SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Details

SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture - Reviews and news about spanish and portuguese writing authors, ibero-american cinema and arts

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Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The King's Gold
2008-04-29 16:01:32
John Spurling reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The King's Gold. “There is now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels,” says a literary critic in Arturo Perez-Reverte's third novel, The Dumas Club, published in 1993. He is defending Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and its sequels against the accusation that they are not sufficiently serious. Since Perez-Reverte has made his name with ...

Interview with Isabel Allende
2008-04-29 15:56:13
Interview with Isabel Allende in The Guardian. Allende speaks powerfully of her literary inheritance, in particular the influence of Shakespeare. She would draw the characters in a play and then cut them out, making each stand up with a match stick "so I would know what the heck was going on". Reading Shakespeare left the sediment that turned her into a writer, she says. "I love King Lear, Romeo ...

Ildefonso Falcones: Cathedral of the Sea
2008-04-29 15:45:09
Tom Gaisford reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea. Cathedral of the Sea is as sculpted and fluid a tale as the image conjured up by its picturesque title. Originally written in Spanish, the international bestseller appears now in an impressively graceful translation which captures beautifully the archaic and lyrical tone of the narrative. Drawing on the chronicle of Pedro III, ...

Albert Sánchez Piñol: Pandora in the Congo
2008-04-29 15:37:46
Christian House reviews Albert Sánchez Piñol's Pandora in the Congo. It's no surprise that in these confused metro-sexual times a resistant force should be celebrating the kind of manly yarns mastered by Victorian and Edwardian popular novelists. The fatalistic trajectories of military endeavours and grand expeditions have gripped a new brace of writers. The late, lamented George MacDonald Fraser ...

Ildefonso Falcones - Cathedral of the Sea
2008-04-29 15:25:34
Michael Eaude reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea. In the 14th century, Catalonia's ships dominated the western Mediterranean. Its merchants opened offices in every port to Alexandria and built fabulous mansions on Barcelona's Carrer Montcada. But the empire was overstretched. Mid-century, plague halved the population. The king taxed the Jews to finance his wars and his nobles ...

PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize
2008-04-17 15:32:57
Margaret Jull Costa's translation of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias has won The PEN/ Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. The Maias is part of the Dedalus project with Margaret Jull Costa to translate all of Eça de Queiroz's work into English, with funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation in London and the Camões Institute and the Portuguese Book Institute in Lisbon. The Maias is the sixth ...

SPLALit @ Yahoo Groups
2008-04-16 11:40:06
Hi all, I've just created a new group in Yahoo: It's called SPLALit and everyone who shares an interest in Ibero-American Literature is invited. Thanks, Caraccioli ...

Subcomandante Marcos: The Speed of Dreams
2008-04-09 16:28:17
City Lights just released Subcomandante Marcos' The Speed of Dreams. From the City Lights site: Since the publication of Our Word is Our Weapon – which Publishers Weekly described “as strong as dignity and as subtle as love” – Mexico’s enigmatic Zapatista leader has written some of his most brilliant and complex works. From a retelling of indigenous myths and legends, to visions of the future of ...

Pulitzer Fiction Prize 2008
2008-04-09 16:24:01
Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao   Please visit SPLALit aStore Latin American Literature ...

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
2008-04-02 18:05:37
Javier Cercas shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with "The Speed of Light". The shortlist also comprises Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish), The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneraratne (Sri Lankan), De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese), Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian), Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli), The Attack by Yasmina Khadra ( ...

Jose Rodrigues dos Santos: Codex 632
2008-04-02 12:07:59
Matthew Narby reviews José Rodrigues dos Santos' Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher Columbus. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code spawned an entire genre of fiction in which a hero searches the globe for a vital but lost historical object. José Dos Santos’s Codex 632 fits into this pattern. Its main protagonist is Thomas Noronha, a middle-aged history professor at the New University in ...

Planeta-Casamérica Iberoamerican Narrative Award
2008-04-02 11:31:16
The board of judges in Buenos Aires announced Chilean writer Jorge Edwards as the winner of the second Planeta-Casamérica Iberoamerican Narrative award for his novel, “The House of Dostoievsky”.   Please visit SPLALit aStore Chilean Literature ...

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days
2008-03-28 19:21:41
Michael Jacobs reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days. Isabel Allende's memoir begins with the author lying wide awake on an exceptionally stormy Californian night. She is disturbed not, by the ferocious wind or the rain but, by a superstitious fear. For it is the eve of 8 January, the day on which for the past 25 years she has always begun the writing of a new book. She feels that if she ...

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night
2008-03-28 19:19:20
Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night. The 19th century British scholar John Willis Clark once defined a library as a "gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present." Clark also regarded libraries as museums in the sense that each is "a temple or haunt of the ...

Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell
2008-03-20 15:49:55
Andrew Ervin reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell. Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of Hell will not be surprised to learn that its author, António Lobo Antunes, is also a practicing psychiatrist. It's difficult to name another artist who better understands the subtle ways in which memory constantly affects our conscious, in-the-present thought processes. W. G ...

Tomas Eloy Martinez: The Tango Singer
2008-03-12 16:50:03
John Brzezinski reviews TomÃ¡s Eloy MartÃnez' The Tango Singer.   Please visit SPLALit aStore Argentine Literature ...

Juan Rulfo: Pedro Paramo
2008-03-12 15:58:25
Jim Lewis reviews Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. It's a very strange book; let me admit that at the outset. It's as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machineâ€”one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja. When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few ...

Jose Saramago: Seeing
2008-03-11 17:35:17
Chiron reviews JosÃ© Saramago's Seeing.   Please visit SPLALit aStore Portuguese Literature ...

Santiago Gamboa: Los Impostores
2008-03-07 13:20:07
Nathalie Vuillemin [fr] reviews Santiago Gamboa's Los Impostores (Les Captifs du Lys Blanc in the french edition).   Please visit SPLALit aStore Colombian Literature ...

José Carlos Somoza: La caverna de las ideas
2008-03-06 18:03:48
AnthivS [ES] writes about José Carlos Somoza's La caverna de las ideas (The Athenian Murders).   Please visit SPLALit aStore Spanish Literature ...

Premio Antonin Artaud en México
2008-03-06 17:29:27
Mexican writer Juan Villoro was awarded the "Premio Antonin Artaud en México" for his book "Los culpables". Por el libro "Los culpables", el escritor mexicano Juan Villoro recibió anoche el V Premio de Narrativa "Antonin Artaud en México", dotado de 80 mil pesos, la traducción al francés de la obra y una escultura elaborada por los artistas plásticos Arturo Guerrero y Marisa Lara. Poco antes de ...

Federico García Lorca
2008-03-06 17:24:44
Murali RamaVarma writes about Federico García Lorca's poem Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)   Please visit SPLALit aStore Spanish Literature ...

Manoel de Oliveira
2008-03-06 17:22:29
Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira. When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase "world's oldest active filmmaker." The operative word is "active." Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies ...

Juan Eslava Galan: The Mule
2008-03-04 16:24:57
Kristina Lindgren reviews Juan Eslava Galán's The Mule. Ah, the romance of fighting for a cause. Remember the Spanish Civil War, that heroic conflict between leftists and fascists that so entranced the 1930s mass media and served as an opening act for the great European clash to come? But as Spanish writer Juan Eslava Galán shows in his sly, Fellini-esque novel, "The Mule" (Bantam: 294 pp., $12 ...

Carmen Laforet: Nada
2008-02-29 18:43:09
Emma Hagestadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada. Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.Read More <!-- amzn_cl_tag="splalit-20"; ...

Antonio Skármeta: The Dancer and the Thief
2008-02-28 18:37:16
Joan Frank reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief. "The Dancer and the Thief" is Skármeta's valentine for Chile's exhausted human capital, the lost, the loose, the marginalized. A shrewd awareness is at work here, one that does not preclude joy, but owes much to the bittersweet comprehensions of the tango. "Suicide was an undignified act," Gray muses, walking along the Mapocho. One ...

Jose Saramago: Death At Intervals
2008-02-25 18:43:29
Lindy Burleigh reviews José Saramago's Death At Intervals. 'Now life is truly beautiful,' proclaim the citizens of the unnamed fictional country in José Saramago's new novel, when suddenly, one New Year's Day, people stop dying. Granted, it's an implausible scenario, but we are asked to take nothing seriously, except for the author himself. We know, too, that Saramago is not going to stick to ...

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives
2008-02-14 12:14:10
Alex Abramovich reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsize, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his ...
Savage

José Saramago: The Double
2008-02-14 12:06:12
Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double. The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel ...

Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture
2008-02-14 11:52:38
Damon Krukowski reviews "Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture". The late-'60s Brazilian pop music movement known as Tropicália or Tropicalismo is—like Dylan's "Basement Tapes"—highly "overdetermined," as they say in grad school, and therefore a good candidate for a Geertz or Marcus-like "unpacking." But Christopher Dunn's book on the subject, Brutality ...
Garden

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