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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Book Review: Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa 2007-04-13 05:17:00 Jason Wilson reviews Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa. The South American liberator Francisco de Miranda warned us to "trust no man over the age of 40 unless you can be sure he is fond of reading". Despite standing in Peru's presidential elections and deriding Castro, Grass and many others, you can trust Mario Vargas Llosa, another kind of liberator, as a reader. Touchstones, the name given to ...

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 2007-04-12 04:10:00 Richard Eder reviews Roberto Bolaños "The Savage Detectives" Mr. Bolaño has given his novel an odd tripartite structure. The first part, narrated by a young would-be poet, tells of his initiation into Belano?s Visceral Realist movement (a hit off the magic realism of García Márquez and others) and some graphically visceralist sex. It ends with his departure from Mexico City by car with Belaño, ... Detectives

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón 2007-04-10 04:45:00 Laura Axelrod reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio. The most striking quality of Daniel Alarcon's book, "Lost City Radio," is the depth of artistry in his prose. This is a book that is not only meant to be read, but also experienced. It begins in a South American country, at a radio station deep in a war-torn city. A young boy appears with a list of those missing from his village. He is ... Lost City

Book Review: Las Soldaderas by Elena Poniatowska 2007-04-09 08:00:00 Martin Winchester reviews Elena Poniatowska's Las Soldaderas. Women in combat may seem a recent phenomenon to some, but to students of the Mexican Revolution the role of women in battle has long since been known. For nearly a century, though, these soldaderas have been buried deep in the background of nostalgia, far behind more recognizable figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. ...

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2007-04-09 07:52:00 Natasha Walters reviews Isabel Allende's Inés of My Soul. Isabel Allende's early fiction, particularly The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, had an emotional warmth about it that readers found hugely compelling. Together with the fey twists and turns of magical realism - which you either love or you loathe - her ebullient inventiveness led inevitably to comparisons with García Márquez. Some of ...

Although a bit off-topic here's a review of Milan ... 2007-04-09 07:35:00 Although a bit off-topic here's a review of Milan Kundera's The Curtain where he tells of an encounter with Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar in Prague. During a conversation with a French acquaintance he is eager not to let his account of life in Prague under Soviet surveillance dip into the syrupy sweet ?aesthetic evil? of kitsch. As the dominant style in the 19th ... Milan

Roberto Bolaño's review roll. Suddenly the reviews... 2007-04-09 06:14:00 Roberto Bolaño's review roll. Suddenly the reviews started popping. Charles Oberndorf reviews The Savage Detectives and Amulet. In 1998, Roberto Bolaño's novel, "The Savage Detectives," galva nized a Hispanic literary world mired in magical realism. In the nine years that followed, the novel's reputation only grew, and its author, who died in 2003, nearly has been deified. Natasha Wimmer's very ...

Book Review: Delirium by Laura Restrepo 2007-04-09 06:05:00 Maya Muir reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium. Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo's new book, "Delirium," poses as a mystery: Why has Bogota beauty Augustina Londono gone mad, and how did she come to be found delirious in a room at the Wellington Hotel? The answers unfold within four fractured narratives of three generations of the Londono family and the people around them. Clever revelations, ...

Carmen Boullosa recalls Roberto Bolaño. We were fo... 2007-04-09 04:27:00 Carmen Boullosa recalls Roberto Bolaño. We were formally introduced, twenty years after he left Mexico, in Vienna (which, like Mexico City in reverse, has shrunk to two-thirds of its former population). We had been invited to speak on a theme that was relevant to Roberto's work, not mine: exile. I said what I felt like saying, and so did he, disregarding the theme. There was a fraternal ...

100 best novels written in Spanish in the past 25 ... 2007-04-08 18:04:00 100 best novels written in Spanish in the past 25 years post has been updated. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Reading others 2007-04-08 16:05:00 a reader?s words on The Uncomfortable Dead by the Mexican Paco Ignacio Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos and Amulet by Chilean Roberto Bolaño. 1968 for Mexico, as for many countries around the world, marked a year of student protests, culminating in what has come to be known as the Tlatelolco massacres. Wishing to change the oppressive one party rule of the PRI students revolted in the backdrop of ...

Book Review: How I Became a Nun by César Aira 2007-04-05 09:59:00 Tom Roberge reviews César Aira "How I Became a Nun" Many novels succeed by virtue of their authors' abilities to take a single event or moment and parse it into individual elements: background information, subtle details, motivations, consequences. The reader, in this model, is taken from a point of relative confusion to a point of clarity. This is a time-tested formula, but there are writers ...

The 62,000 books commemorative edition of One Hund... 2007-04-04 04:00:00 The 62,000 books commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude on sale since March 26 in Colombia sold out. Due to the demand a reprint of more 70,000 is predicted. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Reading Others 2007-04-02 08:14:00 On Alejandro González Iñárritu: A review of 21 Grams in Five Branch Tree and a review of Babel by Aditya. A Daniel Alarcón read at City Lights bookstore by Favianna. orshouldi on José Saramago's Blindness. Daniel Stephens reviews Fernando Meirelles' City of God. ...

100 best novels written in Spanish in the past 25 years 2007-03-28 04:48:00 Colombian magazine Semana published a list of the best Spanish language novels of the last 25 years. The list, complied by 80 writers, literary critics and journalists named the 100 best novels written in Spanish. (...) exclusive as any list. Where is Jorge Volpi's "In Search of Klingsor"? (sent by Stan Baker) 1. El amor en los tiempos del cólera [Love in the Time of Cholera], Gabriel García ...