SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture - Reviews and news about spanish and portuguese writing authors, ibero-american cinema and arts Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 23 1039 0 8295

Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Phil Brown reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Det... 2007-05-21 05:22:00 Phil Brown reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's a real Beat Generation feel to this picaresque novel with its myriad weird and colourful characters, its agitated restlessness, its lack of restraint and the inherent idea that literature constitutes a sort of existentialist political ideology. For Bolano poetry is the purest, most political literary form and his narrative is ...

Ser sincero es decir lo que piensas. La vida sería... 2007-05-18 06:18:00 Ser sincero es decir lo que piensas. La vida sería invivible si uno dijera siempre lo que piensa. Ser veraz significa que lo que digas sea verdad. Aquí interviene el silencio, lo que uno calla para hacer la vida vivible. An interview with Spanish author Manuel Vicent. Please visit SPLALit aStore Spanish Literature ...

An interview from Mexican newspaper Vanguardia wit... 2007-05-18 05:52:00 An interview from Mexican newspaper Vanguardia with Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska, who completes 75 years tomorrow. Please visit SPLALit aStore Mexican Literature ...

Colombian writers Gabriel García Márquez and Santi... 2007-05-18 05:27:00 Colombian writers Gabriel García Márquez and Santiago Gamboa will be homaged today in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo within the "Feira do Livro do Colégio Miguel de Cervantes" (Miguel de Cervantes School Book Fair). Please visit SPLALit aStore Colombian Literature ...

Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, author of... 2007-05-18 04:58:00 Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, author of novels as "A world for Julius", "Tarzan's Tonsillitis" or "El huerto de mi amada" winner of 2002 Prémio Planeta is again envolved in a plagiarism case. Please visit SPLALit aStore Peruvian Literature ...

An overview of new Spanish directors at Cannes, wi... 2007-05-18 04:37:00 An overview of new Spanish directors at Cannes, with notes on: Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage"Jorge Blanco's "Planet One"Rafa Cortes' "Me"Ramon Costafreda's "Wrap Up"Mario Iglesias' "De bares," "Catalina"Jaime Marques Olarreaga's "Thieves"Juanjo Ramirez' "Going Nuts"Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo's "The Night of the Sunflowers"David and Tristan Ulloa's "Pudor"Nacho Vigalondo's "Time Crimes"Read ...

Boyd Tonkin reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Rad... 2007-05-18 04:18:00 Boyd Tonkin reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio. This is a formidably accomplished first novel. Alarcón's nameless country feels as intensely real as the riotous flora of its rainforests or the reeking slums of its cities. Yet its location beyond any map allows him to synthesise the ordeals of many places into a fable of loss and longing that decodes the "indecipherable text" of every murky ... Lost City

Tom Nissley reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage De... 2007-05-17 04:10:00 Tom Nissley reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Like the best big books, The Savage Detectives feels like it could be even bigger. Not by forging past its ending, which comes to a final, if inconclusive, silence, but by broadening its wide middle, into which, like one of Bolaño's more digressive sentences, yet one more anecdote or qualification could always be inserted. Despite the ...

Kai Maristed reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Su... 2007-05-15 10:03:00 Kai Maristed reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda. For all its rigorous authenticity, and lack of narrative surprise, "The Sun Over Breda" is no arcane, little-known exercise in military history. It's the third volume in Pérez-Reverte's Capt. Alatriste series, which, with his other novels, such as "The Club Dumas," first caught fire in the Spanish-speaking world and now have sold ...

Joanne Omang reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to "A... 2007-05-14 06:05:00 Joanne Omang reviews Mayra Montero's Dancing to "Almendra". An escaped hippopotamus has been killed at the Havana zoo, but cub reporter Joaquín Porrata would much rather be writing about the death in New York that same day of Mafia executioner Umberto Anastasia. Then a zoo worker reveals a connection. It's 1957, and we are instantly hooked into this gripping novel about the beautiful, steaming, ...

David L. Ulin reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium. I... 2007-05-14 06:01:00 David L. Ulin reviews Laura Restrepo's Delirium. In her novel "Delirium," the Colombian writer Laura Restrepo attempts to write about madness from the inside and outside all at once. Set primarily in Bogotá, the book operates from a simple premise: A former university professor named Aguilar returns home from a short trip to find that his wife, Agustina, has shrugged off the mantle of her sanity. ...

Benjamin Lytal and Alexandre Gefen review Mario Va... 2007-05-14 05:54:00 Benjamin Lytal and Alexandre Gefen review Mario Vargas Llosa's The Temptation of the Impossible. Although books about other books abound, there are very few that actually tell us what it is like to read. "The Temptation of the Impossible," Mario Vargas Llosa's book about Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables," is one of these rare confessions. Perhaps because Vargas Llosa is himself an author, a ...

Caitlin Esch interviews Bolivian author Juan de Re... 2007-05-11 05:51:00 Caitlin Esch interviews Bolivian author Juan de Recacoechea, on his recently published "American Visa". Rail: What kinds of opportunities exist in Bolivia today for writers, journalists and novelists, as compared to 20 years ago? Recacoechea: Well, now it?s easy to publish. There are many people publishing, but the writers have to pay to publish their own novels. You write a novel, you pay for ...

Christine Thomas reviews José Carlos Somoza's "Zig... 2007-05-07 05:51:00 Christine Thomas reviews José Carlos Somoza's "Zig Zag". If time travel were possible, where and to what occasion would you desire a visit? Cuban-born Spanish author Jose Carlos Somoza recently told an interviewer that his top choices would be the age of dinosaurs and the Jerusalem of Jesus' time, so it's not unexpected that his new novel, "Zig Zag," centers on a covert government project that ...

Mauro Javier Cardenas reviews Javier Cercas' "The ... 2007-05-07 05:47:00 Mauro Javier Cardenas reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light". In Javier Cercas' previous novel, the affecting and widely honored "Soldiers of Salamis," a narrator named Javier Cercas chronicles his attempt to write a true story about a small episode in the Spanish Civil War. Through the recollections of an ensemble of Spaniards, Cercas returns to this episode often, wondering why a soldier ...