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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Book Review: The Heretic by Miguel Delibes 2006-12-29 17:53:00 This international bestseller follows the life of a boy born on the day the Protestant reformation began?when Martin Luther nailed his list of ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg?through his last days in prison and burning at the stake. Cipriano Salcedo, the only son of the Salcedo family, is born in Valladolid, Spain, on October 31, 1517, shortly after which his mother dies. ...

Book Review: The Lonely Hearts Club by Raul Nuñez 2006-12-29 17:21:00 It has been said that the past is another country; if so, then Barcelona in the early 80s must be another planet. Dirty and grim, a capsized ship in the port, whores lining the Ramblas, a shantytown of squatter restaurants down on the open-sewer beach. These are my pre-Olympic memories. Then the city got spruced up and the tourists came in hordes. I mention this because this latest reprint of ...

Book Review: Adios Muchachos by Daniel Chavarría 2006-12-29 17:18:00 Back in the distant past books and films in translation always seemed to verge on the arty side. This has changed over the last ten years or so with the proliferation of popular fiction in translation. The last two offerings I have read for TBR (both from the Spanish) - Raul Nuñez?s The LonelyHearts Club and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez?s Dirty Havana Trilogy - are typical of this trendy new wave. These ...

Book Review: The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán 2006-12-29 17:14:00 In The Buenos Aires Quintet, first published in 1997, we find Pepe in Buenos Aires, bringing that city to life in the way he does Barcelona. Pepe?s been hired by an uncle of his who wants to locate his son, now back in Argentina after years of exile in Spain. What does Pepe know of Argentina? "Tango, the disappeared, Maradona," he flippantly answers, although Pepe is fully aware of Argentina?s ...

Book Review: An Olympic Death by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán 2006-12-29 17:12:00 An Olympic Death, which first came out in 1991, is set in a pre-Olympic Barcelona, a city far different from the one it was soon to become, with its newly created beach front and the inevitable arrival of cruise ships, turning it into slick, urban tourist attraction. 1991 was an emotionally wrenching year for many of us who lived here as we watched the city being dug up, torn down and rebuilt. ...

Book Review: Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piñol 2006-12-29 17:10:00 Already translated into fifteen languages, Cold Skin (originally titled La pell freda) won the Ojo Critico Narrativa prize on its original publication in Catalan in 2002, an amazing feat for anthropologist Albert Sánchez Piñol, born in Barcelona in 1965, who debuted with this darkly beautiful novel. Consider a discrete synopsis: A young, nameless narrator arrives by ship sometime after World War ...

Book Review: The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo 2006-12-29 17:08:00 Among many accolades, Carlos Fuentes calls Juan Goytisolo "Spain's greatest living novelist"?just but curious praise for a writer who has not lived in Spain for 50 years and continues to be its most scabrous critic. Born Barcelona in 1931, Goytisolo?s early novels, including Marks of Identity, were banned by the Franco regime. Driven into exile, Goytisolo lived in Paris from 1956 to 1996, when ...

On the creation of a Colombian national identity through crime fiction 2006-12-18 18:41:00 An article by Colombian author Santiago Gamboa. According to Balzac, a "real novelist" must "plumb the depths of society, because the novel is no less than the secret history of nations." Balzac's observation about the power of fiction to reveal social truth applies with particular force to a country like Colombia, whose reality has been so distorted by its official history. History is typically ...

Pedro Juan Gutierrez 2006-12-16 20:16:00 A couple of texts from Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Claustrophobic Me For years I?ve been trying to get out from under all the shit that?s been dumped on me. And it hasn?t been easy. If you follow the rules for the first 40 years of your life, believing everything you?re told, after that it?s almost impossible to learn to say "no," "go to hell," or "leave me alone." But I always manage . ...

The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt 2006-12-10 19:10:00 It has taken a while for this novel to find its way into English. The Seven Madmen was first published in Argentina in 1929. Its author, Roberto Arlt (1900-42), was a disheveled Buenos Aires journalist who defiantly disregarded the rules of Spanish grammar and the finer sensibilities of critics. They in turn hooted at his work, which included four novels, two collections of stories and eight ...

La Malinche and Inés Suárez 2006-12-08 07:00:00 For centuries both women have been reviled as collaborators in Spanish conquests of the new world that verged on genocide. La Malinche was an Aztec turncoat who helped Hernán Cortés conquer Mexico; Inés Suárez was a Spanish seamstress who joined another conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, in slaughtering the inhabitants of Chile. Now two of Latin America?s female literary giants, Laura Esquivel and ...

Lower City directed by Sergio Machado 2006-12-07 06:07:00 Let's face it, love triangles can be a drag on film. The sex might be diverting but two guys fighting over the same girl (it's almost never the other way round) usually means there's no real love story. The blokes are too busy with their cockfight. It's a phallocentric form. Lower City is a bit different. It does have both a real (simulated) and metaphoric cockfight, but it also encompasses ...

Alfaguara Prize 2007 Jury 2006-12-06 04:34:00 Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa will preside to the jury of the 10th edition of the Alfaguara Prize 2007. Like in previous editions, the composition of the rest of the jury will not become public until the award is announced. From his first edition in 1998, outstanding writers have presided over the Jury of the Alfaguara Prize: Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Mendoza, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Antonio Muñoz ...

Literary renaissance in Peru 2006-12-02 06:37:00 Lima is once again one of Latin America's brightest literary scenes, and in the last year, Peruvian writers have won prestigious literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world for novels that deal with fallout from the war years and, in doing so, add to a growing literature of terrorism and the risks to democracy in fighting it. Alonso Cueto, who lives in Lima, received the Herralde prize for " ...

Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2006-11-27 07:41:00 Washington Post's review of Isabel Allende's Ines of My Soul. Isabel Allende's new novel, Ines of My Soul , the 15th book she has published in just over two decades, is in many ways her most ambitious. It is historical fiction, set in Spain, Peru (where she was born) and Chile (where she grew up) in the 16th century, the time of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, one of the ...