The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro [La Testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro] (New Directions, 1999)
by Antonio Tabucchi [translated from the Italian by J.C. Patrick]
Italy, 1997

"I will start with a question which I address chiefly to myself," said Don Fernando.  "What does it mean to be against death?"

(The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, 164)

Two novels into my relationship with the sadly recently departed Antonio Tabucchi, I think that one of the main things I appreciate about the Italian Lusophile is his light touch with some very heavy themes.  Much like its 1994 predecessor Pereira Declares, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro cloaks a handful of depressing realities--in this case, a violent crime in Oporto which sports a spider's web of connections to the international drug trade, political torture, and the abuse of power in a modern police state--in the garb of a prose style that's easygoing and almost affable in its sensibilities.  The result is a deceptively simple crime story of sorts in which the gruesome crime that literally costs 28-year old errand boy Damasceno Monteiro his head is only the starting point for a melancholic reflection on a gruesome crime of an altogether different nature and scale: societal apathy to the victimization of the powerless by the powerful be it by bloodshed or by economic means.  Without Tabucchi's light touch, this could have ended up as some seriously heavyhanded reading.  With it, however, one only senses a concerned humanist's attempt to persuade his readers of the interconnectedness of all things literary and political as a call to action.  On this note, I should mention that one of the other keys to my enjoyment of this novel was its oddly affecting portrayal of the amicizia between the apolitical but Elio Vittorini and György Lukács-loving Lisbon crime reporter Firmino and the gluttonous social justice attorney Don Fernando--an activist who comes from old money in Oporto but not only defends the "unfortunates" with his words and his actions but actually identifies with them "because to understand the miseries of life you have to put your hands in the shit, if you will excuse the expression, and above all be aware of it.  And kindly don't force me to be rhetorical, because this form of rhetoric is cheap" (94).

Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012)

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro was read for Antonio Tabucchi Week sponsored by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat.  Thanks to Caroline for coming up with such a fine idea for the week.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Penguin, 1992)
by Peter Matthiessen
USA, 1983

Peter Matthiessen's combative, morally outraged In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a 600+ page polemic concerning "the story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's war on the American Indian Movement," is an occasionally frustrating but ultimately powerful account of the June 26, 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that left one Indian companion of Peltier's dead and probably unfairly landed Peltier in jail for the rest of his life for the execution of two white FBI agents who also died there that day.  I say "probably unfairly" because, without passing any judgement on Peltier's actual innocence or guilt in the matter, it's difficult to argue with the conclusion arrived at by Matthiessen that Peltier never really received his fair day in court due to multiple examples of FBI and judicial misconduct.  That being said, one of the most frustrating things about the work is that, in the first half of the book at least, Matthiessen sometimes undercuts the effectiveness of his charges with surprisingly sloppy argumentation: "Many if not most of the FBI agents, fired up by the the sensational press releases being issued by their own superiors, were in a dangerous, vengeful state of mind" he says in one egregiously unsubstantiated moment (195).  "Many," Matthiessen?  OK, maybe.  "Many if not most"?  Suffice it to say that there's no documentation for this assertion.  The irony of all this is that when Matthiessen sticks to the facts, he's an extremely persuasive advocate for the idea that justice wasn't served in the Reservation Murders case.  Among the many strengths of the work, Matthiessen takes great pains to situate the so-called "incident at Oglala" in its historic context through dozens of interviews with the principal players.  His chapter-long portrait of the nascent American Indian Movement (AIM) in the years from 1968-1973 and a pair of chapters on the Wounded Knee occupation and trials in 1973-1974, for example, provide a troubling but much needed political backdrop to what a later chapter terms "The New Indian Wars: AIM Versus the FBI, 1972-75," all of which helps to explain how longstanding patterns of institutional racism directed against Native Americans and violent intra-Indian rivalries between traditionals and goons on Pine Ridge essentially created a climate where the bloodshed of the day in question probably could have been anticipated although maybe not avoided.  A fascinating if ethically unsettling work--not least for the contradictory impressions of Peltier that emerge:

One AIM leader, asked if Leonard was capable of violence, evaded the question with the statement "All Indians are capable of violence; we had to be in order to survive."  Another (who deplored the "violent element" in AIM) claimed to have heard from Pine Ridge people that Peltier was responsible for the killings, and did not think that "a man of violence" should become a hero for Indian children.  This person conceded that Leonard's guilt could be mere rumor, which is epidemic on the Indian reservations; she scarcely knew Peltier personally, she said, because "Leonard was always outside helping build the sweat lodge, or taking care of something else" (437-438).

Peter Matthiessen

The Argentinean Literature of Doom

This probably won't come as much of a surprise to those of you who are already aware of some of my many vices, but I, ahem, still seem to have a ton of unread books left over from the recent Spanish Lit Month excesses.  So, inspired by various interactive reading projects hosted by both Amateur Reader (Tom) of Wuthering Expectations and Nicole of bibliographing in the past couple of years (and in particular whipped up into a delayed reading frenzy by these two posts by Tom here and a year earlier here), I've decided to devote most of the rest of 2012 to the Argentinean Literature of Doom.  "What is the ALoD?" you ask.  Well, it's not a reading challenge--it's more, like Spanish Lit Month on a more expansive scale but only focused on a single country, a reading project/doomathon designed for me and possibly you to sample some great lit specimens from an often overlooked book culture in the company of a handful of virtual others.  I'm pretty sure that I'll at least in part be looking to test Roberto Bolaño's thesis, mentioned in one of Tom's posts above, that a prominent strain of post-Borges Argentinean literature has been infected by a particularly virulent doom virus.  You, on the other hand, may read whatever you like from the entire corpus of sickly or non-sickly Argentinean letters (as Wilhelm Doommeister, I'll also commit to rounding up the links of all participants' posts at least once a month and sharing them here for others to enjoy).  Having already said that the Argentinean Literature of Doom proyecto isn't a reading challenge, I should probably clarify that there is a reading challenge-like component available for anybody who'd like to take me up on it: using the world-famous "the only challenge that matters rules" popularized by the Wuthering Expectations braintrust, you can "challenge" me to read any work of Argentinean literature with you before the end of the year.  That is, we work out an agreeable schedule that works for both of us and then you and I post on the book, poem, or short story more or less around the same time.  Please note that for things I've already read, I reserve the right to just comment on your post rather than rereading a Rayuela-sized book in its entirety; also, I'm open to a challenge title from any author from a country adjacent to Argentina (Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile) as long as the novelist in question isn't named Isabel Allende or Paulo Coelho--I'd like to be geographically flexible, you understand, but this is the Literature of Doom and not the Literature of Middlebrow we're talking about after all.

The Argentinean Literature of Doom

runs September-December 2012.* Your attendance is requested but not required.



Reading Suggestions

Let's say you might want to participate in this project but you're not sure what to read for it.  No problem--no experience necessary.  However, here are a handful of ideas.  If you're of a 19th century bent, you could always read Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's 1845 Facundo [Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism] with Tom from Wuthering Expectations and me at some point during the second half of this month (it's the first Argentinean Literature of Doom "challenge" that's been agreed upon).  Sarmiento's work, written from exile in Chile during Argentina's mid-century civil wars, is a political biography as ethnography and history screed that has had a profound impact on many other Latin American thinkers since its publication.  Other major 19th century works: Esteban Echevarría's "El matadero" ["The Slaughterhouse," reviewed at Wuthering Expectations here], often considered to be one of Latin America's first short stories, and La cautiva [The Captive, possibly unavailable in translation], a long poem having to do with Argentina's Indian wars; Lucio V. Mansilla's 1870 nonfiction Una excursión a los indios ranqueles [A Visit to the Ranquel Indians]; and José Hernández's two-part gaucho epic poem, Martín Fierro, from 1872 and 1879 [described at Wuthering Expectations here and here].

Moving on to the 20th century, you have even more choices--so I'll try and limit myself just to the major names.  Leopoldo Lugones and Macedonio Fernández are said to be two of the bigger deals in pre-Borges 20th century Argentinean letters although Lugones seems to be in decline and Macedonio seems to be in the ascendant right now.  I've read little by either, but Scott from seraillon enjoyed Lugones' Strange Forces short story collection here and E.L. Fay of This Book and I Could Be Friends seemed to like Macedonio's posthumous provocation The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) here.  Borges' lifelong friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife Silvina Ocampo both have long bibliographies of "fantastic literature" you could choose from, as does crackpot acquaintance J.R. Wilcock although most of his work was written in Italian after he left Argentina for Italy. If, on the other hand, you want a near contemporary of Borges' who was "less literary" and a clear precursor of the Literature of Doom that Bolaño talks about, you could do a whole lot worse than Roberto Arlt and his 1926 El juguete rabioso [Mad Toy] and 1929 Los siete locos [The Seven Madmen].  The latter title, about a plan to foment violent revolution in the Americas through funding obtained from a proliferation of brothels, is visionary fucked-upedness at its best if I do say so myself.

Bypassing Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's essayistic 1933 Radiografía de la pampa [X-Ray of the Pampa] and Leopoldo Marechal's humorously post-Joycean 1948 Adán Buenosayres for the moment, let's jump ahead to the "modern era."  A relatively little known nugget for English readers but a standard in Argentina is Rodolfo Walsh's 1957 Operación Masacre, a pre-In Cold Blood work of "novelistic" investigative journalism.  Of the many Julio Cortázar works you could choose from, I'm most fond of the 1959 novella El perseguidor [The Pursuer, reviewed by Rise of in lieu of a field guide here] and of course the 1962 Boom classic Rayuela [Hopscotch].  Alejandra Pizarnik, who almost went down in history as the woman who lost the manuscript of Cortázar's Rayuela, was a poet whose signature work "La condesa sangriente" ["The Bloody Countess"] is almost surrealistically gory and lyrical. Ricardo Piglia and Juan José Saer, two novelists and critics whose writing and professorial careers stretched from the 1960s up to the 2000s, have both written multiple intellectual but hard-hitting novels that floored me--Piglia's 1980 Respiración artificial [Artificial Respiration] and Saer's 1985 Glosa [The Sixty-Five Years of Washington] probably being my favorite examples of each's work.  Fogwill and César Aira,  two fans of Argentinean Literature of Doom anti-hero Osvaldo Lamborghini (more on him before too long, not to worry), have contributed three of my all-time favorite Argentinean works to date: the 1979 short story "Muchacha punk" and 1983 novella Los pichiciegos [Malvinas Requiem] by Fogwill and the 1987 short story "Cecil Taylor" by Aira.  That's probably way more information than anybody cares for, so fans of either Manuel Puig or Tomás Eloy Martínez will have to pardon me for not saying anything about them here.

*Thanks to Stu, who has agreed to co-host Spanish Lit Month with me again but in a winter month next year, Spanish Lit Month will return in January 2013.  That kind of gives you savvy rule-breakers an extra month to participate in the Argentinean Literature of Doom should you choose to do so.*

The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities [Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften] (Vintage International, 1996)
by Robert Musil [translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike]
Austria, 1931 & 1933

A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.  It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction.  The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should.  The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature.  The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks.  The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal.  In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

(The Man Without Qualities [translated by Sophie Wilkins], 3)

Although it took me long enough to finally finish the first 1130 pages of the famously unfinished The Man Without Qualities, I'm actually pretty psyched that I have over 600 pages of material "From the Posthumous Papers" left to sift through at some point since I'm not sure that any other novel has brought me such laughter and joy all year.  Seriously.  In any event, I knew Musil's sense of humor and I were going to get along just fine from the outset--or at least in the amount of time it took me to move on from the precise, pseudo-scientific description of the weather in the opening paragraph above to the gently mocking and yet equally precise description of an upscale couple walking down the "wide, bustling avenues" of a modern metropolis a mere one page later: "They clearly belonged to a privileged social class, with their distinguished bearing, style of dress, and conversation, the initials of their names embroidered on their underwear, and just as discreetly, which is to say not for outward show but in the fine underwear of their minds, they knew who they were and that they belonged in a European capital city and imperial residence" (4).  Surely, any man who can pen a line as unanticipatedly rich and rewarding as "in the fine underwear of their minds" is a man with a narrative voice to be trusted!  Whatever, seeing as how I hope to give both Ulrich, the 32-year old ex-scientist, ladies' man, sceptic, and titular "man without qualities," and some of the colorful cast of characters who cross his path as virtually all of 1913 Vienna prepares to celebrate the 70th year jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef their Caravana de recuerdos due in a series of Musil Monday posts scattered throughout September, for right now I'd merely like to focus on an overview of the work's structure.  Part I: A Sort of Introduction and Part II: Pseudoreality Prevails appear in Volume I of the Vintage edition I read while Part III: Into the Millenium (The Criminals) and several hundred pages of drafts "From the Posthumous Materials" make up Volume II (translators: Sophie Wilkins for the previously published but incomplete parts of the 1130 page "novel," Burton Pike the additional, mostly previously unpublished material that Musil took with him while attempting to finish the novel and flee from World War II's path).  So what's the book about?  Ha, more on that later!  Maybe.  However, please note that while Pike claims in his preface to the posthumous material that "Musil's purpose in writing The Man Without Qualities was a moral one.  He had set out to explore possibilities for the right life in a culture that had lost both its center and its bearings but could not tear itself away from its outworn forms and habits of thought, even while they were dissolving" (II, xii), you might never know that from the humor that permeates the work and from the fact that the wildest philosophical digressions and such are likely to be found in chapters with titles like "A Racehorse of Genius Crystallizes the Recognition of Being a Man Without Qualities."  Hmm, no doubt a good chapter to turn to next.  Until then, though, here's an introduction to Ulrich and a slightly less funny Musil after the man without qualities has just been beaten near-brainless on those same Vienna streets by unknown thugs:

Close by those streets where there is a policeman every three hundred paces to avenge the slightest offense against law and order lie other streets that call for the same strength of body and mind as a jungle.  Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin.  It is democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches, universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the barracks.  It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat a fellow man within an inch of his life and then provides featherbeds for the lonely, mistreated body, like the one now holding Ulrich as if filled with respect and consideration.  It is the old story of the contradictions, the inconsistency, and the imperfection of life.  It makes us smile or sigh.  But not Ulrich.  He hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in regard to life that makes most people put up with its inconsistencies and inadequacies as a doting maiden aunt puts up with a young nephew's boorishness (22-23).

Robert Musil (1880-1942)

Ema, la cautiva

Ema, la cautiva (Editorial de Belgrano, 1981)

by César Aira
Argentina, 1981

Ema, la cautiva [Emma, the Captive should it ever be translated into English], Aira's first or second nivola depending on whether you care about whether his 1975 Moreira was actually published or was only written in that year, is an ahistorical fiction genre workout that might best be thought of as a sort of conceptual slap in the face to 19th century captivity tales like Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva and 19th century civilization and barbarism discourse like that found in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo.  In the unlikely event that I haven't already driven away all squares from this post, please rest assured that I'll try and stick to a description of the captivity story at hand here since I've yet to read Echeverría's work (actually a long poem) and have only read a handful of chapters from Sarmiento's idiosyncratic political biography-as-national ethnography.  These literary criticism ground rules now firmly established, I should probably point out that Aira's 234-page historiola, like many of the more visceral moments in his 2000 Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter] which is also set in some time-warped reconfiguration of the mid-19th century, begins with an apparent nod to the great realist writing of days gone by: "Una caravana viajaba lentamente al amanecer, los soldados que abrían la marcha se bamboleaban en las monturas medio dormidos, con la boca llena de saliva rancia" ["A caravan was traveling slowly at dawn.  The soldiers at the head of the march were swaying in their saddles half asleep, their mouths full of rancid saliva"] (7).  Before long, the presumably rancid saliva-free 21st century reader, jolted out of his or her city-dwelling lethargy by the immediacy of this atavistic country prose, will learn that the hardscrabble armed caravan consists of a mixed group of soldiers and prisoners sent from Buenos Aires to populate the frontier lands to the south.  Ambassadors of civilization!  The title character, it turns out, is one of the prisoners through no fault of her own.  And the soldiers?  "Eran hombres salvajes, cada vez más salvajes a medida que se alejaban hacia el sur.  La razón los iba abandonando en el desierto, el sitio excéntrico de la ley en la Argentina del siglo pasado" ["They were savage men, more and more savage as they moved further south.  Reason was abandoning them in the desert, the eccentric site of law in the Argentina of the past century"] (12-13).  Ema's frontier transformation from forced concubine to happy Indian bride of a warrior whose "entretenimiento favorito era la caza con gases paralizantes" ["favorite pastime was hunting with paralyzing gases"] (160) to a single business woman/ex-captive who rejects civilization in order to philosophize and shoot dice and view snow falling on the Patagonian beaches among the sleeping pill-happy and man-sized fish-hunting "savages" in the south takes up much of the rest of the novel, but why would I want to ply you with information about all that when I could just refer you to the unexpectedly difficult to translate letter that our young author has conveniently left for you on the back cover of his book instead?

César Aira

"Ameno lector:

     Hay que ser pringlense, y pertenecer al Comité del Significante, para saber que una contratapa es una "tapa en contra".  Sin ir más lejos, yo lo sé.  Pero por alguna razón me veo frivolamente obligado a contarte cómo se me ocurrió esta historiola.  La ocasión es propicia para las confidencias: una linda mañana de primavera, en el Pumper Nic de Flores, donde suelo venir a pensar.  Tomasito (dos años) juega entre las mesas colmadas de colegiales de incógnito.  Reina la desocupación, el tiempo sobra.

     Hace unos años yo era muy pobre, y ganaba lo necesario para analista y vacaciones traduciendo, gracias a la bondad de un editor amigo, largas novelas, de esas llamadas "góticas", odiseas de mujeres, ya inglesas, ya californianas, que trasladan sus morondangas de siempre por mares himenópticos, mares de té pasional.  Las disfrutaba, por supuesto, pero con la práctica llegué a sentir que había demasiadas pasiones, y que cada una anulaba a las demás como un desodorizante de ambientes.  Fue todo pensarlo y concebir la idea, atlética si las hay, de escribir una "gótica" simplificada.  Manos a la obra.  Soy de decisiones imaginarias rápidas.  El Eterno Retorno fue mi recurso.  Abjuré del Ser: me volví Sei Shonagaon, Scherazada, más los animales.  Las "anécdotas del destino".  Durante varias semanas me distraje.  Sudé un poco.  Me reí.  Y al terminar resultó que Ema, mi pequeña yo mismo, había creado para mí una pasión nueva, la pasión por la que pueden cambiarse todas las otras como el dinero se cambia por todas las cosas: la Indiferencia.  ¿Qué más pedir?"

[firmado] C Aira

*

"Agreeable reader:

     One has to be from Coronel Pringles and belong to the Commitee of the Significant to know that a back cover of a book is a 'cover that's against something.'  To take an obvious example: I know it.  But for some reason I find myself frivolously obliged to tell you how this storyola occurred to me.  The time is ripe for confidences: a beautiful spring morning at the Pumper Nic in Flores, where I'm wont to come to think.  Tomasito (two years old) is playing in between the tables overflowing with unknown school kids.  Leisure reigns, there's time to spare.

     A few years ago I was very poor, and I earned just enough for a shrink and vacations translating--thanks to the kindness of an editor friend--long novels, those that are called 'Gothic,' odysseys of women, now British, now Californian, that take the usual hodgepodge and set sail through hymen-optic seas, through oceans of passionate tea.  I enjoyed them, of course, but with practice I began to feel that there was too much passion and that each new one canceled out all the rest like an air freshener.  I gave it some thought and came up with the idea, an 'athletic' one if you will, of penning a simplified 'Gothic' novel.  Hands to the task. I'm prone to imaginary snap decisions.  Eternal Recurrence was my means.  I renounced Being: I turned into Sei Shonagon, Scheherazade, plus the animals.  The 'anecdotes of destiny.' I amused myself for several weeks.  I sweat a little.  I laughed.  And upon finishing, it turned out that Emma, my little female self, had created a new passion for me, the passion for which all other passions can be swapped just like money is swapped for everything: Indifference.  What more to ask for?"

[signed] C Aira

Eugénie Grandet

Eugénie Grandet (Le Livre de Poche, 2009)
by Honoré de Balzac
France, 1833

While I wasn't really sure what kind of storytelling experience to expect from my first Balzac ever, what I got was so plain and old-fashioned in some respects that I at times felt a little like an early '80s postpunk fan being confronted with a mid-'70s Bruce Springsteen record by mistake.  What the hell?  That being said, Eugénie Grandet wasn't exactly bad as an exemplar of 19th century earnest realism.  Balzac's relatively straightforward tale of woe--a miser's daughter discovers that her father isn't the only man in the world to place the love of money above love and all else in his life--is related with a subtlety that surprised me, and there was probably just enough of an off-kilter vibe to the characterizations to make up for the lack of narrative flashiness. Although I doubt I'll be reading too much more of La Comédie humaine anytime soon, that Springsteen comparison might seem like more of a slight than was called for if/when you stop to consider that this little book is big and contradictory enough to contain an outsized character like Monsieur Grandet, who at one point accuses his nephew of being a good for nothing for being more upset over his father's death than with his father's debts which he has inherited, and an occasionally sympathetic narrator who, despite casting Eugénie and her mother as "coeurs purs" ["pure hearts"] in contrast to père Grandet's personification of "L'Argent dans toute sa puissance" ["Money in all its power"], is still willing to chastise the Grandet women in a rare intrusive outburst: "Encore, combien d'ignorance dans leur naïveté!" ["Still, how much ignorance in their naïvety!"] (93).

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

I'm two weeks late for this post due to the reading hangover occasioned by Spanish Lit Month, but Eugénie Grandet was read with Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza fame.  Her review can be found here.

July-December Foreign Film Festival and World Cinema Series Links

Adrián Caetano's Bolivia (2001)

Since I think I'll be taking a break from the blog sometime soon, I'll be combining all movie links for my Foreign Film Festival and Caroline's World Cinema Series here for the second half of the year.  While I'm at it, here are a couple of non-film related events I'd like to mention before I forget again: 1) Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza is holding her Japanese Literature Challenge 6 until January 2013.  I'll be reading at least two works for this: Haruki Murakami's Kafka en la orilla (see the rad cover below) + another title to be decided on later (leading candidates at the moment: Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon and Other Stories, Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and Soseki Natsume's Kokoro).  Good choices or could I do even better?  2) Dwight of A Common Reader will be hosting a readalong of Benito Pérez Galdós' 1887 Fortunata and Jacinta in October.  Although I'm really looking forward to this, I'm more than a little put out to discover that the Spanish editions of the novel are about twice the length of the Penguin translation for some reason.  WTF, man/hombre?

July Foreign Film Reviews

• Ashes and Diamonds (dir. Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1958; reviewer: Dwight)
• Children of the Wind (dir. Fernando Merinero, Spain, 1995; reviewer: Obooki)
• Cría cuervos (dir. Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976; reviewer: Amanda)
• Cría cuervos (dir. Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976; reviewer: Jeremy)
• Cría cuervos (dir. Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976; reviewer: Richard)
• Cría cuervos (dir. Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976; reviewer: Séamus)
• Cría cuervos (dir. Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976; reviewer: Tara)
• La ciudad de los prodigios (dir. Mario Camus, Spain, 1999; reviewer: Dwight)

August Foreign Film Reviews

• Film (dir. Samuel Beckett, USA, 1965; reviewer: Dwight)
• Pornografia (dir. Jan Jakub Kolski, Poland, 2003; reviewer: Dwight)
• The Desert of the Tartars [Il deserto dei tartari] (dir. Valerio Zurlini, Italy, 1976; reviewer: Dwight)

Haruki Murakami's Kafka en la orilla (2002)