Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives

Alex Abramovich reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsize, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the "visceral realist" poets, pot dealers, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively—it was Bolaño's most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel's many surprises.

The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima across four continents and twenty-some years; it's framed by the journals of seventeen-year-old Juan García Madero. ("I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists," García Madero explains, by way of introduction. And the very next day: "I'm not really sure what visceral realism is.") But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all—jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others—and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author's own biography. (Among other things, visceral realism is an echo of infrarealism, a movement Bolaño helped launch in Mexico City around 1975, fusing elements of surrealism, shoplifting, and street theater in hopes of urging young Latin Americans to blur whatever lines remained between life and literature.) Even in translation, the effect is cumulative and fuguelike.

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Chilean Literature

José Saramago: The Double

Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double.

The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel Santa-Clara, whose job it apparently is to perform bit parts in a myriad of forgettable B-films. Beyond their professional differences, Tertuliano and Daniel (whose real name is António Claro) are otherwise completely identical, down to their date of birth, their moles, and even their scars. The course of the novel concerns Tertuliano's attempts to locate and meet Daniel/António, the bad blood that emerges from their meeting, and the fiendish plots they then initiate against each other. I won't ruin the end, which is quite moving and features at least one considerably surprising plot twist.

As it is with Saramago's best novels (in the United States, they are probably reckoned to be Blindness, a true masterpiece in my view, and The Cave), The Double seems to have a parabolic, or allegorical, layer, whereby it's possible to view the fabulism of the central conceit as standing in for something particular. Unlike in dream logic, in which the play of interpretation is imperative to arriving at understanding, in Saramago's parabolic world blindness tends to mean one or two things exactly, and the plight of the blind has a clearly representational, if not mimetic, flavor: The modern world, Blindness argues, exists as it does in this story. Saramago's work is not surreal, therefore, in the sense that we might understand it from Breton, or, to take a more recent case, Rikki Ducornet. Saramago is more like the poetry of Bunyan, or perhaps like Swift.

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Portuguese Literature

Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture

Damon Krukowski reviews "Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture".

The late-'60s Brazilian pop music movement known as Tropicália or Tropicalismo is—like Dylan's "Basement Tapes"—highly "overdetermined," as they say in grad school, and therefore a good candidate for a Geertz or Marcus-like "unpacking." But Christopher Dunn's book on the subject, Brutality Garden, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, never reaches those fanciful heights. This is not to say that Dunn isn't in possession of valuable knowledge for non-Brazilian fans of this music, just that the cautious and formal academic tone of his book obscures the fruits of his research. Countless asides, like "In Hegel's formulation, the slave could only comprehend his/her reality as a reflection of the master's will and therefore lacked historical subjectivity and agency," dull one's attention and weary the soul. Likewise the many scholarly tics in his writing, such as the use of "reference" as a verb or the closing of each chapter with a section called "Conclusion." His numerous allusions to Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Horkheimer, Jameson, et al. do not advance the argument of the book; rather they seem intended to justify its subject as worthy of study.

No such excuses are necessary. There is a dearth of information available about Tropicália in English, and I suspect there are many people who, like me, are hunting for more. Tropicália—characterized by a genre-bending passion for both low and high culture, colored by kitsch but also by political urgency, its youthful interest in outrageous costume and style countered by a maturity in its lyrics and melodies—has in recent years attracted the excited attention of a wide range of musicians and music fans in the US and UK.

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Brazilian Culture

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

Peter Bush interviews Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

My family was destroyed. My mother was killed. I was a child of the war, as I describe in Forbidden Territory, a war followed by more than thirty years of General Franco's dictatorship. By the age of eighteen I had decided to abandon a Spain where I knew work such as my novel Fiestas would never be published. Although I was part of a group of young writers opposed to the regime, I still found that writing critically of the regime meant you wrote with the censor looking over your shoulder. Spain was asphyxiating, and I was asphyxiated: From 1962 to 1976, none of my writing came out in Spain.

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Spanish Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat

Francisco Goldman reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat.

The Feast of the Goat, nearly documentary in tone, is a dense, dramatic, at times almost unbearably cruel and relentless political novel. It belongs to the illustrious tradition of the Latin American–dictator novel, in this case the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. But it is also a culmination of two searches that have characterized Vargas Llosa's writing since the beginning of his career: for what he has referred to as the "total novel"; and also for a Flaubertian perfection, a perfect fusion of style, form, and subject. A few years ago, in an essay on Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Vargas Llosa reflected on this idea of a "total" novel: "This is a desire to extend itself, to grow and multiply through descriptions, characters and incidents in order to exhaust all the possibilities, to represent its world on the largest, and also the most minute scale, at all levels and from all angles." Among the great works he lists that have achieved this is, of course, Madame Bovary. The "total" and Flaubertian idea, the "utopian design," is to create a novelistic reality so autonomous and whole that the reader feels convinced that this illusory reality is as true and durable as the reality it purports to describe, perhaps even more so.

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Peruvian Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Jason Weiss reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille—the last book published in Cortázar’s lifetime, it appeared in Spanish in 1983 and is now available in a fluid and felicitous English translation by Anne McLean—figures among his most playful works, its tone recalling, in a lighter vein, travelers’ tales from the age of discovery. Simultaneously, it offers another take on the collage aesthetic that underlies his novels and kaleidoscopic multigenre books, such as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967). After an extended preamble, which introduces the expedition’s protagonists, genesis, and preparations, the record itself comprises a daily log, photos, hand-drawn maps of the rest areas, and the authors’ many commentaries. In these, Cortázar and Dunlop dwell on physical surroundings, metaphysical speculations, cultural reflections, and encounters with truckers, highway workers, and other travelers, as well as observations of each other’s habits; they remark, too, on how their enchanted state has changed them, even sharpening the details in their dreams.

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

bookforum.com just published an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.

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Chilean Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Nicole Gluckstern reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista).

Certain travelogues can be likened to love letters to a destination, though rarely does actual romance play a part in their construction. But when acclaimed postmodern Argentine author Julio Cortázar took to the road with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, it was a journey precipitated by mutual fondness as much as a desire for discovery.

In Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago Books, 354 pages, $20) an author best known for his nonsequential opus Hopscotch and collections of surreal short stories approaches the task of travel with the same whimsy and contradiction that characterize his literary oeuvre. Setting out on a pseudoscientific expedition to map the freeway between Paris and Marseilles, a distance of approximately 500 miles, Cortázar (nicknamed El Lobo) and the Canadian Dunlop (La Osita) spend a full 33 days en route, confining themselves to two rest stops per day.

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Argentine Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Richard Zimler reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 2006 novel The Painter of Battles (El pintor de batallas).

Many of us who grew up during the Vietnam War remember one photograph in particular: a naked Vietnamese girl running down a country road, in flight from a napalm attack, her mouth open in abject terror and hands held out, desperately searching for comfort.

Inside the frozen time of the image, the girl will forever remain abandoned to her fate, ignored by the three uniformed soldiers walking behind her.

Over the years, I've often wondered whether the photographer offered protection to the desperate girl as she ran past him, though perhaps it's unfair of me to hope he did. After all, photographers are observers, not participants. Or are they? Isn't their choice of what subjects to frame inside their viewfinder a form of participation? Might snapping pictures of people in pain or imminent danger be an inhuman way to make a living?

Bestselling Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte explores such complex ethical questions in his novel "The Painter of Battles," and his narrative draws extensively on his experiences as a journalist covering conflicts in the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere.

Perez-Reverte's protagonist is Andres Faulques, a world-weary war photographer who has retired to a 300-year-old tower on an isolated bluff on a small island off the Spanish coast. No longer able to find meaning and purpose through his camera lens, he spends his days painting a mural on his tower walls of the atrocities he has witnessed, as well as horrific images gleaned from the battle paintings he most admires. He's convinced that it is in our nature to oppress, humiliate and kill, and his goal is to create a monumental fresco of human existence as he sees it.

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Spanish Literature

Tomás Eloy Martínez - The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón)

In June 20, 1973, General Juan Domingo Peron returns to Argentina after eighteen years of exile.
He's accompanied by his wife Isabel and a large entourage. In Madrid he leaves years of disregard for General Franco's regime and the memory of a triumphant Eva Perón whose mummified body rests in he's own home. With him he takes some unfinished memories where he wants to give an image of Napoleon for himself.
More than two million people, the largest crowd ever assembled, waits for him at the airport. Meanwhile, his followers are fighting fiercely to get hold of the symbol that still represents the old General.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Alfaguara Prize in 2002, summarizes in this novel, full of action and characters from last century's Argentine history, through the biography of a man who embodied the hope of his people, while inquires the multiple faces of truth and the power fiction has to create bridges between them.



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Argentine Literature

Héctor Aguilar Camín - La Guerra de Galio

La Guerra de Galio is one of the great Mexican novels of the late twentieth century.

This account of the turbulent years that followed the Mexican government's violent repression of the student uprising in 1968. However, as in any great literary work, the story goes beyond the obvious to draw a portrait of the generation that entered its adult life in 1968, its ideals, doubts and miseries.

Meanwhile there is still time to tell the love story of a history teacher and a student.



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Mexican Literature

Ángeles Mastretta - Tear This Heart Out (Arráncame la vida)

When Catalina knowns General Andrés Asensio, she is still a girl who knows little of life. However, he's a candidate for Governor of the State of Puebla, and knows very well what their goals as "cacique".
In a few weeks they marry. But Catalina, a passionate and imaginative woman, very soon discovers that she can not accept the way of life that imposed by the new situation and doesn't accept to live without love.

Biographical note from PenguinGroup

Ángeles Mastretta was born in Puebla, Mexico, in October 1949. She began her writing career as a journalist for such publications as Siete, a magazine published by the Ministry of Public Education, and the afternoon paper Ovaciones. In 1974 she was awarded a scholarship at the Mexican Writers’ Center, where she honed her skills among the writers Juan Rulfo, Salvador Elizondo, and Francisco Monterde. In 1975, La pájara pinta (Colorful Bird), a collection of Mastretta’s poetry, was published. However, the novel that she had been brainstorming for years did not reach fruition until an editor offered to pay her salary for six months so that she could quit her job and focus on writing. Six months turned into a year and in 1985 Arráncame la vida (Tear This Heart Out, Riverhead Books, 1997) was published, winning the Mazatlán Prize for Literature for the best book of the year. A stunning success both in Mexico and abroad, the novel quickly cleared a place for Mastretta in the canon of Mexican writers.

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Mexican Literature