Author: bythefirelight

Mario Vargas Llosa Has a New Book

~ bythefirelight

Mario Vargas Llosa has a new book and was the occasion of a series of articles and videos in El Pais this week. There is a lengthy profile, although if you know his story it isn’t that ground breaking.

From the Review

Y es que el numen y la ley interior de El héroe discreto parecen ser el reencuentro y la coincidencia, al igual que en las novelas bizantinas (a las que a menudo se parece la nuestra) lo es la revelación de identidades; tanto en una como en otras, se trata de aguardar a que, tras la peripecia nítida pero intrigante, llegue el final feliz y justiciero. A despecho del realismo verificable que se busca, nos hallamos en una modalidad de este que es idealista y dialéctica, a la par. Todas las piezas encajan y todos los personajes se ganan su condigno final o al menos un testimonio de su mérito, como en el caso del pobre chino Lau, protegido de Felícito Yacané. Nadie se queda sin su recompensa o su castigo: lo segundo es el caso de los mellizos y herederos de don Ismael, a quienes llaman “las hienas”, o de Miguel, el hijo traidor de don Felícito; ejemplo de lo primero es el reconocimiento de Tiburcio, el hijo leal, o el cumplimiento final de la pasión devoradora que el capitán Silva ha sentido por el próvido trasero de Josefita, desde que inició la investigación de las denuncias de su patrón. Lo único que permanece en la penumbra del misterio jocoso son las apariciones de don Edilberto a Fonchito. ¿Se trata de un Mefistófeles muy venido menos? ¿De un misterioso llorón que ha hecho suyas todas las desdichas del mundo? ¿De un pedófilo cauto e inofensivo? ¿De una invención del muchacho malcriado? ¿O de un explícito homenaje al Doctor Faustus, de Thomas Mann, por parte de don Rigoberto, el diletante que compara con pasión las versiones grabadas de Robert Schumann?

He reads from his new book for about five minutes. It is too short to get a sense of the book other than the style which is very direct. Watch the Video.

The Short Stories of Sergio Chejfec and at César Aira Eterna Cadencia

~ bythefirelight

The blog Eterna Cadencia had an interesting post over two collections of short stories from Sobre Modo linterna, de Sergio Chejfec, y Relatos reunidos, de César Aira.

En Modo linterna, Sergio Chejfec continúa construyendo y ensanchando ese territorio que encuentra en nociones como experiencia, representación, narración y discurso, sus coordenadas fundamentales. Chejfec es consciente de aquello que hace no mucho explicó Luis Chitarroni: que la literatura ha perdido la confianza en la ficción (esa misma confianza que retiene el cine y, más acá, las series de tv). Por lo tanto, el acto de narrar, en estos albores de la era digital, implica conquistar o re-conquistar esa confianza. ¿Pero cuál es la estrategia? ¿Cómo se podría, sin golpes bajos, conjurar la magia perdida? Paradójicamente, la respuesta habría que empezar a buscarla en lo siguiente: no sin pruebas, no sin documentos. Hoy, la mejor ficción surge menos de los artificios y pliegues de una trama o de la singularidad o conflictos de los personajes, que de la desnudez y testimonio de la escritura; de una escritura que produzca ficción fatalmente, acaso como las arañas producen por instinto una hermosa tela. Y para eso, es en el narrador, en la construcción del narrador y su sensibilidad, donde se libra la batalla. No casualmente, autores como Sebald, Magris, Bernhard (pero también, más cerca, Levrero) deben administrar la autobiografía, los diarios, la crónica y fundirlos en la ficción.

Conversation with Ana Maria Matute at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

I’m getting back from vacation and finally catching up on some items that caught my attention, even if they seem a while ago.

El Pais had an interview with Ana Maria Matute sometime ago. Rather odd in many ways, as if the interviewer didn’t have the questions and she was a little combative.

Pregunta. Digo que la niña que se metía en el cuarto oscuro y era feliz, ahora, al cuarto oscuro en que se ha convertido este país, no sé si le ve la gracia.

Respuesta. No tanto, no tanto. Sobre todo esas pobres gentes desahuciadas, con la abuela a cuestas, no es que no lo haya visto porque esto ha pasado siempre. Sí… Pero yo de política no hablo porque no entiendo.

P. ¿Se puede ser escritor y no tener en cuenta la política?

R. Por supuesto que sí.

P. Lo dudo.

R. Yo siempre he sido de izquierdas, pero no comprometida con ningún partido. Lo que aspiro es al deseo de justicia y a que no me engañen. Ingenua, inocente, soy, pero tonta, no.

September Words Without Borders Out Now

~ bythefirelight

The September Words Without Borders is out now, featuring the black market.

This month we’re covering black markets: those underground exchanges of contraband that power parallel economies throughout the world. Goods both human and inanimate are traded in these shadowy venues, where everything from kidneys to diamonds is available, often at horrific cost.  In fiction and essays, Wang Bang, Abdelilah Hamdouchi, Vladimir Lorchenkov, Jason Miklian, Dominique Manotti, Dmitri Novosolov, Edgard Telles Ribeiro, and Ye Yonglie explore clandestine systems around the world. And in the latest installment of our World through the Eyes of Writers feature, Poland’s Paweł Huelle salutes poet Tomasz Różycki.

Juan Rulfo’s Short Stories Profiled at the Guardian

~ bythefirelight

The Guardian has a very good appreciation and introduction to the stories of Juan Rulfo that is worth a read.

At the turn of the millennium, the Uruguayan daily El País asked writers and critics to vote for the greatest Latin American novel. The winner, by a clear margin, was Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the book Jorge Luis Borges called one of the best works of Hispanic literature, or indeed of any literature. If the paper had asked its voters to choose the greatest Latin American short story collection, Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames would probably have come second only to Borges. Remarkably, these two books, published in 1953 and 1955, constitute two-thirds of Rulfo’s entire bibliography, despite the fact that he lived until 1986. “In my life there are many silences,” Susan Sontag quotes him as saying. “In my writing, too.”

The silences yawn in Rulfo’s writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality’s edges fray into a strange gulf. In a story such as They Have Given Us the Land, where a group of peasants trudge across an arid plain, four pages seem to become a vast expanse. It is a negative space, lacking “the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything”. We are in the central-western Mexican state of Jalisco, Rulfo’s birthplace and the territory in which all his startling, bleak fictions unfold. He was born in 1917, and his father and uncle were both killed in the fallout from the Cristero war, in which priests and Catholics tried to overthrow the officially atheist government that formed following the Mexican revolution (1910-1920). Rulfo wrote of his childhood – part of which he spent in an orphanage – that he often saw corpses hanging from posts, and that he spent all his time reading, “because you couldn’t go out for fear of getting shot”. His work, unsurprisingly, is focused on poverty and violence

Under This Terrible Sun by Carlos Busqued – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Under This Terrible Sun
Carlos Busqued
Translated by Megan McDowell
Frisch & Co. Electronic Books, Inc., 2013, pg 191

Carlos Busqued’s Under This Terrible Sun is a dark and at times disturbing book that in its tight and economical prose wastes little time in showing men at their worst. The cruelty is elusive at first. The novel opens with a description from a Discovery Channel show of the cannibalistic tendencies of squid. It is the first of many such descriptions of elusive giant squids. While they seem extraneous to the story, just so much TV background noise, they set the tone for the novel, as the mystery and the ruthless violence have their parallel within the novel.

It is a violence that Cetarti, an Argentine stoner, who has lost his job and spends his time watching the Discovery Channel and smoking marijuana is oblivious to. Even when he is told that his mother and brother had been murdered by her new husband, he is emotionless, the violence of it, just something that happened, nothing more. If the killing wasn’t enough, when he arrives in the small town to meet with the lawyer who is going to settle the estate, he finds that the streets are filled with excrement that has bubbled up from the sewers. He has entered into a place that could be hardly anymore disgusting. It sets the tone for meeting with the lawyer, Duarte, whose only interest is getting a little money out of the death benefits that are due him. While Cetarti and Durate settle business, Durate also spends his time transferring porn from video to digital, and the titles are quite hard core. Cetarti, though, as he does when faced with any new situation, doesn’t seem to care one way or another. He is disgusted by the very graphic scene and Durate delights in showing him, but ultimately getting the money from the estate is all he cares about. Once he gets that he can go back to smoking and watching the Discovery Channel.

Running parallel to Cetarti’s story is that of Durate and Danielito. The two men are scheming to do something and Danielito always seems to be taking care of someone behind a locked door. It is not clear at first who that person is or what they are doing, but as the novel goes on and a woman is kept in the room Durate and Danielito’s intentions become darker and darker, showing that the hardcore porn is only the beginning of Durate’s depravity. Danielito, much like Cetarti, is emotionless and follows Durate’s orders without question. It is never quite clear what the two men are doing, but it is both horrific and yet pedestrian, as if the normal state of men is that of passionless brutes who only follow biological instincts.

The two men and the one who you might think would have something good in him, Cetarti, is too numb to do anything. He has surrendered to marijuana and television. Even when he moves into his brother’s house and begins to clean it, getting rid of all of the junk he had collected as a hoarder, he does it less as catharsis, but as a mechanical event. The contrast couldn’t be stronger between that of a hoarder who sees in everything a rational and Cetarti who can live in the most spartan setting just watching the world go by. It is how Cetarti can join Durate and Danielito as they perform some sort of crime with the woman they’ve been keeping in the room. Cetarti is so uninterested in what is going on other than getting a little extra money he doesn’t even bother thinking about what is happening. He’s there, they’re all there, they do what they are going to do and that is it. Even the writing underscores this passionless view, avoiding any kind of descriptions of emotions or morality, just sticking to a description of the physical events.

It is an approach that when mixed with the nature documentaries is a nihilistic view of men as little more than the predators they are. While it is certainly not the first novel to tackle the subject, Busqued has no interest in explaining why this is. Explanations are not going to help soften the violence. It is an approach that can make for some tough passages, but in general keeps the horrible at a distance, always threatening, but never certain. After reading it, the reader should not be surprised if they want more, but since they are only observers, the whys, those often novelistic easy answers, are never going to come in the form of easy answers. The lack of answers is what makes the book work and Busqued has avoided some of the cliches that afflict crime fiction. Assuming one can get past the descriptions of some of the porn, you’ll see a darker side of Argentina than I have in the recent past.

FTC Notice: I want to thank the publisher for providing me with the book.

Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions by Ror Wolf – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions
Ror Wolf
Open Letter, 2013, pg 142

It would be easy to characterize Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions as a collection of short stories. In some ways they are short stories in that they are short, usually two pages, and stories. However, anyone looking for a well tuned collection of micro fiction might be disappointed because as the title notes, these are digressions. In some ways they could be called anti-stories since they eschew any claim to plot, character or narrative structure that mark most stories, and instead delight in continually breaking down into digressions that call into question the assumptions that are built around story telling.

Ror Wolf is a German visual artist whose work is marked by surrealism and that juxtaposition of otherwise everyday elements into contrasting elements is evident in his work. For Wolf, narrative only exists to be broken down. His typical story is a first person piece that starts with the announcement about what the narrator is going narrate. The narrator never tells the story, though, instead he changes his mind a few sentences in and begins a new narrative direction. For example, The Next Story begins

The next story I’d like to tell I already told on Monday, and would not like to tell it again. So I’ll tell the story from Tuesday. But now it occurs to me that absolutely nothing happened on Tuesday that I could talk about…

or from The Rate of Fame

In the past, Lemm was often compared to Klomm, to whom he absolutely shouldn’t be compared because, one must admit, not a single feature of Klomm’s can be found in Lemm. Enough about him, but think of him from the start as a man to whom there is no one to compare. So we won’t talk about Lemm or Klomm. We’ll talk about Hamm instead…

Just these two short quotes give you an insight into his approach. First, there is a consciousness that we are observing the act of story telling and that that act is not the formalized illusion of a first person short story, but disassemble of the process of telling a story with all its false starts and digressions. Second, the story itself is not necessarily the import element, rather the act of telling the story is the important element. How the teller tells the story says as much as the story itself. Finally, although it is not quite as evident in these two pieces, all the false starts are new directions one can take the unwritten stories. The false starts are not dead ends, they are openings into stories as yet untold.

No Story is a good example of the creation of stories out side the story. It starts,

I don’t have a story to tell about an accountant’s wife who was unable to sit because she caught a filthy, itchy disease, I’ve never heard of such a case. I also don’t have a story to tell about the illegitimate birth of a child, on the occasion that the woman in question implored me not to tell the story.

Again, he starts and stops, hinting at something larger, but that he won’t tell, as if it were boring or distasteful. The sense that certain stories aren’t worth telling and that certain characters are pointless or annoying is a trait Wolf shares with Thomas Bernhard. With some frequency his stories have the acerbic bitterness of Bernhard and more than a few times his stories felt similar to the Voice Imitator. However, where Bernhard wants to poke fun at society and is preoccupied with the pettiness of bourgeois life, Wolf is more interested in how the stories one tells constructs that reality.

All of his stories call into question what is a story. Is it the plot, the characters, or something else? And more important, what is the point of telling them? After reading several of his stories it is obvious there are no answers. But the idea that narrative contains one story, and whose very existence is to relate something is quickly dashed when reading Wolf’s digressions. The breaking of the narrative strategies can also the stories occasionally tiresome to read. No matter how good they are, all the shifting of the story telling can make a stead diet of them difficult to read. I would recommend dosing your effort to get the full power of his work.

While the first two thirds of the book is made up of the stories I’ve described, the last third is a long form narrative: The Forty-Ninth Digression: Twelve Chapters from a Exposed Life. The story is a kind of traveler’s journal of his various ship wreck and travels throughout the world. Except, in typical Wolf fashion, the actual travels are the least important part, often getting a perfunctory line of basic description. They are, if I can use the anti word again, anti-travel writing. The idea that one would describe the emotions, customs, or opinions of the characters is ludicrous. Yet the narrator is aware of his adventures and probably the most telling line from the whole book says,

I took pleasure in these notes; to me they seemed to become increasingly important, they were the real reason for my journey from chapter eight onwards. I didn’t write down my experiences, but tried to experience what I wanted to write down in order to lend a uniqueness to my notes that has not yet appeared in literature, or at best not in in Scheizhofer’s writing. (Emphasis mine)

Here is the crux of Wolf’s writing: one lives to write and in doing so looks for things to write about, but that is an unnatural act. The writing is the artificial element, it is the author’s search for something to write about. And that search rather than reportage, is the disruption of the experiment. Whether or not you love all of his stories, if you are interested in story telling this is a fascinating book to read.

Alejandro Zambra Interviewed in El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a decent length interview with Alejandro Zambra. It is worth checking out to get a sense of what animates his writing.

—Sí, claro. De ser un niño muy teórico e inteligentoso, la literatura pasó a servirme para explicarme cosas de las que no estaba seguro. En Formas de volver a casa yo sabía lo que estaba narrando, pero pretendía también disolver otras certezas, conseguir una cierta ambigüedad. Que el libro fuera muchas cosas a la vez. Y por supuesto que algunas cosas no sabía que estaban ahí. Eso es lo que tiene la literatura de intransferible: existen fragmentos no calculados. Creo que intenté otra manera de hablar de la dictadura chilena, que a ratos desconcierta. Hay escritores chilenos profesionales que recorren Europa…

—Comercializando el dolor.

—Claro, y bueno, sabemos quiénes son. A veces cuesta explicar en el extranjero que acá existía una vida cotidiana mientras sucedían hechos horrendos. Un periodista francés, a propósito de Formas de volver a casa, me preguntó cómo era posible que un niño anduviera por las calles en ese tiempo, sin saber que los niños de entonces andábamos por las calles harto más que los de ahora.

Los libros de Zambra, no es ni necesario preguntárselo, son autobiográficos. Hurguetean en él mismo. Hay una voz que los atraviesa. Cualquiera sea el conflicto —siempre finalmente íntimo— está el testimonio de un narrador encarnado. “En Formas de volver a casa pagué una deuda con mi infancia. Durante mucho tiempo pensé que mi experiencia no tenía importancia. Era el tiempo en que lo realmente significativo era que se esclarecieran los crímenes, que las víctimas de la tortura pudieran hablar; los que importaban no éramos nosotros —los hijos de la clase media del extrarradio, despolitizada— sino los hijos de las víctimas. Si entonces me hubieran dicho que escribiría una novela sobre la villa en que vivía en Maipú, no lo hubiera creído. Esa novela, más que relatar hechos, lo que quiere es hacerse cargo de la imposibilidad de relatarlos. En rigor, ahí hay experiencias, pero también está la sensación de que no valen la pena de ser narradas, porque hay asuntos que son más importantes. En el fondo tiene que ver con el duelo, cuando este se transformó en algo realmente colectivo en Chile. Esto debe haber pasado hace unos diez años. Dejó de ser un asunto solamente de las víctimas, y la mayoría de los chilenos entendieron que estas cosas le habían pasado al país. Aún quedan muchos crímenes sin resolver, todavía campea la impunidad, pero al menos los chilenos entendimos, la mayoría, que el duelo es colectivo”.

August Words Without Borders Brazil Out now

~ bythefirelight

The August Words Without Borders featuring Brazil is out now.

This month we’re presenting writing from Brazil, with authors going beyond bossa nova and the beach to present new perspectives on this vibrant and complex country.

Cristhiano Aguiar’s “Natanael” sees a young man find illumination in the murk of a Sao Paolo river

Antonio Prata’s “Plan” employs Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, and pop star Michel Teló

Carol Bensimon’s “Underwater Snooker” finds young friends reeling from a sudden death

And more fiction and poetry from Horácio Costa, Orides Fontela, Angélica Freitas, Armando Freitas Filho, Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Vinicius Jatobá, Antônio Moura, and Laurenço Mutarelli, plus a special feature of poetry from the Faroe Islands by Sissal Kampmann, Tóroddur Poulsen, and Vónbjørt Vang.

Short Story Collection from José Hierro Reviewed by Fernando Valls

~ bythefirelight

Fernando Valls writing in El Pais has a review of a new collection of short stories from the mid century Spanish writer José Hierro. He’s someone I’m not familiar with and was interested to hear about him. (This originally was published in June but I’ve wanted to post this since July.)

Hasta la aparición de este volumen, apenas sabíamos nada de los cuentos de José Hierro, y ello a pesar de que entre 1941 y 1963 hubiera escrito o publicado 17 narraciones, y luego una más, siete de las cuales permanecían inéditas. Por tanto, sorprende su ausencia en todas las antologías que se editaron a lo largo de la posguerra, pues ni siquiera aparece en la de Francisco García Pavón.

Buena prueba del interés que José Hierro mostró siempre por la narrativa es que en una entrevista realizada en 1981, tras diversos alegatos en favor de la novela, afirmara que lo mejor que había escrito fuera el cuento ‘Quince días de vacaciones’, opinión difícil de compartir. A su manera, José Hierro fue un narrador realista (aunque no falten en sus relatos diálogos absurdos, espacios simbólicos, escenas grotescas o alegatos en pro de la fantasía), y aun cuando no guarde semejanza con los narradores de las dos primeras décadas de posguerra, debió de sentirse más cerca de los neorrealistas por su cuidada prosa y su manera a veces oblicua de encarar la realidad. De hecho, sus mejores relatos los escribe en los cincuenta. Unos cuantos parecen esconder un significativo componente autobiográfico, según se observa en ‘Ciudad Lineal’, sobre todo por la presencia y los efectos de la Guerra Civil, como se aprecia en ‘Quince días de vacaciones’. E incluso en ‘Parábola del viejo, el sol y la gaviota’ alguno de sus baqueteados personajes que han pasado por la cárcel, sorprendentemente la añoran, quizá porque en la calle estaban peor si cabe. Y aunque sus historias nunca tengan un componente estrictamente político, sí nos muestran situaciones que los censores no hubieran tolerado, tal como sucede en ‘Intimidad de ayer’. Acaso por ello el autor descartara recogerlos en un volumen.

Ebooks as a Bridge to Latin America at Publishing Perspectives

~ bythefirelight

Lucas Lyndes the editor of Ox and Pigeon press has an article in Publishing Perspectives about how ebooks can make it easier for Spanish speakers as well as English speakers to have access to works from less well know authors. The way publishing is set up in Latin America is a little strange and he does have a point and ebooks do provide a new way to access authors who have been isolated by sales agreements. While I did enjoy the two books from Ox and Pidgeon I read as ebooks, I still would have preferred physical copies (see my reviews here and here).

First, it might be useful to provide some idea of what the Latin American book market is like. When I first moved to Peru eight years ago (well before my small publishing house Ox and Pigeon was even a synapse in my brain), it was immediately obvious to me that where books were concerned, the region had an abundance of interesting writers but at least one glaring problem: distribution. If you were looking for a certain book, you had to know who published it, and after that, find out which bookstore (often only one, in the case of Lima at that time) imported that publisher’s books. If you were lucky, they had ordered more than one copy and might have it in stock. Clearly, this is not the sort of task casual readers are up for.

But things were not always this way. Legendary publishing houses such as Sudamericana and Emecé in Argentina or Joaquín Mortiz and ERA in Mexico spent decades building relationships and distribution networks with booksellers throughout Latin America. Starting in the 1980s, though, many of these companies either went out of business or were bought up by international conglomerates who—despite their worldwide presence and the undreamt-of resources at their disposal, as well as the argument that their multinational structure would actually help improve things—proceeded to dismantle these distribution networks and severely localize the markets in each country.

El arte de la resurrecction (The Art of the Resurrection) by Hernan Rivera Letelier – A Review

~ bythefirelight

El arte de la resurrecction (The Art of the Resurrection)
Hernan Rivera Letelier
Alfaguara, 2010 254 pg

Hernan Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrecction is a novelization of the life of a Chilean mystic and wandering preacher, Domingo Zárate Vega known as El Cristo de Elqui, who roamed the country during the 30s and 40s. Letelier gives a small slice of his life as El Cristo de Elqui journeys north into the desert in search of the holy prostitute Magalena Mercado who keeps an alter in her home and is devoted the Virgin Mary. He tracks her to a godforsaken little mining town in the desert where he is hailed as a holy man by the striking workers and as a agitator by management. Most of the book is concerned with his preaching in the town and how the strike unfolds as management grows more and more angry at his seeming rebellious behavior.

El Cristo de Elqui, though, is not a revolutionary but a mystic who has added his own additions to Christianity, much to the annoyance of church officials throughout Chile who see him as a threat. He is free, when he feels the need, to have sex with one of his followers, often quickly and on the roadside. In one of the funnier incidents, the day he arrives he gos to Magalena’s shack where he stretches his arms across the back of a table in a pose reminiscent of the crucifixion and she performs her trade. El arte is irreverent but not libertine so scenes like this are more scarce than one might think. El Cristo is more a holy fool, a man who has lost touch with reality and experiences the world in a mystic reality that makes him unable to perform simple tasks. It is this kind of mysticism that leads him to believe he can walk through the desert on his way to find Magalena. Naturally, he ends up walking in a circle and nearly dies, alone, forgotten. A sample of his teachings will illustrate just what kind of holy man he is. When asked for some new proverbs he says,

“La franqueza es la llave de la buena amistad.”
“La honradez es un palacio de oro”
“Las aves del cielo son mas felices que los grandes millonarios, a pesar de dormir en sus patitas y cubiertas solo de sus plumas.”
Y uno que el Padre Eterno me revelo hace solo unos días, mientras evacuaba mi vientre en plena pampa rasa: “Buen remedio es para la soberbia del hombre volver la cabeza de vez en cuando y contemplar su propia mierda.”

“Frankness is the key to good friendships.”
“Honesty is a palace of gold.”
“The birds of the sky are happier than the greatest millionaires, in spite of sleeping on their feet and covered only by their feathers.”
And one that the Holy Father revealed a few days ago when I was evacuating my bowels in the middle of the  pampa: “A good remedy for the pride of man is to turn his head once and awhile and contemplate his own shit.”

Through multiple different voices and flashbacks Letelier leads us through El Cristo de Elqui’s failures and almost successes. At one time, before the novel takes place, he had journeyed to Santiago ready to speak to thousands of followers, only to have the government arrest him and hold him in a mental hospital for several months. An abuse of state power, but given some of his actions there is just a bit of doubt, too, if his hospital stay was needed. It is obvious as the book closes that El Cristo de Elqui is as much a figure of ridicule as wisdom.

Letelier also takes time to describe Magalena’s background and this is where shows the greatest of its many weaknesses. For much the book the idea of the holy prostitute is puzzling and one wonders how someone who was so devoted to the church would become a prostitute. Unfortunately, his solution to this question is simple, insulting, and humorless: she was sexually abused by the priest who took care of her as a child. Her only escape was to run away from home and become a prostitute. What marks his humor uninteresting, and there is plenty of humor on display here, is the frivolity of the abuse and her later life as a prostitute. It is as if there were no scars, as if her personality disappeared in her religiosity. Perhaps one could say it is just a refuge for a damaged soul, but given her character is one of the biggest cliches there is, the prostitute with a heart of gold (who gives tricks on credit to the striking miners), I think it’s just bad writing. There is no complexity gained out of any of this. Just simple characters to push around the desert.

Ultimately, El arte, with its picturesque strikers who are either comical clients of Magalena or buffoonish followers of El Cristo de Elqui, is a book sprinkled with the left overs from a magical realism workshop and really has nothing to say. When I finally reached the end of the book, where El Cristo de Elqui (and yes, his name is used with the same frequency in the book as in this short little piece) and Magalena are exiled to a little hill outside of town where the strikers make their pilgrimage to see her and Letelier takes great pleasure in describing the grotesques they are, I couldn’t take it anymore. Yes, there is humor is this book; yes, there is some good writing in the book; but there is also a tendency to infantilize and instead of black humor, I had the feeling of just another man writing about sex without really saying anything new. I am rather tired of prostitutes and magical realism. Enough. There is more to Latin America.

 

Interview With Patricio Pron At Words Without Borders – If you like Madrid Don’t Read It

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Words Without Borders has a very funny and caustic interview with Patricio Pron a man who despises Madrid. One might think he was from a different province by the sound of his voice. A must read if you a Madrid fan boy.

Can you describe the mood of Madrid as you feel/see it?

Madrid is a singularly ugly city. Its most representative buildings are grotesque, its river is negligible and rotten, its parks are dusty and full of petty criminals and its squares are tiny and uncomfortable. In addition, the city is terribly cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer, and its people are the most ignorant and stupid I’ve met in my life (a good example of this, is their belief that speaking in English consists of shouting and making gestures, as any unfortunate person knows if he or she has ever had the unpleasant experience of coming to Madrid without speaking Spanish). It is not unusual for discussions in bars to escalate into exchanges of insults and that women and children are verbally abused by screaming men and alcoholics. In fact, only the dogs seem to have a good time in this city, as they can shit wherever they want (mostly in front of my house) and are very spoiled by their masters. None of these reasons explain why I still live here, though: sometimes I wonder, but the answer is so difficult to find as it is difficult to leave or forget this city once you’ve had the opportunity to live in it, which is great I think.

What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city?

Shortly after arriving in Madrid from Germany, where I was studying, a young local writer said to me: “Don’t feel embarrassed by your difficulties trying to be like us. The fact is, you can never be like us because unfortunately, you have a degree.”

Borges’ A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell Excerpted at NYRB

~ bythefirelight

The NYRB has an excerpt from one of Borges’ lectures given in 1966. It is a lecture on Johnson and Boswell, although it doesn’t stop him from writing about particularly Borgesian preoccupations. It will be published by New Directions on July 31.

….Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is to bring out the hero’s personality. In other words, often authors need a character who serves as a framework for and a contrast to the deeds of his hero. This is Sancho, and that character in Boswell’s work is Boswell himself. That is, Boswell appears as a despicable character. But it seems impossible to me that Boswell didn’t realize this. And this shows that Boswell positioned himself in contrast to Johnson. The fact that Boswell himself tells anecdotes in which he appears ridiculous makes him not seem ridiculous at all, for if he wrote them down, he did it because he saw that the purpose of the anecdote was to make Johnson stand out.

There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him. According to this theory, in other words, the I would be double: there is a profound I, and this I is identified with—though separate from—the other. Now, I don’t know what experiences you might have had, but sometimes this happens to me: usually at two particular kinds of moments—at moments when something very good has happened, and, above all, at moments when something very bad has happened to me. And for a few seconds, I have felt: “But, what do I care about all this? It is as if all of this is happening to somebody else.” That is, I have felt that there is something deep down inside me that remains separate.

Short Story “Una partida” from Andrés Neuman at Ojo Seco

~ bythefirelight

Ojo Seco has an unpublished short story from Andrés Neuman (Spanish Only). It is short, but quite good.

Hacía casi diez años que mi amigo Riquelme y yo no nos veíamos. Nunca ha sido fácil coincidir. Él vive en Chile, yo en Andalucía. Él detesta los aviones, yo apenas tengo tiempo para viajes. Él es especialista en páncreas, a mí no me interesa la ciencia. Él tiene que hacer guardias todas las semanas, yo es raro el día que no tengo compromisos familiares. Él se mantiene soltero, yo tengo cuatro hijos. Pese a ser atractivo, o por culpa de serlo, a Riquelme le cuesta encontrar pareja estable. Yo (para qué engañarme a mi edad) soy tirando a feo, me gusta la vida casera y me intimida la selva del ocio nocturno. Él reaparece muy de vez en cuando en mi correo, yo no suelo llamar demasiado por teléfono…

Short Story “Proof of Innocence” by Andrés Neuman in English at Contemporary Argentine Writers

~ bythefirelight

Contemporary Argentine Writers has a translated short story from Andrés Neuman, Proof of Innocence. It is a funny story and shows a different style of writing for those of you who’ve only read his novel, The Traveler of the Century.

Yes. I like being interrogated by the police. We all need for them to verify our innocence, to confirm that we have paid our dues and can move along. That’s why I love feeling like I’m beyond reproach and demonstrating how well-mannered I am, convincing them that it wasn’t me.

Spanish Writer Javier Tomeo Has Died

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Javier Tomeo has died. Among other things, he wrote many short stories, something that caught my eye when his complete stories was recently published. I haven’t had a chance to read him yet, but he sounds interesting, if very fantastical. The notice from El Pais:

La mujer tuerta a la que su marido le recrimina que se ponga el ojo de cristal, el despertador que funciona como un cangrejo, el niño de las dos cabezas y esa bestial unión del bien y el mal que era el gallitigre, cruce del felino enamorado del ave, entre otras muchas criaturas aberrantes, están desde ayer huérfanos después de que el corpacho de su padre, Javier Tomeo, no pudiera resistir más las múltiples complicaciones de una diabetes que en los últimos meses le llevaban a dormir mal y a moverse “como un caracol” (de nuevo su amado mundo animal) y falleciera por una grave infección en el hospital Sagrado Corazón de Barcelona, a los 80 años.

Esos seres que poblaron una de las obras más inclasificables del último medio siglo de las letras españolas no surgieron de la infancia de ese niño nacido en el pueblo oscense de Quicena en 1932. Entonces solo había lecturas de Verne y Salgari, aunque en la genética debía haber algo de la tierra. “Soy aragonés, no puedo escribir más que negro y Buñuel es mi Dios; quizá tuvo la culpa la pintura de Goya”, se parapetaba el escritor. Luego, al poco tras un ligero silencio y una mirada más allá del interlocutor, la confesión: “En parte, mis personajes son nacidos de mis carencias”.

I highly recommend the interview he gave last year. It gives good insight into the man:

P. ¿De dónde sale, por ejemplo, su celebrado gallitigre?

R. Pues de cuando un tigre se enamora de una gallina. Cuando sean posibles los gallitigres, el mundo vivirá una edad de oro. Un gallitigre no es algo negativo, es la unión del bien y el mal, lo mejor del mundo; cada ser extraño mío significa una cosa; no sé, pregúnteme: el niño de las dos cabezas, pues los dos países que hay en este… Todos son fruto de cuando dejo volar totalmente la imaginación y entonces me salen esos hombres desmesurados de muchos ojos, dos y tres cabezas —pero nunca de dos penes, curioso—, mujeres con glándulas mamarias múltiples… Sí, reflejo más hombres porque les conozco más. Mis monstruos sirven para enseñar, para mostrar el camino equivocado o sus resultados.

P. ¿Podemos emparentarlo con la eclosión zombi de hoy?

R. Los zombis son vampiros descafeinados, tonterías americanas como el kétchup… No leo nada de eso.

And there is a great review from Fernando Valls, one of the most knowledgeable writers on the short story, of his complete stories.

No será fácil encontrar en el sistema literario español a alguien menos afectado que Javier Tomeo por todo el boato que el Romanticismo proporcionó a los artistas. Tampoco será sencillo dar con alguien menos al tanto de la parafernalia del mundo cultural. Pero es probable que estos desapegos hayan condicionado la recepción de su obra, desde que empezó a ser reconocido tras la aparición de su novela El castillo de la carta cifrada (1979).

FBI Files on Carlos Fuentes Opened – A Dangerous Communist

~ bythefirelight

FBI documents recently released show that he was considered a dangerous communist and that he should be watched. It isn’t surprising that this mischaracterized him that way, and at this distance seems laughable. You can read about it in English at Huff Po or Spanish at El Pais.

MEXICO CITY — The FBI and the U.S. State Department closely monitored Mexican author Carlos Fuentes for more than two decades because he was considered a communist and a sympathizer of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, recently released documents show.

The documents posted on the FBI’s website this week show the United States denied Fuentes an entry visa at least twice in the 1960s.

In one of the memorandums Fuentes is described as “a leading Mexican communist writer” and a “well-known Mexican novelist with long history of subversive connections.”

 

El escritor mexicano Carlos Fuentes fue sometido a un seguimiento por parte del FBI y el Departamento de Estado que se prolongó al menos durante dos décadas, según los archivos que divulgó la agencia esta semana en su página web. El intelectual, fallecido el año pasado a los 83 años de manera repentina, era visto por los funcionarios estadounidenses como un “destacado escritor comunista”  con una larga historia “de relaciones subversivas”.

Fuentes solicitó visas para entrar en Estados Unidos en varias ocasiones pero hubo instrucciones de retrasar las respuestas. El archivo publicado en su página de Internet, al que tuvo acceso Associated Press, es rico en pruebas que confirman que la agencia estaba atenta a los movimientos del escritor. Uno de los motivos por los que se le negó la entrada al país fue el hecho de haber pertenecido al Partido Comunista Mexicano.

Quarterly Conversation Summer 2013 Out Now

~ bythefirelight

The Quarterly Conversation Summer 2013 issue is out now with some interesting pieces. These in particular caught my eye:

What Comes Next

By Sergio Chejfec, translated by Jessica Gordon-Burroughs

The Irresistible Heart of Darkness: Jáchym Topol and the Devil to Pay

By Madeleine LaRue

The Abdellatif Laâbi Interview

Interview by Christopher Schaefer

The Joan Margarit Interview

Interview by Prithvi Varatharajan

The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim

Review by Tim Smyth

Interview with Javier Cercas at El Confidencial

~ bythefirelight

El Confidencial has an interview with Javier Cercas. He is an interesting writer whose work I have reviewed before.

Y se agarró a la lectura, ¿pero cómo dio el salto a la escritura?

Era lector desde muy pequeño, pero después de Unamuno todo cambia. A partir de ese momento leí a brazo partido, como si me fuera la vida en ello, buscando las seguridades y la supervivencia. En Wikipedia dice que Javier Cercas leyó a Borges a los 15 años y que entonces se hizo escritor. Totalmente falso. Fue justo lo contrario: leí a Borges a los 15 años y lo que hizo fue aplazar mi atrevimiento a escribir. Empecé a escribir muy tarde por culpa de Borges.

Así que mejor no leer grandes de pequeño.

W. H. Auden, que es un poeta que me importa mucho, dice que para un joven escritor tener como modelo a un escritor demasiado grande es letal. A mí con Borges me pasó eso. Me hice un lector feroz, pero no me podía comparar con Kafka o Poe. Empecé a escribir a los 19 años. Soñaba con ser escritor, pero me daba vergüenza decirlo.

¿Qué ha cambiado desde entonces?

La escritura ya forma parte de mi vida y de mi modo de estar en el mundo. Es un estado natural. Antes era un sueño y ahora es una realidad con la que convivo. Me asombro de haberme convertido en escritor. Me digo que he engañado a todo el mundo, que soy capaz de escribir una página. De pequeño fingía escribir y hacía garabatos en libretas.