Monday, October 31, 2022

In Memory of My Parents / The Late Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

In Memory of My Parents,

the Late Gabriel García Márquez and

Mercedes Barcha

Rodrigo Garcia Shares Formative Memories

of His Mother and Father

By Rodrigo García

August 2, 2021

Most of my father’s drafts of work-in-progress were salvaged by my mother behind his back, because he was strictly against showing or preserving unfinished work. Many times during our childhood, my brother and I were summoned to sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire previous versions and throw them out—an unhappy image, I am sure, for collectors and students of his process. His papers and his reference library went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and my mom took great pleasure in the opening ceremonies of that collection. Both my brother’s family and mine were there, and she enjoyed and took shelter in the company of her grandchildren.

William Faulkner

The masters who influenced the Latin American Boom

Vargas Llosa and García Márquez took cues from Faulkner

Edmundo Paz Soldán

November 21, 2012

For some time now I have been planning to give a course on William Faulkner's influence on the on the so-called Boom in Latin American writing that began in the 1960s. The course would begin with Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who said that this American writer was the first novelist he read with pencil and paper at hand, trying to "rationally" reconstruct the architecture of his novels, see the workings of the complex play of chronology and point of view.

Brazilian writer Jorge Amado and his son (fourth from left ro right) and Czech journalist and playwright Jan Drda (first from left to right), at Dobříš, a Czech castle that served as a residency for Czech and international writers, in 1950. Photo from the Paloma Amado archive, used with permission.

During the Cold War, Latin American intellectuals found solace in communist Prague

Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado, and Pablo Neruda were among the illustrious visitors

Durante la Guerra Fredda, gli intellettuali latinoamericani hanno trovato rifugio nella Praga comunista (Dante)

Durante a Guerra Fria, intelectuais latino-americanos encontraram conforto na comunista Praga (Pessoa)

Historia de cómo intelectuales latinoamericanos encontraron consuelo en la Praga comunista (De otros mundos)

Filip Noubel
21 November 2020

Before COVID-19, Prague was visited every year by millions of tourists looking for cheap beer and spectacular architecture. In the 1950s, on the other hand, the capital of then-Czechoslovakia attracted a very different crowd of travelers: Leftist intellectuals from around the world looking to see what life was like under socialism.

The Scent of Buenos Aires / Stories by Hebe Uhart

Hebe Uhart

Review: The Scent of Buenos Aires: Stories by Hebe Uhart

Book by HEBE UHART
Translated from the Spanish by MAUREEN SHAUGHNESSY
Reviewed by JASMINE V. BAILEY

In Argentina, the short story is not what you write until you manage to write a novel; it is a lofty form made central by twentieth-century titans like Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo. The form has power and prestige in the broader region as well. Hebe Uhart was a product of that literary tradition and came of age as a writer when Cortázar and Borges were at the height of their fame and literary production. At the end of her life, Uhart was recognized by a lifetime achievement award from Argentina’s National Endowment for the Arts and by the international Manuel Rojas Iberian American Award for Literature. Though she produced many volumes, including two novels and several travelogues, she is known for her short stories. It is appropriate, then, that her first work to appear in English — The Scent of Buenos Aires — is a collection of short stories (translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy).

From Animals

by Hebe Uhart

Hebe Uhart’s Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt’s house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart’s work. Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet. In prose that tracks the goings-on of creatures who care little what we do or say, a refreshing humility emerges, and with it a newfound pleasure in the everyday. Watching a whistling heron, Uhart writes, “that rebellious crest gives it a lunatic air.” Birds in the park and dogs in the street will hold a different interest after reading Uhart’s blissful foray into playful zoology.

Cuentos completos by Hebe Uhart / Review by Ricardo Montiel

BOOK REVIEW

Cuentos completos by Hebe Uhart

by Ricardo Montiel

Translated by Michael Redzich

Cuentos completos. Hebe Uhart. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora. 2019. 784 pages.

Cuentos completos de Hebe Uhart / Reseña

Hebe Uhart, one of Argentina’s most remarkable fiction writers, dies at 81

In the short story “Desfulanizar,” the narrator remembers one of her father’s rules: to greet the townspeople so they didn’t think she was prideful. But the narrator didn’t care what other people thought. She also didn’t care that her father told her about how once, when he was a child and didn’t say hello to someone, he knew he’d done wrong and deserved to be punished. To his daughter, this story, which she considered from a different time, went against her effort to “make people more real, to understand them in their own way, not tied to that deadly routine.” And there it is—the kernel of this piece of writing by Hebe Uhart(Moreno, Buenos Aires Province, 1936 – Buenos Aires, 2018). It is revealed over the course of Cuentos completos [Complete Stories], published by Adriana Hidalgo Editora. “Desfulanizar” means to cleanse the subject of preconceived notions, from the mark of social stereotypes, and to get back to finding their blurred individuality, to observing, and above all, tirelessly listening. This must be done without the pretense of changing them; rather, it is a matter of recognizing their dormant complexity over the noise of “should be.”

Argentine writer Hebe Uhar

Hebe Uhart: Her Simple,

Incredible Time in Ecuador

Hebe Uhart / Su increíble y sencilla historia en Ecuador

by Edwin Madrid
Translated by Michael Redzich

Hebe Uhart, one of Argentina’s most remarkable fiction writers, dies at 81

It was the first time that she had visited Ecuador. She called me but wrote again later: “I’m the Argentine writer, Hebe Uhart, I can’t hear you very well over the phone. I’ll arrive in Quito on Monday, March 10th at noon and I’ll stay at a hotel called ‘Mansión Real’ (capitalized because it is an impressive name). I’m going to get to know the area and if I want to, I can write something for the culture section of El Pais in Montevideo. I’ve written several travel notes for them. If you want me to bring you a book or CD from here, tell me and I’ll bring one along.” So I proposed that we meet for a talk at the FLASCO on Wednesday, March 12, and she responded: “I have a plan on Wednesday along the lines of a ‘city tour’ but that should be in the morning, and if not, I’ll make it work (and I’m flattered by your invitation). I can bring some of my books; they’re short stories. I like speaking informally, fielding questions from people. The knowledge of cultured people piques my curiosity. You don’t have to worry about putting together some massive talk. I do better, and think it’s more useful (at your discretion) if there are only a few people there, or at least not too many.” Then I told her that it would be exactly as she suggested, and that we would speak about “The kitchen of her writing” and she wrote back: “A paper in Buenos Aires asked me to answer the question, ‘Why do I write?’; I didn’t give them a serious answer. That would be my sort of presentation for that talk. Anyway, thanks for deferring to me.”

Hebe Uhart

A Trip to La Paz

by HEBE UHART

Hebe Uhart / Un viaje a La Paz

Translated from the Spanish by ANNA VILNER

Essay appears in both Spanish and English.

Translator’s Note

Hebe Uhart’s “A Trip to La Paz” is delightfully misleading in that we never arrive at our destination; we never see the city that touches the clouds. This essay is concerned with a different kind of beauty—the getting there, the buzzing potential of travel. It encapsulates why we embark on grueling car rides, on flights, on long train journeys, in the first place.

A book that changed me / Dorothy Parker showed me that it was possible to live the life I wanted

Dorothy Parker

A book

that changed

me

Dorothy Parker showed me that it was possible to live the life I wanted

Finding her 1926 work Enough Rope when I was schoolgirl in 1950s Ireland opened the door to a world beyond domesticity

Mary Kenny

Friday 2 August 2013

They had a somewhat restricted view in Sandymount, Dublin 4 of what was suitable reading for a schoolgirl in the late 1950s: my uncle had confiscated an Agatha Christie mystery from me, pronouncing the subject of murder to be "squalid" and "disedifying" for the tender consciences of a young lady. Actually, I had come upon reading-matter that was much more subversive and this other book signalled to me, soul to soul.

Langston Hughes

A book

that changed

me

Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

This article is more than 7 years old

His 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain made clear that a black writer must write the best work they can, while refusing to be defined by other people's racial agendas

Top 10 literary biographies

Gary Younge

Thu 1 August 2013

ne of my first columns on these pages didn't make it into the paper. I'd written about the Nato bombing of Bosnia and the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. "We have people who can write about Bosnia," he said. "Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this."

Seamus Heaney by Tai Shan Schierenberg

A book

that changed

me

Door into the Dark opened the portals to a different future

‘I have only to see Door into the Dark sitting on my bookshelves to remember the feeling that a locked-up door in my life had suddenly swung open,’ says Andrew Motion

How the ‘slap and squelch’ of Seamus Heaney’s poems propelled me into verse

Andrew Motion

Sun 17 Aug 2014

hen I was a child, there were two books of poetry in the whirligig at home: a collected Tennyson that had once been given to my great-grandmother by my great-grandfather, and a Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke which my mother had won as a school prize. Nobody read them. Nobody read anything much. They preferred the life outdoors. Then I began doing English A-level, and was taught for the first time by Peter Way, who walked straight into my head and turned the lights on. Within a few weeks my old life seemed to have fallen away (though not the subjects it contained), and all I wanted to do was to write and read poems.

Alan Garner: ‘You don’t want to have a brilliant idea for a novel at the age of 87’

‘There will be something left undone’ …
Garner at the Old Medicine House, which he saved from demolition;
his new novel is called Treacle Walker.

Interview

Alan Garner: ‘You don’t want to have a brilliant idea for a novel at the age of 87’

Alison Flood

As the much-loved fantasy writer publishes yet another 'final’ novel – about a healer who can cure everything but jealousy – he talks about being made a pariah by Oxford and almost dying three times

Alison Flood
Monday 25 October 2021

Alan Garner has always feared unexpectedly dying before he finishes the book he’s working on. It means that this most beloved of writers – whose works feel chiselled from the Cheshire landscape of his home, and whose devoted fans range from Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman to Margaret Atwood – keeps joking that he’s written his last book.

Percival Everett photographed in South Pasadena, California, in March 2022. Photograph: Dan Tuffs/

The Trees by Percival Everett review – potent satire of US racism

This Booker-longlisted investigation of gruesome murders in Mississippi addresses a deep political issue through page-turning comic horror

Jake Arnott
Wed 31 Aug 2022 11.00 BST

Percival Everett is a seriously playful writer. His 2001 breakthrough novel Erasure lampooned the dominant culture’s expectations of Black authors, in a wonderfully discursive meditation on the angst of the African American middle classes and the nature of literature and art itself (its title is a reference to Robert Rauschenberg rubbing out a drawing by Willem de Kooning). The novel within the novel is a self-consciously absurd parody of “ghetto” fiction called My Pafology. Everett’s latest work, The Trees, now longlisted for the Booker prize, is a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner.

Books that made me / Elizabeth Strout / ‘My guilty pleasure? War and Peace. I read it furtively’

Elizabeth Strout

Books

that

made me

Elizabeth Strout: ‘My guilty pleasure? War and Peace. I read it furtively’

Her in-laws felt so embarrased by her reading it on holiday, they said: ‘Liz, that’s so pretentious, can’t you cover it up?’

Elizabeth Strout

Friday 10 March 2018

The book I am currently reading
A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey. It’s an astonishing piece of work: so Peter Carey, and yet completely on its own, about a couple in the 1950’s who are doing the Redex Trial – a race around the Australian continent – with their navigator. The places the book goes – well, it’s just wonderful; it feels necessary.

The book that changed my life
Honestly, all the good books I have read have somehow changed my life. A good book creates a sense of opening – of the soul, of one’s life, of other people’s lives.

The book I wished I’d written
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. The cultural history of Cuban Americans is something I would have had no knowledge about, but boy, did I admire that book!

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
The Collected Stories of William Trevor. I credit him with a great deal of my ability to find my way around a sentence. What a writer he was; he could flip over a sentence so gently, and show the underbelly in a heartbeat. His work is always quietly compassionate. Also the work of Alice Munro has influenced me. Munro and Trevor have been like two bookends in my writing life.

The book that changed my mind
The Return by Hisham Matar opened my mind. It brought me into unfamiliar territory, and made it familiar; the sense of loss was something I understood right away, and I was so grateful to have read it.

The last book that made me cry
Local Souls by Allan Gurganus. The first novella in this collection of three novellas, called “Fear Not,” had me tearing up almost immediately, and I could not understand why at first. By the end of it, I was weeping openly.

The last book that made me laugh
I recently reread The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky, and I had forgotten – or maybe I didn’t get it the first time around – how funny he is, how funny the book is in places, the observations thrown out. I laughed out loud a number of times reading it.

The book I couldn’t finish
I can’t remember. But I am not a person who feels obligated to read a book to the last page if it is not doing something for me.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
Moby-Dick. I am so embarrassed that I never read that book; I feel as if I should start it right now.

The book I most often give as a gift
I give out Trevor’s Collected Stories like a preacher with his Bible. And people are always glad to have it, I have noticed that.

My earliest reading memory
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike. I must have been about six or seven. Obviously I couldn’t understand much of what was going on, but I did understand this: that to be a child did not pay. Adult life was where the real stuff was happening.

My guilty pleasure
Seriously? It’s War and Peace. The first time I read it, I was on vacation with my in-laws and sitting by the pool one of them said: “Liz, that’s so pretentious, can’t you cover that up?” I almost died. So now I read it furtively in the privacy of my home.

THE GUARDIAN