SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Monday, December 18, 2006

On the creation of a Colombian national identity through crime fiction

An article by Colombian author Santiago Gamboa.

According to Balzac, a "real novelist" must "plumb the depths of society, because the novel is no less than the secret history of nations." Balzac's observation about the power of fiction to reveal social truth applies with particular force to a country like Colombia, whose reality has been so distorted by its official history. History is typically written by the victors, so it tends to be blind before horrors committed by its authors while exaggerating the misdeeds of others. In many Latin American countries, history functions as just another podium for self-aggrandizing elites.

On the other side stands civil society—a society that suffers history, often in silence, a society to which so much is promised and so little delivered, a society that goes to the voting booth every four years with growing disenchantment, a society that suffers the dreams of its supposed prophets.

Interview with Leonardo Padura

An interview with Cuban mistery writer Leonardo Padura.

After years of success across Europe, the detective novels of Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes have finally started to appear in English.
This spring, two novels featuring his charismatic policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde are being published in Britain.
The first, Adios Hemingway (Canongate) has already been critically well received. The second, Havana Red (Bitter Lemon Press) has just been published.
Until Padura began writing detective novels in the early 1990s, the genre in revolutionary Cuba was a medium through which an attempt had been made at using it to inculcate the masses in the correct mode of behaviour in a socialist society.
Borrowing heavily from formulas adopted in the former socialist bloc of eastern Europe, the Cuban genre had some successes, but these were outstanding because they shone amid a mass of mediocrity.
All too often, anodyne policemen chased predictable CIA infiltrators and sympathisers in hackneyed plots that held little suspense.
Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the real world that sustained this fictional counterpart disappeared and the way was clear for a revitalisation of the genre.
In stepped Padura with his four novels Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons), all set in 1989, the cataclysmic year in which the Berlin Wall came down.
Just as in 1930s US, when Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective story from the genteel drawing room mysteries that had been popular in the prosperous 1920s into the hard-boiled thrillers more befitting the gangster age, Padura has brought about a similar genre shift in Cuba.
Padura's Lieutentant Conde is a divorcee and a drinker with a heavy sense of irony who tracks down corrupt officials and home-grown crooks in a familiar Havana - of crumbling buildings, street girls and shortages.

Review: Babel

As we wait for the result of the 7 Golden Globes nominations, here's another review of Guillermo Arriaga's Babel.

The third film from the writer-director team of Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel displays neither the ingenuity of Amores Perros nor the cohesiveness of 21 Grams. Like those earlier films, it focuses on a series of seemingly unrelated events - in this case, involving four families in four countries - that end up being connected to one another in ways that aren't immediately clear. Also like the two earlier films, it purposefully jumbles its narrative, unfolding its story in seemingly random fashion, without regard to chronology (although each story thread is told chronologically, the timelines don't match each other) or any other convention.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Interview with Manuel Puig

This interview with Manuel Puig took place during a weekend in September 1979, after he was part of a Congress of Hispanic-American Writers in Medellin, Colombia. Other participants in the event were Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Mexican short-story writer and novelist Juan Rulfo.

JC: What role does the reader play in your work? Are you aware of a future reader when you write a novel? Has the reader's taste ever influenced the way you constructed a book?

MP: Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader. I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer. That's why I don't request any special efforts in the act of reading.

The Mirror of Lida Sal by Miguel Angel Asturias

"The Mirror of Lida Sal," by Miguel Angel Asturias, is a noteworthy piece of 20th century fiction by a giant of Guatemalan literature. Subtitled "Tales Based on Mayan Myths and Guatemalan Legends," this volume has been translated into English by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) is one of the notable literary figures in Latin America who in the 1920s contrived both to explore and to define Latin literature within the mainstream of Western history. He managed to be poetic, political and mythological at the same time, and with a degree of synthesis rarely achieved then or since. In this book, Asturias draws upon Central American history and culture to create several fascinating short pieces. His style (as I read it through Alter-Gilbert's translation) is psychedelic and florid; Asturias mixes realistic and fantastic elements throughout the book. The result is comparable to a prose version of the paintings of Spanish artist Salvador Dali.

I Gave You All I Had by Zoe Valdes

Zoe Valdes's rambunctious new novel is an appetizingly rich stew, full of the varied flavors of Latin culture -- part bolero, part Brazilian soap opera, with hints of the nostalgia of Oscar Hijuelos and the nutty adrenaline of Pedro Almodovar, not to mention the acrobatic literary abandon of Valdes's fellow Cuban expatriate Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Set in Cuba from the swinging 1950's to the grim periodo especial of the 1990's and exuberantly translated by Nadia Benabid, ''I Gave You All I Had'' is a sumptuous story of love and sorrow, a story that -- like so much in Valdes's native country -- is both personal and political.

Valdes's heroine, Cuca Martinez, is a spindly Cinderella born in 1934 in the provincial city of Santa Clara. At the age of 16, she flees to Havana and falls painfully in love with Juan Perez, a smooth operator with two unfortunate attributes: bad breath and mob ties. Even more unfortunately, Juan will vanish after a brief but chaste encounter, only to reappear eight years later as a nightclub impresario and sometime manager of Edith Piaf (an example, we're told, of ''intelligence and sensuality rolled into one, and when those two things meet in one woman, you might as well . . . head for the exit quick or you're a goner'').

Interview with Zoé Valdés

"To identify as gay or lesbian in Cuba," according to Zoe Valdes, a Cuban novelist and poet who now lives in exile, "is to declare political dissidence. It is equivalent to publishing a manifesto against the government." Though she's heterosexual, Valdes is just the woman to take that challenge. "My brother is gay, my sister's a lesbian, and me, I love the whole world," she says. Gustavo, her brother, translates from Spanish as Valdes takes a sip from her frappuccino on one of New York City's hottest summer afternoons.

She flashes Gustavo a smile, looking at him affectionately with her deep-green eyes as she feeds him her next line. It's an inside joke between them, and they laugh with the intimacy of kinship and the relief of distance from the subject at hand. Gustavo is at the tail end of a giggle when he translates what she said: "In Cuba the gathering of more than three people is considered a conspiracy. But the gathering of three or four gays and lesbians is considered an American invasion."

There is no American invasion in Valdes's astonishing new novel, Dear First Love (translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley, HarperCollins, $23.95)--her third to be published in English. But based on this joke, it comes awfully close by Castro's standards, with two lesbians as the main characters. But Valdes will not let anything compromise her writing. At one point Valdes came this close to being punished for signing a book contract with a French publisher without the permission of the government--one of the "crimes" that landed gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in jail. "When I lived in Cuba," she tells me, "I didn't even know he'd been in jail. That's how restrictive they were with information."

The Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet

Three reviews of Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life.

In a recent issue of Context, the Center for Book Culture's print forum, its publisher John O'Brien scrawled across the back page a passionate essay concerning the lack of literary translations in America. He claims it was not his intent to "argue whether there should be more translations," but rather to investigate why there are so few. Still, the former is as much a part of the argument as the latter, leading O'Brien to call the dearth of translations a "cultural travesty."

Soon after reading this essay I picked up the recently translated Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet, a purportedly somewhat autobiographical novel about a young boy born in Chile, raised through early childhood in Southern California, then returned to Chile for the rest of his years. Now a renowned seismologist, a brief but intense encounter with a female stranger on a plane has caused Beltran Soler to go on a manic writing spree. He sequesters himself in a Los Angeles hotel room when he's due in Japan, inditing essay upon essay about the movies he saw as a child. The essays uniformly end up being about his childhood, not the movies. Ostensibly, he is going to send these essays off to the woman from the plane. And, ostensibly, she is not going to be creeped out by all of this.

Thirtysomething seismologist Beltrán Soler is en route from Santiago to Tokyo when geological and emotional tremors turn his LAX layover into a psychic archaeological dig. Back in movie-metropolis L.A., where he spent his first decade, he holes up in a Holiday Inn to compose an annotated inventory of the films that, so to speak, rocked his world—the ones he projected onto, slept through, or sought refuge in and has since come to idealize, live out, or simply forget. Title and Hornby-ish fanboy conceit notwithstanding, Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life is less about cinemania than family betrayal. Each film on Beltrán's list—viewed between age two and 16, in Nixon's SoCal or Pinochet's Chile—taps into a pungent nostalgia and a painful recovered memory; this associative exercise resolves into a faded snapshot of the Solers, a diasporic, quake-obsessed clan, itself riven with crevices.

Chilean author Alberto Fuguet never really wanted to be South American. Born in Santiago, he spent the first 13 years of his childhood in Encino, California, the backyard of the Los Angeles movie industry, expecting to grow up as a first-generation American. When his family moved back to Chile in the mid-1970s, after Pinochet's military dictatorship deposed Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government, the experience traumatized him. 'Coming to Chile as an immigrant was going down in every sense of the word for me,' he explains to Críticas. 'From democracy to dictatorship, from first world to third world, from English to Spanish. Spanish wasn't so cool then as it is now. It wasn't the second language of the world.'

It may seem strange for a Latin American novelist to admit such reservations about his mother country, much less his language, but in Fuguet's case, it's par for the course. Ever since McOndo, the ground-breaking anthology he co-edited with Sergio Gómez, came out in 1996, the 39-year-old author has made a career of thumbing his nose at literary conventions, chief among them the idea that all novelists south of the border should be magical realists.

Interview with Alvaro Mutis

Interview with Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis.

Alvaro Mutis, one of the most beloved and esteemed of Latin American authors in the Spanish-speaking countries and throughout Europe, is not as well known here in the United States.

That's probably because he isn't easy to categorize: neither magic realist nor political novelist nor regionalist nor confectioner of folkloric whimsies. For most of his writing life, his reputation has been as a poet–one forced to earn his living at a variety of professions while making his home in Mexico rather than his native Colombia. The Mexican writer Juan Villoro once remarked that his Latin American generation grew up with the voice of Alvaro Mutis: for years Mutis did the voice-over narration for the Spanish-language version of The Untouchables. In an astonishing burst, from 1986 to 1993, Mutis wrote seven novellas that have been published all over the world, winning major prizes everywhere, including two of Spain's most important literary honors, the Príncipe de Asturias and Reina Sofia (for poetry), in 1997. In the United States, the novellas were published in two collections, Maqroll and The Adventures of Maqroll. Essentially, the novellas follow the enigmatic, eccentrically learned, seductive, eternally transient seaman-adventurer Maqroll, "el Gaviero" (the lookout), and his friends on their tangled exploits, usually outside the margin of the law, through seedy ports and tropical backwaters. The world of Maqroll–though not confined to any one place–is as unique and whole a creation, as much a region of the imagination, as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez.

Pedro Juan Gutierrez

A couple of texts from Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.

Claustrophobic Me
For years I’ve been trying to get out from under all the shit that’s been dumped on me. And it hasn’t been easy. If you follow the rules for the first 40 years of your life, believing everything you’re told, after that it’s almost impossible to learn to say "no," "go to hell," or "leave me alone."

But I always manage . . . well, I almost always manage to get what I want. As long as it isn’t a million dollars, or a Mercedes. Though who knows. If I wanted either of those things, I could find a way to have them. In fact, wanting a thing is all that really matters. When you want something badly enough, you’re already halfway there. It’s like that story about the Zen archer who shoots his arrow without looking at the target, relying on reverse logic.

Well, when I started to forget about important things–everyone else’s important things–and think and act a little more for myself, I moved into a difficult phase. And it was like that for years: I was on the margins of everything. In the middle of a balancing act. Always on the edge of a precipice. I was moving on to the next stage of the adventure we call life. At the age of 40, there’s still time to abandon routines, fruitless and boring worries, and find another way to live. It’s just that hardly anybody dares. It’s safer to stick to your rut until the bitter end. I was getting tougher. I had three choices: I could either toughen up, go crazy, or commit suicide. So it was easy to decide: I had to be tough.

Buried in Shit

In those days, I was pursued by nostalgia. I always had been, and I didn't know how to free myself so I could live in peace.
I still haven't learned. And I suspect I never will. But at least I do know something worthwhile now: it's impossible to free myself from nostalgia because it's impossible to be freed from memory. It's impossible to be freed from what you have loved.
All of that will always be a part of you. The yearning to relive the good will always be just as strong as the yearning to forget and destroy memories of the bad, erase the evil you've done, obliterate the memory of people who've harmed you, eliminate your disappointments and your times of unhappiness.
It's entirely human, then, to be engulfed in nostalgia and the only solution is to learn to live with it. Maybe, if we're lucky, nostalgia can be transformed from something sad and depressing into a little spark that sends us on to something new, into the arms of a new lover, a new city, a new era, which, no matter whether it's better or worse, will be different. And that's all we ask each day: not to squander our lives in loneliness, to find someone, to lose ourselves a little, to escape routine, to enjoy our piece of the party.

Read More

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (b. 1950 in Matanzas) is a Cuban journalist, writer and artist.
Gutiérrez began to work selling ice cream and newspapers when he was eleven years old. He was a soldier, swimming and kayak instructor, agricultural worker, technician in construction, technical designer, radio speaker and journalist for 26 years. He is a painter, sculptor and author of several poetry books. He lives in Havana. He is the author of Dirty trilogy of Havana, King of Havana, Tropical animal (winner of the Spanish Prize Alfonso Garcia-Ramos 2000), The insatiable spiderman, Dog meat (Italian prize Narrativa Sur del Mundo), Our GG in Havana and the short stories of Melancholy of lions. Dirty trilogy of Havana, Tropical animal and The insatiable spiderman have been translated into English.
Named master of "dirty realism", Gutiérrez depicts life in the shady alleys of Havana with his unadorned style. Without taking any political stance, his books describe contemporary Cuba in an unembellished way. (Source: Wikipedia)

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Jorge Luis Borges' Rare manuscripts lost, then found

A three-week scramble to find two handwritten manuscripts by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges worth nearly $1 million ended on Monday when they were discovered in the bookstore that had reported them missing.
Lame Duck Books, a seller of rare books, art and manuscripts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had reported the short story manuscripts missing and presumed stolen after they were last seen on November 12 at an antiquarian book fair in Germany.
"By strange chance we've located the manuscripts today. They had been tucked behind the backing of a photograph that was inside a little plastic sheath that was in one of our manuscript files when we were at the book fair," John Wronoski, Lame Duck's owner, told Reuters.
The global police network Interpol, which fights international crime, had been notified along with police in Harvard Square in Cambridge, where the bookstore had previously held them locked in a safe.

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.