Richard Wallace reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light".

Javier Cercas is a Spanish writer, author of the award-winning novel "Soldiers of Salamis" (2001), which was also made into a film. That novel, set in the final months and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, explored questions of loyalty and the nature of truth.

"The Speed of Light," published in Spain in 2005 and a huge best-seller there, is also about the legacies of war. Only this time the war is Vietnam.

In an August 2005 interview with the literary publication Criticas, Cercas said his novels begin with a single image, and the image for this one came while he was teaching at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. He saw a Vietnam vet sitting on a bench watching some children play ball, and Cercas wondered, "What was he doing there?"

In Cercas' novel, that real person becomes Rodney Falk, a middle-age war vet who has been forever damaged by his horrific experiences in the Vietnam War.

Cercas' narrator and Falk meet as instructors at the University of Illinois in the Spanish department. Rodney is a big, lumbering man who rarely talks to the other teachers. The two men become friends, talking literature and drinking beer on their off-hours. After winter break Rodney disappears, quitting his job and leaving the university in the lurch.

Visiting Rodney's father, the narrator learns how a bright, talented, young Midwestern kid became a haunted, lost adult.

Years later, back in Spain, the narrator, now a successful writer, meets Rodney again. Finally, he hears Rodney's version of a village massacre in Vietnam called "My Khe." Soon after, the narrator suffers a personal tragedy that links his fate to Rodney's life in ways he could not have foreseen.

Part detective story, partly a rumination on the writing process, Cercas' novel is about the pitfalls of fame and the nature of evil. What he does best is answer, with deep empathy and candor, how the nightmares of the past persist in the living.

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Spanish Literature

Alberto Manguel reviews Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas.

Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in London or Los Angeles, dysfunctional families in Brooklyn or Glasgow, offer readers the impression of bewildering déjà vu. If literature has one Author, it’s time for Her (or Him) to change subjects. The figure in the carpet is wearing thin.

Enter Enrique Vila-Matas. For the past 30 years, aware of the futility of telling interesting stories in a world bent on stolid repetition, Vila-Matas has chosen to construct his books out of bits and pieces of the available literature itself, renewing even the idea of collage or bricolage so dear to the practitioners of experimental art in the early 20th century. Vila-Matas, however, never gives the impression of experimenting; there’s no feeling of trial-and-error in his work. Rather, what he does is hold with the reader an intelligent conversation (monologue is perhaps a better word) made up of quotations, literary anecdotes, personal readings and startling associations, that build up an illuminating and brilliant farrago. If he has any ancestors, they belong to the 17th and 18th centuries: Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, Denis Diderot and Lawrence Sterne. All of Vila-Matas’s books have something of Tristram Shandy.

After several excellent books, admired almost secretly by a restricted group of readers, Vila-Matas achieved international fame in 2000 with Bartleby & Co., an exploration of the limits of literature through a catalogue of writers (real and imaginary) who, like Melville’s famous scrivener, ‘prefer not’ to write. Absence of literature is the subject of this book (just as absence of action is the subject of Sterne) and around that absence, Vila-Matas wove a splendid meditation on the morose nature of our time that, under the pretence of febrile activity and snappy urgency, sits and does nothing. Read More

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Spanish Literature

Jessa Crispin interviews translator Anne McLean.

Roberto Bolaño appears to be the new author in translation to read. Who else should be getting attention?

It’s very exciting that Roberto Bolaño’s brilliant novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) has finally been translated into English. He’s a superb writer.

Bolaño actually features as a character in Soldiers of Salamis, well, a fictional version of him, that is. Cercas has a new novel, The Speed of Light, which I translated. Part of it is set in the States and we’re very curious to see what American readers make of it.

Enrique Vila-Matas is a Spanish author who I think deserves more attention in the English-speaking world, as does Edgardo Cozarinsky, a film-maker and writer from Buenos Aires, whose first novel The Moldavian Pimp is a compelling and haunting elegy for some of Argentina’s wilfully forgotten history.

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Latin American Literature

Reader Review: Pudor by Santiago Roncagliolo

This is a novel about intimacy, about the desires and the fears that we don't even confess to those we love, about the secrets we use to protect ourselves from others.

The charcaters are a man who's going to die, a woman who receives anonymous pornography, a boy who sees corpses and a cat that wants sex. Like many families, all the characters live together and the're all alone.

Sometimes it seems to be a very sad and sordid story, sometimes it seems like a comedy. It's what families and feelings have in common, they never agree.

(sent by David Blanco)


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Peruvian Literature

"A sparse, restless ghost story that ushered in the surreal and influenced later magic realists."

Michael Ondaatje selected Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" as one of the top 5 books of his life, in Newsweek's A Life in Books

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

"One man's freedom fighter," Nelson Mandela famously argued, "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 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 Alarcón describes as the nation's "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 Alarcón brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.

A decade later, Norma still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still come home in the night.

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 collaborators from the resisters.

Based on Alarcón's descriptions, the country might be Argentina or Chile or the author's native Peru — all countries racked by civil wars and state-sponsored disappearances.

But the observations this book makes aren't limited to Latin America, especially when it comes to the siren call of violence: "Before the war began, those of Norma's generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence," Alarcón writes: "cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue."

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Latin American Literature

Scott Timberg on the publication of Bolaño's works and the new Latin American Literature.

While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," a dyslexic, globe-trotting high-school dropout and ex-heroin addict was publishing the most celebrated Latin American novels in three decades.

Then, in 2003, he died.

But the reputation of the Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño, whose old pictures make him look like the guitar for a psychedelic garage band, continued to grow: Young Latin writers in particular sang his praises, and he became, in the Spanish-speaking world, the most admired author of his generation. Though he is still mostly unknown in the North, Bolaño's mystique in Latin America combines Allen Ginsberg's (lusty, nomadic poet), Thomas Pynchon's (difficult postmodern polymath) and Norman Mailer's (macho media provocateur).

Now the major works of Bolaño are appearing in the United States for the first time, four years after his death in Spanish Catalonia, at age 50, of a ruined liver. This month, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish "The Savage Detectives" — a novel about a gang of young avant-garde poets that combines elements of the gangster film, the road movie and the private-eye story — with plans to bring out the gargantuan "2666" next year.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Richard Eder reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

It is as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, vivid portrayers in their different ways of Latin America's violence and visions, had become their own extravagant protagonists. Instead each has written at a certain alleviating distance, and perhaps it is the distance that art requires to achieve itself, just as it takes a few inches of travel for a blow from a fist to hurt.

The Chilean Roberto Bolano, who died three years ago at 50 and is perhaps the outstanding figure of the successor generation, uses no distance or alleviation whatever. He jumps in.

His fiction, which has only recently been appearing in the US, can be stylistically elusive, but in essence it is chokingly direct. In the novella By Night in Chile, for instance, Bolano created a glittering and terrible deathbed confession by a Chilean literary critic who supported the Pinochet dictatorship through acquiescence and the quietest of tiny actions. "One must be very careful with one's silences," he says, since only God judges them. His own, he adds, "are immaculate."

The key to Bolano's work is an insistence that the writer must keep no scrim of art or craft between him and the brute reality of the world he lives in and addresses. If there is a theme that runs through the complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable Savage Detectives, his first long (very long) novel, it is that the pen is as blood-stained as the sword, and as compromised.

Bolano grew up in Mexico and returned to Chile out of enthusiasm for the Allende government, only to be briefly imprisoned after it was overthrown. He went back to Mexico to write and to goad its several literary establishments and eventually moved to Spain. He has created a protagonist who borrows much of this biography, even much of the name. He is Belano, a writer and the savage detective of the title.

Bolano has given his novel an odd tripartite structure. The first part, narrated by a young would-be poet, tells of his initiation into Belano's Visceral Realist movement (a hit off the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and others) and some graphically visceralist sex. It ends with his departure from Mexico City by car with Belano, another writer, and Lupe, a prostitute fleeing her pimp. Belano is seeking traces of Cesarea Tinajera, a poet who long ago belonged to a similar movement and went off to the Sonora desert in the 1920s.

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Chilean Literature

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

James Wood reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.

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Chilean Literature

Book Review: Nada by Carmen Laforet

Fernanda Eberstadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

I have to admit that, until a month ago, I had never heard of Carmen Laforet. The idea that there might be a lone woman in what seems the unrelievedly male pantheon of Spanish novelists of the post-Civil War era - an era which to outsiders, as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his introduction to "Nada," seems to reek of "fustiness, sacristy and Francoism" - was like discovering an extra story built in a house you thought you knew.

"Nada" was Laforet’s first novel. It was originally published in 1945, when its author was 23, and it created a sensation in Barcelona. It has now been reissued in a new translation by Edith Grossman, and more than 60 years later the book’s odd charm is undiminished.

"Nada" recounts, in coolly understated first-person prose, the experiences of Andrea, an 18-year-old orphan from the provinces who arrives in Barcelona to stay with her dead mother’s relatives while she attends university.

Laforet makes us feel the force of this young woman’s long pent-up hunger to escape the oppressiveness of village life and her convent education. For years, Andrea has feasted on childhood memories of her maternal grandparents’ apartment in Barcelona, a haven of sophistication and ease from which she, because of her parents’ death and the war, has long been cut off.

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Spanish Literature

Book Review: Delirium by Laura Restrepo

Terrence Rafferty reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium.

Laura Restrepo writes about Colombia, her native land, but she spends a good deal of her time in Mexico, and to read her latest novel, "Delirium," is to understand why. Most of the action takes place in the Colombian capital, Bogotá — a city, one character says, "where everyone's at war with everyone else" — at a time when the whole country seems either insane or, perhaps worse, in love with insanity and helpless to change. Although Restrepo doesn't specify the year, it appears to be 1983: "E.T." and "Flashdance" are in the movie theaters, Ronald Reagan is president of the United States, and the most powerful man in Colombia is Pablo Escobar, darkly presiding over the vast cocaine empire of Medellín. Escobar "doesn't like being called the King of Coca," though; according to someone who knows him, "he prefers Father of the Nation." And "Delirium" is about his nation of frightened, maddened children, the Colombia he sired.

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Colombian Literature

John Lichfield previews Manoel de Oliveira's "Belle Toujours".

One of the great classics of erotic cinema for the thinking man - and woman - is revisited in a French-Portuguese movie released in France this week.

Belle Toujours, directed by Manoel de Oliveira, has two of the same principal characters as the Luis Bunuel movie, Belle de Jour, made in 1967. It is not a re-make, but an exploration of the memories, fantasies, frustrations and regrets of the same characters, 40 years later. (...)

In Belle de Jour, which was based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, Séverine is a young, beautiful and wealthy doctor's wife who becomes a prostitute during the day to exorcise her sexual fantasies. In the new movie, she is widowed and about the enter a convent. She agrees to a final meeting over dinner with Husson - a friend of her husband who had helped, and exploited her, in her secret life 40 years earlier. Belle Toujours has had enthusiastic reviews in the French press. The critic for Le Monde described it as a "pitiless examination" of "human perversity". (...)

In the new movie, which is expected to appear in Britain in the autumn, Husson spots Séverine again after many years, at a concert in Paris. He tries to arrange a meeting with her but she eludes him.

Finally, just before she enters a convent, she agrees to meet Husson to discuss what happened four decades before. Most of all, she wants him to answer a question which is still torturing her: did her husband know about her clandestine activities?

Sequels to movies are commonplace, but sequels whose action takes place four decades later are almost unknown.

Le Monde described the new movie as a tribute to Bunuel. It said that the Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira, had the same "taste for frustrated love and unsolved enigmas, for the secrets of virgin and profaned bodies".

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Portuguese Cinema