Books

Fernando Iwasaki’s Ajuar funerario (Funeral Dress) Profiled in El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a profile of Fernando Iwasaki’s Ajuar funerario, a collection of short stories that has sold the relatively phenomenal 60,000 copies over multiple printings. The stories are in the horror genre, but with Iwasaki there is always humor, and so I doubt the stories are particularly gruesome. If his España, a parte de mi estes premios is any indication the book aught to be rather funny.

Ahí va un ejercicio para los lectores. Imaginen a un escritor latinoamericano, peruano de nacimiento, japonés de origen, sevillano de facto (casado desde hace veinticinco años con una sevillana), director de una fundación de arte flamenco, que escribe un libro de microrrelatos de terror con retrogusto de humor y que se vende como churros en las dos orillas de Atlántico. Es Fernando Iwasaki y su Ajuar Funerario, de la editorial Páginas de espuma, un longseller que lleva más de 60.000 ejemplares vendidos desde 2004 sin perder el ritmo, y acaba de lanzar su séptima edición. ¿El secreto del éxito de sus microrrelatos? Contienen historias… de miedo.

“Empecé con este género de minificción hace años, cuando me encargaron lecturas y conferencias para la universidad. Verdaderamente me sentía incapaz de leer textos míos de ocho o diez páginas, el público no merecía que le aburriese, así que decidí escribir estas pequeñas historias. Pero para que sean microrrelatos tiene que haber historia, y si no lo hay entonces podrá ser un poema en prosa, una anécdota, un aforismo estirado como un chicle… Pero no un microrrelato”. Iwasaki afirma que vivimos en un mundo invadido de ficción aunque no nos demos cuenta. “Ficción son los currículum vitae, son las esquelas de los periódicos, son los anuncios por palabras… Esa persona que publica: ‘Licenciado, 42 años, culto, encantador, desearía conocer señorita…’ ¡Eso es ficción!, ¿Cómo es posible que nadie haya llegado a esa situación de abandono a los 42 con todas esas cualidades?” Bromea el escritor.

Eugenia Rico – New Collection of Stroies plus excerpts in English

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Eugenia Rico has published a new book of short stories from Páginas de Espuma called El fin de la raza blanca (The End of the White Race). Not having read the whole book, the title is a little off putting for how loaded a term it can be. You can read an excerpt here. I wasn’t too impressed, but you can also read an English translation of part of one of her novels here. There are also some links to videos, etc.

She has one of the more interesting book trailers I’ve ever seen, one that doesn’t try to use a text genre in a visual genre.

A brief interview about here book is also here.

Chapter from New Enrique Vila-Matas Book Aire de Dylan

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais post a chapter from the newest Enrique Vila-Matas book a few weeks ago. I’ve been a little late on getting it up, but you can read it here. The book came out last week (3/14). Here is a brief overview:

Uno de los mayores fracasos puede ser fracasar en el empeño de fracasar. Otro podría ser el vivir pareciéndose a alguien, imitándolo y propiciando la impostura. Con esta idea comienza Enrique Vila-Matas su nueva novela Aire de Dylan (Seix Barral). Una obra que se publicará el 14 de marzo pero cuyo primer capítulo avanza hoy EL PAÍS en exclusiva.En ella, el joven Vilnius, que explota su parecido con el cantautor estadounidense, asiste a un congreso literario sobre el fracaso, mientras cree que su difunto padre le empieza a traspasar sus recuerdos.

El anonimato, la máscara, la impostura, la búsqueda y sus alrededores están presentes en Aire de Dylan. El joven Vilnius protagoniza estas páginas en las que el escritor barcelonés despliega sus mejores armas y elenco literarios con humor, ironía o sarcasmo pero siempre desde el conocimiento del mundo de la creación literaria. A partir de ahí, la novela se va transformando en un homenaje al mundo del teatro y una crítica al posmodernismo.

Leopoldo Brizuela Wins the Alfaguara Prize with a novel about State Terrorism in Argentina

~ bythefirelight

El Pais reports that Leopoldo Brizuela has won the Alfaguara Prize with a novel about State Terrorism in Argentina.

En Una misma noche, Brizuela, nacido en La Plata, capital de la provincia de Buenos Aires, en 1963, ha hecho una inmersión en el terrorismo de Estado de su país iniciado en 1976, con el golpe de la Junta Militar que gobernó hasta 1983. El escritor ha creado como hilo conductor de la novela a un autor en la cuarentena, con una madre viuda, que vio de niño cómo en 1976 la casa de uno de sus vecinos era atacada por las fuerzas del orden. Tres décadas después, un hecho parecido en la misma casa le hace rememorar el pasado y el papel que jugó su padre en todo aquello. A partir de ahí, Brizuela levanta un mapa de una de la épocas más nefastas de la historia latinoamericana con una larga estela en la vida social, política, psicológica y cotidiana.

Th Oprah Book Club: not so good for new literature

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The TNR has a post about how effective the Oprah Book Club in promoting reading and literature. It looks as if it didn’t make new readers out of non readers. It did get readers to switch from crappier books to more literary. But that had the effect of actually hurting the publisher’s bottom line. The law of unintended consequences rears it head again: (via)

The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap. And at least when it came to fiction, Garthwaite found that the net result of Oprah’s endorsements was to reduce aggregate sales. The reason was the one Franzen articulated back in 2001: Winfrey often selected books that posed a challenge for her TV audience. In practical terms, that meant that Oprah Book Club books took longer to read than the crap her viewers would otherwise read. That, in turn, meant that publishers ended up not only selling less crap, but also, in the aggregate, selling fewer books overall. Which probably meant (and I’m extrapolating here from Garthwaite’s findings) that these same publishers were correspondingly less able to publish literary fiction.

Macedonio Fernández Profiled in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

A couple weeks ago La Jornada had several long articles about the Argentine author Macedonio Fernández one of Borges great friends and mentors. He was quite a character and his literary ideas are still unique. Open Letter Press brought out his The Museum of Eterna’s Novel a few years ago. It is called a novel, but it is full of prologues and is quite strange. Any ways, the La Jornada articles are definitely worth reading.

En un cuaderno inédito, hacia 1939, Macedonio Fernández anota: “Artistas: el inventor de colmos de Importunación –El extremador de redondeces.” En arte, según esto, habría dos posibilidades: a) importunar, perturbar inventando algo nuevo; b) agradar perfeccionando lo ya inventado. Dos extremos, dos programas para el arte: la ética de la invención, la estética del pulir y redondear. Claro que esos extremos –inventar, redondear– en cierto modo se dan en toda obra de arte. Por un extremo, la obra de arte se aproxima a lo “ilegible”, corre el riesgo de inventar hasta el punto de hacerse invisible, al diferir al futuro sus condiciones de inteligibilidad; por el otro, se expone a la redundancia, a agotarse en la nitidez de lo que meramente agrada en el presente. En las letras latinoamericanas (y más allá de ellas) pocos se entregaron al extremo de la invención de manera tan colmada de futuro como Macedonio Fernández.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante – The Collected Works Vol I Overview at El Pais

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais has an overview of the first volume of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s collected works. The first volume of 1500 pages has his journalism and screen plays. It is expected to be a long project as he wrote under many pseudonyms and was a prolific journalist. However, for the Cabrera Infante fans it certainly will be welcomed. One thing I like to see are the scripts that novelists have written. I know I have the silent scripts of some of Isaac Babel’s works in his complete short stories.It gives a different dimension to see how they approach such a different form.

A Guillermo Cabrera Infante le gustaba definirse a sí mismo como “un periodista que escribe novelas”. Lo que parecía casi una broma más del autor de Tres Tristes Tigres, que entendíamos como la reivindicación de su aparición continua e iluminadora en la prensa escrita, porque lo habíamos leído primero como novelista, tiene ahora significados nuevos: vocacionales y estrictamente profesionales. Efectivamente, Guillermo Cabrera Infante fue un periodista, un crítico y un informador, y de primerísimo nivel. Este primer tomo de las Obras Completas (Galaxia Gutenberg / Círculo de Lectores), que es también el primero de los tres dedicados al cine —si incluyen finalmente sus guiones—, rescata, en torno a Un oficio del Siglo XX, la infinidad de críticas, reportajes, entrevistas y artículos sobre cine, más de 1.500 páginas en total, que G. Caín, uno de los seudónimos del joven Cabrera Infante, firmó en la revista Carteles, entre 1954 y 1960. Es decir, cuando Guillermo Cabrera Infante era un “periodista profesional”. Y aparece exactamente cuando se cumplen siete años de su muerte.

Profile of the Editor of Anagrama at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais had a profile of the editor of Anagrama last week. It is interesting how their focus has changed more to the literary. Initially they were publishing political non fiction that was against the dictatorship, but once Franco was gone and democracy had returned they grew tired of political essays.

Cualquiera lo habría dicho en 1969, cuando Herralde fundó el sello: la ficción no estaba entre sus prioridades. En aquellos tiempos heroicos, publicaba esencialmente ensayos en la colección Argumentos o los famosos Cuadernos, textos con los que apuntalaba utopías y alimentaba el fuego de la revolución que había de llegar pero que nunca llegó.

“La primera década de Anagrama fue precaria, pero tolerable”, recuerda, “me parecía importante publicar lo que publicaba y me divertía, pero entonces se combinó la precariedad con el llamado desencanto, que en el ámbito político se materializó con la victoria de Adolfo Suárez, con la que desaparecen todas las ilusiones revolucionarias de la ruptura, del hombre nuevo y de todo lo demás”

De pronto, la creación literaria ya no era algo frívolo para evadirse de las condiciones objetivas. En los ochenta Anagrama reduce drásticamente la publicación de ensayos — “porque yo mismo me canso de leer textos políticos”— y busca una salida en la narrativa, un antiguo amor de su juventud: “la buena literatura”.

My Favorite Book Podcasts

~ bythefirelight

Some one was asking me recently what my favorite book podcasts are and I thought I’d put together this list. If any one has any more suggestions I’d be happy to include them. They are in general order of interest.

  1. La Estaction Azul – A Spanish language podcast from Spain.
  2. Writers and Company – A Canadian author interview program that has a lot of in depth with conversations with international authors.
  3. The Guardian Books podcast – from the Guardian UK. My window onto the UK.
  4. Book Worm – Once and a while the host’s questions are a little long, but he always has interesting things to say.
  5. Three Percent Podcast – This is the podcast from Open Letter books. It can go completely off topic and sound like grad students doing their own podcast, but it’s fun and usually insightful. Quite a bit about the industry.
  6. Writer’s Cast – Half of the shows are about the book publishing industry, the others are interviews with authors. In general they are all quite interesting.
  7. The Next Chapter – A Canadian books podcast. Not as good as Writers and Company which is more literary, but nice look out side of the US.
  8. NY Times books podcast – I don’t care much about the best sellers section at the end, but it has its moments.
  9. Scotts Whay Hae! – I haven’t listened to this one much yet, but it’s about Scottish books.
  10. PRI’s World in Words – Another recompilation of public radio stories about books, language and other things you can put in books.
  11. NPR Books – A Recompilation of books topics from NPR shows.
  12. El Ojo Critico – Another Spanish language show from Spain. It isn’t exclusively a book show, but it does have lots of book coverage.
  13. Your suggestions here…

My Article on Four UnTranslated Short Stories Is Up at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

My article about four untranslated Spanish short story writers is now up at the Quarterly Conversation. It turned out really well and is a much longer form article than I normally write coming in at a little over 3K words. While I think the stories mentioned in the article are great I had to leave out so many different ones that it seems at times I haven’t written that much. Writing about short stories is always hard because you end up with some many different ones and you have to try come up with some sort of thematic element to link them together. This was esspecially the case with these four, but I think I was able to do it.

Collections of short stories are generally considered difficult to market, and thus they’re often looked down upon by editors who acquire new works of literature in the United States. This fact is no less true when it comes to editors who acquire works of foreign literature translated into English, an already notably under-represented group. To make matters worse, what stories that do get translated are often lumped into anthologies of what you might call stories from over there, which obscure the full range of an author’s talent beneath the idea that one story is a representative sample.

This is all very important in the case of Spanish literature, which in recent decades has seen a rebirth of the possibilities of the short story. For authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story, this tendency has hidden a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inventions of Hipólito G. Navarro and the surrealism of Ángel Zapata, Spanish short story writers have created an exciting and diverse body of work marked by its openness and dedication to pushing the boundaries of the form.

I  have also commented on other stories from Navarro and Cubas. The rest of the Quarterly Conversation looks very good, too, and definately worth reading. They have a nicely timed overview of the works of Mercè Rodoreda. (You my reviews of Death in Spring and her short stories)

March 2012 Words Without Borders: The Mexican Drug War

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The new Words Without Borders is out now. It is an issue I’ve been looking forward to for sometime, especially since I donated to the Kick Starter campaign. The issue is a mix of non-fiction and fiction all addressing the drug war. I’ve read Volpi before and he can be insightful. I’m looking forward to reading the Juan Villoro. I’ve seen his name several times in the collection of reporting that was recently published in by Anagrama.

Guest Editor Carmen Boullosa

What is it like to grow up in a country where the only safe place you can gather with friends is in your own home? How do you raise a family when going to the supermarket is fraught with the danger of being kidnapped?  This is the situation in Mexico, where the drug wars have transformed the country into a living hell. Guest editor Carmen Boullosa has assembled compelling essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry from Mexican writers on the impact of this bloody conflict. In their eyewitness reports, Luis Felipe Fabre, Rafael Perez Gay, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Lemus, Fabrizio Mejia Madrid, Hector de Mauleon, Magali Tercero, Jorge Volpi, and Juan Villoro document the crisis and demand the world’s attention.

From the other side of the world, we present poetry commemorating last year’s Japanese earthquake, and launch a new serial about an unexpected pig.

Etgar Keret Story at Guernica

~ bythefirelight

Guernica has a good short story from Etgar Keret. It has fun with the idea of the writer and is one of his stories that touches more directly on the troubles. The story is from his forthcoming book to be published in April, I believe.

“Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must admit, is anything but pleasant. I’m someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn’t something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret—I don’t even remember what exactly—and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But here the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn’t have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.

The Professional Writer and the Birth of the Predictable

~ bythefirelight

Tim Parks has an article in the New York Review of Books about the professional writer and how that has lead to a form of sterility in writing. I think his take has a lot of merit, especially with the institutionalization of writing in the universities. I’ve always been a little suspicious of MFA’s and the like. I mean how many books about writers do we need? It often seems like what half the writers who come from those institutions end up producing anyway. It isn’t a depressing article, just one makes me glad I didn’t try and get an MFA. It all seems like a great ponzi scheme.

At the same time the perceived need for an expensive year-long creative writing course on the part of thousands of would-be writers affords paid employment to those older writers who have trouble making ends meet but are nevertheless determined to keep at it. One of the problems of seeing creative writing as a career is that careers are things you go on with till retirement. The fact that creativity may not be co-extensive with one’s whole working life is not admitted. A disproportionate number of poets teach in these courses.

Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from their chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey. Much rarer is the sort of book (one thinks of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, or Peter Stamm’s On a Day Like This, or going back a way, the maverick English writer Henry Green) where the writer appears, amazingly, to be working directly from experience and imagination, drawing on his knowledge of past literature only in so far as it offers tools for having life happen on the page.

António Lobo Antunes Interview on Canal-L (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

Canal-L has an interview with António Lobo Antunes. I can’t say it is the best interview I’ve ever seen, but at least it gives you some sort of an idea of the man.

The New Boom: Latin American Non-Fiction?

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

I actually don’t like terms like the Boom, but El Pais had an interesting conversation about a new collection coming out from Alfagrara: Antología de crónica latinoamericana actual. (You can read an excerpt here – the 42 page introduction) It is an anthology of stories from newspapers and magazines that focus on the way journalistic writing has developed as its own art form among Spanish speaking journalists. I know there have been many excellent journalists in the past so I don’t want to over state the boom idea. But the focus on journalistic narrative, apparently, has undergone a resurgence of interest. The name English speakers might recognize is Alejandro Zambra. El Pais explains the phenomenon:

1. De acuerdo,  la palabra boom huele. ¿Lo dejamos en “explosión controlada de la crónica latinoamericana”? Lo dejamos. Pero también diremos que en los últimos años han proliferado en América Latina las revistas, las colecciones, los talleres y hasta los premios dedicados a la crónica. Además, ahora se publican en España dos amplias selecciones dedicadas a ese género híbrido que llaman periodismo narrativo. Hoy mismo llega a las librerías Antología de crónica latinoamericana actual (Alfaguara), coordinada por Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. El 1 de marzo lo hará Mejor que ficción. Crónicas ejemplares (Anagrama), a cargo de Jorge Carrión. El próximo sábado Babelia -que ya dedicó una portada al género– se ocupará de ambos libros y del fenómeno que representan. Hoy Papeles Perdidos ofrece dos crónicas incluidas en la selección de Jaramillo: El sabor de la muerte, del mexicano Juan Villoro, y Bob Dylan en el Auditorium Theater, del dominicano Frank Báez.

Félix J. Palma a Profile from El Cultural

~ bythefirelight

El Cultural has a profile of Félix J. Palma, an author who among other things has had a New York Times best seller. I haven’t read him yet (I have a collection of his short stories La menor espectacular del mundo), but the appearance on the best seller list makes me a little nervous. Given the success of Carlos Ruis Zafón, it doesn’t bode well for the quality of his work, or to put it another way, the best seller list doesn’t tend to reward literary fiction these days. Despite his appearance on the list I haven’t heard much about him in the American press.

Esta voz narrativa que proporciona al lector recién llegado las pistas necesarias para que no se pierda, es la misma que le escamotea información, que salta en el tiempo y el espacio según se le antoje -y se regodea por ello-. “Es un homenaje al narrador victoriano. Es como un prestidigitador, un ilusionista”. En definitiva, una herramienta eficaz para hilvanar una trama compleja poblada de paradojas temporales y universos paralelos que se desarrolla a lo largo de 744 páginas. Pero el componente fantástico es casi una excusa para abordar el tema más universal de todos: una historia de amor. “Los viajes en el tiempo o la visita de seres del espacio quedan en un segundo plano”.

El estigma de las etiquetas

Palma abraza la etiqueta “bestseller” de buen grado pero con ciertos reparos: “Mi literatura es eminentemente lúdica, apuesto por la trama y la peripecia, pero a diferencia de muchos autores de bestsellers, intento que la prosa tenga valor en sí misma, que no sea una mera herramienta de transmisión del relato”. El espejo en el que se mira son, además de Wells o Verne, contemporáneos de éstos como Dumas, Salgari o Stevenson. “Todos ellos practicaron una literatura popular culta. Se dirigían a un nuevo tipo de lector burgués que demandaba aventuras, pero no le tomaban por tonto. En definitiva, hay dos tipos de escritores: los que hacen pensar y los que hacen soñar. Yo me considero dentro del segundo grupo”.

Short Story from Francisco Hinojosa in Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a short story from Francisco Hinojosa, Fabula (Fable). It is a fun story about rhinoceros that over throw the lion king and the only way for him to regain power is for the Lions to interbreed with the hipos. It works in the sense that the hipolions regain the thrown, but the lions are now dragging themselves through the mud, something that should be an anathema to them. As fables go, it is terse and has an almost surrealistic sense that under cuts the sometime didactic nature of fables.

Andaba el León de contentillo manipulando a uno de sus allegados cuando llegó el Grillo a decirle que los rinocerontes y las rinocerontas estaban de fiesta y no cesaban de copular.

–¿Y se puede saber qué traman los cabrones?

–Dizque el mejor producto que nazca de tanta cogedera será ungido como candidato a gobernar el reino.

–¿Con que quieren mi silla?

–Por así decirlo.

Tin House #50 – A Review

~ bythefirelight

I finally finished the ever interesting Tin House this week. As usual, there were some excellent pieces and some that, while not bad, weren’t as interesting. The big piece in the issue was an excerpt form Michel Houellebecq’s newest book, The Map and the Territory. I’ve only read Platform and found parts of it interesting, this piece, as is the case with most novel excerpts, did little to interest me, or better said, I would like to read his book in spite of what I read here. On the other hand, Maggie Shipstead’s You Have A Friend in 10A mines in some way similar territory as Houellebecq, but makes it a little more interesting. Essentially, it is the story of a Katie Holmes like actress who is trying to survive the escape from a Scientology-like group. It is a dark picture of control, a story one knows or thinks one knows after passing the magazines at the checkout counter so many times. She had several rhetorical touches that made the story interesting and lifted it above the cringe worth stories of drugs and depravity that can come from this subject. Eric Puchner’s Little Monsters was a nice change of pace, telling a science fiction story of a race of young people who are manufactured and who kill any older adults who were created through sexual intercourse. It isn’t exactly a new idea, I know there is a Star Trek story along those lines, but he brought an impressionistic sensibility to what could have been cold science fiction. And as the two young characters learn to take care of a dying adult, the transformation doesn’t bring about a revolution but does cast the brutality of their lives into a new light. The best story of the fictions, though was Quintan Ana Wikswo’s The Little Kretshmar, a story about a couple learning to deal with their disabled son. What set the story apart is Wikswo strips the story down, removing all temporal and physical baggage so that it is just the actions or results of actions that exist.:

For now, the rings dangle on short strings around their necks. When they lean over the little Kretschmar, the rings swing and dangle. But the little Kretschmar cannot see them, nor can he grab at them. The rings swing in peace as the little Kretschmar rolls to the left, and then to the right.

It is all a reminder of the sauna, of Saturday, of sex and disgust and shame. He will no longer look at her rich, high breasts. She turns away when he unbuttons.

And they avert their eyes from the little Kretschmar when he cries, and tuck the rings inside their shirts.

The accumulation of the little pieces, almost devoid of emotion are more arresting, and do not weigh the story down with the extraneous details about time of day or the color of the sun.

The best piece of non fiction in the issue was Sonia Faleiro’s piece Leela, The Mumbai Bar Dancer. The opening is an excellent example of stretching the essay form. Faleiro starts off in what is third person but is really a playful first person between her and Leela, a kind of dance that Leela plays out with all her clients. It gives a great sense of Leela because it characterizes her, lets her act and speak on her own (even though this is just an illusion), instead of a description of her. She manages to capture more than just the working conditions, but a sense of Leela.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II ‘s Take on the Alamo

~ bythefirelight

The Mexican author Paco Ignacio Taibo II has a new book from Planeta coming about the Battle of the Alamo. La Jornada has a write up of it. I don’t know If I’ll read it but it is interesting to see a Mexican take on one of those founding moments in American history. The facts are necessary revealing if you, as I have, read any kind of revisionist history. But history via pop culture never really dies and for some the history of the Alamo in the films is still true. (I think there is an error below. The constitution they are referring to is 1824.)

Dentro de cientos de libros, filmes y series televisivas que los estadunidenses han hecho a lo largo de 175 años, no faltan la westernización a lo John Wayne en la película The Alamo, los filmes “aptos para Hollywood” y la waltdisneyzación de héroes que no lo fueron nunca. Una épica elementalísima que historiadores y escritores, cineastas y gente de la televisión han dado como proteínas a la media de los estadunidenses y en especial a los texanos. Taibo II muestra aquí que la verdad histórica es mucho más ardua, disímil y aun opuesta. Por ejemplo, que los héroes mayores de la resistencia en El Álamo (William Travis, Jim Bowie y David Crockett) eran estadunidenses, y que, como muchos otros de los defensores, tenían en la Texas mexicana menos de cinco años, en suma, eran tan texanos como Santa Anna cherokee. En la Texas mexicana, en la que por la Constitución de 1924 no había esclavitud, los tres “héroes” eran esclavistas y especuladores de tierras, y algo esencial: ninguno de los tres tuvo una muerte heroica como se ha querido mostrar. Travis murió de un disparo en la frente apenas iniciada la batalla; Jim Bowie, el del famoso cuchillo, tenía días enfermo y lo remataron en uno de los cuartos del fuerte, y David Crockett, que John Wayne elevó a la categoría de ángel de la independencia texana, estaba de paso en San Antonio, se refugió en el fuerte ante la inminencia de la batalla y, al terminar ésta, junto con otros pidió clemencia, pero Santa Anna enseguida los mandó fusilar. El cerco y la batalla terminaron con una carnicería. Las banderas rojas y el toque “a degüello” en los días del sitio ya amenazaban con lo que terminaría por pasar. Pero si de los sitiados no se salvó casi ni el perico, los mexicanos tuvieron mayores bajas, lo que llevó a exclamar a Santa Anna una frase digna de Pirro: “Con otra victoria como ésta nos lleva el diablo.” Una carnicería como la que haría poco después el general José Urrea, por órdenes de Santa Anna, con los rebeldes capturados en la batalla de Coleto, y la que harían las tropas de Sam Houston con los mexicanos en San Jacinto.

Jorge Volpi Wins the Planeta-Casa de América

~ bythefirelight

Jorge Volpi has won the Planeta-Casa de América for his book La tejedora de sombras. It is about the psychiatrist Christiana Morgan. Not sure when it will come out.

“La historia de Christiana Morgan me fascinó por ser una mujer adelantada a su tiempo, sumida en una búsqueda continua de la libertad absoluta y el amor por su amante, el también psicoanalista Henry Murray. Una búsqueda que chocaba con lo tradicional de su tiempo y ponía en peligro su integridad y su vida”. Así describe Jorge Volpi La tejedora de sombras, la novela con la cual ha ganado hoy el V Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa. Una historia de amor atormentada premiada justo en el día de san Valentín.