Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño Essay at the NYRB

~ bythefirelight

The NYRB as an essay from Roberto Bolaño about stealing books. It is from his forthcoming collection of essays out in May. Via Conversational Reading

From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine—or shone—with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed.

Review of New Horacio Castellanos Moya Book

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El Pais has a review of the new Horacio Castellanos Moya. It is the fourth installment in his Aragon series. I know Tirania Memoria (Tyrant Memory) is coming out in the US this June. I thought the book was good and I think I would like to read the whole series someday. (you can read my review here) .

La saga de los Aragón se inició con Donde no estén ustedes (2003), siguió con Desmoronamiento (2006) y Tirana memoria (2008). ¿Habrá una continuación tras La sirvienta y el luchador? “Probablemente. Estas novelas van creciendo de forma espontánea. No tengo un diseño preciso de la saga, pero casi siempre queda un fleco suelto”. Ojalá. El lector se pregunta qué será de Joselito, que tiene ahora 19 años y está con los subversivos armados.

En El asco (1997), el escritor narra la demolición política y cultural de El Salvador; en el libro de relatos En la congoja de la pasada tormenta (2009), habla del miedo, de la violencia que trastorna la vida, de la guerra, del destierro, de las difíciles relaciones humanas. Son solo dos ejemplos de su obra, que estremece.

Horacio Castellanos Moya (Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1957) se crió en El Salvador. “Mis historias son de El Salvador. Su eje es la experiencia de mi formación y crecimiento en este país. Quedé conmocionado. De ahí la radicalidad de mis temas”.

¿Alguna vez podrá escribir sobre un país en paz? “Creo que yo no veré esa paz. El gran problema es que una sociedad vive aterrorizada por la violencia política y cuando se logra una cierta normalidad, vive aterrorizada por la violencia criminal. Cuando todo esto alcanza a dos o tres generaciones es difícil desmontar los mecanismos del terror. Centroamérica vive el cansancio de una vida en zozobra permanente”.

There is also a second review in El Pais of the book, which gives it high marks.

La sirvienta y el luchador narra las peripecias de ambos cuando vuelven a encontrarse en circunstancias extremas después de muchos años. El Vikingo, una antigua figura de la lucha libre reconvertido en policía y que se encuentra gravemente enfermo, participa con su escuadrón en el secuestro de una pareja de jóvenes. Al día siguiente, cuando María Elena acuda a limpiar la casa de los desaparecidos y se dé cuenta del suceso, buscará al viejo luchador para que la ayude a salvarlos. Si ella representa la impotencia de una persona vieja y pacífica, él refleja el embrutecimiento de un hombre simple y bruto que, no obstante, es capaz de culparla por no haberlo redimido con su amor. Sin embargo, el pasado que comparten sirve fundamentalmente para tramar la dura historia de cómo van cayendo una a una las esperanzas de todos los personajes salvo, quizá, la del joven y revolucionario nieto de María Elena, cuyas esperanzas son de destrucción y muerte. A su vez, la enfermedad terminal del luchador podría interpretarse como esa agonía sin fin que supone la perpetuación de la violencia. La podredumbre de su cuerpo, en la que se insiste constantemente, se correspondería con la que se ha infiltrado en el país, ramificándose en una densa maraña de pasiones e intereses sociales, familiares y políticos cuya principal consecuencia es el temor. Acierta Castellanos Moya con ese final inclemente y algo precipitado que, sin embargo, conviene a una novela vertiginosa, aristada y esencial.

Juan José Saer Overview at the Nation

~ bythefirelight

The Nation has an overview of Juan José Saer’s work, including a semi-review of The Sixty-Five Years of Washington which was published this year by Open Letter. Worth a read if you are interested in books that eschew the Boom or realistic fiction.

The “historical” novels stand doubly apart because, though set in the familiar ambience of the Litoral region, they lack the other consistent feature of Saer’s novels and stories, which is the recurrence of characters—a device also used by Piglia—to create depth and resonance while highlighting artificiality. There’s Cat Garay and his twin brother, Pigeon, who like the author moved to Paris; there’s Tomatis, the witty, jaundiced journo; Elisa and her painter husband, Héctor; Botón, the bigmouth, and Washington Noriega, the sagacious mentor (an older ex-leftie turned academic, writing a treatise on the very Colastiné Indians invented in The Witness), among assorted pals and hangers-on. In contrast to the prose-poetry of minutely charted sensation, Saer’s dialogue records scraps of banter in colloquial santafesino rhythms. This is the world of The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (1985), henceforth Sixty-Five. (The title does no favors to Steve Dolph’s translation, which is full of elegant, resourceful solutions to a most difficult text yet splotched by basic errors. Why not simply “Washington’s Sixty-Fifth,” as the phrase refers to a birthday?)

Each Saer novel fascinates with its unique machinery: Sixty-Fiveis wholly discursive. Someone must be speaking the text, because he keeps saying things like “as yours truly was saying, no?” But because this nameless someone knows what everyone thinks and remembers as well as says, he must be a personified omniscient narrator—that is, conventional third-person narrative dressed up as a literal “voice.” Within this oral frame people are said to speak, or to report the words of others, or to claim to report what others claimed that yet others said or did, in a maddening feedback of echoes and distortions proposed as realism. The Spanish title isGlosa, meaning commentary, or variation on a theme: every utterance is provisional, a gloss on a gloss. As in Plato’sSymposium, events reach us fourth- or fifth-hand—but here it’s through layers of misapprehension, wishful thinking, false memory or bad faith. There is no lofty absolute Being, only Becoming.

Short Story from Cristina Rivera Garza at Literal Magazine

~ bythefirelight

Literal Magazine has a brief short story from Cristina Rivera Garza. It starts well enough, but I’m not sure I like the ending. Canal-l has an interview with her but their site is down for the moment, otherwise I would link to the interview.

Nunca lo había hecho antes. Había visto suficientes ancianas cruzar la calle con dificultad sin jamás haberme sentido compelido a tenderles el brazo. Cuando me tropezaba con ciegos, prefería hacerme discretamente de lado. A los niños, siempre tan problemáticos, ni siquiera los volteaba a ver. Por eso fui el primer sorprendido cuando me ofrecí a ayudarle a la mujer con su equipaje –una maleta rectangular y de tamaño mediano que parecía causarle incomodidad, aunque no verdaderos problemas, en el pasillo del vagón.

–Claro –dijo, sonriendo con gracia mientras aceptaba mi ayuda–. Aprecio su gesto –añadió al entregarme sin suspicacia alguna la jaladora de su valija. Yo guardé silencio, sin mover la mano derecha del tubo, y ella, que también estaba de pie, hizo lo mismo. Callada, con la vista puesta sobre algún punto inconcebible al final del pasillo, la mujer no parecía necesitar ayuda, puesto que no era ni tan vieja ni tan frágil, pero parecía, en cambio, merecerla. Había algo en ella de altivez, en efecto, aunque suavizada por una especie de distracción a todas luces congénita. Su presencia a la vez menuda y apabullante me hizo sentir que estaba, de cualquier modo, en presencia de la nobleza.

 

Alejandro Zambra Interview at the Millions

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The Millions has a moderate length interview with Alejandro Zambra. There is a little bit about the Granta inclusion, his new book, and what he has thought of being published in English and Spanish at the same time.

TM: Recognizing that any list like Granta’s will be subjective, is there anyone you feel strongly should have been included, but wasn’t?

AZ: Such lists are always arbitrary, and I suppose there are a lot of authors who were worth including in Granta’s, and in the end were not.  The truth is it’s an uncomfortable subject for me, because I really don’t believe in lists or rankings.  In any case I’d like to highlight the work that younger people have been doing, such as the Chilean Diego Zúñiga or the Mexican Valeria Luiselli (the author of Papeles falsos, one of the best books I’ve read recently).

TM: Not many authors have their books published more or less simultaneously in Spanish and in English, but both La vida privada and Bonsai were.  I’m curious about how the experience is different in Chile and the U.S. How does your status as a native or foreigner affect how people read you, do you think?  Do you feel more pressure to be “representative” in some way when you are outside of Chile?

AZ: I think both novels are very Chilean, so I’m sometimes surprised that they can be read in other languages.  To me, it’s a beautiful thing that readers so distant and different can connect with a book of mine.  It’s like sending out thousands of letters, and little by little receiving replies you never expected.  I guess some readers in the U.S. or in France want to confirm some prior idea they had about Chile or about Latin America.  But books aren’t made to confirm ideas; they’re made to refute them, to question them, to put other images out there where we thought everything had already been said.

Review of New Alejandro Zambra Book of Essays at Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Letras Libres has a favorable review of Alejandro Zambra’s new book of essays No Leer/Cronicas Y Ensayos Sobre Literatura. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it, but it is an interesting view into some of his interests. I’m especially intrigued by his selection of American authors he writes about. I usually don’t see too many people mentioning Edgar Lee Masters, and yet it comes up in a Chilean’s essay on American lit. It is always interesting to see what American authors find an audience in other languages.

En la primera sección, la más variada, “Que vuelva Cortázar” va contra el gesto de moda pero fútil de sus contemporáneos argentinos de infravalorar y destituir al extravagante Cortázar. Además de poetas (de Shakespeare a Pessoa, Eliot y Pound) y Flaubert y Diderot, se concentra en narradores del yo como Levrero, Macedonio (“nuestro Sterne”) y Vila-Matas, preferencia esclarecida por su propia ficción y las minucias sobre el arte de escribir. Si la prosa no ficticia de muchos nuevos narradores deja mucho que desear, también es verdad que es inútil emplear el ensayo como excusa “literaria”. Zambra nos convence de no subestimar el propósito original de ese género.

Es evidente que consagra la primera sección a sus autores, obras y temas favoritos. También elogia las fotocopias sin pedantería académica, y dedica numerosos comentarios brillantemente comprimidos sobre autores estadounidenses (partiendo de la Spoon River Anthology, hasta Cheever y Carver) y cultura popular. Tampoco evita proveer información autobiográfica sobre su costumbre de leer en cualquier lado (“Festival de la novela larga”). Enterado, al día con la crítica especializada (Bloom, Derrida) o de autor (Kundera), ajusta cuentas con figuras mayores como Edwards, y con la “chilenidad”. La capacidad de Zambra para leer a través de los siglos, disciplinas, categorías y definiciones lo distancia de sus contemporáneos. No leer es un gps literario extremadamente oportuno, de un autor establecido que contiene multitudes a las que no se les puede hacer justicia en una reseña.

Fabio Morábito Short Story at Literal Magazine

~ bythefirelight

Literal Magazine has a short story from Fabio Morábito. For those of you don’t know who he is, he is a Mexican poet and fiction writer. He is well known for his poetry, although I haven’t read any of it, and received unending praise for his novel Emilio, los chistes y la muerte  which I reviewed some time ago. This story is interesting and in someways funny. Worth a read if you can read Spanish (I’m not sure how Google Translate would do, it still has problems with getting the gender right in pronouns.)

Está lejos de la parte más concurrida de la playa y, como de costumbre, mientras camina, mira las huellas de los bañistas en la arena. Le gustan los sitios apartados, donde las huellas son escasas y puede observarlas mejor. Mira el rastro de una madre y de su niño, que va en sentido contrario al suyo. Son pisadas de dos o tres horas atrás. Piensa que una mujer no se habría aventurado sola cargando a su niño hasta ese punto de la playa, así que también debió de acompañarlos el padre, cuyas huellas han desaparecido porque seguramente caminaba más cerca de la orilla y han sido borradas por el agua. Las del pequeño, que aparecen y desaparecen a intervalos regulares, indican que su madre lo cargaba, lo bajaba durante un rato y volvía a cargarlo. Donde sus huellas están ausentes, las de la madre se ven más delineadas por el mayor peso que sus pies soportaban en ese momento y el arco dactilar de ella se observa dilatado a causa del movimiento instintivo para proporcionar al cuerpo una mejor base de equilibrio. Él nunca se cansa de ver las alteraciones que tienen lugar en la anatomía del pie de una madre cuando ésta carga a su crío; incluso ha observado que la dilatación del arco dactilar se da espontáneamente en muchas mujeres con sólo mirar a un bebé.

Excerpt Of The Century Behind Me: A Family Saga by Eloy Urroz at Ezra Fitz dot com

~ bythefirelight

Ezra Fitz, the translator of Alberto Fuguet, has an excerpt of The Century Behind Me: A Family Saga by Eloy Urroz which he has translated and is looking to publish. As with his excerpt from Missing, it is a generous excerpt and worth a look.

The protagonist is a woman by the name of Silvana Forns Nakash, and the novel traces the history of her family, told in her own voice. She is a Mexican American, born in the US to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, torn between countries, cultures, and languages.  In coming to terms with her own identity, she paints a Diego Riveraesque mural of the century preceding her birth, one whose scenes include a Syria decimated by cholera, revolutionary Mexico under Cardenas, an Edenic kibbutz in Israel, and a the free-wheeling 60s and 70s right here in America.

In case that sounds at all intriguing, I’m posting an excerpt here from my own sample translation.  Please read, and enjoy.

In October of 1918, General Allenby’s cavalry had retaken Damascus and captured some 75,000 Turks and Germans.  The outbreak of malaria—brought by mosquitoes from the Euphrates—came on the wings of the cholera epidemics that had twice (in 1823 and 1832) already decimated the population.  The so-called “Spanish Flu” also swept through Europe and the Middle East in those days, leaving as many dead as the entire Great War itself had.

Once Damascus fell, the final Ottoman redoubt was Aleppo and its surrounding areas, a city that once—and for three centuries—had remained under Ottoman control, until 1833 when it fell to the Egyptian forces led by Muhammad Ali.  The German general von Oppen, who had managed to keep his troops together, died of cholera, leaving a power vacuum that Allenby took advantage of with his attack on the last bastion of central European forces.  Nevertheless it would be none other than Commander Macandrew who would finally retake Aleppo for the Arabs and, of course, for the French (into whose hands it would pass in 1920).  That final campaign took place in Haritan, to the northeast of Aleppo, finally resulting in the armistice of October 31, 1918.  The war had ended, but not the consequences of pain and death that cholera, malaria, and violence had left in their wake.

Missing (una investigacion) by Alberto Fuguet – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Missing (una investigacion) /Missing (My Uncle’s Story) (Spanish Edition)
Alberto Fuguet
Alfaguara, 2010 pg 386

Alberto Fuguet’s Missing (una investigacion) is one of the most interesting books I’ve read for sometime. In it Fuguet continues his explorations of modern life, the interchange of culture between Latin America and the United States, and the mixing of genres that have marked books like Shorts, and applies those elements to his own family, examining what made his Uncle Carlos disappear, to go missing. More than an immigrant narrative, more than a critique of American society, Missing is the story of a man never quite lives the American dream, but lives a life that is all too American.

Carlos Fuguet is one of three sons of a Chilean patriarch who moves the family to the United States in the early 1960s after his fortunes change and he his forced to drive a taxi. The father is a tough and proud man and the thought of driving a taxi is impossible to accept. He moves the family to the US even though that means moving his teenage boys to a country where they don’t speak much English. Carlos, who had always been the good student, the one expected to succeed, soon finds himself adrift. After high school he works as a busy boy in a hotel near LA’s airport and living in a dive in Hollywood since he can’t stand his parents. It is a lonely experience and in one of the more moving episodes he breaks down crying on the Santa Monica pier. A young American sailor comforts him and Carlos says at that moment he finally lost his fear, the fear that had come form being a stranger and alone. Yet that loneliness and living on the margin in dives will follow him throughout his life. Even in the early chapters it is obvious that Carlos finds the need to escape, to be away from his family, especially his father, at all costs.

To understand Carlos, one has to know more about his father. He is a cold man who holds his family at a distance. In a telling moment early on, when Alerto is relating his experiences with the man his grandfather says, “No me tratas de tu. No Soy tu padre…” (Don’t call me by you (familiar form), I’m not your father…). For a Spanish speaker it points to a grandfather who is cold, distant. There will be no grandfatherly indulgences. That coldness is only magnified when describing the relationship between the father and the sons. Carlos can never forgive him, nor his mother who even if she didn’t overtly side with him, always stayed with him and never defended Carlos. Later, when the Carlos’s father is dying and Carlos calls, his father says, “you are a disappointment, we never want to talk to you.” Even on his death bed the father refuses to forgive, and to make he worse he uses the we as if the rest of the family agreed with him. But it is not surprising as he is the father who said when Carlos wanted to buy a car,

tu no, no necesitas un auto,
todos necesitan un auto en los angeles, le dije,
tu no, no necesitas ir a ninuna parte,
aqui esta tu familia
quiero otras cosas que mi familia, le dije.
ah, esos amigos gringos tyuos, me dijo,
te van a arruinar

you don’t need a car,
everyone needs a car in los angeles, i told him,
you don’t need a car to go anywhere,
here is you family
i want other things than my family, i said.
ah, your gringo friends, he said,
they are going to ruin you

The argument is a typical father son argument, and shows a father that despite the successes he would have in the US, he never could see him self as an American. But the family problems run deeper than arguments between first and second generation. In an even stranger episode Alberto notes that Carlos is the second Carlos, the first one was a baby that didn’t live past 1 year. When Carlos was born he was named just like the first. One has the sense that Carlos could never quite live up to what the you Carlos might have.

From such beginnings, Carlos lives a life that is one series of disappointments. When he is 21 he marries a 17 year old and unsurprisingly the marriage lasts less than a year. Latter he marries a rich woman he meets in New Port Beach and while the relationship works, he begins to envy her money. In a fit of frustration he embezzles from a religious community so that he can take her to Vegas. He’s caught and goes to jail for the first of two stints in prison. It is from then on that he seems to live at the margins of American life, if not on the run from the police, then trying to survive the best he can. It is not an easy life and although there are moments of happiness and companionship, he lives alone moving from place to place. For awhile it seems to he has found a place in hotel management, but even that dissipates. At times he is the epitome of Americanness, pulling himself up from his bootstraps, becoming a hotel manager even though he had done two terms in jail for theft. But something always goes wrong and he is left on the margins of society. He is just unable to win.

Towards the end of the book, Alberto asks himself, for all the years he’s worked why doesn’t he have anything to show for it? After having a successful run with a hotel chain turing around troubled hotels he ends up in a run down hotel in Vegas living in a room that is filled with old fast food containers. The irony is he has been living one of the dark sides of the American dream, frittering away his money on silly things, always short on money. In one of the more telling episodes, during the 1980’s Carlos buys an expensive VCR for his father. It is an expensive piece of equipment that makes his father angry. Carlos had only good intentions in giving the VCR, but it shows complete emersion in consumer culture. Missing is not only the troubled story of a rootless immigrant, it is destructive longing for the American dream that is always one purchase away.

Missing, true to its investigative nature, is not a complete story, but one with lacuna and unanswered questions. Alberto uses different genres to approach the unanswerable from as many directions as possible. The bulk of the book is a long poem in Carlos’s voice which lets you see the story as Carlos sees it (and Alberto writes it down). He also includes personal memory, a third person history of his journey to his grandfather’s house, and the abortive first interviews he made with Carlos in a Denver Denny’s. The multiple points of view allow Alberto to comment of Carlos’s story and reveal a fuller picture of Carlos. Much of the family hatred for Carlos’s father comes from these scenes and it makes Carlos a more sympathetic character, one you can almost understand. What also comes is Alberto’s confusion, disappointment and melancholy as he learns Carlos’s life. For Alberto, Carlos had always been the cool uncle, the one who went his own way and disappeared. But that disappearing act was not as glamourous as it seemed from a distance.

One of Alberto’s skills as a writer is to use the detritus of everyday life in his works without it seeming cloying. He has always used product names in his books, but not heavy handedly like a Steven King. They are just something one comes across and occasionally mark certain societal transitions:

Estaba en Las Vegas, en contacto con el mundo, con una direccion que aparecia en Google Earth.

He was em Las Vegas, in contact with the world, with a an address that appeared in Google Earth.

In Missing his use of  this adds to the already strong element of Americanness. Not only does Carlos’s story resonate as an American story, but Alberto shows himself to be a keen observer of American life, something only someone who has lived in a country can show. It is that mix of observation and detail in telling Carlos’s story that makes the book an American story.

Alberto Fuguet considers this his most American book and he is right. Carlos is the other side of America, the one that is free to try and try again, yet it is a futile effort. It is the more than the story of an immigrant, but a story of the other America that lives at the edges of the American Dream.

You can read an excerpt of the book at the translator’s site.

First Chapter of Alberto Fuguet’s Missing in English at Ezra Fitz’s Site

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Ezra Fitz, the translator of Alberto Fuguet’s Missing an Investigation, has posted the first chapter of the book on his blog. It is a sizable excerpt and I recommend that you read it. I have almost finished the book in Spanish and I have been impressed with the book. It is a book that should have a resonance with American readers and I hope a publisher will bring it out soon. Until then, you have the  generous excerpt from the translator to tide you over.

(If you would like to read some of the reviews in the foreign press that I have covered, take a look here.)

From Fitz’s intro:

The book describes the author’s search for his uncle Carlos, who left his native Chile and disappeared into the vast and expansive United States.  It’s been called an impressive reportorial look at what happens when someone becomes trapped between two cultures as well as what is lost and gained through immigration.  This hybrid story is accompanied by a hybrid text comprised of emails, interviews, fiction, memoir, and something that can only be described as a Bukowski-esque epic poem.  The best thing about this book is that it is no run of the mill sob strory or impetus for some kind of political reform.  What it is is a family story about an uncle and nephew, a prodigal sons and the margins of American society through Chilean eyes.

Here is the opening:

In 1986, my uncle Carlos Patricio Fuguet García vanished off the face of the earth.  He disappeared in Baltimore, Maryland, far from his native Santiago.  The phone calls just stopped, and letters started being returned.  A short while later, my father, his older brother, contacted his employer, a four-star hotel, and they knew nothing as to his whereabouts.  Uncle Javier, his younger brother and my godfather, managed to get in touch with the superintendent of his apartment building, who told them he was no longer living there.

That was the last we ever heard of him.

From that point on, he was gone.

Missing.

Nobody knew where he was.

Carlos Fuentes on Mario Vargas Llosa and Latin American Dictators

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El Pais has an essay from Carlos Funtes on Mario Vargas Llosa and Latin American dictators. It is mostly about the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. There were a couple of items that caught my in particular. The first is a project that never came to be, but one can imagine what it might have ben like, a book by Latin America’s greatest authors writing 50 pages or so about a dictator.

Vargas Llosa y yo invitamos a una docena de autores latinoamericanos. Cada uno debería escribir una novela breve -no más de cincuenta páginas por dictador- sobre su tirano nacional favorito. El volumen colectivo habría de llamarseLos padres de las patrias. Nuestro editor francés, Claude Gallimard, se convirtió en el padrino del proyecto. Por desgracia, a la postre resultó imposible coordinar los múltiples tiempos y las variadas voluntades de los escritores que, si mi memoria es tan buena como la de El Supremo de Augusto Roa Bastos, incluían, además de Vargas Llosa y yo mismo, al propio Roa, el argentino Julio Cortázar, el venezolano Miguel Otero Silva, el colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, el cubano Alejo Carpentier, el dominicano Juan Bosch, a los chilenos José Donoso y Jorge Edwards (Donoso prometió ocuparse de un dictador boliviano; su mujer, María Pilar, nació en ese penthouse de las Américas). Al fracasar el proyecto, tres de los escritores mencionados decidieron seguir adelante y concluir sus propias novelas: Carpentier (El recurso del método), García Márquez (El otoño del patriarca) y Roa Bastos (Yo el Supremo).

[…]

Iniciado por Valle-Inclán en Tirano Banderas (1926) el tema del abuso del poder, el autoritarismo despótico y la distancia entre la ley y la práctica, se continúa, con los Ardavines de Gallegos, el don Mónico de Azuela, el Pedro Páramo de Rulfo, el Caudillo de Guzmán y ya citados, los dictadores de Roa Bastos, García Márquez y Carpentier. La diferencia en Vargas Llosa es que no apela a un seudónimo literario o a una figura simbólica, sino que nos refiere a un dictador concreto, personalizado, con nombre, apellido y fechas certificables de nacimiento y muerte: Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Benefactor de la Patria Nueva, Restaurador de la Independencia Financiera y Primer Periodista de la Nación, aunque los dominicanos, para no meterse en aprietos, lo llamaron “Mr. Jones” o “Mr. Jackson”.

Samanta Schweblin’s Pájaros en la boca Reviewed in Letras Libres

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Letras Libres has a fairly negative review of Samanta Schweblin’s latest book. I have been curious about her work and have written a reflection on her works recently. I haven’t decided where I fall when thinking about her work. It can be interesting, but at least one story I read seemed too safe.

¿Qué necesidad tendríamos de ver elevada la temperatura dramática? Acaso mi reparo sea moral, pero también es literario –no creo que los dos adjetivos se hallen para nada distantes uno del otro. Como metáfora de una fisura secreta, la anomalía puede abrir una percepción de la naturaleza paradójica de seres humanos que, al no tener la valentía para ser sus propios verdugos, asignan ese papel a sucesos disruptivos ante los cuales no hay manera –o eso pienso– de mantener la indiferencia. En cambio, por timorata, la pesquisa en torno de la conducta humana, en Pájaros de la boca, se queda en lo superficial.
Y si repite, abaratado (la anomalía sin la consecuencia profunda), el mecanismo propio de Kafka o el primer Buzzati –si no incorpora una variación que surja del temperamento o la circunstancia epocal–, el discípulo permanece en esa condición al revelar sometimiento a la parte más obvia de un método urdido por otros, lo que podría interpretarse como oportunismo: aunque incompleta, la lección ya canónica es fácilmente aplaudida por el lector conformista, sobre todo si nos encontramos ante una prosa sin exigencias, léxicamente seducida por la pobreza y la palidez y negada a la audacia técnica debido acaso a la propensión formulera por finales sorpresivos que, a estas alturas de la repetición, son de lo más predecibles (en “Bajo tierra”, el viejo que cuenta la historia de los niños perdidos en un pueblo minero termina siendo él mismo un minero). Sobre todo una cosa: el texto narrativo puede ser clasicista en su ejecución y austero en su trabajo prosístico cuando la perspectiva de lo vital que la voz literaria presenta es discordante y nueva, y no una reiteración edulcorada de lo que otros antes con mayor hondura han patentado.
¿Para qué ofuscar al comodino lector con una prospección dramática que, si perturbadora, es por lo mismo de aprobación incierta? Supongamos el caso: me subo a los hombros de un gigante, pero en vez de ponerme de pie, estirar los brazos hacia las alturas y lanzar lejos la vista y la voz, mejor cierro los ojos y busco encogerme, guardo silencio aferrándome por el temor a caer o a superar, con el arrojo propio, al gigante que me hospeda. De ese modo, no habré de caer nunca, pero también me niego el mirar lejos, hacia una nueva y mayor distancia. Así estas ficciones. Sobre los hombros de Kafka, se niegan el privilegio de arriesgarse a la victoria sobre Kafka. ~

Portions of Granta Spanish Translation Online

~ bythefirelight

Granta has placed writing from its best Spanish Language writers online (via New Pages). This is a good chance to sample some of the edition for free.

From the print edition, free to read online:

 

Elena Poniatowska Wins Premio Biblioteca Breve Prize for 2011 + Video

~ bythefirelight

The Mexican author Elena Poniatowska has won the Premio Biblioteca Breve 2011 for a novel based on the life of Leonora Carrington.

From El Pais

La escritora mexicana Elena Poniatowska (París, 1932) ha ganado el Premio Biblioteca Breve 2011 de la editorial Seix Barral con la novela Leonora, basada en la vida de la pintora Leonora Carrington, también de origen mexicano. La obra será publicada el próximo 22 de febrero. Entre otros, Poniatowska recibió en 2007 el prestigioso premio Rómulo Gallegos.

From Seix Barral (the publisher) via Moleskin Literario

Leonora» (Seix Barral) es un recuento de su vida desde la infancia, como una niña excéntrica y pija, la oveja negra de una familia de acaudalados industriales, a su destierro en México, tras escapar de un psiquiátrico de Santander. En medio, París, las vanguardias históricas, personajes como Dalí, Miró, Buñuel y Breton, el desastre de la guerra, España, y una aventura vital capaz de enloquecer a cualquiera. «Leonora dice que el sentimentalismo es una forma de cansancio, pero no puedo evitarlo y querría dedicar el premio a todas esas mujeres que viven en tiempos de agresión. En mi país pasan cosas terribles ligadas al narcotráfico. El premio es una alegría que demuestra que no todo es malo», señaló Poniatowska al conocerse el fallo del galardón.

From Canal-L footage of her at the anouncment of the award. (Honestly, it is a little boring and you can skip to minute 1.45 without missing anything).

Fernando Iwasaki on the 1000 and 1 Nights and Spanish Language Literature

~ bythefirelight

Fernando Iwasak has an article on the 1000 and 1 Nights and Spanish Language Literature in El Pais. It is worth a quick look.

Sin embargo, es en nuestro idioma -el castellano- donde he hallado los testimonios más rotundos de la devoción por Las mil y una noches. Pienso en Cuando el viejo Simbad vuelva a las islas (1962), de Álvaro Cunqueiro, una novela de estirpemilyunanochesca, mas no por la presencia de Simbad sino porque está construida con relatos de relatos. Hasta los artículos periodísticos de Cunqueiro remiten a Las mil y una noches, como podría comprobarlo cualquiera que lea La bella del dragón (1991) yFábulas y leyendas de la mar (1982). ¿De dónde viene la amena y fastuosa erudición de Cunqueiro en placeres y fornicios? Marchando una ración de metaliteratura: “En muchos países de Oriente Próximo el primer coito matrimonial es matinal. En España, por ejemplo, es la noche de bodas, porque los novios se han pasado al día en la ceremonia nupcial, en el almuerzo o en la comida, y se van a la cama tarde, a lo mejor tras cien kilómetros o más de viaje”. O sea, una birria de polvo.

Todavía en la literatura española contemporánea abundan los adoradores de Las mil y una noches, como Antonio Muñoz Molina en La realidad de la ficción (1992) o Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga en El juego del mono (2011), aunque son los escritores latinoamericanos quienes más han contribuido a la entronización de la lectura en lengua española del clásico árabe, destacando por encima de todos el argentino Jorge Luis Borges.

Article About Alberto Fuguet’s Missing in La Tercera

~ bythefirelight

La Tercera has a good article about Alberto Fuguets’ Missing. I’m looking forward to reading it in a few weeks.

Missing no es sólo literatura. No es una novela. Una investigación, se lee en el subtítulo del libro. Probablemente, Missing sea el intento de Fuguet por entender por qué su tío un día se fue y nunca volvió. Por necesidad, también es el esbozo de la biografía de ese hombre; por decisión, el registro de la trastienda de esa búsqueda que el autor de Cortos inició en 2003; por reflejo, un viaje al reverso del sueño americano y, sin duda, el retrato más honesto y descarnado que ha hecho Fuguet de su familia. Odios y reconciliaciones incluidas. Nombres y episodios reales.

“Pero esto no es una traición, no es un ajuste de cuentas, esto es un homenaje a mi familia”, precisa Fuguet. “Antes, fui irresponsable porque tiré cosas sin aviso. Quizás dañé mucho a mi familia, ya no la puedo dañar más. Este libro no es sobre el daño. Aquí pido perdón por haber sido un pendejo”, explica.

 

Review of Bolaño’s Newest Book Los sinsabores del verdadero policía en El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a review of Roberto Bolaño’s latest book to appear in Spanish, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía en El Pais.

El secreto de su fortuna está sin embargo en la economía narrativa, el don de fabulador y la exploración de personajes con las raíces en la memoria y la literatura. La aptitud de Bolaño es extraordinaria para contar relevantemente, es decir, para hacer de la rutina o la nimiedad narración poderosa, cargada de sentido y de crecimiento interior: esta cursilería quiere significar la densidad moral que van ganando los personajes cuando el lector entrecruza la información sobre los personajes principales -la madre de Rosa, Rosa, los jóvenes estudiantes catalanes, el policía que vigila al profesor-. Muchas de estas páginas están entre las mejores de Bolaño, espléndidas y suntuosas sin sobredosis ni enmismamiento brujuleante. Y algunas de ellas son autorretratos desde el desvalimiento o la desnudez expuesta, como si a través de los personajes hallase el modo de hablar verdadero. Lo que enseñaba este profesor de literatura era que “los escritores se instalaban en el alma de los lectores como en una prisión mullida, pero que después esa prisión se ensanchaba o explotaba. Que todo sistema de escritura es una traición (…) Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo”. Esta novela es un gran torbellino ordenado ante el espejo.

The Halfway House By Guillermo Rosales a Review

~ bythefirelight

The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook)
Guillermo Rosales
New Directions, 2009, 121 pg

Guillermo Rosales’ The Halfway House is a tortured passage through mental illness and exile.  It is a disturbed vision, a place where dreams do not survive, and the fragility of life away from the home country is unbearable even for those who have little nostalgia for it. Despite its depiction of life in the halfway house as cruel and animalistic, the book, probably thanks to its briefness, has a precision that makes it not only eminently readable, but impactful, leaving one with the deep sense of pain that comes with mental illness and exile.

William Figueras  is a writer and Cuban exile living in Miami. His life, even at a young age, was given over to literature, and by 22 he had written a novel that the Cuban censors refused to publish because they said it was pornographic, but really it had the temerity to show the Communist Party in a bad light. Shortly after, he says, he went mad. 20 years latter he flees to the United States where in his brief 6 month residence he is in and out of several mental hospitals. His family can’t handle him and place him in an halfway house run by a man more interested in collecting the checks of the residents than providing care. It’s a horrid place reminiscent of the 19th century where the mentally ill are left to their own devices and no one cares if the toilets overflow or the residents prey on each other. And all of it is overseen by a thief and sexual predator, Arsenio, whose only interest is to get drunk and take advantage of everyone.

The halfway house is the epitome of a social darwinism with its survival of the fittest mentality. Arsenio thinks nothing of abusing stealing money from the residents or having sex with them. It is the kind of lawlessness that allows Figueras who is the most stable to enter the same kind of abusive relationship with the other residents.After a short stay there he thinks nothing of hitting the residents he doesn’t like or occasionally taking their money. Worst of all he has a pact with Arsenio not to say anything about his abuses. Yet he isn’t criminal as such, but a man who lives by the rule of the environment he is in. He is aware of what he is doing is outside of some norms, but the lack of structure and the ease with which he descends into the cruelty is a reflection of the world outside the halfway house that is just as brutal. Several times Figueras calls those who live outside the house winners, which has the implication not only that those in the house are responsible for their fate, but that the inability to fit into the structure of society automatically casts one out. Figueras, who is obviously self aware of his situation and critical of the Maimi exile experience, he has few options. As Figueras tells it, his mental illness isn’t symbolic, but in Rosales hands it takes on a symbolic aspect, showing the untenable state one finds oneself in when he does not belong in the home country, nor the exile community.

Figueras does try to leave the depravity of the halfway house and seek out a new life, one that is humane, and most importantly, is his own to control. To do this he needs Frances, a resident of his age, who moves into the house and provides him the opportunity to bond with someone. It is a strange bonding, though. He alternates between strangling her and making love to her, all the while she says, Oh, my angel, in a kind of refrain that is disconnected from most of what he does. You are not even sure if she really exists as an independent person and is just responding to his actions. He rents a small apartment for them to live in and they try to escape, but she is taken away by her mother. At one level it is just one more act of control by an oppressive state-like institution. Yet Frances appears quite mentally ill and one wonders if Figueras is just deluding himself with the future they will have. When the escape fails, Figueras who is free to leave, returns to the home. He has few options and the home, despite its horrific conditions, provides him with a kind of easy power and stability that he doesn’t have outside.

The Halfway House is a damming view of exile and the American Dream. Rosales not only sees an America where there are winners and losers, but a place where the basest of human actions occur. Yet he has no illusions about the old country, Cuba. Even though Figueras was a one time supporter of the regime, he does not see anything hopeful in it. To be a refuge from both systems as Figueras, the writer is, is to loose at minimum physical comforts, and the extreme one’s self. Perhaps it is no surprise that Figueras is dedicated to literature, a shifting world of meanings that lays outside of the strictures of communism and capitalism. Yet it is also a futile pursuit and leaves him with little but a suitcase full of books.

It is easy to read Guillermo Rosales’ own struggle with mental illness into The Halfway House. But there is more to the book than facile autobiography, and Rosales created a harrowing picture of humanity pushed, not so much to its most desperate, but its most untethered, a state that brings out the cruelty and complicity in humans by sheer lack of direction. It is in this untethered state that Rosales’ The Halway House finds its greatest power to show humanity at its end.

FTC Notice: the publisher kindly provided me with the book and I thank them for that.

The Centenary of José María Arguedas’ Birth

~ bythefirelight

Moleskine Liteario has a post on the Centenary of the Peruvian author José María Arguedas. He was a boom era writer from Peru who, sadly, committed suicide at the age of 58. He is considered one of the best Peruvian authors of the 20th century. His work Deep Rivers was translated into English in the 70’s and is still in print. I think Moleskin Literario says it best:

Hoy se cumplen 100 años del nacimiento de uno de los autores fundamentales para entender al Perú y, también, a América Latina: José María Arguedas. Espero que este centenario sirva no solo para validar su figura como intelectual y como escritor, sino para lograr leerlo con nuevos ojos, una lectura que escape de los encuadrados límites del indigenismo (o neo-indigenismo, como se le llama en las escuelas) y logre entender esa obra compleja, llena de signos que no tienen que ver solo con la peruanidad o la identidad nacional, y que va desde el intimismo (Los ríos profundos) hasta la experimentación (El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo).

He also links to an article in Ñ :

Hoy se cumplen 100 años del nacimiento de uno de los autores fundamentales para entender al Perú y, también, a América Latina: José María Arguedas. Espero que este centenario sirva no solo para validar su figura como intelectual y como escritor, sino para lograr leerlo con nuevos ojos, una lectura que escape de los encuadrados límites del indigenismo (o neo-indigenismo, como se le llama en las escuelas) y logre entender esa obra compleja, llena de signos que no tienen que ver solo con la peruanidad o la identidad nacional, y que va desde el intimismo (Los ríos profundos) hasta la experimentación (El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo).

Bilingual Review of Clandestine in Chile at Caravana de recuredos

~ bythefirelight

Caravana de recuerdos has a bilingual review of Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile. The book sounds interesting for the adventure of the story, but also to see García Márquez as not only a novelist, but a journalist. It is a very short review (half of it is right here) but it is a good an introduction to the book as any, and sometimes brevity is best.

How cool, how absolutely cool, to be able to close out my 2010 reading year with this little gem of a book.  The year is 1985.  After a long absence in exile abroad, Chilean film director Miguel Littín, “who figures among a list of 5,000 exiles absolutely forbidden to return to their country,” resolves to return to Chile in order to shoot a documentary about “the reality of his country after twelve years of military dictatorship”  (7). Passing himself off as an Uruguayan businessman with false papers and an unconvincing Uruguayan accent, Littín spends six weeks undercover in Chile working with three European film crews to try and “pin the tale on the Pinochet donkey” (22).  My, how I loved this work!  Although it reads like a spy novel, the key moments in this first-person, non-fiction account poignantly underscore the Pinochet regime’s oppressive nature and the will of the Chilean people to live with dignity in spite of the political difficulties.