Argentine Literature

[Heteronym]

Perhaps no other literature has offered me so much joy. Its writers have marvelled me for years with their amazing novels and short-stories where the everyday and the fantastic merge.

It all starts with an epic poem, Jos? Hern?ndez' 1872 Mart?n Fierro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Fierro), the zenith of Gauchesque poetry, a style that emphasized the language, the folklore and the culture of the pampas, which hoped to separate it from the dominating Euro-centric Spanish culture.

The 20th century gave us Leopoldo Lugones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Lugones), poet and a major influence on the poetry circles young Borges was part of. Lugones was also a short-story writer, whose Strange Forces is an awkward piece which reimagines biblical catastrophes, explains why monkeys refuse to talk even though they can, invents a new type of flower, devoted to death, narrates a rebellion of horses against their masters, and discusses new lifeforms at the dawn of time.

There's also Roberto Artl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Arlt), whose The Seven Madmen is one of the greatest novels I've ever read: it's about a man who tries to acquire money to finance a secret society that will take over the world. And how will they finance it? By building brothels all over Argentina, of course! You know O'Brien's diatribe against Mankind in 1984? In Arlt's novel there's the Astrologist, who's ten times more cynical.

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Julio Cort?zar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cort%C3%A1zar) were masters of the absurd and the surreal; their finely-crafted short-stories and novels have fascinated me in recent times. And finally there's Jorge Luis Borges, my candidate for the 20th century's greatest writer: poet, short-story writer, essayist, literary critic, literature teacher, Borges' love for books have made me discover countless new writers.

What is being written in Argentina today? That's what I'd love to know.




Related Threads:

Jorge Luis Borges (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/707-jorge-luis-borges.html)
Adolfo Bioy Casares (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/1-adolfo-bioy-casares.html)
Adolfo Bioy Casares: A Plan for Escape (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/americas-literature/689-adolfo-bioy-casares-plan-escape.html)
Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/americas-literature/2-adolfo-bioy-casares-invention-morel.html)

[Eric]

What is being written in Argentina today? That's what I'd love to know.

What about:

Literatura Argentina Contempornea (http://www.literatura.org/)

If you can't read Spanish, there is, of course, a bit of a problem.

I can't read Spanish, but I am fascinated by the proportion of the literature from any country that actually ends up in English. Is it representative, or just what a few publishers choose on whim? But there are a lot of names here:

Literatura Argentina Contempor?nea : los escritores (http://www.literatura.org/escrfr.html)

Can't some of those that read Spanish give us an overview?

[nnyhav]

To add to your list (me, I'm just as wild about Borges, and mustn't neglect his collaboration with Bioy Casares, and Cort?zar's Rayuela/Hopscotch is *****, but I'm milder on Arlt myself):

Ernesto S?bato:
On Heroes and Tombs: The definitive Buenos Aires novel ***** he takes up half the posts in Forgotten & Obscure Gems (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/general-discussion/36-forgotten-obscure-gems.html)
The Tunnel (? - highly regarded, but I cannot get Englished)
good in the short story department too

C?sar Aira:
My Life as a Nun (http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-we-go-on.html) [appended as last item at link] ****0+
An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter *****
unmatched novellas

Juan Jos? Saer:
The Witness (http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2006/11/keeping-up-appearances.html) *****
still looking for more SerpentsTail releases by him

Manuel Puig:
haven't read anything by him yet, but An Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages awaits on the shelf. I hear he went Hollywood ;)

[obooki]

I've started reading Lugones' Strange Forces - it certainly is pretty weird and baroque and thoroughly recommended.

Also, much impressed by Juan Jose Saer, after only one novel - The Investigation; have another two lying about the flat somewhere, for when I get around to them.

From that list Eric posted, the others I've read have all been pretty so-so: Abel Posse, Luisa Valenzuela, Roberto Piglia, Cesar Aira, Manuel Puig. *shrugs shoulders*

I think I'll have a go at Eduardo Berti right now, since it's quite short.

[Stewart]

I think I'll have a go at Eduardo Berti right now, since it's quite short.
If it's Agua, please do. I have had that for a year or so, never relly getting round to it.

[fausto]

Sololiteratura is an excellent website for latin american literature -- only available in Spanish, unfortunately. They have pages for Argentina.

Pginas de Literatura de Argentina (http://sololiteratura.com/php/pais.php?id=1)

Contemporary authors are less known than their illustrious predecessors but I find them very interesting. Literature seems in good shape over there.

Heteronym's introductory was great and I won't comment on the authors in there as I guess everyone will have heard of them and our Portugues friend made of good job of it. I've got nothing to add. Thanks!

Sabato is obviously mandatory. Two writers not mentioned but also very important in the history of Argentinian lit are Macedonio Fern?ndez and Osvaldo Lamborghini. Macedonio was a huge influence on Borges who dedicated one of his poems to him. For more info, I would direct you an excellent essay published in the latest Quarterly conversation: Macedonio Fernandez: The Man Who Invented Borges | The Quarterly Conversation (http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/TQC12/macedonio-fernandez-jorge-luis-borges.html)
Osvaldo Lamborghini is emblematic of the Argentinian avant-garde of the 70's (influenced by Lacan, C?line, Artaud, Grombowicz or Arlt amongst other things). Quite a prolific writer, especially in his last years. He died aged 45 in 1985, leaving a seven tome work called Teatro proletario de c?mara unfinished: a mixture of prose, verse, graphic design, etc. C?sar Aira's master.

Since we're talking Aira, a couple of words on him. I first read him with a lot of doubts in my head, and if the first one didn't entirely convince I found out afterwards it grew on me. I think I've now read four books of his, and he won me over. Funhouse described him some place else as hallucinatory, and he is right. Very powerful writing.

Ricardo Piglia was also mentioned. One of the big names still writing today. He used to head a series of crime novels for a publisher and is a specialist of the detective story, which shows in his own work especially in his most successful book Money to burn which received a big prize awarded by a jury made of Roa Bastos, Benedetti and Tom?s Eloy Mart?nez -- not the worst jury you could have come up with. He teaches at Princeton and his a reference for most younger Argentinian writers, it would seem.

Fogwill -- He is a weird one. Very funny books, most of them short. Some see in him an heir to Artl.

Juan Gelman -- Received the Cervantes, one if not the main literary prize of the Spanish-speaking world, a few months ago. A poet.

Tomas Eloy Mart?nez -- I guess you have heard of him, one of the most famous Argentinian writer.

Alberto Manguel -- Now I'm sure 99% of the reader of this forum will know the old Borges reader...

Let's move on to the younger generation:

Rodrigo Fres?n -- started out as a journalist. Friend of Bola?o and Vila-Matas. Wrote a couple of novels (Kensigton's gardens is available in English) and a few short-stories collections. I think he is actually better known for his work as a critic -- he is like the number one critic for english-language literature in Spain, especially post-modern one. Again, I would direct you to the Quarterly conversation:
My Own Private Mexico | The Quarterly Conversation (http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/TQC10/fresan.html)

Alan Pauls -- the most talented? A couple of years ago, I read The Past, quite a striking love story, but wasn't quite in love with the writing. Since then, I read him in Spanish and... wow... Proustian might be too much, but I guess you see what I mean. Very smart and very well done.

Martin Kohan -- sold in Spain as one of the rising stars. Read one book, wasn't impressed at all. I think he has something available in English through Sepernt's tail.

Dam?an Tabarovsky -- I have my doubts about him, but he is very interesting. Literary critic and literary director of of Interzon, one of Argentina's most dynamic independent publishing houses. I've read four of his novels, all had some excellent ideas, writing, starting points but I felt they were always being let down by an insistence on politics devoid of subtlelty. Too bad, because it's was very good stuff at times. A master of digression, it would seem.

Sergio Chejfec -- I know very little about him, but I've read a few articles and he is meant to be a future major writer. Unfortunately, I don't think any of his books are available in Spain making it near impossible to find over here. However, I heard the great and small publisher Candaya was planning to publish some titles here at last. Very often being compared to Saer. Now lives in Venezuela.

In another place, I've been recommended Luis Gusman, Gustavo Nielsen and Federico Jeanmaire. I know zilch about the latter two, but I've heard a little about Gusman and I've been meaning to check him out.

So as you can see, a lot of things seem to be happening over there at the moment...

One last note: Juan Rodolfo Wilcock wrote both in Italian and Spanish, died in Italy, which was the nationality on his papers, but was born and bred in Argentine. Friend of Bioy and Borges. Some of his work written in Italian, some in Spanish. I read El estereoscopio de los solitarios last year, damn fine read. Great absurd short stories, very witty.

[Stewart]

Fogwill -- He is a weird one. Very funny books, most of them short. Some see in him an heir to Artl.
I've heard mention of him, particularly for Malvinas Requiem, reviewed here (http://feedingthepigeons.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/rodolfo-fogwill-malvinas-requiem/).


Tomas Eloy Mart?nez -- I guess you have heard of him, one of the most famous Argentinian writer.
I've heard of him, but only because I spotted a single book by him today.l


Alberto Manguel -- Now I'm sure 99% of the reader of this forum will know the old Borges reader...
A Canadian citizen now, I believe. We have a thread for his With Borges memoir (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/americas-literature/95-alberto-manguel-borges.html).



Alan Pauls -- the most talented? A couple of years ago, I read The Past, quite a striking love story, but wasn't quite in love with the writing. Since then, I read him in Spanish and... wow... Proustian might be too much, but I guess you see what I mean. Very smart and very well done.
Interesting. In the UK his The Past was on the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. I don't tend to like thick books, so I was leaving this one until later. On the same list was Vila-Matas, who you also mentioned.

[Settembrini]

Borges was the best Argentinian writer of the XIX century. The best Argentinian writer of the XX century was Gombrowicz... or perhaps Bianciotti after 1982... or perhaps Wilcock after 1957.

About the guys cited by Fausto: Lamborghini (I would include Benito Lynch, Borges and Mujica Lainez among his influences), Fogwill, Gusman, I mean all the group around Literal magazine (Zelarayan, Libertella, etc. but not German Garcia) and perhaps Chejfec -who is from Venezuela as Fogwill always says- are the worthly canon. Aira, Nielsen and Pauls belong to this group (but just for the influence upon them, they were too young for write in Literal).
Then, Piglia is like Bola?o but more "politicized", Mart?nez is a mediocre journalist and an oportunist novelist (a best-sellerist wannabe), Kohan is all about techniques and rewritrings, Fres?n was a promise in the early nineties, and Tabarovsky was the owner of Interzona (kekeke).
Jeanmaire was an interesting writer until 2003.
Manguel is Canadian.
Saer is a true major (sometimes he reminds me Haroldo Conti before the garciamarquezca lousy Mascar?). Also Tiz?n.
Puig was an inspiration for Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa, Fuguet and maybe Bola?o.
Sabato is (fairly) almost forgotten. The same with Cortazar (except for the kids in high-schools, who still read them a lot). The same with Mallea (a major writer in his time).
Revol (who perhaps -but is surely a myth- wrote some letters to Pynchon) was almost a major. The same about Laiseca. The same with Andr?s Rivera.
The critical texts about Macedonio are greater than Macedonio's own work. The same with Arlt. The same with Pizarnik.

[Heteronym]

Roberto Arlt's The Seven Madmen is one of the best novels I've ever read, though.

[fausto]

Too bad I only see Settembrini's reply now that he seems to be gone. Something in it sounds familiar, as if coming from another forum I know. Something in the tone and the inaccuracies. Manguel is Canadian but Wilcock is Argentinian. Chejfec is Venezuelan. That sort of things. Thanks anyway for some of the info, although quite a bit is heavy handed and stereotypical. The opposition of sorts between Chejfec and Fresan reminds me of a very famous polemics in the early 90's between two schools. Seems people over there still buy into that although involved writers now say there was nothing in it. It's also typical, I would say, of some argentinians to disregard the work of Fresan published after he left the country. I don't know why, because his latter work is better I feel.
This being said, maybe I'm wrong and Settembrini is not from Argentine.

[Daniel del Real]

In recent news Argentinan writer Andres Neuman was awarded yesterday with the Alfaguara novel prize, one of the most important prizes given to a novel in spanish. The novel for which he was awareded is El Viajero del Siglo (The Traveler of the Century).

I haven?t read Neuman but this prize is synonim of good literature. He must be a good new talent for Hispanoamerican literature.

[fausto]

I've heard good things about him but I have my doubts on previous winners of that price. I don't think it's synonymous with good literature. Problem in Spain, I feel, is that most prizes are actually given by publishers themselves (see Planeta, Bruguera, Herralde).

[Daniel del Real]

I've read the last 5 or 6 novels awarded with the Alfaguara Prize and in my opinion all of them were really good, nothing really outstanding but well written and pretty entretaining.

Fausto, could you tell me examples of the novels you didn?t like?

[fausto]

Not a fan of Restrepo, Velasco and Vicent, to name three.

[miercuri]

Ernesto S?bato:
On Heroes and Tombs: The definitive Buenos Aires novel ***** he takes up half the posts in Forgotten & Obscure Gems (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/general-discussion/36-forgotten-obscure-gems.html)
The Tunnel (? - highly regarded, but I cannot get Englished)
good in the short story department too

I was surprised to find out that this author is mostly overlooked in the English-speaking world. In Romania he is something of a household name. He's been widely translated and retranslated in the last few decades. On Heroes and Tombs even has some sort of cult following among undergraduates.

[Daniel del Real]

Not a fan of Restrepo, Velasco and Vicent, to name three.


Of those three I really liked Velasco. Along Velasco, Roncangliolo, Eloy Mart?nez, Orlando Rodr?guez and Leante novels are pretty good to me

[Eric]

Daniel, Fausto, Meircuri: Argentinian literature looks very interesting. But could you add a few words of explanation why specific writers are interesting for you, or point us to texts, in Spanish but preferably also in English, which tell us outsiders a bit more about their works?

It is always possible to Google for the names mentioned, and look at Wikipedia entries. But when you mention specific names, presumably on account of your personal taste, it would be interesting to know why you chose those names.

Velasco, Roncangliolo, Eloy Mart?nez, Orlando Rodr?guez, Leante, Restrepo, Puig, Neuman, Vicent, Gelman, Piglia, etc., etc. They are, unfortunately, just names to us Europeans, especially those of us that have either no knowledge of Spanish, or a very limited knowledge. So it's no wonder that threads like this one die (last posting 25th March 2009). We have no encouragement to find out more, merely a list of names.

[Eric]

I hope Settembrini returns to this thread with more explanations. His remarks (along with those of Fausto) seem very informed. While others make lists on hearsay, you get the feeling that Settembrini knows what he's (she's?) talking about.

Gradually, from the various posts here, I'm beginning to get an idea of the names that count in Argentinian literature. All that remains is to locate them in some form of chronology and then start finding the translations into languages I can read.

I can put up with a few minor inaccuracies, but I like people who have opinions about writers, opinions supported by reasoning.. Also the names of literary groupings and movements are interesting to know. Authors of a feather flock together.

I am puzzled at some of Fausto's response to Settembrini. Far from dubbing him Naphta, I do think he read Settembrini's posting a little too hastily, e.g. "Chejfez is from Venezuala".

[Heteronym]

I recently had the pleasure of reading Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel, strenghtening my belief that Argentine literature was one of 20th century's greatest treasures.

Sabato's novel is a killer's examination of himself and of the motives that lead him to kill the only woman that understood his art, because the protagonist is a painter. It's full of post-WWII existentialist angst and nihilism. It's also not unsimilar to M?rio de S?-Carneiro's L?cio's Confession.

[Settembrini]

I recently had the pleasure of reading Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel, strenghtening my belief that Argentine literature was one of 20th century's greatest treasures.


Really?
Bioy Casares wrote in his diary an anecdote about The Tunnel. He says that Sabato gave him the novel, and ask him to "correct" it. Bioy did it: he took a red pencil and made a lot of annotations. Then, he send back the book to Sabato. The fact was that Sabato was waiting laudatory remarks about his work, so he gets very angry when Bioy treats him like a rookie and from that moment the two writers (I mean, the writer and the guy with glasses) went on a silently fight.

[Eric]

This thread has been ailing for some while, but just to give it a touch of class, may I mention that the German weekly Die Zeit has published an interesting section mainly covering Argentinian literature.

Argentina is, if you haven't heard already, the Guest of Honour nation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so various publications are focussing on the literature from that country.

I know very little about contemporary Argentinian literature, but clearly the Germans aren't much better, as the author of the introductory article feels he has to say:


Von Tango, Gauchos, Che, Borges und Maradona ist in der neuen argentinischen Literatur selten die Rede. So contemporary Argentinian literature rarely speaks about such clich?s. As you all adore lists of names, I shall produce one from this theme issue. Names such as Ernesto Mallo, Sonia Cristoff, Pedro Mairal, Claudia Pi?eiro, Beatriz Sarlo (literary scholar), Sergio Olgu?n, Sergio Bizzio, Carlos Busqued, Mart?n Kohan, Alan Pauls, Guillermo Mart?nez, Mart?n Caparr?s, Tom?s Eloy Mart?nez, Rodolfo Fogwill, Osvaldo Bayer, Ricardo Piglia, Ernesto S?bato, C?sar Aira.

A lot of new names to me. I'm sure that some of their works have been dealt with here on the WLF, but it's stimulating to have their names all together, so you can Google and Wiki for them, one by one.

Some of the same names appear in the reviews in the supplement to the Swiss daily Neue Z?rcher Zeitung entitled B?cherherbst 2010.

[Heteronym]

Since I'm still under the spell of the Nobel Prize, I have this question to ask: does anyone else find it amazing that no Argentine writer has been honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature?

How is that possible? This country produced Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort?zar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sabato, Roberto Arlt, and countless other great writers!

[anchomal]

waalkwriter mentioned in one of his posts recently that he felt the Nobel treated England particularly badly, overlooking a lot of fine writers. But England still boasts several winners. I can think, off hand, of no other country that has been as badly treated and as unfairly overlooked as Argentina, given the quality of writer they have produced. Borges not being awarded must rank as one of the Academy's biggest mistakes.

[Stiffelio]

Since I'm still under the spell of the Nobel Prize, I have this question to ask: does anyone else find it amazing that no Argentine writer has been honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature?

How is that possible? This country produced Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort?zar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sabato, Roberto Arlt, and countless other great writers!

It is indeed amazing and unfair that none of the authors you mentioned never got the Nobel, especially Borges - a real crime! S?bato is the only one alive (at 99!) but I don't think he'll get it. Nowadays there are many excellent Argentine writers from the next generation (I think of Piglia, Aira, Saccomano, Rivera, Pauls) but I don't think they are Nobel calibre, not yet at least. Juan Gelman has been mentioned: he's a fairly good poet and fits the politically-correct bill, so he might be the one. A very intereting, albeit poorly promoted, writer is H?ctor Tiz?n, who has over the years consistently produced top quality literature. He's a loner in literary terms, living in the north-western province of Jujuy. But I wonder how much of his work has been translated into other languages. And then he's 83 years old so maybe over the hill for the Swedish Academy.

[Stiffelio]

Borges not being awarded must rank as one of the Academy's biggest mistakes.

Indeed! The Academy should start giving posthumous or memorial awards to remedy these unfair cases.

[Daniel del Real]

So contemporary Argentinian literature rarely speaks about such clich?s. As you all adore lists of names, I shall produce one from this theme issue. Names such as Ernesto Mallo, Sonia Cristoff, Pedro Mairal, Claudia Pi?eiro, Beatriz Sarlo (literary scholar), Sergio Olgu?n, Sergio Bizzio, Carlos Busqued, Mart?n Kohan, Alan Pauls, Guillermo Mart?nez, Mart?n Caparr?s, Tom?s Eloy Mart?nez, Rodolfo Fogwill, Osvaldo Bayer, Ricardo Piglia, Ernesto S?bato, C?sar Aira.


Contemporary? Well, let's see. Tom?s Eloy Mart?nez and Rodolfo Fogwill died recently. Ernesto S?bato is 99 years old. I wouldn't call those names contemporary.


It is indeed amazing and unfair that none of the authors you mentioned never got the Nobel, especially Borges - a real crime! S?bato is the only one alive (at 99!) but I don't think he'll get it. Nowadays there are many excellent Argentine writers from the next generation (I think of Piglia, Aira, Saccomano, Rivera, Pauls) but I don't think they are Nobel calibre, not yet at least. Juan Gelman has been mentioned: he's a fairly good poet and fits the politically-correct bill, so he might be the one. A very intereting, albeit poorly promoted, writer is H?ctor Tiz?n, who has over the years consistently produced top quality literature. He's a loner in literary terms, living in the north-western province of Jujuy. But I wonder how much of his work has been translated into other languages. And then he's 83 years old so maybe over the hill for the Swedish Academy.

I agree, Gelman is the only one with a Nobel caliber.
I haven't read Piglia yet, one of those author that always get out of my hands for some reason or another (how expensive are his books is the main one). However he'll be present at the FIL 2010 in Guadalajara so it's a good time to tackle his books. So you tell me Stiffelio.
I've heard his best work is Respiraci?n Artificial, but it's damn expensive!

[Eric]

Daniel, you in Mexico are a little nearer to Argentina and are more aware of who is 99 and who dead, as well as other writers. Most people in Europe know zilch (as the Yanks say) about contemporary Argentinian literature.

Because of the ignorant attitude to translations exhibited by alarmingly many of my British compatriots, you never hear about contemporary Argentinian literature. People are still going on about Borges and Cort?zar (who spent a lot of his life in Europe). Even in Sweden, you read very little. It's only thanks to the German newspaper Die Zeit and the Swiss one NZZ, that I have read anything (in German) about the Guest of Honour nation at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Tell us more about, for instance, your reading of C?sar Aira, who sounds interesting. He's neither 99 nor dead. And I have noticed that there seems to be a bit of a Gelman craze. Why him? What's he written that is special?

You shouldn't expect the Swedish Academy to keep on expanding its awards, Stiffelio. Why can't the Argentinians or Lula in Brazil start a South American Nobel for the excellent writers there, instead of waiting for the Europeans. The answer is probably because Argentina has fairly recently been through a disastrous and chaotic period when their currency was worth nothing. Though they could pay the winner in tins of corned beef, which the laureate could then sell on to wholesalers to get his prize money. And regarding Brazil, I read excerpts from the Portuguese language press in French translation in Courrier International that Lula's economic miracle may prove to be a bit of a bubble, as only about 25% of Brazilians are what is termed "fully literate". That puts a brake on economic growth.

[Mirabell]

C?sar Aira, who sounds interesting. He's neither 99 nor dead. What's he written that is special?

we have several threads devoted to him (not difficult, forum search)
one about a book of his, for example http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/americas-literature/17956-cesar-aira-how-i-became-nun.html
and one about him directly
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/11537-cesar-aira.html

the same, surprisingly, is true for Juan Gelman
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/13746-juan-gelman.html

abracadabra

[Stiffelio]

Tell us more about, for instance, your reading of C?sar Aira, who sounds interesting. He's neither 99 nor dead. And I have noticed that there seems to be a bit of a Gelman craze. Why him? What's he written that is special?

Aira is one of the most unique, hard-to-classify writers we've had in a while. He's written over 60 novels (nouvelles, actually, as they're usually very short), so it's impossible to keep up with his entire work. To compound this, early in his career he tended to publish with several publishers at a time (mostly small, independent houses) and some of his books were hard to find. A few of his novels are quite brilliant (e.g. A Chinese Novel, Parmenides, The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira) but others are sloppy exercises, where one feels that he's pulling the reader's leg. Critics sometimes don't even bother to review his work. It's not surprising that only a few of his novels have been translated (although I must say the French, as usual, have taken a lot more interest in him than other countries). Aira is a writer's writer; much like Borges before him, the younger generations idolise him. But I don't think the type of playful literature he indulges in (again like Borges, and to an extent like Nabokov) would appeal the Swedish Academy. It would take some dedicated scholars and translators, together with intense lobbying to get them curious about him. But who knows, maybe in 10 years.........

As for Gelman, I cannot judge his poetry as I haven't read him, but it is quite suspicious to me that he only came into the limelight because of a personal tragedy, which he himself and his leftie entourage made sure to propagandise.

[Eric]

Whatever we differ on, I do believe that neither me nor Stiffelio like trendy lefties who use any means, fair or foul, to climb the greasy pole of success. Gelman's life has been scarred by a terrible tragedy. But we must know more about his whole life, and most crucially about the quality of his poetry as poetry, before we deem him, as Daniel has done "one of the most important poets alive in the Spanish language".

Mirabell, in his usual brief way, does have a valid point that we've already got something of a thread here about Aira. It tells us a little. That someone has read two of his books. And something about his style. What attracted me to finding out more about Aira when reading the article in Die Zeit was the fact that he deliberately sought out smaller publishers to publish with. That kind of idealism appeals to me.

If Aira has indeed written 50 books of short-stories, as Stewart says, and a total of 70 books, as Die Zeit says, he is a prodigious author. I'll have a look in the library this afternoon if anything of his has appeared in Swedish so as to give me a taste of his work.

Our Shigekuni might note that six of Aira's books have been translated into German in Berlin, Munich, and Graz, four of them published in 2010, i.e. this year. So I hope Shigekuni reviews one or two. Shigekuni is so much more verbal than Mirabell.

[Daniel del Real]

. And I have noticed that there seems to be a bit of a Gelman craze. Why him? What's he written that is special?


Here's a thread on Gelman Eric

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/13746-juan-gelman.html

This is not only biographic facts about him but a little review I wrote of an anthology I read last year called Pesar Todo (Weighting Everything)


Aira is one of the most unique, hard-to-classify writers we've had in a while. He's written over 60 novels (nouvelles, actually, as they're usually very short), so it's impossible to keep up with his entire work. To compound this, early in his career he tended to publish with several publishers at a time (mostly small, independent houses) and some of his books were hard to find. A few of his novels are quite brilliant (e.g. A Chinese Novel, Parmenides, The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira) but others are sloppy exercises, where one feels that he's pulling the reader's leg. Critics sometimes don't even bother to review his work. It's not surprising that only a few of his novels have been translated (although I must say the French, as usual, have taken a lot more interest in him than other countries). Aira is a writer's writer; much like Borges before him, the younger generations idolise him. But I don't think the type of playful literature he indulges in (again like Borges, and to an extent like Nabokov) would appeal the Swedish Academy. It would take some dedicated scholars and translators, together with intense lobbying to get them curious about him. But who knows, maybe in 10 years.........


The only similar example I can think of is Mexican writer Mario Bellatin who also writes very short novels and many of them are also literary exercices, experimental writings at the same time very ambitious and clever. I've personally enjoyed more Bellatin than Aira. He's not only a strange man with a hook in his arm he's also a very innovative writer with fresh proposals for modern literature.

[Stiffelio]

The only similar example I can think of is Mexican writer Mario Bellatin who also writes very short novels and many of them are also literary exercices, experimental writings at the same time very ambitious and clever. I've personally enjoyed more Bellatin than Aira. He's not only a strange man with a hook in his arm he's also a very innovative writer with fresh proposals for modern literature.

What a coincidence! I just wrote in the Aira thread that I saw similarities between him and Bellatin. I only read Bellatin's Chinese Checkers and I thought 'this is SO Aira-like!'. I definitely look forward to exploring more of Bellatin's work. As for Aira, and as I said before, when he is inspired he is unsurpassed for sheer bizarreness. His novels read like mock theorems for the reader to solve, which most of the time they don't but they have a big laughing ride anyway.

[Stiffelio]

What attracted me to finding out more about Aira when reading the article in Die Zeit was the fact that he deliberately sought out smaller publishers to publish with. That kind of idealism appeals to me.

If Aira has indeed written 50 books of short-stories, as Stewart says, and a total of 70 books, as Die Zeit says, he is a prodigious author.

The problem with this is that these small publishing firms have very limited distribution capabilities and they print very few copies. Therefore the reader is at a loss trying to keep track of Aira's works. My advice is, if you see an Aira book: buy it now or else you most likely won't find it available in a year or two, as the publishing firm might have gone out of business in the meantime, for one reason or other. It has happened before.

Aira doesn't write short-story collections. All his nouvelles typically range from 80 to 120 pages, with a few exceptions (his first 2 or 3 novels) where he would stretch to 200 pages or so.

[kpjayan]

Stiffelio, What about Manuel Puig ?

I've read "Kiss of the Spiderwoman","Eternal Curse on the Reader's of these pages" and "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" .. I like the first two..

[Daniel del Real]

What a coincidence! I just wrote in the Aira thread that I saw similarities between him and Bellatin. I only read Bellatin's Chinese Checkers and I thought 'this is SO Aira-like!'. I definitely look forward to exploring more of Bellatin's work. As for Aira, and as I said before, when he is inspired he is unsurpassed for sheer bizarreness. His novels read like mock theorems for the reader to solve, which most of the time they don't but they have a big laughing ride anyway.

Quite fun indeed :D but quite obvious to those who have read both writers.
Please answer me about Piglia. I've also heard a lot of Argentinian Manuel Mujica Lainez. Have you read him?



Stiffelio, What about Manuel Puig ?

I've read "Kiss of the Spiderwoman","Eternal Curse on the Reader's of these pages" and "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" .. I like the first two..

Another writer I have pending to read. I need more time damn it!

[Stiffelio]

Please answer me about Piglia. I've also heard a lot of Argentinian Manuel Mujica Lainez. Have you read him?

I confess I haven't read Piglia yet. Maybe I have subconsciously been avoiding him because he comes across as snobbish and so full of himself. Yes, his best novel is supposed to be Respiraci?n Artificial. A few years ago he was in the middle of a scandal when it was discovered that the local Planeta Prize to his novel Plata Quemada had been rigged in his favor. That affair certainly didn't help me being attracted to him. All that said, I suppose I'll read him sooner or later. He's just got a new novel published, Blanco Nocturno, and that's probably the reason why he's going to Guadalajara.

I only read one book by Mujica L?inez, Misteriosa Buenos Aires, and I remember being impressed by his polished, proustian style. But that was ages ago. His was a fascinating life story. He was a decadent aristocrat and behaved like one: he was married with children but travelled round the world with a retinue of Tadzio-looking ephebes. He was also very generous with younger writers. His estate in the province of C?rdoba hosted many intellectuals and artists who were going through difficult times. But, above all, he was a wonderful writer, much respected by critics and younger writers.


Stiffelio, What about Manuel Puig ?

I've read "Kiss of the Spiderwoman","Eternal Curse on the Reader's of these pages" and "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" .. I like the first two..

Manuel Puig was a fantastic writer who unfortunatelly died too young. He was a true 'revolutionary' in literary terms. He came from a little provincial town and wrote what were essentially Peyton Place-like melodramas which, thanks to his thorough understanding of his characters's psyche and a unique ear for middle-class dialogue, he elevated to the ranks of high literature. He was fascinated by the radio and the cinema and you can see that influence in his novels. I read Boquitas Pintadas (Heartbreak Tango), The Buenos Aires Affair and Kiss of the Spider Woman, all of which I recommend.

[Daniel del Real]

This one goes to you Stiffelio: I was checking the calendar for the next Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara and I saw a conference titled "Muestra de literatura argentina contempor?nea". There are two young writers mentioned there, and as expected I haven't heard their names.

Eric Schierloh: Narrador, poeta y traductor. Recibi? la beca del Fondo Nacional de las Artes para una investigaci?n y traducci?n de parte de la obra menos conocida de Herman Melville. Como resultado de este proyecto, compil? y tradujo el volumen Lejos de tierra y otros poemas, (2008). En la actualidad trabaja en otro libro sobre el mismo autor, Diario a bordo del Meteor, un diario de viajes, que saldr? publicado en noviembre de 2010. Su tercera novela, Donde termina el desierto, recibi? el Premio del Fondo Nacional de las Artes, ser? publicada en 2011. Ha publicado, entre otras, Formas de humo (2006), Kilgore, o todo vuelve a su cauce m?s pronto o m?s tarde (2010)

Pablo Katchadjian: Narrador, poeta y profesor universitario, ha desarrollado una obra personal y peculiar en el ?mbito de la nueva narrativa argentina. Public? El Mart?n Fierro ordenado alfab?ticamente (2007), El Aleph engordado (2009). Estos dos t?tulos forman parte de un proyecto de intervenci?n cr?tica en desarrollo sobre algunas de las obras can?nicas de la literatura Argentina, como C?sar Aira, El cam del alch (2005) Dp canta el alma (2004) y Qu? hacer (2010)

Please tell me if you know anything about them pls.

[Stiffelio]

I haven't heard anything about these guys with unpronounceable surnames (which only reinforces the notion of Argentina being a huge cauldron of people from the most diverse origins). I've seen Kilgore displayed in specialized bookstores but I haven't seen any reviews. The second guy appears to just write criticism.

[Bubba]

I confess I haven't read Piglia yet. Maybe I have subconsciously been avoiding him because he comes across as snobbish and so full of himself. Yes, his best novel is supposed to be Respiraci?n Artificial. A few years ago he was in the middle of a scandal when it was discovered that the local Planeta Prize to his novel Plata Quemada had been rigged in his favor. That affair certainly didn't help me being attracted to him. All that said, I suppose I'll read him sooner or later. He's just got a new novel published, Blanco Nocturno, and that's probably the reason why he's going to Guadalajara.




Thanks for mentioning this scandal, Stiffelio. I'd either forgotten about it or never been more than vaguely aware of it. How horrifying it was! (In some ways, though, I was a bit pleased, as it confirmed some of my prejudices against Piglia and his ilk.)

For those who don't read Spanish or don't want to go reading through old blog posts, here is a summary of the scandal: Piglia's unpublished novel Plata quemada won the 1997 Premio Planeta by unanimous decision of the jurors. One of the rules of the competition was that the novel had to be unpublished and that the rights to it couldn't have been signed away to any publisher. Yet Piglia had earlier signed away (presumably against an advance, more about which later) the rights to his future novels to a subsidiary of the publisher Planeta. Piglia never got his prize money of about USD40,000. It went straight to cancel a debt of his to Planeta (I am presuming he had this debt to his publisher because he was given an advance for a book or books he never produced). The president of the jury that awarded the prize to Piglia's book was a publisher at Planeta and two weeks later became Piglia's agent. One of the nine other finalists for the award--one Gustavo Nielsen--lodged a civil complaint against the organizers of the prize for rigging it in Piglia's favor. He won his case on appeal, eight years after he first brought it to the courts, and was awarded about USD3,500 in damages. Only one of the jurors testified: she said she had never been given a copy of Nielsen's typescript.

It all might sound extremely petty, but Nielsen has a very moving and eloquent letter explaining his reasons for pursuing this case for eight years (during which he was cast into the wilderness by much of the Argentine literary establishment); all Piglia can do, in a despicable article in which he attempts feebly to come to his own defense, is to compare Nielsen to Carlos Argentino Daneri and himself to Borges. At some point, in addition, a petition denouncing purported attacks on Piglia's reputation, denouncing Nielsen, in short, though not by name, made the rounds of Argentina's literati and was signed by many of them, including such minor luminaries as Saer and Tizón.

I'll never give Piglia another chance now (fairly easy for me to do, as Respiración artificial turned me off). And Saer's and Tizón's signatures on that petition give me leave to think ill of them and their work with fewer scruples than before. Nielsen, on the other hand, strikes me as a good writer, an honest writer. I might look for some of his stuff.

[Stiffelio]

Thanks for your excellent account of the Piglia scandal. You're very well informed. I was not aware of the Saer and Tizón supporting signatures. I think these two are honest (and very talented!!) writers and they were probably not told the whole story at the time, so siding with the until-then-very-respected Piglia (rather than believeing the supposedly 'sour-graped' Nielsen) could have made sense. It was only when Nielsen won the legal battle that the whole truth was known by everybody. But justice to Nielsen was not only made at the courts. His literary prestige has continued to grow with each book he has published and (you probably know this too) he has recently won the Premio Clarín for his novel "La Otra Playa" (The Other Beach).

http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/literatura/Premio-Clarin-Novela-Gustavo-Nielsen_0_369563232.html

[Settembrini]

Piglia's novel La ciudad ausente is one of the greatest books produced in Argentina in the last 30 years. That episode of the Planeta prize shows the miseries of the book business but doesn't turn La ciudad ausente into a forgetful work.


This country produced Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort?zar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sabato, Roberto Arlt, and countless other great writers!

Of that list I would erase Roberto Arlt. He is completly overrated since the sixties.

[Bubba]

I'm rather curious as to why Settembrini thinks La ciudad ausente is one of the greatest Argentine books of the last thirty years. Is it simply because there's so little competition--what other great works have been published in Argentina since 1980?--or is it that he really thinks it's a great book? I know I said upthread I wouldn't bother with Piglia anymore, but I found a French translation of La ciudad ausente in my local library and, since it's very short, I decided to give it a go.

Short though it is, it took me weeks to finish, perhaps because it's a highly episodic novel, and I read the book one episode (or less) at a time. Some of the episodes, I have to admit, I rather enjoyed: Lazlo Malamüd, the Hungarian translator of Martín Fierro who, try as he might, can't learn to speak Spanish, the story of a guy who works with a mechanical bird, a bit about Leopoldo Lugones and his son (also Leopoldo), and a few others. Another, which takes place on an island and recalls Bioy's most famous book--can't remember the title just now (La invención de Morel, maybe?)--involved disquisitions on language and was boring. These episodes don't seem to fit together in any coherent way; people appear early in the book and never reappear (not something that bothered me too much). Half the time, more than half the time, it's impossible to tell what's going on. One chapter also took place in Tigre; it didn't convey much of a sense of the place (doing so would be too conventional for Piglia), but as I read it struck me that Argentine literature (many of whose exponents are from the capital) seems to have neglected Tigre, a large wilderness of water and islands just outside Buenos Aires, almost entirely; this chapter, then, strongly suggested a possible book, which Piglia has not written.

At one point, in an episode about a father's attempts to teach his seemingly autistic daughter to talk--I have no idea how this episode connects to the rest of the book--Piglia writes:
C'était comme apprendre une langue étrangère à un mort (ou comme apprendre une langue morte à un étranger. [It was like teaching a dead person a foreign language (or like teaching a foreigner a dead language).] I find such jokes annoying and unnecessary. Surely teaching a dead person a foreign language would be no harder than teaching him his native language. And then the reversal of the terms. Oh, Piglia is just so clever!

The book is also full of allusions and direct references to Argentine literature: Macedonio Fernández, above all, as well as Arlt, Bioy, Lugones, and lord knows who else. If I were more well versed in the literature--not just Argentine--Piglia is always alluding to in this book, I would probably have gotten more out of it. On the whole, I don't think most readers would get much out of this book; it is for literary intellectuals--Argentine, by preference--only.

[Daniel del Real]

I have Piglia's La Ciudad Ausente waiting to be read. I bought it recently and Piglia signed it to me. Now that it's causing controversy right here I'm more tempted to pick it up today and start reading it. However I'm only going to judge the book by itself, no comparisons. Maybe Bubba is right saying there haven't been amazing works in Argentina in the last 20 years, but if this novel is good it doesn't take anything from it by not being with the right company. That is not a good point to qualify or judge a book.
Last week I read an essay/speech that Bolaño gave talking about Argentinian literature. He established three writers as the main figures on what will be based the future of Argentinian literature. One was Lamborghini, Arlt being the second and another one I don't remember right now was the third. Interesting point of view of a literature that is on the shadow of Borges; new writers cannot follow it as he is unique, so they're trying to follow diffent paths in order to change the direction of Argentinian literature. I'll check on my notes and talk later about it.

[Bubba]

Hey! When did I say that?

[Daniel del Real]

I'm rather curious as to why Settembrini thinks La ciudad ausente is one of the greatest Argentine books of the last thirty years. Is it simply because there's so little competition--what other great works have been published in Argentina since 1980?--


There you are. Did I misinterpret?

[Stiffelio]

I have just read Gustavo Nielsen's La Otra Playa (The Other Beach). It's the first book I read by Nielsen and I was pretty well impressed. This is a cleverly crafted novel mixing up reality with the supernatural, somewhat reminiscent of early Bioy Casares's 'fantasy' fiction like The Invention of Morel or psychological films like Blow-up or Last Year in Marienbad. Antonio, a forty-something photographer is trying to get away from an unhappy marriage, becomes obsessed with a young woman whom he secretly photographs, goes into seclusion to a beach house...... where very strange things begin to happen.....the young woman, named Lorena, on the other hand, has not quite come to terms with her father's death in an accident, decides to 'look back for him' and eventually happens on that same beach house. But is it the same reality these two characters are living out? Same time and space dimensions? An architect by training, Nielsen has a clear sense on how to structure this intriguing novel, which is also peopled with other characters, including Antonio's wife, a daughter and his best friend Zopi, and Lorena's boyfriend, a writer of horror novels. Nielsen is a good narrator and controls the strings of this chilly story almost to perfection. Read it! This novel won this year's Clarín prize; good for him after his long feud against Planeta for the Piglia affair.

[Daniel del Real]

Yes, it sounds like Bioy Casares but ironically it is also similar to Piglia with who he had the controversy of the Planeta Prize. What I wonder is why an author like Piglia is so well known, at least in the Latin American market and why Nielsen is barely mentioned. Who publishes this book you read?

[Stiffelio]

To start with, Piglia (b. '41) has been around a lot longer than Nielsen (b. '61). Piglia has published relatively little in his career but most of his previous books have made a mark (not his latest one, though, which has passed pretty much unnoticed). He and Saer (with Aira joining in much later) were sort of the 'annointed' heirs of the big As, Bs and Cs (Arlt, Borges, Bioy and Cortázar) of Argentine literature. When they started publishing in the late 60s and 70s there wasn't much competition in the 'maintream/serious' literature category. Piglia's reputation has been, IMO, somewhat diluted over time. Nielsen, on the other hand is only one of many interesting writers who sprang up in the 90s. You must also consider that during the Planeta/Piglia affair most of the establishment (mistakenly!) took sides with Piglia and thus stigmatized Nielsen as a code breaker or traitor of sorts. Thereafter, Nielsen always had trouble finding publishing houses to back him and had to resort to permamently taking part in competitions or ending up with small, independent publishers, the result being that many of his books are now hard to find. La Otra Playa is fortunately published by Alfaguara. I hope this answers your questions.

[Daniel del Real]

Really? I've read excellent reviews of Blanco Nocturno. Actually it was categorized as one of the best books published in Spanish in the last year by the newspaper El País. Probably it was a big hit in Spain but not in Argentina which it would still be weird.

[Eric]

Quick question: am I right in thinking that Ernesto Sábato, born 1911, is still alive?

[hdw]

He died yesterday, aged 99. Did you have a premonition of his demise?

Harry

[Eric]

No, Harry, I'm not one of those psychic types that have visions and forebodings.

However, it is rather coincidental that I went to Stockholm public library on Friday and borrowed the book I mentioned on another thread called "El escritor y sus fantasmas", and I did wonder about whether he was still alive and why I found his text strangely lucid, when my Spanish is no great shakes. I have been finding out a bit about Sábato for the past few weeks on and off, and borrowed his "El túnel" from Uppsala public library last week, but then found that my level of Spanish wasn't really up to a novel.

Anyway, if there is any telepathy, his soul may be happy to know that he has at least one reader this week.

[hdw]

I assume this is going to be in tomorrow's (Monday's) Guardian -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/01/ernesto-sabato-obituary

Harry

[Stiffelio]

Another bio piece, from the Buenos Aires Herald:

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/65863/biography-the-life-of-the-literature-legend-ernesto-sabato

Ironically, he was going to be honored today at the Buenos Aires Book Fair for his upcoming one hundreth birthday.

[Eric]

Yes, the Guardian obit is a good one. Clear for outsiders. What is mentioned there about the meat-packing industry was picked up in that book I'm reading called "Väl mött, Europa!" by the Finland-Swede Hans Ruin who went to Argentina and Brazil for a PEN congress in 1936, as I described on another thread. Strange to think that Sábato was already in his twenties when Ruin wrote his description. Ruin mentions the disappointment of Europeans who had regarded Argentina as a bright new world, but that it contained all the evils of Europe, even though in Europe at the time the storm of war was already brewing.

Another thing that Ruin and Sábato have in common was that Ruin mentions Gide, the great defender of Communism - until he visited Russia. Sábato was secretary of the Communist Youth Federation - until he, in turn, heard the same news from Russia, maybe even via Gide's writings, though I think they came a little later. But Stalin was already mowing them down by the dozen, by then.

Another interesting thing about Sábato is that he dropped out of being a scientist.

His human rights commission record under Alfonsín also appears to have been exemplary.

So I will be happy to read his writings, as I was when he was still alive. When the eulogies are over, I hope people will examine what he stood for. I shall continue with his fragment book about literature. I feel that's a good start. Then, when my Spanish is up to it, I'll tackle a novel.

[Eric]

I found a novel of Sábato's in Swedish translation called "Abaddón el exterminador". Anyone here read it in any language?

[Stiffelio]

It's Sábato's last novel and generally considered to be his least accomplished one. I didn't even attempt to read it but I've been told it was a boring brick of a novel, a cheap and bloated throwback to Sartre and Dostoevsky. Try The Tunnel first: its much shorter, easier to read and much better overall. On Heroes and Tombs is his masterpiece, a deep, anguished piece of existential writing. But I wouldn't recommend it to you as an introduction to Sábato. It is too pessimistic.

[Eric]

If what Stiffelio says is true (and he appears to be the poster here who has the best chance of knowing), it is intriguing why that particular novel of Sábato's was chosen for translation into Swedish. Nor do I think that much of Sábato's essay work has appeared in Swedish. Sometimes publishers just snatch at what is trendy or "in", and don't see books in the context of a whole oeuvre.

So it looks as if I shall have to crawl back into the tunnel. Though I'd like to have a Swedish or English version handy; I've only found it locally in Spanish.

Anyway, thanks, Stiffelio for the information.

By the way, are all the streets in central Buenos Aires on a grid pattern as in some in the USA (and Åbo / Turku in Finland)? In the Hans Ruin book I am reading from 1938, the author wasn't too impressed with central Buenos Aires. As I believe you live there, you may have some comments on this. Gombrowicz managed to hang around there for a decade or two, so it can't be that bad. One of the best websites on Gombrowicz is one from Argentina:

http://www.literatura.org/wg/wgea.htm

[Eric]

Have any of you looked at the pdf document mentioned in the following URL:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1425

The document in question is entitled "30 Great Authors From Argentina".

What I wondered was is if anyone here has read any of the novels and other work focused on in the document.

[Bubba]

Sábato is a strange case: an author who lived so long he witnessed what, for most writers of his stature, takes place only after death--the long slow slide of his work into near oblivion. For whatever reason, Sábato's stock has tanked in the last twenty or twenty-five years. And this even though he went on publishing almost to the very end (I myself have read Antes del fin, a slight but fairly enjoyable memoir). El túnel is reasonably good and probably not too hard for someone who is learning Spanish. On Heroes and Tombs is something else altogether, a dense and often unclear brick of a tome that, now, will probably repel all but the most determined reader or the most anguished adolescent intellectual. I read it in my mid-twenties and don't regret having done so, but it's not something I'd plow through now.

Very few of Argentina's most well-known writers are not really ideal for people who are learning Spanish: Borges and Cortázar are often difficult, as are the slightly younger Juan José Saer and Ricardo Piglia. I would suggest that people with an intermediate knowledge of Spanish try the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro, whose stories, written in very clear and almost simple Spanish, are so compelling you read through them and don't even realize you're learning the language.

I checked out the brochure with the "thirty great authors" but was unfamiliar with most of the names; I've flipped through a Chejfec book or two and read a few newspaper columns by Elvio Gandolfo, but nothing about that cursory look at some of their work created a lasting impression.

[Daniel del Real]

I found a novel of Sábato's in Swedish translation called "Abaddón el exterminador". Anyone here read it in any language?

I read many years ago, when I read all three Sábato's novels. Although it was the last I've read with the consequential order everyone recommends (El Túnel, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas and finally Abaddón el exterminador) I remember very little about it. It's a really long novel, really difficult to fully comprehend and I was an inexperienced reader at that time. I think I understood a 30% of what was going on, really complex. Right now I'll be re-reading Sábatos ouvre, already started with El Túnel and will follow with Sobre Héroes y Tumbas and some essays. Not so sure I want to read Abaddón again, I think I won't.

[Stiffelio]

All three Sábato novels are available in English. I'm not sure why the Swedes opted to just translate Abbadon.

Yes, Buenos Aires is generally designed in a grid pattern but has some diagonals and wide, beautiful avenues. It's a huge city, really and every neighborhood is different: some are flat, dirty and poor, others are quite chic and lavish. We copied a lot over the centuries, so some neighborhoods look like Madrid, others like Paris or even London. And there are many lively bohemiam places like San Telmo and Palermo plus a newly developed waterfront. It's a city of great contrasts: dangerous shanty-towns are sprinkled throughout the city, even neighbouring with the poshest quarters. Traffic is chaotic, although less so than Sao Paulo or Mexico DF. Nightlife is very exciting: you can say anything about this city, except that it is boring.

The say Gombrowicz is the best non-Argentine Argentine writer! He has become a serious cult and is universally revered by Argentine writers. I'm afraid, though, that I've read close to nothing by him yet.

[Bjorn]

Looks like The Tunnel is coming out in Swedish in November. I'll have to snatch that one up.

[Daniel del Real]

Yes, Buenos Aires is generally designed in a grid pattern but has some diagonals and wide, beautiful avenues. It's a huge city, really and every neighborhood is different: some are flat, dirty and poor, others are quite chic and lavish. We copied a lot over the centuries, so some neighborhoods look like Madrid, others like Paris or even London. And there are many lively bohemiam places like San Telmo and Palermo plus a newly developed waterfront. It's a city of great contrasts: dangerous shanty-towns are sprinkled throughout the city, even neighbouring with the poshest quarters. Traffic is chaotic, although less so than Sao Paulo or Mexico DF. Nightlife is very exciting: you can say anything about this city, except that it is boring.



You missed the fact that girls are gorgeous over there :rolleyes:

[Stiffelio]

The problem with lists is that they are all idiosyncratic and whimsical. I happen to know one of the people in the selecting panel, Anna Kasumi Stahl. Stahl is a Japanese-American living in Argentina where she teaches and lectures. I took a couple of seminars with her, one on Japanese literature and a specific one on Murakami. She was very good and knowledgeable in her field, but I wonder how well versed she is on contemporary Argentine literature. The other problem I have is when they label people as being "great" when, in most cases, their achievments are only incipient. That said, however, I applaud the project to sponsor translations of these writers' work. Of the list, the only writers I know of are, more or less in order of seniority and number of books published, Alberto Laiseca, Luis Chitarroni, Matilde Sánchez, Federico Jeanmaire, Elvio Gandolfo (better know as a journalist), Daniel Guebel and Fabián Casas. Laiseca is widely regarded as the best of the lot but his books are eithrr out of print or hard to find. Sánchez published a very good novel, El Dock, a few years back. So did Guebel with La Perla del Emperador. Guebel is also a successful film director. And I've just read a short novel and a collection of stories by Casas, a well established poet whose incursion into prose is fairly recent: he is has interesting voice but did not blow me away.

[Eric]

I fully agree with Stiffelio that lists can be "idiosyncratic and whimsical". That's why I often pour scorn on lists, especially where people want to show off which 50 books they've read recently, ones they automatically think are the best ever written. Such solipsism is risible.

But us poor old Europeans, a continent where so few Argentinian books are translated, bought, read, or available in libraries, snatch at any opportunity to get someone living in the country itself to suggest and elucidate.

When I see the word "great", I do a Goebbels and reach for my gun.

But I too applaud the idea of sponsoring and promoting untranslated literature. Because that is doing more than merely writing lists, but as also paying for the authors' works to appear in other countries in translation, always a laudable activity, especially when it is not only the national literary propaganda agency doing the promotion.

[Eric]

Sábato has an intriguing argument in his "El escritor y sus fantasmas" (section: Sobre literatura nacional) that the Russians of the 19th century had problems very similar to those of Argentina in the 1960s. He even identifies parallels between the Slavophiles versus Westernisers situation and similar strands in Argentinian thought. When Sábato met a White Russian taxi-driver back in 1938, he says that he was impressed with Sábato's understanding of Russia.

I'm enjoying this book of fragments a lot. I'm slowed down by the language, but have not yet been brought to a halt by it.

[Liam]

Héctor Tizón (http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/107579/a-great-writer-and-a-wonderful-human-being) passes away.

[Stiffelio]

Thanks for adding the Tizón link here. I had also linked other articles, albeit in Spanish or French. Tizón was quite a unique writer. His early books were a bit hard to get into, almost cryptic, until you discovered meanings in his poetic style, his rhythm. Fire in Casabindo is a masterpiece that I very much recommend reading. It's still in print and available in English. I also read a wonderful collection of stories El Gallo Blanco (meaning The White Rooster). His recurring themes were the desertic Argentine north-west, the so called Puna jujeña, its lonely people, atavistically tied to ancient myths. I have a couple other books of his that I plan to read soon.

[Liam]

WOW, Stiffy, he sounds amazing. I'm very much into folklore and myths, etc.

The novella you've mentioned (at 90 pp.) is unfortunately no longer carried by Amazon, although you can buy it used from a secondhand seller. For what it's worth, the cover:


http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515O0M0a4JL._SL500_AA300_.jpg (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/070437062X/ref=dp_image_z_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books)

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[Eric]

Do people read Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina nowadays? He lived there for twenty-three and a half years, and there is a website in Spanish dedicated to him. But is he still read and discussed? Here's that Spanish-language webnsite again (the URL has been posted up before):

http://www.elortiba.org/gombrowicz.html

It's pretty thorough.

[Stiffelio]

Yes, very much so. He's one of the most revered cult writers. All lit students analyze his works in some depth and he's been influential to many writers, especially those now in their late 40s and 50s. I am ashamed to confess that I haven't read him yet!

[Stevie B]

Do people read Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina nowadays.

Eric, any idea if Ferdydurke or Trans-Atlantyk would be a better starting point for Gombrowicz?

[pesahson]

Although the question is to Eric, I hope you won't mind I butt in with my recommendation. I'd say start with Ferdydurke, which I remember as being very funny. It was like a breeze of fresh air after all the stiff novels we had to read in high school. It is on the school curriculum but don't let that discourage you ;).
Check out this thread on Gombrowicz also: http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/2780-Witold-Gombrowicz?highlight=gombrowicz

[Stevie B]

Thanks for the recommendation, pesahson. I will definitely take your advice and start with Ferdydurke to follow on the heels of a funny book I'm currently reading - Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg.

[Eric]

The other Spanish-language Gombrowicz website is:

http://www.literatura.org/wg/wgea2.htm

That is separate to the Elortiba one I mentioned a few postings ago.

To answer Stevie B's question, I think that "Ferdydurke" is a better starting point. Actually, his diaries incorporate all sorts of semi-fictional passages, and plus two other novels "Pornographia" (no, there are no dirty bits) and "Cosmos", plus his plays are all readable and available in English. These are all more immediately comprehensible than "Trans-Atlantyk" (Transatlantic) because there are certain stylistic aspects, e.g. using allusions to seventeenth century Polish, which mean that non-native-speakers of Polish, and especially anyone reading the book in translation, will miss some allusions and stylistic things.

Pesahson rightly points out that there is a separate thread for Witold Gombrowicz.

[Settembrini]

Have any of you looked at the pdf document mentioned in the following URL:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1425

The document in question is entitled "30 Great Authors From Argentina".

What I wondered was is if anyone here has read any of the novels and other work focused on in the document.

From that brochure I have read some works of Casas, Chejfec, Chitarroni, Coehlo, Cohen, Gamerro, Gandolfo, Heer, Guebel, Gusmán, Jeanmaire, Laiseca, Martini, Tununa Mercado, Rosetti and Matilde Sánchez. The other ones I have no idea who they are (but the trick there is that the brochure is supported by Santa Fe goverment, so that's why so many rosarinos and santefesinos no-ones appears).
I feel curiosity about that chinese guy Maximiliano Matayoshi, quiero leer su novela sobre un chino que "come aloz, plactica kalate y tenel tintolelia o supelmelcadito donde 'chinito no lal monela, chinito no tenel monela'."

[Cleanthess]

Once again, via Bertis' Brilliant Blog at Blogspot, Bertigo.
http://eduardoberti.blogspot.com/2013/01/libros-para-el-verano.html

In the magazine "7 Days", which accompanies the newspaper Tiempo Argentino ... Ana Maria Shua recommends Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango/Boquitas Pintadas:

"Until then, our best novels were huge, brilliant, chaotic and curiously unstructured books . Sabato with On Heroes and Tombs, Cortázar with Hopscotch and Marechal with Adam Buenosayres, had written for us the great urban novels of the 50s and 60s. Heartbreak Tango/Boquitas Pintadas is not a symbol or a metaphor or a microcosm of anything. It's a small, intimate story; it refers only to itself. Puig's intense and believable characters need not be leftist intellectuals to have a distinct voice, like Cortazar's. Puig's novel is about ordinary people, not people of absolute purity or heinous wickedness, like the characters in Sabato. Puig does not try to define or understand Argentina, as Marechal did. But above all, Heartbreak Tango/Boquitas Pintadas is not a thesis novel . At long last we Argentinians have succeeded. Finally, with Heartbreak Tango/Boquitas Pintadas an Argentinian writer wrote a great novel that proves nothing. Except his mad passion for storytelling.

So, to Shua the great modern Argentinian novels are Sabato's On Heroes and Tombs, Cortázar's Hopscotch, Marechal's Adam Buenosayres and Puig's Heartbreak Tango.

Some background: Ana Maria Shua is, among many other things, the Etgar Keret of Argentina, the Empress of Micro-fiction (she's even published a book on Jewish folklore). Her collected micro fictions are published under the title Cazadores de letras, minificciones reunidas. She works on a very competitive field in Latin America, a field where Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar, Augusto Monterroso and others have written masterpieces galore. According to Shua the microfiction should be a text containing a narrative element and no more than twenty lines (about five hundred words).

Let me give you a little taste of Shua's minute greatness:

Demonstration
"The trapeze artists, clowns, contortionists, acrobats, equestrians, the strongmen, all gleefully exhibit their skills. But the sword swallowers, who can not show more than a part of their number, they spend their lives trying to prove that the other part is real. The rest of us feel the same way. Our life is spent trying to prove that we are not pretending, that we are for real, we swallow the knitting needle, cane, knives, the sword to the hilt itself. Unlike the sword swallower, we all know it's a trick.

FIERCE CARESS
Female mammals eat their offspring when they are weak or strange. Not out of meanness, mind you, It is just an instinctive behavior. Using the same ingesting movements that they use to swallow the placenta after delivery, they lick the the puppy, first intensely, urgently, and then they begin to devour it around the navel.
The ethologist Konrad Lorenz tried to make his dog adopt a young Australian dingo cub. When the bitch felt the wild smell of the puppy, the dog began licking its hair with long sucking tongue caresses. Then it tapped the dingo's muzzle to lay it on its back and began to lick the navel and just nibble with its incisors around the belly skin. The small cub trembled and whined. The dog stopped confused: the little animal's cries had awakened her maternal instincts. So does life lick us during the happy moments, the moments we think are happy, when we yield, for lack of instinct or good sense, to life's fierce caress, instead of screaming like the little dingo.

HORROR
Unfortunately for the suicides: they take a leap into the void at the precise moment it begins to fill, to fill slowly and without remedy.

PERFECT TOUCH
No more perfect caress than the soft touch of an eight-fingered hand, or so say those who instead of a woman, choose to go alone and naked into the bedroom of Spiders.

Finally a couple of Borgesian parodies:

DOUBTFUL TEST
If a man falls to hell in dreams and is given as proof of his stay a demon's trident and after awaking the trident is not there, is that enough proof that he has gotten out of hell?

THE GARDEN OF THE PATHS
If I ever got lost in the garden of forking paths it was because I was faithful to the old rule that demands: when arriving at a Crossroad you must split into two to be safe. But sometimes I wonder, isn't happiness to choose to remain one and then to get lost?

[Settembrini]

Microfiction is some kind of boutade that, sadly, became serious business in Argentina (particularly in the Center, West and Northwest area of the country). There is now an incipient industry of microfiction growing in Argentina. Of literary that phenomenon has anything; it's more like people collecting yard elves or something like that.
Samantha Schweblin once told me she has knew someone in Mexico who did know Monterroso (Monterroso is the author of the famous "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there", a microfiction which is seen as a revolutionary piece of work). Well, accordingly Samantha the origin of that story was that Monterroso and two friends went up to a bar to drink some alcohol, got drunk and one of them picked up a very big and kind of old woman which Monterroso called "the dinosaur". Thus, the microfiction was born, it was just a joke.

[Cleanthess]

Microfiction is some kind of boutade that, sadly, became serious business in Argentina (particularly in the Center, West and Northwest area of the country). There is now an incipient industry of microfiction growing in Argentina. Of literary that phenomenon has anything; it's more like people collecting yard elves or something like that.
Samantha Schweblin once told me she has knew someone in Mexico who did know Monterroso (Monterroso is the author of the famous "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there", a microfiction which is seen as a revolutionary piece of work). Well, accordingly Samantha the origin of that story was that Monterroso and two friends went up to a bar to drink some alcohol, got drunk and one of them picked up a very big and kind of old woman which Monterroso called "the dinosaur". Thus, the microfiction was born, it was just a joke.

Settembrini, thank you for that bit of trivia, hilarious! LM big fat AO! I guess that Charly Garcia was wrong then, no todos los dinosaurios van a desaparecer :) .

In any case, let's not be too harsh on micro-fiction, it is supposed to be humorous, ironic, parodical or paradoxical. After all, it descends from the gregueria, the fable, the anecdote (literary or funny), the aphorism, the joke.

Haiku was seen the same way at first, it was considered merely a joking, lesser poetic genre when compared to serious tanka poetry. It is still used in that humorous way: the senryu. But then came Matsuo Basho, who demonstrated the serious literary possibilities of the 5-7-5 syllables short verse and the rest is history.
Kafka was the Basho of micro-fiction, his fragments, fables and cryptic notes are unmatched masterpieces.

If it had been possible to build the tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to explain it that way. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.
No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.
One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be caught.
He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him--he is so diminutive that you cannot help it--rather like a child. "Well, what's your name?" you ask him. "Odradek," he says. "And where do you live?" "No fixed abode," he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.
I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He harms nobody; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

[Bubba]

Microfiction is some kind of boutade that, sadly, became serious business in Argentina (particularly in the Center, West and Northwest area of the country). There is now an incipient industry of microfiction growing in Argentina. Of literary that phenomenon has anything; it's more like people collecting yard elves or something like that.
Samantha Schweblin once told me she has knew someone in Mexico who did know Monterroso (Monterroso is the author of the famous "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there", a microfiction which is seen as a revolutionary piece of work). Well, accordingly Samantha the origin of that story was that Monterroso and two friends went up to a bar to drink some alcohol, got drunk and one of them picked up a very big and kind of old woman which Monterroso called "the dinosaur". Thus, the microfiction was born, it was just a joke.

Excellent, Settembrini. I think I like that "dinosaur" microfiction better now than I did when it was an enigma.