Rabindranath Tagore and Latin American literature

An article on the influence of Rabindranath Tagore in Latin American literature.

After all, Latin America and India are worlds apart, one may say. And prompted by this separation, it may be important for Bengali readers to retrace the origin of the ripples, to see where does Tagore stand today in Latin America and what were the effects of his powerful mind on Latin American intellectuals. This is the idea of this article, and of several to come: to recreate the ties between Tagore and the New World. This implies, of course, the need for an introduction: How did Rabindranath Tagore come to be so well known and beloved in Latin America, a continent so different from India? Well, maybe because they are not so different. After all, not so long ago - due to the confusion of an Italian sailor sailing under the Spanish flag - our continent was still being called the West Indies, and though today this name has come to identify only a portion of the isles situated on the Caribbean sea, many a resemblance can still be found between that India Columbus was looking for, and the one he did really find: two huge continents, with landscapes ranging from humid tropic to frozen heights, and a large population composed of hundreds of ethnic groups.

For some, these affinities can explain the long love affair the Latin Americans have had with Tagore's poetry and thinking. In a lecture on Tagore's manuscripts, given at the University of Delhi by Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet (Nobel Prize of Literature in 1990, and for some time a resident in India) mentions the existence of an essay by Nirad C., in which the Indian scholar points out the similarities between Bengal and Latin America. Paz extends these affinities to Kerala and Goa, saying that, same as the cultural syncretism which resulted from the clash between Spaniards, Portuguese, African and Native Americans in what was called the New World - syncretism that was to adopt the name of Baroque - something similar happened in these three regions of India, where the Western influence was not to neutralize but to be fused into the huge Indian tradition. Yet, says Paz, this would not completely explain the attraction exerted by a poet who only visited Latin America once, who never learned Spanish, and whose work cannot be said to have received any remarkable influence from Spanish or Latin American literature. And not only would this utterly fail to justify the powerful effect Tagore had and continues to have on Latin American readers, writers and intellectuals, as Paz claims, but in my opinion would especially shadow the one and only real reason behind his lingering popularity: the magic of his poetry.

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Inez by Carlos Fuentes

Think of a spider spinning webs, one after another. Each web is constructed on the same basic, instinctive pattern, but each is unique, adapted to a particular niche in the physical world. The spider is "doing the same thing but never repeating." That is a metaphor (one of many) tossed off casually by Carlos Fuentes, one of the master craftsmen of fiction in our time. It describes the aversion to "predictable behavior" of his protagonist, an orchestra conductor named Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, who is 93 years old and reminiscing about a lost love when this novel opens in 1999. Gabriel refuses to allow recordings of his work, audio or video, because he hates exact replays -- a paradoxical attitude in a man whose career is built on the repetition of a limited number of musical works. Gabriel believes that music truly exists only when it is happening, as an immediate, spontaneous communication between musicians and listeners.

The spiderweb image also describes a basic structural principle of the novel. Inez constructs a sequence of situations that echo one another hauntingly but never exactly repeat. The primary narrative subject is the stormy, on-again-off-again relationship between Gabriel and Inez Prada (née Rosenzweig), a singer of extraordinary vocal power whom he attempts to seduce, with varying degrees of success, at widely separated intervals -- in 1940, 1949 and 1967. As happens often in Latin American fiction, the border between reality and fantasy is sometimes blurred. After the 1967 encounter, at London's Covent Garden, Inez disappears. In 1999, talking to her ghost (or her memory), Gabriel thinks she may have gone off to a "different life," dwelling in the dream of a primitive world she has been imagining at intervals throughout the novel. Perhaps she is with a boyhood friend of his who disappeared long ago and who may be a figment of his imagination.

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The Years with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes

Review of Carlos Fuentes's Los Años Con Laura Díaz (The Years with Laura Díaz)

I've been trying to figure out what makes a novel "great." One of the criteria, I think, is easily identified: A great novel forces us to rethink history as more than just a long story told to younger and shorter people. But when a novelist knows this too well, and rethinks history for us programmatically -- as though there were a checklist lurking beneath the story -- the results can be mind-dulling: greatness contrived.

Such is the case with Carlos Fuentes' "The Years With Laura Díaz," a sweeping historical saga that falls prey to its ambitions. Laura Díaz is the novel's main character, protagonist, heroine and measure of Mexican identity. From her early years in Catemaco to her adolescence in Veracruz, and then throughout her adult life in Mexico City, Díaz's biography serves as a kind of screen upon which Fuentes projects his version of the Mexican past. She comes into glancing contact with all sorts of 20th century luminaries -- in her case Latin American and Mexican celebrities such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo -- along with numerous bit players. The historical figures Díaz comes to know best are mostly minor political radicals, but their proximity to power allows Fuentes to explore the Mexican past through its revolutions, from the workers' revolts to the coups and crackdowns. Ultimately, the stories of these revolutions (as seen by Díaz) constitute a critique of the left: The novel presents revolution as an essential instrument of progress, despite its leaders' failures to imagine their country's future. And yes, here we see Fuentes' slip showing.


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The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen is set in Buenos Aires in the then-present-time of 1929 and opens with main character, Remo Erdosain, a self-described "hollow man, a shell moved simply by the force of habit" being accused of embezzling by his employer. That accusation sets loose a chain of events in his life, which ultimately lead him to a gathering of other discontents that make ruthless, detailed plans to set up a "bandit aristocracy." Erdosain is an anguished, pained man whose diatribes portray him as one of the madmen of the title. Nothing goes right for him: his wife, Elsa, leaves him for another man and he?s a failed inventor. Darkness pervades his very being. In The Seven Madmen Erdosain is surrounded by various other characters, richly described by Arlt: Ergueta the pharmacist, a gambler with a religious side and his wife, Hipolita, a former prostitute; Gregorio Barsut, Elsa's cousin, a boorish moneyed man who's the focus of the madmen's kidnap plot.

The madmen, headed by one called the Astrologer, believe it is "magnificent lies" that drive people on. As explained to Erdosain: "Men only respond to lies. (The Astrologer) gives lies the consistency of truth; people who never have so much as budged to get anything, guys who have become totally cynical and desperate, come to life again in the truth of his lies." What happens to Erdosain and his cohorts is continued in Arlt's third novel, The Flamethrowers (Los Lanzallamas), which followed in 1931.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez nominated for Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction

Along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores", where nominated "The March" by E.L. Doctorow, "Veronica" by Mary Gaitskill, Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" and "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami.

Battle in Heaven directed by Carlos Reygadas

On the surface, “Battle in Heaven” has everything necessary to make an intriguing film: sex, kidnapping, nationalism, religion, and more sex. Yet Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas steadfastly drains his sophomore effort of any emotion and context, turning it into a dull, meditative exercise. Shot with non-professional actors, the film links one series of banal events to another through long tracking shots. He pays little regard to a cohesive narrative structure and even less to developing three-dimensional characters. Reygadas asks for his audience to consider the moral dilemmas that play out in the consciousness of his characters and offers little in return for the effort.

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The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer of short, elegant metaphysical fictional pieces, wrote in 1957 A Manual of Fantastic Zoology. In 1967 an expanded version was published under the title The Book of Imaginary Beings. Two years later a further, expanded edition appeared, an edition that Andrew Hurley, the translator of the present edition, criticizes for getting Borges’s collaborator Margarita Guerrero’s name wrong and for bad translation. Hurley excises the four extra "beings" included in that version, consistent with the last Spanish edition that appeared while Borges was still alive.

Borges (1899-1986) was educated in English in Geneva and had a varied career as a critic, literary writer and editor, teacher, lecturer and librarian ("I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness," he wrote, referring to the blindness that overtook him in his 50’s). His vast reading in religion, literature (especially Poe, Kafka, Kipling and Chesterton) and philosophy (especially Berkeley) heavily influenced his fiction, which often focuses on books in a self-referential way, yet not in the smirking style of much modern meta-fiction. This is because his fiction is about ultimate reality, not art itself.

One can see this even in The Book of Imaginary Beings, a modern bestiary (not limited to beasts), a trip (in Borges’s words) to "that zoological garden whose fauna is comprised not of lions but of sphinxes and gryphons and centaurs." Here are 116 such fantastical beings collected, arranged in alphabetical order, including the following well-known creatures: "The Behemoth," "The Brownies," "The Double," "Elves," "Gnomes," "The Golem," "The Harpies," "Lilith," "The Pelican," "Trolls" and "The Unicorn." In describing these beings Borges finds ample opportunity to speculate on the nature of the universe.

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Written Lives by Javier Marias

The Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías has lived so long in other countries and other languages that, by his own account, some of his compatriots have come to deny his own "Spanishness." It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that no Spanish writers are among the "fairly disastrous individuals" Marías has honored in "Written Lives," a collection of short and scintillating portraits deftly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and inspired more by intriguing anecdotes and details than by a determination to capture basic biographical facts. While he claims that his selections are "entirely arbitrary," it can't be coincidental that most of these writers, with a few exceptions like Faulkner, lived for extended periods abroad, either as exiles or expatriates.

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In Evil Hour directed by Ruy Guerra

Shown as part of the Miami International Film Festival, "In Evil Hour," is a cinematic masterpiece that envisions the literary mind of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Brazilian director, Ruy Guerra, bases In Evil Hour on one of Marquez’s earlier works, "La Mala Hora." Guerra encompasses all the telltale signs of a Marquez story in the film, such as a small town in South America, Mysticism, and plenty of colorful wacky characters.

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Duck Season directed by Fernando Eimbcke

Not a whole lot happens in Duck Season, the debut feature from Mexican writer/director Fernando Eimbcke. But then, that's largely by design. After all, it is a movie about a lazy Sunday afternoon. But there's another reason for Eimbcke's lackadaisical approach-he's making a clear homage to the early films of Jim Jarmusch. With its black-and-white photography, static camerawork, deadpan sense of humor, and blackouts in between scenes, Duck Seasonaspires to be nothing less than Stranger than Paradise 2: South of the Border. Needless to say, the film doesn't have the freshness of Jarmusch's debut, but taken on its own terms, it's an amusing comedy enhanced by appealing performances from its four leads.

Set almost entirely in one apartment in a Mexico City housing complex, Duck Season follows the wholly ordinary adventures of two 14-year-old boys, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and his best friend Moko (Diego Cataño). Flama's mother has a party to attend, so she leaves the two kids at home to look after themselves. No sooner have plopped down in front of the TV for a rousing round of video games when there's a knock at the door. It's Rita (Danny Perea), the cute 16-year-old girl from down the hall, asking to use their stove to bake a cake. She's reluctantly granted admittance and Flama and Moko return to their game, only to be interrupted again, this time by a poorly-timed power failure. Deciding to break for lunch, they call the local pizza place and break out the stopwatch to make sure the pie arrives within the 30-minute guarantee. The pizza delivery guy Ulises (Enrique Arreola) reaches the door one minute past the deadline. The boys refuse to pay and Ulises refuses to leave without his money. So for the rest of the afternoon, these four oddballs hang out in Flama's apartment, swapping stories, contemplating their lives and getting stoned on a batch of marijuana-laced brownies.

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Fernando Schwartz won the Primavera Prize for 'Vichy, 1940'

Fernando Schwartz won the 10th edition of the primavera Prize with its work ' Vichy, 1940', "a cosmopolitan story, of victims and of what it takes for a hero to become villain and to a villain to become hero", according to the winner.

Brownsville by Oscar Casares

For the most part, Casares is writing about blue-collar guys -- Hispanic guys -- dealing with neighborhoods that are going to hell, wives who inexplicably want to get educated, and the general need to defend oneself against wily Anglo strategies. "Yolanda," a story that concerns a man remembering the time when he was 15 and the neighbor's beautiful wife took refuge from his jealousy in his bedroom, begins with a long passage that goes like this: "I'm talking about more than 20 years ago now. I'm talking about before some drunk spent all afternoon in one of the cantinas on 14th Street, then drove his car straight into the Rivas' front yard and ran over the baby Jesus that was still lying in the manger ... This was before Pete Zuniga was riding his brand new ten-speed from Western Auto and, next to the Friendship Garden, saw a white dude who'd been knifed a couple of dozen times and was floating in the green water of the resaca." Etc. The world goes to hell in a handbasket, paradise is lost: Now the story can begin.

Since Chekhov invented understatement, the great modern short stories have compulsively shown what doesn't happen, the adventure that's aborted. In "Yolanda," the narrator never has sex specifically with his beautiful neighbor. In "Chango," Bony does obey his dad and throw away the monkey head, and in "Charro," Marcelo does give up trying to kill the neighbor's dog. But don't mistake Brownsville for something like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Casares is no facile distributor of small-town epiphanies. As Bony thinks, dropping Chango's head in a canal, "sometimes he listened, but most times he didn't. He was just living. That's the best explanation he could give. Living."

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