Books

A Short Story from Ángel Zapata with My Translation

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The blog El sindrome Chejov has has a published the sort story Ecuador Ángel Zapata’s latest book Las buenas intenciones y otros cuentos. You can read the original at El sindrome, but here is my translation of the piece.

You place a bone, perhaps from a giant, on the table cloth, my child: at lunch time, at dinner time, at the sad and meticulous hour of breakfast; you place that bone with a casual gesture that could be mistaken for mercy (three bones at the end of the day, I don’t know if  it’s different); and latter you stay there, coming closer to the fire, looking at the bone of a giant on the table cloth, child; like fasting with the hunger of another; the same as if you try to cry with that hard and yellow weeping, empty inside, your mother the same as myself would not have known how to ever show you.

Update (9/7/2011) this is  a different author below, Miguel Ángel Zapata. I got confused by the names. Thanks to Luis for the clarification.

If you are not familiar with Zapata here is what El sindrome noted in his recent review of Esquina inferior del cuadro.

Los cuentos de Zapata están llenos de marcas de estilo. Un estilo profundamente pensado, que no gustará a todos los lectores, pero que busca -y logra- una voz auténtica y personal, reconocible. Ahí está su riesgo y su belleza. Esparce por todos los relatos puntos suspensivos que remarcan las elipsis en cuyos márgenes se construyen  sus narraciones. Gesto gallardo: quiere decir, os cuento esto pero podría contaros todo lo que callo, lo que esos puntos esconden, lo que el escritor-astrónomo tiene que desechar para preferir su historia, que no es sino una elección que sólo a él pertenece y que comparte con sus lectores, porque así lo quiere, no porque lo necesite.

Enrique Vila-Matas Review in the Paris Review

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Scott Esposito of the Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas. Although this came out a little while ago, it is definitely interesting and worth a read. I have yet to read his works, although I have many around the house, but I’m looking forward more and more to doing it.

Decorated with numerous awards in his native Spain—including the same Premio Rómulo Gallegos that catapulted his friend Roberto Bolaño to international renown—Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers. Taking the Modernists as towering giants that will never be equaled, Vila-Matas works to inscribe himself—at times literally—in the margins of their works. His tools are irony, parody, paradox, and futility, and his goal is to mix fact, fiction, and autobiography in order to depict not reality but truth. I asked him about his newly translated novel Never Any End to Paris—his third in English—based on the time he spent in Paris as a young writer attempting (and gloriously failing) to triumph as Hemingway did.

Never Any End to Paris uses your youth in Paris to explore ideas of creativity, influence, and identity. The narrator is a writer whose facts and dates are similar to yours, though—I think—he both is and isn’t you. Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality?

Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.

A Few Micro Fictions from JAVIER PUCHE

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Th blog  La nave de los locos has some short fictions from the Spanish writer Javier Puche. They seem more like koans than stories, but they have their moments. My favorite is Para hacer tiempo, fabrica relojes lentamente. (To make time, make watches slowly).

El sol (cíclope insomne) nos vigila.

Desafina el coro de niños muertos.

Perece el mosquito en una lágrima.

El humo añora levemente al cigarrillo.

Murmura palabras terribles el pez abisal.

Interview with Carlos Yushimito in El Pais

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El Pais has an interview and profile of Carlos Yushimito, one of the Granta youngsters. It gives a little insight into his interests which were shaped by the war in Peru against the Sindero Luminoso. He, unlike most of the writers in the Granta collection, writes short stories, or at least his newest book is short stories.

“Me fascina lo imperfecto; la perfección siempre es una forma de violencia, de lo autoritario”. Hay algo inquietante en Carlos Yushimito (Lima, 1975): parece imposible que de ese cuerpo enjuto que refuerza su imperceptible hilillo de voz surjan esas historias con niños de tan oscuras perversiones, mutantes, gatos que hablan y escenarios de regusto posnuclear. Pero ese es el humus de la selección de sus relatosLecciones para un niño que llega tarde (Duomo), desasosegante puerta para acceder al mundo de uno de los más sugestivos de entre las promesas de la narrativa en español escogidas por la revista Granta.

“Mi generación nació entre el riesgo de coches bomba, sin agua corriente, atrapados en casa con toques de queda; y en mi caso, reforzado por mi abuelo, japonés, que emigró a Perú cuando la II Guerra Mundial y fue expropiado y a punto de ir a un campo de concentración. Ello me ha hecho muy consciente de la precariedad de la vida…”. Letras niponas en su antebrazo derecho tatúan ese episodio que alimenta la explicación de por qué sus personajes se muestran siempre paralizados ante el destino.

Seres predestinados que pueden destilar compasión, pero capaces de una muy refinada crueldad. La culpa es de la “forma perversa” con la que Yushimito lee los clásicos tras años de diseccionar literatura actual. “¿No ve en El flautista de Hamelin, llevándose a todos los niños, una gran metáfora del genocidio humano? Quería que mis cuentos jugaran con esa perversidad, por eso hago que un gato tipo el de Cheshire diga lo que dice o un robot discuta con su creador”.

Interview with Patricio Pron in El Pais – Plus Novel Excerpt

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Patricio Pron, one of the Granta youngsters, was interviewed in El Pais about his latest novel El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia. It is the story of his parents activism during the last thirty years, an activism that of course takes place during the dictatorship. Pron notes that his interest in writing the book “came from hearing the stories of activism at home and his inability to understand them”. The book is not structured as a traditional novel because he doesn’t want to give the impression that the narrator knows everything or that there are no doubts. You can read an excerpt here (pdf). El Pais also has a short and favorable review here.

“Mi interés por las últimas décadas de Argentina viene de las historias que escuchaba en casa sobre el pasado del activismo político de mis padres y de mi propia incapacidad para comprender ese proceso, la voluntad de sacrificio y las decisiones que les habían llevado a comprometerse en hechos trágicos de la historia argentina… Mi interés no era literario en el sentido de que no tenía como objetivo escribir una novela…, pero… fue el descubrir en un momento que de la misma forma en que yo procuraba averiguar quiénes habían sido mis padres, mi padre había estado buscando a una persona… y, a su vez, en esa búsqueda, él buscaba otro desaparecido anterior y ambos eran hermanos… Y fue esa doble simetría que se establecía entre nosotros la que me llevó a pensar en escribir sobre esos años…

Aunque tengo poco interés o desconfío del testimonio. Cosa que por otra parte concierne a mis padres y no a mí… Procuré escapar de esto… incluso darle un carácter ficcional pero desistí porque había algo… espúreo en el uso de esos recuerdos para producir ficción comercial. Y lo dejé en nombre de una cierta honestidad con el lector…”.

“Es una decisión ética de procurar contar algo novedoso. Pensaba, y pienso, que escribir esta historia de jóvenes revolucionarios en Argentina tenía que asumir una forma que procurase ser revolucionaria… Entre otras cosas porque… las convenciones literarias no son mucho más que la extrapolación al ámbito de la literatura de las convenciones que presiden la vida social y nuestra relación. Por lo tanto, hubiese sido desleal con la memoria de mis padres escribir su historia de una forma convencional… Escribí en virtud de que no sabía cómo hacerlo, pero se fue revelando con la propia escritura”.

“La forma que asumió el libro respondía a ciertas ideas mías del fragmentarismo y reflexiones sobre los géneros; pero también al hecho de que esta historia es tan dolorosa para mí como para que no pudiese escribir largas extensiones… También hay una cuestión vinculada con el hecho de que las narrativas unitarias producen, a menudo, la impresión de que el narrador carece de dudas o está en posesión de una verdad absoluta. Si bien esa es una ficción con la cual los escritores jugamos quería dejarla de lado para que fuesen las dudas… las contradicciones y… las piezas ausentes de este puzle las que emergiesen en la lectura…”.

A Defense of Ernesto Sabato from Pablo Chacon

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Letras Libres has an interesting article about Ernesto Sabato and his political history. I’m not much on his history but he notes that Sabato has been characterized as right wing much like Borges, even though Sabato led the Commission of Disappeared Persons and brought allegations against the generals.

Extraño país el que recuerda al escritor recientemente fallecido casi como un cómplice de la última dictadura militar por aceptar almorzar con el general Jorge Videla, en compañía de Borges y del padre Leonardo Castellani a dos meses de que los uniformados asaltaran las instituciones republicanas. Extraño país que olvida su tarea como presidente de la Comisión Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas, conadep, para elaborar, en 1984, por orden de Raúl Alfonsín, el “Nunca más”, un informe donde figuran los nombres y apellidos de los torturados, violados, vejados y asesinados militantes de la izquierda, revolucionaria y reformista, y los de sus parientes, amigos y allegados que hasta ese momento podía darse fe estaban “desaparecidos”, esa figura que nombraría desde entonces el “triste privilegio de ser argentino”.
Ese es uno de los destinos de Ernesto Sabato.
Aclaremos: el trabajo de la conadep, a pesar de las posteriores leyes del perdón que amnistiaron a la mayoría de los militares que irían a juicio, leyes concedidas por los sucesivos levantamientos de los “carapintadas” (que carecían de sponsors civiles pero lo recibían de muchos sectores sindicales), dejó al gobierno radical al borde del colapso.

Juan Jose Saer and Euardo Chirinos Coming from Open Letter Winter 2012

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The new Open Letter catalog for winter 2011 is out. As always the catalog is filled with interesting books. Of note is Scars from Juan Jose Saer and The Smoke of Distant Fires from Euardo Chirinos. The Saer sounds quite interesting.

Juan José Saer’s Scars explores a crime committed by Luis Fiore, a thirty-nine year old laborer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime: a young reporter, Ángel, who lives with his mother and works the courthouse beat; a dissolute attorney who clings to life only for his nightly baccarat game; a misanthropic and dwindling judge who’s creating a superfluous translation of The Picture Dorian Gray; and, finally, Luis Fiore himself, who, on May Day, went duck hunting with his wife, daughter, and a bottle of gin. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in time—be it a day or several months—when the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event. Originally published in 1969, Scars marked a watershed moment in Argentinian literature and has since become a modern classic of Latin American literature.

For fans of poetry Euardo Chirinos will be the second book of poetry published by Open Letter.

The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century

As always the catalog includes an excerpt of each work.

New Book of Stories Due From Andrés Neuman in 2012

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La Nacion has an article about the new works coming from Andrés Neuman in the next year. He will be publishing a book of stories with the publisher Paginas de Espuma. He will also be publishing a book of poetry and a novel some time in the near future. If you can’t wait for those works you can always read his micro stories on his blog.

A fin de año, la editorial española Páginas de Espuma publicará su libro de cuentos Hacerse el muerto, que en 2012 editará en la Argentina el sello La Compañía. “Los relatos exploran el registro tragicómico y van del dolor de la muerte al sentido del humor, del miedo a la ironía”, cuenta Neuman, ocupado por estos días en la corrección de los textos. En octubre, Ediciones del Dock publicará su libro de poesía No sé por qué. “Será la primera vez que me editen en el país antes que en España, donde vivo desde niño. Es una emoción doble, porque mi poesía jamás había circulado en la Argentina”, dice.

Desde hace ya un tiempo, escribe una novela sobre la enfermedad y sus efectos en la sexualidad y en la lectura, en la forma de leer y de desear. Neuman asegura que esta nueva producción literaria será distinta: “Una de mis pocas premisas de escritura es evitar los moldes, la fórmula. Me defrauda que los libros de un autor se parezcan demasiado entre sí. Trato de alejarme todo lo posible de la experiencia previa”. Mientras que la acción de la novela anterior estaba localizada en el norte de Europa, en épocas pasadas, la de la nueva transcurre en la actualidad, en un lugar indefinido donde se habla castellano y que parece hallarse en una frontera imposible entre América latina y España.

(via Moleskine Literario)

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra – A Review

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Bonsai (The Contemporary Art of the Novella)
Alejandro Zambra
Melville Hose, pg 83

In someways I thought Bonsai was quite interesting, and brevity, one of the defining features of the book, should be commended since it is so easy to fill up novels with pointless digressions. It’s not just the lack of pages that makes for brevity, but Zambra’s avoidance of temporal realism, that need to narrate a character’s movement through a doorway, a house, etc. Often that material is quite pointless, and he instead plays with where the story is going. Often it seems as if he is not interested in a story, but the story about the story, as if you were hearing the story second hand. It is that lack of detail, whether physical, or emotional that leaves one distant from the story. You have some facts about the characters, and some facts about the story telling, but structuring a narrative is just what happens when you read.

You can see how he goes about writing in this quote. It has all the hallmarks of his style: repetition, reversals, and a sketch-like description of his characters.

It is possible but would perhaps be abusive to relate this excerpt to the story of Julio and Emilia it Would be abusive, as Proust’s novel is riddled with excerpts like this one. And also because there are pages left, because this story continues.

Or does not continue.

The story of Julio and Emilia continues but does not go on.

It will end some years later, with Emilia’s death; Julio, who doesn’t not die, who will not die, who has not died, continues but decides not to go on. The same for Emilia: for now she decides not to go on, but she continues. In a few years she will no longer continue nor go on.

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it, but there are illusory hopes, and this story, which is become a story of illusory hopes, goes on like this: […]

But where does that take one? Zambra is very conscious in making literary references throughout the book. It is a novel for people who think books create reality, not something that is just part of reality. Zambra moves between characters who read Flaubert, Proust and finally a character who pretends to be transcribing a book by a Chilean author and creates his own work in doing it. Except for the creation of a shadow book, I had the sensation that it would be more interesting if I were 21 again and the discovery of Proust was a revolution. But Zambra doesn’t even go to that level, what he often sounds like is a glib student laughing because he got out of reading it. Yes, that is what his characters do, but in reading it I have that same sensation of glibness. Now it doesn’t matter if he likes Proust or not, but the reading of the book makes his playfulness seem like window dressing of a young man.

Going back to the quote, the style while interesting, in the hands of Zambra, also leaves something wanting. At first the back and forth about the characters continuing is intriguing, but again it is light and while the story about the story, his playing with narrative, is interesting, the characters again are flat. From this slim a book I don’t expect grand insights, that isn’t what if is about, but the humor that should be in Julio’s character is tedious. It reads quick enough, but the transitory whims of young people just end up sounding like spoiled children. Brevity is beautiful, just make it about something interesting.

I had looked forward to Bonsai, and in some ways it was interesting, but if I need a little detachment in my reading I’ll go for Bernhard or De Assis’ Diary of a Small Winner.

 

Santiago Roncagliolo Interviewd at Bookslut

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Bookslut has an interview with the Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo. It doesn’t go into some of the scandals he has been involved in (some of which I’ve mentioned here). It is a review worth reading to get a sense of where he is coming from and they go more into his childhood than I have come across in the Spanish press. I wonder if I would find Red April funny. Listening him talk I know he’s got a sense of humor.

Red April is terrifying in parts, and gory, and Kafkaesque, in other places, but at the same time it made me laugh my socks off – and I felt peculiar about that.

[Laughing] I spent one night with a couple of African writers a few years ago. We were making political jokes and we found that had the same jokes, we just used different names. In poor countries humour is blacker than in rich countries, and more politically incorrect. I had to moderate myself when I arrived in Spain because I would say things I found really funny and everyone would look at me.

It’s beautiful when someone tells me I made them laugh. I love to write humour and terror because I like very physical emotions. When you laugh it’s your body moving, when you’re scared, it’s your skin crawling. These are powerful emotions.

For us, Red April is relatively new, but you wrote it ages ago. Is it hard to reconnect with the man you were then?

Yes. It’s a date with your own past. I am surprised at what this novel did. It won the big prize in Spain, and it was a big bestseller, and keeps being reprinted. In Peruvian society it was the moment to begin to talk about the past. After I wrote about Abimael Guzman, I went to the jails to talk about the books, and it was amazing. I was talking to army people and Shining Path people and guerrilla people in the same auditorium. I would speak then they all begin to tell their own stories. It was a bit of a metaphor of what was going on in the country. Everybody had the feeling that it was time to listen to each other, even to the killers, even to the evil ones, to understand why people arrived at this place. My generation can do it, because we were children when this happened. We were innocent, we have no past. So it was like a liberation for us, and for the people participating.

Tin House Spring 2011 – A Review

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I thought this issue of Tin House was a bit more hit and miss, especially with the fiction, but it still had some good moments. The them was The Mysterious and most of the essays delved into either crime fiction, or true crime. Unfortunately, I’m not a huge mystery fan. Sarah Winman’s overview of domestic thrillers was quite good and has given me an interest in reading some of the authors she mentioned, some of published 100 years ago. Eddie Muller’s call for a new noir was interesting, since he said stop imitating the 40’s and write for today. It was refreshing since noir for most people is 19401-1959. It was even more interesting coming from a guy who hosts noir festivals (I’ve been to 3 of his). I can’t agree, though, that Mulholland Drive is that interesting a movie. I was intrigued by Paul Collins history of the Murder Off Miami (A Murder Mystery)
book/game and its approach to story telling through artifacts, something that has been over done since.

The only fiction I thought was really interesting was Luis Alberto Urrea’s story Chametla that envisions memories as physical objects  that have their own life after one dies. It was perfectly brief and understated. Maurice Pons’ story had that refreshing element that I often found in European short stories: it doesn’t tell you what to think at the end, in other words, there was no epiphany. And like the Urrea, had the virtue of leaving many questions unanswered in the central mystery of the story. Kenneth Calhoun’s piece was also quite good and used language in a refreshing way, starting each paragraph with Then, until the build up of conflicting events actually leads the reader to what has happened.

This issue wasn’t as good as the last one I read, but it still had its moments.

Frans Masereel – The City, The Idea, The Sun, Story Without Words – A Review

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The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (Dover Books on Art, Art History)
Dover, 112pg


The Sun, The Idea & Story Without Words: Three Graphic Novels
Dover, 224pg

Frans Masereel was an early proponent of the graphic novel and the sub genre the wordless novel. Most of his famous wordless novels which use the wood cut printing technique date from 1919 to the 20’s, are beautiful documents of its time, at once impressionistic and documentary. Although his work was not overtly political, he was a critic of a society that valued wealth and power above all things and his stories usually reflect some element of that criticism. At all times he has a great fascination with the little details that make up every day life. It is in that juxtaposition of layers of little details that his works build their narrative, or as it often seems, makes his case, since some of these might be better called wordless essays.

The most complete and compelling of the the works listed here is The City: A Vision in Woodcuts. Vision is the correct term, because there isn’t a narrative but a series of impressions of what the city is. In one sense it is the day in the life of a city, with images of workers in factories, weddings, parties, brothels, military parades. But looking closer at the details he places throughout there is a definite hierarchy in the images and it is obvious that despite the trappings of prosperity and modernity the city is a rough place and only a few win. In an image of a rich couple leaving a fancy cafe, off to the corner is a beggar. In another, a man takes advantage of a maid. He progress into even darker scenes of rape, and violent suppression of protests. The sum of all these images is a sense of isolation and loneliness that is often the early 20th century embodiment of the city.

The Sun takes a more light hearted approach to looking at the city. Instead, of a series of unrelated images, Masereel uses a narrative. The story opens with a man at a desk day dreaming and looking at the sun. He falls asleep and from his head emerges a figure who tries to reach the sun. From there on the figure walks through town and country looking for the sun, never quite reaching it. It is a satirical piece because the sun takes many different forms, all of which are chimeras. He looks for it in books, a crucifix, drink, up a woman’s dress, a brothel, at the top of a factory smoke stack, in the coin a rich man throws him from a car. None of it helps and he continues to seek and never quite gets there despite going by boat to the horizon of a setting sun, or in an airplane. As the story ends the figure, now Icarus like, returns to the sleeping man who laughs. While it has the same social criticism as The City, he also shows an element of the surreal and an interest in the origins of art. And what ties the two elements of the story together are the panels where the figure is constantly set upon by the crowd, as if the seeking is something forbidden. In Masereel you always have the sense that upsetting the social order will only bring trouble.

The Idea continues many of the elements in The Sun. In it an author sits at his desk and struck by lightening he creates the figure of a naked woman. He puts her in an envelope and sends her out into the world where she is hated. Men try to clothe her, but she refuses; when she is loved, the men kill her husband; when she meets a young boy, his parents spank him. And in the most amusing, when her image is printed it has to be burned. Eventually, she has to flee and returns to the author, but he has created a new figure, so he places her on a crucifix and hangs her in a painting. The last scene is the author crying as his newest figure is sent into the world. Despite its fantastical nature, it shares with The Sun the idea that ideas are dangerous, in what ever form. The religious overtones of a creator sending out his children only to see them persecuted, adds to wildness of the story and makes for a bitting satire also of religion.

The final work Story Without Words, is probably the least interesting. The story is fairly simple: a man seeks a woman, and when he finally gives herself to him, he abandons her. Within the context of his other works, he does show a concern for women who are used carelessly by men. In many of his drawings there is the figure of a woman whose desires for freedom, self hood, love are repressed, or her physical being is threatened in someway. Given that context the story has more weight, but it is not his best work.

His art work is not as detailed and stylized as a Lynn Ward, but he captures, especially in The City, a richness of detail that make his work come alive. And it is that detail that makes Masereel’s work a fascinating vision of the enter war period.

 

 

 

Javier Cercas on Why Anatomy is a Novel and What Makes a Novel a Novel

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El Pais has a reprint and translation of a speech Javier Cercas gave in English about why his novel Anatomy of a Moment is a novel. It is interesting if you’ve never heard him talk on the subject before. He raises some good points and for those who aren’t used to think of novels not following the realist tradition it probably is an eye opener (and there are many of them). I think his book is fascinating for its approach, one that ticks you into believing it is history, but is definitely far from it. Yet it also feels if that is a limiting element, leaving little room for interpretation since the tendency, or at least mine, is to compare the characters to the truth. One does not compare Don Quijote to events, but one will compare Suarez to the real man. What I find interesting given this is the investigation of the author by comparing the difference between reality and fiction.

1¿Qué es una novela? Una novela es todo aquello que se lee como tal; es decir: si algún lector fuese capaz de leer la guía de teléfonos de Madrid como una novela, la guía de teléfonos de Madrid sería una novela. En este sentido no hay duda de que mi libro Anatomía de un instante es una novela. ¿Lo es también en algún otro? No lo sé. Lo que sí sé es que a algunos lectores les ha parecido un libro raro.

Quizá lo es. Anatomía explora el instante en que, durante la tarde del 23 de febrero de 1981, un grupo de militares golpistas entró disparando en el abarrotado Parlamento español y sólo tres de los parlamentarios se negaron a obedecer sus órdenes y tirarse bajo los escaños: el presidente del Gobierno, Adolfo Suárez; el vicepresidente, general Gutiérrez Mellado; y el secretario general del partido comunista, Santiago Carrillo. Tratar de agotar el significado del instante en que esos tres hombres decidieron jugarse el tipo por la democracia -precisamente ellos tres, que la habían construido tras haberla despreciado durante casi toda su vida- obliga a indagar en sus biografías y en los azares inverosímiles que las unen y las separan, obliga a explicar el golpe del 23 de febrero, obliga a explicar la conquista de la democracia en España. La forma en que el libro lo hace es peculiar. Anatomía parece un libro de historia; también parece un ensayo; también parece una crónica, o un reportaje periodístico; a ratos parece un torbellino de biografías paralelas y contrapuestas girando en una encrucijada de la historia; a ratos incluso parece una novela, tal vez una novela histórica. Es absurdo negar que Anatomía es todas esas cosas, o que al menos participa de ellas. Ahora bien: ¿puede un libro así ser fundamentalmente una novela? De nuevo: ¿qué es una novela?

An episode of El Publico Lee where he talks about Anatomy.

Ernesto Sabato – A Profile and Unpublished Work

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a lengthy profile of the late Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato that goes into more of his personality then a recital of dates. Considering the scant coverage of his death it is worth a read. His literary output has always struck me as uneven not in its quality, but its frequency. Reading this you can get a sense of why. Also included in El Pais this week is an excerpt of an unpublished work from the 50s. It is so short it is hard to say if it would be any good or not. It kind of has the feel of the Tunnel, what little I could read. It did have the interesting line “…el heroísmo, como alguien que no recuerdo ha dicho, consiste en ver el mundo tal como es y sin embargo vivir y amarlo.” (heroism, as someone that I can’t remember said, consists in seeing the world as it is and still living and loving it.) You can read the profile here and the excerpt here.

Tenía, en efecto, “un interior melancólico, pero al mismo tiempo rebelde y tumultuoso”. Aflora esa intimidad en sus novelas, y en el espacio público; pero en la intimidad adoraba la música, la perfección de la belleza, el vino, las comidas contundentes a las que al final tuvo que renunciar para poder luchar por la vida, que se le prolongó casi hasta los cien años. Pero en ningún momento renunció a ese sentimiento de urgencia imperativa con la que se condujo ante el arte y ante la vida. “Todo debía ser urgente”, cuenta Elvira, “hasta un vaso de vino. ¡Alcánzame un vaso de vino, es urgente!”.

Como un niño junto a un muro sin puerta. Escribió Sabato: “La educación que recibimos (él era el décimo de once hermanos) dejó huellas tristes y perdurables en mi espíritu (…) La severidad de mi padre, en ocasiones terrible, motivó, en buena medida, esa nota de fondo de mi espíritu, tan propenso a la tristeza y a la melancolía”. Pero, como el padre, “debajo de la aspereza en el trato” Sabato mostraba “un corazón cándido y generoso”.

Que afloraba cuando no había escritores alrededor. Se distanció de Jorge Luis Borges por motivos políticos (y bien que lo sintió Sabato, dice en sus memorias), pero volvieron a verse, esporádicamente, con distancia, e incluso compartieron un libro de conversaciones; y fue amigo hasta la muerte de José Saramago, que viajó “como en peregrinación” a Santos Lugares, la casa de Ernesto, y este fue con Elvira a verles a Pilar y a José en Lanzarote… Pero sus afinidades literarias eran clásicas y del pasado, y la vida no lo llevó por saraos o ferias. Su sentimiento de urgencia no lo convertían en un asistente cómodo a los festejos.

By the way, for my regular readers, I’ve been on vacation, so I should start having more frequent posts from now on.

Tyrant Memory by Horacio Castellanos Moya – Reviews

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Three Percent has a good review of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, a book I reviewed several years ago when I read it in Spanish. I would recommend the book and if you are not sold on it just by the author then perhaps one our reviews will help.

My Review:

Tirana Memoria is the latest novel by the El Salvadoran novelest Horacio Castellanos Moya, who also published a translation of his novel Senselessness (Insensatez) in English this year. Tirana Memoria, although fictional, is about the 1944 overthrow of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and takes place over a month and a half period when a failed coup led to reprisals which ultimately led to the general strike that forced the general to flee the country. Part diary, part convicts-on-the-lam narrative, it alternates between comedy and tension as the characters elude the army and the police and attempt to survive post coup repression.

The novel opens as Haydée, the wife of Pericles, relates in her diary that Pericles has been taken to prison again. Pericles is a newspaper editor known for writing essays opposing the government and imprisonment is nothing new. Haydée writes of going to the prison each day to have lunch with him and bring him daily necessities like cigarettes. She is an upper class woman and even though she doesn’t like going to the prison, she has become used to the daily task. However, she is not a political person and all she wants from her visits are to see her husband and find out when he will be released. She is so unpoliticized and accustomed to his imprisonment that when she thinks Percilies will be released she goes to the hairdresser so she will look nice for him. The sheltering has created a woman who, though dedicated, is not consciously aware of the dangers, almost as if the constant imprisonments are part of an annoying game. She has an almost naive sense of entitlement and only midway through the novel when her political consciousness has awakened does she begin to understand what has shaped her.

From Three Percent:

Set over the course of one month in 1944, with a concluding chapter taking place twenty nine years later, the novel’s backdrop is the failed military coup against Salvadoran President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, a sympathizer of European Fascism and casual mystic whose legacy of human rights abuses is frequently recounted by way of his assertion that it is better to kill a man than to kill an ant. The man will be reincarnated, the ant won’t.

The novel—which, it should be noted, is set during the nascent days of Latin America’s “secret Vietnam”—opens with the diary entries of Haydée, a housewife whose husband Pericles, a political journalist, has just been imprisoned for writing an article criticizing the government of Martinez, or as he is more commonly referred to throughout the novel, the Warlock. It is the eve of an anticipated coup and Haydée is certain that the impending fall of the Warlock will ensure her husband’s safe return. Instead the failed attempt on his life leaves her family in shambles, in large part to due her bumbling eldest son Clemens, who prematurely announces the Warlock’s death on national radio. Needless to say, Clemens is very soon public enemy number one.

The novel is built on two alternating narratives, moving from Haydée’s chatty diary entries to a far more streamlined, and slapstick, account of Clemens going into hiding. This pairing can read as a warped sort of he-said-she-said, whereby no one actually knows what anyone said. Both narratives are so thoroughly built upon hearsay, gossip and speculation that each serves as a highly adulterated, though hardly unfulfilling, accompaniment to the other.

Three Micro Fictions from Eduardo Berti at El sindrome Chejov

~ bythefirelight

El sindrome Chejov, in anticipation of the republication of Lo inolvidable, by Eduardo Berti, has published three of his micro fictions. As they are worth a brief look.

Una criatura del pasado
El bisabuelo de mi amiga T., al cumplir los noventa y cinco años, empezó a hablar únicamente en pretérito. Decía «fui al baño», se incorporaba e iba. Decía «me fui a dormir», se incorporaba e iba derecho a la cama. El anciano, afirma mi amiga, había cobrado entera conciencia de que no era sino “una criatura perteneciente al pasado”.

English Interviews with Najat El Hachmi and Teresa Solana

~ bythefirelight

Note: apparently I thought I posted this sometime ago, so it may seem a little old news.

The CBC’s Writers and Company is running an excellent series on Spanish writers. Eleanor Wachtel interviews two Catalan writers, Najat El Hachmi and Teresa Solana. I  don’t know Teresa Solana’s works, but I once saw Najat El Hachmi on El Publico Lee (it was the first episode I ever watched) and thought her book was interesting, as was her story. The interview of both of them lasts an hour and talks about what it means to be Catalan and a writer from a language with around 7 million speakers. Najat El Hachmi mentioned, too, like immigrants to the English language, her writing often takes Catalan in directions that native speakers might not go. Of course, in translation we’ll never see that. Each of them have works translated in English, so if you like what you hear you can read their books.

The State of the Short Story in Spain

~ bythefirelight

La Verdad has an article about the state of the short story in Spain. It quotes critics such as Sergi Bellver who I have mentioned before. Essentially, the short story has the same problems it does in the US: low readership, publishers who prefer novels, and not good way to support yourself while writing them. Not an unknown phenomenon. At least they have the new short story prize with the € 50,000 prize and all the prizes from little towns and clubs that help keep writers going, as it did for Bolaño. The article talks about various projects by editors to publish short story collections.

Also the article mentions a few names worth following that I have mentioned many times in this blog:

Un punto que destaca Casamayor es que esta hornada de autores jóvenes y no tan jóvenes no reniegan de su condición de cuentistas sino que se sienten «orgullosos» de serlo. El editor de Páginas de Espuma cita tres nombres como figuras a las que seguir en el universo del cuento. Uno, Hipólito G. Navarro, publica en su editorial y su ‘El pez volador’ ha concitado muy buenas críticas. El segundo, Eloy Tizón, es profesor en la escuela madrileña Hotel Kafka y autor habitual de Anagrama. El tercero que destaca Casamayor es Andrés Neuman, conocido por obras de ‘largo aliento’ como ‘El viajero del siglo’, pero que ha hecho una importante contribución a la buena salud actual del género corto. Como creador, pero también como director de la colección, antes citada, ‘Pequeñas Resistencias 5’.

Otro nombre que comienza a hacer ruido es el de Matías Candeira, presente en la selección de ‘Chéjov comentado’ y que, pese a su juventud (nació en 1984) está demostrando maneras. Se estrenó en el año 2009 con ‘La soledad de los ventrílocuos’ y acaba de publicar ‘Antes de las jirafas’, un conjunto de relatos que huye de lo solemne. José Luis Pereira, responsable de la librería madrileña Tres Rosas Amarillas, la única de España dedicada en exclusiva al cuento, reconoce su talento.

Los nombres son muchos más: Jon Bilbao, Carlos Castán, Esther García Llovet o Víctor García Antón, Patricio Pron, Norberto Luis Romero, Sergi Pàmies, venerado por Enrique Vila-Matas, y todos los que vendrán.

(hat tip)

Daniel Sada – An Interview and the State of His Health

~ bythefirelight

Moleskin Literario has a good post on the health of the Mexican Author Daniel Sada. He has been hospitalized recently for a Kidney condition and cannot travel. It sounds like he is undergoing dialysis, but the article doesn’t say so specifically. It is a shame because he is beginning to get international and American recognition, something he deserves. Instead, friends are having to do fund raising for his health. The interview with him in El Excelisor is a good over view to how he thinks about writing and his health. It really is a shame. If you have ever read one of his stories you’ll know he can really write. You can read about his health at Moleskine Literario.

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO, 15 de mayo.- Daniel Sada quiere “gozar de otra manera” los frutos de escribir desde los 19 años. “Ir más pausadamente. Tomar distancia a la escritura, pues también me gusta leer. Tengo muchas historias que contar; pero la escritura le quita tiempo a la lectura y aún me falta mucho por leer. En este momento, es importante la serenidad”, admite.

El novelista, poeta y cuentista, considerado una de las voces más singulares de las letras mexicanas, confiesa que actualmente se encuentra en un impasse, debido a la enfermedad renal crónica que lo obligó a hospitalizarse en marzo pasado y a cancelar distintos viajes, pero que no ha logrado detener sus proyectos literarios.

Prueba de ello es que en octubre próximo Anagrama publicará su primera tragedia. “He escrito comedia, tragicomedia y algunas obras con tintes melodramáticos; pero no había explorado la tragedia, un género antiguo que siempre me atrajo. Es fuerte dar vida a una obra en la que las cosas son insolubles, donde no hay remedio para nada, donde no puedes cambiar tu destino”, explica en entrevista.

El creador de 58 años comenta que ya estaba “harto” de los finales felices o medio felices. “Quería personajes más complejos y que se les viera desde diferentes puntos de vista. No hay tanta conjetura en la novela, sólo muestro las situaciones y dejo que el lector saque sus conclusiones, como siempre me recomendó Juan Rulfo”, agrega quien rechaza adelantar el título de la novedad editorial.

El también ex alumno de Salvador Elizondo aclara que hay “humor y recovecos graciosos” en su nueva propuesta, en la que estuvo trabajando parte de 2009 y todo 2010 y quedó lista tras un complejo y lento proceso de correcciones y cambios. “La tesitura final es muy fuerte”, promete.

Elena Poniatowska Talks About Leonora Carrington – RIP Leonora

~ bythefirelight

Elena Poniatowska has a memorial for the British surrealist painter Leonora Carrington who died this week and is the subject of her latest book Leonora. I was a little on the fence about her newest book because it sounded quite like Tisimia, but Leonora sounds like a fascinating woman and Poniatowska’s memorial is definitely worth the read. Anyone who in 1939 would as for a meeting with Franco to tell him not support Hitler is some kind person. (hat tip Moleskine Literario)

Mucho de lo que cuento en la novela Leonora ya estaba escrito. Ella se describió en varios momentos de su vida. Sólo cambiaba su nombre y el de Max Ernst o el de Joe Bousquet. En México sus cuentos publicados son El séptimo caballo, La dama Oval, La trompetilla acústica, La casa del miedo, Memorias de abajo y críticos y especialistas en el surrealismo han analizado su obra extraordinaria y su vida fuera de serie. De Leonora quisiera destacar dos temas que poco se han tocado. Se conoce poco su actitud ante el nazismo y cómo desde los primeros días de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a partir del momento en que los nazis entraron en Francia el 24 de junio de 1940, denunció en las calles de Madrid a Hitler, a Franco y a Mussolini. Si la tacharon de loca era porque fue una clarividente y se dio cuenta del peligro antes que nadie.

Desde el instante en que dos gendarmes se llevaron por segunda vez a Max Ernst, el máximo pintor surrealista, a Les Milles, un campo de concentración en Francia, Leonora luchó contra la injusticia. La invasión de Polonia, la de Bélgica y de Francia la llenaron de rabia y en Madrid, ya desesperada, pidió una entrevista con Franco para decirle que no se aliara a Hitler y a Mussolini y repartió en la calle volantes pidiendo el cese al fuego. Antes que muchos se enfrentó a Hitler y al fascismo. Entonces la tildaron de loca, cuando en realidad se adelantaba a la inmensa locura que es la guerra. La encerraron en un manicomio en Santander. ¿Quiénes fueron normales? ¿Los que escondieron la cabeza como la avestruz o Leonora, la visionaria, que se alzó contra la guerra porque adivinó el peligro?

Otro tema conmovedor de su ya larga vida (el 6 de abril cumplió 94 años) fue su solidaridad con los judíos. El sufrimiento de Chiki, Emerico Imre Weisz, fotógrafo, su marido y el padre de sus dos hijos Gaby y Pablo, está ligado a la guerra civil de España. Chiki fue quien salvó la maleta de negativos de Robert Capa que hace más de un año apareció en México y que ahora es motivo de una película y un documental.