Main character Eduardo, who has a college education, has been assigned to work for a year with people who cannot read, either for physical or emotional reasons. Seven families are assigned to him, and he must read to each of them for one hour each week. His biggest problem is that he gets tired of reading shortly after he starts each book, and his listeners, disinterested in the selections chosen for them, become bored as he is. The characters include a ventriloquist and his brother, a deaf family with children who can hear, a crippled woman who prefers Daphne du Maurier to Henry James, and a host of others who select different books from those chosen for the program. Poetry becomes a turning point for some, including Eduardo, as all try to deal with the social and political changes in Cuernavaca, where crime is on the upswing. Full of energy, humor, literary references, and themes about why we read and what we read, this book also includes a love story (or two), death, and personal growth – something for everyone. This book is WINNER of Mexico’s highest literary award.
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When author Marc Petitjean was contacted in Paris by a Mexican writer named Oscar, who wanted to meet him to talk about Marc Petitjean’s father Michel, the author’s interest was piqued. His father, a “left-wing militant” journalist, and associate of avant-garde artists and writers in Paris, had been dead for twenty years. When they met, Oscar pulled out a short manuscript he had written with information acquired from the archives of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, indicating that she had had an affair with Michel Petitjean during the three months she had been in Paris from early January to late March, 1939. An affair between the author’s father and Kahlo was new information to son Marc Petitjohn, who almost dismissed it as “overblown.” Still, Frida Kahlo had given his father one of her best paintings when she returned to Mexico after that three-month visit in 1939. Ultimately, “Oscar’s curiosity kindled my own, and I in turn embarked on researching the lovers’ lives.” The developing love story of Frida Kahlo and Michel Petitjean is inextricably connected with the fraught pre-war political atmosphere of Paris in 1939, the boiling artistic and philosophical ferment of the period, and the close, interconnected friendships among Joan Miro, Kadinsky, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and “other big cacas of Surrealism.” When she finally departs from France after three months, Michel Petitjean has thought ahead to have letters and notes delivered to her along the way.
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In this dramatic and thought-provoking novel, Edmundo Paz Soldan, a Bolivian writer, displays his enormous gifts of both narrative and character development while also examining serious themes and social and psychological problems. Creating three characters from three different time periods, all of whom are native to Mexico or South America and all of whom are in the US for various reasons and for various periods of time, Paz Soldan explores their lives and creates comparisons and contrasts before making connections among them. Jesus, a young man from Northern Mexico in 1984, is a boy/man who responds impulsively to situations as they arise in his life and does not hesitate to be violent. In contrast to Jesus, Michelle, a graduate student in South Texas who appears as the second main character, is working hard to establish herself as a writer/cartoonist working on a comic book about a librarian with special powers who is bent on revenge. The third main character is Martin Ramirez, living illegally in Stockton, California, in 1931, trying to pay off some debts and help his family back in Mexico by working as a migrant worker. Paz Soldan rotates the action through these three characters’ lives, developing themes as he goes, and the reader cannot help but become involved both in the action of their lives and in the psychological crises they face. All are dealing with issues of identity and a sense of belonging/ . One becomes a killer. Throughout the novel, the author shows the inner conflicts of people who are from one country but live in another, exploring their personal predicaments, their sense of displacement or their sense of hope.
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One out of Two, an early (1994) novel by award-winning Mexican author Daniel Sada, has just been published in English translation for the first time – a tragicomic classic by an author whom both Roberto Bolano and Carlos Fuentes have highly praised for his “contributions to literature in the Spanish language.” It joins Almost Never (2008) as one of only two books by Sada available in English, to date. Though the book appears, at first, to be a simple morality tale, Sada is an adventurous novelist who endows his main characters with more than the flat, stereotypical behaviors and thoughts which one usually associates with stories written to illustrate a moral lesson. While keeping his style uncomplicated, he shows his characters as they live their ordinary lives and make some remarkable decisions which cause unexpected complications for them. The mood is light and the action often very funny, though equally often, it is ironic or edgy. The cumulative result is farcical rather than pedantic, serious rather than lightweight. The story revolves around a pair of forty-year-old identical twins who are invited to a wedding which only one can attend, and she meets a suitor. What the twins do to meet their mutual needs becomes the focus of this farcical but sensitive novella with a surprising ending.
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“On a Sunday evening, I went with some colleagues to an auction of contraband memorabilia in a karaoke bar in Little Havana…I had no intention of blowing my check, but, without the least warning, the god of tiny details set paradise before me…Right there, in the depth of the Sunday solitude of a Little Havana auction I found them: my new teeth…the sacred teeth of none other than [Hollywood diva] Marilyn Monroe…slightly yellowed.”—Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, or “Highway.”
If that quotation does not pique your curiosity with its absurdity, the succeeding images may. As soon as Highway returns from Cuba to Mexico, he contacts the “best cosmetic dental clinic” in Mexico City and has “each of the teeth belonging to the Venus of the big screen transplanted into [his] mouth,” though he does save ten of his old teeth, the best-looking ones, for later, “just in case.” For months afterward, he walks around Mexico City smiling at his appearance in reflections, celebrating his good luck, and believing that “[his] life was a poem.” And this is just the beginning of a serious look at the connections between life, art, and literature.
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