Throughout these stories, the reader becomes hypnotized by the succession of Bolano’s images, by the lives he depicts (including his own in the two essays), and by the metaphysical suggestions and possible symbols of his stories, despite the fact that Bolano does not make grand pronouncements or create a formal, organized, and ultimately hopeful view of life as other authors do. There is no coherence to our lives, he seems to say: chaos rules. Although artists of all kinds try to make some sense of life, Bolano suggests that their visions may not be accurate since they have no way of knowing or conveying the whole story, the big picture, the inner secrets of life. He himself avoids such suggestions of order in life. Vibrant and imaginative, Bolano’s stories seduce the reader into and coming back to them again and again looking for answers or explanations that often remain tantalizingly out of reach.
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Zambra is a unique writer, one who belies the stereotype of a writer as someone who becomes impassioned by an idea, then hies off to his quiet garret to write furiously, developing, refining, and then ultimately promoting it. Zambra, like his alterego Julian, also an author, ties himself to the most mundane aspects of everyday life, which he then describes succinctly and, at times, lovingly. There are no spectacular scenes, no dramatic displays of emotion, and no real plot here, just the story of Julian, a university professor who teaches all week, entertains his stepdaughter with a continuous story of the private lives of trees, and on Sundays works on his novel, a long project which was once three hundred pages but which he, calling himself a “self-policeman,” has whittled down to a mere forty-seven pages. His novel is about a young man tending a bonsai tree, similar to the one given to him by his friends, and which he has neglected to the point that it may die. Filled with warmth and a sly sense of humor about writing, about life in Chile, and about his main character Julian, who is often ineffective, Zambra creates a wonderful irony—it is almost impossible to remember that the main character is Julian and not Alejandro Zambra.
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Within the two hundred fifteen pages of this short, allegorical novel, Evelio Rosero creates a microcosm of Colombian rural life in the fictional community of San Jose, where no one knows who will attack them next—the army, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, or the drug lords. Though the residents are peaceful small farmers and businessmen with few, if any, ties to the “outside” world and virtually no interest in the country’s politics, every militant faction vying for power in Colombia somehow believes that these residents constitute an imminent threat. Every character in the novel becomes a sort of Everyman, an ordinary person living his own life, just like the ordinary people in any other country, with similar kinds of goals, a similar desire for love and family, and a similar belief (or non-belief) in a higher spiritual power. Because Rosero also creates intriguing, quirky personalities for his characters, they are livelier than most other generic, “Everyman” characters, and they therefore generate sympathy and understanding of their individual problems while they also represent broader, more elevated themes.
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In deciding to explore the complex and agonizing story of her brother’s life, Cuban author Cristina Garcia abandons her usual prose and writes in poetry, a form more appropriate for the intense feelings she bears toward her brother, a sick and broken man who was routinely victimized by his family as a child. Tracing her brother’s life from his birth in 1960, when the family became one of the first families to escape to New York from Castro’s Cuba, she recreates his life through poetry, up to 2007, when this book was first published. The short poems in free verse require the reader to fill in some blanks, and as one does, the growing horrors of this child’s life; the author’s own feelings of guilt for being unable (for whatever reason) to stop the torments her brother endured; her intense resentments against her parents, especially her mother; and her abiding sadness for the shell of a man her brother has become threaten to overwhelm the reader in the same degree that they must have overwhelmed the author.
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Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who now teaches French literature at UCLA, writes an often hilarious, non-stop narrative full of life and excitement, a narrative which, at the same time, is also mordant in its depictions of life. The main character, a Congolese alcoholic named Broken Glass, is memorializing the sad stories of his fellow patrons of a bar called Credit Gone West in the beachfront city of Pointe Noire in the Republic of Congo. A teacher, until he was accused of pedophilia for drunkenly baring his buttocks to his class, Broken Glass has traveled the world through books, loving the adventures of Tarzan, Tintin, and Santiago the fisherman, while he was a child, and then going on to study and enjoy the French classics. Ultimately he tells the “civilized” literary world that “Until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there’ll be no such thing as literature.”
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