Argentine master turns 98

Ernesto Sabato, a Buenos Aires novelist whose work earned him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1984, turned 98 on June 24.

He retired from public life some four years ago, though sources close to him report that he was in high spirits on his birthday, especially due to outspoken recognition from his friend the Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago.

Born in 1911, Sabato was an active physicist during World War II. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1940s, but an "existential crisis" in 1943 shifted him to a career in writing. Though the bulk of his work consisted of essays on science and morality, he published three successful novels from 1948 to 1974--a trilogy entitled The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs, and The Angel of Darkness. He is considered by some to be the greatest living Argentine writer.

From the Latin American Herald Tribune:

Sabato, who was born in Rojas, a small town of Buenos Aires province, in 1911, and has been quoted as saying that “art” saved him from suicide, has written three novels that deal with the psychological pressures that weigh on individuals in given situations.

The nonagenarian, who earned a doctorate in physics and worked at the prestigious Curie Institute in Paris before becoming disillusioned with science in the aftermath of World War II, also has written numerous philosophical and literary essays dealing with themes such as the dehumanizing effects of science and technology.

He became famous in 1961 with the novel “Sobre Heroes y Tumbas,” considered by many to be his masterpiece, while his final novel, titled “Abaddon, el Exterminador” (The Angel of Darkness) and published in 1974, won France’s prestigious Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book) prize in 1976.

Those two works completed a trilogy that also included his first novel, “El Tunel” (1948), a work that originally went unappreciated in his homeland but which “fascinated” French novelist Albert Camus.

"In Defense of Google Books"

Google is the one juggernaut corporation of the digital age which stands for many of the things I hate and yet which I don't hate at all. I don't know what I'd do without Google Maps, Gmail, Blogspot, Google Sites, and Google Books. I know it's monolithic, a monopoly, a triumph of technology over tradition... and yet, I love everything about it.

But apparently many people are up in arms against Google Books, and for probably all the wrong reasons.

Mark Gimein of Reuters lists some common arguments against Google Books and defuses them in his "Defense of Google Books."

There are a hundred other gems like the story of the Mahdi's peppered fingertips in Gen. Gordon's diary alone, and hundreds of millions of facts are now being uncovered and made accessible by Google's extraordinary project of digitizing millions of books. But these days, when you read about Google Books, you hardly ever-well, never-get to read anything as lively as those kinds of facts and insights. No, what you get, over and over again if you've followed the saga of Google Books, is the story of all the folks fighting The Coming Google Monopoly.

Adichie visits Dallas

Writing for the Dallas Morning News, Edward Nawotka was able to interview author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was in Dallas promoting her new book, The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories about life in Nigeria during times of war and of peace.

"In the West we have constructed a narrative where the wars and poverty are meaningless, with no real political or historical context, which suggests misery is this atavistic thing," she said, "But what gets forgotten is at the same time all this is happening, people are falling in love, people are still living their lives. That is what I'm trying to do with my fiction, to tell the stories with a bit of complexity, with balance. There needs to be balance."

Adichie currently lives in the Washington, DC Metro area and divides her time between Lagos and Maryland.

Asturias Prize pushes Kadare closert to Nobel

Controversial author Ismail Kadare, whose surreal, Kafkaesque novels twice had him exiled to the countryside of his native Albania and who now lives as an expatriate in France, has received the Prince of Asturias award in the Letters category.

The 50,000 Euro prize, which has previously gone to Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Gunter Grass, Margaret Atwood, and Arthur Miller, is considered second only to the Nobel Prize. It honors a writer's complete corpus and can only be given once in each category.

Kadare has previously won awards such as the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and he has long been considered a contender for the Nobel.

Vargas Llosa to receive honorary doctorate

At a reception on June 23, award-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa spoke about his career as a novelist and the tribulations involved in practicing the art.

The ceremony at the University of Granada in Spain was to celebrate the honorary doctorate the university bestowed on him today, June 24.

In his address he spoke of his two-year stay at Leoncio Prado Military School, and said it was there that he discovered “the truth” about his country: “the violence, the hurt, the bitterness and racism that so distanced Peruvians from each other.”

“My dad sent me to military school because he saw I had a literary vocation and thought the military could cure me of that sickness, but what he did was give me the subject for my first novel, ‘La Ciudad y los Perros’ (The Time of the Hero)”, he said.

Vargas Llosa, also honored with the Prince of Asturias for Literature and the Planeta, among other awards, believes that “this vocation should be a prize in itself for a writer who really loves literature, who wants to write not to be successful but to live according to his deepest desire.”