SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Frida Kahlo's clothes

The trunk, discovered in the back of an old wardrobe that had been forgotten in an unused bathroom, was like stepping into the past.

Curators opened the lid to find hundreds of Frida Kahlo's colorful skirts and blouses, many still infused with the late artist's perfume and cigarette smoke.

It has taken two years to log and restore the nearly 300 articles of clothing. Next summer, the embroidered and sometimes paint-smeared pieces will be put on display at Kahlo's family home-turned-museum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the painter's birth. The exhibit will offer the public a new glimpse into Kahlo's flamboyant and tortured life.

Francisco de Zurbaran in music

The larger than life-sized portraits showing Jacob and his Twelve Sons dressed in Spanish peasant costumes should offer plenty of dramatic material for writers Duncan Brown and Greg Pullen, both from Spennymoor, and David Napthine, from Binchester, in County Durham.

Painted by Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbaran, they were sent to Mexico in the mid-17th Century to promote Catholicism among the native population at a time when it was widely believed that the Aztecs were one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Instead, they were hijacked at sea by English pirates and ended up in London in the hands of merchant James Mendez, a Portuguese Jew.

In 1756, he sold them for £125 to the high-living Bishop Richard Trevor, a vigorous campaigner for the recognition of Judaism's role in the Christian story.

One of the set was missing - Mendez sold Benjamin's portrait to the Duke of Ancaster, who believed himself to be a descendant. It now hangs in Grimethorpe Castle, near Peterborough.

Bishop Trevor had to be content with a copy - a fake by artist Arthur Proud, which was installed along with the rest in the castle's Long Dining Room.

The Bishop had his dramatic political statement to display to his dinner guests, but Zurbaran had been left with nothing.

Receiving no money for his stolen masterpieces, he died a ruined man in 1664.

50 years of Grande Sertão: Veredas

Brazilians have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of a special book: Newspapers have published reports and articles, academies have organized conferences and debates, news shows have broadcasted stories, museums have offered exhibitions, new editions were printed. This could be routine in other countries, but, unfortunately, reading is not a Brazilian's habit. Shame on us.

The book that Brazilians are celebrating is a singular one. It radically divides opinions. Some readers love it and spend their lives reading it again and again; others can not pass the 50th page. They give up saying that the author's style is too difficult to grasp.

It is a novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas written by a diplomat, Joao Guimaraes Rosa. He spoke eight languages, but chose to write in a peculiar and inventive way. The book has been translated into many languages. Its English title is "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands".

The novel is a tragic love story that ends in an astonishing way. It unites Riobaldo and Diadorim, two gunmen in a raging war against rival bands. The author creates a new language, using unknown words that readers magically understand.

Making of Love in the Time of Cholera

He made Hugh Grant a floppy-haired trans-Atlantic star and teenage Harry Potter a screen hero. Now 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 Garcia Marquez.

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 32 C heat and humidity.

There were times – when the city flooded from torrential rainstorms or less-hardy crew members dropped out – when it looked as if it wasn't going to come together.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Leave it to Isabel Allende to reassess the past, individual and collective, from a feminine -- though not a feminist -- perspective. Her new novel, "Inés of My Soul," is structured in the form of a " crónica, " or account, using the standard devices of the form, including placing the narrator at the grave's edge, at the Spanish conquest of Chile, in the 16th century.

The protagonist and narrator is the fiery Doña Inés de Suárez, who is known in textbook s as conquistador Pedro de Valdivia's lover and a "defender" in the battle of Santiago, when, in 1541, the indigenous population rebelled against Spanish power.

Doña Inés is about 70 when she reminisces about her involvement in the so-called Chilean war of 1549 to 1553, and the events that led her to it. She tells the story to Doña Isabel de Quiroga, her daughter with her second husband. (Doña Isabel is a concoction, since Doña Inés is said to have been sterile.) "That I can write down these memories and thoughts with paper and ink," Doña Inés says, "is owing to the good graces of the priest González de Marmolejo, who took the time, amid his labors of evangelizing savages and consoling Christians, to teach me to read."

Book Review: City of God by Paulo Lins

Raw, brutal, and graphically violent, "City of God," by Paulo Lins, is a multifaceted story about hellish life and early death in a Brazilian slum, where family ties can be severed as easily as a kite string.

Based in part on Lins's childhood in the Rio de Janeiro favela known as Cidade de Deus, or City of God, the book was originally published in Brazil in 1997 and made into a film in 2002. While the movie focused on the relationship between two of the characters, the novel is a fast-moving and intense series of snapshots about a complex network of young thugs during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Most of them are known only by their nicknames -- Hellraiser, Green Eyes, Sparrow -- and all of them struggle with issues of class, race, and power.

Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuaron

The future looks bleak in Children of Men, a sci-fi thriller that has less to do with the plot - centering on a world where disease has left all the women sterile - than with the director's vision of where our culture is headed.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that the director is Alfonso Cuaron, one of current cinema's most striking visual stylists - for proof, just check out the soaring majesty of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Children of Men is no less breathtaking, although toward a slightly different end; think of the new film as Potter if Voldemort took over.

But as great as the film looks, the story, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, never quite comes into focus. Is it about the importance of fighting for an ideal? The need to focus on the future, no matter how desolate the present? The redemptive power of love, and devotion? Or is it a determinedly pessimistic ode to the utter (and ultimate) stupidity of men, who spend so much time fighting and looking for scapegoats (thus justifying even more fighting) that they wouldn't know what to do if something good and hopeful happened?

Friday, December 29, 2006

Book Review: The Night Buffalo By Guillermo Arriaga

Manuel loves Tania, his best friend Gregorio’s girlfriend. He is also having recreational sex with Gregorio’s sister. Tania has been sleeping with Manuel for a long time and may or may not love him, but is certainly obsessed with Gregorio. And Gregorio has committed suicide.
What could have been a trite story of youthful passions and betrayal becomes far more haunting and disturbing under Guillermo Arriaga’s pen. Gregorio is insane and brilliant, a doomed genius who manipulates his doctors, friends, and family and is fascinated with death and pain. Alongside, Manuel and Tania thread a delicate razor-edge of sanity, and never succeed in untangling themselves from the maze Gregorio has set for them. As Manuel recognizes, “Gregorio has not finished dying.” Within the scope of this book, he never does.
There are no chapters, no cleanly labeled time frames to ground the reader. Instead, the novel follows Manuel’s frenetic, desperate tumbles through past and present. The short, tense vignettes shade in the relationships between the characters and reveal most of all Manuel, tortured, desperate and tragic. Through his eyes, the women of this novel remain mysterious and merciless, uninvolved in the passionate angst of the men around them. They are an excuse for the actions of the men, not always the true reason.
Arriaga is more famous in the United States for his screenplays: the Academy Award-nominated Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Fans will find the same edgy, urgent pacing and troubled kaleidoscope of characters in The Night Buffalo, the first of three of Arriaga’s novels to be published in the United States.
The flawless English translation is just an added bonus. Alan Page, who has worked with Arriaga on all his screenplays, is a poet. His blend of sympathetic understanding of Spanish linguistic rhythms and taut, meticulous selection of their English counterparts creates a work beyond language barriers. This version will evoke the visceral response of the original text without ever allowing the reader to forget that this is Mexico City in all its tarnished glory. It is a work of art in itself.

Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro

Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time — 1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was painfully starting to awaken — "Pan's Labyrinth" is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it's the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children's story, with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication, illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?

The brilliance of "Pan's Labyrinth," which is being released worldwide through May, is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician. The director, Guillermo del Toro, unapologetically swears allegiance to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical technique and film history.

Book Review: Ines Of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Allende freely admits her novel is "a work of intuition", that she researched events widely and then "strung them together with a fine thread of imagination". This may be so, but her dramatisation is marred by passages of overwrought, over-ripe prose.

At its worst, the book is strewn with bodice-ripping cliches: bodies burn with impatience, days drag by, Valdivia and his paramour were born to love each other and would do so through all eternity ("Ines of my Soul" is the conquistador's special nickname for his feisty concubine).

More Books of the Year

... or in this case translations of the year. From Words Without Borders selection:

From Esther Allen

An Episode in the Life of a Language Painter
by César Aira
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions

"The most extraordinary book in translation of 2006 was César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, brilliantly translated by Chris Andrews (and published by New Directions). Aira is a rather unusual writer who composes his short books (more than thirty of them so far) in uninterrupted bursts of inspiration and without looking back or correcting, or so I'm told. As you might expect, such a methodology leads to a highly varied and uneven though always fascinating body of work. In this brief, incandescent book, about an actual incident in the life of the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas who traveled in Argentina in the early nineteenth century, lightning strikes."

From Francisco Goldman

Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions

"Chris Andrews' translation captures Bolaño's unique and elusive voice perfectly."

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Book Review: The Heretic by Miguel Delibes

This international bestseller follows the life of a boy born on the day the Protestant reformation began—when Martin Luther nailed his list of ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg—through his last days in prison and burning at the stake. Cipriano Salcedo, the only son of the Salcedo family, is born in Valladolid, Spain, on October 31, 1517, shortly after which his mother dies. Resented from birth by his father, who refers to him as “that little parricide,” Cipriano grows up in the care of his peasant wet-nurse and later is abandoned to the town orphanage. When his father dies, Cipriano takes over the family leather business and invents a rabbit-fur overcoat that becomes extremely popular throughout Spain and the rest of Europe, creating a small fortune for Cipriano. With his entrance to the aristocracy, Cipriano marries the daughter of one of his suppliers, an unpredictable woman famed for her sheep-shearing abilities. As their efforts to produce a child prove fruitless over time, his wife grows despondent and is eventually committed to an insane asylum, where she dies, supposedly dreaming of the hills where she raised sheep as a girl. Cipriano, guilt-ridden over his wife’s unhappy demise, takes refuge in the company of a small sect of Calvinists that has sprung up in Valladolid. When the members of this brotherhood are inevitably caught and tried, casualties of the Spanish inquisition, Cipriano is the only member of the group who stays true to his convictions; in his confession the night before his burning he admits to three sins--not loving his father, bedding his wet-nurse during his teens, and fatal indifference to his mercurial wife. Like all the sainted martyrs, however, he holds fast to his beliefs, despite the fact that his demise will be all the more ignominious and painful unless he recants.