Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, author of the novels El cartero de Pablo Neruda (The Postman), La boda del poeta (The Poet’s Wedding) and La chica de trombon (The Girl with the Trobone), just presented a new book Borges y otras historias de amor in Rome.



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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Andrew Riemer reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

I spent a good bit of time googling the names of some of the hundreds of Latin American poets who snake their way through this preposterous but strangely appealing novel. Setting aside one or two world-famous figures like Octavio Paz, the results were almost always zilch - or links to various sites concerning Bolano's book.

I began to suspect, nevertheless, that things may not be quite as simple as that. One of the two focal characters is a poet called Arturo Belano. Like Roberto Bolano, he was born in Chile in 1953. Like Bolano, he fled from Pinochet's regime in 1973, spent some time in Mexico, then in France and Spain, eventually settling on the outskirts of Barcelona. It is possible, therefore, that the names of real poets are encrypted in these fictional names, just as Bolano's seems to be in Belano. But you can't tell of course, unless you are an expert on Latin American avant-garde poetry of the last quarter of the 20th century.

My other problem had to do with the title. By the end, at the culmination of a hectic search in the backblocks of Mexico, I had a glimmering of what it might refer to, but I wasn't at all confident I had cracked the code. I began wondering whether here, too, the cognoscenti would cotton on to something that had bypassed me almost entirely.

None of this is intended to disparage this ample novel that has something of the imaginative boldness and sense of fantasy that distinguished the work of an earlier generation of Latin American writers such as Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. Nevertheless, I am certain that The Savage Detectives is a roman a clef for which I - and, I suspect, most Anglo-phone readers - do not possess the key. And just in case I'm suspected of philistinism, I'd better say straight away that that is our loss. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño - Last Evenings on Earth

Miranda France reviews Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth.

Visiting Chile in the mid-1990s, I was amazed by the ubiquity of poets. They loitered on the streets, wearing tweed jackets and caps in imitation of their icon, Pablo Neruda, and for a few coins they would sell you a poem, or write one to order.

Poets also abound in the fiction of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, but here they are caught up in improbable scenes of violence, as though the author were moonlighting on scripts for CSI. Tension mounts in one story after a literary editor rejects his friend's poems because "two Chileans was one Chilean too many for the first issue of a little magazine devoted to Spanish writing".

In "A Literary Adventure", a character dubbed "B" mischievously writes a parody of his rival ("A") into a novel. But, to his surprise, A praises B's novel in the press. B writes another book and this time A rewards him with a glowing, five-page review. B becomes neurotic, paranoid and ill as he dwells obsessively on the reasons behind A's generosity.

Bolaño, who died in Spain in 2003, acknowledged a debt to Borges, who would have loved these literary detective stories. He writes as though presenting depositions in a court room. Forensic attention is paid to details such as the position of a person's hands, while other information is glossed over in a line or two: "Years went by. Many years. Some friends died. I got married, had a child, published some books." Read More

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Chilean Literature

Alejandro Dolina - Crónicas del Ángel Gris

A review of Alejandro Dolina's Crónicas del Ángel Gris ("Chronicles of the Gray Angel").

“Crónicas del Ángel Gris” es el primer libro que escribió “El negro” Dolina. A mi modo de ver es uno de los grandes libros argentinos del siglo XX que une popularidad con calidad y entretenimiento. No solo ha vendido una gran cantidad de ejemplares, lo que lo ha convertido en un best-seller sino que ha generado centenares de “fanáticos” y seguidores. En sus páginas el autor recopila más de cincuenta crónicas, cuentos, poesías, payadas, mitos y narraciones cortas. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

Mauro Javier Cardenas reviews Javier Cercas' The Speed of Light.

In Javier Cercas' previous novel, the affecting and widely honored "Soldiers of Salamis," a narrator named Javier Cercas chronicles his attempt to write a true story about a small episode in the Spanish Civil War. Through the recollections of an ensemble of Spaniards, Cercas returns to this episode often, wondering why a soldier of the Republic didn't report a Nationalist prisoner who had escaped from a mass execution. At the same time, a series of motifs recur, over and over, as if trying to attach themselves to some meaning about heroism or war or history, eventually finding it in Miralles, a veteran of many wars who transmutes what precedes him with an unexpected and heartbreaking coda.

Cercas' new novel, "The Speed of Light," follows a similar method of inquiry. An unnamed narrator chronicles his attempt to write a true story about Rodney Falk, a Vietnam War veteran he befriended as a young man at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Phil Brown reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

There's a real Beat Generation feel to this picaresque novel with its myriad weird and colourful characters, its agitated restlessness, its lack of restraint and the inherent idea that literature constitutes a sort of existentialist political ideology.

For Bolano poetry is the purest, most political literary form and his narrative is filthy (I use the word advisedly) with bards of all sorts – mostly politically naive, slightly deranged losers.

The main characters, poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are almost certainly Bolano himself and his pal Mario Santiago who once formed their own avant-garde literary movement – the infra-realists – in Mexico City in the 1970s.

They used to go to readings by Octavio Paz (the Mexican writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990) and shout their own poems out. Talk about rude.

In The Savage Detectives, Belano and Lima form a movement called the visceral realists.

They are passionate about their poetry and entrench themselves in Mexico City's Bohemian literary underground before setting out on a quixotic adventure in search of another poet, Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonoran Desert and obscurity decades before.

As with any true quest it's the journey that's important and what the heroes learn along the way which is, frankly, not much.

But there's plenty of wine, women and song en route, lots of politics and way too much poetry.

The intricacies of the local literary scene are exhaustively chronicled and the parade of writers and lowlifes is as endless as it is confusing.

At the beginning of the book we are being told this story by a young man who looks up to the two adventurer poets but in the end a cacophony of voices end up telling the tale.

Self-indulgence is a hallmark of this work and that puts it squarely in the Beat tradition.

Kerouac's alcoholic delusions and his pretentious meanderings led him, eventually, into a morass of despair and after more than 500 pages of The Savage Detectives that's where I ended up too. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Ser sincero es decir lo que piensas. La vida sería invivible si uno dijera siempre lo que piensa. Ser veraz significa que lo que digas sea verdad. Aquí interviene el silencio, lo que uno calla para hacer la vida vivible.

An interview with Spanish author Manuel Vicent.



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Spanish Literature

An interview from Mexican newspaper Vanguardia with Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska, who completes 75 years tomorrow.


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Mexican Literature

Colombian writers Gabriel García Márquez and Santiago Gamboa will be homaged today in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo within the "Feira do Livro do Colégio Miguel de Cervantes" (Miguel de Cervantes School Book Fair).


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Colombian Literature

Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, author of novels as "A world for Julius", "Tarzan's Tonsillitis" or "El huerto de mi amada" winner of 2002 Prémio Planeta is again envolved in a plagiarism case.


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Peruvian Literature

An overview of new Spanish directors at Cannes, with notes on:

• Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage"
• Jorge Blanco's "Planet One"
• Rafa Cortes' "Me"
• Ramon Costafreda's "Wrap Up"
• Mario Iglesias' "De bares," "Catalina"
• Jaime Marques Olarreaga's "Thieves"
• Juanjo Ramirez' "Going Nuts"
• Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo's "The Night of the Sunflowers"
• David and Tristan Ulloa's "Pudor"
• Nacho Vigalondo's "Time Crimes"

Read More


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Spanish Cinema

Daniel Alarcón - Lost City Radio

Boyd Tonkin reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

This is a formidably accomplished first novel. Alarcón's nameless country feels as intensely real as the riotous flora of its rainforests or the reeking slums of its cities. Yet its location beyond any map allows him to synthesise the ordeals of many places into a fable of loss and longing that decodes the "indecipherable text" of every murky civil war. As I found out in Colombia this year, the unfinished business of Latin America's armed conflicts - in states with a semblance of political peace, but no proper social resolution - has been preying on creative minds across the continent.

Alarcón surveys this "postconflict" landscape in a style that weds gravity to grace - but he does so as an Anglophone author rooted in Hispanic realities. We know that fiction in English has flourished for over half a century in the Indian subcontinent. Much more recent is the wave of Anglophone writing from regions that lack the same history of colonisation or settlement. The Bogotá "39 under 39" list has another rising star who only writes in English: Junot Diaz from the Dominican Republic, but now settled in the US.

In the past, a literary shift of tongues signalled a permanent state of exile or emigration: think of Nabokov, or Conrad. Now we enjoy more flexible times, in which a writer such as Alarcón can be claimed, and acclaimed, by two continents at once. Yet it's still the English language that tends to reap the benefits of this hybridity. Secure in its hegemony, English can say to the world, "Make yourself at home". Even if, in this case, the Spanish sounds far sweeter: Mi casa es tu casa. Read More

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Peruvian Literature