Author: bythefirelight

What Some Spanish Speaking Authors Are Reading This Summer

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a list of what some Spanish Speaking authors among others are reading this summer. A couple caught my eye, especially Jose Emilio Pacheco and Fuentes who mentions his newest book (something I doubtful will be that good, sorry). Although, I think I like what Elena Poniatowska said, I don’t read anything any different from the rest of the year.

José Emilio Pacheco

Ciudad de México (México, 1939). Premio Cervantes 2009, su último poemario es ‘La edad de las tinieblas’ (Tusquets)Hago como si hubiera verano en México y me propongo leer o releer la serie Sergio Pitol traductor, organizada por Rodolfo Mendoza. Pitol es uno de los grandes traductores del idioma, a la altura de Ricardo Baeza y Mario Verdaguer. Como Borges y Cortázar, él se forjó en estas versiones que nunca dejaremos de agradecerle. Entre los clásicos recomiendo en especial El corazón de las tinieblas y Otra vuelta de tuerca. Entre los descubrimientos (lo fue para mí),Las puertas del paraíso, de Jerzy Andrzejewski.

Carlos Fuentes

Ciudad de Panamá, 1928. Autor mexicano y premio Cervantes 1987. En septiembre publicará el ensayo ‘La gran novela latinoamericana’ y el libro de relatos ‘Carolina Grau’ (Alfaguara)

Siempre llevo historia y novela, un poco de todo. Pero este verano estoy dedicado a Giacomo Leopardi, debido a que uno de los cuentos de mi próximo libro, Carolina Grau, está dedicado a él. Así es que ahora, al releerlo, quiero ver si el cuento me ha gustado o me ha distanciado de él o si lo he traicionado o respetado o si hice bien en invocarlo. Es una especie de mea culpa retrospectiva, como todas, donde primero cometes el pecado y luego se pide perdón. Como estoy en Italia, estoy leyendo también un libro muy interesante: Roma, de Robert Hughes, que trata desde la fundación de la ciudad hasta Berlusconi. Es una gran historia de la ciudad, ¡espléndida!

The LA Times Cuts Book Critics, Says Will Continue Coverage – Cake and Eat it too?

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The news of the LA Times’ budget reduction for freelance book critics has been going around for a few days now. Some how I don’t see how they are going to keep the same amount of content for the times, with less writers. Less is more works better in home decoration than book coverage. But considering how reduced the coverage has been over the last 6 or 7 years this may not really be a problem, because the damage had already been done. I remember when I fist started to branch out from the NY Times and look for other sources the LA Times had a quality stand alone book section. They would also produce an yearly summary of the best similar to the NY Times. But then the Times became a case study for mismanagement, bad business decisions, and a victim of the Internet, and the stand alone section was done away with and the reviews as far as I could tell shrank in frequency and length.

It is probably a waste of time to bemoan what is done, but beyond the utter stupidity of those who run the Times and have proven that few CEO’s deserve to be worshiped at the altar of capitalism, something the title CEO is meant to confer. Nor do I want to spend much time prematurely aging myself talking hell in a hand basket, every era has plenty of hell and enough hand baskets to go around. It is just too bad that the on going problems have to destroy the fine record of literary culture the Times had. I wonder if this portends anything for the LA Times book festival. While blogs and all help create a literary culture, you can’t beat the size of a large metropolitan newspaper, even when they have lost subscribers, to expand access to book culture. It is also nice to have a west coast voice in books that would counter balance the NY Times, but sadly I think those days are over.

 

Interview with Antonio Lobo Antunes at the Paris Review

~ bythefirelight

The Paris Review has an interview with Antonio Lobo Antunes who talks mostly about his experience in the war in Angola and the difficulty of writing about the war during the dictatorship, and specifically the book The Land at the End of the World.

Your author bio mentions that you were trained as a psychiatrist and served as a military doctor in Portugal’s war in Angola before becoming a writer. This experience seems to be at the heart of The Land at the End of the World, which takes the form of the soul-baring rant of a Portuguese war veteran honing in on a sexual conquest in a late 1970s Lisbon nightclub. How do you see this novel now, which has since been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece on the absurdities and wretchedness of war?

I started that book more than thirty years ago, as a very young man. In the first versions, there was no war at all. In many ways, it’s impossible to speak about the war directly. For me, it was a personal matter. When I arrived in Africa I looked up at the sky and said, “I don’t know these stars. Where am I? What am I doing here?” I just wanted to return alive. I remember we kept calendars and would cross off each day that we were still alive! I’ve talked to people who were in the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, and I’ve understood them perfectly. You can’t say these things to your wife or your son because they won’t understand it. It’s too strange an experience. It’s unreal.

So I never set out to write a book about the war. I was very interested in the relationship between the man who speaks and the woman who listens. I was drawn to the idea that the relationship between a man and a woman can be something like a war itself, very cruel and violent. And then I realized that if I included some things about what happened in Africa, it would provide a powerful counterpoint to their story. I suppose the narrator of the book is trying to use the tales of war to seduce the woman—he believes that women are weak when it comes to these things. I was surprised by the solitude of this character, this lonely and miserable man. The book is about a very personal vision of hell.

Marcos Giralt Torrente Interviewed on Canal-L

~ bythefirelight

Canal-L has an interview with Spanish short story writer Marcos Giralt Torrente about his new book, El final del amor. The book is comprised of four long short stories that play with the idea that ever relationship is marked by the threat of the end of it.

An Alternate Bolaño in Exile – a Short Story from Álvaro Bisama

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a short story from the Chilian author Álvaro Bisama in its July issue. It follow the life of an exile who returns to Chile in 1988 after a 14 year exile. The man is an artist (se dedica al arte, pinta, escribe, dibuja, esculpe, lo que quiere decir que no se dedica a nada / he dedicates himself to art, painting, writing, drawing, sculpture, which is to say he dedicates himself to nothing) who lives in Valparaiso. He spends his time going to bars, meeting women, reading, and studying an obscure book of poetry by a mysterious and obscure poet. He reads like a character from Bolaño or a version of  Bolaño as if he had returned to Chile. The exile tries to turn the book into a novel then a movie script, which is for this man, is a Sisyphean task. The poet is a strange man who believes in Lovecraft’s phantasms and is more interested in narrating stories about surrealist poets who eat them selves in acts straight from Dali. Crypta is told in a very plain style and one has the sense of gloominess that overhangs every thing. Isolation is everywhere, between the exile and the people he knows, and the exile and the reader, as much of what we know of the exile are his actions, not his thought. The exile’s life is as if the exile continues at home, and most of all becomes a form of exile that one never returns from.

I’m not sure if the story is enough to make me want to read more yet. But you can read some interview with him here and here.

Tiene treinta años y viene llegando del exilio. Es 1988 y desembarca en el puerto. No importa su nombre en esta historia que, si se mira bien, es solo una anécdota. Lo que dejó atrás es la memoria de una infancia donde existían otros colores, otros aromas. Se fue el 74, lo que recuerda –la memoria es una lejanía desolada– es el vértigo y un mundo que desapareció. Pero nada más. No le interesa recordar. Así que eso es todo, ese es el punto de partida. Así que recapitulemos: borrón y cuenta nueva al regreso, treinta años, 1988, el puerto. Eso basta para comenzar. A su llegada, no tiene un trabajo seguro. Vive en la casa de una pareja de amigos. Él es profesor y ella enfermera.

La casa queda en los altos del cerro que se eleva en el punto exacto donde alguna vez estuvo el barrio rojo de la ciudad. Sobre ese barrio rojo se escribieron novelas y se filmaron películas pero ahora ya no queda nada salvo eso: las películas y los libros. Pero la vista desde su balcón es impresionante. Cuando se levanta, puede ver la bahía al amanecer y la lentitud de los buques al entrar y salir de la rada. Hace durar los ahorros. Les paga un arriendo mínimo a sus amigos y se dedica al arte, pinta, escribe, dibuja, esculpe, lo que quiere decir que no se dedica a nada; simplemente deambula por el puerto, bebe en los bares, se escurre en la frágil bohemia de los fines de dictadura. A veces se acuesta con novias ocasionales, muchachas que le preguntan por su acento, sus viajes y con las cuales comparte algunas tardes. Él, se hace entender, es poeta y, por ende, lee mucho.

Aquello es falso pero no demasiado, lee mucho pero no es poeta. Alguna vez lo publicaron en una antología sueca de escritores en el exilio. Como todos los de la antología era una copia triste de Nicanor Parra. Pero da lo mismo. Lo que importa: una de las muchachas con las que se acuesta le presta un libro.

Jorge Volpi Interview and Political Problems with His Diplomatic Post

~ bythefirelight

First the good part of the post. Canal-l has an excellent interview with Jorge Volpi ostensibly about his new book Dias de ira, but actually turns into more of a political discussion and a conversation about El sueno de Bolivar, his book about Latin America. I always find what he has to say interesting and he is a good speaker. I’m not yet convinced about his fiction but I ought to read more before I say much more.

On the other hand, it looks as if he has lost his post in Rome as a cultural attache. Apparently he offended a powerful Mexican diplomat when he was at a conference in Spain in April. He had to do a lot of sleuthing to find out it was the Ambassador to Spain who requested the removal. As he noted on his blog (via Moleskin Literario)

  A partir de ese momento, inicié una investigación propia de una (mala) novela de espionaje, hasta llegar al fondo del asunto, confirmado por numerosas fuentes cuyos nombres no estoy autorizado a revelar. En realidad, la anulación del puesto fue en represalia por las opiniones que expresé en la presente conferencia, dictada el 12 de abril de 2011, en la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, para inaugurar su ciclo de Bicentenarios dedicado a México. El texto desató la ira del embajador de México en España, Jorge Zermeño. A continuación, la secretaria Espinosa decidió cancelar el nombramiento, enmascarándolo detrás de un falso “recorte presupuestal”.

I’m curious to know what he said. You can read further developments here.

 

 

Alejandro Zambra Disusing Formas de volver a casa

~ bythefirelight

Canal-l has a Spanish language interview with Alejandro Zambra, one of the more well known Granta youngsters. In it he talks about the novel excerpted in Granta, and why he writes and what he wants from writing.

And as an extra bonus you can read a review of the book at El Cutural.

Violence and Horacio Castellanos Moya – A Review of His Book from Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a good review of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s newest book La sirvienta y el luchador ( The Servant and the Fighter). It is a continuation of the Salvadorean saga that he has been constructing over the last decade, and charts the troubles that have marked generations of the country. This is the fourth book in the volume takes place during the war in the 80s and unlike the last book, which was just published in English as Tyrant Memory, it dwells on the violence, following torturers and revolutionaries. Like the other books it follows members of the same families, make these books a generational saga also. The reviewer puts the book with in that growing trend of writers who are trying to deal with the violence that has devastated some countries, and which given the rise of narco violence has seemed to make the promise of peace after the low intensity wars of the 80s a distant reality.

Hemos construido una sociedad horrible. El Salvador se describe con tres v: violenta, vil y vacía. Sí, muy vacía. Vacía y vil. Pero, sobre todo, violenta. El asesinato como forma de resolver las diferencias se ha arraigado desde hace décadas en la cultura salvadoreña mediante un continuado y cada vez más sofisticado ejercicio. La Mara Salvatrucha, nacida en Los Ángeles, que castiga los barrios más pobres de las ciudades del país, y que se ha ramificado como epidemia por buena parte de Centroamérica y México, es hija directa de los torturadores de finales del siglo pasado. Y también de la guerra de liberación. Tres generaciones van ya dándose un festín con los cadáveres esparcidos por doquier como calabazas reventadas en una noche de brujas.
Ahora la violencia campea desnuda de ideologías. Las escenas que se viven a diario, escandalosamente magnificadas por los periódicos y la televisión, parecen venir de la imaginación de un psicópata. Este asunto rebasa la posibilidad de cualquier localismo. Aunque se esfuerce por mantenerse a la vanguardia, El Salvador es solo uno de los peores. La violencia se llena los carrillos y sopla por toda Latinoamérica, y no solo produce cadáveres y mutilaciones, sino que también hace palidecer las ficciones de los escritores, incluidos los más bizarros.
En nuestros países –desiguales, corrompidos, penetrados por el narco y donde muchos jóvenes deben emigrar o unirse a una pandilla para sobrevivir– la realidad amenaza con volverse cada vez más gruesa. Frente a un horizonte que promete incrementar nuestro bestiario, el trabajo del escritor, ha dicho Horacio Castellanos Moya, consiste en tragar y digerir la cruda realidad “para luego reinventarla de acuerdo con las leyes propias de la fabulación literaria”.

A Short Story from Ángel Zapata with My Translation

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

The blog El sindrome Chejov has has a published the sort story Ecuador Ángel Zapata’s latest book Las buenas intenciones y otros cuentos. You can read the original at El sindrome, but here is my translation of the piece.

You place a bone, perhaps from a giant, on the table cloth, my child: at lunch time, at dinner time, at the sad and meticulous hour of breakfast; you place that bone with a casual gesture that could be mistaken for mercy (three bones at the end of the day, I don’t know if  it’s different); and latter you stay there, coming closer to the fire, looking at the bone of a giant on the table cloth, child; like fasting with the hunger of another; the same as if you try to cry with that hard and yellow weeping, empty inside, your mother the same as myself would not have known how to ever show you.

Update (9/7/2011) this is  a different author below, Miguel Ángel Zapata. I got confused by the names. Thanks to Luis for the clarification.

If you are not familiar with Zapata here is what El sindrome noted in his recent review of Esquina inferior del cuadro.

Los cuentos de Zapata están llenos de marcas de estilo. Un estilo profundamente pensado, que no gustará a todos los lectores, pero que busca -y logra- una voz auténtica y personal, reconocible. Ahí está su riesgo y su belleza. Esparce por todos los relatos puntos suspensivos que remarcan las elipsis en cuyos márgenes se construyen  sus narraciones. Gesto gallardo: quiere decir, os cuento esto pero podría contaros todo lo que callo, lo que esos puntos esconden, lo que el escritor-astrónomo tiene que desechar para preferir su historia, que no es sino una elección que sólo a él pertenece y que comparte con sus lectores, porque así lo quiere, no porque lo necesite.

Enrique Vila-Matas Review in the Paris Review

~ bythefirelight

Scott Esposito of the Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas. Although this came out a little while ago, it is definitely interesting and worth a read. I have yet to read his works, although I have many around the house, but I’m looking forward more and more to doing it.

Decorated with numerous awards in his native Spain—including the same Premio Rómulo Gallegos that catapulted his friend Roberto Bolaño to international renown—Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers. Taking the Modernists as towering giants that will never be equaled, Vila-Matas works to inscribe himself—at times literally—in the margins of their works. His tools are irony, parody, paradox, and futility, and his goal is to mix fact, fiction, and autobiography in order to depict not reality but truth. I asked him about his newly translated novel Never Any End to Paris—his third in English—based on the time he spent in Paris as a young writer attempting (and gloriously failing) to triumph as Hemingway did.

Never Any End to Paris uses your youth in Paris to explore ideas of creativity, influence, and identity. The narrator is a writer whose facts and dates are similar to yours, though—I think—he both is and isn’t you. Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality?

Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.

A Few Micro Fictions from JAVIER PUCHE

~ bythefirelight

Th blog  La nave de los locos has some short fictions from the Spanish writer Javier Puche. They seem more like koans than stories, but they have their moments. My favorite is Para hacer tiempo, fabrica relojes lentamente. (To make time, make watches slowly).

El sol (cíclope insomne) nos vigila.

Desafina el coro de niños muertos.

Perece el mosquito en una lágrima.

El humo añora levemente al cigarrillo.

Murmura palabras terribles el pez abisal.

Interview with Carlos Yushimito in El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an interview and profile of Carlos Yushimito, one of the Granta youngsters. It gives a little insight into his interests which were shaped by the war in Peru against the Sindero Luminoso. He, unlike most of the writers in the Granta collection, writes short stories, or at least his newest book is short stories.

“Me fascina lo imperfecto; la perfección siempre es una forma de violencia, de lo autoritario”. Hay algo inquietante en Carlos Yushimito (Lima, 1975): parece imposible que de ese cuerpo enjuto que refuerza su imperceptible hilillo de voz surjan esas historias con niños de tan oscuras perversiones, mutantes, gatos que hablan y escenarios de regusto posnuclear. Pero ese es el humus de la selección de sus relatosLecciones para un niño que llega tarde (Duomo), desasosegante puerta para acceder al mundo de uno de los más sugestivos de entre las promesas de la narrativa en español escogidas por la revista Granta.

“Mi generación nació entre el riesgo de coches bomba, sin agua corriente, atrapados en casa con toques de queda; y en mi caso, reforzado por mi abuelo, japonés, que emigró a Perú cuando la II Guerra Mundial y fue expropiado y a punto de ir a un campo de concentración. Ello me ha hecho muy consciente de la precariedad de la vida…”. Letras niponas en su antebrazo derecho tatúan ese episodio que alimenta la explicación de por qué sus personajes se muestran siempre paralizados ante el destino.

Seres predestinados que pueden destilar compasión, pero capaces de una muy refinada crueldad. La culpa es de la “forma perversa” con la que Yushimito lee los clásicos tras años de diseccionar literatura actual. “¿No ve en El flautista de Hamelin, llevándose a todos los niños, una gran metáfora del genocidio humano? Quería que mis cuentos jugaran con esa perversidad, por eso hago que un gato tipo el de Cheshire diga lo que dice o un robot discuta con su creador”.

Interview with Patricio Pron in El Pais – Plus Novel Excerpt

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Patricio Pron, one of the Granta youngsters, was interviewed in El Pais about his latest novel El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia. It is the story of his parents activism during the last thirty years, an activism that of course takes place during the dictatorship. Pron notes that his interest in writing the book “came from hearing the stories of activism at home and his inability to understand them”. The book is not structured as a traditional novel because he doesn’t want to give the impression that the narrator knows everything or that there are no doubts. You can read an excerpt here (pdf). El Pais also has a short and favorable review here.

“Mi interés por las últimas décadas de Argentina viene de las historias que escuchaba en casa sobre el pasado del activismo político de mis padres y de mi propia incapacidad para comprender ese proceso, la voluntad de sacrificio y las decisiones que les habían llevado a comprometerse en hechos trágicos de la historia argentina… Mi interés no era literario en el sentido de que no tenía como objetivo escribir una novela…, pero… fue el descubrir en un momento que de la misma forma en que yo procuraba averiguar quiénes habían sido mis padres, mi padre había estado buscando a una persona… y, a su vez, en esa búsqueda, él buscaba otro desaparecido anterior y ambos eran hermanos… Y fue esa doble simetría que se establecía entre nosotros la que me llevó a pensar en escribir sobre esos años…

Aunque tengo poco interés o desconfío del testimonio. Cosa que por otra parte concierne a mis padres y no a mí… Procuré escapar de esto… incluso darle un carácter ficcional pero desistí porque había algo… espúreo en el uso de esos recuerdos para producir ficción comercial. Y lo dejé en nombre de una cierta honestidad con el lector…”.

“Es una decisión ética de procurar contar algo novedoso. Pensaba, y pienso, que escribir esta historia de jóvenes revolucionarios en Argentina tenía que asumir una forma que procurase ser revolucionaria… Entre otras cosas porque… las convenciones literarias no son mucho más que la extrapolación al ámbito de la literatura de las convenciones que presiden la vida social y nuestra relación. Por lo tanto, hubiese sido desleal con la memoria de mis padres escribir su historia de una forma convencional… Escribí en virtud de que no sabía cómo hacerlo, pero se fue revelando con la propia escritura”.

“La forma que asumió el libro respondía a ciertas ideas mías del fragmentarismo y reflexiones sobre los géneros; pero también al hecho de que esta historia es tan dolorosa para mí como para que no pudiese escribir largas extensiones… También hay una cuestión vinculada con el hecho de que las narrativas unitarias producen, a menudo, la impresión de que el narrador carece de dudas o está en posesión de una verdad absoluta. Si bien esa es una ficción con la cual los escritores jugamos quería dejarla de lado para que fuesen las dudas… las contradicciones y… las piezas ausentes de este puzle las que emergiesen en la lectura…”.

A Defense of Ernesto Sabato from Pablo Chacon

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has an interesting article about Ernesto Sabato and his political history. I’m not much on his history but he notes that Sabato has been characterized as right wing much like Borges, even though Sabato led the Commission of Disappeared Persons and brought allegations against the generals.

Extraño país el que recuerda al escritor recientemente fallecido casi como un cómplice de la última dictadura militar por aceptar almorzar con el general Jorge Videla, en compañía de Borges y del padre Leonardo Castellani a dos meses de que los uniformados asaltaran las instituciones republicanas. Extraño país que olvida su tarea como presidente de la Comisión Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas, conadep, para elaborar, en 1984, por orden de Raúl Alfonsín, el “Nunca más”, un informe donde figuran los nombres y apellidos de los torturados, violados, vejados y asesinados militantes de la izquierda, revolucionaria y reformista, y los de sus parientes, amigos y allegados que hasta ese momento podía darse fe estaban “desaparecidos”, esa figura que nombraría desde entonces el “triste privilegio de ser argentino”.
Ese es uno de los destinos de Ernesto Sabato.
Aclaremos: el trabajo de la conadep, a pesar de las posteriores leyes del perdón que amnistiaron a la mayoría de los militares que irían a juicio, leyes concedidas por los sucesivos levantamientos de los “carapintadas” (que carecían de sponsors civiles pero lo recibían de muchos sectores sindicales), dejó al gobierno radical al borde del colapso.

Juan Jose Saer and Euardo Chirinos Coming from Open Letter Winter 2012

~ bythefirelight

The new Open Letter catalog for winter 2011 is out. As always the catalog is filled with interesting books. Of note is Scars from Juan Jose Saer and The Smoke of Distant Fires from Euardo Chirinos. The Saer sounds quite interesting.

Juan José Saer’s Scars explores a crime committed by Luis Fiore, a thirty-nine year old laborer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime: a young reporter, Ángel, who lives with his mother and works the courthouse beat; a dissolute attorney who clings to life only for his nightly baccarat game; a misanthropic and dwindling judge who’s creating a superfluous translation of The Picture Dorian Gray; and, finally, Luis Fiore himself, who, on May Day, went duck hunting with his wife, daughter, and a bottle of gin. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in time—be it a day or several months—when the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event. Originally published in 1969, Scars marked a watershed moment in Argentinian literature and has since become a modern classic of Latin American literature.

For fans of poetry Euardo Chirinos will be the second book of poetry published by Open Letter.

The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century

As always the catalog includes an excerpt of each work.

New Book of Stories Due From Andrés Neuman in 2012

~ bythefirelight

La Nacion has an article about the new works coming from Andrés Neuman in the next year. He will be publishing a book of stories with the publisher Paginas de Espuma. He will also be publishing a book of poetry and a novel some time in the near future. If you can’t wait for those works you can always read his micro stories on his blog.

A fin de año, la editorial española Páginas de Espuma publicará su libro de cuentos Hacerse el muerto, que en 2012 editará en la Argentina el sello La Compañía. “Los relatos exploran el registro tragicómico y van del dolor de la muerte al sentido del humor, del miedo a la ironía”, cuenta Neuman, ocupado por estos días en la corrección de los textos. En octubre, Ediciones del Dock publicará su libro de poesía No sé por qué. “Será la primera vez que me editen en el país antes que en España, donde vivo desde niño. Es una emoción doble, porque mi poesía jamás había circulado en la Argentina”, dice.

Desde hace ya un tiempo, escribe una novela sobre la enfermedad y sus efectos en la sexualidad y en la lectura, en la forma de leer y de desear. Neuman asegura que esta nueva producción literaria será distinta: “Una de mis pocas premisas de escritura es evitar los moldes, la fórmula. Me defrauda que los libros de un autor se parezcan demasiado entre sí. Trato de alejarme todo lo posible de la experiencia previa”. Mientras que la acción de la novela anterior estaba localizada en el norte de Europa, en épocas pasadas, la de la nueva transcurre en la actualidad, en un lugar indefinido donde se habla castellano y que parece hallarse en una frontera imposible entre América latina y España.

(via Moleskine Literario)

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Bonsai (The Contemporary Art of the Novella)
Alejandro Zambra
Melville Hose, pg 83

In someways I thought Bonsai was quite interesting, and brevity, one of the defining features of the book, should be commended since it is so easy to fill up novels with pointless digressions. It’s not just the lack of pages that makes for brevity, but Zambra’s avoidance of temporal realism, that need to narrate a character’s movement through a doorway, a house, etc. Often that material is quite pointless, and he instead plays with where the story is going. Often it seems as if he is not interested in a story, but the story about the story, as if you were hearing the story second hand. It is that lack of detail, whether physical, or emotional that leaves one distant from the story. You have some facts about the characters, and some facts about the story telling, but structuring a narrative is just what happens when you read.

You can see how he goes about writing in this quote. It has all the hallmarks of his style: repetition, reversals, and a sketch-like description of his characters.

It is possible but would perhaps be abusive to relate this excerpt to the story of Julio and Emilia it Would be abusive, as Proust’s novel is riddled with excerpts like this one. And also because there are pages left, because this story continues.

Or does not continue.

The story of Julio and Emilia continues but does not go on.

It will end some years later, with Emilia’s death; Julio, who doesn’t not die, who will not die, who has not died, continues but decides not to go on. The same for Emilia: for now she decides not to go on, but she continues. In a few years she will no longer continue nor go on.

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it, but there are illusory hopes, and this story, which is become a story of illusory hopes, goes on like this: […]

But where does that take one? Zambra is very conscious in making literary references throughout the book. It is a novel for people who think books create reality, not something that is just part of reality. Zambra moves between characters who read Flaubert, Proust and finally a character who pretends to be transcribing a book by a Chilean author and creates his own work in doing it. Except for the creation of a shadow book, I had the sensation that it would be more interesting if I were 21 again and the discovery of Proust was a revolution. But Zambra doesn’t even go to that level, what he often sounds like is a glib student laughing because he got out of reading it. Yes, that is what his characters do, but in reading it I have that same sensation of glibness. Now it doesn’t matter if he likes Proust or not, but the reading of the book makes his playfulness seem like window dressing of a young man.

Going back to the quote, the style while interesting, in the hands of Zambra, also leaves something wanting. At first the back and forth about the characters continuing is intriguing, but again it is light and while the story about the story, his playing with narrative, is interesting, the characters again are flat. From this slim a book I don’t expect grand insights, that isn’t what if is about, but the humor that should be in Julio’s character is tedious. It reads quick enough, but the transitory whims of young people just end up sounding like spoiled children. Brevity is beautiful, just make it about something interesting.

I had looked forward to Bonsai, and in some ways it was interesting, but if I need a little detachment in my reading I’ll go for Bernhard or De Assis’ Diary of a Small Winner.

 

Santiago Roncagliolo Interviewd at Bookslut

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Bookslut has an interview with the Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo. It doesn’t go into some of the scandals he has been involved in (some of which I’ve mentioned here). It is a review worth reading to get a sense of where he is coming from and they go more into his childhood than I have come across in the Spanish press. I wonder if I would find Red April funny. Listening him talk I know he’s got a sense of humor.

Red April is terrifying in parts, and gory, and Kafkaesque, in other places, but at the same time it made me laugh my socks off – and I felt peculiar about that.

[Laughing] I spent one night with a couple of African writers a few years ago. We were making political jokes and we found that had the same jokes, we just used different names. In poor countries humour is blacker than in rich countries, and more politically incorrect. I had to moderate myself when I arrived in Spain because I would say things I found really funny and everyone would look at me.

It’s beautiful when someone tells me I made them laugh. I love to write humour and terror because I like very physical emotions. When you laugh it’s your body moving, when you’re scared, it’s your skin crawling. These are powerful emotions.

For us, Red April is relatively new, but you wrote it ages ago. Is it hard to reconnect with the man you were then?

Yes. It’s a date with your own past. I am surprised at what this novel did. It won the big prize in Spain, and it was a big bestseller, and keeps being reprinted. In Peruvian society it was the moment to begin to talk about the past. After I wrote about Abimael Guzman, I went to the jails to talk about the books, and it was amazing. I was talking to army people and Shining Path people and guerrilla people in the same auditorium. I would speak then they all begin to tell their own stories. It was a bit of a metaphor of what was going on in the country. Everybody had the feeling that it was time to listen to each other, even to the killers, even to the evil ones, to understand why people arrived at this place. My generation can do it, because we were children when this happened. We were innocent, we have no past. So it was like a liberation for us, and for the people participating.

Tin House Spring 2011 – A Review

~ bythefirelight

I thought this issue of Tin House was a bit more hit and miss, especially with the fiction, but it still had some good moments. The them was The Mysterious and most of the essays delved into either crime fiction, or true crime. Unfortunately, I’m not a huge mystery fan. Sarah Winman’s overview of domestic thrillers was quite good and has given me an interest in reading some of the authors she mentioned, some of published 100 years ago. Eddie Muller’s call for a new noir was interesting, since he said stop imitating the 40’s and write for today. It was refreshing since noir for most people is 19401-1959. It was even more interesting coming from a guy who hosts noir festivals (I’ve been to 3 of his). I can’t agree, though, that Mulholland Drive is that interesting a movie. I was intrigued by Paul Collins history of the Murder Off Miami (A Murder Mystery)
book/game and its approach to story telling through artifacts, something that has been over done since.

The only fiction I thought was really interesting was Luis Alberto Urrea’s story Chametla that envisions memories as physical objects  that have their own life after one dies. It was perfectly brief and understated. Maurice Pons’ story had that refreshing element that I often found in European short stories: it doesn’t tell you what to think at the end, in other words, there was no epiphany. And like the Urrea, had the virtue of leaving many questions unanswered in the central mystery of the story. Kenneth Calhoun’s piece was also quite good and used language in a refreshing way, starting each paragraph with Then, until the build up of conflicting events actually leads the reader to what has happened.

This issue wasn’t as good as the last one I read, but it still had its moments.

Frans Masereel – The City, The Idea, The Sun, Story Without Words – A Review

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The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (Dover Books on Art, Art History)
Dover, 112pg


The Sun, The Idea & Story Without Words: Three Graphic Novels
Dover, 224pg

Frans Masereel was an early proponent of the graphic novel and the sub genre the wordless novel. Most of his famous wordless novels which use the wood cut printing technique date from 1919 to the 20’s, are beautiful documents of its time, at once impressionistic and documentary. Although his work was not overtly political, he was a critic of a society that valued wealth and power above all things and his stories usually reflect some element of that criticism. At all times he has a great fascination with the little details that make up every day life. It is in that juxtaposition of layers of little details that his works build their narrative, or as it often seems, makes his case, since some of these might be better called wordless essays.

The most complete and compelling of the the works listed here is The City: A Vision in Woodcuts. Vision is the correct term, because there isn’t a narrative but a series of impressions of what the city is. In one sense it is the day in the life of a city, with images of workers in factories, weddings, parties, brothels, military parades. But looking closer at the details he places throughout there is a definite hierarchy in the images and it is obvious that despite the trappings of prosperity and modernity the city is a rough place and only a few win. In an image of a rich couple leaving a fancy cafe, off to the corner is a beggar. In another, a man takes advantage of a maid. He progress into even darker scenes of rape, and violent suppression of protests. The sum of all these images is a sense of isolation and loneliness that is often the early 20th century embodiment of the city.

The Sun takes a more light hearted approach to looking at the city. Instead, of a series of unrelated images, Masereel uses a narrative. The story opens with a man at a desk day dreaming and looking at the sun. He falls asleep and from his head emerges a figure who tries to reach the sun. From there on the figure walks through town and country looking for the sun, never quite reaching it. It is a satirical piece because the sun takes many different forms, all of which are chimeras. He looks for it in books, a crucifix, drink, up a woman’s dress, a brothel, at the top of a factory smoke stack, in the coin a rich man throws him from a car. None of it helps and he continues to seek and never quite gets there despite going by boat to the horizon of a setting sun, or in an airplane. As the story ends the figure, now Icarus like, returns to the sleeping man who laughs. While it has the same social criticism as The City, he also shows an element of the surreal and an interest in the origins of art. And what ties the two elements of the story together are the panels where the figure is constantly set upon by the crowd, as if the seeking is something forbidden. In Masereel you always have the sense that upsetting the social order will only bring trouble.

The Idea continues many of the elements in The Sun. In it an author sits at his desk and struck by lightening he creates the figure of a naked woman. He puts her in an envelope and sends her out into the world where she is hated. Men try to clothe her, but she refuses; when she is loved, the men kill her husband; when she meets a young boy, his parents spank him. And in the most amusing, when her image is printed it has to be burned. Eventually, she has to flee and returns to the author, but he has created a new figure, so he places her on a crucifix and hangs her in a painting. The last scene is the author crying as his newest figure is sent into the world. Despite its fantastical nature, it shares with The Sun the idea that ideas are dangerous, in what ever form. The religious overtones of a creator sending out his children only to see them persecuted, adds to wildness of the story and makes for a bitting satire also of religion.

The final work Story Without Words, is probably the least interesting. The story is fairly simple: a man seeks a woman, and when he finally gives herself to him, he abandons her. Within the context of his other works, he does show a concern for women who are used carelessly by men. In many of his drawings there is the figure of a woman whose desires for freedom, self hood, love are repressed, or her physical being is threatened in someway. Given that context the story has more weight, but it is not his best work.

His art work is not as detailed and stylized as a Lynn Ward, but he captures, especially in The City, a richness of detail that make his work come alive. And it is that detail that makes Masereel’s work a fascinating vision of the enter war period.