Augusto Roa Bastos (1917 – 2005), Paraguayan novelist.
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Latin American Literature
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos (1917 – 2005), Paraguayan novelist.
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Latin American Literature
Antero de Quental
Antero de Quental, Portuguese Poet (1814-1873) painted by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro.
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Latin American Literature
Roberto Bolaño: Amulet
David Flusfeder reviews Roberto Bolaño's Amulet.
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Latin American Literature
The Chilean poet, novelist and provocateur Roberto Bolaño died in Spain in 2003. He was 50 years old and had already gathered a wide readership in the Spanish-speaking world. Death, though, can be a great career move. The response to the 2007 publication in the United States of his 1998 novel The Savage Detectives, followed by 2666, which was almost finished at the time of his death, has brought him into the international literary front rank. Both are large books, celebrations of poetry and a battered kind of urban heroism, written in Bolaño’s beguiling combination of concision and wordiness. But now, with the success of those, his smaller books are being translated into English for the first time.Read More
Bolaño’s work is a roman-fleuve: characters and situations recur throughout his writings, and time is a watery element that the characters drift through. Amulet has its origin in a 10-page episode in The Savage Detectives. That novel was centred on two provocative young poets living in Mexico City in 1976: Ulises Lima and the author’s alter-ego, Arturo Bolaño. In one of the most striking episodes, a woman, Auxilio Lacoutre, “the mother of Mexican poetry” (and a “mother” is, in this context, a woman who sweeps and shops and listens and adores), is in a fourth-floor lavatory cubicle when the army occupies the campus of the Mexico City Universidad. She is stuck there for 12 days. In the original episode, the emphasis was on Auxilio’s physical predicament. She drank water from the tap, ate loo paper and lived in a state of fear and heightened memory.
In Amulet, the emphasis is on the remembering rather than the predicament. Auxilio suffers from the blessing of being able to “remember” the future as well as the past. There are feverish prophecies about literary destinies: “For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033… Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045… Louis-Ferdinand Céline shall enter Purgatory in the year 2094… Witold Gombrowicz shall enjoy great prestige in the environs of the Rio de la Plata around the year 2098… Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.”
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Latin American Literature
Friday, August 28, 2009
Jorge Volpi: Bolivar’s Insomnia
Jorge Volpi, introduced his essay “Bolivar’s insomnia” at the XXII International Book Fair in Bogota, where power will find controversial issues as “the evolution of democracy, leaders of the region, drug trafficking and local issues that transcend borders. ”Read More
He made statements about his work related to Latin America:
“Latin America has disappeared for the world because it is not the place of dictatorships and guerrillas, except for the dramatic case of Colombia, nor of the fantastic stories portrayed in the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez.”
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Latin American Literature
Roberto Bolaño is an example of dead authors sucess. A new market trend?
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Latin American Literature
Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano was highly acclaimed in Latin America, but his work wasn't published in English until 2003, the year he died. "The Savage Detectives" finally got him noticed here when it was published in English in 2007, and his final novel, the enigmatic 900-page "2666," earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year.Read More
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Latin American Literature
José Saramago's new novel
José Saramago's new novel "Cain" will be presented in October.
A return to biblical themes almost 20 years after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ(1991).
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Latin American Literature
A return to biblical themes almost 20 years after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ(1991).
Portuguese author Jose Saramago takes an irreverent look at the Old Testament in his new novel, “Cain,” in which he absolves that Biblical villain of the killing of his brother and puts the blame squarely on God.Read More
His Portuguese-language publisher, Zeferino Coelho, will present the novel at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and the title is scheduled for release in bookstores in Portugal, Latin America and Spain by the end of that month.
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Latin American Literature
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Benjamin Moser: Why This World - A Biography of Clarice Lispector
Fernanda Eberstadt reviews Benjamin Moser's "Why This World - A Biography of Clarice Lispector".
Here's a riddle for literary sleuths. Which 20th-century writer was described by the eminent French critic Hélène Cixous as being what Rilke might have been, if he were a "Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine"? By the poet Elizabeth Bishop as "better than J. L. Borges"? And by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso as one of the chief revelations of his adolescence, along with sex and love and bossa nova? The answer is Clarice Lispector, a Portuguese-language novelist who died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977, and who, despite a cult following of artists and scholars, has yet to gain her rightful place in the literary canon.
During her lifetime, Lispector, a catlike blond beauty with movie-star magnetism and an indefinably foreign accent, enjoyed an enormous succès d'estime in Brazil. Her fiction, which combines jewel-like language, deadpan humor, philosophical profundity and an almost psychotically lucid understanding of the human condition, was lauded for having introduced European modernism to a national literature felt to be pretty parochial.
Carlos Fuentes Lemus: La palabra sobrevive; poemas 1986-1999
Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) presented a new edition of "La palabra sobrevive; poemas 1986-1999" a collection of poems of Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999) son of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.
La obra contiene el epílogo de escritor español Julián Ríos escrito en marzo de 2000, para su primera edición, en la que considera que la muerte está "agazapada en cada poema" de la obra de Fuentes Lemus.Para el editor Omegar Martínez el "valor intrínseco" de la reedición estriba en que "muestra la posibilidad de la gama que hubiese alcanzado el autor de haber seguido vivo".A su juicio, el poemario "tiene una profundidad muy intensa y a veces se desdibuja, como los primeros intentos de un adolescente que escribe, pero con una intensidad muy valiosa, casi inusitada para autores de su generación, de su edad"."Como editor veo la capacidad de un lenguaje de superponerse al mismo sufrimiento y crecimiento de un adulto joven, y la capacidad de la poesía para sobrevivir a pesar de la pesadumbre", concluye.
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