Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Purity of Blood

If the phrase "mission impossible" hadn't already been used elsewhere, it would have made a perfect title for Arturo Pérez-Reverte's second adventure featuring the lethal mercenary with a conscience known as Capt. Diego Alatriste. Instead, the renowned Spanish novelist has chosen "Purity of Blood" for this follow-up tale of intrigue and double-dealing in 17th century Madrid.

The title is an ominous reference to a delicate complication Alatriste must confront as he takes on a clandestine assignment that is doomed. The year is 1623, and the grizzled warrior is considering a return to active duty as a soldier in Flanders, where hostilities with the Dutch are flaring anew. It's also a place where his facility with knife and pistol might give him some needed distance from people in high places who are still annoyed at having been outmaneuvered in a previous encounter.

But as we learned in last year's "Captain Alatriste," the first novel in a five-part series (Pérez-Reverte wrote the series early in his career, but they are only now being translated into English), this is a man whose moral streak occasionally clouds his judgment. Last time around, his intended marks were allowed to escape by virtue of having displayed uncommon courage in the face of death. Now Alatriste is persuaded by a good friend, the notable poet-about-town Francisco de Quevedo, to rescue the daughter of a prominent patron from the clutches of a lascivious priest. The reason her father is unable to rescue her from the convent himself is out of fear that he will be exposed for a heritage that lacks "purity of blood" - in other words, for being of Jewish ancestry. This would be catastrophic for his family's name and fortune.

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A Cock-Eyed Comedy by Juan Goytisolo

Ferlinghetti forever! Ginsberg rejoice! City Lights Books has done it again -- the bourgeois-bashing San Francisco publisher is stirring up trouble with the publication of Juan Goytisolo's religious gay sex farce, "A Cock-Eyed Comedy."
Goytisolo's new novel, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, is a fun, troubling, troublesome read. It's a tome of time travel -- Europe in the Middle Ages, the dark basement of a Parisian cinema house, Castro's Cuba, a 1980s gay bathhouse in Manhattan and more. It's also a jumble of literary forms: novel retold, poetry recalled, scraps of diary and news reports recaptured. As a collection of texts working to form a single narrative, it is, well, hard to follow.

"A Cock-Eyed Comedy" begins, really, as a picaresque novel with a Don Quixote-like protagonist, Father Trennes, who gets busy recounting a string of gay sexual encounters using the high language of Scripture: "After hallowing me, he'd stay on, insatiably ardent, searching for new hallelujahs steeped in indulgences." And further, "The only solution ... was to allow him to come up to my room for a quick prayer before breakfast. ... Prayer meetings thus continued for more than fifteen years." Father Trennes, later, transfigures himself from the itinerant Catholic cleric into the boorish leader of Opus Dei, a conservative present-day church organization.

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

Spanish writer Javier Marias has been celebrated around the world for decades as a master of fiction and non-fiction. His books have sold five million copies in more than 40 languages, and his weekly articles in El Pais, in which he muses on politics, art or wherever his thoughts take him, have an enormous following. This 'clandestine greatness' was profiled in the New Yorker last year, when Marias published the first volume of his tour de force of treachery and espionage, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, which is set in England. So why doesn't Marias have a larger audience in Britain? Indeed, why is comparatively little of his work (a mere eight, soon to be nine, of his 29 books) available in English? Marias's passionate readers feel exhilarated when a new title arrives, then hold their breath while his skilful translator, Margaret Jull Costa, tries to keep up with the backlog.

Written Lives, which contains essays on well-known literary figures, probably won't do much to broaden his reputation, but it does prove what a beguiling, clever and original writer Marias is, and may act as a taster for the next volume of Your Face Tomorrow, due here in June. In the introduction, Marias says that his selection of writers was 'arbitrary', the only stipulations being that they were dead and not Spanish. In fact, the book is more personal than that; quite a few of the writers he's translated into his native language. The result is a survey of 26 international authors, among them Conan Doyle, Madame du Deffand, Faulkner, Kipling, Nabokov, Rilke, Sterne and Wilde, who led illustrious but primarily tragic lives. Marias knows the dangers of taking on subjects who have been dissected many times over, and his solution is to treat them 'as if they were fictional characters'. As an observer-cum-biographer, he allows himself to embellish history, filter material, omit certain facts and dwell on others, stopping short of invention. He brings these well-known faces into the light by making them seem strange, even bizarre.

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Carlos Fuentes in South Africa

The University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Literature and Language Studies is pleased to announce that the second Nadine Gordimer Lecture will be given by the distinguished Mexican writer and public intellectual, Carlos Fuentes.

Born in Panama in 1928, Fuentes has spent parts of his life in the United States, Switzerland, Chile, Argentina and France. Since the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University, he has adopted Mexico as his home country. A diplomat and public intellectual who speaks and writes with immense authority and range especially on Latin American history and cultural affairs, Fuentes has won major awards in Europe and Latin America, notably the National Prize for Literature in Mexico and the Miguel Cervantes Prize. Much of his early work, in novels such as 'The Death of Artemio Cruz', was concerned with Mexican national identity.

More recently, he said the following: "There are now 30-year old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned...You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don’t necessarily have to deal with Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity...We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican. Now the problem is to discover difference - not identity but difference: sexual difference, religious difference, political difference, moral differences, aesthetical differences..."

Gordimer has said of Fuentes: "He has brought up in his grasp with the rubble and uncut gems, the confusion of our human existence, something of the truth. And he has achieved the imaginative maturity of the intellect by which he has been able to give us, through his art, a share of the truth. That is all a writer can do."

More information here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

A brief review of Tomas Eloy Martinez' The Tango Singer.

Tomas Eloy Martinez originally set out to write a book about Buenos Aires for Bloomsbury's "Writer in the City" series before his novelist's instincts took over. This explains why the Argentine capital is the real protagonist of The Tango Singer.
"I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third storey upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear," writes Bruno Cadogan, visiting the inflation-stricken city to research a thesis about Jorge Luis Borges' essays on tango.

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Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda and the poetry of South American love.
On 12 July 1904 Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was inconspicuously born in the small Chilean town of Parral, the son of a railway working father and teaching mother who died shortly after his birth. On 23 September 1973, Neftali - by then known as Pablo Neruda the Nobel Laureate and South America’s greatest poet, died of leukaemia in the Chilean capital Santiago, shortly after the murder of President Salvador Allende.

It was Allende’s socialist government that had appointed Neruda as Chile’s Ambassador to France from 1970-72, yet it has been suggested that the politics of Chile hastened the death of the despairing socialist poet - his decline accelerated by the murder of Allende and the Pinochet coup in 1973. Modern day Chile’s imminent return to a left wing government however, with the recent success of Michelle Bachelet, may have restored something his own personal vision of Chile (Bachelet, a 54-year-old socialist pediatrician was elected in January and takes office on 11 March). In the midst of these months of significant South American political events sits the unrelated commercial spectacle of Valentine’s Day, which of itself should have precious little to do with the government of Chile. Yet, however tenuous the link, thoughts of romance (on 14 February or any other time of the year) will inevitably lead me back to Neruda’s Chile and the poetry of South American love. For at the age of only 20, Neruda (the pen name which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891) and used for over 20 years - before adopting it legally in 1946) wrote Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair) in Santiago. Correspondingly at the age of 28, I met and fell briefly in love with a Chilean woman in Santiago, and mere days later was introduced to Neruda’s first of many collections of love poetry. The episodic romance of that particular woman has passed. The romance of the poetry and the country that she reminds me of has not.

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The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

Madonna performed it in Evita. Sally Potter directed it in The Tango Lesson. Hundreds, mainly women of uncertain age, dance it across British cities. And the Argentines, who claim to have choreographed it - although the roots lie in the male partnerships of Cuban sailors improvising on the rhythms of the habañera - have written about it. Even Borges's brief "History of the Tango" opens by paying homage to the many histories that precede his. And British visitors to La Boca (the port where tango emerged) write glamorous accounts of their encounters.

Tomas Eloy Martinez takes a less glamorous approach. The novelist is interested in tango's myth and mystique, related through the lyrics rather than the movements of this lament that balances on a knife-edge between consummate control and intense passion. As with The Peron Novel and Santa Evita, The Tango Singer is about the Buenos Aires of his youth, before a right-wing bomb ousted Martinez from his newspaper and brought exile in the US.

The eponymous singer is Julio Martel, discovered by a North American PhD student during a chance conversation with the cultural historian Jean Franco. Again, this mingling of actual and fictitious protagonists belongs to a Latin American genre of "meta-historical fiction".

You can find the full review here

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Interview with Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin America’s foremost novelists, talks to Isabel Hilton about his latest book “The Eagle’s Throne” which explores the nature of power and presidency in a future Mexico.

Isabel Hilton: The Eagle's Throne is an epistolary novel which deals with the drama around the presidency in Mexico. It's a novel which gives rather a bleak view of politics. Now Mexico is in an election year, it's gone through an extraordinary political evolution in the last 10-15 years. Reading The Eagle's Throne, is that really how you see Mexican politics?

Carlos Fuentes: Well this is a satire; it is not a truthful portrait of politics. It is a satire and satires are merciless. They do not pardon anyone. There are no heroes in a satire; you have to demolish them all with wit and poison. In that sense it is a political novel because it does describe what in Mexico, and all over the world, passes as nine tenths of politics. Politics is like an iceberg and you see the tiny white cusp that sticks out in the ocean, and there you find statesmen. Many I like and admire. But the nitty gritty that is under the water is treachery, knives in the back, intrigues of all sort. This is common throughout politics. Someone said once that politics is like a pack of dogs. Only the first dog knows why he barks, the rest just follow him. So this is a satirical novel about politics. It does not pretend to be a truthful portrait about the many levels of politics but a satire of the kind that Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh would have written about their own times.

You can find the full interview here.

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The Cave by Jose Saramago

Review of José Saramago's The Cave

At a cursory glance, not a whole lot seems to happen in The Cave. Nobel laureate José Saramago's twelfth novel is a gentle tale about gentle people. There is little to no action, the book contains a lengthy, technical discourse on the finer points of fire-kilned pottery, and the protagonist is an elderly widower who really doesn't get around too much. But don't let this description fool you -- The Cave is a beautiful novel, rich with inter-character tensions, and like all of Saramago's work, it reads with a rambling beauty and an irresistible wink-wink charm.
The Cave examines the simple life of Cipriano Algor, an old-fashioned earthenware potter. The last in a line of potters stretching back for three generations, Cipriano's work is rapidly becoming obsolete. Cipriano, who is getting on in years, lives with his pregnant daughter Marta and her husband Marcal on the outskirts of a small rural village. He sells his pottery solely to an enormous shopping and living complex called "The Center," located on the outskirts of the nearby city. As in Saramago's last two novels, Blindness and All The Names, he leaves the city and country of his setting unnamed, and his narrative is deliberately free from specific political or cultural references. The Center could be in any town in any country, and Saramago delivers his message loud and clear: that's not what this story is about.

You can find the full review here

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Deep Purple by Mayra Montero

Review of Mayra Montero's Deep Purple

There is a profusion of awards in the current literary marketplace, many of them little known. In terms of publicity, there are only a few that attract the attention of the general public. These are the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has the advantage of the Nobel "brand" and association with the inevitable controversy over the winner of its sibling award for "Peace"; the Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded in the largest market for English-language literature and also has well-established brand recognition; and England’s Man Booker Prize (known usually, no doubt to the distress of its new sponsor, just as the "Booker"), which generates an extraordinary amount of international coverage - even in the United States, whose writers are just about the only ones in the world not eligible.
Smaller awards such as the Sonrisa Vertical and the Bellwether Prize may never get the attention of the general media, but they do serve a useful function. Of course, there’s the prize money - always welcome to a struggling author - but more importantly, they provide an imprimatur of quality, marking the work as an outstanding representative of a particular type. The Book of Dead Birds won the Bellwether Prize before publication, so is able to advertise the fact on its dustcover, along with an approving quote from Barbara King solver attesting to the lyricism and intelligence of the book. For those unfamiliar with the prize, the flap informs the browsing book-buyer that the Bellwether is awarded to a work that "displays social responsibility," indicating something of Brandeis’ subject matter.
The prize won by Mayra Montero’s Deep Purple, however, is well outside the bounds of "social responsibility." The Sonrisa Vertical (its amusing name means "Vertical Smile") is a Spanish international prize for erotic fiction, won by Montero after the initial publication of Púrpura profunda in 2000. However, the prize is not advertised on the dustcover of the novel, which prefers to quote praise for her earlier works from the "quality press," including the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. This strategy of not mentioning an award may be a move by the publishers to avoid any taint of a "lesser genre" - particularly erotic fiction - and instead promote the intellectual and literary qualities of the work. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time an author was slightly embarrassed about an endorsement; witness Jonathan Franzen’s famous reaction to his selection in Oprah’s Book Club.

You can find the full review here

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Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

Review of Cervantes' Don Quixote

How important a consideration it may or may not be, clearly Cervantes never attempted to reconcile the contradictions that one finds in Don Quixote. The lack of consistent intentions - a characteristic found in much of Shakespeare - is troublesome in a long prose work. On the stage, effect succeeds effect, and the audience has no time to impose critical strictures; but a book is necessarily an invitation for reflection, and a lack of unified effect can be serious. Much of Don Quixote is lost in the shadow of Cervantes’ confused intentions. What stands out vibrantly are the gestures of magnificent foolishness, the warm regard that the Don has for Sancho, and the strong - if unstressed - conviction that nothing in the real world of so-called sanity has the grandeur of Don Quixote’s delusions. Although these estimable virtues are both abundant and laudable, it is doubtful if they can entirely offset the defects of the book, or provide as fully rewarding a reading experience as reading, for example, Homer or Shakespeare. But the reader must read Don Quixote once, and Edith Grossman’s translation provides an outstanding version.

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Tarzan's Tonsillitis by Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Review if Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Tarzan's Tonsillitis

In 1970, the Peruvian novelist Alfredo Bryce Echenique published a fictionalized portrait of his Lima childhood. Richly detailed and full of subtle scorn for his country's ruling class, "A World for Julius" is an exile's novel. It could only have been written in a seat of alienation like Paris, where the author lived and taught in the 1960's and 70's.

"Tarzan's Tonsillitis," Bryce Echenique's 14th published work, is something rather different -- an expatriate's novel, a rueful retrospective tribute to the heroic survivors of decades of rebellions and coups and dirty wars. The encomium takes the graceful form of a love story between a hyperarticulate Peruvian singer and composer, leading a charmed life in Europe, and the beautiful Salvadoran woman he worships from afar.

The star-crossed lovers meet in Paris in 1967, when Latin liberation movements and Latin ''boom'' novelists are all the rage. Fernanda María de la Trinidad del Monte Montes, a beautiful red-haired, green-eyed daughter of the oligarchy, arrives in town to occupy a sinecure at Unesco. She has an Alfa Romeo and great connections. Her exclusive Swiss finishing school has even taught her the correct posture to assume while hailing a taxi. Juan Manuel Carpio, the grandson of Quechua-speaking Indians, is at the beginning of his career, performing in the Métro with a Che Guevara poster as a backdrop to increase his tips. This unlikely couple fall in love, quarrel and separate, knowing right away that they have missed their great opportunity.

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