SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Friday, December 29, 2006

Teolinda Gersão

A short text from Portuguese novelist and short story writer Teolinda Gersão.

On her way home one day, a humble bank clerk happened to see a red fox fur coat in a furrier's shop window. She stopped outside and felt a shiver of pleasure and desire run through her. For this was the coat she had always wanted. There wasn't another one like it, she thought, running her eyes over the other coats hanging from the metal rack or delicately draped over a brocade sofa. It was rare, unique; she had never seen such a color, golden, with a coppery sheen, and so bright it looked as if it were on fire. The shop was closed at the time, as she discovered when, giving in to the impulse to enter, she pushed at the door. She would come back tomorrow, as early as possible, in her lunch break, or during the morning; yes, she would find a pretext to slip out during the morning. That night she slept little and awoke feeling troubled and slightly feverish. She counted the minutes until the shop would open; her eyes wandered from the clock on the wall to her wristwatch and back, while she dealt with various customers. As soon as she could, she found an excuse to pop out and run to the shop, trembling to think that the coat might have been sold. It had not, she learned, been sold; she felt her breath return, her heartbeat ease, felt the blood drain from her face and resume its measured flow.

My First Language by Bernardo Atxaga

A short text from Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga:

For a brief period during my childhood, euskara, or Basque, was, for me, simply the language I used every day. I had no views about it, and I had no concerns as to its future. I called my father and my mother atta and ama, just as I called the rain ebi and the sun eguzki, for that is what euskara was for—naming people and things with the usual words. In that sense, I was no different from any of the other children who had, in the past, been born in my house, Irazune: they too, regardless of whether it was the twentieth century or the nineteenth or the eighteenth, had said atta, ama, ebi, and eguzki when they wanted to refer to father, mother, rain, or sun. It was the same for other children in my village, Asteasu, and for many others throughout the length and breadth of the Basque Country: we were all euskaldunak, that is, "people who possess euskara."

Book Review: The Lonely Hearts Club by Raul Nuñez

It has been said that the past is another country; if so, then Barcelona in the early 80s must be another planet. Dirty and grim, a capsized ship in the port, whores lining the Ramblas, a shantytown of squatter restaurants down on the open-sewer beach. These are my pre-Olympic memories. Then the city got spruced up and the tourists came in hordes. I mention this because this latest reprint of Nuñez’s book makes great mention of Barcelona and its landmarks on the cover blurb, and readers who only know the new, post ’92 city might be baffled by a thing or two, particularly the fact that the street and place names appear in Spanish rather than Catalan as they are now. No matter, as there is really no great reason the book couldn’t be set in any other seedy Mediterranean port. Knowledge or ignorance of Barcelona won’t hinder the enjoyment of this story one iota.

The original (1984) Spanish title was Sinatra because the protagonist, Antonio Castro, looks like the singer. Frankie, as he therefore gets called, is a forty-year-old night porter in one of those clapped-out no-star ‘hotels’ you can still just about find off the Ramblas. His wife has left him and he is lonely, leading a tedious, directionless life. He knows that things must be bad when he gets a severe case of diarrhoea. An answer may lie in an ad in a paper for a lonely hearts club. He joins up and the letters start arriving. Now Frankie is quite a sweetie in his way, generous and wouldn’t hurt a fly - but remember, he is a lonely, frustrated male controlled by macho pride. This brings out a nasty side, revealed at times in comments like: ‘She wasn’t much to look at but who cares’. The letters, however, aren’t just from plain, lonely widows and widowers, nothing that simple. There’s a boozy armed robber fresh from prison wanting to move to Barcelona, a gay barman, and a dwarf who writes lousy poems and is desperate to have a man inside her. Then there are those that Frankie just happens to bump into on and around the Ramblas; for example Natalia, a junkie teenager who believes a ratty doll is her baby. Somehow Frankie gets involved with all of them and it gives him bad dreams. He is himself too emotionally weak to help those who ask and he begins to crack. Then, just when it looks like his luck has changed, disaster strikes. His floundering makes a sad but wonderful human story.

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Raul Nuñez was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Barcelona from 1975 until his death in 1988.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Adios Muchachos by Daniel Chavarría

Back in the distant past books and films in translation always seemed to verge on the arty side. This has changed over the last ten years or so with the proliferation of popular fiction in translation. The last two offerings I have read for TBR (both from the Spanish) - Raul Nuñez’s The LonelyHearts Club and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy - are typical of this trendy new wave. These novels are anything but arty; in fact, I doubt there is a word as long as ‘pretentious’ in either one. Adios Muchachos follows in this tradition. For those having a sense of déjà vu this is the UK’s first publishing, and Serpent’s Tail, following the 2001 release in the US, have given the book a graphic-design cover, but made it brighter, more modern and, appropriately, toned down the illustration to a less tarty looking girl. The cover boasts ‘2002 Edgar Award Winner’ for best original paperback; and Martin Cruz Smith’s blurb: ‘Pulp fiction in Castro’s Cuba…sex, scheming, and, well, more sex’. So, we have a mystery-cum-sex book (sic).

The opening line says a lot about the speed, style and content of what follows: "When Alicia decided to become a bicycle hooker, her mother agreed to sell a ring that had been in the family for five generations." Straight in, no messing about, we know mum is going to invest heavily so her daughter can become a prostitute. Not your everyday family setup then. In fact mum cooks fantastic meals for the foreign-tourist-johns that Alicia brings home through a scam with her built-to-break-down bike. It is a good investment and soon the two have a healthy stockpile of refrigerators, air conditioners and so on as Alicia doesn’t really do it for money; she is even insulted if money is offered. No, what she wants is a stinking rich husband who lives anywhere other than Cuba, so to blatantly come across as a hooker is not on.

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And a brief biographic note on Daniel Chavarría.

Writer, professor of Greek and Latin. Daniel Chavarria is considered one of the greatest pen of the Spanish Literature, despite his work was published for the first time on 1978. He lives in Cuba since 1969. As fluent speaker of five languages, he has been serving as German translator for the Cuban Institute of Book and professor of Latin, Greek and Classic Literature at the Havana University among 1975 and 1986.

Author of literary and political papers, movie and TV scripts, he considers himself as a pupil of who is, in his opinion, an ''extraordinary fable narrator'', Alejo Carpentier. ''I consider myself his pupil, he was master of Spanish language during the last century, a figure to whom I devoted ''El Ojo de Cibeles'', my novel awarded in Mexico.

Book Review: The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

In The Buenos Aires Quintet, first published in 1997, we find Pepe in Buenos Aires, bringing that city to life in the way he does Barcelona. Pepe’s been hired by an uncle of his who wants to locate his son, now back in Argentina after years of exile in Spain. What does Pepe know of Argentina? "Tango, the disappeared, Maradona," he flippantly answers, although Pepe is fully aware of Argentina’s history. Once there, he encounters people of around his age who fought against the military take-over in 1976; i.e., the "subversives," most of whom have "disappeared." The nephew he is sent to find, Raúl Tourón, was aligned with these left-wing Perónists, although he worked as a research behavioral scientist and, in fact, made an important discovery in working with rats: that a link exists between animal behavior and the quality of animal feed. Put another way: "he taught how to treat people like rats." The military dictatorship stole his research, putting it to use for their own ends. The following year Raúl’s house was raided and his wife, the lovely, militant activist Belma was shot and their baby daughter taken away. Raúl was taken into custody as was his sister-in-law Alma, but they were later released. Raúl doesn’t learn the facts until much later, but it was his father, already in exile in Spain, who made a deal with the military junta to spare their lives and get them out of prison.

Book Review: An Olympic Death by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

An Olympic Death, which first came out in 1991, is set in a pre-Olympic Barcelona, a city far different from the one it was soon to become, with its newly created beach front and the inevitable arrival of cruise ships, turning it into slick, urban tourist attraction. 1991 was an emotionally wrenching year for many of us who lived here as we watched the city being dug up, torn down and rebuilt. Construction work was everywhere you looked; cranes dominated the landscape. At that time the Barceloneta "chiringuitos" (the tattered but colorful open-air restaurants) dotted the beach. You could sit at a wooden table smack on the sand and enjoy an affordable paella year-round (some even provided wool blankets to keep the customers warm in winter). When those were pulled down that, for me, marked the end of an era. Beach dining shifted to the overly priced Olympic Port, which doesn’t even provide a view of the sea in most cases. A hastily and ill-conceived Olympic Village was constructed which looked like standard-issue welfare housing (with apartments selling for extraordinary prices) that within a few years was looking run down. The "community" that was to have grown around this area never developed and is now surrounded by much dead space. A superfluous airport-like mall went up at the other end of the port (trendy bars, including one of the city’s many new Irish bars, and a miniature golf course are located on its terrace rooftop; a McDonald’s and a Ben and Jerry’s sit below.)

Book Review: Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piñol

Already translated into fifteen languages, Cold Skin (originally titled La pell freda) won the Ojo Critico Narrativa prize on its original publication in Catalan in 2002, an amazing feat for anthropologist Albert Sánchez Piñol, born in Barcelona in 1965, who debuted with this darkly beautiful novel. Consider a discrete synopsis:

A young, nameless narrator arrives by ship sometime after World War I at a remote island somewhere in the south Atlantic near the Antarctic Circle. It is there—far away from the normal shipping lanes, apparently more than six hundred leagues from the nearest large landmass—that he is to remain alone for a year. He will take on the unlikely job at this desolate outpost as the weather official for a company that has an incomprehensible need for such a person.

Book Review: The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo

Among many accolades, Carlos Fuentes calls Juan Goytisolo "Spain's greatest living novelist"—just but curious praise for a writer who has not lived in Spain for 50 years and continues to be its most scabrous critic. Born Barcelona in 1931, Goytisolo’s early novels, including Marks of Identity, were banned by the Franco regime. Driven into exile, Goytisolo lived in Paris from 1956 to 1996, when his wife, the writer Monique Lange, died. Since then he has lived in Marrakesh where he continues to be actively engaged in political and humanitarian projects and write trenchant essays and articles supporting these causes. The Blind Rider marks his10th novel, which he claims will be his last.

Goytisolo has always brought autobiographical elements into his fiction, and The Blind Rider clearly belongs to the genre "fictional memoir," where personal reminiscences of past and present events play a large part. The heart of these memories is expressed through the unnamed narrator, a widower, as he struggles with the anguishing grief that he feels over his loss.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende's new novel, Inés of My Soul, takes as its subject 16th-century Spain's conquest of Chile and the founding of Santiago. Meticulously researched and peopled by real historical characters, the novel is framed as the memoir of Doña Inés Suárez, sometimes described as Chile's "founding mother." The narrative moves from the sleepy towns of Spain to the harsh ferocities of Latin America's New World colonies.

Led by the lust for gold, the Spanish employ both cross and sword to overcome the Incans, then turn on each other in pursuit of riches. Inés becomes the lover and helpmate to conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, and proves indispensable to the proposed establishment of a society based on egalitarian principles in Chile.

Inés' rise from oppressed anonymity to power and fame embodies one of Allende's most persistent themes: the woman confined by a traditional culture but determined to alter her circumstances. Inés insists early in her memoir that she has never grown accustomed to the New World's "lack of order." But the remark seems tongue-in-cheek, as the "scrambling" of society she decries is partly of her own making and enables her transformation from poor seamstress in a Spanish back street to a "highly placed señora" in Santiago society.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuarón

The end is nigh in “Children of Men,” the superbly directed political thriller by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. It’s 2027, and the human race is approaching the terminus of its long goodbye. Cities across the globe are in flames, and the “siege of Seattle” has entered Day 1,000. In a permanent war zone called Britain, smoke pours into the air as illegal immigrants are swept into detainment camps. It’s apocalypse right here, right now — the end of the world as we knew and loved it, if not nearly enough.

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

bhupinder on César Aira's Life of a Landscape Painter - It has certainly been one of the more unexpectedly wonderful books I came across this year, elegant with a dense story that is most poignant when the bolt of lightening strikes Rugendas and transforms him even while deforming his face forever.

Miguel de Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in The Fates Conspire Against Us - The Tragic Sense of Life is a book filled with the most visceral philosophy that I have ever read or even heard of. Miguel de Unamuno looks some of the toughest philosophers in the eyes and slaps them, and often the reader at the same time. He smiles at Hegel and says, oh, yes, “The great framer of definitions, who attempted to reconstruct the Universe with definitions, is like the artillery sergeant who said that a cannon was made by taking a hole and enclosing it in steel.”

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Latin American Literature

Friday, December 22, 2006

Book Review: The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes

In the early part of the century, authors like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and James Joyce cobbled together difficult masterpieces out of shifting narrators and changing time sequences. After World War II, this method fell out of favor, but a Portuguese novel recently translated into English pays homage to the technique--and throws in a dose of magical realism for good measure.

In The Natural Order of Things, Antonio Lobo Antunes traces the complex multigenerational fortunes of two families that are haunted by their pasts. The book opens with the rambling nighttime reminiscences of a middle-aged man as he lies in bed next to a much younger, diabetic woman. It's clear that this is no easy relationship. As the man pathetically puts it, "Whenever I talk about myself, you shrug your shoulders, twist your mouth and stretch your eyelids in disdain and mocking wrinkles appear behind your blond bangs, so that I finally shut up."

In the ensuing chapters, the narration is taken over in alternating segments by a bitter, elderly man and an army officer who is arrested and tortured. And that's just in part one. Future chapters introduce us to a feisty prostitute and her pimp, and an illegitimate girl who is locked up by her father. The author doesn't exactly make all this narrative juggling easy to keep track of. When the speaker jumps, abruptly, in midparagraph, time shifts too, taking a reader across several decades and from modern-day Lisbon to Africa. (The relative obscurity of Portuguese history serves as an additional obstacle.) Only in the final 50 pages or so--or more likely, on a second read--will the careful reader be able to cobble together the pieces of this genealogical puzzle and construct the web that ties all these main characters together.