Scott at Conversational Reading is putting together a new group read for the fall. You can make your voice heard if you hurry. This time it won’t be as long as the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.
Author: bythefirelight
Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, Historian of Mexico Has Died
The great historian of Mexico, Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, has died. It has been some time since I have read his work, especially The Great Rebellion: Mexico 1905-1924 (Revolutions in the Modern World)
The LA Times has the full obit.
In 1998, the 77-year-old American son of Mexican immigrants joined historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., biographer Stephen E. Ambrose, novelist E.L. Doctorow and five other distinguished Americans who were awarded the National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony.
In the classroom and through his books, Ruiz told the San Diego Union-Tribune before traveling to Washington, he sought to “convey the complexity and excitement of Mexican history. I especially try to convey the great cultural richness of Mexican life and of Mexican literature.”
What to Do With Books That Have No Value: Sell Them By The Pound
I have always had a hard time getting rid of old books, even ones I’m not going to read. It seems one step removed from book burning, which is the devil’s playground. I do fool myself into thinking they will all go to good homes when I give them to the library sale, but I’m sure some don’t find a home. Well now if you want to be kind to books and save them you can buy those ubiquitous 1¢ books you see on Amazon and the like by the pound. All you have to do is go to the warehouse of Once Sold Tales. I know that books aren’t forever, but perhaps a little scarcity might be in order some day.
“Used books are now completely commoditized,” Eric says. “You have to price your books below all competitors, constantly, or they won’t sell.”
But the reason I’m here is that there was a strange twist on the way to the Web revolution. The books somehow got left behind.
It turns out that in the ruthlessly efficient, instantly updateable Web market, countless books are no longer worth selling, because it costs far more to ship them than the market judges they are worth.
“Book prices are so low they’re becoming a disposable product,” Eric says.
Take “The Trumpet of the Swan,” E.B. White’s classic about a voiceless swan who learns to speak by playing a stolen trumpet. What’s it worth, used, on the Web right now?
Only one cent, believe it or not. Plus $3.99 to mail it to you.
via the Seattle Times.
When Writing Groups Go Bad: The Cat Man
I should have known better, but I was somewhere between desperate and lonely, that place writers who want to be read often find themselves and which leaves them susceptible to the power of assertive critics. Sure, giving the story you slavishly worked over for days to someone who is never going to read it often comes to a disappointing nothing, but its just a sin of eagerness. Giving your mailable self over to a self appointed arbiter of taste is another mater.
I met the Cat Man at a local writers group after the night’s speaker had spent 45 minutes explaining the best way to do goal setting. My least favorite thing to hear about in writing groups. The Cat Man was an older fellow with white hair and glasses, and wore a button down collar and white sweater. He came right over to me—I was the only stranger—and introduced himself. He told me within 30 seconds that he hosted a writing group at his home. He had done it for years and had had helped the writing of a local author whose books I had vaguely heard of. What he didn’t do, was write. I should have thought that was a bad sign, but I’m not particularly tied to the notion that everyone in a group needs to participate. Anyway, it had been a couple years since the last group so I was more than eager.
The next week I arrived at his home around 7. It was an old craftsman and was well taken care of. I knocked and he let me in, recognizing me from the week before. As I walked into the house, though, I was overcome by the smell of cat, or to be more precise, litter box. I don’t hate cats, just that smell. I’ve never understood how people can live with that, but I ignored the smell as best I could and entered the dining room where two other writers were waiting. When I took a seat his wife asked if I wanted coffee. It seemed like a good sign, especially since she looked like a kindly grandmother, and picturing them both together they were quite charming.
After the coffee came, we all traded stories and I read the two pieces of fiction from the other two, while he read all three of ours. Normally, I like to know something about the people I’m trading writing with, so I can know if it is really going to be interesting. With this group I didn’t have any option but to read. It was one of the most painful 20 minutes of reading I’d ever done in my life. Not only was their writing uninteresting, it was so badly written that I think a tenth grader must have written both of the pieces. I’ve read uninteresting things that at least held together, but this stuff was in such desperate need of work.
My mind quickly wandered. I hoped I could make it down to the Trader Joe’s before they closed to buy a case of wine since I’d just gotten a raise and I wanted to celebrate. I couldn’t leave, though. That would have been rude. So I waited until the Cat Man finished marking up our work.
When we finally got to the criticisms and talked about the other writing, he mostly said good improvement. I don’t even want to think about what those writers had written before. It was obvious that he was shepherding along his foundlings and they were slowly becoming what he envisioned. When he came to mine, I knew we would be in conflict. He had begun punctuating my first paragraph and chopping it up into small pieces. Sure the sentences were long. I knew that, but that was part of the deal. He looked at me and said, “these sentences are too German. They don’t work in English.”
Too German? What does that mean? And, really, what’s wrong with a little German flavor now and then? His criticism is the kind that ticks me off, because it doesn’t ask the question, does this work? Rather, it asks, is this in Stunk and White, because that is the limit of my thinking. I wasn’t going to pay much more attention to him, because he obviously wasn’t going to be helpful. What I want in a critic is to know what they see. I know what I want to happen, but is it there? It is the hardest thing for a writer to do. Instead, I found a fellow who subscribes to those tired dictums, such as, always use Anglo Saxon words instead of Latin and French imports, but I like to eat beef instead of cow, and I’d rather live in a mansion than a house.
My mind had already shifted back to the case of wine at Trader Joe’s, when he said, “you shouldn’t be so serious.” Serious? Now he had lost me. Why should I be funny? I’m not a comedian, so I seldom write comedy. It wasn’t as if I was writing about a Dickensian work house, either. On your first encounter with an author, especially his first four pages, you should refrain from suggestions on the weight of material. If you are going to be helping the writer through to the next level, you need to know what the writer is about. There will be plenty of time for readers to say someone is too serious.
Needless to say I left as quickly as I could. It was too late to get my cheep case of wine, but at least I didn’t have to smell that cat box, which I never got used to. When he emailed me the next week to ask I was coming, I politely declined. I wish I had said, “I’m sorry but I’m moving to Germany where they will understand me.”
Miramar by Nagib Mahfouz – A Review
Miramar
Nagib Mahfouz
Nagib Mahfouz’s comparably brief novel, Miramar, captures a moment of great change in the history of Egypt through the lives of the inhabitants of a the pension Miramar. Although politics are ever present in the background, the novel focuses on the way the lives of the inhabitants of the pension have been changed by the Nasarite revolution of the late 50s. Mahfouz, the great story teller he his, uses the personal disappointments brought on by the revolution to draw a picture of a country trying to radically change, yet tied to the past and unable to change many of its ways despite official policies. His subtle focus on the relationships between the characters of the pension, drawing out the conflicts between the shifting class of people, lifts the book above politics and draws a fascinating picture of classes rising and falling.
Miramar is divided into four chapters, each told by a different resident of the pension. Amir Wagdi, the first to narrate, is a retired journalist who provides a historical memory to the story. He had seen the uprising against the British in the twenties and later the revolution. A long time friend of the proprietor of the pension, Mariana, he has returned an old man, content to live in his memories and accept what his life has given him. He has a sage like quality that in conversation with his contemporary the Pasha, a rich man now disposed of most of his lands, he is able to avoid arguments about politics. Much of his chapter has a dream like feel of the lost, and his interactions with the Pasha and Mariana recall the days when he was amongst the action, before their respective lives and the movements they belonged to failed and faded into the past.
When a young peasant girl, Zorha, comes to work at the pension, everything changes for the boarders. For Amir Wagdi, he takes on the role of a grandfather, hoping for her to succeed as she attempts leave the country side and survive in a world where everyone wants to take her independence. Zorha is a defiant woman who had left the village when her family wanted her to marry someone she didn’t want to marry. Surrounded by men in the pension, she stands up to them and though shy she, she is strong enough to fight back against all the things that befall her. She is one of the few characters in the book that really is looking towards the future and doing it on her own terms. She is illiterate, but hires a teacher to learn to read even though most people tell her it is a waste of time. She is also one of the few, perhaps the only, who is good hearted. One read could see Zorha as the future of the new Egypt, but Mahfouz is too clear eyed for that simplicity, because all the young who live in the pension either want the old society, or are just looking for ways to exploit the new corruption that has replaced the old corruption. Nor is the country side a bastion of wisdom. If it were, Zorha wouldn’t have needed to leave the country side. Instead, Mahfouz celebrates an individuality that is strong and not tempted by the faults of society.
The other men, Husni Allam, a rich playboy, Mansour Bahi, an indecisive radio host, and Sarhan al-Behairi, a low ranking party man whose is looking to make money on the black market, have only one interest: what they can get for themselves. They are consumed by lust, which varies in cruelty, but is all consuming and is an attempt themselves in a position of power, using women without care. The hustling nature puts them in conflict with each other, especially as they fight for Zorha’s affections. Ultimately, the mix of hustling, sexual tension and the close confinement leads to the murder of Sarhan al-Behairi, who is found on a street one morning. As each of the three men narrate their section, the events that lead up to al-Behairi’s death become clearer. It is obvious that none of these men are particularly praiseworthy. Yet even in a character such as Husni Allam, Mahfouz creates evocative characters that also express the frustrations of men who, in many ways, don’t have many options. On the one hand, the rich are loosing their lands, and on the other those are part of the new regime can’t get ahead either. The frustrations add complexity to what might have otherwise been a simple tale of lust and envey.
Ultimately, it is not important if al-Behairi’s murderer is found, what is important is Mahfouz’s picture of post revolution Egypt. The conflicting interests and impulses he presents avoids the pessimistic, yet there is an air of fatalism in the characters who cannot get beyond their pasts. Only Zorha offers hope, but it is unclear what that it is. It is not for Mahfouz to describe the future. Still, one hopes Zorha will survive, for it suggests there is a future worth having.
Christina Fernandez Cubas – Reinvigorating the Spanish Short Story
In this review
Mi hermana Elba (My Sister Elba)
Los altillos de Brumal (The Attics of Brumal)
from Todos los cuentos (All the Stories)
Tusquets, 2008
Christina Fernández Cubas is considered on of the most important Spanish short story writers since the end of the Franco era. Starting with her first book, My Sister Elba, published in 1980, she has been continually praised as important author by authors such as Enrique Villa-Matas (Spanish only) who recently said, “as everyone knows, her book My Sister Elba was decisive in the revitalization of the genre of the short story in Spain at the end of the 70s.” Her work is lauded for its inventiveness and the originality of her imagination, and a reading the relatively little she has published, bares out the praise. While it can be hard for an someone not familiar with the history of the Spanish short story to know if her impact was that great, her stories transcend any historical moment and are gems of story telling.
Cubas’ stories all fall within the genre of fantastic literature, yet in the same way that Poe, one of her favorites, is more than just spooky stories for Halloween, her works transcend genre. Often she focuses on the border lands between childhood and adulthood, creating a worlds were the impossible exists for children, and is unimaginable by adults. These dualities also intersect age and class, so that the modern, educated adult may look for rationality where there is none.
El reloj de Bagdad (The Clock from Baghdad) is probably the best example of this tension. In the story, the father of two young children brings home an antique clock one day. It is a beautiful clock with exquisite complications, yet the two old women who live in the house and have taken care of the family for years, don’t trust it. They think it is cursed. One won’t even go near it and leaves the house after years of service. The children, too, are scared of it. Yet the clock hasn’t done anything specific. The narrator, one of the now adult children, only can give us a sense of its immensity, as if that presence alone was enough to scare. When the family returns from a vacation the house is on fire and one of the few things they can save is the clock. The fire seems to confirm the curse. And when the father wants to sell it, the antique dealer refuses to take it back. Ultimately, the family moves out of town on the Day of San Juan, and the old women burn the clock in one of of the many pyres that mark the day.
The Clock from Baghdad has all the elements that mark her work. First, the story has an uncertain narrator who is always looking back into a past that is not only hazy, but a way of thinking that doesn’t exists for her anymore. Second, it is peopled with children who don’t understand the grown up world, and who make their own world, which creates a tension that is often mysterious, but can also be a possibility that is no longer possible to express. Her stories, however, do not rest on simple platitudes of the incorruptibility of children or their innate goodness. Cubas is too inventive to let her stories conclude so easily.
Mi hermana Elba, the title story of her first work, shows how she uses childhood as a distant place that has different powers, but can be as terrifying and cruel as the adult world. The narrator opens the story looking at an old note book and wondering how she wrote it. It appears as something unconnected to her. In its pages are one year of her life when when she attended at Catholic boarding school with her younger sister, Elba. It is a lonely experience at first, but then she meets an orphan from the neighboring village who lives in the school. Together they explore the off limits quarters where the nuns live. One day when a nun returns suddenly to her room, the girls hide in a corner where the nun should have seen them, but for some reason does not notice them. It is here that the orphan reveals the secret pockets throughout the school where one can hide in plain sight. They explore all of these together. Elba, though, is the best at them and often can go deep into the secret spots so that her voice sounds plaintive, lost. Then summer comes and when the orphan returns, she is no longer interested in the hiding spots and has changed her interest to boys. Elba continues with the hiding spots and the narrator often will hear her pleading for her even though she isn’t around. It is a haunting feeling and the story is at it strangest at these moments. Yet like the orphan, the narrator ages at and the next summer she is more interested in boys, finding her first boy friend amongst the kids who hang out on the beach. When a tragedy suddenly befalls Elba, the narrator is shocked to learn twenty years latter, that the only thing she could think to write in her diary is “this is the best day of my life.”
Mi hermana Elba mixes the fantastic with coming of age in away that is both haunting and disturbing. What could those spaces be? And more importantly, why is Elba disappearing into them so easily that she sounds lost? A fascicle read could make the spaces the lack of wonderment adults often have, but it is more interesting to ask, what if they existed, and latter you lost interest? Is an adulthood even in a world with such places that dulling that you would leave them to childhood? The narrator’s reaction to the tragedy, both in its callousness as a teen, and as an uncertain adult suggest even when they were at the school, Elba was lost already, as if she knew this was coming but didn’t understand it. The blending of the mysterious and coming of age makes this one of the best stories in the collection, and one that is sure to stay with someone after reading.
Los altillos de Brumal isn’t metaphysically fantastic, instead, it suggests a place that really could exist and would be terrifying. The narrator is the host of a radio show and asks people to send her samples of their homemade jam so she can put a book together. She receives and unmarked jar of a blackberry like jam and when she tastes it she is reminded of the village she lived in as a child. She can’t stop eating the jam and before she knows it she has eaten the whole jar. Inspired, she returns to the village even though her mother had said only pain comes from the village. Once there, everything seems familiar, but out of place. She meets the town priest who shows her where the jam is made in a small attic. He tells her that the woman who used to make it passed away and he sent her the jam because he wanted her to do it. What was at first a voyage into memory now becomes something dark. While her mother’s warnings were unspecific, the narrator leaves you with the impression that the village is some sort of feudal throw back, where the priest has complete power over everything. It hints at darker times in Spain’s past. The question remains, though, is the jam powerful in a Proustian sense, a magical sense, or does it even matter what has drawn her back? The genius of Cubas to give the reader just enough to puzzle with these mysteries and leave one debating if the realities of these stories are just another manner of living.
Christina Fernández Cubas’ work is taught, concise and yet mysterious. She uses the fantastic not only to intrigue, but to play with reality. These games that often seem to contain supernatural elements leave the reader wondering which reality really exists. It is the mark of her great skill that the search for explanation only leads to deeper mysteries that keep one returning to them. I still don’t know how she marked a transition in Spanish short stories, but her works definitely warrants a translation to English.
Note: You may also want to see my article on four untranslated Spanish short story writers which includes a section on Cubas.
Neruda, Huerta, and Bolano – An Investigation of Influences
John Herbert Cunningham has a long and detailed examination of the late poetry of Neruda, and an Cunningham’s thoughts on its influences on the poetry of David Huerta and Roberto Bolano that was written at the same time. It is an one of those few articles where the writer has the luxury of making his case mostly with the art form, instead of summaries. Even if you don’t like his conclusions, you can at least read large sections of poetry from each of these authors.
Cecil and Jordan In New York by Gabrielle Bell – A Review
Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell
Drawn & Quarterly, 148 pg
Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York is an inventive and funny collection of short comics that is able to take youthful angst and not dwell on its difficulties, but expand the experience into stories that read like fables. The 11 unconnected stories collected in this volume follow high school misfits in small towns, and new inhabitants in the big city as they struggle to make ends met. While the ground has been covered many times in graphic novels, and sometimes seems a requirement that every graphic novelist write about their struggles, Bell shows promise as a fabulist. At her best she creates stories that surprise you with a the unexpected.
The eponymous Cecil and Jordan in New York is a good example of her ability to express angst through fable-like stories. The story starts off common enough: two friends move to NY and find that the city is a harsh place and the friends they were relying to help them don’t have the time. Cecil is Jordan’s girlfriend and has nothing to do: she is the girlfriend, as she says in one panel. It is a lonely experience as her boyfriend pursues his film making career. As she is wandering the streets during winter she decides to become a chair. Once the transformation is complete she lives a new life as a chair when people are around, and as herself when the chair’s owner is not home. The transformation to chair is both an escape from the hardness of reality, but also a longing to be wanted. In the last panel she says, I’ve never felt so useful. The ideal life isn’t to be ensconced in an apartment, but to have a purpose and be with people who need you. It is here that Bell captures loneliness so well, yet leaves the reader laughing (there are more difficulties in being a chair than you would think of).
In My Affliction a young woman is captured by a giant and in escaping falls from a great height. Hurtling towards her death she suddenly stops mid air and it turns out she can now float. This is the first of many strange episodes as she begins various relationships with men that all turn out to be wrong for her. The men range from a truck driver with a myna bird that swears at ever turn; a giant that keeps her in a cage; a rich man who’s more interested in making his boat perfect. Each, though, is only someone she has to bond with because her affliction, the same one that lets her float, makes her give herself to others. Using the episodic structure of a fable she has fun with relationships, ultimately creating a story that condenses the story of five relationships into a brief comic, and finds a triumph in surviving them.
Several of the stories take place in a small town where the narrator lives with her parents in small cabin that without electricity. These stories are a good laugh at the expense of hippies who tried to live off the grid and found out it was hard, not only physically, but socially. The focus, of course, is on the young protagonist who hates the lifestyle and who obviously wants a different life. Yet as with most of the stories the desire to escape is subtle and Bell creates a character whose way of coping is to not rebellion, but just to survive. As in Hit Me, the way to escape is to no longer be the strange, smelly kid, even if that means turning your back on friends. Like many of her stories, Hit Me ends in a realization that relationships so often dissolve this way and leave one regretful.
Gabrielle Bell’s collection is a funny and shows some inventive story telling ideas. Hopefully, her coming work will continue to evolve from this good start.
How Not To Write a Borges Article
I shouldn’t even bother with this, but when you write about Borges in the NY Times and make it so boring, what is the point? I love Borges, though not later Borges, and can’t seem to soak up enough articles about him. Still, I want something new and interesting. The article starts out badly, telling us the inadequacies of writing about him. I should have stopped there. Since the writer obviously can’t describe his work, I don’t need to read it.
Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.
What the real problem is, though, he writes about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrecker devoting time to an analysis of the book and Borges’ fascination. Sounds good. I want to hear about his sources. But, alas, he falls short and has to resort to the same generalities he was going to avoid. Borges can be difficult to write about and say something new. But it helps when you put the article into a cogent framework.
In “The False Problem of Ugolino,” an essay on Dante not included in “On Writing,” Borges quotes from an essay by Stevenson that makes the rather Borgesian claim that a book’s characters are only a string of words. “Blasphemous as this sounds to us,” Borges comments, “Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to it.” Borges then adds: “The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.” The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles.
Among the vast books that do not really exist, and that Borges has commented on, are the innumerable pages of the future. Borges’s work answers the unanswerable weight of his reading, the boyish and the arcane at once. The pages of both what he wrote and what he only traced the shadows of present us with their own wavering interrogations; we are happy and afraid to be lost amid our insufficient and unceasing responses. Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson. We still do not know how to create Borges.
Carlos Funtes Remembers Carlos Monsiváis
El Pais has an interesting reflection from Carlos Fuentes about his friend, the late writer Carlos Monsiváis. He sounded like quite the iconoclast, at least, as Fuentes saw him. A man of diverse passions and a seeming voracious appetite for knowledge. Worth the read or Google translate.
Me inquietaba siempre la escasa atención que Carlos prestaba a sus dietas. La Coca-Cola era su combustible líquido. No probaba el alcohol. Era vegetariano. Su vestimenta era espontáneamente libre, una declaración más de la antisolemnidad que trajo a la cultura mexicana, pues México es, después de Colombia, el país latinoamericano más adicto a la formalidad en el vestir. Creo que jamás conocí una corbata de Monsiváis, salvo en los albores de nuestra amistad.
Compartimos una pasión por el cine, como si la juventud de este arte mereciera memoria, referencias y cuidados tan grandes como los clásicos más clásicos, y era cierto. La frágil película de nuestras vidas, expuesta a morir en llamaradas o presa del polvo y el olvido, era para Monsiváis un arte importantísimo, único, pues, ¿de qué otra manera, si no en el cine, iban a darnos obras de arte Chaplin y Keaton, Lang y Lubitsch, Hitchcock y Welles? Y no se crea que el “cine de arte” era el único que le interesaba a Carlos. Competía con José Luis Cuevas en su conocimiento del cine mexicano y con el historiador argentino Natalio Botana en películas de los admirables años treinta de Hollywood.
Félix J Palma’s English Debut and New Short Story Collection
Last month Spanish novelist and short story writer Félix J Palma published a new book of short stories, The Smallest Show in the World (El menor espectáculo del mundo). In it he mixes the fantastic with the comic to explore “human relations, most of all those of love, are microcosms inhabited only by those who are living it” (relaciones humanas, sobre todo las amorosas, son microcosmos habitados únicamente por los protagonistas de la historia. Revista de Letras Spanish only.) He treats the subject with humor and his use of the fantastic sounds interesting. In one story, a character doubles every time he has to make a decision (via Spanish only) . Instead of the Garden of Forking Paths, the character becomes the path, turning the Borges classic on its head. As Palma notes in an interview at Canal-l (Spanish only) many Spanish short story authors follow one of two paths, either those of Borges, Cortizar, and other Latin American authors who tended towards the fantastic, or those of Americans like Raymond Carver. He, by his own accounting, is in the first camp. While I’m not sure if he is one of Spain’s best short story writers as the Revista de Letras article says, I am sufficiently intrigued to get a copy of his book.
For those of you who can only read English, his successful novel The Map of Time will be coming out in English sometime this year. I don’t know much about it and from the description Publisher’s Weekly gave I’m not sure if I should be afraid or hope for something interesting. Given that it got a six figure deal, I’m a little leery.
Johanna Castillo at Atria won an auction for Felix J. Palma’sThe Map of Time via Thomas Colchie, who sold North American rights for six figures (in collaboration with Palma’s principal agent, Antonia Kerrigan, on behalf of Algaida in Spain). Set in Victorian London with characters real and imagined, Palma’s English-language debut features three intertwined plots, in which H.G. Wells is called upon to investigate incidents of time travel and save the lives of an aristocrat in love with a murdered prostitute from the past, a woman attempting to flee the strictures of society by searching for her lover somewhere in the future and Wells’s own wife, who may have become a pawn in a plot to murder him as well as Henry James and Bram Stoker. The book was just published in Spain.
Ana María Matute at Revista de Letras (Spanish Only)
There is a good ten minute interview with the great Spanish writer Ana María Matute at Revista de Letras where she talks about her writing and her life. Of particular interest, she says she was the first to use children in fiction in Spain. Her contemporaries did not. Only after she gained success did they also do it. Considering how much she writes about children she probably is talking with some authority, although, I would like a little more confirmation. Fortunately, you can read her works in English. Many have been translated.
The video is also a lesson in what not to do when interviewing an author. While author interviews can be a little boring, the producers put such long transitions between ideas, complete with Jazz and hazy graphics, that it got a little boring waiting for her to speak.
Wharton’s Fighting France Now in Spanish; or Why More Books Aren’t Translated
First of all, I love Edith Wharton’s work. However, Fighting France and A Son at the Front, her novels about World War I, are not really the best of her work. What is so annoying and marvelous at the same time is how the non-English speaking world is willing to translate so much more than we do. Perhaps she has the reputation of the current literary superstar Roberto Bolaño, but I doubt it. So to translate a lesser of her works seems to have a genuine respect. It is just so exasperating that we English speakers do return the favor.
You can read a review of it in Spanish at the Revista de Letras.
The Paris Magazine giveaway!
I didn’t know there was a Paris Magazine that was related to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, and now it has just relaunched. If you can write a little bio like the tumbleweeds of the Paris Magazine, you could win an edition. The contest is here. I would do this myself, but I’ve never been there and have nothing to say. Another reason to go to Paris.
SO. If you can write in with your favorite story about Shakespeare and Company, I will send you a copy of the magazine. The winner will be drawn at random, because I bet all your stories are great, and I’m not going to presume to judge which one is “best.” Leave your story in the comments, or email me if you don’t want it to appear on the site. I’ll run a selection (say, the 4 runners up?) after the festival is over.
Marta Chudolinska’s Wordless (graphic) Novel ‘Back + Forth’
I just saw this note at Book Patrol about Marta Chudolinska’s Wordless Novel Back + Forth. In the same vain as the works of early wordless novel writer Frans Masereel, she uses wood cuts without any dialog to tell the story. It looks like an interesting bit of work. You can see all the panels in one large photo here.
Mexican Author Carlos Monsivais has Passed Away
I haven’t read anything from Monsivais but he was an important writer, one whose work has been little appreciated in the English speaking world. His book on Mexico City sounds fascinating. La Plaza has an excellent appreciation on his like and work in English and El Pais has a lengthy piece in Spanish.
The writer was not well-known outside Mexico. Translation of his work is very limited. Unlike contemporaries such as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, Monsivais did not strive to address great universal themes but instead concerned himself with the politics and peculiarities of life in Mexico. And specifically, in the urban carnival that is modern Mexico City.
His first book “Dias de guardar” (“Days to Remember,” 1970) chronicles the tumult and tragedy of the 1968 student movement, which culminated with the massacre at Tlatelolco. In “Amor perdido” (“Love Lost,” 1977) Monsivais writes eloquently on the politicians, artists and movie stars of the moment. In “Los rituales de caos” (“Rituals of Chaos,” 1995) Monsivais weaves a kaleidoscopic look at a Mexico City brimming with life under the duress of pollution, crime and overcrowding.
“In the visual terrain,” the book’s opening line says, “Mexico City is, above all, the too-many-people.”
He also wrote numerous biographies, including volumes on artist Frida Kahlo, singer Pedro Infante and Salvador Novo, an eccentric early 20th century bohemian who is considered Monsivais’ primary predecessor. He published prolifically even late into his life, producing a new set of essays on Mexico City in 2009, “Apocalipstick.”
A dedicated lover of Mexican cinema and popular culture, Monsivais offered to the general public his collection of thousands of photographs, prints and other items with the formation of the Museo del Estanquillo in downtown Mexico City.
Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago dies at 87
Jose Saramao passed away. You can read a short notice at Jacket Copy.
Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature, has died, his publisher announced Friday. He was 87.
Saramago’s works include “Blindness,” “The Cave,” “All the Names,” “The Stone Raft” and “Seeing.” The Nobel committee cited Saramago’s restless need to invent wholly new worlds in his fiction when they presented him the award for literature in 1998. Saramago, the Nobel citation reads, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” It concludes:
New Carmen Laforet Biography: Insight into the Author of a Spanish Classic, Nada
El Pais has good review of the new Carmen Laforet biography, Carmen Laforet Una mujer en fuga. Laforet rose to fame in the early 40s after publishing her classic, Nada
Although the biography is not available in English, Nada is considered a must read when looking at 20th century Spanish literature. It is all the more impressive when one considers that it was a first novel. She was able to capture a sense of post civil war Spain that still resonates and can give one the impression of poverty and social collapse that the war brought on.
De modo que enseguida empezó a tener problemas para escribir y para ser, esto es, para adaptarse a la mirada de los otros. La primera década parece normal. Se casó con el periodista Manuel Cerezales; tuvo cinco hijos; hizo diversas colaboraciones en prensa; publicó un libro de relatos y otra novela. Pero si se aplica el microscopio se observa el borboteo de la angustia. No se llevaba bien con su marido, la escritura era un tormento y, en 1951, conoció a Lilí Álvarez, la famosa y atractiva tenista, y se prendó de ella. Porque a Laforet le gustaban las mujeres, pero eso era algo que no se podía permitir. No con su inseguridad y su perenne sentido de culpabilidad, no en el aplastante entorno del franquismo. De modo que Carmen sublimó el amor por Lilí y lo transmutó en un rapto místico perfectamente adaptado al nacionalcatolicismo imperante. Incluso escribió una novela muy religiosa, Una mujer nueva, que dejó patidifuso al personal. La etapa beata duró siete años, los mismos que su relación con Lilí. Después rompieron, y Laforet volvió a ser ella misma. Sólo que unos escalones más abajo. Resulta terrible pensar que algo tan intrascendente como la orientación sexual de una persona pueda llegar a destrozar la vida de alguien dentro de un ambiente represivo.
Concha Urquiza A Modern Mystic Poet from Mexico’s Past
La Jornada has an long appreciation for the Mexican poet Chocha Urquiza, who died young at the age of 35. Her story is turbulent and full of activity as seems to happen with many Mexican artists of the time. At first writing poetry with vanguard poets and joining the communist party, she latter moves to the US to work in the publicity department of MGM. Returning to Mexico a few years latter she returns to the university, and later allies herself with Catholic groups. In 1945 she drowns off Ensinada. Her work is marked by a conflict between mysticism constrained and directed by Catholicism and her ideas about physical love, androgyny, and other transgressive ways of living. The brief description below describes her ideas well. In her poems (which you can read here in Spanish), you can get a sense of that. Of course, nothing is in English and probably never be.
La explicación es obvia. La irrupción de Dios en el alma es un acontecimiento inefable, para el que no existen palabras. Se encuentra, como lo dice ese espléndido tratado de la vida mística, La nube del desconocimiento, “entre el silencio y la palabra”. Mientras el empleo de cualquier vocablo “presupone –dice Borges– una experiencia compartida de la que el vocablo es símbolo. Si nos hablan del sabor del café es porque ya lo hemos probado, si nos hablan del color amarillo, es porque ya hemos visto limones, oro, trigo y puestas de sol”. Para sugerir la inefable experiencia de Dios, los místicos se ven obligados a recurrir a la tradición que reescriben con metáforas prodigiosas que hablan de embriaguez y de amor carnal. Esa experiencia lleva el impreciso y ambiguo nombre de deseo. Todos lo experimentamos, pero sólo los místicos que tienen el don de la poesía, encuentran en él el signo de Dios y de nuestra trascendencia. Raimundo Panikkar decía sabiamente que “Santa Teresa se enamoró primero del cuerpo de los hombres para luego enamorarse del cuerpo de Cristo”. Podríamos decir que a Concha le sucedió lo mismo. Al igual que Santa Teresa, Concha sintió en el deseo por el otro la resonancia carnal de lo inefable que la llamaba a la unión trascendente –de allí su atracción por el mito platónico del andrógino original–; al igual que ella, también, descubrió que esa realidad era sólo una imagen de la encarnación que sólo adquiría su pleno sentido en la carne de Cristo. A diferencia de ella, sin embrago, Concha no logró reordenar su rompecabezas interior y sentir la plenitud espiritual y carnal que Santa Teresa logró con el Cristo y de la cual su “Transverberación” es su expresión más acabada. Incapaz, por el dualismo de la espiritualidad católica de principios de siglo –en donde la sexualidad y la sensualidad quedan excluidas como realidades pecaminosas– de llegar a unir su yo interior con su yo orgánico, atrapada en esa ambigüedad de la mejor tradición cristiana que, como señala Eugenio Trías, percibe, a través de la encarnación, la “inspiración (mística) de un espíritu material vinculado con el amor sensual y físico (y, a su vez, por la ausencia física del Cristo,) el influjo de la idea origenista de un espíritu desencarnado.” y dotado, por lo mismo, de una sensualidad indirecta y travestida, Concha se movió siempre entre el enamoramiento del cuerpo de Cristo y sus resonancias en el cuerpo de los hombres. A través de ese arrobo ambiguo y desgarrador de la pasión intentó acercarse a ese estado en el que, para decirlo con Octavio Paz, “la muerte y la vida, la necesidad y la satisfacción, el sueño y el acto, la palabra y la imagen, el tiempo y el espacio, el fruto y el labio se confunden en una sola realidad”, y la hicieron descender a estados cada vez más antiguos y desnudos.
By The Firelight 