Vargas Llosa knows where paradise lies Blinded by syphilis, rotting alive, Paul Gauguin, just before his death, attempts to turn the wild secret of the South Seas into color. Around 50 years earlier, Flora Tristán heads to the shantytowns of major European cities, she sees the excesses of prostitution in London, the adverse conditions of…

Gabriel Garcia Márquez ‘novel “Memories of my melancholy whores” “Sex is the only a comfort when love is not enough,” is one of the key words in the new novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. This slim work by the 77-year-old Nobel Prize winner from 1982 is all about love, unfulfilled yearnings, disappointments and newly discovered great…

The secrets of the Argentine pampa in Ricardo Piglias clever and allusive novel Before Ricardo Piglia passed away early this year, he assumed the reputation of being Argentina’s most prominent living writer. Upon his death, his status among the great writers of Argentina, such as Jorge Borges and Julio Cortazar has been the subject of…

On Milan Kundera’s novel essay “Identity” Much does not happen in Milan Kundera’s latest novel, Identity, except perhaps in the imagination. The imagination dominates the action of the characters in the novel and the progress of the story. From the banality of contented life, the characters develop thoughts about disturbances of contentment, about the death…

Martin Heidegger speaks of technology as a “Gestell” or a “frame”. This is not a finished construction, but an activity of “ordering”. Modern technology, for him, is the culmination of the “conquest of the world as a picture”. For Heidegger, the word “image” means “the structure of imaginative creation” – an activity “of the calculation,…

The Argentinian Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) is one of the most dazzling cult figures of Latin American literature. When Cronopios and Famas was published, fifty years ago, Julio Cortázar was already an author admired and praised by critics thanks to his early books of short stories and also his novel “The Winners”. He had not yet published…

Eka Kurniawan tells a story of a great rage The Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan reverts to old folk beliefs in the novel ‘Man Tiger’. It covers not only a psychological drama but also many layers of his native culture. One day the young Margio jumps to his neighbor Anwar Sadat and bites him in his…

Annette Hug’s novel “Wilhelm Tell in Manila” follows the life of the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal through the jungle of words and languages. The ambitious novel essentially attempts to tell the story about how literature changes the world. For Jose Rizal, his attempt to change the world with literature ends in his own death. Rizal is…

As both psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon joined the struggle against French colonialism in the 1950s. Today, countless studies explore his work—yet one question persists: is Fanon more relevant now than ever? In late 1956, Fanon formally enlisted in the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) during Algeria’s war of independence. The gulf between today’s world…

Roberto Bolano channels the many characteristics that made Jorge Borges a great writer in his book, “The Insufferable Gaucho” Borges died in 1986. At about the same time Roberto Bolaño was rising to become the most interesting author of emerging Spanish-language literature. Jorge Borges shares his inexhaustible imagination with Roberto Bolano, which allows him to…

In 1969, Vikram Seth moved from India to London to study. He finds accommodation with his uncle Shanti and his German wife Henny, a Jewish woman. Both got to know each other during Shanti’s studies in Berlin in the 1930s. The relationship of his Uncle and Aunt, which was at first rather distant, gradually deviates…

There is more to what is being said in Rodrigo Hasbun’s novel that reviews the convulsion of Latin America In Rodrigo Hasbun’s (Cochabamba, Bolivia 1981) The Affections, it is convenient to emphasize, from the outset, the extreme conciseness of a prose that suggests more of what is being accounted. What is said and what remains…

The 2017 Literature Nobel Prize is awarded to the writer Kazuo Ishiguro. He was born in Japan in 1954 and moved to England at the age of five with his parents. I previously reviewed his work “The Buried Giant” on this blog. An article on the occasion of his winning the prize will follow.