NORTE TRANSLATION SERIES:

Latin American writing made available to a wider public

At 8:25 Evita Became Immortal by Mario Szichman

Szichman has produced a narrative world obsessively, and brilliantly, informed by cultural displacement as a form of vertigo and cultural hegemony as the fabulous discourse of an innacessible center. In this novel (the humorous saga of the Pechofs' befuddled struggle to survive), the four brothers and their sister emerge as the mixed heirs to two distinct literary traditions: the Hispanic pícaro and the Jewish meshuga - the latter complete with strong family ties and guild feelings. In 1917, after a month of traveling and in spite of Pechof's suspicions that they are still in Poland (everyone at the immigrant's hotel speaks Polish, anti-Semitic slogans are smeared on the hotel walls and tanks are gunning down workers in the streets), the family finds itself in Buenos Aires ready to start a new life. At the end of the story they are packing their belongings, this time in a van, to run away once again. In between, the plot moves back and forth in time with such impeccable ease that, instead of flashbacks or flashforwards, the progress of the narrative seems to consist of furiously spinning concentric circles. At their center is the night of 1952 when Eva Perón dies: all clocks are stopped at 8:25 and Argentina is paralyzed in a timeless limbo pending Eva's funeral. The Pechofs are denied a permit to bury Dora's daughter (whose corpse has been rotting in government-supplied formaldehyde), because the issuance of death certificates has been banned until the former First Lady's obsequies are over. Instigated by Jaime, the family agrees to impersonate high-class Catholic patricians in order to get the complicity of a powerful doctor to circumvent the law. But their farcical attempts fail; "the anti-Semitic doctor" is enraged at their deceit; and the Pechofs, without premeditation, fed up with the whole comedy, murder him. Thus their final escape. The triumphant iconoclasm of this novel belongs to a tradition dating back to Robert Arlt.
Latin America in Books

The insurrection by Antonio Skarmeta

Antonio Skarmeta's The Insurrection recreated the Nicaraguan revolution with Stendahlian scope

The insurrection is a novel by Antonio Skármeta of Chile; this marvelous book conveys a sense of changes which occur in the lives of ordinary people when they are engulfed by war, and the range of choices arising in a revolution which is not primarily ideological, but social in the most practical way. The Insurrection takes place in the town of Leon, Nicaragua, in the final year of the Sandinista-led uprising against Somoza. This is the story of townspeople who initially would rather duck and hide than fight back. We come to know the postmaster, the dental student, the provincial priest, the conscript, all of whom are trying to make a decision, according to specifically difficulty circumstances, in the face of routine brutality and arbitrary official vengeance.
Comic, serendipitous, and lovingly detailed, the book is a history of shifting awareness. The individual lives of the citizens of Leon are infused with camaraderie and mutual suffering, but retain their uniqueness. The tension between those who believe in armed revolt against the dictator and those who are tentative, frightened, and incomprehending is played out with extraordinary subtlety and intimacy. When the town as a body burns down the local National Guard garrison, it is a major culmination, textured by the crossing of hundreds of small thresholds beforehand. There is little romance to the final military battle, for though victory follows and the dictator flees the country, the cost is grevious. Skármeta clearly believes in the historical necessity of defense against inhumane force, but the weight of the book's closing falls on mourning, and the rapid recoiling of the townspeople from war to the task of rebuilding. There is an air of achievement, an accomodation of differences, but no callousness about the price of the bargain made with violence.

The Insurrection. Antonio Skármeta. ISBN 0-910061-13-0. 247 pgs., $12.00

Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo

This collection of black and white photographic studies of the people and landscapes of Juan Rulfo's native Jalisco, accompanied by verbal homages by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and three Mexican writers, is a visual and a literary event. The stark chiaroscuro fo the Mexican writer's portraits of rural life suggests the depth of a lost indigenous past and the solitude of rural people as they face a hostile environment.
The written testimonies, which include poignant anecdotes by Rulfo growing up during the violent Cristero revolution, give us special insights into the fascinating world of Latin American letters. Gabriel García Márquez tells of his lonely years in Mexico City when he possessed five "clandestine" novels without a publisher, and recounts his discovery of Rulfo's masterpiece, Pedro Páramo, which opened the way for his own fiction. The Mexican writers Elena Poniatowska, Fernando Benítez, and José Emilio Pacheco give us a sense of the very rich world of their national literature and a more immediate perspective on Rulfo the man and the artist.
As Octavio Paz has said: "A landscape never refers only to itself." Rulfo's photographs inevitably evoke an idea of man. Here, man, appears to survive by mimetic adaptation; his dwellings of stone and mud blend into the terracotta fields; the indifference of his countenance mirrors an indifferent cosmos. In this concentrated study of his Jalisco, Rulfo finds strength in ruins, eloquence in simple people, poetry in abandoned towns and empty doorways and grace in the dramatic gestures of a dancer or a poet. He has developed a photographic equivalent of the understatement which distinguishes his writing.

"The veritable portrayal of the inframundo of Mexico, of the illusory pueblo of Comala from Pedro Páramo, comes from Rulfo's over one hundred photographs depicting ceremonial and daily rituals - the Day of the Dead, men, women and children at work and play - are juxtaposed with arid landscaped, decaying buildings, and women in mourning
Charlotte A. Bagby, Lector

Other Weapons by Luisa Valenzuela

Born and brought up in Argentina but now equally at home in the United States, she writes in a style marked by the dazzling elipses, bizarre fantasy and baroque textures we have come to associate with Latin American prose. In these five stories, tyranny and submission, power and impotence are examined in the light of intimate male-female relationships. They chronicle female desire in tightly circumscribed worlds where women's live are largely ruled by their erotic dreams. Where their loves and hates are involved, Miss Valenzuela's women clearly identify with those in power and define themselves through their men. In a fictional world where event and fantasy seem to coalesce, only their penchant for masochism stands in sharp relief.
The stories focus repeatedly on the destructive power relations between the sexes. "The Word Killer" presents the disturbing fantasy of a woman who can gain a sense of herself only through subjugation: " inside we all want to let ourselves be mauled so as to know, to find ourselves in the last little piece that's left." The woman's sudden awareness that her lover is a killer and torturer becomes a form of liberation. Yet we are not sure if this recognition is equivalent to an act of rebellion.
Miss Valenzuela never loses her grasp on the interplay of dependence and power that rules these men and women. Her title story is the most arresting in this volume. A woman is locked up, and perhaps because of madness. The complex narrative examines her ambivalent feelings toward her passionate and often humiliating sexual experience with her jailer, known as the Colonel. A man of "countless names, the nameless man," he comes to symbolize all men. If this relationship, with its trappings of sadomasochism, expresses the universal state of men and women, then Miss Valenzuela's vision is a stark one indeed. Her images of cruelly manipulated women are not softened by the subsequent revelation that reverses male-female, and the larger political resonances that generally mark this writer's work can only be faintly. Deborah Bonner's translation of "Other Weapons" is good.
Ms.

Other Weapons Luisa Valenzuela ISBN 0-910061-22-X 135 pgs., $10.00

Maitreya by Severo Sarduy

It is commonplace to speak of a body of writing, but in Severo Sarduy's Maitreya it is the writing of the body that informs - or inflates - the text with an unsparing excess of language. This doesn't mean that Sarduy's novel is wordy or overblown; on the contrary, his writing is irridescent and exemplifies what Roland Barthes meant by the pleasure of the text: "that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas that I do."
Sarduy believes in this erotics of reading and writing, and practices it to a degree that borders on an unhinged rapture. His verbal virtuosity flutters between the sacred and the profane, glorifying the surface and toying with truth and morality. He stretches character, narrative, plot, point of view - everything - to the point of the inmaterial, like the bones of the dead. Tibetan masters that are hurled into the windy void at the beginning of the novel.
Published in Spanish in 1978, Maitreya like much of Sarduy's fiction, is based on a constant transformation of characters, places, objects, and perspective. The characters sprout doubles, become rivals or distorted mirrors of each other, only to vanish, die or become other characters in a constant whirlwind of transmigration and resurrection. The identity of a Sarduyan character (this is already an oxymoron) is slippery and unstable, detonating all the 19-th century norms of the realistic novel as well as many tenets of 20th century modernism.
Maitreya which translates into "the Buddha of the future" begins in Tibet at the time of the Chinese invasion, follows the believers of the Master (Dalai Lama) into exile into India, then south to Sri Lanka; a new set of characters (and some of the previous ones), go to Cuba, later to Miami and New York, and finally to Iran. It is a novel about exile and the dispersion of culture, language, and belief systems, bereft of any idea of recuperating some kind of totality or center with whichto anchor one's existence. As Roberto González has pointed out, it is Buddhism's insistence on human development as of series of mental states not underlined by a sense of a unified self that imbues Maitreya with a de-centering of identity, time and place.

Maitreya.Severo Sarduy ISBN 0-910061-31-9 100 pgs., $10.00

The Magic Dog by Antonio Benítez Rojo

tales from the inner Cuba
The stories of Antonio Benítez Rojo cover a lot of ground - from the "deep sands" of of New York bar where a young expatriot is mired in his quest for a real oasis, to the bureaucrat with cultural pretensions who finds himself transported, to his great discomfort to colonial Havana ("The Scissors"); from the pseudo-Proustian jeweler in hiding from the Revolution with a beautiful black singer, and in whom are crystallized contradictory class, sexual, and racial attitudes, to the Haitian immigrant/soldier executed by the Revolutionary army ("Heaven and Earth"). There are amusing and disturbing portraits of the Cuban middle-class wherein the need to ascend assumes grotesque proportions ("The Magic Dog"). In "I'll Be Back Yesterday" - a true masterpiece of cinema verité - the cyclical effects of ingrained class attitudes are given a most terrifying and banal form, the fatuos self perpetuated ad infinitum to the kitsch rhythm of a cuckoo clock in a kind of symphony of tedium vitae.

Gypsy Ballads and Songs by Federico García Lorca

translation by David Loughran

Gypsy Ballads and Songs. Federico Garcia Lorca ISBN 0-910061-51-3, 1998, Span./Eng. HC $26.00