Almudena Grandes has just published a new book "El corazón helado" (Iced Heart)
From ABC.es

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Spanish Literature

In the Pit directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo

Literally and existentially down and dirty, “In the Pit” is an absorbing documentary about work and the transformation of men into laborers. Directed and shot with sensitive attention to detail by Juan Carlos Rulfo, the film takes us into a world apart, populated by members of the construction crew building the second deck of the Periférico beltway in Mexico City. For the city’s inhabitants, each of whom apparently spend an estimated 1,485 hours a year commuting, and mostly on public transportation, the construction is at once a nuisance and a possible solution. For the most part, like construction sites everywhere, it is also hidden in plain sight.

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Mexican Cinema

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires, spent part of his childhood in Israel, wandered Europe in his youth and now resides in France. Yet he is, by his own assertion, a Canadian writer. It was after moving here in 1982 that Manguel first felt he lived “in a place where I could participate actively as a writer in the running of the state.”

Manguel’s significance, however, is hardly limited to his reflections on Canada. His essays, fiction and anthologies represent the worldliest of intellectual itineraries. The volumes on reading for which he’s famous—A History of Reading, Reading Pictures and, most recently, The Library at Night—are mosaics rich with anecdote, research, insight and an eloquently articulated passion for the fathomless role of books in our lives.

VUE WEEKLY: In The Library at Night you confess that as a youth you dreamed of being a librarian, but found this goal sabotaged by “sloth and an ill-restrained fondness for travel.” Had a writing career not yet occurred to you?

ALBERTO MANGUEL: No. I think it’s a reaction many readers have. You read great books, finding them such well-crafted, magical objects, worlds into which you enter, that the idea of creating something similar seems impossible. I didn’t know that every writer thinks this way. Writing eventually came to me by chance, from ideas sparked by reading. Even in my fiction, the starting point has something to do with reading.

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Argentine Literature

Book Review: With Borges by Alberto Manguel

Like the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Manguel's With Borges is almost perfect in its brevity (almost only because of the annoying typos and spelling mistakes). But, as with Borges, brevity in this case doesn't mean simplicity. In fewer than 100 narrow pages, many of them with Sara Facio's evocative photographs, Manguel manages to echo the complexity of his fellow Argentinean's labyrinthine tales, with their blending of fact and fiction, mysticism and mathematics. With Borges does not include fiction (although the conversations are based on memories of a time long past), but it does combine memoir, biography, and reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired to create an intimate portrait of this enigmatic writer.

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Argentine Literature

Book Review: Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas

The sick critic decides to cure himself by visiting his son, Montano, who has a different problem. After one precocious novel, about writers who give up writing, he finds himself totally blocked. The meeting is an oedipal calamity, and Rosario changes tack.

Rather than curing himself of literature, he decides it would be better for him to turn "into the complete memory of the history of literature... to embody it in my own modest person". So on to Pico, and the moles.

Then, 100 pages in, it stops. Rosario blithely informs us that he invented Montano in order to project on to him his own writer's block. He declares that the next step in his recuperation from literature sickness is to treat us to his autobiography, in the form of a dictionary of literary diarists. This is not talk to make the reader's heart soar. The folding-in of literature on to itself often leads to arid games. But Enrique Vila-Matas, the Spanish author skulking behind Rosario, is in no danger of that.

The names he co-opts into his curious memoir include Gide, Valéry, Borges and Kafka. Most pertinent, though, are mentions of W G Sebald and Claudio Magris, whose books have opened what Rosario calls "new ground in between essay, fiction and autobiography". It is this ground that Montano works, to impressive and delightful effect.

Vila-Matas is far less serious than Sebald or Magris, though he is thoughtful about how writers grow through parasitism on those who came before. But for all the erudition on display (and one of the great merits of Montano is the casual introductions it offers to dozens of European writers), we are never far from a novelistic flourish - a light touch carried through in Jonathan Dunne's fine translation. Will the moles prevail? Not with books like this around.

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Spanish Literature

Correntes d`Escritas Literary Festival

The 8th edition of Correntes d`Escritas Literary Festival starts tomorrow in Póvoa do Varzim, Portugal. This year's festival will have the presence of 60 Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American authors. Until Saturday visitor will find among others, Luís Sepúlveda (Chile), Eucanãa Ferraz and Nélida Piñon (Brasil), Ignacio Martínez de Pisón e Enrique Vila-Matas (Spain), Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru), Hélder Macedo, Fernando Pinto do Amaral, Lídia Jorge, Jacinto Lucas Pires and Hélia Correia (Portugal).
More Information: Correntes d’Escritas Web Site (In Portuguese)

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Latin American Literature

A Spanish Short wins the Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival

The international festival of Clermont-Ferrand has awarded in its last edition the work of the Spanish director Gabe Ibáñez. Máquina, directed by Gabe Ibáñez, tells in 16 minutes the transformation of a girl who discovers, through pain, its new nature and finds the way to reach the lost harmony. Máquina is Gabe Ibáñez' first work.
From elpais.com

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Spanish Cinema

Interview with Tomás Eloy Martínez

The novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez believes his career as one of Argentina's most prominent journalists imperilled him yet saved his life. Blacklisted by a paramilitary group in the 1970s for his job on a Buenos Aires newspaper, he ignored death threats, including a letter bomb at his home, until gunmen surrounded a fashionable restaurant where he was eating lunch. It chilled his blood, he recalls, "but I wanted people to have pictures of my killers". When he rang his paper to send a photographer, the receptionist said: "Why so modest? I'll send them all." Martínez is convinced that the bevy of cameras scared off the death squad.

He fled to Paris, taking refuge in the residence of Mexico's then ambassador, the novelist Carlos Fuentes. It was 1975, the year after the death in office of Argentina's populist dictator Juan Perón, and shortly before his reigning widow, his third wife Isabel, was overthrown by the military junta in 1976, ushering in the terror and disappearances known as the "dirty war". During 10 years of exile, Martínez moved from France to Venezuela and, in 1982, to the United States, where he became director of Latin American studies at Rutgers university in New Jersey. He is writer-in-residence there.

His imagination, however, remains rooted in his homeland. While he denounced the junta in Venezuelan newspapers, his three early novels were banned in Argentina, and republished there only after the return to democracy in 1983. The Perón Novel (1985), which riled the Peronistas, was a political satire centred on the dictator's return in 1973 from 18 years of exile, while its prequel, Santa Evita (1995), artfully deconstructed the myth of Perón's second wife, Eva Duarte - Evita. A peasant-turned-B-movie actor, Eva bewitched the president and the crowds alike. She died of cancer in 1952, aged only 33. The novel, which traces a macabre struggle over her embalmed corpse, was a bestseller in Argentina for more than a year, and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

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Argentine Literature

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Few people have entered literature more dramatically than Carmen Laforet. She was 23 when the unpublished Nada (Nothing) won the 1944 Nadal Prize; it has remained in print in Spain ever since. It still surprises that this powerful, albeit implicit, indictment of Franco's dictatorship got past the censors. At the time, it was seen as a sensationalist novel about violent, mad, abnormal people. Today, when Nada is recognised as one of the few great novels to be written during the dictatorship, its portrayal of a crushed, starving middle-class family in a sordid Barcelona reveals how violent abnormality was the norm of life under fascism.

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Spanish Literature

Interview with Daniel Alarcón

I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice. I invented a country, a city, drew upon my experiences in Lima, upon my travels in West Africa, upon texts I read about Chechnya (the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya, RIP), or Beirut, or Mumbai. I was influenced and deeply inspired by the work of Joe Sacco as well, whose books on Palestine and Bosnia are truly masterful. The liberty to call on all kinds of sources was freeing: I came across a book called Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, possibly apocryphal, but it rang so true when compared with the interviews I had done in Peru and Bolivia, that I felt confident referencing it in my attempt to create a composite of what that life might have been like.

Read Daniel Alarcón’s interview at The Elegant Variation

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: The Initials of the Earth by Jesús Díaz

Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing,” has long been a favorite saying of Fidel Castro’s, the memorable, simple-sounding formula he has cited when he has felt the need to silence a critic, justify an apparently indefensible repressive measure or simply remind Cubans that his all-seeing eye is ever upon them. Jesús Díaz’s ambitious novel “The Initials of the Earth” was published in Cuba in 1987, which makes it by definition a within-the-revolution product. But that distinction was, it seems, hard won — the prize at the end of an arduous journey from nothingness to the sanctifying light of full, Fidel-approved being. In an essay appended to this first English-language edition, Ambrosio Fornet, a friend of the writer’s, tells us that Díaz wrote a version of the book in the late ’70s that was “condemned ... to the limbo of a tacit censure.” When the censure was lifted (presumably also tacitly) in the early ’80s, Díaz had, we are told, “the composure and professional sobriety to sit down and rewrite the novel from scratch.” Read More

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Cuban Literature

Literary Guide to Brazil

Jorge Amado, Brazil's most celebrated novelist, was, like the country, larger than life. His novels ("Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" were reissued this past fall by Vintage; "Tent of Miracles" and "Tieta" in 2003 by University of Wisconsin Press) burst with energy -- rollicking, robust, earthy tales from the northeast port cities of Ilheus and Salvador, of worker strikes, rubber booms and busts, and mulatto beauties. (The film versions of "Dona Flor" and "Gabriela," incidentally, are classic '70s softcore fare, starring the sumptuous Sonia Braga.) Amado, embraced in the U.S. during the Latin boom era of the '60s and '70s, had been pumping out hardy, proletarian-style novels since the '30s, though by the '50s they had turned more comic, lighthearted and bawdy.

The late-19th-century author Machado de Assis wrote stylish, whimsical portraits of modern bourgeois life that made him a literary phenomenon of his time (his novels were often first serialized in popular women's magazines). Machado de Assis is an original -- witty, erudite, deft and acrobatic, and endlessly inventive. You'll be won over instantly by his "Epitaph of a Small Winner" (1881), republished in 1997 as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" by Oxford University Press, and translated by Gregory Rabassa -- a titillating, quasi-philosophical reckoning on a life of missed opportunities, narrated from beyond the grave by the eccentric Brás Cubas himself. De Assis' novels cleverly anticipated the mental games and mazes of major 20th-century writers like Borges, Cortázar and Kafka.

Speaking of Kafka, equally bewitching is the Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector, whose modernist, heavily metaphysical works have often been compared to those of the Czech master himself. Lispector, who immigrated to Brazil from a Ukrainian shtetl in 1920 when she was just 2 months old, wrote some of the most lively, raw and dizzying internal soliloquies of the past century. "I shall be as light and vague as something felt rather than understood, I shall transcend myself in waves, oh God, and may everything come and fall on me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain blank moments," she rhapsodizes in her first novel, "Near to the Wild Heart," "for I need only fulfill myself and then nothing will impede my path until death-without-fear; from whatever struggle or truce, I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."

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Brazilian Literature