Category: Reviews
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Sweet Caress (William Boyd, 2016)
British author William Boyd writes about the fictive photographer Amory Clay. She manages a photo agency in Paris during the Second World War and moves to Germany with the Allies. But what the heroine thinks about her profession does not go beyond truisms. The British writer William Boyd is a prolific writer. His 15 novels…
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Gramsci and Bordieu on the critique of power
Similarities and Differences in the Critiques of Power by Gramsci and Bourdieu The following text examines the convergences and divergences in the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and another major theorist of power: the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died on January 23, 2002. Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu “If Gramsci was too optimistic about questioning…
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The Buru Quartet (Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1980-1988)
The Buru Quartet refers to the the volumes Bumi Manusia (“This Earth of Mankind”, 1980) , Anak Semua Bangsa (“Child of All Nations”, 1980), Jejak Langkah (“Footsteps”, 1985) and Rumah Kaca (“Glass House “, 1988). The books were banned by the regime of long time Indonesian president Suharto and his successor B.J. Habibie. The ban…
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Literate Gangsters
“BY NIGHT IN CHILE” is another novel discovery by the great Chilean author Roberto Bolaño A mediocre Chilean poet, far more famous as a literary critic and priest, is dying. All his life he had been alone, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix writes. He then proceeds to a monolithic paragraph of his laborious justification, in which it…
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Protected: Overview of four novels by Lazaro Francisco
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Protected: Noli me tangere (Jose Rizal, Penguin 2015)
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Protected: This Craft, as with a Woman Loved: Selected Poems (Artemio Tadena, 2016)
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Protected: A Bruise of Ashes (Carlos Angeles, 1993)
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Protected: Galaw ng Asoge (Cirilo Bautisa, 2005)
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Protected: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Jacques Ranciere, 2013)
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Unknown University (Roberto Bolaño, 2013)
Roberto Bolaño, in several interviews, confesses that his entrance to literature was through writing opoetry. In his books of pose and in his novels we find recurrent lyrical figures, who plot below the main story a pictorial, sensitive substory, which woul condense in the image of the Unknown University, a nightmare enclosure frozen in the…
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Beauty is a wound (Eka Kurniawan, 2015)
Hi style is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and William Faulkner, says the New York Times Book Review. “Beauty is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan is a wild and rousing nightmare about Indonesia’s recent history. Eka Kurniawan, born 1975 in West Java, is not only novelist, screenwriter and blogger, but also comic artist. And you…
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The Kingdom of this World (Alejo Carpentier, 2007)
The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) tells of the slave revolts in the Antilles during the French Revolution. Led by Macandal, a black man who can take the form of various animals, the slaves, headed by the bird-man Ti Noel, fight for their freedom; they pit their their belief on miracles and magic against the…
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Culture of Death in Yukio Mishima’s Novels
Portrait of a Japanese eccentric and poet and suicide victim, Yukio Mishima In the morning of November 25, 1970, dressed in a theatrical fantasy uniform and accompanied by four cadets of his theatrical fantasy private army, he captured the Commander of Japanese Civil Defense. He ordered that the soldiers of the 32nd Regiment should sit in…
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Ilaw Sa Hilaga (Lazaro Francisco, 1980)
The novel, Ilaw sa Hilaga (Northern Lights) was originally published as “Bayang Nagpatiwakal” in 1931. It depicts the 1920s, during the American colonial period in the Philippines. By this time, the war for independence which started in 1896 had already subsided and the colony had entered into a delicate period of peace time. There is…
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Piercing (Ryu Murakami, 2009)
A novel about the interactions of sex that is powerfully repulsive and captivating at the same time In Japan and the English-speaking world, Ryu Murakami first became known with his novel “Coin Locker Babies” (1980). In it he describes the life of two boys who were exposed in locker rooms in infancy and grew up…
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The East-West Burlesque of Santiago Gamboa
“What is the actual situation of a secondary writer, if not on a single, huge drain?” When Santiago Gamboa, on the first page of his most recent novel with Gombrowicz’s voice, scoffs at the inferior writers, it is almost self-evident that he himself is not one of those pitiful creatures of the literary rearguard. For, as Gamboa…
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No more love (Javier Marias, 2016)
“The older I get, the less certainty I have,” said Spanish writer Javier Marías in a recent interview. Almost exactly twenty years ago, after the publication of the translation of his novel My Heart So White, he had been discovered by more English-speaking countries. More than six million copies of his novels, stories and essays translated into 34…
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The Specter of Comparison
The Philippines at the Venice Biennale 2017 After returning to Venice in 2015 after over 50 years of absence, the country has already secured a place in the arsenal this year. It is the first position in the long series of national appearances following the grand main exhibition. Joselina Cruz presents works by Lani Maestro…
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The Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino, 1972)
I decided to revisit The Invisible Cities (1972) of the Italian author Calvin with whom I believe, with the force of a bump on the little toe, to have some astral connection. The book was reprinted this year. Bibliophile fetishes aside, Invisible Cities will be a different experience for each reader. Just as the experienced traveler sees in a new city…
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The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 2006)
The Canadian Margaret Atwood, in addition to the vast and diverse career as a writer (exploring the novel, the tale and the poetry), has also taught English language and literature and has long exercised literary criticism, without neglecting activism in environmental causes and humanitarian. The political approach, moreover, is a striking feature in her fictional works,…
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The Way to Paradise (Mario Vargas Llosa, 2003)
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…
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Memories of my melancholy whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2004)
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…
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Target in the Night (Ricardo Piglia, 2015)
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…
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The essay as a novel: Identity (Milan Kundera 1997, reprinted 2017)
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…
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In the digital frame of Heidegger
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,…
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Cronopios y Famas (Julio Cortazar, 1962)
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…
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Man Tiger (Eka Kurniawan, 2015)
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…
Geronimo Cristobal 