Books

Stay Where You Are – Quédate donde estás by Miguel Ángel Muñoz – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Quédate donde estás / Stay Where You Are
Miguel Ángel Muñoz
Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2009
154 pg

Miguel Ángel Muñoz’s Quédate donde estás is a playful work from an author who takes the art of the short story very serious and has created a work that both relishes the act of reading a well written story and the act of writing it. The stories shift between two themes: what it is to be a writer and what it means to face a loss, whether that loss is a fabulistic extra set of arms or Kafka losing his ideal place to work. While I find stories about writing sometimes tedious (even if you are a writer it never sounds that interesting), Muñoz injects a humor and insight that makes his works clever and perceptive. While the styles and themes clash at times and I’m not sure if all the micro stories between the larger stories create a cohesive work, Muñoz shows himself as a skillful cuentista (short story writer).

The first story of the collection Quiero ser Salinger (I Want to Be Salinger) is kind of a misleading opening, yet it is idea Muñoz returns to continually: how does life inform the writer. He is not interested in platitudes, but a question to reveal the art. In Quiero ser Salinger, the narrator wants to be a writer, a Salinger and for him it is taking on all the gestures of Salinger, his isolation, his strange habits. It is a Borgesian question about what creates the writer, the circumstances that one lives in, or something else? Would living as Salinger in Spain really make you a writer like Salinger?

The question is indicative of the questions Muñoz finds in the lives of the writers he explores. In the story Hacer feliz a Franz (Making Franz Happy), he creates a fictional bet between Franz Kafka and Jakob Blod, where Blod bets Kafka he could not stand to be a locked in a cell without human contact and just write for even a week. Naturally, Kafka loves the writing and he finds the need to leave the cell when the bet is over not a relief but a loss, as if his relation with the power of words has been disabled. He’s a man who seeks the ultimate isolation where words are more interesting than people and its the power in themselves, not the communication they facilitate that is most interesting.

In a more humorous vein is Vitruvio (refers to Da Vinci’s famous drawing of the proportions of a man). It is the story of a writer who under goes a transplant operation and has 3 extra sets of arms attached to his body so that he can be a more productive writer. It helps greatly as one pair of hands is incessantly scribbling notes in notebooks and he begins publishing at a feverish rate, becoming a great success. His personal life also improves, including his sex life: eight hand are better than two, it turns out. But one day he receives strange letter that says he has something that belongs to someone. He makes a journey to the address to find the original owner of the arms waiting for him. What ensues returns again to the question of what makes a writer, in this case the hands, or the mind? But what happens after you loose the power in the source? Muñoz treats writing not mystically, but fantastically, almost surprised that the power exits. His use of the fantastic as a way to get at the question is intriguing, something I see quite often in Spanish language writers, and adds not only a bit of humor, but a more nuanced way to get at the question. Having to bother with reality can be so limiting.

His wonderment at the power, though, doesn’t stop him from writing the more traditionally realistic El reino químco (The Chemical Rein). In El reino a young boy goes with his parents to visit his grandfather who he has no memory of ever seeing. His father hates his grandfather so until this one summer they have never met. From the start the visit is mysterious and plagued with troubles, the car breaks down and when they arrive he wakes up from a long nap and all he sees are stars, as if the whole world had disappeared. Quickly, though, the boy sees that the real problem is in the strained relationship of the grandfather and dad, which can’t even bear a week long visit. After an argument, of which the origins are never clear, the father demands they leave right away. The grandfather, taking his only opportunity to really get to know the boy, takes him to a secluded cove on his property where he has a little roller coaster suspended over the water which dumps the passenger into the water at the end of the ride. The boy at first says he’ll do it, then he struggles and fights, afraid to go down the track. When the grandfather is knocked into the water during the struggle the boy thinks he has killed him. Instead, the grandfather stands up and says, you’ve got more balls than you father. You’re alright. The strange reaction of the grandfather is what makes the story so interesting. Too often when a character is domineering any deviation from his rules is a weakness, but when they grandson says no, he is congratulated. What, then, did the son do that he hates his father so much? It is that open question that makes it one of the better stories in the collection.

Finally, I should touch on Muñoz’s style, which is clear and analytical, especially in his third person stories. However, he can shift styles as he does in Quédate donde estás, the eponymous story, where he shifts to a stream of conscious-like narration to examine the decisions a young makes when his girlfriend is found to have skin cancer just as he is leaving for university. The way he obfuscates, and reveals the story so that what ever decision he makes, is sure to be painful, if not wrong, is impressive.

Miguel Ángel Muñoz’s Quédate donde estás is a solid collection of stories, ranging from the funny to the painful to the intriguing. All of his stories are clever and well written and I hope to read some more of his work sometime. In the meantime I will continue to read his blog avidly. Hopefully, someday a few of his stories will make it into English.

You can read an interview in Spanish with him about Quédate donde estás.

Unedited Foreword to Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists at Three Percent

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Three Percent has reprinted the English introduction to Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. It is a good read for anyone interested in some of the thoughts that went into putting together the collection and some more general thoughts on writing and publishing in the Spanish and English speaking worlds.

Here’s the final part of the unedited version of Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles’s introduction to the special issue of Granta dedicated to “Young Spanish Novelists.” Part I is available here, Part II, here, Part II here, and you can download a Word doc of the entire piece by clicking here.

From the third post:

If a good part of contemporary Spanish literature seems eccentric to Europe, Latin America has always been the literary Far West, offering another way of being European, if you wish, since the traditions there incorporate all sources, not only their own. No other language shares the same territorial expanse (nor population) in contiguous “nations”. Its modernity seemed peripheral until its literature became contemporary of all men in the sixties: it brought about a renovation in the metropolises of various languages, thus moving the periphery into the center. The intellectual meridian has not passed through Madrid for over a century, although the publishing meridian cuts across both Madrid and Barcelona, where writers can be found building their reputations, which then furthers their regional prestige. The controversy over whether there are national literatures in Latin America has long become the stuff of historians, and we prefer to sustain, without excessive romanticisms, that the literary homeland is the language itself. Although in reality all literature is a magma of forces and traditions or trends in opposition, fluctuation and influence; of the living and the dead, of all languages—as is proven by reading the authors selected for this issue—and put in circulation by other hidden legislators: the translators, the editors and the critics (since without criticism there is no literature, either). In order to discover this, though, one needs to know the works, and this can only be done by reading, obviously, in translation. This issue, for example. Need we be reminded that a literary culture in which there is no translation is doomed to repeating the same things to itself over and over again?

Battlescapes: A Photographic Testament to 2000 years of Conflict – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Battlescapes: A Photographic Testament to 2000 years of Conflict (General Military)
Alfred Buellesbach and Marcus Cowper
Osprey Publishing, 2009 220pg

Battlescapes is a beautiful collection of photos taken on the battle fields of Europe showing what they look like now. It’s a truism to say that the older the battle field the less field has obvious marks of the battles fought. At best, there are monuments places over the last hundred and fifty years. Often, as the text makes clear, the monuments say more about those who erected them, than those who fought the battle. If one did not have the accompanying text the photos would just look like lovely photos of fields full of crops or freshly plowed waiting for the coming season’s planting. It is all very bucolic and without the text you wouldn’t know that 100,000 died here, 50,000 there. It is only the more modern wars, especially World War I where you see the evidence of war. This is partly because the fields have been preserved, but it is also due to the intensity of the industrial war that reshaped the land so thoroughly and left large sections of it unusable, which the French called the Red Zones where the mix of biological waste and unexploded ordinance made for dangerous going. It is that intensity that make the images of the World War I battle fields the most interesting, especially those of the Italian front where they fought even more pointless battles in the Dolomites. The photos of the Dolomites are stunning and it is a wonder why anyone would bother. Moreover, while the old battle fields often have markers that have more to do with an growing sense of nationalism, and less to do with the battles, the markers for World War I have an ironic gesture, massive sentinels to massive waste and dedicated only shortly before the start of the next one. It makes for a good companion to Nigel Jones, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front .

It is unfortunate, though, that such beautiful photos obscure what really happened. It is not the fault of the authors, it is the way nature erases what humankind destroys.

Lynd Ward’s Wood Cuts Collected by Library of America

~ bythefirelight

Library of America is releasing a two volume set of Lynd Ward’s wood cuts. I’m looking forward to them as they are some fascinating early to mid 20th century art. I’ve read Vertigo which is called his best work and it has left me wanting more. The NPR review was unimpressive, but it will give you a sense of his work, both its excellence and its flaws. You can see some of the drawings here.

As Spiegelman notes in his introduction (“Reading Pictures: A Few Thousand Words on Six Books Without Any”), Ward’s work doesn’t involve the familiar visual syntax we have come to associate with comics, with their motion lines and word balloons. Neither is he interested in guiding our eye across a succession of images arranged on a page, nor of controlling, by virtue of the placement and size of those images, the pace at which we read them. Instead, Ward’s one-image-per-page narrative places strict demands on his storytelling: Each image must stand alone and declare its message simply and unmistakably even as it builds on the images that preceded it.

The LOA edition’s layout — one woodcut per right-hand page, surrounded by generous margins — may be the one that Ward preferred, and it certainly allows readers to appreciate the unfussy force of his lines, figures and composition more easily than ever. But it does drive up the page count: Book One, including the Faustian fable Gods’ Man, the multigenerational gothic yarnMadman’s Drum and the imagistic folk tale Wild Pilgrimage, weighs in at over 830 pages. The nearly 700 pages of Book Two include Prelude to a Million Years, which explores the art vs. society theme Ward so adored, Song Without Words, a grimly terrifying and hallucinatory anti-war screed, and Vertigo, an ambitious and sprawling tale of class struggle told from multiple perspectives.

 

Women Dominate the Spanish Bestsellers Lists – Except for Ken Follett

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Moleskine Literario has a post pointing to an article in the Spanish news paper ABC that says that women are on top of the best sellers list, except, for good or bad, Ken Follett, who reigns supreme.  The authors are María Dueñas, Almudena Grandes, Julia Navarro y Elvira Lindo. The Dueñas is a historical novel, as is the Grandes, who, with this book, plans to publish a cycle of books that trace the last eight years of Spain, starting with the Civil War. She is attempting to write a 6 or 7 chronicle like Benito Pérez Galdós’ Episodios nationales. Elvira Lindo’s book takes place during the Movida in the early 80’s (I should know more since I watched an hour long interview with her to weeks ago, but I can’t seem to remember much more than that). She is also the wife of Munoz Molina (I don’t necessarily like to say who’s married to who since it lesson’s one’s role as a writer, but since she is little known in the US, I’ll break the rule).

María Dueñas, Almudena Grandes, Elvira Lindo y Julia Navarro no se han encontrado nunca codo con codo, pero en las listas de los más vendidos sí lo están. Hace semanas que han desbancado a los hombres -salvo al invencible Ken Follett– de la cabecera de los superventas en España, y lo han hecho a fuerza de trabajo, porque ninguna de ellas es una debutante.

Para la directora de la agencia literaria Pontas, Anna Soler-Pont, que estas maestras de la literatura coincidan en las listas “no es una casualidad. ¡Tenía que llegar este momento!“.Augura, así, que “en unas décadas” no se hablará de fenómenos como éste porque habrá “igualdad plena en todo tipo de listas, y no por las cuotas”.

Repaso a las listas

Según la lista semanal de La Casa del Libro, los más vendidos después de Follet son Dueñas, con El tiempo entre costuras (Temas de Hoy), Grandes, con Inés y la alegría (Tusquets) y en el puesto 13 Lindo, con Lo que me queda por vivir (Seix Barral).

En la Fnac la escritora española más vendedora ha sido Dueñas (en cuarto lugar), seguida por Grandes (quinto) y Lindo (décimo).El top ten de El Corte Inglés está copado de mujeres del tercer al sexto puesto en este orden: Dueñas, Grandes, Carmen Posadas -uruguaya, pero afincada en Madrid desde que tenía doce años- con Invitación a un asesinato (Planeta) y Julia Navarro, por su novela Dime quien soy (Plaza & Janés).

En ninguna de las tres listas las supera en ventas un autor español, y tan sólo el ex publicista John Verdon, con su opera prima Sé lo que estás pensando (Roca Editorial), y David Safier con su divertido Maldito Karma (Seix Barral) se atreven a sobrepasarlas en la lista de la Fnac.

Some Spanish Language Authors You May Not Know and Are in English Including Javier Cercas

~ bythefirelight

Jessica Crispin at PBS had a brief list of Spanish language authors (from the translator Anne McLean) you might have heard about, but should look into. It is a brief list but definitely worth looking at. One I’m looking at is Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas. It was a huge hit in Spain and occasionally controversial. I was happy and surprised to learn it was going to be published in English. As a Spanish fried asked, are English speakers going to understand it? I’m not sure, but if you like history and different ways of writing it, the book will be worth the read.

“Anatomy of a Moment”
by Javier Cercas
(will be released February 2011 by Bloomsbury)

“Three of the writers I translate are actually favorites of Vargas Llosa’s,” McLean wrote me, including Javier Cercas. McLean has translated Cercas before, and this latest is “about the 1981 attempted coup in Spain, which won the National Prize for Narrative the day after the Nobel was arrived.”

New Words Without Borders – The Modern Middle East

~ bythefirelight

The November, 201o Words Without Borders is available now covering the Modern Middle East. In this issue the Middle East is Turkey and lands to the East, rather than Arabic speaking lands.

This month we celebrate the publication of our fifth WWB anthology, Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, edited by Reza Aslan. The aim of this book, and of this complementary issue, is to provide a different, more authentic perception of this complex region, an image not fashioned by the descriptions of invaders, but rather one that arises from the diverse literatures of its most acclaimed poets and writers. These translations from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu display the rich poetic tradition of the region and provide a new paradigm for viewing the mosaic that is the modern Middle East. We hope that the writing presented here and in the anthology may help move our consciousness of the region away from the ubiquitous images of terrorists and fanatics and toward a new, more constructive set of ideas and metaphors—wrought by the region’s own artists, poets, and writers—with which to understand the struggles and aspirations of this restless and multifaceted part of the world.

You can read Arab Literature (In English’s) take on the Gibran piece here.

A Of Robert Alter’s “The Wisdom Books” at The New Republic

~ bythefirelight ~ 4 Comments

Adam Kirsch Reviews Robert Alter’s “The Wisdom Books” | The New Republic.

Robert Alter has come out with another translation of books from the old testament. This is the third book in his effort to translate biblical Hebrew into to a clear and as accurate as possible English. This collection covers Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs and adds to his work on Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses), I and II Samuel, and Psalms. If this book is as good as those of the The Five Books of Moses, then this will be well worth the read. The one thing I noticed, though, when I was reading the First Five, is that his copious notes, while fascinating, at times make for an exasperating read. I wanted to read all his interesting notes, but I found it distracting at times. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it makes for slow going.

Robert Alter’s ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more accurate and forceful English version is one of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age. Turning the Bible into Greek, in the second century BCE, required seventy-two sages—which is why the Greek version is called the Septuagint (after the Latin word for “seventy”)—and the King James Version, in the early seventeenth century CE, was produced by a committee of forty-seven Anglican divines. Yet Alter, working alone, has already produced new English versions of the Pentateuch, I and II Samuel, and Psalms. Now he gives us new renderings of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—possibly the most challenging and perplexing works in all of Scripture.

For this very reason, they are also the Biblical books that speak most directly to the modern, skeptical, secular reader. If the Torah is revelation—an ostensibly factual account of God’s actions and commandments—the Wisdom Books are a kind of counter-revelation: an emphatically human expression of the impossibility of knowing God or believing in His justice. As Alter writes in his introduction, “the three Wisdom books are, in different ways, worlds apart from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets.”

One sign of the difference is that Job, Proverbs, and Qohelet (Alter uses the Hebrew name, whose actual meaning is hard to ascertain, rather than the familiar Greek name Ecclesiastes) do not deal with the people of Israel, but with humanity in general. Job is a monotheist but not an Israelite; he lives in “the land of Uz,” which Alter glosses as “a never-never land somewhere to the east.” In Qohelet, God is referred to only occasionally, and then only as Elohim, not by His specifically Israelite name, Yahweh. And while Proverbs ascribes its often banal sayings to Solomon, at least one section of the book is an adaptation of an Egyptian text from the second millennium BCE, the “Instruction of Amenemope.” Indeed, the scholarly designation “wisdom books” assigns these texts to a genre that is also found in Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature. “The perspective of Wisdom literature,” Alter summarizes, “is international and, in many instances, one might say, universalist. It raises questions of value and moral behavior, of the meaning of human life, and especially of the right conduct of life.”

The Dylan Dog Case Files – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Dylan Dog Case Files
Bonelli Comics, 2009, 680 pg

The Dylan Dog Case Files are the most ridiculous and ludicrous comics I’ve read in ages. In some ways, because they are so silly, it was refreshing to read a comic that doesn’t take it self so seriously like those countless super hero comics that are filled with mopey teen age anxiety and cry about having super powers. On the other had, Dylan Dog is a repetitive joke that gets old. The Italians love them, 56 million copies of worth of love, but after the first story, which was actually funny, they slid into the realm of tiresome who done-its. Fortunately, it takes little time to read each story, so I don’t feel I lost wasted time reading them. You might be asking yourself why I read them in the first place as they really aren’t my kind of thing? It was the jacket blurb (yes, they do work): I can read the Bible, Homer, or Dylan Dog for days on end without every feeling bored–Umberto Eco. All I can say is his idea of boredom and mine are two different things.

Dylan Dog is an investigator of strange cases, kind of a paranormal Sherlock Holmes. Typically the cases revolve around beautiful women who he manages to seduce in each episode. Like hard boiled novels, he is outside the law and often in trouble, but in the end always the one who figures out the problems. His cases range from zombies to serial killers and as in any detective story he usually gets something wrong–falls for the wrong woman, believes the wrong man–before he solves the case, often with his superior fighting skills. Accompanying him is his trusty helper and Groucho Marx clone, who loves to tell Goucho like jokes: I gave my cat lemons to eat and now I have a sour puss. (I’d love to know what the original was, because that joke can only work in English.) In the first story when the Groucho had more of a role, it was funny, but as the stories went on and he disappeared into the background, the humor abated.

There is certainly a charm to the Dylan Dog character. The wise cracking loner has so many possibilities, but the repetitive and predictable nature of the stories quickly grows tiresome after a while.

From Arabic Literature – Iraqi Literature in Translation: A Brief Introduction

~ bythefirelight

Arabic Literature in English has compiled another one of her excellent lists on books in translation, this time Iraqi Literature in Translation.

My list is anything but comprehensive. (For instance, several authors who made the Arab Writers Union’s “Top 105″ list are not here because they haven’t been translated.) If you’re looking for more seasoned authors, check the list. If you’re looking for more young authors, visit Blasim’s “Iraq Story” website. I also recommend the anthology Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (edited by Shakir Mustafa) and Banipal 37: Iraqi Authors, for writers who are sometimes a bit off the beaten path.

I’m still working my way through Banipal 37, but I have already come across some interesting writing. There is definitely some interesting work coming from Iraq.

16 Excerpts from Mario Vargas Llosa’s Newest Novel

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El Pais has 16 excerpts selected by Mario Vargas Llosa’s from his newest novel about the Belgian Congo and Roger Casement who fought to end the horrendous condition. I’ll be curious to see the reviews. He certainly despised the system the Belgians instituted, but will that make an interesting novel? Man’s inhumanity to man is boundless. I hope he has something interesting to say about it. You can see the photos that accompany the excerpts here.

La Force Publique se enquistó, como un parásito en un organismo vivo, en la maraña de aldeas diseminadas en una región del tamaño de una Europa que iría desde España hasta las fronteras con Rusia para ser mantenida por esa comunidad africana que no entendía lo que le ocurría, salvo que la invasión que caía sobre ella era una plaga más depredadora que los cazadores de esclavos, las langostas, las hormigas rojas y los conjuros que traían el sueño de la muerte. Porque soldados y milicianos de la Fuerza Pública eran codiciosos, brutales e insaciables tratándose de comida, bebida, mujeres, animales, pieles, marfil y, en suma, de todo lo que pudiera ser robado, comido, bebido, vendido o fornicado.

The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope – A Review

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The Wrong Blood
Maunel de Lope
Other Press, 2010, 288 pg

What strikes one when reading The Wrong Blood, Spanish writer Manuel de Lope’s first book to be translated into English, is the movement through time. It is a book that reveals itself if in concurrent glimpses of the past and the future, where even as the underlying story is revealed, Lope is constantly seeding the pages with little moments of the future that explain just enough lured you on. It is a difficult balancing act that can easily descend into over powered winks at the reader: you see what I know. It is a fitting style, though, for what has become the emblematic topic of Spanish writing over the last few decades—the Spanish Civil War—and the slow, confused, uncertain mystery of remembrance that often doesn’t completely explain what happened to the participants. The question for readers, though, is does the book work with the materials of history to get at something that addresses the Civil War, or does it just use the past as a backdrop for a well told story?

Most of the action of The Wrong Blood takes place in a small section of the Basque country on the border with Spain and follows two women, Maria, a poor, uneducated girl of 17 whose family owns a rural inn, and Isabel, an upper class woman who lives in a large home and is the young bride of an army captain. The story begins just as the Spanish Civil War starts and the two sides are rushing to put together armies and militias. It is a confusing time and the geography of the war is changing quickly. The young girl is abandoned at the inn when her parents run away from advancing fascist soldiers. The soldiers move into the inn and she works as a servant. Most of them are young militia men and have an ominousness presence. However, it is the sargent, separated his wife during their wedding anniversary, who rapes her. It isn’t a violent moment, he just expects her to because she understands she has no choice. The soldiers will move on and she will live the inn, but the rape, the third one in her short life, marks her with a great distrust and mixed with a rural sensibility, she is becomes a secretive woman.

Marrying on the eve of the war, Isabel has but just a brief honeymoon with her husband before the war starts. It is a moment of great hope, and like many novels that open with a wedding it is doomed from the start. From the beginning de Lope juxtaposes the wedding with the war:

It was the month of may, or the month of June, in any case summer was near, and within only a few weeks the war would break out, although nobody knew this at the time, and those who had premonitions couldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what the intuition accepts, and they wouldn’t have been able to convince anybody anyway. And so it was the month of May, or the month of June, in wedding season.

It is an inauspicious moment, as one of the wedding guests has a stroke in the bathroom of Maria’s inn during a stop on the way to the wedding. From there the problems only continue. The region they live in is initially Republican (anti-fascist) but quickly falls and Hondarribia, the small town where she lives which is tantalizingly across the river from France, becomes occupied territory, filled with soldiers guarding every town, summary executions, and privation. And her husband, the only one of his army comrades to join the Republican forces, is captured and executed just months after the war begins.

But even before he describes much of the war, he moves into the future, sometime in the 1960s, when the grandson of Isabel comes to stay at the family home. Yet the house is no longer in the family. Instead, Isabel had willed in to Maria, who is now an old woman. It is unclear why an upper class woman would give a home to a poor country girl, and even more, why the country girl would let the woman’s grandson stay at the family home for a few months. It is the first of many mysteries that begin permeate the story. The above history of the war is not even clear at this point, yet de Lope leaves a feeling that something dark has happened. He is a master at revealing the mystery slowly. Even though the old doctor who lives in the house next door knows the whole story, his hesitation, his doubts about what to reveal and to who, only add to the tension.

Despite the the well written nature of the novel, the strange relationship between the doctor and the grandson, where the doctor wants to reveal all, and the grandson wants to escape the pesky only man, provides the only interesting commentary on the passage of the time and who owns the right to secrets. Is the doctor right to want to explain what happened, or does he just want to make himself feel better? These kinds of questions swirl around the doctor. De Lope is obviously interested in the way ideas are transmitted. For example, in this representative sample of his style, the kind of intra-sentence refinement that works out its ideas through constant use of counter images.

But nobody appeared to be paying any attention to this enigmatic vision, and with the passage of the years, when recalling a wedding celebrated so long ago, it may all seem grotesque, strange, or simply unread–a memory of playing with figures decked out in wedding finery amid flowers and balustrades, or ow wandering in a labyrinth of bushes, or of seeing the bust of a horseman above a garden wall as he rode by during the magic moments when twilight was galling–for real life had offered one of those sequences that would never be repeated except in the theaters where what were then still called talkies were shown. In the end, memory adopts images that originated in films.

When getting at memory he is at his best. He has a good eye for the images that make up a moment and a way of describing them that is concrete and lush at the same time. Reading this book will surely overwhelm one with images and sensations that seem to pop off the page.

Yet, I can’t help but return to the question first asked: are his ample skills at evoking the time, simply used to dress up a mystery? I ask this because the central mystery of the book, which I’m not going to spoil, doesn’t seem far fetched, but feels as if it isn’t explored as well as it could be. Instead, de Lope seems to sidestep the central issue, the real pain it would have caused. And in describing the emotions of that pain he obscures with such strong descriptions, what should by its very weight, its existence, be powerful and reveal the depths of the character’s thoughts that would bring to life the past.

The Wrong Blood is a solid book, well written, and it is not for nothing that Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende give him high praise of the book jacket. Considering how little from Spain is translated into English, it is worth a read. However, despite the perfection of the story and the writing, I think he could have reached just a little father and found something even more humanly revealing in his characters.

FTC note: The publisher sent me this book. For that I thank them.

Mexico and the Narco Wars – Some New Books

~ bythefirelight

The New York Review of Books has an excellent article on the narco wars that have over taken Mexico in the last couple of years and have been brewing for even longer. If you are interested in Latin America or Mexico they are interesting in themselves, but it will also be helpful to understand the growing body of literature that is covering these events (you can see some of my posts on the subject here and here). Reading the review may leave you depressed, but at least it will give a bit more context than another story on beheaded corpses that seem to come up every so often.

How to write about Mexico’s drug war? There are only a limited number of ways that readers can be reminded of the desperate acts of human sacrifice that go on every day in this country, or of the by now calamitous statistics: the nearly 28,000 people who have been killed in drug-related battles or assassinations since President Felipe Calderón took power almost four years ago, the thousands of kidnappings, the wanton acts of rape and torture, the growing number of orphaned children.

For reasons they themselves probably do not completely understand, the various Mexican drug clans and organizations responsible for so much bloodshed have acquired a liking for public attention, and to hold it they have developed a grisly theatrical performance of death, a roving display of grotesque mutilations and executions. But for all the constant innovations, one horrifying beheading is, in the end, much like the next one. The audience’s saturation point arrives all too quickly, and news coverage of the war, event-driven as all news is, has become the point when people turn the page or continue surfing.

We, the people in charge of telling the story, know far too little ourselves about a clandestine upstart society we long viewed as marginal, and what little we know cannot be explained in print media’s standard eight hundred words or less (or broadcast’s two minutes or under). And the story, like the murders, is endlessly repetitive and confusing: there are the double-barreled family names, the shifting alliances, the double-crossing army generals, the capo betrayed by a close associate who is in turn killed by another betrayer in a small town with an impossible name, followed by another capo with a double-barreled last name who is betrayed by a high-ranking army officer who is killed in turn. The absence of understanding of these surface narratives is what keeps the story static, and readers feeling impotent. Enough time has passed, though, since the beginning of the drug war nightmare1 that there is now a little perspective on the problem. Academics on both sides of the border have been busy writing, and so have the journalists with the most experience. Thanks to their efforts, we can now begin to place some of the better-known traffickers in their proper landscape.

Short Form Pieces Availble for the Kindle Soon – Could this Reinvigorate the Short Story?

~ bythefirelight

Tech Flash is reporting that the Kindle will soon be able to read “singles”, short form pieces of 10,000 to 30,000 words. I don’t know how it is going to do, but it is good to see some movement on the short piece front. Bubble Cow’s piece on Ether Books also looks promising as a means to distribute short work. Mobile devices lend themselves to the short form and if these distribution channels can be harnessed correctly there is no reason that short fiction could reach a wider readership. It is too early to tell, but one can hope.

Amazon.com is putting out the call for short works for its Kindle platform. The online retailer is seeking Kindle books of about 10,000 to 30,000 words, about “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.” These mini digital books — ‘Kindle Singles’ — will have their own section on Amazon’s site and be priced less than a typical book, though Amazon gives no specifics on how the pricing will work.

Mario Vargas Llosa and the Nobel: The View From Latin America

~ bythefirelight

La Plaza in the LA Times has a very good run down (and in English) of the reactions to in Latin America to Mario Vargas’s Nobel Prize. Suffice it to say, he is a bit controversial, not only for his conservatism, but his abandonment of Latin America for Spain, the former imperial power.

Vargas Llosa also became identified with abandoning Latin America for Spain, which is what the author did, taking Spanish citizenship after losing the 1990 election. This move was also seen as a betrayal in some intellectual circles. His open and expressive affinity for Spain, which he’s reiterated in interviews since Thursday’s prize announcement, doesn’t win Vargas Llosa points among those who regard him as antagonistic — or at least indifferent — to indigenous-rights movements in Latin America.

The author is quoted as saying in 2003, while commenting on indigenous movements in Latin America in general (link in Spanish): “Development and civilization are incompatible with certain social phenomenons, the principle being collectivism. […] The indigenism … that appears to have been forgotten is now behind phenomenons such as the señor Evo Morales in Bolivia.”

Two years later, Peru’s neighbor Bolivia elected Morales, its first indigenous president in history — a moment regarded as a victory for long-oppressed indigenous groups in the Andean region. Vargas Llosa was unimpressed, dismissing Morales in 2008 as a “typical Latin American criollo [Spaniard born in the Americas], a Spanish-speaking mestizo, who is finishing off Bolivia.” (Link in Spanish.)

(Morales, for the record, is an Aymara Indian.)

I Remember, Beirut (Me acuerdo, Beirut) by Zeina Abirached – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Me acuerdo Beirut (I Remember Beirut)
Zeina Abirached
Sinsentido, 2009

I Remember Beirut (Me acuerdo, Beirut) is a short graphic novel that forms a kind of addendum to Zeina Abirached’s excellent The Swallow’s Game. Where Swallows told a complete story and interspersed the stories of the war, creating a large work that feels complete, large, as if she had captured at least one moment of experience. I Remember Beirut, on the other hand, is brief, a longing for something that no longer exists, or if it does it is out of reach of the author. Compared side by side, the smaller volume feels some how lacking. Perhaps that isn’t fair, but it is hard not to.

I Remember Beirut has new stories, but the characters are familiar if you have read Swallows. Included, are the narrator and her family, the brave taxi cab driver, and Victor the French speaking gentleman. She writes with the same humor, contrasting the dreams of a young girl with those of the war. It isn’t a particularly dark book and has many moments where she remembers how to make a paper boat, what Florence Griffith-Joyner’s finger nails were like, or the fruitless attempts to calm her curly hair. At the same time there are childhood memories that make war seem like a game. For example, her brother collects scraps of artillery shells, she takes a Zodiac ride to the ship evacuating the family from Beirut, the make an impromptu swimming trip where even asking directions uncovers refugees. She also returns to the daily hardships that fill The Swallows Game. It is the man in the horse drawn cart who delivers kerosene because they have no electricity, the explanation of how they stored water and took showers that makes the book intriguing. War is brutal, but how is it that people survive and continue on? That is the interesting question. In one scene towards the end, the narrator shows herself as an adult terrified by a thunderstorm in Paris; the war has a long reach. The best moment of the book comes, though, when the war ends and the family goes for a walk through what had once been no man’s land. There is nothing there, just rubble, but the parents narrate the journey of what had been, pointing out the stores that no longer exist, the street car tracks with out street cars, where the best bakery had been. And when the father is depressed after wards she notes that her brother is so happy, because he had found even more shell casings. Not only has the war divided the past from the present, but it has separated the generations. Beirut has changed and all one can do is remember it.

I Remember, Beirut is a good book, a kind of desert after Swallows. But what I’m also curious about is what is next? Now that her coming of age stories are over, can she go onto something else? It seems that so many graphic novels are based on the coming of age story. Fine, we all have one, but after that? Her skill as an artist is certainly impressive. I’m curious, though, if she has the skills as a story teller to continue on. I Remember Beirut has the slight feel that she used the last of her material. But she’s young, so there is a lot of time to find out.

Javier Cercas Has Won the el Premio Nacional de Narrativa

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Javier Cercas has won the el Premio Nacional de Narrativa for his book Anatomía de un instante (The Anatomy of an Instante). The book is a detailed examination of the attempted coup in Spain in 1981 when the transition to democracy seemed to be in peril. Three men, 2 flangests, and 1 communist, stod their ground and the rest is history. Or is it? Cercas examins every player, such as, the king who seemed to wait until he knew how it was going to turn out, or the Uninted States’ reaction which was predictably reactionary. The book has been some what controversial in Spain for some of his conclusions, but it was a big success at the same time. And, apparently, is a success in France and Italy, too.

Los tres llegaban de un pasado equivocado para construir un futuro acertado”, comentaba Cercas esta mañana desde su casa de Barcelona. Las reacciones, una vez leído, han sido cruzadas. “Me duele que a Carrillo no le haya gustado”, dice el autor. “Yo creo que le dejo bien, como un auténtico héroe, pero es que no era un santo”. Y eso también lo cuenta Cercas. Porque la complejidad de los gestos de sus tres protagonistas principales es crucial para comprender su grandeza. Es un viaje de las sombras a la luz. Dos representantes del franquismo y un comunista con destino a la democracia. “A veces resulta más virtuoso traicionar los ideales que ser leal. Ellos son tres grandes traidores, pero su posición es un acierto”.

El resultado canta. La transición fue un éxito para Cercas, digan lo que digan ahora nuevos agoreros. “Hoy la Transición tiene una leyenda rosa y otra negra. Las dos son inciertas. Los que es verdad es que aquella posición de estos tres personajes ha sido el último gesto épico que ha vivido este país”, asegura el autor de Soldados de Salamina.

Mario Vargas Llosas’ Newest Novel, an Excerpt

~ bythefirelight

You can read an excerpt of Nobel winning author Mario Vargas Llosas’ newest novel at El Pais. You can read it in web version here, or pdf here. And you can read an analysis of the novel here, although, honestly, doesn’t really tell you much.

Es un libro escalofriante del que uno sale con la boca pastosa, llena de hormigas oscuras que van deletreando esa palabra tan temida, i-n-f-i-e-r-n-o, la terrible, inclemente maldad del hombre hundiendo en el fango el cada vez más deterioro prestigio de la palabra nobleza.

Mario Vargas Llosa and the Nobel – the View From Spain

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

As you might expect, Spanish speakers are quite excited about the award. For the Spanish, Llosa gave a special shout out, noting they have done more for him than any other country in promoting his works than any other country. And naturally, the Real Academia (the group that confers definitions on what is Spanish and not) is quite happy, since he is their fifth member to win the award.

A few comments by Vargas Llosa.

An overview. Even if you don’t read Spanish, there is a slide show of 27 photos through the ages.

A profile of his agent Carmen Balcells, who has represented some of the greatest Spanish language writers: Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, etc.

Thoughts from the director the Real Academia.

An editorial about why he deserves the prize.

And a special edition with a huge number of tributes from the likes of Antonio Muñoz Molina, Javier Cercas, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Fernando Iwasaki.

Want to Publish a Translation of a Short Story in English? Try This List

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Arab Literature (in English) published this excellent list of literary journals in English that publish translations. I know that I’ve had a few readers from Spain who’d like to have their work translated in English and published here in the great isolation. It is a great start for you efforts and I hope it can be of help. I know it took quite a while to put together.

Now and then, I get a note from an emerging translator who wonders where she or he might submit a short story (or stories, or novel excerpts or poems) translated from the Arabic.

There are a few names we all—all of us in this racket, anyhow—know: Banipal, Words without Borders, and Two Lines.

However, these three are not necessarily the most accessible venues: Banipal and WWB both regularly have theme issues, and Two Lines (like WWB) is working from the entire world-language community. (However, Two Lines does publish Arabic translations, as with a lovely translation of Ibrahim al-Koni’s “Tongue,” by Elliott Colla.)

But those three aren’t the only magazines that are looking for your translated stories, novel excerpts, poems, plays, and essays.

The list below has an emphasis on magazines that allow for electronic submissions and simultaneous submissions (that means they’re okay if you send your story to several magazines at once). I have some information below, but please check it against the magazine’s submission guidelines before you send anything in.