Peruvian writer Jaime Bayly concludes his popular trilogy "Morirás mañana" (You will die tomorrow) with "Escupirán sobre mi tumba" (They will spit on my grave), a novel full of irony and grotesque characters who find death at the hands of the infamous murderer/writer Javier Garces.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
The Poetry of Antonio Machado
Stephen Akey writes about the poetry of Antonio Machado
Big themes: God, belief, love, death, solitude, time, Spain. But Machado wrote about small things as well, and my favorite poem of his concerns something of monumental, so to speak, insignificance: the common housefly. Despite its tightly rhymed octosyllabics and half-lines, the tone of "Las moscas" is relaxed and conversational; Machado might have titled it "My Life with Flies." The life he describes from infancy to fidgety boyhood to dreamy youth to disillusioned adulthood is so unspectacular as to be all lives, even if the family parlor mentioned in the third stanza happened to be in a palace in Seville. (The Machados were impecunious but highly cultured.) In contrast to the archetypal imagery of the seasons of life and their attendant objects, Machado particularizes the flies with their hairy legs bouncing off the windowpanes. Where we would expect to find disgust, however, he evokes something like enchantment. There's enough real horror out there (and inside our heads) without having to work up any literary anguish over some houseflies buzzing around. Besides, in their acrobatic ubiquity, they really are rather amazing. How can you not look?
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Big themes: God, belief, love, death, solitude, time, Spain. But Machado wrote about small things as well, and my favorite poem of his concerns something of monumental, so to speak, insignificance: the common housefly. Despite its tightly rhymed octosyllabics and half-lines, the tone of "Las moscas" is relaxed and conversational; Machado might have titled it "My Life with Flies." The life he describes from infancy to fidgety boyhood to dreamy youth to disillusioned adulthood is so unspectacular as to be all lives, even if the family parlor mentioned in the third stanza happened to be in a palace in Seville. (The Machados were impecunious but highly cultured.) In contrast to the archetypal imagery of the seasons of life and their attendant objects, Machado particularizes the flies with their hairy legs bouncing off the windowpanes. Where we would expect to find disgust, however, he evokes something like enchantment. There's enough real horror out there (and inside our heads) without having to work up any literary anguish over some houseflies buzzing around. Besides, in their acrobatic ubiquity, they really are rather amazing. How can you not look?
Read more
Carlos Fuentes: Vlad
Heather Cleary reviews Carlos Fuentes's last novel "Vlad".
The figure has again been cast in a contemporary mold, this time by the late Carlos Fuentes, the celebrated author of dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction, including Where the Air is Clear (1958), Terra Nostra (1975), for which he received the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia and Romulo Gallegos prizes, and The Old Gringo (1985). Nor is it the first time Fuentes has dabbled in the occult: his 1962 novella Aura—to name just one prominent example—uses the supernatural machinations of a solitary old woman as a lens through which to examine the intersection of personal and national history, and the sometimes porous borders of the self.
Vlad, the last novel Fuentes published before his death this past May, is told from the perspective of Yves Navarro, a partner at a Mexico City law firm who seems to have it all: the career, the house, the adoring wife, the adorable daughter, and the respect of his politically influential employer, Don Eloy Zurinaga. The latter asks Navarro to help an old friend from the Sorbonne (whom he met "back when law, like good manners, was learned in French") purchase a home in advance of his arrival in the Distrito Federal. It is a simple assignment, well beneath his qualifications, but Navarro is the only attorney available at the moment, and it just so happens that his wife, Asunción, is a real estate agent. Nothing, really, could be more convenient. There are just one or two eccentricities to accommodate: all the windows of the residence are to be blacked out and a tunnel should join its interior with a ravine out back. None of this, oddly, gives Navarro or his wife significant pause.
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The figure has again been cast in a contemporary mold, this time by the late Carlos Fuentes, the celebrated author of dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction, including Where the Air is Clear (1958), Terra Nostra (1975), for which he received the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia and Romulo Gallegos prizes, and The Old Gringo (1985). Nor is it the first time Fuentes has dabbled in the occult: his 1962 novella Aura—to name just one prominent example—uses the supernatural machinations of a solitary old woman as a lens through which to examine the intersection of personal and national history, and the sometimes porous borders of the self.
Vlad, the last novel Fuentes published before his death this past May, is told from the perspective of Yves Navarro, a partner at a Mexico City law firm who seems to have it all: the career, the house, the adoring wife, the adorable daughter, and the respect of his politically influential employer, Don Eloy Zurinaga. The latter asks Navarro to help an old friend from the Sorbonne (whom he met "back when law, like good manners, was learned in French") purchase a home in advance of his arrival in the Distrito Federal. It is a simple assignment, well beneath his qualifications, but Navarro is the only attorney available at the moment, and it just so happens that his wife, Asunción, is a real estate agent. Nothing, really, could be more convenient. There are just one or two eccentricities to accommodate: all the windows of the residence are to be blacked out and a tunnel should join its interior with a ravine out back. None of this, oddly, gives Navarro or his wife significant pause.
Read more
Sergio Chejfec: The Planets
Mythili G. Rao reviews Sergio Chejfec's "The Planets".
The Planets considers the impact of friendship—and its loss—in cosmic terms. The novel unfolds in Buenos Aires, in the shadow of M's sudden abduction during the state campaign of terrorism of the 1970s. Chejfec's narrator—a peculiarly opaque figure who is at once idiosyncratic and exacting—traces his emotional trajectory from the moment a mutual friend calls to let him know about M's kidnapping ("This friend, named A, sounded like an idiot. How could he say 'to let me know?' (Someone, someone else was speaking through him; he could not be saying that.") he remembers) to his chance encounter, years later, with M's mother on calle Acevdo She has been hollowed out from years of grief and they do not have much to say to one another, but their meeting is laden with symbolic significance.
Years before, M's disappearance in the midst of Argentina's "Dirty War" had paralyzed his parents; they could respond only with "disorientation, dishevelment and a particular vacillation." In the end they are unable to organize a search for their son. Because of his parents' passivity, M's name—which the reader never learns—is absent from newspaper accounts of the missing, or from flyers or banners rallying relatives of "the disappeared"; the anonymity only deepens the sense of loss.
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The Planets considers the impact of friendship—and its loss—in cosmic terms. The novel unfolds in Buenos Aires, in the shadow of M's sudden abduction during the state campaign of terrorism of the 1970s. Chejfec's narrator—a peculiarly opaque figure who is at once idiosyncratic and exacting—traces his emotional trajectory from the moment a mutual friend calls to let him know about M's kidnapping ("This friend, named A, sounded like an idiot. How could he say 'to let me know?' (Someone, someone else was speaking through him; he could not be saying that.") he remembers) to his chance encounter, years later, with M's mother on calle Acevdo She has been hollowed out from years of grief and they do not have much to say to one another, but their meeting is laden with symbolic significance.
Years before, M's disappearance in the midst of Argentina's "Dirty War" had paralyzed his parents; they could respond only with "disorientation, dishevelment and a particular vacillation." In the end they are unable to organize a search for their son. Because of his parents' passivity, M's name—which the reader never learns—is absent from newspaper accounts of the missing, or from flyers or banners rallying relatives of "the disappeared"; the anonymity only deepens the sense of loss.
Read more
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Mario Vargas Llosa: The Dream of the Celt
Roberto Ignacio Díaz reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Dream of the Celt.
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In the late '60s, at the height of Latin America's literary boom, Vargas Llosa was one of the region's new stars. He authored daringly experimental novels, such as "The Time of the Hero" and "The Green House," whose intricate narrative devices challenged readers even as they renewed the art of fiction. Decades later, "The Dream of the Celt" is quite traditional in form. Not surprisingly, Victor Hugo - to whose novel, "Les Misérables," he devoted a book - remains one of Vargas Llosa's heroes. What is lost in literary craft is gained in political clarity.
Like Hugo's characters, Casement too dreams of a better world, in this case one devoid of colonial rule. As it moves from continent to continent, "The Dream of the Celt" suggests a new literary cartography in which Ireland, despite its temperate climate, is not unlike the tropical lands exploited by empires. This spatial expansion has a historical dimension as well. As in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," allusions to the Roman Empire abound in Vargas Llosa's text, whose hero imagines Roman legionnaires marching on the Caledonian Road outside his prison.
Curiously, though, the novel seems to have little to say about Ireland itself beyond the immediacy of politics and allusions to its fabled past. The text's most affecting words, in the epilogue, are by Yeats, not Vargas Llosa. Then again, given the novel's title, that's perhaps best. The ancient Celtic land, for Casement and Vargas Llosa's readers alike, remains an impossible dream.
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Mario Vargas Llosa: The Dream of the Celt
Richard Eder reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Dream of the Celt
Vargas Llosa gives a painful account of Casement’s tormented indecisions, switches of plans, and stumbles over his own feet. He also describes numerous sexual encounters with young men. Some, presumably, are drawn from the so-called Black Diaries, circulated by the British government to diminish sympathy for him. For many years these were denounced as forgeries; a few years ago an independent group of experts analyzed the handwriting and text and pronounced them genuine. Vargas Llosa, without mentioning the study, agrees that they seem authentic, while suggesting that much of the contents were more fantasy than fact.Read More
Fictionalized history is a perilous genre, and not often done well. Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Hilary Mantel are shining examples of how it can extend itself into a new dimension. Vargas Llosa’s attempt here is more a matter of embroidery.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Argentine writer Hector Tizon dies at 82
Author of more then twenty novels, died in the city of Jujuy in northern Argentina. The writer was exiled in 1976 and until 1982 lived in Spain.
Interview with Hector Tizon in Ñ Magazine - "The traveler who stole love letters"
"Nací por accidente —¿acaso no todos nacemos de ese modo?— en una remota provincia de este vasto y despoblado país, en un hotel a cuyas aguas termales mi madre había ido en busca de remedio para sus males."Read the obituary in El País
Interview with Hector Tizon in Ñ Magazine - "The traveler who stole love letters"
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Jake Arnott's book of a lifetime.
Like many of my generation, I first encountered him in the Penguin edition of Labyrinths, a collection of stories, essays, parables and poetry. An excellent compendium, it's a sort of collection of collections which I find a little frustrating (although it mirrors his theme of recursiveness). More recently, there has been the reissue of all of his short stories: Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. But this new translation, commissioned by his estate after his death, has proved controversial. The battle over Borges's legacy in English has become as Daedalian as one of his faux literary essays. It's hard to know where to begin rereading.
Borges's first appearance in Anglo-Saxon culture was a story that ran in a 1948 edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is a prescient attempt to incorporate quantum ideas into fiction, with uncertainty principles and multiple outcomes. It was to have a massive influence in the SF world as well as in more "literary" circles, and proof that Borges himself could easily exist in two states at once: in "high culture" and a pulp magazine.
So the only way to approach him is on one's own terms, and to have the will bent by the master. And over the years I've found his writing has changed as I have. My Spanish is just about good enough for me to slowly navigate my own translation; maybe now I'm ready to really begin. So his most famous collection, Ficciones, could be the book to take me through the rest of my years (though it is actually two collections in one, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you?). There's plenty to keep me occupied: writers, dreamers, heretics, young men with impossible memories, other worlds revealed by secret encyclopedias, traitors transformed by betrayal, conspirators that plot their own downfall: 17 pieces, none longer than 25 pages; none shorter than a lifetime.
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Like many of my generation, I first encountered him in the Penguin edition of Labyrinths, a collection of stories, essays, parables and poetry. An excellent compendium, it's a sort of collection of collections which I find a little frustrating (although it mirrors his theme of recursiveness). More recently, there has been the reissue of all of his short stories: Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. But this new translation, commissioned by his estate after his death, has proved controversial. The battle over Borges's legacy in English has become as Daedalian as one of his faux literary essays. It's hard to know where to begin rereading.
Borges's first appearance in Anglo-Saxon culture was a story that ran in a 1948 edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is a prescient attempt to incorporate quantum ideas into fiction, with uncertainty principles and multiple outcomes. It was to have a massive influence in the SF world as well as in more "literary" circles, and proof that Borges himself could easily exist in two states at once: in "high culture" and a pulp magazine.
So the only way to approach him is on one's own terms, and to have the will bent by the master. And over the years I've found his writing has changed as I have. My Spanish is just about good enough for me to slowly navigate my own translation; maybe now I'm ready to really begin. So his most famous collection, Ficciones, could be the book to take me through the rest of my years (though it is actually two collections in one, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you?). There's plenty to keep me occupied: writers, dreamers, heretics, young men with impossible memories, other worlds revealed by secret encyclopedias, traitors transformed by betrayal, conspirators that plot their own downfall: 17 pieces, none longer than 25 pages; none shorter than a lifetime.
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Mario Vargas Llosa: Dream of the Celt
Julius Purcell reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Dream of the Celt.
The life of Roger Casement – the former British consul turned Easter Rising traitor – is ripe for fictional treatment, but it struggles to take shape in this clumsy account
He saw Congolese slave workers with hands and genitals hacked off, and later reported on indigenous Peruvians burned alive or drowned. He returned to Europe, took part in the failed 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, and was hanged in Pentonville prison. With a potted history this extraordinary, it's a wonder more novelists haven't taken up the tale of colonialist-turned-traitor Roger Casement. But fictionalising a life this complex has its pitfalls, and Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel (his first translated into English since winning the Nobel prize in 2010) staggers at times under the weight of research.
But first, let's give due credit. Principally remembered for the homosexual diaries used to undermine his reputation shortly before his execution as a traitor, Roger Casement has long awaited a writer of the stature of Vargas Llosa to focus on the real legacy of his life: how working as a British consul in the early 1900s, Casement's reports on colonial abuses in the Belgian Congo and in Peru were remarkable early exercises in international justice. Casement's journey from colonialist stalwart to Irish rebel was also bound up with some major events of literary modernism. It was on his Congo travels that he got to know Joseph Conrad, who was in turn mulling over the novella that would become Heart of Darkness. Later, Casement's doomed role in the Easter Rising instructed WB Yeats in "the terrible beauty" of martyrdom.
With raw material like this, we might have hoped for something like Pat Barker's Regeneration series, a gripping account shorn of historical cliches and bringing an era vividly to life. But Vargas Llosa hobbles his story from the start. Compelling moments are spoiled by clumsy exposition and a stubborn adherence to the mantra of tell-don't-show. "The same old story. The never-ending story," reflects Casement wearily at one point, a lament many readers might share. Vargas Llosa opts for repeatedly depicting similar atrocities, rather than selecting the illuminating detail. I lost count of the times variants of "scars on their backs, buttocks and legs" cropped up, but found the replication of Casement's meticulous note-taking deadened rather than heightened the horror.
What makes the novel readable is the character of Casement himself. A shy man, he does not baulk from facing down his enemies and, while shrinking from the abuses of power, can pull rank if he has to. In what is perhaps the novel's best touch, the extent of Casement's gay encounters is revealed only towards the end: late information that subtly reconfigures him in our eyes.
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The life of Roger Casement – the former British consul turned Easter Rising traitor – is ripe for fictional treatment, but it struggles to take shape in this clumsy account
He saw Congolese slave workers with hands and genitals hacked off, and later reported on indigenous Peruvians burned alive or drowned. He returned to Europe, took part in the failed 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, and was hanged in Pentonville prison. With a potted history this extraordinary, it's a wonder more novelists haven't taken up the tale of colonialist-turned-traitor Roger Casement. But fictionalising a life this complex has its pitfalls, and Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel (his first translated into English since winning the Nobel prize in 2010) staggers at times under the weight of research.
But first, let's give due credit. Principally remembered for the homosexual diaries used to undermine his reputation shortly before his execution as a traitor, Roger Casement has long awaited a writer of the stature of Vargas Llosa to focus on the real legacy of his life: how working as a British consul in the early 1900s, Casement's reports on colonial abuses in the Belgian Congo and in Peru were remarkable early exercises in international justice. Casement's journey from colonialist stalwart to Irish rebel was also bound up with some major events of literary modernism. It was on his Congo travels that he got to know Joseph Conrad, who was in turn mulling over the novella that would become Heart of Darkness. Later, Casement's doomed role in the Easter Rising instructed WB Yeats in "the terrible beauty" of martyrdom.
With raw material like this, we might have hoped for something like Pat Barker's Regeneration series, a gripping account shorn of historical cliches and bringing an era vividly to life. But Vargas Llosa hobbles his story from the start. Compelling moments are spoiled by clumsy exposition and a stubborn adherence to the mantra of tell-don't-show. "The same old story. The never-ending story," reflects Casement wearily at one point, a lament many readers might share. Vargas Llosa opts for repeatedly depicting similar atrocities, rather than selecting the illuminating detail. I lost count of the times variants of "scars on their backs, buttocks and legs" cropped up, but found the replication of Casement's meticulous note-taking deadened rather than heightened the horror.
What makes the novel readable is the character of Casement himself. A shy man, he does not baulk from facing down his enemies and, while shrinking from the abuses of power, can pull rank if he has to. In what is perhaps the novel's best touch, the extent of Casement's gay encounters is revealed only towards the end: late information that subtly reconfigures him in our eyes.
Read More
Manuela Fingueret: Daughter of Silence
Pierce Alquist reviews Manuela Fingueret's Daughter of Silence, translated from the Spanish by Darrell B. Lockhart.
Acclaimed Argentinean poet and novelist Manuela Fingueret details the 1980's neofascist military dictatorship in Argentina and its dark, painful parallels to the Holocaust through the tales and memories of a mother and daughter in her second novel Daughter of Silence. Translated by Darrell B. Lockhart, Daughter of Silence is a crucial addition to "The Americas" series of contemporary Latin American literature published by Texas Tech University Press, for its exploration of violence, national identity, and survival. Fingueret depicts the tradition of a silent female figure, mute and helpless throughout history, and drastically refutes it with the voice of her narrator Rita, a young Jewish Argentinean and incarcerated Peronist revolutionary. Abused, starved, and rapidly losing her mind, Rita weaves together both her memories and the experiences of her mother, Tinkeleh, a Holocaust survivor.
A poignant portrayal of women, Daughter of Silence illustrates these parallels between the Holocaust and Argentina's political past, while also exploring the unique dichotomy between being Jewish and living in Latin America, a primarily Catholic nation. According to Lockhart in his introduction to the text, "Argentina is home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America and one of the largest in the world" and the text explores the complexities of a divided national and religious identity. Rita also meditates on the controversial links between the Holocaust and her Jewish identity, and her imprisonment as a Peronist rebel, warning that history is in a constant state of repetition. In a moment of vulnerability Rita details her path to incarceration and its correlation to her mother's path to the Holocaust, one of marginalization and silence. She counts the strikes against her, her religion, her culture, her politics, and ultimately her sex.
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Manuela Fingueret is an Argentine author, storyteller, poet, journalist, essayist, and editor.
Acclaimed Argentinean poet and novelist Manuela Fingueret details the 1980's neofascist military dictatorship in Argentina and its dark, painful parallels to the Holocaust through the tales and memories of a mother and daughter in her second novel Daughter of Silence. Translated by Darrell B. Lockhart, Daughter of Silence is a crucial addition to "The Americas" series of contemporary Latin American literature published by Texas Tech University Press, for its exploration of violence, national identity, and survival. Fingueret depicts the tradition of a silent female figure, mute and helpless throughout history, and drastically refutes it with the voice of her narrator Rita, a young Jewish Argentinean and incarcerated Peronist revolutionary. Abused, starved, and rapidly losing her mind, Rita weaves together both her memories and the experiences of her mother, Tinkeleh, a Holocaust survivor.
A poignant portrayal of women, Daughter of Silence illustrates these parallels between the Holocaust and Argentina's political past, while also exploring the unique dichotomy between being Jewish and living in Latin America, a primarily Catholic nation. According to Lockhart in his introduction to the text, "Argentina is home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America and one of the largest in the world" and the text explores the complexities of a divided national and religious identity. Rita also meditates on the controversial links between the Holocaust and her Jewish identity, and her imprisonment as a Peronist rebel, warning that history is in a constant state of repetition. In a moment of vulnerability Rita details her path to incarceration and its correlation to her mother's path to the Holocaust, one of marginalization and silence. She counts the strikes against her, her religion, her culture, her politics, and ultimately her sex.
Read More
Manuela Fingueret is an Argentine author, storyteller, poet, journalist, essayist, and editor.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Cesar Aira: Varamo
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.
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…
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