Books

Finalists for the Spanish Short Story Prize Premio Ribera del Duero Anounced

~ bythefirelight

The short list fr the third Premio Ribera del Duero for short stories in Spanish has been announced.  I have only read one of these authors, Tizon, which I reviewed in my article on the Spanish Short story. I didn’t realize he had a new book last year. Rossi sounds familiar as does Padilla, but I haven’t read them. It feels more international this year which is a good thing (via)

– Ernesto Calabuig (Madrid, España, 1966), con Caminos anfibios.

– Guadalupe Nettel (México DF, México, 1973), con Historias naturales.

–Gustavo Nielsen (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1962), con Novela.

–Ignacio Padilla (México DF, México, 1968), con Lo volátil y las fauces.

– Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1941), con Los amores equivocados.

– Eloy Tizón (Madrid, España, 1964), con Técnicas de iluminación

The Best Argentine Writers – Roberto Piglia on His New Series

~ bythefirelight

La Jornada has an interview with Roberto Piglia that discusses his selection of certain Argentine authors for a new series of books set to rediscover Argentine. It isn’t a long interview, but it does talk about some authros you may or may not know. They’re are some genre breaking ones in here such as Carlos Eduardo Feiling’s work of terror.

–Entiendo que se trata de reeditar una gama de autores que abrieron las brechas de la nueva literatura argentina, la serie arranca con Nanina (1968), de Germán García, una novela de iniciación, donde un joven cuenta sus andanzas en la gran urbe en su doble exploración del medio cultural y las mujeres, obra cercana tanto en la forma como en la atmósfera a De perfil, de José Agustín y Gazapo, de Gustavo Sáenz, y En breve cárcel (1986), de Sylvia Molloy, una novela corta de ambiente intimista que aborda la relación lésbica de tres mujeres, una escritora, una mujer mayor de cierta solvencia económica y una mujer más joven y apetecible. ¿Cuáles son las próximas entregas de la serie, por una parte y por otra, por qué elegir estos autores tan diversos, con casi veinte años de diferencia en las fechas de primera publicación?

–Nos interesa hacer ver que esos libros, publicados en distintas épocas, más que anticipar, actualizan poéticas literarias de nuestros días: Nanina está en diálogo con el auge actual de la autobiografía y la literatura del yo; En breve cárcel, como usted ha señalado, instaura –y renueva al mismo tiempo– las historias de amor y la pasión entre amantes de un mismo sexo que hoy son una línea muy visible en nuestra narrativa. En cuanto a Oldsmobile 59 (1962), de Ana Basualdo, creo que retoma la gran herencia de los libros de cuentos que se construyen como un conjunto unitario. El mal menor (1996), de Carlos Eduardo Feiling, en su luminosa elaboración del relato de terror, dialoga con los géneros menores que son uno de los caminos centrales de renovación de la novela moderna. Valen por sí mismos y por su novedad y también por su diálogo con obras escritas mucho tiempo después. En ese sentido, también son recienvenidos a una lectura que ellos mismos han contribuido a definir.

Inteview and Overview of Patricio Pron’s New Book of Short Stories

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a review/interview with Patricio Pron about his new collection of short stories. It sounds interesting:

Sea como fuere, la escasa creatividad de sus colegas es también el tema central de Un jodido día perfecto sobre la tierra, uno de los cuentos del libro. En ello, Pron relata la insoportable y autobiográfica experiencia de ser jurado de un concurso literario al que llegan solo textos casi idénticos: “Me juré que jamás volvería a hacerlo. En línea general falta originalidad. Es el resultado de un establecimiento de condiciones genéricas, literarias y narrativas que los autores normalmente no cuestionan”.

Portada de ‘La vida interior de las plantas de interior’.

El mercado, según Pron, también juega contra la innovación: “Muchos autores en este momento están escribiendo el mismo libro. Se debe en parte al negocio editorial pero también al deseo de ciertos escritores de producir algo que tenga éxito”. ¿Qué escritores? Todo lo que se obtiene es un “es bastante visible” y el ejemplo de “las novelas de la crisis”.

Con su personalísimo estilo, Pron también está teniendo mucho éxito. A sus 36 años ya cuenta con premios, aplausos de críticos y colegas y un CV literario donde lucen libros como El comienzo de la primavera y El mundo sin las personas que lo afean y lo arruinan. De hecho, a veces hasta se sorprende de sus resultados. “Estuve en México de promoción y tenía ocho entrevistas al día durante cinco días. Jamás pensé que había tantos medios allí y que tuvieran interés en lo que escribo. Creo que la charla número 40 era intercambiable con la 39 y la 38…”, recuerda Pron.

New February 2013 Words Without Borders – The Graphic Novel

~ bythefirelight

The February 2013 Words Without Borders is out now, featuring the graphic novel. This is always one of my favorite editions of the magazine. There are two stories from Spanish, A Shining Path of Blood: Massacres and a Monologue by Jesús Cossio and The Art of Flying by Antonio Altarriba. The rest of the issue, of course, also looks interesting especially the Oubapo works from the Oulipo group.

February brings our annual showcase of the international graphic novel. On topics ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Shining Path, organized labor in France and broken homes in South Africa, these artists delineate character and plot in their singular styles. See how Antonio Altarriba and Kim, Jesús Cossio, Étienne Davodeau, Karlien de Villiers, Akino Kondoh, Migo Rollz, and Li-Chen Yin make every picture tell a story.  And in a special feature, graphic artist and translator Matt Madden introduces the Oubapo, the graphic arm of the Oulipo, with wildly inventive work by François Ayroles, Patrice Killoffer, and Etienne Lécroart.

In the latest installment of our World Through the Eyes of Writers column, the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko introduces Belarus’s Uladzimir Niakliaeu.

The Complete (More or Less) Stories of Javier Tomeo Reviewed at Cultura/s

~ bythefirelight

I’ve been watching the press about Javier Tomeo’s Cuentos completos, de Javier Tomeo, for a few weeks now. He is a Spanish writer who sounds interesting and definitely different. Sergi Bellver has a good review of the book that gives a good idea of what kind of writer he is. (You can read an excerpt here)

Tres prodigios, Historias mínimas (1988) ―uno de los siete libros recogidos en el volumen de Páginas de Espuma―, y las novelas El castillo de la carta cifrada (1979) y Amado monstruo (1985), descubrieron una mirada al margen de la avalancha literaria de la época, saturada de realismo social, y consagraron el prestigio de Tomeo, avalado por Anagrama ―“inesperada colisión entre Kafka y Buñuel”, le llamaría Jorge Herralde―. Después llegaron adaptaciones teatrales, traducciones, reconocimiento a nivel europeo y hasta una campaña de las fuerzas vivas aragonesas en pro del Nobel para su paisano ―el sabio Tomeo utiliza en “El sueño del Nobel” a Ramón, su recurrente personaje especular, para ironizar sobre su propia obra, algo que repitió en Los amantes de silicona (2008).

Los cuentos de Tomeo filtran la realidad, la alteran y la perfilan en un mundo genuino y personalísimo en el que también viven las luces y las sombras del lector. Ese es el poder atávico de jugar con un imaginario de animales y monstruos, arquetipos que el autor convierte en psicópatas de poética anómala. Tomeo admira al Goya más sombrío, disfruta dibujando ―faltan sus ilustraciones de Zoopatías y zoofilias en estos Cuentos completos― y estudió Criminología para conocer la oscuridad humana, aunque no ha insistido en la novela negra, ni bajo el seudónimo de sus primeros libros alimenticios, “Frantz Keller”. Las iniciales recuerdan al abogado Kafka, como Tomeo, otro hombre de leyes dispuesto a hacer añicos las literarias. El autor estará ya tan harto como feliz de que le menten al checo, al que homenajea en su relato “Gregorio, el insecto”, pero del que le separa su humor, negro, fuerte y lento como un burro, un humor que cocea aún tras la lectura.

“An Unlucky Man” by Samanta Schweblin Translated at Contemporary Argentine Writers Blog

~ bythefirelight

Update 1/30/2013

Schweblin’s has expressed interest in finding a forum for publishing the story. As such Bard has been asked to take the translation down for the time being. When ever the story is published I will be sure to let you know. Dario’s blog is still worth taking a look at.

Edited Post

The new and interesting blog Contemporary Argentine Writers has published a translation of Samanta Schweblin’s prize wining story An Unlucky Man. As anyone who has read this blog knows, I’m a fan of her work. A few of her stories have made it into English. Dario Bard has translated her recent prize winning story at his blog. It is a good translation and well worth reading.

 

You can see all my Schweblin coverage here.

Roberto Bolaño Short Stories Overview at the Guardian UK

~ bythefirelight

The Guardian UK has a good overview of some of Roberto Bolaño’s short stories. (Tip: make sure you read through the comments. There is further suggestions of what to read from the author, Chris Power)

It is impossible to write about any one strand of Bolaño’s work in isolation, because nearly all of it inhabits one sprawling intertextual territory. Speaking in 1998 he said, “I consider, in a very humble way, all my prose, and even some of my poetry, to be a whole. Not only stylistically, but also as a narrative.” Enjoying contrariness, Bolaño rowed back from this statement elsewhere, but the recurrence of characters, themes and incidents in his work is undeniable. His alter ego Arturo Belano, for example, features in or narrates many of the short stories, as well as being a lead character in the novel The Savage Detectives, and the narrator of the novels Distant Star and – according to a note in Bolaño’s papers – 2666.

Bolaño’s stories take the form of fragments of memoir (“Sensini”, “The Grub”), unsolvable detective stories (“Phone Calls”), or anxious transmissions from a region between dream and reality (“The Dentist”). Sometimes, as in “Gómez Palacio”, they feel like all three at once. An account of a writer going to a remote town in northern Mexico to interview for a teaching post, the story establishes its strange air of lassitude and dread at once: “I went to Gómez Palacio during one of the worst periods of my life. I was twenty-three years old and I knew that my days in Mexico were numbered.” The narrator discusses poetry with the director of the art school, has bad dreams (Bolaño’s work is clotted with dreams), and stands in the room of his isolated motel “looking at the desert stretching off into the dark”. Parked at dusk in the desert in the director’s car, a situation with a vague sexual potential that perhaps neither party wants to realise, a man pulls in a few metres ahead of them. “It’s my husband, the director said with her eyes fixed on the stationary car, as if she were talking to herself.” The cars sit in silence. When the writer drives away the man in the other car “turned his back to us and I couldn’t see his face.” The director then tells the writer she was joking, that it wasn’t her husband after all.

Is the Translation of Spanish Works into English the Key to International Success?

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article that suggests the best way for Latin American writing to get international exposure is to be translated into English. This is especially true if one hopes to break into Asian markets.  It is a fascinating statement, suggesting that English language markets are the gateway into other languages. It gives an almost outsized power to English as an arbiter of cultural maters. It is even a bigger statement when so little foreign language fiction is translated into English. I’m not completely sure the need to translate into English is quite as prevalent when translating between European languages, but that still keeps books stuck within the European context.

The award underscores the ongoing question of access of foreign literature to what is increasingly becoming the international language of commerce and literature. In a recent article for Spanish organization Real Instituto Elcano, Cartagena Hay Festival director Cristina Fuentes affirmed that an estimated 250-500 million people across the world speak English as their first language and an estimated 1 billion as a second language.

This preponderance renders it the gateway to translation for other languages. Edith Grossman, renowned for her translations of Cervantes´ Don Quixote and Gabriel García Márquez, stated in an article for Foreign Policy that English often serves as the linguistic bridge for books aiming to reach a number of Asian and African languages: for a book written in Spanish to enter the Chinese market, it must often be translated into English first. (For further exploration of this topic, see “Edith Grossman Frowns: The Challenges of Translation in America.”)

In Europe, statistics show literary translations surpass those in many other segments of publishing. A 2012 survey of European publishers carried out by Literature Across Frontiers revealed that the majority of translated titles are fiction, more than 75% of translations for all publishers surveyed. Earlier, the organization had carried out a study on trends across the continent between 1990 and 2005, which revealed that as of 1996, English as a source language for translations represented double the share in translated literature titles of the next 25 most important European languages together. As of 2005, English was followed —and the gap was wide — by French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Japanese and Russian.

This is all well and good, and it is important to show that Latina American literature is more than Magical Realism. However, there is a darker flip side that in commenting on a Publishing Perspectives article Chad at Three Percent noted:

I’m not sure what direction this took in the panel discussion, but what’s always interested me (mostly because of the publishing angle), is the way that authors around the world ape current trends in Anglo-American fiction in hopes of getting their work translated into English. That sounds a bit dismissive and damning, but I remember talking with editors in Germany a dozen years ago and having someone remark, “[Germans] used to write those experimental novels, now we write like Americans!” Which totally bummed me out. The retaining of something unique about a country’s “book culture” is something I think is extremely important. And in some ways, it’s the responsibility of (certain) publishers to help preserve this by publishing and promoting works that are “uniquely French” (if there is such a thing), or at least not “from France, but just like Freedom!” Otherwise, what’s the point?

The article in question was  Cultural Homogeneity and the Future of Literary Translation Burton Pike suggested that the there is a growing international style based on the globalization of literature and the transnational nature of modern authors. I believe it to a certain degree, but I’m not completely convinced. In a cultural sense, perhaps writers are less “foreign”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the works are completely homogenized.

I used to tell my students in translation courses that in preparing to translate a writer they could never know enough about the writer’s culture. But looking at the writing coming out of Europe now, I’m not so sure. Now I ask myself: What other culture? Or, what other culture? A creeping homogenization is developing in prose fiction, a kind of generic international content and style that transcends national borders.  A broad horizontal culture seems to be replacing vertical national cultures. The critic Richard Eder writes in a review of a novel by Geoff Dyer that “his novel is an early specimen of what you might call European Community fiction. Luke, the vaguely intending writer, and Alex are British and need no papers to get laboring jobs in a book warehouse [in Paris]. Nicole, a Yugoslav immigrant, and Sarah, an American, are employed more formally, the first as a secretary, the second as an interpreter.”

Literature is no longer regarded as the sacred bearer of high culture. The Russian formalists’ distinction between literary language and everyday language has faded away. Nora Tarnopolsky writes, for instance, that “Hebrew is becoming an ordinary language, and its literature, a normal literature, no longer the exclusive province of high-minded ideals and nationalistic fervor…[C]haracters in contemporary Israeli fiction have turned away from ideals and ideology, away from the burdens of history, toward their own individual lives, however outlandish.”

Still, I’m reminded of what Jorge Volpi recently said in an interview with the Quarterly Conversation:

DA and CF: In recent statements you have declared Roberto Bolaño to be the last Latin American writer. What does this mean?

JV: Certainly there is some provocation to this statement, a small boutade like the ones Bolaño loved so much, but there is also something true to it. Bolaño seems to me to be the last writer that really felt part of a Latin American tradition, the last writer that responded with a knowledge of those models. Not only did he have a battle with the Latin American Boom but with all of the Latin American tradition—in particular with Borges and Cortázar—but that extends back to the 19th century. His was a profoundly political literature that aspired to be Latin American in a way different from that of the Boom, but that was still Latin American. I believe that this tradition stops with Bolaño. After him, my generation and the subsequent generations, I don’t see any authors that really feel part of the Latin American tradition, or that might be responding to these models. They seem to respond to more global models. There is no knowledge of a strong Latin American identity. This is the central theme of this book [El Insomnio de Bolívar] that has won the Casa de las Americas Award. Latin American literature seems to dissolve as a unity, and it is only possible to understand it as a collage of fragments that no longer form, as in the times of the Latin American Boom, a cathedral. Now, writers in the distinct countries of Latin American feel part of their own nationality, and maybe what they are beginning to form are models whose paradigm would no longer be a giant edifice, a cathedral, for example, a Latin American temple, but rather holograms. That is to say, little fragments that contain information that is Latin American, almost in an unconscious fashion, but that above all respond to an individual will and that are no longer a matter of identity.

I have mixed opinions on all of this, but I do know that I’m always surprised by the number of English language books that are translated into Spanish. There are more than enough books out there to influence that writing. In some ways, if you read The Future Is Not Ours you will get that sense that the short story has homogenized a little.

What do you think?

A Thousand Morons by Quim Monzó – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Thousand_Morons-frontA Thousand Morons
Quim Monzó
Open Letter, 2012,pg 111

Reading Quim Monzó’s short stories is always refreshing experience, a kind of cleansing of the palate after imbibing too many stories in the American vein. In Monzó there is little interest in the well written story and its obligatory finish with an apropos epiphany. His characters are seldom explored in strong emotional terms, instead they exist within the irrepressible march of time. In other words, events happen, characters perform their roles, but there is no reason why, it just is. The lack of explanation comes because Monzó and his narrators are always distant, keeping what is before them at arms length. It can feel cold, uncaring, but at his best it makes for a literature of perceptive descriptions and, surprisingly, empathetic stories that never loose his sense of humor, akin to that of Thomas Bernhard’s in the Voice Imitator.

While A Thousand Morons still has the touches of the comedic and the satiric, there is something more personal, too. In the first of the two sections, the stories are more personal, less distant from every day experience. There is still humor, but it is a humor that comes from contrasting a typically emotive subject against the absurdities of his telling. It isn’t that the injection of accessible experiences have weekend his work, it has allowed him to contrast play with the genre and retarget his humor at something new.

In the first story, Mr. Beneset, a son visits his father in a nursing home. The description is given in a dead pan third person that after the first paragraph which gives just the most minimal back story, becomes almost a dialog with stage direction. The father is a talker and performs a kind of elderly stream of consciousness, bouncing from one topic to another: the beauty of the Cuban aide, the thought of death, the deaths of his neighbors. These are not new ideas for a story. Monzó turns things around, though, because all the time they are talking the man’s father is dressing as a woman. It is mater of fact, as all things are in his stories. It doesn’t mater why he is doing it to the characters. They already know why. It puts the locus of exploration on the reader and opens up the story, moving it past the visit, to an alternate vision. The humor, which is surprising for Monzó, is moderated, and he uses the contrast of the father’s clothing to reenliven the dilemmas of old age and family.

The Coming of Spring mines similar territory, describing a man–there is no name–as he visits his parents in an old age home. It is a story of repetition: his visits; their problems; and the surprising ability of an old couple to survive so long. They survive as much by habit as by will and, the Monzós repetitive text underscores that. Many of the paragraphs that open the little sections all start with the phrase, A man… The habit of the elderly couple, is mirrored in the prose. The repetition lends a sense of melancholy as the man walks through the old apartment where the couple once lived and now stands vacant. A physical memory that has been left to deteriorate like the couple in the home. And like the couple it also continues on as if by habit. What makes the story so strong is the distance the reader feels between the characters. There is no comforting resolution here and it is in that distance, the separation of the son from the reader that the real emotional power resides.

While those two stories overpower the rest of the collection and give Monzó’s work, for the first time, a heavier, less comedic weight, the humor from his other works is evident throughout the collection. In Saturday, echoing Carver, a woman tries to erase her ex from her life. First its the photos. Next the furniture, until she attempts to destroy everything he has ever touched which is either impossible, or self destructive depending on how far one wants to take it. Of course the story is purely physical. There are no insights, just the illogical end of removing all physical memories of a lover. It is an unsettling idea.

For fans of Monzós more flippant and philosophical sides, there are still plenty of stories where the absurdity of an experience becomes an maddening experience. These are the typical Monzó story where the completely absurd, although often common place occurrence,  becomes an overwhelming experience. In Praise, an author makes a passing comment that he enjoyed an up an coming author’s book. Soon the the young author begins to hound the established author until the tables turn and the nice, off handed comment the established author gave, becomes his down fall. It is a typically Monzonian story in that something small can bring so many problems. It is the kind of story he excels at. It also underlies a kind of cynicism that pervades his work, as if what ever one does you will fail in some way. It is an idea I rarely see in American fiction, but in continental fiction it seems to show up quite often. On one hand, you have American optimism always finding a better tomorrow, even when everything is going to hell. And contrasting is a realism that seems cynical, but is really an outlook guided by precedent that knows how easy it is for the simple to turn into complete horror. Monzó is full of that idea, which is why this collection with its turn towards the personal seemed more startling.

Monzós stories deserve to be better known. His humor, cynicism and insight are a great antidote to short stories that can seem tiresome in their perfected resolution. With this collection, Monzó has show that the distant and skeptical stance can even be used in more personal settings.

You can read the story of A Cut (pdf) form Open Letter

The Best Spanish Language Short Stories of 2012 from Sergi Bellver

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish writer and critic of the short story Sergi Bellver has published his list of the best short stories that appeared in Spanish. It is a long list and will give anyone reading it an insight into the art of the short story. In his list I’ve seen a couple authors that I’ve seen in a couple of other articles. One is Edmundo Paz Soldán a Bolivian writer, and Ignacio Ferrando a Spanish writer. Both had interesting collections come out this year. You can read the full article here.

Llama la atención la irrupción en 2012 de varios narradores latinoamericanos en el panorama editorial español del cuento. Tal vez la más llamativa sea la del excelente escritor mexicano Alberto Chimal, de cuya narrativa breve el crítico Antonio J. Morato seleccionó los relatos del libro Siete (Salto de Página). Otro de los hallazgos trasatlánticos del año ha sido la edición española, a cargo del sello aragonés Tropo, de Vacaciones permanentes, que la boliviana Liliana Colanzi había publicado con la editorial El Cuervo en su país.Precisamente su compatriota Edmundo Paz Soldán, a quien ya conocíamos por estos lares gracias a sus novelas,ha publicado en el último tramo del 2012 uno de los conjuntos de relatos más interesantes de la temporada, Billie Ruth (Páginas de Espuma). América sigue siendo un filón para el mejor relato, y de algunos ilustres cuentistas latinoamericanos que ya no están entre nosotros, como el original y desapercibido Francisco Tario (mexicano) con La noche, o el inigualable y genial Felisberto Hernández (uruguayo) con La casa inundada, la editorial Atalanta ha recuperado en 2012 sus mejores textos para la colección Ars Brevis. Pero no sigamos por esa senda, ni por la de los libros traducidos de lenguas extranjeras (porque entonces no daríamos abasto y tendríamos que empezar mencionando joyas tan singulares como los relatos de Peking by night, de Svetislav Basara, publicados por Minúscula), y regresemos a los autores españoles actuales, aunque me detendré antes en otro libro de cuentos en particular, uno de los mejores en el arranque de 2012: el convincente Un montón de gatos, de Eider Rodríguez (Caballo de Troya), autora vasca que escribe y publica primero en euskera y luego traduce al castellano sus relatos, pero que, hasta donde sé, revisa y edita a fondo sus textos en ese proceso, por lo que su propia traducción se convierte en todo un trabajo de autoría. Capítulo aparte (que dejaré para otro día, por sangrante) merece el cuento en catalán, en un año en el que los lectores en castellano han visto pasar de largo el centenario de un cuentista contemporáneo de talla europea como Pere Calders, ya que ninguna editorial ha considerado acometer la tarea de actualizar y presentar sus cuentos al lector en castellano, es decir, no sólo al español, sino también al hispanoamericano. Respecto al cuento escrito en gallego, en otoño de 2012 llegó la traducción al castellano de la Narrativa breve completa de Carlos Casares, por parte de la editorial barcelonesa Libros del Silencio.

The Free Book Incident – Giving Away Books in Seattle

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

freebookNear where I work is a popup store front called The Free Book Incident. It is a temporary installment of a book store like space where all books are free to take. I finally went in the other day. Nothing fancy, just book shelves and old books. There was a librarian reading a short story. Apparently he reads a story twice a week at the Central Library during what he calls Story Time for Adults.

I milled around for a while and selected two books. One The Spendthrifts by Perez Galdos (1952), a classic Spanish novelist of the 19th century. The second A Purse of Coppers Stories by Sean O’Faolain (1938), an Irish writer from the early to mid 20th century. I have no idea what he’s like, but it was free.

In a month or so it will be gone and Olson Kundig Architects will create a new store front. From the Olson Kundig website:

coopersOlson Kundig Architects partnered with Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers, Inc. for its next [storefront] installation, The Free Book Incident. Inspired by a long-running book exchange, “The Book Thing” in Baltimore, MD, The Incident explores what can happen when books are made available for free.

Describing the idea behind The Free Book Incident, Wessel & Lieberman state, “It is not a book store (there is nothing for sale); it is not a library (there is nothing to return). The Incident is a place for exploration, engagement, ideas, activity, conversation—and ultimately, alchemy—all of it generated by the decommidification of books.”

The Free Book Incident celebrates the organic experiences that occur when one searches for a new book. With Olson Kundig Architects providing its [storefront] space and Wessel & Lieberman providing the inventory, this installation is designed for all to enjoy.

galdos“Books are more than pages and binding; they are a catalyst for an experience. The reader finds a book on a shelf, takes that book into his hands and home, and its words into his head,” says intern architect and installation co-curator Adam Monkaba of Olson Kundig Architects. “For the space itself, we designed a kinetic book shelf that pivots, offering a variety of settings in which visitors can explore books. Our goal was to create an engaging environment that promotes access to books and allows visitors to interact with them in surprising ways.”

A series of events from readings and bookmaking classes to writing workshops and book clubs will take place during the months of January and February. In addition to special events, [storefront] will be open Monday through Friday, 11:30am -1:30pm during which time visitors can browse for books.

14 Critics on the 5 Best Spaish Fiction of 2012

~ bythefirelight

This will be the last time I write on this subject, but La Nave de los Locos  has a post that compiles the top 5 best books published in Spain from 14 different critics. It is a nice long list. The usual suspects are there (Marias, Vila-Matas, Cercas) but there are some that aren’t known that well outside of Spain. Enjoy

One of the 14 lists:

Luis Mateo Díez, La cabeza en llamas, Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores
Luis Landero, Absolución, Tusquets.
Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, Medusa, Seix Barral
José María Merino, El río del Edén, Alfaguara
Clara Usón, La hija del Este, Seix Barral
ÁNGEL BASANTA (El Cultural. El Mundo)

Hi, This is Conchita and Other Stories by Santiago Roncagliolo – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Hi, This is Conchita and Other Stories
Santiago Roncagliolo
Edith Grossman, translator
Two Lines Press, 2012, pg 176
(Publication Date: April 9, 2013)

Santiago Roncagliolo’s Hi, This is Conchita is a series of phone calls stripped of all narrative clutter. They exist just as voices as if one were listening to a wire tap, or as fits Conchita, voyeurs . It is a structure that served another Latin American writer, Mario Benedetti, well, and in the hands of Roncagliolo it makes for some humorous writing. It also shows Roncagliolo’s talent for comedy, which has not been as apparent in his works translated into English so far.

Composed of alternating phone calls, Conchita follows four characters in an unnamed city. Conchita is a phone sex worker and her first call opens the book with straight up porn. Within a couple lines she is already talking about how hot she is. Every imaginable cliché follows from there. Roncagliolo adds even more humor as Conchita’s clients break in mid fantasy to correct her descriptions of the act. For example, in the first call she says she is on his office desk and leaning on the coffee machine, and the caller corrects her and says the machine is across the room. From there they go back and forth negotiating what she really would be leaning on, before she returns to the act. The humor intensifies with each call because they all start the same way and have the same non sequiturs into details of the room, or what the caller looks like. For the callers, though, the illusion never fails and one caller continues to call back, falling in love with Conchita. It is a voice of loneliness that inhabits all to frequently the men who engage with phone sex. Roncagliolo does not make fun of the caller, but the situation and in the end he gives a power to change events that he does not know he has and may never realize.

Following on the humor of Conchita are the conversations of a hit man and his client. The hit man is a professional but he is also clumsy and has a philosophical outlook that leads him to question his client if he really wants to kill his lover. The client can’t stand the questions, but the hit man thinks affairs of the heart don’t need to be solved by killing. The conversations between the two are funny and create a dynamic between the passions of the client and the professionalism of the hit man that leave the reader with the impression that the hit man is of great skill. Yet when it comes to the actual hit the only thing professional about him is willingness to kill. And from that a series of humorous events ensue that tie the book together.

Two other callers are a self obsessed ex boy friend who leaves long and rambling messages on his ex’s answering machine. After the first call it seems obvious why she left him. However, Roncagliolo is playing with the reader here, because all one knows is his voice. She never speaks. All that is known is that they had something for sometime and like the Conchita’s callers he is lonely and pitiful. He’ as pitiful as the man who keeps calling the customer service agent and never gets help with what he needs. While the ex boyfriend is occasionally heavy handed, the customer service vignettes with their bureaucratic logic and employees who make one feel as if you are wasting their time, are the most common stereotype throughout the book. If it did not link in with the other stories as the book concludes it would have dragged the book down.

At first the calls are separate, unconnected, then as the story grows the characters begin to intersect. The calls between a man and his lover intersect between the hit man and his client, changing what had been the comedic episodes of two men, intrudes its true horror on the voice of a desperate woman who demands her lover respect her. Roncagliolo doesn’t tie all the stories neatly together, but they do all interrelate, if even lightly. The interrelations, though, expand the characters and adding a level of complexity to them that has not existed until then. Even the otherwise week customer service calls are reframed by the new relationships. It is this ability to shift how one looks at the stories and turns the humor from bright to dark that makes Hi, This is Conchita interesting.

Three stories are also included in the collection. While their is nothing particularly wrong with them, they are not really that noteworthy. For someone looking for a good short story, one should see the story included in The Future Is Not Ours. The stories are typical written in the realistic tradition, ones that populate so many collections of short stories that while well written, don’t really add anything new. However, if one has not read many short stories from younger Latin American writers, they will give an insight into how younger writers are looking at more international models and as such the stories can seem similar.

Hi, This is Conchita and other stories is a funny book from an up and coming star of Latin American fiction. A reader would do well to spend a little time with this short volume of freely rendered conversations.

FTC Notice: The publisher of the book provided me a copy of the book. For that I thank them.

Antonio Muñoz Molina Wins the Jerusalem Prize

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina has won the Jerusalem Prize:. According to El Pais:

El jurado ha seleccionado a Muñoz Molina “porque es un autor excelente, pero también porque su obra expresa la libertad del individuo”, explica Joel Makov, director del festival literario en conversación telefónica. Makov detalla que el autor de Sefarad o El jinete polaco ha confirmado que viajará a Jerusalén para recibir el premio a principios de febrero.

El jurado ha considerado que los libros de Muñoz Molina reflejan además “los grandes cambios que han tenido lugar en España durante su transición de la dictadura a la democracia y han expuesto la traumática memoria colectiva”. Los jueces destacaron también al dar a conocer su elección “la simpatía que Molina expresa por los exiliados y los que sufren. Aquellos víctimas de las revoluciones históricas”. “Es uno de los autores más importantes de nuestro tiempo”, añadieron.

La realidad quebradiza: Antología de cuentos (The Fragile Reality) by José María Merino – A Review

~ bythefirelight

cubierta_MERINO_IMPRENTALa realidad quebradiza: Antología de cuentos
(The Fragile Reality: An Anthology of Short Stories)
José María Merino
Páginas de Espuma, 2012, pg 262

José María Merino’s La realidad quebradiza: Antología de cuentos is an anthology of short stories from a writer who in his fiction has explored the fantastic as a way to break open the fragile reality surrounds and paradoxically for something so ephemeral traps us. While not particularly well known in the English speaking world, he has published a steady stream of fiction since 1976 including novels, short stories, and children’s books, and has won several awards, is a member of the Real Academia Española, and amongst fans of the short story is a respected figure. Although he has not exclusively focused on the fantastic, it is, perhaps, what he is best known for, with stories ranging in style from horror to science fiction to meta works that hearken to Borges, Kafka and Cortazar. With La realidad quebradiza: Antología de cuentos, Páginas de Espuma has put together a career spaning overview of his work amongst the short form that not only includes a large selection of short and micro stories, but a lengthy if rather strange introduction to his work from Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel, and a long interview with Merino that examine his approaches to writing short fiction. It is probably as a good an introduction as one could ask for.

The fantastic is difficult material to work with: too obvious and you have the literary equivalent of a Twilight Zone episode where the camera changes at the last second and you say, ‘oh, I get it now,’ but then never return to the episode because the shock has worn off; too subtle and it ventures into the purely symbolic (perhaps surrealistic), where nothing has any relation to reality. Merino’s own working definition of the fantastic would be helpful before going on much farther:

Coincido con una definición moderna de lo fantástico de Roger Caillois: una ruptura estrepitosa del orden habitual, textualmente <<una irrupción de lo inadmisible en el seno inalterable de la legalidad cotidiana>>. Otroa cosa sería lo maravilloso, en que lo aparentemente inadmisible resulta la regla general, como los cuentos de hadas o El señor de los anillos, pero sin duda no estoy dotado para ello, pues a la hora de escribir, la realidad está en mí demasiado al acecho.

I agree with Roger Caillois’ modern definition of the fantastic: a resounding rupture of habitual order of things, textually “a burst of the impermissible in the unalterable breast of the routine laws of everyday.” Something altogether different would be the marvelous where the apparently impermissible is the rule, such as in fairy tales or The Lord of the Rings, but without a doubt I’m not blessed with that skill because when it comes time to write, reality is lying in wait for me too much.

For Merino, the fantastic is that little explosion of unreality in an otherwise real world that opens new perspectives on reality. What it isn’t, is fantasy which is more concerned with its own fictive reality. It is an important distinction because the interplay between reality, which is often described in a realist tradition, and the fantastical can occasionally seem jarring. However, the shock of the rupture in the habitual that he mentions usually overcomes the Twilight Zone moment. And as you will see, there is a great fluidity in his writing that can make the occasional disappointment worth reading.

El niño lobo del cine Mari (The Wolf Child of the Mari Theater) is perhaps the best story in the collection in terms of a pure mix of a narrative and the fantastic. One day when an old movie theater is the process of destruction, the construction workers find a little boy amongst the ruins. It turns out he has been missing for 30 years yet has no aged a day since he disappeared. It is a mystery, but despite all pleas to tell his story the boy won’t explain what happened. In desperation, the doctor looking after the boy takes him to another theater. It would stand to reason he likes movies. The doctor watches him carefully at first, but caught up in the movie she doesn’t see him go behind the screen and enter the movie where he disappears again. Here, Merino mixes the two streams of reality, that of the everyday and that of the cinema, locating our dreams not just in the films themselves, but in the portals to them, as if they formed a kind of collective memory that lasts as long as the movie does. Moreover, he expands the idea of a fiction not as something that you only observe, but as something you participate in and extend. It is that extension of the story, or the bifurcation of the story into multiple paths, that reappears throughout the book.

You can see that bifurcation La casa de los dos portales (The House With two Entrances). In the story a group of boys break into an old abandoned mansion. After exploring the house they find a small passage way to an a room that has its own door to the exterior. They go through it and head to their respective homes. But nothing is right. Family members who were dead are alive or vice a versa; homes are not kept in the same ways. In short, it is a parallel world, one that is terrifying to the boys. That parallelism also links back to the idea of the double, of the other self, a classic trope in Spanish language fiction, but here it extends to a whole world.

Both stories come from his collection Cuentos del reino secreto (Stories from the Secret Kingdom) published in 1982. They show an interest in stories where the line between reality and the fantastic exists, but is not a commented on within the text. In his latter works, his short stories are much more open to direct introspection of the limits of reality. In El viajero perdido (The Lost Traveler) and Bifurcaciones (Bifurcations) he explores the way linear construction of reality is really a series of forking paths (to quote Borges) one takes, but are also mental paths one takes as they construct the narrative for themselves when they remember.  El viajero perdido follows a writer as he tries to create a story about a traveler who he stumbles on one night. The story though twists between what the writer struggles to write and the trip his wife is having. With each new strange encounter he comes up with it is mirrored in his wife’s world. As he brings the story to conclusion she comes closer to home. And with in the wife’s world she comes across the traveler that first promoted him to write the story, bringing the different bifurcations of story together. Merino leaves the story open as to what will happen, as if stories can never be finished.

In Bifurcaciones, a middle aged man is invited to a college reunion. He begins to wonder what ever happened to a girl, Pilar, he had once been infatuated with. He wanders down by where she used to live and he runs in to her. Feeling lucky, they spend some time together and he thinks his dreams have come true. Then she begins to ask him why he never wrote after ‘that summer?’ He has no idea of what has happened, but she creates a whole different life they led together. Yet he begins to believe it, rewriting his past. Yet when he finally goes to the reunion she’s not there and yet another bifurcations of the past occur. Merino places layer after layer of bifurcations so that man is rewriting his past and going through memories of events he never had. With each memory he recreates his whole history summed up towards the end of the story when he tries to make sense of the differing stories he is living.

Su esfuerzo por esclarecer la contradcción de aquellos veranos contrapuestos le hizo comprender que el encuentro en el vestíbulo era un misterioso punto de bifurcación, donde su memoria parecía titubear, aunque al cabo siguiese con más seguridad el camino que lo lleveaba a un período de angustiosa apatía, a sus primeros empleos, a la vinculaión con el bufete de su tío Jaime, en una ciudad del sur, al encuentro de Pilar y todo lo que, desembocando en el día que recibió la invitactión de Carlos Campoy, parecía formar la urdimbre verdadera de su vida durante aquellos veinticinoc años.

His effort to clear up the contradiction of those opposing summers made him understand that the meeting in the vestibule was a mysterious point of bifurcation where his memory seemed to hesitate, although after following with more certainty the road that took him to a period of agonizing apathy, to his first jobs, to his joining his uncle Jaime’s firm in a southern city, to the meeting with Pilar and everything that flowing from the day that he received the invitation from Carlos Campoy, seemed to form the true plot of his life during those twenty five years.

Finally, it would be remiss if a few comments about his language were overlooked. In more than a few stories the role of language itself is the center of story and even in one story when a man looses his ability not only to speak, but think in words, he disappears from reality. So for a writer with such wide ranging interests it would be natural that he prose have a certain power to it. In Papilio Siderum, a story that reworks Chuang Tzu’s story of the butterfly where a man dreams he is a butterfly then wakes as a man is unable to tell the distinction between the two. In Merino’s telling the story takes on a deeper and wider celebration of the paradoxes of memory and he captures both the transitory nature of memory, but the beauty in it to (sorry no translation; I’m out of time).

Intentaré empezar diciendo que, después de dejar la terraza, nos fuimos cada uno a nuestro cuarto, y que yo me encontraba desvelado, porque la presencia de Elisa haviía despertado en mí el enardecimiento de los veranos de la adolescencia, aquel tiempo en que hasta la propia luz y los olores del día eran capaces de provocar en mi ánimo una sucesión de impresiones indefinibles y hasta contradictorias, un tempr confuso la luz implacable del mediodía, que a su vez despertaba en los arbustos esos aromas secos tan estimulantes de la placidez, o cierta euforia la larga luz del atardecer, cuando sin embargo el olor humedo de los parados me incitaba a senir la congoja de alguna pérdida que no podía indentificar, y en cada momento y en cada paraje una conciencia tiubeante, que ya no tenía la capacidad de embeleso de la infancia pero que tampoco podía apoyarse en esas seguridades que al parecer eran privilegio de los adultos.

While every story in La realidad quebradiza: Antología de cuentos didn’t excite me as these did (a couple were too much in the ghost story vein, something I’m not much interested in), on the whole is a successful mix of the fantastic and reality, and the majority of the stories are fascinating reads. The selection of these short stories and micro stories, almost prose poems at times, which I didn’t even have a chance to discuss, leaves me wondering what other intriguing work remains in the volumes that these stories were selected from. Merino is definitely a maestro of the fantastic and Páginas de Espuma has put together an excellent collection to demonstrate that.

The Short Story, The Class Room, and New Directions Forward: Fakes Reviewed at LARB

~ bythefirelight

The Los Angles Review of Books has an excellent review of David Shields and Matthew Vollmer’s Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. What is so interesting about (in addition to the book itself) is the author, Johannes Lichtman, goes into some detail about the foundational text books of the MFA scene, how they have shaped writing and how this book may too, for good and bad. As I’m always interested in how the short story is developed I found it quite interesting. I’m less and less inclined to like the MFA experience of teaching writing. I didn’t get an MFA, but I can remember my undergrad days and the heavy Carver influence running through the whole thing.

AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW, it’s not easy to make money writing. Young writers read of a mythical past when aspiring authors could work for “newspapers” in exotic locales like Kansas City, but even if there is still a newspaper operating out of some soon-to-be-abandoned warehouse on the banks of the Missouri, I bet it isn’t hiring. The BFA/MFA track has become one of the last refuges for young writers before they start fighting their way into the welfare state of grants and fellowships, and even if we remain undecided on the question of whether writing can be taught — if I have to read another essay asking that question I may run away to Kansas City myself — we have definitively declared that the teaching and learning of creative writing can be a good way to make money (or at least to postpone the need to do so).

For this reason, contemporary fiction anthologies have never been more proliferant than they are now. Classroom texts — most often either the Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone or the Vintage Book of Short Stories edited by Tobias Wolff — are where many undergraduate writers (weaned on high school classics, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, and Chuck Palahniuk) get their first doses of modern short fiction. These books answer the burning question: what are real writers writing today?

Which makes it such a shame that the two most popular anthologies offer such limited answers. The Vintage and Scriber collections feature eleven writers in common, but more importantly, they draw from a common aesthetic. Both favor a kind of story that generally relies on a first page/first sentence hook, a second page circling back to explain how we came to this interesting place, and, after the necessary information has been dumped on the reader, a series of events that lead to some sort of change in the protagonist: a change which usually takes place epiphanically, when the story has, to paraphrase Stuart Dybek, shifted from the narrative to the lyrical mode.

There’s nothing wrong with writing stories in this manner; some of the best American fiction follows just such a traditional blueprint. But the Vintage anthology — which, published in 1994, is starting to feel a bit dated — suggests that this is pretty much the only way to write a story. While the Scribner book offers more ethnic diversity than the Vintage anthology, it likewise doesn’t put much effort into diversity of narrative approach. To the latter’s credit, it does include work by Junot Diaz, A.M. Homes, and Daniel Orozco, but woefully absent from its pages are David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, and Dave Eggers, three of our most stylistically influential authors. As such, the Scribner anthology is pretty much the worst fiction anthology out there. Except for every other anthology.

I’ll also point you to another review of the book that is quite positive. The entirety is below:

David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, eds., Fakes: Shields’ ongoing project to smash the support beams of conventional fiction (or maybe just expose them; hard to tell sometimes) clearly led him to help assemble this collection, which is largely made up of parodies of everyday forms of writing. (Jack Pendarvis’ “Our Spring Catalog” brilliantly sends up publishing-speak.) But fiction can’t survive on satire alone—one hopes—and the best stories here thrive on taking their artificial formats and making something sincere from them: Charles Yu’s “Problems for Self-Study,” Charles McLeod’s “National Treasures,” Caron A. Levis’ “Permission Slip.”

Best Books of the Year Round up: Spanish Language Press

~ bythefirelight

Here is my not comprehensive list of best books of the year compiled by the various Spanish language presses of note.

Revista Ñ breaks their lists into 5 sections: Argentine narratives, foreign narratives, essays, poetry, and various. Below are the Argentine novels. The Juan José Saer is an unfinished collection of drafts and pieces. It is on the list, but I’m doubtful. If they hadn’t made mention of Steven King in the write up, Luciano Lamberti’s stories sound interesting. Leopoldo Brizuela’s novel won the Alfaguara this year and sounds interesting too.

  • El viento que arrasa de Selva Almada (Mardulce)
  • Papeles de trabajo de Juan José Saer (Seix Barral)
  • Una misma noche de Leopoldo Brizuela (Alfaguara)
  • El amor nos destrozará de Diego Erlan (Tusquets)
  • Borgestein de Sergio Bizzio (Mondadori)
  • El loro que podía adivinar el futuro de Luciano Lamberti (Nudista)
  • Canción de la desconfianza de Damian Selci (Eterna Cadencia)

From El Páis comes several lists, including best translated book (there’s no shame in that over there and always worth a look to see what they think is important in foreign literature). The El Páis edition also includes a Saer book, but this one looks more promising, his complete short stories: Juan José Saer Cuentos completos (El Aleph). I’m not familiar with Luis Landero, their number one, but the others on the list are old standbys and I’m a little dubious if they are really the best of the year. I have read some good reviews of the Cercas book though.

From ABC in Spain we have a list that doesn’t really catch my eye. It is very heavy on fascism, nazis and war. I’m not sure where their head has been this year. I will say they have picked from a wide range of publishers. I think most are small press. (nod to Moleskine) Bonus coverage of the critics talking about why they chose certain books.

  • Contra toda esperanza, Nadiezhda Mandelstam (Acantilado).
  • Malaparte. Vidas y leyendas, Maurizio Serra (Tusquets).
  • Continente salvaje, Keith Lowe (Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores).
  • Guardianas nazis. El lado femenino del mal, Mónica González Álvarez (EDAF).
  • Noches azules, Joan Didion (Mondadori).
  • Algún día este dolor te será útil, Peter Cameron (Libros del Asteroide).
  • El diablo a todas horas, Donald Ray Pollock (Libros del Silencio).
  • La cápsula del tiempo, Miqui Otero (Blackie Books).
  • ¿Por qué nos gustan las guapas?, Todo Rafael Azcona en La Codorniz (Pepitas de calabaza y Fulgencio Pimentel).
  • Me hallará la muerte, Juan Manuel de Prada (Destino).

From La Vanguardia in Barcelona we have the bonus list of the best in Catalan. But since I only speak Spanish I’ll leave that to you to investigate. There are some of the usual names here (Marias, Cercas, Vila-Matas). The Lusi Landero from El Páis’s list made it to the list. Andres Neuman was listed, too. I’m looking forward to the book. I already have my copy and will be reading it in the near future.  Juan Villoro’s new novel made it on to the list. I’ve been on the fence with the reviews I’ve heard of it. He always strikes me as more of a non fiction writer. Perhaps if I read the book I might change my mind.

Título: El país imaginado
Autor: Eduardo Berti (Buenos Aires, 1964)
Editorial: Impedimenta

Título: Aire de Dylan
Autor: Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948)
Editorial: Seix Barral

Título: Perros que ladran en el sótano
Autor: Olga Merino (Barcelona, 1965)
Editorial: Alfaguara

Título: Mala índole
Autor: Javier Marías (Madrid, 1951)
Editorial: Alfaguara

Título: Lo que cuenta es la ilusión
Autor: Ignacio Vidal-Folch (Barcelona, 1956)
Editorial: Destino

Título: Absolución
Autor: Luis Landero (Alburquerque, 1948)
Editorial: Tusquets

Título: Las leyes de la frontera
Autor: Javier Cercas (Ibahernando, 1962)
Editorial: Mondadori

Título: Arrecife
Autor: Juan Villoro (México, 1956)
Editorial: Anagrama

Título: Victus
Autor: Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, 1965)
Editorial: La Campana

Título: Hablar solos
Autor: Andrés Neuman
Editorial: Alfaguara

El Cultural from Spain has an interesting list. I found their list last year one of the more interesting ones (and 100% Spanish, I believe; no Latin Americans). Their top pick is the Spanish writer José María Merino’s realistic novel. He’s generally thought of a writer of the fantastic and a short story writer, though not exclusively. I just finished one of his books and a review will becoming shortly, but his work is interesting and wide ranging. His interviews are worth a read, too.

  • El río del Eden, José María Merino (Alfaguara)
  • Absolución, Luis Landero (Tusquets)
  • Años lentos, Fernando Aramburú (Tusquets)
  • El Tango de la Guardia Vieja, Arturo Pérez Reverte (Alfaguara)
  • Las Leyes de la Frontera, Javier Cercas (Tusquets)
  • La hija del Este, Clara Usón (Seix Barral)
  • Las voces del Pamano, Jaumé Cabré (Destino)
  • La cabeza en llamas, Luis Mateo Diez (Galaxia Gutemberg)
  • Medusa, R. Menéndez Salmón (Seix Barral)
  • Ayer no más, Andrés Trapiello (Destino)

Their write up of Landero’s book is quite succinct:

Con pericia de narrador en plena madurez, Landero (Alburquerque, Badajoz, 1948) relata en Absolución las aventuras de Lino, un treintañero conflictivo, tierno y desvalido, de muchos oficios y poco asiento. Con él se cruzan personajes casi tan raros como él, excéntricos y quijotescos, a los que Landero retrata con una mirada cordial, piadosa y distante hasta construir , en palabras de Santos Sanz Villanueva, “una excelente novela, divertida y triste, cálida, repleta de seres entrañables, que además se atreve a plantear, con lucidez y humor, con más melancolía que tragedia aparente, el irresoluble arcano de nuestra misteriosa existencia y enigmático destino”.

The Columbian Magazine Semana has this list (nod to Moleskine). Two items of note: a book of creative writing from indigenous authors; and a book from James Thurber (What?).

1. Memoria por correspondencia, de Emma Reyes.
2. Crímenes, de Ferdinand von Schirach.
3. Abandonarse a la pasión, de Hiromi Kawakami.
4. Lenguaje creativo de las etnias indígenas de Colombia, de varios autores.
5. Elegía, de Mary Jo Bang.
6. Érase una vez en Colombia, de Ricardo Silva Romero.
7. El desafío de la memoria, de Joshua Foer.
8. Doce relojes, de James Thurber.
9. El incendio de abril, de Miguel Torres.
10. Los hermanos Cuervo, de Andrés Felipe Solano.

Finally, El ADN Cultura from “La Nación” has a list you can read here. It is long and has a lot of translations on it–including Steven King, so just by that it is a dubious list. Perhaps, translation makes him better.

Samanta Schweblin Recieves the Juan Rulfo Prize for the Short Story

~ bythefirelight

Samanta Schweblin one of the short story writers I mention here with some frequency received the Juan Rulfo Prize for the Short Story. What’s interesting is that she won for a story that really isn’t in her typical fantastical and absurd style. Instead, she won for a short story that is mostly autobiographic and realistic. “Este cuento tiene algo especial con respecto a todos mis anteriores, pues hasta la mitad es prácticamente autobiográfico y súper realista, mientras los anteriores se centraban mas en lo anormal o lo absurdo”, revelo Schweblin sobre el relato premiado.

You can read the story in Spanish here.

100 Books about War from Warscapes Weekly

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

I’ve been reading Warscapes Weekly for a while now and they have consistently put together some good collections of stories and essays from war torn areas. They have now put out a list of hundred books about war. The list tilts towards the current and for my tastes has a little too much from journalists, but it is an intriguing list and I found a couple I was interested in reading in the future. I have even read a few of these (Homage to Catalonia, Catch-22, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, The English Patient, The Story of Zahra, No-no Boy, Testament of Youth, War Against War, Autumn of the Patriarch ) or tried in a couple cases (Forever War, Journal, 1955-1962, Reflections on the French-Algerian War). I think the the omission of Eugene Sledge’s book is large, but no list is perfect.

Dispatches
by Michael Herr, a visceral and lyrical memoir about the Vietnam war

Memory for Forgetfulness
by Mahmoud Darwish, unique prose-poem sequences that evoke the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982.

Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell (1938) Journalist and novelist George Orwell’s personal account of experiences and reflections during the Spanish Civil War.

Hiroshima
by John Hersey (1946) Told through the memory of survivors, this is a journalistic account of what happened on the day that the United States dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller (1961) Now celebrating 50 years, this novel follows Captain John Yossarian and several other characters as they navigate bureaucracy, absurdity, injustice and greed during World War II.

Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon (1973) A sprawling epic novel about the deployment of V-2 rockets by Nazis during World War II.

Pity the Nation
by Robert Fisk (1990) An epic account of the Lebanese civil war and the crisis of Israel and Palestine during the eighties through the eyes of a fearless journalist.

Regeneration Trilogy
by Pat Barker (1991) A novel based on real-life accounts of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I.

Black Hawk Down
by Mark Bowden (1999) An account of the urban battle that raged in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 between US Special forces and Somali militias headed by warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So
by Anthony Loyd (2001) An English journalist’s memoir about his experiences in Bosnia and Chechnya.

 

 

 

Andrés Neuman Interviewed in Sur.es

~ bythefirelight

Andrés Neuman was interviewed in Sur.es about his new book and his thoughts on writing and culture. It is an interesting interview that gives one a taste of his new novel.

-¿’Hablar solos’ nace de muchas conversaciones en soledad?

-Bueno, en realidad me atraen las historias de carretera, pero siempre han tendido a postergar al personaje femenino. Desde el principio de la narrativa, con Ulises y Penélope, hasta nuestros tiempos, las historias de viaje iniciático casi siempre han sido reductoramente masculinas. Hacía tiempo que le daba vueltas a contar una historia de carretera donde el personaje femenino pasara de secundario a protagonista. Y, por otra parte, la experiencia de haber cuidado a distintos seres queridos y haber ido viendo cómo caminaba mi idea de la vida ha sido otra de las claves. Me interesaba contar las aventuras y desventuras de quien cuida a un ser querido, ver cómo su idea del placer, del cuerpo y del amor cambian para siempre.
-¿Por cierto sentimiento de culpa?
-Claro, la culpa de estar sano cuando el otro vive y la de haber sobrevivido cuando muere. Yo siempre digo que el duelo es una especie de posguerra íntima. En todas las posguerras, quienes sobreviven a los bombardeos tienen una mezcla de fortuna por no haber caído, y de perplejidad porque han caído otros. Cuando uno está pasando un duelo parte de su dificultad no es solo la ausencia física del otro sino otros conflictos que me interesaban narrar, porque esta novela se centra sobre todo en el después: la culpa del superviviente y la batalla que emprende nuestra memoria por sanar el recuerdo de quien hemos perdido.
-Freud decía que recordar es la mejor manera de olvidar…
-Yo creo que lo decía por la parte de ficticia que tiene nuestra memoria. Él también hablaba de lo siniestro, decía que era lo próximo y lo cotidiano cuando se vuelve terrorifico. En ese sentido, la enfermedad es siniestra porque hace que todas las rutinas con un ser querido sano se vuelvan de pronto amenazantes, estremecedoras y melancólicas. Pero también hay otra cara en contraposición y es lo emocionante y profundamente poético que se vuelve todo cuando amenaza con ser la última vez; se agudiza el relieve de las cosas, todo adquiere una dimensión nueva que tiene que ver con la conciencia de la mortalidad. Por eso en la novela, al personaje de Elena se le disparan los dos índices: el del dolor y el del placer. Se aferra al placer y lo vive como pura supervivencia, como un acto de vida o muerte.