SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Thursday, December 14, 2006

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Don Felisberto Fernandes, a piano tuner, arrives at the secluded villa of the malevolent Dr. Droz to find that there are no pianos. It seems Droz has hired him to tune a set of musical automata in preparation for some macabre final performance. The Quay Brothers’ latest film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, traces Felisberto’s efforts to understand Droz’s evil scheme. At night Felisberto is haunted by the sound of a wordless, yearning voice. What is this singing, he wonders—is it a dream? “Well, it was certainly beautiful,” he decides. Assunta, the housekeeper, assures him: “After a while, you get used to the confusion.”
Piano Tuner is the Quay Brothers’ second full-length, live action feature. Like their first—1994’s Institute Benjamenta—it plays like an animated film made with actors rather than puppets. Currently in limited release in theaters (including, in New York, Cinema Village), Piano Tuner is not so much a movie. The earlier term “moving picture” better captures Piano Tuner: a series of images tied loosely together by a narrative idea. The experience of watching a Quay Brothers film may be likened to dreaming, but it more closely approximates living in someone else’s dream. Like Felisberto (played by the wide-eyed Cesar Sarachu), you just have to get used to the confusion.
(...)
The Quays talk a lot about the influence of Kafka and other Eastern European writers; The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is an homage to the Czech animator by that name, and Street of Crocodiles adapts a story by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Ultimately those films feel empty, as though the Quays thought they were taking part in an imagined generic Eastern European aesthetic. Thankfully, they explore new territory with Piano Tuner. A key reference point is the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and the plot is influenced by stories by Jules Verne and the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. Their themes—animation and reanimation, the line between wakefulness and sleep, navigating confusion—remain the same. So does their curious unwillingness to delve into the many questions they raise.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Love in the Time of Cholera on Location

British director Mike Newell faces the greatest challenge of his career: bringing a masterwork of 20th-century Latin American fiction to Hollywood from a land better known for drugs and guerrillas. Newell just wrapped filming for "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez. From the two-year struggle to acquire film rights from the notoriously protective author to the commercially risky casting of foreign lead actors to crises in filming on location, the making of the movie has been anything but easy.
Then again, neither were the 51 years, nine months, and four days that lead character Florentino Ariza famously waited in the novel for his true love. In the end, it was worth it for Ariza, and Newell and Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff are betting their travails will pay off in the authenticity of the adaptation -- and at the box office.
For the last three months, Newell, Steindorff, and a polyglot cast and crew have taken over the steamy Caribbean port of Cartagena, a little-known colonial gem of leafy, hidden patios and turreted city walls where a great part of the novel is set. They transformed cobbled squares into painstaking re - creations of the 1880s and the 1930s. They turned a commercial tugboat into a replica of a 19th - century paddle steamer. They designed makeup to span five decades and withstand 90-degree heat and humidity.

Juan Rulfo 2006 Award

Cuban writer Miguel Barnet won the Juan Rulfo 2006 award for his short story Fatima o el Parque de Fraternidad.
Barnet, Cuba's 1994 National Literary award winner, defeated another 6,000 contenders with the story of a transvestite he met at a park in Havana, and earned 9,000 euros.
The award for the best short novel El Punto se Desborda went to Spaniard Jose Antonio Lopez Hidalgo, while Venezuelan Julio Armando Estrada Nebreda won the prize for best photography.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Spanish Cinema Now

Presented in collaboration with the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Instituto Cervantes of New York and the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX).

2006 should go down as a banner year for Spanish cinema; the great international success of Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth set the pace, together providing powerful evidence that daring, imaginative works can still attract broad audiences. This year’s selection for Spanish Cinema Now shows in its breadth of styles and subjects how Spanish filmmakers refuse to rest on the tried and true, continuing instead to work out news forms of expression. Agustín Díaz Yanes’s Alatriste, based on the series by Pérez-Reverte, offers a different kind of swordsman-hero, more brooding and pensive in actor Viggo Mortensen’s interpretation. Celia’s Lives, directed by leading producer Antonio Chavarrías, is an effective updating of film noir, while Esteve Riambau and Elisabet Cabeza’s The Magicians interprets a bizarre fantasy-adventure film made during the Spanish Civil War as a true and revealing document of the period. The series also features several extremely impressive debuts, including Daniel Sánchez Arevalo’s wonderful DarkBlueAlmostBlack and Javier Rebollo’s Lola — powerful evidence that the future indeed should be bright for Spanish Cinema Now!

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas

Success as a writer arrives at last - with a novel which resembles exactly Cercas's own acclaimed Soldiers of Salamis - but because it seems so arbitrary, it brings with it no self-confidence. Instead it turns him into a narcissistic womaniser who alienates then loses his wife and child. By the end of his war with himself, his life is as ruined as Rodney's: all he can do now is tell the story he couldn't tell before, and in doing so tell his own. An event becomes story only when someone has a use for it. The writer hopes to validate himself by becoming his friend's voice; he hopes to save himself - from being a lifetime wannabe, a ghost, a moral and emotional failure in his own eyes - by identifying and strengthening the parallels between their experience.

His tone throughout is calm and busily discursive. In his attempts to understand his relationship with Rodney (not to say his relationship with himself) he draws in everything from the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song to a poem by Malcolm Lowry. To begin with, this seems emotionally uninformative. He describes people very clearly - "a Cuban American, well-built, enthusiastic, with a gleaming smile and slicked-back hair"; "a very well read, ironic, slightly haughty guy, who dressed with a meticulousness not entirely free of affectation" - but we don't see anyone or feel anything. And though we know that this is a novel about writing novels, its discussions of fiction soon become as boring as the intellectual landscape of Urbana. For nearly a hundred pages, it's an academic discourse, a book written with intelligence and humour but without sensation. Then Cercas takes us with Rodney to Vietnam, and everything explodes. Ironically enough, though we are now at the heart of the lie of narration, the point where things are at their most written, their most constructed, we begin to travel at the speed of light. As Rodney says, echoing all those grunts so ably ventriloquised by Michael Herr in Dispatches, "war lets you go very far and very fast".

The Speed of Light will vie with Daniel Pennac's The Dictator and the Hammock for the title of tricksiest Euronovel of 2006. But while Cercas has credible enough reasons for encouraging the content to sleep with the presentation, he understands that it's possible to be bored by this romance; and while he's as interested in the fictional hall of mirrors as any postmodern, unlike Pennac he is careful not to be blinded by his own conceits. Forget the biographical conundrum, because that's just a way of teasing us with what we already know about narrators and narration; what saves The Speed of Light from being the template writing-class novel is its humanity. Like Soldiers of Salamis, it's an intricate, male exploration of guilt, monsterhood and authenticity, the impossibility of redemption and the plausibility of self-forgiveness.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

It has taken a while for this novel to find its way into English. The Seven Madmen was first published in Argentina in 1929. Its author, Roberto Arlt (1900-42), was a disheveled Buenos Aires journalist who defiantly disregarded the rules of Spanish grammar and the finer sensibilities of critics. They in turn hooted at his work, which included four novels, two collections of stories and eight plays. The author once mordantly mimicked the typical response of his detractors: "Mr. Roberto Arlt keeps on in the same old rut: realism in the worst possible taste."

If anyone ever actually believed that this novel was realistic, then life in the Argentine capital must once have been unimaginably weird. True, the trappings of proletarian fiction are all roughly in place—lowlife taverns, brothels and urban rot: "The setting sun lit up the most revolting inner recesses of the sloping street." But the anti-hero who stumbles through this landscape is a perversely comic invention. Remo Erdosain collects bills for a sugar company and engages in petty embezzlement. He also writhes in noisy anguish at a world that can ignore his true genius. "Didn't they call me crazy," he asks an acquaintance, "because I said they should set up shops to dry-clean and dye dogs and metallize shirt cuffs?" One day, everything gets even worse.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Pacific Cinematheque's Cine Chile 2006

For the past decade, celebrated Chilean author Alberto Fuguet (The Movies of My Life, Bad Vibes, Shorts, Red Ink) has been a leader in the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo (a name that combines McDonald's with Macondo, the fictional setting of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude).

McOndo eschews mythical Hispanic villages in favour of condos, Spanglish and Mac computers. And Fuguet's characters are more likely to be disillusioned, globetrotting hipsters than grandmothers who can fly.

Last year, the 42-year-old writer took his revolt against magic realism to the big screen in his directorial debut, For Rent. The gentle drama concerns a failed, thirtysomething composer adrift in a Santiago powered by movers and shakers who were once his less-talented university pals.

The film lit up box offices in the slender republic, and tonight it kicks off the Pacific Cinematheque's Cine Chile 2006 -- a week-long spotlight of movies from that nation's youth wave.

From this year's The Guardian's selection

Kiran Desai: A new translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star (Harvill), pertinent once again now we're back to discussing the machinery of dictatorship, of institutionalised distrust. This book charts the destruction of bohemian life in Chile, the corruption of poetry.

Hisham Matar: Javier Marias' Written Lives (Canongate) is a wonderfully luxurious collection of short biographical pieces on authors the Spanish writer so clearly enjoys evoking. Marias's gaze is affectionate, humorous and penetrating.

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Latin American Literature

La Malinche and Inés Suárez

For centuries both women have been reviled as collaborators in Spanish conquests of the new world that verged on genocide. La Malinche was an Aztec turncoat who helped Hernán Cortés conquer Mexico; Inés Suárez was a Spanish seamstress who joined another conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, in slaughtering the inhabitants of Chile.

Now two of Latin America’s female literary giants, Laura Esquivel and Isabel Allende, have come to the rescue by writing novels casting them as misunderstood heroines who could be role models for today’s women.

Some critics have balked at the revisionism, saying the novels gloss over the rape and savage subjugation that accompanied the 16th century colonial invasions of Central and South America.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes

The natural choice after reading José Saramago is to read António Lobo Antunes, another leading Portuguese writer with several novels already available in English translations. Reading these two novelists, as well as João de Melo, gives the impression that there is some very exciting fiction coming out of Portugal. The Natural Order of Things is a novel in which the very theme is the coexistence, or simultaneity, of the past and the present, and of the real and the unreal. Antunes’s technical skill in getting this across is alone worth looking at. Among other stylistic feats, he writes amazing sentences in which two scenes, years apart in time, take place at once. He is compared to Nabokov, among others, for the time shifts, the song-like riffs and the very particular repetitions which are also reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

32nd Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival

As the 32nd Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival headed into its final stretch, Francisco Vargas' "The Violin," Jorge Duran's "Forbidden to Forbid" and Juan Carlos Valdivia's "American Visa" figured as favorites to take top plaudits at Huelva's kudofest.

In his first edition as Huelva fest director, Eduardo Trias put together a strong competition with three lesser-known competish titles also currying good buzz: Alejandro Doria's healing priest drama "The Hands," Santiago Loza's femme friendship story "4 Women, Barefoot," and Chilean Alberto Fuguet's frustrated musician tale "For Rent."

Playing out-of-competish, fest opener, flamenco musical comedy "Por que se frotan las patitas?," went over strongly on its world preem last Saturday.

"Visa" and "Hands" also figure among the six nominations announced at Huelva for best foreign Spanish language film at January's Goya Awards.

Other contenders are Mexican docu "In the Pit," Chile's sex drama "In Bed," Ecuador's road movie "How Much Further" and Colombia's foreign-lingo Oscar candidate "A Ton of Luck."

The Republic of Poetry by Martín Espada

What sort of place is "The Republic of Poetry"? As portrayed in the title poem of Martín Espada's dynamic eighth collection, it's a place where poets eat for free in restaurants, where "poets rent a helicopter/ to bombard the national palace/ with poems on bookmarks," and where the "the guard at the airport/ will not allow you to leave the country/ until you declaim a poem for her/ and she says Ah! Beautiful."
While such a land might sound like a fanciful literature-loving utopia, what's described here is the very real republic of Chile -- to which the poem is dedicated, and whose culture and recent history provide the lion's share of inspiration for the book. Yet Chile is not the only muse here: The book's three sections provide a triptych of metaphorical "republics" of poetry, including the poetry of elegy -- where both the past and the dead are visited -- and the poetry of protest. Throughout, poetry is shown to bear the power to dissolve, reshape and illuminate the borders of time and place.

Espada, a Brooklyn native whose parents hailed from Puerto Rico, has long been inspired by Latin American poetry (of which he is a widely published translator), and most especially by Chile's most esteemed and extraordinary poet, Pablo Neruda. Today Espada teaches courses on Neruda, along with creative writing classes, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And in his own poetry (for which he has won the American Book Award), he often seems to work in the tradition of Neruda, displaying a vibrant, far-reaching and distinctively openhearted imagination on matters both political and personal.