Horacio Castellanos Moya: Senselessness

Jed Lipinski reviews Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness.

Senselessness is the eighth novel by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya and, remarkably, the first to appear in English. Moya has been hailed as El Salvador's foremost novelist, and Senselessness, published in Spanish in 2004, took only four years to arrive in the States—not a bad track record, considering that Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, released here last fall, was first published in 1998.

A chaptered but nearly paragraphless 142 pages, Senselessness reads like a vicious, novella-length rant by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard—had Bernhard spent his developmental years drinking mescal in a corrupt, oppressively Catholic Latin America and having sex with passionate Spanish women. Bernhard's influence is obvious, like Joyce's influence on Flann O'Brien and J.P. Donleavy, but never burdensome. By filtering Bernhard's addled consciousness through his own, and steeping it in the humidity of a thinly disguised Guatemala, the novel provides a kind of meta-analysis of the neurotic Austrian master—though it stands alone, too, as an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art.

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Salvadoran Literature

Felisberto Hernández: Lands of Memory

Jed Lipinski reviews Felisberto Hernández' Lands of Memory.

The Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964)—considered the father of magic realism for his influence on García Márquez, Cortázar, and Calvino—was fond of dimly lit rooms, veils, hats in general, and the way blind people strike matches. A virtuosic pianist, in his youth he worked as a "musical illustrator" for silent films. He required absolute silence to write and admired the way silence draws attention to a person's face. He liked to wander through unfamiliar houses. A friend claimed he lived "on a mountain in the moon."

The two novellas and four stories that make up Lands of Memory—most of them published in the 1940s, all of them first-person accounts and rigorously translated for the first time by Esther Allen—are summarized by the author as "commentaries on things." The main "thing" is Hernández's affection for certain moments, especially those that precede knowledge. Memories of his childhood, like the inexplicable sadness he felt after throwing a yellow banana peel into a green alfalfa field, were particularly important to him for having preceded adulthood, when thought begins to influence and corrupt feelings. Lands of Memory provides a kind of solution to n + 1 magazine's complaint with the "faux-naïf" sensibility of McSweeney's. Hernández is capable of writing with a child's sense of wonder, but he can also philosophically justify childhood's connection to the unknown ("With respect to the unknown, I want to define the vein more clearly by specifying that there is little thought in it"). The story "Mistaken Hands" consists of complex psychological letters to female strangers, in the hope they'll write back and describe what their day is like.

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Uruguayan Literature

Jose Eduardo Agualusa: The Book of Chameleons

Steven G. Kellman reviews José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons.

The Book of Chameleons begins with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine master of conceptual ficciones: “If I were to be born again, I’d like to be something completely different.” Agualusa’s book teases the reader with the fungibility of multiple identities. What Félix imagines for a client is what the client becomes. Declaring himself an animist, the salesman of selves explains: “The same thing happens to the soul as happens to water — it flows. Today it’s a river. Tomorrow, it will be the sea.”

Eulálio sees a procession of strangers enter the house in search of fresh identities. One, an itinerant photojournalist eager to be thought Angolan, ends up with a new name, José Buchmann, and a complicated family history. His mother, he is told, was an American painter who mysteriously abandoned the family. So “José Buchmann” goes off to New York to find this concocted woman and finds traces of her there and in Cape Town that Félix never imagined. Another client is a government minister who is intent on commissioning a personal genealogy that will endow him with heroic stature. Still another makes this uncommon request: “What I’m after is for you to arrange for me exactly the opposite of what you usually do for people — I want you to give me a modest past. A name with no luster to it whatsoever.”

Though he never reveals his original name, Eulálio, we learn, was once a human being, a librarian whose failure to love was probably the reason for his transformation into a gecko 15 years before. Now, in his saurian state, he is especially attentive to the relationship developing between Félix and a beautiful young visitor named Ângela Lúcia. Like José Buchmann, she, too, is a photographer, though she demurs: “I’m not even sure that I am a photographer. I collect light.” One of the finest sections in The Book of Chameleons consists of Ângela Lúcia’s comparative analysis of the quality of light in different locales, including Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Goa, Berlin, and Cairo.

Throughout the novel, which is composed of brief, terse chapters, a haze hovers over boundaries between identities, as well as states of being. In this Borgesian ether, dreams alternate with what passes for “reality,” and characters collide with their doubles. Agualusa situates his story within the context of the dictatorships and violence that have plagued Angola since Portugal began to pull out in 1975. If his novel has a fault, it comes at the end, when the author does not trust the reader’s imagination enough to refrain from explaining. Until that point, Agualusa is, like his character Félix, a consummate con. “I lie with joy!” the merchant of pasts exclaims. “Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance.” For the true lies of this novel, José Eduardo Agualusa deserves not just acceptance but acclaim.

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A few poems by Fernando Pessoa translated by George Monteiro.

Self-Analysis

The poet is a forger who forges so completely that he forges even the
feeling he truly feels as pain. And
those who read his poems feel absolutely, not his two separate pains,
but only the pain that they do not feel.
And thus, diverting the understanding, the wind-up train we call the
heart runs along its track.

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and the original:
Autopsicografia

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só a que eles não têm.

E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão,
Esse comboio de corda
Que se chama coração.



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Portuguese Literature

Jose Luis Peixoto: The Implacable Order of Things

Jack Shreve reviews José Luis Peixoto's The Implacable Order of Things.

Hailing from the worlds of the theater and poetry, award-winning Portuguese novelist Peixoto (b. 1974) writes straightforward prose that, with its incantatory cadence, brings readers to new heights of realization. Recommended.

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Portuguese Literature

Roberto Bolano: The Savage Detectives

Claire Buckland reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives".

Translated into English for the first time, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s prize-winning book portrays a lost generation. It opens in Mexico City in 1975 with the diary of Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old devotee of the “visceral-realist” movement championed by fictional poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.

The visceral realists spend their time reading, stealing and destroying books – and posturing outrageously: according to a gay friend of Juan’s, “novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual”.

Juan’s own writing is self-regarding, exuberant, naïve and charged with possibilities. The diary ends when Juan, Belano, Lima and a runaway prostitute set out on a road trip to trace the last recorded journey of a 1920s poet.

Bolaño’s intense monologues fragment into a series of interviews with just about anyone who came into contact with Lima and Belano between 1976 and 1996.

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Chilean Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Ilan Stavans reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days

Isabel Allende has recently published a sequel to her popular memoir "Paula," which recounted the tragic death of her 28-year-old daughter Paula Frías, who became ill with the rare blood disease porphyria at the end of 1991. Like its predecessor, "The Sum of Our Days" is structured as a mother's letter to the absent Paula. In it she recounts her life since Paula's death, her artistic hits (the global appeal of her memoir, the making of the Billie August film adaptation of "The House of the Spirits," the research of novels like "Portrait in Sepia" and "Inés of My Soul") and an array of indiscretions (the fertility treatments of a daughter-in-law, the bisexual identity of another one). Seasoned throughout are recurrent dreams, as is fashionable in Allende's work, and recommendations on how to live a happy life amid endless misfortunes.

There's an unavoidable honesty to the narrative, a directness that is likely to hypnotize a handful of readers. Yet at its core the book is soulless, sin alma. The short chapters leap haphazardly from one tale to another, from this relative to that tourist trip to meeting Antonio Banderas, as if the book was nothing but a series of journal entries.

Allende used to be a writer of promise. She came late to the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s. But once she arrived into the mostly male club (Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, García Márquez), people paid attention. But somewhere in the journey she became a facile, consenting storyteller, ceasing to surprise her audience.

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Chilean Literature

Leonardo Padura: Havana Gold

A few reviews of Leonardo Padura's Havana Gold.

This is the final novel in the English-language version of Padura's Four Seasons series of novels, set in Havana in 1989, although in fact it is the second in the original Spanish. Again we have a murder set against the looming crisis of Cuba's Special Period as the implosion of the Soviet Union starts. And again the disillusioned detective Mario Conde sets out to resolve the crime in his own slow-paced, insightful manner. It is a formula that has worked throughout the four-part series as well as in two other novels, Adios Hemingway and the latest, and by far most sophisticated work in this genre, La neblina del ayer (2005, still untranslated into English). Leonardo Padura's recent presentation at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba will have illustrated the reason for his novels' popularity (now translated into sixteen languages) and his own personal success.

The plot is simple: the body of Lissette Delgado, a young teacher, is found after she has been raped, beaten and strangled. Mario Conde's mission is to find the killer, a challenge that takes him through the crumbling streets of Havana to his old high school, where Lissette taught. The Special Period is on the verge of arriving, along with massive dislocations in Cuban society - and the edgy atmosphere, complete with incipient social problems (drugs were virtually unheard of until this time), growing corruption, and generally demoralized environment, are all superbly presented.

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Like an indulgent parent, Leonardo Padua allows his literary progeny (in this, his fifth outing) free rein to chat up women, argue about books and music, get drunk with friends and express his desires. Indeed, we get to know The Count so well, and become so involved with his arguments about Franny and Zooey (better than The Catcher in The Rye), John Fogerty (the greatest ever voice) and “Strawberry Fields” (The Beatles’ best song), that unravelling the murder becomes almost incidental to the plot.

Havana Gold is a textured treat for those who like their detective fiction served long and lazy with a double shot of rum.

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Havana Gold is the fourth novel in the Havana quartet by Leonardo Padura and once again creates a rich and fascinating portrayal of a crumbling yet vibrant city. Lusty, macho, foul-mouthed and poetic in roughly equal amounts Lieutenant Conde becomes our guide to the faded grandeur of Cuba's stylish yet poverty-stricken capital as he reflects on the changing conditions in the city that he grew up in. Vital and rough-edged, Havana Gold is perhaps best enjoyed with a glass of rum and a cigar.

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Cuban Literature

Interview with Margaret Sayers Peden

Steve Bennett interviews translator Margaret Sayers Peden.

If you've ever read Isabel Allende or Carlos Fuentes — in English — then say a prayer for Margaret Sayers Peden.

Peden is the translator from Spanish to English of more than 60 books over the past 50 years, including the work of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Mexican essayist Octavio Paz, both Nobel laureates, as well as “Como agua para chocolate” (“Like Water for Chocolate”) author Laura Esquivel and, of course, Allende and Fuentes.

The Missouri native, who will teach two workshops on translation during Gemini Ink's Summer Literary Festival next month, follows a simple rule when she receives a Spanish manuscript to translate: “Take small bites and chew very hard.”

Actually, Peden follows two rules religiously. The other: “The dictionary is the great betrayer.”

Renowned translator Edith Grossman once said, “Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper.”

“If you translate word for word,” says Peden in her welcoming, musical voice, “it sounds ridiculous. Words — I love pizza, I love Josephine — can have so many meanings. Words can be like amoebas. If you just look at meanings of words, you won't get it.”

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Latin American Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Philip Hensher reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Like many writers - "a subset of readers," Alberto Manguel calls us - I am a creature of libraries, and can trace my life through each one habitually used. New Malden branch library; Broomhill (a lovely Edwardian villa in that queen of suburbs); Sheffield central library; the Bod; the Cambridge University Library, always feebly abbreviated to the UL; and the London Library.

And, as Manguel says in this remarkable and lovely book, our personal libraries, too, are "reflections of the owner", carapaces into which we fit neatly. Libraries are living things, and have their own lives, as surely as books or people do. Nowadays, of course, the idea of the library is under attack, and many librarians seem the last people who should be left alone with a book and a waste-paper basket.

Nicholson Baker has chronicled the brutal assaults on library stock carried out by librarians, but it hasn't stopped. The librarians of the university I teach at, Exeter, regularly toss out irreplaceable volumes without any consultation, to the point where academics have to loiter around skips to rescue anything important.

The tragedy is that nobody has ever invented a piece of such durable and portable technology as the printed book, and it has, thus far, proved irreplaceable. Manguel tells an amusing story of the BBC, which, in 1986, celebrated the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book by putting the whole thing on computer discs.

Sixteen years later, those discs proved impossible to read by any technological means. The Domesday Book itself was still fine, but if it had been, say, a 19th-century newspaper rather than a 12th-century manuscript, it would have long been consigned to the flames by a librarian, and lost for ever.

Manguel's study addresses the idea of the library, which will always be incomplete, and empty both of books that remain to be written, and books that remain to be found. Somehow libraries, both shared and private, fill up with complete surveys of the most surprising subjects.

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Argentine Literature

Interview with Mario Benedetti

Juan Cruz interviews Mario Benedetti.

Cómo nacen mis libros es un misterio. Porque de repente estoy meses sin escribir, y de pronto aparece, plaf, ahí está, vuelve la escritura. Aparecen de golpe, con sus títulos y todo, con la división de capítulos. Pienso que eso le pasa a todos los escritores, que un nuevo libro les surge como un secreto que se revela...

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Uruguaian Literature

Post Boom Novels

Alberto Manguel selects sixteen post-boom novels. (In Spanish)



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Latin American Literature