Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Ed King reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

In December 1992 Isabel Allende's only daughter, Paula, died after a year-long coma. During the long hours spent at her bedside Allende wrote her first memoir, which she named after and addressed to her unconscious daughter.

In The Sum of Our Days Allende, the great matriarch of Latin American literature, picks up the conversation where she left it, telling Paula how she and her family have spent their time and, most of all, how her life has accommodated the abrupt, grief-induced onset of old age.

The overarching protagonist of Allende's memoir is her vast family in Marin County, California, where she came as an exile from the Pinochet dictatorship and has lived ever since. Like her slightly overwhelming 'tribe', Allende's narrative is sprawling and pleasingly chaotic.

She visits each family member in turn and charts the evolution of their relationships since Paula's death. We meet her lawyer husband, Willie, who campaigns for the rights of immigrant workers and looks quite like Paul Newman; her strictly Catholic daughter-in-law, Celia, who offends everybody with her strident homophobia before running off with a woman called Sally; and her indomitable mother, Abuela Hilda, who 'sees things that are invisible'.

But it's the family's spiritual life that gets the most attention.

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Chilean Literature

Ildefonso Falcones - Cathedral of the Sea

Michael Eaude reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.

In the 14th century, Catalonia's ships dominated the western Mediterranean. Its merchants opened offices in every port to Alexandria and built fabulous mansions on Barcelona's Carrer Montcada. But the empire was overstretched. Mid-century, plague halved the population. The king taxed the Jews to finance his wars and his nobles ravaged the countryside to feed the city. Peasants starved. Ildefonso Falcones's adventure novel is set just at this moment of Catalonia's greatest glory, when ostentatious wealth is barely papering over imminent collapse.

Barcelona's Santa Maria del Mar church (the cathedral of Falcones's title) was built in 54 years in this century, so quickly as cathedrals go that it is all in one style, a high, spacious, unadorned Gothic. "Its only decoration will be the light of the Mediterranean," as Falcones writes. His hero, Arnau, sees the cathedral start and lives to celebrate its completion. Some of Falcones's best pages describe the construction: the carrying of the stones from the Montjuic quarries, the raising of the giant keystones.

Just as the cathedral is a great enterprise, Arnau is a great man. Born a serf, he survives perils, saves Barcelona from Pedro the Cruel of Castile, and is made a baron. His evil enemies plot to have him imprisoned by the Inquisition. His lifelong goodness to his fellow-workers, to clients and to outcasts such as the Moors and Jews leads to a near-revolutionary uprising to free him.

Cathedral of the Sea is a formula adventure novel, its huge sales augmented by the glamour of Barcelona's reputation. It contains everything such a book requires: the evil lord raping a serf on her wedding night, summary hangings after a bread riot, long-suffering Jews, demented friars, cruel treatment of women, the vicious Margarida Puig, the beautiful and sexually voracious Aledis.

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Spanish Literature

PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize

Margaret Jull Costa's translation of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias has won The PEN/ Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. The Maias is part of the Dedalus project with Margaret Jull Costa to translate all of Eça de Queiroz's work into English, with funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation in London and the Camões Institute and the Portuguese Book Institute in Lisbon. The Maias is the sixth book in the nine book project to be published by Dedalus and will be followed later this year by The City and the Mountains.




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Portuguese Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Two new reviews of Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days and an interview.

Thirteen years ago, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende published a memoir, Paula, in the form of a letter to a daughter who lay in a coma. The Sum of Our Days is a sequel, also addressed to Paula, that explains what has happened to the family since her death from porphyria, a rare blood disorder, in 1992. The author, I believe, attempts three things: She defends her use of magical realism as an emotional device, demonstrating how it operates in her everyday life as well as in her novels -- which is fascinating. She explains to her deceased daughter how she has endeavored to merge her family, her second husband's previous wives and children, and various friends and acquaintances into one big "tribe" -- which is puzzling. And she tries, all too plainly, to discredit and diminish her second husband's children -- which is disturbing.

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"Every life can be told as a novel," remarks Allende near the start of this memoir covering the years since 1992 when she lost her daughter, Paula. Written in the style of a long letter to the much-missed girl, this book about the lives of her family is told just like a novel, even beginning with a hook: "I always approach the eighth of January with trembling."

Allende, we learn, uses this date every year to start writing a new book or else risk a year of devastating bad luck. It is her grave preoccupation with superstition, tradition and spiritual enlightenment that colours and shapes this piece of autobiographical writing. The Sum Of Our Days is a book about loss, about healing; but most of all about the dynamics of a close family.

The Sum of Our Days makes frequent references to her dead daughter's spirit, which Allende believes guides her family, answering their prayers and causing good things to happen. Although to the reader this can seem misguided, even irritating, the author's grief-stricken denial of the finality of death is understandable and poignant. Her deep-rooted conviction that the living and the spirit world can interact will come as no surprise to those who read her debut 1982 novel The House Of The Spirits.

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For Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, a mother-daughter bond is something to forge and nurture daily — even after death.

Allende still writes a letter to her mother every day, a tradition that has endured for years. And before her daughter, Paula, died in 1992, Allende exchanged daily letters with both women.

Those letters are the cornerstone for Allende's memoir, The Sum of Our Days, which is a sequel to Paula, a memoir she wrote as her daughter was dying of the enzyme disorder porphyria. The latest installment updates Paula on what's happened to Allende and her family since Paula's death.

The Sum of Our Days begins in a forest where the family has gathered to scatter Paula's ashes. Allende tells NPR's Lynn Neary that returning to that difficult period wasn't hard for her.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Brad Thomas Parsons interviews Junot Díaz. The interview includes an excerpt of his new work in progress, a novel called Dark America.

Diaz: Oh sure, why not, who knows when it will ever see the light of day again. This is some opening throat-clearing from my next novel Dark America.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck. Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora. See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.

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Dominican Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Michael Dirda reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries -- row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination. Sadly, this cozy vision is usually little more than a daydream, though not for Alberto Manguel. As The Library at Night indicates, he has managed to take every reader's castle in the air and put a foundation under it.

From a psychological viewpoint, most bookmen and women are actually among the more unfortunate sufferers on the wheel of life -- for them there is no respite, no relief, from the insatiate ache of desire. Surrounded by plenty, they hunger for more. Collections are never complete. Unsigned modern firsts really do need to become signed or inscribed. Any merely fine copy suddenly looks dingy when compared to one in mint condition. Moreover, as everyone can attest, the exhilaration of actual possession lasts but a twinkling. The newly acquired treasure is soon slipped onto a bookshelf or even, as the bookcases fill up, into a cardboard box stored in the basement or the attic or the American Self Storage in Kensington, Md. And once in a box, the book can never, ever be found when it's needed. Trust me. I know.

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Argentine Literature

Subcomandante Marcos: The Speed of Dreams

City Lights just released Subcomandante Marcos' The Speed of Dreams.

From the City Lights site:

Since the publication of Our Word is Our Weapon – which Publishers Weekly described “as strong as dignity and as subtle as love” – Mexico’s enigmatic Zapatista leader has written some of his most brilliant and complex works. From a retelling of indigenous myths and legends, to visions of the future of Mexico, from searing critiques of the U.S. war in Iraq, to clandestine radio broadcasts from the jungles of Chiapas, here is an amazing selection of writing that gives voice to the literary and poetic genius of Latin America's greatest living writer/rebel.

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Mexican Literature

Pulitzer Fiction Prize 2008

Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao



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Latin American Literature

Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell

Benjamin Lytal reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell.

We talk about psychological novels without expecting their authors to have any particular expertise in psychology. Novelists go on instinct, we understand. Henry James described a "sublime confidence" that allowed him to write about the inner lives of others, and we ask no more — and often less — of contemporary authors.

What, then, to make of a psychological novel written by a practicing psychiatrist? António Lobo Antunes, who has been in residence at Lisbon's Hospital Miguel Bombarda since the 1970s, is no mere dilettante: Until 1998, when José Saramago collected what will probably be Portugal's only Nobel Prize in literature for a generation, Mr. Antunes was widely considered a favorite for that prize. The author of some 20 novels, eight of which have now been translated into English, Mr. Antunes differs sharply in style from Mr. Saramago. Where the Nobel Prize winner writes universal allegories in polished, sometimes pale, prose, Mr. Antunes prefers a dense, distinctly Portuguese style, full of mnemonic crosscuts and unstinting imagery.

His attitude toward Portugal is one of wry disgust — he devoted one novel, "The Return of the Caravels" (1988), to the notion that the national heroes from the days of Prince Henry the Navigator might someday return, only to find a squalid harbor town, rather than the great nation they thought they had founded. In Portuguese literature, this attitude — not of keen regret, but of weary self-loathing — is at least as old as Eça de Queiros, the great 19th-century novelist. To this tradition, Mr. Antunes adds his own wretched experience as a medic in Angola during the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–74).

The belatedly translated "Knowledge of Hell" (Dalkey Archive Press, 312 pages, $13.95), from 1983, in many ways an autobiographical novel, draws heavily on Mr. Antunes's memories of Angola — but the titular inferno lies elsewhere. "In 1973, I had come back from the war and knew about injuries, about the cries of pain on the trail, about explosions [. . .] knew about spilled blood and longing, but I had been spared the knowledge of Hell."

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Portuguese Literature

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Javier Cercas shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with "The Speed of Light".
The shortlist also comprises Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish), The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneraratne (Sri Lankan), De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese), Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian), Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli), The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algerian), and The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russian).
The winner will be announced on 12th June.




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Spanish Literature

Jose Rodrigues dos Santos: Codex 632

Matthew Narby reviews José Rodrigues dos Santos' Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher Columbus.

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.

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.

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Portuguese Literature

Jose Rodrigues dos Santos: Codex 632

Patrick Anderson reviews José Rodrigues dos Santos' Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher 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.

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.

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Portuguese Literature