Elite Squad directed by Jose Padilha

A Washington Post article on the latest sensation of Brazilian cinema.

After taking a phone call last week, director José Padilha stepped onto the patio of his studio and told a business partner that the intense discussion provoked by his latest film had spread to yet another sphere of Brazilian society.

"Now they're going to speak about it in Congress," Padilha said, looking at his watch. "In 20 minutes, someone is going to take the floor and start."

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The film, called "Elite Squad," centers on the police officers who wage war against the drug-dealing gangs that rule Rio's slums, called favelas. The movie has put almost everyone -- from the slums, to the penthouses, to the halls of government -- in the mood to talk about this city's violence.

Even before it was released in theaters this month, "Elite Squad" was Brazil's most-watched movie of the season: The country's leading polling firm estimated that about 11.5 million adults -- as well as an unknown number of children -- had seen the movie on pirated DVDs before its first screenings.

Police initially tried to keep the movie out of theaters, fearing that scenes depicting officers torturing slum dwellers portray their ranks in a bad light. Critics of the police argued that the movie was too sympathetic to corrupt officers, because it presents the action from their point of view. Some nongovernmental organizations objected to the film's suggestion that some activists have aligned themselves with the drug gangs to get access to the favelas.

To Padilha, rather than being controversial, such suggestions should ring true to anyone who has spent any time in a city with one of the world's highest murder rates.

For decades, most of Rio's 600-plus favelas have been ruled by drug-dealing gangs. The police, both military and civil, have waged war on those groups, and they are often criticized for being as brutal -- if not more so -- than the gangs. Shootouts are common, and favela residents are often caught in the crossfire.

On Wednesday, for example, a dozen people -- including a 4-year-old boy -- were killed during a battle between police and gang members in Rio. Local television showed images of residents running in fear as police helicopters circled overhead -- images that people here have been living with for years.

"None of this is rocket science," said Padilha, 40. "These are very simple concepts, and they are all here for everyone to see. Just look around. It's obvious. But just by stating it in a way that shows a little bit of everything in there, it is making this movie an object of social discussion."

Padilha said his intention was to show the drug war from the perspective of a cop and to let the audience judge whether the cop is good, bad or both. For those with firm opinions about Rio's violence, the movie's refusal to impose its own moral is offensive.

Arnaldo Bloch, a columnist for Rio's largest newspaper, O Globo, wrote that showing the unvarnished point of view of a member of the military police special favela units was the equivalent of apologizing for their actions. He labeled the movie "fascist."

The record turnout at theaters -- even though many viewers had already seen the movie at home on DVD -- indicates that a lot of people disagree. Enterprising street dealers have tried to latch on to the movie's success by throwing together footage of police operations and selling DVDs they claim to be sequels.

"I think it's a great movie, and it just shows things that really happen," said Cesar de Assis, 35, a resident of a favela called Chapeu Mangueira. "I've seen the police come into the community, and it happens exactly the way the movie shows."

Miguel Colker, 20, is a student at the Catholic University of Rio, the setting for a couple of scenes in the film. He viewed a pirated copy of "Elite Squad," and its effect on him, he said, has been sobering, literally.

"I haven't smoked pot since I saw the movie," said Colker, who described himself as an occasional user of drugs. "I always knew that of course the drugs here are controlled by the gangs, but seeing it in the movie shocked me a little."

Padilha is a Rio native whose previous film, a documentary called "Bus 174," told the life story of a man who hijacked a city bus, then was killed by the military police. "Elite Squad" was conceived as a companion piece to that film, showing the "other side of the same coin," Padilha said.

He started by trying to tell the story in documentary form. But he quickly realized that police officers wouldn't talk openly about their experiences, he said, so he interviewed about 20 officers and turned their off-the-record stories into fiction. Earlier this month, police officials ordered him to identify the officers who had helped him. Padilha did not appear for questioning after Rio's governor took his side, telling him not to be afraid to defy the police.

The film is fast-paced and hard around the edges, depicting violence unblinkingly. The aesthetic is intended to overwhelm the viewer, Padilha said, not allowing time to make analytical judgments until the film is over. He compares it to downloading a computer program that threatens to crash the system.

"It's creating a chaos of confusion, and that chaos is very interesting from my point of view," Padilha said. "I'm not involved in it now. I'm just sitting back and watching."

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Brazilian Cinema

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Chloë Schama reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel, "The Bad Girl" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 276 pages, $25) is a joyful romp through a torturous relationship. The novel traces the obsession of its narrator, Ricardo Somocurcio, from the inception of the affair in Peru to its last spasm in Spain, alighting in a Paris roiling with student ferment, a London filled with peace-loving hippies, and a sterile Tokyo flashing with neon.

Various incarnations of the bad girl of the title surface in all these places. She first appears as Lily, a 14-year-old girl who sinks her talons into the youthful narrator's heart while they roam the streets and cafes of Miraflores in Peru, and her grip lasts the entirety of her life. "Lily" reappears 10 years after their first meeting as "Comrade Arlette," the recipient of a scholarship to train for Castro's forces. Her ambition, however, is anything but revolutionary, and the scholarship is merely a means to escape the poverty of her upbringing. Just before she is scheduled to depart the training ground of Paris for Cuba she offers Ricardo an alternative: If he can get her out of her obligations, she will stay with him in Paris. Ricardo punts, unwilling to endanger his friend (a more active revolutionary) who has arranged the scholarship, and assures her that he will wait in Paris while she fulfills the conditions of her contract. The bad girl slips away and begins the elusive life that will bring her in and out of contact with the narrator for the rest of the novel.

She returns to Paris as "Madame Arnoux," the wife of a high-ranking Unesco official, absconds with Monsieur Arnoux's paltry fortune, and finally resurfaces in the country town of Newmarket outside London; now she is "Mrs. Richardson," the wife of a stuffy horse breeder. In a later life, she becomes "Kuriko," the mistress and employee of a shady Japanese businessman or gangster. Time after time, the narrator runs to the bad girl's side when she needs his attention and assistance, ready with declarations of his love, to which she responds with snide deprecations. His sentimental education is brutal and the lesson should be obvious, and yet he's incapable of changing his adulatory, punch-drunk response to her whims and fancies. How could he? The thing that pains him the most also brings him the greatest pleasure.

Allusions to Flaubert's "Sentimental Education" run throughout Mr. Vargas Llosa's novel. Madame Arnoux, of course, is the object of Frédéric Moreau's devotion and the narrator reads Flaubert's novels from time to time. But "The Bad Girl" is influenced by Flaubert beyond its offhand references. In an encomium to Flaubert, "Flaubert, our Contemporary," Mr. Vargas Llosa commends Flaubert for making his narrators "ghostly figures" — beings who "enjoy no special privileges of omniscience or ubiquity." Ricardo Somocurcio is a dramatic extension of this quality which, Mr. Vargas Llosa believes, has been one of the defining elements of modern literature. Ricardo makes his living as a translator and interpreter — "the professions of phantoms," as his colleague phrases it — voicing other people's opinions and thoughts before his own. His sole aspiration is to "die of old age in Paris" and, as he spends more and more time away from Peru, he gradually loses any sense of a national identity. No longer a true citizen of Peru, he is aware that he will also "never be integrated into the country where we had chosen to live."

In Flaubert's novels, Mr. Vargas Llosa writes, the spectral narrator allowed Flaubert to create a fictional reality that was undisturbed by an omniscient, judgmental, and external observer. It didn't have to be an entirely believable reality, just cohesive. Flaubert's great gift to modern novelists, according to Mr. Vargas Llosa, was to inform them that "between real reality and fictional reality there is no possible identification, but rather an unbridgeable distance." The fictional world of "The Bad Girl" is a world distant from the wars and poverty of "real" reality. Mr. Vargas Llosa doesn't ignore these things, but they take place on the periphery. What remains at the center, and what unifies the novel, is melodrama.

His characters — from Fukuda, the evil Japanese gangster, to Mrs. Stubard, the English guardian angel — are almost Dickensian in their dimensions, unabashed stereotypes of their native lands. The love affair is painful, perverse, and perpetual, relying entirely on unlikely coincidences. The sun always sets at the right moment; the waves always break dramatically. Small apartments in back alleys are horrifically squalid; large apartments on grand boulevards are lavishly sumptuous. These a aesthetic elements are not out of place; they fit within Mr. Vargas Llosa's world where polar emotions — extreme pain and extreme pleasure — are inextricably entwined. In a certain reality, this entangled dynamic would lead to sorrow, but in this novel the excess is entertaining. "The Bad Girl" is not without its quiet, more subdued moments but, for the most part, raucous sadomasochism has never been so much fun.

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Peruvian Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera - Trailer

New Line Cinema is bringing Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez' best-selling novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen with Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") writing the screenplay, and Mike Newell ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", "Four Weddings and a Funeral") directing. The cast includes Javier Bardem, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Hector Elizondo and Liev Schreiber.






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Latin American Literature

Enrique Vila-Matas - Interview

La escritura siempre parte de algo que falta. Y a veces lo que falta es el libro mismo.

An interview with Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas.





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Spanish Literature

Havana Noir

Carlos Rodríguez Martorell reviews "Havana Noir".

Novelist Achy Obejas has turned her native Havana into a crime scene — without shedding a drop of blood.

In "Havana Noir" (Akashic Books, $15.95), the author of "Days of Awe" has gathered 17 Cuban authors to write short crime stories set in the Caribbean island's capital.

The just-released compilation is part of Akashic's series of noir genre books — called in Spanish género negro — set in different cities and neighborhoods (the Bronx, Los Angeles, Miami), and Havana seemed like a natural fit.

"Noir has been always popular in Cuba," Obejas said on the phone from Chicago, where she lives. "Cuban TV pirates a lot of American TV. And probably the most popular show on the air right now I think is ‘Law & Order.' They are addicted to that stuff."

Among the contributing authors are Leonardo Padura Fuentes, internationally known for his Detective Mario Conde novels, and Arnaldo Correa, "one of the founders of Cuban noir," said Obejas.

Another highlight is young sensation Ena Lucía Portela, who has won literary prizes in Spain and France, but has barely been translated into English.

Her disturbing story "The Last Passenger" revolves around a woman infatuated with a serial killer, and portrays a class-divided Cuba where the nomenklatura enjoys vacations in the Bahamas and wears gold Rolexes.

"Cuba's upper class is invisible for most people," Portela, 34, said via e-mail from Havana. "Official propaganda insists that in communist countries all citizens live under the same economic conditions, which is a huge lie."

Portela's brash, raw style landed her on the Bogota 39 — the Colombian International Book Fair's list of the 39 most important writers in Latin America under the age of 39 — but the prestige doesn't extend to her own country.

"For now, this tale in particular will only have readers outside Cuba," she said. "Here, it's unpublishable because of political censorship."

Obejas edited and translated into English most of the stories and wrote "Zenzizenzic," in which she sheds light on the tiny Cuban community in Hawaii.

Cuban noir is a distinctive genre in itself, she says. "It tends not to have a detective. It's never the lone guy out there, but the collective working for the better good. It's almost an antithesis of what we know noir to be."

Although she won't name them, she says many "very well-known Cuban authors" wrote stories for the book, but they were discarded because the genre "completely defied them."

Others just adapted to it. "[Noir] was something I never set myself to do in a conscious manner," said author Mabel Cuesta, "but which may be underlying in some of my previous stories."

Cuesta, who lives in North Bergen, N.J., writes in "Virgins of Regla" about a brutal rape in a Havana neighborhood infused with Afro-Cuban culture.

"I would live intermittently in a predominantly black neighborhood," she said. "I would be la blanquita (the whitey), but that didn't prevent me from going to listen to their drums and see women and men bursting into screams because the saints were 'passing through' them."

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Cuban Literature

Malta con Huevo directed by Cristóbal Valderrama

Rob Bartlett reviews Cristóbal Valderrama's Malta con Huevo.

Imagine a hot Santiago day. The smog is cloying, stifling. Lethargy washes over you with every warm breath of wind. Your throat is parched. You need refreshment, an energy boost, a pick-me-up. You need Malta con Huevo.
This is how you get it: take 1 liter of cold Malta beer, 1 or 2 eggs and sugar to taste. Blend. Drink.

It is October in the city. The Papi Ricky soap opera has finished, you are bored and you don’t know what to do. You can’t face Transantiago, and anyway, your Metro Bip! card is out of funds. Yet an idle curiosity is beating back the anesthetizing effects of the office. You want stimulation, contentment, entertainment. You need Malta con Huevo - the movie.

Malta con Huevo is the first feature film from Chilean director Cristóbal Valderrama and looks set to be a big hit. It tells the story of Vladimir and Jorge, two former schoolmates who are diametrically opposed in almost every way, except in an affinity for the eponymous drink.

Vladimir is a waster, a scrounger, an artist. He lives for the moment and for women.
Jorge is a controlled, independent scientist. He plans for the future and for himself.
Following one chance meeting, the pair agrees to move in together, along with Jorge’s capricious, materialistic and sexually adventurous lover Rocío. The arrangement seems perfect for Jorge. The house satisfies the consumerist desires of his girlfriend, as well as helping him towards one of his own longed-for objectives.

The arrangement also seems perfect for Vladimir. He has just been kicked out of his flat for not paying his rent and his attempt to move back into the bed of a former girlfriend is thwarted by the current boyfriend. His bright yellow Citroën car, loaded with all his worldly possessions, does not make for an ideal home. And even better, during a house-warming party, some of Rocío’s sexual adventurousness starts to be directed his way.
Director Valderrama handles their shared story in a simple but highly effective and amusing way. He successfully blurs genre boundaries, not by merger, rather by juxtaposition.

Initially we see events from Vladimir’s point of view, sharing his prejudices and perspectives on the house party, on Jorge and Rocío, and on football results. As viewers we are therefore as confused as he is when things appear to come in the wrong order. We are seemingly traveling through time, entering the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. What is happening? We don’t know, he doesn’t know.

Vladimir wants to find out though, so he goes to meet the loner Fedora, an aspiring witch. Although she has never met him, he had previously found her threatening when they met for the second time at a liquor store they both frequent. When he accidentally kills her black cat, her enmity is assured. As ever, a Malta con Huevo helps to calm him down. Doesn’t it?

Then we see the same events from Jorge’s angle, with the disparity giving rise to plenty of amusement as well as ensuring the audience has a clear understanding of events. Still, Jorge’s mentality is not quite as rational as he would like to believe. His deluded opinion of himself as a dominant, forceful personality suffers from the constant subversive influence of his broken arm, sustained at the hands of Rocío and her emasculating, sadomasochistic sexuality. From his standpoint, events that were fantastical from Vladimir’s perspective morph into black comedy. And the suspense starts to build like any good thriller.

These are two people clearly on a collision course. The owner of the liquor store wants one of them dead and why is there so much cabling on the floor in the shared house? There is only one love interest, right? What about the shallow grave in Fedora’s back garden? And why do the eggs for the Malta con Huevo have holes in them?

The film has received a very positive critical response in Chile, winning an award at the Northern Chile International Film Festival and expected to gain further attention at the ongoing Valdivia festival. Even the normally reserved daily La Tercera told readers that the film “will make you laugh out loud.”

Indeed, laughter seems to have been a driving force in the production process. Director Valderrama, when questioned by El Mercurio as to any didactic message, rubbished the idea, saying “We are not trying to make a speech, change the world or establish a new morality. We were just having a bit of a laugh.”

But that does not mean the film should be seen as lightweight in an artistic sense. There is a very well thought out aesthetic to both the plot and the mise-en-scène, with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, particularly his 1986 work “Matador”, seemingly an important reference point.

On the other hand it would be wrong to overstate foreign influences, as Malta con Huevo has a very strong Chilean identity. The film is not only written and directed by a Chilean, funded by Chilean institutions, and produced by the Chilean company Cinepata, it was shot on the streets of Santiago, uses young Chilean actors and technicians and is peppered with “Chilenismos” (Chilean slang).

In common with much of Latin American Cinema, Chilean features are currently proving very popular. Films such as “La Casa de la Remolienda” have done well at the box-office and new releases, such as “Radio Corazón”, being well received.

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Chilean Cinema

Planeta Prize - 2007

Spanish Juan Jose Millas was awarded the 56th edition of the Planeta Prize for best Spanish-language novel for his work "El mundo" (The World).

The prize panel was made up of Alberto Blecua, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Soledad Puertolas, Rosa Regas and Carlos Pujol.

The 56th edition of the Planeta Prize was presented at the Convention Palace of Catalonia, with numerous personalities from political, social and cultural life in attendance.

A highly honored writer since he won the Sesamo Prize, in 1974, for best short novel with "Cerbero son las sombras," 61-year-old Millas is currently one of the icons of literary journalism thanks to his columns and his reporting for the Madrid daily El Pais.





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Spanish Literature

Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Peggy Barnett reviews Arturo Perez-Reverte's Purity of Blood

Arturo Perez-Reverte writes historical novels set in his homeland of Spain. This one, Purity of Blood, is the second in a series he is writing about characters in the early 17th century. (The Mary Willis Library also has the first book in the series, Captain Alatriste, if readers prefer to begin at the beginning.)

The narrator is Inigo Balboa, a 13-year-old whose father was killed in battle, fighting for the king. His mother has sent him into the care of his father's friend and fellow soldier, Captain Alatriste. Inigo admires and tries to imitate the courageous, skilled, and honorable captain. Unfortunately, in this corrupt and evil-haunted land, the captain is not paid for his wartime service, and must offer his sword for hire.

The purity of blood of the title refers to the historical fact that any taint of Jewish heritage may lead to the dreaded attention of the Inquisition. The daughter of a prosperous merchant is being held prisoner in a defiledconvent, and the villains of the story threaten to reveal his family history if he appeals to the king. He goes, instead, to a friend of Captain Alatriste, who agrees to help in a rescue attempt.

The "purity of blood" is also a metaphor for the honor of the captain and his friends in contrast to the dishonor and evil of their enemies, who are of influence in the Church and government. This struggle is the background for a tale of derring-do and breathtaking action. Because of treachery, the rescue attempt goes awry in a big way, and young Inigo becomes a prisoner.

"I had heard enough about the practices of the Inquisition -- that sinister shadow that had loomed over our lives for years and years and years -- to know my destination: the dreaded secret dungeons of the Holy Office,in Toledo." Though beaten and abused, Inigo's stubborn courage enables him not to give the captain away. He does not hope for rescue: "The fact is that later, life -- the passing years, adventures, loves, and the wars of our lord and king -- caused me to lose faith in many things. But I had already, young as I was at the time, ceased to believe in miracles."

Faith is a theme of the novel. The Church had become notoriously corrupt, but Perez-Reverte and his characters have faith in integrity and love, and we cheer them on through their turbulent adventures. The author is skillful. Foreshadowing is well-handles: "What I did not know -- God save me! -- was how I would come within a hair of losing my own [life.]" The outcome is not predictable, and though some will die in terrible ways, exactly who will survive is not clear until the end.

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Spanish Literature

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