SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Friday, December 22, 2006

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia

A text from Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda.

We were in southern Argentina, not far from El Bolsón, a picturesque town on the border between the provinces of Río Negro and El Chubut. The giant poplars sheltering the cemetery bent in the wind. Their foliage formed a huge dome over all who rested there, people who had come to this southern tip of the world with their dreams, ambitions, hopes, plans, loves and hates - the basic ingredients of our brief passage on earth. These polyglot people in their different costumes had come from all over the world only to end up in this forsaken, windswept cemetery, united through eternity in the universal language of death.
A man lent on a tombstone, replacing a few dry flowers. A cigarette dangled from his lips.
"They say Martin Sheffields is buried here," I opened.
"The sheriff. Yeah, that no-good is here all right."
He could have been any age. His face, tanned by wind and sun, was inscrutable.
"Do you know where his grave is?" I insisted.
"Sure, but we can’t rush him. They buried him with his Colts in his hands. In a bad mood the bastard could blast us to hell," he answered, and led the way.
Martin Sheffields arrived in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century. He spoke a rough and ready Tex-Mex Spanish. His only possessions were two magnificent Colt revolvers, slung low on his hips, a well-harnessed white horse with a fine Texas saddle, and a sheriff’s star pinned to his breast. He was straight out of Marcial Lafuente Estefania’s westerns (1).
"He’s down there," said the man, pointing to an unnamed grave, "and I hope he stays put."
It was covered with a layer of beaten, almost petrified red earth, adorned by a single plastic daisy with scorched petals. Not much to mark the last resting place of a great Patagonian legend.
Sheffields probably died in 1939. No one knows for sure. Several biographies based on hearsay have been written by authors who appropriated the history of the region. But in Patagonia, legends, myths and truths change with the wind and history is a narrative genre indifferent to chronology and objective facts (2), an excuse to embroider a fireside tale over a glass of maté.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Interview with Julio Cortazar

Evelyn Picon Garfield:Let's begin with some general questions. How would you characterize your writing within the context of a literary generation in Argentina and in Latin America?

Julio Cortázar: The question is somewhat ambiguous because there are many ways to belong to a generation. I suppose you are referring to a strictly literary generation. Let's leave Latin America aside until later since the Argentine panorama is complicated enough. In order to understand generations you must have distanced yourself in time because while you are experiencing that generational context, you don't realize it. I mean that when I began to write, or rather publish in 1950, I wasn't aware of any generational context. I was able to discern some strengths, writers I admired in Argentina and others I detested; but now, twenty-five years later, I believe I'll be able to say a few intelligent words about it. The first part of my work is situated along extremely intellectual lines, the short stories, Beastiary for example. It is rather logical to imagine that in the fifties I was inclined towards the most refined and cultured writers, and to some extent influenced by foreign literatures, that is European, above all English and French. It is necessary to mention Borges, at once, because fortunately for me, his was not a thematic or idiomatic influence but rather a moral one. He taught me and others to be rigorous, implacable in our writing, to publish only what was accomplished literature. It is important to point this out because, in that period, Argentina was very unkempt in literary matters. There was little rigor, little self-criticism. Someone as extra ordinary as Roberto Arlt, the opposite of Borges in every sense, was not at all self-critical. Perhaps for the best, since self-criticism might have rendered his writing sterile. His language is untidy, full of stylistic errors, weak. But it has an enormous creative force. Borges has less creative energy in that sense, but he compensates for it with an intellectual reflection of a quality and refinement that for me was unforgettable. And so I automatically leaned towards that hyper-intellectual bent in Argentina. But it is all ambivalent because at the same time I had discovered Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt, populist writers. You know the division between the Florida and Boedo groups. I had also discovered those in Boedo. And what I called "force," a moment ago, impressed me. So, for example, the whole "porteno" side of city life in the short stories of Bestiary, I owe--not as a direct influence but rather as rich themes--to Roberto Arlt. Because despite all that has been said about Borges' Buenos Aires--a fantastic, invented Buenos Aires--that Buenos Aires does exist but it is far from being all that the city is. Arlt perceived things from below for cultural, vital and professional reasons and saw a Buenos Aires to live in and stroll through, to love in and suffer in, while Borges saw a Buenos Aires of mythic destinies, of a metaphysical mother and eternity. So you see, my place in that generation--which is not mine but the previous one--at the same time fulfills a kind of moral, ethical obedience to Borges' great lesson, and a teluric, sensual, erotic (as you like) obedience to Roberto Arlt. There are many examples, of course, but this one should give you an idea of what I mean. Others in my generation followed similar paths at times, but I know of no one else who simultaneously encompassed those two poles. There were pseudo-Borgeseans who produced an imitative literature.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Interview with Laura Restrepo

I had never conducted an interview via e-mail before my conversation with the Colombian author Laura Restrepo; therefore, I wasn't prepared to get answers that had the quality of polished writing. Because Restrepo's answers are lengthy and rich in anecdote, I missed not being able to interject whenever she wrote about a subject that I wanted to know more about. That's perhaps the main reason why the resulting interview reads, I think, like a memoir—an evocative recreating of Restrepo's fascinating life. What I hope also comes across in Restrepo's responses is that she has been creating, slowly and deliberately, a remarkably consistent body of work that reflects her singular preoccupations with politics and history. Although relatively unknown in the United States, she will be better known and appreciated as more of her books begin to appear, and the magnitude of what she has achieved becomes clear to all. It is Restrepo's ferocity of vision, her love of language, of storytelling and of innovation, that have made her one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America since the glorious and distant days of the "boom."

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.