At the time of his death at age 50 in 2003, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was already considered one of the great talents of his generation, and since then his reputation has only increased. With the posthumous publication of the novel "2666," his place within Latin American letters is indisputable. But Bolaño has until fairly recently remained somewhat obscure outside the Spanish-speaking world. Thankfully, this is changing: New Directions (the same visionary house that introduced W.G. Sebald to the United States.) has published two Bolaño novels to date: "By Night in Chile" in 2003 and the stunning "Distant Star," last year. His work has begun appearing in some of the United States' better literary journals, and the prestigious publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is preparing the release of "2666" for next year.
Now New Directions is offering Bolaño's short fictions, and for those who are unfamiliar with this author, "Last Evenings on Earth" is a fine place to begin. It is a powerful introduction to the exquisite sadness of Bolaño's world, gathering texts from his two story collections, "Llamadas Telefonicas" ("Phone Calls," 1997) and "Putas Asesinas" ("Murderous Whores," 2001). Both were published to wide acclaim, and neither has been translated in full: "Last Evenings on Earth," despite being a sort of greatest hits compilation, comes together remarkably well, with 14 mostly autobiographical tales, all imbued with a helpless devotion to writing as the only potential means of redemption.
The finest pieces here come from Bolaño's second collection, "Putas Asesinas." "Gomez Palacio" and the title story, both of which first appeared in the New Yorker, are masterpieces of restraint: the latter, ostensibly about a father-son vacation in Acapulco, tackles the psychological aftermath of Chile's traumatic recent political history. The protagonist, identified only as B, has survived the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power and cannot bring himself to explain to his father what it was like. The two men talk past each other, each impossibly isolated in his own world. "Dentist," the penultimate story, exists as if on the edge of an unsettling dream: 15 pages in, after a few false starts, the narrator and a friend wind up in a shack at the edge of a provincial Mexican city, reading the hallucinatory fiction of an unlikely 16-year-old prodigy. This moment, when it arrives, is wondrous, strange, dizzying, and no one-sentence explanation can do it justice. The final piece, "Dance Card," is a perfect summation of Bolaño and his literary ethic: a harrowing mash-up of fact and fiction, biography and fantasy, with appearances by the ghosts of Adolf Hitler and Pablo Neruda, nods to Zen meditation, a recognition of the inevitability of smoking, and the specter of political failure -- shot through with the memory of "those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell."
You can find the review here
Monday, June 12, 2006
La Malinche by Laura Esquivel
It ought to be difficult, if not impossible, to make the Spanish conquest of Mexico lyrical, but Laura Esquivel comes close in her fifth novel, "Malinche." This is not a good thing either for history or for literature.
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her first novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments. That book used recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th-century Mexico. In Esquivel's new book, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica (Aztec) woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as "The Tongue" — Cortes' translator — helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin — the first true mestizo Mexican, or at least the most famous one — before the conquistador married her off to a much nicer man named Juan Jaramillo, with whom, according to Esquivel's account, she had a daughter.
As far as I can tell — one of the many shortcomings of Esquivel's book is that it leaves the reader grasping for details — Malinche was one of the names by which Cortes was sometimes known. It means something like captain, so the captain's translating mistress became La Malinche. Esquivel gives her the birth name of Malinalli, which refers to a sacred grass and also seems to have associations with death.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists have argued that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate (sometimes) with words instead of swords — not that he was afraid to use those.
You can find the review here
Most readers will remember Esquivel for her first novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments. That book used recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th-century Mexico. In Esquivel's new book, the eponymous heroine encounters her share of heartbreaks, but there's little magical or realist about the process.
Mexican national memory hasn't been kind to La Malinche, the Mexica (Aztec) woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as "The Tongue" — Cortes' translator — helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin — the first true mestizo Mexican, or at least the most famous one — before the conquistador married her off to a much nicer man named Juan Jaramillo, with whom, according to Esquivel's account, she had a daughter.
As far as I can tell — one of the many shortcomings of Esquivel's book is that it leaves the reader grasping for details — Malinche was one of the names by which Cortes was sometimes known. It means something like captain, so the captain's translating mistress became La Malinche. Esquivel gives her the birth name of Malinalli, which refers to a sacred grass and also seems to have associations with death.
Esquivel deserves credit for attempting the difficult task of imagining herself into the skin and heart of a woman whom history has found it easy to scorn. Some revisionists have argued that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate (sometimes) with words instead of swords — not that he was afraid to use those.
You can find the review here
Malinche by Laura Esquivel
Malinche, the Amerindian slave who accompanied Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés through his invasion of Mexico, serving as both his translator and lover, has long been reviled by the Mexicans. In a country where the "feminine" is divided very clearly along the virgin-whore polarity, the much revered Virgen de Guadalupe is often starkly juxtaposed against the traitorous Malinche, who, in giving herself to Cortés, not only facilitated the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, but also helped to found the new mestizo or mixed-blood race through the son she had with the conquistador.
The psychological dimensions of this rejection in a country where more than 90 per cent of the people are mestizos have been extensively and fascinatingly explored by Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. Malinche herself, though, remains an enigma. Little is known about her, and that little does not allow us any insight into her motivations. Now, Paz's compatriot, Laura Esquivel, best known for her popular novel Like Water for Chocolate, has attempted to bring this controversial figure to life in a new novel, Malinche.
You can find the review here
The psychological dimensions of this rejection in a country where more than 90 per cent of the people are mestizos have been extensively and fascinatingly explored by Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. Malinche herself, though, remains an enigma. Little is known about her, and that little does not allow us any insight into her motivations. Now, Paz's compatriot, Laura Esquivel, best known for her popular novel Like Water for Chocolate, has attempted to bring this controversial figure to life in a new novel, Malinche.
You can find the review here
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
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
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
Thursday, June 08, 2006
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
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
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
Monday, June 05, 2006
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
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
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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
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
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
Monday, May 29, 2006
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
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
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
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