SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Monday, January 15, 2007

Book Review: Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas

A novelist who takes himself as the principal subject of his novel is asking for it, and if he names his narrator after Renaissance statesman and essayist Michel de Montaigne, he is asking for it in a big way. Montaigne was an erudite and charming writer who more or less originated the personal essay, and, you could say, gave all subsequent writers permission to extrapolate from their own experiences and thoughts to larger questions of religion and morality. Montaigne was not a novelist - the novel was being invented elsewhere at the time - but it was inevitable that his idiosyncratic authorial voice would eventually be wedded to stories, long or short, and that, say, Laurence Sterne would pop up, followed by a long line of fictive autobiographers, diarists, explorers of consciousness, existentialists and solipsists. It was also inevitable, according to the narrator of Montano, that a mal, or malady, would result, and indeed, the original title of Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas's novel is El Mal de Montano (Montano's Malady)

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Book Review: Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño was born in Chile, raised partly in Mexico, and died in Spain in 2003 at the age of 50. He spent much of his life in exile, in Mexico and Europe, after returning to Chile in 1973 "to help build socialism," a disastrous sojourn he describes in the story "Dance Card."

Arrested during a road check and imprisoned for a few days on suspicion of being a "Mexican terrorist," he was neither tortured nor killed, as he'd expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles."

By the time I'd finished the two novels, close friends and total strangers who made the mistake of asking what I'd been reading found themselves compelled to listen to a summary of "By Night in Chile," a narrative framed as the deathbed rantings of a Chilean Jesuit priest and failed poet. At a crucial point in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two agents of Opus Dei, who inform him that he has been chosen to visit Europe to study the preservation of old churches: the perfect job for a cleric with artistic sensitivities. On his arrival, he is told that the major threat to European cathedrals is pigeon droppings, and that his Old World counterparts have devised a clever solution to the problem. They have become falconers, and in town after town he watches as the priests' hawks viciously dispatch flocks of harmless birds. Chillingly, the Jesuit's failure to protest against this bloody means of architectural preservation signals to his employers that he will serve as a passive accomplice to the predatory and brutal methods of the Pinochet regime.

The novel seamlessly blends surrealism, lyricism, wit, invention and political and psychological analysis — and the same brilliance illuminates "Last Evenings on Earth." In most of the stories, the horrors of the Pinochet years are farther from the surface, but they're always present, a minor chord thrumming beneath narratives that, like "Gómez Palacio," are told in a straightforward style suffused with an ominous disquiet, a sense of loneliness and loss.

Many concern a writer simply called B, a Chilean exile living and traveling, often aimlessly, in Mexico and Spain. B has strongly mixed feelings about the Chilean exile community, a turbulent love life and an obsession with European and Latin American literature — especially minor writers and Surrealist poets — as well as political dispossession and suicide. Occasionally, all these fascinations converge, as in the title story, in which the young hero, trapped on a doomed Acapulco vacation (and a sorry experiment in debauchery), finds distraction and consolation in the poetry of Gui Rosey, an obscure Surrealist who may have killed himself as he and his more famous friends fled the Nazis.

Bolaño manages to convince us that the deceptively disparate topics of B's fixations (bad writers, great art, suicide, dictatorship and its victims) are essentially the same subject. In "Sensini," an author who has encouraged B to enter a series of humiliatingly modest literary competitions mourns a son named Gregorio (after Kafka's Gregor Samsa) who is among the "disappeared" killed by the Argentine junta. In "Days of 1978," B finds himself at a party telling a disputatious Chilean exile the plot of Andrei Tarkovky's film about the medieval icon painter Andrei Rublov. B's version, which emphasizes the movie's depiction of the power of art and mostly ignores its scenes of torture and violence, causes his compatriot to weep. Later B hears that the man has met a fate not unlike Gui Rosey's.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Book Review: The Uncomfortable Dead, by Subcomandante Marcos & Paco I. Taibo II

This so-called "four-handed book" has alternating chapters written by Marcos and the Spanish author Paco Taibo. It is self-referential even in its cops. Taibo's limping, one-eyed private investigator, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, gets to tackle a historical murder with El Subco's indigenous campaigner, Elias Contreras. Another equally fictitious sleuth - Pepe Carvalho - puts in an unexpected starring appearance, proving himself just as real as his creator, the late Vasquez Montalban.

The crime Elias and Hector coincide in resolving dates back to 1968 - which in Mexico meant something different to peace and love, and rather more like its opposite. The plot's intention to track down the murderer of a left-winger, imprisoned in a government swoop on those student activists not massacred in Mexico City, takes in much of that generation's history, and a lot more besides.

El Subco remains much given to philosophising; hence the whole chapters on distinctions between Bad and Evil. From the part of the world that brought us "magical realism", he explores the varieties of magic, otherwise known as sleight of hand by politicians. "There's black magic, which is the one you do with demons, and there's white magic... and then there's dirty magic, which is the one the politicians do."

Interview with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film "Babel" took home best director and jury prizes at Cannes and is up for a slew of Golden Globe awards, including best picture and best director. Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" is at 91 percent on the critical opinion meter RottenTomatoes.com, making it one of the best-reviewed films of the year.
But during their separate visits to the District this season, both directors took time out from promoting their own films to ask if I'd seen the work of someone else.
Mr. Inarritu assured me I'd be blown away by "Pan." Mr. Cuaron marveled, "Isn't it amazing? That ending is so fantastic. ... Very powerful."
These are some strangely uncompetitive filmmakers -- and very good friends.
Mr. Inarritu, Mr. Cuaron and "Pan" director Guillermo del Toro all hail from Mexico and all are in their early- to mid-40s. While they've left their native land, they remain friends who have established Mexico as a hotbed of film talent.
"It must be the water," laughs Mr. del Toro.
"There is a fierceness in how we express ourselves that comes from need and hunger," he says more seriously. "When Alfonso and I started doing films 25 years ago, it was almost impossible to make a Mexican film. It was almost unheard of for a Mexican film to open in America. So we came out of adversity. And I think that makes your voice stronger."

reading others words

A review of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star in La Bloga.
My latest excursion with Bolaño, Distant Star confirmed my first impressions and added to my level of exasperation, but did not lessen my admiration for this writer.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Casablanca and Other Stories by Edgar Brau

Edgar Brau was born in 1958 and moved from the provinces to Buenos Aires when he was 10. According to Yates's introduction, he read voraciously as a boy but also played soccer and rugby and nearly pursued a career as a boxer. At the age of 18, he was drawn to the theater, soon acting and directing plays by Moliere, Chekhov and Shakespeare. In 1986, he won first prize in a short-story competition and decided to devote himself to literature, opening a small bookshop on the side. In 1992, his first collection was published, followed since by more than a dozen other books of poetry and short fiction. Casablanca and Other Stories is the first selection of his work to be published in English, but one hopes that others will follow soon. The atmosphere in Brau's fiction ranges appealingly from the mysterious to the claustrophobic, from the horrific to the lyrical and transcendent.

And even to the comically grotesque. In "The Blessing," the president of an unnamed country has taken to firing his revolver into the sky at dusk, as a way of working off the day's tensions. One night, a stray bullet accidentally wounds a little girl, who is rushed to the hospital, given first-class treatment and returned home in a chauffeured limousine, with a car full of gifts and the promise of a scholarship to the university. "When the automobile left later on, the neighbors departed from the modest house in silence; the grownups among them appeared deep in thought." Guess what happens next.?

Read More

Edgar Brau's website has a brief biography in english.

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Argentine Literature

Enrique Metinides - Mexico’s Weegee

Enrique Metinides photographed his first dead body before he was 12. It was as if he had caught a fever, because after that he couldn’t stop. For years while he slept he kept his radio in Mexico City tuned to emergency stations so that he could be awakened by the latest news of disaster. He would often throw on his clothes and rush into the night to see yet another car wreck or fire or murder.

He found a cornucopia of gore: suicides, jumpers, accidental electrocutions and exploding gas tanks. (In that case petty thieves drove off from the pumps with the hose still inside their car.) We feel somehow we shouldn’t gawk. But how can we not?

So we do. We stare at the mangled corpses and at the crowds who stare back into Mr. Metinides’s camera, which means they stare at us. The cycle of voyeurism is complete.

Mexico’s Weegee, as he’s often called, Mr. Metinides, now 72, worked from the 1940s into the early ’90s, when he retired. His métier was Mexico City’s “nota roja,” the grisly pages. He shot for pulp magazines and mostly for the newspaper La Prensa, making visual sense out of urban mayhem and life’s general unpredictability.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

With the help of various colourful characters, including a voluble anti-fascist ex-spy, Daniel starts trying to piece together the story of Carax's life, which turns out to be a splendidly morbid Gothic melodrama. He also finds love with his best friend's gorgeous sister, who is engaged to a charmless Francoist, and incurs the wrath of her rich, reactionary dad. A psychopathic fascist cop starts taking an interest in Daniel's activities, and it soon becomes clear that Carax's fate is a matter of more than scholarly interest to everyone Daniel meets on his perilous trail.

With its bookish outer story and hints of the supernatural, The Shadow of the Wind has inevitably been compared to Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club. Zafon's brow is less high than Perez-Reverte's, and his puzzles are less ingenious, but his story is impressively well-rounded.

Humour, horror, politics and romance are skilfully deployed, and although the cardinal plot-twists aren't hard to guess, the overall effect is hugely satisfying. Zafon, a former screenwriter, is particularly good at contrast and pacing: the book's 400 pages whip past with incredible speed.

Interview with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu is not just a director; he’s a filmmaker, an auteur in the traditional sense of the word. His three films to date, all collaborations with screenwriter and novelist Guillermo Arriaga, have been conceived and developed by the duo, sidestepping the lure of big studio productions, as a director-for-hire, that most successful directors in Hollywood follow.
Not that he is opposed to it. “Well, there is always an idea, a subject, that I want to tackle,” he says about his choice of films, adding, “fortunately, or unfortunately, I just haven’t had the time, or perhaps the luck, to find something that interests me more than what I am working on. If it does, of course, I’d be open to it.”
His latest endeavor, Babel, distributed by Paramount Vantage, the specialty distribution arm of Paramount Pictures, is indeed a studio film. But just like 21 Grams, its predecessor, it was developed by Iñárritu and Arriaga, based on their own ideas.
Babel, the third in a trilogy that began over six years ago with Amores Perros, followed by the 2003 sensation 21 Grams, borrows the fractured narrative style of its predecessors. And like them, it is an exploration of human relations, of cause and effect, and of the way in which our destiny is the random end result of circumstances beyond our control. “Life is a sum of accidents,” says González Iñárritu, sitting in a plush sofa, legs propped on a chair, at the offices of Paramount Vantage in New York where we met to discuss his film. “It’s a series of extraordinary events that we’ve lost the ability to question,” he asserts, adding: “A Cuban friend of mine says: ‘If a second is enough to end our lives, then it is certainly enough to change it.’ I think there are events and actions that determine our lives, and that of others, even across the world.”

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro

So here's Guillermo del Toro, Mexican maestro of the fantasy film, a big fat man with a mess of hair, a ready chuckle and a large leather book held tight across the rolls of his stomach like a Crusader's shield. It would be a hard-hearted hack who could resist that plump, friendly face. If del Toro were to turn into his namesake he would surely be Ferdinand, the bull who sat down in the middle of the ring, chewed the flowers and smiled at the sky instead of fighting.

Yet this jolly man is the author of Pan's Labyrinth, a visual feast of a fantasy film set in Franco's Spain that is so dark, so fired with passion, fear and hope, that it blasted almost everything else at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was first shown, into the blue Mediterranean water. Critics who were not expecting anything quite so viscerally satisfying from the director of Blade II, Hellboy or Mimic, the films he made for US studios, described it as the surprise triumph of the festival; in the past few weeks, Pan's Labyrinth has appeared on various top-10 lists and has been nominated for a Golden Globe for the best film in a foreign language. Mark Kermode, of the London Observer, did not hesitate to declare it the best film of the year.

Peruvian Literary Renaissance

Now, more than a decade after the waning of the Shining Path rebellion, the conflict's legacy is fuelling a literary renaissance. Peruvian writers are blazing a trail through Spanish and English language publishing with books exploring a saga as fascinating as it is painful.

In the past year two of the three top literary prizes in Spanish have been won by novelists from the capital, Lima. Alonso Cueto won the Herralde award for The Blue Hour, about a lawyer who discovers that his naval officer father tortured prisoners. Santiago Roncagliolo received the Alfaguara prize for Red April, which follows a prosecutor's attempt to unravel a murder in Ayacucho, a pre-Inca citadel which became a cradle of the Shining Path in the 1970s.

Daniel Alarcón, who was born in Lima but grew up in the US and writes in English, was shortlisted for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway award for his short story collection, War by Candlelight.

"For a writer this is one of the most stimulating environments you can have. Conflict is the basis of any type of storytelling," said Cueto, seated at a Lima cafe overlooking the Pacific where he does much of his work.

Lima's fog - Herman Melville said it was the saddest city he had ever seen - created an ambiguous atmosphere, said Cueto. "Never dark, never bright, it's somewhere in between."

Don Quixote on Screen

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempt to bring classic novel Don Quixote to the big screen has been given another chance.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on the work by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, featured a star-studded cast including Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort.
But, after filming commenced in 2000, the insurer quickly pulled the plug on the multi-million pound project after a spate of misfortunes, including flash floods and illness. The trials of the disastrous shoot were captured in documentary movie Lost In La Mancha.