a man can be transformed into a snake and the living speak to the dead.

In addition to the problem of finding money for the projects, there is the question of whether tourists will travel to a region that is far safer than before but still, just 2½ years ago, saw 11 Colombian soldiers killed when they wandered into a rebel minefield just outside town.

Jimenez said about 2400 people visited the Garcia Marquez home in 2004, a significant jump from the 500 visitors in 2000 but hardly a bonanza for the local economy.

And the famous writer himself apparently hasn't stepped foot in Aracataca since the raucous Nobel Prize celebration in 1983, something his cousin said was due in part to the area's peril.

"There are armed groups operating here, and he could be kidnapped," said Nicolas Arias, 70, one of the few members of the García Márquez clan still living in Aracataca. "It's a real danger for him."

García Márquez could not be reached for comment, but Marriaga and others say the 78-year-old author approves of the redevelopment plans.

There is little doubt that the author's childhood in Aracataca, where he lived with his beloved grandparents until he was nine, had a profound impact on his life and work.

In Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of his autobiography, García Márquez wrote that he decided to become a novelist during a two-day trip back to Aracataca in 1950 with his mother to sell the childhood home.

While there, he took notice as the train passed a banana plantation with "Macondo" written over the gate.

Garcia Marquez later would appropriate Macondo as the name of the fictional town where the Buendia family saga unfolds in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author's 1967 breakthrough novel.

It's clear that Macondo is grafted from Garcia Marquez's boyhood memories of Aracataca, but seven decades later there is little of the dreamy, Technicolor world captured in his prose.

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Shanghai Nights by Juan Marse

Shanghai Nights, only the third of Marsé's novels to be translated into English, is another crossover of these worlds. It is told by Daniel, an adolescent, who is killing time in 1940s Barcelona after leaving school and before taking up his apprenticeship in a jewellery workshop. He minds an unhinged Civil War veteran named Captain Blay, who lost both his sons in the fighting, and who spends his days campaigning against a gas leak and a factory whose smoke, he says, is killing local people.(...)

Marsé has said that the voices he writes are the voices of his childhood, of mothers and old men, whores, drunks, policemen and informers. If he is occasionally sentimental, his handling of different registers is consummate (as is Nick Caistor's translation) and it is clarity of language that settles the argument. His combined rendition of both childish adventures and an adult moral landscape, relayed in his poised and teasing voice, makes for a novel as fulfilling and provocative as one would like.

You can find the review here

Etiqueta Negra - A Literary Magazine from Peru

Although they won't always admit it, Peruvians enjoy being underestimated.

"Do you realize that -- after Haiti -- Peru has the lowest literacy rate in all of Latin America? Who would have thought that the most exciting literary magazine to come out of South America would be from Lima and not somewhere like Buenos Aires or Santiago?" asks Daniel Titinger, an editor and writer with the sleek New Yorker-esque nonfiction magazine Etiqueta Negra.

The smile in Titinger's voice suggests he knows exactly who expected Etiqueta Negra to put Peru on the literary map.

Founded four years and 33 issues ago by two brothers born in a remote part of the Andes Mountains who had no experience in publishing or journalism, Etiqueta Negra has grown from an idea "that probably wouldn't make it in a place like Peru" to a circulation of 11,000. The magazine is available in the United States only via pricey special-order subscriptions (www.etiquetanegra.com.pe), but it is read across the Americas -- from Argentina to Canada. While plans are in the works to distribute the magazine more widely around the world, annual online subscriptions (PDF files) will soon be available for $30.

"We consider ourselves a magazine for the distracted," Titinger says. "Our readers are high school students, university professors, retirees, depressed divorced women -- anybody attracted to stories from a backward world."

Literally translated "Black Label," the name Etiqueta Negra was chosen to conjure up images of sophistication and quality like a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky. With stories about swingers, suicide, soccer stars, conspiracy theories and Peruvian politics, the magazine created a quick buzz across the literary landscape.

You can find the review here

The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa

Reviews of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Way to Paradise.

The bold, dynamic and endlessly productive imagination of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the writing giants of our time, is something truly to be admired. It feeds almost always on the material of history and transforms such matter into fiction quite personal without ever losing the effect of universality. Nothing demonstrates this better than his latest novel, "The Way to Paradise," a dual narrative about the life and work of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, the political organizer Flora Tristan.
As with any great writer, Mario Vargas Llosa makes us see clearly what we have been looking at all the while but never noticed -- in this case, the Peruvian connection to one of Europe's first utopian activists and one of the late 19th century's greatest artists -- and their links to each other.

You can find the review here

In Latin, the title of Vargas Llosa's new novel might translate as Sic Itur Ad Astra. But it is another Latin tag which the book suggested in this reader: Ars longa, vita brevis.

It is the story of two real-life figures from the 19th century: one an artist, Paul Gauguin, whose immortality is secure; the other a female suffragist and pamphleteer, Flora Tristan, whose legacy has been largely forgotten. Everyone knows those incomparable Tahitian nudes. But who now reads Peregrinations of a Pariah or On the Need to Give a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women?

Llosa has combined the two life stories in one novel, alternating between the two with fugal delicacy, for the excellent reason that Flora Tristan was the grandmother of the painter. She died before Gauguin was born and went down in family folklore as "that meddlesome madwoman".

You can find the review here

Might it be possible, for once, to judge Mario Vargas Llosa's novel by its cover? Exotically curled around the spine of the book is a striking reproduction of Paul Gauguin's masterpiece, Manao Tupapau, a disturbingly voyeuristic vision of the painter's adolescent Maori lover, tormented in her sleep by ancient Tahitian demons.

Gauguin lived the kind of life that even his literary idol, Victor Hugo, would be hard-pressed to invent: a sailor, stockbroker and Sunday-painter who, in his mid-30s, abandoned his bourgeois wife and family to rediscover the primitive in himself; first in Brittany, where his best friend made a present of his ear, before booking a passage to French Polynesia on an outward ticket to disaster. Romantic novelists and film-makers have rehashed and travestied this story ever since. What is remarkable is the transformation when an unromantic novelist such as Vargas Llosa takes over.

It was perhaps inevitable that the greatest living Peruvian novelist should be attracted to Gauguin, as the painter himself spent his formative years in Peru. Surprisingly, Vargas Llosa glosses over this childhood period, as his chief interest lies in the strange combination of stasis and inspiration Gauguin experienced in Tahiti. Having travelled to the South Seas, Gauguin did not paint what he saw so much as express his frustration with what he found. His putative paradise was not quite as simple as he imagined. Rather than an untramelled Eden, Tahiti turned out to be a decadent colonial backwater - the first time Gauguin plunged naked into a stream, a gendarme popped up and charged him with offending public morality.
Vargas Llosa wryly dramatises this and many similar instances of Gauguin's troubles in Tahiti - not least the fact that he meekly accepted minor bureaucratic office in the colonial administration to pay his hospital bills. But where the novel really flares into life is in the fleeting descriptions of the creative process - the maddeningly unpredictable moments when Gauguin briefly found what he had been looking for.

You can find the review here

His new novel, ''The Way to Paradise,'' draws heavily on history, or rather two histories. There is no question of transfiguring. Only occasionally does the book even amount to filling in history, and rarely very shrewdly. It is more in the nature of lavish personal decorating, with speculative sorties.

The histories have twin protagonists: Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán, his Franco-Peruvian grandmother. Just two of the celebrated degrees of separation lay between them, but they were enough to mark out a vast distance between the tumultuous-living painter of polychromatic, totemlike figures in Brittany and the South Seas and the puritanical, self-unsparing woman who struggled around France in the 1840's to campaign for workers' and women's rights.

What did Tristán and Gauguin -- born four years after her death -- have in common? A fiery temper, a fierce unconventionality and a driving impulse toward their two very different extremes. Vargas Llosa's novel follows the extremes in alternate narrative loops without constructing a fictional mean, or even much of a fictional connection. The main connection, in fact, is the author himself. Besides relating his characters' lives he interrogates them persistently, and in an intimate second person that quickly does more than irritate, and creates special awkwardness for Natasha Wimmer's otherwise diligent translation.

You can find the review here