Dancing to “Almendra” by Mayra Montero

The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it’s a wonder more stories haven’t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble of the Revolution, all playing out in a gorgeous city. Is there more in the way of material than this? A great narrative, an elegant and charismatic cast, a setting as alluring as any in the world; but we have little to show for it, in English anyway, aside from a slight Graham Greene novel and a few scenes in “The Godfather, Part II.” And here is Mayra Montero, a Cuban woman now living in Puerto Rico, and “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” her ninth novel, lovingly translated by Edith Grossman: a flawless little book with a deceptively light touch, that covers exactly those years.

Montero’s novel is narrated by a man named Joaquín Porrata, a 22-year-old reporter living in Havana during the last days of Batista, who shows up for work one morning and finds he’s been assigned the story of a hippopotamus that has escaped from the zoo and been shot to death. As it happens, that same night the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber’s shop in New York City, and from a rather strange little zookeeper named Juan Bulgado (or Johnny Angel, or Johnny Lamb: in Havana even a zookeeper can dream), Porrata discovers that the two killings are related. Rebuffed by his boss, who wants to keep him on the entertainment beat, he takes his notes to a rival paper, which sends him first through the Cuban underworld, then to New York and then to the upstate town of Apalachin, where a mob summit has been interrupted by the police, though not quickly enough to spare Anastasia a death sentence from his peers. Along the way Porrata encounters a woman named Yolanda, a small-town refugee who ran away with the circus, where she lost her arm serving as the model in a magician’s sword-through-a-box trick. She’s rumored to have a lover of her own, Santo Trafficante — himself a Mafia boss and a very scary man. Nevertheless Porrata pursues her as he pursues the story, and winds up getting them both, though not without being roughed up a few times along the way. In fact, between the animals in the zoo and the mobsters running the casinos, the book gets very bloody.

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Latin American Literature

Del Toro Effect??

One of the holy grails at this year's Berlinale was buyers' search, in the wake of "Pan's Labyrinth," for the next Guillermo del Toro.

It gave an unexpected leg-up to Spanish pic sales.

Spain's hottest sales ticket, Jose Antonio Bayonas' ghost tale "The Orphanage," sold Stateside to Picturehouse by Wild Bunch, was co-produced by Del Toro, who waxes lyrical in a brochure about its merits.

By market end, "Santos," a super-hero spoof from Chile's Nicolas Lopez, also was sparking considerable major territory interest.

Del Toro hasn't anything to do with "Santos," but, budgeted at $6.4 million, it's one of the most ambitious movies to come out of Latin America this year. And its mix of auteur vision and U.S. pop culture sensibility recalls Del Toro's style.

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Latin American Cinema

Family Law directed by Daniel Burman

Uruguayan actor Daniel Hendler plays lawyer Ariel Perelman in "Family Law," Argentine writer-director Daniel Burman's third film about the relationships between fathers and sons. This is Hendler's third starring role in the Burman trilogy, featuring "Waiting for the Messiah" (2000) and "Lost Embrace" (2004).

The plot of "Family Law" seems to mirror elements of the 33-year-old filmmaker's life: Before studying film, he studied law; his father, mother and brother are all lawyers; and Burman became a father four years ago with the birth of his first son, Eloy, who plays Hendler's son in the film.

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Can a low-key comedy be too low-key? Daniel Burman's "Family Law," set in contemporary Argentina, stars Daniel Hendler as Ariel Perelman, a law professor in his 30s who, upon getting married and having his first child, is reassessing his relationship with his father.

That imposing figure -- a charismatic lawyer who plies his trade with all the moxie and style the self-effacing Ariel lacks -- is named Bernardo (played with understated gusto by Arturo Goetz). Seen at a distance by Ariel, who narrates "Family Law" as if his life were a public television documentary, Bernardo emerges as a man whose paternal desires for his son have been continually thwarted by the less ambitious Ariel.

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Argentine Cinema

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

At first glance, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón has the look of a political fable. It tells the story of an anonymous Latin American nation, first ravaged by a pointless war and now governed by a faceless totalitarian regime. The book's tone is chillingly Orwellian.
But politicians – either of the left or the right – are neither the real heroes or the villains in this haunting debut novel. "Lost City Radio" is indeed a wrenching commentary on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story is not political – it's a riddle of the human heart.

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Latin American Literature

Summer Rain directed by Antonio Banderas at the Berlinale

Antonio Banderas returned to the southern Spain of his youth and found things much improved for "Summer Rain," his second film as a director.

"Summer Rain" is a coming-of-age tale set in Malaga in the late 1970s as Spain emerged from the decades-long dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.

"The engine of what I have been for good or for bad in my life ... started there when I was 17, 18, 19," Banderas said Monday of his decision to return to Malaga for the Spanish-language movie, which was presented outside the main competition at the Berlin film festival.

The movie, based on a novel by his childhood friend Antonio Soler, follows the lives, loves and dreams of a group of teens growing up in the Mediterranean resort. Stars of the film include Maria Ruiz and Alberto Amarilla.

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Spanish Cinema

Thankfully There is Moonlight!

Galleon Theatre Company stages Thankfully There Is Moonlight!, a world premiere theatre production of Alice de Sousa’s translation of Luis Sttau Monteiro’s Felizmente Há Luar. For those in London a great opportunity to see Sttau Monteiro's finest play.

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Portuguese Literature

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