Author: bythefirelight

Magdy al-Shafee’s Metro to be Published in English in 2012

~ bythefirelight

Arabic Literature in English is reporting that Magdy al-Shafee’s Graphic Novel Metro which has been baned in Egypt will be coming out in English in 2012. I don’t have too much more information on the book, but I have been waiting for this to get published into English or Spanish so I could give it a read. It has gotten a lot of good criticism. You can read an excerpt at Words Without Borders (link below).

And, further on the good-news front, Magdy al-Shafee’sMetro, which was yanked from stores in April 2008, will receive a new edition. According to al-Shafee,Metro will be republished by Dar Merit (in Arabic) in conjunction with a Lebanese publishing house.

Metro also will also soon have an English version. The graphic novel—the first Egyptian graphic novel for adults—has been translated in full by Humphrey Davies, who earlier translated an excerpt for Words Without Borders. It will be published in early 2012 by Metropolitan Books, which also publishes Joe Sacco.

 

Reworking Borges, What Could be More Borges – Agustín Fernández Mallo

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Canal-L has an interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo about his new book El hacedor (de Borges), Remake  {The Maker (by Borges), Remake}. It is a work that takes its inspiration from Borges. If it was anyone else besides Borges, I would be doubtful, but following from Borges seems to make sense.

“Crear no es más que ver la realidad como si fueras un marciano” / To create is nothing more than to see reality as if you were a Martian.

Finalists for the Short Story Prize II Premio de Narrativa Breve “Ribera de Duero”

~ bythefirelight

The finalists for the second prize for the short story  Ribera de Duero (II Premio de Narrativa Breve “Ribera de Duero”) was announced last week.  via Moleskin Literario). I’m not familiar with any of them, but neither was I with Javier Sáez de Ibarra who won last year and I liked the story that was in El Pais. The winner is announced on the 31st of March.

Convocado por el Consejo Regulador de la Denominación de Origen Ribera del Duero y la editorial Páginas de Espuma, la segunda edición del Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero ya tiene a sus finalistas. Las obras que entran en la selección final, seleccionadas de entre seiscientos sesenta libros de cuentos presentados por escritores de veinticinco nacionalidades, vienen firmadas por siete primeros espadas “de perfil muy heterogéneo”, según el comité de lectura, “aunque todos ellos están ligados desde hace tiempo al mundo de las letras”. Los miembros del jurado, cuya identidad se desconoce, dará a conocer el nombre del ganador el próximo 31 de marzo, día en que se celebrará el acto de entrega en el Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.

El ganador de la edición anterior fue Javier Sáez de Ibarra por su obra Mirar al agua.

Finalistas del II Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve
“Ribera de Duero”

– Dioses inmutables, amores, piedras, de Lolita Bosch

– Cuatro cuentos de amor invertebrado, de Marcos Giralt Torrente

– Ensimismada correspondencia, de Pablo Gutiérrez

– No hablo con gente fea, de Marcelo Lillo

– Ideogramas, de Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez

– El libro de los viajes equivocados, de Clara Obligado

– Los constructores de monstruos, de Javier Tomeo

 

Excerpt Of The Century Behind Me: A Family Saga by Eloy Urroz at Ezra Fitz dot com

~ bythefirelight

Ezra Fitz, the translator of Alberto Fuguet, has an excerpt of The Century Behind Me: A Family Saga by Eloy Urroz which he has translated and is looking to publish. As with his excerpt from Missing, it is a generous excerpt and worth a look.

The protagonist is a woman by the name of Silvana Forns Nakash, and the novel traces the history of her family, told in her own voice. She is a Mexican American, born in the US to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, torn between countries, cultures, and languages.  In coming to terms with her own identity, she paints a Diego Riveraesque mural of the century preceding her birth, one whose scenes include a Syria decimated by cholera, revolutionary Mexico under Cardenas, an Edenic kibbutz in Israel, and a the free-wheeling 60s and 70s right here in America.

In case that sounds at all intriguing, I’m posting an excerpt here from my own sample translation.  Please read, and enjoy.

In October of 1918, General Allenby’s cavalry had retaken Damascus and captured some 75,000 Turks and Germans.  The outbreak of malaria—brought by mosquitoes from the Euphrates—came on the wings of the cholera epidemics that had twice (in 1823 and 1832) already decimated the population.  The so-called “Spanish Flu” also swept through Europe and the Middle East in those days, leaving as many dead as the entire Great War itself had.

Once Damascus fell, the final Ottoman redoubt was Aleppo and its surrounding areas, a city that once—and for three centuries—had remained under Ottoman control, until 1833 when it fell to the Egyptian forces led by Muhammad Ali.  The German general von Oppen, who had managed to keep his troops together, died of cholera, leaving a power vacuum that Allenby took advantage of with his attack on the last bastion of central European forces.  Nevertheless it would be none other than Commander Macandrew who would finally retake Aleppo for the Arabs and, of course, for the French (into whose hands it would pass in 1920).  That final campaign took place in Haritan, to the northeast of Aleppo, finally resulting in the armistice of October 31, 1918.  The war had ended, but not the consequences of pain and death that cholera, malaria, and violence had left in their wake.

March 2011 Words Without Borders Out Now: At the Movies, and Jorge Eduardo Benavides

~ bythefirelight

The March 2011 Words Without Borders is out now. It is focusing on the Movies. Also, and perhaps of more interest to this blog, the Peruvian author Jorge Eduardo Benavides has a short story and an essay in the issue. Always an interesting read:

Now showing: a celebration of film around the world. We’re offering a double bill of documentaries and features, with memoirs from international directors and screenwriters complemented by tales of characters immersed in a world of film. From close-up to wide angle, on location and off in a dream world, these writers provide a panoramic view of the cinematic world. In two stories of film’s international reach, Ryu Murakami’s yakuza finds a soulmate in small-town Texas, while João Paulo Cuenca’s Brazilian slacker aspires to la dolce vita. Montreal’s Robert Paquin describes the delicate art of dubbing profanity. Japanese director Nishikawa Miwa recalls the nightmare origins of her Sway, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s assistant director Flavio Niccolini shares his diary from the set of the masterpiece Red Desert. Strega Prize-winner and screenwriter Domenico Starnone recounts the beginning of his lifelong infatuation with film. And the great Saadat Hasan Manto pens an amused portrait of the Pakistani star Nur Jehan. We hope you’ll find this issue a blockbuster.

Elsewhere, in poetry from three continents, Algeria’s Habib Tengour reflects on exile and identity, Australia’s Cobbin Dale spins an Aboriginal folk tale, and Vietnam’s Nguyen Phan Que Mai moves between earth and sky. In the second installment of “Our Man in Madrid,” Peruvian Jorge Eduardo Benavides depicts a society caught in the grip of a deadly presence. In another story of menacing elements,  Eom Jeong-Hui and Ko Im-Hong return with the second chapter of their graphic novel The Secret of Frequency A.

Missing (una investigacion) by Alberto Fuguet – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Missing (una investigacion) /Missing (My Uncle’s Story) (Spanish Edition)
Alberto Fuguet
Alfaguara, 2010 pg 386

Alberto Fuguet’s Missing (una investigacion) is one of the most interesting books I’ve read for sometime. In it Fuguet continues his explorations of modern life, the interchange of culture between Latin America and the United States, and the mixing of genres that have marked books like Shorts, and applies those elements to his own family, examining what made his Uncle Carlos disappear, to go missing. More than an immigrant narrative, more than a critique of American society, Missing is the story of a man never quite lives the American dream, but lives a life that is all too American.

Carlos Fuguet is one of three sons of a Chilean patriarch who moves the family to the United States in the early 1960s after his fortunes change and he his forced to drive a taxi. The father is a tough and proud man and the thought of driving a taxi is impossible to accept. He moves the family to the US even though that means moving his teenage boys to a country where they don’t speak much English. Carlos, who had always been the good student, the one expected to succeed, soon finds himself adrift. After high school he works as a busy boy in a hotel near LA’s airport and living in a dive in Hollywood since he can’t stand his parents. It is a lonely experience and in one of the more moving episodes he breaks down crying on the Santa Monica pier. A young American sailor comforts him and Carlos says at that moment he finally lost his fear, the fear that had come form being a stranger and alone. Yet that loneliness and living on the margin in dives will follow him throughout his life. Even in the early chapters it is obvious that Carlos finds the need to escape, to be away from his family, especially his father, at all costs.

To understand Carlos, one has to know more about his father. He is a cold man who holds his family at a distance. In a telling moment early on, when Alerto is relating his experiences with the man his grandfather says, “No me tratas de tu. No Soy tu padre…” (Don’t call me by you (familiar form), I’m not your father…). For a Spanish speaker it points to a grandfather who is cold, distant. There will be no grandfatherly indulgences. That coldness is only magnified when describing the relationship between the father and the sons. Carlos can never forgive him, nor his mother who even if she didn’t overtly side with him, always stayed with him and never defended Carlos. Later, when the Carlos’s father is dying and Carlos calls, his father says, “you are a disappointment, we never want to talk to you.” Even on his death bed the father refuses to forgive, and to make he worse he uses the we as if the rest of the family agreed with him. But it is not surprising as he is the father who said when Carlos wanted to buy a car,

tu no, no necesitas un auto,
todos necesitan un auto en los angeles, le dije,
tu no, no necesitas ir a ninuna parte,
aqui esta tu familia
quiero otras cosas que mi familia, le dije.
ah, esos amigos gringos tyuos, me dijo,
te van a arruinar

you don’t need a car,
everyone needs a car in los angeles, i told him,
you don’t need a car to go anywhere,
here is you family
i want other things than my family, i said.
ah, your gringo friends, he said,
they are going to ruin you

The argument is a typical father son argument, and shows a father that despite the successes he would have in the US, he never could see him self as an American. But the family problems run deeper than arguments between first and second generation. In an even stranger episode Alberto notes that Carlos is the second Carlos, the first one was a baby that didn’t live past 1 year. When Carlos was born he was named just like the first. One has the sense that Carlos could never quite live up to what the you Carlos might have.

From such beginnings, Carlos lives a life that is one series of disappointments. When he is 21 he marries a 17 year old and unsurprisingly the marriage lasts less than a year. Latter he marries a rich woman he meets in New Port Beach and while the relationship works, he begins to envy her money. In a fit of frustration he embezzles from a religious community so that he can take her to Vegas. He’s caught and goes to jail for the first of two stints in prison. It is from then on that he seems to live at the margins of American life, if not on the run from the police, then trying to survive the best he can. It is not an easy life and although there are moments of happiness and companionship, he lives alone moving from place to place. For awhile it seems to he has found a place in hotel management, but even that dissipates. At times he is the epitome of Americanness, pulling himself up from his bootstraps, becoming a hotel manager even though he had done two terms in jail for theft. But something always goes wrong and he is left on the margins of society. He is just unable to win.

Towards the end of the book, Alberto asks himself, for all the years he’s worked why doesn’t he have anything to show for it? After having a successful run with a hotel chain turing around troubled hotels he ends up in a run down hotel in Vegas living in a room that is filled with old fast food containers. The irony is he has been living one of the dark sides of the American dream, frittering away his money on silly things, always short on money. In one of the more telling episodes, during the 1980’s Carlos buys an expensive VCR for his father. It is an expensive piece of equipment that makes his father angry. Carlos had only good intentions in giving the VCR, but it shows complete emersion in consumer culture. Missing is not only the troubled story of a rootless immigrant, it is destructive longing for the American dream that is always one purchase away.

Missing, true to its investigative nature, is not a complete story, but one with lacuna and unanswered questions. Alberto uses different genres to approach the unanswerable from as many directions as possible. The bulk of the book is a long poem in Carlos’s voice which lets you see the story as Carlos sees it (and Alberto writes it down). He also includes personal memory, a third person history of his journey to his grandfather’s house, and the abortive first interviews he made with Carlos in a Denver Denny’s. The multiple points of view allow Alberto to comment of Carlos’s story and reveal a fuller picture of Carlos. Much of the family hatred for Carlos’s father comes from these scenes and it makes Carlos a more sympathetic character, one you can almost understand. What also comes is Alberto’s confusion, disappointment and melancholy as he learns Carlos’s life. For Alberto, Carlos had always been the cool uncle, the one who went his own way and disappeared. But that disappearing act was not as glamourous as it seemed from a distance.

One of Alberto’s skills as a writer is to use the detritus of everyday life in his works without it seeming cloying. He has always used product names in his books, but not heavy handedly like a Steven King. They are just something one comes across and occasionally mark certain societal transitions:

Estaba en Las Vegas, en contacto con el mundo, con una direccion que aparecia en Google Earth.

He was em Las Vegas, in contact with the world, with a an address that appeared in Google Earth.

In Missing his use of  this adds to the already strong element of Americanness. Not only does Carlos’s story resonate as an American story, but Alberto shows himself to be a keen observer of American life, something only someone who has lived in a country can show. It is that mix of observation and detail in telling Carlos’s story that makes the book an American story.

Alberto Fuguet considers this his most American book and he is right. Carlos is the other side of America, the one that is free to try and try again, yet it is a futile effort. It is the more than the story of an immigrant, but a story of the other America that lives at the edges of the American Dream.

You can read an excerpt of the book at the translator’s site.

Kafka and Adolfo Bioy Casares – at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

 

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

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

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

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

[…]

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

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

 

Keys to New Spanish Literature at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

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

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

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

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

Antonio Muñoz Molina Interview on 1001 Noches (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

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

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

From Fitz’s intro:

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

Here is the opening:

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

That was the last we ever heard of him.

From that point on, he was gone.

Missing.

Nobody knew where he was.

Carlos Fuentes on Mario Vargas Llosa and Latin American Dictators

~ bythefirelight

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

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

[…]

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

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

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

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

Short Videos of Spanish Authors at Conocer Al Autor

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

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

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

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

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

~ bythefirelight

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

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

Spanish women writers to watch at Books on Spain

~ bythefirelight

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

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

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

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

 

Portions of Granta Spanish Translation Online

~ bythefirelight

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

From the print edition, free to read online: