Javier Marías was interviewed at El Pais about his journalistic work, which usually consists of a weekly article. I don’t know if any of it has appeared in English, but he is usually a sharp tonged critic of Spain. I don’t read his articles too often because they are very Spain centric. You can get a sense of what he thinks by looking at this phrase “Tradicionalmente, la derecha en España solo dice estupideces”, which translates as “traditionally the right in Spain only says stupid things.”
P. ¿Le cuesta verbalizar ciertas cosas o no se pone límites? Es que, en el del domingo pasado, donde decía que estamos alumbrando una sociedad de chivatos, escribía: “O, dicho peor pero más a las claras, es crear una sociedad de hijos de puta”.
R. No soy muy dado a utilizar este tipo de expresiones pero tampoco me escandalizo con ellas. Y es que lo creo: el peligro de la globalización y de la rapidez con que nos llegan las noticias de todas partes es que cualquier idea es susceptible de ser copiada. Y ahí hablaba de Corea del Sur, donde la delación está remunerada y el ciudadano ejerce de policía cuando ve que alguien se salta un semáforo o deja la basura donde no es debido. Si a alguien le dan dinero por chivarse de alguien, esa es una sociedad de hijos de puta. De gentuza.
P. Lo que ocurre con las reglas de la sociedad es que…
R. Tenemos que tener un cierto margen para saltarnos las reglas, en una época en la que todo tiende a estar regulado. Si no existe ese margen, vivimos en una sociedad imposible. Hay demasiada gente recta, demasiada gente con conciencia y vocación de ser recta. Son el equivalente a los acusicas del colegio.
Andrés Neuman has been popping up in many different media outlets in Spain while he promotes his newest book Hacerse el muerto. Two of the more interesting interviews have been on Canal-l and El País. The Canal-l interview, of course, talks about his new book and what it is about. All the stories have something to do with death, but range in tone from the fantastic to one about the death of his mother at a young age. Then they go on to talk about Borges and how in his time he wasn’t part of the vanguard, especially in stylistic terms, and over time he has been recognized as the vanguard. Neuman posits the same will happen to this era where writers are blending genres such as the essay, the short story, and the novel, which eventually grow tiresome to a new generation of writers.
From El País is this interview which focuses quite a bit on what interests him in writing. (via)
Es como una contradicción permanente ¿La frase en sí “hacerse el muerto” implica una gran dualidad?
Yo me contradigo muchísimo, la contradicción es algo inevitable y la contradicción no es lo mismo para nada que la tibieza o la incapacidad de comprometerse con una emoción , si no que muchas veces como dice Borges, en un cuento que me gusta mucho, que se llama El tema del traidor y del héroe, “no era un traidor, sino un hombre desgarrado por sucesivas y opuestas lealtades”; el caso es que nada que es gracioso deja en, algún momento, de resultar siniestro y ninguna tristeza deja de tener algún golpe de risa. Es muy difícil profundizar en la emoción sin que te encuentres con su opuesto y nuestra vida cada vez más tiene que ver con esto; la capacidad de pasar de la alegría a la depresión se Ha disparado en la actualidad y en los géneros especialmente breves, y por tanto de estructura interna nerviosa, como es un libro de cuentos breves, sobre todo, porque en ellos algo está comenzando a cada rato; se presta de manera particular a este cambio de estado de ánimo que puede formar una idea estructural.
A qué orden te refieres cuando en el Dodecálogo cuarto cuando hablas de que es una época de desordenar el orden
Es una observación acerca de la estructura del relato breve, la teoría del cuento siempre ha sido como excesivamente tradicionalista en ocasiones, hay como dos o tres lugares comunes que se repiten a la hora de explicar su estructura: que el cuento es un mecanismo de relojería, que el cuento es una cosa redonda y perfecta, que el cuento te sorprende al final; y con esas dos o tres frases parece como que pudiéramos abarcar toda la teoría pero no es así porque hay millones de cuentos que incumplen esas normas, entonces esta expresión se relaciona con otra también presente en el Tercer dodecálogo de un cuentista que dice: “Al cuento lo persigue su estructura. Por eso, cada cierto tiempo, conviene dinamitarla”, con todo amor. Por tanto creo que el cuento tiene, por un lado, como una tentación clásica, ordenada y perfecta y por eso es muy importante que la otra mitad del cuento tienda al desorden, al caos, a la dispersión. Yo veo la historia del cuento como un combate entre el paradigma esférico y el paradigma caótico y para que el cuento esté fresco es necesario que esas dos fuerzas empaten, que haya un deseo de estructurar el cuento y un deseo de desordenar esa estructura.
And from El Pais another interveiw/profile about his newest book (Via):
Neuman lleva jugando a los equilibrios con ellos siete años. El tiempo durante el que ha ido incluyendo y descartando piezas en este artefacto tragicómico compuesto de enormes emociones y cortas transiciones. Pero lo hizo sin tener tampoco muy claro a dónde le conducía la pendiente del libro. Aunque fuera breve. “Es que me parece opresor pedirle a un libro de cuentos que el escritor sepa de antemano que va a escribir 12 relatos sobre, por ejemplo, ciclistas en Praga. ¿Y si se me ocurre algo sobre un ciclista en La Paz? ¿Qué hago entonces? Hay una cierta energía que queda reprimida con un punto de partida”. Ya, bien… en el libro se entiende. Pero en un relato corto, con tan poco margen de maniobra, ¿puede el escritor dejarse llevar por la historia o hay que salir a jugar con un plan muy concreto? “Para nada. Más corta es la poesía y no tiene problemas para navegar a su antojo. Podríamos sostener lo contrario, avanzar durante 200 páginas sin un plan es abusar del lector. En un número pequeño de páginas se puede llegar a crear una voz; una canción improvisada puede ser una maravilla, pero una sinfonía sería un horror”.
Guernica has an interview with Sergio Chejfec about his new book My Two Worlds. This is his first book to be translated in English and I’ve heard some good thing about it. I’m intrigued also because Scott at Conversational Reading has said it is “is a fairly difficult book to find one’s way into”. He has some interesting things to say about literature and I’m curious if they work in practice.
Guernica: Something else I noted in the text, something that interested me, was the narrator’s experience with nonhuman things, and things that are untraceable. You mention well-trodden paths that have been walked countless times by other human beings. And at one point you say “the ground of the world speaks different, near-incomprehensible languages.” Could you talk about instances like this, instances your narrator experiences that don’t belong to the realm of human experience?
Sergio Chejfec: Yes, for me, this speaks to the stuff of life, the unnatural stuff of life, which is quite distinct from the life of nature. One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn’t exist anymore, this idea of “the wild.” This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work—they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource. We can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it’s always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that’s why I write the way I do—it’s an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this “constructed” life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect. I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It’s similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don’t like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you’re not speaking about real things. There’s a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.
Alberto Olmos newest book is reviewed in Revista de Letras. He is one of the Granta youngsters, and one of the may that didn’t really sound that interesting or at least would have to go a long way to convince me they had the goods. In Javier Moreno’s review it sounds as if he has made steps in improving his work. Still, I’m not quite convinced yet.
La literatura de Alberto Olmos ha oscilado hasta ahora entre la querencia por la confusión entre lo literario y lo biográfico a través de personajes que uno imagina muy cercanos al propio autor y que este pareciera usar como mera máscara interpuesta (pienso, por ejemplo, en Trenes hacia Tokio o A bordo del naufragio) y el distanciamiento premeditado de un artesano que busca explorar los límites de su oficio (pienso en Tatami y, sobre todo, El estatus). A primera vista Ejército enemigo formaría parte del primer grupo de novelas.
[…]
Sin duda en Ejército enemigo se suplen muchas de las carencias de las que hablé anteriormente. Estamos en este caso ante una obra con un contexto social e histórico claramente actual y reconocible, aunque desprovisto de referencias explícitas (allá quien quiera encontrar relación entre esta novela y el movimiento 15M), el personaje puede parecerse o no al autor aunque eso es algo que deja de interesarnos (a mí, al menos) con el transcurrir de las páginas, y el tema (esa gran palabra) es lo suficientemente ambicioso como para que el lector sienta que la inmersión en una novela de casi trescientas páginas merezca la pena. Y está bien. Todo esto está bien. Está bien que la trama simule un argumento tan de género como la búsqueda del culpable de un crimen sin esclarecer. Está bien el sexo real y virtual que aparecen en esta novela (memorables me parecen las secuencias del Chatchinko o la écfrasis de un vídeo porno que circula por la web, un vídeo que, todo sea dicho, existe, pero cuya visión no logró excitarme ni la décima parte de lo que lo hizo la narración hecha por el autor). Está bien que la cuenta de correo simbolice de alguna manera el alma del desaparecido y que Santiago, el personaje (detective, a su pesar), se recree ante su lectura con una mezcla de morbo y espíritu mefistofélico. Y está muy bien, por último, el espíritu jacobino que destila Santiago, un personaje nada bien pensante, políticamente incorrecto y con conciencia de clase, una combinación que resulta difícil de encontrar en las letras hispanas actuales.
Publishing Perspectives has a list of the top Spanish-language cultural news Twitter Feeds. I know a few of these and they are some good sources, especially Canal-L which has some good interviews. Many of these I don’t know but look interesting.
@revistaenie: Revista Ñ, the cultural magazine of the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín. It specializes in book reviews, author interviews and feature stories.
@canalL: An author video-interview site based in Barcelona.
@Gatopardocom: The excellent Mexican cultural magazine specialized in contemporary Latin-American journalism and narrative.
@babelia_elpais: The feed of one of the Spanish language’s most important weekly cultural magazines, published by El País of Madrid.
@casamerica: The Spanish institution Casa de America, a central clearinghouse of cultural debate in iberoamerica.
@hipermedula: Based in Spain, this site is on the cutting edge of contemporary art and culture.
I can remember liking some of his other story collections and the recent story I read in the New Yorker recently. As such the review in the LA Times makes me a little less interested in his work. Since I’ve been spending so much time of late thinking about short stories, his sound like so many well told stories that fit convention, but go no father. I’m not sure everyone ca break convention, but the conventional can get a little tedious from time to time.
“Before the End, After the Beginning” is a collection of stories written mostly after the stroke, and it serves as a reckoning. The first, “please, thank you,” is a gateway into the new status quo: Written from the point of view of Mr. Sanchez, a recent stroke victim, we see a tough guy in a diminished state. He’s obstinate, funny, slowly improving, but he’s lost the use of one hand; the story has no capital letters because he cannot reach the shift key. This also happened to Gilb himself, but autobiographical details don’t say much about how these stories work. They work well.
Gilb, who was raised in Los Angeles and now makes his home in Texas, is known for writing stories of men and masculinity. This book continues that tradition — almost all of these stories are told from the point of view of boys or men — while moving that tradition into a place of transition. Over and over, the characters are in-between. We see Mr. Sanchez only from the time he wakes up from the stroke to when he checks out of the hospital.
[…]
A couple of stories are compact exercises in character and voice, a few intense pages of joy that begin on L.A.’s freeways, or a story in which misfortune is seen third-hand. But even with these and the first story’s lack of capitalization, Gilb is not pushing stylistic boundaries. He’s simply telling good stories: of men who are both Mexican and American, who are cultured and uncouth, who look at wealth from the outside and, occasionally, from within. A student may make something of himself; a poor young father might fall through the cracks; an older man might discover something new. They are formed by forces outside themselves, but they are not finished yet.
Martín Caparrós from Argentina has won the Premio Herralde de Novela. This is one of the more important prizes in Spanish Language writing and one of those that a publishing house, Anagrama, sponsors.
El escritor argentino Martín Caparrós (Buenos Aires, 1957) ha ganado el XXIX Premio Herralde de Novela, que concede la editorial Anagrama y está dotado con 18.000 euros, con la obra Los Living, una novela que aborda la relación de los hombres con la muerte. Los Living narra las vicisitudes de un hombre cuya infancia queda marcada por la muerte confusa de su padre y de su abuelo y queda fascinado por el tránsito entre la vida y el deceso. Caparrós es colaborador de EL PAÍS con su blog Pamplinas.
El ganador ha declarado que se trata de una novela “de picaresca contemporánea”. En Los Living, su protagonista, Nito, nace en Buenos Aires el día en que muere Juan Domingo Perón, en julio de 1974. Su infancia, con el trasfondo de la turbulenta historia argentina, queda marcada por la confusa muerte de su padre y de su abuelo, y Nito se siente cada vez más fascinado por ese tránsito. En su relación con un personaje llamado Pastor llegan a la idea de que la sociedad no debe deshacerse de los muertos. El autor, en la rueda de prensa como ganador del Herralde, ha rechazado cualquier símil con los desaparecidos de la dictadura argentina, aunque sí ha dicho que en su texto hay personajes de la cultura pop argentina. Caparrós ha desvelado que la novela empieza con un tono divertido que se va amargando “de forma notable”.
These were the shortlisted authors:
– El salto de Donatti, Juan Almar (pseudónimo), España
– Usted me pidió que le contase, Budrun (pseudónimo), España
– Modelos animales, Aixa de la Cruz, España
– Otros negocios, Martín Hernández (pseudónimo), Argentina
– Érase una vez en el invierno, Antonio Jiménez Iznaga (pseudónimo), Cuba
– La piscina, Roberto Lara (pseudónimo), España
– La sala en noviembre, Gonzalo Leal Manrubia (pseudónimo), España
– El hombre del mini, Peña Maín (pseudónimo), España
– Padres de la patria, Gabriel Pasquini, Argentina
– La vida nueva, Alberto de Santos (pseudónimo), Argentina
The November 2011 Words Without Borders featuring Caribbean Spanish and French language writers. The Spanish language writers come from Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The featured Spanish language writers are below.
This month we present literature from the Caribbean. Writers from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Martinique, and Puerto Rico contribute compelling portraits of their countries and societies. From sober reports on natural disasters and political oppression to antic depictions of sexuality run amok, the pieces collected here testify to the range and vitality of this region’s writers. Haiti’s Dany Laferrière reports from the rubble of the 2010 earthquake. In an excerpt from his Prix Goncourt-shortlisted novel, Lyonel Trouillot sends a young woman in search of her family history. Cuba’s Jorge Olivera Castillo brings a nightmare to life. His countryman Omar Pérez performs a lively regguetón. From Martinique, Suzanne Dracius rides with Amazons, while Johan Moya Ramis struggles with an unruly body part. Évelyne Trouillot gives voice to a madwoman on a turbulent journey. Puerto Rico’s Juan Flores presents a tap-dancing sage, while José María Lima speaks from the grave. In poetry from the Dominican Republic, Frank Baez paints a self-portrait, José Mármol communes with nature, and Aurora Arias comes full circle. We trust you’ll enjoy this island tour.
The Other Day After the Rain
By Johan Moya Ramis
Translated from Spanish by David Iaconangelo
He throws the arm with the machete around my shoulders, the edge of the blade scant centimeters from my neck. more>>>
Self-Portrait
By Frank Baez
Translated from Spanish by Hoyt Rogers
The neighbors dream of shooting me. more>>>
Alive or Dead
By Jorge Olivera Castillo
Translated from Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson
One of the dogs goes for him as if there were nothing between them to block its way. more>>>
Deus ex Machina
By José Mármol
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena
Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has inevitably come. more>>>
Invention of the Day
By José Mármol
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena
thursday the man who invented death with his blood rested on a rock. more>>>
The Crane
By Juan Carlos Flores
Translated from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
somewhat drunk he tap dances over the wet cobblestones more>>>
From the Grave of My Grave
By José María Lima
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena
stalker-yesterday says slowly / my death has not begun more>>>
Bird’s Nest
By Aurora Arias
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena
the honied bodies of whores / hold all the men. more>>>
This is yet another of her collections of stories I am reading for an article on the Spanish short story. While all of her stories have an element of the mysterious in them, Con Agatha en Estambul (With Agatha in Estambul) seems to have less and less of it. It almost becomes a device, especially in a story like Con Agatha en Estambul where the suggestion that the ghost of Agatha Christie is giving clues to the narrator about her relationship is so small, you could remove the it. Or in the story El Lugar (The Place) a husband narrates his encounters with his dead wife in his dreams. Are these real encounters or just dreams? Since it is Cubas you are disposed to think of them as real. But either way the story, much like Con Agatha, is really about women becoming who there are supposed to be. And it is in the rich stew of mystery do the characters find what the image of themselves they are trying to construct. It is an apt metaphor for creation of the self. It is that interest that makes her work so intriguing.
Antonio Muñoz Molina has published a new book of short stories in Spain called Nada del otro mundo. I don’t know much about them other than he has written them over the last 13 years, one is unpublished, and he enjoys reading Cheever and Updike so I gather they are in that vein. (It is a truism that short story writers in Spain come from two traditions: Cortazar and Borges, or Carver, Cheever, and the other Americans). Considering the size of his books, I’m actually curious how he handles the short form. It must be difficult to be judicious when you are normally free to write 400-900 pages.
“El cuento es una máquina que tú ves. Es como la maqueta de un edificio racionalista. Se ve todo el proceso de la construcción narrativa, pero de una manera sintética”. Para Muñoz Molina, el cuento (tocado de más misterios y fantasías que la novela) se rige por el mismo pulso que la poesía y eso lo convierte en impredecible. “Siempre recuerdo el momento, o el proceso, en el que surgió cada uno de ellos, como el último, que llegó repentinamente, por equivocación, en una noche de insomnio. Yo había empezado a escribir otro pero se hacía cada vez más y más largo. Tuve que dejarlo. Hasta que una noche surgió El miedo de los niños, lleno de ciertas sensaciones de la infancia, de pequeños detalles”. Una fuerza emocional que, según el escritor, empuja a los grandes relatos que él admira, como El nadador, de Cheever, o Un día perfecto para el pez plátano, de Salinger: “En los grandes cuentos parece que no pasa nada pero siempre pasa algo decisivo”.
I’ve been hearing a lot of praise for Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries and the LA Review of Books has a good review of it. The story naturally interested me although I’ve been a little hesitant because the search for the novel of [insert name here] seems a hopeless task, one that is never reachable because the frame of reference always changes. But for our time this sounds like the LA Novel. I have added it to the list. You can here an interview with him on Bookworm.
Whenever the question comes up as to why there hasn’t been a quintessential novel about Los Angeles, the notion that the place is just too diffuse is bandied about, as if writers are incapable of writing a novel which can address a territory larger than, say, the island of Manhattan. Certainly there are novels that lay claim to parts of L.A., be they classics, like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust or Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, or contemporary works, like Janet Fitch’s Paint it Black or Eric Puchner’s Model Home (to say nothing of the city’s rich tradition of noir and crime fiction). But none has ever seemed to capture the paradox-ridden profundity of the grit and the glamour, the farm worker and the starlet, the 405 North and the 5 South, the 10 West and the 60 East, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the tracks filled with empty Metrolink trains. There is the Los Angeles on the maps; the Los Angeles that is actually Orange County; the sprawling, urban Los Angeles that only stops when you hit the Salton Sea; the Los Angeles that exists on television screens in other states, where the surf comes right up to your front yard.
Diffuse? Certainly. Impossible to represent in its fullness? Certainly not, as Héctor Tobar proves with his astonishing second novel, The Barbarian Nurseries. Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, has crafted a novel that examines the smallest people — both literally and figuratively — who populate our shared landscape, while casting a wide view on the culture created behind the walls of gated communities, within the vast inland sea of interracial bedroom communities, and on the lost streets beneath the highways, where entire lives play out in the shadows of passing SUVs.
These worlds are viewed chiefly through the eyes of Araceli Ramirez, Mexican servant to Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson and their three young children. Araceli is the last remaining household worker for the Torres-Thompsons (the novel is filled with hyphenates: proof, it would seem, that the alleged melting pot of Southern California more closely resembles a too-hot double boiler), the rest having been let go when Scott realized that the family’s personal recession was not going to rebound. It’s an uptown problem: While they live in a seven-figure home in the exclusive Laguna Rancho Estates, can afford to send their children to private school, and enjoy all the trappings of opulence, Scott’s family is, if not broke, quietly slipping into the middle-class:
I always find it fascinating how wars are remembered and what wars are worth remembering. The other weekend I was in Walla Walla Washington drinking wine and I came across this monument to the Washington soldiers who fought against Spain in the Philippines. I don’t remember every seeing a monument to this war. It is one of the US’s lesser known wars and I wondered what was it about the war that made the Walla Walla commemorate it? Perhaps, as you can see from the photo, nothing has come along to displace it. Walla Walla hasn’t changed too much over the years and perhaps it is just luck to be there. I don’t know if it’s location next to the church was the original placement, but seems odd.
I write about Cristina Fernandez Cubas as often as I can because I find her short stories so interesting and also illusive. I can’t say much because the book is for part of an article on Spanish short story writers, but again she knows how to mix the fantastic with the real. My favorite story of the bunch, though, had nothing about the fantastic and was just a great and funny piece on the failed relationship between a father and daughter. The more I read her stories, the more it is a shame she is not available in English.
There is a new newsletter that is going to specialize on Spanish Language book news, specifically publishing. If you don’t already read Publishing Perspectives you may want to consider now. Here is the press release:
Publishing Perspectives is proud to announce the debut of Spanish World Book News, an email newsletter and extended coverage focused on the publishing in Spanish-speaking countries.
This newsletter will bring you the top publishing stories from across Latin America and Spain, offering English-language readers insight into some of the most interesting, exciting and innovative publishing companies any where the planet.
Spanish is the third most spoken language on Earth, following English and Chinese, and any publishing professional will benefit from learning more about these dynamic publishers and their markets. This newsletter is a cooperation between Publishing Perspectives and the Fundación El Libro in Argentina.
If you are already a subscriber to Publishing Perspectives, you will automatically receive Spanish World Book News twice per month.
You can read a couple of very short stories from Francisco Antonio Carrasco over at El sindrome Chejov. I’m not convinced this is an interesting collection especially after the first story.
Francisco Antonio Carrasco sobre Taxidermia:
Taxidermia es una colección de veintiún cuentos actuales de corte realista en los que la fantasía acaba muchas veces imponiéndose a la propia realidad, en los que la obsesión triunfa generalmente sobre la cordura; veintiún cuentos de desconcierto y desajuste ante la vida, de impotencia ante un mundo que no podemos controlar. En fin: una metáfora de la incomunicación humana. Y es que, en el fondo, todos necesitamos un taxidermista para naturalizar la vida a nuestro antojo.
An La nave de los locos has another short one from Ana María Shua (A book of hers is in English so if you can’t read this you can still check out her work).
Almudena Grandes has won the Premio Iberoamericano de novela Elena Poniatowska for her book Inés y la alegría which is about the Spanish Civil War and is supposed to be the first in a series of books that follows characters from the Spanish Civil War to the modern day.
Almudena Grandes gana el Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska por su trabajo Inés y la alegría, que aborda episodios de la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939), según informa el gobierno de Ciudad de México. La escritora española se convierte así en la primera extranjera en ganar el premio, que en 2011 celebra su cuarta edición.
La secretaria de Cultura del Distrito Federal, Elena Cepeda, anunció el nombre del galardón, dotado con un premio en metálico de 500.000 pesos (unos 27.000 euros), en una rueda de prensa celebrada en el Museo de la Ciudad de México.
Grandes (Madrid, 1960) es la ganadora en un certamen que ha contado con “más de cuarenta libros concursantes” procedentes de ocho países iberoamericanos y de Estados Unidos. El acta del jurado señala que la novela es “una portentosa obra narrativa que, montada en la tradición galdosiana escrita contra viento y marea, contra la tendencia general en nuestro tiempo, de andar con prisas, tanto del lado de quien la construye como de quien la lee”.
The book trailer/short story for Andrés Neuman’s collection of stories Hacerse muerto is available. In it one of his stories from the book, El fsilado is read and not so much dramatized as expressed. (via)
The new Words Without Borders came out last week featuring writers from Iceland, poetry from China and a review of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s “Down the Rabbit Hole”.
Inferno
By Gyrðir Elíasson
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
Strindberg had ended up after death here, in a branch of IKEA in Iceland. more>>>
The Sound Words Have
By Þórarinn Eldjárn
Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith
Once there was a town where no two people spoke the same language. more>>>
lithograph
By Sjón
Translated from the Icelandic by David McDuff
Marie was alone there and showed the painter how she and Pierre / wrestled with radium more>>>
solstice
By Sjón
Translated from the Icelandic by David McDuff
The earth (like the heart) leans back in its seat more>>>
the stone collector’s song
By Sjón
Translated from the Icelandic by David McDuff
Brimstone – pyrite – opal / and jasper – dear friends! more>>>
2093
By Andri Snær Magnason
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
He’ll eat anything except people and foxes. more>>>
Patriotic Poem
By Gerður Kristný
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
The cold makes me / a lair from fear. more>>>
Skagafjörđur
By Gerður Kristný
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
I try to be / kind to the children / so they’ll tend my grave more>>>
The Chamber Music
By Bragi Olaffson
Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith
I’ll possibly throw myself onto the pyre more>>>
Dessert
By Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Peter Constantine
You have all sucked at my breasts. more>>>
Three Women Poets
By Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Peter Constantine
A man in a pirate sweater / comes in through the door more>>>
The Slayer of Souls
By Ólafur Gunnarsson
Translated from the Icelandic by Ólafur Gunnarsson
She very much enjoyed being made love to by her husband in a bed that had belonged to another woman. more>>>
Four Creaking Wheels
By Sindri Freysson
Translated from the Icelandic by Martin Regal
perhaps they’re kindling the ovens at the crematorium. more>>>
La Jornada has a profile of Daniel Sada’s writing. As his first book in English is coming out in a few months, this is a timely piece on what kind of writer he is, and hopefully what kind of treat Casi Nunca will be (see more). I for one really need to make some time to read his books that I own because the more I read the more excited I get.
Daniel Sada empezó escribiendo novelas de contexto rural y provinciano, en la cauda de la narrativa de la revolución y con una fuerte presencia rulfiana. Parecía que era su contexto ideal y que no lo modificaría –no tenía por qué hacerlo– a lo largo de su obra. Sin embargo, hace una década se empezó a notar que se asfixiaba en ese contexto y que quería poner en juego su virtuosismo prosódico y descriptivo en un marco distinto, mucho más urbano. Y dio ese giro, triple salto mortal, similar al que dio José Revueltas entre El luto humano y Los errores, a partir de Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe.
Ese cambio lo hizo concentrarse más en el interior de sus personajes, en la cerrazón (otra palabra muy suya) y claustrofobia de sus anécdotas, el hecho intuido en novelas como Lampa vida o Una de dos, de que el infierno son los otros, encontró plena expresión en el contexto urbano, en esa interioridad personificada incluso por la arquitectura –no se está dentro de casa de la misma manera en la ciudad que en el pueblo– que condiciona comportamientos. Ese cambio de contexto también influyó en una mayor presencia de las clases sociales, mismas que determinan un comportamiento.
Hay en la prosa de Sada un proceso de hipnosis del lector. ¿Qué sucedería si conserváramos la anécdota y la estructura pero modificáramos el lenguaje? Aunque creo que se sostendrían, habría un proceso de pérdida de matices, de ablandamiento de los personajes, de pérdida de textura. Sada puede narrar, en –La incidencia–, la historia de ese profesor convertido en confesor-psicoanalista-consejero de una incestuosa muchacha gringa, cuya conclusión no es sino la llegada paródica a una nueva historia –la nueva alumna que le confiesa haber tenido relaciones sexuales con un equipo de beisbol (una “novena– es la muestra más directa de desdeñar la anécdota volviéndola puro recurso –combustible– de la máquina de contar que es su prosa.
By The Firelight 