Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Lucinda Byatt reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Peru's leading contemporary writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, needs little introduction after rising to fame in the boom years of Latin American literature. This latest work combines his political and literary passions, expressed as always with wit and irony, but without the grand scope of his "total novels". The Bad Girl is primarily an analysis of love in which Vargas Llosa questions the nature of unrequited love and abject devotion expressed in "cheap, sentimental" language.

Vargas Llosa narrates the story through Ricardo, a teenager from the rich suburb of Miraflores in Lima, whose romance with Lily throbbed to the explosion of mambo in the summer of 1950. The evocation of Lima at the time is hauntingly nostalgic. Lily's unmasking and disappearance follow in rapid succession, yet the "bad girl" has left her mark. After moving to Paris, the haunt of other exiled "writers who didn't write, artists who didn't paint", and qualifying as a Unesco translator, Ricardo again meets Lily, now a trainee guerrilla fighter, Comrade Arlette.

But after using him for her own ends, she again disappears. As the pattern repeats itself, the predictability of each parting and "surprise" reunion becomes rather tedious. Indeed, Ricardo wonders if, after 30 years of suffering, this farce could still be called a l
ove story?

Ricardo's work as a translator also provides Vargas Llosa with a wonderful pretext to explore that "profession of phantoms", scathingly described by a colleague as a "disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between".

Taken solely at face value, the main characters remain unconvincingly monochromatic – Ricardo the unambitious drudge who drowns his misery in work, and the "bad girl" a scheming liar whose pursuit of material wealth overrides any compunction for having deserted her family and ruined countless other lives.

But the novel remains intriguing and poignant, sustained by historical evocations of the Fifties and Sixties, the violent years of the Shining Path, and the author's own unsuccessful political foray into Peruvian politics.

Above all, it pays homage to the Vargas Llosa's literary heroes, their sentiments and the redeeming power of love.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Perla Sassón-Henry: Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds

Noam Cohen reviews Perla Sassón-Henry's Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds.

THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet. A fusty sort who from the 1930s through the 1950s spent much of his time as a chief librarian, Borges (1899-1986) valued printed books as artifacts and not just for the words they contained. He frequently set his stories in a pretechnological past and was easily enthralled by the authority of ancient texts.

Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

Among the scores of Borges stories, a core group — including “Funes the Memorious,” “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — first appeared in the United States as “Labyrinths” in the early 1960s. With their infinite libraries and unforgetting men, collaborative encyclopedias and virtual worlds conjured up from the printed page and portals that watch over the entire planet, these stories (along with a few others like “The Aleph”) have become a canon for those at the intersection of new technology and literature.

New Directions, the publisher of “Labyrinths,” reissued the collection in May, for the first time in more than 40 years. In a sign of the changing times it includes an introduction from William Gibson, the cyberpunk author. (The original, by contrast, came with a preface from André Maurois of the Académie Française.)

By 1955 Borges had lost his sight yet was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. Assessing his predicament (the digital age predicament) of having access to so much information and so few ways to process it, Borges wrote in “Poem of the Gifts,” “No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

What follows are excerpts from prophetic Borges short stories — translated by Andrew Hurley in “Borges: Collected Fictions” (Penguin Books) — and examples of those prophesies fulfilled.

Infinite Encyclopedia

THEN “Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

NOW Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 “active contributors,” many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia’s contributors is: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

Life Is Like A Blog

THEN “Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. ‘I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,’ he said to me. ... And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” “Funes” (1942)

Now The path from diary to blog to the frequently updated “microblog” has now descended to “life-logging.” Not content merely to record their thoughts or even daily activities, life-loggers record and preserve everything they see, hear, say and read during the day. The world-recognized early adopter is Gordon Bell, a 73-year-old computer programmer who wears an audio recorder as well as a tiny camera that snaps a picture every 60 seconds. A 2006 profile in Fast Company described Mr. Bell as at one time being “worried about filling up his hard-drive space too quickly.” He adds a gigabyte of information a month and figures that an average 72-year-old person would require one to three terabytes, “a hefty amount of storage.”

Nothing Is Forgotten

THEN “I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures.” “Funes” (1942)

Now There once was a time when a poet could assert that “the revolution will not be televised.” But today, of course, even a politician’s informal meet-and-greet will be recorded for posterity. Senator George Allen of Virginia learned this in 2006 when a tape of him calling his opponent’s videographer a “macaca,” a racially tinged epithet, spread like a virus across the state and, soon, the world. He lost his re-election bid.

Universal Library

THEN “From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is ‘total’ ... that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. ... When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist.” “The Library of Babel” (1941)

Now In announcing that an ambitious international project to digitize universities’ book collections had passed the 1.5 million mark, one of its organizers, Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, proclaimed in November: “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language.” To others, the Internet itself is the Universal Library, where readers can search for recipes, medical treatments, barroom trivia or perhaps even Google themselves.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Alan Cheuse reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Just as we have our one-of-a-kind popular writers these days in John Grisham and Stephen King, Spain claims Arturo Pérez-Reverte, one of contemporary fiction's great entertainers. Most of his novels take us back into European history, but now and then he has touched on the contemporary world. In "The Painter of Battles," his latest novel to be translated here, he introduces us to a contemporary with a vengeance: Andres Faulques, a renowned war photographer, who, under the weight of grief and conscience, has withdrawn to an old tower overlooking a bay on Spain's southeast coast, where he has given up photography for painting, an art form he finds difficult and laborious.

"He had a good hand for drawing," we learn in the opening chapter, "but he was a mediocre painter." Faulques, or "the painter of battles" as he is often referred to in these pages, is pushing ahead with his new life-project, a mural on the subject of war that will cover all of the cracking inside walls of the tower. His monumental project incorporates images from major battle paintings by various Western artists as well as some from his two decades as a battlefield photographer in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere (accompanied in recent years by his last lover, a daunting though not greatly talented Italian woman named Olvido Ferrara). "There was no ambition to achieve a masterwork," we hear. "[T]he mural did not even pretend to be original, although in reality it was the sum and combination of countless images taken from painting and photography that would be impossible without the existence and the eye of the man who was painting in the tower."

The second chapter immediately changes the pitch of the narrative. It opens with the appearance of a visitor to the tower, a stranger who over the course of the rest of the novel becomes quite familiar to the painter of battles. His name is Ivo Markovic, a former foot soldier, who announces to Faulques that he wants revenge for being featured in one of the man's photographs from a battlefield in the Balkans.

The photograph "destroyed my life," and brought down horror on him and his family, Markovic explains. "Now I know enough to agree that it wasn't entirely the work of chance, since there are circumstances that brought you and me to that exact moment on that exact day. And as a consequence of the process begun by you, by me, by whoever, I'm here now. To kill you."

The rest of the novel takes us back and forth between the painter's daily round and his recollections of his past work as a photographer, with his memories of the now deceased Olvido growing more powerful by the hour as his final confrontation with Markovic draws inevitably closer. Were it not for his recollective state of mind, Faulques' encounters with Markovic would have made for a taut if melodramatic narrative - one about half the size of the present volume. But those forays into the past, added to the pages given over to the description of the painter's unfolding mural, lift the story out of the realm of melodrama and give it a heft and gravity it probably could not have otherwise obtained.

"The painter of battles stirred, running his fingers along the cold, rough edges of the crack in the wall. Raw meat, he remembered suddenly, beside amphibian tracks in the sand. Horror always lying in wait, demanding tithes and first fruits, poised to decapitate Euclid with the scythe of chaos. Butterflies fluttering through all wars and all peaces. Every moment was a blend of possible and impossible situations, of cracks predicted from that first instant at a temperature of three billion kelvins within the fourteen seconds and the three minutes following the Big Bang, the beginning of a series of precise coincidences that create man, and that kill him. Drunken gods playing chess, Olympian risk-taking, an errant meteorite only ten kilometers in diameter that, when it struck the Earth and annihilated all animals weighing more than twenty-five kilos, cleared the way for the then small and timid mammals that sixty-five million years later would become Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo occisor."

Laying on page after page of this philosophical rhetoric, the way his artist hero slathers parts of his mural in paint, tends to amplify Faulques' fate, as Pérez-Reverte elevates his novel above the level of the merely entertaining pages of King and Grisham. It also, alas, reminds American readers of the sublime rhetoric of Faulkner and how such passages in the hands of a master can add to the momentum of the story and how, in instances such as this, it can also drown out the music of the plot.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Jose Saramago: The Double

Michael Freeman reviews José Saramago's The Double.

In his recent novel "The Double," the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago looks at the theme of identity, and just how much our personalities dictate who we are, in the story Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a history teacher in a secondary school whose life is completely shaken up one evening after he watches a routine comedy.

Tertuliano is feeling depressing and thinking of breaking up with his girlfriend. A colleague at the school recommends that he rent out a movie, and he has just the title for him: a comedy called "The Race Is To The Swift." Tertuliano rents the video and watches it that night, but finds it to be lame and unfunny, a complete waste of his time. He goes to bed, still feeling downbeat.

But in the middle of the night, he wakes up thinking he's heard something in the apartment. He gets up, and finds himself alone; but then he notices that silly video is playing again. Tertuliano sits down to watch, and that's when he notices it: one of the actors in the movie, in a small bit part, looking exactly like him -- almost as if he had a twin out there.

From then on, Tertuliano becomes obsessed with finding the name of that actor.

At this point, "The Double" seems almost comical, as Tertuliano goes to great lengths in his frantic search, renting out every video he can find by the same production company, and watching hours and hours of movies to spot this lone actor. He goes from being depressed and withdrawn to almost manic in his determination to locate his double. Tertuliano also goes to great lengths to avoid letting his collagues or his girlfriend know what he's up to, and his efforts are quite comical.

Then he discovers the name of the actor, who has roles in several of the production company's movies. He even writes a "fan" letter to the lowly bit player, convincing his girlfriend to pretend she's the one sending it to mask his identity. But when Tertuliano finally learns the real name and address of his double, the book starts to take on a much darker, and more ominous, tone. It begins when he calls the actor's apartment and gets the man's wife on the phone. Only, she's immediately convinced that she's talking to her own husband. It seems Tertuliano and this actor share more than just a striking resemblance. Their voices are identical as well.

Saramago moves to the meeting between the two men, and there are a few sharp twists to come before the book's very chilling ending. Along the way, Saramago's tale raises some intriguing questions for the ongoing debate about human cloning. It is a remarkable breakthrough waiting to be discovered, or a ticking time bomb disaster waiting to go off?

Saramago's book provides ammunition for both sides. For one thing, he debunks the myth that we're all unique based on our outward appearances alone. Tertuliano and his twin, who are not related by the same parents, nevertheless have unique and different personalities -- disastrously so, it turns out, as one of them develops an angry, almost resentful view of the notion that he has an exact twin wandering around. Saramago also suggests that few among us could cope psychologically with the notion that someone out there looks and sounds exactly like we do -- and could step into our shoes anytime they wanted to, in essence "playing" us for our friends, co-workers and loved one. It could quite literally become a dark obsession we can't control.

"The Double" is a fascinating book that doesn't aim to politicize the cloning debate, but to offer a careful study of how one individual might react to having a double. Saramago's conclusions are as eerie as they are believable.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Bernado Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son

David Flusfeder reviews Bernado Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.
Bernardo Atxaga's leisurely novel is a rare thing in our literary culture. Look around a bookshop's tables of fiction and you will see very few translated books; maybe a couple of contemporary novels from France, a few reissued classics from Russia and Germany and South America. The rest will be British and American.

Bernardo Atxaga is a Basque novelist, writing in a language that has fewer than a million speakers, and yet whose work has commanded an international audience.

The Accordionist's Son begins with the untimely death of its hero and supposed author, David Imaz, on his ranch in California, a long way from his home in the Basque village of Obaba. In the introduction we are told that David's book will be "very interesting, very dense…events and facts have all been crammed in like anchovies in a glass jar". In fact - and this is both the book's weakness and its strength - it reads like a slowly unfolding memoir.

We are moved back in time, first into the romance of how David and his (American) wife met and fell in love, and then to his 1960s boyhood in Obaba, where he did the sorts of things that boys do everywhere: flirting, fighting, squabbling with his father and falling in love.

But this is Franco's Spain, where the men with power in the village, including David's father, Angel, are those who fought or conspired for the winning side in the Civil War. Before we can approach these unpleasant truths, though, we pass several seasons in the life of the village, where things pass slowly.

The most remarkable events are David's expulsion from school, after being caught with a pornographic magazine that belongs to his friend Martin (who will later become a cocaine-tooting nightclub entrepreneur and boxing promoter); his hiding of his Uncle Juan's horse so that the rich Fascist's daughter will be unable to buy it; and his love affairs.

The most poignant of these is his afternoon of love in room 27 of the Hotel Alaska with Martin's sister, the lame Theresa. She has always loved him, while he has always loved the virginal Virginia, who is engaged to a sailor who will later be lost at sea.

In defiance of Chekhov's maxim that a pistol introduced in Act 1 must always be fired in Act 3, Theresa's pocket revolver is introduced with no greater shock ensuing than the death of a sparrow.

But there have been human deaths: the village was ripped apart in the Civil War, with Uncle Juan on the Republican side and Angel the accordionist implicated in the murders of Republican sympathisers. (Moral value here is generally equated with which side a character supported, or would have, in the Civil War.)

And the boy David, the reluctant accordionist and 1960s adolescent, becomes obsessed with disinterring the truths of the village's past.

The surface of village life is finally lifted, and we are thrust into murder and conspiracy in the story of Don Pedro "The American" (a Leftist villager so-called because he once lived in Canada), who had been chosen for death but managed to get away.

By the end of the novel, subtly, with the reader almost being unaware of the process taking place, we are in tune with the lost rhythms of Basque rural life and able to begin to comprehend a world that supported both communal village traditions and the atrocity of Guernica.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Barrie Swift reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Andres Faulques has spent his life photographing wars. Now retired to an 18th century coastal watchtower, he is painting a giant mural on its walls to capture what his photographs couldn't the meaning of war.

A stranger arrives one day and tells Faulques he is going to kill him. The stranger is in fact the subject of one of Faulques' prize-winning war pictures and wants Faulques to explain his motivations. As the painting progresses, the back stories of photographer and subject are revealed together with interesting references to famous paintings. It is a story of art, love, actions and consequences in the form of a psychological thriller and as such, builds to a satisfying climax. Perez-Reverte is a best-selling author in his native Spain: previously a war correspondent, his experiences show through in the gritty realism of the war scenes he portrays. With translated works it's not possible to gauge the quality of the author's prose, but Peden's translation reveals memorable passages.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

The Guardian review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

A man lives alone, in a crumbling tower by the sea. On its interior wall, he is painting a vast circular mural of war, melding histories and landscapes into a singular nightmare. One day a stranger arrives, and announces that he intends to kill the painter. Instead of punching the man, fleeing or informing the police, the painter takes the news phlegmatically, continuing to work on his mural while receiving the visitor each day for a series of long, philosophical conversations on the nature of art and war.

Such is the curious setup of this novel. There is no point complaining of implausibility, since if the painter had reacted otherwise, this particular story wouldn't exist, and it is this story we have in front of us. Other fictions are based on similar theatrical conceits: perhaps Sandor Marai's Embers, in which two men converse in a castle to reveal one's betrayal, long ago, by the other; or the sly entertainment of another two-hander, Gilbert Adair's A Closed Book. But here Pérez-Reverte - the author of some delicious novels constructed around enigmas in chess or painting, and the series of elegant swashbucklers starring Captain Alatriste - is composing in a more minor and less ludic key.

The painter, Faulques, used to be a war photographer, and his memories of those times form the meat of the novel. (The publishers tell us that Pérez-Reverte drew on his own experience as a war correspondent.) These scenes - in Beirut, Croatia, Chad, Kuwait - are drawn with a terrible precision, beautifully rendered, and yet within them Pérez-Reverte manages to argue also that the beauty is a problem. Paying intense attention to light and colour, allowing Faulques to recall the exact technical details of the f-stops and shutter-speeds he used, he simultaneously draws the reader's gaze over the photographer's shoulder to the killers and victims who appeared to him more as material than as human beings.

The novelist implicates himself, too, in the callousness he depicts in Faulques, using suffering to make art, even as he also indicates what Faulques has to leave out of his work: "What there was no way to photograph was the buzzing of flies - they won all the battles." The strategy can result in moments of powerful, seductive nihilism. On one job, Faulques photographs a group of prisoners who are tied up by a river and left to be eaten by crocodiles. Later, safe in a restaurant, he thinks of all humanity as "rational meat lying in the sun".

But the novel, it seems, does not quite trust the texture of its own painting, and writes explicatory notes to the exhibition. The framing story - that of the present-day conversations between Faulques and the stranger - spells out all the concerns about the ethics of representation that are already eddying, with productive stealth, through the muddy ochres, winter greys and scarlets of the war scenes. The visitor who proclaims his intention to murder the artist is a Croat, called Ivo Markovic, whom Faulques once photographed. The photograph, published internationally, made Markovic recognisable to his enemies, and his wife and daughter were murdered. Thus the issues of responsibility and guilt are rather overtly staged; and there is a lot of inconclusive talk about Faulques's own theories of symmetry and chaos as they apply to art and violence.

There is also a beautiful and tragic woman in Faulques's past. She is called Olvido, and her function in flashback is to laugh behind crystal wineglasses in restaurants and to stand naked on balconies at night. She goes to art galleries with Faulques, where they talk about the paintings; and then follows him to war zones. On the way she is made to say such things as: "I watch you; you're all the time taking mental photos, as focused as if you were practising some strange Bushido discipline, with a camera in place of a samurai sword." That is a rather lovely physical image, but in the end her character seems over-burdened with wisdom.

The Painter of Battles is a strange book, much of its material shoehorned cornily into its flashbacks, its central dialogue straining under the moral weight placed upon it; it's a messy clash between showing and telling. And yet in a way it also becomes the mural of which it tells, drawing a perfectly obsessive, claustrophobic panorama. Few novels display such intensely marshalled powers of extended visual evocation. "Faulques never used pure black," the prose explains laconically at one point. "That colour created holes, like a bullet or burst of shrapnel on the wall." Finally, perhaps redemptively, Pérez-Reverte pulls off an ending of such calm tact and art that the reader is left in contemplative silence, circling the images left in his head.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Argentine writer Jose Hernandez's epic poem "Martin Fierro," is finally ready to enter the libraries of Turkish bookworms, some 130 years after it was published in 1872.

The Turkish translation of "Martin Fierro," produced with the initiative of Spain's Cervantes Institute and the Argentinean Embassy in Ankara, was launched at the institute in İstanbul last week. The book's Turkish translators, Ertuğrul Önalp and Mehmet Necati Kutlu of Ankara University's Spanish language and literature department, are both scholars of the Spanish language.






Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

A new edition of A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, was presented here last December 26th as a tribute to the 80 years of an indispensable writer in the history of Spanish speaking literature.

Illustrated by the painter Roberto Fabelo and published by the editorial house Arte y Literatura, the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute) also celebrates with this volume the 40th anniversary of a book that marked a new way for narration and opened the boom of Latin American literature, during the 1960’s.







Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Alberto Manguel: Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey

Melinda Harvey reviews Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey.

New books crowd our view of old ones. But publishers and authors are culling while they clutter. Thousands of original titles are printed each year and a significant number of them tell us precisely which books to read and how many.

There have been Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed The World and Peter Boxall's rather more dispiritingly titled 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Meanwhile, Penguin's slim and chichi Great Ideas titles continue their reign at bookshop counters.

Upping the ante, American publisher Atlantic Books has launched a Books That Shook the World series. Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is its ninth and penultimate addition. Earthquakes, bombs and asteroids shake the world - but do books? More to the point, do poems? The Republic, The Bible, The Koran, Rights of Man, On The Origin Of Species, The Wealth of Nations, On War and Das Kapital - the focus of the previous eight instalments of the series - can lay clear claim to whipping up seismic shocks on history's timeline. But, as Bragg observes, explaining the absence of novels from his list, literature didn't put men on the moon or clinch the right to orgasm for women.

For Manguel, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Literature has accompanied us every step of the way from the polis to the politburo, and Homer's epics have managed to talk in time, regardless of the ideological beat. Or indeed tribal beat: Manguel tells the remarkable story of a remote jungle people who, supplied with a copy of The Iliad as well as a selection of practical handbooks on farming by Colombia's Ministry of Culture in the 1990s, refused to return it. When the village elder was asked why, he replied that Homer's story exactly mirrored his people's own past - of wars without reason and unhappiness without relief.

Manguel celebrates literature's pat-head-rub-tummy ability to reflect the real world, as well as entertain and move. He notes that The Iliad and The Odyssey have served as geographical textbooks (Strabo), war manuals (Alexander the Great), treasure maps (Heinrich Schliemann), not to mention Ancient Greek primers and civilising agents for countless boys from Horace to today. These poems are also "the beginning of all our stories". Beyond pioneering techniques related to plot, character and point of view in fiction-telling, they have seeded myriad books, from Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses and beyond to Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates, Derek Walcott's Omeros and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.New books crowd our view of old ones. But publishers and authors are culling while they clutter. Thousands of original titles are printed each year and a significant number of them tell us precisely which books to read and how many.

There have been Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed The World and Peter Boxall's rather more dispiritingly titled 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Meanwhile, Penguin's slim and chichi Great Ideas titles continue their reign at bookshop counters.

Upping the ante, American publisher Atlantic Books has launched a Books That Shook the World series. Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is its ninth and penultimate addition. Earthquakes, bombs and asteroids shake the world - but do books? More to the point, do poems? The Republic, The Bible, The Koran, Rights of Man, On The Origin Of Species, The Wealth of Nations, On War and Das Kapital - the focus of the previous eight instalments of the series - can lay clear claim to whipping up seismic shocks on history's timeline. But, as Bragg observes, explaining the absence of novels from his list, literature didn't put men on the moon or clinch the right to orgasm for women.

For Manguel, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Literature has accompanied us every step of the way from the polis to the politburo, and Homer's epics have managed to talk in time, regardless of the ideological beat. Or indeed tribal beat: Manguel tells the remarkable story of a remote jungle people who, supplied with a copy of The Iliad as well as a selection of practical handbooks on farming by Colombia's Ministry of Culture in the 1990s, refused to return it. When the village elder was asked why, he replied that Homer's story exactly mirrored his people's own past - of wars without reason and unhappiness without relief.

Manguel celebrates literature's pat-head-rub-tummy ability to reflect the real world, as well as entertain and move. He notes that The Iliad and The Odyssey have served as geographical textbooks (Strabo), war manuals (Alexander the Great), treasure maps (Heinrich Schliemann), not to mention Ancient Greek primers and civilising agents for countless boys from Horace to today. These poems are also "the beginning of all our stories". Beyond pioneering techniques related to plot, character and point of view in fiction-telling, they have seeded myriad books, from Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses and beyond to Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates, Derek Walcott's Omeros and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.

That we have read and treasured Homer for more than 28 consecutive centuries is, for Manguel, proof that the poems have shaped, if not shaken, the world. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey is subtitled A Biography, and Manguel believes a biography of a book is a history of its readers. With a Casanovan mixture of fickleness and genuine affection, we gad about the ages, rendezvousing with a galaxy of authors, artists, scholars and translators for whom Homer mattered. There's the painstaking Aristarchus, the conflicted St Jerome, the ecstatic John Keats and the speculative Samuel Butler, who wholeheartedly believed that The Odyssey was the work of a young unmarried Sicilian woman and not a blind and wandering male bard. The story of Caliph al-Ma'mun, who, after an encounter with Aristotle in a dream, had the entire corpus of Ancient Greek writing translated into Arabic, ensuring its survival, serves as a timely parable for our times. Manguel's world view is a cosmopolitan one: while we should delight in differences, the world is a single civilisation, and Homer is the one thing upon which we all agree.

Manguel exults in unearthing an imprecise decoding of The Iliad by Pope here, a fleeting allusion to Homer by Goethe's Werther there for the same reason that he waxes lyrical about the mutable materiality of books themselves in A History of Reading (1996). Like a slight tear on page 72, a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of a back cover or a handwritten poem on a flyleaf, these are signs of life, proof that literature has a pulse. Like his hero, Jorge Luis Borges, whom he famously met at Pygmalion, a Buenos Aires bookshop, aged 16 and subsequently read aloud to for the next two years, "the concept of the 'definitive text' corresponds only to religion or exhaustion".

Yet one wonders whether this fad for treating books like historical relics is a symptom of literature's decadence. A curiosity of the statistically verifiable decline in reading in our time - the US National Endowment for the Arts's recent study, To Read Or Not To Read, found we read less and less well - is the preponderance of books about books in our marketplace.

In Manguel's books, readers are eulogised as an endangered species. This book harbours more than a hint of nostalgia for the days when people read Homer with passion and with real world issues at stake. As for Manguel himself - well, it's clear he dearly prizes Homer, but what his poems have whispered into Manguel's ear when no one's watching one cannot, ultimately, say.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Argentine Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Lorraine Adams reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Until Susan Sontag disavowed some of her more arch anxieties in "Regarding the Pain of Others," intellectual debate over the depiction of atrocities was mostly a chronicle of aesthetic alarmism. Walter Benjamin’s notion that photography creates "a new reality in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions" turned out to be fairly silly. John Berger’s idea that overexposure to violent images leads us into unconscionable passivity is demonstrably untrue. (Vide Vietnam.) Terrain that has tripped up such great critical minds is not to be entered incautiously.

Yet Arturo Pérez-Reverte - a Spaniard who writes intellectual thrillers and historical novels about such subjects as fencing and musketeers - proposes to scale these heights. In his latest novel to appear in English (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden), a contemporary war photographer exchanges his Nikon for a paintbrush as he energetically embarks on a pictorial representation of suffering, all "26 centuries of the iconography of war," inspired by everything from Greek vases to Diego Rivera’s murals and every minor Italian master in between. Pérez-Reverte is also drawing on personal experience: before becoming a best-selling novelist, he was a journalist covering conflicts in Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya and elsewhere.

The hero of "The Painter of Battles," Andrés Faulques, lives in a 300-year-old tower on the Spanish coast. A war photographer for 30 years, he’s been everywhere: "Cyprus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia, Eritrea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, the Balkans." Why did he give up his career to paint a mural on the walls of his tower? Because he couldn’t find, through the lens, "the definitive image; the both fleeting and eternal moment that would explain all things," "the hidden rule that made order out of the implacable geometry of chaos."

Faulques’s foil is a Croatian soldier, Ivo Markovic, who shows up at the tower bearing a photograph of himself that Faulques took in 1991 just before the battle of Vukovar in the former Yugoslavia. The image was on the cover of many magazines and made Markovic famous. It also ruined his life: by the end of the second chapter, he has let Faulques know he intends to kill him.

Yet Markovic repeatedly puts off the murder. "I can’t just kill you," he explains. "I need for us to talk first; I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand. ... After that, I’ll be able to kill you." Faulques, popping mysterious tablets and occasionally grabbing his side in pain, seems quite ill. He also seems not entirely worried about the threat, although he checks to make sure his shotgun is still in working order.

Throughout this curiously inert and static book, Markovic returns to the story of what happened when, thanks to the photograph, his face became "the face of defeat." Recognized at an army detention center, he was tortured for months by a group of Serbs, then sent to a prison camp, where he was detained for more than two years. Finally released, he went looking for his wife and son, but the photograph had doomed them too. Serbs raped, mutilated and killed his wife because they recognized this likeness of her husband. They ran a bayonet through his 5-year-old son.

Vignettes of depravity, which the photographer and the soldier discuss with stoic manliness, multiply. While Faulques snapped away, men in Chad, wounded and bound, were left on a riverbank to be devoured by crocodiles. Matter-of-factly, Markovic tells of tormenting and beating a mentally retarded man in front of the man’s parents.

The reader feels remarkably distant from these horrors, perhaps because the perpetrators have such drawn-out pseudo-intellectual discussions about who feels the least, who committed the worst wrongs. And perhaps it’s because these discussions are interspersed with cumbersome descriptions of the mural the photographer is painting and how it relates to other works of Western battlefield art: Bruegel the Elder’s "Triumph of Death," Gerardo Murillo’s "Eruption of Paricutín," Goya’s "Duel With Cudgels," Paolo Uccello’s "Battle of San Romano," Gherardo Starnina’s "Thebaid," Aniello Falcone’s "Scene of Sacking Following a Battle."

Pérez-Reverte seems reluctant to omit any remotely pertinent allusion, and he gets into some trouble with his literary references. In one of the rare instances when the two men’s dialogue isn’t too rambling to quote, it dips into a surprising take on British Romanticism. "An English poet wrote the words ‘terrible symmetry’ referring to a tiger’s stripes," Faulques tells Markovic. "He meant that all symmetry encases cruelty."

Another surprising quotation, a translation from Pascal’s "Pensées," prefaces the novel. Pérez-Reverte and his translator have rendered the French philosopher’s "règle des partis" as "the rules of the game," at best an unorthodox translation that trivializes Pascal’s meaning. (Most English translations would render it as "the rule of probability" or the "doctrine of chance.") As the novel proceeds, Pérez-Reverte makes frequent references to geometry as the underlying rule of the game in war photography - and in life. "From below it will always appear to be God’s shoe, but what kills them," Faulques remarks of his subjects, "is geometry." It’s a misapprehension based on a misinterpretation based on a mistranslation.

Amazingly, the novel’s allusive intertextual play fails to smother all drama - especially when Faulques remembers his lover, Olvido Ferrara, an art history student and former fashion model turned photographer. Accompanying him on his travels to various war zones, she takes photographs of objects (shoes, bridges, landscapes) but not people.

Expressions of emotion would have ruined Faulques’s war photography - and possibly his mural - but he had no such difficulty when it came to Olvido:

"Faulques rejoiced in his heart - a savage and at the same time tranquil elation - that he had not been killed any of the times it might have happened, because were that the case, he wouldn’t be there that night, slipping off Olvido’s panties, and he would never have seen her back up a little and fall onto the bed, onto the upturned spread, the loose, snow-wet hair falling across her face, her eyes never breaking from his, her skirt now up to her waist, her legs opening with a deliberate mixture of submission and wanton challenge, while he, still impeccably dressed, knelt before her and placed his lips, numb from the cold, to the dark convergence of those long, perfect legs."

It may be unclear what this passage (and others) about Olvido, a "well brought up and slightly haughty girl," with her "gentle cruelty," has to do with the moral dilemmas of photographing the brutalities of war. It does, however, demonstrate that, given certain convergences, geometry can indeed be fatal - at least to certain novels.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

Chris Barsanti reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

If it weren’t for unrequited love, our literature and film would be in sorry shape. As a clear representation of how deeply buried in our psyches this trauma is, we have seen it reflected back to us time and again: the moon-eyed lover sighing into the wind as his/her beloved walks past, blissfully unaware of the wonderful torment they are inspiring simply by existing. Often these things work themselves out in the end, the distant object of affection is suddenly made to realize how perfect their admirer is for them, and so into the happily ever after they go. Or, the other common resolution is that the admirer is made to realize that it is not the uncaring, gorgeous target of all their woo-pitching whom they should be with, but instead the good friend who has stood by them throughout their torture (normally more homely in appearance, but sharper of mind and generally seen as a better match overall).

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa