Interview with Carmen Boullosa

Carmen Boullosa, the Mexican novelist, poet and playwright, lives in central Brooklyn. A student of Juan Rulfo, she is now a professor at the City College, a host of the CUNY TV program New York; she has also been a fellow at New York Public Library and the Guggenheim Foundation. Boullosa’s Brooklyn house and neighborhood provide the setting for her new fantastic novel, La Novela Perfecta.
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Boullosa says that La Novela Perfecta is an homage to the neighborhood where she has lived for two years, as well as to the “heroes” of her youth, the Argentineans Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, the foremost exponents of Latin American fantastic literature. “This is my Brooklyn novel. This neighborhood fascinates me as an almost prototypical city, with people from all over the world living together in a small place,” explains Boullosa, whose previous novels include Antes and La Otra Mano de Lepanto. “I’m right next to a mosque, and nearby stores with Al-Jazeera propaganda as well as Jewish shoe repair shops. These are cultures that are obliged to make a pact of coexistence. When one takes the subway in Brooklyn you reach another space, marked by different limits, because there is always a border zone with other cultures.”

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Las viudas de los jueves by Claudia Piñeiro

At the onset of Claudia Piñeiro's prize-winning novel, Las viudas de los jueves (Thursday Widows, Alfaguara), three bodies lie at the bottom of a tranquil pool in a gated country estate in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

It's a Thursday night at the Scaglia house, the most magnificent in the neighborhood, and Mrs. Scaglia is strolling through the pool area gathering the empty wine glasses left over from her husband's weekly gatherings with his neighborhood buddies.

She doesn't detect a thing. She only worries about dropping the crystal glasses.

Across the street, a hysterical neighbor and member of the male-only Thursday social club at the Scaglia house has fallen down his stairwell and broken a leg. He begs his wife to take him across the street to his friends instead of the hospital. She thinks he's hallucinating from the pain.

At first, Piñeiro's novel appears to be a murder mystery. It has all the markings of one -- page-turner pacing, short breathless sentences, a great cast of suspects, and the looming sense throughout the novel that, although something terrible has already happened, something even more terrible is going to happen.

But this is no crime fiction. The suspense is a byproduct of Piñeiro's masterful hand at crafting a deeper story -- a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair.

It's a universal story that will resonate among debt-ridden, downsized Americans, and even louder in Miami, home to hundreds of Argentine expatriates, and where Piñeiro will be featured Friday in the Miami Book Fair International's Spanish-language program.

''There's a tradition in Latin America of using elements from the detective story -- a murder, a crime -- to say things about society, in my case, about people who would go to an unthinkable extent for the sake of maintaining appearances and status,'' Piñeiro says in a telephone interview from her home in a Buenos Aires suburb. She lives in a country estate a lot like the one depicted in her novel, the fictional Altos de la Cascada (Waterfall Heights).

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Interview with Isabel Allende

The welcome that Isabel Allende extends at her Mediterranean-style villa in the hills overlooking San Pablo Bay is as radiant and warm as the California sun.

At 63, she is petite and beautiful. She holds out both hands in greeting, her smile wide, her dark eyes kind, drawing in strangers as if they were her neighbors or grandchildren.

The warmth and light that infuse Allende’s aspect and home stand in dramatic contrast to the dark and bloody world of “Ines of My Soul,” a work of historical fiction set in Spain and Chile. Its heroine, Ines Suarez, was a real-life Spanish conquistadora who endured crushing hardships in helping her lover, Pedro de Valdivia, to conquer the indigenous Inca and Mapuche and to found the city of Santiago, Chile.

Their love story is set in an era defined by horrific warfare, murder and torture. The 1500s, in both Europe and the New World, were absolutely brutal, Allende said. This was the time of the Spanish Inquisition, when it was assumed that the only valid confession was one extracted through torture.

Ines is wholly a woman of her day, and Allende does not turn away from the historical record, which has her decapitating indigenous prisoners and hurling their heads over a fortress wall to terrorize their peers as well as saving lives as a gentle-handed healer.

Why this woman, this place, this time?

“A lot is known about this era, although less is known about Ines,” Allende said. “But you know she was an extraordinary woman—look at all she accomplished! She crossed the ocean, then the Chilean desert on foot; she helped found and save the city of Santiago. In a time when women rarely left home, what she did was like going to the moon.”

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Spanish-language Authors at the Miami Book Fair

This year's program includes 60 Hispanic authors, more than in any previous year, according to Adriana Salas, who helped coordinate the event.

Mega-sellers like Chilean Isabel Allende (who will speak in English and Spanish) are scheduled to present their works alongside writers including Miami-based Cuban novelist Daína Chaviano (La Isla de los Amores Infinitos/The Island of Infinite Loves, 2006), Chile's Jorge Edwards (Persona non grata, 1973; El Inutil de la Familia/The Worthless One in the Family, 2004), Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli (El Pergamino de la Seduccion/The Scroll of Seduction, published in 2005 in Spanish and 2006 in English) and Argentine Marcos Aguinis (¿Que Hacer?/What To Do?, 2005).

Exile and the political consciousness that often defines Latin American literature will be among the themes discussed in this year's presentations, along with the subjects of immigration and Cuba's future. On a lighter note, readers can attend talks on Latin American soccer and the controversy surrounding Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a best seller across borders.

Also noteworthy, Maria Kodama, the widow of Jorge Luis Borges, will lead a tribute to her late husband on the same day -- Saturday -- that a panel called Tinta Fresca (Fresh Ink) will celebrate the works of new or relatively unknown writers and poets.

"We're trying to encourage a Spanish-language literary scene in South Florida," Salas said of the growing numbers of Hispanic authors who swamp Miami every November.

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Literary renaissance in Peru

Lima is once again one of Latin America's brightest literary scenes, and in the last year, Peruvian writers have won prestigious literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world for novels that deal with fallout from the war years and, in doing so, add to a growing literature of terrorism and the risks to democracy in fighting it.

Alonso Cueto, who lives in Lima, received the Herralde prize for "The Blue Hour," about a lawyer who discovers that his father, a naval officer, oversaw the torture of political detainees.

Another Lima-born author, Santiago Roncagliolo, won the Alfaguara award for "Red April," about a prosecutor who investigates a bizarre murder in Ayacucho, the region at the center of the violence between the Shining Path guerrillas and government forces.

Even if the plots evoke violence, the general style of writing is reflective and even casual, a relief from the darkness of the past.

"People here are still very melancholic, but they are much more relaxed than they used to be," said Álvaro Lasso, who two years ago founded Estruendo Mudo, a publishing house that has released more than a dozen books by Peruvian and foreign authors. "I'm hesitant to say this, but there is almost a sense of optimism in Lima."

Hopefulness in Peru, of course, comes clouded in narratives that describe how war's legacies seep into daily life. Adrián Ormache, the upper- class lawyer in Cueto's book, finds his comfortable life disrupted when he encounters a woman who escaped captivity by his father; the shock prompts him to plunge into Lima's demimonde of discotheques and roadside bars.

"His father and the Andean world were much closer than he thought," Cueto said of the lawyer. "With its unresolved conflicts, Lima is an ideal place for a writer."

Similarly, Roncagliolo questions the tacit approval of atrocities in a nominal democracy. In his book, a prosecutor is confronted with having experienced the war almost abstractly in Lima as it raged in Ayacucho, and in one passage, an officer challenges him: "I suppose you were reading little poems by Chocano. Literature, right? Literature says too many pretty things, Mr. Prosecutor. Too many. You intellectuals despise the military because we don't read."

In some ways, impoverished Peru is an unlikely spot for a literary renaissance. Its literacy rates trail those in countries like Mexico and Argentina. And literary exile is a longstanding tradition. Like Vargas Llosa, who returns to Lima from homes abroad for a few months each year, Roncagliolo lives abroad, in Spain.

Painful revelations of the cruelties of the "internal war," which essentially ended in 2000, still come to light. It was not until last month that Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path's messianic founder, was sentenced, to life in prison, after a chaotic retrial in 2004.

Today the mood is ambivalent - hesitant to be too hopeful. People seem intent on avoiding the potentially destabilizing populism that has swept Venezuela and Bolivia. The economy is growing, and Peru wants closer ties with Chile and the United States.

"I remember the ritual of taking candles to parties in case of blackouts," said Roncagliolo, who is writing a book on Guzmán. "As Peru's situation improves, terrorism has become a global theme."

The magazine Etiqueta Negra captures Peru's new sense of breaking out of isolation. Founded five years ago, the monthly publishes narrative journalism by foreigners as diverse as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski and the American author Susan Orlean, as well as by Peruvian writers.

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2007 Sundance Film Festival - Latin American Films

The Sundance Institute has announced the line-up of 64 films selected for the Independent Film and World Cinema Competitions for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

This edition has a strong Latin American presence, between the selected films we find:

Acidente / Brazil directed by Cao Guimaraes and Pablo Lobato
Experimental in form, this lush cinematic poem weaves together stories and images from twenty different cities in the state of Menas Gerais, Brazil, to reveal the fundamental role the accidental and the unpredictable play in everyday human life.

Bajo Juarez, The City Devouring Its Daughters / Mexico directed by Alejandra Sanchez
In an industrial town in Mexico near the US border, hundreds of women have been sexually abused and murdered. As the body count continues to rise, a web of corruption unfolds that reaches the highest levels of Mexican society.

Cocalero / Bolivia directed by Alejandro Landes)
Set against the backdrop of the Bolivian government's attempted eradication of the coca crop and oppression of the indigenous groups that cultivate it and the American war on drugs, an Aymara Indian named Evo Morales travels through the Andes and the Amazon in jeans and sneakers, leading a historic campaign to become the first indigenous president of Bolivia.

Drained (O Cheiro Do Ralo) / Brazil directed by Heitor Dhalia; Screenwriters: Marcal Aquino, Heitor Dhalia)
A pawn shop proprietor buys used goods from desperate locals - as much to play perverse power games as for his own livelihood, but when the perfect rump and a backed-up toilet enter his life, he loses all control.

The Night Buffalo (El Bufalo De La Noche) / Mexico directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana; Screenwriters: Jorge Hernandez Aldana, Guillermo Arriaga
A 22-year-old schizophrenic commits suicide after his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. Before killing himself, he lays out a plan that will drive the lovers into an abyss of madness.

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Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro

Mexican film-makers are currently in the ascendant, working together and abroad. The year opened with Tommy Lee Jones's modern western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, scripted by Guillermo Arriaga. Alfonso Cuaron's British dystopian thriller Children of Men is still running. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel (scripted by Arriaga) will be released in January. And Guillermo del Toro's remarkable Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), which Cuaron has produced, appears this week. It's del Toro's sixth film, and his best to date, and like the others it's a horror movie though much less of a genre picture than his Hollywood output.

His previous Spanish film, The Devil's Backbone (2001), was set towards the end of the Civil War at a remote orphanage, and the events - which include the terrible brutality of Franco's troops and a ghost that issues warnings of forthcoming catastrophe - are seen through the eyes of a sensitive young boy. We inevitably think of an earlier Spanish movie, Victor Erice's masterly Spirit of the Beehive, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Pan's Labyrinth is set six years or so later, in 1944, very precisely in June when news of the Allied invasion of Normandy arrives in an authoritarian state where a party of left-wing guerrillas, the last remnants of the Republican army, are hiding out in the mountains.

They are, perhaps fortunately, unaware that Franco will remain dictator for a further 30 years. Hunting them down is a detachment of soldiers led by Captain Vidal, brilliantly played by the handsome, menacing Sergi Lopez, best known in this country for playing the psychopathic killer in Dominik Moll's Harry, He's Here To Help and the evil head porter of a London hotel in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things. Vidal is a ruthless sadist, an archetypal fascist bully trying to live up to the expectations of his father, a military hero killed in North Africa. This would be an exciting thriller in itself, but there is another story of a quite different kind.

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Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Once upon a time, Isabel Allende was the doyenne of the weird and wondrous, the heiress to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's kingdom of magical realism. With early novels and short story collections such as "Of Love and Shadows" and "Eva Luna," and particularly her first novel, "The House of the Spirits," the Chilean writer proved herself one of the very few writers capable of following in Garcia Marquez's capacious footsteps, adding her name to the long list of remarkable fabulists from Latin America.

In recent years, though, Allende has turned her back on the literary style that brought her to the dance, preferring a more accessible but significantly less appealing method of historical adventure, of which "Ines of My Soul" is the latest installment. Allende's take on the historical novel in "Ines of My Soul" is solid, well-constructed and entirely arid. The effortless mystery and charm of "The House of the Spirits" are entirely lacking from the pages of "Ines," which seems to be written by a different writer altogether.

"Ines of My Soul" purports to be the last testament of Ines Suarez, a real-life 16th century Spaniard who was among the first Europeans to journey to present-day Chile. Inés is a seamstress and cook in the Spanish city of Plasencia who travels to the New World to chase after her feckless husband, Juan de Malaga. Once she arrives, she learns that Juan is dead, but discovers an entire world of opportunity for a capable woman. Aligning herself with the ambitious, ruthless soldier and politician Pedro de Valdivia, and through her erotic affiliations, her political skill, and her native-born compassion for her constituents, European and Indian, Inés becomes a gobernadora in a Chile still undergoing the bloody process of birthing itself.

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Interview with Guillermo del Toro

Mythical underworld beasts clash with the real-life monsters of fascism in Guillermo del Toro’s new film. Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, a lonely young girl caught up in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is the most ambitious work yet by the Mexican writer- director of Cronos and Hellboy. Fusing historical drama with horror film, magical realism with political allegory, Del Toro’s eighth film is that rarest of hybrids: a fairytale for adults.

“A fable is a good way to address issues as opposed to addressing them purely as a war movie in a big, selfimportant way,” says the 42-year-old director. “To me, fascism is the moment when all your choices are removed. You are given one single choice to align to, but the idea of the fable is that choice is what makes you free. That’s a very simple parable for me, and the best way to do that was a fairytale. There was something incredibly attractive in creating a world full of creatures and monsters, but making the human characters much more monstrous than them.”

This is not the first time Del Toro has used the Spanish Civil War as a backdrop for a supernatural tale of childhood innocence. His 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone, drew on the same historical hinterland. Now a part-time resident of Madrid, the director grew up besotted with Spanish literature, cinema and comics. The civil war brought “a fascism that was agreed to be overlooked by the world”. This struck a personal chord in Mexico, where exiled film-makers such as Luis Buñuel fled Franco.

“Mexico is one of the few countries that, during the civil war period, was politically supportive of the Republican side,” Del Toro says. “Many people exiled from Spain to Mexico were extremely influential in the arts — actors, directors, production designers. Many became good friends of mine growing up. I heard things about the war that I didn’t read in For Whom the Bell Tolls, heh heh! It was not a grand adventure of macho bravado. It was a much more human, compelling, brutal and small drama.”

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Interview with Antonio Banderas

Interview with Antonio Banderas' on his second experience as a director "El Camino de los Ingleses" (The English Path).

Antonio Banderas' second turn as a director is a far cry from cinematic romps like "The Mask of Zorro," "Spy Kids" or the other box-office hits which made him a household acting name.
Instead, he's created a chronicle about the bewildering path to manhood in Spain.
"It's my age!" one of Spain's biggest international film stars told a news conference. "I'm becoming more pensive and I can imagine myself better behind a camera than in front of it."
The Spanish language film tells the story of a group of teenage boys on the threshold of maturity, their loves and conflicts as they try to understand their transition to adults.
Banderas says the movie is an attempt to bring something more personal and risky to the big screen, but also to provide a springboard for a new generation of local actors in Malaga, his home city in southern Spain.

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Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the 2006 Cervantes Prize

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Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.(...)
Gamoneda, 76, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer. His first published work was a collection of poems, "Sublevacion inmovil" ("Still Uprising"), in 1960. His biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, "Edad," was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.

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Founded in 1976 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes prize, carrying a 90,180 euros (108,000 U.S. dollars) cash award, is presented to the writer whose Castilian language work as a whole is judged to have most enriched the Spanish literary canon.
On Thursday, Gamoneda also received the Queen Sofia Ibero-Americana Poetry Prize at a ceremony in Madrid's Royal Palace. It had been "an overwhelming day for me", he said.
The Ibero-American prize carries a 42,000-euro (50,000 dollars) cash award and is presented to living authors whose work is relevant to all Ibero-American nations, and includes both Spanish language and Portuguese writing.
Gamoneda is one of the significant contemporary Spanish language poets. He was born in Oviedo in 1931 and has lived in Leon since 1934.
His work includes 1960's Sublevacion Inmovil (The Motionless Revolt), 1979's Leon de la Mirada (The Look of Leon), 1982's Blues Castellano (Spanish Language Blues), 1995's Libro de los Venenos (The Poison Book) and 2003's Arden las Perdidas (The Losses Burn).

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Gamoneda, 76, who was born in the northern city of Oviedo, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer in literary circles. His first published work was a collection of poems, ''Sublevacion inmovil'' (''Still Uprising''), in 1960. Themes of pain, memory and darkness define his work.
''Blues Castellano'' was published in 1982 and was translated into several languages, but his biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, ''Edad,'' was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.
Gamoneda has also translated works by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and France's Mallarme into Spanish.

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The National Prize for Spanish Letters

Raul Guerra Garrido, known for novels set in Spain's Basque region, has won one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes, the Culture Ministry said Monday.

The National Prize for Spanish Letters recognizes the literary achievements of a Spanish author over the course of a career. The award, considered the most important national literary accolade after the Cervantes Prize, carries a cash stipend of more than €30,000 (US$40,000).

Born in Madrid in 1935, Guerra Garrido completed undergraduate and doctorate degrees in pharmaceutical studies. He later moved to the country's northern Basque region, where he opened a pharmacy and began his literary career, writing both traditional and suspense novels.

His 1987 novel, "La Mar es Mala Mujer" (The Sea is a Bad Woman) was made into a motion picture. Other works include "El Otono Siempre Hiere" (Autumn Always Hurts) and "La Gran Via es New York" (The Gran Via is New York).

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