Mayra Montero - Dancing to 'Almendra'

Lois D. Atwood reviews Cecilia Samartin's Broken Paradise and Mayra Montero's Dancing to 'Almendra'.

In these two novels, life in the tropical paradise of Cuba has fallen apart under either totalitarian or communist rule. Dancing to ‘Almendra’ is set in Batista’s Havana, where gangsters run all the casinos; Broken Paradise on the idyllic island whose society Castro is restructuring.

Dancing . . . is a thriller about mobsters, zoo keepers, casino and carnival performers, pimps — and Joaquin Porrata, a clueless young journalist. Sent to cover the killing of a hippopotamus, he meets Juan Bulgado, a lion keeper who also runs the zoo’s slaughterhouse, and learns that the killing was a warning to Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia. When Joaquin makes the connection in a news story, he becomes a danger to those in power. Read More

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Cuban Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa - Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics

Ian Thomson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics.

With this marvellous new collection of essays, Touchstones, Vargas Llosa takes his place alongside the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez as a Latin with a civic conscience. The book gathers an impressive array of articles on Latin American politics, European writers and painters, as well as sections of a diary the author kept during a visit to Iraq shortly after Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003.

Not surprisingly, 'Iraq Diary' presents Hussein as a dictator in the megalomaniac lineage of Tamerlane (and about as cruel). Vargas Llosa declares himself reluctantly in favour of the invasion; only an author with experience of South American dictatorship, perhaps, could do as much.

Throughout these essays, Vargas Llosa is drawn to writers who enter wholeheartedly into public affairs; André Malraux, Gunter Grass and Thomas Mann are among his heroes. Busybody commentators in the Rushdie vein are not always to British tastes. Yet Vargas Llosa is not afraid to champion literature as indispensable to what he calls the 'culture of freedom' and the formation of free individuals. Read More

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Peruvian Literature

Tomás Eloy Martínez tells the story of the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Agosto de 1967 fue el mes que cambió la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. Había cumplido 40 años el 6 de marzo de ese año, y en septiembre anterior había puesto punto final a Cien años de soledad, su novela de gloria. Todavía no tenía editor. Lo más probable era que terminara cediéndola a Era, el sello mexicano independiente que acababa de publicar El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.

En mayo, cuando la revista Mundo Nuevo adelantó en París el fragmento sobre el insomnio en Macondo, una ráfaga de deslumbramiento corrió entre los lectores hispanoamericanos. Se estaba ante la completa novedad de un lenguaje sin antecedente y de una osadía narrativa que sólo podía compararse con Rabelais, con Kafka y con los cronistas de Indias. Aun así, el autor seguía siendo casi un desconocido. En su casa de San Angel Inn, al sur de la infinita ciudad de México, seguía enredado en apuros económicos que le impedían pagar a tiempo el alquiler y obligaban a su mujer, Mercedes Barcha, a pedir que les fiaran sin término los alimentos en el mercado. Llevaban ya seis meses de insolvencia cuando el propietario de la casa llamó a la puerta y les preguntó si tenían idea de cuándo podrían saldar la deuda. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Reading Others

Reading impressions on Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary at Entertaining Research.

A book certainly worth checking out; you might even buy yourself a copy, hunt down the books that Manguel notes in the diary, read them, and compare your reactions with that of his (provided you have enough time and inclination).

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Argentine Literature

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