Spanish

Cristina Fernandez Cubas Profiled in El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has a short profile of Cristina Fernandez Cubas this week. She is an excellent short story writer, one of those I wish would be translated into English. I’m still reading her stories, but they all are excellent. You can also see what her study looks like here.

Ha escrito también novela, memorias y teatro, pero son los relatos los que han convertido a Cristina Fernández Cubas (Arenys de Mar, Barcelona, 1945) en la cuentista de cabecera de toda una legión de lectores. Si entraran en su casa les parecería que está llena de vestigios. De su biografía, por supuesto, pero también de las inquietantes historias que explica en sus libros. En la puerta de la cocina, por ejemplo, hay una pequeña pintura de un entrañable demonio con rabo, el regalo de una amiga que sabía de su afición por estos seres que sobrevolaban Parientes pobres del diablo, y en un frasquito guarda un puñado de arena del teatro de Mérida que recogió el día del estreno de la Orestiada en la versión que adaptó su marido, el fallecido escritor Carlos Trías. De su afición a la tauromaquia da cuenta un “belén eterno” en el que, en lugar de pastores ha situado dos toreros, un elefante y tres nazarenos. Al inicio ha comentado que tiene dudas razonables sobre cuál sería “su rincón” en este agradable ático del Eixample de Barcelona, con terraza a un patio de manzana en la que reinan unos tímidos cactus. “Es que mi rincón es toda la casa”, aclara. “No sólo se trabaja cuando se está escribiendo, a veces mientras me balanceo es cuando se me aparece lo que después voy a desarrollar”. Y lo demuestra sentándose en un cómodo balancín repintado varias veces al que, explica, le costó encontrar su lugar hasta que se varó en esta salita en la que lee y escucha música. “De hecho, podríamos haber hecho la foto en un tren porque lo utilizo mucho, siempre que puedo, y allí leo, me invento cosas, escribo …”.

No será por falta de estudios. Tiene dos, que utiliza de manera indistinta, pero la foto se hace en uno pequeño, junto al salón, en el que va dando forma a esa “novela llena de cuentos” de la que sólo adelanta que es un trabajo difícil de definir, que aún está en gestación. “Será un paréntesis respecto a lo que hacía ahora, pero estoy muy animada porque es algo muy creativo y extraño”. No tiene fecha -“la libertad y la falta de presión es lo más importante para escribir”- y, mientras, espera ilusionada que a principios del próximo año Tusquets, que en 2008 recopiló sus relatos en Todos los cuentos, recupere Cosas que ya no existen, las memorias que publicó hace ya casi una década. También fue una aventura, una mezcla de géneros en la que se adentra de tanto en tanto. Aunque lo suyo, reconoce, es el cuento, este género “misterioso” y “falsamente breve” que, advierte, “no se acaba con la palabra fin”.

Juan Jose Saer, Mercè Rodored, Mathias Enard’s Zone Winter 2010 from Open Letter

~ bythefirelight

Open Letter Press has released its fall catalog and it has some pretty exciting items in it. Of particular interest to me are Mercè Rodored’s short stories. I read her Death in Spring last summer and thought it was great. I don’t know much about Juan Jose Saer, but the description sounds interesting. And Mathias Enard’s Zone is one of those stylistic works that is too tempting not to read.You can down load the catalog which contains samples and bios from Open Letter.

The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Catalonia) Collected here are thirty-one of Mercè Rodoreda’s most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda’s most beloved short story collections: Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These stories capture Rodoreda’s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition—Rodoreda’s “women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty” (Natasha Wimmer).

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington by Juan Jose Saer. Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Argentina)

It’s October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematician—wealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in white—is just back from a grand tour of Europe. He’s on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into Ángel Leto, a relative newcomer to Rosario who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.

One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife’s assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega’s sixty-fifth birthday—a party neither of them attended.

Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.

Zone by Mathias Enard. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France)

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .

One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.

Gioconda Belli Wins the Premio La Otra Orilla

~ bythefirelight

MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO notes that Gioconda Belli has won the La Otra Orilla prize. I haven’t read her fiction, but her auto biography about her time with the Sandanistas was interesting, funny and insightful. In person she is quite interesting and I’m curious what her novels are like. It is quite the prize, too.

El éxito que tuvo la poeta y narradora nicaragüense Gioconda Belli en el Festival de la Palabra en Puerto Rico fue, para mí, inédito. Sabía de su prestigio, sabía de sus premios (de hecho, yo la presenté como Premio Seix Barral en la Feria Internacional del Libro hace unos años) pero no sabía que su carisma arrastraba multitudes en Puerto Rico. Ahora que ha ganado el premio La Otra Orilla, de la editorial Norma, me imagino que esas multitudes estarán felices.

Dice la nota:

La poeta y novelista nicaragüense Gioconda Belli fue galardonada hoy con el premio La Otra Orilla -dotado con 100.000 dólares y la publicación de su novela en toda América y España- por su libro “Crónicas de la izquierda erótica”, informaron voceros de la casa local del Grupo editorial Norma. Entre los 615 manuscritos recibidos se encontraba la obra de Belli, la primera mujer elegida para recibir este galardón, cuyo jurado estuvo integrado por los escritores Santiago Roncagliolo (Perú), Mario Mendoza (Colombia) y Pere Sureda (España). El jurado expresó que en la novela “se destaca el humorismo de su sátira política, la notable inventiva de la trama y la destreza de la autora para mantener la tensión narrativa contando una historia desde múltiples puntos de vista sin perder la sencillez”. Y agrega: “En el panorama de la novela política latinoamericana, ampliamente dominado por figuras masculinas, esta novela es una divertida e inesperada provocación”.

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Christina Fernandez Cubas – Reinvigorating the Spanish Short Story

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

In this review
Mi hermana Elba (My Sister Elba)
Los altillos de Brumal (The Attics of Brumal)
from Todos los cuentos (All the Stories)
Tusquets, 2008

Christina Fernández Cubas is considered on of the most important Spanish short story writers since the end of the Franco era. Starting with her first book, My Sister Elba, published in 1980, she has been continually praised as important author by authors such as Enrique Villa-Matas (Spanish only) who recently said, “as everyone knows, her book My Sister Elba was decisive in the revitalization of the genre of the short story in Spain at the end of the 70s.” Her work is lauded for its inventiveness and the originality of her imagination, and a reading the relatively little she has published, bares out the praise. While it can be hard for an someone not familiar with the history of the Spanish short story to know if her impact was that great, her stories transcend any historical moment and are gems of story telling.

Cubas’ stories all fall within the genre of fantastic literature, yet in the same way that Poe, one of her favorites, is more than just spooky stories for Halloween, her works transcend genre. Often she focuses on the border lands between childhood and adulthood, creating a worlds were the impossible exists for children, and is unimaginable by adults. These dualities also intersect age and class, so that the modern, educated adult may look for rationality where there is none.

El reloj de Bagdad (The Clock from Baghdad) is probably the best example of this tension. In the story, the father of two young children brings home an antique clock one day. It is a beautiful clock with exquisite complications, yet the two old women who live in the house and have taken care of the family for years, don’t trust it. They think it is cursed. One won’t even go near it and leaves the house after years of service. The children, too, are scared of it. Yet the clock hasn’t done anything specific. The narrator, one of the now adult children, only can give us a sense of its immensity, as if that presence alone was enough to scare. When the family returns from a vacation the house is on fire and one of the few things they can save is the clock. The fire seems to confirm the curse. And when the father wants to sell it, the antique dealer refuses to take it back. Ultimately, the family moves out of town on the Day of San Juan, and the old women burn the clock in one of of the many pyres that mark the day.

The Clock from Baghdad has all the elements that mark her work. First, the story has an uncertain narrator who is always looking back into a past that is not only hazy, but a way of thinking that doesn’t exists for her anymore. Second, it is peopled with children who don’t understand the grown up world, and who make their own world, which creates a tension that is often mysterious, but can also be a possibility that is no longer possible to express. Her stories, however, do not rest on simple platitudes of the incorruptibility of children or their innate goodness. Cubas is too inventive to let her stories conclude so easily.

Mi hermana Elba, the title story of her first work, shows how she uses childhood as a distant place that has different powers, but can be as terrifying and cruel as the adult world. The narrator opens the story looking at an old note book and wondering how she wrote it. It appears as something unconnected to her. In its pages are one year of her life when when she attended at Catholic boarding school with her younger sister, Elba. It is a lonely experience at first, but then she meets an orphan from the neighboring village who lives in the school. Together they explore the off limits quarters where the nuns live. One day when a nun returns suddenly to her room, the girls hide in a corner where the nun should have seen them, but for some reason does not notice them. It is here that the orphan reveals the secret pockets throughout the school where one can hide in plain sight. They explore all of these together. Elba, though, is the best at them and often can go deep into the secret spots so that her voice sounds plaintive, lost. Then summer comes and when the orphan returns, she is no longer interested in the hiding spots and has changed her interest to boys. Elba continues with the hiding spots and the narrator often will hear her pleading for her even though she isn’t around. It is a haunting feeling and the story is at it strangest at these moments. Yet like the orphan, the narrator ages at and the next summer she is more interested in boys, finding her first boy friend amongst the kids who hang out on the beach. When a tragedy suddenly befalls Elba, the narrator is shocked to learn twenty years latter, that the only thing she could think to write in her diary is “this is the best day of my life.”

Mi hermana Elba mixes the fantastic with coming of age in away that is both haunting and disturbing. What could those spaces be? And more importantly, why is Elba disappearing into them so easily that she sounds lost? A fascicle read could make the spaces the lack of wonderment adults often have, but it is more interesting to ask, what if they existed, and latter you lost interest? Is an adulthood even in a world with such places that dulling that you would leave them to childhood? The narrator’s reaction to the tragedy, both in its callousness as a teen, and as an uncertain adult suggest even when they were at the school, Elba was lost already, as if she knew this was coming but didn’t understand it. The blending of the mysterious and coming of age makes this one of the best stories in the collection, and one that is sure to stay with someone after reading.

Los altillos de Brumal isn’t metaphysically fantastic, instead, it suggests a place that really could exist and would be terrifying. The narrator is the host of a radio show and asks people to send her samples of their homemade jam so she can put a book together. She receives and unmarked jar of a blackberry like jam and when she tastes it she is reminded of the village she lived in as a child. She can’t stop eating the jam and before she knows it she has eaten the whole jar. Inspired, she returns to the village even though her mother had said only pain comes from the village. Once there, everything seems familiar, but out of place. She meets the town priest who shows her where the jam is made in a small attic. He tells her that the woman who used to make it passed away and he sent her the jam because he wanted her to do it. What was at first a voyage into memory now becomes something dark. While her mother’s warnings were unspecific, the narrator leaves you with the impression that the village is some sort of feudal throw back, where the priest has complete power over everything. It hints at darker times in Spain’s past. The question remains, though, is the jam powerful in a Proustian sense, a magical sense, or does it even matter what has drawn her back? The genius of Cubas to give the reader just enough to puzzle with these mysteries and leave one debating if the realities of these stories are just another manner of living.

Christina Fernández Cubas’ work is taught, concise and yet mysterious. She uses the fantastic not only to intrigue, but to play with reality. These games that often seem to contain supernatural elements leave the reader wondering which reality really exists. It is the mark of her great skill that the search for explanation only leads to deeper mysteries that keep one returning to them. I still don’t know how she marked a transition in Spanish short stories, but her works definitely warrants a translation to English.

Note: You may also want to see my article on four untranslated Spanish short story writers which includes a section on Cubas.

Carlos Funtes Remembers Carlos Monsiváis

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an interesting reflection from Carlos Fuentes about his friend, the late writer Carlos Monsiváis. He sounded like quite the iconoclast, at least, as Fuentes saw him. A man of diverse passions and a seeming voracious appetite for knowledge. Worth the read or Google translate.

Me inquietaba siempre la escasa atención que Carlos prestaba a sus dietas. La Coca-Cola era su combustible líquido. No probaba el alcohol. Era vegetariano. Su vestimenta era espontáneamente libre, una declaración más de la antisolemnidad que trajo a la cultura mexicana, pues México es, después de Colombia, el país latinoamericano más adicto a la formalidad en el vestir. Creo que jamás conocí una corbata de Monsiváis, salvo en los albores de nuestra amistad.

Compartimos una pasión por el cine, como si la juventud de este arte mereciera memoria, referencias y cuidados tan grandes como los clásicos más clásicos, y era cierto. La frágil película de nuestras vidas, expuesta a morir en llamaradas o presa del polvo y el olvido, era para Monsiváis un arte importantísimo, único, pues, ¿de qué otra manera, si no en el cine, iban a darnos obras de arte Chaplin y Keaton, Lang y Lubitsch, Hitchcock y Welles? Y no se crea que el “cine de arte” era el único que le interesaba a Carlos. Competía con José Luis Cuevas en su conocimiento del cine mexicano y con el historiador argentino Natalio Botana en películas de los admirables años treinta de Hollywood.

Félix J Palma’s English Debut and New Short Story Collection

~ bythefirelight

Last month Spanish novelist and short story writer Félix J Palma published a new book of short stories, The Smallest Show in the World (El menor espectáculo del mundo). In it he mixes the fantastic with the comic to explore “human relations, most of all those of love, are microcosms inhabited only by those who are living it” (relaciones humanas, sobre todo las amorosas, son microcosmos habitados únicamente por los protagonistas de la historia.  Revista de Letras Spanish only.) He treats the subject with humor and his use of the fantastic sounds interesting. In one story, a character doubles every time he has to make a decision (via Spanish only) . Instead of the Garden of Forking Paths, the character becomes the path, turning the Borges classic on its head. As Palma notes in an interview at Canal-l (Spanish only) many Spanish short story authors follow one of two paths, either those of Borges, Cortizar, and other Latin American authors who tended towards the fantastic, or those of Americans like Raymond Carver. He, by his own accounting, is in the first camp. While I’m not sure if he is one of Spain’s best short story writers as the Revista de Letras article says, I am sufficiently intrigued to get a copy of his book.

For those of you who can only read English, his successful novel The Map of Time will be coming out in English sometime this year. I don’t know much about it and from the description Publisher’s Weekly gave I’m not sure if I should be afraid or hope for something interesting. Given that it got a six figure deal, I’m a little leery.

From Publisher’s Weekly

Johanna Castillo at Atria won an auction for Felix J. Palma’sThe Map of Time via Thomas Colchie, who sold North American rights for six figures (in collaboration with Palma’s principal agent, Antonia Kerrigan, on behalf of Algaida in Spain). Set in Victorian London with characters real and imagined, Palma’s English-language debut features three intertwined plots, in which H.G. Wells is called upon to investigate incidents of time travel and save the lives of an aristocrat in love with a murdered prostitute from the past, a woman attempting to flee the strictures of society by searching for her lover somewhere in the future and Wells’s own wife, who may have become a pawn in a plot to murder him as well as Henry James and Bram Stoker. The book was just published in Spain.

Ana María Matute at Revista de Letras (Spanish Only)

~ bythefirelight

There is a good ten minute interview with the great Spanish writer Ana María Matute at Revista de Letras where she talks about her writing and her life. Of particular interest, she says she was the first to use children in fiction in Spain. Her contemporaries did not. Only after she gained success did they also do it. Considering how much she writes about children she probably is talking with some authority, although, I would like a little more confirmation. Fortunately, you can read her works in English. Many have been translated.

The video is also a lesson in what not to do when interviewing an author. While author interviews can be a little boring, the producers put such long transitions between ideas, complete with Jazz and hazy graphics, that it got a little boring waiting for her to speak.

New Carmen Laforet Biography: Insight into the Author of a Spanish Classic, Nada

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has good review of the new Carmen Laforet biography, Carmen Laforet Una mujer en fuga. Laforet rose to fame in the early 40s after publishing her classic, Nada, at the age of 23. After that initial success, though, her she published a few more books, but nothing of the quality of Nada, eventually giving up writing completely. While one might be tempted to say she was a one hit wonder, the biography goes into great details about her, until now, hidden private life. She was a shy person, married shortly after her success, but was more interested in women. Unfortunately for her, the 40s and 50s were the height of Francoism, a mix of Catholicism and fascism, and had to keep it secret, delving into Catholicism to make up for her lack of opportunity. At the same time, she suffered from depression and eventually became addicted to amphetamines. She died out of the public eye after suffering for many years with Alzheimer’s disease.

Although the biography is not available in English, Nada is considered a must read when looking at 20th century Spanish literature. It is all the more impressive when one considers that it was a first novel. She was able to capture a sense of post civil war Spain that still resonates and can give one the impression of poverty and social collapse that the war brought on.

De modo que enseguida empezó a tener problemas para escribir y para ser, esto es, para adaptarse a la mirada de los otros. La primera década parece normal. Se casó con el periodista Manuel Cerezales; tuvo cinco hijos; hizo diversas colaboraciones en prensa; publicó un libro de relatos y otra novela. Pero si se aplica el microscopio se observa el borboteo de la angustia. No se llevaba bien con su marido, la escritura era un tormento y, en 1951, conoció a Lilí Álvarez, la famosa y atractiva tenista, y se prendó de ella. Porque a Laforet le gustaban las mujeres, pero eso era algo que no se podía permitir. No con su inseguridad y su perenne sentido de culpabilidad, no en el aplastante entorno del franquismo. De modo que Carmen sublimó el amor por Lilí y lo transmutó en un rapto místico perfectamente adaptado al nacionalcatolicismo imperante. Incluso escribió una novela muy religiosa, Una mujer nueva, que dejó patidifuso al personal. La etapa beata duró siete años, los mismos que su relación con Lilí. Después rompieron, y Laforet volvió a ser ella misma. Sólo que unos escalones más abajo. Resulta terrible pensar que algo tan intrascendente como la orientación sexual de una persona pueda llegar a destrozar la vida de alguien dentro de un ambiente represivo.

Concha Urquiza A Modern Mystic Poet from Mexico’s Past

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

La Jornada has an long appreciation for the Mexican poet Chocha Urquiza, who died young at the age of 35. Her story is turbulent and full of activity as seems to happen with many Mexican artists of the time. At first writing poetry with vanguard poets and joining the communist party, she latter moves to the US to work in the publicity department of MGM. Returning to Mexico a few years latter she returns to the university, and later allies herself with Catholic groups. In 1945 she drowns off Ensinada. Her work is marked by a conflict between mysticism constrained and directed by Catholicism and her ideas about physical love, androgyny, and other transgressive ways of living. The brief description below describes her ideas well. In her poems (which you can read here in Spanish), you can get a sense of that. Of course, nothing is in English and probably never be.

La explicación es obvia. La irrupción de Dios en el alma es un acontecimiento inefable, para el que no existen palabras. Se encuentra, como lo dice ese espléndido tratado de la vida mística, La nube del desconocimiento, “entre el silencio y la palabra”. Mientras el empleo de cualquier vocablo “presupone –dice Borges– una experiencia compartida de la que el vocablo es símbolo. Si nos hablan del sabor del café es porque ya lo hemos probado, si nos hablan del color amarillo, es porque ya hemos visto limones, oro, trigo y puestas de sol”. Para sugerir la inefable experiencia de Dios, los místicos se ven obligados a recurrir a la tradición que reescriben con metáforas prodigiosas que hablan de embriaguez y de amor carnal. Esa experiencia lleva el impreciso y ambiguo nombre de deseo. Todos lo experimentamos, pero sólo los místicos que tienen el don de la poesía, encuentran en él el signo de Dios y de nuestra trascendencia. Raimundo Panikkar decía sabiamente que “Santa Teresa se enamoró primero del cuerpo de los hombres para luego enamorarse del cuerpo de Cristo”. Podríamos decir que a Concha le sucedió lo mismo. Al igual que Santa Teresa, Concha sintió en el deseo por el otro la resonancia carnal de lo inefable que la llamaba a la unión trascendente –de allí su atracción por el mito platónico del andrógino original–; al igual que ella, también, descubrió que esa realidad era sólo una imagen de la encarnación que sólo adquiría su pleno sentido en la carne de Cristo. A diferencia de ella, sin embrago, Concha no logró reordenar su rompecabezas interior y sentir la plenitud espiritual y carnal que Santa Teresa logró con el Cristo y de la cual su “Transverberación” es su expresión más acabada. Incapaz, por el dualismo de la espiritualidad católica de principios de siglo –en donde la sexualidad y la sensualidad quedan excluidas como realidades pecaminosas– de llegar a unir su yo interior con su yo orgánico, atrapada en esa ambigüedad de la mejor tradición cristiana que, como señala Eugenio Trías, percibe, a través de la encarnación, la “inspiración (mística) de un espíritu material vinculado con el amor sensual y físico (y, a su vez, por la ausencia física del Cristo,) el influjo de la idea origenista de un espíritu desencarnado.” y dotado, por lo mismo, de una sensualidad indirecta y travestida, Concha se movió siempre entre el enamoramiento del cuerpo de Cristo y sus resonancias en el cuerpo de los hombres. A través de ese arrobo ambiguo y desgarrador de la pasión intentó acercarse a ese estado en el que, para decirlo con Octavio Paz, “la muerte y la vida, la necesidad y la satisfacción, el sueño y el acto, la palabra y la imagen, el tiempo y el espacio, el fruto y el labio se confunden en una sola realidad”, y la hicieron descender a estados cada vez más antiguos y desnudos.

Ana Maria Matute, Amin Maalouf and Nicanor Parra Finalists for the Principe de Asturias

~ bythefirelight

The Spanish author Ana Maria Matute, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf, and the Chilean Nicanor Parra are the finalists for the Principe de Asturias prize, which will be awarded on Wednesday. El Pais has a run down on the authors. It is interesting that a Lebanese author is listed amongst an otherwise Spanish language prize. As a fan of Matute I would like to see her win.

Where Have the Latin American Novelists and the Dictators Gone?

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Ilan Stavans has an article in the Chronicle Review looking at the demise of Latin American novelists who were politically engaged. I think the article provides a good overview of the boom authors, but I think it is a little weak when describing younger authors. Certainly there are authors who haven’t been politically engaged like Llosa or Fuentes, but not all of them. It also depends what engagement means. Is it writing about a dictatorship, or has it shifted to the narco novel? Perhaps when Volpi goes expands from Mexico, he is actually making a new engagement with the new realities that leave a country like Mexico at the mercy of other forces, too. I wonder what he would think of Jorge Volpi’s three examples of political writers: Edmundo Paz Soldan, Ivan Thays, or Santiago Rocagliolo? Ultimately, what he didn’t mention was perhaps the novel of the cauldio is just tired. There are so many of them that they may have worn themselves out.

Is it that they don’t usually torture and kill adversaries? That their regimes aren’t controlled by vengeful police forces? That they have been democratically (more or less) elected? Perhaps. But in important ways, they are caudillos. They rewrite constitutions to perpetuate themselves as supreme leaders. They embrace a populist oratory that condemns materialism and ridicules individuality (thereby fostering an environment where freedom is often a casualty). They promote an anti-imperialist (often synonymous with anti-American) message that brooks no disagreement. Their rhetoric embraces the downtrodden but creates fear among all who disagree with them.

To answer why writers have not taken on the left-wing strongmen, it is important to remember that the Latin American intelligentsia in the 20th century, particularly from the 1930s through the 70s, habitually embraced communism. To be a novelist was tantamount to being anti-establishment. As opposed to writers in North America, you didn’t need to be a bohemian to be considered serious. You needed to believe that power corrupts, and that excess power corrupts excessively. And you needed to see Latin America as the victim of colonialism and capitalism.

The road to the region’s redemption lay in rejecting foreign ideologies—except those of communism. Communism was viewed as representative of collective goodness, a utopianism that would magically retrieve what was best in the pre-Columbian past, as if the indigenous population before the arrival of the Europeans had always lived in harmony. Communism became a vindication of the Indian past.

The Most Important Spanish Authors as Critic José María Pozuelo Yvancos Sees It

~ bythefirelight

ABC has an interview with Spanish critic José María Pozuelo Yvancos and an excerpt of his new book on the 100 most important writers in Spain today (link to book review in Spanish). I am familiar with many of them, even though I haven’t had a chance to read many of them. Some are obvious, such as Javier Marias and Enrique Vila-Matas. I’m in the midst of reading Cristina Fernandez Cubas work and I can’t say if she is one of the best in Europe, but she is a great writer and deserves to be know outside of Spain.  I ran this through Google Translate (I don’t have time to translate it) and fixed a few obvious problems although many more remain, but at least you’ll get a sense of them.

  • Armas Marcelo: “The reader sees at once that their literature is written in fury and win, who cares.”
  • Fernando Aramburu: “I appreciate it especially that a work of serious tone and follow other with mocking irony.”
  • Juan Pedro Aparicio, “His stories hide behind wit molla.
  • J. M. Caballero Bonald: “It is one of the few writers have total, so good storyteller as a poet.”
  • Casavella Francisco: “A case of genius cut short by a young death.”
  • Rafael Chirbes: “His novels will help us to trace the memory of the Transition.”
  • Luis Mateo Díez: “One who has conquered territories narrator’s own imagination and memory.”
  • Cristina Fernández Cubas, “In the first row of European short story writers.”
  • Juan Goytisolo: “A commitment-minded narrator essayist.
  • Luis Goytisolo: “It’s nice to see how being a senior makes in experimentation and search for many young people.”
  • Raul Guerra Garrido: “His novels are used to open our eyes on the situation of the Basque Country.”
  • Eduardo Lago: “Few can draw better connection of Spanish and American traditions.”
  • Luis Landeros’: The real disciple of Cervantes in themes and tone. “
  • Manuel Longares: “Example of stylistic requirement that the novel should not forget.”
  • José Carlos Llop: “His stories married life and fiction so intelligently.”
  • Javier Marias: “A great writer who created his own style by combining reflective and narrative voices.”
  • Jose Maria Merino: “To say that he is master of the story should not conceal their excellent novels.”
  • Antonio Muñoz Molina: “The mind is a large area of memory: the best has won.”
  • Ramiro Pinilla: ‘No person may have the same form that has been the formation of Basque History of the twentieth century. “
  • Alvaro Pombo: “He has the rare privilege of looking out the soul of his characters and showing the readers who are like them.”
  • Soledad Puértolas: “Their literature has the merit of linking personal and collective memories.”
  • Valenti Puig: “Reading it one thinks of Chesterton, the smart way to be English from Catalonia.”
  • Juan Pedro Quiñonero “His memoir shows the formation of a vocation as a reader as I have known few.”
  • Clara Sanchez: “He has the rare virtue of that side show their troubling everyday.”
  • Antonio Soler: “Literature made in forging a requirement.”
  • Enrique Vila-Matas: “Few like him can say creators of a unique style, original in the representation of a self.”

Jorge Volpi Interview at El País: History Is Often More Important Than Fiction in a Novel

~ bythefirelight

El País offered readers a chance to submit questions to Jorge Volpi for a form of on-line interview. I took the opportunity to submit a question about Season of Ash which I reviewed for the Quarterly Conversation and found to be more interested in writing history than a novel, sacrificing character development to his thesis. I wanted to know if he thought the history was more important than the fictional elements:

When you write fiction mixed with history, what do you think is more important: the narrative and characters, or the history? I noticed in Season of Ash that at times the narrative served more to explain the history, and the characters became a method for arriving at the history.

My intention is for history and fiction to complement each other, though it is certain that in this novel I wanted the History in capital letters to have an importance as clear as the history of the characters, perhaps this provokes the sensation that the characters serve the grand History.

¿Cuando escribes ficción mezclada con historia, cual piensa es mas importante: la narrativa y los personajes o la historia? Noté en ” No será la tierra” que a veces la narrativa sirve mas para explicar la historia y los personajes se convierten en un método para llegar a la historia.

Mi intención es que historia y ficción se complementen, si bien es cierto que en esta novela quería que la Historia con mayúsculas tuviese una importancia tan clara como las historias de los personajes, acaso eso provoque la sensación de que los personajes ficticios “sirven” a la gran Historia.

It is an honest answer and confirms to his interest in writing politically engaged novels. Many of the other questions in the interview make it obvious that he is a political writer, by which I mean he wants to comment on politics and history and use fiction to explore ways of getting at these ideas. He doesn’t write from to serve a specific political base, such as the PRI or PAN, which would make him a hack. He is certainly not a hack and his commitment to working with politics and history is commendable, but it comes with risks. I think Elias Khoury from Lebanon use politics and history in his works with much better affect. Or Fernando Del Paso’s News from the Empire which has the grand sweep of history that Volpi wanted, is also a good example of how to mix the two.

As he mentioned in his lectures for Open Letter Press, he sees the younger generations as less politically engaged:

How do you see the lack of political literature and authors, lets say, or how they called it during the Boom “committed” on a continent that in the midst everything it is very political in those countries that often only breathe politics?

In effect, if we compare the present Latin American literature with that of the 60s and 70s (and after), we find an absence of political literature. On one hand, the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the USSR contributed to the disappearance of committed literature. And on the other hand, the gradual democratization of our countries made it so that politics stopped being regular material of those intellectuals and passed to the political scientists and political analysts that are part of the media. In addition, the latest generation are not only apolitical, but very apolitical. However, there continue to be examples of political literature in Latin America, you only have to mention the novel of Edmundo Paz Soldan, Ivan Thays, or Santiago Rocagliolo. And, in one sense, the literature about the violence that fills a good part of the region should also be considered political. Even this way, it is certain that writers don’t have a direct interest in contemporary politics, even the most authoritarian and picturesque.

¿Cómo ves la poca presencia de literatura política y autores digamos o como se decia en la epóca del boom “comprometidos” en un continente que en medio de todo es muy político en los países muchas veces tan solo se respira política?

En efecto, si comparamos la literatura latinoamericana actual con la de los sesentas o setentas (e incluso después), nos encontramos con la ausencia de literatura política. Por una parte, la caída del Muro de Berlín y el fin de la URSS contribuyeron a que desapareciera la literatura comprometida. Y, por la otra, la paulatina democratización de nuestros países hizo que la crítica política dejara de ser materia habitual de los intelectuales para pasar a los politólogos y a los analistas políticos de los medios. Además, las últimas generaciones no son sólo apolíticas, sino un tanto antipolíticas. Sin embargo, sigue habiendo ejemplos de literatura política en América Latina, baste mencionar las novelas de Edmundo Paz Soldán, de Iván Thays o de Santiago Roncagliolo. Y, en un sentido, la literatura sobre la violencia que prevalece en buena parte de la región también debe considerarse política. Aun así, es cierto que no parece haber un interés directo por parte de los escritores hacia nuestros políticos actuales, incluso los más autoritarios o pintorescos.

Finally, he talked about his latest novel, a free verse novel that is part fable, part history of the Holocaust. Mixing the Holocaust with non realistic elements could be interesting, or just lend itself to silliness. Hopefully, it isn’t the latter. It is an interesting approach and I would like to look it over someday, if not read it.

What made you write Dark Forest Dark, your latest novel, like a fable?

Dark Forest Dark is meant to reflect on the way everyday people can become an active part of a genocide, with Nazism in the background. However, in this meditation about innocence it seemed to me I could establish a connection between the massacres of Jews in the forests of Poland and the Ukraine, and the forests in the stories of the brothers Grimm, stories that Germans read obligatorily in those years. From this starting point I included many of their stories in the book.

¿Qué te llevó a construir Oscuro bosque oscuro, tu última novela, como una fábula? Gracias por tu literatura.

“Oscuro bosque oscuro” intenta reflexionar sobre la manera en la que la gente común se puede convertir en parte activa de un genocidio, con el nazismo como telón de fondo. Sin embargo, en esta meditación sobre la inocencia me pareció que podía establecerse una conexión entre las masacres de judíos que se producían en los bosques de Polonia y Ucrania, y los bosques de los cuentos de Grimm, que los alemanes leían obligatoriamente en esos años. De allí la inclusión de muchas de sus historias en el libro.

Javier Marias – I Would Like to Be Sherlock Holmes – Spanish Only Video

~ bythefirelight

El País in celebration of the Madrid Book Fair has a video of Javier Marias explaining that if he were to be any character he would like to be Sherlock Holmes. It is a brief interview, but fun for its willingness to pick a character that might not seem the most literary—although, that is not something I would claim as I like the early stories of Doyle. Unfortunately, it is only in Spanish.

Review of Chilean Author Alberto Fuguet’s New Novel

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Moleskine Literario has an lengthy and well reasoned review of Alberto Fuguet’s newest book, which is not quite a novel and not quite non-fiction. It is a book based on his own family and his own experience. The narrator, who is also named Alberto Fuguet, is trying to find out more about his uncle, Carlos, who led a Bohemian life in the US during the 60s. Estranged from his father, a man who says

“Stop bothering me,” he said by telephone one night, “cease to exist. You don’t exist for me. You have only brought me problems. We don’t want to see you ever again. I don’t care that you are my son.”

“Deja de molestarnos”, le dijo por teléfono una noche, “deja de existir. No existes para mí. Sólo me has traído problemas. No queremos verte nunca más. No me interesa que seas hijo mío” (25).

While this could become, perhaps, just a tale of family strife, Luis Hernán Castañeda, notes that he uses the search not only to imagine what could have been, but to avoid the malicious that often comes with family investigations.

Missing (an investigation), is, most of all, a touching text: the material is intense, per se, and the treatment of this material does justice to its intensity. Nerveless, it is also a lucid and ambitious textual artifact, in which the gaze of the narrator Fuguet is  sharpened to penetrate the cloudy and confusing and hurtful, with the artistic intention, completely achieved, of returning to the transformed light -perhaps exalted-of a skillful and complex text of elaboration.

“Missing (una investigación)” es, sobre todo, un texto conmovedor: su materia es intensa per se, y el tratamiento de esa materia le hace entera justicia a su intensidad. Sin embargo, también es un artefacto textual lúcido y ambicioso, en el que la mirada del narrador Fuguet se afila para penetrar en lo turbio y lo confuso y lo hiriente, con el propósito artístico plenamente logrado de devolverlo a la luz transformado -quizá enaltecido- en un texto de elaboración diestra y compleja.

What sounds particularly interesting is his use of multiple modes of story telling. If you’ve read Short Cuts you will know that he does like to play with form some what, although this seems like the farthest hes gone.

The formal complexity of the the novel does not respond to a gratuitous pyrotechnic effort but the requirements of dark and tangled material. In the ample formal repertory we find, for example, one whole section dedicated to commenting on the origin of the book that the reader has in his hands, a very short chronicle that appeared in the magazine Etiqueta negra; there is also a section constructed from the Diary of the Psychiatrist, composed of annotations in which Fuguet, transformed into a detective, explains the progress of his investigation; another part of the book gives two interviews conducted by Fuguet with his uncle, en which the uncle expresses himself in the first person, even though it is clear after hearing him that there are enigmatic areas, secret territories that he refuses to reveal. Lastly, the center of the novel, both in terms of expansiveness and importance, emerge in the eighth part, titled The Echoes of his Mind. Carlos Talks [title is in English]. It is about a long narrative and autobiographic poem, one where an imaginary Carlos, fruit of an amalgamation of observation and fantasy, narrates his intire life and seeks to impress a feeling of him for himself and for others.

La complejidad formal de la novela no responde, pues, a un gratuito afán de pirotecnia sino a los requisitos de una materia oscura y enmarañada. En el amplio repertorio formal encontramos, por ejemplo, toda una sección dedicada a comentar el origen del libro que el lector tiene entre manos, una crónica muy breve que apareció publicada en la revista “Etiqueta negra”; existe también una parte construida a partir de un “diario de la pesquisa”, compuesto por anotaciones en las que Fuguet, transformado en detective, va dando cuenta de los progresos de su investigación; otra zona del libro ofrece dos entrevistas realizadas por Fuguet a su tío, en las que éste se expresa en primera persona, aunque queda claro tras escucharlo que hay una zona enigmática, un territorio secreto que se niega a revelarse. Por último el centro de la novela, tanto en términos de extensión como de importancia, eclosiona en la octava parte, titulada “The Echoes of his Mind. Carlos talks”. Se trata de un largo poema narrativo y autobiográfico en el cual un Carlos imaginario, fruto de una amalgama de observación y fantasía, narra su vida entera y procura imprimirle un sentido, para sí mismo y para los otros.

I hope someday it will come out in English, especially since he has had one book published in English already.

Update (6/2/10): I have been informed by @ezrafitz that they are working on a translation right now. No ETA as yet.

Satirizing Modern Spain on the Edge of Crisis: Robert Juan-Cantavella at the Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight

The Quarterly Conversation has a very good article on the young Spanish novelist Robert Juan-Cantavella and his satires of modern Spain on the edge of the current crisis. Whether or not you will ever read him, it is a very good summary of many of the cultural trends that have afflicted Spain in the last few years as the country moves farther from the transition to democracy after the death of Franco. While one article can’t describe a literary scene, he does sound like part of the literary scene where there is quite a bit of playfulness in stories. You can see some of that in my reviews of Fernando Iwasaki and Hipolito Navarro. The segment of from his novel is quite short, but looks like it has promise. Perhaps he’ll be translated or I’ll get a copy in Spanish one of these days.

Ever since the publication in 2001 of Otro, his first novel, Robert Juan-Cantavella has seemed to position his work as a continuation of a certain Spanish literary tradition as much as a cheeky raid on its vaults and a blithe taunt to anyone wishing to hold him accountable for his hijacking of or attacks on sacred cows. In Proust Fiction (2005), a story collection, Juan-Cantavella introduces into several of the pieces a character called Escargot—not really an alter-ego or a pseudonym, probably a heteronym . . .—and we learn that, were it not for him killing them all beforehand, a bunch of giants really would have been waiting for Don Quixote on that fateful day at the windmills. This is no mere comic gesture, not any more than an attempt by a bold young man to pretend that Spanish literature owes him something; it’s also, and more importantly, a way to insist that all creation is also recreation (in more than one sense of the word).

The Shape of EBooks in Spain

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Below is a brief outline of the state of the ebook industry in Spain. While it is moving slowly, there have been some big agreements recently that will shape the future of the ebook there. Consumer access to the books, though, remains limited. It will be interesting to see how this works versus the Amazon model, especially now that Apple has entered the game. (The article comes from La Nacion in Argentina and is translated via Google Translate with my corrections).

Is the Spanish publishing industry diving into digital waters? Not really. A few weeks ago in Madrid it announced the upcoming launch of Libranda, a distribution platform for digital books led by Planeta, Santillana and Random House Mondadori. The initiative promises to expand the catalog of electronic books in Spanish: eleven publishers will make their digitized collections available to libraries. For now, however, the reader does not have direct access to the platform. It is not a minor detail: the publishers chose not to neglect the channel now accounts for 90% of its business, and so launched a project that is more a defensive strategy than a full exploitation of the advantages of the digital ecosystem.

While they can not buy and sell ebooks directly through Libranda, readers and authors will benefit of the final price of electronic books which will be 30% lower than the paper copy, and the authors will receive 20% of the selling price , twice as much as they receive a paper copy.

Until the arrival of Libranda, the great platform of electronic books in Spanish was to be TodoEbook, which brings together more than 400 small and medium-sized Spanish publishers, offering 20,000 titles, mostly from collections and nonfiction works whose rights are in the public domain. Now, between the two platforms have 95% of the supply of ebooks in Spanish.

The expanding market for electronic books will result in the growth of eReaders, a scene now dominated by the Kindle, but seriously threatened by Apple’s IPAD. While the latter is more than an e-book reader, a fact revealed when its launch shook the foundations of the emerging ebook industry. According to a recent survey, 60% of Americans heard about the IPAD while only 37% of the Kindle.

On this side of the ocean, Musimundo opened the first shop that sells electronic books in the country. Built on Bibliográfika platform that integrates bookstores and publishers for printing, distribution and marketing of books on demand, now offers an extensive catalog of 20,000 books.

[tweetmeme=http://wp.me/plDex-xz]

Outlook for Publishing Spanish Language Books In English Is Good

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Publisher’s Weekly has an interesting summary from the BEA on the outlook for Spanish language publishing in the US and translation from Spanish to English. Of more interest to English speakers is their take on Translation from Spanish to English. They all seem to think the market is growing and acceptance of translated works will be greater. Perhaps translation some day will go from 3% to 4%? I’ll believe it when I see it, but it is good to see that the publishers feel that there is something happening, although publishers have been known to be wrong before.

“Translations from Spanish into English: Overview, potentials and hurdles,” looked at the recent surge of successful translations of Spanish-language books. Esther Allen, translator and director Center of Literary Translation at Columbia University, moderated the panel, and began by saying she has “never felt so excited, so sanguine about the possibilities of bringing work from Spanish into English…both from Latin America and Spain.”

“It’s now ‘groovy’ again to read translations,” said New Directions’ Barbara Epler. “It’s the new generation that doesn’t care about anything,” such as whether it’s a translation or not, she explained. “They’re just really excited about somebody fabulous.” Epler said there’s now a difference in the way Spanish-language literature is being perceived in the U.S., and it’s reflected in the number of translations from Spanish published today. “It’s more than I’ve ever seen.”

Granta en español’s Valerie Miles noted that there is “an awakening of talent” within Spanish-language literature itself. Miles said an upcoming issue of Granta, The Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists, would highlight translations of works by young novelists under 35. Miles later noted it was important to steer clear of “blanket” labels, such as Latin American literature, because such tags don’t allow for the notion that each writer hails from a different culture and tradition.

Jesús Badenes from Editorial Planeta said one way Spanish authors measure their own success now, is by whether or not they’ve been published in the U.S. and, consequently, Spanish editors and agents are putting more of a focus on making that happen. He also noted that the U.S. is now more concerned about “world matters,” and thus open to reading—and publishing—more works in translation.

Young Spanish Language Writers on the Internet and Writing

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

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

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

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

Carlos Fuentes on Chilean Literature

~ bythefirelight

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

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