Carlos Fuentes receives the keys to L.A.

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa invited Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes to his home in Hancock Park. Fuentes, the author of many novels, including "The Death of Artemio Cruz" (1962), "A Change of Skin" (1967), "The Old Gringo" (1985) and "The Eagle's Throne" (2006), was given the keys to the city. What follows is an excerpt from the speech Fuentes gave.

"Some people might think you have taken a major risk in offering the keys to the city of Los Angeles to a Mexican citizen.

Not to worry. I will use these marvelous keys judiciously. But I will use them, fear not. I will open the gates to this magnificent metropolis — Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula — with confidence and generosity.

With generosity because Los Angeles means so many things. This is a city of global significance. A city sustained by Native and Afro and Anglo Americans. The meeting point of the Orient and the Americas, North and South. A city that is re-created daily by the energy of its multicultural environment.

With confidence because Los Angeles proves that California is not the slide area but the solid area of solidarity among all its cultural and racial constituencies. The city by the sea where all the peoples of the world arrive in order to recognize and share each other's values.

The City of the Angels is also the city of its citizens: confident, generous, fraternal in its conviction that we can and must all live together. Latinos and Asians, Anglo and Afro Americans, linked by the values of work and mutual respect."

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

IN his latest novel, Carlos Fuentes flashes forward — using literary conventions of the 18th century — to construct an epistolary novel that chronicles a tumultuous Mexican future. In the 2020s, the U.S. government, headed by President Condoleezza Rice, orchestrates an embargo against Mexico that cuts off the country's access to satellites and every other form of communication technology. In the absence of telephones and the Internet, the characters of Fuentes' novel vie for the Mexican presidency, recording their affairs and political maneuverings with ink and paper and relying on hand deliveries as their only means of transmission.

The initial impression, and the one the jacket copy wants the reader to believe, is that this is a political novel. Fuentes' conceit isolates Mexico from the rest of the world and focuses on the presidential palace and the contest for the Eagle's Throne, which is what the presidential seat is called. Fuentes is primed to wax prophetic about the approaching political dystopia, critique Mexico's political corruption and lament Latin America's dependency on the United States.

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Malinche by Laura Esquivel

Some writers learn early in their careers to find a niche, then it’s up to readers to decide if they will embrace it. Such is the case with Laura Esquivel.

She set the tone for a highly respected career in the early 1990s with her first book, “Like Water for Chocolate,” detailing a young girl’s expression of passion through cooking.

That novel sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide, was made into a movie and earned an award from the American Booksellers Association.

Above all, “Chocolate” displayed Esquivel’s knowledge and familiarity with her native Mexico and established her comfort level with magical realism. Her new book, “Malinche,” doesn’t stray from either of those expressions.

“Malinche” is a historical novel about Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes and his translator. The story is a lyrical interpretation of their relationship during Cortes’ destruction of Montezuma’s 16th-century Mexicas empire.

Mallinalli, also called Malinche in the book, is sold into slavery as a child and later becomes Cortes’ interpreter. Cortes and Mallinalli share an intimate relationship that leads to the birth of a child and lends itself to vibrantly written scenes by Esquivel.

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Displaying ambition bordering on recklessness, Laura Esquivel (``Like Water for Chocolate") revisits a tale infamous in her native Mexico but little known north of the border, the story of the slave woman who accompanied Cortés as his concubine and interpreter on his bloody march of conquest across Montezuma's kingdom.

In ``Malinche," Esquivel puts imaginative flesh on the bones of legend. Her Malinalli is not a traitor but an Edenic innocent, an artist and a mystic who believes that the Spaniard Cortés is the reincarnation of the god Quetzalc ó atl, come to rescue her people from their Aztec oppressors.

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The Heretic: A Novel of the Inquisition by Miguel Delibes

If there is one characteristic symbol that sparked the great German Protestant Reformation, it is that of Martin Luther nailing his Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. Appalled by the conviction of purchasing God's pardon for sins, Luther's determined defense of his 95 Theses, which he was willing to debate, led to an investigation by the Roman Catholic Church. His principles were reviled and he was excommunicated in January 1521.

Readers familiar with the Protestant Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition will find the beginning and end of Miguel Delibes' novel The Heretic to their taste. The opening Prelude, set in 1557, begins the book with the title character, Cipriano Salcedo, returning from Germany. He was to meet with Luther's friend and supporter Phillip Melanchthon and other leaders of the reform church and bring back outlawed books.

What follows is not a continuation of this story. Instead, Delibes takes us back to the beginning. We follow Cipriano's birth, childhood and career before heresy and the Inquisition are mentioned again after almost 300 pages. This in-between story takes place in the Spanish city of Valladolid, where the author was born in 1920 and to which the novel is dedicated.

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Sergio Pitol translated to Chinese

Outstanding Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, 2005 Cervantes Literature Prize winner, is in Beijing to present two of his works translated into Chinese.

During his two-week stay in China, the prestigious writer will launch the Chinese versions of his novels "La vida Conyugal" (Married Life, 1991) and "El arte de la Fuga" (The Art of Escape, 1996), and attend related cultural events.

Pitol, also winner of the 1999 Juan Rulfo Prize, told Prensa Latina, that apart from the two novels launching here, Chinese publishers plan to translate and print a series of his literary works.

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Lower City directed by Sergio Machado

With his first fiction feature, Walter Salles protégé Sergio Machado makes a thorough study of the Brazilian bas-fonds, from a bloody cockfight with a knife-fight coda to strip clubs, whorehouses, sweat-stained flops, low-rent boxing gyms, rusty cargo ships filled with slobbering gobs, back-alley sex, late-night holdups—everything, it seems, but a crack den. You may well wonder if Machado's protagonists—a pair of boat-owning buddies and the young hooker who triangulates them—ever just go to the movies, or watch a soccer match in a bar not filled with sweaty women and drooling criminals. The ambience resonates off the walls—in what has become the proto-professional template for exportable Brazilian films, Machado's imagery is saturated with the high-contrast colors of rotten fruit, and the grungy lowlife is never less than convincing.

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Interview with Guillermo Arriaga

Best known in the United States for writing the screenplays to "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" - films centered around dramatic car accidents - Arriaga published three novels in Spanish before turning to cinema.

Arriaga now is on tour to promote "The Night Buffalo" (Atria Books), which is the first of his novels to be released in the United States. Originally published in Spanish in 1999, it features Arriaga's distinct storytelling style - a disjointed puzzle of flashbacks woven into layers of dreams and conversations that add up to a love affair in the aftermath of a suicide.

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Don Quixote translated to Quechua

The version of the classic “Don Quijote de la Mancha” in the indigenous language of Quechua makes this book, marking the birth of the modern novel as a literature genre, now available in a language spoken by nearly 20 million people in seven South American countries.

Symbol of the powerful Incan culture, Quechua is a common language of ethnic groups in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, contributing to keep it alive.

Presented Thursday in Spain by Tupac Yupanqui, member of the Peruvian Academy of the Quechua Language, the volume is enriched by the reproduction of illustrations made by farmers of the San Juan de Salua region.

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Interview with Isabel Allende

Among the bright lights and celebrities gracing our valley for last weekend's big wine auction, none shine so vividly on the international stage as the provocative author, Isabel Allende.

Her fans are passionate and legion, and Allende is a platinum-selling, bona fide "rock star" of the literary world. Yet Allende slipped quietly into St. Helena Saturday evening, without entourage, in the company of her hosts Agustin and Valeria Huneeus, the proprietors of Rutherford's Quintessa, to make her contribution to the fund-raising and festivities.

The three have been close friends for nearly 20 years, bonding in San Francisco through the shared experience of being transplanted ex-pats -- exiles from the turbulent politics of 1970s Chile who now count themselves Californians. But beyond this, the three share an indomitable joie de vivre, perhaps more appropriately rendered in Spanish, gozo de la vida, and an appreciation of the necessity of wine and food and conversation to enliven the soul.

Both this alegria and the California-Chilean connection sparkled unpretentiously in Quintessa's live auction lot Saturday which offered up an intimate dinner party with the irrepressible Allende at the Huneeus' winery home -- a "quintessential fiesta" of Latin music, food and Isabel's spicy storytelling. The lot included a bonus of signed first editions of her latest bestseller and California historical novel, "Zorro." Ann Colgin's winning bid brought $130,000 to the Napa Valley Vintners' funds benefiting local health care, housing and youth development programs.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes, a longtime critic of American imperialism and economic policies in Latin America, is best known for his 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz. A lawyer and Mexican dissident, Fuentes has had a political career that runs the gamut: assistant head of the press section of Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, head of the Department of Cultural Relations and, after a period of exile in Paris, Mexican ambassador to France. Fuentes wrote The Eagle's Throne, originally published in Spanish in 2002, after he was asked by President Bill Clinton why Mexico had no vice presidents and what would happen if the Mexican president died in office. In such a situation, the Mexican Congress appoints an acting president, but, as Fuentes shows us, there are enough contenders for the office of president - the eagle's throne of the title - without adding a vice president to the mix.

The Eagle's Throne starts in the not-too-distant future of January 2020, and President Lorenzo Teran of Mexico has called for the withdrawal of American occupation forces from Colombia and a ban on Mexican oil exports to the United States unless Washington agrees to abide by OPEC pricing. The U.S. responds by blacking out the international communications satellite for Mexico, leaving the country without phone, fax or e-mail service. But this is only back story to allow for the novel's epistolary form as the characters are forced to communicate via letters. The Eagle's Throne is a political Dangerous Liaisons, with all the intrigue, blackmail, backstabbing and seduction of a telenovela.

Fuentes' politicians aren't particularly upset by their current rupture with the U.S., because they have other concerns: The 2023 presidential election is looming, and the current president has yet to anoint a candidate as his successor. The behind-the-scenes jockeying for power begins, with Cabinet members pitted against each other and using every possible tactic to gain the advantage.

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La Malinche by Laura Esquivel

Nearly five centuries after she helped Hernan Cortes conquer the Aztec Empire, Malinche is still a controversial figure in Mexican history.

A noble-born child sold into slavery by her mother, she used her unusual ability as a linguist to enable the Spanish to negotiate alliances with the native tribes against the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. As a result, she's reviled as a traitor to her people and, because she was Cortes' mistress and bore him a son, regarded as the symbolic mother of the Mexican people.

In "Malinche," Laura Esquivel, known best for her 1992 best seller "Like Water for Chocolate," reimagines her in this latter role, as a deeply devout woman caught in a clash of civilizations and attempting to make sense of what she experiences.

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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. This is not a good thing either for history or for literature.

Most readers will remember Esquivel for her debut novel, Like Water for Chocolate, the story of how a woman transforms heartbreak into culinary astonishments, using recipes and magical realism to explore life in early 20th century Mexico. In Malinche, 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 woman who came into the possession of Herman Cortes as a slave, learned Spanish and as Cortes' translator helped talk Montezuma out of an empire, with ghastly, near-genocidal results. She mediated between the Spaniards and the Mexica (Aztec) people whom Montezuma governed. She also bore Cortes a son, Martin, the first true mestizo Mexican.

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 argue that La Malinche saved her people from total destruction because she gave Cortes the chance to negotiate with words instead of swords.

It's unclear whether Esquivel shares this particular revisionist point of view, but then many things in this novel are unclear. We get a few scenes of pillage and massacre, fever dreams that interrupt the story that Esquivel really cares about: one woman's spiritual journey.

The novelist treats her heroine with refreshing sympathy. How can you not feel for a 5-year-old girl whose mother, eager to remarry after the death of her first husband, gives her away to slave-traders? All the young Malinalli has to hold on to are memories of her grandmother, a loving woman rich in the spirituality of Mexica culture. But by the time Malinalli travels with Cortes to Tenochtitlan, Montezuma's capital, her grandmother's indigenous lyricism has given way to self-aggrandizing, almost New Age escapism.

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