Cuban Author Wins Italian Poetry Award

The prestigious Camaiore de Poesia international poetry award for 2006 was given to the Cuban writer Miguel Barnet for his book Il poeta nell’isola (The poet in the island), published last year by Campanotto.

You can find the article here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

The year is 2020. Condoleezza Rice is president of the United States, and neighboring Mexico is grappling with internal political tensions and external pressures to revise the strongholds of current Mexican President Lorenzo Terán.
After Terán demands the removal of U.S. troops from Colombia and insists on keeping the price of Mexican oil high, the United States cuts off Mexico's satellite communications system, leaving Mexico with no phones, e-mail, or faxes. Terán's downfall is inevitable, and Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, paints an epistolary portrait of the ensuing scramble for political power.

Named for the presidential seat itself, The Eagle's Throne is a political thriller of sorts, toying with our preconceived notions of how we communicate, who's in charge, and how much power an individual truly has when standing up against sometimes-long-established political machinery.

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.

New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.

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

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.

New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.

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

Our Lives Are the Rivers by Jaime Manrique

Manrique's novel is full of stories: how the teenage Manuela ran off with an amorous lieutenant, destroying her reputation; how she helped Bolívar dodge an ambush at the Presidential Palace in Bogotá, then met his intended assassins, saber in hand, earning her the honorific "liberator of the Liberator"; how in a letter she dispensed with James Thorne, her pasty English husband ("I have an idea: in heaven we will marry again; but no more on this earth. . . . Everything will be done in the English style in heaven, where a perfectly monotonous life is reserved for the people of your nation").

Yet Manrique doesn't always make these tales as vivid and convincing as they should be; it's as if he's holding his imagination in check. We hear about Bolívar's "perturbing maleness," but can't quite visualize the tiny, brooding conqueror in the flesh. And Manrique's Manuela can be a bore, especially when she pummels the reader with allusions to Don Quixote, or with trite revelations ("Had I fallen in love with a man whose true mistress was war?"). Her passions make her an engaging heroine, but it's not until she goes into exile and her spirit, liberated from her plague-ridden body, swirls above the lush volcanic wilderness of the Andes that Manuela — and Manrique's prose — begin to soar, freed perhaps from the clutches of history.

You can find the review here

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