Written Lives by Javier Marias

Javier Marias is perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences as the author of the novels All Souls and A Heart So White, winner of the 1997 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award.

Yet, in his native Spain, his weekly articles in El Pais are hugely popular and he is equally well known for his essays and translations. It is in this latter guise that we see him now in Written Lives.

Written Lives is an exquisite collection of miniatures, ironic and idiosyncratic portraits of 25 of the most famous (and infamous) writers of the past two centuries. Here Marias turns his affectionate (in most cases) and humorous gaze onto, among others, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, James Joyce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Emily Bronte.

You can find the review here

Interview with Isabel Allende

Isabelle Allende is the most affable diva of world literature. She is so direct and creates such an immediate sense of familiarity and trust that one wonders whether she has any flaws. The celebrated Chilean writer is a mixture of many different ingredients: a significant family heritage, political activism, roots in a country that is liked by the world and a home in California, where the citrus groves, she says, remind her of her homeland. She survived the death of her daughter, attracted the love and admiration of millions of readers around the globe and has been hailed as being a model wife and mother. She is the classic voice of Latin American literature. Her world is ruled by waves of nostalgia, fantasy, the awakening of female identity, eroticism, ecology and passion.

Allende has written many successful novels, but «The House of the Spirits,» published in 1982 and later made into a film, consolidated magical realism and launched the writer on an international scale.

Allende is currently in Greece, where she visited the book fair in Athens on Sunday, gave a lecture yesterday at the Athens Concert Hall and is scheduled for a book signing at the Papasotiriou bookshop (at 37 Panepistimiou Street) today at 8 p.m. Knowing that she has thousands of readers in Greece, she was happy to give an interview to Kathimerini.

You can find the interview here

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 Mr. Fuentes, a chance for that sophisticated, passionate novel of the pasodoble between the United States and Mexico that he was born to write.

Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

Mr. Fuentes has chosen to do neither. Instead of rendering the transformation of electoral politics, he refuses to acknowledge it.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

Among North American readers, José Saramago is most famous for his novel Blindness, which was translated into English in 1997, a year before the Portuguese novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Blindness is both gripping and scary, a book one is tempted to read as quickly as possible just to break free of Saramago's manipulative if brilliantly conjured nightmare. The novel is about an unexplained plague that renders an entire city (with one exception) sightless. Saramago, an avowed pessimist and a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, uses this conceit to explore human cruelty and the corrupting force of power.

The first people in Blindness who lose their sight are rounded up like lepers and deposited at an old mental hospital. In the book's most queasy passage, a gang of bullies takes control of the food supply and demands sexual favours for rations. Ultimately, a reader is tempted to explain the blindness of the novel with a Kafka-like paradox: The people in Blindness are struck blind as punishment for the crimes they will later commit.

Saramago's new novel, Seeing, is a companion piece, a backhanded sequel to Blindness. Whereas the earlier book deals with cruelty among the powerless, Seeing concerns the viciousness of those who control the military, the media and the police.

Seeing is also a strange, markedly different, strangely divided book.

You can find the review here

Seeing by Jose Saramago

There are no easy lessons to be drawn from this book. It stands more as an invitation to reflect and to be fundamentally disconcerted. Parallels to present democracies are easy to draw, yet conclusions are slippery and difficult to come by.

In Saramago's 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, the Iberian Peninsula breaks adrift from Europe. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an unnamed country fights a strange plague.

His fiction is ultimately impossible to classify and, for that reason, invaluable. Seeing is no exception; it should be read, and we should be afraid of what we see.

You can find the review here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

We don't usually hear literature and national politics spoken of in the same breath these days, but in the case of Carlos Fuentes the two often go naturally together. Ever since his debut as a novelist in the late 1950s, the prolific Mexican writer has attempted the Joycean feat of trying to put into prose, mostly novels and stories, the great uncreated conscience of his nation.
His latest effort in this regard came out four years ago in Mexico, and that book, translated as "The Eagle's Throne," has just been published in English. The bird of the title is part of the Mexican national emblem, and the seat in question is the presidency. Just recently a friend of mine, fresh from working in the Chilean presidential election campaign, told me that Michelle Bachelet, who was sworn in as Chile's president in March, had received from friends a number of copies of Fuentes' new book.

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In "The Tango Singer," as in his two previous novels, "Santa Evita" and "The Perón Novel," Martínez's locale is Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martínez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the "atrocious dictatorship" in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in "Tango."

You can find the review here

With Borges by Alberto Manguel

An excerpt of Alberto Manguel's "With Borges" can be found here.

La Malinche by Laura Esquivel

Another review of Esquivel's "La Malinche".

The Spanish encounter with Mexico was many things, but "confusing"? I'm tempted to blame the translator for some of the novel's more unfortunate moments, such as Malinalli's realization that "she was tired, extremely tired of Cortés and all his strategies." But the problem surely goes deeper than diction in whatever language. For instance, in an early scene when the hirsute Spaniard "takes" Malinalli for the first time -- on a riverbank, no less -- Esquivel tells us that the pair "looked into each other's eyes and found their destiny and their inevitable union." Are those literary terms for rape?

In its treatment of plot (sketchy) and character (sketchier) and its emphasis on wifty spirituality, Malinche feels half thought out, its heroine an excuse for the author to indulge her meditations on pre-Columbian (or pre-Cortésian) folkways. Esquivel hints that Malinalli is a kind of Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure in whom the blood of warring races mingles together, the mother of the Mexico that will be born out of the clash of cultures. That's a fascinating idea, but in this book it's only an idea. The more Malinalli retreats from history into spirituality, the more she melds into the universe and the vaguer she becomes as a character -- until she's lost entirely in the mists of myth. From conquistador's mouthpiece to author's is not a fate anyone should suffer.

You can find the review here

Captain Alatriste

Captain Alatriste is poised to become fiction's hottest international swashbuckler since the Scarlet Pimpernel. Already a cult hero in Spain, Alatriste is the star of five novels by former journalist Arturo Pérez-Reverte that have sold more than 4 million copies in 50 countries since the first volume appeared a decade ago. That book, Captain Alatriste, was finally published in English last year, and the second, Purity of Blood, came out in January. The captain has his own website, comic strip, board games and, in Madrid, guided tours of his fictional haunts. Alatriste, a feature film based largely on the first book and starring Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings), will open in Europe and the U.S. later this year. With a $28 million budget, it's the most expensive Spanish-language film ever made in Spain.

The protagonist of this franchise is perhaps the least dashing, most enigmatic hero ever to rattle a rapier. Alatriste speaks little, drinks alone, dresses badly and blunders into traps set by more cunning adversaries. But he is fearless, deadly with a blade and, beneath his armored persona, stubbornly loyal. Those qualities animate the newly translated Purity of Blood. Alatriste is hired to help an aging father free his daughter, a nun, from the clutches of a well-connected priest who is using the convent as his private seraglio. The old man and his family have a secret: as Christian descendants of a converted Jew in anti-Semitic times, they lack "purity of blood" and soon become targets of the Inquisition. Alatriste too comes under suspicion, and the blood, pure and otherwise, begins to flow.

You can find the article here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Sex, politics, Mexico and the enigmas of identity are the themes that have preoccupied — even, at times, obsessed — Carlos Fuentes for his entire writing life, and he brings them together once again, in full regalia, in his smashing new novel, "The Eagle's Throne." Here, though, they feel less like obsessions than like old friends, the trusted longtime companions of the novelist's working days. By now, they're so familiar to Fuentes, and to one another, that they mingle freely, casually, almost flirtatiously. Fuentes has gathered them all in one place many times before, usually for grave, summit-level meetings in ambitious novels like "The Death of Artemio Cruz," "The Old Gringo" and "The Years With Laura Díaz." This is the first time he's thrown them a party.

Which is not to say that "The Eagle's Throne" is unambitious. Fuentes doesn't put finger to keyboard without having at least one fairly large idea to get off his chest, and over the years he has managed to store up more than a couple of big ones about the subject he addresses here: the exercise of practical politics.


You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In his new novel, "The Tango Singer," Tomás Eloy Martínez ("The Péron Novel"), who was short-listed for the International Man Booker Prize, explores themes not unlike those found in tango music.

Bruno Cadogan, a New York academic, is writing a dissertation on the origins of tango. He hears of an extraordinary tango singer in Buenos Aires named Julio Martel, who is believed to be even more talented than the legendary Carlos Gardel, and journeys there to seek him out.

The year is 2001 and Argentina is undergoing an economic upheaval. Citizens have taken to the streets to protest unemployment. Crimes and betrayals are common. And Buenos Aires, once a majestic city compared to Paris and Madrid, has taken on a shabby appearance.

You can find the review here