Right now a novel's length seems a neutral force. Over here, you have Haruki Murakami and Peter Nadas lying silent for years, then storming the shores of consciousness with thousand-page dreadnoughts; over there, the Argentine writer César Aira, pumping out books of one-tenth the size that can still put knots in your brain.Since 1975 he has published more than 80 of them in Spanish, according to his publisher. "Varamo" is the seventh to be translated into English, and the sixth since 2006 by New Directions. It concerns an afternoon and evening in the life of a middle-aged civil-service flunky by that name. The setting is Colón, the Panamanian city by the Caribbean mouth of the canal; it's 1923, nine years after the canal's completion.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Cesar Aira: Varamo
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Gonçalo M. Tavares: Jerusalem
Such questions about technological determinism occupy a vital space in the artistic medulla of the Portuguese novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares. Since 2001, Tavares has been publishing plays, story collections, essays, and novels while concomitantly snagging a whole bevy of literary prizes. Born in 1970, the Portuguese novelist's Jerusalem won the 2005 Jose Saramago Prize and inspired the Nobel Prize-winning Saramago himself to rather hyperbolically state that "in thirty years' time, if not before, [Tavares] will win the Nobel Prize, and I'm sure my prediction will come true…
Friday, December 02, 2011
When Gabriel Garcia Marquez Saw Ernest Hemingway
For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I faced the same great inconvenience. At the time, I spoke the same rudimentary English that I still speak now, and I wasn’t very sure about his bullfighter’s Spanish. And so I didn’t do either of the things that could have spoiled that moment, but instead cupped both hands over my mouth and, like Tarzan in the jungle, yelled from one sidewalk to the other: ”Maaaeeestro!” Ernest Hemingway understood that there could be no other master amid the multitude of students, and he turned, raised his hand and shouted to me in Castillian in a very childish voice, ”Adiooos, amigo!” It was the only time I saw him.Read More
Cervantes prize goes to Chilean poet Parra
Chilean poet Nicanor Parra has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor, for his influential work mixing everyday slang with traditional verse. The 97-year-old poet, essayist and physics graduate was announced the winner Thursday in Madrid by Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. He published his first book of poetry in 1937 and eventually adopted the style he called anti-poetry, introducing colloquial language into traditional poetry, the Spanish Culture Ministry said. He has won the Chilean National Literature Award twice — in 1969 and again in 1981 — and his work has been translated into many languages. The euro125,000 ($170,000) prize honors writers who contribute to the richness of Spanish-language literature, and generally alternates between Spanish and Latin American writers. Last year, it went to Spain's Ana Maria Matute.Read More
Jorge Volpi's address at the Guadalajara International Book Fair's Reading Promoters Conference.
“Fiction teaches us to be human” is the phrase that opened the Reading Promoters Conference as part of the address by Jorge Volpi, that ran longer than expected due to the great interest shown by the audience on the subject proposed by the writer: fiction as a tool for reading and in everyday life to go into other consciousness, other lives and experiment new things to be better persons in real life.Read More
Monday, August 29, 2011
Francisco Goldman: Say Her Name
Francisco Goldman's fourth novel is based on a real tragedy in which his wife, Aura Estrada, broke her neck while body-surfing along the Mexican coast, and died. She had recently turned 30. They had known each other for four years and would have celebrated their second wedding anniversary if she had lived another month.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Quim Monzó: Guadalajara
Three pages into Quim Monzó
Monday, August 22, 2011
José Saramago: Death with Interruptions
I've just finished José Saramago, a novel which I didn't consider as strong as Blindness, but which I felt, nevertheless, accomplished what it set out to do: which is to transform death into a human experience.
Like Blindness, which captures the shock of a community confronting a sudden plague of sightlessness, Death with Interruptions
Goncalo Tavares: Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique
In the very first scene of this book, a young Lenz Buchmann is instructed by his father to "do" a young servant girl in front of him. The command is issued without qualification, and there is no recourse for Lenz except to follow it. From this incident onward the novel spins forth a philosophy of strength, of power, of competence, of morality, or the lack thereof, that is alienating to say the least.Lenz is a skilled surgeon, who does not operate out of compassion or to save lives, but because he is good at being a surgeon, and it is simply a side effect of his competent practice that lives are saved. Lenz regularly invites beggars into his home, with the implied promise of food or money, and then drags out their stay, demeaning them in conversation and having sex with his wife in front of them. But at his brother's funeral—the brother that is his opposite in many ways—Lenz witnesses the influence that public figures hold, a renown and regard that even as a celebrated surgeon he could never possess. And so begins his foray into politics.
Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholerawas probably one of the first books I read that introduced me to a South American sensibility, having been immersed in a traditional English A-level. That sense of reality slightly altered, not quite magical realism but not life as we know it, despite the faded grandeur and trappings of a post-colonial state.
Re-reading it a few years ago, unsurprisingly I struggled to recapture the same sense of wonder, in busy working life, reading snatches in 10-minute tube journeys and trying to keep up with the interweaving narratives from across the generations. But perhaps what my jaded adult mind appreciated more was the wry humour in the narrative voices, a sense of the fun Márquez is poking at the pretensions of his characters and their little world.
Friday, August 19, 2011
José Saramago: Cain
Abel and Cain have each made an offering to God. Abel's is accepted, Cain's rejected. In a fit of jealousy, Cain murders his brother. When God asks where Abel has got to, Cain replies tetchily, "Am I my brother's keeper?" God discovers the murder, and Cain is punished. He will live, but he will be forever marked, and condemned to wander the earth.
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