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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Stan Persky reviews Alberto Manguel's "The Library... 2007-03-23 12:16:00 Stan Persky reviews Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night", John Sutherland's "How to Read a Novel" and Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer", three books on reading and readers. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Interview with Daniel Alarcón 2007-03-23 07:15:00 This is the world Daniel Alarcón has created in his first novel, Lost City Radio. Born in Peru but raised in Birmingham, Ala., Alarcón often visited relatives in Lima when the Peruvian troops were engaged by the guerilla outfit, Shining Path. Even now, he cannot completely fathom what happened. "To a certain extent, it's unimaginable to me," he says. "I've gone back to collect the stories and ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon 2007-03-05 07:39:00 Daniel Alarcón writes with a poet's heart and a reporter's skill. He began researching the book in 1999, interviewing those who'd survived the violence that tore through his native Peru, and studying other conflicts around the globe. His journalism paid off. "Lost City Radio" is filled with startling images that are impossible to shake: A boy from the rain forest longs to see the ocean, not to ... Lost City

Daniel Alarcón in Granta's Best Young American Nov... 2007-03-02 07:08:00 Daniel Alarcón in Granta's Best Young American Novelists list. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon 2007-02-26 05:34:00 'One man's freedom fighter," it has been said, "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 the trauma inflicted upon a society when these freedom fighters - be ... Lost City

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2007-02-26 05:28:00 The best novels tell stories that matter with perfect credibility. Isabel Allende?s latest effort, ?Ines of My Soul,? is compelling and ambitious in scope. But it was not believable enough for me. It is very seldom that the story of the brutal era of colonial 15th century South America and its conquistadors is told without guilt. It is very seldom that the story of conquest is anything but a ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón 2007-02-26 05:09:00 Two new reviews of Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio. Daniel Alarcon's compelling debut novel, "Lost City Radio," opens with a visitor to a radio station: Victor, an 11-year-old boy from the jungle sent as an envoy by his village to the city bearing a list of names to Norma, host of the weekly program "Lost City Radio." On the list of names is one Norma recognizes, one she is forbidden to ... Lost City

Book Review: The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud by Julia Navarro 2007-02-22 08:46:00 Spanish author Julia Navarro's debut novel The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud (John Murray £10.99, pp416) is a religious suspense thriller with an epic quest, an age-old secret conspiracy and a secretive group of people who will, naturally, stop at nothing. But Navarro moves away from the Grail and Mary Magdalene to focus on the Turin Shroud, that relic believed by many to bear the likeness of ...

Dancing to ?Almendra? by Mayra Montero 2007-02-21 04:24:00 The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it?s a wonder more stories haven?t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon 2007-02-14 06:01:00 At first glance, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón has the look of a political fable. It tells the story of an anonymous Latin American nation, first ravaged by a pointless war and now governed by a faceless totalitarian regime. The book's tone is chillingly Orwellian. But politicians ? either of the left or the right ? are neither the real heroes or the villains in this haunting debut novel. " ... Lost City

Interview with Alberto Manguel 2007-02-09 07:55:00 Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires, spent part of his childhood in Israel, wandered Europe in his youth and now resides in France. Yet he is, by his own assertion, a Canadian writer. It was after moving here in 1982 that Manguel first felt he lived ?in a place where I could participate actively as a writer in the running of the state.? Manguel?s significance, however, is hardly limited to ...

Book Review: With Borges by Alberto Manguel 2007-02-09 07:47:00 Like the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Manguel's With Borges is almost perfect in its brevity (almost only because of the annoying typos and spelling mistakes). But, as with Borges, brevity in this case doesn't mean simplicity. In fewer than 100 narrow pages, many of them with Sara Facio's evocative photographs, Manguel manages to echo the complexity of his fellow Argentinean's ...

Book Review: Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas 2007-02-08 08:12:00 The sick critic decides to cure himself by visiting his son, Montano, who has a different problem. After one precocious novel, about writers who give up writing, he finds himself totally blocked. The meeting is an oedipal calamity, and Rosario changes tack. Rather than curing himself of literature, he decides it would be better for him to turn "into the complete memory of the history of ...

Interview with Tomás Eloy Martínez 2007-02-05 09:45:00 The novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez believes his career as one of Argentina's most prominent journalists imperilled him yet saved his life. Blacklisted by a paramilitary group in the 1970s for his job on a Buenos Aires newspaper, he ignored death threats, including a letter bomb at his home, until gunmen surrounded a fashionable restaurant where he was eating lunch. It chilled his blood, he recalls, ...

Interview with Daniel Alarcón 2007-02-02 06:02:00 I?m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I?ve traveled, the more places I?ve seen and people I?ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was ...