Category: Reviews
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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…
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Proletarian Nights (Jacques Ranciere, 2012)
The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France Politics occurs when those who do not have the time, take the necessary time to live as a resident of a common space, proving that their mouths do not only speak with a voice but with a language, which signifies the pain. […] Politics consists in the division of the sensible,…
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The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie, 2008)
The female figure in the cover of Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel, the “Enchantress of Florence” hints on the action that will unfold in the text. But before any of the action occurs, Rushdie loses himself in meandering narrative streams and meticulous details. The story begins at the end of the fifteenth century where we meet…
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Wilhelm Tell in Manila (Annette Hug, 2016)
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…
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The masks of Frantz Fanon
As a psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon took part in the fight against French colonialism in the fifties. Today numerous publications are devoted to him. Is Fanon more relevant today? At the end of 1956, Frantz Fanon joined the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) in the Algerian liberation struggle. The distance between the present world…
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Traces of Jorge Borges in Roberto Bolaño
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…
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Two Lives (Vikram Seth, 2005)
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…
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Affections (Rodrigo Hasbun, 2015)
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…
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The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015)
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.
Geronimo Cristobal 