Cellophane by Marie Arana

If you fly high above Peru's parched southern coast, you'll see one of the world's enduring mysteries, the Nazca lines: geometric shapes and renderings of animals and plants, some of them miles long, scratched into the surface of the desert. How did their ancient creators draft these gigantic patterns with such precision? According to one theory, their shamans drank a liquid that took them on soaring psychedelic journeys whose visions were later traced in lines on the ground. Today, as you hover above them, you come to a singular realization: in Peru, magic realism is more than a literary genre, it's embedded in the landscape.

Marie Arana's first novel, "Cellophane," is set not in the western desert but in the eastern rain forest, yet it's still steeped in the mysticism of Peru's pitiless nature and outsized human ambitions. Her protagonist, the aging engineer Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, is obsessed by his desire to build a cellophane factory on the banks of the Ucayali River. To that end, he has dragged his family to this savage terrain from the coastal city of Trujillo, propelled by a prophecy he received as a child: "Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer. Pay them no mind. They are small-minded people with dubious motives." Doggedly pursuing his destiny, he builds a hacienda called Floralinda ("Beautiful Flowers") in a "wilderness of mud."

You can find the review here

Picasso's Closet by Ariel Dorfman - Stage Review

A Nazi officer, sickened by the depiction of prostitution in a famous painting, seeks the artist's head. A fiercely possessive lover desires the artist's undivided affection. An old friend, swept up in a Gestapo dragnet, needs the artist's help in avoiding the concentration camps.

And so Picasso bides his time in a Paris atelier, dodging, weaving, tap-dancing, weighing his options and, most of all, inveighing against the pressures of being a vulnerable, venerated figure in a time of madness. "Why the hell does everyone want a piece of me?" he wonders in "Picasso's Closet," Ariel Dorfman's intriguing if emotionally opaque drama, which examines the plight of a petulant iconoclast living under the Third Reich's fastidiously malignant thumb.

Dorfman, a poet, teacher and playwright, knows firsthand about the brutal fist of repression: He was an official in the government of Salvador Allende when the popular Chilean president was overthrown in a 1973 military coup. Dorfman's stage work, steeped in themes of retaliation and redemption, draws potency from the idea that the pain of totalitarian trauma is more chronic than acute. His most celebrated play, the 1992 "Death and the Maiden," tells the table-turning tale of a victim who exacts revenge on the man who raped and tortured her.

You can find the review here

Voices of Time: A Life in Stories by Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano is one of South America's most distinguished literary figures, best known for his brilliant Memory of Fire trilogy, a fictionalized history of Latin America that won him the 1989 American Book Award. He is also a journalist and historian, renowned for his probing criticism.

But his work can be charming, too. Some of the pieces in Voices of Time seem like throwbacks to Art Linkletter's "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" franchise -- except that Galeano's kids are verbally brilliant rather than cutesy. In "Curious People," a 9-year-old boy wonders, "If God made himself, how did he make his back?" In "The Teacher," a 6th grader in Montevideo confides to a visitor after everyone in her entire class has been given an award -- that "she loved her teacher . . . loved him very very very much, because he'd taught her not to be afraid of being wrong."

You can find the review here

Cellophane by Marie Arana

Childhood is the age of discovery. Some kids fall in love with horses, some with dolls, others toy cars or butterfly collections. But Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua, in Marie Arana's captivating new novel, Cellophane, isn't like other little girls and boys.
"He had always wanted to be an engineer," Arana writes, "a builder of mills, a virtuoso of machinery, a maestro of paper."

Victor grows up in Lima, Peru, at the end of the 19th century. To make his dreams of paper production come true, he sets off along a branch of the Amazon in search of a factory site. He is accompanied by his beautiful wife, Doa Mariana. Don Victor is drawn deeper and deeper not only into his quest to bring modern industry to the wild rain forest but also into an involvement with the supernatural beliefs of the tribes who live there.

Arana's writing is influenced by the magic realism of Latin American fiction, so that even Don Victor's manufacture of boring brown paper has an element of witchcraft to it. And when he sets his sights on the translucent, shimmering new invention cellophane, all sorts of strange things start to happen.

You can find the review here

Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa

BEIRUT: In Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "The Feast of the Goat," the aging Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is driven to fits by an inability to control his bladder. In one tense scene the generalissimo, fearing that he has wet himself at an official banquet, sits stiffly in his chair, silently cursing the incompetence of whoever failed to seat next to him the usual aide who could be counted on to spill a drink in his lap when necessary. After dinner, it seems, somebody is going to be fed to the sharks.

"Well, probably it was not like that, you know," says Vargas Llosa, sitting in a hotel in Downtown Beirut after giving a lecture in the Lebanese capital last week. "Probably the details that are in my book are not exactly the details that were in Trujillo's life. But he had this problem with his bladder, as many old people have ... Not everything that happens in my book happened during the Trujillo regime, but it all could have happened."

This embroidering of history, this coloring of panoramic canvases with human details - incontinence, banal embarrassments, secret desires, petty jealousies - is performed to beautiful effect in the Peruvian writer's major works, notably "The War of the End of the World" (published in English in 1984).

You can find the interview here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

If I had to come up with some basic texts in political science for college freshmen, I'd probably include "The Eagle's Throne" along with its companions in amoral realism: Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Carl von Clausewitz's "On War." It emulates them in refusing all forms of idealism and their attendant pieties. It prefers the nasty wisdom of corruption to the smiling platitudes of democracy. An example: "Corruption makes the system fluid and effective, unbothered by utopian hopes regarding justice or its lack thereof."

For all that, "The Eagle's Throne" can't be described as a cynical book so much as an unromantic one that rolls away the rock of Mexican politics and uncovers a pit of treacheries, deceits, maneuvers, stratagems, and the scurrying tarantulas of personal ambition. "The Eagle's Throne" itself is the Presidency of Mexico, a title that is roughly equivalent to our West Wing or The Oval Office.

You can find the review here

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.

You can find the review here

Kensington Gardens by Rodrigo Fresán

Some novels grab you from the first page; you begin insisting on quoting line after line to anyone who will listen. Then there are those very few novels that make you quiet, selfish even, and quoting from them begins to seem a violation of the book's wondrous delight. You feel a growing dismay as the number of pages remaining dwindles. "Kensington Gardens," the first of Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán's 10 books to be translated into English, is one of these rare, exhilarating and hypnotic novels.

The opening lines dare you to read on: "It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man's suicide and a boy's death, and ends with a boy's death and a man's suicide. Or with various deaths and various suicides at varying ages. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter."

You can find the review here

Cabot Prize Winners for Latin American Journalism Announced

Four journalists and writers were announced as winners the 2006 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for coverage of Latin American Affairs this morning at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. The awards are given to journalists whose coverage of Latin America “demonstrated a commitment to freedom of the press and inter-American understanding”; it is the oldest international award for journalism.

This year's recipients were independent journalist/writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Ginger Thompson, the Mexico City Bureau Chief for The New York Times; Jose Hamilton Ribeiro, a special reporter for TV Globo, Brazil; and Matt Moffett, the South American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Each winner will receive the Cabot medal and a $5,000 honorarium at a dinner ceremony at Columbia University in October.

You can find the full article here

Teatro Real de Madrid to Premiere Opera Based on Juan Goytisolo Novel

Catalan painter Frederic Amat and Andalucian composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú are collaborating on a new work that will premiere next spring at the Teatro Real de Madrid.

Europa Press reports that the opera, called Viaje a Simor ("Trip to Simor"), is inspired by the independent and dispossessed thinkers in Juan Goytisolo's 1988 novel The Virtues of the Solitary Bird. Goytisolo, a gay Spanish writer, voluntarily exiled himself from Franco's Spain in the late 1950s and still lives in Morocco.

The opera is also inspired by other works by "writers and poets who have undergone exile or torture" according to Sánchez-Verdú. The opera will use poems of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and the Syrian poet Adonis, among others, and each will be sung in its original language.

You can find the article here

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

If "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace," didn't turn you away from political science fiction forever, you might enjoy a trip to the not-too-distant future, to a country not too far away, where the political intrigues are as convoluted as one of Princess Amidala's hairdos.
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico's communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)

The conceit, which involves a satellite, works best if you don't squint at it too closely. I wasted several pages wondering why the secretaries were bothering to haul out the old Remington typewriters: With the electricity still on, the computers should have worked just fine. Nor could I figure out why the phones or TVs were dead: Alexander Graham Bell's little invention, in particular, had a pretty good track record for decades before the first satellite hit outer space.

You can find the review here

Jose Saramago has cancelled his appearence at the Rome Festival delle Letterature

Nobel prize winner José Saramago has cancelled his scheduled appearance at the Rome Festival delle Letterature on 22 June due to “serious and unforeseen personal problems”. The Portuguese author was due to close the fifth edition of the literature festival, which this year has seen over a dozen writers from across the globe read from their works in the Basilica di Massenzio in Via dei Fori Imperiali. Elisabetta Rasy and Zadie Smith will perform as planned on 20 June, but American writer Gore Vidal will now end the festival on 21 June.

You can find the article here