SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Thursday, December 07, 2006

In the National Board of Review Awards, held yesterday, Pedro Almodovar's "Volver", which swept the European Film Awards at the start of the week, won best foreign language film.
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Spanish Film

reading others' words

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel as seen by edify. Babel is a difficult and challenging experience, and doubt I'll ever watch it again, but I don't really need to; it stays with you and never lets go.

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DC's found some Juan Goytisolo's fans, quoting Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Edmund White and Orhan Pamuk.

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Mantex on Alejo Carpentier - His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on - be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture.

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Almodovar's colors

An article about Viva Pedro! festival, a retrospective of Almodovar's films, and the predominance of Red

Attending this month's Pedro Almodovar film festival will have you seeing red.

Not from anger, disillusionment or disappointment. Far from it.

Literal red. The brilliant Spanish director's movies are awash in the color, symbolically used to evoke revenge, murder and, most of all, passion.

In "The Flower of My Secret," a woman's sexy red dress at once captures her physical desire and her bottomless desperation. In "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," a scorned woman's smart red pantsuit signals her determination to get even.

In "Matador," a fantastic yet overlooked thriller, the action culminates with lovers completing a murder-suicide pact, their nude bodies collapsing onto a bed of crimson bullfighter's capes at the moment a solar eclipse turns the Castillian countryside the shade of blood.

The bold use of color is just one of the many stylistic ticks you pick up when you watch Almodovar's best films back to back. And that's what makes Cinema 21's two-week Viva Pedro! festival particularly enticing. The double-feature screenings that begin Friday (and precede the Dec. 22 opening of Almodovar's latest, "Volver") span two decades of work, pairing the director's hits with lesser-known rarities. Seeing these eight films during the course of days, not years, you notice artistic brushstrokes and recurring themes that might otherwise get lost.

Lola Alvarez Bravo by Elizabeth Ferrer

Lola Alvarez Bravo did not set out to be the "first woman photographer" of Mexico, but that is how she is remembered today. Wife of Mexico's leading photojournalist Manuel Alvarez Bravo, her influence extends to the latest generation of Mexico's female photographers, many of whom studied under her tutelage. Bravo's contribution is now being acknowledged through an assessment of her work by scholar Elizabeth Ferrer titled Lola Alvarez Bravo.
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As photographer, educator, and curator Bravo traveled the country documenting rural areas, indigenous people, and cultural traditions. Her imagery was inspired by "frolicking," she said - a playful description that typifies her approach to her subjects.

Colleagues such as surrealist painters Frida Kahlo and Marie Izquierdo, as well as visits from acclaimed French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, encouraged her to weave both surreal and traditional elements into her work.

Alfaguara Prize 2007 Jury

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa will preside to the jury of the 10th edition of the Alfaguara Prize 2007. Like in previous editions, the composition of the rest of the jury will not become public until the award is announced.
From his first edition in 1998, outstanding writers have presided over the Jury of the Alfaguara Prize: Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Mendoza, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Jorge Semprún, Luis Mateo Ten, Jose Saramago, Manuel Caballero Bonald and Angeles Mastretta.
The Alfaguara Prize is one of the most important literary awards in Spanish language.
Previously awarded authors include, last year's winner Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo with Abril Rojo, Graciela Montes, Ema Wolf, Laura Restrepo, Xavier Velasco, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Elena Poniatowska, Clara Sánchez, Manuel Vicent.
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Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature

Interview with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

An interview with Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu about his last film "Babel", which is tipped for an Oscar.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has become one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood with just three films - Amores Perros, 21 Grams and, now, Babel, perhaps the film he's received the most press for and one that will likely lead him to an Oscar nomination for best director. Part of the recent wave of Mexican directors, including Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, Inarritu is a part of a new era of filmmakers who are willing to challenge viewers to see something new in the medium. As great as Perros and Grams were, Babel is Inarritu's first masterpiece, a fascinating dissection of culture, communication, and crisis in the new millennium.

What attracted studios to Babel

I don't know. I think maybe the [studio] people are tired to be making the same kinds of films. They feel that there's something, that maybe they can bet on some elements. Maybe they feel like the package makes sense and they trust in the elements, like the story, the director, the actors, and the way I pitched them. And, I presented them in a way that they trust. I think all of these people, maybe as you are, are bored, of doing and seeing the same thing. So, I gather that's what drives them, kind of the curiosity about this film.

Carlos Fuentes presents his new book

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in an interview to El Tiempo talks about is new book 'Todas las familias felices' (All the happy families). This work is a collection of 16 short stories connected by the presence of a choir remembering the ancient Greek tragedies. About this new book Fuentes tells us that "Each one of this stories tells histories of families, of relationships between man and woman, father and sons, lovers. But they are histories of families who I did not want to remove them from a more collective context. So the choir comes to be the collective voice, the one of without voice. This unites the family stories and gives a greater social resonance to them.

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Latin American Literature

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

A 2002 interview with Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

Except for a scattering of dream fragments and apocalyptic fantasies, State of Siege, Juan Goytisolo's eighth novel to be published in the U.S., begins reasonably conventionally. About a quarter of the way through, though, a major in the International Mediation Force, stationed in a Sarajevo-like city under siege, realizes that a letter he is reading "correspond[s] word for word to the contents of the first pages of the present book." From then on in it's all Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, a labyrinth of texts within texts that would have dizzied Borges. Goytisolo's narrative contortionism is not mere postmodern showmanship, but precisely the point—that the reader, like the inhabitants of the besieged city, is "caught in the rattrap," cornered in an epistemological purgatory in which "Reality has been transmuted into fiction: the horror tale of our daily existence!"
Goytisolo, the 71-year-old author of over a dozen novels, is widely considered Spain's finest living writer—somewhat ironically, as he left Franco's Spain in 1956, living in self-imposed exile in Paris and North Africa ever since, where he has remained a harsh critic of contemporary Spanish society. He first visited Sarajevo during the summer of 1993, as a correspondent for El País. The result was his "Sarajevo Notebook" (published here in 2000 as part of the collection Landscapes of War), a series of impressionistic reports describing the horrors of the siege and attacking the international community's non-interventionist policy for its cowardice and hypocrisy. He returned in January 1994 and found that "the situation was more horrible than the first time. It was winter and the cold was terrible." The Serb bombardment of the city was constant. "It was impossible for me to write a second 'Sarajevo Notebook,' " says Goytisolo on the phone from his home in Marrakech, "but my impression was so horrible that I thought that the only way to answer this situation was through literature, and to oppose the truth of fiction to the lies of propaganda."

Monday, December 04, 2006

Books of the year

The season for the Books of the Year lists is here, and here's the SPLALit selection from the New Statesman list.

Andrey Kurkov

Ruben Gallego's White on Black : a boy's story (John Murray) is an incredible and moving autobiographical novel of a handicapped son of famous Spanish communists who was abandoned in a Soviet special institution for children.

Jonathan Meades

The Moldavian Pimp (Harvill) sketches tango, brothels, Jewish sex traffickers and Buenos Aires in the 1920s. Cozarinsky's shadowy novella is preoccupied with the way that any attempt to exhume this ignominious history - or any other history - is impaired by the accretion of all previous attempts and by the ghosts of those who strayed into the territory.

You can find the full list here

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Cesar Aira / Eloy Urroz

A review of César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Eloy Urroz's The Obstacles

After the Rabelaisian movement known as El Boom in Latin American letters there came along a period of exhaustion. And revolt, too. There was, for instance, a group of authors that included the Chilean Alberto Fuguet and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán who ascribed to the generation of McOndo. Their objective was to turn Magic Realism on its head. But their novels were flat and repetitive and, in most cases, D.O.A.

Then there were the five Mexicans responsible for the "Crack Manifesto." Their aesthetic was far more ambitious: to shape a novel in Spanish unburdened by language and geography. The results were interesting, among them Jorge Volpi's "In Search of Klingsor," about the Nazis and the making of the atomic bomb. Interesting, of course, is a demeaned word: It used to mean appealing but nowadays is a synonym of all right, maybe even tolerable.

Interesting is the last adjective I would use to describe the late Roberto Bolaño, by far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English, in renditions by Chris Andrews, released under the aegis of New Directions. (His collection of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth," has just appeared.) His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

More imaginative, although also less consistent, is the astonishingly prolific Argentine César Aira, whom Bolaño once described as the type of "eccentric" whose prose, "once you start reading [it], you don't want to stop." Bolaño's portrait isn't quite accurate: Born in 1949, Aira has published almost 60 books, from criticism on Edward Lear and Alejandra Pizarnik to editions of the poetry of Osvaldo Lamborghini to a vast number of novels. In the novels I've read, like the untranslated "El congreso de literatura," about a writer's conference where one of the participants decides to clone Carlos Fuentes, the premise is better than its execution. Aira's dreams are emblematic but never unconventional. When he's in top form -- and it's seldom the case -- he can be utterly astonishing, as in "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter," published in Spanish in 2000 and now translated into English by Andrews, too.
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On the opposite end of the spectrum is "The Obstacles," a laborious novel by Eloy Urroz, one of the members who agglutinated around the Crack Manifesto. Published originally as "Las Rémoras" in 1996 and translated into English by the superb Ezra Fitz, it is a trite, self-obsessed novel-within-a-novel typical of the French Nouveau Roman.

Urroz was born in 1967. He came of age in Mexico City and spent summers in La Paz, Baja California. Infatuated by and aspiring to Xerox, at least structurally, Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Green House" -- which, oddly, is, in his view, "the best Latin American novel of the 20th century" -- Urroz has a series of narrators, all of them male, interrupting the narrative, three of them on a quest for unrequited love. Women are sheer objects of desire. The perspective shifts back and forth from Mexico's capital to the town of Las Rémoras. Unfortunately, he belongs to the school of fiction that believes in the reader's journey as a form of punishment. Suffer and ye shall be redeemed from the wretchedness of pop lit!

Read the full review

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State of Siege by Juan Goytisolo

A review of Juan Goytisolo's State of Siege.

Juan Goytisolo's labyrinthine novel, originally published in Spanish in 1995 and now ably translated by Helen Lane, is at once an account of the siege of Sarajevo, a parade of postmodern storytelling techniques and an indictment of Western indifference. The action involves the death of a man resembling Goytisolo who visits Sarajevo when Serbs blockaded it between 1992 and 1996, and killed more than 10,000 people. In the subsequent investigation into the man's identity, the author offers several different narrators, including an academic turned hotel receptionist who lost more than 20 years' work in the burning of the Sarajevo library, and a bumbling major of the ''International Mediation Force'' who writes detailed reports about a handful of homoerotic poems and stories left behind in the dead man's room.

Interview with Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz

Despite 35 or so films to her credit, Penelope Cruz is better known for her glam-rag covers and famous beaus (Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey) than her acting prowess.
The Spanish beauty, 32, just has never fully translated on-screen.

Until now. Maybe it is the fake bottom, designed after Dustin Hoffman's shapely derrière in Tootsie, which causes her to trot with such fiery determination. Or the zest for life her housewife Raimunda acquires once her layabout husband is put on ice. Literally.

What is clear is that the cine-magic finally happens for her in Volver, director Pedro Almodóvar's vibrant valentine to Cruz that manages to be a ghost story, a murder thriller, a multilayered chick flick and a celebration of motherly devotion all in one. The pair sat down together to talk about their third collaboration after All About My Mother (1999) and Live Flesh (1997).

Q: I liked the sense of community of the women in Volver — most Hollywood movies are more about the men. Is it crazy to work with that many at one time?

Almodóvar: Do you know, it was very easy. I think it is more complicated to make promotion with many actresses. Then there is the light, the makeup, the dresses, all the things that make them feel more secure or more competitive. But on the set, I was really lucky that they really felt like family.