Author: bythefirelight

ELENA PONIATOWSKA Interview Video at El Publico Lee Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

Elena Poniatowska was on El Publico Lee discussing her new book about the British Painter Leonora Carrington. Although she is friends with Carrington and so has a deeper understanding of the artist, it still strikes me as similar to Tinísima. If you are going to watch it, it will only be up for a few weeks so you’ll have to hurry.

Estaba destinada a crecer como la rica heredera de un magnate de la industria textil, pero desde pequeña supo que era diferente, que su capacidad de ver lo que otros no veían, la convertía en especial. Desafió las convenciones sociales, a sus padres y maestros, y rompió cualquier atadura religiosa o ideológica para conquistar su derecho a ser una mujer libre, personal y artísticamente. Leonora Carrington es hoy una leyenda, la más importante pintora surrealista, y su fascinante vida, el material del que se nutren nuestros sueños.

Roberto Bolaño Essay at the NYRB

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The NYRB as an essay from Roberto Bolaño about stealing books. It is from his forthcoming collection of essays out in May. Via Conversational Reading

From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine—or shone—with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed.

Review of New Horacio Castellanos Moya Book

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El Pais has a review of the new Horacio Castellanos Moya. It is the fourth installment in his Aragon series. I know Tirania Memoria (Tyrant Memory) is coming out in the US this June. I thought the book was good and I think I would like to read the whole series someday. (you can read my review here) .

La saga de los Aragón se inició con Donde no estén ustedes (2003), siguió con Desmoronamiento (2006) y Tirana memoria (2008). ¿Habrá una continuación tras La sirvienta y el luchador? “Probablemente. Estas novelas van creciendo de forma espontánea. No tengo un diseño preciso de la saga, pero casi siempre queda un fleco suelto”. Ojalá. El lector se pregunta qué será de Joselito, que tiene ahora 19 años y está con los subversivos armados.

En El asco (1997), el escritor narra la demolición política y cultural de El Salvador; en el libro de relatos En la congoja de la pasada tormenta (2009), habla del miedo, de la violencia que trastorna la vida, de la guerra, del destierro, de las difíciles relaciones humanas. Son solo dos ejemplos de su obra, que estremece.

Horacio Castellanos Moya (Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1957) se crió en El Salvador. “Mis historias son de El Salvador. Su eje es la experiencia de mi formación y crecimiento en este país. Quedé conmocionado. De ahí la radicalidad de mis temas”.

¿Alguna vez podrá escribir sobre un país en paz? “Creo que yo no veré esa paz. El gran problema es que una sociedad vive aterrorizada por la violencia política y cuando se logra una cierta normalidad, vive aterrorizada por la violencia criminal. Cuando todo esto alcanza a dos o tres generaciones es difícil desmontar los mecanismos del terror. Centroamérica vive el cansancio de una vida en zozobra permanente”.

There is also a second review in El Pais of the book, which gives it high marks.

La sirvienta y el luchador narra las peripecias de ambos cuando vuelven a encontrarse en circunstancias extremas después de muchos años. El Vikingo, una antigua figura de la lucha libre reconvertido en policía y que se encuentra gravemente enfermo, participa con su escuadrón en el secuestro de una pareja de jóvenes. Al día siguiente, cuando María Elena acuda a limpiar la casa de los desaparecidos y se dé cuenta del suceso, buscará al viejo luchador para que la ayude a salvarlos. Si ella representa la impotencia de una persona vieja y pacífica, él refleja el embrutecimiento de un hombre simple y bruto que, no obstante, es capaz de culparla por no haberlo redimido con su amor. Sin embargo, el pasado que comparten sirve fundamentalmente para tramar la dura historia de cómo van cayendo una a una las esperanzas de todos los personajes salvo, quizá, la del joven y revolucionario nieto de María Elena, cuyas esperanzas son de destrucción y muerte. A su vez, la enfermedad terminal del luchador podría interpretarse como esa agonía sin fin que supone la perpetuación de la violencia. La podredumbre de su cuerpo, en la que se insiste constantemente, se correspondería con la que se ha infiltrado en el país, ramificándose en una densa maraña de pasiones e intereses sociales, familiares y políticos cuya principal consecuencia es el temor. Acierta Castellanos Moya con ese final inclemente y algo precipitado que, sin embargo, conviene a una novela vertiginosa, aristada y esencial.

Spanish Literature and the World from Alberto Manguel

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I have always thought the Spanish Language writers have had a disadvantage that those in English do not: the Siglo de Oro, or the golden century. Sure we in English have Shakespeare who is from about the same time and is in a seemingly untouchable place, but we don’t have an era named in such a way that it suggests you can’t do any better. So it was rather funny to read the opening of Alberto Manguel’s essay on Spanish Literature in the world and see him note that when he was growing up high school teachers would tell him, there’s been nothing good from Spain since the Siglo de Oro. That disrespect, he argues, goes a long way to explaining why Spanish Literature has had little influence until now. It is an interesting statement and I wish the essay was longer and not one of those quick overviews that newspapers do so well.

La literatura española en el mundo · ELPAÍS.com.

“Con la excepción de algunos poetas de la primera mitad del siglo veinte, la buena literatura española dejó de escribirse a finales del Siglo de Oro”, nos informó un profesor de literatura cuando teníamos trece o catorce años. Salvo ciertos lectores empedernidos, esta opinión prevaleció en Argentina durante toda mi adolescencia. Borges había decretado que ninguna novela española, después del Quijote, valía el esfuerzo de ser leída (cuando alguien le dijo que Galdós era, en su opinión, mejor novelista que Eça de Queiroz, Borges le contestó “mi sincero pésame”). A pesar de tal desolado juicio, los lectores de mi generación descubrimos que la literatura española sí existía. Aprendimos de memoria a Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Blas de Otero y Miguel Hernández; leímos (sin respetarlos lo suficiente) a Ortega y Gasset y Américo Castro; devoramos a los novelistas (que nos parecían extraordinariamente osados), de Goytisolo a Juan Benet, de Carmen Laforet a Mercé Rodoreda. Es cierto, sin embargo, que la literatura española influyó poco en los escritores de mi época, volcados sobre todo a la poesía y filosofía francesa, y a la novela americana e italiana.

Juan José Saer Overview at the Nation

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The Nation has an overview of Juan José Saer’s work, including a semi-review of The Sixty-Five Years of Washington which was published this year by Open Letter. Worth a read if you are interested in books that eschew the Boom or realistic fiction.

The “historical” novels stand doubly apart because, though set in the familiar ambience of the Litoral region, they lack the other consistent feature of Saer’s novels and stories, which is the recurrence of characters—a device also used by Piglia—to create depth and resonance while highlighting artificiality. There’s Cat Garay and his twin brother, Pigeon, who like the author moved to Paris; there’s Tomatis, the witty, jaundiced journo; Elisa and her painter husband, Héctor; Botón, the bigmouth, and Washington Noriega, the sagacious mentor (an older ex-leftie turned academic, writing a treatise on the very Colastiné Indians invented in The Witness), among assorted pals and hangers-on. In contrast to the prose-poetry of minutely charted sensation, Saer’s dialogue records scraps of banter in colloquial santafesino rhythms. This is the world of The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (1985), henceforth Sixty-Five. (The title does no favors to Steve Dolph’s translation, which is full of elegant, resourceful solutions to a most difficult text yet splotched by basic errors. Why not simply “Washington’s Sixty-Fifth,” as the phrase refers to a birthday?)

Each Saer novel fascinates with its unique machinery: Sixty-Fiveis wholly discursive. Someone must be speaking the text, because he keeps saying things like “as yours truly was saying, no?” But because this nameless someone knows what everyone thinks and remembers as well as says, he must be a personified omniscient narrator—that is, conventional third-person narrative dressed up as a literal “voice.” Within this oral frame people are said to speak, or to report the words of others, or to claim to report what others claimed that yet others said or did, in a maddening feedback of echoes and distortions proposed as realism. The Spanish title isGlosa, meaning commentary, or variation on a theme: every utterance is provisional, a gloss on a gloss. As in Plato’sSymposium, events reach us fourth- or fifth-hand—but here it’s through layers of misapprehension, wishful thinking, false memory or bad faith. There is no lofty absolute Being, only Becoming.

Short Story from Cristina Rivera Garza at Literal Magazine

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Literal Magazine has a brief short story from Cristina Rivera Garza. It starts well enough, but I’m not sure I like the ending. Canal-l has an interview with her but their site is down for the moment, otherwise I would link to the interview.

Nunca lo había hecho antes. Había visto suficientes ancianas cruzar la calle con dificultad sin jamás haberme sentido compelido a tenderles el brazo. Cuando me tropezaba con ciegos, prefería hacerme discretamente de lado. A los niños, siempre tan problemáticos, ni siquiera los volteaba a ver. Por eso fui el primer sorprendido cuando me ofrecí a ayudarle a la mujer con su equipaje –una maleta rectangular y de tamaño mediano que parecía causarle incomodidad, aunque no verdaderos problemas, en el pasillo del vagón.

–Claro –dijo, sonriendo con gracia mientras aceptaba mi ayuda–. Aprecio su gesto –añadió al entregarme sin suspicacia alguna la jaladora de su valija. Yo guardé silencio, sin mover la mano derecha del tubo, y ella, que también estaba de pie, hizo lo mismo. Callada, con la vista puesta sobre algún punto inconcebible al final del pasillo, la mujer no parecía necesitar ayuda, puesto que no era ni tan vieja ni tan frágil, pero parecía, en cambio, merecerla. Había algo en ella de altivez, en efecto, aunque suavizada por una especie de distracción a todas luces congénita. Su presencia a la vez menuda y apabullante me hizo sentir que estaba, de cualquier modo, en presencia de la nobleza.

 

Magdy El Shafee’s Metro Profiled at CNN

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CNN has a profile of Magdy El Shafee’s Metro. It gives a little more background about the writer and some of the controversy.

(CNN) — An Egyptian cartoonist who was arrested and had his graphic novel banned under Hosni Mubarak’s regime is to be published in English.

Magdy El Shafee wrote the graphic novel “Metro” in 2008. It was banned in his home country and El Shafee was convicted of offending public decency after a lengthy trial.

A translation of “Metro” will be published across the English-speaking world next year. It has also been published in Italian, and some Arabic copies are available in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.

After the revolution that ousted Mubarak, El Shafee is hoping his novel will once again be available in Egypt.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez Wins the 2011 Alfaguara Prize

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The Columbian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez won the 2011 Alfaguara Prize for his book El ruido de las cosas al caer. You can read the full notice at El Pais and also an excerpt of his book.

El Premio Alfaguara ha recaído este año en uno de los jóvenes autores en lengua española cuya obra más unanimidad ha despertado en los últimos tiempos: el colombiano afincado en Barcelona Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Nacido en Bogotá en 1973, Vásquez ha obtenido el galardón por El ruido de las cosas al caer, una novela que el jurado ha presentado como “un negro balance de una época de terror y violencia”, en una capital colombiana “descrita como un territorio literario lleno de significaciones”. Para ese balance, el novelista se vale de los recuerdos y peripecias de Antonio Yammara, empezando por la “exótica fuga y posterior caza de un hipopótamo, último vestigio del imposible zoológico con el que Pablo Escobar exhibía su poder”. Al dubitativo Yammara se suma la figura de Ricardo Laverde, un antiguo aviador de tintes faulknerianos que ha pasado 20 años en la cárcel y que, en cierto sentido, representa a la generación de los padres del protagonista.

Alejandro Zambra Interview at the Millions

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The Millions has a moderate length interview with Alejandro Zambra. There is a little bit about the Granta inclusion, his new book, and what he has thought of being published in English and Spanish at the same time.

TM: Recognizing that any list like Granta’s will be subjective, is there anyone you feel strongly should have been included, but wasn’t?

AZ: Such lists are always arbitrary, and I suppose there are a lot of authors who were worth including in Granta’s, and in the end were not.  The truth is it’s an uncomfortable subject for me, because I really don’t believe in lists or rankings.  In any case I’d like to highlight the work that younger people have been doing, such as the Chilean Diego Zúñiga or the Mexican Valeria Luiselli (the author of Papeles falsos, one of the best books I’ve read recently).

TM: Not many authors have their books published more or less simultaneously in Spanish and in English, but both La vida privada and Bonsai were.  I’m curious about how the experience is different in Chile and the U.S. How does your status as a native or foreigner affect how people read you, do you think?  Do you feel more pressure to be “representative” in some way when you are outside of Chile?

AZ: I think both novels are very Chilean, so I’m sometimes surprised that they can be read in other languages.  To me, it’s a beautiful thing that readers so distant and different can connect with a book of mine.  It’s like sending out thousands of letters, and little by little receiving replies you never expected.  I guess some readers in the U.S. or in France want to confirm some prior idea they had about Chile or about Latin America.  But books aren’t made to confirm ideas; they’re made to refute them, to question them, to put other images out there where we thought everything had already been said.

The Playing Card Novel of Max Aub – At El sindrome Chejov

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El sindrome Chejov has a post about the playing card novel written by Max Aub (1903 – 1972), a Spanish novelist and short story writer . It is a clever novel printed on playing cards. The novel is printed on the reverse side of the suit, which could make for an interesting game of poker when everyone is holding their cards up, but would not be the best set if you don’t like cheaters. A new edition of the book was just republished for the first time since 1964. It is a little pricy at 50 euros, but an intriguing approach to story telling nonetheless. It is worth a look even if you don’t speak Spanish.

I reviewed a book of his, Field of Honor, sometime ago. I wasn’t impressed with it. You can see why here.

The Short Stories of Merce Rodereda – A Brief Review

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I just finished reviewing The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda for Asymptote Journal so I don’t want to say too much about the book. However, it is an excellent read and worth a read for sure. If you have read Death and Spring with came out last year you will see a few similarities to some of the later stories, but her earlier works are much different, and just as good.

Excellent Overview of the Spanish Short Story of the Last 20 Years at Sergi Bellver

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Sergi Bellver has an excellent article on trends in the Spanish short story of the last 20 years. It is well worth the look if you want to see what is going on and more importantly, know who is doing it. He has an excellent list of authors past and present including some of my perennial favorites, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Ana María Matute, Hipólito G. Navarro, and others I have read or am going to read such as Andres Neuman (one of the recent Granta writers) and Miguel Ángel Muñoz. I’m don’t exactly agree with some of his statements about the American short story scene which is on the defensive with fewer and fewer magazines printing short stories. It is also fascinating to see which Americans make the list of influential short story writers: Carver, Ford, Cheever, Capote y Shepard.

Tras la llamada Generación del Medio Siglo, el cuento conoció horas más bajas y sólo algunas obras esporádicas mantenían su aliento. Más tarde, los nuevos cuentistas españoles revivieron con piezas clave que, sin embargo, no bebían directamente de las generaciones anteriores. Eso produjo una suerte de espacio en blanco y, salvo importantes excepciones, las referencias vendrían de los grandes cuentistas norteamericanos (Carver, Ford, Cheever, Capote y Shepard), gracias a catálogos como el de Anagrama, y también de la tradición europea, empezando por Kafka. Así, Quim Monzó, heredero de Pere Calders, o el incomparable Eloy Tizón iban a convertirse en el paso de los 80 a los 90 en dos de las cabezas de puente de la regeneración del cuento en nuestro país. A renglón seguido vendrían libros extraordinarios como Historias mínimas (1988), de Javier Tomeo; Días extraños (1994), de Ray Loriga; El que apaga la luz (1994), de Juan Bonilla; El fin de los buenos tiempos(1994), de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón; El aburrimiento, Lester (1996), de Hipólito G. Navarro y Frío de vivir (1997), de Carlos Castán, entre otros muchos.

A partir de ese caldo de cultivo previo y gracias a expertos como Andrés Neuman o Fernando Valls y sus antologías Pequeñas resistencias 5 y Siglo XXI (publicadas respectivamente por las dos editoriales más especializadas en el cuento, Páginas de Espuma y Menoscuarto), y también a la labor de otros sellos independientes como Salto de Página, Tropo, Lengua de Trapo o Ediciones del Viento, el lector español tiene a su alcance una extensa nómina de cuentistas. Autores que trabajan las cuerdas fundamentales del cuento (Óscar Esquivias, Fernando Clemot, Iban Zaldua o Javier Sáez de Ibarra) o investigan en las grietas que pueden socavar el sentido de lo real (Juan Carlos Márquez, Víctor García Antón, Fernando Cañero o Jordi Puntí). Cuentistas que tocan lo fantástico y lo insólito (Ángel Olgoso, Pilar Pedraza, Félix J. Palma o Manuel Moyano) o que inscriben en el cuento su condición femenina sin hacer “literatura de mujeres” (Cristina Cerrada, Inés Mendoza, Sara Mesa o Eider Rodríguez). Autores latinoamericanos que también construyen el cuento español (Fernando Iwasaki, Norberto Luis Romero, Santiago Roncagliolo, Eduardo Halfon o Ronaldo Menéndez) y autores españoles que desconstruyen lo formal (Eloy Fernández Porta, Vicente Luis Mora, Juan Franciso Ferré o Manuel Vilas). Esta tremenda diversidad y efervescencia literaria garantizan, más que nunca, que el lector dispuesto se contagie, como de la fiebre más bella, de la buena salud del cuento español contemporáneo.

Short Story from Quim Monzo – Books – At Three Percent

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Three Percent has a short story (pdf) from Quim Monzo that you can down load. I thought it could have gone in other directions, but then again that is just echoing Monzo himself when he says, ” a narrative is never as good as the possibilities that fan out at the beginning” . Nevertheless, it is in English and short. I found it to be a mix of Bernhard and Borges, which, despite my love of both, didn’t excite me. But perhaps it will you.

Review of New Alejandro Zambra Book of Essays at Letras Libres

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Letras Libres has a favorable review of Alejandro Zambra’s new book of essays No Leer/Cronicas Y Ensayos Sobre Literatura. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it, but it is an interesting view into some of his interests. I’m especially intrigued by his selection of American authors he writes about. I usually don’t see too many people mentioning Edgar Lee Masters, and yet it comes up in a Chilean’s essay on American lit. It is always interesting to see what American authors find an audience in other languages.

En la primera sección, la más variada, “Que vuelva Cortázar” va contra el gesto de moda pero fútil de sus contemporáneos argentinos de infravalorar y destituir al extravagante Cortázar. Además de poetas (de Shakespeare a Pessoa, Eliot y Pound) y Flaubert y Diderot, se concentra en narradores del yo como Levrero, Macedonio (“nuestro Sterne”) y Vila-Matas, preferencia esclarecida por su propia ficción y las minucias sobre el arte de escribir. Si la prosa no ficticia de muchos nuevos narradores deja mucho que desear, también es verdad que es inútil emplear el ensayo como excusa “literaria”. Zambra nos convence de no subestimar el propósito original de ese género.

Es evidente que consagra la primera sección a sus autores, obras y temas favoritos. También elogia las fotocopias sin pedantería académica, y dedica numerosos comentarios brillantemente comprimidos sobre autores estadounidenses (partiendo de la Spoon River Anthology, hasta Cheever y Carver) y cultura popular. Tampoco evita proveer información autobiográfica sobre su costumbre de leer en cualquier lado (“Festival de la novela larga”). Enterado, al día con la crítica especializada (Bloom, Derrida) o de autor (Kundera), ajusta cuentas con figuras mayores como Edwards, y con la “chilenidad”. La capacidad de Zambra para leer a través de los siglos, disciplinas, categorías y definiciones lo distancia de sus contemporáneos. No leer es un gps literario extremadamente oportuno, de un autor establecido que contiene multitudes a las que no se les puede hacer justicia en una reseña.

Interview with Carlos Funtes – Mexico needs an overhaul – at Literal Magazine

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Literal Magazine has an interview with Carlos Funetes about Mexico and its directions for the future. Of late I have found him a better political commentator than a novelist and the interview, which mentions his newest book, makes that clear. The interview is in English and Spanish.

Rose Mary Salum: In 2010, Vlad was published. Why the vampire theme?

Carlos Fuentes: This was before the theme became fashionable. I used to watch vampire movies when I was a child. Bela Lugosi would give me a terrible fright whenever I saw him. So I said, Dracula the Vampire is always hanging out in Europe. When is he coming to America? Well, he came in to New Orleans in the Tom Cruise movie, but he’s never come to Mexico. Perhaps because he would be competing with too many local vampires… it’s terrible. But he finally came to Mexico and settled down there, under the name of Vlad.

[…]

RMS: As an editor and writer living in the United States, it concerns me that not enough books are being translated. In your opinion, what’s going on?

CF: What’s going on is that this country, the United States, has become very provincial. When I started out, my editors, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, were publishing Francois Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, and ten or fifteen foreign novelists. Now there’s no one. Those of us who have been established for a long time, like Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, or myself, have kept on publishing, but almost out of condescendence. There is no interest in new writers, in the vast quantity and quality of writers we have in Hispanic Ameirca. This country has become very self- absorbed and preoccupied, and it still does not understand what is going on in the world. Barack Obama, who is a great president, is trying to tell Americans, “We are not alone, we are not the only ones,” but it is very hard for them to accept that the era of the United States is over.

RMS: And perhaps this has to do with deteriorating standards of education…

CF: They have deteriorated terribly; education is no longer the priority it once was. But above all, the issue is how the United States sees itself in relation to the rest of the world.

My Review of The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas up at Quarterly Conversation

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My review of the Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas is up at the Quarterly Conversation. I like this review quite a bit and I think I did justice to the book.  It seems like I spent a lifetime with it, reading it both in Spanish and in English then reading all the articles about the period over the last few weeks. Hopefully, you’ll find it interesting.

At 6PM on February 23rd, 1981, Lieutenant Coronel Tejero, accompanied by armed soldiers, entered Spain’s legislative assembly to overthrow the young democratic government. He failed. Instead, King Juan Carlos and President Aldolfo Suárez became heroes by defeating the coup and opening the path for Spain to become the modern democracy it is today. Or so goes the legend. For the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, who lived through the events of that night, it is dismaying to see them pass into legend, turning a complicated night full of intrigue and ambiguity into a triumphalist moment of Spanish history whose only legacy seems to be the annual televising of Tejero’s entrance into the Congress of Deputies. The 30 seconds of televised memory isn’t enough, what is needed is a thorough investigation, and Cercas’s answer is the genre-bending novel, The Anatomy of a Moment, which examines every facet of the night in detail—sometimes excruciating detail. The novelistic approach lets him question one of modern Spain’s founding myths, but also invites controversy; Anatomy was a sensation is Spain when it was published in 2009. Now English-language readers have a chance to see why.

You can read all my other posts about Javier Cercas here.

Spring 2011 Quarterly Conversation Up Now

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The Spring 2011 issue of the Quarterly Conversation is up now. There are some interesting articles in this issue. I found the ones below of particular interest.

“I run with the future ahead of me and the cops behind me”: A roundtable on Margarita Karapanou

“I run with the future ahead of me and the cops behind me”: A roundtable on Margarita Karapanou

By Hilary Plum

There are writers who make you want to go back into writing. Karapanou makes you want to go back into living your life. She also belongs to this rare community of writers who work beyond influence; they are on their own. When I was in my twenties I tried to imitate my favorite writers, but with Karapanou it never worked. Her voice was so unique and what I wished for was just to listen to her voice. Her atmosphere influenced some of my stories but at that young age I always felt that I failed to create an atmosphere as extraordinary and magical as hers. As she doesn’t belong to a group of writers, her influence within Greek literature is difficult to be measured. I am afraid Greek literature looks always for ethnic characteristics, for more “Greekness” and Karapanou goes beyond Greekness. She is not at all interested in that stuff. Her Hydra is primarily a psychological landscape.

Notes Toward an Understanding of Thomas Bernhard

Notes Toward an Understanding of Thomas Bernhard

By E.J. Van Lanen

Bernhard’s novels move from the present to the past. There is an action, usually a suicide, that has happened before the novel begins. In The Loser it is the suicide of Wertheimer; in The Lime Works it is Konrad’s apparent brutal murder of his wife; in Woodcutters it is the suicide of the “movement-teacher” Joana; in Wittgenstein’s Nephew it is the death of Paul Wittgenstein; and in Concrete it is the continuing inability of Rudolf to write his treatise on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. By the time these novels have begun, all of these actions have already happened. What remains to Bernhard’s characters is to make some sort of sense of these actions, to provide a justification for the suicide, to explain their writers’ block, to seek out from all their relations with society, with history, with their own minds that have made this action somehow necessary or inevitable. They seek causes and try to discover in everything the logic that is dictating events.

Fictional History: The Irreverent Chronicles of Alfredo Iriarte

Fictional History: The Irreverent Chronicles of Alfredo Iriarte

By Andrea Rosenberg

Alfredo Iriarte’s Tropical Bestiary: Dictator Chronicles, a collection of biographies of nine Latin American dictators, is a text that refuses to be faithful to established institutions and ideologies. It resists and undermines mainstream historiography, and rebels against what Iriarte viewed as a whitewashing of barbarism and cruelty with glorious myths of national progress. Iriarte’s approach is both to emphasize horrific and grotesque moments in Latin American history, and to fictionalize history, abandoning strict historical accuracy and incorporating apocrypha and popular legends into the portraits, preferring literary qualities over stodgy factual precision.

IN TRANSLATION

From Tropical Bestiary: Dictator Chronicles by Alfredo Iriarte

From Tropical Bestiary: Dictator Chronicles by Alfredo Iriarte

Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In Tropical Bestiary: Dictator Chronicles, Colombian author Alfredo Iriarte wrote hilarious, grotesque biographies of nine Latin American dictators. The following chapter narrates the heartwarming tale of Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo and his equine sidekick Holofernes. A profile of Alfredo Iriarte can be found here in the current issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

REVIEWS

 

Six Novels in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward

Six Novels in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward

Review by John Lingan

Writing with twenty-six years’ hindsight, Eisner reclassified his trilogy as a work of “literary comics,” and claimed among his forebears Lynd Ward, the illustrator, printing press impresario, and woodcutter whose own Depression-era work has been recently compiled in two volumes by the Library of America and deemed Six Novels in Woodcuts. The Library’s collection, described on its packaging as “The Collected Works of America’s First Graphic Novelist,” has been edited and introduced byMaus author Art Spiegelman, and accolades from other contemporary comics legends, including Eisner, adorn the books’ gorgeous Art-Deco dust jackets.

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes

Review by Jordan Anderson

The novel takes the structure of what might be termed a “false” autobiography of the dictator, as imagined by Fuentes. (It is notable that the real Castro has written and published both the first volume of an autobiography covering his childhood and development as a revolutionary, as well as a “spoken autobiography” transcribed and organized by journalist Ignacio Ramonet.) Fuentes’s often violent descriptions of Castro’s mindset are beautifully composed, with a highly strung treatment of a life led under a seemingly unsustainable and unstable amount of pressure.

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita

Review by Rone Shavers

Weighing in at slightly over 600 pages, author Karen Tei Yamashita’s National Book Award-nominated I Hotel is an encyclopedic compilation of facts, personages, and allusions both common and obscure that could very well represent a turning point in Asian-American literature. A novel that took its author 10 years to write, I Hotel actually consists of ten “hotels”: loosely-associated novellas that detail the variegated strands of activism within San Francisco’s Asian-American community, circa 1968-1977. Yet such a description only hints at the obvious, surface-level aspects of the novel, while just underneath much more is going on.

Manazuru by Hiromi Kawakami

Manazuru by Hiromi Kawakami

Review by Gregory McCormick

Born in 1958 in Tokyo, Kawakami is one of Japan’s most celebrated novelists. She burst onto the scene in 1994 with her first short story which won the Pascal Short Story Prize for New Writers. Her novel, Manazuru, was published in Japan in 2007. It tells the story of Kei, a middle-aged Tokyo mother trapped in the confines of a rhythmic, if slightly off-kilter, life.

Interview with Cristina Fernandez Cubas in El ojo critico (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

El ojo critico has an interview with Cristina Fernandez Cubas about the redeiting of her book, Cosas que ya no existen. The book is a form of memoir and the excerpt they read on the show will sound familiar to anyone who knows the story the Clock from Bagdad (El reloj de Bagdad). Unfortunately, the story is not translated into English, or at least in a volume that I know of. The interview starts around minute 13 or so.

Hoy se ha fallado el segundo premio Aula de las Metáforas para Joan Manuel Serrat y le hemos llamado a Guatemala, donde está de gira, para felicitarle, además hoy hemos conocido que tiene tres candidaturas a los premios de la Música. Cristina Fernández Cubas reedita Cosas que ya no existen y con ella hemos estado hablando de cuentos. Segunda entraga de Música de Oscar con Arteaga y clásicos con Esther de Lorenzo completan el menú.

 

Fabio Morábito Short Story at Literal Magazine

~ bythefirelight

Literal Magazine has a short story from Fabio Morábito. For those of you don’t know who he is, he is a Mexican poet and fiction writer. He is well known for his poetry, although I haven’t read any of it, and received unending praise for his novel Emilio, los chistes y la muerte  which I reviewed some time ago. This story is interesting and in someways funny. Worth a read if you can read Spanish (I’m not sure how Google Translate would do, it still has problems with getting the gender right in pronouns.)

Está lejos de la parte más concurrida de la playa y, como de costumbre, mientras camina, mira las huellas de los bañistas en la arena. Le gustan los sitios apartados, donde las huellas son escasas y puede observarlas mejor. Mira el rastro de una madre y de su niño, que va en sentido contrario al suyo. Son pisadas de dos o tres horas atrás. Piensa que una mujer no se habría aventurado sola cargando a su niño hasta ese punto de la playa, así que también debió de acompañarlos el padre, cuyas huellas han desaparecido porque seguramente caminaba más cerca de la orilla y han sido borradas por el agua. Las del pequeño, que aparecen y desaparecen a intervalos regulares, indican que su madre lo cargaba, lo bajaba durante un rato y volvía a cargarlo. Donde sus huellas están ausentes, las de la madre se ven más delineadas por el mayor peso que sus pies soportaban en ese momento y el arco dactilar de ella se observa dilatado a causa del movimiento instintivo para proporcionar al cuerpo una mejor base de equilibrio. Él nunca se cansa de ver las alteraciones que tienen lugar en la anatomía del pie de una madre cuando ésta carga a su crío; incluso ha observado que la dilatación del arco dactilar se da espontáneamente en muchas mujeres con sólo mirar a un bebé.

To Be Continued – The Novel With Chapters By Different Writers Continues with Mallo

~ bythefirelight

I knew I recognized the name Agustín Fernández Mallo when I posted a video interview him last week, but I couldn’t place it. Now I found the article which I wanted to post about the subject. He has just written a chapter in the project To Be Continued, which features a different chapter by a different author, a difficult task if ever there was one. Santiago Roncagliolo was the first author and others have been chosen by a jury. You can check it out here.

From Moleskin Literario

El proyecto To Be Continued sigue viento en popa. Al primer capítulo, escrito por Santiago Roncagliolo, le han seguido tres autores jóvenes, elegidos por un jurado (entre los que me encuentro) sobre varios finalistas de mucho valor. Asimismo, las historias han sido ilustradas también con talento.

Ya tenemos cuatro capítulos escritos y el quinto capítulo tendrá un escritor invitado: Agustín Fernández Mallo, que tendrá la complicada labor de darle una vuelta de tuerca a la historia del detective Colifato y el crimen en la cartelera del High School Music. Complicado lo que le toca al narrador español, pero seguro saldrá bien librado del reto (él, que no le teme a los retos y ha publicado una versión del borgiano El Hacedor, ni más ni menos).

Si quieren ver los capítulos publicados hasta el momento, o saber cómo participar en el futuro, ilustrando o escribiendo continuaciones, pueden ir a la página web del proyecto.