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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Alberto Manguel reviews Montano by Enrique Vila-Ma... 2007-04-20 18:18:00 Alberto Manguel reviews Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas. Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in ...

Jessa Crispin interviews translator Anne McLean. ... 2007-04-17 11:13:00 Jessa Crispin interviews translator Anne McLean. Roberto Bolaño appears to be the new author in translation to read. Who else should be getting attention? It?s very exciting that Roberto Bolaño?s brilliant novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) has finally been translated into English. He?s a superb writer. Bolaño actually features as a character in Soldiers of Salamis, well, a ...

Reader Review: Pudor by Santiago Roncagliolo 2007-04-17 06:07:00 This is a novel about intimacy, about the desires and the fears that we don't even confess to those we love, about the secrets we use to protect ourselves from others. The charcaters are a man who's going to die, a woman who receives anonymous pornography, a boy who sees corpses and a cat that wants sex. Like many families, all the characters live together and the're all alone. Sometimes it ...

"A sparse, restless ghost story that ushered in th... 2007-04-16 06:28:00 "A sparse, restless ghost story that ushered in the surreal and influenced later magic realists." Michael Ondaatje selected Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" as one of the top 5 books of his life, in Newsweek's A Life in Books Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón 2007-04-16 06:22:00 John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio. "One man's freedom fighter," Nelson Mandela famously argued, "is another's man's terrorist." In his debut novel, Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcon reminds that one man's freedom fighter is probably another woman's husband, another boy's father, certainly another man's son. Set in a fictional Latin American republic, Lost City Radio depicts ... Lost City

Scott Timberg on the publication of Bolaño's works... 2007-04-16 06:11:00 Scott Timberg on the publication of Bolaño's works and the new Latin American Literature. While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," a dyslexic, globe-trotting high-school dropout and ex-heroin addict was publishing the most celebrated Latin American novels in three decades. Then, in 2003, he died. But the ...

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 2007-04-16 06:04:00 Richard Eder reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. It is as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, vivid portrayers in their different ways of Latin America's violence and visions, had become their own extravagant protagonists. Instead each has written at a certain alleviating distance, and perhaps it is the distance that art requires to achieve itself, just as it takes a ... Detectives

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 2007-04-16 05:53:00 James Wood reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in ... Detectives

Book Review: Nada by Carmen Laforet 2007-04-16 05:44:00 Fernanda Eberstadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada. I have to admit that, until a month ago, I had never heard of Carmen Laforet. The idea that there might be a lone woman in what seems the unrelievedly male pantheon of Spanish novelists of the post-Civil War era - an era which to outsiders, as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his introduction to "Nada," seems to reek of "fustiness, sacristy and ...

Book Review: Delirium by Laura Restrepo 2007-04-16 05:37:00 Terrence Rafferty reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium. Laura Restrepo writes about Colombia, her native land, but she spends a good deal of her time in Mexico, and to read her latest novel, "Delirium," is to understand why. Most of the action takes place in the Colombian capital, Bogotá ? a city, one character says, "where everyone's at war with everyone else" ? at a time when the whole country ...

John Lichfield previews Manoel de Oliveira's "Bell... 2007-04-13 06:33:00 John Lichfield previews Manoel de Oliveira's "Belle Toujours". One of the great classics of erotic cinema for the thinking man - and woman - is revisited in a French-Portuguese movie released in France this week. Belle Toujours, directed by Manoel de Oliveira, has two of the same principal characters as the Luis Bunuel movie, Belle de Jour, made in 1967. It is not a re-make, but an exploration ...

Interview with Isabel Allende 2007-04-13 06:29:00 Elaine Ayala interviews Isabel Allende. From her Marin County home in San Rafael, Allende ? who, as niece of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, lived for a while in exile, traveled the world as the stepdaughter of a diplomat, and was once fired from her job as a book translator for changing endings to better reflect women ? spoke with flair and humor about her life and work. Q. Your ...

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 2007-04-13 06:21:00 Patrick R. Chesnut reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There?s only one question more agonizing than ?You go to Harvard??, and that?s the inevitable follow-up: ?What are you studying?? Say English or Hist and Lit and watch admiration turn to disappointment as eyebrows furrow to let you know that, at best, you?re wasting your abilities, and at worst, you?re wasting your life. ... Detectives

Boyd Tonkin writes about Spanish literature at the... 2007-04-13 06:17:00 Boyd Tonkin writes about Spanish literature at the London Book Fair. In literary terms, the British market may well rank as the terrain of hard-headed Sancho Panzas rather than high-minded Don Quixotes. All the same, it has hosted plenty of leading Spanish writers over recent years. Whatever one feels about the artistic merits (or otherwise) of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, that ...

Book Review: The Sun over Breda by Arturo Pérez-Reverte 2007-04-13 06:09:00 Erik Spanberg reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Sun over Breda. "The Sun Over Breda," the third installment of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's delightful series of swashbuckling novels, once again focuses on the reluctantly heroic Captain Alatriste, a mercenary in the Spanish Army and a sword-for-hire in 17th-century Madrid. This time out, the narrator is Inigo Balboa, a teenager taken in by Alatriste ...