New York Magazine has a review Destiny and Desire (La Voluntad y la Fortuna), which unfortunately is more about him than the book. It starts off alright but goes into all his controversies (not a bad thing if you don’t know about them). However, I mention the review because it shows, albeit briefly, where Fuentes is and why I think he is one of those writers who should have stopped writing or at least with less frequency.
The emos who hang out in Mexico City’s Insurgentes Circle, distant relations of our own kohl-eyed musical mopes, face constant harassment from corrupt police and local punks. Some of them have also been forced to contend with the intrusive questions of a handsome, weathered, impeccably dressed gentleman of 82 who occasionally likes to listen, uncomprehending, to their lingo. “They invent language all the time,” says Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most prominent author, who still spends hours wandering the vast plazas and narrow alleys of his country’s capital. “It’s a language I, at times, cannot understand.”
Destiny and Desire is the 24th novel by Fuentes, one of the architects of the sixties’ “Latin American Boom” in literature (along with friends “Gabo” García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and 2010 Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa). The novel is a tracking shot of modern Mexico City as seen through the eyes of two ambitious frenemies, Josué and Jericó (Cain and Abel is the working archetype), caught in the swirl of dirty politics, narco-trafficking, and a burgeoning telecommunications monopoly. Its more surreal touches—potent symbolism, magic, long polemics, and disorienting leaps in time—bring to mind the best of Latin Boomer lit, including Fuentes’s own classic, The Death of Artemio Cruz, published in English in 1964. It also showcases Fuentes’s need to stay current in his ninth decade—as in the incongruous phrase “Hug it out, bitch,” which telegraphs Jericó’s mysterious international activities.
You can thank the author’s wife, Mexican journalist Silvia Lemus, for the disconcerting (though perfectly logical) Entourage reference; Fuentes has never seen the show. “That’s what my wife is here for,” he says. “She keeps me up on popular culture. I’m a telephone and fax man.” The only American TV he follows, avidly, is Mad Men. “It’s quite fascinating … the American version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” His favorite character is Bert Cooper, “the boss who doesn’t wear shoes. He’s the only likable guy. The others are horrifying.”
The Nation has a solid overview of Vasily Grossman’s the Road and Everything Flows which are new from the New York Review of Books. I haven’t had a chance to crack Life and Fate yet, but these works sound good too and need to go on my list.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, Grossman was one of the earliest, most searching and humane investigators of the totalitarian condition. Compare his psychological insights with the accusatory pen of his near contemporary Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who sought to vilify Communist beliefs rather than understand them. Or recall Anna Akhmatova’s famous words, that with the opening of the prison camps “two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent these people to the camps and the one that came back.” Readers of Grossman will learn about the gray area of the psyche that lies between the two Russias; they will also learn more about themselves.
Robert Chandler, the editor of Everything Flows, incorrectly refers to the famine of 1932–33, during which as many as 5 million people perished, as a Ukrainian “terror famine.” The famine resulted from a brutal collectivization campaign that did not target Ukrainians alone but other grain-growing regions of the Soviet Union as well. Grossman pointedly writes about “the death by famine of the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban.” The story of the famine as a uniquely Ukrainian genocide was propagated by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in an attempt to create a sacrificial founding myth for present-day Ukraine. Grossman would have objected to any attempt to appropriate the history of past suffering for the purposes of aggrandizing state power.
* * *
While chipping away at the Soviet state, Grossman retained his belief in the ideas of humanity and freedom that he claimed were embodied in the original script of the Soviet revolution. He remained convinced that the Soviet soldiers fighting in World War II had heroically sacrificed themselves for the future of humanity. But Grossman was also a writer shaped by a century of Russian thought. He preferred the philosophic views of the “Westernizers” to the “Slavophiles” and their mystical belief in the Russian “soul” as a harbinger of political freedom. As a writer he practiced an aesthetic of critical realism that can be traced to the works of Turgenev and Tolstoy, among other novelists of prerevolutionary Russia. Like them, Grossman judged the merits of a literary work by whether it proved useful to the cause of social progress. A writer’s primary task was to educate and enlighten, to show readers how to tap into their potential and rise up to become moral “personalities” who would lead Russia out of its oppressive past. Crucially, this aesthetic also had a self-reflexive dimension: there was to be no more separation between art and reality, literature and life. Only on the strength of such involvement could the writer claim moral authority. It is for this reason that Everything Flows has such a personal ring and why the narrator exhorts himself as much as he does his characters and readers. It is also why the story of Ivan Grigoryevich and the narrator’s authorial musings become intertwined and fully merge in the end.
So it is best of time and Moleskine Literario points to the best Argentine books for 2010. It is as fitting a list as any. I only know Ricardo Piglia and Cesar Aria and look forward to looking into some of these authors.
La Revista Ñ del diario Clarín ha elegido los autores argentinos más destacados del 2010. Desde autores consagrados, como César Aira y Alan Pauls, hasta autores que no suenan mucho en América Latina como María Martoccio o Federico Falco, tenemos acá una lista de imprescindibles de la siempre activa literatura argentina. Les dejo la lista y los enlaces:
I seldom write about music since this is a literary blog primarily, but there are times when a musician’s importance cannot be ignored, and Enrique Morente was just such a figure. He was a legendary flamenco singer, one of the most important of the last 40 years, perhaps the most important since the death of Cameron. He was also the most controversial flamenco singer since Cameron. What makes him such an important figure is the breadth of his singing and his experimentation. His early work is marked by a respectful and confident knowledge of traditional flamenco. His album Homage to Don Antonio Chacon tradition flamenco at its best with just a guitar and a voice capturing the essence of flamenco, the rich complexity of styles, the profound passion, but also the light and joyous elements of flamenco that sometimes is forgotten when talking about flamenco. He, too, delved into the older palos (rhythms) that you often do not find in recordings and was a testament to his reverence for flamenco. At the same time, and what made him so controversial, was his willingness to experiment. Sure there was the traditional album recorded with Sabicas in 1990 (which is one of his better albums) and some other efforts, but he also sought out different approaches. Albums like Sacramonte and Negra, si tú supieras fused a mix of rock and Latin rhythms that moved into a more pop sound, but always kept to its flamenco roots, often reworking traditional words. And unlike many of the pop experiments with flamenco, he seemed to make records that didn’t sound like a dozen other pop flamenco albums, which often bring flamenco to pop and loose the fundamental nature of flamenco.
When he recorded Omega in 1996 he took flamenco even farther from its roots, joining forces to record with the Gypsy metal band Lagartija Nick. True to his constant shifting, the album is a mix of hard rock or even metal blends with flamenco, and more traditionally sounding works. It was a brave choice and could have been a disaster, but like Cameron’s La leyenda del tiempo, the other ground breaking fusion of rock and flamenco, it works because it is true to each musical form. The rock isn’t watered down and playing around at the edges, and the flamenco holds its own. Although, it is in the pieces that are less metal where the flamenco is at its most powerful.
Like many flamencos, he had a reverence for the works of Frederico Garcia Lorca and Omega, fashioned as a tribute on the 100th anniversary of his birth, uses the poems from Poet in New York and a few Songs of Leonard Cohen to create a sometimes dark, sometimes joyous picture of New York, and urban life. The music is a perfect match to those elements in Lorca’s work, whether it is the enchanting Dawn in New York (La aurora de Nueva York), or the dark and heavy Sleepless City (Ciudad sin sueño). For me it was one of the best introductions to Lorca and for a time I even had the text of Dawn in New York memorized in Spanish. I still return to the Poet in New York from time to time. It was one of those perfect confluences of literature and music that seldom happen let alone work. Even when I didn’t like what he did on some of the albums later, for example, Lorca, I will always love that album.
In some ways, too, he and Cameron helped push my imagination to Spain and I remember my first trip to Spain searching out flamenco I brought along a tape of him and Cameron and saw as much as I could, but for some reason never could swing it to see him. Fortunately, I’ll always have the great albums and my memories of that time, with the discovery of all the palos, the traditions, and the pueblos. IT was an exciting time and I’m glad he produce such good albums.
If you would like to listen to him or watch him in action RTVE has created a whole page with videos and audio. Definitely worth a check. I recommend the video “Romería de Yerma” y otras (1990), and if Omega sounds interesting try ‘Omega’ vuelve con Lagartija Nick y Morente en el FIB (2008).
El Pais has a list of his best albums with a write up. I think Homage a Don Antonio Chacon, Nueva York /Granda, and Omega are the best. I don’t know Despegando and would like to hear it some day.
My review of the short stories of Mario Benedetti has been published in the latest edition of the Quarterly Conversation, along with many other fine essays. If you are interested in Latin American literature it is worth the effort to check him out.
The Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, sadly, was little translated into English during his lifetime, and most of what made it through was poetry. Perhaps this was because his fiction never quite fit the English-world model of a Latin American writer, neither writing the meta investigations of a Borges or Cortazar, nor delving into the magical realism of the Boom. Instead, his short stories were in a more realist vein, interested in urban dwellers; later, as he was marked by the turbulent history of Uruguay and its neighbor, Argentina, he reflected on the plight of the political prisoner and the exile. He was concerned with more than just 20th-century history, though, and he included in his stories moments of the fantastic and a humor that finds the foolishness in the deepest held aspirations of his characters. At his best, he combined these to draw portraits of stagnation, isolation, and the limiting power of dreams that are often funny, sometimes dark, and usually surprising.
David Means knows how to write, there is no doubt about that. He writes lyric sentences that flow with beautiful descriptions of the land and seedy descriptions of lives on the margin. The language is a kind of folksy lyricism, that brand of American writing that you can find in writing at least as far back as Shwerwood Anderson and running through short story writers up until this day. It is marked by a descriptive sensitivity to what ever is around one and a narrative precision, not minimalism, but the selection of just the right details, which, in turn, are rendered in a sometimes plain spoken language, but often a metaphorical language of objects that is incapable of expressing ideas in anything other than what is at hand in the physical. The language can work to great effect at times, but applied too often it leads to an infantilization. While Means doesn’t make this mistake, he does create characters who border on this, especially in the Botch. The bigger problem for Means, though, is the mix of these kind of characters with the nihilistic and oft treated themes of drifters, petty criminals, and other losers that populate the book. They are dark outcasts of the American dream, some who’ve never even been close enough to want it, and they all live in a hopeless despair where to live is little more than an animalistic instinct. In other words, the book is full of tired stories, dressed up as new, of people down on their luck with little more point than going on to the next failure. This is not original and descends into the search for the easy fallacy that drunks and bums are some how wiser and will show us an unreconstructed wisdom that is not artificial. If I wanted that, I would dig up some Steinbeck or Kerouac or some other writer from the 30s to the 50s. There are, fortunately, some good stories in the book. The first story, The Knocking, was probably the best of the lot and used his rhythmic skills to describe a man who is driven to despair by the knocking in the apartment above. It felt inventive and wasn’t marked with such futility. Spontaneous Human Combustion was also notable for its way of describing a man’s life, using fragments and suppositions generated during the investigation of his spontaneous combustion. The Actor’s House is also notable for its play on the passage of time in a small town. Despite these strong pieces, I had a hard time finishing the book and had it not been for the first piece, I would not have even bothered to keep searching for what few scraps I found. My return to the American short story has not been successful so far.
Andres Neuman, Andres Felipe Solano and Santiago Roncagliolo were interviewed on the BBC about their work and their take on Latin American Literature. It is a brief interview, but interesting to hear what they have to say. I can’t help but think, though, that these interviewers need to work a little harder and find questions besides those about magical realism.
I seldom write about music since this is a literary blog primarily, but there are times when a musician’s importance cannot be ignored, and Enrique Morente was just such a figure. He was a legendary flamenco singer, one of the most important of the last 40 years, perhaps the most important since the death of Cameron. He was also the most controversial flamenco singer since Cameron. What makes him such an important figure is the breadth of his singing and his experimentation. His early work is marked by a respectful and confident knowledge of traditional flamenco. His album Homage to Don Antonio Chacon tradition flamenco at its best with just a guitar and a voice capturing the essence of flamenco, the rich complexity of styles, the profound passion, but also the light and joyous elements of flamenco that sometimes is forgotten when talking about flamenco. He, too, delved into the older palos (rhythms) that you often do not find in recordings and was a testament to his reverence for flamenco. At the same time, and what made him so controversial, was his willingness to experiment. Sure there was the traditional album recorded with Sabicas in 1990 (which is one of his better albums) and some other efforts, but he also sought out different approaches. Albums like Sacramonte and Negra, si tú supieras fused a mix of rock and Latin rhythms that moved into a more pop sound, but always kept to its flamenco roots, often reworking traditional words. And unlike many of the pop experiments with flamenco, he seemed to make records that didn’t sound like a dozen other pop flamenco albums, which often bring flamenco to pop and loose the fundamental nature of flamenco.
By The Firelight 