Ernesto Sabato Died

Ernesto Sabato, a famous Argentinean writer, died at the age of 99 today. Sabato may not have been the most talented Latin American writer (which is not surprising since the amount of literary talent in Latin America is overwhelming), but if I had to recommend a single Latin American novel for somebody to read, I would recommend Sabato's short novel The Tunnel. 

I don't claim that the literary quality of this novel is higher than that of many other amazing Latin American writers. However, the importance of The Tunnel resides in the profound insight it offers into the nature of machismo. (The feminist in me will always defeat the literary critic, the academic, the educator, and every other facet of my personality, and I confess this freely.) The workings of the mind of a woman-hater, whose main goal in life is to perpetuate his passionate belief in female inferiority, are described in minute and terrifying detail. As you look into the diseased mind of Castel, the women-hating protagonist of the novel, you realize exactly where the horror of machismo comes from. 

As I have written on various occasions, I was initially going to dedicate my life to the study of Latin American literature. Soon, however, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to deal with how machista the entirety of Latin American literature is, so I switched to Peninsular Studies. So many extremely talented authors from Latin America celebrate and prettify male chauvinism that it just gets tiresome. Sabato, however, goes so deep into the mind of a woman-hater that all you can do as a reader is shrink away in horror. That, I believe, is extremely valuable because I cannot think of another Latin American writer of either gender who does anything even close to this.

On a personal level, The Tunnel was one of the first novels in Spanish I ever read. I was in my early twenties, and the novel really helped me to understand what informs and nourishes male chauvinism. Many things that I was seeing around me became very clear. Actions of some of the men I knew transformed from highly mysterious to crystal-clear in their machismo. I strongly believe that this novel should be required reading for all young women. There are aspects of machismo that, at a first glance, might even seem (and often do) attractive to many young women. Understanding how male chauvinism works would be an invaluable skill for the life of any woman.

El sueño del celta / The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Review

In case you found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine difficult to understand, here is Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel El sueño del celta to explain to you exactly what happened in those novels. Roger Casement, the novel's protagonist, was a British consul who traveled to Congo and the Amazon and wrote scandalous reports about the horrible treatment of the natives of Africa and South America by the colonial forces. Later on, he joined the Irish nationalist movement and militated for the cause of Ireland's independence.

This is not a novel that offers much - or any, I would say - space for the reader to analyze, interpret, imagine, or look for his or her own answers. Everything is spelled out with painstaking attention to detail. As a result, some parts of the novel sound like they were copy-pasted from an encyclopedia. Sources of historical data, short biographical sketches of real-life people who appear in the novel, dates and gigures populate the pages of El sueño del celta. Vargas Llosa seems to have lost his capacity to relinquish control over his text and allow the readers to interact with it on their own. For those who managed to remain unfamiliar with the civilization versus barbarity conflict, Vargas Llosa makes absolutely sure that you will be sick to death of both terms by the end of the novel. And for those who didn't get the message that imperialism is wrong, it will be hammered in on every other page.

Everything I have written so far has probably made you think that I hated the novel. This, however, is not true. El sueño del celta doesn't offer much for analysis but it is surely informative and very well-written. I now know everything I ever wanted to know (and a lot, lot more) about Roger Casement, his travels, struggles, ailments, friends, foes, hopes and dreams. This novel is anything but boring. Vargas Llosa is a great narrator who can turn anything into a great story. I have no doubt that this novel will be quite successful if only for the fact that it is very easy to read.

The enumeration of sufferings inflicted by the colonial forces on the natives of African Congo and the indigenous people of the Amazon becomes painful to read at a certain point. This, of course, is a story that needs to be told and repeated as many times as possible lest we forget that imperialism can never be excused. I have to warn you, however, that an honest piece of writing about colonialism (such as this one) will be so disturbing as to prevent you from sleeping at night.

There are people who insist that Vargas Llosa is a Libertarian. It is a statement that is as silly as claiming that Juan Goytisolo is a Communist. Writers have a tendency to try on political discourses without really knowing what those discourses are about. They don't, however, allow their political triflings influence what and how they write in any way. It's been a while since I have read an indictment of the horrors that free market and wild capitalism inevitably bring along that would be as passionate and convincing as El sueño del celta. Anybody who believes that it would be a good idea to let market forces act freely, without any restraints from the government, should read this novel and hopefully just shut up already. In El sueño del celta,Vargas Llosa condemns the horrifying greed of free market capitalists better than any writer I have read in a while.

Contemporary Latin American Literature: Reading Suggestions

By huge popular demand or, rather, by request of one intellectually curious reader, I will now try to offer suggestions on which contemporary Latin American writers might be worth reading. I don't study Latin American literature professionally, even though when I first started my career in Hispanic Studies that was what I was going to do. Then I realized that I was psychologically unprepared to deal with the kind of deep-seated hatred of women that informs contemporary Latin American literature. (If you have discovered Latin American novels that you think are not machista, leave their titles in the comments, and I will show you why you are mistaken.)

So these are the authors from Latin America who are writing right now and who are good enough for me to disregard their Stone Age attitudes towards women:

- Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru is the only writer of the Latin American Boom whose work I love to the point of following everything he writes. My favorite book ever by this writer is La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World in English.) As I wrote before, Latin American writers have been trying to create a great Latin American love story for a very long time now. They have failed miserably, in my opinion. Vargas Llosa's attempt at this goal, however, (titled The Bad Girl: A Novel) is better than most. It's also one of the most recent novels by this newly-minted Nobel Prize winner.

- Another Peruvian whose work I'm reading right now is Alfredo Bryce Echenique. When I finish his Un mundo para Julius (Spanish Edition) (or A World for Julius: A Novel (THE AMERICAS)), I will post a review on this blog.

- If you are interested in Cuban literature, I'd recommend Zoe Valdes. Her I Gave You All I Had is available in English translation, so it might make sense to check it out. 

- Alberto Fuguet is what I'd call a very typical Chilean writer. His male Bildungsroman Mala onda (in English translation Bad Vibes) has had a cult following, although I have no idea why. I find this author's writing to be infantile and boring. 

- Edmundo Paz Soldan is a Bolivian who teaches at Cornell. His novel La materia del deseo (Spanish Edition) (or The Matter of Desire: A Novel in English) is a story of a Bolivian professor who teaches at Cornell. The book would be really fantastic if it weren't for its profound machismo, but well, what else is new. If you want to read Latin American literature, you'll have to get used to it. 

- Roberto Bolaño from Chile died recently. He is a Latin American writer you need to read because his fame keeps growing. If you don't feel prepared to tackle his humongous 2666: A Novel, maybe you should start with The Savage Detectives: A Novel. 

As I go over this list, I'm seeing that I don't have any authors from Mexico and Argentina which upsets me. If anybody knows of anything good in terms of literature that happened in these countries since Juan Rulfo and Manuel Puig respectively, please let me know in the comment section. My familiarity with other Latin American countries in terms of literature has always been next to non-existent.

Remember that the best gift you could give me is a reading suggestion. So feel free to share your favorite contemporary Latin American writers in the comments. Please don't list Borges and Carpentier, though, because we are talking about people who are writing right now.

Aristocracy

The Spanish king Juan Carlos awarded the title of Marquis to the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa*. It's great, of course, that the king is trying to do something to recognize a writer who has done so much to make the people of the world love and respect literature in Spanish**. Still, the very idea of honoring a writer by giving him a title is quite bizarre. The concept of aristocracy, of some people being better than others because they were born to a certain family, is one of the most ridiculous inventions of humanity. Nowadays, it has become popular with the surviving European monarchs to award nobility titles to important artists in order to save the concept of nobility from complete oblivion. 

The very nature of creative talent is such as to make of it the exact opposite of the concept of nobility. Even if you come from a long line of talented writers, painters or musicians, this heritage does not bring you even an inch closer to being capable of creating your own work of art. The nobility of spirit and the nobility of blood often fail to coincide at all. An artist always begins creative work from scratch. A noble has every advantage possible from birth but, more often than not, never manages to transform it into something worthwhile.

For these reasons, I find it funny that Juan Carlos of Spain would think that he has something he can give Mario Vargas Llosa to honor him. The power of this writer's creative genius gives him a much greater right to confer honors on other people than any such right that a king might possess. It would have made a lot more sense for Vargas Llosa to decide whether he chose to honor the king of Spain.

* The link is in Spanish.

** If you are looking to get familiar with the work of this great writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, I recommend his beautiful novel The War of the End of the World. Another novel by Vargas Llosa that merits attention is The Bad Girl: A Novel. This novel represents the writer's contribution to the attempts to create the great Latin American love story. In my opinion, all such efforts until now have failed (Juan Rulfo got close to this goal in his novel Pedro Paramo, even though the novel itself is not centered on love) but Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl: A Novel is a good effort in that direction.

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel Prize!

Finally!!! After years of handing out Nobel Prizes to people almost nobody knows and absolutely nobody reads, the Nobel committee conferred the prize to the impossibly talented Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Of course, I am convinced that while Juan Goytisolo is living giving the Nobel Prize to anybody else is a joke. But then again, Goytisolo - the most gifted writer of the second half of the XXth century in the world - is way too good for the Nobel.

Vargas Llosa is an amazing writer. Among the writers of the Latin American Boom, he is definitely my favorite. Vargas Llosa simply doesn't know how to write a bad sentence. His novels are complex and beautifully structured. He is even a lot less machista than other writers from Latin America. Of course, male chauvinism is still there in his books. However, unlike Garcia Marquez, who is a virulent and unrepentant woman-hater, Vargas Llosa has gone to great lengths over the years to reduce the degree of male chauvinism in his work.

Now, of course, everybody will rush to buy his books. (Maybe they will appear in Kindle format in the original). I feel extremely jealous of those who will now get a chance to read Vargas Llosa's books for the very first time. As one of my professors once said, "I really wish I get Alzheimer's when I grow old. Imagine the joy of re-dicovering all these amazing books as if you had never read them before."

If you are among the lucky readers who are about to discover Vargas Llosa, I recommend that you start with his beautiful novel The War of the End of the World. It will give you a taste of what Vargas Llosa is capable of but, at the same time, this is not one of his most difficult novels, so it will ease you into his way of writing.



In case you want to read something more recent - but still absolutely amazing - by this author, I recommend you read his The Bad Girl: A Novel. Written in 2006, this novel is an attempt by the writer to analyze the roots of male chauvinism and address machismo as a way of being that has dominated Latin America for centuries. Among the male writers of Latin America, Vargas Llosa, I believe, is the only one who at least made an effort to recognize his own machismo and look at it critically.

Congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa and to all of us who have loved and followed his work for years!

Students and Sexism

I've been grading student reader responses to some Latin American poetry we have read in class and the degree of sexism - that the students don't even notice - is nothing short of shocking. The two poets of the early XXth century we were reading are called Alfonsina Storni and Gabriela Mistral. Got it? Alfonsina and Gabriela.

Their lyrical and feminist poetry is addressed to men. In one poem, Storni addresses "a little, little man" who has imprisoned her and wouldn't let her be free. In another poem, Mistral says that "to see him again" is all she wants because she is dreaming of "winding my hands around his bloody neck." And so on.

In their responses, the absolute majority of students refered to both poets as "he." As a result they produced things like: "In this poem, the poet talks about his lover and wants to kill him."

Apparently, it's easier for them to imagine that poets in the early 20th century Latin America wrote openly gay poetry than to realize that those poets - called Gabriela and Alfonsina, in case you have forgotten, - were women.

I have read about these tests where college students are asked to draw a human being and they end up drawing - almost exclusively - male figures. Encountering within my own class this incapacity to equate an artist and a woman in spite of the obvious evidence is truly shocking.

Paula Varsavsky's Visit

Paula Varsavsky is a very good Argentinean writer. I invited her to speak to my students this coming February, and the whole Department was very eager to see her here. I included her short story as required reading in my courses. The plan was to have the students read the text and then give them a chance to meet the author and speak to her. Paula is a very good speaker, and I know they would have loved listening to her. Everybody was really looking forward to this.

Today, however, I had to disappoint my students. I told them that the writer's visit to our university has been cancelled bacause of the budget freeze. The budget for Paula Varsavsky's visit was actually very very modest. The writer offered to limit the budget even more, but all to no avail. We are not allowed to spend even a dollar on such an important cultural activity.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrating this is. The students would have benefited from this in a variety of important ways. When I heard the President say in his yesterday's State of the Union address that universities need to start cutting spending, I thought how sad it is that we have to give up on such important cultural activities - which also cost next to nothing - while there is always money to send more troops all over the world and the Pentagon does not see even a tiny little cut in its spending.

They call it a "freeze" and a "cash flow problem." I know from sad experience, however, that when an institution gets into the practice of cutting funding for cultural and educational events, it's very hard to get it back on track. The efforts to kill the Humanities have been going on for a while. They started long before anybody even heard of the current economic crisis. I feel that this particular crisis is just an excuse that is being used to continue the assault on Humanities.

And more than anything in the world I hate having to deprive my students of the educational experiences they deserve.

Roberto Bolano's 2666: A Review, Part I

by the late Chilean-Mexican writer Roberto Bolano** is, without a doubt, this amazing author's masterpiece and a worthy culmination to his incredible literary career. 2666: A Novel consists of five parts, and the author hoped that they would be published as separate novels. His heirs, however, decided to publish it as one large novel, which I think was the right decision, even though it contradicted the writer's wishes. The novel is huge, so I am going to review each of its part separately.

I. The Part about the Critics

From the moment I started reading the opening part of 2666: A Novel, I literally started moaning with pleasure. Bolano's language is mesmerizing and I would even say scrumptious. This writer's skill in constructing simply delicious sentences is incredible. This part of the novel is definitely not to be gulped down in one seating. It should be savored during long winter nights, appreciated and tasted word by word as if it were a delicious and rare wine.

"The Part about the Critics" is especially near and dear to my heart because it presents a beautiful parody of academic life. The main characters are four literary critics who are obsessed with the work of the same writer. Bolano's knowledge of the little weirdnesses, obsessions and peculiarities that drive an academic's life is profound and he makes great use of this knowledge in order to poke gentle fun at us. In their search for an elusive author in whose work they all specialize, three of the four critics find themselves in Santa Teresa, a small Mexican bordertown.There, they are confronted with the unusual for them reality of Mexico and find out about the feminicide that is taking place in Mexican bordertowns.

** Unfortunately, this site's format doesn't allow me to use diacritics, so I have to write the Chilean writer's last name in this weird way. Believe me, it annoys me more than I can say.