Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code spawned an entire genre of fiction in which a hero searches the globe for a vital but lost historical object. José Dos Santos’s Codex 632 fits into this pattern.Read More
Its main protagonist is Thomas Noronha, a middle-aged history professor at the New University in Lisbon, Portugal. An expert in classical languages and cryptography, Thomas is hired by the mysterious Americas History Institute to continue the research of the recently deceased history Prof. Toscano. The institute is funded by Italians from Genoa, the traditional home of Christopher Columbus.
Thomas first flies to New York to meet with the institute and is then sent on a whirlwind tour of Brazil, Portugal and Jerusalem. In the course of his research, Thomas discovers that Toscano had strayed from the original intention of the institute, which was to have him pinpoint the exact day of the Portuguese discovery of Brazil. Toscano instead spent most of his time (and the institute’s money) searching for the true identity of Columbus.
Dos Santos’s narrative is presented in question-and-answer format with little action or plot. The work functions as a vehicle to present Thomas’s exhaustive research on Columbus.
Ever since the amazing success of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," the market has been flooded with would-be successors. The problem is that most of the imitators miss the point. Brown didn't sell millions of copies because of Leonardo da Vinci or a code; he sold them because he launched a ferocious attack on the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, the imitators keep coming, featuring mysteries deep in the past with literary and/or religious overtones. I read one novel that involved deciphering Dante's "Inferno." Another featured a search for a missing play by Shakespeare. Our old friends the Knights Templar often figure in these plots. In one, as I recall, a band of knights, newly arrived from the Middle Ages, rode their mighty steeds along Park Avenue and up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, where I took leave of them.Read More
The latest contender in the da Vinci sweepstakes, "Codex 632," by the Portuguese journalist and novelist José Rodrigues dos Santos, focuses on the mystery surrounding the origins and life of Christopher Columbus. As dos Santos tells it, we really don't know where or when the man we call Columbus was born or what his name was. He seems to have gone to great lengths to keep his past a secret. One theory is that the "real" Christopher Columbus -- the man who went by that name, or something close to it -- was an unlettered silk weaver whose identity the great navigator borrowed. In this, of course, are echoes of the supposed mystery of Shakespeare's identity, with some arguing that William Shakespeare was a country bumpkin whose name was used by the brilliant aristocrat who wrote the plays.
Isabel Allende's memoir begins with the author lying wide awake on an exceptionally stormy Californian night. She is disturbed not, by the ferocious wind or the rain but, by a superstitious fear. For it is the eve of 8 January, the day on which for the past 25 years she has always begun the writing of a new book. She feels that if she starts on any other day, the work will be a failure.Read More
All this is very typical of Allende, who,, by her own admission, inhabits a world full of melodrama, premonitions, omens and spiritual encounters. Her family history is so extraordinary that she needed to look little further for inspiration for the characters that make up such a fantastical saga as her first, most successful novel, The House of Spirits. Unsurprisingly, as she confesses, such a legacy made her unable for much of her life to separate fantasy from reality.
The 19th century British scholar John Willis Clark once defined a library as a "gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present." Clark also regarded libraries as museums in the sense that each is "a temple or haunt of the muses," a sanctuary for the intellect where inspiration issues forth in myriad forms by way of countless sources.Read More
These thoughts came to mind as I was reading "The Library at Night," Alberto Manguel's latest reflection on the miracle of the written word, especially the sections in which the Argentine-born author pays tribute to the 30,000 books he has assembled so painstakingly over the last five decades. "My books," he writes, "hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."
"You turn me into a character in a soap opera," says Ricardo to the bad girl.Read More
But it's the bad girl who is the soap's femme fatale in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel. She first appears in 1950 in the narrator's teens in Miraflores, a smart Lima suburb, during the mambo craze, with her "mischievous laugh and mocking glance". There is no delicate exploration of character, just that laugh, that glance and an unfolding chain of erotic encounters, in which she is passive and elusive.
Vargas Llosa's subtly crafted novels divide into deeply serious ones, like the recent The Feast of the Goat, and more light-hearted, teasing ones, sometimes combining both as in his brilliant Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Here, the bad girl tantalises her absurdly loyal romantic lover in different guises. She is Comrade Arlette, guerrilla fighter in Paris and Havana, then Madame Arnoux in Paris, then Mrs Richardson in Newmarket, and Kuriko, shady businessman's moll in Tokyo. We appreciate Vargas Llosa's skill in delaying her dramatic entrances and latest mutation, although she remains the same.
The writers in this early work by Roberto Bolaño have poetry in their veins and small swastikas in their hearts. And yet, despite the bluntness of the title, the quick sketches of these fictional lives don't constitute a literary Nuremberg trial. With the cool pose of an academic reference work, Bolaño portrays the politics here as almost beside the point, something dragging from the bumper of literature's runaway car - or maybe thumping in its trunk.Read More
"Nazi Literature in the Americas" poses as an academic reference work on a disturbing subgroup of reactionary writers. The 30 writers portrayed range across the Western Hemisphere, from a wealthy Argentine salon hostess visiting Hitler in Europe (her baby gets "dandled by the Führer") to a Haitian plagiarist "excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet while continuing to espouse a certain kind of négritude." Two Colombian writers volunteer to fight with the Germans on the Russian front; another poet heads a gang of soccer thugs. The entries scroll on with obituary calm.
But for all the objectivity of the prose, Bolaño unleashes blistering, dark comedy. Despite the layers of protective irony, despite the fact that the writers never seem as grotesque as we imagine fascist writers will be, the humor remains tense, even disorienting. In this sense, the book becomes a kind of ethical dare: Is it possible to play with the Nazi sympathies even of made-up writers rather than face them more soberly? Isn't there a moral pressure at certain depths that makes too much lightness frivolous? Surely it's one thing for Borges to fool around with Don Quixote, and another thing to play it cool about Auschwitz.
When Nazi Literature in the Americas was published in Spain in 1996, Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño captured the attention of Latin American and Spanish critics for the first time. The book consists of thirty entries, ranging from one to twenty-seven pages, each devoted to assessing a writer who has some relation to fascism. These include not just contemporaries of Hitler and Mussolini but members of subsequent generations, down to that of Pinochet. In addition, there is some important back matter: a bibliography of all the works produced by the authors examined, a list of the publishing houses and magazines that brought them out and a quasi glossary that provides snippet descriptions of personalities referred to in the major pieces (and, as well, some who have not been previously mentioned in the book).Read More
Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolaño dropped out of high school shortly after he decided to become a poet at age 15. The year was 1968, a time as wild in Mexico City, where Bolaño and his parents were living, as it was in the United States--but much more dangerous. There, student protests, rock 'n' roll and sexual liberation were the pursuits not only of poets but also of activists and leftist guerrillas, and the Mexican government greeted them with a dirty war. Four unlucky students died at Kent State in 1970; some 300 were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Yet for Bolaño, who'd just arrived from a small country town in Chile, the atmosphere of the big city was intoxicating. Years later he recalled that the capital had seemed to him "like the Frontier, that vast, nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are the spectacles of every day."Read More
Bolaño's own transformation began with a five-year period of isolation. Rather than join the party, he shut himself in his bedroom to consume book after book after book. The poet Jaime Quezada, who came to visit the family when Bolaño was 18, recalls that the young writer was living like a hermit. "He didn't come out of his bed-living-dining-room," Quezada has said, "except to go to the toilet or to comment out loud, pulling on his hair, about some passage in the book he was reading."
Young and broke, Bolaño stocked his shelves by shoplifting from bookstores all over Mexico City. His captures included volumes by Pierre Louÿs, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Pepys, Alphonse Daudet, Juan Rulfo, Amado Nuevo and Vachel Lindsay. But the book that changed his life was Albert Camus's The Fall, in which a lawyer who hangs out at an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City resigns himself to a life of calculated hypocrisy. Bolaño explains in his essay "Who's the Brave One?" that after reading it, he was possessed by a desire "to read everything, which, in my simplicity, was the same as wanting to or intending to discover the mechanism of chance that had led Camus's character to accept his atrocious fate." Bolaño's library was his own private Frontier.
Unlike many passionate young readers--who knock off two books a week when they're in high school but slow down to three or four a year once adulthood hems them in--Bolaño kept reading all his life. Most authors, Bolaño's editor Jorge Herralde observed in his book For Roberto Bolaño (2006), bury themselves in their own work, losing sight of the larger field. But Bolaño loved reading the works of his contemporaries--and he loved talking about what he was reading with his friends. According to Herralde, he was that rare and beautiful animal: "an insatiable reader." This lifelong compulsion, and its fleeting gratifications, formed the foundation of Bolaño's critical rulings, many of which can be found in his posthumous collection Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003) (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches).
.Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of HellRead More
Knowledge of Hell
's Nazi Literature in the Americas.The writers in this early work by Roberto BolañoRead More
"Nazi Literature in the Americas
But for all the objectivity of the prose, Bolaño unleashes blistering, dark comedy. Despite the layers of protective irony, despite the fact that the writers never seem as grotesque as we imagine fascist writers will be, the humor remains tense, even disorienting. In this sense, the book becomes a kind of ethical dare: Is it possible to play with the Nazi sympathies even of made-up writers rather than face them more soberly? Isn't there a moral pressure at certain depths that makes too much lightness frivolous? Surely it's one thing for Borges to fool around with Don Quixote, and another thing to play it cool about Auschwitz.
