Seeing by Jose Saramago

It's election day in an unnamed capital. A ceaseless, torrential rain keeps voters away from the polls.

The rain finally stops and residents rush out to vote, but the outcome of the election rattles the very foundation of the democracy: more than 70 percent of the ballots are blank. A second election only makes things worse. This time, 83 percent of the voters submit a blank ballot.

So begins "Seeing," Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's unsettling allegory of power and politics that stays with you long after the last page is turned.

You can find the review here

Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande

As the public discourse over undocumented immigration becomes more heated and, at times, outright ugly -- particularly in the blogosphere -- attacks on such immigrants are often made in broad strokes and with gross generalizations.

This should not be a surprise, because it is easier to denigrate and reject a group of people if you dehumanize them and make them faceless.

But that's where talented writers come in: With skillful prose, they can focus on a small group of undocumented immigrants and make their struggles and humanity real to the reader so that it becomes difficult to dismiss their plight with a bumper-sticker slogan or the waving of a flag.

Two years ago, Luis Alberto Urrea did exactly that with "The Devil's Highway", in which he brilliantly chronicled the plight of 26 Mexican men who, in 2001, crossed the border into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. The book received wide acclaim and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Now comes a fictionalized story of undocumented immigration in Reyna Grande's debut novel, "Across a Hundred Mountains" . Grande tells her story in evocative language that never falls into pathos.

In the nonlinear narrative, chapters alternate between her two female protagonists, Juana Garcia and Adelina Vasquez. First, we have Juana, a young girl who lives in a small Mexican village in extreme poverty. When a flood leads to yet another death in her family -- a death that Juana feels responsible for -- Juana's father believes that he must earn more money to house his family in safer quarters. He believes that there are abundant opportunities "en el otro lado," based on a letter from a friend: "Apá's friend wrote about riches unheard of, streets that never end, and buildings that nearly reach the sky. He wrote that there's so much money to be made, and so much food to eat, that people there don't know what hunger is."

You can find the review here

Saving the World by Julia Alvarez

Evaluated by the standards of sheer entertainment value, Saving the World, Julia Alvarez's sixth novel, has much to recommend it - a relatively fast pace (especially in the second half), a couple of big action scenes, a through-line of up-to-the-moment ecopolitics, considerable injections of tragedy and sadness, and a reaffirming resolution.

Starring Alma, a 50-year-old Latina writer with more than a passing resemblance to Alvarez, and featuring a novel-within-a-novel, Saving the World tells the story of what happens when Alma's husband travels to the Dominican Republic (Alma's birthplace) on business and Alma stays in bucolic Vermont, her adopted home, to try to answer persistent calls for a next novel and to prove to herself that she can still do some things on her own.

You can find the review here

The Lost City directed by Andy Garcia

Andy Garcia directs and stars in his latest film, “The Lost City,” a dramatic and historical romantic tribute to his native Cuba set against the background of the Cuban revolution. Garcia left Havana when he was five years old when his family fled to Florida after Fidel Castro’s takeover, and he has been nurturing this project for 16 years. Unfortunately, while the film is handsomely produced and shot on location in the Dominican Republic, it is seriously marred by weak direction and a poorly realized screen adaptation.

Written by Cuban master novelist, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who became one of the most important voices of opposition against the Castro regime, the film follows the bittersweet tale of one family, three brothers and a beautiful woman whose fates are dramatically intertwined with that of a nation caught up in revolutionary turmoil in the late 1950s. Fico Fellove (Garcia), the owner of Havana’s classiest music nightclub, El Tropico, struggles to hold together his family, his club, and the woman he loves. The entertainment that takes place nightly on the stage of his nightclub mirrors what is happening to his country. Indeed, the club serves as a microcosmic theater of the absurd where national historic events play out.

You can find the review here

The Crime of Padre Amaro directed by Carlos Carrera

A review of The Crime of Padre Amaro directed by Carlos Carrera based on the novel by Eça de Queiróz.

''El Crimen del Padre Amaro,'' a suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them. The film, an updated adaptation of a late 19th-century novel by the Portuguese author José Maria Eça de Queiroz, tells the story of Father Amaro (Gael García Bernal), a dreamy-eyed 24-year-old cleric dispatched to a small parish church in Los Reyes to assist its aging priest, Father Benito (Sancho Gracia). If Father Amaro proves a cooperative partner, it is a given that he will one day take over the parish.

Arriving in town, Father Amaro hasn't the foggiest inkling of the political rats' nest that's about to consume him. As played by Mr. Bernal, who has become an international star with ''Amores Perros'' and ''Y Tu Mamá También,'' the young priest projects the dewy naïveté of a Robby Benson character from the 1970's. Mr. Bernal's physical resemblance to that former icon of milk-and-cookies wholesomeness is so pronounced that you half expect the movie to turn into ''Ice Castles'' or ''Ode to Billy Joe,'' but of course it doesn't.

What Father Amaro discovers is a corrupt church bureaucracy collaborating with local drug lords who donate huge sums of money to favorite church charities. In return the church hierarchy turns a blind eye to their activities, which include the violent appropriation of land occupied by poor rural farmers. Any priest who seriously dissents from the bishop's party line risks excommunication.

With one heroic exception the procession of church officials parading through the film are an unsavory lot who justify their money laundering by smugly pointing to the good works to which the funds are applied. Running the diocese is an obese, porcine-eyed bishop (Ernesto Gómez Cruz), whom the movie views with a palpable physical loathing.

The scandalous nature of ''El Crimen del Padre Amaro,'' directed by Carlos Carrera from a screenplay by Vicente Leñero, has helped make it the highest-grossing home-grown film in Mexican history. But what probably accounts for its popularity isn't its indictment of money laundering and conspiracy but its prurient, nostril-flaring portrait of a handsome young clergyman violating his vows of celibacy.

You can find the review here

The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Had they been contemporaries, Carlos Fuentes and Ambrose Bierce would have revelled in each other’s company.

Bierce was the satirist nonpareil and “laughing devil” of the San Francisco newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1913, aged 71, he rode down into Mexico to witness -- or perhaps even join in -- the revolution that was playing out there. Bierce disappeared, but he has not been forgotten.

For one thing, there is Fuentes’s popular novel, The Old Gringo, a myth-making tribute to Bierce. For another, there is Bierce’s great legacy, The Devil’s Dictionary (issued also in amplified form as The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary).

Bierce’s caustic dictionary entry for politics could well serve as the epigraph for Fuentes’s latest novel, The Eagle’s Throne: “Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

Fuentes here ploughs new ground, as well as returning to familiar fields.

The Eagle’s Throne revives the epistolary novel while taking as subject the endless, abject manoeuvres and manipulations that characterise the politicking classes. In the Fuentes oeuvre, it is arguably the work most directly engaged with the moral compromises of Mexican politics and society since his first two novels, Where the Air is Clear (1960) and The Good Conscience (1961).

Indeed, it is tempting to view The Eagle’s Throne as the last in a triptych. Fuentes attempted to define national identity in philosophical and psychological terms in Where the Air is Clear, then moved on in The Good Conscience to the painful realities inherent in changing society from agrarian to urban, peasant to middle class. These were reflections of Mexican life; so too is The Eagle’s Throne, but it has another, prospective function: it is, as Fuentes himself has been careful to emphasise, in the manner of a prophecy.

You can find the review here

La Mujer de Mi Hermano, directed by Ricardo de Montreuil

Some movies sell and you don't know why. With "La Mujer de mi Hermano," a big-screen romantic drama with the aura of a nicely steamed telenovela, you know why: because the three stars look good in plush white bathrobes, that's why. Uruguay native Barbari Mori, Peruvian-born Christian Meier and Colombian heartthrob Manolo Cardona ooze the sort of high-gloss charisma required by Peruvian novelist Jaime Bayly's story, trading in many of the usual soap opera suspects--family secrets, closeted homosexuality and high-grade terry cloth among them.

A large hit all over Latin America, "La Mujer de mi Hermano" ("My Brother's Wife") unfurls in a dreamy, high-end Mexico City. (The novel took place in Peru.) On the surface Zoe (Mori) lives the sweet life with her husband Ignacio (Meier) in their ultra-chic rectangular slab of a home, all concrete, glass and chrome. Underneath, trouble: The childless couple's sensual currents have gone flat, and the grind of Ignacio's infertility has taken its toll.

You can find the review here

Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario

A review of Sonia Nazario's Enrique’s Journey by Luis Alberto Urrea author of “The Devil’s Highway” and “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.”

Joseph Campbell would recognize “Enrique’s Journey.” It’s the stuff of myth. A lone child embarks on a terrible journey through a landscape of monsters and villains. His goal is noble, almost chivalric – he travels through hardship and dangers to find his mother, lost in the far mysteries of the north. To add another layer to the story, it contains a vehicle right out of a fairy tale: a Fury-haunted freight train known as El Tren de la Muerte – the Train of Death.

Sonia Nazario, however, is not writing myths: “Enrique’s Journey” is true.

The story begins in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where Enrique’s mother, Lourdes, supported several children by selling tortillas and gum on the street. It was a small step up from begging or picking garbage to live. One day, Lourdes saw visions of Las Vegas on a customer’s TV screen. It was a revelation – she could risk everything and try to earn enough money to save her children from grinding poverty. But to do so, she had to leave them behind, like thousands of mothers before her. And like thousands of those mothers’ children, when Enrique’s sorrow grew too great to bear, he followed her north. When his mother left, Enrique was 5 years old. He made his own journey 11 years later.

You can find the review here

Brief History of Puerto Rico's Literature

Puerto Rico's literature dates back to the era of conquest and colonization. The early settlers, along with friars and governors, began to describe the new land they had discovered and its Taíno inhabitants. Their letters and documents provide clues to what life was like in the Caribbean before the coming of Columbus.

Notable in this collection are letters written by Puerto Rico's first governor, Ponce de León, to both the rulers in Spain and the ecclesiastical hierarchies in Seville. Here are found the first descriptions of the "conquistadores", the vocabulary and descriptions of the mythological rites of the Taíno people appear for the first time. Many pre-Columbian names have survived, town names such as: Humacao, Coamo, Utuado, and Caguas. It is believed that the Taíno language became extinct by mid-16th century, although pockets of Amerindian culture may have survived in the remote hinterlands.

Spanish cronists like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Fray Tomás de la Torre, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, and others are among the most notable writings about the island...

You can find the review here

La Extranjera

The Stranger (La Extranjera)

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

Gabriela Mistral

Saving the World by Julia Alvarez

Alvarez, an acclaimed author and teacher, grew up in the Dominican Republic, a setting she mines compellingly in her fiction, essays and poems. She has an impeccable grasp of Latin culture and history, and she brings them to life fully.

Readers unfamiliar with the times and places of the stories may lose their way occasionally amid the many historical and political details in this ambitious novel.

Nevertheless, "Saving the World" is a rich and satisfying work of fiction that bridges two worlds -- the one within that tries to define who we are, and the one beyond our grasp that will always pull us to defy our boundaries.

You can find the review here

In the complementary tale set in contemporary Vermont and the Caribbean, Alvarez further probes the roles of medicine, politics, devotion and the explosive mix of ambition and altruism. Unlike Isabel, Alma is plagued by angst and even anorexia, and overreacts to crank phone calls and encounters with her neighbor's unstable son. She finds herself turning to Isabel to calm herself. And when she must rush to Richard's side to try to rescue him from a local takeover of the clinic where he is being held hostage, she must deal with bungling bureaucrats and overzealous militia. "Make believe you're Isabel," she keeps reminding herself.

Paradoxically, she decides she must also try to help the misguided muchachos who see themselves as "ethical terrorists" and whom she sees as teenage boys who would have been satisfied with a pool table, and a training program that would have led to jobs, money, and a chance to be treated as human beings. In the end, like Isabel, she realizes "you cannot live entirely for your own time; you have to imagine a story bigger than your own story, than the sum of its parts."

As in her novel In the Name of Salome, also based on a historic Hispanic woman, Alvarez's heroines encounter corruption and must grapple with disappointment and an ongoing undercurrent of pain. And similar to In the Time of the Butterflies, her best-known novel about three sisters who gave their lives in the struggle against Trujillo, Alma's story builds to a gut-wrenching climax. In each she deals with women who dare to act beyond themselves to help save the world, or at least try.

"I have desperately to dream to go on living," Alma discovers. But she also realizes that she too is a carrier, "carrying this story which would surely die unless it took hold in a future life."

This latest work reflects Alvarez's creative agility, political insight and spiritual depth, and should add to her already impressive reputation.

You can find the review here

Interview with Javier Sierra about The Secret Supper

In ``The Secret Supper'' Leonardo da Vinci is accused of heresy as his latest and overly original painting showing Jesus Christ dining with his 12 disciples provokes the fury of Pope Alexander VI.

Just translated into English, the novel by the Spanish journalist Javier Sierra is already a bestseller in Spain, where it has sold about 250,000 copies since its 2004 publication. Those are huge numbers, if not quite up to the ``other'' thriller featuring Jesus and the works of Leonardo, Dan Brown's ``The Da Vinci Code,'' which has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Sierra spoke with me at Bloomberg's New York headquarters about da Vinci's genius, his own novel and the competition.

Schatz: People inevitably compare ``The Secret Supper'' to ``The Da Vinci Code.'' How are they different?

Sierra: Dan Brown uses Leonardo da Vinci like a cultural reference. In my book, Leonardo is still alive; he's painting his masterpiece ``The Last Supper'' in the convent Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

My main purpose was to get in contact with the mind of the genius, to enter the mind of Leonardo. And that was not the purpose of Dan Brown. The ``Da Vinci Code'' is a page turner; mine is also a page turner, but ``The Da Vinci Code'' is a contemporary thriller and mine is more like Umberto Eco's ``The Name of the Rose.''

You can find the full interview here