Author: bythefirelight

Words Without Borders The Queer Issue Volume V Out Now

~ bythefirelight

June 2014: The Queer Issue Volume V

This June we present the fifth installment of our annual queer issue. We’ve gathered a group from all corners of the world to celebrate this milestone with us. From Colombia, Alberto Salcedo Ramos gets in league with the queens of soccer, while Taiwan’s Qiu Miaojin pens fiery, lyrical dispatches from Montmartre. Belgium’s Stéphane Lambert paints a nostalgic portrait of a teenage friendship, and Iranian writer Ghazal Mosadeq’s beleaguered asylum seeker finds himself at a crossroads in France. From Israel (via Brooklyn), graphic artist Miki Golod blends memories of army service with a snowbound New York, while Spain’s Elvira Tobío frames a carnal appetite in haiku form. Nao-Cola Yamazaki’s protagonist dwells on a foundering relationship from the dentist’s chair, while Algerian Rachid Boudjedra’s Olympian falls in love with a student. From Mexico, Javier Malpica reads us entries from a coming-of-age diary, while Russia’s Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina dwells on the allure of youth.

Elsewhere in the issue we showcase new writing from Equatorial Guinea. Graphic novelist Jamón y Queso lampoons the man in charge, while Melibea Obono Ntutumu’s protagonist takes a cab ride from hell and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel remembers his island home.

El matrimonio de los peces rojos (The Marriage of the Red Fish) by Guadalupe Nettel

~ bythefirelight

El matrimonio de los peces rojos (The Marriage of the Red Fish)
Guadalupe Nettel
Paginas de Espuma, 2013, pg 120

Guadalupe Nettel’s collection of short stories explore the relationship between animals and humans. Over the course of five stories the animals become reflections of human behavior as they interact with her characters at the edge of their preoccupations. The animals are not actors in these stories, but a disappointment with what we had first projected on the animals. The sense of disappointment fills these otherwise bright stories. In the title story, the narrator is a woman whose marriage reflects the life of her Beta fish. Beta’s are notoriously difficult to take care of because of their violent tendencies with other fish, even other Betas. That reflection of the state of one’s marriage is not the most faltering and ends with a separation. She notes a question that is at once interesting, and irritating,

Nadie nos obligó a casarnos. Ninguna mano desconocida nos sacó de nuestro acuario familiar y nos metió en esta casa sin nuestro consentimiento.

No one forced us to get married. No unknown hand took us out of our aquarium and put us in this house without our consent.

No, they don’t. Unfortunately, despite Nettel’s skill as a writer, her prose is very good, these kind of conclusions to her stories bothered me for their obviousness. The story of the woman and her fish was well told, but didn’t offer any particular surprises and the ending was a little too pat. It is too bad because in her second story, Guerra en los Basureros (The War in the Garbage Cans) she starts out with the memories of a young girl who goes to live with her aunt and family. Her parents are divorcing so living with people who eat together and otherwise get along is too much for her. She prefers to stay with the servants in the kitchen, eating only after the family has gone to bed. Then she kills a cockroach one night. It is a mistake because that only makes more and more of them come. She tries everything to stop them, including eating them in a form of penance. Here, her skills as a writer are on display and the story of the orphan and the cockroaches has a resonance of sadness and regret missing in the other stories which lean more toward the style of the first. Still while the end of the first story felt pat, this one felt forced. I can’t help think that this collection suffers for its insistence on forcing the framing metaphor: humans and animals. Yes they are alike, but they’re also  not. And in between something got lost. It is too bad, because I her stories always started with such promise. I know something of hers is coming in English soon (I can’t remember if it is this book or not). If it is a different work perhaps it will change my mind.

 

 

Rafael Chirbes Wins the Premio de la Crítica

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Rafael Chirbes won the Premio de la Crítica for his latest novel En la orilla, a criticism of Spanish society and the crisis. It is a realistic novel in the vein Dickens and Benito Pérez Galdós one of Spain’s great writers of the 19th century. He is pessimistic about the world and for that the book is appealing.

En esta novela, En la orilla, como en la anterior, Crematorio, con la que también ganó el Premio de la Crítica en 2007, el autor aborda el momento de la burbuja inmobiliaria, la especulación y la corrupción política, el fraude y la resaca posterior cuando el castillo de naipes se desmorona, una resaca que ha llevado a la sociedad española a descubrir la verdadera carroña que existe cuando llega el dinero fácil, palabra que utiliza en sus dos novelas. Chirbes, poco optimista con el futuro, habla del declive de la sociedad, de la desesperación del ciudadano cuando no tiene para comer porque el paso siguiente es “el cabreo. Mucha gente cabreada sin ordenar las ideas y pasarlo por la cabeza te puede llevar a cometer locuras y eso provoca miedo. Es peligroso”.

El pesimismo de Chirbes es eco del que existe entre los jóvenes que hace una década vivían muy bien con el sueldo que ganaban y que hoy se encuentran en el umbral de la pobreza. “Es duro para alguien de 30 o 35 años que en los primeros años de este siglo tenía un buen trabajo llevando una grúa y un sueldo acorde. Y hoy se encuentre en la calle acudiendo a los comedores sociales porque no encuentra nada y tampoco se le forma para mejorar su situación. El gris que se respira en el ambiente te lleva a los años 50 del pasado siglo, a ese momento en el que las dificultades eran evidentes y no veías el futuro”, puntualiza el escritor.

 

An Interview with Elena Poniatowska on the Event of her Cervantes Prize

~ bythefirelight

El Pais had an interview last week with Elena Poniatowska on the event of her wining the Cervantes prize

P. Cuando usted publicó La noche de Tlatelolco, un referente sobre lo ocurrido el 2 de octubre de 1968, el momento más duro de la represión del régimen, ¿se sintió amenazada?

R. Sí. Amenazaron a Tomás Espresate Pons [catalán exiliado en México tras la Guerra Civil, librero y editor] que era el que estaba imprimiendo el libro. Le dijeron que iban a quemar su negocio. Él respondió: “Mire, yo estuve en la Guerra Civil de España. Yo sé lo que es la guerra y este libro se publica”. Luego esparcieron el rumor de que el Ejército lo iba a incautar, pero eso fue la mejor propaganda. Todo el mundo salió corriendo a comprarlo. Se hicieron cuatro ediciones en un mes. La locura.

La periodista y escritora Elena Poniatowska, en un momento de la sesión fotográfica. / SAÚL RUIZ

P. ¿Se considera usted una feminista?

R. ¡Claro!

P. ¿Y qué es una feminista?

R. Es una mujer que pone ante todo el respeto a sí misma. En este país, 400 mujeres han sido asesinadas con total impunidad en Ciudad Juárez. Es aterrador. Y lo de las mujeres en general en México es aterrador.

Tenth of December by George Saunders – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Tenth of December
George Saunders
Random House, 2013, pg 251

It has been some time since I’ve read a book of short stories from an American writer and enjoyed them. For some reason I’ve had some back luck-that and I’m tired of reading about middle class problems, or, at least, the ones that I find when I read short stories. Which is not to say Sanders avoids these themes but Tenth of December takes some more interesting approaches to the avoids the easy outs and self satisfying conclusions and takes his narratives in different directions. He, too, uses a good dose of humor and the fantastical to flip what otherwise might be conventional into something perceptive.

The first in that line is the opening story, Victory Lap, which uses a multiple points of view to describe an attempted abduction. What makes the story worth reading is the different voices he uses, especially the boy who has been so smothered as he has grown up that he doesn’t have any idea how to make a decision of his own. When he finally decides to save the young girl who is about to be raped he can’t avoid thinking about his parent’s rules:

Then he was running. Across the lawn. Oh God! What was he doing, what was he doing? Jesus, shit, the directives he was violating! Running in the yard (bad for the sod);

And they go on that for sometime in a humorously panicked tone that at once makes fun of the parents and turns a story of heroism into a critique of it. The humor, the sharp edge that can descend easily into disrespect, is handled well in Tenth of December. And while the stories always have a knowing wink from Saunders, as if he knows this is all just a bit ridiculous, it doesn’t ruin them.

He is at his most successful when he keeps closest to the little defeats and accidents of everyday life, pulling from those the absurdity that is masked behind the common place. In the The Semplica Girl Diaries he creates a family that is trying to keep up with its neighbors, spending all its money on appearances. While it sounds familiar, there is something obscure, just off page, that is swirling around the family. The statues that they have bought, just like the ones everyone else has, have disappeared and now the family is at risk of arrest. Using the fantastical, the statues are more than stone ad to have let one escape is dangerous. It is in this play between the desire to keep up with your neighbors, the purchase of what ostensibly are tacky garden decorations, and the sentient statutes, that makes the story resonate with the absurdities and traumas of the lower middle class. Certainly, there is a lightness to the story, no dirty realism here, but that is what makes it refreshing.

The lightness comes at the expense of knowing the characters. Saunders is not necessarily a character driven writer but most of the stories in the collection revolve around their inner lives. Al Roosten is the best at looking inside the desperation of a man who doesn’t quite have it together, but is holding on as best he can. It is an internal monolog full of the desperate tropes that people use to convince themselves everything will turn out alright. Of course, for Roosten it probably won’t. Yet the story has a charm that keeps it from the looserus americanus style of writing. Roosten is human, his decisions are not fiat-acomplie, but the uncertain steps of a man who doesn’t know where he is going.

The sense that the characters don’t know exactly know where they are going gives Saunders a touch, not of hope, but an openness that evades the frivolous that is always wanting to enter his stories. He keeps that at bay by holding his characters close and giving them a life that resonates still, despite the absurdities that happen. I would like a little more complexity in his work, a deeper play amongst his character’s thoughts, but what he has on display here is still significantly interesting.

 

 

Jorge Volpi Has a New Book

~ bythefirelight

The Mexican author Jorge Volpi has a new novel, Memorial del engaño (The Memorial of a Fraud). It is a political-economic novel with various narrative games, including the use of an alternate J. Volpi as narrator.

Así, la novela no la escribe él, sino un tal J. Volpi, nacido en Nueva York en 1953 y no en México, en 1968; y no es un reconocido escritor, sino el fundador y director general de JV Capital Management, en paradero desconocido y prófugo de la justicia tras defraudar 15.000 millones de dólares en 2008. El estafador ha entregado una especie de memorias a su agente literario A. W., seguro el temible Andrew Wylie (exagente real del Volpi escritor), que ha dado pie a este trepidante relato, con traducción de un tal Gustavo Izquierdo y precedido por entusiastas críticas de supuestos grandes expertos internacionales que se reflejan en la contraportada y en las solapas del volumen.

[…]

La génesis de Memorial del engaño es triple, lo que se refleja en otras tantas líneas del relato, construido con estructura de ópera. Por un lado, la crisis de 2008 que se inició con la caída de Lehman Brothers: “No sabía que no iba a golpear a México, pero como he vivido ya tantas crisis, quería entender qué pasaba; luego ya la viví en directo en Madrid entre 2011 y 2012”. El segundo incentivo fue conocer la historia de Harry Dexter White, creador del Fondo Monetario Internacional, pero que fue llevado ante el Comité de Actividades Antinorteamericanas acusado de espiar para la Unión Soviética.

La tercera pata es la más literaria: “Me interesan los engaños familiares y la relación padres-hijos”, dice el Volpi escritor, marcado por “el carácter poderoso pero a la vez frágil” de su progenitor. Por ello hace que su Volpi financiero vague por la obra buscando a su padre, en una estructura que recuerda la del mítico Pedro Páramo de Juan Rulfo: la madre que cuenta al hijo sobre el padre y este sale en su búsqueda. “Mi Volpi engaña toda la vida, pero al final él es el engañado”, resume.

I’m always a little doubtful about his political novels but, still, it sounds interesting. The more I see his canon I think he is the heir of Fuentes.

April Words Without Borders: Writing from South Korea Out Now

~ bythefirelight

The April Words Without Borders: Writing from South Korea is out now:

This month we’re spotlighting South Korea. Although the country is among the ten largest book markets in the world, relatively few of its writers have been translated into English, and many emerging writers were largely unknown outside South Korea. Kyung-sook Shin’s Man Asian Prize sparked new interest and contributed to the increased visibility of the country’s thriving literary culture. The writers here, ranging from the perennial Nobel nominee Ko Un to the precocious Ae-ran Kim, demonstrate the depth and variety of contemporary South Korean literature. Kyung-sook Shin follows a lovesick young soldier. Ae-ran Kim’s disaffected teen tries to escape her battling parents, as Kim Young-ha goes in search of an absent father. Han Kang’s enigmatic wife gives up meat and sex. Han Yujoo mourns a death and battles writer’s block. Park Min-gyu and Yi Mun-yol find their workplaces transformed. In a poem from his multivolume epic Ten Thousand Lives, Ko Un depicts the human side of history. In other poetry, Shim Bo-seon yearns for magic, Kim Sa-in reminisces, Kim Soo-Bok reflects on fertility and the sea, and Jeong Ho-seung books a trip to hell. We thank the Literature Translation Institute of Korea for its generous support, and our advisors Martin Alexander and Sora Kim-Russell.

Elsewhere, we present poetry by two exiled writers, Iraqi Manal Al-Sheikh and Palestinian Mazen Maarouf, as well as the sixth and final installment of Sakumi Tayama’s tale of an accidental medium.

Going to the Emerald City Comic Con

~ bythefirelight

I read comics as a kid, mostly war. As an adult I read graphic novels from authors like Joe Sacco. Sure, I know who most of the big name super heroes are and I’ve seen more than my share of Star Trek, but superheros, sci-fi, fantasy, and gaming are not really my thing. Superheroes have always bored me: they always seem to be defeating an arch villain while spouting angst ridden thought bubbles wondering if they are strong enough, good enough, and not too much of a freak. I don’t mind a few who do this, Spider Man I’m looking at you, but every time I turn the page of a super hero comic I’m bored. So that I would go to the Emerald City Comic Con might seem a bit of a stretch, but I’ve always been curious and supposedly as someone who makes a living from programming I’m bombarded by my supposed interest in all things geek.

The first thing that struck me was at 10 AM the crowd of people to get in was enormous. I’ve been to big events before but I’d never seen that many people stuffed into a convention center. I was always bumping against people or close to, especially in the exhibition hall. The hall, as in most conferences, was the hub of everything and for someone who doesn’t buy much of what is on display at a comic con it was like going to a mall and not wanting to buy anything. The reality is I spent half of my time window shopping. Fortunately comics are books and I do like to flip through them, especially the different graphic novels, many of which were more geared towards fantasy and heroic, but interesting nonetheless. Of course, I paid a visit to Fantagraphic Books the local Seattle publisher of graphic novels and whose editions I own, and added to there. Perhaps the most interesting of it all were all the comic shop stores with their wares. Yet as much as I leafed through the books looking at issues of Sgt. Rock or GI Combat I’d read (yes, I still could recognize some) and those I had not, I didn’t know what I’d do with any of them if I were to buy them. It was a pleasant entertainment to  browse through them, nostalgic, almost.

What fascinated me the most, though, and what makes the fandom that goes to a comic con so interesting is the loyalty mixed with commerce. For $40 dollars average you could get an autograph of a star, the same for a photo with said star, and for around $20 a sketch or a drawing from one of your favorite artists. That same loyalty is found in the celebrity panels when the audience would come up and ask questions. You could see that many of them didn’t want just an inside story from behind the scenes they wanted to continue their immersive experience where what they love can expand the limits of its genre, whether it be the page or a 45 minute episode, and become larger than just a product, but a living thing that they too have interacted with physically. If you can buy that drawing, which to my mind was the best of the celebrity deals, you, the artist, the work, and you are just that much closer. As a prose writer I’m actually a little envious this. Sure I have signed books but there seems to be a more intense devotion here, or better said, a more wide spread devotion.

They did have enough panels I went to fit my. One on publishing contracts, on on Fantagraphic Books, and the requisite Star Trek actor appearance from John de Lance, Q. His was funny and had the perfect mix of insider information for the fan and enough distance to make fun of the fandom in a way that the fans enjoyed.

In all I found the experience fun and surprisingly entertaining enough to keep me going for the day. Three days? Perhaps not, but it was definitely worth the experience.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War
Peter Englund

Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War is the history of World War I told from the perspective of 20 average participants. Combing the diaries, letters, and published memoirs of soldiers and civilians alike, he eschews a military history that focuses on generals, or even those in command  and lets these usually unheard voices speak. For good and for bad, this is not exactly an oral history, but history focused on the participants. I was actually a little disappointed by the lack of quotes. Englund will take short quotes from the participants, but he prefers to summarize the participant’s experience and place it within the larger context of the battle or event they were participating in. It makes for a very readable history, but looses some of the character that might have come if he’d given us larger quotes. This is especially true with the lives of the soldiers on the eastern front who are seldom heard from. In his defense, I once read the journal of Dr. Harvey Cushing (From A Surgeon’s Journal) one of the participants he follows and it was a little dull in parts. That said, The Beauty and the Sorrow offers a different, and much need, way to look at the experience of World War I. Englund is adept at blending the big picture with the personal narratives of the participants. What is paramount in any history in this style is if the writer can capture some of the motivations of the participants. In this he has succeed quite well. The motivations are often quite conflicted. The young Dane Andersen who is conscripted by the Germans is not really interested in the war and would like to miss the whole thing. Whereas the young sailor in the German navy is completely frustrated by the lack of action and the great class divide between the officers and the men. What might strike one is that only there of these participants die, but more to the point, few fight in the famous battles of any of the fronts. Perhaps it’s because not as many survived or they did not present enough of a rounded account. Englund’s focus is the breadth of the war, from France to Italy to Russia to Africa to the Ottoman Empire he wants to show that it is more than a war of the trenches. Ultimately, a reader will come away not with the full horror of the war, but an understanding of the personal costs, in both life, property, and most importantly, optimism, that they paid. No one leaves the war untouched, even the Venezuelan adventure seeker who witnesses the anti-christian killing in Turkey nor the British Victory Cross winner who Englund paints as someone who actually likes the war. I wouldn’t recommend this as a first look at the war, but it is certainly a solid addendum to other histories, especially if they only focus on strategy and the trenches.

The Future of the Novel: Spanish Language Writers Interviewed

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an article that asks Spanish Writers what the future of the Novel is:

Uno de los escritores que hace seis años señaló al horizonte fue el mexicano Jorge Volpi. Él empieza a despejar ese territorio al decir que “hoy los escritores de América Latina ya no parecen obligados a tocar ciertos temas (o a usar ciertos recursos formales). No hay una deontología crítica que indique sobre qué escribir o sobre qué no escribir. De allí una variedad inusitada de temas y estilos”. Pero antes de cualquier otra cosa, el agente literario Guillermo Schavelzon recomienda que “en algún momento habrá que dejar de hablar de los autores latinoamericanos como si fueran un conjunto o tuvieran una identidad común. Comparten —con variantes— la lengua, pero su voz y su mundo es muy diferente”.

Javier Cercas no se considera un escritor español sino en español. Para él la narrativa latinoamericana también es su narrativa, y su tradición, cuenta, “se ha enriquecido extraordinariamente en el último medio siglo, porque lo que ha ocurrido en ese lapso en Latinoamérica es lo mejor que le ha ocurrido a la narrativa en español desde Cervantes”.

Luego vino ese florecer de la literatura española de los ochenta que permite a José-Carlos Mainer, crítico, escritor y catedrático español, asegurar que “después del gran giro narrativo internacional de los años ochenta, los escenarios son urbanos y los protagonistas, perplejos, complicados y un poco culpables. Y, muy a menudo, tratan de indagar en el pasado cercano que creó un presente tan incómodo. O buscan implícitamente el diálogo y la confrontación con las generaciones precedentes por la vía del reproche, de la aceptación o del redescubrimiento de la verdad”.

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918 Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front – A Review

~ bythefirelight

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918 Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front
Winston Groom

I never imagined I would read a book by the author of Forest Gump, let alone liking it, but Winston Groom’s history of the Ypres Salient in World War I is a good readable account of the battles in Flanders. I’m not going to spend much time detailing the history, but briefly, the Ypres Salient was a battle field in Flanders, Belgium near the Flemish city of Ypres, now called Iper. There were three battles there of the course of the war, the third and most famous also known as Passchendaele. The second battle gave us the first use of poison gas in battle, a lamentable first. It is also where Adolph Hitler served. As a reader of military history I’m not particularly interested in tactics and evaluations of strategy. Yes, that is part of military history and I’m aware of the importance, but it is the experience of the soldiers and what it was really like that interests me most. In this regard, Groom does an excellent job in describing what it was like there. I think his novelist’s eye helps him as he describes in great detail the mud, the battle conditions, especially how the dead and parts of the dead, were left everywhere. How the constant shelling made for several hundred casualties per day. This is during the calm times. His descriptions of the warfare that happened amongst the tunneling squads that were digging under the German lines to lay mines is particularly horrific. There were whole companies below ground digging huge tunnels all the while the Germans were listening for them, hoping to find them, breakthrough the tunnel and start fighting. The mines that were laid at Ypres were perhaps the most emblematic of the war and had the greatest success in immobilizing the German lines. Putting a million pounds of explosives under the German lines is an impressive and terrifying feat. When it comes to describing the generalship, he is definitely impressed with Plummer and not Haig. Since I find Haig wanting, I don’t have much to quibble with here, and as I mentioned earlier, this isn’t an area I’m particularly interested in. While the book is very good at describing the overall shape of the battles and the experience of the soldiers, he does leave the battle to occasionally give context. While these aren’t bad digressions, I’m not sure he really needed to to that. My only other real issue is the lack of end notes. However, since this isn’t aiming to be a scholarly work, I’m not going to hold it against him.

Técnicas de iluminación (Illumination Techniques) by Eloy Tizón

~ bythefirelight

Técnicas de iluminación
(Illumination Techniques)
Eloy Tizón
Páginas de Espuma, 2013, pg 163

Spanish author Eloy Tizón’s Técnicas de iluminación (Illumination Techniques) is the most aptly name collection of short stories I have read for some time, one that not only describes what he is trying to do as a writer, but also what the stories themselves are trying to do. In each case he is, quite simply, attempting to illuminate modern existence, sometimes with his narratives, but always with his language. I have not read anyone for some time who is as adept at aphorisms and the ability to capture in quick images, often in just a short sentence, not only what it means to live, but what it looks like. While Parpadeos had this element, Técnicas seems to have moved him even farther towards a poetics of experience. The stories, as I think all good writers should strive to do, are varied in style, ranging from the the dense atmospheric first story, Fotosíntesis with its nod to Robert Walser, to the desperate monolog of a lost assistant in El cielo en casa.

Fotosíntesis (Photosynthesis) shows Tizón as his most perceptive in a story that is part dialog part exploration of existence. An overwrought description? Not when describing this story, which from the opening dazzles with its fresh ways of describing what is common place. It leaves one with the first glimpse into what Tizón has suggested he is doing in the title. At the same time, the story does not fall into easy philosophizing, instead challenges the reader as the narrator takes his figurative journey into the questions of life, but always keeping too much seriousness at bay:

La ley de la gravedad no tiene por qué llevar siempre razón.
The law of gravity does not always have to make sense.

In this story, the first of the collection you can see a line from Parpadeos, but one that is even more curt, eschewing all but the barest descriptions. Yet that serves the story well as its brevity conceals an enormity of ideas, or worlds that extend out from it. It is the mark of Tizón’s immense skill that his writing keeps you excited to see how he can reveal what could so easily become pedantic in lesser hands:

Todos somos viudos de nuestra propia sombra. Sin embargo, en el instante de morir, con nuestro último aliento, todos comprenderemos que sin sospecharlo nuestros pies han bordado un tapiz.

We are all widowers of our own shadow. Nevertheless, at the moment of death, with our last breath, we all understand that without suspecting it our feet have embroidered a tapestry.

From the meditative journey into existence of Fotosíntesis  Tizón moves, as if in progression, towards the more common place, both in theme and structure, but always keeping to the exploration of techniques that illuminate our lives. In Merecía ser domingo (It Deserved to be Sunday), we have one of his narrators who is lost and finds in every day incidents something behind them that suggests a larger world.

En el silencio de la casa, en el silencio del mundo. Me han dejado a propósito aquí solo, se han ido todos. De excursión, creo. A a montaña, tal vez. O no, a la playa. Es domingo o merece ser domingo. La luz es de domingo y el azul del cielo es de domingo y el periódico está abierto en la página dominical, así que tanta insistencia empieza a ser sospechosa.

In the silence of home, in the silence of the world. They have left me here by myself on purpose, they’ve all left. On an excursion, I think. To the mountains, perhaps. Or no, to the beach. Its Sunday or deserves to be Sunday. The light is a Sunday one and the blue sky is a Sunday one and the newspaper is open on the Sunday section, so there is so much insistence that you become suspicious.

The disappearance, like everything in this story, is about absences, not the explanation of them. There are hints of why things are absent, but what really is at stake is what the narrator observes while everyone is absent. Later in the third section of this triptych as the narration moves from apartment, to street, to the forest searching for something that goes beyond Sunday in the city, but is more removed, more primal, where a concert is nothing more than the sound of a heart beat, we have this observation of futility:

Atrás quedó la ciudad con su nebulosa de oficinas en las que un funcionario se entrena durante viente años para encestar una bola de papel o una telefonista se acaricia la entrepierna.

Behind remained the city with its nebula of offices in which the employees train for twenty years to throw into a basket a ball of paper or a receptionist cresses the inner thigh.

This kind of futility is written in precise detail and finds the narrators always trying to escape them, but rarely do they have much luck. Not that these stories are particularly plot driven. What is more important is to see the layers of habit and custom that overlay all encounters.

The book, too, is playful. There is a reimagining of the story of the Wizard of Oz and moving it away from a dream to a reality contained within the farm. In El cielo en casa we have a desperate narrator who is the assistant for a star of the fashion world. Like so many of these stories the powerful and the weak employees it ends baddy, and though it is probably the weakest story in the collection (but only in comparison), it also seems Tizón’s greatest stretch in this collection, one where he moves more towards the relationships between people to illuminate what life is. The power in this story comes in the last sentence as the narrator describes in the second person, addressing to her employee, the wonder and the slow decline into hell of their relationship. Yet at the end of the story she switches to the less formal form of address. Is this a take down? A realization that the narrator isn’t someone to be mistreated and thrown away?

Llevar un lago en tu propio apellido, en tu propio pelo, qué envidia, si es que hay gente que nace ya presdentinada para ser algo grande en la vida, en esta vida, es ley de vida, por eso te lo cuento.

To carry a lake  in your own last name, en your own hair, what envy, if it is that there are people who are born and are already predestined to be something great in life, in this life, it is the law of life, and because of this I’m telling you this.

Finally, there is perhaps my favorite of this collection, or at least the one that sticks with me, which is perhaps the same thing, Cuidad Dormitorio. Again, we have a story that describes a mechanical world where one places them self at its service, ridding buses and subways long distances just to come to meaningless work. Tizón along with his excellent portrayal of a hardworking woman’s daily routine, injects a boss who asks her to get rid of a mysterious box which he says has caused him many problems. She is not to look in it and if she does she’ll have a great future with the company. The box moves from time to time, but other than that she has no idea what is in it. Does she take care of the box and enter a world of success? The dilemma is not as clear and this small touch of the fantastic amongst a world he has already described as mildly dystopian, creates yet another way of illuminating the world.

Eloy Tizón is certainly a master of the short story and Técnicas de iluminación certainly shows him at the top of his skill.

The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The End of Love
Marcos Giralt Torrente
Tran: Kathline Silver
McSweeny’s, 2013, 163 pg

The End of Love is Marcos Giralt Torrente’s winning entry in the 2012 Ribera del Duero prize for the short story competition. Handily translated by Kathline Silver, it is simply one of the better collections I have read in sometime. I was a little surprised since I had dismissed it initially when it had one the prize. Something about the excerpt that was printed in El Pais did not catch my eye. That was a mistake. Torrente’s writing and narrative skill make this collection shine.

The four stories, as the name implies, are about the end of love. Torrente approaches the end of relationships not through a history of the decline, but through the elements that show it in relief. It is a powerful technique and mark his stories with a subtly that reveals the collapse of the four different relationships in ways that avoid cliche’s. In the first story, We Were Surrounded By Palm Trees, he describes a couple who has gone to a small coastal village in an unnamed African country. They arrive with a German couple that they don’t known. From the beginning there is something strange with the village. The head of the village gives vague warnings about going out at night. It is unspecified what, but there is a threat of something, an area where the reader can inject their own fears. The German couple doesn’t follow the requests of the village head and the couple fight over if the husband should go out and look for them. Again what they fear is unsaid but the husband is reluctant to do the search the wife wants. It is in these arguments, none of them a blow out or relationship defining, that you see the problems with the couple. It’s what makes it so subtle and refreshing. What we are seeing is just the part of a larger story that is unsaid, much as the fear that permeates the foreigners. Even the story itself is caught midway between the relationship and the end, opening with an ellipsis:

…I remember when it started. There is one scene that comes back to me, frequently, though it seems arbitrary to focus on it.

As the story ends the reader can see why the relationship is going to fail, but the opening paragraph also makes it clear that on its own, without the context of memory, of a failed relationship, this might just be a bad weekend getaway. These subtle turns make the story haunting and leaves one asking what more was there with this couple.

In Captives we have a participant-observer as a narrator, a man who relates the strange love and marriage of his cousin. The reader, like the narrator is always kept at a distance from what is happening. Where as We Were Surrounded By Palm Trees focuses on a seemingly incidental incident to obfuscate, the narrator by his very distance is unable to know the full story. What ever it is happening between his cousin and her husband it is odd. Torrente also uses the narrator’s idolization of his cousin to miss questions that as an older, wiser adult he would like to know. If the couple are so happy together why is it she takes him out alone when he visits her in New York? Do they have private lives? It is these kind of questions that permeate the story as the narrator describes their long marriage that slowly drifts into living in separate homes on the same farm and the only thing between the couple seems to be the narrator. In his brilliant first paragraph (one of many in this erudite work) you can see the shades of mystery that Torrente weaves so well:

Guillermo Cunningham had more money, more status, and was definitely more sophisticated than any member of our family, the only strike against him being a foreign surname that conjured vague social origins, as vague as the origins of his wealth–an indeterminate amount of income from nobody knew where and that would most likely not be increasing due to his lack of interest in business, which was an even more serious concern. I don’t think, in any case, that it would have occurred to Alicia’s parents, nor to any other adult relation, to in any way hinder their engagement. The possibility of bringing into the family someone who possesses wealth is much more tempting for those who have had it and no longer do that for those who never have.

Despite the brilliance of Captives, I still think Joanna is my favorite of the four stories. The narrator is an adult looking back on when he lived in with his gradmother in El Escorial outside of Madrid. She is one of those those grandmothers who means well, but belong to a different time:

…a strong and affectionate woman who ave me everything she could, but who was shaped by a set of old-fashioned beliefs that view misfortune as a circumstance requiring even more rigorous discipline, not greater tolerance. The misfortune, of course, was mine, orphaned and abandoned as I was, and it was precisely for this reason that my grandmother kept me on such a short leash, lest I forget that life is hard, that there is no respite.

He begins a friendship with Joanna, a girl of his age and a summer resident in one of the big homes in the town. Because of his age he is permitted to be friends with her, even though his class would not normally permit it. From the beginning the Joanna’s mother is a disturbing woman preoccupied with her looks, especially in relation to Joanna. The mother tries to insert herself into to Joanna’s world and is the epitome of a woman who’s never grown up. Joanna does not like her and with the narrator there is a freedom that comes to a halt when they are with her family. When her brother shows up midway through the story there is a hint that something perverted is going on. The narrator doesn’t know what it is though. For him, Joanna disappeared when he was 18 and she returned to Madrid and a life among the well to do. What he suspects, though, is that one of his call in guests on his radio show has told him what really happened and it haunts him still. The ending which is so strong, like his other stories, plays with what the narrator truly knows as is a masterful ending that avoids the taint of epiphany.

My only criticism of the book is with the first story. It felt a little as if he were playing with exotic locals, using Africa, for his own devices and projecting on it. It certainly not egregious, but as I read it I couldn’t help but have that in mind. In part this is because the most powerful part, the mystery, also feels tinged with stereotypes.

That aside, this is a masterful collection. One in whose pages I can continually find phrase that distil the essence of a moment into something greater. I leave you with one of my favorites:

I was carrying the camera, but I did not take a single photo. I regret it. If I had, those photos would now be of what could have been.

New Words Without Borders: March 2014 – Writing from Venezuela

~ bythefirelight

March 2014 Words Without Borders featuring writing from Venezuela is out now.

This month we present fiction and poetry from Venezuela. The current crisis has thrown this often-overlooked country into the spotlight; the writers included here put the protests in context and demonstrate the richness of Venezuelan literature. Alberto Barrera Tyszka brings the curtain down on an actor. Milagros Socorro shops for personalized customer service. Victoria De Stefano visits a literary hangout past its prime, while Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles eavesdrops on unhappy divorcés. Israel Centeno blends sex and aerial attack; Ana Teresa Torres ponders house and home. In poetry, Rafael Cadenas makes peace; Yolanda Pantin speaks of a private death; María Auxiliadora Álvarez considers suffering. We thank our guest editor, Ana Nuño, for bringing these new writers to us.  Elsewhere this month, we present the fifth installment of Sakumi Tayama’s “Spirit Summoning,” as well as poetry from Marie-Claire Bancquart, a tale of an absentee father from Ryuichiro Utsumi, and a peek at domestic intrigue from Espido Freire.

La Puerta Entreabierta (The Half-Open Door) by Fernanda Kubbs aka Cristina Fernandez Cubas – A Review

~ bythefirelight

La Puerta Entreabierta
(The Half-Open Door)
Fernanda Kubbs (Cristina Fernandez Cubas)
Tusquets, 2013, 221 pg
La Puerta Entreabierta (The Half-Open Door) is Cristina Fernandez Cubas’ latest book and finds her assuming a pen name, Fernanda Kubbs, to create a much more fantastical novel that celebrates famous stories of mystery while creating her own. Cubas’s work has always dealt with the fantastic, but La in Puerta Entreabierta the fantastical becomes almost the primary focus of the novel making the mysterious less an element of suspense, but exploration. Avid readers of her work, as I am, will find the book, dare I say it, a little lighter than some of her other work. Her writing style is still as good as ever and it is a pleasure to read some one of her talent write was is, for all intents and purposes, an intelligent fable.

The story follows Isa a human interest story reporter for a newspaper. She’s not particularly good and doesn’t know how to dress well either, wearing bermuda shorts to a reprimand by her boss. Her assignment is to write an article on fortune tellers. She finds a stereotypical fortuneteller dressed as gypsy and using a crystal ball. Sometime during the reading she is transported into the crystal and is trapped inside. The fortuneteller is a fraud and has no idea how she ended up in the ball. Thus begins Isa’s journey in the sphere, landing ultimately in the shop of an antiquarian dealer who on learning of her predicament tries to helper escape from the sphere.

Interspersed between Isa’s narrative are stories, told as examples, of famous frauds who fooled people with illusions and tricks. Readers of Poe might be familiar with Von Kempelen and his chess playing machine. Here, as in the other stories, she reworks the stories, playing with the legends of the frauds, both showing them as ridiculous and compelling, as if there is something in the stories that is true. It is a typical move for her, but in this book it is more playful and the stories remain what they have long been: fables.

What makes the book enjoyable are two things: the interaction between Isa and her protector; and Cubas’ ability to make what might otherwise be a light story something that shines with her strong language. Moreover, Cubas is a clever writer and her decision to leave the story open ended makes this detour into the magical quite interesting. While this will not be my favorite work of hers (hence the short review), I enjoyed it for what it is and given that it is Cubas it is much better that most books.

The Velocipedist Social Club by Norberto Luis Romero At Contemporary Argentine Writers

~ bythefirelight

Contemporary Argentine Writers has published a translation of The Velocipedist Social Club by Norberto Luis Romero. You should give it a read.

Along the town’s main street, there were no more than 400 meters from his home to the fledgling Velocipedist Social Club and Mr. Garcia walked them with his head held high and his eyes set forward, guiding his brand new velocipede beside him by its impeccable, polished handlebars, like someone proudly leading angelic, clean and well-dressed offspring to mass by the hand. But Garcia was a bachelor by inertia and his immediate plans, which had him completely absorbed, did not contemplate marriage but instead other more daring and novel ambitions. With each step he was aware that, behind the lace curtains of every kitchen window, the eyes of housewives were on him until he disappeared from their field of vision: out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the poorly concealed movements in the curtain folds, and even an incredulous face now and then suddenly veiling itself behind lace trimmings and embroidery. He knew that their curiosity wasn’t stirred by his person, despite the tight, flashy orange velocipedist outfit he wore, which was strikingly audacious in and of itself, but rather by the surprising object of his devotion, the true protagonist of that peaceful gray morning: the velocipede.

Words Without Borders Featuring International Graphic Novels Out Now

~ bythefirelight

My favorite yearly issue of Words Without Borders is out now featuring International Graphic Novels:

February brings our annual showcase of the international graphic novel. On topics ranging from Korean genocide to an inside view of French bloviation, love and intrigue in Mexico to mistaken identity in Israel, these artists delineate character and plot in their singular styles. In two looks at prostitution, Victoria Lomasko talks to the “girls” in Russia’s fifth-largest city, while Mathias Picard’s elderly woman recalls how she stumbled into the profession. Hadar Reuven’s vulnerable boy makes a devastating choice, while Egypt’s Donia Maher adjusts to a cryptic neighborhood. In two very different biographies, Kun-woong Park documents Heo Yeong-cheol’s years as a dissident in 1940s Korea, and Ángel De la Calle travels to Mexico City on the trail of the enigmatic actress, model, artist, and spy Tina Modotti. Israel’s Dan Allon plays many roles. In Iran, Nicolas Wild smokes opium and speaks of poetry. The pseudonymous government employee Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain reveal the workings of French bureaucracy. We’re also launching a new feature, International Translation Culture, featuring essays on translation reception around the world. This month, Spanish writer and editor Luis Magrinyà considers reviewers and readers. And we present the latest installment of Sakumi Tayama’s “Spirit Summoning.”

Latino Authors in the United States – an Overview from El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais had an article this week about Latino authors in the United States. I’m familiar with some of the names Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Cisneros, Anaya, José Antonio Villarreal, among others. It is an interesting article, more list than anything else and a good place to start if you are interested in Latino authors. Many of the works have been translated into English if they were not written in English in the first place.

La primera obra de envergadura de las letras hispanas es The Squatter and the Don (1885), de Amparo Ruiz de Burton, escrita a la sombra de la derrota que infligió Estados Unidos a México, en la que se refleja la situación de los vencidos tras la firma del Tratado de Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Para dar con un título que conecte con la sensibilidad literaria de la modernidad hay que trasladarse a 1936, fecha de publicación de Locos, sofisticada colección de cuentos del americaniard (español afincado en Estados Unidos, el término lo acuñó él) Felipe Alfau. Autor también de Chromos (1948), novela que narra las peripecias de los americaniards. Alfau es un outsider del canon latino, en el que ocupa un valor más bien simbólico y marginal. Publicada en 1945, Mexican Village de Josephina Niggli es una obra de considerable valor literario. Aunque nació en México, Niggli era de origen europeo tanto por línea materna como paterna, lo cual explica su visión, más idealizada que vivida, de la cultura mexicana. Mexican Village es un conjunto de 10 relatos que se entrecruzan configurando un artefacto narrativo sumamente ágil y de lectura muy amena. La obra del puertorriqueño Jesús Colón (1901-1974), una de las figuras más interesantes de la literatura hispana, es fascinante. Coetáneo de Alfau, de orígenes paupérrimos, Colón era negro, comunista, así como autor de una copiosa y brillante obra periodística tanto en inglés como en español. Un puertorriqueño en Nueva York y otras estampas (1961), su obra más emblemática, es una pequeña joya literaria. Lo más destacado de la visión de Colón es su inmensa humanidad, impregnada de un saludable sentido del humor. Colón fue precursor de la sensibilidad nuyorican, que en paralelo con la emergencia de una conciencia de la identidad chicana señala el comienzo de un movimiento de resistencia política y afirmación de los valores culturales latinos. A lo largo de la década de los sesenta, surgen en las dos costas del país obras de importancia parelela. El juez puertorriqueño Edwin Torres nos ofrece una interesante visión del mundo de la delincuencia neoyorquina que conoció de primera mano en la novela titulada Carlito’s Way (1963). Ese mismo año el chicano John Rechy publica City of Night, novela demoledorasobre el mundo de la prostitución masculina en las ciudades de Nueva York, Los Ángeles, San Francisco y Nueva Orleans. Down These Mean Streets (1967),sobrecogedor relato autobiográfico de Piri Thomas sobre la vida en Spanish Harlem, concitó el interés general del público hacia lo que ocurría en los barrios hispanos del Alto Manhattan. Aunque no vio la luz hasta 1984, la mejor crónica de la historia de la colonia puertorriqueña de Nueva York son Las Memorias de Bernardo Vega, documento de gran valor sociológico, además de literario.

A principios de la década de los setenta las letras chicanas experimentan una sacudida, con la aparición en años consecutivos de tres obras cumbre de la literatura mexicano-americana: …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), de Tomás Rivera; Bless Me, Ultima (1972), de Rudolfo Anaya, y Estampas del valle (1973), de Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. La primera y la tercera de estas novelas se escribieron originariamente en castellano. Muy diferente, aunque de innegable interés es la Autobiografía de un búfalo marrón (1972), del activista chicano Oscar Z. Acosta, personaje de vida y muerte intrigantes que gozó de la amistad de Hunter S. Thompson, quien trazó un perfil inovidable en Rolling Stone. Simultáneamente, se deja oír en Nueva York la voz de Nicholassa Mohr, autora de tres obras de gran valor testimonial y literario: Nilda (1973), El Bronx Remembered (1975) e In Nueva York (1977). La trilogía de clásicos de la literatura chicana escrita por Anaya, Rivera e Hinojosa-Smith tiene un precursor en Pocho (1959), de José Antonio Villarreal, y un continuador en Sabine Ulibarri, autor de una espléndida colección de relatos titulada Mi abuela fumaba puros y otros cuentos de Tierra Amarilla (1977).

 

José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican Writer, Has Died

~ bythefirelight

The Mexican poet and novelist José Emilio Pacheco has died after a fall. He was 74. He might be best known as the writer of The Battles in the Desert. You can read the notice from El Pais:

El poeta mexicano José Emilio Pacheco ha muerto este domingo en la Ciudad de México según ha informado a través de su cuenta de Twitter Rafael Tovar y Teresa, director de Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA). El escritor, de 74 años años, fue hospitalizado en la tarde del sábado.

Un hombre sencillo, sin vanidad. La imagen pública de José Emilio Pacheco (Ciudad de México 1939-2014) era la de un poeta sin pretensiones. Cuando recogió el Premio Cervantes en 2010 en España hizo un comentario sobre eso que se andaba diciendo de que él era uno de los mejores poetas latinoamericanos. “Pero si ni siquiera soy uno de los mejores de mi barrio. ¿No ven que soy vecino de Juan Gelman?”.

 

My Review of On Leave by Daniel Anselme is up at Three Percent

~ bythefirelight

My review of Daniel Anselme’s On Leave is up at Three Percent. The book is a lost novel from the 1950’s that takes on France’s war with Algeria:

In 1957, Daniel Anselme published On Leave, a novel about three soldiers on leave from the Algerian War. At that point during the war, only two of its eight years had passed and the full savagery and politically instability that would mark latter years of the conflict had yet to occur. Yet despite the national trauma of the intervening years, On Leave, as translator David Bellos notes in his introduction, is one of the rare literary responses to the war. It is even more remarkable given it received little notice when it was first published, and was then soon forgotten. It now makes its first appearance in English.

read the whole thing at Three Percent