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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

 

 

Even with the slight journalistic pretense of portraying the bohemia of Havana in the 20s, Aprendices de Brujo is an adventure novel that could easily be adapted into a comic book. The tension of extraordinary events, the protagonists somewhat ingenuous insights, and the sought-after Italian diva Eleonora Duse, lost in the mirage of her own legend, all leads to high doses of vertigo and deception.

The novel is a strange laboratory that manages to give a mythic character to the voyages of the main characters, two young Colombians, bourgeois and in love. Switching off chapter after chapter, their two voices tell the 465-page tale at a bracing pace.

Author of numerous children’s stories and of the grown up novels Striptease and Dear Dracula, Cuban writer Antonio Orlando Rodríguez, has written a story where a poetics of the impossible outweighs any literary artifice.



                                                                      Vera



Review Aprendices de Brujo, Antonio Orlando Rodríguez (Meansheets)

Alejandras

 

 

Sobresalir con su propio mito cuando todas las luces de la cultura de un país caen sobre una figura, es difícil. Para los argentinos sólo hay una mujer: Evita Perón, nuestra  Santa Evita. Su imagen lo abarca todo, o casi.  Relegada a la más humilde y sombría de la efigies, entonces, es que el mito Alejandra Pizarnik se expone ante nosotros. El ámbito  al que ha sido confinada es el de las letras, una mitología que no es menor en el Río de la Plata.

He visto muchas “Alejandras” en mi vida. Las veía en mi primera juventud por calle Corrientes, por sus madrugadas y sus librerías twenty four hours deambular con su tristeza a cuestas; por los pasillos de la Universidad Pública  cargando el peso del mundo que les molestaba, aunque sabían muy bien cómo lidiar con él.  Esas Alejandras parecían haber estudiado a la perfección – traducido– aquello que la otra Alejandra, la hermana mayor alguna vez dijo: escribir para darle un significado al sufrimiento.

 

Aun cuando esas  adolescentes eran el reflejo de las obsesiones de su admirada, en el papel ese eco era otra cosa: se perdía en una intemperie ineludible. Era como si toda la voluntad puesta en cada movimiento se viera torpe a la hora de escribir.  En verdad, ellas no hacían más que intelectualizar el dolor de Alejandra.

 

Caer en la trampa es fácil: su poesía está hecha de palabras simples. Es su intensidad, sin embargo, la ingenuidad y  perversión  –infantil– que Pizarnik  utilizó  como  vehículo para crear meticulosamente una obra.

Después de tanto tiempo esas Alejandras no pueden, no harían, aquello que sintetizó la otra, una noche del  25 de septiembre de 1972, en una nota dejada a un lado de su cuerpo: "No quiero ir nada más que hasta el fondo."

 

                                                                                                                                                      Vera

 

 Texto leído en Terraza 7, Gleane Street, Elmhurst, NY

 

El crimen paga (sometimes)

Pablo De Santis, escritor de inolvidables argumentos fantásticos, guionista de comics y lúcido ensayista de este arte, en pocas líneas consigue delatar su ADN: “Hija del siglo XX, hermana pobre del cine, la historieta se fue alejando de sus vínculos con la ilustración y aún con la literatura, para avanzar en sus lazos con las aventuras filmadas. Del cine recibió técnicas, modos de narrar; le cedió, a cambio, provincias enteras de su mitología”.

En “Deep City” reaparece este cruce, la visión de un mundo que se ha alimenta de una y otra expresión, construido en este caso de viñetas en blanco y negro. Publicada durante la década de los ochenta en revistas de España y Argentina, en formato de capítulos cerrados, fue creada por el dibujante Francisco Solano López – “El Eternauta”, “Ministerio”–  y el escritor y crítico de jazz Carlos Sampayo – “Alack Sinner”–. Esta edición, estadounidense, enteramente en inglés, se editó por los mismos años.

Es el comisario Evaristo –  rostro duro, ojos cortantes, figura gruesa, en definitiva, una presencia que intimida – y la ciudad de Buenos Aires los protagonistas de las siete historias del libro que se desarrollan entre finales de los ‘50 y principios de los ’60. Inspirado en la figura del mítico policía argentino Evaristo Meneses, éste es principalmente un hombre ético, de códigos entre los delincuentes, que prefiere dejar como último recurso la violencia. Utilizando diálogos cortos e imágenes que se suceden rápidamente, dibujadas con la pluma maestra de Solano López, las historias de Sampayo son un cross a la mandíbula que continúa su efecto en la memoria del lector por mucho tiempo. Son piezas que transitan el trecho negrísimo del policial duro norteamericano donde los personajes están derrotados de antemano sin ninguna afectación ya que simplemente son creíbles por ser humanos, demasiado humanos.

El libro abre con “Breaking the tie”, una historia en el que un deuda del pasado, esos resentimientos que se arrastran como viejas pesadillas pegadas al sueño,  logra por fin tomar revancha en el presente. En la siguiente, “The Famous Lubitsch Case”, lo que parece el secuestro de una adolescente da un giro sorpresivo que concluye con cierto sabor tragicómico. Es por eso que la ciudad de Buenos Aires retratada por Solano López, tan extrañamente europea como americana en sus arterias, se une perfectamente a esta atmósfera implacable de Deep City. 

Así, la dupla creativa refuerza el concepto de otros artistas a lo largo de la historia del comics, ya sea en la Chicago alucinada de “Dick Tracy” (Chester Gould) o las imaginadas Gotham City de Batman (Hill Finger y Bob Kane) o la Santa María de Perramus (Alberto Breccia y Juan Sasturain), que encontraron en la ciudad contemporánea el escenario adecuado para desarrollar la justicia y la miseria, en pocas palabras, nuestra predilecta obra colectiva.     

                                                                             

 

                                                                                                                              Vera

 

Review Deep City,Carlos Sampayo –  Francisco Solano López, (Hojasbravas)

 

Eduardo González Viaña: Bad Dreams in America

The appointment is in Books and Books, a well-known bookstore in Coral Gables, a peaceful residential neighborhood in Miami. That’s where Jaime Bayly lives, but he’s not around. In a small auditorium improvised in one of the rooms, however, about 20 readers listen to Eduardo González Viaña present the English-language edition of American Dreams, a work that has given him great satisfaction.

 The host is Beto Ortiz, a journalist and writer who, like Viaña and Bayly, is a Peruvian living in the United States. First published by Alfaguara, this book of 19 stories has become a small best-seller. Everyday Viaña receives e-mails from all over the United States from Latinos thanking him for this stories where with sharp insight and prose praised by Bryce Echenique they feel that someone has recorded their lives, dreams, and some of their nightmares in a foreign land.

There is something of travesty about the exodus across the thin line that is the border South of the Rio Bravo, that the author of “Frontier Woman” and “The Dead Fish” compares to “the biggest and most transcendent since the Jews walked toward the Promised Land.”

Can you tell us how you came up with the idea of recounting the voyage of Latin Americans to the United States?

— In the early 90s, when I was a professor at Berkeley, I received a visit in my office from an ancient Guatemalan woman. She wanted the university to lend her a “small atomic bomb” that could supposedly cure cancer. She had read about it somewhere and that’s why she came illegally to the United States. Her son, in his 50’s, had desahuciado in his own country, but she brought him here completely sure that they would be able to cure him. I was fascinated by this mother’s love and I thought that it was a symbol for the experience of all of us. I decided to write this story. After that, other stories, or the true story, came to me day after day. I will have to write many more books to tell them all.

In all 19 stories there is a lot of hope but also desperation. It seems like the American Dream is sometimes a nightmare.

— The majority of immigrants come here pushed by terrible problems in the land they have left behind. They don’t arrive; they flee. Under those circumstances, it’s more than likely that the dream will become a nightmare.

You have lived here a long time. How has the Latin community in the United States progressed and what challenges still lie ahead?

— I’ve lived in the United States for 15 years. In that time, I’ve seen many totally gringo communities transformed suddenly. A taquería truck replaces fast food with tacos that are cheaper and taste better – or at least have some taste. Spanish classes are offered in the public library. The economic power of our community is being felt. Banks and stores try to attract us. Advertising speaks our language. I’d like it if the community’s political presence would be expressed as well, if our people would vote. I’d like it too if ou people would by books – including, of course, American Dreams.

Why do you think more and more Latin writers decide to live in the United States rather than Europe, as they used to years ago?

— You’re right. I also did my “obligatory European service.” I lived in Paris and Madrid for six years, some of which were the best of my life, especially the years I spent in a tiny apartment on Galileo Street in Madrid. What happened? How did I end up here? I don’t know, but I don’t regret it. It’s peaceful enough for me to write what I have to write. Overall, I know what I have to write from here until I die.


How important was it for your career when you won the international Juan Rulfo prize? What does it mean to you that American Dreams is a bestseller in Spanish?

— It scared me when I heard the news in both cases. I said: Caramba, Eduardo, know you’re screwed. Now you’re really going to have to write morning, noon, and night. You don’t have an excuse for resting anymore. You’ve won a terrible responsibility.        

 

 

 

 

                                                                                              Vera

 

Interview Eduardo González Viaña (Meansheets)

 

El consuelo de...

Literature without Borders

Susan Sontag wrote in the prologue to Urban Voodoo: “As Godard said that he wanted to make fiction films that were like documentaries and documentaries that were like fiction films, Cozarinsky has written autobiographical narratives that are like essays and essays that are like stories.”

That’s why the reader might suspect that that author born in Argentina was a Borgesian reader, capable of disarming any structure in order to remake it according to his style and whim, always leading to an exquisite, ironic, and cosmopolitan work.  

 Tres Fonteras (Three Frontiers) lives up to Sontag’s evaluation. The 11 stories collected in the book are arranged geographically and approach the memoir as contaminated by fiction – perhaps because reality can never satiate our desires – in a device that the author classifies as “documentary fiction.” The story “En Tránsito” (In Transit), set in Paris during the Second World War, recounts a useless existential debate with a writer who we discern through clues to be Walter Benjamin, although Cozarinsky has the delicacy not to anme in. “El Fantasma de la Plaza Roja” (The Ghost of Red Square) unites the destinies of a journalist assassinated by the Argentine military and an ancient silent film star from Hollywood. The implacable and current “Piercing” describes the little sex tourism adventure of an older man – although it also could have been a woman – and a teen on a Caribbean island.

 Many of Cozarinsky’s new stories – particularly “En Tránsito” and “A Day in 1942” – could have been included in The Bride from Odessa, a fine volume of stories translated into various languages that Chris Marker of Liberation calls “the most beautiful book I’ve read in a long time.”  

 

                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                          Vera

 

Review Tres Fonteras (Three Frontiers), Edgardo Cozarinksy (Meansheets)