Month: January 2009

Ana María Matute Interview in El País

~ bythefirelight

There is a great interview in El País with Ana María Matute. They talk about how her heath has kept her from writing recently even though she has been completely mentally able to write. When talking about literature they discuss Matute’s works for children and how she has often written from the perspective of children. It has been very important throughout her career to write for them, in part because there wasn’t anything good and she wanted to write for her son. They also talk about how her mother supported her writing, something rare during the Franco Period, and with her help would type up her drafts before submitting them to publishers.

There was fascinating questions about her style.

You seem especially predisposed to this type of literature [sparse], since you uphold plain and straightforward writing that is not easy to achieve; en fact, you say it is very difficult. Yes. It is that I want the whole world to understand me. I don’t want to torture the reader. No. There are a lot of writers that love to torturer the reader. Not me! [Said harshly] I like that the understand me. For this reason I write. In addition, I’m not such an elitist.

Usted parece especialmente predispuesta a este tipo de literatura, ya que defiende la escritura llana y sencilla, que no es tan fácil de conseguir; de hecho, usted dice que es muy difícil. Sí. Es que yo quiero que me entienda todo el mundo. Yo no quiero torturar al lector. No. Hay muchos escritores a los que les encanta torturar al lector. ¡A mí no! [Proclama con dureza]. A mí me gusta que me entiendan. Para eso escribo. Además, no soy tan elitista.

She also talked about her relationship to the Civil War and recent pushes to investigate the past in Spain.

Undoubtedly it is a traumatic experience. It was tremendous. I still can’t stand fireworks. They have the same sound as the bombs. The bombardments here in Barcelona were terrible. By sea and by air. We lived on Platón Street and back then I saw the sea from my room and I was completely frightened. You feel so powerless…My father would say: take everyone by the hand against the teacher’s wall. And we all would stay that way…[She remains quiet, in suspense, with a face of fear]. I also remember the lines. Those of us who were bourgeois children, those that didn’t go out without one’s father [she makes a face of horror], we quickly had to go stand in line to get bread, where nobody gave a damn. For us it was great! Because we had the liberty to come and go…We looked like mice wanting to go after cheese. My older brother and I discovered freedom. We enjoyed it a lot.

I have found that many people your age reject, perhaps out of fear, the plans to recover the historical memory, to remove this part of history from the past. It is that the way perhaps the fear hasn’t gone, but yes the sadness [remains], the laceration, and the waking of hatreds. I understand that those that have not lived the war have their own feelings, but for me it makes me shiver. To return to relive, to remember. I remember the attempted coup de Tejero [in 1981]. I was with my son in a taxi and we hear the shots on the radio. Look! And I became desperate. “Not again! No, God, not again!” My son asked me: “What’s happening mama?” The taxi cab driver and my son began to talk about what was happening and I would only say: “No, not again. No I will resist it.

Indudablemente es una experiencia muy traumática. Es tremenda. Yo todavía ahora no soporto los fuegos artificiales. Tienen el mismo sonido que las bombas. Los bombardeos aquí en Barcelona fueron terribles. Por mar y por aire. Nosotros vivíamos en la calle de Platón y entonces veía el mar desde mi cuarto y pasaba un miedo espantoso. Te sientes tan impotente… Mi padre decía: cojámonos todos de la mano, contra el muro maestro. Y así nos quedábamos todos… [Se queda quieta, en suspenso, con cara de susto]. También me acuerdo de las colas. Nosotros, que éramos unos niños de clase burguesa, de esos que no salían más que con las tatas [pone cara de horror], teníamos de pronto que ir a hacer colas para conseguir el pan, sin que a nadie le importara. ¡Para nosotros era fenomenal! Porque teníamos libertad de entrar y salir… Parecíamos ratones deseando salir del queso. Mi hermano mayor y yo descubrimos la libertad. La disfrutamos mucho.

He comprobado que mucha gente de su edad rechaza, quizá por miedo, los intentos de recuperar la memoria histórica, de remover esa parte del pasado. Es que de la guerra quizá ya no te queda el miedo, pero sí la tristeza, el desgarro y un despertar de odios. Entiendo que los que no han vivido la guerra tengan un sentimiento distinto, pero a mí me escalofría. Volver a repasar, a recordar. Me acuerdo del intento de golpe de Estado de Tejero [en 1981]. Yo iba con mi hijo en un taxi y oímos los tiros a través de la radio. ¡Mira!, me entró una desesperación… ¡Otra vez no! ¡No, por Dios, otra vez no! Mi hijo me preguntaba: “¿Pero qué te pasa, mamá?”. El taxista y él empezaron a hablar de lo que estaba pasando y yo sólo decía: “No, otra vez no. No lo resistiré”.

Arabic Translation – A History

~ bythefirelight

The Complete Review has a link to a review in the National of a new history of translation and Arabic, Prison-house of Language. The author raises some interesting issues about translation and power, but what caught my eye was this paragraph.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

I have had the feeling at times when I read a story that was originally writen in Arabic, that it is so different in style and approach from the common ways of writing stories in the US and Europe that I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it good? Os it considered good there and I just don’t understand? Hassouna Moshbahi’s The Tortoise in Sardines and Oranges is a perfect example. Using the refrains “that was my first adventure” and “they beat me” the story mixes day dreams, boyish adventures and descriptions of everyday life in Tunisa. There is no ephinanic moment, no Frytag’s triangle, so what is going on? At such moments I think of the reverse, too, when Nagib Mahfouz talks about looking for models for his fiction. In each case, the cultural associations on each side make it difficult to know what the tradition is.

El País Reviews Bolaño and Bolanomania Again

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País has another article about Bolanomania in the United States. (You can see a previous post I did on the subject here). It talks about some of the reviews he has received, how most talk about his biography as much or more than the books and notes the controversy over his heroin usage. The article also notes that one’s reputation after death is based on luck. The author notes that the translation into English has created a different Bolaño, a Bolaño that Americans read from within their own cultural framework. Nothing surprising there. He goes on to compare Bolaño to Kerouac and suggests Americans are placing reading Kerouac and the Beat’s vitalism into Bolaños vitalism and from this reading they are culturally locating Bolaño.

Probably the North American reader recognizes a diction en these novels that es not dissimilar and lets the reader make the book their own, with local flavor and its riches. In English the books are not only very literary and miticulous, pasionate and brillant; they are, over all, vitalist.

The grand tradition of North American vitalist prose, in effect, has been the setting where the various styles of fiction characteristically Yankee were defined. The greatest stylist of this style is Jack Kerouac, and his On the Road, written in 1951 and rejected by 19 publishers before its publication in 1957, is a a modern classic. Even though the Beat Generation ended up being devoured by its own reputation, its works are more serious than the image of its authors, simplified to the point of being taken granted, and converted into merchandise. The brilliance of that vibrant, radiant, fluid, and unpredictable prose echoes like a spell in the pages of Bolaño.

Probablemente el lector norteamericano reconoce en estas novelas una dicción que no le es ajena, y que le permite hacer suya, con apetito local, su riqueza. En inglés no son sólo muy literarias y minuciosas, apasionadas y brillantes; son, sobre todo, vitalistas.

La gran tradición de la prosa norteamericana vitalista, en efecto, ha sido el escenario donde se definen los varios estilos de la ficción característicamente yanqui. El mayor estilista de este estilo es Jack Kerouac, y su On the road, escrita en 1951 y rechazada por 19 editoriales antes de su publicación en 1957, un clásico moderno. Aunque la generación Beat terminó devorada por su biografía popular, sus obras son más serias que la imagen de sus autores, simplificados al punto de darse por leídos, convertidos en mercancía residual. El brillo de esa prosa vivaz, irradiante, fluida, imprevisible, resuena como un conjuro en las páginas de Bolaño.

Alaa Al Aswany Reviewed in the New York Times

~ bythefirelight

The New York Times has a mixed review of Alaa Al Aswany’s new book. The reviewer doesn’t like it quite as much as the The Yacoubian Building. The book, which takes place in the US, does sound a little off and not as interesting as The Yacoubian Building.

Al Aswany writes about his Egyptian characters with charm, gentle humor and genuine conviction. It’s his depiction of Americans in their natural habitat that baffles. A beautiful young black woman is fired from her job at a shopping mall, supposedly because of her race; unable to find work, she succumbs to the indignity of posing as an “adult lingerie” model — for $1,000 an hour. A middle-aged woman, shunned by her husband, ventures into a sex shop to buy a vibrator and is treated to a lecture on the G spot and its role in female emancipation (“A woman is no longer a tool for man’s pleasure or his physical subordinate”), complete with bibliographic citations (Gräfenburg, Perry and Whipple).

Turbine – New Zealand Writing

~ bythefirelight

I’ve been reading through Turbine recently. There is some good stuff, but what caught my eye, and what I wish more magazines would do, are the audio clips of the authors reading the work. It adds more favor when you hear the words in the author’s own words, especially if the English you speak is spoken differently than their’s.

El País – Best Books of 2008

~ bythefirelight

El País has published there list of the best books of 2008. It is an interesting list and comparing it to the lists I’ve seen in major English language presses it is quickly obvious who many translations made the list. Chelsa Beach is number one on their list.

Sea of Poppies

~ bythefirelight

Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies, much like Glass Palace, is what one might call post-colonial recovery fiction, a novel that not only takes on the British colonial system with all its prejudices and injustices, but seeks to recover or reimagine the lives of people who left no records. In doing so Ghosh has created a trilogy with a large cast that represents the range of Indians and British whose lives either depended on or were disrupted by the colonial system. The novel’s scope and language are ambitious and one can easily get lost within the intertwining stories and arcane language. The question I had as I was reading the book, though, was if the history of it was enough? Sea of Poppies is richly plotted and all the threads of history and characters come together beautifully, but in recapturing the lives of the forgotten, are the characters really recovered?

The short answer is it is hard to say: the wealth of research is strong and obviously the details are quite good. And the scope the historic sweep of the novel is very accurate, something Ghosh does very well. And unlike the Glass Palace, there didn’t seem to be any dead spots in the novel—every scene was important to the story. Yet if there are no records then what are you recovering? One can recover the facts—rates of pay, living conditions—but the internal lives of the characters is much more difficult. So when one reads about the spiritual beliefs of one of the characters—especially when you are completely unfamiliar with the culture—are you rediscovering what they really thought, or what we’d like to think they thought? For the western and wealthy Indian characters, Ghosh is accurate in their portrayal. For the villagers and the Lascars, though, it is difficult to know, and, most likely, it will always be difficult to know. So the inner life is a best guess (true all inner lives are best guesses, but some can be based more closely in the actual), one that serves the story and that is not a bad thing, just a limitation.

Keeping those limitations in mind, the novel then is a fictionalization of the great colonial enterprise and if the inner lives of the characters are just guesses, the destruction of so many lives is exposed at the macro level, not in the emotional struggles but in Dickensian horror—the description of the opium plant is the perfect example and will make it clear how horrible the trade was. At times, the politics of the trade takes center stage and underscores the focus of the book. As one British characters says, “We need only think of the poor Indian peasant — what will become of  him if his opium can’t be sold in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore.”

Yet for all the callousness of the British characters, it is not a harsh world in its fictional outcome. Certain characters are living in poverty and don’t have a much of a future, but there is never an overwhelming sense of impending doom or urgency, and just when one of the main characters is threatened with death, something will come along just in time to save him. Instead, Ghosh makes clear from the beginning that all the main characters will be in Deeti’s shrines, suggesting that everything is going to work out just fine. The lack of narrative tension, perhaps, is the result of so much history, not only the details, but telling the story as if it already had happened. The experience of reading is not about what is going to happen next, but where is everyone going to end up in the end, since you know it is all going to work out anyway.

Sea of Poppies is an impressive bit of writing and worth the read and I hope the rest of the trilogy is written soon. The novel may feel a little preordained as it seeks to fulfill its purpose, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting.

A Literary Resolution

~ bythefirelight

I don’t like resolutions that much, but I think this one will work. My plan is to read one book in Spanish for every two books I read in English. I won’t be reading monsters like 2666 in Spanish, but shorter 200-300 page books should make this a doable resolution.