Ronald Flores

“El huésped” (2006) es la primera novela de Guadalupe Nettel (México, 1973). Se trata de una narración fluída, bien estructurada, sobre la ceguera, su irrupción, la subcultura que engendra. El inicio, que trata sobre la manera en que la protagonista y su familia encaran la muerte temprana de un hermano menor me pareció la mejor. Una de las frases que me gustó:

“Eran tantos años de observar cada uno de sus gestos, cada expresión, cada actitud, que Diego acabó por creer que yo sabía algo muy profundo acerca de él (aunque probablemente él mismo no supiera qué) y yo por fingir que en realidad lo sabía” (p. 17).

“Wasabi” (1994) fue la tercera novela de Alan Pauls (Buenos Aires, 1959) y trata sobre un novelista argentino que intenta escribir una novela durante su estadía en una residencia de escritores en Francia. Una frase:

“Pero enseguida toda melancolía desapereció, y una radiante comprobación vino a reemplazarla: la obra literaria de Klossowski, ¿no había tenidosiempre para mí el brillo de una excepción, su carácter frágil, solitario y perecedero?” (p. 27).

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Limón Blues (2002) de Anacristina Rossi (Costa Rica, 1952) es una novela memorable, ambiciosa, que mezcla ecuánimemente los amores, las pasiones y la lucha política de la población afrodescendiente centroamericana y caribeña, una parte de la población fundamental pero usualmente silenciada en las historias nacionales de la región.

Limón Blues es una historia de amor, una crónica política, una reinvindicación étnica-histórica y una novela nacional. Las vidas de Irene y Orlando le sirven a Rossi para proponer una mirada indispensable sobre la historia reciente de la nación Costrarricense, de la región centroamericana y de la cultura afro-trasatlántica, en general.

Aunque anclada sólidamente en Puerto Limón, la historia también se desarrolla y repercute en Cuba, Jamaica, Nueva York y Liberia, con una interesante y sutil referencia a Israel. Además, contiene reflexiones cruciales sobre la relación entre las implicaciones coloniales de España y Gran Bretaña en América. De tal forma, se convierte en una novela que engloba y abarca parte de la historia y las luchas políticas del siglo XX. (more…)

The theorists that I consider best suit the contradictory elaboration of the “contemporary” as opposed to the ancient, are Tacitus, Schiller and Cinthio. I am well aware that I do not cite them in their respective chronological order, but in doing so I pursue a different type of arrangement, a claim for the vivid incompleteness of the present.

Following Plato’s Symposium setting, Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory, addresses the issue of the decline of public-speaking in early Imperial Rome by contrasting contemporary practices versus those of the Republic. The discussion, as Shelley A Defense of Poetry for instance, even though it is presented as a critique on “letters”, it is also a critique of society.

Through his characters, which were also at a time his mentors, Tacitus explores the social conditions which have produced the decline in the art of oratory. Messala’s view is nostalgic for the roughness of the early republic time, in which orators sprung in the midst of the struggles between internal parties, rose in controversy, defending or attacking strongly felt causes, in passion, in turmoil, in disagreement, and were not the product of “oratory schools”, in which, it’s implied, the students learning is conducted by men who know how but not of what to speak. He contrasts that “ancient” and now “ideal” republican scenario with the present Imperial scenario in which there is not much room for debate, since the ruling elite seems to be rather in consent about what to do. (more…)

Even though Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962), often viewed as the masterpiece of emerging postmodern fiction (according to John Burt Foster Jr.), can be considered an innovative and disruptive discourse, it follows a tradition established by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Modernity’s seminal fiction.

These two novels, standing in the opposite spectrum of the Modern Era, have many characteristics in common. It is the relationship between these two novels, that which will be briefly explored hereon.

In 1952, ten years before Pale Fire was published, Nabokov was asked to dedicate a series of lectures on Don Quixote at Harvard University; these lectures were later published as Lectures on Don Quixote, a book that Nabokovian scholars should re-examine, since it reveals as much of Cervantes’, as of Nabokov’s, aesthetics of the novel. (more…)

Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel “The Crying of Lot 49” can be read as a reflection of the failures of the communication process. A message muted, differed, changed or lost between its sender and its receiver, or by the inability of the receiver to decode it.

Various symbols of this failure can be observed throughout the novel, beginning from the main character’s name: Oedipa, as an extension or play of the man that was able to decipher the Sphinx’s riddle, which might parallel the solution of the enigma (man’s entropy) to America’s culture.

The Tristero “message-carrying” system, which carries the narrative, can be seen in this light, since as Hilfer points out, “is seeking to undermine official systems of communication”. The muted horn. The similarity between the order of houses in Suburbia and a radio’s circuit card, convey a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning. (more…)

“Reading Myself and Others” compiles interviews, essays and articles written by Philip Roth over a quarter of a century. It was first published in 1975, when Roth had published his first 8 books of narrative, among them “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969) and “My Life as a Man” (1974).

“Reading Myself and Others” is a book about the art of writing fiction. The long interview with The Paris Review and the essay “Writing American Fiction” are the best of this collection, and are usually studied with all seriousness. It seems to me that society has a hard time understanding what exactly novelist do. At times, novelists are expected to be critical. But if novelist become too critical, society dislikes it and tries to censor them.

The interviews and essays are full of insightful and hilarious observations about the predicament facing a novelist. For example: “What is the moral of the story? Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality” (p. 167). (more…)

“I am Charlotte Simmons” (2004) is Tom Wolfe’s ambitious campus novel. It follows Charlotte Simmons in her first year at the fictitious Dupont University. It’s about her transformation from an average nerd freshman to a cool and beautiful sophomore. Romantic trouble, coming of age and all, included.

“I am Charlotte Simmons” serves as an introduction to the complex and competitive college life, and it depicts the daily challenges and problems that confront an average student (sometimes if feels like an “Ivy League” for dummies). Simmons, however, is not your average student but a young beautiful and intelligent student, who is struggling to be the best she can be, and leave her mark in the world.

Wolfe is always a keen observer and a master ironist, but certainly this is not his best novel. Something fails. It might be that it feels like your grandfather talking about today’s student life, trying to sound hip and not patronizing. It might be that Charlotte Simmons is like “Legally Blonde” (2001) without Reese Witherspoon’s spark or like “Good Will Hunting” without Matt Damon’s rage. (more…)

“Historia del llanto” (2007) es la última pieza narrativa de Alan Pauls (Buenos Aires, 1959). Aunque ha sido calificada como novela, “Historia del llanto” lleva el curioso subtítulo de “testimonio”, acaso porque Pauls se adentra en los recuerdos de una infancia sudamericana en plena guerra fría.

La narración parece fundamentada en la relación significante entre los padres divorciados y el hijo, suspendido entre ambos, suspendido entre el país que vive y el que añora, entre la infancia en la violencia y la madurez en la incertidumbre.

“Historia del llanto” es un discurso intimista acerca de la vida pública, en la cual la memoria de un niño incluye ramalazos de la historia tumultuosa de Argentina, entremezclándose, confundiéndose, creciendo en la cultura del miedo, la represión y la agresión. (more…)

John Barth in his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, was arguably the first prominent U.S. American writer to acknowledge in his own creative process a resonance stemming from a South American, in this case Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1980).

Although that year Latin American literary tradition received world wide attention (Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias was the Nobel Laureate and Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published), Barth’s essay bears especial importance since it provides a turn in the relationship between the literatures of the Americas.

The long debated “The Literature of Exhaustion” first appeared in the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly in 1967. That same month, Barth read –spoke- at Harvard University of some of his self-recorded fictions, part of Lost in the Funhouse, a work in progress at that time, which would appear a year later. David Morrell claims that at that moment, Barth wanted to write “something quite different, he explained: to compose several small pieces, what he called ‘fictions’” (80), after Giles Goat-Boy, a novel that took five years to write, published in 1966, which had left Barth “exhausted”. (more…)

Aproximación a las generaciones literarias en América Latina a fines del XX (versión corta del ensayo publicado originalmente en “La sonrisa irónica”, 2005).

El manifiesto vanguardista presentado como prólogo a la antología de cuentos “Se habla español: voces latinas en USA”, publicada por Alfaguara en el 2000, motiva esta reflexión tardía acerca de la más reciente generación de escritores latinoamericanos.

En la suerte de prólogo que presenta el libro, los compiladores Edmundo Paz Soldán y Alberto Fuguet advierten: “Una antología sobre los Estados Unidos, sí, pero en español. Articulada desde las entrañas mismas del monstruo –Martí dixit-, pero en una USA contemporánea, vista por escritores latinoamericanos (¿qué significa ser latinoamericano?) de la nueva generación (¿qué implica nueva generación?), todo esto escrito, por cierto, en el nuevo idioma del gigante: Spanish (14)”. (more…)