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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte 2007-10-08 08:50:00 James Urquhart reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. With murderous intent, Croatian veteran Ivo Markovic tracks down former war photographer Andres Faulques to a derelict coastal tower. Inside, Faulques is trying to capture in a mural the true meaning of humanity that had always eluded his camera. Markovic’s life had been shattered because of appearing in a famous picture by ...

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa 2007-10-06 18:22:00 Jonathan Yardley reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. The Bad Girl will do nothing to improve his lot in Stockholm, but somehow it seems unlikely that this much worries Vargas Llosa. Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -- the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it. It also obviously was written out of a deep nostalgia for the author's lost ...

Bogota Film Festival 2007-10-03 05:01:00 The Bogotá film festival starts today. Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ... Film

La señal, directed by Ricardo Darín 2007-10-03 04:36:00 Argentine actor Ricardo Darín makes his debut as director with "La señal". Please visit SPLALit aStore Argentine Cinema ...

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2007-10-03 03:51:00 Two reviews of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Nowadays, there may be Hmong in Madison and Somalis in St. Paul, but some of us still have trouble keeping up with all the intense cultural mixing and melting going on amid our purple-mountained majesty. For example, mention the Dominicans among us to the average Tom, Dick or Andy Rooney, and he's liable to speak of a mythical ...

Brazilian Cinema in the Hamburg Film Festival 2007-09-28 17:38:00 The 15th edition of the Hamburg Film Festival will include four new Brazilian films. "Baixio das Bestas" - Directed by Cláudio Assis. "O Cheiro do Ralo" - Directed by Heiter Dhalia "A Via Láctea" - Directed by Lina Chamie and "Fabricando Tom Zé", a documentary directed by Décio Matos Jr. ... Film

Interview with Junot Diaz 2007-09-21 18:24:00 Understanding the immigration experience may be impossible if you haven't been through it. But it helps to hear Junot Díaz talk about classified ads. Díaz is the author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a novel published early this month to immediate acclaim. He's sitting in the lobby of the venerable Algonquin Hotel trying to describe how it felt to be a 6-year-old kid from the ...

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2007-09-13 15:56:00 Johnny Diaz reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Diaz is relieved. It has taken him 11 years to produce the follow-up novel to "Drown," his collection of short stories about growing up Dominican-American that was published to critical success in 1996. His new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," follows the loves and losses (mostly losses) of a ...

Eça de Queirós - The Maias 2007-09-06 12:33:00 Benjamin Lytal reviews Eça de Queirós' The Maias. It is not simple to read a virtually unknown book that, suddenly, is supposed to be one of the greatest 19th-century novels. Margaret Jull Costa, translator of José Saramago and Javier Marías, has recently turned to José Maria Eça de Queirós, reputedly the great national author of Portugal. And the resulting translation, of Eça's masterpiece "The ...

Belle Toujours, written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira 2007-09-06 12:23:00 Jeff Shannon reviews Belle Toujours directed by Manoel de Oliveira. What do you get when the world's oldest working filmmaker pays homage to one of the most controversial films of the 1960s? In the case of "Belle Toujours," 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's tip-of-the-hat "sequel" to Luis Buñuel's scandalous "Belle de Jour," you get a slight little curio that honors Buñuel ...

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth and Amulet 2007-09-06 12:04:00 Benjamin Kunkel reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth and Amulet. Bolaño’s desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk they entailed, the movement he founded, his poverty, exile and addiction, his death in his prime: the combination of these elements is foreign to the increasingly professionalised career of the ... Detectives

Interview with Cristóbal Valderrama 2007-09-06 11:38:00 An interview with Cristóbal Valderrama director of "Malta con Huevo". "El ánimo era hacer una película que a nosotros nos gustaría ver y que sentíamos que no se había hecho. Ése fue el espíritu para escribir la historia para que fuese un poco distinto a lo que uno está acostumbrado a ver... en Chile, porque en el mundo hay muchas películas parecidas" Read More ...

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2007-09-04 08:14:00 Michiko Kakutani reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a ...

FIL Prize 2007 2007-09-04 05:15:00 Mexican writer Fernando del Paso won the FIL Prize 2007, formerly known as the Latin American and the Caribbean Literature Juan Rulfo, granted annually in the Guadalajara International Book Fair. Del Paso was born in 1935 in the Federal District, although he has been residing for more than one decade in the capital of Jalisco. Publicist, speaker, journalist, sketcher, painter and diplomat the ...

César Vallejo - The Complete Poetry 2007-09-03 09:21:00 John Timpane reviews César Vallejo's The Complete Poetry. What a year was 1922. That year, T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land was published. So was James Joyce's Ulysses. So was Jean Toomer's Cane. Whatever "modernism" means, 1922 was one of its peaks. Also that year, a poet from Peru published a book called Trilce - to complete silence at home and abroad. Too different, a departure too far. The ...