No news, just reviews

Some of the more interesting book reviews and interviews I've read this weekend:

At SFGate, Carolina de Robertis reviews Sudden Fiction Latino, a comprehensive Norton anthology of flash fiction and microfiction from Latino writers throughout North, Central, and South America--from the internationally acclaimed Gabriel García Márquez to writers barely known in the United States, like Rodrigo Rey Rosa of Guatemala.

Robert McCrum of The Observer presents an amusing interview with Lorrie Moore, the American novelist and short story writer known for her brevity and tragicomic tone. Her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, offers a glimpse into the lives of Americans in the years between September 11 and the United States invasion of Iraq and has been longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Shabnam Minwalla of The Times of India provides some context for the latest Stieg Larsson craze, offering a biographical sketch of the best-selling, deceased, Swedish crime novelist and providing reviews of his Millennium Trilogy--The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

A Saudi Arabian novel about divorce, sexual oppression, and superstition during the first Gulf War has recently been translated by Anthony Calderbank and published by the American University Press. Munira's Bottle by Youssef al-Mohaimeed and its translation are reviewed by Amany Aly Shawky at AlMasryAlYoum.

William Skidelsky of The Observer details the life and works of David Mitchell, a young British novelist whose complex, experimental, diverse novels have become a bestselling, postmodern sensation.

Venezuela's Brain Drain

Newsweek has reported on the effect of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's "twentieth-century socialism" on the educated classes of Venezuela and surrounding Latin American countries. Fleeing cronyism, corruption, cutbacks, censorship, recriminations, and inflation, many of the thinkers and achievers of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and nearby nations have fled to countries such as the United States, where they believe their talents and skills can find appreciation and funding. More than one million emigrants including scientists, writers, engineers, media producers, and professors have left Venezuela in the decade of Chavez's rule, and many more express an adamant desire to do so in the near future, citing the worldwide recession and lack of visas as the only obstacles.

A recent study by Vanderbilt University in Nashville showed that more than one in three Bolivians under 30 had plans to emigrate, up from 12 percent a decade ago, while 47 percent of 18-year-olds said they planned to leave. Many established professionals have already made up their minds. "I ask myself if I'm not patriotic enough," says Giovanna Rivero, an acclaimed Bolivian novelist who is leaving for a teaching job at the University of Florida and has no plans to come back. But "Bolivia is coming apart. There are people who've known each other all their lives who don't talk to one another anymore."

In Venezuela, Chávez has pushed hard against anyone who refuses to accept his party line. Daniel Benaim was one of Venezuela's top independent television producers, turning out prime-time entertainment and game shows for national channels with Canal Uno, a leading production house. "We had 160 employees and a 24/7 operation," he says. But after the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the government cracked down on independent media, and programming budgets dried up. In a month, Canal Uno was down to four employees and heading for bankruptcy. Benaim redirected his business to serve the international advertising market and raked in prestigious international awards, including multiple Latin Emmys. But opportunities for non-Chávistas in Venezuela had withered. One by one, he watched the people he trained over the years leave the country. "I used to give angry speeches about the brain drain. Now I have to bite my tongue," says Benaim, who is also moving to the U.S. "We had the best minds in the business, and now there's nothing for them here."

One of Benaim's associates was Gonzalo Bernal Ibarra. He, too, had soared up the career ladder in broadcast television and until recently ran a campus network that reached 100,000 students. Everything changed in late 2007, when Chávez lost a referendum to rewrite the Constitution and began to crack down on his media critics, including Bernal. Strangers in jackets with weighted pockets—dress code for Chávez's military-intelligence police—began to follow him day and night. Then Congress was set to pass a bill obliging schools to teach 21st-century socialism. "I didn't want my kid learning that crap," says Bernal. Even shopping became a trial as spiking inflation and government price controls emptied the supermarkets of basic goods like milk, eggs, and meat. One day in late 2008, Bernal opened a bottle of whisky and held a yard sale. "I got drunk and watched my life get carted away," he says. He now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, and is trying to adapt. "I was living in the most beautiful, wonderful, funny country in the world. Now a third of my friends are gone. In another 10 years, Venezuela is going to be a crippled country."

The "brain drain" bodes poorly for Latin American literature in the region, as writers can hardly find time, resources, or encouragement in such an environment. Tellingly, one of the most recent Bolivian novels to be translated into English, Juan de Recacoechea's American Passport, the best-selling novel of all time in Bolivia, chronicles a man's desperate attempt to leave his country. On the other hand, the exodus of intellectuals may result in a flowering of diasporaic, exile literature, as has been seen with South Asian novelists living in London and Canada and Iranian writers living in the United States.

The German experience in Colombia

Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has written a debut novel detailing the xenophobic accusations against and hardships of German immigrants in Colombia during the second World War, blending the historical story with more recent Colombian history. Titled The Informers and translated into English by Anne McLean, the novel has been given a very positive review by Larry Rohter of The New York Times.

Running like an undercurrent through “The Informers” is the violence that has pervaded Colombian life for decades, leaving survivors with the “fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else’s death.” A cavalcade of assassinations, kidnappings, bombings and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by guerrillas and drug lords are mentioned in passing, so casually that when one character is asked about the death of a lover, she replies: “There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world.”

Mr. Vásquez also proves adept at capturing the sense of dislocation and vertigo experienced by those forced to separate from their language and culture. Novels about immigrants have become a genre of their own in recent years, usually centered on Latin Americans or Asians trying to make their way in the United States or some other industrialized country. Here, though, the positions are reversed, and while one Nazi supporter sneers at Germans in Colombia who “wanted to assimilate” and have “done so downward,” Mr. Vásquez clearly sympathizes with those struggling to adjust.

Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973, and Los informantes was originally published by Alfaguara in 2004, at which time it was hailed by the Colombian magazine Semana as one of the most important novels of the past twenty years. In 2007, Vásquez published a second novel in Castilian, Historia secreta de Costaguana, which has won awards in Colombia and Spain. Having studied at the Sorbonne of France, Vásquez now lives in Barcelona, where he works in journalism, translates the works of Victor Hugo, E.M. Forster and John Hershey, and has written a brief biography of Joseph Conrad, whose style and themes often draw comparisons to his own work.

Macondo vs. McOndo: goodbye to South American magic realism?

Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian author who has won the National Book Award in his native country, is scheduled to lecture in Alberquerque, New Mexico, US, on the "McOndo Movement," a twelve-year-old literary style in hispanic literature that contrasts the more common magical realist style by being more firmly rooted in the gritty, modern, real world.

Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet coined the term McOndo. "My own world," he wrote, "is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' ? a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes, and condos." In 1996 Fuguet co-edited (with Sergio Gómez) the anthology "McOndo," whose title combined McDonalds with Macondo, the fictional town created by Nobel Prize writer Gabriel García Márquez in his famed classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Interest in McOndo writing has grown ever since.

Despite the popularity of surrealist works by Juan Rulfo, García Márquez, and Borges, Paz Soldán insists that McOndo writing is a literary mindset that can be embraced by today's readers.

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.

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.”

Posthumous Onetti story found

The magazine Turia will publish "El último viernes" ("The Final Friday"), a hand-written short story by acclaimed Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who died in 1994.

The story narrates the meetings and interviews between a journalist and a police officer, and it explores Onetti's common theme of finding truth through fiction and lies.

Onetti's daughter found the story in a thick, unlined notebook. It was likely written in the 1950's, while the author was living in a barrio of Buenos Aires.

Onetti was well known for creating the Faulknerian universe of Santa Maria, a fictional coastal town of Uruguay, and peopling it with his own creations, politics, scandals, and history. Santa Maria first appeared in A Brief Life in 1950.

The one hundredth anniversary of Onetti's birth will occur on July 1.

Vargas Llosa to Receive Spanish Award

On October 12 in Toledo, Spain, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa will receive the individual International Award of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which recognizes contributions to the Spanish language. Vargas Llosa previously won the Cervantes Award in 1994, considered the most noteworthy Spanish-language literature prize, and has long been considered a contender for a Nobel Prize.

President Arroyo of the Philippines will also be awarded the Don Quixote institutional prize for her efforts to reintroduce the Spanish language to her country's public school curricula.

Galeano Exposes 5000 Years of History

The Uruguayan author of The Open Veins of Latin America, a 1971 exposé of the United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and Memory of Fire, a 1982-1986 three-volume epic spanning 500 years of colonization, violence, and revolution in the Americas, Eduardo Galeano released Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone on May 25. The vast and fanciful book attempts to examine all of human history in insightful and intimate ways.

From The Washington Post:

Among Latin American literary giants, Gabriel García Márquez is known for mesmerizing, Pablo Neruda for wooing. Mario Vargas Llosa educates. Jorge Luis Borges captivates. Then there is Eduardo Galeano, the galvanizer, firebrand, a writer who tells readers about history that other, more powerful people don't want them to know or understand.