SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Monday, October 19, 2009

José Saramago - Cain

Last Monday José Saramago launched his new novel "Cain" with a very critical view of the Bible.

A row broke out in Portugal on Monday after a Nobel Prize-winning author denounced the Bible as a "handbook of bad morals".

Speaking at the launch of his new book "Cain", Jose Saramago, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, said society would probably be better off without the Bible.

Roman Catholic Church leaders accused the 86-year-old of a publicity stunt.

The book is an ironic retelling of the Biblical story of Cain, Adam and Eve's son who killed his younger brother Abel.

At the launch event in the northern Portuguese town of Penafiel on Sunday, Saramago said he did not think the book would offend Catholics "because they do not read the Bible".

"The Bible is a manual of bad morals (which) has a powerful influence on our culture and even our way of life. Without the Bible, we would be different, and probably better people," he was quoted as saying by the news agency Lusa. Read More

This is not a new situation, in 1992 when he released "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", the book was even banned from running to a literary prize by a member of the portuguese government close to the catholic church.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Brazilian publishers Record created a web site (in portuguese) dedicated to Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the greatest writers of brazilian literature and one of the masters of the portuguese language.
It can be visited here.

Gerald Martin - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Une vie

Étienne de Montety (Le Figaro) reviews the french traslation of Gerald Martin's "Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Life" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Une vie)

Garcia Marquez travaille beaucoup. Pour le cinéma et aussi pour la presse colombienne et espagnole. Nombre de ses articles traitent du prix Nobel de littérature et de l'Académie suédoise, Dieu sait pourquoi. Un jour de 1982, il reçoit un coup de téléphone lui annonçant que le prix lui échoit. Le cri de sa femme est éloquent : «Mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qui nous attend, maintenant ?» La réponse est contenue dans une déclaration de Garcia Marquez, faite à ses débuts dans la carrière. Elle résume cet homme complexe longtemps tiraillé entre l'action politique et l'écriture, toujours tenté de faire coïncider les deux, mais mû par une telle énergie qu'il lui est impossible de considérer la littérature comme un art replié sur soi-même. Gabo ne manque pas d'humour, sinon de vérité quand il assure : «Je ne parle jamais de littérature parce que je ne sais pas ce que c'est ; de plus, je suis convaincu que le monde serait le même sans elle. D'un autre côté, je suis convaincu qu'il serait différent sans la police. Je pense par conséquent que j'aurais été plus utile à l'humanité si, au lieu d'être écrivain, j'avais été terroriste.»

Et pourquoi pas un écrivain dont les livres seraient autant de bombes lancées dans le choeur paisible de la littérature mondiale ? Read More

Premio Internacional de Ensayo Caballero Bonald

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2009 Premio Internacional de Ensayo Caballero Bonald for his essay "El viaje a la ficción", where he analyses the life and work of Juan Carlos Onetti.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Wyatt Mason reviews Roberto Bolañops The Skating Rink.
In the apparently inexhaustible posthumous career of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, a significant second act will soon be upon us, leaving some readers to clap excitedly while others throw up their hands in submission: the large number of books by Bolaño already available is soon to double. In addition to the eight that have swiftly and ably arrived in translation in the six years since his death in 2003 at age 50, four new books by Bolaño are scheduled to appear in 2010 (two novels, two story collections) with three others promised for 2011. What’s more, according to recent reports out of Spain, another two finished novels have been found among Bolaño’s papers, as well as a sixth, unknown part of his already abundant 900-page novel “2666.”

While such a mountain of new material is bound to make literary hearts flutter, a little red flag waves at its summit: when it comes to publishing the dead, the best isn’t often saved for last. Given the nearly uniform excellence of Bolaño’s writing to date, it seems unlikely that any of the looming titles could equal the exceptional “By Night in Chile” (translated in 2003), “The Savage Detectives” (2007) or last year’s “2666,” which already compete for consideration as Bolaño’s masterpiece. At the very least, readers yet to experience Bolaño’s writing — its narrative variety and verve, its linguistic resourcefulness, its unusual combination of gravity and playfulness, brutality and tenderness — increasingly face the very practical problem of having to divine which book on the widening shelf of Bolaños should be read first.

“The Skating Rink,” the only new Bolaño appearing this year, won’t make the decision any easier: this short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. Originally published in Spanish in 1993 and the first of Bolaño’s novels to see print, “The Skating Rink” could seem, in thumbnail, little more than a modest whodunit. A crime, the brutal murder of a woman, is committed in the Spanish seaside town of Z. As the corpse-and-culprit genre dictates, the novel establishes the sequence of events that sets the crime in motion and follows the bloody trail until, in the final pages, the killer’s surprising identity is revealed.
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