Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' novel "The Crystal Frontier" is being adapted to film. The script was written by Spanish Fernando León Rodríguez under Fuentes supervision.

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Latin American Literature

Review: Body Rice directed by Hugo Vieira da Silva

Portuguese filmmaker Hugo Vieira da Silva makes a bold transition from doc shorts to "Body Rice," a debut feature that skirts the edges of narrative and palpably conveys the drift and anomie of young Germans sent to an "alternative" community in southern Portugal. Local January opening spawned a public debate over the pic, and wide fest embrace (including prizes in Locarno and Mexico City) will lead to further notoriety and possible arthouse distrib buys.

Vieira da Silva smoothly joins the esteemed company of other young Iberoamerican helmers like Lisandro Alonso ("Los Muertos"), Albert Serra ("Honor de Cavalleria") and Paz Encina ("Paraguayan Hammock"), interested more in image and sound than psychology and dramatics.

Cast of pro German and Portuguese thesps is asked to work largely without words -- the nearly two-hour film contains less than 10 minutes of spoken dialogue, much of that in brief fragments -- and let their bodies do the talking. But the intensely observant manner in which the final results are put onscreen commands similarly intense involvement from viewers primed for a kind of "silent" cinema with sound.

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Portuguese Cinema

Stan Persky reviews Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night", John Sutherland's "How to Read a Novel" and Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer", three books on reading and readers.

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Latin American Literature

The Feast of the Goat

(...) This is a brilliant, but hard novel. Vargas Llosa deals brilliantly with the psychological profile of a people that admires the dictators and allows them, consequently, all the excesses. Essential.

(sent by Leff)

Interview with Daniel Alarcón

This is the world Daniel Alarcón has created in his first novel, Lost City Radio. Born in Peru but raised in Birmingham, Ala., Alarcón often visited relatives in Lima when the Peruvian troops were engaged by the guerilla outfit, Shining Path.
Even now, he cannot completely fathom what happened.
"To a certain extent, it's unimaginable to me," he says. "I've gone back to collect the stories and talk to people, but I haven't lived through these things I described. The process of writing the story - it was all about keeping myself in it, in that world. ... And I agree, it's not necessarily a world I want to hang out in."
Nevertheless, it was a story he felt compelled to write. The title refers to a radio program in which the names of missing people are read. Norma is the beguiling host. Her voice is "her greatest asset, her career and her fate," bringing hope to people desperate to find their lost loved ones.

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Latin American Literature

The Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga announced during an interview with Basque radio Euskadi Irratia he will publish in April a new book, entitled Markak. Gernika 1937.

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Spanish Literature

Review: Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

Just out is a short novel called Amulet, which puts his poetic way with language — at least as rendered, presumably faithfully, by translator Chris Andrews — on vivid display.

The narrator is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan by birth, who settled in Mexico in the 1960s and may or may not be the mother of Mexico poetry. Throughout this short novel she spools out her memories of the Bohemian life in Mexico City. There are café scenes and dangerous liaisons on the wrong side of town.

But also woven into the novel — it’s driving force, perhaps — is a reflection of a period of political unrest and terror. For a dozen or so days, it seems, Auxilio hid in a women’s restroom in the department of philosophy at the university, becoming the lone survivor of a police roundup of some kind.

These memories keep returning to her consciousness as she tells her tale, visions of hunger, thirst and the moonlight on the white tiles of the washroom. Time collapses and pulls apart, but the narrative often comes back to that moonlight.

Among Auxilio’s acquaintances is a young immigrant poet, Arturo Belano, who apparently is a stand-in for our author, Bolaño.

The spirit of Jorge Luis Borges hovers over this book, and even as it loses itself in a kind of poetic mist, you can find yourself absorbed by its voice and the mysterious charm of its central character. Bolaño and his work are worth discovering.

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Chilean Literature

Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

And then I never saw him again”: this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolaño’s ten novels and three story collections—all completed in his torrential final decade, before he succumbed to a chronic liver ailment that he suspected would seal his fate—characters go through life in a state of agitated migration. They sever friendships, quit jobs, abandon apartments without giving notice, skip the return flight home, assume new identities, flee combustive love affairs, cut off ties to everyone they have ever known, head off into the desert, simply disappear.
Relationships, in Bolaño’s world, tend to be febrile but fleeting, yielding memories suffused by the afterglow of emotion; his narratives are often the testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind. It’s no coincidence that Bolaño’s most heartbreaking creation—the rebellious, doomed poet at the heart of his 1998 masterwork, “The Savage Detectives,” which Farrar, Straus has just published in translation—is named Ulises.

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Chilean Literature

This was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño and of that I got addicted to his prose. They say that Bolaño is the new Cortazar… could be. This is the history of two Mexican young poets the “wild detectives”, Their mission to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero. And this search extends in the time, and spans beyond the Mexican borders taking us to Guatemala, Barcelona, Paris, Israel, Congo, Liberia, and the U.S. and intercrosses numberless stories. That is, in my opinion, the best thing of Bolaño: those thousand histories that intermingle in the plot and where you can find everything: love stories, crimes, humorous anecdotes…(...)
(sent by Nelly)

Review: Dancing to "Almendra" by Mayra Montero

In a time long, long ago before the nation state of the Bahamas captured American media attention due to one Anna Nicole Smith, another Caribbean country riveted our gaze: Cuba. Today Cuba boils down to the three C’s: cigars, Castro, and classic cars. In the 50s, as Mayra Montero suggests in her sixth novel, Dancing to "Almendra", Cuba’s national identity was intertwined with our own.

Cuban-born novelist Montero creates a delightful narrative of Havana in 1957. An entertainment reporter for the local rag, Joaquin Porrata, is assigned to cover the brutal slaughter of a hippo at the Havana Zoo. While covering this story, the zookeeper hints that the animal’s death was actually a message for Mafioso Umberto “Albert” Anastasia who was killed the same day in a New York barbershop. Porrata realizes that the hippocide could be an indicator of the turf war emerging between new restaurateurs, hoteliers, and casino operators in the plush and flush nation.

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Cuban Literature

Cuban poet and essayist Fina García Marruz won the Ibero-American Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. The award will be presented by President Michelle Bachelet during the Ibero-American Culture Ministers Summit, in July in Santiago de Chile.

Fina García Marruz was born in Havana, April 28, 1923. She his the winner of the National Literature Prize in 1990.

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Cuban Literature

Conversation Piece (1998) sculpture by Juan Muñoz

Juan Muñoz (1953 - 2001) began his career in the mid-1970s, and gained international recognition as an artist, a curator, and a writer of art criticism and prose. Drawing upon a wide range of sources-literature, music, art history, theater and film-Muñoz's work explored the ways in which architecture and sculpture can weave powerful, open-ended narratives that involve the viewer on both a visceral and intellectual level. Throughout his career, Muñoz revisited certain visual themes-a balcony, a streetscape, patterned floors, the ballerina, the dwarf-which link a diverse body of work that includes drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and sound-based works. He created his first Conversation Piece in late 1990, shortly after he began to incorporate the human figure into his sculptural installations.

Muñoz was born in Madrid, and studied at University of Madrid, Croydon College in London, and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. In June 2001, Muñoz realized his most ambitious project ever, Double Bind, a site-specific installation for the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London. Muñoz's first-ever American career retrospective originated last year at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and is traveling nationally through March 2003. Muñoz's work has also been presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1996); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996).

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Spanish Art

Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, has begun shooting his latest film, "Christopher Columbus: The Enigma,".

The film is based on the book "Cristóvão Colombo Era Português" (Columbus was Portuguese), by Manuel Luciano da Silva and Silvia Jorge da Silva, which claims that Columbus was born in a small town in Portugal's hinterland, called Cuba, in whose honor he named the island of Cuba.

The film will be shot in the U.S. and Portugal and it's premiere is scheduled for July in Washington.

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Portuguese Cinema