NY Mag - The Year in Books

Junot Díaz and Roberto Bolaño among the New York Magazine's "Culture Awards" choices.

1. BEST NOVEL
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
Among the abstract categories routinely killed off by doomsaying cultural critics (cf. irony), the novel has long been a favorite target. Often overlooked in such forecasts, however, is that—at least when it’s done right—the genre is invincible. For 400 years, it has laughed at, then absorbed, every threat. Díaz’s novel, which tells the story of Oscar (a monstrously fat, occasionally suicidal Dominican-American “ghetto nerd”), ingests such an overflowing bucketful of poison pills that any other book probably would have died: anime, role-playing games, comic books, the Internet. But Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic- book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness. By the end, his geek references—“Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ringwraith, but he wasn’t no orc either”—take on solid weight, like Milton dropping allusions to Dante and Greek myth.

2. MOST DESERVING PROMOTION TO THE CANON
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The book begins with a diary entry in which the narrator tells us that he’s joined a radical school of poets called the “visceral realists.” In the next entry, he admits that he doesn’t really know what visceral realism is. The novel was published in Spanish in 1998, and this translation seems to have ushered in Bolaño’s American moment. An English version of 2666—the alleged career-capping masterpiece he was working on at his death—is already one of the most anticipated novels of next year.

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Latin American Literature

The Best of 2007

Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is one of the Village Voice's writers choice for their favorite 20 books of the year.

A decade after his legendary story collection Drown, Díaz seems like a different writer, but just as strong—where the earlier book was dead-serious, gory, and cinematic, Oscar Wao uses a light touch and incisive comedic sensibility to tell the story of a fat Dominican nerd from New Jersey who can't get a date; a Dominican dictator who can't not get a date; an immigrant family creaking and snapping under the weight of both; and a fukú the size of Hispaniola.

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Dominican Literature

Best books of 2007

The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors.

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. - Jabari Asim

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Nan A. Talese). A book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. The setting is Bogota, Colombia. Far above politics, right up into high art. - Carolyn See

In Her Absence, by Antonio Munoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other). This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely on a civil servant and his passionate yet painful relationship with his wife of six years. - Brigitte Weeks

Nada, by Carmen Laforet; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Modern Library). After six decades, it has lost none of its power and originality, and we are fortunate to have it in this fine translation. - JY

Dancing to "Almendra", by Mayra Montero; translated by Edith Grossman (FSG). The fictional, gossamer beauty and blood-soaked brutality that personifies Cuba of 1957. - Joanne Omang

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins). Readers will recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Peru. A fable for the entire continent. - Jonathan Yardley

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Latin American Literature

República y Grau

A short story by Daniel Alarcón.

El ciego vivía solo en una habitación independiente encima de una bodega, en una calle no muy lejos de la casa de Maico. Se ubicaba subiendo una pequeña cuesta, como todo en aquel barrio. No había nada en las paredes de la habitación del ciego, ni un lugar donde sentarse, de manera que Maico se quedó de pie. Tenía diez años. Había una cama de una plaza, una mesita de noche con una radio envuelta con cinta adhesiva y una bacinica. El ciego tenía el cabello entrecano y era mucho mayor que el padre de Maico. El niño bajó la mirada y formó con los pies un pequeño montículo de polvo en el suelo de cemento, mientras su padre y el ciego hablaban. El niño no los escuchaba, pero nadie esperaba tampoco que lo hiciera. No se sorprendió cuando una diminuta araña negra emergió del insignificante montículo que había formado. La araña se alejó rápidamente por el piso y desapareció bajo la cama. Maico levantó la mirada. Una telaraña brillaba en una esquina del techo. Era la única decoración del cuarto.

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Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru in 1977 and raised in the Southern United States. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly magazine based in Lima. His works include the short story collection "War by Candlelight" and the novel "Lost City Radio".





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Peruvian Literature

Premio Tusquets de novela

Mexican novelist Elmer Mendoza has won the Tusquets award with his novel "Quién quiere vivir para siempre" (Who wants to live forever).
Mendoza was born in 1949 in Culiacán, capital of the Sinaloa state, also wrote the novels "Cóbraselo caro" (2005), "Efecto Tequila" (2004), Dashiell Hammett award finalist in 2005, and El amante de Janis Joplin (2001), awarded with the Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares.





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Mexico Literature

Cuban Napkin Fiction

Leonardo Padura wrote Esquire this napkin.

Read the text here.





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Cuban Literature

Cervantes prize 2007

The Argentine poet Juan Gelman has won the Cervantes prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.
Gelman, 77, has published more than 20 books of poetry since 1956, and is widely considered to be Argentina's leading contemporary poet. His poems address his Jewish heritage, family, Argentina and his painful experience as a political activist during his country's 1976-83 "dirty war" against leftist dissent, an ordeal that led to his fleeing Argentina for Europe.





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Argentine Literature

100 Notable Books of 2007

This year's New York Times' 100 Notable Books includes 5 Latin American Books, and Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives made it to The 10 Best Books of 2007 list.

THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.

DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

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Latin American Literature

José Luís Peixoto: Blank Gaze

Daniel Hahn reviews José Luís Peixoto' "Blank Gaze".

An unnamed village in the Alentejo region, southern Portugal. Its inhabitants are rural, and poor – some are desperate, some more or less resigned, but all are poor.

Among them are the old twins joined at a little finger, identical, with identical gaits and postures, and (though they don't know this) an identical number of white hairs on their heads; and Old Gabriel, who is 120 when the story begins and then proceeds to age several decades further. And then there's the cook who falls in love, and starts making exquisite little figures out of her food. The feuding cousins, and the local priest – more frequently known as "the devil" – who torments them. A master carpenter and the blind prostitute who becomes his bride. There's a voice speaking from inside the old trunk in the big house. And there's a man in a windowless room, writing.

In presenting these characters and the vignettes that constitute their lives, novelist José Luís Peixoto pulls off a impressive and unusual feat; he creates characters who are archetypes, and yet simultaneously ones who are drawn in sufficient detail to demand (and earn) the sympathy of his readers.

The characters are general – many, the women especially, are denied even a name – but the descriptions of their stories and their sufferings are sometimes dreadfully particular. Just look closely at the lips of that tiny stillborn child... Life may seem a shared, common, endlessly repeated experience, but death is a particular, personal and lonely one.

Peixoto does give us weddings as well as funerals, though; there are moments of joyful news, new homes, happy births, unions and reunions, moments showing the unthinking tenderness of lovers, of parents and children. And there are pauses, of something like peace; peace that is hot and dry and grimly poor, but peaceful, at least – and then, out of this seeming stillness, burst other moments that are stark and startlingly brutal. The author gives us agonised death in childbirth, as well as fires, beatings and terrible suicides.

It's these images of grief that are the most vivid – it's death, but given to us as a vivid, lived experience, thanks to some intensely beautiful writing packed with startling and memorable images. (A giant's hand on display in church, anyone?)

Sadness and death, and the awful inevitabilities in each character's story, resonate throughout Richard Zenith's well-pitched translation. But the trust required by the author to follow his fragmented and claustrophobic tale is amply repaid; his bold, incantatory prose is consistently beautiful – apparently simple but also incredibly rich and resonant.

Voices are echoed in other voices, and the dialogue pulses along within it all, undifferentiated. The storytelling role passes between an external narrator and first-person characters and back again; the narrator's own wise words are picked up later and repeated by the characters, as though these portentous lines, these profound thoughts, are out there, abstracted from their lives, just humming in the air, like great discovered truths...

That even these weighty lines are moving and thought-provoking, rather than (as well might have been) tiresomely over-zealous or pretentious, is further testament to the author's considerable skills.

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Portuguese Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Amy Linden reviews Junot Diaz' "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao".

Not sure if them there literary folks call it a comeback. But when you write a book, said book blows up, (and upon doing so breaks more ground than a jackhammer, as well as garnering unanimous acclaim), chances are good that when the author returns, his new book will be greeted with mad attention, anticipation and maybe even (to keep the alliteration going), apprehension.

Eleven years after his masterful collection of short stories, "Drown," Junot Diaz, the once and future king of Dominican American fiction, has returned: not only with his first full length novel, but possibly - hell, definitely - one of the best books you will ever read in your whole damn life. Period.

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao is blindingly good - loaded with warmth, keen observation, biting political and social commentary and the sort of humor that makes you laugh out loud, and then pause to reflect on what was so funny. Diaz peppers his narrative with Spanglish, breaks it down with a flow to give Jigga sleepless nights, offers a brutal history and most of all, more of the people in Oscar's wondrous life.

Above all, this is a saga about family. The roots. The aunts, uncles, grandmothers and cousins. The ties that bind. The generational pull and the traditions and superstitions - in this case the curse of the Fuku- and just what it means to truly love, consequences and all. Motivating this socio-economic sit-com/Dominican "Dynasty" are some vibrant and unforgettable folks. There's Oscar's sister Lola, a heartbreaker who masks her sexual siren's call by becoming the neighborhood's first Dominican Goth. There's Oscar's and her moms, Belicia - a former DR beauty queen whose bombshell looks and "dear diary" naiveté results in the kind of damage that will never be repaired. There's dedicated homeboy, relentless skirt chaser and Oscar's BFF, Yunior (a holdover from "Drown," as well as a wisecracking stand-in for Diaz himself) and, of course, the man-child in the vortex of everything swirling around him, Oscar; an overweight, virgin, comic-book-collecting, JR Tolkien-obsessed, sweet-natured, pathetically romantic nerd who spend his days looking for love in all the wrong places.

The book is set in NYC's little DR, Washington Heights, Patterson, New Jersey, and the Dominican Republic: both present and horrific past tense, back when its citizens were terrorized by the bloodthirsty dictator Rafael Trujillo. But the infusion of pure evil doesn't read as despair, at least not all of the time. Diaz's powerful prose turns ugly into beauty, painful into triumphant and ordinary into revelatory. Oh yeah. The prose. People. Check the technique. Describing a particularly deadly cop Diaz writes, "He was one of those tall, arrogant, acerbically handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. Also one of those very bad men that not even post modernism can explain away." What?! But without being all experimental or obtuse or literary on your ass (this is one of the most user-friendly of "important" works you will come across), Diaz pushes and pushes and then goes to Staples and gets himself another damn envelope - one big enough to contain the magic and mayhem contained within The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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Dominican Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera directed by Mike Newell

Ryan Stewart reviews Mike Newell's "Love in the Time of Cholera".

Great literature is dumbed down to drippy soap opera in Mike Newell's adaptation of the Gabriel García Márquez novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. Set in Colombia between the 1870s and the 1930s, the story follows a born romantic named Florentino Ariza (played in teen years by Unax Ugalde and in adulthood by the great Javier Bardem) who never forgets his first love, Fermina (Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno) even as he becomes the Latin Neil Strauss, bedding several hundred women and dutifully recording his conquests in a notebook. Having lost Fermina to the straight arrow Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) in his youth, Florentino vows the ultimate romantic gesture — he will quietly outlive his rival, however long that takes, and then renew his pursuit of Fermina.

To say Newell has no feel for Márquez 's voice would be a kind understatement. Instead of spilling the author's vaunted magical realism onto the screen the way, say, Guillermo del Toro might, or exploring the "rationalism vs. romanticism" battle represented by the leading men, the director seems taxed by the demands of simply filming the wide-ranging, ethereal book. Scene after dry, airless scene is ticked off in a workmanlike manner, and though we occasionally hear a Márquez zinger — "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse" — we feel none of the weight of his cold, time-averse passions or recognize his obsessions, such as keeping the spirit vital as the body diminishes. Instead of wrestling these abstractions onto the screen, Newell simply boils Cholera down to a one-dimensional Romeo & Juliet knock-off, awash in passionate glances, pained outbursts and chest-beating Shakira ballads.

The damage caused by the director's inexplicable reliance on melodrama can't be overstated, as it turns multiple scenes into unintentional comedy sketches. Consider an early one, in which Dr. Urbino makes a house call on Fermina to assess fears that she may be infected with cholera. As Urbino enters the room, the camera locks on both of their gazes, after which Urbino strides across the room and aggressively yanks open Fermina's shirt, exposing her breasts before smushing his head into them in a faux-diagnostic gesture. Or consider the scene where Florentino and his mother both explode into tears over his inability to find love and they have a good, long cry while we, the audience, sink down in our seats in embarrassment.

There's no "on the other hand" coming, but if there was, it would revolve around Bardem, who at least tries for a relatable performance as the dogged dreamer who hopes in vain to recapture Fermina's affections, despite her being "cured" of her own romanticism by Dr. Urbino. As Cholera wears on, Florentino goes about making his living in a telegraph office, entangles himself in romantic dalliances with non-Ferminas and shoots the breeze with his uncle, played by Hector Elizondo, sporting some impressively bushy mutton chops. This twinkly eyed character, on hand to give advice to his lovelorn nephew, is a variance on the persona Elizondo has recreated continuously since 1990's Pretty Woman, but I suppose it works.

What doesn't work at all — saving the worst for last — is a ship-sinking performance by John Leguizamo as Lorenzo, the disapproving father of Fermina who scuttles her early courtship with Florentino. Putting aside the weird fact that Leguizamo and Mezzogiorno are more or less contemporaries in age, I've rarely seen an actor so jarringly out of step with his role. Leguizamo doesn't recite his dialogue so much as he spits it out in a weirdly affected, stuttering voice that has the feel of something improvised seconds before the camera rolled. Why did Newell allow this? Could the once-promising director of Donnie Brasco not be bothered to pull Leguizamo aside and ask him not to single-handedly derail his film? Love in the Time of Cholera isn't enough of a pitfall to slow down the Bardem juggernaut, but Newell should choose his next project more carefully.

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Latin American Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera directed by Mike Newell

Roger Moore reviews "Love in the Time of Cholera".

They've gotten an entertaining movie out of Gabriel García Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera." But it's also one of those epic miscalculations that Hollywood makes, every so often, to let us know that, no, they haven't necessarily read the book. Well, not all of it.

A spotty skip through a 50-year love triangle set in Colombia, it's a morally murky tale of undying love, unrepentant promiscuity, a South American "Great Gatsby" that utterly loses track of its tragedy and the big cholera metaphor at its heart.

Bells are ringing in 1930s Cartagena. An old man (Javier Bardem) rolls the naked coed off him and says that "a pretty big fish" must have died. He figures out who that was in an instant. It was the beloved doctor (Benjamin Bratt), who married the dirty old man's lifelong love (Giovanna Mezzogiorno).

But now she's available. He dresses and goes to profess his "51 years, nine months and four days" torch for her, only to be rejected.

Again.

Thus begin the flashbacks to the late 1870s, the "time of cholera" of the title. That's when Florentino first met Fermina, when her father forbids her from marrying the poor telegraph messenger who woos his "crowned goddess" with letters in purple prose. Florentino isn't taking the father's warnings seriously.

"There is no greater glory than to die for love." She is sent away, only to read his forbidden telegrams with the help of her too-saucy cousin (Catalina Moreno Sandino, terrific). He wastes away so much that his mother (the great Fernanda Montenegro) fears it is cholera. When Fermina comes down with the same lovesickness, the doctor makes his entrance, and you can see her father's greed sucking in through his crooked teeth. Here is her proper match.

Bratt, looking dapper, sophisticated and regal, is well-cast as the educated man who sets his top hat for Fermina. But Mezzogiorno starts out bland and blank-faced, no one's idea of a "love at first sight" prize.

Director Mike Newell settles on his movie's tone when he put Hector Elizondo in the role of Florentino's rich, whimsical uncle. "Love in the Time of Cholera" becomes something of a farce from the moment Elizondo makes his entrance, as Florentino drowns his lovesickness in mostly comical sexual conquests, which he tabulates and documents in his diaries.

You don't have to have read this Oprah Book Club selection to see that they've shortchanged the doctor who somehow saved the city from cholera, that Florentino's journey from stricken to sad but sexually sated is meant to be more than mere farce, and that Mezzogiorno doesn't have the charisma or sex appeal to carry her third of the movie.

With its overwrought romance and stumbling timeline and international cast (including Liev Schreiber), all speaking Spanish-accented English, this is like a Spanglish "Memoirs of a Geisha," more a marketing package than a movie.

But all that said, there's enough to make this feast worth sitting through, and best of all, make you want to read the book.

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Latin American Literature