SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez Saw Ernest Hemingway

2011-12-02T16:07:00.001-08:00

For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I faced the same great inconvenience. At the time, I spoke the same rudimentary English that I still speak now, and I wasn’t very sure

Cervantes prize goes to Chilean poet Parra

2011-12-02T16:01:00.001-08:00

Chilean poet Nicanor Parra has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor, for his influential work mixing everyday slang with traditional verse. The 97-year-old poet, essayist and physics graduate was announced the winner Thursday in Madrid by Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. He published his first book of poetry in 1937 and eventually adopted

2011-12-02T15:57:00.001-08:00

Jorge Volpi's address at the Guadalajara International Book Fair's Reading Promoters Conference. “Fiction teaches us to be human” is the phrase that opened the Reading Promoters Conference as part of the address by Jorge Volpi, that ran longer than expected due to the great interest shown by the audience on the subject proposed by the writer: fiction as a tool for reading and in everyday life to

Enrique Krauze: Redeemers

2011-08-29T10:25:00.001-07:00

A look at literary and political figures in Latin America. Read More

Francisco Goldman: Say Her Name

2011-08-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Francisco Goldman's fourth novel is based on a real tragedy in which his wife, Aura Estrada, broke her neck while body-surfing along the Mexican coast, and died. She had recently turned 30. They had known each other for four years and would have celebrated their second wedding anniversary if she had lived another month. Read More

Quim Monzó: Guadalajara

2011-08-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Three pages into Quim Monzó's new short story collection, the opening tale's seven-year-old protagonist makes a startling discovery: everyone over the age of nine in his family of carpenters is missing the ring finger of his left hand, and it's not by accident. Welcome to "Family Life," which fits within the morbid boundaries of Guadalajara—a realm where fables are subvertedRead More

José Saramago: Death with Interruptions

2011-08-22T04:02:00.001-07:00

I've just finished José Saramago's Death with Interruptions, a novel which I didn't consider as strong as Blindness, but which I felt, nevertheless, accomplished what it set out to do: which is to transform death into a human experience. Like Blindness, which captures the shock of a community confronting a sudden plague of sightlessness, Death with Interruptions takes as its subject a cataclysmic

Goncalo Tavares: Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique

2011-08-22T03:29:00.000-07:00

In the very first scene of this book, a young Lenz Buchmann is instructed by his father to "do" a young servant girl in front of him. The command is issued without qualification, and there is no recourse for Lenz except to follow it. From this incident onward the novel spins forth a philosophy of strength, of power, of competence, of morality, or the lack thereof, that is alienating to say the

Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

2011-08-22T03:07:00.001-07:00

Love in the Time of Cholera was probably one of the first books I read that introduced me to a South American sensibility, having been immersed in a traditional English A-level. That sense of reality slightly altered, not quite magical realism but not life as we know it, despite the faded grandeur and trappings of a post-colonial state.Re-reading it a few years ago, unsurprisingly I struggled to

José Saramago: Cain

2011-08-19T08:53:00.001-07:00

Abel and Cain have each made an offering to God. Abel's is accepted, Cain's rejected. In a fit of jealousy, Cain murders his brother. When God asks where Abel has got to, Cain replies tetchily, "Am I my brother's keeper?" God discovers the murder, and Cain is punished. He will live, but he will be forever marked, and condemned to wander the earth.Read More

Horacio Castellanos Moya: Tyrant Memory

2011-08-17T03:11:00.000-07:00

Horacio Castellanos Moya's Tyrant Memory is a book of revolution, of tanks rolling through city streets, of intrigue, imprisonment, and exile, of torn families and firing squads — but it will not for that reason be passed around dorm rooms, nor is it likely to feature on Glenn Beck's old chalkboard. In El Salvador in April 1944, the dictatorship of Maximiliano Herna´ndez Marti´nez, a fascist who

José Saramago: Cain

2011-08-16T06:00:00.001-07:00

Cain is a Saramago novel that takes his oft-used "what if" set-up—what if people stopped dying within a geographic region (Death with Interruptions), or what if everyone in a town became blind (Blindness)—and asks, what if cain (Saramago doesn't capitalize names in this book) were able to tell his story? This is cain of cain and abel, the first two children of adam and eve, the first murderer

Carlos Franz: The Absent Sea

2011-08-12T09:49:00.001-07:00

"Where were you Mamá, when all those horrible things were taking place in your city?" This question, put to Laura by her daughter Claudia, is what has drawn The Absent Sea's protagonist back to the fictional town of Pampa Hundida at the start of novelist Carlos Franz's exploration of the turbulent aftermath of Chile's 1973 coup. Read More

Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

2011-08-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

The Chilean novelist and poet is best known for the novels The Savage Detectives and 2666: his "supernovel", in part an elegy to the real murder victims of a Mexican town. Read More

Gonçalo M. Tavares on man, machines and society

2011-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

At euronews Elza Gonçalves speaks with Gonçalo M. Tavares on man, machines and society. His book, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technology, is coming out from Dalkey Archive Press this summer. Read More

Moacyr Scliar: Kafka’s Leopards

2011-08-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a review of Kafka's Leopards by the recently deceased Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar, and then I got around to reading the piece that translator Thomas Beebee wrote for us on Scliar, his writings, and Kafka's Leopards and realized that there was not much enlightenment that I could offer on any of these topics that Thomas had not already covered. So I come to you today,

José Saramago: The Notebook

2010-12-11T07:20:00.000-08:00

Leora Skolkin-Smith reviews José Saramago's The Notebook. In September of 2008, at the age of eighty-five, Jose Saramago began to write a blog. His wife, watching him suffer the restlessness and anxiety of advanced age, had suggested to him that he try doing something challenging, as his traveling and own writing were slowing down. Unlike so many writers who viewed the approaching age of the

Mario Benedetti: The Rest is Jungle

2010-12-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

Paul Doyle reviews Mario Benedetti's The Rest is Jungle. The Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, sadly, was little translated into English during his lifetime, and most of what made it through was poetry. Perhaps this was because his fiction never quite fit the English-world model of a Latin American writer, neither writing the meta investigations of a Borges or Cortazar, nor delving into the

Macedonio Fernandez: The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel

2010-12-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

Three Percent reviews Macedonio Fernandez' The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel. Macedonio Fernandez is little known outside Argentina. Unfortunately I foresee this remaining the case for some time. Even with the recent translation and publication of his posthumous novel, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel (Museo de la Novela de la Eterna), by Open Letter Books (

José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

2010-12-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Richard Elliott reviews José Saramago's The Elephant’s Journey. The late Portuguese writer José Saramago was a master at combining the fantastic with the banal, the metaphoric with the everyday. There’s always a sense in his prose that, whatever the story he might be telling us, there are a multitude of stories framing it, running alongside it, or visible just beyond its borders. Saramago wants

Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

2010-12-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

Tim Martin reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Skating Rink. It took the English-speaking world until several years after Roberto Bolaño’s death in 2003 to get a sense of his genius in drip-fed translations, but, thanks to excellent English versions by (separately) Natasha Wimmer and Chris Andrews, a full-scale excavation of the Chilean novelist’s talent is now underway. The Skating Rink is just one

Juan José Saer: The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

2010-11-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

Abigail B. Lind reviews Juan José Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. Given its lofty historical and ontological concerns, it is easy to forget that “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington” is ultimately a travel narrative: a morning’s journey of 21 blocks. Saer punctuates his characters’ musings with descriptions of Santa Fe, and he fixates on a conception of “the city not as though it were

Belles Étrangères

2010-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

This year's edition of Belles Étrangères is dedicated to Colombian Literature. The invited author for this edition are: Hector Abad Faciolince, Antonio Caballero, Jorge Franco, Santiago Gamboa, Tomás Gonzalez, William Ospina, Juan Manuel Roca, Evelio Rosero, Gonzalo Sanchez, Antonio Ungar, Fernando Vallejo and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Here's an interview with Jorge Franco.

Interview with Gonzalo Márquez Cristo

2010-10-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Nathalie Handal interviews Colombian poet, editor, and writer Gonzalo Márquez Cristo. An interview about his city Bogotá. I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million

Silvina Ocampo: The Golden Hare

2010-10-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

Andrea Rosenberg translated Silvina Ocampo's The Golden Hare and writes about it. I knew I had to translate “The Golden Hare,” Silvina Ocampo’s mysterious fable, as soon as I read the first few sentences. Now often published separately as a children’s book in Argentina, it is the first story in Ocampo’s 1959 collection La furia (The Fury). Silvina, the less famous and more ethereal of Argentina’s