Books

The Girl on the Firdge by Etgar Keret – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Girl on the Fridge
Etgar Keret
Farrar, Straus and Grioux 2008, pg 171

Etgar Keret’s work is often marked by a sense that one is in a slightly different reality. It isn’t surrealism, just a place where you might be able to buy for 9.99 the meaning of life. In the stories of Keret that purchase never really works out as one would want, and usually the charters don’t so much as regret their decisions as abandon them as just yet another of life’s let downs.  The stories in The Girl on the Fridge aren’t quite as fantastic (see my review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God), but there is still that sense that what one wants doesn’t always work out. Keret’s stories are very short and he has the ability to zero in on those moments with great precision, stripping away everything except those small moments of disappointment.

In The Real Winner of the Preliminary Games, a group of men get together every few weeks to talk and drink. They have a ritual to it and the evenings allow them to not so much find answers to their problems, but find that they are not so bad.  Towards the end one of the men says he’s feed up and is going to commit suicide. His friend, Eitan, talks him out of it. But Eitan, in a moment that has that feeling of melancholy that is just below the surface of many Keret stories takes out his M 16.

“If I want to, I can shoot,” he said out loud. He ordered his brain to pull the trigger. His finger obeyed, but stopped halfway. He could do it, he wasn’t scared. He just had to make sure he wanted to. He thought about it for a few seconds. Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning to life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time. He wanted to live, he really did. That’s all there was to it. Eitan gve his finger another order to make sure he wasn’t kidding himself. It still seemed prepared to do whatever he wanted. He put the gun on half cock and pushed the safety back in. If not for those four beers, he’d never even have tried it. He would have made up an excuse, said it was just a dumb test, that it didn’t mean anything. But like Uzi said, that was the whole point. He put the gun back in the drawer and went into the bathroom to puke. then he washed his face and soaked his head in the sink. Before drying himself, he took a look in the mirror. A skinny guy, we hair, a little pale, like that runner on TV. He wasn’t jumping or yelling or anything, but he’d never felt this good.

Eitan puts the gun away because that is what one does. He then feels a rush. Is it from the test or the rush that comes after throwing up? Whatever it is, it isn’t the answer to anything, just the relief from melancholic doubt. Tomorrow it may return and when the men return to the bar they’ll talk each other into living again because that’s what one does.

In one of his more fantastical ones, Freeze, a man gains the power to make the world freeze. When the world freezes he takes the opportunity to have sex with the best looking women (rape is what he is actually doing although the character would never admit it). At first it works out great for him, but eventually some one tells him that is not good because the women aren’t asking for it. So he then begins a series of experiments, telling the women why they are in their frozen state to scream during sex. Nothing satisfies him until he realizes all he has to do is tell the woman to love him for himself. Of course that works and the woman loves him. All through the story, though, you have a man getting what he wants only to find it is what he wants and in relationships is isn’t just the one person that matters. He is satisfied, but there is always the lingering doubt that what the relationship, any relationship is built on are demands that only one wants. That he can command someone to love him for himself is in of it self contradictory and at the same time a parody of what should be a operating principle for couples. It is a disturbing story that leaves one wondering what loving one for oneself really means.

Keret often uses the perception of children to expose the strangeness of the adult world. In Moral Something, a man is sentenced to hang and the kids who have seen the sentencing on TV try to understand what happens we someone is hung. Since the adults are trying to protect them from the information and the kids only have roumor they have to experiment. They hang a stray cat, but of course it settles nothing because they don’t know if they have done it right. The boys argue over it and when the prettiest girl in school walks by she tells them they are all animals. Keret in that little scene is able to create what the adult world looks like without the veneer of rules, laws, and moral codes. The kids, too, are on that ever present search for the answers that never exist. They don’t know yet, as Eitan in The Real Winner, that there are only approximations, things you settle on because they work even if they aren’t what everyone else is doing.

There are dozens of brief little encounters such as these that show Keret as a master of the form. His vision of a world that never quite operates with the same rules as ours does makes him one of the most interesting short story writers around. While The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is a little more fantastical and, therefore, more interesting, The Girl on the Fridge is still a welcome addition to his body of work.

The Spanish E-Book Wars Have Started

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an article about the start of the Spanish e-book wars that Amazon has started. It is fairly typical of what we have seen in the US. The One big exception is how the Amazon is getting around the fixed book price law in Spain. Apparently, Amazon claims that they are selling direct from the author, versus from a publisher. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Pero El emblema del traidor es una novela peculiar por otro motivo: se puede encontrar en edición electrónica por dos precios: 2,68 euros en Amazon.es y 7,99 euros en Casadellibro.com; algo que, en principio, viola la ley española de precio fijo (según la cual la misma edición de un libro no puede tener dos precios distintos dentro del territorio nacional). Gómez-Jurado ofrece una explicación al respecto: “En un caso lo vende directamente el autor, en el otro hay una editorial de por medio”.

Margaret B. Carson, Translator of Sergio Chejfec, Interviewed at Conversational Reading

~ bythefirelight

There’s a great interview at Conversational Reading with Margaret B. Carson the translator of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds. It is a book that the more I hear about the more I want to take it off my shelves and read. This in particular caught my eye (once I was accused of writing German sentences because they were so long):

On the whole, I tried to stick quite close to the original, not just in word choice but also in preserving the length and density of the sentences. I had to search for models in English to give me an idea of how to structure and balance the clauses and sub-clauses that, as Enrique Vila-Matas points out in his introduction to My Two Worlds, seem to test the elasticity of the sentence itself. I was happy to discover that the long literary sentence en English is not a relic from 19th-century, and that many contemporary writers—among them Lynne Tillman, William Gaddis, and David Foster Wallace—provided excellent models that helped me carry over this essential part of Chejfec’s style.

The Black Minutes by Martín Solares – A Review of a Mexican Noir

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments
New Year's Cartoon from La Jornada

The Black Minutes
Martín Solares
Black Cat 2010, pg 436

If you’ve read anything about Mexico in the last few years then you know something about The Black Minutes by Martín Solares. The Black Minutes is one of a growing trend of crime novels that, in some ways, are replacing the novel of the cacique as the literary image of Mexico. I know there are plenty of other novels written in Mexico, but the Black Minutes reflects a moment in Mexican history that is wracked with incredible violence and corruption and it only makes sense for Mexican authors to turn to that theme. The question, though, with such overwhelming violence and mind-numbing numbers of disappearances how does a fiction writer address the subject without seeming shrill or a journalist with a few obscured details? Can a novelist make compelling fiction without falling into polemics? Of course that assumes the goal of the writer is to make compelling, entertaining, or what every adjective you want to use that suggests there is an artistic end to the novel. Solares has decided not to write directly about a specific event—the femicides in Juarez—but create his own version of Juarez, a smaller, more manageable one, that exists both in the past and in the now. It is a strategy that makes for a good novel, not just a good crime novel, which it most certainly is, and Solares’s skills as a writer move it beyond genre.

The Black Minutes opens in the present with the brutal murder of a journalist. It is a resonant crime ripped, as one might say, from the headlines. A crusty old policeman, El Maceton,  is put on the case. Little by little he follows the footsteps of the late journalist as he gets closer and closer to what had happened. Along the way he interviews people who tell him to stay away from it  all, that it isn’t worth it. Chief among them is a Jesuit priest who knows more than he is willing to say, but gives the story an already sinister edge of coverups and corruption. Paralleling the story is the constant powerlessness of Meceton in the face of the crime boss’s son who continually threatens him because he took away his gun. Meceton, a man who’d rather watch TV than have sex, is the typical middle aged civil servant, tired, getting headaches when ever there’s trouble around. Just as Maceton is getting close to finding out what happened the crime boss’s son rams his car a few times, before he is killed in traffic.

At this point the story goes back 30 years to follow Vincente Rangel, a failed rock musician and nephew of a long time detective for the police department of Paracuán, Tamaulipas. At first Rangel is just a rookie—intern might be a better word—who follows his uncle around to get on the job training. He has no formal training, no one does, nor does he have a gun. He is part of a police force that works through favors, friendships, and bribes. When the bodies of mutilated and murdered school girls start to appear around town, his uncle is given the task of finding the killer. It falls to Vincente when his uncle dies of a heart attack. As the story unfolds, the level of corruption and old-boy-networking that goes on makes it almost impossible to find who the killer is. Rangel is constantly dealing with people in his own force who want to stop him, with the seemingly endless number of judicial agencies that want him to stop, local officials who what something to happen as long as it doesn’t snare one of their people. And the police force is completely inept, made up of untrained lifers like his uncle, who most are just in the business to get bribes, and the unofficial helpers that each cop has and who they pay to do some of the grunt work, including bringing them coffee. Yet Rangel some how is able to figure it out and more amazing, perseveres in the hunt despite the ever present threats. Just as Rangel is about to bring the killer in, the story switches to the present and Solares wraps the story up tiddly, closing all the chapters where he left a character hanging.

One of Solares’s strengths is the ability to weave this story of corruption and lies through the two different time periods and leave each section unanswered until the very end. The sense of mystery and dread that that evokes through out the novel starts just the background fear surrounding any crime and grows as Rangel and Maceton find themselves, in typical detective fashion, the lone forces of good. But the real power in the novel is his depiction of the chaotic town of  Paracuán as a reflection of a larger Mexico. Readers can be forgiven if they begin to think at some point, it’s a wonder anything gets done in Mexico. Solares’s depiction of every last member of society as somehow corrupt begins to wear the reader down until all that is left is the same foreboding that runs through out the novel: any second I could get it. Yet the Rangel and Maceton don’t succumb and despite the terror that runs throughout the book, and its antecedents in the press, there is some sort of hope still there.

The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi (one of Solares’s friends according to the acknowledgements page) has said more writers should create political novels, novels that meet the actual. The Black Minutes is one of those few cases where the political—and how a society deals with crime is political—and the novelistic are perfectly tuned.

P.S if you want to feel better about Mexico you might try listening to this interview about Mexico City here .

Álvaro Pombo Wins the Nadal Prize with El temblor del héroe

~ bythefirelight

Álvaro Pombo has won the Nadal Prize for El temblor del héroe, a book that is a criticism of the insensitivity of these times of crisis. That’s all I know about the book which will appear in February. You can read the notice from El Pais and from La Vanguardia.

From el Pais:

Además de -o por culpa de- la crisis, son tiempos en los que la gente ha perdido el entusiasmo hacia los otros; no se sabe qué actitud tomar frente a ellos; cuesta reaccionar ante cualquier drama, propio o ajeno. A un escritor de la alta sensibilidad de Álvaro Pombo no podía escapársele esa situación moral, que ha decidido volcar en un profesor universitario de Filosofía recién jubilado, atribulado en el Madrid actual, que asiste a una desgracia ante la que ni se inmuta. Así es el protagonista de El temblor del héroe, novela con la que el autor ha obtenido en Barcelona los 18.000 euros del 69º premio Nadal (que convoca ediciones Destino), decano de las letras españolas, que llegará a las librerías el 2 de febrero. Cierta añoranza por tiempos pasados más bienaventurados destila también Quan erem feliços, con la que otro veterano, aquí en lides periodísticas, el gerundense Rafael Nadal, se alzó con el 44º premio Josep Pla de prosa en catalán (6.000 euros), memorias de infancia con las que el galardón regresa a la no ficción tras 24 años de novela pura.

Interview with Antonio Muñoz Molina About His Short Story Collection At Canal-L

~ bythefirelight

Canal-L has an interview of Antonio Muñoz Molina talking about his new book of short stories, Nada del otro mundo (Nothing exceptional). He talks about what he likes in short stories, why he thinks the fantastic only works in short stories, and how to be a Spanish speaker in the US is to be an internationalist.

Interview with Laura Freixas About her New Book at La Vanguardia

~ bythefirelight

La Vanguardia interviewed Laura Freixas about her new book, Los otros son más felice.

La carrera de Laura Freixas es fruto del esmero por mantenerse firmemente anclada en el compromiso con una literatura que es y quiere ser femenina. Freixas nunca ha disimulado que le interesa proponer la mirada de la mujer sobre el mundo y sobre la propia condición femenina, una perspectiva bien escasa en la historia de la literatura, incluso en la historia de la literatura hecha por mujeres, y habría que decir, también en la hecha para mujeres. Los otros son más felices (Destino), su cuarta novela, es un relato de iniciación, el de una joven, Áurea, radicada en un pueblo de La Mancha pero habitante del Madrid del tardofranquismo, a la que su madre envía a casa de unos familiares ricos y cultos en Cadaqués. Es pues una novela sobre el descubrimiento del mundo.

Su novela puede funcionar como una lectura complementaria del clásico Nada de Laforet, porque aunque la condición social no sea la misma, el descubrimiento del mundo de Laforet está contado en el inmediato, mientras que en su novela pese mucho que se trata de un relato retrospectivo.

Oye pues es una buena comparación, no se me había ocurrido y claro me honra, porque Nada es una gran novela. Es verdad, ahora que lo dices seguramente me haya influido en ese planteamiento de una chica joven que llega de otra región de España a casa de una familia catalana que no comprende. Es verdad, ¿cómo no se me había ocurrido?

I thought her comments about Madrid in the 70s was interesting too

En su novela está reflejado algo muy cierto y que cambió luego de forma sensible: Madrid por entonces era muy rural, una especie de agregación de gente de pueblos. Casi la antítesis de lo que ocurre ahora.

Es cierto sí, efectivamente, y ahora es cosmopolita, una ciudad plenamente anónima, cosa que hoy no ocurre en Barcelona por ejemplo, donde rápidamente te preguntan de qué familia eres y donde veraneas y te hacen el retrato, algo que a mí me agobiaba un poco. El Madrid de los setenta era un Madrid que era muy pueblo, se notaba que había mucha gente que venía del pueblo y que mentalmente todavía estaba en el pueblo. Es un tipo de gente que todavía se ven en Madrid, aunque hoy sea efectivamente la única ciudad realmente anónima y cosmopolita de la península; sobre todo los viejos, es un tipo de viejo que no ves en Barcelona. Aquí ves viejas de luto, viejos con alpargatas y con boina sentados en los parques que serán de pueblo toda su vida. Eso en los setenta se notaba mucho, entonces la narradora de mi libro aunque haya nacido en Madrid se siente muy pueblerina en comparación con los elegantes y cultos catalanes. Y te diré más, de hecho, cuando yo empecé a escribir la novela, su familia venía de Castilla La Vieja, que es de donde viene mi familia materna, pero luego lo cambie a La Mancha por el nombre, porque ella lo siente como una mácula. Y quería huir del tópico. En cambio, Madrid se ha hecho más cosmopolita y más anónimo, se ha beneficiado de su condición de capital, y del crecimiento demográfico tan brutal, le ha perjudicado urbanísticamente porque ha crecido a tontas y a locas, muy mal…

January 2012 Words Without Borders Out- The Apocalypse

~ bythefirelight

A new Words Without Borders is out now featuring The Apocalypse , as this is the year of the Apocalypse(s). As always it looks interesting. I also noticed that they have added the original language along side of the translation which is really a nice touch. I’ll be able to read some of the Spanish language ones in the original.

With a nod to the doomsday prophecy, we’re launching 2012 with writing about apocalypse. In two riffs on the Old Testament, André-Marcel Adamek builds a Belgian ark, while Fernando Paiva eulogizes the Creator. Ofir Touché Gafla counts down the hours in a runaway city. Sławomir Mrożek awaits the end of days at McDonald’s. Hector G. Oesterheld and Solano Lopez depict a deadly snowfall in Buenos Aires. Gyrðir Elíasson sees banned books in Iceland’s future. Antônio Xerxenesky exposes a conspiracy to rewrite a famous ending. And Mexico’s Ambar Past provides an incantatory oracle. We trust you’ll enjoy these apocalyptic visions; and if not, well, it’s not the end of the world. Elsewhere, Luis Nuño slips out for a smoke, Juan Villoro misses connections, and Alber Sabanoglu heads to sea.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The High Window
Raymond Chandler
Library of America, 1995

Chandler’s The High Window is shorter and less robust than his other novels, but it is one of the few that I have not seen in a movie version (one exists from 1944 but it isn’t considered a particularly good film). In theory that should make for a better reading experience. It has the usual collection of reprobates and self destructive lowlifes. Still, it feels a bit sanitized, as if the real dark side of LA had been overlooked. Sure there are the murders and the mysterious young woman who is kept as a virtual slave in the house of his Marlowe’s client, but there isn’t any tension to them. They just happen 1,2,3 and each time Marlowe goes back to his client, a port drinking shut-in, only to have her refuse to answer his questions. After all that back and forth, Marlowe explains what happened. It is not a particularly interesting way of doing things. Any work of mystery that has to have a lengthy explanation at the end of it to explain what happened is usually a failure. Chandler usually managed to avoid those failures. On the plus side, his depiction of the drunks on Bunker Hill has his typically dark clarity, as do all his depictions of alcoholics. And the young private eye that follows him around only to get killed is funny, if nothing else. As a work of Chandler, though, The High Window is a disappointment. In part because his client, stays in the shadows, both figuratively and literally and does not animate the novel the way Farewell, My Lovely or The Big Sleep. Without that interaction in the plot, something is missing. The High Window is, at best, an intermezzo between his better works, and one any person new to Chandler should not read first.

Natasha Wimmer Interview about Bolaño at Conversational Reading

~ bythefirelight

Conversational Reading has an interview with Natasha Wimmer about Roberto Bolaño’s latest book to be published in English, The Third Reich. It s a good interview, especially the parts about approaching a Bolaño novel.

SE: It’s interesting that you read the novel’s lack of a strong climax as a positive thing, since I’ve seen a number of reviewers ding The Third Reich for not having that one culminating scene of horror that many of Bolaño’s other novels accustom you to expect. (For my own part, I liked the anti-climax, regarding it more as a failure of Udo’s transformation than of Bolaño’s imagination.) To tie this in to your reading of the book as a farce, do you think there’s a certain perception out there of what Bolaño represents and that a book like Third Reich will be judged in terms of what’s accepted “Bolaño” instead of simply on its own terms?NW: Yes, I do think that there is a certain expectation of what a Bolaño novel will be, and I worried from the beginning that critics wouldn’t appreciate The Third Reich. Mostly I thought they would have problems with it on a sentence level, because Bolaño’s prose is thinner and more transparent than usual, with fewer of the oblique-lyrical moments that so dominate a novel like By Night in Chile, for example. My sense of the book, though, is that it’s one giant oblique-lyrical moment, and that the pacing is what gives it its stylistic edge and distinctiveness. It’s a book that leaves you feeling off-balance without realizing quite why, because the effect develops so gradually. I like your interpretation of the anti-climax as a reflection of the failure of Udo’s transformation, although I do think that he’s changed—diminished, or somehow shrunken—by his loss of faith in gaming, absurd or creepy as that faith was.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Farewell My Lovely
Raymond Chandler
Library of America, 1995

The problem with Chandler is that every time I read him I hear voices: Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery and even Gerald Mohr (thankfully, not Elliot Gould). Because I’ve listened to dozens of Richard Diamond radio shows Dick Powell is the foremost of the voices, but they’re all there and as I read the novel itself seems strange, foreign, as if it were the fake and all the films and radio versions were the real thing. That cultural ever-presence distracts one from the source and obfuscates through layers of sanitizing changes the real Chandler and his clear observations. As I read him, scraping away layers of Hollywood, I’m always surprised at the society Chandler describes: its as petty and real as the one I know. There is no tabu that he is unwilling to acknowledge and it is that willingness to show every nasty detail that makes returning to his books so rewarding.

When thinking about Chandler, if you can separate yourself from the film and radio versions, the way he constructs the narrative voice is refreshingly clean, edited down to an almost editorially free mode of observation. That the observations are commentaries in of themselves goes without saying, but he always remains professionally detached. Perhaps not to the level of a Johnny Dollar, but its there. Of course, that detachment is suspect with women characters. Still even his romantic interests have the sense of the reportage about them. This might not seem so important, but when compared to his contemporaries, even some non crime writing, the clarity of his work, uncluttered by repeating the obvious via internal monologues.  While I hate the “show don’t tell” prescription to writers, Chandler is one writer who knew how to follow it and it makes his work still stand.

Farewell, My Lovely opens with a clear eyed description of the changing racial make up of LA. Marlowe goes to a bar in central LA that had changed from white to black clientele. Like most things in these Chandler novels, Marlowe is in the area on a case and sees a tough enter the bar and decides to follow him in. It’s there that Chandler sketches the racial tensions of the changing city as the tough, Moose Malloy, cannot understand how the bar could change. That aggravation, first shown verbally through racial slurs, is ultimately expressed in a violence that leads to murder. When Marlowe is interviewed by the police, Chandler again shows the complete indifference of white society to the minorities. The cop in charge wants some glory from the case, but knows he’ll get nothing from it because no one cares. In those opening pages he sets up a great critique of LA, dark as it can be, and Marlowe is restrained in using racist language (he sticks with the then common negro).

Where his work breaks down, is the silly Indian character who seems like some stereotype right out of the movies. At one point in the book he is captured by a crime boss. One of his henchmen is an Indian who has a sideline as an Indian in western movies. Problem is, he talks as if he were on the plains of the old west circa 1880. Perhaps it was supposed to be a joke, but the only thing it is silly. Where he captured the corruption and racial tensions of LA in the bar scene, here he just imports mid century stereotypes for a little buffoonery that is not funny at all.

Still, it is the I don’t give a damn about you attitude that permeates the characters that makes the book so fresh. Nor is is a cartoonish look. Here I’m specifically thinking of the drunk woman he visits repeatedly. This isn’t a Hollywood drunk of so many noir films that has some semblance of control, but a total wastrel whose only goal in life is the next bottle. The busybody across the street from the woman is interesting, too, a nice depiction of the non criminal, but still having the Chandler eye for details.

Plenty of people have commented on the logic of his plots so I won’t bother here, and really I don’t care. They are good enough for me. It is the world he creates that interests me. But one thing that will strike anyone is that Marlowe is lucky and that several moments of the book hinge on fortunate accidents, especially when he is in a dark canyon and hit over the head and a young woman comes to his rescue. And the chances he takes, such as sneaking on to the gambling ship anchored off Bay City to confront the a crime boss. Occasionally, it is a little too much and were it not for the writing, perhaps it would be. (I can’t help but imagine Marlowe years latter suffering dementia for all the certain concussions he’s received.) Yet despite all that Farewell, My Lovely is an excellent piece of noir that rises above so much of the pulp material of the era (I’ve been reading some of it and have been quite disappointed. Just compare the first paragraph of Chandler’s Red Wind to anything else and you’ll see what I mean). One I could easily read again and hopefully, finally, get those voices out of my head.

When Borges Lost the Premio Nacional Because of Politics

~ bythefirelight

The Nobel wasn’t the only prize Borges lost because of politics. He also lost the Premio Nacional in 1941, the year of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Revista Ñ has an article about the ins and outs of his loss. Mostly, though Borges was ahead of his time.

La pérdida del premio acaso no fuera tan inesperada. En la bibliográfica que publicó en Sur en mayo de 1942, apenas antes de que se conociera el dictamen del jurado, Bioy Casares fue clarividente y se adelantó a los reparos que el libro recibiría: “Estos ejercicios de Borges producirán tal vez algún comentador que los califique de juegos. ¿Querrá expresar que son difíciles, que están escritos con premeditación y habilidad, que en ellos se trata con pudor los efectos sintácticos y los sentimientos humanos, que no apelan a la retórica de matar niños, denunciada por Ruskin, o de matar perros, practicada por Steinbeck?”. Captando el clima de época, Bioy conjetura que “tal vez algún turista, o algún distraído aborigmpensa nacional, a una obra exótica y de decadencia (…) juzgamos que hizo bien.”

Best Book of 2011 from Elvira Navarro, Carlos Yushimito, Ana María Shua and other Spanish Language Authors

~ bythefirelight

Canal-l has put together a blog that lists the favorite books of 2011 by various Spanish Language authors such as Elvira Navarro, Carlos Yushimito, Ana María Shua. It is an interesting list and I have even read one book, Alberto Fuget’s Missing. Una investigación which I thought was a great book and one of my favorites of the year. Another I have been reading for a while, The Complete Short Stories of Lydia Davis. As with all the lists from outside of the US it is always fascinating to see how many books from outside the Spanish speaking world they choose.

Libro de mal amor by Fernando Iwasaki – Reviewed at La Jornada

~ bythefirelight

La Jornada has a review of the Mexican republication of the Libro de mal amor by Fernando Iwasaki. The book was originally published in Spain, where Iwasaki lives, in 2001. Iwasaki can be quite funny and I have read one of his more recent books, España, aparte de mi, estes premios. This book sounds funny and interesting.

Fernando Iwasaki (Lima, 1961) es un autor que no goza de la fama que merece. Tal vez porque siempre ha escrito lo que le ha venido en gana sin afán de satisfacer a los lectores. Él mismo nos dice que “no cree en la escritura como texto de representación, sino como texto de presentación”.

[…]

Primero: cada una de las diez veces Fernando se enamoró de la mujer más bella del mundo. ¿Hay forma de que no sea así? Enamoradizo a más no poder, el personaje y narrador siempre supo entregarse por completo. Para ello requería ser seducido por una mujer que valiera la pena. Cada una de ellas lo valía por completo. ¿Se puede amar de otra forma? Parece ser que no.

[…]

La lista continúa. Pero la suma de las virtudes de este libro sólo sirve para evidenciar algo: reírse de uno mismo sirve para hacer literatura, para desmitificar el amor y para, en una de ésas, lograr presentarlo como sólo las palabras lo pueden hacer.

Recent Acquisitions – More Spanish Short Stories and a Little History for Good Measure

~ bythefirelight

Christmas always means books to me and this year, between what I bought myself and a few gifts, my to read stack grew nicely. I continue with my reading, or should I say study, of the Spanish short story. And since I like history but don’t read it enough I picked up a few interesting titles. I can’t wait to read start reading them.

I forgot one:

Literary Resolutions 2012

~ bythefirelight

For the last few years running I’ve been making a few small literary resolutions. This years are much like last years, read things I already own and get some fiction published. Simple right? Well if I look back on how well I did from last year, the first item wasn’t too bad. The main problem with the first is I keep adding to the items that I own, but that just shows my enthusiasm (my next post will be evidence of that phenomenon). The second, though, did not happen at all. I wrote, but sending things to publish is such a bore and eats time I could be writing or reading or doing something much more interesting. I guess that is just the way it is.

Last year I believe I said I wanted to read more in Spanish. I think I fulfilled that requirement. And for the year that comes I don’t think I’ll have a problem with that since quite a bit of what I bought this year was in Spanish, so if I’m reading what I own, in theory, I’ll be reading in Spanish.

Any one else have literary resolutions?

The Best Fiction From Spain According to El Mundo and El Pais

~ bythefirelight

Last week I mentioned the El Pais best of 2011 list with its unsurprising selection of Javier Marias’ newest book, Los enamoramientos. You can see their list here and read about why they picked the book here. El Mundo, one of El Pais’ competitors has an all Spanish list which you can see here.  Their number one was Yo confieso by Jaume Cabré, a novel that mixes moments from the middle ages to now as a the narrator with Alzheimer remembers in fragments the various scenes that beak and interweave with each other. Of course,  Javier Marias is 3rd on the list and Issac Rosa’s La mano invisible is number 8. The Rosa’s book looked interesting. I saw him on El publico lee earlier this year and the way he wrote the book and its structural elements sounded interesting, along with the story. Their write up is below.

En una vieja nave industrial,un albañil levanta un muro para demolerlo y comenzar de nuevo; una teleoperadora persigue a posibles clientes, un mecánico demonta un motor para montarlo de nuevo, desmontarlo, y volver a empezar, mientras una costurera trabaja sin descanso con metros y metros de tela… Lo que todos y cada uno de ellos soñaban que sería su vida laboral hace tiempo que se ha diluido en el fracaso, la derrota y la frustración. O el miedo al innombrable paro. Implacable, Isaac Rosa (Sevilla, 1974), retrata en esta ambiciosa novela nuestro mundo actual. Sin compasión.

Daniel Sada Appreciation from Fransisco Goldman

~ bythefirelight

Franisco Goldman has a nice Appreciation of Daniel Sada in the Pairs Review. It is an insightful piece and I think Almost Never is going to be the big book of next year.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/19/daniel-sada/#.Tu9eCLHG0hU.twitter

Bolaño compared Sada’s baroque writing style to Lezama Lima’s, by way of making the point that because the Cuban Lezama’s baroque reflected the crowded natural effulgence of the tropics, Sada’s baroque is a more impressive verbal invention, a baroque of the desert. It, too, came only from “the efficacy of words.” In Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems like a lie the truth is never known), Sada’s huge, dense masterpiece (a novel routinely referred to as Joycean, with 650 pages and 90 characters, narrated almost entirely in alexandrine, hendecasyllabic, and isosyllabic verse-prose), the desert and its sparsely populated towns teem with all the political turbulence, corruption, and violence of modern Mexico. Sada is to Juan Rulfo—author of only one, hundred-page novel, the Mexican desert ghost-town masterpiece Pedro Páramo, voted by readers of Spain’s most important newspaper, El País, as the greatest Spanish-language novel of the twentieth century—what Beckett was to Joyce, only inverted. Beckett’s minimalism was his response to Joyce unsurpassable maximalism. Sada’s maximalism was his response to Rulfo’s unsurpassable minimalism.

Los enamoramientos from Javier Marías its El Pais’ Best Book of the Year

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has announced their best if 2011. Javier Marias latest book is their best of the year. You can see the whole list here. http://blogs.elpais.com/papeles-perdidos/2011/12/los-enamoramientos-de-marias-mejor-libro-de-2011.html

Javier Marías desvela en este vídeo parte del proceso de creación de su novela Los enamoramientos (Alfaguara), elegida, por Babelia, como el mejor libro de 2011. La elección es el resultado de una encuesta con 57 críticos y colaboradores de la revista cultural de EL PAÍS. La edición anual y especial de Babelia con los mejores libros del año y los cinco más destacados en ocho géneros y categorías saldrá mañana, y no el sábado como es habitual, debido a las fiestas navideñas. Tras Los enamoramientos, las obras más votadas son (cada una tiene un enlace a una entrevista o crítica publicada este año en Babelia