Antonio Skarmeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Jonathan Yardley reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

Obviously the outcomes of both courtships must be left for the reader to discover, but The Dancer and the Thief is much more than an agreeable caper. Though Skarmeta scarcely ranks at the very top of Latin America's remarkably distinguished and varied literary elite, he is a serious writer to whom the death and rebirth of democracy in his native Chile is an endlessly compelling subject. Now in his late 60s, Sk¿rmeta fled Chile more than three decades ago as Pinochet clamped down -- he had practiced journalism and taught literature at the University of Chile -- and though he has lived in Germany on and off since 1975, his burning interest and literary preoccupation remain his home country.

His attitude toward it, as toward its capital of Santiago, is a mixture of exasperation and love. When Vergara Gray tells his son about a forebear who invented the telephone but lost the U.S. patent to Alexander Graham Bell, the boy replies: "You are so Chilean. Instead of commemorating victories, you celebrate defeats. Like our national hero, Arturo Prat: everybody remembers him with great affection because he lost the naval battle of Iquique against the Peruvians." Though in fairness Skarmeta really ought to acknowledge that Peru itself honors as "heroes" many leaders who lost battles in the same War of the Pacific, it is true that the self-deprecatory streak runs strong in Chile. It is scarcely anything to be ashamed of.

Skarmeta also is proud of Chile for rising above Pinochet and establishing what now is one of the few strong democracies in Latin America. Its president, Michelle Bachelet, is capable and widely respected in the international community, its economy is strong and its vino is maravilloso. Though the ending that Skarmeta gives his characters falls well short of happy, the Chile that he portrays herein is vibrant and strong.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Jackie McGlone interviews Junot Díaz.

So, Junot Díaz, how does it feel to be a literary sensation – again? I ask the hip-looking 39-year-old – almost-shaven head, neat manicured goatee, designer spectacles – who has been living in Rome since being awarded a Literature Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters last April, which is only one of many glittering prizes bestowed upon him.

"Well, us writers, we're just throwing words up into the wind, hoping that they will carry, and that someone, somewhere, sometime, will have a use for them," he replies.

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Dominican Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Steve Bennett reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novels have been translated into 29 languages in 50 countries. A longtime war correspondent, recently elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, he now concentrates on fiction: "The Queen of the South," whose title character is a resourceful Mexican woman caught in the world-wide web of drug trafficking, was on many best book lists of 2005, while his Capt. Alarista series, following the adventures of a 17th-century Spanish soldier of fortune, has been a swashbuckling success, with more than 4 million copies in print.

His latest novel, "The Painter of Battles," is a book-length parable of right vs. wrong, a meditation on the morality of man. Pérez-Reverte is nothing if not ambitious.

Translated from the Spanish by the master, Margaret Sayers Peden, who has brought the work of Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz to the English-speaking world, "The Painter of Battles" is an intoxicating mix blending philosophy, art history and treatises on the nature of love, the elusiveness of justice, man's inhumanity to man, human cruelty, the utility of war and the necessity of revenge. Pérez-Reverte is undoubtedly a very smart man and very deep thinker.

Trouble is, this cocktail is light on the essential ingredient: story.

Which, basically, is this: Andrés Faulques is an award-winning war photographer who has covered conflicts from Lebanon to Latin America for more than 25 years. He is tired, he is weary. So he retires to a life of solitude in an old tower on the Spanish coast.

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Spanish Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Andrew Ervin reviews Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Bolaño's genius then, lies not only in telling a series of compelling stories, nor even in piling those up to form a larger narrative about a particular and unfortunate (if make-believe) artistic movement, but also in gently prodding us to ask some important questions about our own literary establishment.

Readers new to Bolaño might consider starting with something more formally traditional, such as the novellas By Night in Chile or Distant Star, but don't be surprised to find yourself soon devouring everything he wrote. When you make your way to Nazi Literature in the Americas, you will discover that all-too-rare book that will read you just as much as you read it.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey D'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor.

In his novel "The Savage Detectives," two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hideout in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

"Nazi Literature in the Americas," a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, "Nazi Literature" is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

John Brenkman reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer. But beyond that, it produces an unsettling mix of overt satire and covert elegy. The reductive force of summary after summary starts to have an effect that transcends the satire; the book begins to convey a sense of the vanity of human endeavor and the ease with which a lifetime's work might be flicked into oblivion by a witty remark. As the mocking of the imaginary writers' lives reverberates through one entry after the next, it comes back to mock the mockery itself; if the lives and works are in vain, the mocking of them is even more acutely in vain. So, too, does the satirized impulse to fuse a poetic project with a radical political vision lose its right-wing provenance: The conviction that reality will be utterly transformed "by novel, unexpected, marvelous means" is, Bolaño implies, a sickness of the left as well as the right. A masterful satirist, Bolaño wields a scalpel sharpened on both edges. Ultimately, his almost juvenile imaginative exuberance expresses just the opposite: a precocious world-weariness.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey d'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

“Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible. Like Leni Riefenstahl, the artistes Bolaño invents share a certain Romantic aesthetic, a taste for the classic and nonvulgar, a dislike of “cacophony” and a lurking sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the modern world — that children, for instance, have been “stolen and raised by inferior races” and that a better world in the form of the Fourth Reich is imminent. There is little to no mention of Jews or other undesirables; there are no death camps; World War II is a passing reference at best. Instead, with a straight face, Bolaño narrates the Nazi writers’ tireless imaginations, their persistence in the face of a world history that goes against them, their contrarian determination as they continue to write books that go unread, unreviewed and largely unnoticed. They’re the losers but, with incredible passion, they remain steadfastly in denial of that fact, churning away at their refutations of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre; their verses vindicating Il Duce; their novels decrying the decline of piety; their Aryan literary societies. Like Riefenstahl, they find the highest beauty in a particular sort of symmetry and order that only in retrospect seems indubitably fascist. Horribly, persistently, they have a vision that they are incapable of giving up.

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Chilean Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Katie Goldstein reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Through a series of wartime memories, many including Olvido, Pérez-Reverte takes us to the burning oil fields of Kuwait, to the war-torn Balkans, to Lebanon, Somalia, Romania, Mozambique, Chad, and beyond. Meanwhile, he acquaints us with Faulques' mural, where ancient and modern war coexist, where everyone from Hector and Andromache to Bosch and Goya plays a role. Markovic, when not prodding Faulques with provocative questions, takes an interest in the painting, in Faulques' vision of war - the vision of an observer, not a participant.

Though Markovic at times seems nothing more than a pain in the painter's side, much like the one that visits the artist reliably every eight hours or so, his presence forces Faulques to face his demons. "Did you ever try to stop anything, señor Faulques?" Markovic asks. "Even once? A beating? A death?"

Both men have lived war, one from behind his camera lens, the other with an automatic weapon in his hands. "Is it chance that leaves an animal's tracks in the snow?" Markovic asks. "Was that what put me in front of your camera or did I walk toward it for subconscious reasons I can't explain?" The narrative development may sometimes move slowly or seem repetitive, but Pérez-Reverte is a skillful architect of the tension between the retired photographer and his former subject, of those who witness and take photographs and those who fight, kill, beat, and torture.

Throughout the course of The Painter of Battles, it becomes apparent that the painter and his former subject have more in common than initially appears. Both are ravaged by war, still living, years later, in its aftermath.

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Spainish Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Neel Mukherjee reviews Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

And through the tissue of the personal dramas of his characters, Díaz weaves the history of 20th-century Dominican Republic, both in its presence as a kind of scathing narrative unfolding through the footnotes, and in the more oblique way of how his characters come to get caught up in that history, participate in it, become its victims and survivors. This is a blistering novel, its language and style an effortless extension of the immense varieties of immigrant Englishes that have been appropriated for fiction, a high-octane, amphetamine-fuelled marriage of demotic Spanish and English that is equally at home with rough street slang and the domain of poetry.

Its characters are unforgettable, its emotional impact both crushing and liberating at the same time, and the voice in which it speaks, a rare, new, spellbinding sound altogether.

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Dominican Literature

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