Books

Vasily Aksyonov – RIP

~ bythefirelight

The Russian author Vasily Aksyonov passed away on Monday the July 6th. I have yet to get around to reading Generations of Winter even though I’ve had it for sometime. He was one of those finds along with Platonov that I was quite happy to find when I decided to make it my mission to give my dad as many different books by Russian authors as I could. One day I’ll get around to the book, despite its size.

From the NY Times obit:

For all the torment of his background, Mr. Aksyonov, as a prose stylist, was at the opposite pole from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, becoming a symbol of youthful promise and embracing fashion and jazz rather than dwelling on the miseries of the gulag. Ultimately, however, he shared Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fate of exile from the Soviet Union.

“Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. “It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.”

The Ugly American An Appreciation in the NY Times

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

MICHAEL MEYER in the NY Times has a very good appreciation of the Ugly American. It is one of those mid fifties books that were held so much cache in there day, but not seem lost in to a different time as literary styles change. Yet there is a salience in reading them. Despite its weaknesses The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is still interesting and Meyer makes The Ugly American seem so too, not so much as a piece of literature but of Americana, a time capsule.

The novel is a series of linked sketches of real people that Lederer, a Navy captain who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of United States forces in the Pacific and Asian theater, and Burdick, a political scientist, encountered overseas during the buildup to Vietnam. The book was originally commissioned by W. W. Norton as nonfiction, but an editor suggested it might be more effective as a novel. “What we have written is not just an angry dream,” the authors note in the introduction, “but rather the rendering of fact into fiction.” Yet the book’s enduring resonance may say less about its literary merits than about its failure to change American attitudes. Today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can’t speak Sarkhanese.

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568582463?ie=UTF8&tag=bythefir-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1568582463″>The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=bythefir-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1568582463&#8243; width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />

José Emilio Pacheco and Elena Poniatowska in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight

There is an excellent, if writterly, appreciation of José Emilio Pacheco in this Sunday’s cultural supplement in La Jornada. It is certainly worth a read if you have an interest and know Spanish. Pacheco is the author of Las batellas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) which I reviewed sometime ago and remains one of my most popular posts. Poniatowska focuses on three things: his relation to the past; why young people are so dedicated to him; and what has made him the writer he is. On the first count he is an other of memory but not nostalgia: “José Emilio cree en la memoria, a la nostalgia la repudia.”  Which Poniatowska points out in quoting from the end of Batallas en el desierto

They demolished the school, they demolished Mariana’s building, they demolished my house, they demolished the Roma neighborhood. That city is gone. That country is gone. There isn’t any memory of Mexico form those years. And it doesn’t bother anyone: who wants to remember that horror? Everything goes like the records on a record player. I will never know if Mariana is still living. If she was a live she’d be 70.

Demolieron la escuela, demolieron el edificio de Mariana, demolieron mi casa, demolieron la colonia Roma. Se acabó esa ciudad. Terminó aquel país. No hay memoria del México de aquellos años. Y a nadie le importa: de ese horror, quién puede tener nostalgia. Todo pasó como pasan los discos en la sinfonola. Nunca sabré si aún vive Mariana. Si viviera tendría sesenta años.”

Second, the youth like Pacheco because he is like them and respects them. Part of this is his focus on youth and part of it his willingness to meet with them. When his conferences have filled up he has given two conferences, one in the conference hall and the other outside where the students are waiting for him.

The young who still live their memories of childhood find themselves in El viento distate, El pricipio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) and through Condesa neighboorhod of Moriras lefjos and they celebrate the novelist and short story writer with never ending gratitude. It is rare to feel gratitude for a living writer but Jose Emilio gathers all their devotions. When the boy Carlos in Los batallas en el desierto confesses, “I never thought that Jim’s mother was that young, that elegant, least of all that beautiful. I didn’t know how to tell him. I can’t describe what I felt when she shook my hand,” readers relive the torment of their first love. The same occurs with the stories in La sangre de Medusa written between 1956 and 1984. Jose Emilio touches fibers in which they recognize themselves, in which you and him and I and we identify with. On reading it, everyone rewrites “Tarde o remparano”. His is ours. We make the book with him, we are his part, he changes us into authors, he reflects us, he keeps us in mind, he completes us, and the reading takes away our problems. We owe him being readers, as much as we owe him for life.

According to him, those truly unhappy loves, those terrible loves are amongst the young because they have no hope. “In any part of your life you have some little possibility of reuniting with the person you love, but when you are young your history of love has no future.”

Los jóvenes que todavía viven sus recuerdos de infancia se encuentran a sí mismos en El viento distante, El principio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto y hasta en la colonia Condesa de Morirás lejos y le brindan al novelista y al cuentista un testimonio de gratitud interminable. Es raro sentir gratitud por un escritor vivo pero José Emilio reúne todas las devociones. Cuando el niño Carlos de Las batallas en el desierto confiesa: “Nunca pensé que la madre de Jim fuera tan joven, tan elegante y sobre todo tan hermosa. No supe qué decirle. No puedo describir lo que sentí cuando ella me dio la mano”, los lectores reviven el tormento de su primer amor. Lo mismo sucede con los cuentos de La sangre de Medusa escritos de 1956 a 1984. José Emilio toca fibras en las que se reconocen, en las que tú y él y yo, ustedes y nosotros nos identificamos. Al leerlo, cada quién escribe de nuevo “Tarde o temprano”. Lo suyo es nuestro. Hacemos el libro con él, somos su parte, nos convierte en autores, nos refleja, nos toma en cuenta, nos completa, nos quita lo manco, lo cojo, lo tuerto, lo bisoño. Le debemos a él ser lectores, por lo tanto le debemos a él la vida.

Según él, los amores verdaderamente desdichados, los amores terribles son los de los niños porque no tienen ninguna esperanza. “En cualquier otra época de tu vida puedes tener alguna mínima posibilidad de reunirte con la persona que amas, pero cuando eres niño tu historia de amor no tiene porvenir.”

Finally, he is a writer whose history has been influenced by some of the greats of 20th century Mexican Writing. Moreover, his family had been part of the great events of the 20th century, his father escaping execution only through the intervention of President Obregon.

Some of these family friendships were liberal like Juan de la Cabada and Hector Perez Martinez and most of all Jose Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsivais remembers that Jose Emilio used to invite him to eat at his house and they would both listen seriously and quietly to Vasconcelos, an absolutely fascinating personality. Together they would also go to visit Martin Luis Guzman who both of them admired, and don Julio Torri who would tell them in a low voice the secret history of Mexican pornography.

Algunas de esas amistades familiares eran libertarias, como Juan de la Cabada y Héctor Pérez Martínez, y sobre todo José Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsiváis recordó que José Emilio lo invitaba a comer a su casa y ambos escuchaban muy serios y callados a Vasconcelos, personalidad absolutamente fascinante. Juntos iban a visitar también a Martín Luis Guzmán, que es una de las admiraciones de los dos, y don Julio Torri les hablaba en voz baja de la historia secreta de la pornografía mexicana.

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito in Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Letras Libres reviewed Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito recently and for those who like to read fiction as much for the style as the story it looks like an interesting book. If you read Spanish the review is worth a look.

The style of this novel is that of his stories and that is a good thing: we are before one of the stellar writers of our literature. Before anything, it is his self control. It is known that Morábito did not learn Spanish until he was 15, and it is noticeable: his relation with Spanish is adult-like, lacking the natural childishness fascination, marked with a distrust that obliges him to ponder every word. There is not, nor does it seem like there is, artificial nor capricious lyrics. If there is poetry, it is the poetry of Mondays: “Mondays/ they take apart the platforms/ and the bandstands, / they remove the nails / and the promises,/ reality returns / to its brutish state, / to poetry.” (from From Monday All the Year) There is a simplicity but not it is not simplistic, an economy but not a coldness. The sentences-he doesn’t stop to hide their elegance-are the remains of a fight we don’t see. Because there is a struggle:  Morábit’s struggle to purge the language.

El estilo de esta novela es el de sus cuentos, y eso es buena cosa: estamos ante uno de los prosistas estelares de nuestra literatura. Ante todo, su contención. Se sabe que Morábito no aprendió el idioma hasta los quince años, y se nota: su relación con el español es adulta, como desprovista de la natural fascinación infantil, como teñida de una desconfianza que lo obliga a ponderar cada palabra. No hay, no parece haber, artificio ni caprichos líricos. Si hay poesía, es la poesía de los lunes: “Los lunes/ se desmontan las tarimas/ y los estrados,/ se desclavan lo clavado/ y las promesas,/ la realidad vuelve/ a su estado bruto,/ a la poesía” (“De lunes todo el año”). Hay sencillez pero no simpleza, economía de me-
dios pero no frialdad. Las frases –no termina de ocultarlo su elegancia– son restos de una lucha que no observamos. Porque hay una lucha: la de Morábito purgando el idioma.

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito in Letras Libres

Season of Migration to the North – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover, a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story and he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it. Thus, if Sa’eed took his revenge in England, then England has its revenge in Sudan.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who are alienated by their experience in the west. They have left Sudan and become something different, which not only sets them apart in the village, but sets them apart in the west. Each has taken on a role in the west, but the role doesn’t integrate them, it leaves them empty. Yet they are still attached to the west. Sa’eed constructs a private room in his house that is the perfect replica of an English study. Sa’eed, especially, is shaped by the duality of his lives and that duality, the feeling of emptiness in the west leads him to the cunningly profligate life in London. He uses women out of a vindictiveness as if to prove sarcastically that if this is what you think I am, then here you have it.

Neither the narrator nor Sa’eed can let go of what they learned, though. The narrator imports a western sensibility into the decision about Sa’eed’s wife. It seems clear that by tradition she would have been married off much earlier, yet he hesitates. However, Season is not a novel that wants to say the west is better, and the narrator is not interested in fighting for Sa’eed’s wife, he just thinks if she is not interested then she should be free not to marry. This conflict between the way of life in the village and that in England manifests itself as rage in England and scandal in Sudan. In each case the narrator and Sa’eed marked by their experiences abroad.

Season is a complicated novel and the issues are more than just sexual. Focusing on the relationships between Sa’eed and the women, though, creates scenes, those of the bedroom, that are easily transported between cultures. Moreover, the taboos Salih addresses create fundamental conflicts between all the characters that profoundly show the issues between the different cultures. Yet the use of the women in England seems slightly off. The women are not full characters, which makes sense since Sa’eed is only using them, but to have two kill themselves over him and the third use him as a means of suicide, Salih seems to using shallow caricatures at best. The silly notion that they are going to kill themselves over him seems to use some of the simpler cliches about women. While the women are not central characters, their suicides are the weakest part of the book.

Season is an impressive book despite its few weaknesses. It was for good reason that Arabic critics selected it as one of the best books of the 20th century in Arabic.

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants all so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story but he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who

Carlos Fuentes Wins for El Yucatán de Lara Zavala

~ bythefirelight

Carlos Fuentes has won the González-Ruano prize for journalism for the article El Yucatán de Lara Zavala which is a book review of Península, península, by Hernán Lara Zavala. The article is interesting if you are interested in Mexican history and literature and gives a brief history of the Mexican authors who have used history in their works. The also sounds interesting. You can read another review at Letras Libres too.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón at the Seattle Public Library

~ bythefirelight

Carlo Ruiz Zafon the Spanish author of the Shadow of the Wind and the Angel’s Game was at the Seattle Public Library on Friday June 26th. Zafón, for those who don’t know, is the largest selling author in Spanish history after Cervantes. He is a world wide phenomenon and auditorium was packed and the line for the book signing was huge. As with best sellers in literary circles there is always a little stand-offishness. During the moderated talk you got the sense that Zafón has heard the criticisms, but isn’t that concerned about them. He writes what he writes and it works for him. Having read Shadow of the Wind, I wouldn’t call him high literature, but he writes well and the first 350 pages are really good. And the idea of a library of forgotten books, where the last remaining copy of a book goes to reside is magical.It is just too bad he couldn’t quite finish it convincingly. Of course, having his sales must help.

He talked of the books he likes, which is a wide range of 19th century novelists such as Dickens and Tolstoy, but also modern books, and histories and anything else that he is interested in. His approach to translation in English is interesting and sounds like a lot of work. Since he is fluent in English he has the luxury of working with the translator and almost rewriting the book in English, which makes, not some much for an authentic translation, but one that is true to the author’s wishes.

He is interesting talker and given a question can go on for five minutes without stopping. And I think what sets him apart from the really pointless beach reads that hit the best seller lists is that he is genuinely interested in literature and even if his works are not the best works in Spanish, they do help install an interest in reading in the reader.

Black Jack Vol 1 – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

I continue to read graphic novels because I think I’ll find some gold in them, and occasionally I do as with the work of Joe Sacco. Lately I’ve been trying Manga, and except for the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi in Good Bye I have been disappointed. Black Jack, Vol. 1was not an exception. Although Osamu Tezuka is a pioneer and master of the form, I found his work, or perhaps it is just the form, lacking much depth.For those who don’t know, Black Jack is a mysterious doctor who doesn’t have a license but is the greatest doctor on earth and can save patients in complicated surgeries all by himself. While the concept itself is not bad, in execution the mysterious doctor flies in for the life saving surgery just at the right moment not only to save a life, but to give someone his due. The stories are formulaic: someone is ill or injured; they deny they need help or denied help; Black Jack shows up and offers to save the ill person and against everyone’s wishes he succeeds to everyone’s amazement. Black Jack pretends to be a selfish man, but in reality he has a heart of gold. While Black Jack does play with themes of health and the power of science, the stories are not particullarly long lasting and are emphemoral like so much pulp. I hold out hope that Manga will truely be interesting, and will in the words of Yani Mentzas will “stay within the framework [of Manga]to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, that which exceeds man.”

Jorge Volpi Wins the Debate-Casa de América Prize

~ bythefirelight

El País reports that Jorge Volpi won the Debate-Casa de América prize for his work El insomnio de Bolívar. From the description it sounds very interesting, a little like News From the Empire. All I need to do now is find a copy.

The history of Latin America from its mythic past to an imagined future is what El insomnio de Bolívar touches. With this work the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi won the Debate-Casa de América prize yesterday. This book, acording to the jury, is “well documented, avoids an academic tone and contributes with humor, irony and great literary skill, to the understanding of the American continent.” The winning work was selected by the jury from among 42 works.

The writer was in the US when he received the news of the award. “I imagine an American future with enormous problems and challenges and with the dream that all of America, including the English speaking, will form something like the European Union.” Volpi has written an essay divided into four parts about the identity, democracy, narrative, and the future of Latin America. “The las part I have added some bits of fiction,” said the writer.

La historia de América Latina desde su pasado mítico hasta un futuro imaginado es lo que aborda El insomnio de Bolívar. Con esta obra, el escritor mexicano Jorge Volpi (México, 1968) se hizo ayer con el Premio Debate-Casa de América. Este libro, según el jurado, está “ampliamente documentado, escapa al tono académico y contribuye, con humor, ironía y gran oficio literario, a la comprensión del continente americano”. La obra ganadora fue seleccionada por el jurado entre un total de 42 trabajos presentados.

El escritor se encontraba en EE UU cuando recibió la noticia del premio. “Imagino un futuro de América con enormes problemas y desafíos y con el sueño de que toda América, incluida la anglosajona, formase algo parecido a la Unión Europea”. Volpi ha escrito un ensayo divido en cuatro partes en el que se acerca a la identidad, la democracia, la narrativa y el futuro de América Latina. “A la última parte le he podido añadir algunos tintes de ficción”, señaló el escritor.

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature – A Review

~ bythefirelight

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature truly is a brief introduction, but for anyone who is unacquainted with modern Arabic Literature, this book is a good introduction. The book covers literature from the 20th century and primarily from the eastern part of the Arabic speaking world. The book focuses heavily on Egypt followed by Lebanon and Palestine, while other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria rate an occasional mention.

The book traces the development of modern Arabic literature from the early 20th century, finding its first exemplar in Taha Hussein in Egypt. What makes the literature modern is its break from Arabic poetry, which was the primary form of literature, towards prose based, in part, on western models. The early works, especially in Egypt, were concerned with defining what the new Arab states would be like and what is the role of tradition and western influence. Usually these works were written in a realistic manner. Illustrating that point, the book focuses on the works of Mahfouz and shows how his earlier works fit that model.

Latter as disappointment and dissolution came to the Arab world, it too was reflected in the literature. Authors like Al-ghitani began to use more post modern (although in his case he goes to much earlier times for source material) approaches to describe the problems besetting the countries of the authors, such as the the power of the west, the despotism of Arab regimes, and an uncertainty about the future.

Each author he covers, with the exception of Mahfouz, receives about a page or two of coverage. A Brief Introduction sticks to works, primarily novels and short fiction, available in English and originally written in Arabic. This approach leaves out authors such as Assia Djebar, who writes in French, and doesn’t examine the breath of a writers work which would be useful to non Arabic speakers. However, in reading the book a reader will find a great list of books to read, if the reader can find them.

While A Brief Introduction is a useful introduction its brevity makes for some choppy sections and the inclusion of poetry, a subject in itself, seems forced and might have been left for a different book. That said, his descriptions of the books he does write about make for a good guide and should arouse one’s curiosity.

Jetlag – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Jetlag by Etgar Keret is a short but fascinating collection of five short stories set to drawings by five different Israeli artists: Mira Friedman, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert. Keret, one of Israel’s best writers, creates what might be better called fables. His stories are brief and always have an element of unrealty to them. The unreality, though, is designed to turn the reader back to the strangeness of reality.

The first story is about a magician who suddenly begins to have trouble pulling the rabbit out of the hat. One time he pulls a bloody rabbit’s head from the hat and in a another he pulls a dead baby. But the audience seems to love it and a child keeps the bloody head of the rabbit as a memento. Instead of magic revealing the wondrous, the unfathomable becomes the way the audiences accept death and the grotesque as entertainment. The magician gives up his trade, and finishes the story saying,

…I don’t do much of anything. I just lie in bed and think about the rabbit’s head and the baby’s body. As if they’re some clues to a riddle, as if somebody was trying to tell me something; that now it’s not really the best of times for rabbits or for babies. That it’s not the best of times for magicians.

In the story Jetlag the narrator finds himself on an airplane where a flight attendant is paying extra attention to him. At first it seems as if she wants him to join the clichéd mile high club with her. A ten year-old girl at his side tells him he should go have sex with her, then claims she is a 30 year-old dwarf smuggling heroin. Eventually, the narrator goes to the back of the plane to talk to the flight attendant. She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but instead, wants to give him a parachute because the plane has orders to crash. The flight attendant says they crash a plane every year or two so that passengers will take flight safety seriously. As the story ends he says, the rescue looked quite heart warming on TV. Again, Keret takes liberties with a reality that has become all too common—the disaster coverage on TV—and uses it as an opportunity to look at it as a fiction, switching genres to make it observable. What should be a horror, becomes just entertainment.

In each of the stories Keret is able to say something about modern society, its violence, its loneliness, its spectator culture, and question how it effects us. His stories are marvels of compression and an unreality that seems real.

Manga, Genre and Osamu Tezuka in Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

Yani Mentzas makes some interesting points about how one should view the work of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, and how in general the graphic novel should be approached when trying to make it more serious.

Narrative comics can mature in two diverging ways: either by jettisoning the juvenile framework in favor of standards borrowed from realism, or by staying within the framework to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, “that which exceeds man.” My personal preference is against the former path, which leads to comics that give an impression of wanting to be art, cinema, or literature rather than comics and that indeed seem only the more shame-faced the better they are. I believe the latter is the royal road of intelligent comics in that it sees the merits of cartooning’s openness to caricature, acceptance of absurdity, and unflagging curiosity about that which exceeds man.

I’m not sure I agree completely but he does have a point. However, I think there is a mistake in equating the medium, pictures and words, with the genre, superhero or fantastic stories. Having tried to read Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a richly drawn work, I couldn’t stand the fantasy element. On the other hand, Shortcomings a fine graphic novel is so chatty perhaps it would have been better as a play.

He does make an interesting point about the transition to or the search for more serious work. A market does need to develop for everything:

What’s more striking in fact is the comparable paucity of these elements in the early oeuvre of the master who’d eventually come to employ them so deftly. We could attribute this difference to the fact that aging tends to inculcate a greater interest in spirituality, but Tezuka’s mature phase began when he was in his forties, which is hardly old. The better answer has to do with intended readership; to simplify a little but not much, in his early period before 1970 Tezuka wrote for children, while he had grownups in mind after the seventies due to an immense demographic shift in manga buying.

Mario Benedetti Has Passed Away

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Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti has passed away at age 88. As El Pais said

Muere Mario Benedetti después de una larga vida de lucha contra la adversidad y en defensa de la alegría

Mario Benedetti died after a long life fighting against adversity and defending joy

Jose Sarmago has a short reflection in El Pais.

The work of Mario Benedetti, friend, brother, is surprising in all aspects, in the expansiveness of the varied genres he touched, in the density of his poetic expression as much for the extreme conceptual liberty that he uses. The language of Benedetti has deliberately ignored the supposed existence of poetic words and the others that are not. For Benedetti, language, above all, is poetic. Read from this perspective, the work of the great Uruguayan poet presents us not only as the sum of a vital experience, but over all, as the persistent search for and the reaching a feeling, that of a human being on the planet, in a country, in a city or in a village, or simply in his house or in a collective action. There are many reasons that bring us to read Benedetti. Perhaps the best is this: the poet has become the voice of his own village. Or better, a universal poet.

La obra de Mario Benedetti, amigo, hermano, es sorprendente en todos los aspectos, ya sea por la extensión en la variedad de géneros que toca, ya sea por la densidad de su expresión poética como por la extrema libertad conceptual que usa. El léxico de Benedetti ha ignorado deliberadamente la supuesta existencia de palabras “poéticas” y de otras que no lo son. Para Benedetti, la lengua, toda ella, es poética. Leída desde esta perspectiva, la obra del gran poeta uruguayo se nos presenta, no sólo como suma de una experiencia vital, sino, sobre todo, como la búsqueda persistente y lograda de un sentido, el del ser humano en el planeta, en el país, en la ciudad o en la aldea, en su casa simplemente o en la acción colectiva. Son muchas las razones que nos llevan a la lectura de Benedetti. Tal vez la principal sea ésa, precisamente: que el poeta se ha convertido en voz de su propio pueblo. O sea, en poeta universal.

If you read Spanish you can read about him at Clarin also.

News from the Empire – A Brief Review

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I just finished Fernando del Paso’s News from the Empire which I will be reviewing for The Quarterly Conversation in the fall. However, I do have some brief thoughts. It is a sprawling novel that is worth the read. It may help if you know something about Mexican history. A quick read of a few pages a Wikipedia would suffice. To call it a novel, though, might give the wrong idea. A better name might be fictive history. A times the book is purely novelistic, at other times it reads like a history book. Either way the breath of the novel is impressive and is an achievement.

New Urban British Fiction in the TLS

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The TLS has a good write up of some interesting first fiction from Britain. It sounds interesting, perhaps because the themes and settings resonate with an image on Britain I have from the 80s.

Coventry, the setting for Mez Packer’s witty, fast-paced thriller, Among Thieves, was settled by Jamaicans in great numbers in the 1950s and 60s thanks to the opportunities for work. Jamaican ska music, a speedy jazz-tinged shuffle-beat, took off in Coventry, as it did elsewhere in urban Britain, and before long its driving, dance-floor rhythms attracted groups of skinheads and scooter- riding Mods. (Sometimes, if suitably dressed in Crombies and sharp Trevira suits, Jamaicans were even allowed to join the skinhead gangs.) Ska was, triumphantly, a Commonwealth music, which brought together the poor whites and poor blacks of Britain. In the late 1970s it was revived in Coventry by local “2 Tone” bands, such as The Specials and The Selecter, who sought to emulate the Jamaican ska legends Derrick Morgan and Desmond Dekker.

Packer’s novel unfolds in the Midlands city in 1984, at the fag-end of the 2 Tone period when, as the author tells us, it was “cool to have black mates”. Jez, a ska-loving “Cov lad” and a wheeler-dealer, is sent to Spain with a Jamaican rude boy associate, Bas, to change a suitcaseful of fake dollars; the counterfeit money came from a disastrous drug deal made with IRA gangsters back in Coventry. As it charts ever more dodgy Spanish business, the novel recalls Robin Cook’s cult crime memoir The Crust on its Uppers (1962), about a similarly doomed attempt to smuggle counterfeit notes abroad. Packer, like Cook, crams her novel with comic characters such as the murderous Albanian Mehment Lucca, whose Balkan sense of justice leads him to commit an eye-for-an-eye revenge killing. The other bad hats include Pads and Andy, middle-class Coventry students who deal in drugs and credit card scams when not studying Politics and Sociology. The novel is spiked with Jamaican vernacular (“raasclot”, “bwoy”) and a rich criminal slang. Packer lovingly evokes Coventry in the 1980s, a city on the point of disintegration, it seems, its theatres and social clubs closed down – as conjured by the Specials in their hit single “Ghost Town”. Packer, who has a gift for quirky conversational description and social satire, is a promising new novelist.

Ghost Town by the Specials

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith In Seattle 5/12/09

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Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Chicano author of the Klail City Death Trip Series including Kali City y sus alrededores, will be in seattle on 5/12/09.  He will be speaking at the Physics-Astronomy building Auditorium on the University of  Washington Campus from 5:30-7:00PM.

Christina Fernandez Cubas on El Publico Lee

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It won’t be there for too much longer, but it you can understand Spanish there is a good episode of El Publico Lee at Canal Sur that features Christina Fernandez Cubas.

Bolaño forever in El País

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El País has yet another article marveling at the excitement about Roberto Bolaño in the English speaking world. The author is primarily interested in whether the excitement is misplaced.

I have read that the North American success of Bolaño is due to his premature death and in fact have constructed a cursed legend partly false of someone politically persecuted, on the literary margin, and a heroin addict. I have read the the success of Bolaño is due to the way in a certain mode Bolaño was a North American author whose literary models are North American and whose prose works better in English than in Spanish. I have read that the North American success of Bolaño is because he found a great North American editor that has known how to use all these things to make Bolaño a great success in North America. I have many answers more, but all of them has produced an embarrassing sensation that these have been engineered not only to reduce the merit of Bolaño’s success, which at the end of these stories is unimportant, but to diminish the merit of Bolaño’s works, if they have any. I confess that I don’t understand them.

He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a su muerte prematura y al hecho de que se haya construido en torno a él una leyenda maldita y en parte falsa de perseguido político, marginado literario y adicto a la heroína. He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a que en cierto modo Bolaño era un escritor norteamericano, cuyos modelos literarios son norteamericanos y cuya prosa funciona mejor en inglés que en castellano. He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a que ha encontrado un gran editor norteamericano que ha sabido usar todas esas cosas para convertir a Bolaño en un gran éxito norteamericano. He leído muchas respuestas más, pero todas ellas me producen la embarazosa sensación de que han sido ingeniadas no sólo para rebajar el mérito del éxito de Bolaño, lo que a fin de cuentas no tendría ninguna importancia, sino para rebajar el mérito de la obra de Bolaño, lo que sí la tiene. Confieso que no alcanzo a entenderlas.

In the end he says it is due to the art of Bolaño that he is a success.

The reality is that Bolaño experienced during his life an absolute success. I want to say that the ghostly question is a mistaken question and the question that at first look seems correct also es a mistaken question. Every true writer knows that success and failure (or what tends to be called success and failure) are illusions: the test is that they obtain it, the great writers, the good writers, the average writers, the bad writers, and the terrible writers; or in other words: every true writer knows that what truely is a success and a failure. Cyril Connolly wrote that “the true mission of a writer is create a master work.” There are few writers who get to create one; in my opinion, Bloaño was one of them: he experienced the incomparable intensity of writing not just one master work but more than one. No one that I have known knows better that Bolaño in order to be a writer there is no greater success than to be able in your wildest dreams compare yourself to him.

Porque la realidad es que Bolaño conoció en vida un éxito absoluto. Quiero decir que la pregunta fantasmal es una pregunta equivocada y la pregunta que a primera vista parece acertada también es una pregunta equivocada. Todo escritor de verdad sabe que el éxito y el fracaso (o eso que suele llamarse éxito y fracaso) son espejismos: la prueba es que lo obtienen escritores buenísimos, escritores buenos, escritores regulares, escritores malos y escritores malísimos; o dicho de otro modo: todo escritor de verdad sabe lo que son de verdad el éxito y el fracaso. Cyril Connolly escribió que “la verdadera misión de un escritor es crear una obra maestra”. Hay poquísimos escritores que consiguen crearla; en mi opinión, Bolaño fue uno de ellos: experimentó la intensidad incomparable de escribir no una obra maestra sino más de una. Nadie que yo haya conocido sabía mejor que Bolaño que para un escritor no hay ningún éxito que pueda ni remotamente compararse a ése.

Perhaps only an author would say this, but there is some truth for non writers too.

Flannery O’Connor Discussed on Leonard Lopate and NYRB

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A new biography of Flannery O’Connor has led to a lengthy review of the book and an appraisal of her work by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books, and an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with the author of the book. Both are quite interesting for anyone who has enjoyed her works.

From Oates’ intro:

Short stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings subtly, quietly, and are as nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode in the reader’s face. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and James Joyce, and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford.

But O’Connor’s plainspoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish, and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—as Brad Gooch puts it in his new life of O’Connor—lay in their frontal assault upon the reader’s sensibility: these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.

20th Century Mexican Authors

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There is a great site dedicated to 20th century Mexican Literature called simply enough 20th Century Mexican Literature. Maintained by a professor at Wake Forest University it has a gigantic biography of Mexican Authors. It also contains a blog with somewhat regular updates about Mexican culture. Definitely worth a look. (Primarily in Spanish)