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: 11 1039 59 7094

Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Ilan Stavans reviews Roberto Bolaño's "Savage Dete... 2007-05-07 05:45:00 Ilan Stavans reviews Roberto Bolaño's "Savage Detectives" and "Amulet". Not since Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does with The Savage Detectives. The Chilean-born Bolaño moved with his parents to Mexico in 1968, returned to Chile in 1973 only ...

Volver by Pedro Almodovar 2007-05-03 08:27:00 Mitchell Warren reviews Volver. Volver plays like a melodrama more than a piece of visionary film making, like a Mike Leigh film (Secrets And Lies) with far more pleasant scenery. There is also some dark comedy in the film, with Raimunda's unfortunate problem of disposing of a corpse. Performances are excellent, even if subtitled, most notably Penelope Cruz and followed by Blanca Portillo as ...

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 2007-05-03 08:14:00 Marcelo Ballvé reviews Roberto Bolaño's "Savage Detectives". There are certain books that mark generations. That is the case, in the English-speaking world, with F. Scott Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby, which left an indelible imprint on the generation that came of age before World War II. It is also the case with David Foster Wallace?s Infinite Jest, which more than any work seems to capture the ... Detectives

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón 2007-05-02 05:58:00 John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's "Lost City Radio". This novel could feel like a political tract, were it not so skilful at portraying the moral insanity of war. Lost City Radio reveals how hard it is to separate villains from victims, killers from the killed. The novel's key plot revolves around a boy who is sent from a village to the city to have a list of names read on Norma's show. His ... Lost City

Interview with Isabel Allende 2007-04-29 17:36:00 Aida Edemariam wrote a biographical piece on Isabel Allende. It wasn't until she had published her third book, Eva Luna (1989), that she left her day job at a school for the disabled, and, for good measure, her marriage. Allende has an unusual willingness to make her private life public. Her website contains a selection of personal photographs; she has written without reservation (though with ...

Bogota39 2007-04-27 05:37:00 Bogotá, this year's World Book Capital, and the Hay Festival presented a list of the new generation of Latin American Novelists. This selection was made by a jury composed three Colombian novelists Piedad Bonnet, Oscar Collazos y Héctor Abad Faciolince, from the suggestions made by readers, editors and literary agents in the Hay Festival web site. Here's the Bogotá39 list of 39 Latin American ...

Scott Esposito reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savag... 2007-04-26 05:08:00 Scott Esposito reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives". In January, New Directions published a translation of the short, lyric and stunning Amulet. Now Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published The Savage Detectives, the first of Bolaño's big books. Upon its original publication in 1998, this sprawling, 600-page ode to Latin America's lost generation of post-boom writers won the Romulo ...

A few extracts of reviews on Alberto Manguel's bio... 2007-04-24 18:11:00 A few extracts of reviews on Alberto Manguel's biographical novel depicting Robert Louis Stevenson's final days in Samoa. Alberto Manguel, who evidently shares the enthusiasm for Robert Louis Stevenson of his friend Borges, has written this short tale of the RLS of the Samoa days. This is the very end, with Stevenson barely fit for firing off missives to the Times about Germans or any other ...

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa revealed on Mon... 2007-04-24 05:57:00 Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa revealed on Monday that he is currently writing a new novel which will be the last part of his trilogy he started in 1988 with the release of ?Elogio a la madrastra? (In Praise of the Stepmother) and continued in 1997 with ?Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto? (Notebooks of Don Rigoberto). The probable title of his latest work in progress will be ?Las cartas de Doña ...

Susan Wyndham reviews The Paris Review Interviews,... 2007-04-24 05:39:00 Susan Wyndham reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 which includes the Jorge Luis Borges 1967 interview. Jorge Luis Borges, on the other hand, enjoyed the interview so much that he ignored his secretary's frequent reminders that a Senor Campbell was waiting for him. "The Campbells are coming!" he cheers as he ploughs on in his demolition of English-language writers from Shakespeare onwards ...

Jenny Cockle interviews Isabel Allende. My Chile i... 2007-04-24 05:29:00 Jenny Cockle interviews Isabel Allende. My Chile is an idealised country, probably frozen in the 1970s; it's the old country where I grew up. Though I was born in Peru my parents were Chilean diplomats (the children of diplomats always take on the nationality of their parents) and we returned to Chile during my childhood to live in my grandfather's house in Calle Cueto, Santiago. That particular ...

Amanda Heller reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City R... 2007-04-24 05:17:00 Amanda Heller reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio We have been here before, in the totalitarian brave new world of "Lost City Radio." This self-defeated place has no name, though that of the author's native Peru will do as well as any other. The heroine of the novel, Norma, is her unhappy country's earth mother of the airwaves. On her radio show she reads aching messages from people looking ... Lost City

Book Review: Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende 2007-04-23 05:38:00 Harriet Paterson reviews Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende. Ferocious Indians and hostile geography were grist to the average conquistador's mill in the early 16th century. The real problem with organising an invasion of Chile was that there was no promise of gold. A disastrous expedition under Diego de Almagro in 1535 led to appalling hardship, many deaths, but worst of all, no treasure. This ...

Emily Carter Roiphe reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The ... 2007-04-20 18:37:00 Emily Carter Roiphe reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives". Even satisfied adults will sometimes hear a train go by and become alert with desire: What would it be like to be in an open boxcar, the wind rushing through, the light shining, hurtling with an unknown purpose toward an unknown destination? It might be something like settling in to read Roberto Bolaño's combustible novel "The ...

Richard Wallace reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed ... 2007-04-20 18:29:00 Richard Wallace reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light". Javier Cercas is a Spanish writer, author of the award-winning novel "Soldiers of Salamis" (2001), which was also made into a film. That novel, set in the final months and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, explored questions of loyalty and the nature of truth. "The Speed of Light," published in Spain in 2005 and a huge best-seller ...