António Lobo Antunes: The Fat Man and Infinity and Other Writings

Dwight Garner reviews António Lobo Antunes' The Fat Man and Infinity and Other Writings.

Writing last year in The Nation, Natasha Wimmer, the gifted young translator of Roberto Bolaño's major novels into English, described the rivalry between the Portuguese novelists José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, Ms. Wimmer wrote, "there were those who believed that the wrong writer had been chosen."

One of those people may have been Mr. Antunes. In 1998, when a reporter for The New York Times called him for a comment about Saramago's Nobel, Mr. Antunes said, "This phone doesn't work!" and cut the connection.

Mr. Saramago, born in 1922, and Mr. Antunes, born in 1942, are not easily confused on the page. Mr. Saramago's style is spare and allegorical. His best novels, like "Blindness" (1998), build like ticking cerebral thrillers. Mr. Antunes's work, on the other hand, is chaotic and jagged, in a style that can be reminiscent of Faulkner's.

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Luis Sepúlveda

Chilean novelist Luis Sepúlveda won the 13th Edition of the Premio Primavera de Novela (Spain) with a prize value of 200.000 Euro.
More details in El País.

António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes announced in an interview that in two years he will stop writing.
After his new book "Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?" to be released this year and another one, Lobo Antunes intends to put an end to his career.

Roberto Bolaño: 2666

Stephen Abell reviews Roberto Bolaño's 2666

The first temptation might be to dismiss this wondrous novel as no more than cult fiction. It certainly has plenty of those qualities associated with cult status: it is posthumous, unfinished, written in a foreign language, postmodern, ultra-violent, dauntingly long, mysteriously (perhaps even meaninglessly) titled. And Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean author who died in 2003, is a suitably romantic figurehead, having turned to the "dangerous calling" of writing fiction late in life in order to support his family (and avoid penury from his poetry).

But 2666 is a major literary event. It is a supernovel comprising five sections, each capable of standing alone (as was Bolaño's original idea, with one eye on the increased sales that would accrue). The first is the tale of four literary critics, who join together in search of a mysterious German writer called Benno von Archimboldi. Their search leads them to Santa Teresa, a city in northern Mexico, where they are entertained by the local intelligentsia (including a strange professor called Amalfitano, who hangs a geometry book outside his home so the wind could "see whether there was anything in it that might be of use") and learn that hundreds of women have been murdered in the region over the last few years. The second part is an odd account of Amalfitano and his apparent nervous breakdown. The third focuses on an African-American writer called Quincy Williams, known to everyone as "Fate", who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match.

The fourth section focuses in disturbing detail on the rapes and murders of the women (the effect, a combination of what might be called shock and bore). In pulpish paragraphs, it describes the remains of each victim ("the blows she'd received had destroyed her spleen") and the police's desultory attempts to find the person responsible. One suspect is a giant German named Klaus Haas, who could be, but probably is not, Archimboldi.. In the final part, we learn of Archimboldi's life as a German soldier in the Second World War and then as a writer wandering around the Mediterranean.

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Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist’s Son

Jascha Hoffman reviews Bernardo Atxaga's "The Accordionist's Son"

The Basque novelist Bernardo At­xaga has spent his career moving between fairy tales and terrorism. His early works were set in the mythical Spanish town of Obaba, where birds, squirrels and snakes could speak. Later he turned out gritty novels about men and women backed into corners by their entanglement with the Basque separatist movement. These two worlds converge in "The Accordionist's Son," a sprawling novel about the legacy of civil war in Spain that borrows characters from Atxaga's previous works but does not have quite the same charm and power.

Stretching across most of the 20th century, the novel is framed as the memoir of David Imaz, a Basque exile. Dying on a ranch in Northern California in 1999, he steals away from his American family each night to document his early life in his native language. We learn he was raised in the peaceful town of Obaba, not far from Guernica, with only a dim awareness of the civil war that ended a decade before he was born. As a teenager he discovers a list of Republican sympathizers executed on behalf of the Franco regime in 1937. It is in his father's hand.

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Antonio Muñoz Molina: A Manuscript Of Ashes

Colin Fleming reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript Of Ashes

Riddle, sham, requiem, detective story - Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "A Manuscript of Ashes" is one nasty revenge tale, bound to trip up readers as mercilessly as it flogs its characters. Simply, this is an exercise in psychological horror, a study of how far one man and his accomplice will go to crush the literary ideals of another - for sport, spite and inspiration.

The story begins in a darkened bedroom, in Mágina, Spain, where an unknown first-person narrator commands his lover, Inés, to leave. We have no idea who this narrator is, nor will we until 300 pages later, after he has made his horrible revelation plain to Minaya, a young man who has come to Mágina to escape the police for his role in the Madrid student protests of 1969. In Mágina, he boards with his uncle, Manuel, under the pretense of writing a dissertation about Jacinto Solana, an agitprop poet who had lived in the house and was later assassinated. Both Solana and Manuel were in love with Mariana, a temptress who married Manuel and was ostensibly killed on her wedding night by a stray bullet from a rooftop exchange of gunfire. Determined to find Solana's lost novel, Minaya instead enters into the role of civilian detective, convincing himself that either his literary hero or his uncle was a murderer.

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António Lobo Antunes: What can I do when everything's on fire?

Jaime Manrique reviews António Lobo Antunes' What can I do when everything's on fire?

From the beginning of his long, distinguished career, António Lobo Antunes has been a pitiless chronicler of Portugal's colonialism in Brazil and in Africa, the repercussions of which are felt to this day. Lobo Antunes served as a military doctor in the Angolan war of independence from Portugal (1961-75), which generated genocidal acts on both sides, and has emerged as the unquestionable historical conscience of the liberation wars fought by the Portuguese colonies in the 1960s. Haunted by Portugal's imperialist past and decades of repression at home, Lobo Antunes's characters are a cast of disaffected, predominantly marginal people whose souls have been corroded by the legacy of their nation's brutal history (another one of his major subjects is the 36-year right-wing dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, which ended in 1968). His latest novel, "What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?," translated into English with a pitch-perfect ear for colloquial speech by the legendary Gregory Rabassa, is another dissection of Portugal's sick soul.

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Portuguese Literature

Carlos Fuentes' Autobiography

According to milenio.com Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes is writing his autobiography.

El escritor mexicano Carlos Fuentes anunció hoy que ya trabaja, de manera adelantada, en la preparación de un libro autobiográfico, el cual vendrá a ser "la culminación de mi vida".

Fuentes aseguró que su texto se llamará "Los días de mi vida" y que le llevará tiempo terminarlo, por tratarse de "un género complicado".

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Latin American Literature

Jose Saramago: A Viagem do Elefante

José Saramago as just published his new novel "A Viagem do Elefante"
(The Elephant's Journey).

Saramago built this new novel from an historical fact the story of
Salomon an elephant that crossed half Europe in the XVI th century as
a gift from John III, King of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian II of
Austria.
I'm personally very curious about this new experience in an historical
novel 26 years after "Baltasar and Blimunda".




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Portuguese Literature

Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families

Eric Liebetrau reviews Carlos Fuentes' Happy Families
.

In his latest short-story collection, "Happy Families," Mexican author Carlos Fuentes lends credence to Tolstoy's paradigmatic line from "Anna Karenina," demonstrating in myriad ways that, indeed, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Certainly, there aren't many "happy families" to be found in these pages - more like miniature cyclones of emotion that oscillate between loyalty and betrayal, devotion and rebellion. These 16 stories, like most of the author's fiction, spotlight his home country, though more often than not it's portrayed in less-than-rose-colored hues. A former diplomat, Fuentes is acutely aware of the corruption (a "national pastime"), greed and opportunism that pervade modern Mexico, and he rarely misses an opportunity to dig in and expose the raw-boned truth beneath the surface.

"Being a man doesn't mean not being a child anymore but beginning to be a criminal," notes the narrator in "The Mariachi's Mother," a simmering portrait of a mother's love for her son and desire for him to lead a better life than she. After Maximilian is injured in the wake of a violent protest, Doña Medea supplicates herself in prayer for her son's recovery - though she wryly notes "that even though her example of charitable availability benefits no one, at least it creates something like an aura of kindly normality in a neighborhood with no standard but evil."

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Mexican Literature

Julián Ayesta: Helena, or the Sea in Summer

Benjamim Lytal reviews Julián Ayesta's Helena, or the Sea in Summer.

Books are often about the same things: the beach, a fire, a memory of sound and light. "The cherry jam shone bright red amongst the black and yellow wasps, and the wind stirred the branches of the oak trees, and spots of sunlight raced over the moss." This sentence, written by Julián Ayesta (1919-96), a Spanish diplomat and sometime author, could stand in for any number of literary memories.

There are some books that we talk about with each other. What did Isabella Archer have in mind, at the end of "The Portrait of a Lady," when James reported that she now finally knew where to turn, that now, to her, "there was a very straight path"? More than one reader is prepared to discuss the question. But only a few of the very most famous novels stay out in the open like this. Most remain private affairs, bottled, stored away.

The cherry jam shone bright red ... The coffee shone too, black amongst the cigar ash in the saucer. And the men all wore lopsided grins because they had a cigar in their mouth and talked and laughed like toothless old crocks, poking out tongues bright with spit as they blew out clouds of blue smoke.

Julián Ayesta's one published novel has only part of what we want from fiction; it is short on conflict and long on atmosphere. Originally published in 1952, and titled "Helena, or the Sea in Summer" (Dedalus, 124 pages, $12.99), this short book sets an idyllic series of early adolescent scenes against the tense backdrop of pre-revolutionary Spain. It reads like repeated sips from Keats's ideal cup of inspiration: "O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene." It is slight, but intoxicating.

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Spanish Literature

Luis de Camoes: The Collected Lyric Poems

Eric Ormsby reviews The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões.

In its great century, Portugal commanded an empire extending from Brazil to India. Vasco da Gama reached the coast of India in 1498, and in 1500 Pedro Cabral first sighted Brazil. But the imperial glory was short-lived. In 1580, Philip II of Spain invaded and added Portugal to his kingdom, where it remained unhappily for another 60 years.

But Portugal lost more than its independence in that year. For in 1580, Luís de Camões, later acclaimed as the national poet, died in Lisbon and was cast along with other victims of the plague into a common grave. In "The Lusiads," his great epic of a new world, Camões immortalized the exploits of da Gama, to whom he was distantly related, while in hundreds of shorter poems, he griped — and griped beautifully — about his own disastrous life. To be the national poet of Portugal, the country where the melancholy "fado" was born, is perhaps inevitably to be a laureate of hard luck.

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Portuguese Literature