Month: March 2012

My Little War by Louis Paul Boon – A Review

~ bythefirelight

My Little War
Louis Paul Boon
Dalkey Archive, 2010 125 pg

This scant book is one of the more interesting ways to write about war I have read. It is also what makes it difficult to capture. My Little War is a series of 1-3 page episodes and little paragraph length moments that are tacked to the end of the episodes without any real relationship. They are just more noise of war. All of it is narrated by a person claiming to be the author. I mention this because while the style is consistent, one has the impression that multiple voices are at work. Nevertheless, each of the episodes describes the chaotic lives of the Flemish during World War II. The stories aren’t related and do not create a narrative arc that ties the lives of the characters together, giving the reader much of a connection to the characters. Boon is not creating great heroic stories of the resistance or of the pathos of the long suffering. Instead, he shows a world that in many ways has always existed and which during the shifting power structures of the war force to the surface. In story after story he shows the Belgians stealing and lying to survive. At other times the fascist sympathizers parade around town, finally powerful, only to change their stripes when the allies come. It’s a vision of pettiness that makes some of the Belgians look anything but heroic. That view is part of his larger point about the war. Those who lived  through it were surviving each day lacking any information of what was going on or any power to control it. It is not a sympathetic view, but it is effective and the voices of the episodes that seem anonymous in their brevity begin to suggest one thing: what was it all for?

But all the poets who wrote so enthusiastically about the Eastern front peeked out cautiously in their socks, back to writing poems about the stars and their solitude and God–God for God’s sake–after having pissed right onto Christ’s loincloth.

Eugenia Rico – New Collection of Stroies plus excerpts in English

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Eugenia Rico has published a new book of short stories from Páginas de Espuma called El fin de la raza blanca (The End of the White Race). Not having read the whole book, the title is a little off putting for how loaded a term it can be. You can read an excerpt here. I wasn’t too impressed, but you can also read an English translation of part of one of her novels here. There are also some links to videos, etc.

She has one of the more interesting book trailers I’ve ever seen, one that doesn’t try to use a text genre in a visual genre.

A brief interview about here book is also here.

Chapter from New Enrique Vila-Matas Book Aire de Dylan

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais post a chapter from the newest Enrique Vila-Matas book a few weeks ago. I’ve been a little late on getting it up, but you can read it here. The book came out last week (3/14). Here is a brief overview:

Uno de los mayores fracasos puede ser fracasar en el empeño de fracasar. Otro podría ser el vivir pareciéndose a alguien, imitándolo y propiciando la impostura. Con esta idea comienza Enrique Vila-Matas su nueva novela Aire de Dylan (Seix Barral). Una obra que se publicará el 14 de marzo pero cuyo primer capítulo avanza hoy EL PAÍS en exclusiva.En ella, el joven Vilnius, que explota su parecido con el cantautor estadounidense, asiste a un congreso literario sobre el fracaso, mientras cree que su difunto padre le empieza a traspasar sus recuerdos.

El anonimato, la máscara, la impostura, la búsqueda y sus alrededores están presentes en Aire de Dylan. El joven Vilnius protagoniza estas páginas en las que el escritor barcelonés despliega sus mejores armas y elenco literarios con humor, ironía o sarcasmo pero siempre desde el conocimiento del mundo de la creación literaria. A partir de ahí, la novela se va transformando en un homenaje al mundo del teatro y una crítica al posmodernismo.

Leopoldo Brizuela Wins the Alfaguara Prize with a novel about State Terrorism in Argentina

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El Pais reports that Leopoldo Brizuela has won the Alfaguara Prize with a novel about State Terrorism in Argentina.

En Una misma noche, Brizuela, nacido en La Plata, capital de la provincia de Buenos Aires, en 1963, ha hecho una inmersión en el terrorismo de Estado de su país iniciado en 1976, con el golpe de la Junta Militar que gobernó hasta 1983. El escritor ha creado como hilo conductor de la novela a un autor en la cuarentena, con una madre viuda, que vio de niño cómo en 1976 la casa de uno de sus vecinos era atacada por las fuerzas del orden. Tres décadas después, un hecho parecido en la misma casa le hace rememorar el pasado y el papel que jugó su padre en todo aquello. A partir de ahí, Brizuela levanta un mapa de una de la épocas más nefastas de la historia latinoamericana con una larga estela en la vida social, política, psicológica y cotidiana.

Th Oprah Book Club: not so good for new literature

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The TNR has a post about how effective the Oprah Book Club in promoting reading and literature. It looks as if it didn’t make new readers out of non readers. It did get readers to switch from crappier books to more literary. But that had the effect of actually hurting the publisher’s bottom line. The law of unintended consequences rears it head again: (via)

The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap. And at least when it came to fiction, Garthwaite found that the net result of Oprah’s endorsements was to reduce aggregate sales. The reason was the one Franzen articulated back in 2001: Winfrey often selected books that posed a challenge for her TV audience. In practical terms, that meant that Oprah Book Club books took longer to read than the crap her viewers would otherwise read. That, in turn, meant that publishers ended up not only selling less crap, but also, in the aggregate, selling fewer books overall. Which probably meant (and I’m extrapolating here from Garthwaite’s findings) that these same publishers were correspondingly less able to publish literary fiction.

Macedonio Fernández Profiled in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

A couple weeks ago La Jornada had several long articles about the Argentine author Macedonio Fernández one of Borges great friends and mentors. He was quite a character and his literary ideas are still unique. Open Letter Press brought out his The Museum of Eterna’s Novel a few years ago. It is called a novel, but it is full of prologues and is quite strange. Any ways, the La Jornada articles are definitely worth reading.

En un cuaderno inédito, hacia 1939, Macedonio Fernández anota: “Artistas: el inventor de colmos de Importunación –El extremador de redondeces.” En arte, según esto, habría dos posibilidades: a) importunar, perturbar inventando algo nuevo; b) agradar perfeccionando lo ya inventado. Dos extremos, dos programas para el arte: la ética de la invención, la estética del pulir y redondear. Claro que esos extremos –inventar, redondear– en cierto modo se dan en toda obra de arte. Por un extremo, la obra de arte se aproxima a lo “ilegible”, corre el riesgo de inventar hasta el punto de hacerse invisible, al diferir al futuro sus condiciones de inteligibilidad; por el otro, se expone a la redundancia, a agotarse en la nitidez de lo que meramente agrada en el presente. En las letras latinoamericanas (y más allá de ellas) pocos se entregaron al extremo de la invención de manera tan colmada de futuro como Macedonio Fernández.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante – The Collected Works Vol I Overview at El Pais

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais has an overview of the first volume of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s collected works. The first volume of 1500 pages has his journalism and screen plays. It is expected to be a long project as he wrote under many pseudonyms and was a prolific journalist. However, for the Cabrera Infante fans it certainly will be welcomed. One thing I like to see are the scripts that novelists have written. I know I have the silent scripts of some of Isaac Babel’s works in his complete short stories.It gives a different dimension to see how they approach such a different form.

A Guillermo Cabrera Infante le gustaba definirse a sí mismo como “un periodista que escribe novelas”. Lo que parecía casi una broma más del autor de Tres Tristes Tigres, que entendíamos como la reivindicación de su aparición continua e iluminadora en la prensa escrita, porque lo habíamos leído primero como novelista, tiene ahora significados nuevos: vocacionales y estrictamente profesionales. Efectivamente, Guillermo Cabrera Infante fue un periodista, un crítico y un informador, y de primerísimo nivel. Este primer tomo de las Obras Completas (Galaxia Gutenberg / Círculo de Lectores), que es también el primero de los tres dedicados al cine —si incluyen finalmente sus guiones—, rescata, en torno a Un oficio del Siglo XX, la infinidad de críticas, reportajes, entrevistas y artículos sobre cine, más de 1.500 páginas en total, que G. Caín, uno de los seudónimos del joven Cabrera Infante, firmó en la revista Carteles, entre 1954 y 1960. Es decir, cuando Guillermo Cabrera Infante era un “periodista profesional”. Y aparece exactamente cuando se cumplen siete años de su muerte.

Profile of the Editor of Anagrama at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais had a profile of the editor of Anagrama last week. It is interesting how their focus has changed more to the literary. Initially they were publishing political non fiction that was against the dictatorship, but once Franco was gone and democracy had returned they grew tired of political essays.

Cualquiera lo habría dicho en 1969, cuando Herralde fundó el sello: la ficción no estaba entre sus prioridades. En aquellos tiempos heroicos, publicaba esencialmente ensayos en la colección Argumentos o los famosos Cuadernos, textos con los que apuntalaba utopías y alimentaba el fuego de la revolución que había de llegar pero que nunca llegó.

“La primera década de Anagrama fue precaria, pero tolerable”, recuerda, “me parecía importante publicar lo que publicaba y me divertía, pero entonces se combinó la precariedad con el llamado desencanto, que en el ámbito político se materializó con la victoria de Adolfo Suárez, con la que desaparecen todas las ilusiones revolucionarias de la ruptura, del hombre nuevo y de todo lo demás”

De pronto, la creación literaria ya no era algo frívolo para evadirse de las condiciones objetivas. En los ochenta Anagrama reduce drásticamente la publicación de ensayos — “porque yo mismo me canso de leer textos políticos”— y busca una salida en la narrativa, un antiguo amor de su juventud: “la buena literatura”.

My Favorite Book Podcasts

~ bythefirelight

Some one was asking me recently what my favorite book podcasts are and I thought I’d put together this list. If any one has any more suggestions I’d be happy to include them. They are in general order of interest.

  1. La Estaction Azul – A Spanish language podcast from Spain.
  2. Writers and Company – A Canadian author interview program that has a lot of in depth with conversations with international authors.
  3. The Guardian Books podcast – from the Guardian UK. My window onto the UK.
  4. Book Worm – Once and a while the host’s questions are a little long, but he always has interesting things to say.
  5. Three Percent Podcast – This is the podcast from Open Letter books. It can go completely off topic and sound like grad students doing their own podcast, but it’s fun and usually insightful. Quite a bit about the industry.
  6. Writer’s Cast – Half of the shows are about the book publishing industry, the others are interviews with authors. In general they are all quite interesting.
  7. The Next Chapter – A Canadian books podcast. Not as good as Writers and Company which is more literary, but nice look out side of the US.
  8. NY Times books podcast – I don’t care much about the best sellers section at the end, but it has its moments.
  9. Scotts Whay Hae! – I haven’t listened to this one much yet, but it’s about Scottish books.
  10. PRI’s World in Words – Another recompilation of public radio stories about books, language and other things you can put in books.
  11. NPR Books – A Recompilation of books topics from NPR shows.
  12. El Ojo Critico – Another Spanish language show from Spain. It isn’t exclusively a book show, but it does have lots of book coverage.
  13. Your suggestions here…

My Article on Four UnTranslated Short Stories Is Up at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

My article about four untranslated Spanish short story writers is now up at the Quarterly Conversation. It turned out really well and is a much longer form article than I normally write coming in at a little over 3K words. While I think the stories mentioned in the article are great I had to leave out so many different ones that it seems at times I haven’t written that much. Writing about short stories is always hard because you end up with some many different ones and you have to try come up with some sort of thematic element to link them together. This was esspecially the case with these four, but I think I was able to do it.

Collections of short stories are generally considered difficult to market, and thus they’re often looked down upon by editors who acquire new works of literature in the United States. This fact is no less true when it comes to editors who acquire works of foreign literature translated into English, an already notably under-represented group. To make matters worse, what stories that do get translated are often lumped into anthologies of what you might call stories from over there, which obscure the full range of an author’s talent beneath the idea that one story is a representative sample.

This is all very important in the case of Spanish literature, which in recent decades has seen a rebirth of the possibilities of the short story. For authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story, this tendency has hidden a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inventions of Hipólito G. Navarro and the surrealism of Ángel Zapata, Spanish short story writers have created an exciting and diverse body of work marked by its openness and dedication to pushing the boundaries of the form.

I  have also commented on other stories from Navarro and Cubas. The rest of the Quarterly Conversation looks very good, too, and definately worth reading. They have a nicely timed overview of the works of Mercè Rodoreda. (You my reviews of Death in Spring and her short stories)

March 2012 Words Without Borders: The Mexican Drug War

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The new Words Without Borders is out now. It is an issue I’ve been looking forward to for sometime, especially since I donated to the Kick Starter campaign. The issue is a mix of non-fiction and fiction all addressing the drug war. I’ve read Volpi before and he can be insightful. I’m looking forward to reading the Juan Villoro. I’ve seen his name several times in the collection of reporting that was recently published in by Anagrama.

Guest Editor Carmen Boullosa

What is it like to grow up in a country where the only safe place you can gather with friends is in your own home? How do you raise a family when going to the supermarket is fraught with the danger of being kidnapped?  This is the situation in Mexico, where the drug wars have transformed the country into a living hell. Guest editor Carmen Boullosa has assembled compelling essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry from Mexican writers on the impact of this bloody conflict. In their eyewitness reports, Luis Felipe Fabre, Rafael Perez Gay, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Lemus, Fabrizio Mejia Madrid, Hector de Mauleon, Magali Tercero, Jorge Volpi, and Juan Villoro document the crisis and demand the world’s attention.

From the other side of the world, we present poetry commemorating last year’s Japanese earthquake, and launch a new serial about an unexpected pig.

Etgar Keret Story at Guernica

~ bythefirelight

Guernica has a good short story from Etgar Keret. It has fun with the idea of the writer and is one of his stories that touches more directly on the troubles. The story is from his forthcoming book to be published in April, I believe.

“Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must admit, is anything but pleasant. I’m someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn’t something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret—I don’t even remember what exactly—and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But here the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn’t have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.