Book around the World Challenge

Dear Readers:

Book around the World is another reading challenge sponsored by Bonnie Jacobs. In her introduction to this one, Bonnie notes that "The world has many countries, some big and some small, and I want to find the best books about each country. The book should help us learn something ABOUT that country and not just be one written by somebody who lives there. Let's 'book around the world' and find at least one excellent book for each country in the world."

While I think this is another cool idea, I definitely won't be in any hurry to complete it given the massive number of countries involved and other reading plans I have in place (at least in my mind!). Thankfully, there is no time frame to consider. José Saramago's 1989 The History of the Siege of Lisbon for Portugal is the nearest "sure thing" I have to a country choice at this point; however, other ideas and review links will show up below. For more info on joining the challenge, click here for instructions.

*****

• Brazil: Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (review)
• Chile: Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante [Distant Star] (review)

Book around the States Challenge

Dear Readers:

Although I'm still playing catch-up on the first reading challenge I joined this year, that's not going to stop me from joining another: the no-timetable, do it whenever you please Book around the States challenge hosted by Bonnie Jacobs. The goal as described by Bonnie is as follows: "The United States is a union of 50 states, and I want to find the best books about each state. The book should help us learn something ABOUT that state and not just be one written by somebody who lives there. Let's 'book around the states' and find at least one excellent book for each state of the union."

I actually spend more time with international history and literature than I do with domestic stuff these days, so this challenge may be a good way to incorporate some new authors/places from closer to home into my reading diet as it progresses. First up on the list (probably): Ned Sublette's 2008 The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (my choice for the state of Louisiana). Other selections by state, both tentative ideas and actual review listings, will be posted below eventually. In the meantime, those interested can click here to learn how to join the challenge, which started last summer but is ongoing.

State by State Selections

NEW YORK: Paul Auster, City of Glass (review)

Coronación

Coronación (2005 DVD)
Dirigida por Silvio Caiozzi
Chile, 2000
En español con subtítulos en inglés

Después de haber leído tantas reseñas en alabanza de esta película, tengo que confesar que la obra me decepcionó. Basada en la novela de José Donoso, Coronación cuenta la historia de Don Andrés, un solterón burgués de 58 años que se enamora de Estela, una joven "morena" de 17 años, después de contratarla para cuidar a su abuela senil. Cuando Estela se enamora de un tal Mario y se queda embarazada, la envidia y la obsesión sexual de Don Andrés se convierten en las causas de un colapso psicológico. Una especie de lucha de clases sigue, acompañada por varias escenas de embriaguez por parte de los ricos y los pobres.

Aunque no conozco el libro de Donoso, me imagino que él debe haberlo manejado el tema de "decadencia" mucho mejor que el guión de Caiozzi lo hace. Si la actuación de Adela Secall como Estela y María Cánepa como la abuela (juntas, arriba) es impresionante, otros entre el elenco parecen venir del mundo de telenovelas en cuanto a su nivel de "talento". No hay mucha sutileza por lo que se refiere a los personajes, y al fin y al cabo estos "estereotipos que andan" son aburridos. Muy, muy aburridos. (Cinemateca, distribuido por Facets Video: http://www.facets.org/)

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

Las 10 mejores películas chilenas

Queridos Lectores:

Había pensado ver la película chilena Coronación hoy, pero voy a inaugurar la nueva etiqueta de "cine chileno" con esta lista en lugar de eso. Si alguien está firmemente en contra de esta decisión, puede encontrarme al café en el otro lado de la calle. Seré el guapo con un iced latte, un libro y mucho tiempo libre. ¡Hasta pronto!

PD: Gracias a Antonio Martínez de El Mercurio por las sugerencias (desgraciadamente no he visto ningunas de las cintas sobre su lista, pero Chile, la Memoria Obstinada de Patricio Guzmán es un documental excepcional).

2009: Lo siento mucho, pero el enlace de arriba se ha quitado para siempre.

Diary of a Lost Girl

Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (2001 DVD)
Directed by G.W. Pabst
Germany, 1929
Silent with English intertitles

Pabst and screenwriter Rudolph Leonhardt might have sacrificed all subtlety to deliver their pitch ("With a little more love, no one on this earth would ever be lost!"), but this anti-juvenile delinquency message movie is still quite a spectacular follow-up to the director's Pandora's Box. Louise Brooks is once again astounding as the naive protagonist Thymian (with her diary, below), a pharmacist's daughter who's ordered to give up her baby and is then sent away to a reform school after her dad's reptilian-looking assistant (Fritz Rasp) forces himself upon her one night--while she appears to be unconscious. Other indignities that follow eventually lead to Thymian's stint in a brothel, a not totally unexpected turn of events given the circumstances but one that Pabst ingeniously seizes on to suggest that there's more of a sense of community for Thymian among the other lost souls there than in the typical bourgeois home of the time. Along the way, this scathing moral critique is amplified with unusually vivid visual references to rampant sadism and sexual abuse at the reformatory and a narrative condemnation of capitalism and male philandering as two of the true evils at work in society. And lest you ever forget that desperation is the order of the day, twin suicides frame the action with motives both "understandable" and not. A flawed masterpiece but a masterpiece nonetheless.(http://www.kino.com/)

Cine, cine, y más cine

Queridos Lectores:

Tengo un montón de DVDs para ver que crece cada día, y estos dos tipos no están ayudándome en cuanto a la adicción.

• Paxton @ the Movies: Tengo odio a la cadena Blockbuster (la tienda típica te ofrecerá 101 copias de Legally Blonde y el último fracaso de Mel Gibson e un único ejemplar de cualquier cine de autor extranjero que buscas...en un video VHS desde los años 80), pero me reí como un loco cuando leí lo que el bloguero Paxton Hernandez escribió acerca de su experiencia a una Blockbuster mexicana. ¡Qué chistoso, carnal!


• Dave Kehr.com: Entre los pros, sigo con frecuencia este crítico de los New York Times. Un especialista en los nuevos DVDs que lleguen a las tiendas estadounidenses cada mártes, el blog de Kehr incluye enlaces a su trabajo para el periódico y atrae una cantidad sin número de comentarios por parte de otros cinemadictos. Los que leen inglés pueden pasar por aquí para el blog y por aquí para un vínculo a las reseñas de esta semana : Vampyr de Carl Theodor Dreyer (en la lista de cosas para comprar) y La Momia de Karl Freund (ídem). ¡Parecería que 1932 fue un gran año!

PD: Se pueden encontrar otros enlaces interesantes a la derecha bajo las rúbricas de "Otros blogs que me gustan", "Cine, cine y más cine" y "El canal de cine".