SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Resurrección
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
La poesía, más valiente que nadie,
entra y cae
a plomo
en un lago infinito como Loch Ness
o turbio e infausto como el lago Balatón.
Contempladla desde el fondo:
un buzo
inocente
envuelto en las plumas
de la voluntad.
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios.

Roberto Bolaño

Pablo Neruda Prize-winner and prodigious poet Isabel Gómez has launched a new book of poems, entitled “Dasein.” The book, published by Cuatro Propio, deals with Gómez’s favorite topics of madness, love, and anguish. According to Gómez, “Dasein” represents a person who seeks to find and understand himself.

Much of the book deals with the life of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. Born in Marseille in 1896, Artaud spent much of his life battling disease and drug addiction, and spent some of his final years in an asylum for the insane. For Gómez, Artaud’s life provided an ample source of inspiration.

Nativel Preciado (Madrid, 1948) won the Premio Primavera de Novela with her novel 'Olvida el Paraíso', Care Santos was the runner-up with 'La muerte de Venus'.

There were 350 work on contest for the XI edition of the prize, mainly from Spain (216), Argentina (36) and United States (14).

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Spanish Literature

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Cândido Portinari, Group of Women and Children, oil on canvas, 1936

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Brazilian Art

Malaga Spanish Film Festival

Miguel Hermoso's film "Lola, the Movie," about Spanish Gypsy flamenco star Lola Flores, will open the official section of the Malaga Spanish Film Festival, organizers announced Friday(Feb. 23) as they unveiled the festival lineup.

"Lola" will screen out of competition in the official section, which comprises 14 features. Francesca Joseph's "Four Last Songs" will close the section that includes five directorial debuts.

The festival, which runs March 9-17 in the Mediterranean resort town on Spain's southern coast, is the country's most important festival entirely dedicated to Spanish film and has attracted a following of industry heavyweights and enthusiasts.

Antonio Hernandez's much-anticipated "El menor de los Males"; Anton Reixa's first part of a two-picture co-production agreement with Lars Von Trier's Zentropa, "Hotel Tivoli"; and Rodrigo Cortes' game-show comedy "Concursante" will compete for the €60,000 ($79,000) Golden Biznaga award and the Special Jury prize. So will Azucena Rodriguez's "Atlas de geografia humana," Vicente Penarrocha's "Arritmia," Ricardo Macian's "Los ojos de Ariana" and Santiago Lorenzo's "Un buen dia lo tiene cualquiera."

Monday, February 26, 2007

Paula Rego, "Mulher Cão" (Dog Woman), Pastel on canvas, 1994

"To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable."

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935. In 1954 she left Portugal to study at the Slade School of Art in London. Married to an Englishman she remained in England, where she lives since 1976.

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Portuguese Art

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

'One man's freedom fighter," it has been said, "is another's man's terrorist." In his debut novel, Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcon reminds that one man's freedom fighter is probably another woman's husband, another boy's father, certainly another man's son.

Set in a fictional Latin American republic, Lost City Radio depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when these freedom fighters - be they vigilantes or soldiers on the side of the government - simply disappear.

The book takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcon calls "the provincial capital." Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the disappeared.

"The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?"

The voice connecting the lost with the found belongs to Norma, a brave, beautiful and damaged journalist whom Alarcon brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.

Alarcon's portrait of the emotional toll this loss takes on Norma is heartrending. A decade later, she still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still walk through the door.

Lost City Radio then cycles backward to tell the story of the country's war, the way it fractured the committed from the fearful, the urban from the rural, and the collaborative from the resistant.

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

The best novels tell stories that matter with perfect credibility. Isabel Allende’s latest effort, “Ines of My Soul,” is compelling and ambitious in scope. But it was not believable enough for me.

It is very seldom that the story of the brutal era of colonial 15th century South America and its conquistadors is told without guilt. It is very seldom that the story of conquest is anything but a cautionary tale of blood and calamity. But in this novel, the narrator Ines Suarez describes the conquest of Chile as a success.

I was not convinced.

Personally, I find this sort of borderland-epic concept compelling enough to justify reading 300-page novels written by authors much less talented than Allende. It is the frontier story; the tale of the Old West. The story is supposed to create a world in which human nature can be explored outside of the rules constructed by civilization as we know it.

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Two new reviews of Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

Daniel Alarcon's compelling debut novel, "Lost City Radio," opens with a visitor to a radio station: Victor, an 11-year-old boy from the jungle sent as an envoy by his village to the city bearing a list of names to Norma, host of the weekly program "Lost City Radio." On the list of names is one Norma recognizes, one she is forbidden to pronounce.
Ten years have passed since the war ended. The tanks have stopped, the government-approved battle reports have given way to government-scrubbed news bulletins, members of the "Illegitimate Legion" (echoes of Peru's Shining Path insurgency) dispersed, jailed or killed. But disappearances continue. Most who were lost during the decade of war are not found. The old towns' names are replaced by a numbering system, the history books amended, the citizens made diligent informants.
In this "nation at the edge of the world, a make-believe country outside history," only Norma's voice speaks to those displaced or left behind. Listeners call with names of loved ones not heard from, and her voice becomes theirs. With a microphone at the only national radio station, Norma dreams of the day when she can call out a name of her own -- "Rey," or even his nom de guerre that now appears on a list in the boy Victor's hand -- calling to her husband, gone these 10 years since the war, and calling him home.

With the publication two years ago of his short-story collection "War by Candlelight" (HarperCollins), Daniel Alarcón received critical acclaim that included comparisons to Mario Vargas Llosa, Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Peru and living in northern California, Alarcón unflinchingly portrays people battered by civil strife, natural disasters and governmental abuses. He now brings us his first novel, "Lost City Radio" (HarperCollins, hardcover $24.95), a potent, disturbing, but, in the end, hopeful portrait of a nation torn by years of war and betrayal.
Set in an unnamed South American country, Alarcón's novel centers on Norma, the host of a popular program, "Lost City Radio," in which she reads the names of missing persons and lends an understanding ear to callers who hope she can help them reunite with lost loved ones. Norma has become a celebrity, a voice everyone knows, the apolitical salve for a nation that has lost too much.

New Editions in English of Roberto Bolaño's Books

Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is the subject of a posthumous reclamation project by New Directions, which plans to publish nine of his 10 books in English.
Among the first is "Amulet," a slim novel of physical exiles and emotionally displaced persons.
A wanderer himself, the Chilean Bolaño eventually settled in Spain but always returned in his fiction to Latin America with tales of vagabond artists and impotent political refugees, members of the "failed generation" who came of age in the 1960s and lost Chile to Pinochet.

Bittersweet night for Mexican film

The recent prizewinning success of Mexican filmmakers, particularly of directors Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, has restored a measure of good feeling to Mexicans who had endured a year filled with drug-related killings and a disputed presidential election.

Last night was a bittersweet climax. Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" won awards for cinematography, makeup and art direction but lost the best foreign film trophy to Germany's "The Lives of Others." González Iñárritu's "Babel," nominated for seven Oscars, managed to secure only one award, for best original score. Cuarón's "Children of Men" failed to capture the best adapted screenplay prize, losing to "The Departed." Adriana Barraza, who played a distraught Mexican nanny in "Babel," couldn't overcome Jennifer Hudson of "Dreamgirls" as best supporting actress. Still, for some, it was important simply that their national film talent had received so much recognition, especially at time when the movie business here is in the doldrums.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Babel directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

As an Academy Award nominee for best picture, “Babel” was a startling choice. The movie, which was written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is composed of three stories held together by a slender thread, and the mood is darkly calamitous; even the few joyous moments are suffused with dread. In the Arriaga-Iñárritu world, if something bad can happen it happens—hardly a typical American movie’s view of life. Earlier, the two men made, in Mexico, the bloody, turbulent “Amores Perros” (2000) and, in the United States, the dolorous “21 Grams” (2003), which starred Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro. Now, however, the collaborators have had a falling out (each claiming the greater credit for what appears in the movies). As they seem to be heading in separate directions, these fate-driven films can be seen as a kind of trilogy. All three send characters from separate stories smacking into one another in tragic accidents; all three jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.