The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Heller McAlpin reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful new novel, "The Bad Girl," is about one man's persistent desire for a difficult woman. It is also, cunningly, about a broader persistence of hope for a better world. On one level a deliciously absorbing love story that details the eponymous bad girl's damaging lifelong hold on his narrator, Vargas Llosa's novel spans decades and continents - and, in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal.

Although less overtly political than such earlier novels as "Death in the Andes" and "The Feast of the Goat," Vargas Llosa sets his thwarted love story against a backdrop of social turmoil, revolutions and the recurrent heartbreak of failed democracy in his native Peru. "The Bad Girl" spans 1950s Lima, 1960s revolutionary Paris, 1970s hippie London, 1980s swinging Tokyo and 1990s theatrical Spain. Vargas Llosa's novel is more similar in tone to his 1977 dazzler, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," than to his last, quasi-historical novel, "The Way to Paradise" (2003), about Paul Gauguin and his socialist grandmother. Each of its seven long chapters, separated by years, relates a new episode in the lurching, on-again-off-again saga of Ricardo Somocurcio and the bad girl, who sports a new identity each time he encounters her.

Ricardo is an unusually sympathetic narrator - modest, bookish, utterly trustworthy. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a loving aunt in Miraflores, he has fixed on a simple ambition by the time he first meets the love of his life the summer he turns 15: to live in Paris. Posing as Lily, a Chilean newcomer to the neighborhood, the bad girl is flamboyant and gorgeous, "the incarnation of coquettishness." Ricardo writes, "I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times." In what is to become a lifelong pattern, Lily leads him on before rebuffing him - and then vanishes.

When she turns up again in Paris more than a decade later, it's as Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba for guerrilla training. Ricardo, meanwhile, is training as a simultaneous interpreter. She pretends they never met, then, with an insult, concedes that they have - "Even back then you had a sanctimonious look" - yet denies being Lily the Chilean girl. She accepts his advances passively, unresponsively, and keeps him dangling: "Never lose hope, good boy."

Comrade Arlette's political apathy is as obvious as her sexual indifference. Her outspoken credo is "to get what you want, anything goes." When she allows Ricardo to make love to her, it's clear that she's using him as a possible ticket to stay in Paris.

Three years later, she turns up as the elegant Mme. Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, where her husband is a diplomat and Ricardo works as a translator.

And so it goes. They resume their affair, abuse included. She's both a liar and brutally honest. "How naive you are, what a dreamer," she scolds when Ricardo asks her to marry him. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."

Ricardo is repeatedly taken in and left "a human wreck." He swears it's the last time when he falls into a trap arranged to excite the bad girl's creepy, voyeuristic Japanese lover, yet a few years later he goes into debt to finance her medical care. He retreats between episodes to a "fairly normal, though empty ... dull, flat life," throwing himself into the self-effacing interpreting business at international conferences and berating himself as a "failure ... imbecile."

This works, without trying our patience, because Vargas Llosa succeeds not only in conveying the bad girl's attraction but also in pulling us into Ricardo's cycle of hopefulness, eager to learn what will happen next between them. Is it love, masochism, fate or compulsion that keeps him coming back for more? Whatever it is, most of us have been there at one time or another.

Ricardo's friendships with doomed individuals - a revolutionary in Paris, a hippie artist in London, a fellow translator in Japan - and his unexpected but satisfying discovery of la niña mala's true identity further heighten the novel's considerable allure. (One wishes translator Edith Grossman had left a "niña mala" or two in Spanish for flavor.)

Most impressively, by mirroring Ricardo and the bad girl's tug-of-war with the tug-of-war between democracy and totalitarianism that concurrently roils the world, and especially their native Peru, Vargas Llosa's novel becomes an allegory for the undauntable desire not just for love but also for freedom. Over and over again, the world dashes our hopes just as the bad girl disappoints Vargas Llosa's narrator - and yet we love it and keep hoping for the best anyway.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Frida Kahlo

Peter Schjeldahl writes about Frida Kahlo and a retrospective of her work at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis.

There are so many ways to be interested in Frida Kahlo, who was born a hundred years ago and died forty-seven years later, in 1954, that simply to look at and judge her paintings, as paintings, may seem narrow-minded. No one need appreciate art to justify being a Kahlo fan or even a Kahlo cultist. (Why not? The world will have cults, and who better merits one?) In Mexico, Kahlo’s ubiquitous image has become the counter-Guadalupe, complementing the numinous Virgin as a deathless icon of Mexicanidad. Kahlo’s ascension, since the late nineteen-seventies, to feminist sainthood is ineluctable, though a mite strained. (Kahlo struggled not in common cause with women but, single-handedly, for herself.) And her pansexual charisma, shadowed by tales of ghastly physical and emotional suffering, makes her an avatar of liberty and guts. However, Kahlo’s eminence wobbles unless her work holds up. A retrospective at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, proves that it does, and then some. She made some iffy symbological pictures and a few perfectly awful ones—forgivably, given their service to her always imperilled morale—but her self-portraits cannot be overpraised. They are sui generis in art while collegial with great portraiture of every age. Kahlo is among the winnowed elect of twentieth-century painters who will never be absent for long from the mental museums of future artists.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in the house where she would die, in Coyoacán, then a prosperous suburb and later a district of Mexico City. She was the third child of a Hungarian-German immigrant photographer, who was an atheist Jew, and a pious mestiza from Oaxaca. Polio, at age six, withered her right leg and foot. She was among the rare girls admitted to the sterling National Preparatory School, in Mexico City, where she grew from an effervescent tomboy into a brilliant young woman, during the creative tumult of the nineteen-twenties. When she was eighteen, a bus crash left her with spinal and pelvic damage that would entail many surgeries, some of them probably unnecessary. (Was she masochistic? Anyone doomed to a lifetime of pain will find veins of sweetness in it.) While convalescing, she began to paint, depicting herself, in styles influenced by Renaissance and Mannerist masters, with the aid of a mirror set in the canopy of her bed. In 1928, she took up with Mexico’s chief artist, Diego Rivera, who was twenty years her senior. They married in 1929, divorced for a year in 1939, then remarried. They were the loves of each others’ lives, though with innumerable supplements. Their semi-public affairs (her amours included Leon Trotsky and numerous women); their dealings with famous figures in America and Europe, from John D. Rockefeller to Pablo Picasso; and their political adventures, as Communists subject to sectarian pushes and pulls, make Hayden Herrera’s hugely consequential biography, “Frida” (1983), a delirious read. (Herrera is a co-curator, with Elizabeth Carpenter, of the Walker show.) Kahlo died, probably of a complication of pneumonia, the last in a cascade of deteriorative maladies, a year after the opening of her first solo exhibition in Mexico.

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Art

Las auroras de sangre. Juan de Castellanos y el descubrimiento poético de América - William Ospina

Winston Manrique Sabogal reviews William Ospina's Las auroras de sangre. Juan de Castellanos y el descubrimiento poético de América.

El cielo empezó a reverberar de grises hasta soltar un océano que convirtió en mares la tierra para llevarse Cubagua, Nueva Cádiz, frente a las costas de Venezuela. Fue uno de los primeros episodios que embistió al joven Juan de Castellanos en el umbral del nuevo mundo. Era 1543. Y la vida allí no sabía de recatos.

"Me impactó su capacidad de asumir que la poesía existe para hacernos sentir lo abrumador del destino"

"Los latinoamericanos tenemos que reconciliarnos con esos otros mundos que se fusionaron en América"

Son las primeras luces que arroja William Ospina (Tolima, Colombia, 1954) en Las auroras de sangre (Belacqua) sobre la aventura de este sevillano (Alanís, 1522-Tunja, Colombia, 1607) que se orilló de la codicia y la crueldad de la conquista para ser testigo del deslumbramiento mutuo de dos mundos, que plasmó en Las elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, su particular descubrimiento y conquista de América a través del lenguaje, de la poesía:

"Salían a mirar nuestros navíos

Volvían a los bosques espantados,

Huían en canoas por los ríos,

No saben que hacerse de turbados".

Y así hasta 113.609 versos, que Juan de Castellanos escribió en cuatro partes durante los últimos 30 años de su vida en Colombia, y que se convirtieron en el poema más largo en español. Una especie de Ilíada que no fue entendida durante siglos en ningún lado del Atlántico, pero que en 1999 el escritor colombiano rescató de la incomprensión en uno de los ensayos literarios más importantes de América Latina en los últimos años.

"Él es el mejor ejemplo que España puede mostrar de que su labor en América no fue un mero saqueo, un exterminio y un acto de depredación. Saber que hubo hombres como él, llenos de la cultura del Renacimiento, llenos de lenguaje, nombrando como Adán el primer día toda la realidad de ese continente, enamorados de todo, celebrando las selvas y los lagos, la belleza de los indios del Caribe, su destreza, su fuerza, su ferocidad, tratando de contar todos esos hechos que no se repetirían, haciendo surgir un universo en el ámbito de la lengua, convirtiendo una lengua local en una lengua planetaria, sintiendo admiración y respeto; censurando a menudo los excesos de los guerreros: ¡qué grandeza de espíritu! España merecía saber todo eso: abandonar un poco la fascinación por el costado épico de su conquista y ver la magnitud de su diálogo con otro mundo, su capacidad de arraigar en él, la explicación de por qué un continente habla la lengua castellana. No fue por las espadas ahogadas en sangre, sino porque esta lengua fue capaz de amar a América y de cantarla".

"Porque decían ser estas naciones

Falta de los orgullos y los bríos

Que mueven los humanos corazones

A trastornar los mares y los ríos;

Y no pueden hacer navegaciones

A causa de estar faltos de navíos,

Y que canoas, balsas y piraguas

No podían arar prolijas aguas".

Es la forma como Castellanos va mostrando el nuevo mundo al mundo entero. Lo hace desde esa evocación donde sueños inimaginables cobraron vida. He ahí el impacto que causaron en William Ospina estas elegías: "Su fluidez, su nitidez, su capacidad de hacer surgir un mundo en el lenguaje, su capacidad, que es asombrosa para la época, de abandonar la idea de la poesía como un lenguaje ornamental, alejado del mundo, y de asumir que la poesía existe para hacernos sentir lo tremendo de la historia, lo abrumador de nuestro destino. Baudelaire dijo: "Lo feo puede ser hermoso, lo bonito nunca". Este poema no es bonito: es rudo, poderoso, cruel, deslumbrante, tremendamente humano y está fuera de toda correcta proporción: como lo estuvo la conquista de América. Casi parece imposible que un solo hombre lo haya escrito: tiene la magnitud de una cosmogonía oriental".

"Veréis muchos varones ir en una

Prosperidad que no temió caída,

Y en éstos esta misma ser ninguna,

De su primero ser desvanecida

Usando de sus mañas la fortuna

En los inciertos cambios desta vida;

Otros venir a tanta desventura

Que el suelo les negaba sepultura".

Belleza, sabiduría y temblor en tierras de miedos agazapados hechos palabras musicales. "El Descubrimiento y la Conquista fue un hecho de tales proporciones, que lo primero que produjo en la Península fue un gran silencio. El hecho más importante de la historia planetaria en los últimos siglos no parece haber sido advertido en su magnitud por los poetas del Siglo de Oro: tanto Quevedo como Lope de Vega y Góngora siguen en lo fundamental encerrados en el ámbito de la tradición europea, y si a veces aparecen los temas, la perspectiva es muy distante. Ello es natural, la literatura engendrada por América tenía que surgir inicialmente en el Nuevo Mundo, y no tenía por qué ser comprendida inmediatamente desde Europa. Pero una buena prueba de que España estaba a la altura de las tareas históricas que le correspondían es que detrás del avance, a menudo atroz, de los conquistadores, se dio el avance lleno de perplejidad, de curiosidad y de inspiración creadora de los cronistas".

"La tierra cubren venenosos tiros

Y golpes causadores de suspiros"

"La mayoría no eran inicialmente hombres de letras: la historia iba improvisando sus relatores, sus fabuladores y sus poetas. Pero al mismo tiempo la conciencia profunda de España iba rumiando sus descubrimientos. Tengo la convicción de que la aparición del Quijote es, entre tantas cosas, consecuencia de la aventura de España en el siglo XVI. Una aventura que excedió por sus peligros, por sus atrocidades y maravillas, a todo lo que soñaron "los ciclos de Rolando y de Bretaña", y no fue un hecho literario sino una aventura vital, una confrontación cotidiana durante un siglo de los aventureros con sus sueños, con sus delirios, una aventura de la carne y una aventura de la imaginación. Muchos conquistadores eran de algún modo una suerte de borradores de don Quijote: lectores de novelas de caballerías, buscando en el mundo lo que les habían dicho los libros y los cuentos".

"Mas si también deseas ver mujeres,

Direte dónde viven maniriguas,

Que son mujeres sueltas y flecheras,

Con fama de grandísimas guerreras (...) Pues en tan penitísimas regiones

Podría ser que vivan amazones".

Leyendas, mitos y realidades se trenzan en versos que cantan los mestizajes que formarán la identidad. El futuro. Según William Ospina, "para poder reconciliarnos plenamente con nuestra herencia europea, los latinoamericanos tenemos que reconciliarnos con esos otros mundos que se fusionaron en América: los nativos que vivieron allí treinta mil años, y los hijos de África, la parte más alegre y vigorosa de nuestra cultura".

Tierras de promisión donde un día hubo "dioses vivos que caían y dioses muertos que triunfaban". Pero que cinco siglos después ha pasado de ser puerto de llegada para convertirse en embarcadero hacia el resto del mundo. "El intercambio no ha cesado. Con Las auroras de sangre me interesa demostrar que desde muy temprano se dieron grandes aventuras del comienzo de la modernidad literaria. Castellanos hizo el primer poema verdaderamente americano en lengua castellana, y es el fundador de la poesía en diez países de América. Pero, claro, él vivió setenta años en las Indias, y se convirtió en un poeta americano". El que hoy, cuatro siglos después de su muerte, vuelve al haber atisbado con sus versos la manera de adentrarse futuro arriba.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Colombian Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Heller McAlpin reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Bad Girl.

Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful new novel, "The Bad Girl," is about one man's persistent desire for a difficult woman. It is also, cunningly, about a broader persistence of hope for a better world. On one level a deliciously absorbing love story that details the eponymous bad girl's damaging lifelong hold on his narrator, Vargas Llosa's novel spans decades and continents - and, in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal.

Although less overtly political than such earlier novels as "Death in the Andes" and "The Feast of the Goat," Vargas Llosa sets his thwarted love story against a backdrop of social turmoil, revolutions and the recurrent heartbreak of failed democracy in his native Peru. "The Bad Girl" spans 1950s Lima, 1960s revolutionary Paris, 1970s hippie London, 1980s swinging Tokyo and 1990s theatrical Spain. Vargas Llosa's novel is more similar in tone to his 1977 dazzler, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," than to his last, quasi-historical novel, "The Way to Paradise" (2003), about Paul Gauguin and his socialist grandmother. Each of its seven long chapters, separated by years, relates a new episode in the lurching, on-again-off-again saga of Ricardo Somocurcio and the bad girl, who sports a new identity each time he encounters her.

Ricardo is an unusually sympathetic narrator - modest, bookish, utterly trustworthy. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a loving aunt in Miraflores, he has fixed on a simple ambition by the time he first meets the love of his life the summer he turns 15: to live in Paris. Posing as Lily, a Chilean newcomer to the neighborhood, the bad girl is flamboyant and gorgeous, "the incarnation of coquettishness." Ricardo writes, "I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times." In what is to become a lifelong pattern, Lily leads him on before rebuffing him - and then vanishes.

When she turns up again in Paris more than a decade later, it's as Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba for guerrilla training. Ricardo, meanwhile, is training as a simultaneous interpreter. She pretends they never met, then, with an insult, concedes that they have - "Even back then you had a sanctimonious look" - yet denies being Lily the Chilean girl. She accepts his advances passively, unresponsively, and keeps him dangling: "Never lose hope, good boy."

Comrade Arlette's political apathy is as obvious as her sexual indifference. Her outspoken credo is "to get what you want, anything goes." When she allows Ricardo to make love to her, it's clear that she's using him as a possible ticket to stay in Paris.

Three years later, she turns up as the elegant Mme. Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, where her husband is a diplomat and Ricardo works as a translator.

And so it goes. They resume their affair, abuse included. She's both a liar and brutally honest. "How naive you are, what a dreamer," she scolds when Ricardo asks her to marry him. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."

Ricardo is repeatedly taken in and left "a human wreck." He swears it's the last time when he falls into a trap arranged to excite the bad girl's creepy, voyeuristic Japanese lover, yet a few years later he goes into debt to finance her medical care. He retreats between episodes to a "fairly normal, though empty ... dull, flat life," throwing himself into the self-effacing interpreting business at international conferences and berating himself as a "failure ... imbecile."

This works, without trying our patience, because Vargas Llosa succeeds not only in conveying the bad girl's attraction but also in pulling us into Ricardo's cycle of hopefulness, eager to learn what will happen next between them. Is it love, masochism, fate or compulsion that keeps him coming back for more? Whatever it is, most of us have been there at one time or another.

Ricardo's friendships with doomed individuals - a revolutionary in Paris, a hippie artist in London, a fellow translator in Japan - and his unexpected but satisfying discovery of la niña mala's true identity further heighten the novel's considerable allure. (One wishes translator Edith Grossman had left a "niña mala" or two in Spanish for flavor.)

Most impressively, by mirroring Ricardo and the bad girl's tug-of-war with the tug-of-war between democracy and totalitarianism that concurrently roils the world, and especially their native Peru, Vargas Llosa's novel becomes an allegory for the undauntable desire not just for love but also for freedom. Over and over again, the world dashes our hopes just as the bad girl disappoints Vargas Llosa's narrator - and yet we love it and keep hoping for the best anyway.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Cautiva directed by Gastón Biraben

Boyd Williamson reviews Cautiva directed by Gastón Biraben.

Quietly angry and subtly polemical, Cautiva addresses Argentina’s long period of willful amnesia following military rule from 1976 to 1983 and the “disappearance” of thousands of student activists, union members, and other dissidents. First-time director Gastón Biraben creates a poignant allegory of this historical-political amnesia and the struggle to overcome it with the story of Cristina (Bárbara Lombardo), a teenager who, one day in 1994, finds that her parents are not who she thought they were and that neither is she.

The film announces it’s political intentions, and targets, immediately. It opens with a ghostly, staticky television image of a stadium full of ecstatic soccer fans chanting and waving the cheerful light-blue and white Argentine colors. As the image becomes clearer it reveals itself to be a broadcast of Argentina’s famous 1978 World Cup victory over the Netherlands. After the Argentines score the goal putting them over the top, the home-town crowd erupts and the television camera focuses on a couple of figures sitting close to the field: “President General Videla”, reads the yellow text under a shot of a mustachioed, aristocratic-looking man in a business suit; there’s also “Admiral Massera”, who has a grin on his concrete-block face; looking grimmer and wearing a grey trench coat against a light drizzle is “Ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger”. After the game has ended, nine men, including Videla and Massera, are brought onto the field. “Their Excellencies, the commanders of the nation’s Armed Forces; members of the Military Junta!” announces the sportscaster as the crowd is obscured by confetti and blue and white flags.

It’s the day of the ’78 World Cup, we find out later, that Cristina is born to a blindfolded and bruised woman in the dank, fluorescent-lit basement of a military prison. Fast forward 16 years and Cristina is celebrating her “Quinceañera” in a comfortable, loving, upper-middle class home outside of Buenos Aires. Cristina is a popular, pretty girl who does well in school and is adored by her parents and godparents—but there are early hints that she doesn’t quite belong, that she’s different. She has a sober, mostly unsmiling face—reflecting the tone of the movie—that contrasts with the gregariousness of her privileged classmates and friends. She also betrays a surprising amount of sympathy for Angélica (Mercedes Funes), a rebellious and angry girl who sits in the back of class and interrupts a lecture on Argentina’s constitution with an expletive-laden diatribe against the recent presidential pardon of ex-junta officials.

Read More






Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Cinema

The Complete Poetry - César Vallejo

John Timpane reviews César Vallejo's Complete Poetry.

What a year was 1922. That year, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” was published. So was James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” So was Jean Toomer’s “Cane.” Whatever “modernism” means, 1922 was one of its peaks.

Also that year, a poet from Peru published a book called “Trilce”—to complete silence at home and abroad. Too different, a departure too far.

The intervening 85 years have made clear that “Trilce” deserves to stand among the most original and startling productions of 20th century literature. Its author, César Vallejo (1892-1938), stood out even among Peruvian poets—he was of indigenous blood, with two grandmothers from the Chimu people of the Andes. Today he has a place among the finest of his century’s poets. And now we have this spectacular edition of his complete poetry, edited and translated, also spectacularly, by poet Clayton Eshleman. A priceless window opens on a poet who is by turns invigorating, incomprehensible, and inimitable.

There are four Vallejos, four poetries.

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

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."

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging?
» Links to this article

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."

Please visit SPLALit aStore
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.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
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.






Please visit SPLALit aStore
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.





Please visit SPLALit aStore
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."

Please visit SPLALit aStore
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.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Chilean Cinema