The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

In Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, it is the year 2020. America has knocked out all of Mexico's communications—there are no phones, fax, or e-mail. Washington made its move in a fit of pique over Mexico's refusal to lower oil prices and its demand that the United States end its military occupation of Colombia. This is the context for a story about presidential succession—a potentially timely subject, as Mexicans will elect a new president in July.

This is a juicy setup for Fuentes, a chance for that sophisticated, passionate novel of the paso doble between the United States and Mexico that he was born to write. Fuentes, Mexico's most prominent novelist, is also an essayist, dramatist, professor, and former student of international law. The son of a diplomat, he was raised partly in Washington and served as Mexican ambassador to Paris. He is a longtime, if not particularly original, critic of American ideas and influence, and in 2004 he published a book of essays called Contra Bush, which is just what you think it is. Always a more interesting novelist than essayist, Fuentes could have used the situation he has imagined in The Eagle's Throne to probe the love/hate relationship Mexicans have with the United States. Or, well-known proponent of Mexico's democratization that he is, he could have explored Mexico's second modern transformation as he dramatized the workings of presidential politics. In his best novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, written in 1962, Fuentes portrayed the gradual corruption of Mexico's revolution a century ago. Today, Mexico's emergence from 71 years of dictatorship—democratic, but hobbled by the habits of old—again offer him a rich subject.

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Interview with Jose Saramago

The architecture of José Saramago's purpose-built library, as it rises from a parched hillside on his adopted island of Lanzarote, creates the impression of a modern cathedral. Sunlight splinters through high, narrow windows of opaque glass that stretch the full two storeys; the clean, white walls and cool flagstones contribute to a sense of hushed reverence in the presence of so many volumes, ancient and modern, in so many languages. Here is a shrine to literature, an alternative religion for a Portuguese Nobel laureate, who left his homeland 14 years ago in protest at the government's censorship of his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (it vetoed its submission for the European Literature Prize on the grounds that it was offensive to Catholics).
It takes some effort to believe that Saramago is about to turn 84 - not just because of his vivid physical presence, his barely-lined face and the quickness of his eyes and hands when he talks, but also because of his extraordinary productivity.

Although Seeing is published this week in English translation, he has produced another book in the meantime; Las Intermitencias de la Muerte was published last autumn in Portugal, Spain and Latin America (his Spanish wife, Pilar del Rio, translates his books as he goes along so that they can be published simultaneously for his large Spanish readership), and he is now working on an autobiography entitled Pequenas Memorias (Little Memories), about his childhood in rural Portugal.

But the image of the venerable novelist shut away in his island retreat, disengaged from the world, could not be further from the truth. Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak at conferences and presentations on politics and sociology. 'Most of it doesn't have much to do with literature,' he explains, 'but this is a part of my life that I consider very important, not to limit myself to literary work; I try to be involved in the world to the best of my strengths and abilities.' Still a member of the Communist party, Saramago is a vocal opponent of globalisation and many of his best known novels have taken the form of political allegory. Does he believe that the artist is obliged to take on a political role? 'It isn't a role,' he says, almost sharply.

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The Heretic by Miguel Delibes

Visitors to Valladolid, located north of Madrid, can follow a route through the city that is dedicated to sites associated with Cipriano Salcedo, a 16th-century merchant who was swept up in the fires of the Inquisition. Stations on the route include the old Jewish quarter, where the Salcedo family's warehouse would have been located, and the Plaza Mayor, where the auto-da-fé was held that condemned Salcedo and other presumed Protestant heretics. As they move among the remnants of Valladolid's former royal splendor, tourists can consider how Spain might have developed had the Counter-Reformation not been so successful in suppressing the nascent Protestant heresy--or what might have happened had there been more men like Salcedo.

There were people like Salcedo among those burned in Valladolid, but Salcedo himself is a fictional character in The Heretic, Miguel Delibes' 1998 novel, which was recently translated into English. Though little known in the U.S., Delibes is a member of Spain's Royal Academy and a winner, along with Vargas Lllosa, Cabrera Infante and Alvaro Mutis, of the Cervantes Prize.

Salcedo, born to wealth though not to the nobility, survives a loveless father, a mad wife and a liaison with his former wet nurse to develop into an astute and innovative businessman. Delibes' account of the Salcedo's vertical integration of the rabbit-coat industry--How many writers can boast of sustaining interest in a subject like that?--fleshes out Salcedo in much the same way that detailed manufacturing processes and financial transactions provide the background in Balzac's fictions. In terms of character, a contract can be as revealing as a seduction. Fortunately, this book has both.

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Interview with Carlos Fuentes

In the new political novel by preeminent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican bishop counsels a general to forgive his enemies. "I can't," the general replies. "I haven't got any left. I've killed them all."

On the eve of Mexico's July presidential elections, Fuentes is treating U.S. readers to his fictional sendup of Mexico's baroque political baggage, from the historic mestizo nation that arose from the Mexican Revolution to the murders and political intrigues that marked the end of the seven-decade rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. "The Eagle's Throne" opens in the year 2020, and U.S. President Condoleezza Rice's administration has shut down Mexican satellite communications in reprisal for Mexico's rising oil prices and its opposition to U.S. troops in Colombia.

"This is a satire. Satire knows no pity," Fuentes said last week, sitting under a window that spills soft morning light on his silver temples and aquiline features, and rolling up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt. "It is a book that seeks not to prophesize, but to exorcise. I hope that 'The Eagle's Throne' doesn't happen. But I fear it will be a prophecy, because exorcism can become prophecy."

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Laura Esquivel on La Malinche

Her new book, "Malinche," follows the relationship between La Malinche, or Malinalli as she is called in the book, and Spanish explorer Hernan Cortez, who uses Malinalli as his translator in his quest to overthrow the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and then tosses her aside after conquering Mexico. Hurt and disillusioned, Malinalli discovers true love with Cortez's lieutenant and eventually even forgives Cortez.

Like her previous books, "Malinche" is full of love and longing, with the same plain language that makes for a quick read but at times betrays the author's origins in television.

The book is also something new for Esquivel, serving as a political and historical text. As Cortez's translator, La Malinche has often been called the ultimate traitor, yet her role in Mexican history is more nuanced, Esquivel maintains.

"She is a person who we have yet to judge fairly," Esquivel says, adding that it wasn't hard to imagine why La Malinche helped Cortez. It was about cycles.

For the Aztecs, "there were always cycles that ended, and then came a struggle and a new cycle," Esquivel says. "A woman, in this time, being a slave, would have hoped that a change was coming."

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Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize

Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo received Spain's Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize on Monday (April 24) 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.

Roncagliolo, 30 years old, is the youngest author ever to obtain the Alfaguara award.

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Giovanna Mezzogiorno in "Love in the Time of Cholera"

Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who starred in Italian foreign-language Oscar nominee "Don't Tell," will join Spanish actor Javier Bardem in "Love in the Time of Cholera," a project based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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Interview with Luis Alberto Urrea

His best-selling nonfiction book "The Devil's Highway" was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. His widely acclaimed novel "The Hummingbird's Daughter" recently shared Pacific Rim Voices' $30,000 Kiriyama Prize for fiction, an award celebrating literature that contributes to greater understanding of the people and nations of the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia.

Urrea, 50, is about to launch a major book tour promoting the paperback release of "The Hummingbird's Daughter." With the recent national debate over immigration, he is in hot demand on the lecture circuit.

Book critics have compared "The Hummingbird's Daughter" to the work of Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The novel is a fictional account about Urrea's great aunt, a Yaqui faith healer. And if that's not enough applause, both "The Devil's Highway" and "The Hummingbird's Daughter" will be made into motion pictures.

"I'm going crazy, man. Oye, right now it's the crazy season anyway because the big book tour is starting," Urrea said in a phone interview from his home near Chicago, where he teaches at the University of Illinois.

Urrea was among featured authors at the Border Book Festival, which concludes today in Mesilla.

How is Urrea adapting to his recent literary celebrity status?

"I approach it with gratitude. Most of the time, I'm the guy hassling my teenage son to take out the trash," he said. "Then you go somewhere else and people cry or they wait an hour to shake your hand. Then it's kind of startling."

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Saving the World by Julia Alvarez

This is the story Alma would rather write. Isabel, the heroine and scarred survivor of this story-within-the-story, lovingly runs the orphanage from which the Spanish boys are chosen to be the living carriers of the vaccine. She accompanies them on their dangerous voyage from Spain to the Americas to the Philippines.

"Saving the World" bounces back and forth between the early 19th and 21st centuries; the somewhat graceless transitions are presaged by Alma's internal struggles, as her mind wanders from her troubles toward the story that compels her.

Other messianic types vie to fill Alma's midlife void and compete with Isabel as saviors of the world: Her friend Tera is a raging extremist for all causes; the psychotic son and daughter-in-law of Alma's beloved dying neighbor call themselves "ethical terrorists," though their psychotic symptoms are limited to lurking about and making scary crank calls.

Then there are the young revolutionaries who take Richard hostage at the AIDS clinic that has become the focus of his mission to the Dominican Republic. Alma poses as a journalist and joins her husband after his abduction. The black-kerchiefed leader of the small band of rebels talks to her. " 'The questions are very simple. Why do we go hungry? Why do our people die of curable diseases? What is it that has excluded us?' "

These are indeed the questions; the answers are complex and only superficially addressed in "Saving the World," as humanitarian efforts fall to terrorism and corporate lies.

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Our Lives Are the Rivers by Jaime Manrique

Though Manuela Sáenz lies buried in an unmarked grave in Peru, her efforts on behalf of South America's liberation from Spain have not been forgotten. And neither has her devotion to the Latin American hero Simón Bolívar, with whom she had a love affair from the time of their meeting until his death in 1830.

This legendary couple and the battlegrounds on which their tumultuous relationship unfolded are masterfully imagined in Jaime Manrique's page-turning novel "Our Lives Are the Rivers".

"With all my wealth, I would devise my own future," claims Manuela, a woman of privilege bitterly attained after growing up an illegitimate daughter of a Spanish businessman.

Her father marries her off to one of his associates, and Manuela rebels by raising funds for the patriot armies that later overthrow the Spanish monarchy in Peru.

As a lifelong witness to the injustices against the criollos (South American descendants of Spaniards), Manuela becomes invested in the revolutionary furor that is headed by the dashing Bolívar, whom she enamors with both her beauty and her commitment to "the only cause worth fighting for."

What follows is an impassioned account of an adulterous affair, the vanity of "the first lady of Gran Colombia," and the ardent obligation that takes its toll on the couple's emotional health.

Bolívar eventually reveals his unflattering temperament; Manuela, her nationalistic fanaticism as she orders the death of a young traitor before his mother, confirming the truth that "no one in the epic of independence could claim not to have blood on their hands."

Fleshing out this tale of a heroine in the making are Jonatás and Natán, Manuela's two slaves and companions in arms, who offer their perspectives, critical of the war-torn 1800s that neglected the rights of the indigenous people and of the women's fellow Africans. And through their eyes, though they loved Manuela, it was she who had sole control over their freedom, not the revolution.

Through this complex narrative, Manrique succeeds in creating a memorable and human portrait of a woman so embedded in the upheaval that she must ask herself, "Had I fallen in love with a man whose true mistress was war?" And under the author's skillful guidance, the romantic banter and lovers' quarrels between Sáenz and Bolívar never slip into vitriol, and the accuracy of historic events and timelines is never compromised.

You can find the review here

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

The Spanish novelist Javier Sierra has written a scintillating murder mystery, The Secret Supper, that, like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, attempts to decode the unique features of this crumbling five-centuries-old fresco on the wall of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.

Sierra's book, which sold 250,000 in his native Spain (pop. 40 million) before becoming a bestseller throughout Europe, has finally arrived here in a seamless English translation by Canadian writer Alberto Manguel. The Da Vinci Code cannot hold a candle to it for sophistication.

Though they both draw inspiration from the same well, in the words of Australian critic Alan Gold, "any comparison between Sierra and Brown is similar to pitting a Renaissance painter against a graffiti artist."

"I did not read Dan Brown's book until I finished my manuscript; it had just come out in Spanish and I wasn't going to read it but my wife pushed me," says Sierra, whose latest book was first out in 2004 as La cena secreta. It is the 34-year-old author's seventh work (three non-fiction, four novels).

"It was not news to me: many of his sources were well-known to me," he says. "His book is not well finished; the end is poor. But it excited the imagination of people and invited them to look for more information, and that has been wonderful for my book."

The Secret Supper has been published in 35 countries and is set to explode here. When we spoke in Toronto this week, Sierra was finishing a 10-city tour with his wife Eva, a ballet teacher whom he credits with helping him develop the psychology of his characters. An avid traveller, he speaks fluent English.

If you have not yet read The Da Vinci Code, this is your spoiler alert - Brown's plot hinges on the supposed marriage of Mary Magdelene and Jesus, based on the contention that the feminine figure next to Christ in The Last Supper represents the Magdelene. In Sierra's scheme, and according to art historians, that figure is John the Evangelist.

"Many masters in the Middle Ages used female models to paint John to give the idea of his purity," says Sierra. "I am sure Leonardo's model for this character was a lady, but the figure is John. We know that from Leonardo's notes. If we accept that it's the Magdelene, then where is John? We are missing a very important disciple."

The Secret Supper is set in late 15th-century Milan and most, though not all, of Sierra's characters are carefully researched historical figures. The story is told by a fictional monk, Father Augustino Leyre, who is dispatched by the Inquisition in Rome to check whether the unconventional fresco Leonardo is painting embodies heretical notions.

If Leonardo is not a heretic, why do Christ and his disciples not wear halos? Why is there no chalice or Paschal lamb on the supper table? Why no Eucharist? Who are the models for the Apostles and why do some have their backs turned to the Saviour?

You can find the review here

Interview with Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz arrives late for his interview, ticked off and out of breath. The Dominican American author, whose work is onstage at Intersection for the Arts, was walking down 15th Street in the Mission when he saw a white woman on the sidewalk, berating a Mexican woman for her lack of English.

"We were just talkin' about immigration and stuff and there is this woman screaming, 'Learn English! Learn English!' I was like, 'Yo, what the f -- is your problem, yo?' It was like nasty, dude. The poor woman she was screaming at was trembling."

Diaz, 37, emigrated from the Dominican Republic when he was 6 and grew up near Perth Amboy, N.J., on the periphery of a landfill. He knows about poverty, racism and marginalization; he knows how immigrants become targets for misdirected resentments.

"This immigration s -- has got people flippin'," he says.

A few deep breaths. A slug of water. Focus. And then Diaz, a slender, tightly wound man, is ready to move on. He sits at a long table at the Intersection's upstairs gallery, looking slightly shell-shocked.

In fact, the incident he witnessed on 15th Street is indivisible from the kind of thing he writes about. Diaz is the author of "Drown," an acclaimed 1996 short-story collection, mostly semiautobiographical, about growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey during the '70s and '80s.

It's a scary time for new Americans. With the Bush administration putting the clamps on illegal immigration and legislators calling for a 700-mile wall to stop Mexicans at the border, Diaz says it's more important than ever to speak up.

You can find the interview here