Spain - 100 Books for 100 Years

To prepare this special issue of Letras Libres, the editors asked four of its critics a list of twenty-five books who had the most influence in the evolution of Spain for the last one hundred years.

Here's the list:

Andrés Sánchez Robayna

• Soledades (1903), de Antonio Machado
• Lecturas españolas (1912), de Azorín
• Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912), de Miguel de Unamuno
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• Las rosas de Hércules (1922), de Tomás Morales
• Tirano Banderas (1926), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• El público (1930), de Federico García Lorca
• Juan de Mairena (1936), de Antonio Machado
• La realidad y el deseo (1936), de Luis Cernuda
• Poeta en Nueva York (1940), de Federico García Lorca
• El escritor (1941), de Azorín
• La realidad histórica de España (1948), de Américo Castro
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• Dios deseado y deseante (1949), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Cántico (1951), de Jorge Guillén
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• Pido la paz y la palabra (1955), de Blas de Otero
• Conjuros (1958), de Claudio Rodríguez
• Tiempo de silencio (1962), de Luis Martín Santos
• Don Julián (1970), de Juan Goytisolo
• Material memoria (1979-1989), de José Ángel Valente
• Todas las almas (1989), de Javier Marías
• Teatro completo (1997), de Fernando Arrabal
• París no se acaba nunca (2003), de Enrique Vila-Matas

Jordi Canal

• Campos de Castilla (1912), de Antonio Machado
• Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912), de Miguel de Unamuno
• Platero y yo (1917), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), de Federico García Lorca
• Nada (1945), de Carmen Laforet
• Historia de una escalera (1949), de Antonio Buero Vallejo
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• Notícia de Catalunya (1954), de Jaume Vicens Vives
• Obres completes (desde 1956), de Josep Pla
• España, un enigma histórico (1957), de Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz
• Las brujas y su mundo (1961), de Julio Caro Baroja
• Cinco horas con Mario (1966), de Miguel Delibes
• El fracaso de la revolución industrial en España, 1814-1913 (1975), de Jordi Nadal
• La Edad de Plata, 1902-1939 (1975), de José Carlos Mainer
• Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (1977), de Jorge Semprún
• Antiguo régimen y revolución liberal (1978), de Miguel Artola
• Contra las patrias (1984), de Fernando Savater
• Salón de pasos perdidos (1990-2009), de Andrés Trapiello
• El bucle melancólico. Historias de nacionalistas vascos (1997), de Jon Juaristi
• La era de la información (1997-1998), de Manuel Castells
• Sefarad. Una novela de novelas (2001), de Antonio Muñoz Molina
• La loca de la casa (2003), de Rosa Montero
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

Jordi Gracia

• Niebla (1914), de Miguel de Unamuno
• El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925), de Américo Castro
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• Juan de Mairena (1936), de Antonio Machado
• Lírica de una Atlántida (1936-1954), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Poeta en Nueva York (1940), de Federico García Lorca
• Diccionario de Filosofía (1942-1976), de José Ferrater Mora
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• El arco y la lira (1956), de Octavio Paz
• Tiempo de silencio (1961), de Luis Martín-Santos
• Desolación de la quimera (1962), de Luis Cernuda
• El quadern gris (1966), de Josep Pla
• Arde el mar (1966), de Pere Gimferrer
• Volverás a Región (1967), de Juan Benet
• Conversación en La catedral (1969), de Mario Vargas Llosa
• Crónica sentimental de España (1971), de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
• Si te dicen que caí (1973), de Juan Marsé
• Las personas del verbo (1975), de Jaime Gil de Biedma
• La edad de plata. Ensayo de interpretación de un proceso cultural, 1902-1936 (1975), de José-Carlos Mainer
• La infancia recuperada (1976), de Fernando Savater
• Coto vedado y En los reinos de Taifa (1985-1986), de Juan Goytisolo
• Vendrán más años malos y nos harán más ciegos (1994), de Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
• Tu rostro mañana (2002-2008), de Javier Marías
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

Félix Romeo

• Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880-1882), de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo
• El espectador (1916-1934), de José Ortega y Gasset
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• Fiesta (1926), de Ernest Hemingway
• Imán (1930), de Ramón J. Sender
• A sangre y fuego (1937), de Manuel Chaves Nogales
• Homenaje a Cataluña (1938), de George Orwell
• Españoles de tres mundos (1942), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• El corazón y otros frutos amargos (1959), de Ignacio Aldecoa
• El verdugo (1963), de Luis García Berlanga y Rafael Azcona
• El cuaderno gris (1966), de Josep Pla
• La infancia recuperada (1976), de Fernando Savater
• El castillo de la carta cifrada (1979), de Javier Tomeo
• Mi último suspiro (1982), de Luis Buñuel
• Hormigón (1982), de Thomas Bernhard
• Lo peor de todo (1992), de Ray Loriga
• Las armas y las letras (1994), de Andrés Trapiello
• Los detectives salvajes (1998), de Roberto Bolaño
• La fiesta del chivo (2000), de Mario Vargas Llosa
• Cuadernos de todo (2002), de Carmen Martín Gaite
• Fiebre y lanza (2002), de Javier Marías
• París no se acaba nunca (2003), de Enrique Vila-Matas
• Enterrar a los muertos (2005), de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

You can find the full article here.




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Latin American Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: El Asedio

According to publishing house Alfaguara, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's latest novel, not yet published 'El asedio' (The siege) is allready in the top selling list of the Spanish online bookstore Casa del Libro.

The events of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel occur in 1811 in the province of Cadiz. In a time Spain was fighting for independence, a criminal uses the city as a chessboard in which young women are flayed with whips, with an even more enigmatic event, in each place, before the a body is found, a French bomb has been dropped.




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Latin American Literature

A roundtable discussion (by e-mail) joining Daniel Alarcón, Eduardo Halfon, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez.

I started thinking about language—I mean really thinking about it—a few years ago when I signed up for first-semester Arabic at UC Berkeley. There was something about entering a language knowing absolutely nothing that made me consider what it is I know about those two languages I do speak (and read and write), English and Spanish. In class, we began with the alphabet, the sounds each symbol represented, and even now I am still working on the construction of sound, words, sentences. It’s been said before that language is the architecture of thought, and while I’m not convinced this is entirely accurate (my two-year-old nephew conveys a great deal without the benefit of words) it seems self-evident when one is beginning, when the immensity of all that you don’t know is overwhelming. I’m referring to the poetry of a language, of course, the beauty of which is most apparent (for me) when it is used in daily life—this is the level at which it is transformed, made new. This is the level of language-creation that I find most inspiring when I’m writing, which is odd, considering I write in English; the language I love most is Spanish. Not the literary language, necessarily, but its spoken dialects. It is impossible not to be awed by the inventiveness the language as it exists all over Latin America and Spain, the breadth and diversity of it, the way each local and regional vernacular traces a particular history, honors it, then subverts it, transcends it.

I wanted to talk about the most basic tool that writers utilize—language—with two artists uniquely situated to understand its significance. For most of us, the language we work in is a matter of circumstance, not choice; our language is an inheritance, an accident of the time and place of our birth, the education we were given or subjected to, the country we or our parents emigrated to. Eduardo Halfon and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, two fluent, native English speakers raised in the United States, have both chosen Spanish as their literary language; something that I’ll admit struck me at first as crazy. I mean, isn’t writing fiction hard enough already?

Eduardo Halfon was born in 1971 in Guatemala City. He studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and has published eight books of fiction, most of them in Spain, garnering wide critical praise. His latest novel, The Pirouette, to be published in 2010, was recently awarded the XIV José María de Pereda Literary Prize, in Cantabria, Spain. His work has been translated into Serbian and Portuguese. In 2007 the Hay Festival of Bogotá named him one of the best young Latin American writers.

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an unrepentant border-crosser, painter, former DJ, and currently teaches US Latino literatures and creative writing in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in the Barcelona Review, Ventana abierta, Paralelo Sur, and in the anthologies Líneas aéreas, Se habla español: voces latinas en US, Pequeñas resistencias 4: Antología del Nuevo cuento norteamericano y caribeño, and En la frontera: I migliori racconti della narrativa chicana.

I began this email conversation with a simple, obvious question: Why and how did these two writers make the decision to write in Spanish?

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Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich

According to EFE.

MADRID – In what figures to be among the most significant literary events this year in Spain, Anagrama has released the previously unpublished first novel by late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Appearing at bookstores on Thursday, six and a half years after the acclaimed author’s death, “El Tercer Reich” (The Third Reich) will subsequently be published in the coming weeks in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, among other Latin American countries, sources with the Spanish publishing company told Efe.

The novel, typewritten and then hand-corrected by Bolaño (1953-2003) in 1989, was first shown to publishers in 2008 at the Frankfurt Book Fair after being dug up by his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, known as “the Jackal.”

Many of his recurring themes were already present in this debut novel, including “the strange forms and deformations of Nazism or (the idea) that culture (games or literature) is reality,” Anagrama said.

“El Tercer Reich” is written in the form of a diary and features as protagonist a 25-year-old German named Udo Berger who is a war-games enthusiast and champion in his homeland, where he writes articles on the subject in specialist journals.

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Roberto Bolaño: The Romantic Dogs

Levi Stahl reviews Roberto Bolanõ's poetry collection The Romantic Dogs.

English-language readers have experienced Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s career sort of upside down and backwards. None of his work was translated into English until after his death in 2003, and it wasn’t until the publication of Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives in 2007—nearly a decade after it took the Spanish-language literary world by storm—that Bolaño got serious attention in the United States. That novel, a sprawling, mesmerizing masterpiece, was the rare translated work that achieved both critical and commercial success. Its renown has led to renewed attention to the handful of other volumes of Bolaño’s fiction that are available in English, and has led New Directions to step up their admirable program of translating all of Bolaño’s older works. Now, coinciding with the English-language publication of the last novel Bolaño wrote, the horror-show magnum opus 2666, we have The Romantic Dogs, a career-spanning poetry collection translated by Laura Healy.

Bolaño would likely appreciate the irony that the translation of his poetry is only viable in the wake of the success of his fiction, for he always considered himself a poet rather than a fiction writer, explaining, “I blush less when I reread my poems.” He turned to prose out of necessity late in life, when faced with the need to support a family. His diagnosis with fatal liver disease only increased the pressure, and while he continued to write poetry, it was into his novels that Bolaño poured the majority of his energy in his final decade. Yet even the novels are suffused with poetry—or, more properly, the epiphenomena of poetry. Amulet opens with the narrator stating “I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but I better not. I know all the poets, and all the poets know me.” The Savage Detectives is lousy with poets declaiming, drinking, fighting, fucking. But there is almost no actual verse in the books—the life of the poet, the trappings of poetry, are what matter, while the poetry itself is passed over in silence.

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2666 in French

2666, Roberto Bolaño, éd. Christian Bourgois

Ilan Stavans - Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years

Kevin O’Kelly reviews Ilan Stavans' Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.

In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was an obscure writer drowning in debt, a law school dropout living hand-to-mouth as a journalist and screenwriter. His early novels had garnered solid reviews but little money. Two years later he was the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,’’ a novel that achieved immediate commercial and critical success in the Spanish-speaking world. When “Solitude’’ appeared in English in 1970, critics in the United States invoked the author’s name in the same breath as Faulkner and Günter Grass.

The transformation of a young man from Colombia’s coastal provinces into one of the greatest writers of our time is the subject of “Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.’’ Ilan Stavans, a prominent scholar of Latin American culture at Amherst College, is an able guide to the world that shaped García Márquez, from the small towns where he spent his early years (he was born in 1928) to the often violent politics that played a pivotal role in his family’s history and radicalized his political consciousness. Stavans also recounts the family stories that provided the novelist with much of the raw material for his fiction, such as his grandparents’ disapproval of his father as a suitor and his parents’ subsequent secret courtship that was recast in “Love in the Time of Cholera.’’

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Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich

The Spanish editon of Roberto Bolaño's posthumous El Tercer Reich is due next week, for now, the first chapter is available here.

20 de agosto
Por la ventana entra el rumor del mar mezclado con las
risas de los últimos noctámbulos, un ruido que tal vez sea
el de los camareros recogiendo las mesas de la terraza, de
vez en cuando un coche que circula con lentitud por el Paseo
Marítimo y zumbidos apagados e inidentificables que
provienen de las otras habitaciones del hotel. Ingeborg
duerme; su rostro semeja el de un ángel al que nada turba
el sueño; sobre el velador hay un vaso de leche que no ha
probado y que ahora debe estar caliente, y junto a su almohada,
a medias cubierto por la sábana, un libro del investigador
Florian Linden del que apenas ha leído un par de
páginas antes de caer dormida. A mí me sucede todo lo
contrario: el calor y el cansancio me quitan el sueño. Generalmente
duermo bien, entre siete y ocho horas diarias,
aunque muy raras veces me acuesto cansado. Por las mañanas
despierto fresco como una lechuga y con una energía
que no decae al cabo de ocho o diez horas de actividad.

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Latin American Literature

David Toscana: The Last Reader

Katie Cappello reviews David Toscana's The Last Reader

Available in English for the first time, David Toscana’s award-winning novel, The Last Reader, is a desert noir of sorts—a Twin Peaks set in a small town in Mexico where it hasn’t rained for a year, and no one but the librarian reads books. This librarian, Lucio, is the strange protagonist following his own strange logic, both when it comes to shelving his books and when he must deal with real-life situations. In fact, he often turns to the fictions lining his shelves for inspiration.

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Interview with Edgar Borges

An interview with Venezuelan writer Edgar Borges, an author who's work, according to Letralia, is being followed by Enrique Vila-Matas, Vicente Luis Mora, Javier Abril Espinoza and Ricardo Menéndez Salmón.

S: Edgar Borges, llevar este nombre y apellido debe de haberte marcado de algún modo en tu vida, ¿por qué te pusieron Edgar?, entiendo que Borges sea apellido y por tanto es algo heredado, ¿algún parentesco con Jorge Luis Borges?

EB: El único parentesco que tengo con Jorge Luis Borges es la lectura y la escritura; igual me parece que el parentesco literario es, quizá, más importante que cualquier otro. Por lo menos, para quienes, como es mi caso, no podemos vivir sin leer ni escribir. La literatura es la geografía invisible que anda buscando la existencia. Y para intentar comprenderla vive transitando un campo minado de preguntas. Eso es la literatura: la geografía invisible de la existencia, un campo minado de preguntas.

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: 2666

Nicholas Reid reviews Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Roberto Bolano was a minor poet, born in Chile in 1953, exiled from the military coup there, and spent most of his later life in Mexico and Spain. Although he was a fervent left-winger himself, he had a reputation for seeing Latin America's leftist literary establishment as gutless, elitist and complacent. He was notorious for his fierce criticisms of the revered novelist Isabel Allende.

In the 1990s, needing to earn a living for his family, Bolano turned from poetry to fiction. He began to turn out dark, satirical and often oddly surreal short novels that gradually gained critical praise. But for the last four or five years of his life, he was working on something really big. In 2003, at the age of 50, he died of liver failure (exacerbated by a history of drug abuse). He left behind him a huge, unfinished manuscript divided into five parts. His literary executors debated whether they should publish it as five shorter novels or as one big one. They decided to go with one big one.

2666 was published in Spanish in 2004. It was at once hailed by Spanish and Latin American critics and became a huge bestseller. Natasha Wimmer's English-language translation came out in 2008. The praise continued. 2666 was seen as the most stunning Spanish-language novel since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude, but completely different in tone from the old macho poseur. The Picador paperback edition quotes enthusiastic reviews by John Banville, Susan Sontag, Colm Toibin and Edmund White, among others. The word "masterpiece" is used frequently. On YouTube, I have accessed Spanish and Portuguese language promos which sell it to readers in a style usually reserved for movie blockbusters.

So here is a certified masterpiece, a critical and popular success. Now how dare I say, after making my way through its 900 pages, that I have not been knocked over in the tsunami?

Let's make it clear that I am not at all scared of long novels. In fact there are some that are among my best friends. Cervantes, Richardson, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Morante – bring 'em on, I say.

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William Burns is a short story by Roberto Bolaño, that published in The New Yorker and can be found here




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