Gringa Latina

Gringa Latina (Kodansha Globe, 1996)
by Gabriella De Ferrari
USA, 1995
ISBN 1-56836-145-9

"Gringa Latina is a celebration of my growing up as a gringa in a land of Latinos and becoming a Latina in a land of gringos. I was a gringa in Peru, because my parents had come from a distant land to make their life there; I have been called a Latina in Saint Louis, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, the places where I have made my life as an adult. Yet I am not one or the other but both. Like mirrors, they are the reflection of each other, their images continually resonating throughout my life. These reflections, with their peaceful islands and their turbulent waters, form the chapters of this book." --Gabriela De Ferrari, p. 1.

While Gabriella De Ferrari's Gringa Latina is a lovely little memoir that you could probably polish off in a few hours of serious reading, I spaced out my time with it so that I could savor it over the course of the three days we here in the metro Boston area spent snowed in last weekend. A celebration of the author's childhood in Tacna in southern Peru, where she was born to Italian emigrant parents who had become Peruvians not by birth but by choice, the book offers up a precious glimpse at a kind of paradise lost written from the vantage point of an adult whose own wanderlust had led her to residence--and eventual citizenship--in the United States after college. Although De Ferrari's "otherness" in Peru seems to have had as much to do with class differences as matters of culture or ethnicity (her family was very well off in relation to most of their counterparts, and her parents' annual Italian Day celebration on June 2 seems to have been a hit with everybody lucky enough to score an invitation to it), her story should resonate with anyone who's ever had a bicultural upbringing or an expat experience of their own. This book is out of print but well worth tracking down for its series of family vignettes that read like touching little prose haiku. Brava!

Los de abajo

Los de abajo (Colleción Archivos, 1996)
por Mariano Azuela
México, 1915
ISBN 84-89666-04-0

"Yo soy de Limón, allí, muy cerca de Moyahua, del puro cañon de Juchipila. Tenía mi casa, mis vacas y un pedazo de tierra para sembrar; es decir, que nada me faltaba..." (Los de abajo, p. 40).

Otra lectura absorbente para el reto Orbis Terrarum de Bethany. No tengo nada nuevo decir acerca de esta novela clásica escrita a la sombra de la revolución mexicana, pero me gustó mucho el estilo sencillo de Azuela. Carlos Fuentes se refiere a Los de abajo como "La Ilíada descalza" en su introducción al libro, un comentario acertado que llama la atención a la medida de "poesía épica" escondida dentro de sus páginas humildes. Pero ¿quiénes son los héroes aquí? Demetrio Macías, el protagonista y lo más valiente de todos, sólo se convierte en un guerrillero villista después de ver su casa incendiada por los federales. Luis Cervantes, el ideólogo de la resistencia nacionalista, eventualmente saldrá de la lucha en busca de una vida petita burguesa al otro lado de la frontera. Los demás personajes, sean soldados o soldaderas, parecen seguir luchando porque la violencia es la única vida que la sepan. Azuela no fue lo único percibir la evolución de la revolución mexicana como un abuso de confianza, pero sí fue uno de los primeros ponerlo por escrito con convicción. Un librazo.

*****

"I'm from Limón, over there, real close to Moyahua, right from the Juchipila canyon. I had my house, my cows and a piece of earth to sow; that is to say, nothing at all was lacking to me..." (Los de abajo, p. 40).

Another engrossing read for Bethany's Orbis Terrarum Challenge. I don't really have anything new to add to the conversation about this classic novel written in the shadow of the Mexican Revolution, but I very much enjoyed Azuela's unadorned style of writing. Carlos Fuentes refers to Los de abajo [The Underdogs] as "the barefoot Iliad" in his introduction to the work, an astute comment that draws attention to the amount of "epic poetry" hidden within the novel's humbles pages. But who are the heroes here? Demetrio Macías, the protagonist and the bravest man of all, only becomes a fighter for Pancho Villa's forces after seeing his house burned to the ground by the federales. Luis Cervantes, the ideologue of nationalist resistance, will eventually leave the struggle in search of a petit bourgeois lifestyle on the other side of the border with the U.S. The rest of the characters, whether soldiers or camp followers, seem to keep on fighting because violence is the only life they know. Azuela wasn't the only one to view the evolution of the Mexican Revolution as a betrayal of trust, but he was one of the first to put it on paper with feeling. A great book.

Don Mariano Azuela (1873-1952)

Estrella distante

Estrella distante (2008 libro de bolsillo)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 1996
ISBN 978-84-339-6673-5

Estrella distante abre con una cita enigmática de Faulkner ("Qué estrella cae sin que nadie la mire?") antes de involucrarnos en una breve pero impactante meditación sobre el destino de algunos poetas chilenos después del golpe militar en 1973. Aunque la imagen de la estrella distante claramente evoca memorias de la bandera del país, esta visión de la inocencia perdida también llama la atención a la victoria del mal en la época. "Me parece que estamos entrando en el campeonato mundial de la fealdad y la brutalidad", dice el protagonista (p. 27); poco después, éste se cae preso y sus amigos empiezan desaparecer. Supuestamente narrado por un tal Arturo Belano (el alter-ego ficticio de Bolaño y un personaje que también aparece en Los detectives salvajes) a los mediados de los noventa al exilio en Cataluña, el argumento o, mejor dicho, el testimonio traumatizado de esta obra tiene que ver con la búsqueda de un hombre conocido como Alberto Ruiz-Tagle o Carlos Wieder. Sin querer revelar demasiado acerca de la intriga, resulta que el misterioso Ruiz-Tagle era un derechista infiltrado en los talleres literarios en la presidencia de Allende, vigilando a los izquierdistas y a los otros "sospechosos" entre los grupos intelectuales de aquel entonces. Después del golpe, Wieder se reveleba ser un oficial en la Fuerza Aéra Chilena, un piloto/poeta que dejara poemas escritos en humo en el cielo, un asesino en serie patrocinado por el estado, y un fotógrafo de sus víctimas. De un lado, el símbolo por excelencia de "la nueva poesía chilena" escrita en sangre. De otro lado, un prófugo de la justicia a causa de su estética del genocidio como arte. Mientras que sigo leyendo el grueso 2666 de Bolaño con gran placer, estoy contento decirles que Estrella distante es el tercer libro suyo que me parece una obra maestra total. Nota: 5 estrellas (distantes) a escala de 5 estrellas (distantes).

*****

Distant Star opens with a cryptic Faulkner quote ("What star falls unseen?") before involving us in a brief but devastating reflection on the fate of a handful of Chilean poets after the military coup there in 1973. Although the image of the distant star clearly evokes memories of the star in the country's flag, this vision of innocence lost also calls attention to the victory of evil in that specific time and place. "It seems to me that we are entering into the world championship of ugliness and brutality," says the protagonist (p. 27); shortly afterward, he becomes a political prisoner and his friends begin to disappear. Supposedly narrated by one Arturo Belano (Bolaño's fictional alter ego and a character who also appears in The Savage Detectives) in the middle of the '90s while in exile in Catalonia, the plot--or better yet--the traumatized testimony offered by this work has to do with the search for a man variously known as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle or Carlos Wieder. Without wanting to reveal too much about the intrigue, it turns out that the mysterious Ruiz-Tagle was a right-wing infiltrator in the literary workshops of Allende's presidency during the democracy, spying on the leftists and the other "suspicious people" among the intellectual groups of the time. After the coup, Wieder was revealed to be an officer in the Chilean Air Force, a pilot/poet who would leave poems written in smoke in the air, a serial killer sponsored by the state, and a photographer of his victims. On the one hand, the symbol par excellence of "the New Chilean Poetry" written in blood. On the other, a fugitive from justice on account of his genocide-as-art aesthetic. While I continue reading Bolaño's thick 2666 with great pleasure, I'm happy to note that Distant Star is the third book of his that seems like a complete masterpiece to me. Rating: 5 out of 5 (distant) stars.

Estrella Distante en español: (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/); Distant Star in English (http://www.ndpublishing.com/).

Roberto Bolaño

El reino de este mundo

El reino de este mundo (2005 libro de bolsillo)
por Alejo Carpentier
Venezuela, 1949
ISBN 84-322-1653-4

"Todos sabían que la iguana verde, la mariposa nocturna, el perro desconocido, el alcatraz inverosímil, no eran sino simples disfraces. Dotado del poder de transformarse en animal de pezuña, en ave, pez o insecto, Mackandal visitaba continuamente las haciendas de la llanura para vigilar a sus fieles y saber si todavía confiaban en su regreso. De metamorfosis en metamorfosis, el manco estaba en todas partes, habiendo recobrado su integridad corpórea al vestir trajes de animales. Con alas un día, con agallas al otro, galopando o reptando, se había adueñado del curso de los ríos subterráneos, de las cavernas de la costa, de las copas de los árboles, y reinaba ya sobre la isla entera. Ahora, sus poderes eran ilimitados. Lo mismo podía cubrir una yegua que descansar en el frescor de un aljibe, posarse en las ramas ligeras de un aromo o colarse por el ojo de una cerradura. Los perros no le ladraban; mudaba de sombra según le conviniera. Por obra suya, una negra parió un niño con cara de jabalí. De noche salía aparecerse en los caminos bajo el pelo de un chivo negro con ascuas en los cuernos. Un día daría la señal del gran levantamiento, y los Señores de Allá, encabezados por Damballah, por el Amo de los Caminos y por Ogún de los Hierros, traerían el rayo y el trueno, para desencadenar el ciclón que completaría la obra de los hombres. En esa gran hora --decía Ti Noel-- la sangre de los blancos correría hasta los arroyos, donde los Loas, ebrios de júbilo, la beberían de bruces, hasta llenarse los pulmones". (Carpentier, p. 41)

Un ejemplo temprano de lo que el cubano Carpentier llamó "lo real maravilloso" y de lo que otros más tarde llamarían el realismo mágico, El reino de este mundo es un innegable clásico de la literatura hispanoamericana que todavía hechiza a los lectores. Aunque el protagonista del libro es un esclavo ficticio que se llama Ti Noel, otros "personajes" dentro de la novela son varios hombres y mujeres históricos relacionados con la revolución haitiana a principios del siglo XIX: los rebeldes Mackandal y Bouckman, el "rey negro" Henri Christophe, y la princesa Paulina Bonaparte entre otros. El resultado es una obra que finge imitar las reglas de la novela histórica al mismo tiempo que su autor introduce novedades en la manera de abordar su tema.

Al contar gran parte de la novela desde la perspectiva de los esclavos, Carpentier llama la atención al hecho de que hay una ruptura entre la cosmovisión de los africanos y la de los europeos. Interesantemente, no se trata simplemente de religión, del vudú de los negros contra el cristianismo de los blancos. En lugar de eso, Carpentier sugiere cómo las metamorfosis de Mackandal se pueden leer como dos acercamientos a la historia: en líneas generales, uno influido por el mundo de los espíritus y otro influido por las fuerzas de la razón. Su técnica narrativa emplea ambos acercamientos, describiendo lo real (multiples malos tratos por parte de los revolucionarios después de su victoria contra los blancos) y lo maravilloso (hombres que se convierten en animales, estatuas vivas, etc.) con igual destreza y verosimilitud dentro de la esquema de la novela. Dado el tema, quizás el extraordinario éxito del autor no debe sorprendernos. Como Carpentier nos pregunta en su prólogo (12): "¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real-maravilloso?"

• Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2005 [1949].(http://www.booket.com/)

Alejo Carpentier, el novelista como mago

Gomorrah

Gomorrah (2007 hardback)
by Roberto Saviano
Italy, 2006
ISBN 978-0-374-16527-7

Questo libro è eccezionale. It's so exceptional, in fact, that I decided to replace the controversial but highly regarded Italian novel I had in mind for this leg of my Orbis Terrarum Challenge travels with this absolutely stunning non-fiction masterpiece aimed at exposing Naples' organized crime scene. Part diligent investigative reporting chronicle/part furious, outraged denunciation of the way business as usual is conducted in the increasingly interconnected global and mob economies, Gomorrah is a work that's almost impossible to put down even when Saviano's only setting up a scene. An example: "I used to go to the port to eat fish. Not that nearness to the sea means anything in terms of the quality of the restaurant. I'd find pumice stones, sand, even boiled seaweed in my food. The clams were fished up and tossed right into the pan. A guarantee of freshness, a Russian roulette of infection" (Saviano, 9).

While this terse, Tacitean prose and a flair for description are typical of Saviano's breathless but decidedly no-bullshit style, an equal reward for readers is that he's somehow at his most fearless and lucid precisely when he's most at risk from the information he's revealing. From stories about bootleg haute couture to the nightmarish details explaining how Italy's hazardous waste winds up in poor people's backyards, Saviano seems to have the inside scoop on practically everything that "the system" is involved with. Want to know what it feels like to be stuck in the middle of a clan war? Read the chapter on the Secondigliano War. Want to know what happens when a doctor tries to assist a victim of mob violence who's been left to die in the streets? Read the anecdote about Saviano's own father, beaten up so badly by associates of the suspected hitmen that he couldn't look anybody in the eye for months afterward. Want to know what it feels like to stay in the cesspool where you grew up when other hometown friends have either joined the camorristi or fled for safer lives far away from the Naples area? Read the sequence where Saviano describes vacationing friends returning home--those who "smile sarcastically at you, wondering whom you have become. They look at you from head to toe, try to size you up, figure out if you are a chiachiello or a bbuono. A failure or a Camorrista" (119).

A working journalist, Saviano is now under police protection because he chose not to become either a Camorrista or a failure. You can read a little more by him below and see the response to Gomorrah by an Italian blogger I like here. In the meantime, I give the book 5/5 stelle (*****) for delivering the writing and the reporting goods with conviction.

"On December 26, 2004, Dario Scherillo, a twenty-six-year-old, is riding his motorcycle when he's shot in the face and chest and left to die in a puddle of his blood, which soaks his shirt completely. An innocent man. But he was from Casavatore, a town that has been chewed up by the conflict. For him there is still silence and incomprehension. No epigraph, no plaque, no remembrance. 'When someone is killed by the Camorra, you never know,' an old man tells me as he crosses himself at the spot where Dario was killed. Not all blood is the same color. Dario's is reddish purple and seems to still be flowing. The piles of sawdust have a hard time absorbing it all. After a bit a car takes advantage of the space and parks on top of the stain. Everything comes to an end. Everything gets covered over. Dario was killed to send a message to the town, a message of flesh sealed in an envelope of blood. As in Bosnia, Algeria, Somalia, as in any confused internal war, when it's hard to understand which side you're on, it's enough to kill your neighbor, a dog, your friend, or your relative. The hint of kinship or physical resemblance is all it takes to become a target. It's enough to walk down a certain street to immediately acquire an identity of lead. What matters is to concentrate as much pain, tragedy, and terror as possible, and the only objective is to show absolute strength, uncontested control, and the impossibility of opposing the real and ruling power. To the point that you get used to thinking the way they do, like those who might take offense at a gesture or a phrase. To save your life, to avoid touching the high-voltage line of revenge, you have to be careful, wary, silent. As I was leaving, as they were taking away Attilio Romanò, I started to understand. To understand why there is not a moment in which my mother does not look at me with anxiety, unable to understand why I don't leave, run away, why I keep living in this hell. I tried to recall how many have fallen, how many have been killed since the day I was born" (118-119).

• Saviano, Roberto. Gomorrah (translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss). New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007. http://www.fsgbooks.com/

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007 hardback)
by Francisco Goldman
USA, 2007
ISBN 0-8021-1828-3

On April 26, 1998, 75-year old Guatemala City Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his parish house in what many considered Guatemala's "crime of the century" (Goldman, 52). While various theories would be floated in an attempt to pass off the killing as the work of drug-addled vagrants, a crime of passion, an organized gang of traffickers in church relics, and even a dog attack, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? masterfully chronicles the high-profile trial that eventually led to the convictions of three members of Guatemala's Presidential Military Staff and Military Intelligence and one member of Bishop Gerardi's own household for their collusion in an "extrajudicial execution"--essentially a politically-motivated assassination of the bishop for his role in the production of a 1400-page report, Guatemala: Never Again, documenting the role of the army and Military Intelligence in the massacres of thousands of innocent civilians during the government's 36-year civil war with leftist guerrillas. Goldman's book, part legal thriller and part real-life whodunit, is both fascinating and depressing. Based on over eight years worth of interviews and reporting, the work is an organizational marvel at reconstructing the extremely complicated chain of events from the night of the crime to the ongoing investigation and pursuit of false leads on through to the dramatic trial and last-ditch series of appeals. At the same time, the constant threats of kidnapping, torture and murder faced by many of the witnesses, prosecution members, and their families throughout the long drawn out judicial process make for grim reading for anyone concerned about Guatemala's future. Goldman's belief that those convicted probably only represented a small number of co-conspirators who were party to the crime is equally unsettling. Despite this, this is an important and utterly compelling read. (http://www.groveatlantic.com/)

• Goldman, Francisco. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? New York: Grove Press, 2007.

• Guatemala: Nunca Más: Informe del Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica is available in print in Spanish (four volumes) and in English (one volume, abridged). Parts are also available online--along with other information about Bishop Gerardi such as the photo above--at http://www.odhag.org.gt/ , which is a site maintained by the Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala.

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

by Andrés Reséndez
USA, 2007
ISBN 978-0-465-06840-1

"For sheer drama and excitement, the journey of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains unrivaled, even by the adventurous standards of the Age of Exploration. Out of 300 men who set out to colonize Florida in 1528, only four survived: Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and Estebanico. They became stranded. And to reenter European-controlled territory, they were forced into a harrowing passage on makeshift rafts across the Gulf of Mexico, years of captivity in what is now Texas, and a momentous walk across the continent all the way to the Pacific coast.

This small band of men thus became the first outsiders to behold what would become the American Southwest and northern Mexico, the first non-natives to describe this enormous land and its peoples. Conversely, innumerable natives living in the interior of the continent experienced the passage of the three Spaniards and the African as an extraordinary portent, a first brush with the world beyond America. The natives called the four travelers 'the children of the sun' because they seemed to have come from such unimaginably remote lands." (Reséndez, 2-3)

For our latest installment in the Back to History Challenge, I'm pleased to note that Andrés Reséndez, a professor of history at UC Davis who hails from Mexico City, has written an outstanding companion piece to Naufragios called A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca. Although I chose the quote above to start with in part because it does such an effective job of selling Cabeza de Vaca's story, I also like it because Reséndez' sensitivity in considering both sides' reactions to this early New World encounter is typical of his style. As a result, his book, accurately described as "the extraordinary tale of a shipwrecked Spaniard who walked across America in the sixteenth century," is just a delight. What's more, reading this text side by side with Cabeza de Vaca's own version of events will probably only increase your appreciation of the original.

Where Naufragios basically begins in media res, for example, Reséndez thankfully backtracks to provide biographical information on ill-starred expedition leader Pánfilo de Narváez and a wealth of background info on Spain's maritime activities in the 16th century. Moving ahead to the even juicier parts of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative, Reséndez' history is equally adept at filling in the various lacunae that are either glossed over or left unaddressed in that early chronicle. An epilogue concerning what happened to the four survivors after they returned to "civilization" is particularly moving. All in all, this is an extremely engaging and eye-opening account that should be of interest whether or not you've ever read Naufragios in the first place. In addition, there are a host of carefully-chosen maps and images and a full 18 pages worth of suggestions for further reading for those who want to know more about the world of the four survivors--Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and the slave Estebanico--"who were European and African by birth...but becoming American by experience" (10). A superb read.

• Reséndez, Andrés. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Bonus: Click here for a nice interview with Professor Reséndez where he talks about his book.

Naufragios

Naufragios (libro de bolsillo, 2003)
por Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
España, 1542 y 1555
ISBN 84-376-0851-1

"Los indios, de ver el desastre que nos había venido y el desastre en que estábamos, con tanta desventura y miseria, se sentaron entre nosotros, y con el gran dolor y lástima que hubieron de vernos en tanta fortuna, comenzaron todos a llorar recio, y tan de verdad, que lejos de allí, se podía oír, y esto les duró más de media hora. Cierto ver que estos hombres tan sin razón y tan crudos, a manera de brutos, se dolían tanto de nosotros, hizo que en mí y en otros de la compañía creciese más la pasión y la consideración de nuestra desdicha". (Cabeza de Vaca, 121)

Este libro fue un verdadero encanto. Un clásico de la literatura hispanoamericana colonial, la obra es la relación en primera persona de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, el tesorero de la expedición de Pánfilo de Narváez a conquistar la Florida en 1527 para el entonces rey Carlos V de España. Después de una serie de desventuras e un errabundeo de nueve años en las tierras que ahora pertenecen a los Estados Unidos y México, Cabeza de Vaca reapareció al lado opuesto del continente en 1536 como uno de sólo cuatro sobrevivientes (tres españoles e un esclavo de Marruecos) del proyecto. Seis años más tarde, escribió este testimonio para compartir con su rey todo lo que pasó durante los años "que por muchas y muy extrañas tierras que anduve perdido y en cueros" (76).

No tengo ganas de entrar en el debate sobre la veracidad de Cabeza de Vaca como narrador aquí (si quiere saber más, veáse los comentarios agudos del editor Juan Francisco Maura en su introducción a esta edición), pero hasta un simple resumen de los "ingredientes" de su historia incluiría asuntos como huracanes, ataques dirigidos a o sufridos por parte de varios grupos de indígenas, episodios de hambre e incluso del canibalismo, un periodo de esclavitud para los españoles, otros periodos de vivir en paz con los "indios", varios ahogos, etcétera. ¿Increíble o sencillamente difícil creer? Cada uno tendrá su propria respuesta, pero a lo largo de su narración Cabeza de Vaca nunca deja sorpresarnos. Además, muchas de las escenas narradas parecen proceder de experiencias auténticas como la de los indios en la cita arriba. La nota: ¡totalmente divertido: cinco estrellas de cinco estrellas!

*****

"The Indians, upon seeing the disaster that had befallen us and the disastrous circumstances which we were in with so much misfortune and misery, sat down among us. And with the great grief and pity that they had in seeing us in such straits, they all began to cry so loudly and so earnestly that the wailing could be heard very far away from there. They did this for more than half an hour. To be sure, seeing that these men so lacking in reason and so primitive, in the manner of beasts, were so grief-stricken over us, only increased the agony and the reflections about our wretched situation in me and others in my company." (Cabeza de Vaca, 121)

This book was a sheer pleasure. A classic of Spanish-American colonial literature, the work is the first-person account of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the treasurer on Pánfilo de Nárvaez' expedition to conquer Florida in 1527 for the then king Carlos V of Spain. After a series of misfortunes and nine years spent wandering in lands that now belong to the United States and Mexico, Cabeza de Vaca reappeared on the other side of the continent in 1536 as one of only four survivors (three Spaniards and one slave from Morocco) of the mission. Six years later, he wrote this testimonial for his king to convey everything that had happened during the years when he passed "through the many and very strange lands where I wandered lost and in animal hides" (76).

I don't want to enter into the debate about the truthfulness of Cabeza de Vaca as a narrator here (those wanting to know more should see editor Juan Francisco's Maura's trenchant comments in his introduction to this edition), but even a simple summary of the "ingredients" of his story would include matters like hurricanes, attacks directed at or received from various indigenous groups, portrayals of starvation and even of cannibalism, a period of enslavement for the Spaniards, other periods of living in peace with the "Indians," various drownings, etc. An incredible story or just difficult to believe? Everybody will have their own response to that, but Cabeza de Vaca never once fails to surprise us throughout the length of his narrative. In addition, many of the narrated scenes seem to come from authentic experiences such as the one about the Indians in the quote above. Grade: totally entertaining--five out of five stars!

• Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. Naufragios (edición de Juan Francisco Maura). Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. (http://www.catedra.com/)

The Leopard

Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (2007 paperback)
by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Italy, 1958
ISBN 978-0-375-71479-5

"Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tailcoat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die." (Di Lampedusa, 225-226)

Of the four books I've read so far for the Back to History Challenge, The Leopard is both the first novel and the only text consciously chosen for its status as a classic of world literature. It didn't disappoint on either count. While nominally concerned with a 19th-century Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio di Salina, who foresees the old aristocratic order and way of life coming to an end with the annexation of Sicily and unification of Italy, its graceful prose and penetrating behavioral insights elevate it into something much more profound than that. Although most of the posthumously-published novel concerns events that take place in 1860, the closing chapters move forward fifty years while descrying an epic arc that seems due less to the literary machinations of the author and more to the inexorable hand of fate guiding the characters' lives. You don't have to know anything about Garibaldi or the Risorgimento to appreciate the Prince's concerns, and Di Lampedusa--himself a Sicilian prince writing nearly 100 years after the main events in question and basing his fictional Don Fabrizio on a real-life great-grandfather with the same name--does a masterful job of describing the essential "otherness" of Sicilians in relation to their cousins on the mainland. With characterizations much more vivid and fleshed-out than what you might expect from such an old school novel, don't be surprised if the sense of loss and the perfume of death that permeate the latter stages of The Leopard haunt you when you're done reading it. An outstanding work worth all the accolades it's earned over the years.

• Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe. The Leopard (translated by Archibald Colquhoun). New York: Pantheon Books, 2007 [1958]. (http://www.pantheonbooks.com/)

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, 1896-1957

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001 paperback)
by Mark Bowden
USA, 2001
ISBN 978-0-14-200095-3

A riveting account of the sixteen-month manhunt for former Medellín drug cartel leader/one-time Forbes magazine-certified "seventh richest man in the world" Pablo Escobar. Fans of Bowden's earlier Black Hawk Down won't be surprised by the frenetic pace of the narrative or the reporter's agile reconstruction of events based on interviews with many of the key participants involved, and those new to his work can look forward to a solid piece of investigative journalism that reads very much like a thriller. While primarily a painstaking reportage on the operation that led to Escobar's 1992-1993 downfall at the hands of a US-trained and supported Colombian secret police "Search Bloc" employing state of the art eavesdropping devices and an alleged shoot first/ask questions later methodology, there's much more here than meets the eye. Bowden does a magnificent job at recounting the grim parade of assassinated political leaders, judges, reporters and others who spoke out against the violence during Colombia's reign of terror, but to his credit he doesn't shy away from questioning whether the end actually justified the means in this case either. Recognizing that Escobar might have avoided justice indefinitely but for the counter-terror campaign against him waged by an equally violent vigilante group with other drug cartel ties called Los Pepes, Killing Pablo ends with the uncomfortable suggestion that this rival death squad's spree of targeted assassinations and intimidation bombings probably worked hand in hand with the Search Bloc in going after human targets knowingly or unknowingly provided by US intelligence personnel--with little or no ultimate impact on the flow of cocaine into the United States.

• Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. New York: Penguin, 2001. (http://www.penguinputnam.com/)

(NB: This is an alternate choice for one of my Back to History Challenge selections. The original list of books to be reviewed can be found here.)

The Pilgrimage to Santiago

The Pilgrimage to Santiago (2001 paperback)
by Edwin Mullins
UK, 1974
ISBN 1-56656-371-2

"That evening, talking with Padre Agustín, there was no doubt at all in my mind that the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos was among the most radiantly beautiful places on earth. Should I perhaps have been disturbed by my own very peace of mind? Here was I, after all, an atheist, brought up tepid C of E and now standing in a Roman Catholic monastery chatting to a monk who referred to my home city of London (albeit chucklingly) as 'Babylon,' and I dared to experience such a thing as peace of mind. But the thought did not disturb me. I merely became aware of how few secular buildings in the world were capable of inducing such a condition of peace. Why, asked General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, should the Devil have all the best tunes? And why, I felt, should God have all the best buildings?" (Mullins, p. 159)

OK but occasionally uninspiring account of the "long journey to heaven" (120) also known as the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. While I didn't bond with Mullins quite as much as I would've liked to given the vividness of passages such as the one cited above, his hybrid travelogue/art history work/historic overview of the camino does a nice job of looking at its subject from the point of view of someone enamored of all the art and architecture along the various routes. I use the plural here because Mullins spends a good deal of time--a little too much for me, in fact--celebrating art finds on and off the beaten track of all four of the main pilgrim roads out of France. One problem with this approach is that it took the frequent use of a car to make visiting all these sites possible, something that seems to have prevented the author from conveying the first-person passion of a quality backpacker's account like Conrad Rudolph's engaging Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela (University of Chicago Press, 2004). In the final analysis, this may be less meaningful a book for those wanting to understand the pilgrim experience (medieval or modern) from an insider's perspective than it would be for those merely curious about architectural-oriented travel in France and Spain near the end of the Franco era.

• Mullins, Edwin. The Pilgrimage to Santiago. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2001. (http://www.interlinkbooks.com/)

Santiago de Compostela

(NB: This is a probable alternate for one of my Back to History Challenge books. Conrad Rudolph, the humble "backpacker" mentioned above, doubles as an art historian/medievalist in his spare time!)

Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (2000 paperback)
by John Phillip Santos
USA, 1999
ISBN 0-14-029202-0

"It sometimes seems as if Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. We have made selective forgetting a sacramental obligation. Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could not be. There is pain enough in the present to go around. Some memories cannot be abandoned. Let the past reclaim all the rest, forever, and let stories come to their fitting end." (5)

A beautifully-written meditation on the passage of time and the repatriation of cultural memory. While ostensibly a very personal memoir dedicated to unearthing the truth behind the untold story of his grandfather Juan José's apparent suicide in 1939, family history eventually merges with an almost cosmological mysticism here as the San Antonio native Santos' search for answers leads him further and further afield in time and space piecing together the puzzle of his family's "lost history in Mexico" (122). Somewhere along the line, this investigation into his roots and the subsequent reflections upon what his closest relatives gained and lost when they fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution to take up a new life in Texas become linked to universal themes about exile and how we all relate to the past. Like the voladores, whose aerial performances he so admires, Santos' own fearless narrative arc unfolds with both poetic grace and an almost pre-Columbian precision in an elegiac testimonio shot through with magic and realism. A superb achievement. (http://www.penguinputnam.com/)

Back to History Challenge

Yourcenar: A near-miss or a future substitute?

The previously unknown to me Shannon, formerly of Shannon's Reading Log and now the host of another blog elsewhere, is graciously sponsoring a Back to History Challenge for 2008 which you can read about here. In essence, the challenge is to read 12 history-themed works (non-fiction or historical fiction) this year and to share the reviews with other history geeks. Since there are no entry fees or fines for starting late, I've decided to accept the challenge and start catching up to the others after spotting them a three months' lead. The following is my tentative list of choices to be read:

History

• Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios (review)
• Fredric L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours
• Georges Duby, Le temps des cathedrales: l'art et la société, 980-1420
• Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco
• John Phillip Santos, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (review)
• Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life

Historical Fiction

• Radwa Ashour, Granada
• Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita
• Juan Goytisolo, La reivindicación de Conde Julian
• Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (review)
• Carme Riera, Dins el darrer blau
• Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

Definite Maybes (Possible Alternates)

• Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo [The Underdogs] (review)
• Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante [Distant Star] (review)
• Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (review)
• Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (review)
• Gabriella De Ferrari, Gringa Latina (review)
• Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (review)
• Edwin Mullins, The Pilgrimage to Santiago (review)
• Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (review)
• Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah (review)