In Her Absence - Antonio Muñoz Molina

Nick Antosca reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's "In Her Absence".

Unconditional romantic love can be a particularly subtle and damaging form of masochism. As the act of gamely rationalizing away flaws in the character of one's beloved becomes a daily ritual, one's misery and devotion increase by equal measure. The absolute best way to make the whole experience more excruciating is, of course, to get married.

Antonio Muñoz Molina's sly and enigmatic new novel, "In Her Absence" (Other Press, 126 pages, $13.95), concerns a provincial Spanish bureaucrat named Mario López who has married, well out of his league, a beautiful woman for whom he could not be more poorly suited. Because Mario remains infatuated to the point of obsession with his wife, he must regularly engage in grueling mental gymnastics to a) convince himself that the marriage has any chance whatsoever of survival, b) not resent the relative tepidity of her feelings for him, and c) not break his mind as a result of the psychological contortions required for a) and b).

The reason Mario and his wife, Blanca, are not right for each other is that his frightful dullness (and he knows he's dull; he tries to be otherwise but just cannot manage it) simply does not complement her petulance, frivolity, or persistent attraction to fashionable artistic poseurs. In Mr. Muñoz Molina's frank, blunt sentences, one senses both pity and contempt for the ill-matched lovers.

Before Blanca, Mario's life was drab. For seven years he dated a bland creature named Juli, but that quietly crumbled. ("How strange, he thought ... I was on the verge of marrying a total stranger.") There followed a time of watching videos alone and slowly, diligently reading Ramon Menéndez Pidal's "History of Spain": "He embarked on a plan to read it from the first volume to the last, and would always remember that he had made it to the obscure and tedious reign of the Visigoths when he met Blanca."

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Spanish Literature

Pablo Ramos - Interview

Two interviews with Argentine writer Pablo Ramos, who has just published a new novel - La Ley de la Ferocidad.

Para mí fue una novela necesaria, no pude no haberla escrito. Me tuve que mostrar el infierno para mostrarme que tengo una puerta de salida; está dirigida a cualquier lector, pero aquel que estuvo en un infierno parecido la va a leer de otra manera. Y el tipo al final tiene una salida, puede ponerse en cero y reencontrarse con su madre, con su hijo. Puede decir, finalmente, “basta de padre, basta de castigarse”. Creo que corro riesgos de ser truculento, de caer en el lugar común y vulgar, pero trato de quedarme de este lado de eso. Me animo a caminar por esa cuerda floja.

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Yo no escribo así: soy así. Estoy en un momento de mi vida donde la sinceridad lo es todo, aunque muchas veces soy víctima de ella. Convivo permanentemente con todo, con la felicidad, con el dolor, y eso se nota en mi literatura. Me influyó mucho Arlt cuando dice que entre los ruidos de un edificio social que se desmorona hay que escribir sin adornos y con “la violencia de un cross a la mandíbula”. El adorno parece la frutilla de un postre que en el medio está podrido. Bolaño decía que hay que meter la cabeza debajo de la mierda, y abrir los ojos y escribir. Eso hice yo, me expuse de una manera extrema, y si bien se trata de una ficción está claro que en ellas se miente para decir una verdad muy profunda.

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Pablo Ramos was born in 1966 in a suburb of the province of Buenos Aires.





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Argentine Literature

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Jonathan Gibbs reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean poet and author who grew up in the years after the Latin American boom that put Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa on the international stage. He achieved some notoriety as a young long-haired poet in Mexico City in the early 1970s, but it was only after emigrating to Europe, and turning to prose, that he found wider success.

This is the book that clinched it for him. When The Savage Detectives came out, in Spanish, in 1998, it won its author a clutch of literary prizes, but also huge acclaim for his portrayal of the generation he had in some manner led, and then abandoned. By this time, however, he was already seriously ill with the liver disease that would kill him in 2003, at the age of 50.
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This is an extremely important book in the Latin American canon, but there is nothing difficult or high-minded about it. The Savage Detectives is a grubby epic, part road movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession. It starts as a diary, written by the 17-year-old Juan García Madero, who comes under the spell of the revolutionary-minded poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (for whom read Bolaño himself and his friend Mario Santiago) and their "visceral realism" movement, in Mexico City in 1975.

These pages read like a homage to Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, as Juan learns to drink, argue, screw and write. They are at once brimming with exuberant, innocent depravity, and open to mature condescension. We were all like that once; or if we weren't, we probably wish we had been.

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Chilean Literature

Mezcal - Directed by Ignacio Ortiz

There's a saying that people here use when knocking back a shot of mescal, the spirit distilled from the agave plant with a fiery sting like the devil's own pitchfork: "Para todo mal, mescal. Para todo bien, también." For everything bad, mescal -- and for everything good, as well.

Malcolm Lowry, the British author whose 1947 novel "Under the Volcano" is easily the best book ever written about mescal and whose own battles with the bottle were the stuff of legend, undoubtedly would have toasted to that judicious proverb.

Set in 1939 in the Mexican provincial city of Cuernavaca (which Lowry called by its Aztec name, Quauhnahuac), "Under the Volcano" chronicles the final tragic hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a dipsomaniacal British consul unable to shake his personal demons. Miraculously reunited that morning with his estranged actress-wife, Yvonne, the consul squanders his last chance at redemption and, through a string of inebriated misunderstandings, is killed and flung into a ravine.

Critics repeatedly have declared "Under the Volcano" to be one of the 20th century's literary monuments. Lowry's prose has provoked many imitators, and his masterpiece inspired a 1984 movie adaptation directed by John Huston, starring Albert Finney and Jacqueline Bisset. Though written by a Cambridge-schooled Englishman, "Under the Volcano" is revered by many Mexicans for being among the most discerning modern depictions of their country's convulsive and incendiary character, along with Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo," published eight years later.

"It's an English novel, its point of view, but it's a Mexican tragedy," says Mexican screenwriter and director Ignacio Ortiz, who first read Lowry's book 30 years ago. "For me, it's the great modern Mexican tragedy about Mexico."

Now Ortiz has become the latest artist to borrow a page, or several, from Lowry, who died 50 summers ago. In his feature film "Mezcal," which finally has reached theaters here after repeatedly being rejected by distributors, Ortiz uses "Under the Volcano" as a jumping-off point into his own sulfurous odyssey.

"Mezcal" bears little resemblance in plot to "Under the Volcano," but it channels the novel in subtle ways, thematic and imagistic. When he first considered making his film several years ago, Ortiz says, he deliberately erased the book from his mind, because "there would be the temptation to make an adaptation of the novel, and the novel is unadaptable."

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Mexican Cinema

An article on the new generation of Latin American novelist and movie directors, whith special focus on Mexico.

Del ruido de un ‘boom’ al sonido de un ‘crack’ van unos cuantos decibeles. En la literatura, sin embargo, va toda una visión de mundo y una manera diferente de novelar. Los escritores del ‘boom’ -y muchos de sus precursores- le descubrieron al mundo cómo era el ser latinoamericano en toda su complejidad y nos convirtieron a todos en lectores de la región. Muchos cineastas del mismo período -sobre todo los del ‘cinema novo’ brasileño; Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues y Glauber Rocha y también los cubanos que hicieron de los sesenta la “década de oro del cine cubano”, como Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás y Pastor Vega, además de los mexicanos Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals y Jaime Humberto Hermosillo- mostraron a las claras la realidad particular de sus países. Todos trabajaron mayormente dentro del marco de sus respectivos cines nacionales.
Quienes empezaron a escribir o a filmar a partir de los años noventa -sobre todo, de nuevo, en México- le han dado un vuelco a esa perspectiva. Han dejado claro que los latinoamericanos son ciudadanos del mundo con tanto derecho como cualquier europeo o estadounidense a apropiarse de temas y de geografías diversas y de imponer su propia visión sobre géneros y modalidades identificadas con otras literaturas o con diferentes cinematografías. Si los novelistas europeos o norteamericanos siempre han podido explorar -con libertad y sin suscitar sospecha alguna de estar ‘traicionando’ su tradición- las formas de las culturas latinoamericanas (novelas como ‘Under the Volcano’ o ‘The Fugitive’, escritas por británicos como Malcolm Lowry o Graham Greene vienen a la mente), ¿por qué no pueden hacer otro tanto un Ignacio Padilla en ‘Amphitryon’ o un Jorge Volpi en ‘En busca de Klingsor’ sin que se les acuse de ‘lesa nacionalidad’? Esas novelas -las más visibles, inicialmente, del ‘crack’- instalaron una nueva dimensión de libertad en la literatura de la región, pero ¡ojo! no se trata únicamente de que se sitúen fuera de México y de que no tengan personajes mexicanos. Como ha dicho Eloy Urroz en el libro ‘Crack: instrucciones de uso’: “… en ninguna de nuestras declaraciones y entrevistas hemos suscrito que nuestras novelas tengan que desarrollarse en otros ámbitos que no sean los del territorio mexicano. Si esto aparenta suceder en una u otra, es, insisto, por razones intrínsecas a la obra misma (es decir, la ficción lo ha exigido así y no al contrario)…”. Estos escritores han logrado, afirma, “deshacerse por una y última vez del concepto del ‘locus’ o ‘imago fictio’ por ese otro que, con acierto, Nacho ha llamado ‘imago mundi’”. Esta literatura, pues, acabó con las certezas monolíticas de lectores y críticos de toda índole que habían asignado temas y restringido formas.

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Latin American Literature, Latin American Cinema

Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal has been proposed as candidate to the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his poetic creation translated into 20 languages.









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Nicaraguan Literature

Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska will receive tomorrow the XV Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos (Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Award)in Venezuela.




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Mexican Literature

Carlos Fuentes on Frida Kahlo

El escritor mexicano Carlos Fuentes recordó a Frida Kahlo como "una Cleopatra quebrada" en un catálogo especial sobre la pintora publicado como complemento de una magna exposición que conmemora el centenario del nacimiento de la artista, informaron hoy autoridades culturales de México.

En un comunicado, el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) resaltó la visión de Fuentes entre las decenas de aportaciones de 70 intelectuales y expertos que conforman el libro "Frida Kahlo 1907-2007 Homenaje Nacional", el mismo título de la muestra presentada en el Palacio de Bellas Artes de la capital mexicana.

"Era una Cleopatra quebrada que escondía su cuerpo torturado, su pierna seca, su pie baldado, sus corsés ortopédicos, bajo los lujos espectaculares de las campesinas mexicanas", afirmó el literato sobre la famosa pintora, según la nota informativa.

Para Fuentes, "ella, la mujer irreemplazable, la irrepetible mujer que llamamos Frida Kahlo, está rota, desgarrada en el interior de su cuerpo, igual que México está desgarrado en su piel externa".

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Latin American Literature

The Past by Alan Pauls

Sophie Ratcliffe reviews Alan Pauls' The Past.

We first meet the hero of Alan Pauls's novel fresh out of the shower. He's standing on the pavement, groin covered by a hand towel, trying to sign for a recorded delivery letter. It's an uncomfortable position, but, by the standards of this novel, a relatively clean one.

Set in Argentina, and translated from the Spanish, The Past follows Rimini, a thirtysomething translator, who spends most of his time masturbating and snorting coke. His addiction, we learn, is a way of facing the void left after the end of his relationship with a volatile blonde, Sofia, who does something involving therapy.

Rimini and Sofia had been inseparable for 12 years. Now they've parted, Sofia seems in need of some counselling herself. She spends her time writing long parenthetical letters to Rimini, recovering from nose-jobs, and stalking him in a yellow plastic mac.

Pauls's account of the two ex-lovers lies somewhere between Fatal Attraction and À la recherche du temps perdu, and their tempestuous relationship offers a good arena for some gnomic abstractions, along the lines of "every love has its beginning … but this by definition is a lost moment" or "every lover is the tardy inheritor of an instant of love they never see".

Halfway through, the novel changes pace, and switches into a cod-biography of a gay artist called Jeremy Riltse whose work had been admired by both Rimini and Sofia. Riltse, the founder of the "Sick Art" movement, had specialised in paintings consisting of real body-parts (called things like "Plaque", "Glans" and "Herpes"), with a sideline in canine gangbangs. He committed suicide shortly after the culmination of his career - a series of pierced canvases entitled "Bogus Hole" achieved during a night of passion with a well-endowed stranger.

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Argentine Literature

Alan Pauls - The Past

Ben Bollig reviews Alan Pauls' The Past.

The past, Alan Pauls' first novel to be translated into English, has arrived with a certain amount of fanfare - including a film adaptation starring Gael Garcia Bernal, an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival and critical comparisons to Proust and Nabokov.

Like Proust's epic, The Past is about memory. A twentysomething Buenos Aires couple, Rimini and Sofia, split up after 12 years together, sharing out friends, possessions and living arrangements. But there is a sticking point: their photographs. Sofia wants desperately to divide up the thousand-plus photos they have; Rimini feels repulsed by the pictures. For Sofia, the images are a visual prompt to aid her perfect memory of their years together; for Rimini, they moor him in the past.

Rimini moves on: a new, younger girlfriend, cocaine abuse, work addiction (he is the most productive of multilingual translators) and compulsive masturbation. He marries and divorces, breaks down and recovers. He even becomes a tennis coach. Sofia, meanwhile, haunts him with recollections at pivotal moments in his life. By the final section of the novel she has become the founder member of a remarkable organisation: the Women Who Love Too Much.

A large proportion of the text digresses from this main narrative: the life and works of a fictional painter and pioneer of 'Sick Art', Jeremy Riltse (one of his pieces involves an attempt to have part of his rectum removed and attached to canvas); the tale of the adman who brings Riltse's 'Bogus Hole' to Buenos Aires; the story of the obsessive lover Adele Hugo; the tragic fate of Rimini's junior-school teacher. After about 400 pages, the novel is even good enough to recap an earlier sequence, presumably fearing that the portrayal of amnesia may have brought it on in the reader.

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Argentine Literature

Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby & Co. and Montano's Malady.

Roberto Ontiveros reviews Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co. and Montano's Malady.

Enrique Vila-Matas writes novels about those who can't write, those who can write but choose not to and those who wrote until they woke up one day and discovered they no longer could. His book "Bartleby & Co." is a respectful devotion to all who engage in the grand "No" of literature, who spurn the static word for politics, ennui or maybe even a chance at actual living. Because writing, which demands solitude and often leads to misanthropy, stands outside of life.

In the guise of an assemblage of footnotes to a study of an invisible text, our narrator — a disgruntled desk clerk with a humpback who has no luck with women — explores his fascination with writers such as Rimbaud, Becket and Kafka, who, like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, prefer not to further engage in the pingpong of literature. Our hero sacrifices his mind and employment for this project. He takes a trip to New York on a phony sick leave and is torn between his desire to run up to a man he is sure is J.D. Salinger and his desire to proposition the young woman standing near him. Upon realizing that the two are an item, he balks at the unfairness of the world and decides to listen in so he can stay apprised of the reclusive author's newest work.

This book is no labyrinthine joke but rather a genuine puzzle: Can a reader not at least marginally enthralled with these authors find entertainment in a book about what they haven't written?

"Bartleby & Co.," which was published in Spain in 2001 and translated into English in 2004 (the New Directions edition is a recent paperback reissue), is Vila-Matas' first book to appear here. It falls into a line of honorable literary experiments: During the cold war the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem put together an entire book composed of reviews of nonexistent books. More recently, the late writer Roberto Bolaño created "Nazi Literature in the Americas," an encyclopedia of fake fascist writing. But everything here is genuine — genuine hearsay about the proto-surrealist Marcel Duchamp, grounded criticism of Guy Debord's Situationist movement and real debate over the very reasons for writing.

Even the made-up material rings with authenticity. There is a touching and perplexing moment when our scholar of absence asks the proprietor of a bookstore why he doesn't write.

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Spanish Literature

Mexican Writers on Writing edited by Margaret Sayers Peden

Edward Hirsch reviews a new collection of Mexican texts, Mexican Writers on Writing edited by Margaret Sayers Peden

The history of Mexican literature, at least of that written in the Spanish language, begins during the Conquest with "chronicles and letters," explains Margaret Sayers Peden, "a fascinating body of materials in which their authors report, not infrequently with exaggeration, their own feats, along with the wondrous landscapes and cities and peoples they encounter." Novels and plays and poems came much later, once Spanish dominance was established. But "it seems inevitable," Peden writes, "that future scholars and historians will define the twentieth century as Mexico's Golden Age." Three giants -- Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo (all of whom are included in this collection) -- ruled the field, but many other writers (and a nascent publishing industry) contributed to the cultural richness, which has only in recent decades been translated into English.

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Mexican Literature