Interview with Junot Diaz

Carlos Rodríguez Martorell interviews Dominican author Junot Díaz.

Junot Díaz is savoring the raving success of his debut novel — briefly.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" has made it to the New York Times Best Sellers list (a first for a Dominican author), Miramax Films bought the screen rights and a translation into Spanish is already in the works.

"This is just a temporary change after 11 years in silence and solitude," Díaz deadpans, referring to the time it took for the book to see the light after his acclaimed "Drown."

"All this stuff is really nice but nothing is gonna make me happy until I can figure out a way to write more easily than I write now."

Díaz is not very hopeful about the movie. "Hollywood is Hollywood," he says. "It would be wonderful if it was brilliant, and it would be wonderful if it was made. But that's not usually what happens."

The novel revolves about Oscar, an obese comics fan growing up in Paterson, N.J., and his dysfunctional Dominican family, going back to the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship.

The book is being translated by Cuban author Achy Obejas.

In the novel, Díaz takes on so many genres that it makes it almost impossible to imagine what the movie would look like. Comedy? Epic? Sci-fi?

"Structurally, the perfect director would be the director who made ‘Babel' and ‘Amores Perros' [Alejandro González Iñárritu], because he knows how to juggle different story lines," he said. "I also really love that director who did ‘Secuestro Express' [Jonathan Jakubowicz]."

As for the cast, he can't think of any actor to play Oscar, but ventures two options for his fierce "ghetto-punk" sister, Lola.

"Minimum, we have two Dominican actresses who are tall and beautiful and [a bit] morenita, and that's Dania Ramírez and, of course, Zoë Saldaña."

He has another sure pick: "A friend of mine wrote that the best Trujillo would be Oscar de la Renta, and I think she's right. I think it would be genius."

Díaz says he's working on a novel about a woman raised an orphan who goes back to her native city, which has been destroyed in a terrorist attack.

"Oscar didn't sound funny either when I first described him," he said. "My problem as a writer is that I always take the strangest route to my destination."

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Dominican Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Mary Jo Anderson interviews Chilean autor Alberto Manguel.

Alberto Manguel is a master of words and he doesn’t mince any of them.

How fitting that language is the subject of his newest book, The City of Words (Anansi, $18.95), comprising the 2007 Massey Lectures which Manguel will be delivering across Canada over the next few weeks.

"We are being infantilized daily. I believe we come into the world as intelligent creatures and we have to be taught to be stupid."

But against the culturally induced stupor, Manguel posits that story and literature have the capacity to make us more human.

Manguel spoke on the telephone from Toronto as he prepared to travel to Halifax to deliver the first in this series of lectures. (He was scheduled to speak on Friday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.)

Begun in 1961 for the purpose of stimulating public discussion of important social issues, the Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Every October the selected speaker/author/lecturer, travels to five Canadian cities to deliver one of the lectures. Every November, the CBC Radio program, Ideas, airs the lectures consecutively for one week. (For information visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey2007.ca)

Alberto Manguel is erudite, cosmopolitan, and vastly well read. He is a translator, author, editor, and literary critic. His book The History of Reading (Random House, $24), is full of fascinating information and resonant with the passion for reading.

In The City of Words, Manguel examines the concept of nationalism and the idea of "personal and social" identity from the perspective of story and language. As countries fracture and hostilities increase, Manguel asks how — given that "language is our common denominator" — words and story can save us. He also asks whether words will divide and destroy us.

In our conversation (and in the lectures), Manguel asserts that much depends on how language is used. And equally, it is crucial whether questions are posed or answers expounded. For Manguel believes that answers breed dogma and intolerance while questions nurture openness and possibility.

"Answers close us in and literature opens doors and windows for us. It forces us to look further, not be content with what seems like an easy answer," Manguel said.

"It is, I think, exactly what opposes the arts to the kind of society that we are building — in which the notion of value is of financial value and is therefore a closed notion. A closed notion, like a closed book, offers no exploration, no ambiguity, and no spaciousness in which to connect with others. And connection is what language, literature, and stories offer us."

Manguel provides innumerable examples gleaned from many centuries to illuminate the process by which language and art allows us to understand and empathize with people from different cultures while also enabling us to unite as a society.

While discussing the film The Fast Runner by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, Manguel says, "Like other communal tasks, storytelling has the function of lending expression and context to private experiences, so that under recognition by the whole of society, individual perceptions . . . can acquire a common, shared meaning on which to build learning."

Imagination and its off-spring, literature, is a "survival mechanism developed to grant us experiences (that) serve to educate" us, Manguel writes in the lecture, The Bricks of Babel. So what is it that stands in the way of this shared perception, this tolerance of others? How can language be at the heart of the conflicts between religions, cultures, and societies?

The problems arise when the rich language of literature is stripped and co-opted for the purposes of politics and commerce.

In his illuminating lecture in Chapter Five, entitled The Screen of Hal (a reference to the computer in Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey), Manguel states, "Distortions are the essence of demagogical and of commercial language, intent on ‘selling’ an idea or product . . ."

Subtly and gradually, the language of literature, which is "complex (and) infinitely capable of enrichment" is replaced by the "short, categorical, imperious" language of advertising or the "static" language of politics. It is an example of the tail wagging the dog as language is transformed into mere slogans and propaganda.

Manguel cites philosopher and literary critic George Lukacs to explain this "colonization of the world of experience" into "one-dimensional generalizations . . . granting value and identity not through imaginative stories but merely according to what something is said to cost."

And in our conversation, Manguel asserts "there is a deliberate effort made to render us stupid so that we become the consumers that are needed for this society to function."

This "co-opted" language is the language of "statements that cannot be explored without destruction. You cannot open up "Drink Coca Cola" and try to reflect upon it," Manguel says.

"You have to use your mind and on the basis of these words (in a book) that are here offered to you, build a reasoning and an emotion of your own. It is your responsibility. It is your task."

Maybe if we build a city of words, a culture of tolerance, we will not suffer as those who built the Tower of Babel. Maybe we will understand — even as we speak different languages.

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Chile Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Kathryn Harrison reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

The genius of “Madame Bovary,” as Vargas Llosa describes it in “The Perpetual Orgy,” is the “descriptive frenzy … the narrator uses to destroy reality and recreate it as a different reality.” In other words, Flaubert was a master of realism not because he reproduced the world around him, but because he used language to create an alternate existence, a distillate whose emotional gravity transcends that of life itself. Emma, Vargas Llosa reminds us, has survived countless readers. Not merely immortal but undiminished by time, her passions remain as keen as the day her ink was wet.

Vargas Llosa, too, is a master. Long one of the pre-eminent voices of postmodernism, he has transformed a revolutionary work of Western literature into a vibrant, contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s — and ’70s and ’80s — just as “Madame Bovary” did the provincial life of the 1830s. In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters. The trajectory of Emma’s yearning leads inexorably to her poisoning herself with arsenic, the torturous death of a woman who seizes freedoms allowed only to men. And if contemporary society appears less inclined to penalize a sexually liberated woman than did the rigidly censorious era of Emma Bovary, Vargas Llosa evinces a more dangerous postfeminist world, one in which misogyny flourishes under a veneer of progressive attitudes and token equalities.

“The Bad Girl” begins, like “Madame Bovary,” with boyhood scenes narrated in the first person, an “I” who becomes for a time “we,” echoing Flaubert’s chorus of schoolmates. But while Flaubert shifts into an exalted omniscience, Vargas Llosa allows the “good boy,” Ricardo, to claim his novel’s voice, recounting an erotic fixation that begins in 1950, in the Mira flores district of Lima, Peru, when Ricardo is just 15 and a new girl arrives in town. She calls herself Lily and, in clothes that cling “perversely,” dances the mambo like a “demonic whirlwind,” pulling Ricardo into her orbit, awakening his lust and enslaving him to the idea that she alone can answer his desire. Permanently intoxicated, Ricardo will recognize Lily’s essence no matter how she disguises herself, no matter how many years pass between their assignations, reunions whose power to devastate Ricardo drives him to the point of suicide, and which she dismisses as bland interludes between more compelling love affairs.

Blessed with an ability to enjoy simple pleasures, Ricardo achieves his life’s dream by the age of 25: he lives in Paris, where he makes a modest living as an interpreter for Unesco. The bad girl, his one complicated pleasure, with the capacity to ruin all the rest, seems securely fixed in his past, a peculiarly intense first crush, until she reappears. No longer a memory but a riveting presence, Lily, now “Comrade Arlette,” poses as a would-be revolutionary, “bold, spontaneous, provocative,” passing through the City of Light en route to Cuba for guerrilla training — arguably wasted on a woman to whom sneak attacks seem second nature.

Six months later, having seduced “one of the historic commandantes” of the Cuban revolution, the bad girl has embarked on a career of increasingly daring affairs. Ricardo, she makes clear, is unworthy of what little attention she gives him. Treating him as a plaything, she ignores the depth of his feelings and teases him sexually even as she leaves him, for a month, a year, three years: he never knows how long his loneliness will last. At the end of one such tryst, she waves goodbye with a “flowered parasol,” summoning the one “of rosy iridescent silk” Emma carries while seducing Charles Bovary. There are enough such alignments to amuse ardent admirers of the older novel, but it’s possible they won’t catch them. So complete and convincing is the spell cast by “The Bad Girl” that it doesn’t allow a reader’s attention to stray.

Ricardo’s work as an interpreter affords him ample opportunity to travel and reconnect with his jet-setting, selfreinventing love, who attaches herself like a succubus to one rich paramour after another, in one locale after another. Less welcome is the anxiety his job inspires about his identity. Paris of the 1960s, the culture in which Vargas Llosa came of intellectual age, witnessed the popularization of existential philosophy, and Ricardo judges himself not only deracinated, a perpetual foreigner, but also lacking in substance. He’s trapped in the moment of translating one person’s language into another’s, “of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

But what is identity? The bad girl sheds one mask only to try on the next. Driven by a need for excitement and riches only the most powerful and dangerous men can offer, she assumes whatever appearance might secure what she craves. Is her true self hidden from view, or does it, like the good boy’s, not really exist? Does only desire have the power to define us , Ricardo shaped by his love for the bad girl, who is herself the reflection of what she pursues? The reader knows that Ricardo and the girl who began as Lily will cross paths indefinitely, that she will allow him to possess her only long enough to rekindle his obsession, and that despite his intention to give her up for the toxic addiction she is, he will take her back the next time. Still, the novel possesses an intensifying, at points almost exhausting suspense, like that of a car being driven recklessly around hairpin turns, each more perilous than the one preceding. The bad girl demands attention from lovers and readers alike. Is she wicked, or admirable, or both? Where will she be the next time the good boy encounters her? What will she call herself? How long can he endure? Will she ever return his affection in kind?

“It is because she feels that society is fettering her imagination, her body, her dreams, her appetites,” Vargas Llosa writes in “The Perpetual Orgy,” “that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and in the end kills herself.” Vargas Llosa’s bad girl suffers, too, even as she makes those around her suffer. Though she tries to temper her restlessness and limit her aspirations, she cannot reconcile herself to the suffocation of petit- bourgeois existence any more than Emma can. “A man is free, at least,” Emma observes, praying the child she carries is a son, “free to range, … to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted.”

The heroism of both women is that they refuse to be diminished by modest, reasonable hopes or by respectable society. Creatures of appetite — for sex, money, excitement, life — bad girls serve their hunger first, and last. They are terrible and they are enviable, because they won’t settle for less than everything they want. Because, in the end, they accept not only their essential nature, but also the consequences of their choice to fulfill rather than deny it.

Source: NY Times





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Peruvian Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Carlos Fresneda interviews Junot Díaz.

"¡Diablo, este idioma es difícil!"... Seis años tenía Junot Díaz (Santo Domingo, 1968) cuando dio con sus huesos en Nueva Jersey, sin hablar "ni papa de inglés" y bregando con los molinos de viento de una cultura ajena: "Este país se nutre del silencio de los inmigrantes para mantener su imagen idílica...".

Sufrimiento, incomprensión, trabajo duro. Así se fue forjando su idea particular del sueño americano: leer y escribir a destajo en 'el idioma del diablo', que acabó superponiéndose con el tiempo a la lengua madre. Aunque por las noches, cuando todos callan, inglés y español siguen librando aún una tenaz batalla en su cabeza: "Todos mis sueños son bilingües. ¡Qué mierda, bro!".

Once años hace de la primera campanada de Junot Díaz, aquel 'Negocios' que le consagró como joven maestro del relato corto. Ahora rompe sonoramente el silencio con su primera novela, 'La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao', con la que se ha encaramado como "una de las voces más distinguidas e irresistibles de la ficción contemporánea norteamericana" ('The New York Times').

Junot Díaz recorre estos días en volandas su país adoptivo, agasajado por la crítica y aupado a la lista de los 'bestsellers' por un público cada vez más nutrido y variado. En plena gira tuvo el detalle de cumplir con su viejo amigo y traductor, Eduardo Lago, y llegar hasta el Instituto Cervantes con su peculiar visión de la lengua y del oficio: "No eres de verdad un novelista hasta que llegas al agujero más profundo de tu jodida vida, y desde ahí escribes".

Díaz estuvo a punto de morir ahogado bajo el éxito prematuro de 'Drown' (que así se tituló Negocios en su versión orginal). "Tuve que soportar mucha presión al inicio, y empecé a escribir al mismo tiempo dos novelas en las que avancé con la esperanza de que alguna de las dos entrara en ignición", confiesa. "Todos los caminos me llevaron a una zona muerta, pero perseveré en el intento: yo soy mi peor verdugo".

Hubo que esperar a una noche de excesos para que sus ojos se clavaran en las solapas de un libro de Oscar Wilde, y así nació en su mente el "maldito gordito ese", o sea Oscar Wao, y después vinieron la hermana Lola y la madre, Beli, mientras a pie de página fue ganando fuerza la presencia inquietante y monstruosa del infame dictador, Rafael Trujillo.

De La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao han escrito que es "una saga de inmigrantes para los que no leen sagas de inmigrantes". Con ayuda inestimable de Yunior, ese alter ego en el que vuelve a apoyarse "para que haga el trabajo sucio", Díaz tiende un puente imaginario entre dos mundos irreconciliables, con la brisa de Samaná y la lengua su infancia colándose como un viento peleón bajo de la puerta: "You are the most buenmoso man I know".
Idioma mixto

"Lo que yo escribo no es esa cosa desaliñada que llaman spanglish sino una especie de criollo, con palabras y expresiones intercaladas de español", admite Díaz.

Hay quienes acometen su libro con diccionario en mano, pero la mayoría se deja arrastrar por el río caudaloso su prosa vivaz, moteada con expresiones al alcance del americano medio: "Then you will be mi negra bella". Ahora trabaja mano a mano con una traductora cubana para la versión en español.

Junot Díaz cree que se le da demasiada importancia al "poder mítico" de lengua, ora el inglés o en español. "La gente está obsesionada con el sueño del idioma puro como una cosa uniformadora", admite. "Y ésa es una idea que fomentan mucho los políticos... Estados Unidos es el opuesto a España en el siglo XIV: los que tienen el poder hablan un idioma; los demás hablan, tú sabes, una lengua distinta. Aquí los moros son los gringos, encerrados en sus castillos, cuando la gente empieza a hablar otra cosa".

"Los gringos quieren negar el español, lo perciben como una amenaza", asegura Díaz, "pero lo cierto es que este país camina hacia el bilingüismo. Con el español pasa lo que nunca ha ocurrido aquí con otro idioma, que se va reforzando con la llegada de nuevos inmigrantes. Cada cinco o seis años viene aquí un nuevo draw, una extracción de dominicanos, y los mexicanos que no dejan de llegar, y los colombianos, los ecuatorianos, los argentinos... Yo lo veo como una piscina que a la luz del día se seca un poquito, pero que por la noche se vuelve a llenar de agua".

Admirador de Toni Morrison, comparado con David Foster Wallace, Díaz se siente más próximo a la narrativa norteamericana que a las letras hispanas. La fiesta del chivo de Vargas Llosa le parece "una biografía novelada y bidimensional". Su debilidad es Juan Rulfo, y su última obsesión, Martín Solares: "Los minutos negros es lo mejor que he leído en español en bastante tiempo".

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Dominican Literature

If you love love, this book is the best love story ever.

Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.





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Latin American Literature

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño's The Insufferable Gaucho in the New Yorker.

In the opinion of those who knew him well, Héctor Pereda had two outstanding virtues: he was a caring and affectionate father and an irreproachable lawyer with a record of honesty, in a time and place that were hardly conducive to such rectitude. As evidence of the first virtue, his son and daughter, Bebe and Cuca, whose childhood and adolescent years had been happy, later accused him of having sheltered them from the hard realities of life, focussing particularly on his handling of practical matters. Of his work as a lawyer, there is little to be said. He prospered and made more friends than enemies, which was no mean feat, and when he had the choice between becoming a judge or a candidate for a political party he chose the bench without hesitation, although it obviously meant passing up the opportunities for greater financial gain that would have been open to him in politics.

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Chilean Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

James Urquhart reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

With murderous intent, Croatian veteran Ivo Markovic tracks down former war photographer Andres Faulques to a derelict coastal tower. Inside, Faulques is trying to capture in a mural the true meaning of humanity that had always eluded his camera. Markovic’s life had been shattered because of appearing in a famous picture by Faulques of terrified, retreating Croatians – but he had also witnessed Faulques photographing the mangled corpse of his colleague and lover, Olvido Ferrara.

Perez-Reverte, himself a former war correspondent, makes a heroic stab at anatomising artistic responsibility in the grudging rapport between Faulques and Markovic. But their aesthetic ruminations smother the more exciting story of Faulques’s truncated affair.

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Spanish Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Jonathan Yardley reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl will do nothing to improve his lot in Stockholm, but somehow it seems unlikely that this much worries Vargas Llosa. Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -- the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it. It also obviously was written out of a deep nostalgia for the author's lost youth and for the Lima in which he then lived. He evokes it beautifully:

"In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses -- two at the most -- and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas, laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine. In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani, jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers in the gardens and the little D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks . . . that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. You could still hear birds singing in that Miraflores, where families cut a pine branch when their girls reached marriageable age because if they didn't, the poor things would become old maids like my aunt Alberta."

Into this paradise, during the "fabulous summer" of 1950, comes a 14- or 15-year-old girl who calls herself Lily and claims to be Chilean. Soon enough she is found out as an impostor and expelled from 15-year-old Ricardo's privileged set, but the damage has been done: He is madly in love with her, and her expulsion is "the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality." She has rejected his declarations of love, but she scarcely vanishes from his life. By the early 1960s he is in Paris, studying (successfully) to become a translator at UNESCO, when she appears as Comrade Arlette, ostensibly to bring Castroite revolution to Peru. She goes off to Cuba, but soon resurfaces as Madame Robert Arnoux, wife of a French diplomat. Ricardo craves her as ardently as ever, even as she blithely dismisses him: "What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito." She does permit him to make love to her but vanishes once more, reappearing as Mrs. Richardson, wife of a wealthy Englishman hooked on "the aristocratic passion par excellence: horses."

By now Ricardo has figured out that she has come a long way: "I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now." He understands that she is now "a grown woman, convinced that life was a jungle where only the worst triumphed, and ready to do anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher." And yet:

"Everything I told her was true: I was still crazy about her. It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism and disappearances. A cheap, sentimental thing, no doubt, but also true that I wouldn't do anything . . . but curse how slowly the hours went by until I could see her again."

Over and over again she tests him, never more so than in a bedroom in Tokyo, "an experience that had left a wound in my memory." He actually manages to persuade himself for a time that he does not love her, but the obsession is too powerful: "I was a hopeless imbecile to still be in love with a madwoman, an adventurer, an unscrupulous female with whom no man, I least of all, could maintain a stable relationship without eventually being stepped on." In time he tells his story to a friend, a woman, who calls it "a marvelous love story," and who later adds, "What luck that girl has, inspiring love like this." There is a moment when Ricardo wonders, "Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?" but in his heart he knows that's just what it is, and Vargas Llosa tells it as such.

Being Vargas Llosa, he takes care of plenty of other business as well. The novel touches on the full sweep of Peruvian history from the 1950s to the Shining Path terrorism, "which would last throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in Peruvian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared." He says a lament for the generation of Peruvians before his own "who, when they reached old age, saw their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of materialize."

He also, having made Ricardo a translator and interpreter, affords himself the opportunity to have a bit of fun. One interpreter remarks: "Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between," and when Ricardo himself turns to translation, he discovers that, "As I always suspected, literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than for commercial ones." Probably no one is more amused by this than the redoubtable Edith Grossman, who has translated The Bad Girl with her accustomed skill and grace, making this lovely novel wholly accessible to American readers.

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Peruvian Literature

Bogota Film Festival

The Bogotá film festival starts today.









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Latin American Literature

La señal, directed by Ricardo Darín

Argentine actor Ricardo Darín makes his debut as director with "La señal".








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Argentine Cinema

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Two reviews of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Nowadays, there may be Hmong in Madison and Somalis in St. Paul, but some of us still have trouble keeping up with all the intense cultural mixing and melting going on amid our purple-mountained majesty. For example, mention the Dominicans among us to the average Tom, Dick or Andy Rooney, and he's liable to speak of a mythical Shortstop Island from which wing-footed infielders plot their takeover of America's pastime. As for the Dominican Republic's history, imports, exports, that sort of thing? Well, its national baseball team is one of the best in the world, right? Or is that Venezuela?

Junot Diaz has the cure for such woeful myopia. The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Diaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander -- a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as "the anguished diaspora."

Thus, that nation's bloody history, often detailed in Diaz's irreverent footnotes, intrudes periodically in Oscar Wao, as if to remind Dominicans that tragedy is never far from one's doorstep. Or maybe it emerges simply to instruct the rest of us, because Diaz's characters are already painfully certain that they are destined for misfortune.

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The hero of Junot Díaz’s first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a “ghetto nerd” from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls “the more speculative genres.” He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games — the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit.

But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Díaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called “Drown,” shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to “Dune,” “The Matrix” and (especially) “The Lord of the Rings” rub up against references to Melville and García Márquez. Oscar’s nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween.

“What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” Oscar wonders. And the question of how to take account of his ancestral homeland — its folklore, its politics, the diaspora that brought so many of its inhabitants to North Jersey and Upper Manhattan — is one that explicitly preoccupies Oscar’s creator. The way Díaz tells it, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Spanish-speaking half of the island where Columbus made landfall, is the kind of small country that suffers from a surfeit of history. From the start, it has been a breeding ground for outsize destinies and monstrous passions.

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Dominican Literature

Brazilian Cinema in the Hamburg Film Festival

The 15th edition of the Hamburg Film Festival will include four new Brazilian films.
"Baixio das Bestas" - Directed by Cláudio Assis.

"O Cheiro do Ralo" - Directed by Heiter Dhalia

"A Via Láctea" - Directed by Lina Chamie

and "Fabricando Tom Zé", a documentary directed by Décio Matos Jr.






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Brazilian Cinema