SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Friday, February 29, 2008

Roberto Bolano: 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 hide-out 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?

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Maya Jaggi interviews Junot Díaz.

Like the "ghetto nerd" Oscar Wao of his latest fiction, Junot Díaz was an avid consumer of SF and fantasy. Wrested from the Dominican Republic aged six, and brought with his family to New Jersey, he found that only such fiction captured his experience. There are "historical extremes in the Americas that are difficult for the mind to grasp: it's hard to convince people the Caribbean was a 300-year-long Auschwitz. Migration is like having your house burn down with everything in it, and only whispers left of what went before. Yet in genres I found descriptions of these very extremes: endless genetic breeding; time travel; leaving one world and being miraculously teleported to another."

Still on the move and with a gym bag over his shoulder, Díaz is speaking in a coffee shop near his London publishers. He has an apartment in East Harlem, teaches creative writing at MIT (for which post he thanks a mentor, Anita Desai), and is spending a year at the American Academy in Rome, grateful for the cuisine, but homesick for his fiancée, a "big-time lawyer" in New York. Yet he returns every month to New Jersey, to the same childhood friends. "I've travelled far from where I grew up, but I'm still stubbornly attached to it," he says. "Migration was so hard for me; I felt I'd lost so many worlds that I didn't want to lose another."

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Dominican Literature

Carmen Laforet: Nada

Emma Hagestadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.

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Spanish Literature

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Benjamin Lytal reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Put briefly, "Nazi Literature" is a fictional encyclopedia of far right-wing authors who, to varying degrees, did or would have supported Hitler's party. It's his most Borgesian work, but unlike his literary ancestor, Bolaño cares more for the real world than for the library. His is not the account of a concerted movement or school, but the taxonomy of a wide-ranging sensibility. All of the writers are fictitious, but they do not inhabit an alternate universe; instead, they and their work are, case by case, just plausible.

Bolaño has imagined Boca Junior soccer thugs whose fanzines and mock-allegorical victory poems sell out hundreds of mimeographed copies; he has imagined bad painters who make alliances with bored widows, and end up shopping for antiques mentioned in Edgar Allen Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture"; he has even imagined an American youth who as a child overheard Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and his father discussing "Projective Verse," took it too seriously, and started a cult.

The voluminousness of this creativity would be one thing, but Bolaño is also — simultaneously — overachieving tonally. He constantly has to come up with titles for fictional books, and each title has to sound like it distinctly belongs to its one author. Sometimes this is fun — and Bolaño is clearly enjoying himself — as when "a Mexican poet inclined to mysticism and tormented phraseology" publishes her first collection, "A Voice You Withered." But "Nazi Literature" would grow tiring if its stories did not resonate with wider human problems: futility, obscurity, and fatal disorientation. Even had they existed, most of these writers would be forgotten, and for very good reason. But Bolaño makes us care about a few of them, and introduces a larger compass: that of the Americas, "ever fecund in enterprises verging on insanity, illegality and idiocy."

This kind of self-confident despair always makes Bolaño loquacious, and in his later work he uses the likes of Nazism to set the pitch for his own, brave voice. Having read "Nazi Literature," it is also possible to see how the dense networks of young poets in, say, "The Savage Detectives" repeat Mr. Bolaño's initial grand act of creative overdrive. And how would he have initially achieved it, isolating and embellishing a literature that really does not exist, except by founding it on a taboo? After "Nazi Literature," the idea of verboten doom worked as a kind of generative antimatter, setting off explosions in Bolaño's world and delineating it, just enough, from reality.

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Chilean Literature

Antonio Skármeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Joan Frank reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

"The Dancer and the Thief" is Skármeta's valentine for Chile's exhausted human capital, the lost, the loose, the marginalized. A shrewd awareness is at work here, one that does not preclude joy, but owes much to the bittersweet comprehensions of the tango. "Suicide was an undignified act," Gray muses, walking along the Mapocho. One cool nod is given to Chileans with money: "On Friday afternoons, the wealthy who own beach houses leave for the coast." Everyone else in this story is poor, hungry and cold; when food appears, it's embraced like a lover.

"[H]e knew he could devour at least two, maybe three, of those completos 'with everything' [...] hot dogs, nestled in fluted rolls [...] piled high with a leaning tower of mashed avocado, chopped tomatoes, a thin, long line of El Copihue hot sauce, a pile of pickled cabbage - German-style - and crowned with a feverish delight of mayonnaise and mustard. These sandwiches begged to be downed in two bites that left the front of your shirt covered with the unstable ingredients and your face smeared all the way up to your eyebrows with a voluptuous carnival of flavors."

"A voluptuous carnival of flavors" summarizes Skármeta's enterprise, with its now breathless, now sardonic sensibility; its deft jabs at bureaucracy and academic rigidity; impassioned invocations of art and artists; jubilant sex and sexuality. And its funny, solemn pronouncements: "I may be a thief, but I'm not a pimp," Gray sniffs. Shaping a fond, brave, modern fable from authentic, anguished history, Skármeta has cooked up a completo.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolano: 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

Monday, February 25, 2008

Jose Saramago: Death At Intervals

Lindy Burleigh reviews José Saramago's Death At Intervals.

'Now life is truly beautiful,' proclaim the citizens of the unnamed fictional country in José Saramago's new novel, when suddenly, one New Year's Day, people stop dying. Granted, it's an implausible scenario, but we are asked to take nothing seriously, except for the author himself.

We know, too, that Saramago is not going to stick to the rules, because he doesn't use capital letters.

The big idea is that the 'absence of death' doesn't make for an earthly paradise. In fact, it causes bureaucratic chaos and societal breakdown.

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Portuguese Literature

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