Santiago Gamboa: Los Impostores

Nathalie Vuillemin [fr] reviews Santiago Gamboa's Los Impostores (Les Captifs du Lys Blanc in the french edition).




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Colombian Literature

José Carlos Somoza: La caverna de las ideas

AnthivS [ES] writes about José Carlos Somoza's La caverna de las ideas (The Athenian Murders).




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Spanish Literature

Premio Antonin Artaud en México

Mexican writer Juan Villoro was awarded the "Premio Antonin Artaud en México" for his book "Los culpables".

Por el libro "Los culpables", el escritor mexicano Juan Villoro recibió anoche el V Premio de Narrativa "Antonin Artaud en México", dotado de 80 mil pesos, la traducción al francés de la obra y una escultura elaborada por los artistas plásticos Arturo Guerrero y Marisa Lara.

Poco antes de recibir el reconocimiento, en la residencia de Francia en México de manos del embajador galo, Alain Le Gourriérec, el novelista y dramaturgo explicó que la publicación ganadora está integrada por siete historias que hablan sobre la deslealtad y las corrientes subterráneas que desata.

El también autor de "El disparo de Argón" y la obra teatral "Muerte parcial" aseguró que quien vive con un engaño es como tener un doble porque significa guardar un secreto que lo obliga a vivir con un estándar difuso, es alguien distinto que pasa su vida representando al que era antes.

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Mexican Literature

Manoel de Oliveira

Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira.

When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase "world's oldest active filmmaker." The operative word is "active." Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies preconceptions of what an artist's twilight period should be. Oliveira's undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.

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Portuguese Cinema

Federico García Lorca

Murali RamaVarma writes about Federico García Lorca's poem Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)



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Spanish Literature

Juan Eslava Galan: The Mule

Kristina Lindgren reviews Juan Eslava Galán's The Mule.

Ah, the romance of fighting for a cause. Remember the Spanish Civil War, that heroic conflict between leftists and fascists that so entranced the 1930s mass media and served as an opening act for the great European clash to come?

But as Spanish writer Juan Eslava Galán shows in his sly, Fellini-esque novel, "The Mule" (Bantam: 294 pp., $12 paper), war is a decidedly different experience for conscripts on the ground. Consider Juan Castro Pérez, a stable boy drafted by the Republican government to fight Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his nacionales. A year into the fighting, Castro switches sides and is pressed into service as a "muleteer," shuttling munitions and other supplies across rocky terrain to the ever-shifting front line.

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Spanish Literature

Roberto Bolano: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Michael Dirda reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Let me admit, straight off, that any reviewer might feel hesitant before recommending a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas. At the checkout, the bookstore clerk will almost certainly look twice at the title -- and then avoid looking at you. Certainly, it would be politic to leave the dust jacket at home if you like to read on the subway; and even then, you might want to invest in one of those anonymous wrap-around opaque covers. When friends casually ask the title of the book you're carrying, you'll want to have an explanation prepared in advance.

Why? Because Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas very much deserves reading: It is imaginative, full of a love for literature, and, unlikely as it may seem, exceptionally entertaining. The book purports to be a biographical dictionary gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. While several meet violent ends, most are simply deluded sentimentalists and frustrated litterateurs. They come from all the Latin American countries, but at least a half-dozen are citizens of these United States, including the fanatical preacher Rory Long, the poet and football player Jim O'Bannon, the science fiction writer J.M.S. Hill and the founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, Thomas R. Murchison, alias The Texan.

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Chilean Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Sameer Rahim reviews Junot Díaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

What distinguishes Junot Díaz's debut from other precocious-geek novels is its historical backdrop. Oscar's story is intercut with that of his family's life in the Dominican Republic - in particular the troubles they faced under the dictator Rafael Trujillo.

"For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history," writes Díaz in a witty footnote, Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, set the standard for third-world dictators. He used violence to enforce his will, re-named all the landmarks in the country after himself and raped any woman - even wives of subordinates - that took his fancy. The novel takes us into the violent world he created.

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Dominican Literature

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

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