It is an interesting interview, but he doesn’t explain how he can dislike long modern novels, and yet write such monsters himself. Other topics covered:
The Spanish author Javier Marías talks to Richard Lea about the looping trajectory of his three-volume epic, Your Face Tomorrow, his father’s wish to see himself portrayed in fiction and why he prefers his own novel in translation
Nadirs
Herta Müller, pg 122
Nadirs poses a problem: how does one describe a child’s vision of the world? And once that is asked the next is only logical: can you? In Nadirs Herta Müller constructs an almost privativist child, one who is not only unable to understand the social world around her, but unable to construct a narrative of her own life. In constructing such a narrator Müller has dispensed with the narrative arc which links events in one’s life into a series of logical steps to some end. For Müller incidents don’t explicitly describe the what has made someone the way they are, nor do her incidents describe a world. Instead, she use the implicit—father beats the child; father has sex with his sister-in-law; mother slaps her for inappropriate questions—interspersed with the everyday—how the cats sleep; how the organist plays. Each item is brief, a thought, and there is no linkage between them other than the narrator says they are hers. It is a completely atemporal world that neither grows nor moves forward in time.
To say that narrative is artificial is to state the obvious, but so is the lack of narative. In casting away narrative Müller suggests children are incapable of putting together coherent thoughts, that they can only explain, not theorize about their world. She may not believe that, but the effect is the same: a jumble of sensations that amount to little. The problem is not that she is breaking one or another rule of narrative fiction, it is that she has not created a new form for the genre. Her work is part memoir, part history and customs and the pastiche of the two doesn’t blend in a way that reinforce how the history and customs reflect in the memoir. Certainly, a child would not be able to place context on the events, but would a child spit out such small fragments either? Who really is the teller here: the child or an embodiment of the child? And this is the problem, because the book is not about a child’s view of the world, either one that searches for meaning or one that just relates what it knows, it is about creating a stark wasteland of memory where the author can put together all the grimy bits without having to explain why they are important. Just that they are there is enough (although knowing Müller’s history seems to enliven the book). Unfortunately, the pastiche becomes a tiresome mix of of partially worked out ideas and tedious banalities. Certainly, a book that is just one horror after another would be just as bad, but although the banal is part of every life, the banal seldom rises to insight in a work.
Despite the repetitiveness the book has its moments:
Every time I sat in front in the children’s pew, the Madonna had her finger raised. But she always had a friendly face at the same time, so I was not afraid of her. She also wore that light blue long dress and had beautiful red lips. And when the priest said that lipsticks are made from the blood of fleas and other disgusting animals I asked myself why the Madonna at the side altar was using lipstick. I also asked the priest and then he beat my hands sore with this ruler and sent me home immediately. I couldn’t bend my fingers for several days afterward.
That is Müller at her best, blending the logic of childhood together to create question the logic of the adult world. But passages like that are few and far between and more often resemble the following imagistic pasage:
Squealing salamanders in a nest that resembles a handful of frazzled corn fibers. Glued-shut eyes ooze from every naked mouse. Thin little legs like wet thread. Crooked Toes.
Dust trickles down from wooden planks.
You get chalky fingers from it, and it settles on the skin of your face so that you get the feeling of being dried out.
Whether or not that is a child’s voice may not really matter, it is the simple repetition that is either delightful or agonizing that makes or breaks the book. Given the pages and pages of fragmentary thoughts, Nadirs is not a rewarding book to read. While reality may only be narrative applied to the past, narrative, no matter how unreliable, still structures a child’s thoughts, and what may be most interesting is seeing how they structure the narrative, not the flight from it.
No Tomorrow (New York Review Books Classics)
Vivant Denon, pg 63
No Tomorrow is neither a love story, nor the remnants of a siliceous affair. It is a suggestion that doesn’t state, a book filled with lacuna where a modern would explain. Yet the story in its scant 30 pages (the other 30 is in French) is a reminder that the erotic need not be explicit.
The story follows a young man who has been having an affair with a Comtesse but she jilts him and by seeming chance he meets her friend Mme de T— in the Comtesse’s opera box. They begin a flirtation during the opera and she invites him back to her place, which is a mansion in the countryside she has begun to share again with her husband. Her husband is a sick man who she has agreed to reconcile with after man years. After he goes to bed, the narrator and Mme de T— go for a walk in the dark, stopping occasionally to embrace, kiss and talk. Finally, they end up in her room where he spends the night, only rushing from it when day light comes and her husband is beginning to wake.
Yet the night reveals more about what could be than what is. The farthest the narrator goes is to kiss and though he talks of love’s embrace, the night is part allegory and part ode to love, both physical and romantic. Where a modern would describe the act, the narrator and the Mme only talk. Yet it is obvious that if the affair continues it could go beyond what has occurred. Mme is very matter of fact in describing her other affairs and the separation she has had from her husband. So while the book is a celebration of desire and restrained passion, it plays against a back drop of long affairs and open marriages that suggests that the playfully suggestive can easily become more.
However, the book ends just as suddenly as it begins, as if it was just a brief interlude, a moment of pure pleasure without any repercussions. It is in that brief and free encounter that you see the ideal libertine romance: open, free, and playful. No Tomorrow is probably not a guide to love, but perhaps a tendency, a longing that despite its Ancien Régime setting is still easily recognizable.
It looks like there is some push back on the e-readers from publishers. According to TechFlash publishers think e-reader sales should come between hard backs and paper backs. We will see how this works out. The film industry is fighting this battle right now with studios wanting simultaneous release on all channels. Will there be someone who blinks first and goes simultaious?
It’s a sign that parts of the book publishing industry are hardening their opposition to the widespread retailer practice — spearheaded by Amazon.com — of selling electronic versions of new release books at a heavily discounted $9.99.
Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group are the two publishers delaying more titles. Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy told the Journal that the “right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” acknowledging that some readers will be “disappointed” by that timeline. Upcoming Simon & Schuster titles affected by the new policy include Don DeLillo’s “Point Omega” and the Karl Rove memoir “Courage and Consequence.”
It is official, Elliott Bay Books is moving to 1521 10th Avenue Capital Hill. From the email sent out today, it looks like a good move and I for one will be more likely to go there more often now that it is near things I goto, instead of a separate trip into Pioneer Square. I would hate to loose their great line-up of author events.
After many weeks of speculation about the future of The Elliott Bay Book Company, I am now able to confirm that the book store will be moving to a new location on Capitol Hill in the spring of next year.
The past two years have been a difficult, painful period of exploring and evaluating possibilities in an attempt to determine what would be best–and necessary–to ensure the long-term health and vitality of the store. And while the thought, and the practicalities, of moving from the site and the locale which have been home for the past 36 years are daunting to say the least, I am convinced that this upcoming relocation will afford us the best opportunity to remain, and further develop as a thriving enterprise.First–about the new location. We will be moving into a beautiful vintage building on 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine. The building dates from 1918–and was the original Ford truck service center for Seattle. The space will be comparable to the current store (in fact a bit larger), and will incorporate a café and a room dedicated to author appearances. It has the fir floor–complete with creaks–we’re used to treading, and gorgeous high wood ceiling-including massive wood beams–and skylights. While no space could exactly duplicate the charm of the original store, I can promise that the new building will offer a warm, comfortable and cozy environment that will be true to the beautiful place Walter Carr founded on Main Street.
The building has its own parking below street level-and between this and a nearby lot we will be able provide ample validated parking. In addition the new space will offer something we’ve never been able to offer before–wheelchair access to all levels.
The neighborhood is one of incredible vitality. I’m confidant that this move will boost our business to the level necessary to maintain our commercial viability–and to facilitate the ongoing investment necessary to keep any business vital.
My review of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is now available at the Quarterly Conversation. I wrote the review before many reviews had come out and it has been interesting to see how much positive press he has gotten. NPR named it one of the best books of foreign fiction this year. As you will see from the review I thought the book had some flaws, but it has its moments.
The Winter 2009 issue of the Quarterly Conversation went up on Monday, as usual it has a great mix of features and reviews. Some of the things that caught my eye were
We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.
By Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch
Mahmoud Darwish was a poet essential to Palestinian concepts of identity an nationhood. Here, George Fragopoulos looks at four recently published book by the prolific writer, tracing an outline of the map Darwish left for his readers to follow.
By George Fragopoulos
Blog, farce, open letters, or all? Austrian-Polish author Stanislaw Borokowski has been writing a blog to the Soviet Union’s final General Secretary, touching on everything from glasnost to the former world leader’s romantic songs. [more]
By Chris Michalski
False Truths: How Fact Is Fiction in Machado de Assis
Widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer, Machado de Assis was a unique writer. Like a Laurence Stern across the Atlantic, this freed slave wrote postmodern literature long before the 20th century.
By Michael Moreci
Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But what if it’s really not so black and white?
By Ellen Welcker
Read this chapter from The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis, the first time it’s ever been published in English.
By George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli
George Fragopoulos explains why he wanted to translate The Mezzanine, a book that brings to mind Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and even Proust.
By George Fragopoulos
An excerpt from Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s next novel, available next year.
By Jerzy Pilch (translated by David Frick)
Matt Jakubowski introduced Jerzy Pilch’s latest novel, available next year.
By Matt Jakubowski
Jose Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet and novelist, has won the most important Spanish language literary prize. From what I have read it is deserved. His Battles in the Desert is an excellent book about Mexico in a certain epoch.
My review of Battles in the Desert
An appreciation from Elena Poniatowska I translated.
Emilio, los chistes y la muerte
Fabio Morabito , 173 pg
I read this because of a review—a good one—but a review that focused on the style of the writing whose clarity and precision showed a master stylist at work. Emilio is certainly sparse and there are few pharagraphs of more the five sentences. Most of the book is given over to short moments of dialogue, a dialogue of inquisitiviness that makes the book concise and interesting.
The book follows Emilio a 12 year-old boy who has moved to a new neighboorhod in Mexico City and as he doesn’t know anyone, he begins to spend time in a cemetary looking for his name on the grave stones while carrying a joke detector (a metal tuble that plays recorded jokes). He meets a woman who has lost her son and comes weekly to place flowers on his grave. Her son was about the same age as Emilio so they strike up a friendship after Emilio guards her emgerency trip to the bushes to urinate. From the story continues as a strange menalnge of youthful infatuation as Emilio falls in love with the woman, the loneliness of devorced women as Emilio’ mother and the woman began a tentative friendship initiatied by a message, and a sexual discovery. Yet in the same maner that the language is brief, the exploration of these themes is brief. It is as if the novel is the unfolding of a child’s understanding, which leaves the same questions that the child has, but unlike the child has a few ideas of what is happening. Unfortunately, that approach, too, can lead to a fractured story that doesn’t quite seem to finish.
The growth of the child is evident when he and the woman slowly draw closer and he asks to kiss her and latter touch her breasts to ‘see if they are bigger than his mother’s’, which he saw during the message. The boy’s curiosity is understandable, but what makes the woman let him touch her? Is Emilio the surrogate for her late son, and if so what was their relationship? It is never clear what drives her friendship—it is one of the many intriguing mysteries of the novel—but it is fairly clear that Emilio has begun to leave boyhood. Yet as the story ends it takes a different turn as Emilio descends into a cave under the cemetery with the androgynous altar boy he has seen at all the interments. The altar boy who has been sexually abused in some manner by the local priest asks if Emilio wants to kiss him. The altar boy who knows what the joke detector really is and likes to smoke, is older than his years. But Emilio, too, is searching and he wants to kiss the boy to see if he is gay. They kiss, but it is inconclusive and when the altar boy falls in the river the novel closes as Emilio is running from the dark cavern to the light of the cemetery.
The novel leaves many questions unanswered, but many of those are intriguing, such as what motivates the woman. But the ending seems a little week. Sure, one could say that as he leaves the cavern he is moving into a new phase of life. And what can one say at the end of a coming of age story: he triumphed in the end? However, its concision is a puzzle that leads to a strange novel, yet one that seems to end abruptly. You can’t help but wanting to know more about Emilio’s adventures. He is such an intriguing boy.
The Guardian UK has a nice appraisal of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. It is a book I had long heard of but could never really understand what the attraction was. It was an artifact of another time—I still remember her obituary in the NY Times and even then she seemed so distant. I tried reading Memories of a Catholic Girlhood but did not get far. I had always thought The Group was the story about the lives of some privileged Vassar grads, which didn’t seem to interesting since I didn’t go to Vassar. However, Elizabeth Day has written an intriguing article about the book that has made me curious. Although, she did make a few comparisons to Sex and the City and having seen the show that is either unfair or a bad omen. Hopefully, it is the former. At worst, it could be a Revolutionary Road or a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which still make it an interesting piece of mid century Americana.
Although McCarthy repeatedly distanced herself from the idea of being a “feminist” writer (she once described feminism as a cocktail of “self-pity, shrillness and greed”), her insistence on seeing women as they truly were, rather than how society wanted them to be, was in its own way revolutionary. The Group was published at a time of considerable flux in America. It was the year that Kennedy was assassinated, a time when the myth of the contented domesticity of previous generations was beginning to be challenged. A few months before it came out, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, a sociological study that brought to light the lack of fulfilment in women’s lives based on the results of a questionnaire sent to 200 of her university contemporaries. Friedan called it “the problem with no name”: the nagging dissatisfaction that lay at the heart of many women’s experience despite a gloss of financial security.
McCarthy’s novel was set in 1933, but it dealt with precisely the same issues that Friedan had identified. In The Group, the female characters set out to make their own way in Roosevelt’s New Deal America, only to discover that they are just as economically and emotionally dependent on men as their mothers were. They believe in romantic love even though it costs them their independence and their idealistic, liberal politics come to nothing when the novel ends with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Mark Athitakis reports that what have been called the best novels of the last ten years have all had a similar theme: “Men struggling against a society whose rules and limits are defined by women.” If I had actually read some of these works I could comment, but many have never really piqued my interest. However, it is a thesis worth noting and I would like to see it explored more. Definitely, worth exploring the threads he mentions.
A week or so back, Andrew Seal spent some time testing an argument by literary scholar Nina Baym that critics’ favorite works of American literature tends to adhere to a particular theme: Men struggling against a society whose rules and limits are defined by women. To celebrate such books, the argument goes, is to bolster a particular American myth. (At least, that’s how I understand the argument; I haven’t read the Baym essay that Seal discusses.) To investigate the matter, Seal picks a few consensus favorites from the past ten years—The Corrections, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Netherland, The Road—as well asKeith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men, I suppose just for the sake of slapping it around a bit more.
I haven’t read Translation is a Love Affair
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War
Peter Carroll, 440 pg.
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is the definitive account of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, not only during the war, but the before and after. The book is also a labor of love and it some times colors the otherwise solid writing in the book. Carroll clearly loves his subject and it shows in the lengths he goes to show the veterans as committed anti-fascists. Yet as a true believer he is blinded to a few contradictions that should have been addressed in his book.
The book is roughly divided into three parts: before the war; in combat; and after the war. In part one Carroll shows that most of the veterans were already radicalized workers, many who were already communists or labor activists. Many had spent time in jail during labor unrest and were politically aware of what was going on in Europe. There were some college graduates, but most were workers. As the call for volunteers went out, the Communist Party organized the recruitment and because of fears of spies primarily communists were sent to Spain. Others such as socialists were excluded for lack of commitment. What is clear is that most volunteers believed in the party.
Once in Spain the Brigade was not well trained and suffered high losses from initial lack of leadership, training, and bad strategic decisions. Never equipped adequately, the Brigade did their best but suffered high losses. Carroll notes that several times the men expressed discontent with the war and there were some desertions, but in general the men continued to believe in the war and follow the leadership. Carroll goes at great length to show that the men were brave and good soldiers. It often seems that he is determined to show that despite any myths people have heard, they were brave men. He also wants to show that the men were committed and few wanted to desert. While from his numbers that seems to be true, he repeats this several times and one gets the impression this was more than a fact but a detail personally dear to him.
Once the war ends the veterans return to the US where they try to support the defeated republic, a commitment that would follow them throughout their lives. The biggest controversy in this period is when the veterans follow the party line after the Soviet-German non aggression pact and say that it is no longer their business to be anti-fascist. It is here that Carroll doesn’t really examine the case particularlly well. If they were anti-fascist they should have continued with that line, but instead they changed, and Carroll suggests that it was natural, that it wasn’t their fight any more. It is not exactly an apology, but it is a soft peddle that underscores the weaknesses of the book: the soldiers were brave and fought the good fight, therefore, criticism should be kept to a minimum. For Carroll the important thing is to restore the honor of the Brigade, not to find the mistakes they made.
His coverage of the McCarthy era is solid and shows some of the excess of the period quite well. Yet he would have done well to have explained a little better how some veterans were not a threat, while in one case one was a spy for the Soviet Union. He is a little quick on passing over that veteran. And while the McCarthy era was excessive, he needed to better explain what the veterans were and were not. Just because the supreme court found that the enemy agent laws were illegal and suppressed free speech, doesn’t explain the history of the veterans.
Overall, the book is an important resource for the era, but has some weaknesses. I find it hard to imagine that many of the veterans he wrote about in the book would have ever agreed with Antony Beevor
For fans of Spanish Literature Antonio Muñoz Molina is set to publish a new book and El País has a 25 page excerpt you can read.
The breaking and cracking that human beings suffer for the ideological phantasms, in this case the Spanish Civil War, are the geography of the awaited novel from Antonio Muñoz Molina: La noche de los tiempos. A work that takes place at the end of the fratricidal conflict that devastated the country between 1936 and 1939, but with a desolate shadow, whose first chapter is available exclusively in Babelia en El País.com…
El desgarro amoroso y las grietas que sufre el ser humano por los fanatismos ideológicos, en este caso de la Guerra Civil española, conforman la geografía de la esperada novela de Antonio Muñoz Molina: La noche de los tiempos (Seix Barral). Una obra que transcurre en las vísperas del conflicto fratricida que asoló el país entre 1936 y 1939, pero con una desoladora sombra, cuyo primer capítulo adelanta hoy en exclusiva Babelia en ELPAÍS.com…
New Directions is going to publish a new book of Borges. It is unclear weather it has new material in English or is just a different approach at compiling his work.
Everything and Nothing collects Borges’ highly influential work – written in the 1930s and ’40s – that forsaw the internet, quantum mechanics, and cloning. In one essay, he discusses the relationship between blindness and poetry. As Roberto Bolaño succinctly said: “I could live under a table reading Borges.”
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music
Elijah Wald, 336 pg.
The title is inflammatory and in many ways does the book a disservice because most of the book has little to do with the Beatles, or even Rock and Roll. The title after the colon is really what the book is about and for anyone interested in
American popular music from the late 1800’s to through the Jazz era and up to the birth of Rock and Roll the book is an excellent resource. Wald has done an amazing job at exploring the how American music developed and what the people at the time thought of the music, not what latter critics have said about the music.
One of his main themes is that popular music until quite recently was about dancing and that most musicians would have played dance music if not exclusively, then at many times during their career. The demand for dance music, therefore, kept music less segregated. Since people did not have ways to listen to music at home they would go out and would dance. And since the lack of music affected everyone, a broader range of people would go out to dance. The dancers, then, would be diverse and request from musicians not only current songs or dances, but older ones too. Even musicians whose primary music was not the dance hits of the day would know some dance songs. For example, when John Lomax recorded Muddy Waters in Mississippi he was not only playing his blues numbers, but hits like The Chattanooga Choo Choo. Nothing remains, though, of this music because when critics and writers discovered musicians they were looking for what set them apart from other musicians, not what made them similar. The need to create differences continues throughout the book so that many musicians such as Elvis rose to stardom on their differences, but were great fans of the popular music of the day even though they never performed it in public.
Wald continues to point out these connections throughout the book in part to make the case that the history of music has not been by those who listened to it, but those who wrote about it, namely the critics. The critics, according to Wald, are more focused on the artistic aspects of the music, and perhaps the historical, but not on what they meant for the listener. The result is often dismissive treatment of pop hits, which leads latter listeners who use the critics as a guide to older music to take misunderstand the role of the music the critics praise and what was popular. Jazz is particularly prone to this phenomena. For example, the Jazz that Louis Armstrong is most known for is the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, but those were groups formed only for the recordings which were limited to 3 minutes max, and what Armstrong was really playing had a wider range of influences, was dance-able, and had a slower tempo. Like Muddy Waters, none of the more audience oriented music survives.
Jazz is the strength of the book and he details how when Jazz began to sweep the country it wasn’t the improvisational centered music we know now, nor the Hot Fives and Sevens music either, but something people could dance to, and that was assumed to be new and free. However, most musicians could read music and often if they made up the work “faked it” they would play it over and over as it created. Long solos and fast tempos did not work for those who came to the shows to dance. There were other opportunities for people like Duke Ellington later to break free of the dancers, because they were playing for professionals at the Cotton Club and were not quite as constrained. Wald also does not think the history of white musicians robbing blacks of ideas is exactly accurate. Racism prevented many musicians from succeeding like white musicians, but a figure like Paul Whiteman has is responsible some developments in Jazz that he is often not credited with, namely the introduction of the arrangement styles that latter grew into Swing. There were better arrangers, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, but Whiteman was the most popular Jazz musician and Wald believes that even if his music is to sweet now, he is relevant.
All of this underlies Wald’s idea that what we claim is great now, is really transitory and as the music changes so does the interpretation of its relevance. This may be a novel insight in music criticism, but in other fields such as literature and film this isn’t exactly new. One gets the impression that he sees The Beatles loosing their throne; at this date I don’t see it. The title, which I have yet to explain, refers to how Rock and Roll which had been more dance oriented and coming out of a mix of country and rhythm and blues was change into a more pop sensibility that was made more for listening and less for dancing. It wouldn’t be until Disco that dance would really be part of a musical trend.
Ultimately, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll is a good history of American Popular music, but once it gets to the Rock and Roll era it begins to loose a little steam. His insistence that popular music is dance based muddies the story once Rock and Roll comes along. He is correct, though, in noting how American Popular music has gone from a more cross cultural and cross generational music to a very niche based music, much to its detriment.
In part five of Jorge Volpi’s excellent lecture on Latin American writing he delves into the world of the narco novel. It is a fascinating list of works and it is a bit of a shame that they won’t make it into English, but since Americans would rather avoid the South than admit they are part of the problem when it comes to drugs, I doubt many will be translated, which only highlights Volpi’s emphasis on the otherness of Latin America.
Instead of worrying about what is going wrong in the new democracies—too predicable and boring—the Latin American writers interested in the present situation of their nations have preferred to occupy themselves with the enemies of the system, the criminal bands and drug dealers that are waging a war against the states and their rivals. This new contemporary epic, whose main influence is found in the Westerns and in the blacksploitation films, with touches of The Godfather and Pulp Fiction, has become an authentic literary sub-genre in the region and has even contaminated writers of the international mainstream, like the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who transformed a drug dealer from Sinaloa into the main character of The Queen of the South (2002). As opposed to the realism of other times, the narco-literature teaches no lessons, passes no moral judgments, and is barely an instrument of criticism, but as its authors have felt compelled to recreate the speech and habits of their protagonists, their out of control lives, and their atrocious deaths with pinpoint accuracy, it has ended up becoming the social art that remains nowadays.
For evident reasons, Columbian literature was the first to explore this territory: the war between the government, the drug dealers, the different guerrilla groups, and the paramilitary quickly inspired a literary explosion. The already classic La virgen de los sicarios (1994) by Fernando Vallejo, centered in the desolate lives of young hit men at the service of the drug barons, pointed a way for the next generation: main characters that seem motivated only by bitterness, inertia, reproduction—or, as in this case, reinvention—written in the language of criminals, and in a style that, thanks to its dryness and distance, emphasizes the protagonists’ alienation. A little bit later, Jorge Franco finished defining the conventions of the genre when he incorporated a vigorous feminine figure into a world that up to then had been ruled by men in Rosario Tijeras (1999). It barely surprises that both novels were quickly adapted into movies: La virgen de los sicarios by the Belgian Barbet Schroeder in 2000 and Rosario Tijeras by the Mexican Emilio Maille in 2005.
New Directions is set to publish Bloaño’s Antwerp in April. If you can’t wait to read it then you can get a sample in Conjunctions:53.
In part four of Three Percent’s talk from Jorge Volpi, Volpi discusses recent historical novels in Latin America. What is interesting is that after saying there was no Latin American literature, he talks as if there were one. However, he sees in Latin American historical novels a reluctance to deal with the now.
The ”historical novel” blossoms in Latin America just like everywhere else, but in general it covers a more remote past—the Pre-Hispanic or the Colonial period—or it aspires to secularizing heroes and official villains, but always distant in time. If to that you add the lack of interest—or the revulsion—that politics awakens among the writers who were born from the sixties on, the result is an absence of stories related to our recent history.
But if younger writers have been younger fiction writers have been reluctant to write about recent history, historians have even been more reluctant and so it has to fall to the fiction writers to do something.
To this date, except for a few pamphlets of support or opposition, characters as fascinating and dark as Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Carlos Andrés Pérez, Carlos Menem, Alberto Fujimori, Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales, and Hugo Chávez all lack definitive biographies. There is hardly any detail of their intimate lives or examination of their public performance or, at the other extreme, novelistic explorations of their acts (among the few exceptions, the already classic Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez or La hora azul by Alonso Cueto about Vladimiro Montesinos).
Part of the dearth has been fear and some of it has been disillusion with politics in general. Now, though, he sees some younger writers who have begun to tackle some of the issues of violence in their home countries.
In Peru, after the grotesque Fujimori-Montesinos government, the new democracy installed a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation that played a significant role in public life. It could be a coincidence, but from that moment on, a good number of writers have dared to scrutinize the immediate past with different and sometimes contrary perspectives. Besides de Cueto, I consider the work of three authors born after 1960 outstanding: Abril rojo (2002) by Santiago Roncagliolo, War by Candelight (2006) by Daniel Alarcón—whose first novel Lost City Radio (2008) also refers to this theme—and Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro (2008) by Iván Thays.
The rest of the article explains the books and how they represent the trend he has been talking about and is a good conceptualization of novels in the historical genre.
Ya Sabes Mi Padadero: La guerra civil a través de las cartas de los que la vivieron
Javier Cervera Gil, 483 pg.
Ya Sabes Mi Padadero: La guerra civil a través de las cartas de los que la vivieron is a book that will never be translated into English, but for those who are interested in the the Spanish Civil war it is a shame, for the book is window on the everyday experience of soldiers and civilians during the war. Using the letters and journals of around 35 people, Javier Gil Cervera shows the war as it was, with its boredom, fanaticism, and quotidian.
At its strongest Ya Sabes shows the war at its most extreme. Many times a fascist soldier would write that they brought back a mortally wounded soldier and as they were dying they would kiss the crucifix and shout VIVA ESPAÑA and VIVA CHRISTO REY. It was even more impressive to the letter writers if a Republican soldier did this because it only confirmed the righteousness of the cause. Along similar lines there were several letters from men condemned to die who wrote about their undying faith in God and the cause which God had blessed and they would become a martyr. At its most extreme one letter writes about a mass he attends that should rightly be called a fascist mass, the disturbing mix of religion and militarism.
A field mass. A magnificent altar, a its base the church of San Salvador de Oña that reminds one of the mercenary abbots of El Cid, and the mountains of Castilla that the Lord gave us which with its blue sky like those of our heroes and the cloaks of our statues of the Virgin Mary form the best canopy for the Christ’s sacrament that from these steps blesses perhaps all these soldiers.
Misa de campaña. El altar magífico, por fondo la iglesia de San Salvador de Oña que recuerda los Abades mesnaderos de Mío Cid, y los montes de esta Castilla que el Señor nos dio, que con su cielo azul como las camisas de nuestros héroes y los mantos de nuestras Vírgenes forman el mejor dosel a Cristo Sacramentado que desde esta escalinata bendijo quizás a tantos caballeros.
His description goes on for quite sometime and gives one some the source of the savagery of the war.
On the Republican side there are few examples of the fascist style ideology. Only one Republican, a French communist, talks of the war in those terms, and even he is more interested in the failures of the government to carry out the revolution than thinking about ideologies. Perhaps the letters were lost or destroyed, but the Republican side had its committed followers, too.
Outside of the ideologues, the book splits its time between describing the conditions on the front: letters about the cold in Tuerel and the trenches and the bombings. The descriptions are not too detailed because the information was intended for those at home and were probably going to be censored by officers so the letter limit themselves to generalities. For those not at the front the letters are a mix of deprivation, logging for those who are not at home and for the things they have lost in the displacements of the war.
While letters to give one an insight to what people are thinking, they are also an insight into what people want to obfuscate so the letters can be very cursory, telling you only what the writer was choosing to write. The result are letters that might have best been omitted. Case in point: how many times do you need to print letters that say I miss you? Unfortunately, there is a series of letters between a couple that is like that and becomes quite repetitive, which is the problem of reading letters. Perhaps if the book was trimmed down a hundred pages it would have been a little less repetitive. And while having the author explain the context of the war, the book would have been more interesting to read full letters, not snippets here and there.
In all Ya Sabes Mi Paradero is a good insight into the Spanish Civil War even if it is a little slow at times.
By The Firelight 