|
|
||||
|
Putting together Tuesday’s post, I naturally spent some time skimming back through many of the narratives, especially the earlier ones. I wasn’t so much amazed at how much I’d forgotten, but at how little I’d realized the tightness and cohesiveness of the section. Tightness, ha, how many narrators are there again? Yet I’m serious. [...] Selena’s post on The Savage Detectives pointed me to this New Yorker Book Bench blog post, an alleged “user’s guide to Bolaño.” I’m not sure if I’d say so much I “disagreed” with the post as that it “depressed” me; is there a word for some mixture of the two? And it might seem [...] Since I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how the second section of The Savage Detectives worked—and who was reporting it, as discussed, for example, here, I decided to actually analyze the darn thing and try to figure some stuff out about it. First, one possibly interesting observation that struck me as [...] Since I didn’t wrap up reading The Savage Detectives until last night, I’ve stayed away, so far, from most other participants’ posts. One of the few I did read, because I could tell right away that she had stopped before the point I had already reached, was Dolce Bellezza’s lament that the second part [...] Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, is a rather interesting collection in principle. It gathers fiction shorter than most short stories, but longer than flash fiction, written either in English by US writers of Latino origin or in Spanish by Latin Americans (no Brazilian lit here). I liked [...] Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai fell into two lucky categories for me; I’m a sucker for the Melville House Art of the (Contemporary) Novella series, and it fit into my meandering Latin American literature theme. This is truly a slim book, even superslim or sleek. A fair number of its 83 pages are at least halfway [...] Just after I finished writing my less-than-positive post on world-building in Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama I encountered an example of fantasy that put it to shame in a fraction of the length. It’s probably not fair to compare most writers, especially most contemporary writers (who haven’t been preselected for us by their staying power) [...] Last night I read Bonsai, a wonderful novella by Alejandro Zambra and apparently the next installment in the Latin American project. I didn’t know it at the time, but there is a strong connection to Madame Bovary. The young lovers at the beginning of the novel like to read to each other, and that [...] María Luisa Bombal’s 1938 novel House of Mist opens with a prologue that promises “a mystery without murder,” or, more precisely, a mystery without the usual characteristics of a mystery novel. It also suggests that it might only be enjoyed by “[t]hose for whom fear has an attraction; those who are interested in the [...] At the beginning of this year, one of the ideas I was mulling was a Latin American literature project. It promised to be even more superficial than the Russian one (which had not yet been conceived anyhow); I was thinking that the best I could really do was try for one book from each [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 bibliographing - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments