Juan José Saer: The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

Abigail B. Lind reviews Juan José Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington.

Given its lofty historical and ontological concerns, it is easy to forget that “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington” is ultimately a travel narrative: a morning’s journey of 21 blocks. Saer punctuates his characters’ musings with descriptions of Santa Fe, and he fixates on a conception of “the city not as though it were divided into neighborhoods or sections, but rather into territories in the animal sense, an archaic and violent demarcation of ritual, bloody defense.” Yet Saer seems more interested in the social fragmentation of national trauma than in its geographical repercussions. In his Argentina, people are isolated from each other, and they are lucky if their experiences overlap enough to chat about Washington Noriega’s birthday last weekend. That may be the case, but it’s fortunate that this last novel affords one last chance to glimpse Saer’s distorted and provocative inner world.

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Belles Étrangères

This year's edition of Belles Étrangères is dedicated to Colombian Literature.
The invited author for this edition are: Hector Abad Faciolince, Antonio Caballero, Jorge Franco, Santiago Gamboa, Tomás Gonzalez, William Ospina, Juan Manuel Roca, Evelio Rosero, Gonzalo Sanchez, Antonio Ungar, Fernando Vallejo and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

Here's an interview with Jorge Franco.

Interview with Gonzalo Márquez Cristo

Nathalie Handal interviews Colombian poet, editor, and writer Gonzalo Márquez Cristo. An interview about his city Bogotá.

I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million people where chaos is opposed to a great life force that keeps you from succumbing. One graffiti emblematic of the seventies, written by an anonymous hand in a salsa bar said: “el país se derrumba y nosotros de rumba” (The country is falling apart and we are celebrating).But it is this playful and delirious state founded by the nocturnal exorcism of dance and celebration that collectively frees the harsh reality of a people who have not solved the most basic experiential problems. Bogotá, therefore, to many sensitive people, is a city built during the night and destroyed with the wound of dawn.

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Silvina Ocampo: The Golden Hare

Andrea Rosenberg translated Silvina Ocampo's The Golden Hare and writes about it.

I knew I had to translate “The Golden Hare,” Silvina Ocampo’s mysterious fable, as soon as I read the first few sentences. Now often published separately as a children’s book in Argentina, it is the first story in Ocampo’s 1959 collection La furia (The Fury). Silvina, the less famous and more ethereal of Argentina’s most renowned literary siblings, is perhaps best known in the United States (if she is known at all) for her associations with other more prominent literary figures—she was Victoria Ocampo’s sister, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s wife, Jorge Luis Borges’s close friend—but she was a prizewinning poet and short-story writer in her own right and published more than two dozen collections of short narrative and poetry during her lifetime, as well as a novel and a play. She was also, to my great delight, a prolific translator, bringing such writers as Dickinson, Melville, and Poe into Spanish.

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And the full story is also available here.

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Mariana Enriquez on Silvina Ocampo

Gabriel García Márquez: Clandestine in Chile

Jo Littler reviews Gabriel García Márquez' Clandestine in Chile.

Márquez has had parallel careers as journalist and screenwriter alongside his more prominent role as Nobel prizewinning novelist. This book brings these strands together as Márquez tells us about the exiled film director Miguel Littín's experience of returning to Chile in 1985, under a false identity, to record life under Pinochet's dictatorship. Littín had only narrowly escaped with his life 12 years earlier, when the socialist president Salvador Allende was brutally ousted by a US-backed military coup and many of his supporters were rounded up and murdered.

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Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Ilan Stavans: Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years
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Press Round Up

Here's a very limited list of articles and reactions on Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize.
Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Nobel de littérature : Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel da Literatura para Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el ganador es… ¡Mario Vargas Llosa!
La fête à Vargas Llosa
Le Nobel 2010 s'appelle Vargas Llosa
Le prix Nobel de littérature décerné à Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian Vargas Llosa wins literature Nobel
Nobel de littérature 2010 : Mario Vargas Llosa, éternel révolté
Le prix Nobel de littérature 2010 attribué au Péruvien Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: a worthy Nobel prize for literature winner?
Nobel : la surprise Vargas llosa
Le Nobel à Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el Nobel de Literatura es para… Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: an unclassifiable Nobel winner
Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o should have won the Nobel prize for literature
Mario Vargas Llosa's work and life push boundaries
A Storyteller Enthralled by the Power of Art
Mario, el fuego que nunca se apaga
Waiting for Luggage With Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa surprised and delighted by Nobel prize win
Vargas Llosa wins Nobel literature prize
Vargas Llosa: Nobel Goes for Well-Known Name
Mario Vargas Llosa: Five essential novels
Mario Vargas Llosa, Premio Nobel de Literatura 2010
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel
A look at Mario Vargas Llosa
'Cartographer of Power' Vargas Llosa A Phenomenal Choice for Nobel
Vargas Llosa, l'insoumis

Audio from Mario Vargas Llosa's press conference

Click to hear the New York Times audio clips.

Júlio Cortázar reads "El perseguidor" (The Pursuer).


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Júlio Cortázar: El Perseguidor (The Pursuer)

José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

J. M. Ledgard reviews José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey.

The Portuguese writer José Saramago died in June at the age of 87. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, having peaked as a writer later in life. His prose is impish and subtle enough to bear comparison with Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, even if he lacked their scope. Saramago was a Communist. He believed there was a new totalitarianism of multinational companies. “To be a Portuguese Stalinist” well into the 21st century “means you’re simply not living in the real world,” the critic Harold Bloom has said. True enough. Yet when Saramago picked up his pen, a richer world was made.

“The Elephant’s Journey,” Saramago’s slender new posthumous novel, is a road trip. There’s no sex, not much violence, no God-awful narrative arc, and the insights arrive as gently as a skiff pulling up to a riverbank. Confounding though it is for me to say (believing as I do the mind of the apparatchik to be the nastiest soup), it would be hard to more highly recommend a novel to be downed in a single draft.

Saramago disliked America and cars — he once said that being in a car was like being in a spaceship that protects you from everything — so his road trip is naturally dustier, with ox carts on sunburnt plains, cuirassiers, swirling mists, wolves and snows. It is 1551. João III of Portugal gives an elephant from his Lisbon menagerie to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The elephant is called Solomon. His mahout is named Subhro. Together, whispering to each other a tongue known only to them and born of solitude, they journey on foot from Lisbon to Valladolid, to Catalonia, by sea to Genoa, on to Venice, over the Alps, arriving at Innsbruck on the feast day of Epiphany in 1552, before continuing by barge down the rivers Inn and Danube toward Vienna.

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Alberto Manguel: All Men Are Liars

Steven Poole reviews Alberto Manguel's All Men Are Liars.

Alberto Manguel is a liar. Or so the reader of this book is invited to think, having enjoyed a peculiarly evasive and suspenseful story told by a rather neurotic and unreliable character named "Alberto Manguel", only to see the next narrator exclaim, at the start of her version of the same tale: "Alberto Manguel is an asshole [. . .] No, nothing is true for Manguel unless he's read it in a book."

If Paul Auster (another man, and also, in one of the senses of Manguel's title, another liar) wore a friendly beard and had more of a Latin temperament, he might produce something like this richly hued, melancholy and funny puzzle of a novel. It centres on a group of Argentinian literary expatriates in 1970s Madrid, one of whose number, Alejandro Bevilacqua, has recently died, apparently falling from his balcony on the eve of publication of a novelistic masterpiece. "Alberto Manguel" and three other characters who knew Bevilacqua address their memories of him to a fifth person, a journalist named Terradillos living in France who hopes to piece together the truth of the deceased writer's life.

The accounts are contradictory in crucial details, but the broad picture that emerges is one of a thin, gloomy man (somewhat Baudelairean in aspect) who grows up in Argentina (falling in love with a puppetmaster's daughter), begins to write (lurid scenarios for photo-romances), is imprisoned and tortured (he doesn't know why, but we eventually do), and then escapes to Spain (where he is irresistible to certain women). One of those women is the narrator who denounces "Alberto Manguel", Bevilacqua's lover Andrea, who finds the manuscript hidden among his belongings and secretly takes it to be published. The title is In Praise of Lying. Andrea comments: "Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature."

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Roberto Bolaño

Michael Greenberg reviews Roberto Bolaño's works recently translated into English, The Insufferable Gaucho, The Return and Antwerp.

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has to be one of the most improbable international literary celebrities since William Burroughs and Henry Miller, two writers whose work Bolaño’s occasionally resembles. His subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching. His lens is largely (though not literally) autobiographical, and seems narrowly focused at first. There are no sweeping historical gestures in Bolaño. Yet he has given us a subtle portrait of Latin America during the last quarter of the 20th century — a period of death squads, exile, “disappeared” citizens and state-sponsored terror. The nightmarish sense of human life being as discardable as clay permeates his writing.
Readers trying to navigate Bolaño’s gathering body of work may find themselves wondering where to turn: since his death in 2003, 12 of his books have been published in the United States. “The Insufferable Gaucho” would be an excellent place to start. The title story of this collection is one of Bolaño’s most powerful fictions. It is a reimagining of Borges’s story “The South,” an emblematic tale of the schism that has plagued South America’s republics for almost two centuries: between the capital cities with their totems to European culture, and the vast, serenely violent countryside that surrounds them. In Borges’s story, the protagonist has survived a fever that brought him to the brink of death. He sets out from Buenos Aires to convalesce at his ancestral ranch on the Pampas. On arriving, he goes to the general store where a drunken tough lures him into a fight that honor won’t permit him to decline. Clutching a knife he hardly knows how to wield, he walks resignedly and without fear into the death that “he would have chosen or dreamt” had he been given the chance.

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Cristina García: The Lady Matador's Hotel

Amy Driscoll reviews Cristina García's The Lady Matador's Hotel.

On the first page of Cristina García's new novel, the lady matador stands naked before a mirror, rolling on a pair of long pink stockings as part of her preparatory ritual for the bull-fighting ring.

The ceremony has other steps, too: lighting candles for her mother, eating a single sliced pear -- seeds and all -- and, for extra luck, having silent sex with a stranger two days before a fight.

When she finally steps into the ring, she repeats three words in Spanish and Japanese.

Arrogance. Honor. Death.

The Lady Matador's Hotel is filled with those elements, plus hefty doses of lust, violence and bad intent. It's a ruthless romp through an anonymous Central American capital buffeted by the winds of political turmoil. Suki Palacios -- she of the pink stockings and unusual appetites -- has arrived with her all-male entourage to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors.

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