Author: bythefirelight

More on Mexican Noir and the Black Minutes

~ bythefirelight

The Quarterly Conversation tipped me off to this review at the Nation written by the Translator Natasha Wimmer about the Black Minutes from Martín Solares. I’ve mentioned this book before and I continue to be intrigued by it. I think I will have to read it soon (and turn my gaze from Spain back to Mexico). Considering the troubles in Mexico the book seems timely, which may also be why it has been translated. Along with her praise of the book Wimmer gives some context to Mexican Noir, which is a new phenomenon, something that surprised me since I’m so used to the noir genre, even its imports from abroad. I wonder, though, if anyone can name noir works from Latin America as I’m at a loss at the moment?

Depending on how you look at it, the noir novel is either perfectly suited to Mexico or beside the point. It’s hard to imagine a plot that somehow encompasses the August massacre of seventy-two migrants in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, for example, or the Zacatecas jailbreak in late May when fifty-three inmates simply walked out of their cells. The scale of real-life crime is such that it dwarfs the classic private eye and makes him irrelevant.

And yet Martín Solares’s first novel, The Black Minutes, an uncommonly nuanced neo-noir—set, as it happens, in Tamaulipas—may be exactly the right book to read at the end of 2010, a particularly dark year in recent Mexican history. It’s crime fiction, but it’s also a meditation on corruption, and it captures the kind of nightmarish helplessness that many feel in the face of the tide of narco-violence sweeping the north of Mexico. In Tamaulipas alone, assassinations since June include the front-runner candidate for governor of the state and two mayors of a single small town over the course of two weeks. On September 19, after the killing of a photography intern, the Ciudad Juárez paper El Diario ran an extraordinary editorial asking the drug gangs for instruction: “We want you to explain to us what…we are supposed to publish or not publish…. You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city.” Scraping away some of the cool remove of the traditional noir, The Black Minutes gives a gorgeous, suffocating sense of life in Mexico’s sweltering northeast and an equally smothering sense of a justice system in which the concept of justice has been leached of meaning.

 

When Translators Go To Far – Caravana de Requerdos on The Swindler

~ bythefirelight

Over at Caravana de Requerdos (it is in English despite the title) there was an interesting discussion on how much the translator should try to help the reader understand a book, even to the extent they are adding elements that were not originally in the book. I can see why the translator added an element to his book, but it doesn’t do a service to the book. You can be overly faithful, but adding things is going to far. I still would like to read the book as I am not very familiar with that period of Spanish Literature.

At the beginning of Chapter Twelve in Alpert’s translation of The Swindler, we find the rascally narrator Pablos on the road to Madrid in the Castilla-La Mancha region in Spain.  “But to get back to my journey,” he writes, “I was riding on a grey donkey like Sancho Panza and the last thing I wanted was to meet anybody when, in the distance, I saw a gentleman walking along with his cloak on and his sword by his side, wearing light breeches and high boots” (147).  This gentleman, whose appearance, manners, and hard luck may superficially remind some of Don Quixote, will then fall in with Pablos for a spell in what looks like it could be a send-up of an adventure from Cervantes’ recent runaway best-seller.  So what’s the problem with such a tantalizing metafictional scene? It doesn’t appear this way at all in my Spanish version!  At least, there’s no mention of Sancho Panza in my Quevedo–just the detail that Pablos was riding on a “rucio de la Mancha” [gray horse from La Mancha] (II, 5, 95 in the Spanish text).  Is Alpert trying to embellish the Don Quixote-like “cameo” for English readers, using a variant text, or just making shit up?  It’s hard to say.  While there are at least threeBuscón manuscripts known to scholars in addition to various printed versions of the novel, Alpert never once mentions which version of Quevedo’s text he’s used as the source for his translation.  Kind of a big problem there, no?

New Directions to Publish Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory June 2011

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

New Directions is going to publish Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory (Tirana Memoria) in June of 2011. Below is a description of the book, or if you can’t wait you can read my review of Tirana Memoria. If you are familiar with his works which are marked with violence and extremes, Tirana Memoria is much more funny and not as heavy.

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez — known as the Warlock — who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Haydée Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Haydée’s political awakening in diary entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory — sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny — is an unforgettable incarnation of a country’s history in the destiny of one family.

Interview Cesar Arias and Review of Newest Book El error at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a long interview with Cesar Arias which is worth reading (and running through Google translate if need be). One of the things I found most interesting is that although he publishes something every year, his total lifetime out put is less than a 1000 pages. (via Moleskine Literario)

P. ¿Forma parte de su manera de escribir empezar contando una historia que después va abandonando?

R. Eso se me ha dado ahora, recientemente, porque he notado que muchas de mis novelas eran prácticamente una sola escena. Quise probar otras técnicas. Publiqué hace poco una novelita que se llama El divorcio, cuatro historias independientes metidas dentro de un marco. En este caso quise empezar con una historia y seguir con otra para ver qué pasaba, hacer una especie de díptico. Nunca son cosas deliberadas, voy improvisando las novelas a medida que las voy escribiendo, sin un plan.

P. ¿Arranca con la idea de una historia que quiere contar?

R. Sí, siempre empiezo con una idea. Tiene que ser una idea sugerente, no muy definida, de modo que me permita aventurarme en algo desconocido, pero siempre hay algo que me lleva a empezar. A veces es una idea más conceptual y a veces un lugar, los gimnasios, por ejemplo, o una ciudad.

P. Cuando empezó a escribir

El error, ¿existía el bandolero Pepe Dueñas?

R. No. La idea con la que empecé fue pequeñísima, la que está en las primeras líneas del libro, alguien que entra a la novela por una puerta que dice “error” y se justifica diciendo que era la única puerta que había. Esa fue una idea pequeñísima y tonta que se agotó en las tres primeras líneas, pero justamente es la clase de idea que me gusta porque me da completa libertad.

My idea of a writer:

P. Es curioso que mucha gente diga que es usted un autor prolífico, porque la verdad es que usted publica mucho, pero escribe poco. Lleva unos 60 libros publicados pero, en total, no serán más de 800 páginas.

R. Sí, a veces llego a publicar cuatro libros en un año, pero uno tiene 14 páginas, el otro 80 y alguno llega a las cien, o las pasa. Es mucho menos de lo que escribe cualquier periodista con una columna semanal. Yo escribo muy lento, media paginita por día. Escribo a mano. Y escribo en un café; todas las mañanas hago mi horita de escritura y tengo todo un fetichismo de lapiceras, cuadernos, papeles. Me gusta eso.

 

 

El Pais has a short review of Cesar Arias’ new book El Error. If you like Borgesian fiction, then this is a book for you, granted right now it is only in Spanish. Fortunately, he has many works translated into English. (Via Moleskine Literario)

(Emphasis mine)

La literatura como acto radical de fingimiento. Esto enseña siempre Aira, tal vez tras los pasos de Borges. Precisamente una palabra muy borgiana es el laberinto. Un concepto. Pues bien, en El erroralguien, el narrador, entra en un laberinto de historias hasta desembocar en su comienzo, pero ya sin su propia identidad. Destruido (u olvidado), el sujeto de la historia que se nos contaba se ha diluido en otras historias que ya nada tienen que ver ni con su voz ni con su existencia. Se ha impuesto la narración, la peripecia, distintos dramas, épicas, zozobras. La ficción pura. Empecemos por el principio, por definir un punto del que no estamos muy seguros que exista en esta novela. Un hombre (el narrador) y una mujer entran en el jardín de un escultor. Sabemos luego que dicho escultor mantiene una relación epistolar con una mujer que está presa (y condenada a cadena perpetua) por haber cometido un homicidio. Esta mujer nos conduce luego al mundo editorial. O a un mundo editorial muy sui géneris. De aquí saltamos a un relato épico en torno a la figura de un bandolero. A estas alturas el narrador primigenio ya está desaparecido. Y todo termina con Pepe Dueñas, el bandido legendario, y su mujer, Neblinosa. O mejor dicho, termina con el escultor del principio de la novela.

El error es una novela. Y la vez su alegoría. Tiene un mecanismo para que la novela funcione y a la vez es el mecanismo mismo de la ficción al desnudo. El humor, como en toda la literatura de Aira, juega en esta novela la función de contrapunto. El bandolero, Neblinosa, la presa que se cartea con el escultor, están descritos siempre al filo de la sonrisa inevitable. Pero la tristeza y la soledad y la incertidumbre que los afligen forman parte de su destino. Y este destino, Aira lo resuelve magistralmente con la descripción de una pesadumbre distantemente irónica. Y con algo de la impronta del maestro Macedonio Fernández. Al final, hemos disfrutado con una de las caras de la ficción, que como la vida tiene varias e ignotas. Nos enseña César Aira que la verdadera vida no está en otra parte. Está en la parte que miramos. Pero no vemos. Y en la vida que vivimos. O nos cuentan.

The Roberto Bolaño Syllabus at the Millions Updated With His Latest Published Books

~ bythefirelight

For Bolaño fans the Millions has updated their Syllabus, really a run down of what novels are the best and which ones are reading first. I’m not sure I agree with them on some choices, but at least you have a list in one place. It looks like there will be a couple more books of his coming out too.

Though the great Roberto Bolaño fever of 2008 appears to have moderated somewhat, this year saw new Bolaño titles pop up in American bookstores with the frequency of periodicals. We’ve probably passed that point in the hype cycle – and in Bolaño’s own back catalogue – where we might look for critical consensus: in January, reviewers seemed hesitant to gainsay Monsieur Pain; by autumn, The Return was getting a decidedly mixed reception. (In between, no one except our own Emily St. John Mandel seemed to know what to do with Antwerp.) So where was a Bolañophile to turn first?

We first tried to answer this question with our original Bolaño syllabus. With the aim of offering continued guidance to newcomers and enthusiasts alike, we’ve updated it below to take into account the two most recent novels and the thirteen stories in The Return. The Insufferable Gaucho will be added shortly. We continue to feel, hype notwithstanding, that this is one of the most important authors to emerge in the last decade, and we’ll try to stay on top of the work yet to appear: an essay collection, a book of poetry, and The Sorrows of the Real Policeman (a.k.a. the “sixth part of 2666.”)

New Novel About Cameron – Pistola y cuchillo – to Be Published

~ bythefirelight

You might be asking who is Cameron? He was one of the greatest flamenco singers of all time. A tragic legend who died before his time, but who left twenty albums of amazing material. I have all 20 albums, so I should know. Now, whether a novel about him is needed I don’t know, but it shows the power of his legacy that 20 years after his passing someone would publish a novel about him. I wish the author luck, but will be passing on it. An English language equivalent would be a novel about John Lennon or Curt Cobain. At least it gives me an excuse to put a few Cameron videos on the blog.

From El Pais

Camarón“Al rico camarón de la Bahía, al rico camarón de la Bahía, lo pesco de noche, lo vendo de día”, vocean con mucho soniquete en los aledaños a la venta de Vargas. En la puerta del local de San Fernando donde empezó a cantar José Monge cuando sólo era un niño rubio han colocado una estuta a la que le roban pedazos por la noche para venderlos después a los turistas. La historia tiene su guasa y encaja divinamente en el universo Camarón pero, en este caso, forma parte del arranque de la nueva novela deMontero Glez (Madrid, 1965), Pistola y cuchillo que El Aleph publica en noviembre. A Camarón, que ya cuenta con una ruta turística que atraviesa el pueblo donde nació y la fragua de su padre, sólo le faltaba convertirse en personaje literario. Con saltos al pasado, la acción transcurre a lo largo de una noche en la popular venta de María Picardo, considerado por los aficionados como una templo flamenco, con un Camarón ya tocado por la enfermedad que lo mató y fumando sin parar. En la vida real se fumaba tres paquetes de Winston yCarlos Lencero solía decir que “no dormía para seguir fumando”

 

 

 

Interview With Mario Vargas Llosa on Informe Semanal (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

It seems like Mario Vargas Llosa is all over the place. It must be nice to win the Nobel and have a new book coming out at the same time. Latin America and Spain’s latest addition to Nobel laureates talks about his new novel The Dream of the Celt with Informe Semanal on RTVE. It is a lengthy interview (17 min) and is worth checking out if you understand Spanish.  And if you want more of Vargas Llosa in Spanish you can watch a 2006 interview at El Publico Lee.

Decir Josep Ratizger es decir Benedicto XVI. Y decir “el escribidor”, es decir Mario Vargas Llosa. Este otoño, al escritor peruano se le han acumulado las grandes noticias: la concesión del premio Nobel, del que “casi”, sólo “casi”, se había olvidado, y la publicación de la que parece destinada a convertirse en una de sus grandes novelas, “El sueño del celta”.

La llamada de la Academia Sueca le sorprendió en Nueva York, dando clases en la Universidad de Princeton. Pero estas días ha vuelto a su casa de Madrid y allí nos ha recibido: para hablar de literatura y de su compromiso personal; para contarnos los secretos de “El sueño del celta”; para mostrarnos su corazón agradecido con España por muchos, eso dice él, grandes motivos.

 

Stay Where You Are – Quédate donde estás by Miguel Ángel Muñoz – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Quédate donde estás / Stay Where You Are
Miguel Ángel Muñoz
Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2009
154 pg

Miguel Ángel Muñoz’s Quédate donde estás is a playful work from an author who takes the art of the short story very serious and has created a work that both relishes the act of reading a well written story and the act of writing it. The stories shift between two themes: what it is to be a writer and what it means to face a loss, whether that loss is a fabulistic extra set of arms or Kafka losing his ideal place to work. While I find stories about writing sometimes tedious (even if you are a writer it never sounds that interesting), Muñoz injects a humor and insight that makes his works clever and perceptive. While the styles and themes clash at times and I’m not sure if all the micro stories between the larger stories create a cohesive work, Muñoz shows himself as a skillful cuentista (short story writer).

The first story of the collection Quiero ser Salinger (I Want to Be Salinger) is kind of a misleading opening, yet it is idea Muñoz returns to continually: how does life inform the writer. He is not interested in platitudes, but a question to reveal the art. In Quiero ser Salinger, the narrator wants to be a writer, a Salinger and for him it is taking on all the gestures of Salinger, his isolation, his strange habits. It is a Borgesian question about what creates the writer, the circumstances that one lives in, or something else? Would living as Salinger in Spain really make you a writer like Salinger?

The question is indicative of the questions Muñoz finds in the lives of the writers he explores. In the story Hacer feliz a Franz (Making Franz Happy), he creates a fictional bet between Franz Kafka and Jakob Blod, where Blod bets Kafka he could not stand to be a locked in a cell without human contact and just write for even a week. Naturally, Kafka loves the writing and he finds the need to leave the cell when the bet is over not a relief but a loss, as if his relation with the power of words has been disabled. He’s a man who seeks the ultimate isolation where words are more interesting than people and its the power in themselves, not the communication they facilitate that is most interesting.

In a more humorous vein is Vitruvio (refers to Da Vinci’s famous drawing of the proportions of a man). It is the story of a writer who under goes a transplant operation and has 3 extra sets of arms attached to his body so that he can be a more productive writer. It helps greatly as one pair of hands is incessantly scribbling notes in notebooks and he begins publishing at a feverish rate, becoming a great success. His personal life also improves, including his sex life: eight hand are better than two, it turns out. But one day he receives strange letter that says he has something that belongs to someone. He makes a journey to the address to find the original owner of the arms waiting for him. What ensues returns again to the question of what makes a writer, in this case the hands, or the mind? But what happens after you loose the power in the source? Muñoz treats writing not mystically, but fantastically, almost surprised that the power exits. His use of the fantastic as a way to get at the question is intriguing, something I see quite often in Spanish language writers, and adds not only a bit of humor, but a more nuanced way to get at the question. Having to bother with reality can be so limiting.

His wonderment at the power, though, doesn’t stop him from writing the more traditionally realistic El reino químco (The Chemical Rein). In El reino a young boy goes with his parents to visit his grandfather who he has no memory of ever seeing. His father hates his grandfather so until this one summer they have never met. From the start the visit is mysterious and plagued with troubles, the car breaks down and when they arrive he wakes up from a long nap and all he sees are stars, as if the whole world had disappeared. Quickly, though, the boy sees that the real problem is in the strained relationship of the grandfather and dad, which can’t even bear a week long visit. After an argument, of which the origins are never clear, the father demands they leave right away. The grandfather, taking his only opportunity to really get to know the boy, takes him to a secluded cove on his property where he has a little roller coaster suspended over the water which dumps the passenger into the water at the end of the ride. The boy at first says he’ll do it, then he struggles and fights, afraid to go down the track. When the grandfather is knocked into the water during the struggle the boy thinks he has killed him. Instead, the grandfather stands up and says, you’ve got more balls than you father. You’re alright. The strange reaction of the grandfather is what makes the story so interesting. Too often when a character is domineering any deviation from his rules is a weakness, but when they grandson says no, he is congratulated. What, then, did the son do that he hates his father so much? It is that open question that makes it one of the better stories in the collection.

Finally, I should touch on Muñoz’s style, which is clear and analytical, especially in his third person stories. However, he can shift styles as he does in Quédate donde estás, the eponymous story, where he shifts to a stream of conscious-like narration to examine the decisions a young makes when his girlfriend is found to have skin cancer just as he is leaving for university. The way he obfuscates, and reveals the story so that what ever decision he makes, is sure to be painful, if not wrong, is impressive.

Miguel Ángel Muñoz’s Quédate donde estás is a solid collection of stories, ranging from the funny to the painful to the intriguing. All of his stories are clever and well written and I hope to read some more of his work sometime. In the meantime I will continue to read his blog avidly. Hopefully, someday a few of his stories will make it into English.

You can read an interview in Spanish with him about Quédate donde estás.

Unedited Foreword to Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists at Three Percent

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Three Percent has reprinted the English introduction to Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. It is a good read for anyone interested in some of the thoughts that went into putting together the collection and some more general thoughts on writing and publishing in the Spanish and English speaking worlds.

Here’s the final part of the unedited version of Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles’s introduction to the special issue of Granta dedicated to “Young Spanish Novelists.” Part I is available here, Part II, here, Part II here, and you can download a Word doc of the entire piece by clicking here.

From the third post:

If a good part of contemporary Spanish literature seems eccentric to Europe, Latin America has always been the literary Far West, offering another way of being European, if you wish, since the traditions there incorporate all sources, not only their own. No other language shares the same territorial expanse (nor population) in contiguous “nations”. Its modernity seemed peripheral until its literature became contemporary of all men in the sixties: it brought about a renovation in the metropolises of various languages, thus moving the periphery into the center. The intellectual meridian has not passed through Madrid for over a century, although the publishing meridian cuts across both Madrid and Barcelona, where writers can be found building their reputations, which then furthers their regional prestige. The controversy over whether there are national literatures in Latin America has long become the stuff of historians, and we prefer to sustain, without excessive romanticisms, that the literary homeland is the language itself. Although in reality all literature is a magma of forces and traditions or trends in opposition, fluctuation and influence; of the living and the dead, of all languages—as is proven by reading the authors selected for this issue—and put in circulation by other hidden legislators: the translators, the editors and the critics (since without criticism there is no literature, either). In order to discover this, though, one needs to know the works, and this can only be done by reading, obviously, in translation. This issue, for example. Need we be reminded that a literary culture in which there is no translation is doomed to repeating the same things to itself over and over again?

Battlescapes: A Photographic Testament to 2000 years of Conflict – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Battlescapes: A Photographic Testament to 2000 years of Conflict (General Military)
Alfred Buellesbach and Marcus Cowper
Osprey Publishing, 2009 220pg

Battlescapes is a beautiful collection of photos taken on the battle fields of Europe showing what they look like now. It’s a truism to say that the older the battle field the less field has obvious marks of the battles fought. At best, there are monuments places over the last hundred and fifty years. Often, as the text makes clear, the monuments say more about those who erected them, than those who fought the battle. If one did not have the accompanying text the photos would just look like lovely photos of fields full of crops or freshly plowed waiting for the coming season’s planting. It is all very bucolic and without the text you wouldn’t know that 100,000 died here, 50,000 there. It is only the more modern wars, especially World War I where you see the evidence of war. This is partly because the fields have been preserved, but it is also due to the intensity of the industrial war that reshaped the land so thoroughly and left large sections of it unusable, which the French called the Red Zones where the mix of biological waste and unexploded ordinance made for dangerous going. It is that intensity that make the images of the World War I battle fields the most interesting, especially those of the Italian front where they fought even more pointless battles in the Dolomites. The photos of the Dolomites are stunning and it is a wonder why anyone would bother. Moreover, while the old battle fields often have markers that have more to do with an growing sense of nationalism, and less to do with the battles, the markers for World War I have an ironic gesture, massive sentinels to massive waste and dedicated only shortly before the start of the next one. It makes for a good companion to Nigel Jones, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front .

It is unfortunate, though, that such beautiful photos obscure what really happened. It is not the fault of the authors, it is the way nature erases what humankind destroys.

Lynd Ward’s Wood Cuts Collected by Library of America

~ bythefirelight

Library of America is releasing a two volume set of Lynd Ward’s wood cuts. I’m looking forward to them as they are some fascinating early to mid 20th century art. I’ve read Vertigo which is called his best work and it has left me wanting more. The NPR review was unimpressive, but it will give you a sense of his work, both its excellence and its flaws. You can see some of the drawings here.

As Spiegelman notes in his introduction (“Reading Pictures: A Few Thousand Words on Six Books Without Any”), Ward’s work doesn’t involve the familiar visual syntax we have come to associate with comics, with their motion lines and word balloons. Neither is he interested in guiding our eye across a succession of images arranged on a page, nor of controlling, by virtue of the placement and size of those images, the pace at which we read them. Instead, Ward’s one-image-per-page narrative places strict demands on his storytelling: Each image must stand alone and declare its message simply and unmistakably even as it builds on the images that preceded it.

The LOA edition’s layout — one woodcut per right-hand page, surrounded by generous margins — may be the one that Ward preferred, and it certainly allows readers to appreciate the unfussy force of his lines, figures and composition more easily than ever. But it does drive up the page count: Book One, including the Faustian fable Gods’ Man, the multigenerational gothic yarnMadman’s Drum and the imagistic folk tale Wild Pilgrimage, weighs in at over 830 pages. The nearly 700 pages of Book Two include Prelude to a Million Years, which explores the art vs. society theme Ward so adored, Song Without Words, a grimly terrifying and hallucinatory anti-war screed, and Vertigo, an ambitious and sprawling tale of class struggle told from multiple perspectives.

 

Women Dominate the Spanish Bestsellers Lists – Except for Ken Follett

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Moleskine Literario has a post pointing to an article in the Spanish news paper ABC that says that women are on top of the best sellers list, except, for good or bad, Ken Follett, who reigns supreme.  The authors are María Dueñas, Almudena Grandes, Julia Navarro y Elvira Lindo. The Dueñas is a historical novel, as is the Grandes, who, with this book, plans to publish a cycle of books that trace the last eight years of Spain, starting with the Civil War. She is attempting to write a 6 or 7 chronicle like Benito Pérez Galdós’ Episodios nationales. Elvira Lindo’s book takes place during the Movida in the early 80’s (I should know more since I watched an hour long interview with her to weeks ago, but I can’t seem to remember much more than that). She is also the wife of Munoz Molina (I don’t necessarily like to say who’s married to who since it lesson’s one’s role as a writer, but since she is little known in the US, I’ll break the rule).

María Dueñas, Almudena Grandes, Elvira Lindo y Julia Navarro no se han encontrado nunca codo con codo, pero en las listas de los más vendidos sí lo están. Hace semanas que han desbancado a los hombres -salvo al invencible Ken Follett– de la cabecera de los superventas en España, y lo han hecho a fuerza de trabajo, porque ninguna de ellas es una debutante.

Para la directora de la agencia literaria Pontas, Anna Soler-Pont, que estas maestras de la literatura coincidan en las listas “no es una casualidad. ¡Tenía que llegar este momento!“.Augura, así, que “en unas décadas” no se hablará de fenómenos como éste porque habrá “igualdad plena en todo tipo de listas, y no por las cuotas”.

Repaso a las listas

Según la lista semanal de La Casa del Libro, los más vendidos después de Follet son Dueñas, con El tiempo entre costuras (Temas de Hoy), Grandes, con Inés y la alegría (Tusquets) y en el puesto 13 Lindo, con Lo que me queda por vivir (Seix Barral).

En la Fnac la escritora española más vendedora ha sido Dueñas (en cuarto lugar), seguida por Grandes (quinto) y Lindo (décimo).El top ten de El Corte Inglés está copado de mujeres del tercer al sexto puesto en este orden: Dueñas, Grandes, Carmen Posadas -uruguaya, pero afincada en Madrid desde que tenía doce años- con Invitación a un asesinato (Planeta) y Julia Navarro, por su novela Dime quien soy (Plaza & Janés).

En ninguna de las tres listas las supera en ventas un autor español, y tan sólo el ex publicista John Verdon, con su opera prima Sé lo que estás pensando (Roca Editorial), y David Safier con su divertido Maldito Karma (Seix Barral) se atreven a sobrepasarlas en la lista de la Fnac.

Some Spanish Language Authors You May Not Know and Are in English Including Javier Cercas

~ bythefirelight

Jessica Crispin at PBS had a brief list of Spanish language authors (from the translator Anne McLean) you might have heard about, but should look into. It is a brief list but definitely worth looking at. One I’m looking at is Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas. It was a huge hit in Spain and occasionally controversial. I was happy and surprised to learn it was going to be published in English. As a Spanish fried asked, are English speakers going to understand it? I’m not sure, but if you like history and different ways of writing it, the book will be worth the read.

“Anatomy of a Moment”
by Javier Cercas
(will be released February 2011 by Bloomsbury)

“Three of the writers I translate are actually favorites of Vargas Llosa’s,” McLean wrote me, including Javier Cercas. McLean has translated Cercas before, and this latest is “about the 1981 attempted coup in Spain, which won the National Prize for Narrative the day after the Nobel was arrived.”

New Words Without Borders – The Modern Middle East

~ bythefirelight

The November, 201o Words Without Borders is available now covering the Modern Middle East. In this issue the Middle East is Turkey and lands to the East, rather than Arabic speaking lands.

This month we celebrate the publication of our fifth WWB anthology, Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, edited by Reza Aslan. The aim of this book, and of this complementary issue, is to provide a different, more authentic perception of this complex region, an image not fashioned by the descriptions of invaders, but rather one that arises from the diverse literatures of its most acclaimed poets and writers. These translations from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu display the rich poetic tradition of the region and provide a new paradigm for viewing the mosaic that is the modern Middle East. We hope that the writing presented here and in the anthology may help move our consciousness of the region away from the ubiquitous images of terrorists and fanatics and toward a new, more constructive set of ideas and metaphors—wrought by the region’s own artists, poets, and writers—with which to understand the struggles and aspirations of this restless and multifaceted part of the world.

You can read Arab Literature (In English’s) take on the Gibran piece here.

A Of Robert Alter’s “The Wisdom Books” at The New Republic

~ bythefirelight ~ 4 Comments

Adam Kirsch Reviews Robert Alter’s “The Wisdom Books” | The New Republic.

Robert Alter has come out with another translation of books from the old testament. This is the third book in his effort to translate biblical Hebrew into to a clear and as accurate as possible English. This collection covers Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs and adds to his work on Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses), I and II Samuel, and Psalms. If this book is as good as those of the The Five Books of Moses, then this will be well worth the read. The one thing I noticed, though, when I was reading the First Five, is that his copious notes, while fascinating, at times make for an exasperating read. I wanted to read all his interesting notes, but I found it distracting at times. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it makes for slow going.

Robert Alter’s ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more accurate and forceful English version is one of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age. Turning the Bible into Greek, in the second century BCE, required seventy-two sages—which is why the Greek version is called the Septuagint (after the Latin word for “seventy”)—and the King James Version, in the early seventeenth century CE, was produced by a committee of forty-seven Anglican divines. Yet Alter, working alone, has already produced new English versions of the Pentateuch, I and II Samuel, and Psalms. Now he gives us new renderings of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—possibly the most challenging and perplexing works in all of Scripture.

For this very reason, they are also the Biblical books that speak most directly to the modern, skeptical, secular reader. If the Torah is revelation—an ostensibly factual account of God’s actions and commandments—the Wisdom Books are a kind of counter-revelation: an emphatically human expression of the impossibility of knowing God or believing in His justice. As Alter writes in his introduction, “the three Wisdom books are, in different ways, worlds apart from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets.”

One sign of the difference is that Job, Proverbs, and Qohelet (Alter uses the Hebrew name, whose actual meaning is hard to ascertain, rather than the familiar Greek name Ecclesiastes) do not deal with the people of Israel, but with humanity in general. Job is a monotheist but not an Israelite; he lives in “the land of Uz,” which Alter glosses as “a never-never land somewhere to the east.” In Qohelet, God is referred to only occasionally, and then only as Elohim, not by His specifically Israelite name, Yahweh. And while Proverbs ascribes its often banal sayings to Solomon, at least one section of the book is an adaptation of an Egyptian text from the second millennium BCE, the “Instruction of Amenemope.” Indeed, the scholarly designation “wisdom books” assigns these texts to a genre that is also found in Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature. “The perspective of Wisdom literature,” Alter summarizes, “is international and, in many instances, one might say, universalist. It raises questions of value and moral behavior, of the meaning of human life, and especially of the right conduct of life.”

The Dylan Dog Case Files – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Dylan Dog Case Files
Bonelli Comics, 2009, 680 pg

The Dylan Dog Case Files are the most ridiculous and ludicrous comics I’ve read in ages. In some ways, because they are so silly, it was refreshing to read a comic that doesn’t take it self so seriously like those countless super hero comics that are filled with mopey teen age anxiety and cry about having super powers. On the other had, Dylan Dog is a repetitive joke that gets old. The Italians love them, 56 million copies of worth of love, but after the first story, which was actually funny, they slid into the realm of tiresome who done-its. Fortunately, it takes little time to read each story, so I don’t feel I lost wasted time reading them. You might be asking yourself why I read them in the first place as they really aren’t my kind of thing? It was the jacket blurb (yes, they do work): I can read the Bible, Homer, or Dylan Dog for days on end without every feeling bored–Umberto Eco. All I can say is his idea of boredom and mine are two different things.

Dylan Dog is an investigator of strange cases, kind of a paranormal Sherlock Holmes. Typically the cases revolve around beautiful women who he manages to seduce in each episode. Like hard boiled novels, he is outside the law and often in trouble, but in the end always the one who figures out the problems. His cases range from zombies to serial killers and as in any detective story he usually gets something wrong–falls for the wrong woman, believes the wrong man–before he solves the case, often with his superior fighting skills. Accompanying him is his trusty helper and Groucho Marx clone, who loves to tell Goucho like jokes: I gave my cat lemons to eat and now I have a sour puss. (I’d love to know what the original was, because that joke can only work in English.) In the first story when the Groucho had more of a role, it was funny, but as the stories went on and he disappeared into the background, the humor abated.

There is certainly a charm to the Dylan Dog character. The wise cracking loner has so many possibilities, but the repetitive and predictable nature of the stories quickly grows tiresome after a while.

From Arabic Literature – Iraqi Literature in Translation: A Brief Introduction

~ bythefirelight

Arabic Literature in English has compiled another one of her excellent lists on books in translation, this time Iraqi Literature in Translation.

My list is anything but comprehensive. (For instance, several authors who made the Arab Writers Union’s “Top 105″ list are not here because they haven’t been translated.) If you’re looking for more seasoned authors, check the list. If you’re looking for more young authors, visit Blasim’s “Iraq Story” website. I also recommend the anthology Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (edited by Shakir Mustafa) and Banipal 37: Iraqi Authors, for writers who are sometimes a bit off the beaten path.

I’m still working my way through Banipal 37, but I have already come across some interesting writing. There is definitely some interesting work coming from Iraq.

16 Excerpts from Mario Vargas Llosa’s Newest Novel

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais has 16 excerpts selected by Mario Vargas Llosa’s from his newest novel about the Belgian Congo and Roger Casement who fought to end the horrendous condition. I’ll be curious to see the reviews. He certainly despised the system the Belgians instituted, but will that make an interesting novel? Man’s inhumanity to man is boundless. I hope he has something interesting to say about it. You can see the photos that accompany the excerpts here.

La Force Publique se enquistó, como un parásito en un organismo vivo, en la maraña de aldeas diseminadas en una región del tamaño de una Europa que iría desde España hasta las fronteras con Rusia para ser mantenida por esa comunidad africana que no entendía lo que le ocurría, salvo que la invasión que caía sobre ella era una plaga más depredadora que los cazadores de esclavos, las langostas, las hormigas rojas y los conjuros que traían el sueño de la muerte. Porque soldados y milicianos de la Fuerza Pública eran codiciosos, brutales e insaciables tratándose de comida, bebida, mujeres, animales, pieles, marfil y, en suma, de todo lo que pudiera ser robado, comido, bebido, vendido o fornicado.

Stephen Fry – Against the Pedantic Grammarians

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

This isn’t a brand new video, but since I have a distaste for self appointed grammarians I enjoyed it quite a bit. And Frye knows how to make words seem fun, a real talent.