SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Friday, January 26, 2007

Book Review: A Heart So White / Dark Back of Time by Javier Marias

Mere plot summary would give you a mistaken impression. A nameless Spaniard spends two years teaching at Oxford, has an affair with a married woman and buys a lot of rather obscure old English books. A man in Madrid is about to have an affair with a married woman when she drops dead in his arms; he flees the scene and spends the next few months surreptitiously getting to know the surviving members of her family. A simultaneous translator, recently married to another simultaneous translator, uses the growing friendship between his wife and his father to unravel the mystery behind a suicide that took place before he was born. An author reflects on the strange events -- many of them involving eccentric Englishmen, others having to do with his own private and public life -- that are connected to the publication of one of his earlier novels.

These are the story lines (though that may be precisely the wrong word, for they come to us in circular, disconnected form) of ''All Souls,'' ''Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me,'' ''A Heart So White'' and ''Dark Back of Time,'' the four novels by the Spanish writer Javier Marías that are now available in English. If you judged by the summaries alone, you might guess that Marías's fiction is ludicrously melodramatic or cruelly comic or tediously postmodern. It is none of these. On the contrary, all four novels possess an odd combination of true sadness and deeply satisfying wit that I have yet to find in any of Marías's English or American contemporaries.

Although this review will concentrate on the two novels that are most recently available, it is difficult, with Marías, to segregate any single work from the others. The experience of reading him is cumulative. When you take up a Marías novel or even a Marías short story, you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar. Names and characters recur: the wives are often called Luisa, a slightly suspect friend will be either Custardoy or Ruibérriz de Torres, and there are frequent references to an Englishman named John Gawsworth and his position as king of Redonda. Public figures, too, put in an appearance, though Franco is not always called Franco, and Margaret Thatcher may simply be identified as a female British leader. The events take place mainly in Madrid, but London, Oxford, Havana, Venice and New York are also knowledgeably invoked. Time is an active presence, a nearly tangible entity. Ghosts flit through; sometimes (as in the title story in the collection ''When I Was Mortal'') they even act as narrators.

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

Two years ago, the masked, pipe-smoking leader of the Zapatista army — Subcomandante Marcos — sent a hand-carried proposal from his jungle headquarters to one of his favorite writers. “El Sup,” as Marcos is called by his admirers, invited Paco Ignacio Taibo II, an internationally celebrated crime-fiction writer, to co-author a mystery novel. But not just a run-of-the-mill whodunit. This one would be written pingpong style, each writer pursuing his own storyline without consultation and the two bound together only by the promise that their respective protagonists would meet up about two-thirds of the way through the book.

Taibo, a devilishly provocative literary anarchist who relishes spurning the cultural establishment, immediately agreed. Within weeks, the chapters came cascading out and started appearing in serial form, as a work in progress, inside the pages of Mexico City’s leftist daily La Jornada (which experienced a 20 percent growth in its Sunday readership as a result). Now translated into English, The Uncomfortable Dead reads as an uproarious, dizzying, purposefully incoherent plunge into the multiple ironies, absurdities and injustices of present-day Mexico.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The Bride from Odessa by Edgardo Cozarinsky

The name "Odessa" makes you think of Chekhov, involuntarily inviting a comparison that would make most writers’ work shrivel; but not Edgardo Cozarinsky’s.

He was born in Buenos Aires in 1939 and has lived in Paris since 1974. He is best known for his subtle, semi-documentary films, and has written a previous collection of short stories and prize-winning essays. From his name and these stories one may deduce rather more: that his parents emigrated to Argentina as refugees from the Europe of the dictators, probably from Hitler; that his roots are in Central Europe, perhaps Vienna, perhaps Budapest, possibly more remotely, the Crimea or the Ukraine; and that he is, probably only on one side of his family, Jewish.

He writes in Spanish and the blurb states "his stories belong to spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of history." This seems fair comment, though the stories are not clever like Borges’s. Yet they do recall that line of his about Buenos Aires: that the city where the other side of the street hadn’t been built, symbol of an incomplete society.

The stories are not anecdotes. That’s to say, they couldn’t be told in other words without dissolving. They exist only as they are written, unlike, say, some of Maugham’s. You might call them mood pieces, except that this suggests a certain insubstantiality, which would be misleading. An exile is someone who has lost everything except his past, which for that very reason is more alive in his memory than in the memories of those who have never been uprooted. The exile lives in no community except that of the dead and the disinherited. He knows complete uncertainty, the absence of any imaginable future, and yet continues to live from day to day.

The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky

The title of Argentine film-maker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky's first novel promises a shady émigré underworld, while the cover image of 1920s tango star Osvaldo Fresedo playing the bandoneon evokes an era of underpaid musicians, tubercular artistes and European immigrants with small suitcases and big hopes. Among them were thousands of Jewish women whose hopes were promptly crushed. The "fiancés" who had brought them to the New World often turned out to be procurers for the flourishing white slave trade between Europe and Argentina, of which the most infamous gang was the Jewish Zwi Migdal. The young woman was locked up in some dingy Buenos Aires attic and forced to service local machos, recent immigrants themselves. She couldn't buy herself back, even if she saved enough from her meagre wages. The punishments for attempted escapes were terrible.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Literary Guide to Colombia

Post-Gabo writers don't have it easy in a place where "it is often a matter of life and death not to tell a single truth," as one of Restrepo's characters puts it. Two contemporary authors, Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco, both recently given high-profile English translations, explore an increasingly urban reality, as opposed to the rural, timeless and universal fantasy of the magical realists -- the young writers' stone to Gabo's Goliath. Vallejo, who lives in Mexico City, depicts in "Our Lady of the Assassins" (1994) a disillusioned returning writer in love with a series of young male assassins. Nothing sacred in Colombian society, from iconic liberator Simón Bolívar to the Roman Catholic Church, is spared Vallejo's ecstatic rage. "Colombia changes," laments the narrator, "but remains the same, this is the new face of the same old disaster."

It's no accident that Vallejo and Franco are both from Medellín, the regional capital that shepherded the first great drug lord and the thorny prosperity and scourges in his wake. (Read Mark Bowden's masterly, intricate "Killing Pablo" (2001) to grasp the fascination -- and the almighty dread -- "Don Pablo" Escobar continues to evoke for Colombians even 13 years after his death.) Medellín may be "wrapped in the arms of two mountain ranges," as it's described in Franco's "Rosario Tijeras" (1999), but there's nothing precious about the ferocity of the Colombian "barrio popular." Franco's young sophists, lacking formal education but superbly schooled in cruelty, observe with casual innocence events only readers can recognize as unjust. As Emilio, the lovelorn and slumming narrator, says, "We don't know how long our history is, but we can feel its weight." Rosario's last name, Scissors, is a sobriquet bestowed after one of many acts of violence against "being born to misfortune." In the book, a corpse gets shot (again) in his casket while another gets paraded around his favorite salsa bars. Franco, Vallejo and others writing in an urban noir vein defiantly turn over the decayed log of Colombian society to examine the activity underneath, seeking that combination of thrilling revulsion and incredulous wonder that Colombia seems so adept at provoking: extremes of terror and beauty.

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.