Havana Black by Leonardo Padura

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Leonardo Padura's Havana Red introduced the English-speaking world to Lieutenant Mario Conde, who pursued a baroque concept of police work amid the crumbling riches of Havana. Now, his admired boss has been replaced, his Siamese fighting fish is floating belly-up, and Conde has handed in his resignation, locking himself in to die of "rum and cigar-ettes, grief and bitterness".

He is persuaded to interrupt this bout of anomie to take on an intriguing case. A former minister responsible for confiscating pre-revolutionary art-works has been killed. As well as having his head smashed in, the deceased had been castrated. The victim had been living safely in Miami, so why had he returned to a country where he might have many enemies?

Padura's satisfying narrative delves deep into Conde's world and into the stories of his friends and colleagues. Hanging over the book is an oppressive tension; Cuba is waiting for a hurricane. Conde needs to get his story sorted out before the storm hits - not just the crime, but the fictional narrative at which he bangs away on an old typewriter.

You can find the review here

"Achados e Perdidos" at the Beverly Hills Film Festival

Brazilian director José Joffily's thriller "Achados e Perdidos" (Lost and Found), based on a novel by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, is bathed in the neon noir of Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana. A retired chief of police, Vieira (Antônio Fagundes), awakens to learn that his prostitute girlfriend, Magali (Zezé Polessa), has been murdered and he is the prime suspect. Vieira blacked out and cannot remember anything about the previous night, casting doubt in his own mind as to what happened.

Into his life comes Magali's protégé, the younger Flor (Juliana Knust), who seems to have an eerily certain faith in Vieira's innocence. Her youthful optimism invigorates the 60-year-old ex-cop, but their happiness is clouded by the reemergence of dark events from his past.

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The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

What is it about Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" that captivates the imagination?

Is it his vivid depiction of the moment Jesus tells his followers one of them will betray him?

The puzzling absence of the bread and chalice symbolizing his body and blood?

Or the startlingly feminine appearance of the disciple seated at his right hand?

Dan Brown turned his theories about "The Last Supper" into a taut thriller that topped best-seller lists and was snapped up by Hollywood. But he wasn't the only writer to see literary gold in da Vinci's peeling fresco.

Javier Sierra, a Spanish author who's written on the secrets of the Templars and the enigmas of lost civilizations, was researching clues the painter may have hidden in his masterpiece at the same time Brown was writing "The Da Vinci Code."

The result is "The Secret Supper," a best-selling novel in the Spanish-speaking world that captured one of Spain's top literary awards in 2004. It likely will ride "The Da Vinci Code's" coattails to popularity in the United States now that it's finally been published in English.

You can find the review here

Intervew with Laura Esquivel

Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel says it is time for a re-examination of what resulted from the clash and combination of European and indigenous cultures in Mexico since the early 16th century, and progress beyond what has become a knee-jerk condemnation of the Spanish side.

"The time has come for a better understanding of our mixture of races and to weigh all that the Spaniards brought" to the Mexico whose history began in 1519, she said in an interview with EFE at the presentation of her latest novel, "Malinche" (Suma de Letras, 2006).

"Official" Mexican culture makes something of a cult of the pre-Columbian native world while demonizing the Spanish conquerors, who engaged in widespread massacre, enslavement, rape and robbery. For example, Aztec resister Moctezuma is a popular hero, while Hernán Cortés is universally a complete villian.

At the same time, European-descended and mestizo Mexicans who speak Spanish, the language of the conquerors, have exercised political and economic power since the conquest, while the indigenous - about 10 percent of the population - have languished in abject poverty.

Esquivel called it necessary to cultivate more empathy and sympathy for La Malinche, an indigenous woman stigmatized for having been the interpreter and lover of Cortés.


You can find the interview here

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

While Dan Brown saw significance in the letter formations created in the fresco -- the perfect W created by Jesus at the centre, for one -- Sierra plumbs a hidden phrase from the letters of the Apostles names and their positions on the mural.

Leonardo is an enigma himself, always dressed in white like Apostle Simon and living a secretive life with a stable of young apprentices. He refuses to eat meat and is said to practice celibacy (except, as the author points out, he "fancied men -- which would make him not as celibate as some assert").

While waiting for inspiration, Leonardo is said to have worked slavishly on his inventions, mostly of a labour-saving nature but whose success was often determined by the number of fatalities they caused. To keep his notes from prying eyes, he wrote backwards using a mirror.

What Sierra reads into The Last Supper is that Leonardo was a Cathar, a sect that practised abstinence from food and sex to purify themselves but which was thought to have been exterminated during the Crusades in Southern France in 1244. Also factored into this story is a mysterious blue book owned by Leonardo, one said to have recorded a discussion between Saint John and Jesus in heaven.

The ancient Oriental treatise, the death of many in Sierra's story, is called Interrogatio Johannis, or The Secret Supper. It was purportedly the bible of a new church, one that would fly in the face of Catholicism. Were its contents encoded in Da Vinci's mural?

From a European standpoint, The Secret Supper is, like Da Vinci's fresco, a masterpiece -- the most talked about book of the year -- from an already popular Costa del Sol author who cut his teeth on a series of earlier historical enigmas, including one about the secretive Templar sect.

Rights to the novel have been sold in 25 countries and its release 10 days ago was accompanied by a no-holds-barred, Da Vinci Code-style marketing campaign.

Unlike Brown's epic tale, Sierra keeps you guessing to the bitter end -- the last line on the last page of the book's last chapter, in fact. What Sierra has produced is more than just a clever, spine-tingling mystery but a great divide -- those who will swear by Brown and those who put Sierra to the head of the Da Vinci class.

In truth, Sierra's story -- soon to face The Da Vinci Code's heavy Hollywood guns -- is more than just a contender. It leaves Brown's fabled tale in the dust.

Be warmed though: If you don't thoroughly enjoy The Last Supper, there's no dessert.

You can find the review here

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

The "Da Vinci" wannabes just keep coming. Europe's highest-profile entry in the sweepstakes is The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra, translated from the original Spanish by Alberto Manguel.

This is a considerably better novel than most pretenders to the mystical-thriller throne. While it covers similar ground to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," this is a moodier and generally more intellectual story, with an undertone of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose."

One thing that immediately distinguishes "The Secret Supper" is that Leonardo Da Vinci is in fact a character in the tale, and he's depicted with an agreeably enigmatic puckishness. The novel takes place in 1497, as Leonardo is completing "The Last Supper" in Milan.

Virtually everyone, from Pope Alexander VI to the monks cohabiting with the painting, suspect that Leonardo is concealing a mysterious (and possibly blasphemous) message in the work. But no one can decipher it.

You can find the review here

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels including the “Havana Quartet”, a series of detective novels featuring Havana police Inspector Mario Conde. The latest installment, available in English, in that series is Havana Red. Havana Red was awarded the Dashiell Hammett prize for detective fiction in Spain in 2004. Adios Hemingway, the next Mario Conde mystery, is due out this month. Padura lives in Havana, Cuba.

PA: Do you favor the detective/crime fiction genre? If so, why?

LP: I remember that back in 1977, when I wrote the first book review that I had published in a magazine, it was a commentary on a crime novel. Since that time, when I was a liberal arts student at the University of Havana and wasn’t even dreaming of being a fiction writer, I was already very close to the crime novel, dark, detectivesque, or whatever you want to call it, but at the same time I was developing my preferences for the approaches of authors such as Hammett and Chandler. Then, in the 80’s, I was the critic “par excelence” of the Cuban-authored crime novel, and was also sketching out my interests. I did not like the majority of those Cuban crime or spy novels, but what was lacking was “literature,” perhaps because there were too many very obvious political intentions, almost typical of socialist realism. For this reason, back in 1990, when I emerged from a period of six years during which I did practically nothing but journalism—I had written my first novel in 1984, Horse Fever (Fiebre de caballos), a story of love and initiation – I had decided to write a crime novel and I had several objectives. Among these were, it had to be very Cuban, but not resembling those crime novels that I had criticized; that it should be a crime novel, but only in appearance, because I was more interested in the literary aspect than in any kind of mystery; that it should have Hammett and Chandler as models, but also authors who I had been reading in those years, such as Vazques Montalban, Chester Himes, Jean Patrick Manchette and many other non-crime-novel authors.

My decision to write that novel, which I titled Past Perfect (Pasado Perfecto) and which was first published in 1991 had several purposes, but the greatest was that, being a crime novel, it should also be a social novel, because I believe that one of the virtues of this genre is that one can utilize it in any way one wishes, as long as it [does not] violate the known rules of what one is doing. The “dark” novel can take one directly to the darkest corners of a reality, of a society, while always maintaining something that is very important to me: the possibility of communicating with readers. That is why I like the police-type novel so much – I call my novels “false crime novels,” because the crime novel structure is only a pretext to get to other places – and being that I have practiced it so much: of my eight novels, six are police-type, even though I must recognize that my most ambitious book, The Novel of my Life, is a novel of intrigue in which there are no cadavers, even though there are some mysteries.

You can find the full interview here

The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo

Spanish septuagenarian Juan Goytisolo, in what is rumoured as his last book, has concocted one of these sweet opiates. His loosely fictionalised memoir Blind Rider, although terrifying, is intensely interesting.

Old age is a fascinating, headlong charge into oblivion by Goytisolo's measure and it looks as if it may be worth hanging around for. His protagonist, bitter and confused shortly after the death of his wife (the author's died in 1996), embarks on a journey through memory to try to understand this loss.

We are led on an ethereal drift across his childhood, his mother's death, the intense years of his young adulthood when he read Tolstoy and Kierkegaard and mystic theology, becoming a man of letters. There is no contented reminiscence or firming of identity, however. "Time was a blind rider nobody could unsaddle. As he galloped, he ravaged all that seemed enduring, transformed landscapes, reduced dreams to ashes," Goytisolo writes.

Ageing is presented as an exercise in despair, "a hole or voracious abyss down which memory plunged". You are born "to perpetuate oblivion ... Those around you will shed some tears over you but your image will dissolve like snow in a glass of water," God tells our unnamed protagonist while he sleeps.

His memories serve only to reinforce a vision of earth as a bloodbath of self-interest: where armies of children die every day, where no one and nothing is really remembered, where millions found nations on the fictions of religion and slaughter each other over disagreements in their cults of faith. These nightmares, Goytisolo writes, are what absorb the last days of an introspective life: when literary ambitions have dried up, when no more can be said and done, and one can finally survey the earth and its works. From his wizened perspective, only terror and absurdity seem the enduring themes of this mortal coil.

Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. Since 1956 he has lived in voluntary exile outside Spain and now lives in Marrakesh. In 2004 he was awarded the prestigious Juan Rulfo International Latin American and Carribean Prize for Literature.

You can find the review here

Bernardo Atxaga full member of Euskaltzaindia

Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, has appointed Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga full member of the academy in the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

As articles of association establish, the incorporation of new members has been approved by the absolute majority.

Thus, Atxaga takes over from priest and poet Juan Mari Lekuona, deceased in 2005. His candidacy was promoted by Academy members Juan Luis Lizundia, Ana Toledo and Xabier Kintana.

Joseba Irazu Garmendia, better known as Bernardo Atxaga, was born 1951 in Asteasu, in the province of Gipuzkoa. With a degree in commerce and despite having worked as a Basque teacher and radio scriptwriter, he has been in literature over the last years.

The Basque writer published his theatre play Borobila eta puntua in 1972. Four years later he wrote his first novel titled Ziutateaz and it was Ethiopia's turn in 1978, his first book of poetry.

In principle, he chose aesthetic and ideological avant-garde movement, but in 1980 he began writing literature for children. Moreover, he published one of his most popular pieces of work: Obabakoak.

Gizona bere bakardadean, Lekuak and Soinujolearen semea are three of many of his works.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of futuristic fiction. Most such fiction - E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice - describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time it was written. But in The Eagle's Throne, the fact Condoleezza Rice is the first black female US president is about all that differentiates Carlos Fuentes's satirical vision of the political future from today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge that he was pillorying real people? The foundation on which Fuentes has erected his elaborate if sometimes unconvincing plot is that the Mexican president has incensed the US by hoisting oil prices and demanding that the superpower cease to meddle in the affairs of Colombia. In retaliation the US, which controls Mexico's satellite systems, immediately cuts off its phones, faxes and email. This allows Fuentes to tell his story entirely through letters.

All the letters are stylistically and intellectually brilliant. Not one is without its arresting aphorisms: "What is melodrama but comedy without the humour?"; "Politics is the art of swallowing frogs without flinching"; "It takes much more imagination to be ex-president than to be president".

Each letter glitters with brutally vivid similes and metaphors. The problem is, all these letters seem to be written by the same person: Fuentes. When, in his latest novel Kept, D.J. Taylor produces pastiches of two great Victorian writers, one can immediately distinguish that one is William Makepeace Thackeray and the other George Eliot. But if the letters in Fuentes's novel were not preceded by the names of their authors, one would be hard-pressed to decide who wrote what. Sadly, he cannot do voices.

You can find the review here

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Interview with Mexican Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga likes to write car crashes into his scripts. It's a road accident in Mexico City that unites the three separate stories of Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Amores Perros', and another that wipes out the children of Naomi Watts's character in Iñárritu's second film, '21 Grams' – which somehow makes it all the more worrying that Arriaga is now telling Time Out about his new film, the Tommy Lee Jones-directed 'Three Burials', while at the wheel of a car in his home country of Mexico. 'Don't worry,' Arriaga reassures me, 'I'll be careful.'

'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' – to give it its full title – is a cruel but also compassionate and intelligent revenge tale set in the unforgiving desert between Texas and Mexico. It won Arriaga the prize for best screenplay after its world premiere in Cannes last year, where Jones also picked up the best actor award. So how did a famed Mexican screenwriter hook up with a celebrated Hollywood actor to collaborate on the latter's directing debut?

'I was driving once and my cellphone rang and it was Tommy Lee Jones,' Arriaga begins. 'He said he'd seen 'Amores Perros' and that he would love to have a conversation with me. We had dinner together in Los Angeles, and, you know, in cinema I think it's very important to work with people who have similar tastes. We talked about our favourite writers, our favourite films, our favourite actors. He has an impeccable taste. Well, he has the same taste as me.'

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Duck Season directed by Fernando Eimbcke

"Duck Season" is the first film by Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke to receive wide release in the States, and it's a sly and shifty comedy that slowly peels back its audience's preconceptions about the characters in that tacky little apartment. Playing like a cross of Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise" and the "Lazy Sunday" music video from "Saturday Night Live" that was an Internet hit earlier this year, the movie sneaks up on you to make its points.

The longer we stay in the apartment and the less that happens, the more we learn about the characters. Flama (Daniel Miranda) is miserable because he's caught in a custody battle between his divorcing parents. Moko (Diego Catano Elizondo) has a crush on his more reserved friend and is basically a hormonal outburst waiting to happen. Ulises (Enrique Arreola) is a dreamer who imagines escaping his miserable life and all care. And Rita (Danny Perea) is a girl-child, burgeoning on maturity, ignored by her family and incapable of the simplest tasks.

Eimbcke brings his characters together in unpredictable combinations of sympathy, longing, hope, mischief and despair. It doesn't blast off like that other Mexican art house coming-of-age hit, "Y Tu Mama Tambien," but it's warm, winning and clever.

You can find the review here