Month: February 2011

Kafka and Adolfo Bioy Casares – at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

Scott Esposito has a fascinating article about the literary cross currents in the work of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Franz Kafka. If you are familiar with one and not the other (or Borges for that matter) you should definitely read the article. I like realism in my works, but I also love the approaches fashioned by Casares, Kafka, and Borges.

Realism, with its insistence on mimicking the flow and feel of reality as we construe it, is often declared more rigorous and difficult to write than other novelistic genres. Reality, this argument goes, though perhaps infinite, is also real: is rule-based and thus is difficult to mimic well, whereas fantasy—especially hysterical fantasy—permits anything to happen, and thus the fantastic makes room for the arbitrary and the sloppy. Jorge Luis Borges neatly reversed this: the fantasy novel, he argued, is in fact far more rule-based than most Realist fiction. It may rely on rules that are not of our world, but its rules are very strictly adhered to. Fantasies are in fact far more tightly wound than the chaos of realism, which makes room for big, baggy books likeWar and Peace and Ulysses. These are the books—embracing everything from the Napoleonic Wars to defecation—where anything can happen, even, to Borges’s great chagrin, nothing at all.1

Borges tailored this argument explicitly for his good friend, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares. Fifteen years his junior and a consummate heartbreaker, Bioy is generally considered an odd match for the persnickety, mamma’s boy Borges, but Borges took the young writer under his wing and the two forged a genuine, lifelong friendship. They spent long afternoons talking animatedly over coffee in Buenos Aires; they collaborated on some playful but altogether unremarkable detective stories; and Borges even made Bioy the protagonist in his fiction “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

 

Belen Gopegui’s The Scale of Maps – Cervantes, Nabokov and Borges In One Book

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Words Without Borders has a review of Belen Gopegui’s The Scale of Maps. The book is interesting sounding even though the review is slightly mixed. I’ve never heard of this writer before, so she comes a bit under the radar for me. It is also interesting that she is one of the few women authors translated from Spanish into English, which makes this book unique. You can read an excerpt of the book at World Literature Today.

Who is this strange man charting a fantastical, solitary course?  Gopegui has been compared to Cervantes and Nabokov, and it’s easy to see Prim as a kind of windmill-battling Pnin.  Prim’s labyrinthine imaginings could easily place him in a work of Borges as well.  Prim is a geography student who doesn’t like to travel; he’s a young old man “sporting his first gray hairs, a short man with a large head, a man alone and full of sorrow.”  After abandoning architecture studies and joining the army, “a general lack of direction” brings Prim to the study of geography.  He gets a job writing reports for a government agency that serves to “thicken the purportedly indispensable annals of bureaucracy.”  He marries and then separates from a dark-haired woman named Lucia.  He keeps to himself.

[…]

But she stops short of letting him conquer his shortcomings, and here it becomes difficult to distinguish Prim’s excesses from the novel’s. “Trust me, Mr. Prim, one cannot lock oneself within a conviction as one might within a book,” Prim’s psychologist says, her sympathies for her patient dwindling.  But in the final pages of The Scale of Maps, Prim does just that, retreating into those diaphanous notes of his feelings and thoughts like a solitary artist answering the call of his creativity.  But of course it’s ultimately a failure of imagination that drives Prim into reclusiveness; in the end he can neither picture nor push himself to try to live a life that exists outside the world mapped in his mind. Is it Prim’s fault or the fault of Gopegui’s vision? In The Scale of Maps, it all depends on the reader’s perspective

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/belen-gopeguis-the-scale-of-maps/#ixzz1F5N8aD4C

 

Keys to New Spanish Literature at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

The Quarterly Conversation has a short article from Antonio J. Rodríguez about some new writing in Spanish mostly from Spain. I didn’t find the article too compelling, partly because it is so brief that it feels just like name dropping. I wasn’t particularly by some of Rodríguez’s descriptions of the books, either. Something about them left me unenthused. The other thing that bugged me really has nothing to do with Rodríguez, but the sudden rush to see who the young are when very few authors even a few years older have yet to be translated into English. I’d like to know who any of my readers who know Spanish literature might consider as keys to contemporary Spanish literature and, perhaps, not in English?

It is well known to observers of Spanish fiction that for about the last five years most debates on our emerging authors have taken into account the so-called “Nocilla Generation,” a journalistic label coined after the publication of Agustin Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream (2007) and used to group some writers whose works experimented interestingly with elements from Anglo-Saxon (McCaffery’s Avant-pop, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders . . . ) and pop culture that were not very common or appreciated in Spain at that time. Vicente Luis ­­Mora, Agustín Fernández Mallo, Robert Juan Cantavella, Germán Sierra, Juan Francisco Ferré, Jorge Carrión, and Oscar Gual are some of the most recurrent names. These authors were looking for new ways to—once again—bury the good old realism, and at the same time raise—once more—questions on the art of storytelling. In doing this, one of the main features of their style would be fragmentarism.

Many essays and texts published by these (relatively) young authors created a necessary disruption in Spanish fiction’s most recent history. But problems came once these efforts changed from innovation to mere trendy gesture; that is, when their way of doing things became the rule and not the exception. In our literary market, this change in trend, combined with the recently published Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list by Granta (which is devoid of names linked to the “Nocilla” literature) and, even more importantly, what we may call the power vacuum brought about by the lack of a leader of American fiction (in Spanish eyes) after the death of Infinite Jest’s author, brings about one question: Where do we look now? Where do we find new references?

Javier Cercas and The Anatomy of a Moment – All the Videos You Need

~ bythefirelight

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the attempted coup in Spain. It times nicely with the publicatin in English of Javier Cerca’s book, The Anatomy of a Moment. RTVE has a page filled with clips and shows about the subject (in Spanish). Even if you don’t understand Spanish, though, you can watch the famous 30 minutes of the coup filmed inside the Congress of Deputies. So for the curious there is a lot to look through. And El Pais has complete copies of each of their editions from that night, 7 in all.

And to mark my final post on the subject until my review comes out (I think I’ve beat this horse for long enough), a profile of Javier Cercas.

Interview with the Editor of the Quarterly Conversation at the Marketplace of Ideas

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment
The Marketplace of Ideas had an interesting interview with the editor of the Quarterly Conversation. I do writer for it a few times a year, but I also thought the interview touched on some interesting things in writing and appreciating literature, especially how the non academics fit in with literary criticism.

Colin Marshall talks to critic Scott Esposito, blogger at Conversational Reading, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and marketing coordinator at the Center for the Art of Translation. A lover and promoter of today’s most interesting fiction, Esposito writes about fiction at the intersection of the experimental and the international. This conversation took place at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2011 conference in Washington, D.C.

Antonio Muñoz Molina Interview on 1001 Noches (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

Antonio Muñoz Molina was on 1001 Noches a month or two ago. He talks about his last book, La noche de los tiempos, a Spanish poet, his view of Spanish, and other things. It is a lengthy interview. It is also one of the strangest programs I’ve ever seen. They have a live piano player on stage and playing in the background. Then a couple of clowns give him a present after telling jokes. And 20 minutes in they cut to an interview with a different person, then but back. However, if you are interested in his work the video is worthwhile (and Canal Sur’s Flash player makes it easy to skip over uninteresting sections).

http://www.radiotelevisionandalucia.es/tvcarta/impe/web/contenido?id=6147

First Chapter of Alberto Fuguet’s Missing in English at Ezra Fitz’s Site

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Ezra Fitz, the translator of Alberto Fuguet’s Missing an Investigation, has posted the first chapter of the book on his blog. It is a sizable excerpt and I recommend that you read it. I have almost finished the book in Spanish and I have been impressed with the book. It is a book that should have a resonance with American readers and I hope a publisher will bring it out soon. Until then, you have the  generous excerpt from the translator to tide you over.

(If you would like to read some of the reviews in the foreign press that I have covered, take a look here.)

From Fitz’s intro:

The book describes the author’s search for his uncle Carlos, who left his native Chile and disappeared into the vast and expansive United States.  It’s been called an impressive reportorial look at what happens when someone becomes trapped between two cultures as well as what is lost and gained through immigration.  This hybrid story is accompanied by a hybrid text comprised of emails, interviews, fiction, memoir, and something that can only be described as a Bukowski-esque epic poem.  The best thing about this book is that it is no run of the mill sob strory or impetus for some kind of political reform.  What it is is a family story about an uncle and nephew, a prodigal sons and the margins of American society through Chilean eyes.

Here is the opening:

In 1986, my uncle Carlos Patricio Fuguet García vanished off the face of the earth.  He disappeared in Baltimore, Maryland, far from his native Santiago.  The phone calls just stopped, and letters started being returned.  A short while later, my father, his older brother, contacted his employer, a four-star hotel, and they knew nothing as to his whereabouts.  Uncle Javier, his younger brother and my godfather, managed to get in touch with the superintendent of his apartment building, who told them he was no longer living there.

That was the last we ever heard of him.

From that point on, he was gone.

Missing.

Nobody knew where he was.

Carlos Fuentes on Mario Vargas Llosa and Latin American Dictators

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an essay from Carlos Funtes on Mario Vargas Llosa and Latin American dictators. It is mostly about the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. There were a couple of items that caught my in particular. The first is a project that never came to be, but one can imagine what it might have ben like, a book by Latin America’s greatest authors writing 50 pages or so about a dictator.

Vargas Llosa y yo invitamos a una docena de autores latinoamericanos. Cada uno debería escribir una novela breve -no más de cincuenta páginas por dictador- sobre su tirano nacional favorito. El volumen colectivo habría de llamarseLos padres de las patrias. Nuestro editor francés, Claude Gallimard, se convirtió en el padrino del proyecto. Por desgracia, a la postre resultó imposible coordinar los múltiples tiempos y las variadas voluntades de los escritores que, si mi memoria es tan buena como la de El Supremo de Augusto Roa Bastos, incluían, además de Vargas Llosa y yo mismo, al propio Roa, el argentino Julio Cortázar, el venezolano Miguel Otero Silva, el colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, el cubano Alejo Carpentier, el dominicano Juan Bosch, a los chilenos José Donoso y Jorge Edwards (Donoso prometió ocuparse de un dictador boliviano; su mujer, María Pilar, nació en ese penthouse de las Américas). Al fracasar el proyecto, tres de los escritores mencionados decidieron seguir adelante y concluir sus propias novelas: Carpentier (El recurso del método), García Márquez (El otoño del patriarca) y Roa Bastos (Yo el Supremo).

[…]

Iniciado por Valle-Inclán en Tirano Banderas (1926) el tema del abuso del poder, el autoritarismo despótico y la distancia entre la ley y la práctica, se continúa, con los Ardavines de Gallegos, el don Mónico de Azuela, el Pedro Páramo de Rulfo, el Caudillo de Guzmán y ya citados, los dictadores de Roa Bastos, García Márquez y Carpentier. La diferencia en Vargas Llosa es que no apela a un seudónimo literario o a una figura simbólica, sino que nos refiere a un dictador concreto, personalizado, con nombre, apellido y fechas certificables de nacimiento y muerte: Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Benefactor de la Patria Nueva, Restaurador de la Independencia Financiera y Primer Periodista de la Nación, aunque los dominicanos, para no meterse en aprietos, lo llamaron “Mr. Jones” o “Mr. Jackson”.

Anatomy of a Moment & Javier Cercas Wrong? Francisco Laina Gives His Story of What Happened

~ bythefirelight

Since I just finished a review of The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas, I am disappointed to see this the interview with Francisco Laina in El Pais today. Besides the King, and Suarez who has Alzheimer’s, he is the last surviving member of the Spanish government from the night of the coup on 2/23/1981. His characterization of the King’s behavior on the night is in stark contrast to that of Javier Cerca’s (if you read the book or my review you will know why). Essentially, though, he makes the King out to be a more intelligent political actor than Cercas does. I imagine his comments will only add to the debate in Spain about what happened and for those looking for conspiracies there are still plenty of openings.

Respuesta. [En este punto de la conversación, Laína se ha fumado ya el segundo cigarrillo de la larga ristra que quemará durante la entrevista]. Adolfo nunca me lo manifestó así en las abundantes charlas que mantuvimos antes de que la enfermedad le minara la memoria. De todas formas, Suárez era un hombre valiente y de coraje, y el que le conocía sabía que no iba a arredrarse fácilmente. La irrupción de Tejero en el Congreso me pilló en mi despacho estudiando un informe sobre la construcción de la Escuela de Policía de Ávila, mientras seguía por la Cadena Ser la retransmisión de la sesión de investidura de Calvo Sotelo. Recuerdo que de fondo se oían como un sonsonete los nombres de los diputados llamados a votar cuando surgieron los gritos y los tiros. Antes de cinco minutos sonó el teléfono de comunicación con La Zarzuela, que estaba integrado en un sistema protegido llamado Malla Cero, reservado para las comunicaciones entre las altas instituciones del Estado. Era el Rey. Me preguntó qué sabía de lo que estaba pasando en el Congreso y le tuve que decir que no más que lo que contaban por la radio, aunque le añadí mi sospecha de que ese teniente coronel de la Guardia Civil que acababa de ocupar el Congreso podría ser Tejero, el mismo de la Operación Galaxia.

Como primera autoridad civil, en calidad de presidente de la Comisión de Secretarios de Estado y Subsecretarios que asumió las funciones gubernativas, Laína habló esa tarde noche repetidas veces con La Zarzuela, casi siempre con Sabino Fernández Campo, secretario general de la Casa del Rey, pero también con el monarca. “Sobre las 19.45, el Rey me llamó para advertirme: ‘¡Paco, cuidado con Armada! Te paso a Sabino para que te lo explique’. Sabino me reiteró que sobradamente la advertencia: ‘¡Ojo con Armada, que está metido hasta las cejas”.

A esas horas, el juego del antiguo preceptor del Rey había quedado al descubierto porque, visto que los golpistas decían seguir órdenes de su Majestad y sostenían como prueba que Armada estaba en ese momento en La Zarzuela, el general José Juste, jefe de la poderosa División Acorazada Brunete, asentada en Madrid, había optado por tomarles la palabra y verificar personalmente el dato. Llamó a La Zarzuela, preguntó por el general Alfonso Armada y obtuvo de Sabino Fernández Campo la respuesta que ha quedado para la posteridad: “Ni está, ni se le espera”. A partir de ahí, los intentos del antiguo preceptor del monarca de ser llamado a La Zarzuela resultaron infructuosos y la coartada real se fue desvaneciendo. “Reconozco que hasta entonces no había sospechado de Armada. Cuando hablé con Tejero, me dijo que él solo obedecía órdenes del capitán general de Valencia, Jaime Milans del Boch, y del general Alfonso Armada, y acto seguido me colgó el teléfono”.

Short Videos of Spanish Authors at Conocer Al Autor

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Concer Al Autor has nearly a hundred short videos of Spanish authors talking about their books. Some of it is a little short and of course about their most recent book, but interesting nonetheless. The Paginas de Espuma subsite is filled with authors I am much more familiar with including Javier Saéz de Ibarra y Andres Neuman. http://www.conoceralautor.com/paginasdeespuma/

Short Stories from Spain At Cuatro Cuentos – Hipólito G. Navarro, Pilar Adón, Iban Zaldua y José Manuel Martín Peña

~ bythefirelight

The on-line journal Cuatro Cuentos’s newest edition is about Spain and has a story from one of the writers I’ve discovered recently and have enjoyed immensely, Hipólito G. Navarro. His story comes from his 2000 book Los Tigres Albinos. I haven’t had a chance to read the stories yet but I look forward to giving them a read soon.

Cuatrocuentos #12. Edición Especial España, a cargo del editor invitado Javier Sáez de Ibarra, con cuentos de  Hipólito G. Navarro, Pilar Adón, Iban Zaldua y José Manuel Martín Peña.

“Ahora los críticos españoles –dice Sáez de Ibarra– y también los periodistas, afirman que el cuento vive aquí un momento extraordinario y hasta empiezan a igualarlo a la consagrada entre nosotros generación del medio siglo (Aldecoa, Fernandez Santos, Martín Gaite, Rodoreda, Matute, Fraile). Quien esto escribe sabe que no verá el veredicto del futuro, que dicen que es el bueno, en tanto discrepa de las competiciones. Así que me complace el gusto de presentar a los lectores de Cuatrocuentos, a estos autores que espero muestren una diversidad de estéticas posibles y un rato suficientemente extenso para el placer lector. Conque allá van:
Hipólito Navarro, que ha ido ganando crédito como patriarca de lo breve, entre otras cualidades exhibe la de la construcción del relato. Las escenas se suceden con maestría, ofreciendo momentos y perspectivas que se suman, se comentan, se corrigen. Esto da lugar a la posibilidad de lo complejo, espacio a lo imaginable, silencios elocuentes y opciones para la interpretación; así como el sumo deleite de ir descifrando lo que se lee, o incluso después, cuando las páginas se han apagado y nos quedamos solos.

Samanta Schweblin’s Pájaros en la boca Reviewed in Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a fairly negative review of Samanta Schweblin’s latest book. I have been curious about her work and have written a reflection on her works recently. I haven’t decided where I fall when thinking about her work. It can be interesting, but at least one story I read seemed too safe.

¿Qué necesidad tendríamos de ver elevada la temperatura dramática? Acaso mi reparo sea moral, pero también es literario –no creo que los dos adjetivos se hallen para nada distantes uno del otro. Como metáfora de una fisura secreta, la anomalía puede abrir una percepción de la naturaleza paradójica de seres humanos que, al no tener la valentía para ser sus propios verdugos, asignan ese papel a sucesos disruptivos ante los cuales no hay manera –o eso pienso– de mantener la indiferencia. En cambio, por timorata, la pesquisa en torno de la conducta humana, en Pájaros de la boca, se queda en lo superficial.
Y si repite, abaratado (la anomalía sin la consecuencia profunda), el mecanismo propio de Kafka o el primer Buzzati –si no incorpora una variación que surja del temperamento o la circunstancia epocal–, el discípulo permanece en esa condición al revelar sometimiento a la parte más obvia de un método urdido por otros, lo que podría interpretarse como oportunismo: aunque incompleta, la lección ya canónica es fácilmente aplaudida por el lector conformista, sobre todo si nos encontramos ante una prosa sin exigencias, léxicamente seducida por la pobreza y la palidez y negada a la audacia técnica debido acaso a la propensión formulera por finales sorpresivos que, a estas alturas de la repetición, son de lo más predecibles (en “Bajo tierra”, el viejo que cuenta la historia de los niños perdidos en un pueblo minero termina siendo él mismo un minero). Sobre todo una cosa: el texto narrativo puede ser clasicista en su ejecución y austero en su trabajo prosístico cuando la perspectiva de lo vital que la voz literaria presenta es discordante y nueva, y no una reiteración edulcorada de lo que otros antes con mayor hondura han patentado.
¿Para qué ofuscar al comodino lector con una prospección dramática que, si perturbadora, es por lo mismo de aprobación incierta? Supongamos el caso: me subo a los hombros de un gigante, pero en vez de ponerme de pie, estirar los brazos hacia las alturas y lanzar lejos la vista y la voz, mejor cierro los ojos y busco encogerme, guardo silencio aferrándome por el temor a caer o a superar, con el arrojo propio, al gigante que me hospeda. De ese modo, no habré de caer nunca, pero también me niego el mirar lejos, hacia una nueva y mayor distancia. Así estas ficciones. Sobre los hombros de Kafka, se niegan el privilegio de arriesgarse a la victoria sobre Kafka. ~

Spanish women writers to watch at Books on Spain

~ bythefirelight

Books on Spain has an interesting list of contemporary Spanish women writers. The list was prompted by another of her post where she notes that women writers from the Spanish speaking world tend to get ignored in translation and best lists. I agree with her completely, and it is also easy to fall into that trap of ignoring them, consciously or not, given the way that the literary world functions. Some of the authors she mentions I have heard of, even seen in interviews, but I must day, I haven’t ready any of them.

Almudena Grandes. Author of erotic classic, Las edades de Lulú, now embarked on monster civil war trilogy, of which first two volumes, Corazón helado and Inés y la alegría have been published so far.

Almudena Solana. Galician-born, writes in Spanish. Her first novel, El curriculum de Aurora Ortiz, was a success in David Frye’s English translation,The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz (2005). I love her second novel, Las mujeres inglesas destrozan los tacones al andar (2007; English Women Ruin their Heels Walking), which is about Louise/Louisa, daughter of Galician emigrants in London, and her struggle to be considered ‘an English girl like any other.’ It’s funny and charming, and has serious things to say about the ’1.5 generation’ of children forced to emigrate in their parents’ wake.

Elena Moya Pereira. I’ve mentioned The Olive Groves of Belchite here before. Moya is a Catalan-speaker from Tarragona who wrote her first novel in English, for which she has my utmost admiration, quite apart from the quality of the novel itself, which is an intriguing combination of historical reflection, social observation, family saga, and lesbian love story. Review coming here soon!

 

Portions of Granta Spanish Translation Online

~ bythefirelight

Granta has placed writing from its best Spanish Language writers online (via New Pages). This is a good chance to sample some of the edition for free.

From the print edition, free to read online:

 

Elena Poniatowska Wins Premio Biblioteca Breve Prize for 2011 + Video

~ bythefirelight

The Mexican author Elena Poniatowska has won the Premio Biblioteca Breve 2011 for a novel based on the life of Leonora Carrington.

From El Pais

La escritora mexicana Elena Poniatowska (París, 1932) ha ganado el Premio Biblioteca Breve 2011 de la editorial Seix Barral con la novela Leonora, basada en la vida de la pintora Leonora Carrington, también de origen mexicano. La obra será publicada el próximo 22 de febrero. Entre otros, Poniatowska recibió en 2007 el prestigioso premio Rómulo Gallegos.

From Seix Barral (the publisher) via Moleskin Literario

Leonora» (Seix Barral) es un recuento de su vida desde la infancia, como una niña excéntrica y pija, la oveja negra de una familia de acaudalados industriales, a su destierro en México, tras escapar de un psiquiátrico de Santander. En medio, París, las vanguardias históricas, personajes como Dalí, Miró, Buñuel y Breton, el desastre de la guerra, España, y una aventura vital capaz de enloquecer a cualquiera. «Leonora dice que el sentimentalismo es una forma de cansancio, pero no puedo evitarlo y querría dedicar el premio a todas esas mujeres que viven en tiempos de agresión. En mi país pasan cosas terribles ligadas al narcotráfico. El premio es una alegría que demuestra que no todo es malo», señaló Poniatowska al conocerse el fallo del galardón.

From Canal-L footage of her at the anouncment of the award. (Honestly, it is a little boring and you can skip to minute 1.45 without missing anything).

Ana Maria Matute Interview Video at El Pais (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an interview with Ana Maria Matute where she talks about the role literature has had in her life, including saving her life.

Matute explains from her home in Barcelona what literature has meant to her, ” it even saved my life,” she confesses; she explains the use of reality and imagination at the moment of writing and talks about biggest prize she has won.

Matute cuenta, desde su casa en Barcelona, lo que para ella ha significado la literatura, “incluso me ha salvado la vida”, confiesa; explica el manejo de la realidad y la imaginación a la hora de escribir y habla del máximo galardón que se le ha concedido.

Javier Cercas Interview Video at El Pais (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

El Pais has an interview with Javier Cercas where he talks about what he thinks the novel is, does originality exist. He also spends about half of the interview talking about An Anatomy of a Moment and what his fascination was with the subject. For him, to explore how history informs the present is one of he most interesting things. Worth a watch if your Spanish is up to it. He has a some time strong accent, although in this video it didn’t seem to strong.

Fernando Iwasaki on the 1000 and 1 Nights and Spanish Language Literature

~ bythefirelight

Fernando Iwasak has an article on the 1000 and 1 Nights and Spanish Language Literature in El Pais. It is worth a quick look.

Sin embargo, es en nuestro idioma -el castellano- donde he hallado los testimonios más rotundos de la devoción por Las mil y una noches. Pienso en Cuando el viejo Simbad vuelva a las islas (1962), de Álvaro Cunqueiro, una novela de estirpemilyunanochesca, mas no por la presencia de Simbad sino porque está construida con relatos de relatos. Hasta los artículos periodísticos de Cunqueiro remiten a Las mil y una noches, como podría comprobarlo cualquiera que lea La bella del dragón (1991) yFábulas y leyendas de la mar (1982). ¿De dónde viene la amena y fastuosa erudición de Cunqueiro en placeres y fornicios? Marchando una ración de metaliteratura: “En muchos países de Oriente Próximo el primer coito matrimonial es matinal. En España, por ejemplo, es la noche de bodas, porque los novios se han pasado al día en la ceremonia nupcial, en el almuerzo o en la comida, y se van a la cama tarde, a lo mejor tras cien kilómetros o más de viaje”. O sea, una birria de polvo.

Todavía en la literatura española contemporánea abundan los adoradores de Las mil y una noches, como Antonio Muñoz Molina en La realidad de la ficción (1992) o Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga en El juego del mono (2011), aunque son los escritores latinoamericanos quienes más han contribuido a la entronización de la lectura en lengua española del clásico árabe, destacando por encima de todos el argentino Jorge Luis Borges.

Nikolai Leskov Appreciation at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

I finally had a chance to read this excellent review of Nikolai Leskov’s work at the Quarterly Conversation, someone who I’d never heard of before, although since I’m not up on my Russians it shouldn’t be too surprising. On the other hand, the review is called the Forgotten 19th-Century Great so I shouldn’t beat myself up too much. The descriptions of his work sound fascinating, entertaining, and somewhat genre bending. I’m going to put him on my list to read.

Abstract morality disappears almost entirely from The Enchanted Wanderer (1874). This brilliant novella, the greatest piece by Leskov I have read, confounds every moral generalization that could be placed on it. Passengers on a boat listen to a long tale from a simple monk, Ivan, though he is less a fool and also less holy than Akhilla. There are no longueurs as there were in The Cathedral Folk. Everything is subordinated to the story, which careens through one adventure after another, frequently taking hairpin turns over the course of a few sentences. Ivan is a young serf, a simple, large man who is now a deacon and recounts his journey to the clergy. He is still a man of raw passions, however, always engaged with the matter at hand, making him the opposite of the refined, reserved Pechorin of Lermontov’sA Hero of Our Time. Pechorin says, “My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.” Ivan does not try to deny anything for even a second. The possibility does not even occur to him.

[…]

  • Ivan becomes the nursemaid for a landowner’s wife and child. The wife’s lover prevails on him to let the wife and child run away with him. Ivan initially wants to beat up the lover, but decides instead that they deserve to be together. He helps them get away and then runs off from his job.
  • Ivan flees from the law to the Tartar Steppe, where the Tartars imprison him by sewing painful bristles into his heels. He spends ten years there, with several wives and children, before he is able to escape.
  • Ivan is cured of his alcoholism by a mysterious magnetizer who leads him through a sequence of surreal nightmares.
  • A later master purchases a gypsy girl and imprisons her in a cottage. She escapes and begs Ivan to kill her, which he does, though he feels tremendously guilty about it and attempts (and fails) to get himself killed in military combat as a result.

And so on and on, for 150 pages. The whole tale has the quality of a fever dream, though when the strangeness ratchets up, as in the magnetizer sequence, Leskov’s imaginative powers appear to be without limit. There is a dreamlike quality to the pacing as well, since Ivan narrates his tale based on the rate of interesting things that happened, so the ten years on the steppe fly by while the single night with the magnetizer seems to last forever. The narrative breaks into a question and answer format periodically so that the older Ivan can answer the queries of the passengers of the boat he is on, and he always answers with total frankness and deep though simple feeling. The pace increases toward the end, and as the stories pile up it seems that there is less and less sense to be made out of what had initially been presented as a tale of sin and redemption. Ivan doesn’t say he has learned

 

The Last 20 Years of Spanish Literature as José-Carlos Mainer Sees it

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

El Pais has an overview of Spanish Literature of the last 20 years. It is an arbitrary number, as José-Carlos Mainer notes, but it also a period of many changes and some exciting new authors. It is a bit of a mixed article, but it has moments where he picks out authors worth reading. At the bottom of the passage he notes 2 that I have been extremely impressed with, Navarro and Fernandez Cubas whose short stories deserve to be translated some day.

La norma constituyente de muchos de estos libros es la inclusión, la bulimia. Algunas memorias de escritores (pienso en las de Josep Maria Castellet y Rafael Argullol) ceden buena parte del espacio legítimo del yo a viajes, historias, personajes conocidos: son demoradas galerías de espejos. Y otras, sin embargo, se adelgazan hasta convertirse en un provocativo y fibroso ensayo de antropología cultural: la autobiografía de Félix de Azúa. Hay dietarios en los que habita fundamentalmente el mundo exterior, golosamente gozado, como fueron los de Antonio Martínez Sarrión, y hay otros en que los muchos acontecimientos nunca acaban de desplazar al terco “yo” que los trae y lleva: el Salón de pasos perdidos, de Andrés Trapiello. Y hay literatura que se alimenta de literatura, como le sucede fecundamente a la de Enrique Vila-Matas, Sergio Pitol y José Carlos Llop. Y a su manera paródica, a la de César Aira… Ricardo Piglia acaba de publicar la novela que nunca escribió Borges pero que le hubiera gustado leer al autor de El Sur. Por eso, los libros suelen ser tan dilatados como la dieta bulímica que los alimenta, pero también la vivencia del mundo ha aconsejado a otros agazaparse en las formas breves: el microrrelato se ha convertido en una experiencia de nuestro tiempo y un plante desdeñoso a la sobreabundancia (siguen siendo referencia las actitudes al respecto del inolvidable Augusto Monterroso). Otros han encontrado la proporción áurea del cuento de diez páginas y las columnas de a dos, artefactos de precisión que condensan y ejercitan el ingenio mediante el arte de prescindir: cada cual a su modo, lo hacen Cristina Fernández Cubas, José María Merino, Luis Mateo Díez, Quim Monzó, Manuel Rivas, Hipólito García Navarro, que han hecho del cuento un género imprescindible. Las columnas son el dominio de Manuel Vicent, por ejemplo. Juan José Millás respira por igual en el cuento, el artículo y el reportaje.