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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Book Review: The Initials of the Earth by Jesús Díaz 2007-02-01 08:16:00 Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing,? has long been a favorite saying of Fidel Castro?s, the memorable, simple-sounding formula he has cited when he has felt the need to silence a critic, justify an apparently indefensible repressive measure or simply remind Cubans that his all-seeing eye is ever upon them. Jesús Díaz?s ambitious novel ?The Initials of the Earth? ...

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón 2007-01-29 04:48:00 Two reviews of Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio. Although Lost City Radio is Daniel Alarcón's first novel, his previous short stories hold a novel-like attachment to one protagonist: the city of Lima. In the young Peruvian American author's 2005 collection, War by Candlelight, Lima wasn't just a staging ground for the rotating casts of characters; the city emerged as the book's subject. ... Lost City

Book Review: A Heart So White / Dark Back of Time by Javier Marias 2007-01-26 10:15:00 Mere plot summary would give you a mistaken impression. A nameless Spaniard spends two years teaching at Oxford, has an affair with a married woman and buys a lot of rather obscure old English books. A man in Madrid is about to have an affair with a married woman when she drops dead in his arms; he flees the scene and spends the next few months surreptitiously getting to know the surviving ...

Book Review: The Uncomfortable Dead, by Subcomandante Marcos & Paco I. Taibo II 2007-01-26 04:24:00 Two years ago, the masked, pipe-smoking leader of the Zapatista army ? Subcomandante Marcos ? sent a hand-carried proposal from his jungle headquarters to one of his favorite writers. ?El Sup,? as Marcos is called by his admirers, invited Paco Ignacio Taibo II, an internationally celebrated crime-fiction writer, to co-author a mystery novel. But not just a run-of-the-mill whodunit. This one would ...

The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky 2007-01-25 08:08:00 The title of Argentine film-maker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky's first novel promises a shady émigré underworld, while the cover image of 1920s tango star Osvaldo Fresedo playing the bandoneon evokes an era of underpaid musicians, tubercular artistes and European immigrants with small suitcases and big hopes. Among them were thousands of Jewish women whose hopes were promptly crushed. The " ...

Book Review: Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas 2007-01-15 17:44:00 A novelist who takes himself as the principal subject of his novel is asking for it, and if he names his narrator after Renaissance statesman and essayist Michel de Montaigne, he is asking for it in a big way. Montaigne was an erudite and charming writer who more or less originated the personal essay, and, you could say, gave all subsequent writers permission to extrapolate from their own ...

Book Review: Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño 2007-01-13 18:50:00 Bolaño was born in Chile, raised partly in Mexico, and died in Spain in 2003 at the age of 50. He spent much of his life in exile, in Mexico and Europe, after returning to Chile in 1973 "to help build socialism," a disastrous sojourn he describes in the story "Dance Card." Arrested during a road check and imprisoned for a few days on suspicion of being a "Mexican terrorist," he was neither ...

Book Review: The Uncomfortable Dead, by Subcomandante Marcos & Paco I. Taibo II 2007-01-12 06:25:00 This so-called "four-handed book" has alternating chapters written by Marcos and the Spanish author Paco Taibo. It is self-referential even in its cops. Taibo's limping, one-eyed private investigator, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, gets to tackle a historical murder with El Subco's indigenous campaigner, Elias Contreras. Another equally fictitious sleuth - Pepe Carvalho - puts in an unexpected ...

reading others words 2007-01-12 05:37:00 A review of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star in La Bloga. My latest excursion with Bolaño, Distant Star confirmed my first impressions and added to my level of exasperation, but did not lessen my admiration for this writer. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

Book Review: Casablanca and Other Stories by Edgar Brau 2007-01-12 05:18:00 Edgar Brau was born in 1958 and moved from the provinces to Buenos Aires when he was 10. According to Yates's introduction, he read voraciously as a boy but also played soccer and rugby and nearly pursued a career as a boxer. At the age of 18, he was drawn to the theater, soon acting and directing plays by Moliere, Chekhov and Shakespeare. In 1986, he won first prize in a short-story competition ...

Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón 2007-01-07 19:23:00 With the help of various colourful characters, including a voluble anti-fascist ex-spy, Daniel starts trying to piece together the story of Carax's life, which turns out to be a splendidly morbid Gothic melodrama. He also finds love with his best friend's gorgeous sister, who is engaged to a charmless Francoist, and incurs the wrath of her rich, reactionary dad. A psychopathic fascist cop starts ...

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2007-01-05 11:27:00 Leave it to Isabel Allende to reassess the past, individual and collective, from a feminine -- though not a feminist -- perspective. Her new novel, "Inés of My Soul," is structured in the form of a " crónica, " or account, using the standard devices of the form, including placing the narrator at the grave's edge, at the Spanish conquest of Chile, in the 16th century. The protagonist and narrator ...

Book Review: City of God by Paulo Lins 2007-01-05 11:25:00 Raw, brutal, and graphically violent, "City of God," by Paulo Lins, is a multifaceted story about hellish life and early death in a Brazilian slum, where family ties can be severed as easily as a kite string. Based in part on Lins's childhood in the Rio de Janeiro favela known as Cidade de Deus, or City of God, the book was originally published in Brazil in 1997 and made into a film in 2002. ...

Book Review: The Night Buffalo By Guillermo Arriaga 2006-12-29 18:36:00 Manuel loves Tania, his best friend Gregorio?s girlfriend. He is also having recreational sex with Gregorio?s sister. Tania has been sleeping with Manuel for a long time and may or may not love him, but is certainly obsessed with Gregorio. And Gregorio has committed suicide. What could have been a trite story of youthful passions and betrayal becomes far more haunting and disturbing under ...

Book Review: Ines Of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2006-12-29 18:12:00 Allende freely admits her novel is "a work of intuition", that she researched events widely and then "strung them together with a fine thread of imagination". This may be so, but her dramatisation is marred by passages of overwrought, over-ripe prose. At its worst, the book is strewn with bodice-ripping cliches: bodies burn with impatience, days drag by, Valdivia and his paramour were born to ...