This isn’t literary at all, but it is funny and I am always amazed at what will devote a website and, more importantly, their time to. The pictures speak for themselves. It is a site full of photos of home made fixes to everything. Kind of like the Red Green Show gone global. There I Fixed It is worth the look.
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El País reports that Manuel Sánchez has won the 2nd SER Sudden Fiction Contest (edición del concurso de microrrelatos de la SER). Here it is in its entirety:
I recognized the look in the photo. It was the same pig from the alley. The cop nodded his head and gave the photo to the other cop. ‘Write an order to find and capture him,’ he said. The next week they called me to pick him from a line up. They put me behind a window and five guys came in. ‘Which one of them?’ they asked me. I doubted for a moment, but after examining the eyes of all of them I was clear: ‘The one in the blue shirt.’ The other four left, but I followed the one in the red shirt to his house. I took out my scissors and said, ‘Do you remember me?’
“Entonces reconocí la mirada de la fotografía. Era aquel cerdo del callejón. El policía asintió con la cabeza y le dio el retrato a otro agente. ‘Dicta una orden de busca y captura’, le dijo. A la semana siguiente, me llamaron para una rueda de reconocimiento. Me pusieron tras un cristal y entraron cinco hombres. ‘¿Cuál de ellos lo hizo?’, me preguntaron. Dudé un instante, pero después de examinar los ojos de todos lo tuve claro: ‘El de la camisa azul’. A los otros cuatro los soltaron, pero yo seguí al del jersey rojo hasta su casa. Saqué las tijeras y le dije: ‘¿Te acuerdas de mí?”.
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Tagged: Manuel Sánchez, SER concurso de microrrelatos, Spain, Sudden Fiction
La Jornada has an interview with the Chilean Author Alberto Fuguet is a younger author who as a proponent of Mc Hondo has looked to turn away from the over saturated magical realism that came to define Latin American Literature. His book Shorts
At the beginning of the year he published a new book in most of Latin America and Spain, a novel “mounted”by Fuguet, My Body Es a Cell, which is an autobiography of Andrés Caicedo, a Columbian cult writer whose book has continued to be the best selling book in Columbia.
A inicios del año, salió en la mayoría de los países de América Latina y España, la novela “montada” por Fuguet, Mi cuerpo es una celda, autobiografía de Andrés Caicedo, escritor colombiano de culto, cuyo libro se ha mantenido como el mejor vendido en ese país sudamericano
The interview covers several themes. First, he talks about hos he wished he could direct films instead of write, yet he isn’t interested in being a screen writer either. He has created a website for hosting independent videos. He has also made several short films.
Second, he talks about what he sees the role of the blog and the new media. It is refreshing for an author not to see it as just another means of publicity, or a half way step to print.
I think that there are people in the virtual world who are very shy and unknown who write very personal things in their blogs; the people who are less shy use the virtual as a type of trampoline to eventually publish on paper. I am sure that there is a Kafka, a Pavesse, and people like that hidden on the web and that we are going to discover them latter. My idea of a blog is to help myself, to help others, as breaking the circle of books, in my case I see that my books come from the same planet.
Creo que lo que hay virtual es de gente muy tímida y muy desconocida, que escribe en sus blogs cosas muy personales; la gente que es menos tímida lo usa como una especie de trampolín para eventualmente llegar al papel. Estoy seguro de que hay un Kafka, un Pavesse, y hay gente así escondida en la red y que vamos a descubrirlo después. Mi idea del blog es apoyarme, apoyar a otros, como romper el círculo de los libros, en mi caso yo veo que mis libros vienen como del mismo planeta.
Finally, he talks about Rulfo and Bolaño.
Rulfo is super global writer, super preliminary, who seems very interesting to me. In general I have voices and companions that interest me. In the future perhaps one should find that not all of the world is Latin American. I am interested in everything hybrid, like chronicles; in Andrés Caicedo, the Argentine Fabián Casas, or what the small presses are doing.
I think that Blaño is a hybrid writer, but one that has the respect of intellectuals. He is very pop, has a much more mixed world…Rather than writing about a nostalgic Argentine exiled to Paris, he wrote about Mexicans or Spaniards. He dared to with other passports. He took on voices that were not his and transformed them.
Rulfo es un escritor súper global, súper liminar, me parece muy interesante. En general tengo voces y compañeros de ruta que me interesan. En el futuro habría que analizar que no todo el mundo es latinoamericano. Estoy interesado en todo lo híbrido, como crónicas; en Andrés Caicedo, en el argentino Fabián Casas, o en lo que se está haciendo en las editoriales pequeñas.
Siento que Bolaño es un escritor bien híbrido, pero que logró tener respeto intelectual; es súper pop, tiene un mundo mucho más mestizo [...] Más que escribir de un argentino exiliado nostálgico en París, él escribía sobre mexicanos o españoles, se atrevía escribir con otros pasaportes. Logró meterse en voces que no eran las suyas y las transformó.
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Tagged: Alberto Fuguet, Juan Rulfo, La Jornada, Latin American Fiction, Magical Realism, McHondo, Mexico, Roberto Bolaño
Three Percent has updated their invaluable Translation Database. If you are interested in foreign fiction in English it is an invaluable resource. (You will need Excel or Open Office to open it. )
As always, these spreadsheets contain info on never-before-translated works of fiction and poetry distributed in the U.S. (I left off anything that’s been published in English translation before, even if the earlier version was censored, corrupt, etc. Just trying to focus on what new titles are being made available to English readers.)
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Tagged: Three Percent, Translation
The Russian author Vasily Aksyonov passed away on Monday the July 6th. I have yet to get around to reading Generations of Winter even though I’ve had it for sometime. He was one of those finds along with Platonov that I was quite happy to find when I decided to make it my mission to give my dad as many different books by Russian authors as I could. One day I’ll get around to the book, despite its size.
From the NY Times obit:
For all the torment of his background, Mr. Aksyonov, as a prose stylist, was at the opposite pole from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, becoming a symbol of youthful promise and embracing fashion and jazz rather than dwelling on the miseries of the gulag. Ultimately, however, he shared Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fate of exile from the Soviet Union.
“Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. “It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.”
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Tagged: Platonov, Vasily Aksyonov
MICHAEL MEYER in the NY Times has a very good appreciation of the Ugly American. It is one of those mid fifties books that were held so much cache in there day, but not seem lost in to a different time as literary styles change. Yet there is a salience in reading them. Despite its weaknesses The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
The novel is a series of linked sketches of real people that Lederer, a Navy captain who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of United States forces in the Pacific and Asian theater, and Burdick, a political scientist, encountered overseas during the buildup to Vietnam. The book was originally commissioned by W. W. Norton as nonfiction, but an editor suggested it might be more effective as a novel. “What we have written is not just an angry dream,” the authors note in the introduction, “but rather the rendering of fact into fiction.” Yet the book’s enduring resonance may say less about its literary merits than about its failure to change American attitudes. Today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can’t speak Sarkhanese.
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Tagged: American History, American Lierature
Abu Raed is a janitor at the Aman airport who lives a quiet life of a widower but is a respected man in his neighborhood. Behind his humble job and quiet life is a man whose life has not gone as he wanted, beyond the death of his wife and son, it is not clear what other tragedies have brought him to work as a janitor. What is clear is he doesn’t belong as a janitor, he is a highly educated man who spends his spare time reading such works as A Season of Migration to the North. One day he brings home a captain’s hat he finds in the garbage at the airport. One of the neighborhood children sees him and insists he is a captain and despite his reservations he begins to play the role, telling the children stories he has picked up in his readings.
The relationship with the children is what animates the movie. At first it seems he is just a kindly old man who entertains the children, but when one boy, whose father beats him, seeks to unmask him as a fraud, Abu Raed begins to draw closer to their lives. He finds, much to his disappointment, that the children are succumbing to hardships of poverty. One child is beaten by his father, another who is very smart cannot go to school because his dad makes him him sell candy on the street. Abu Raed wants to help, but he is powerless. What can a janitor do? He has been freed by what he reads, but is trapped by circumstance. He knows the two boys have no future if they continue on the way they are. He tries to help one by buying all his candy, but that just makes his father want him to sell more. His best intentions go astray.
Contrasting with the boys is Nour, a woman of thirty and a pilot for Royal Jordanian airlines. She is everything the Abu Raed is not: wealthy, young, free to travel, and very westernized. Yet she finds in him an understanding and refuge from her family whose sole goal is to marry her off. In her he sees the life he couldn’t have and through her travels, he travels.
Nour, too, becomes the means for Abu Raed to finally do something to save one of the boys and finally make up for his son who he lost at the age of four. He gets Nour to take the boy’s family in as they make a midnight escape from their home and abusive father. Abu Raed, though, does not flee with them. Instead, he meets with the father, a drunk who likes to use his fists, and tries to talk to him, help him. It is a useless gesture, more a sacrifice, but Abu Raed is a man who believes in peace and the family. It would be impossible for him to send the family into hiding if he did not try and help.
Captain Abu Raed is a movie that at its core is about family and the search for meaning without one. Both Nour and Abu Raed really don’t have one, at least one they want. For them to take in the boy and his family is a way of saving what they don’t have, but value most. While these elements make for a good film, I can’t help but wonder what happens now, after the family flees and the father is on trial for murder? Will this nicely tied up ending really hold in the end? Perhaps not, but at least while the family is safe the idea that one can save a life even when you are an old janitor is still possible.
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Tagged: Jordan
There is an excellent, if writterly, appreciation of José Emilio Pacheco in this Sunday’s cultural supplement in La Jornada. It is certainly worth a read if you have an interest and know Spanish. Pacheco is the author of Las batellas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) which I reviewed sometime ago and remains one of my most popular posts. Poniatowska focuses on three things: his relation to the past; why young people are so dedicated to him; and what has made him the writer he is. On the first count he is an other of memory but not nostalgia: “José Emilio cree en la memoria, a la nostalgia la repudia.” Which Poniatowska points out in quoting from the end of Batallas en el desierto
They demolished the school, they demolished Mariana’s building, they demolished my house, they demolished the Roma neighborhood. That city is gone. That country is gone. There isn’t any memory of Mexico form those years. And it doesn’t bother anyone: who wants to remember that horror? Everything goes like the records on a record player. I will never know if Mariana is still living. If she was a live she’d be 70.
Demolieron la escuela, demolieron el edificio de Mariana, demolieron mi casa, demolieron la colonia Roma. Se acabó esa ciudad. Terminó aquel país. No hay memoria del México de aquellos años. Y a nadie le importa: de ese horror, quién puede tener nostalgia. Todo pasó como pasan los discos en la sinfonola. Nunca sabré si aún vive Mariana. Si viviera tendría sesenta años.”
Second, the youth like Pacheco because he is like them and respects them. Part of this is his focus on youth and part of it his willingness to meet with them. When his conferences have filled up he has given two conferences, one in the conference hall and the other outside where the students are waiting for him.
The young who still live their memories of childhood find themselves in El viento distate, El pricipio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) and through Condesa neighboorhod of Moriras lefjos and they celebrate the novelist and short story writer with never ending gratitude. It is rare to feel gratitude for a living writer but Jose Emilio gathers all their devotions. When the boy Carlos in Los batallas en el desierto confesses, “I never thought that Jim’s mother was that young, that elegant, least of all that beautiful. I didn’t know how to tell him. I can’t describe what I felt when she shook my hand,” readers relive the torment of their first love. The same occurs with the stories in La sangre de Medusa written between 1956 and 1984. Jose Emilio touches fibers in which they recognize themselves, in which you and him and I and we identify with. On reading it, everyone rewrites “Tarde o remparano”. His is ours. We make the book with him, we are his part, he changes us into authors, he reflects us, he keeps us in mind, he completes us, and the reading takes away our problems. We owe him being readers, as much as we owe him for life.
According to him, those truly unhappy loves, those terrible loves are amongst the young because they have no hope. “In any part of your life you have some little possibility of reuniting with the person you love, but when you are young your history of love has no future.”
Los jóvenes que todavía viven sus recuerdos de infancia se encuentran a sí mismos en El viento distante, El principio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto y hasta en la colonia Condesa de Morirás lejos y le brindan al novelista y al cuentista un testimonio de gratitud interminable. Es raro sentir gratitud por un escritor vivo pero José Emilio reúne todas las devociones. Cuando el niño Carlos de Las batallas en el desierto confiesa: “Nunca pensé que la madre de Jim fuera tan joven, tan elegante y sobre todo tan hermosa. No supe qué decirle. No puedo describir lo que sentí cuando ella me dio la mano”, los lectores reviven el tormento de su primer amor. Lo mismo sucede con los cuentos de La sangre de Medusa escritos de 1956 a 1984. José Emilio toca fibras en las que se reconocen, en las que tú y él y yo, ustedes y nosotros nos identificamos. Al leerlo, cada quién escribe de nuevo “Tarde o temprano”. Lo suyo es nuestro. Hacemos el libro con él, somos su parte, nos convierte en autores, nos refleja, nos toma en cuenta, nos completa, nos quita lo manco, lo cojo, lo tuerto, lo bisoño. Le debemos a él ser lectores, por lo tanto le debemos a él la vida.
Según él, los amores verdaderamente desdichados, los amores terribles son los de los niños porque no tienen ninguna esperanza. “En cualquier otra época de tu vida puedes tener alguna mínima posibilidad de reunirte con la persona que amas, pero cuando eres niño tu historia de amor no tiene porvenir.”
Finally, he is a writer whose history has been influenced by some of the greats of 20th century Mexican Writing. Moreover, his family had been part of the great events of the 20th century, his father escaping execution only through the intervention of President Obregon.
Some of these family friendships were liberal like Juan de la Cabada and Hector Perez Martinez and most of all Jose Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsivais remembers that Jose Emilio used to invite him to eat at his house and they would both listen seriously and quietly to Vasconcelos, an absolutely fascinating personality. Together they would also go to visit Martin Luis Guzman who both of them admired, and don Julio Torri who would tell them in a low voice the secret history of Mexican pornography.
Algunas de esas amistades familiares eran libertarias, como Juan de la Cabada y Héctor Pérez Martínez, y sobre todo José Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsiváis recordó que José Emilio lo invitaba a comer a su casa y ambos escuchaban muy serios y callados a Vasconcelos, personalidad absolutamente fascinante. Juntos iban a visitar también a Martín Luis Guzmán, que es una de las admiraciones de los dos, y don Julio Torri les hablaba en voz baja de la historia secreta de la pornografía mexicana.
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Tagged: Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, Hector Perez Martinez, José Emilio Pacheco, José Vasconcelos, Juan de la Cabada, La Jornada, Martín Luis Guzmán, Mexican Literature, Mexico, Spanish Language
Departures is a movie for crying if the tears streaming down the faces of several women in the audience is any indication. While the movie is about undertakers, it is really about family and the search for the healing when a family falls apart. The film follows Daigo a cellist who is laid off from his job and takes a new job in his village of birth as an undertaker. For western audiences undertaker here means someone who washes, dresses, and makes up the body as the family watches. It is very ritualized and as they do the washing the film suggests there is not so much a closure but a briefest healing for the families. At first Daigo is the reluctant novice, but he soon learns he has a talent for the job and begins to like the ritual of it. As he begins to understand the job more and how important it is for the families to see him clean the body, his family and friends distance themselves from him. Yet he perseveres and when those same families and friends see him wash the bodies of their loved ones they understand how important he is to the process of taking care of the dead. In addition to the families who watch him work, Daigo is also trying to come to terms with his father who abandoned him when he was just a boy. It was so long ago he can not even remember him.
The power in the film is located in continual sense of healing, of the families who have been arguing about the death, suddenly seeing the loved one as they were or as the family wants to remember the loved one. The grief is naturally hard on the families but the under takers, but the ritual is calming not only in the sense that the family sees a new the loved one, but the grief becomes part of the ritual which in turn becomes part of the ritual of life. From the sense of healing Daigo and the other undertakers become part of life cycle of the town they live in and as much as the film is about the dead it is about the rituals about the every day. It is not by chance that Diago has to leave Tokyo to find the calmer rhythms of a Japan from the past. Ultimately, when Diago resolves the issues with his father not only is there the same healing for him that he has seen with the families, but the course of life has made its natural progression. To compare Departures to a Japanese tea ceromony or the care taken in flower arangements might be over stating it, but the movie leaves one with that sense of tranquility and suggest while that ritural and tranquilty may not end grief it helps.
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Tagged: Departures, Japan
Letras Libres reviewed Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito recently and for those who like to read fiction as much for the style as the story it looks like an interesting book. If you read Spanish the review is worth a look.
The style of this novel is that of his stories and that is a good thing: we are before one of the stellar writers of our literature. Before anything, it is his self control. It is known that Morábito did not learn Spanish until he was 15, and it is noticeable: his relation with Spanish is adult-like, lacking the natural childishness fascination, marked with a distrust that obliges him to ponder every word. There is not, nor does it seem like there is, artificial nor capricious lyrics. If there is poetry, it is the poetry of Mondays: “Mondays/ they take apart the platforms/ and the bandstands, / they remove the nails / and the promises,/ reality returns / to its brutish state, / to poetry.” (from From Monday All the Year) There is a simplicity but not it is not simplistic, an economy but not a coldness. The sentences-he doesn’t stop to hide their elegance-are the remains of a fight we don’t see. Because there is a struggle: Morábit’s struggle to purge the language.
El estilo de esta novela es el de sus cuentos, y eso es buena cosa: estamos ante uno de los prosistas estelares de nuestra literatura. Ante todo, su contención. Se sabe que Morábito no aprendió el idioma hasta los quince años, y se nota: su relación con el español es adulta, como desprovista de la natural fascinación infantil, como teñida de una desconfianza que lo obliga a ponderar cada palabra. No hay, no parece haber, artificio ni caprichos líricos. Si hay poesía, es la poesía de los lunes: “Los lunes/ se desmontan las tarimas/ y los estrados,/ se desclavan lo clavado/ y las promesas,/ la realidad vuelve/ a su estado bruto,/ a la poesía” (“De lunes todo el año”). Hay sencillez pero no simpleza, economía de me-
dios pero no frialdad. Las frases –no termina de ocultarlo su elegancia– son restos de una lucha que no observamos. Porque hay una lucha: la de Morábito purgando el idioma.
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Tagged: Fabio Morábito, Letras Libres, Spanish Language
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