Mario Benedetti’s Anniversary

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Uruguayan writer; one of Latin America's best known writers
Born September 14, 1920
Paso de los Toros, Uruguay
Mario Benedetti (born September 14, 1920) is an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet.

Benedetti was born in Paso de los Toros, Tacuarembó;, Uruguay. He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers. In 1946 he married Luz López Alegre.

From 1973 to 1985, when a military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile in Buenos Aires, Lima, Havana, and Spain. He currently divides his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He has been granted Honoris Causa doctorates by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. On June 7 2005 he was named as the recipient of the Premio Menéndez Pelayo.

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Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has signed on to direct Blindness

Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles has signed on to direct an ambitious film based on Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's novel Blindness. And he's partnering with two of Canada's most avant-garde and prodigious cinematic talents, Don McKellar and Rhombus Media's Niv Fichman.

The film, based on the 1995 novel by the renowned Portuguese writer that remorselessly rubs readers' faces in the apocalypse, will have a budget north of $25-million (U.S.) and is slated to begin production this summer.

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Federico Garcia Lorca - Biographical note

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the brutal assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca, widely proclaimed to be Spain’s finest writer. He was murdered at the age of 38 by a fascist militia and thrown into an unmarked grave.

It is unsurprising that Lorca died at the hands of General Franco’s supporters. He stood in defiance of everything that Spain’s fascist dictator represented.

Lorca was gay. He was a celebrated poet and playwright, as well as a noted artist, pianist and composer.

He used his artistic ability to explore modernity, what it meant to be human, and to desire, and he raged against the injustices inflicted on ordinary people by wealth and power.

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Interview with Leonardo Padura

Mario Conde is Cuba's best-known cop. A hard-boiled, hard-drinking, rule-breaking, loose-living police lieutenant who views the world around him through a hungover haze of cynicism and rum, he is no revolutionary role model. The Havana he inhabits, with its nervous transvestites, corrupt ex-officials and moralising newsreaders, is a rough old place. But the cop and his city have no shortage of admirers.
Leonardo Padura, a 50-year-old journalist-turned-author, has recently won his third Premio Hammett (the International Association of Crime Writers award) for his latest Mario Conde novel. And yet, he says, what he is writing now, with its references to misbehaviour and unconventional sexuality, would never have been published in the stricter Cuba in which he grew up.

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Mike Newell has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera

British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 1985 novel, in Cartagena.

Newell, also known for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Donnie Brasco, filmed scenes this weekend in the walled colonial Caribbean city's Factoria street, according to members of the crew.

The film's cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem and Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as well as Colombian actress Catalina Sandino, nominated in 2005 for an Oscar as best actress in a leading role for her performance in Maria, Full of Grace.

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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."

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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