Books

Young Spanish Language Writers on the Internet and Writing

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

I don’t often take much stock in prognosticative journalism, but El País has an interview with 8 young Spanish Language novelists about how the Internet has effected their writing, and they mentioned a few things that have influenced their writing. I haven’t read any other their work, although, I did give up on an El Público Lee episode that was interviewing Elvira Navarro. I’m a little doubtful that filling a story with the detritus of the Internet would make for good reading:

[…]Kirmen Uribe: “The structure in the Internet, the utilization of the first person, the sub-chapters that have length of a computer screen, that are autonomous…” All of this has a great influence on his work. “I even reproduce,” he says, “the new technologies explicitly: emails, Wikipedia entries, Google searches…”

[…]Kirmen Uribe: “La estructura en red, la utilización de la primera persona, que los subcapítulos tengan la longitud de una pantalla de ordenador, que sean autónomos…”. Todo eso tiene una gran influencia en su obra. “Incluso reproduzco”, dice, “las nuevas tecnologías de manera explícita: correos electrónicos, entradas de Wikipedia, búsquedas de Google…”

Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview with Chad W. Post – In English

~ bythefirelight

Three Percent has an excellent interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya and Chad W. Post. They discuss the background of his work, some of the controversy surrounding his work, including death threats during the war in the 80’s, and his thoughts on Latin American fiction and American marketing of it. His comments about Senselessness, noting that the report the narrator is editing is a real report, were very informative and when I get around to reading it will make for a deeper read. Definitely worth the watch and it is in English.

Overview of Novelist Juan Carlos Onetti at the Nation

~ bythefirelight

The Nation has an excellent overview of Juan Carlos Onetti, his works and his place in Latin American Literature. I have been thinking of reading him, especially after Horacio Castellanos Moya called him an unlucky writer, someone who never quite got the respect he was due. Calling him a mix of Faulkner and Celine who writes stories that are fantastical, but not magical realism is intriguing.

Born in 1909 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Onetti was one of the most idiosyncratic and virtuosic Latin American writers of the twentieth century. His readers in Spanish know this. In his later decades, after years of writing in relative obscurity, he earned a reputation as a quirky, cosmopolitan Modernist–a South American Faulkner who also enjoyed an aesthetic kinship with Borges and Céline (an unlikely pairing that only Onetti could provoke). In 1980 Onetti won the Premio Cervantes. He also became known as a writer’s writer. Mario Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño, Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortázar and Antonio Muñoz Molina are among his admirers, all of them better-known (and very different) masters who have acknowledged, always in intensely personal terms, the debt they owe Onetti. Bolaño, who attempted to interview Onetti in Mexico in 1975, once joked that he was himself a terrible writer by comparison. Vargas Llosa, for his part, said no other modern writer has grasped the human need for fiction “with more force or originality” than Onetti.

[…]

When not treated with utter disinterest or disregard, Onetti’s literary output was–and still is, you might say–beset by critical misunderstandings. The latest example comes from the admiring Vargas Llosa, whose as yet untranslated book on Onetti, El viaje a la ficción, appeared in 2008. Even though Onetti liberated Latin American fiction from parochial literary traditions, Vargas Llosa argues, he nevertheless represents a Latin America of “failure and underdevelopment,” a world whose exigencies breed an author almost congenitally inclined to stage fantasies and flights from reality. Vargas Llosa casts Onetti’s work as the inevitable product of a universal Latin American experience that forces its literary denizens into the counterfactual and heady realm of fiction. Such an appraisal, though, doesn’t clarify the Uruguayan’s work. In one sense, Vargas Llosa is clearly trying to affix Onetti to the Latin American literary firmament, where there is already a richly ennobling tradition of masterly fantasizing and defiance of realism. And yet, in another way, Vargas Llosa propounds an ill-fitting essentialism, something that obscures rather than illuminates the particularities of Onetti’s visions, which have at least as much in common with Sartre and Camus as with his towering Latin American counterparts.

Andrés Neuman Wins the Spanish Critics Prize (Premio de la Crítica) Plus Profile

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País notes that Andrés Neuman from Argentina has won the Premio de la Crítica, one of the more prestigious literary prizes in Spain (although, it doesn’t come with any money). You can read a bit of the first chapter there, too.

And you can read a profile and interview with him at El País, too.

J. Peder Zane on David Shield’s Reality Hunger

~ bythefirelight

David Shield’s Reality Hunger has been making the rounds of blogs, reviews and radio interviews lately, but everything I’ve come across just makes the book sound one long bore. This is in part because I like stories and fiction and find articles or books that claim story is over premature, if not unfounded (as are most screeds about the coming collapse or death about any subject). Zane’s commentary is apt and squares with other criticisms I’ve heard.

I, me, mine | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment (via).

If Shields took his critique of memory and his hunger for reality seriously, his book would make an argument not for the memoir – whose inherent subjectivity makes it unreliable – but for reportage or history. Just as the stock market assigns the value of stocks through the wisdom of crowds, the reality of any experience is best approximated by collecting and sifting through multiple versions of events. It is often collective memory that replaces confusion with clarity, establishing the facts on the ground.

[…]

“Reality Hunger” would be easy to dismiss if its wrongheaded ideas weren’t resonating in the culture. Its assault on authority and its radical solipsism are of a piece with Oprah culture and anti-intellectual movements that have taken root in academia since the 1950s. It also highlights a growing contradiction in liberal thought. Generally speaking (liberalism is not groupthink) even as some liberals extol the importance of community and government action, others, like Shields, are promulgating ideas that loosen our bonds to one another. When all truth is personal truth, when there no facts, only art, conversation and true understanding becomes increasingly unrealistic.

The Flying Fish (El pez volador) by Hipólito G. Navarro – A Review of the Spanish Short Story

~ bythefirelight ~ 6 Comments

EL PEZ VOLADOR
Hipólito G. Navarro
PAGINAS DE ESPUMA, 2008
Occasionally when you begin a short story collection it is quickly apparent that you are reading something masterful where each story shows great attention to structure, language and narrative. That might be enough to make a good collection, but Hipólito G. Navarro’s El pez volador goes beyond the well written and gives one a collection where every story is written in a different style so that his stories keep evolving and suggesting new ways to construct a story. His stories, if one has to categorize them, move from the somewhat realistic interior monologue to meta fiction to more stream of consciousness, although, each of those terms only serves to constrain his work. And little seems to constrain his work which is always surprising, whether it is a twist at the end of a story, a sudden shift in perspective, or his ever present sense of humor, the stories reveal Navarro as a master and one of important writers in the revitalization of the Spanish short story.

Brevity, Darkness, Humor

For Navarro, story telling is a two fold act: telling a story, and telling the story of the story.

El pez volador from Páginas de Espuma (unavailable in English) is a collection of Navarro’s stories published over the last 15 – 20 years. It is hard to know what order they were published in, which might give a sense of his development, but there is a sense of progression, from more familiar story telling to the more meta. Yet that gives the impression that everything he writes about is self referential and refers only to story telling, which is far from the case. For example, Las notas vicrias (The Vicar’s Grades) two boys are given an old piano from a move theater. They spend all their time playing it even though it is missing a few keys. They struggle to learn how to play, to master the music of the Beatles and the Blues, often ignoring their homework, which gets them in trouble. After a few years when they have become good musicians, a stranger moves to the outskirts of town where one of the boy’s father had sold him a house in his orchard. The man is solitary and there are whispers around town about the man who they call the vicar, but the narrator, 30 years latter, doesn’t understand why they used that word, which suggests he was celibate. The narrator knows he lived alone, so he finds the gossip confusing. One day his friend’s father has the piano tuned. When the boys go to play it they learn, to their horror, that what they had learned to play sounds horrible on the newly tuned piano. It isn’t music any more, and they give up, never to play it again. On top of the piano is a card from the tuner: it is the man who has moved to the orchard. Years latter he remembers that the home in the orchard burned down and the piano tuner died. No one cared much but there was talk that the fire was arson and the story ends as the narrator says,

…Rafa y yo, sabemos positivamente que sí que fue provocado.

…Rafa and I, we know that it was arson.

Many of the common elements of Navarro’s stories are here. First there is the humor, a kind of humor based in inexperience or naiveté. His stories are not cruel, and bitter satire is not one of his methods. Following the humor, is a kind of unsettling of dreams, not so much a shattering, although the boys certainly have their dreams shattered, but a comic undoing of what a first seemed so obvious—the piano is in tune. Yet that isn’t to say there isn’t darkness in his work. The conclusion suggests something extremely dark, a violence and revenge that is quite passionate. However, that violence is off page, something only hinted at and softened by the multiplicities of interpretations of the story. The multiplicity of possibilities and the disparate elements that make up the motivations of the story are another trademark of his work. Navarro, leaves as much unsaid as possible. For him, it as if the shorter the better. Las notas nicrias is slightly more than four pages, yet in that brevity he is able to be both funny and dark, starting with a coming of age story that ends in revenge and suggestions of abuse.

The stories Las frutas mas dulces (The Sweetest Fruit) and La cabeza nevada (The Snowy Head) are similar in style, and the power in these stories is how he reveals what is actually happening. In La cabeza neveda it is only until the last moment does a shift in understanding in who the narrator is does the story finally describe reveal itself. It isn’t so much that the story makes no sense until then, rather he lets you make sense of the story, then says what I just told you is true, but you made an assumption where you shouldn’t have. In Las frutas mas dulces he goes again into the dark. In a scant three pages he describes a young girl who gets revenge on her uncle by having sex with a boy who comes into his melon fields to violate the melons. While the girl has her revenge,  the question what kind of revenge has she gotten and with whom? Again, Navarro leaves one with more question than he answers.

Playing With Stories

Moving into the more meta or experimental, the story El tren para Irún, por favor? (The Train for Irun, Please?) is told with only questions. Every sentence is a question and it leaves many open ended thoughts. Yet he has structured it so that many of the questions are implicitly answered by the following question. It is an effective technique, although, I found myself a little tired of it part of the way through and then warmed to it again as the life of the narrator filled out more and more. El tren is probably the most autobiographical piece, too. In his interviews he has mentioned his father who owned a bar in a village in southern Spain and who eventually died of alcoholism. In this story, a son is returning to a village after his father has died. He hasn’t seen him for years and is full of questions about what he will find. Will he ever get to know his father, understand what it was like to be an immigrant in Germany in the early 70’s. From these questions, though, the troubled father emerges. Despite the unsettling number of questions, El tren para Irún, por favor? is probably the story that is the closest in theme to modern American short stories: family dysfunction.

In A buen entendor (Dieciocho cuentos muy pequeños redactados ipsofácticamente) (A Good Understander — 18 very small stories edited ipso factly) Navarro dispenses with even the semblance of traditional story telling and gives the reader a series of short pieces with titles that seem to edit themselves, as if there were two voices talking. Each piece seems unconnected with the next, but as the story comes to an end they begin to refine themselves and the story that contains the little stories finally takes shape. The writing is some of his most playful and meta at the same time. For example, he opens the story with this piece that sets the action, but also makes a little joke with the repetition of the title in the first phrase.

I came about the anouncment
—I came about the announcement.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Listen, this thing about fucking interests me
—Listen, this thing about fucking interest me.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio.
—Ya!, eso sel lo dirás todas.

Hombre, eso de follar me interesa
—Hombre, eso de follar me interesa.
—Ya, eso se lo dirás a todas.

Later, after several short bits, the phrase is repeated, but in a longer, more contextual frame:

I Came About the Anouncement
—I came about the announcement, he told her.
—Don’t fuck with me, she answered surprised (and no wonder).
—Listen, this thing about fucking interests me, came out suddenly.
—Alright, you already told everyone about it, replied the woman, inevitably.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio — le dijo.
—No me jodas — contstó ella asmobrada (y no era para menos).
—Hombre, es que eso de follar me interesa -soltó el de pronto.
—Ya, eso se le dirás a todas —replicó la chica, inevitablemente.

Each of these parts slowly builds a story and and expands the story. Ultimately, in the last bit he puts all the pieces together and each of them is a different way of looking at the character and his way of thinking. At the same time it is a way of looking at how a story is constructed in pieces, as if the characters who are living the story are writing it too.

Navarro’s playfulness extends to the title story, too. In Sucedáneo: pez volador (relato en varios tiempos e higienes) (Substitute: Flying Fish — A Story in Various Tempos and Hygienes) Navarro again plays with structure. This time he breaks ups the story into numbered sections that are thematically grouped by the numbering. He then breaks up all the story into little sections that are imagistic and leave the reader, as he does in so many of his stories, wondering how the story will come together. In Pez volador another one his common elements appears: the natural world. Navarro, a former biology student, put vivid descriptions of the natural world in his works. In this story the main character keeps his bath tub as a kind of stagnate pond filled with worms, fish, and other creatures. It is not only a pond for observing, but one for bathing in and the protagonist spends his time sitting in the bath letting the creature crawling over him. Naturally, that is something one would not want to let others know and he keeps the shameful secret. The contrast of the secret with the intertwining stories creates a tension that, as in many of the stories, the characters are isolated, in a world of their own making. The resolution of the story, brining the natural into the larger world, the character out his isolation, and tying all the threads of the story together, again creates a story whose resolution is not only the end of the story, but a resolution of that one particular exploration of story telling. For Navarro, story telling is a two fold act: telling a story, and telling the story of the story.

Navarro is considered one of the preeminent short story writers of the last 30 years. His works, especially El aburimiento, Lester (The boredom, Lester), have been touchstones for the revitalization of the Spanish short story since Spain emerged from the dictatorship of Franco. With his power as a story teller and stylist his stories are a continuation of the legacy of of the Spanish language short story by such notables as Julio Cortazar. Hopefully, one day more of his work will be available in English.

What’s In English?

So far there isn’t too much English from Navarro. This is a shame and hopefully more will become available. Unfortunately, he has two strikes against him: American’s don’t read a lot of works in translation; and short story collections tend not to be published. Mix the to together and we may be waiting for some time There are a few works out there for the diligent and I would recommend reading his stories if you can. The NH Hotel chain published a collection of stories called, Bedside stories 6, which contains a couple of stories. I have yet to see a copy anywhere on the Intenent, so good luck finding it. In the collection Been There, Read That! Stories for the Armchair Traveller from The University of Victoria in New Zeeland he has one story. The book is readily available through sites like Abe Books. And the author has said that his translator Nicola Gilmour is working on a story for Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction, one can only hope it will come out in 2011. If it does come out, it will be the easiest way for and American to read one of his stories.

Occasionally when you begin a short story collection it is quickly apparent that you are reading something masterful where each story shows great attention to structure, language and narrative. That might be enough to make a good collection, but Hipólito G. Navarro’s El pez volador goes beyond the well written and gives one a collection where every story is written in a different style so that his stories keep evolving and suggesting new ways to construct a story. His stories, if one has to categorize them, move from the somewhat realistic interior monologue to meta fiction to more stream of consciousness, although, each of those terms only serves to constrain his work. And little seems to constrain his work which is always surprising, whether it is a twist at the end of a story, a sudden shift in perspective, or his ever present sense of humor, the stories reveal Navarro as a master and one of important writers in the revitalization of the Spanish short story.

El pez volador from Páginas de Espuma (unavailable in English) is a collection of Navarro’s stories published over the last 15 – 20 years. It is hard to know what order they were published in, which might give a sense of his development, but there is a sense of progression, from more familiar story telling to the more meta. Yet that gives the impression that everything he writes about is self referential and refers only to story telling, which is far from the case. For example, Las Notas Vicrias (The Vicar’s Grades) two boys are given an old piano from a move theater. They spend all their time playing it even though it is missing a few keys. They struggle to learn how to play, to master the music of the Beatles and the Blues, often ignoring their homework, which gets them in trouble. After a few years when they have become good musicians, a stranger moves to the outskirts of town where one of the boy’s father had sold him a house in his orchard. The man is solitary and there are whispers around town about the man who they call the vicar, but the narrator, 30 years latter, doesn’t understand why they used that word, which is similar to priest and suggests he was celibate. The narrator knows he lived alone, so he finds the gossip confusing. One day his friend’s father has the piano tuned. When the boys go to play it they learn, to their horror, that what they had learned to play sounds horrible on the newly tuned piano. It isn’t music any more, and they give up, never to play it again. On top of the piano is a card from the tuner, who is the man who has moved to the orchard. Years latter he remembers that the home in the orchard burned down and the piano tuner died. No one cared much but there was talk that the fire was arson and the story ends as the narrator says,

…Rafa y yo, sabemos positivamente que sí que fue provocado.

…Rafa and I, we know that it was arson.

Many of the common elements of Navarro’s stories are here. First there is the humor, a kind of humor based in inexperience or naiveté. His stories are not cruel and bitter satire is not one of his methods. Following the humor, is a kind of unsettling of dreams, not so much a shattering, although the boys certainly have their dreams shattered, but a comic undoing of what a first seemed so obvious—the piano is playing correctly. Yet that isn’t to say there isn’t darkness in his work. The conclusion suggests something extremely dark, a violence and revenge that is quite passionate. However, that violence is off page, something only hinted at and softened by the multiplicities of interpretations of the story. The multiplicity of possibilities and the disparate elements that make up the motivations of the story are another trademark of his work. Navarro, is a master of leaving as much unsaid as possible. For him, it as if the shorter the better. Las Notas Vicrias is slightly more than four pages, yet in that brevity he is able to be both funny and dark, starting with a coming of age story that ends in revenge and suggestions of abuse.

The stories Las frutas mas dulces (The Sweetest Fruit) and La cabeza nevada (The Snowy Head) are similar in style, and the power in these stories is how he reveals what is actually happening. In La cabeza neveda it is only until the last moment does a shift in understanding in who the narrator is does the story finally describe reveal itself. It isn’t so much that the story makes no sense until then, rather he lets you make sense of the story, then says what I just told you is true, but you made an assumption where you shouldn’t have. In Las frutas mas dulces he find goes again into the dark. In a scant three pages he describes a young girl who gets revenge on her uncle by having sex with a boy who comes into his melon fields to violate the melons. While the girl has her revenge,  the question what kind of revenge has she gotten and with whom? Again, Navarro sets leaves one with more question than he answers.

Moving into the more meta or experimental, the story El tren para Irún, por favor? is told with only questions. Every sentence is a question and it leaves many open ended thoughts. Yet he has structured it so that many of the questions are implicitly answered by the following question. It is an effective technique, although, I found myself a little tired of it part of the way through and then warmed to it again as the life of the narrator filled out more and more. El tren is probably the most autobiographical piece, too. In his interviews he has mentioned his father who owned a bar in a village in southern Spain and who eventually died of alcoholism. In this story, a son is returning to a village after his father has died. He hasn’t seen him for years and is full of questions about what he will find. Will he ever get to know his father, understand what it was like to be an immigrant in Germany in the early 70’s. From these questions, though, the troubled father emerges. Despite the unsettling number of questions, El tren para Irún, por favor? is probably the story that is the closest to modern American short stories: family dysfunction.

In A buen entendor (Dieciocho cuentos muy pequeños redactados ipsofácticamente) (A Good Understander — 18 very small stories edited ipso factly) Navarro dispenses with even the semblance of traditional story telling and gives the reader a series of short pieces with titles that seem to edit themselves, as if there were two voices talking. Each piece seems unconnected with the next, but as the story comes to an end they begin to refine themselves and the story that contains the little stories finally takes shape. The writing is some of his most playful and meta at the same time. For example, he opens the story with this piece that sets the action, but also makes a little joke with the repetition of the title in the first phrase.

I came about the announcement
—I came about the announcement.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.
Listen, this thing about fucking interests me
—Listen, this thing about fucking interest me.
—Alright! You already told everyone about it.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio
—Yo venía por lo del anuncio.
—Ya!, eso sel lo dirás todas.
Hombre, eso de follar me interesa
—Hombre, eso de follar me interesa.
—Ya, eso se lo dirás a todas.

Later, after several short bits, the phrase is repeated, but in a longer, more contextual frame:

I Came About the Announcement
—I came about the announcement, he told her.
—Don’t fuck with me, she answered surprised (and no wonder).
—Listen, this thing about fucking interests me, came out suddenly.
—Alright, you already told everyone about it, replied the woman, inevitably.

Yo venía por lo del anuncio

—Yo venía por lo del anuncio — le dijo.

—No me jodas — contstó ella asmobrada (y no era para menos).

—Hombre, es que eso de follar me interesa -soltó el de pronto.

—Ya, eso se le dirás a todas —replicó la chica, inevitablemente.

Each of these parts slowly builds a story and and expands the story. Ultimately, in the last bit he puts all the pieces together and each of them is a different way of looking at the character and his way of thinking. At the same time it is a way of looking at how a story is constructed in pieces.

Elias Khoury’s White Masks – Lebanon and the Civil War

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

I finished my review of Elias Khoury’s White Masks last week and on the whole I liked it and it is worth reading. I don’t want to say much more until the review comes out, although, I do think Yalo was a bit better book. However, considering it was only his second novel it is pretty good. White Masks is available from Archipelago on April, 20th.

Poster of the Lebanese Left Showing Martyrs

In writing the review I came across two interviews, one I’ve mentioned on the site before and the second I found. They add to the context of the book. Finally, I found a collection of posters at the American University of Lebanon. A quick perusal will give you a good sense of what the posters Khoury mentions in the book might have looked like, especially those of the Lebanese Left, which Khoury was allied with, and the example I have included here.

My Review of Translation is a Love Affair is up at the Quarterly Converastion

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

My review of Jacques Poulin’s Translation is a Love Affair is up at the Quarterly Conversation. Jacques Poulin is from Quebec, a city that is relatively close but can seem rather distant to someone from the US. It was a good change of pace to read a book from our neighbor to the north. The review begins

True to its title, Translation Is a Love Affair is centered around language—not only how writers and translators use it but also how it brings people together. Author Jacques Poulin’s characters see language as something to live, like a friendship, and translation is both a means of rendering one language in another and closing the distance between people, and even creatures. But that doesn’t mean Translation is a work of theory; it is a quiet novel of companionship through language.

MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO to pause publication

~ bythefirelight

Always a shame, the fine literary blog MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO is going to stop publishing for a while.

Update

They restarted publication.

Carlos Fuentes on Chilean Literature

~ bythefirelight

Carlos Funtes has a reflection of the literature of Chile and what it has meant to him. It is a quick overview but worth reading as it mentions many writers I am not familiar with.

(Google translate here if you don’t speak Spanish.)

Enrique Vila-Matas Interview at el sindrome chejov

~ bythefirelight

The excellent blog El sindrome chejov has a length interview with Enrique Vila-Matas about his new book, Dublinesca. If you are interested in Vila-Matas this interview will be worth it. Miguel Ángel Muñoz asks interesting questions, in part because he is a writer and seems to avoid some of the less interesting things journalists do.

Enrique Vila-Matas’ Newest Book and Excerpt

~ bythefirelight

El Cultural has an extremely brief interview with Enrique Vila-Matas about his new book Dublinesca (Dublinesque). It is so brief I can sum it up in three phrase: the book has more narrative and humanity than others because he has had many changes in his personal life; it is about an editor who goes to Dublin on Blooms Day; Vila-Matas was impressed by Dublin in a recent trip, but the editor character is not him, rather and amalgamation of many people he has known.

More importantly El Cultural has an excerpt of the book.

Enrique Vila-Matas Interview and Excerpt at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

ELPAÍS.com has an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas about his new book Dublinesca. There is also an excerpt of the book.

P. Ha elegido para protagonizar su novela a un editor jubilado de su edad. Ha decidido cerrar su editorial, y se va a hacer un funeral por la letra impresa y declara: “¿Para qué sirve la novela si ya tenemos la teoría?”. Un editor que considera terminado su catálogo y, en cierto modo, su vida…

R. Si te fijas, hay muy pocos escritores que hayan ficcionado a los editores… En principio trabajé -como tantas otras veces he hecho- con un personaje que era escritor. Un día, cuando llevaba ya cincuenta páginas escritas, decidí transformarlo en un editor, y todo de pronto se me volvió diabólicamente diferente. Las situaciones que tenía ya escritas pasaron a poder ser interpretadas de un modo no sólo distinto sino a veces incluso perverso. Y, de golpe, pasé a divertirme mucho.

P. Cuando lo situó como escritor, ¿era usted?

R. Era un personaje de ficción, con algún punto en común conmigo. Cuando lo convertí en editor ya era una mezcla de muchos editores que he conocido. En París, por ejemplo, algunos lectores han creído ver que hablo de Christian Bourgois, mi editor francés. No he negado que Riba tenga cosas de él. Es un conjunto de personas que he conocido.

Two Lebanese American Novels Reviewed at The New York Review of Books

~ bythefirelight

In Colm Tóibín’s The Anger of Exile at The New York Review of Books he reviews two novels by Lebanese exiles living in the North America. They sound like they have some promise.

About Rabih Alameddine’s book he writes

The Hakawati offers a set of competing narratives, some fabulous, some filled with memory and desire; it allows what we might call geopoetics to flow over geopolitics. By refusing to permit a single perspective or a single story or style to dominate, it offers, almost despite itself, a paradigm of mingling images and rich difference living in a panoramic, harmonic disunity. Alameddine suggests with some subtlety and much exuberance how this tapestry might come to the aid of the very world that the book explores.

About Hag’s novel he writes

In scene after scene our narrator mocks the very idea of the ordered self or the ordered society. He makes racist comments about other immigrants, calling them “welfare dogs” and forcing the reader to side with him or hate him all the more. His deep dislike of a poor émigré Algerian professor is irrational and fierce. He is an affront to all types of decency. The fact that he is writing this in Canada, a country that rightly is proud of its policy on immigration and ethnic diversity, adds a comedy to the book; the sound of the hand that feeds being bitten sharply offers a rhythmic energy to the prose and removes any possibility of easy self-pity from the tone.

Cockroach is all voice, and it depends on the holding and wielding of tone. The problem is that it is also a novel and thus Hage works a number of plotlines through the book, some more convincing than others.

Spanish Author Miguel Delibes Has Died

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Miguel Delibes has died at age 89 at his home in Valladolid. El Pais has an obiturary here and commemoration his life here. He had won the Cervantes prize among many others and was considered one of Spains greatest writers of the 20th century. Several of his books have been translated into English.

Javier Marías Conversation at the NY Public Library

~ bythefirelight

Words Without Borders pointed me to a lengthy (90 min) conversation between Javier Marías and Paul Holdengräber at the NY Public Library.

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel
Joe Sacco, 432 pages, Metropolitan Books

Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is his most ambitious work to date, both in page size and in the depth of his reporting. It is not only a book about current events as all of them are, but a detailed examination of events in Gaza in the mid 50’s. The search for witnesses of the events in Khan Younis and Raffa not only make the book more involved, opening questions of memory and truth, but also creates a contrasting history that is frustrating in its continuation of a conflict that has existed over 60 years.

The book is covers two different areas, the events in Khanunis and Raffa and what led up to them, and the events in Gaza during the early 2000’s before Hamas took over Gaza. Sacco spends most of his time investigating the history in part because he wants to look at some lesser known events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Sacco it is not only the events themselves that are interesting, but the process of creating the story, the way memory is shaped by the survivors, current events,  and those taking down the stories. Sacco makes it clear that the memories of the survivors and witnesses to these events vary in reliably. Often Sacco would find people who mixed events, or, worse for Sacco, wanted only to push a political agenda. When Sacco finds a fidayeen veteran he shows repeated scenes of the man talking about events he thinks are important, avoiding what Sacco is after, but Sacco continues on, sure the man has the story he is looking for. Eventually he get what he is looking for, but throughout the book is the interplay of the journalist and the story. As the he goes deeper and deeper into researching the story it appears he becomes intoxicated by the act of searching for the story, knowing what will actually be relevant. In doing so, he controls the narrative, yet his depiction of the process is a refreshing reflection on the act of journalism. Sacco has always been aware in his works how journalists become adventure seekers and how that distorts part of the story. His Christmas with Karadzic in War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-1996 is probably his clearest expression of the phenomenon.

From all the interviews and archival research (20 pages of the book are reprints of archival documents) Sacco tells the little known story of mass killings of Palestinian refugees in Khan Younis and Raffa by the Israeli Army. While exact numbers are not clear, all together a few hundred may have died in these incidents. In Khan Younis the survivors tell of a systematic rounding up of men between 15 and 60 and their mass execution and the forced quick burial. Since most of what happened in Khan Younis was witnessed by just a few survivors, Sacco only has a couple testimonies of Palestinian men who escaped the shooting. There are plenty of post incident witnesses, the women and children who helped in the burials, along with UN reports that say something happened, and Israeli reports that say the soldiers were panicked and shot in self defense. Sacco’s rendering of the survivor’s testimony is vivid and it is clear that he thinks that the Palestinian story is what happened.

The events in Raffa, on the other hand, were less brutal and so there are many more survivors. In Raffa, the Israeli army rounded up all the men and sent them through a gantlet where they had to jump over barbed wire while being clubbed by soldiers. Sacco notes that the memories of the survivors don’t always agree, but from each of repeated images he finds he structures a narrative that he thinks is most likely what happened. As with Khan Younis, the Israeli’s come off as brutal and arbitrary, more interested in killing and terrorizing than finding fidayeen in amongst the refugees. The story of Raffa is the most compellingly researched and has the best interplay between memory and journalism.

But what preceded the incidents? Sacco explains some of the history that had occurred since the 1948 war when Palestinian refugees spilled into Gaza. He notes that the border was easy to cross and little by little a series of tit-for-tat  killings and attacks by refugees, Israeli’s and Egyptian sponsored terrorist squads called the fidayeen, led to a state of violence where the refugees in Gaza became victims of power plays between Egypt and Israel. The cross border attacks had gone on for several years and both sides had hardened their positions substantially. Sacco includes a quote from Moshe Dayan who noted that Israel had to be strong, but in doing so the Palestinians, too, would harden and continue to fight. It is amongst these incidents the larger incidents in Khan Younis and Raffa occurred.

For Sacco, it is relatively obvious that the Israelis committed the abuses described in the books even though they deny they did. He notes that even right wing historian Benny Morris agrees that there were killings in the two refugee camps. However, given the state of tensions between the two sides it seems impossible for something even resembling agreement to be reached on what happened.

The notion of agreement and the problematic search for the past, continually surfaces amongst the modern day inhabitants who are only interested in the present and continually tell Sacco why do you bother with the past, it doesn’t help the present. Recovering the past doesn’t feed one, but given the endless tit-for-tat that can consume one’s perspective, a look back at the historical can help. Sacco’s nuanced reflection on one little part of the past is an excellent look at some of the events that had served to lock the conflict in its current stalemate. Unfortunately, his book will probably be taken by many as belonging to one side.

Interview with Edith Grossman at The Boston Globe

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

A brief interview with Edith Grossman about her approach to translation. Interesting, if brief.

IDEAS: Do you read much work by other translators?

GROSSMAN: It’s difficult, but that’s part of the trick of translating – to be able to leave your ear neutral enough so you can hear the first language, and know your own language well enough so you can echo it.

GROSSMAN: When I’m working I prefer to read contemporary American and English fiction. It gives me an idea of what’s possible. Aside from the fact that I’m addicted to novels, reading great fiction broadens my own repertoire of responses to a text. Gregory Rabassa said that when he was working on “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” some ninny asked him if he knew enough Spanish to translate it, and his answer was that the real question was whether or not he knew enough English. He hit it right on the head.

IDEAS: As you translate a book into a different language, how do you separate your own voice from the author’s?

The other author of ‘Don Quixote’ – The Boston Globe.

Celebrating the Small Press: Spain’s Páginas de Espuma

~ bythefirelight

Recently I read two books from the publisher Páginas de Espuma, a Spanish press devoted to the art of the short story. Both España, a parte de mi estos premios (Fernandow Iwasaki), and El pez volador (Hipólito G. Navarro) are very good and are part of the resurgence of the Spahish short story. Páginas de Espuma has published many of the writers that are part of the resurgence and fills an important role in celebrating an art that is often held in less esteem than the novel. But the catalog doesn’t stop at modern Spanish writers, but includes thematic collections and republications of older writers. Recently they published an edition of Poe’s stories with an introduction for each story written by a different author. With El pez volador they have introduced a new series, Vivir del Cuento (Living with stories) that I hope they continue with. The books is divided into three parts: a long overview of the work of the author; a representative sample of the author’s stories; a long interview with the author. It is a great way to get an introduction to an author’s work, especially if you are not familiar with his or her milieu. Hopefully, next time I get to Spain I can pick up a few more books of theirs.

The Book Swap at Conversational Reading

~ bythefirelight

Scott at Conversation Reading talks about the idea of a book swap as a way to connect readers with other readers and their local independent bookstore.

The bookswap came from a few simple facts that you can read about in this post, written by Madan and Evans for The Huffington Post. Essentially, they realized that readers want more than to buy books at a bookstore–they want to meet other readers there and have experiences that have to do with authors, publishers, great books, and literary culture. This is why people will go to bookstores for author events, and it’s also the reason why so many author events can feel flat. It’s nice to see your favorite author read from a new book, but if you’re just an isolated reader who is permitted to squint at your author on a podium for an hour and then walk away, perhaps with a signed book and an anxiety-ridden ten-second conversation with said author, you feel just as isolated and alone as you did before the event started.

An Idea Every Independent Bookstore Should Steal « Conversational Reading.