Tag Archives: Mexico

Book of the month: Fernanda Melchor

February 29, 2020 By in Book of the month, Central America Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Mexican stories have been much in the news in recent weeks. The controversy that blew up around US author Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt brought questions of authenticity and who decides which voices are heard in an industry skewed strongly in favour of white, anglophone authors to the forefront of many booklovers’ minds.

As often happens in such situations, the debate pitted two issues connected with freedom of expression against each other: the right of all communities to be heard and to speak for themselves versus the right of individual artists to allow their imaginations to venture into whatever territory they wish to explore.

This is not an easy conflict to resolve. However, it is problematic to make one title the battleground for such far-reaching concerns. Just as writers rarely, if ever, set out to speak on behalf of their nation, ethnicity or other demographic markers, so single novels are hardly ever designed to carry the weight of such issues. It is unfortunate that the way many big publishers and the mainstream media deal with books (giving a handful of titles 90 per cent of the attention and focus) means that these conversations usually remain reactionary and tied to specific events rather than opening up into more thoughtful, meaningful debates.

One positive thing that did come out of the furore, however, was a series of tweets from translators and other Latin American literature aficionados sharing titles by Mexican writers that deserve more attention. As they pointed out, there is an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Favourite names in the frame included Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman), The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana) and Brenda Lozano’s Loop (translated by Annie McDermott) – all of which, I heartily second.

For my money, however, there is one recent Mexican book that stands in a class of its own: Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes. Set in motion by the discovery of the body of an ambiguous figure known as ‘The Witch’ in an irrigation canal on the outskirts of the impoverished village of La Matosa, this whirlwind of a novel rampages through an entire community, blowing back curtains, breaking down walls and cracking open skulls to lay bare the secrets within.

Each chapter focuses on the experiences of a different person, plunging into their fears and rifling their memories to reveal the steps that led to the savage killing at the book’s heart. Circling around and around, often rehearsing the same incidents several times in different words, the narrative smashes together intimacy and violence, beauty and filth, creating an accretion of details that coheres into a compelling and disturbing exploration of scapegoating and the legacy of abuse.

The urgency of the subject matter is mirrored stylistically. Each chapter forms a single block of text, often containing sentences that run for a page or more, and, although each one represents a particular characters’ experiences, the narrative perspective swings like a ceiling light in a gale, illuminating now the interior monologue of the character in focus, now the voices of the community, now prejudices internalised below the level of conscious thought. Occasionally, it even casts its glare on the reader, who is at points a bystander, gossip, police officer or other player in the action.

This approach is extremely risky – and in lesser writers’ hands it would be a mess. However, with Melchor and Hughes, the writing pulses with energy. The chaos comes from the sort of virtuosity that arises from painstaking effort; the force and bluster is the result of laser precision.

But the reader is expected to work too. The book is unapologetic in its demands. In addition to assigning the reader roles at various points, it requires intense concentration. The dense weave of the chapters does not support dipping in and out. Distractions must be put aside.

And you can forget about being babied. With song lyrics kept in Spanish and cultural references left largely unexplained, this is not a text that comes meekly to the reader but one that requires its audience to meet it on its own territory, ready or not.

The same goes for the subject matter. This is one of the most explicit books I have read. To me, it never feels gratuitous – indeed, one of its greatest achievements is the way that the events are so richly imagined that Melchor and Hughes manage to take us into extreme mindsets (from murderous frenzies and rank bigotry to fantasies involving bestiality) and show the mechanisms by which love and vulnerability can be sublimated into such things. But there’s no getting away from the fact that, for some readers, this will be too much.

I don’t expect this will do anything to impede Hurricane Season‘s progress to the lasting success it richly deserves, however. It contains that rare energy and vitality that now and then power a story far beyond its beginnings and into the collective imagination. The day I finished reading it, I heard that it had been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. I have a feeling it won’t stop there.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

Photo: ‘The Walls Come Tumbling Down’ by Carl Campbell on flickr.com

Giving books away

March 17, 2016 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

 

One of the most common queries I get is whether I can share e-versions of the books from my year of reading the world for free.

This question always provokes mixed emotions in me. I can well understand the excitement and eagerness that prompt it. The idea of broadening your horizons through reading is thrilling. When you realise how much world there is out there and that books could enable you to explore it, you can feel as though a whole new reality has opened up to you (as I did when I put an appeal out to the planet’s bibliophiles to help me read the world one rainy evening in October 2011). You’re impatient to get started and if someone can send you files that can speed you on that journey, why wouldn’t you want to jump at the chance?

The problem for me is that, in their excitement, these would-be literary adventurers often don’t realise that what they are effectively asking for is pirated copies of books. If I were to scan and make available e-versions of the books I read, the writers, translators and publishers behind them would not receive any money.

This would not only be unfair but also, cumulatively, could be very damaging. If I were giving away unlimited free versions of books, it would make those titles less likely to be kept in print and available for commercial sale (and it would make anglophone publishing deals very unlikely for those titles that are not yet published in English). Over time, it could further reinforce the economic imbalance which sees English-language writers like me much more widely published than those writing in other languages (and consequently much more likely to be able to live off writing – although, according to a 2015 survey, only around 10 per cent of UK authors do so).

But the mixed feelings don’t stop there because, while I’m very conscious of the financial challenges facing writers in many parts of the world, I’m also aware of the economic difficulties facing a lot of readers. I’m lucky that I’m able to afford to buy the books that intrigue me. My year of reading the world wasn’t cheap (it cost me several thousand pounds – perhaps a little more than a month’s salary at the time – to track down all those books, several of which were quite rare), but it wasn’t impossible. These days – rare books aside – most of the titles I buy cost less than £15, a small fraction of my weekly income.

That is not the case for readers in many parts of the world. Even though cheap e-books for smartphones are making much more literature available to people in a large number of the world’s poorest countries, the cost of physical books relative to income is still prohibitive. When I interviewed Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov for my book, Reading the World, he told me that translated books in the unofficial markets in Tashkent during the Soviet era often used to sell for about the same money as he made in an entire month. In other words, it cost Ismailov proportionally the same amount to buy one translation as it cost me to read the whole world.

So, although I do not share versions of the books I read during my project (except the titles like my Maldivian read, which the creator has chosen to put online), I am always very glad to hear about and support initiatives that make literature freely available to others. These include Chinese translator collective Paper Republic’s excellent project to put one English translation of a short story by a Chinese author online each week ‘for readers who wonder what new Chinese fiction in English translation has to offer and would like to dip a toe in the water’, as their website says.

As a result, I was delighted to hear recently from a group of students in Mexicali, Mexico, near the US border. Inspired by hearing about a year of reading the world, they decided to do something to help people in their community who might not be able to get hold of many books. They collected  a load of secondhand titles and created El Librero Communitario, a community bookshelf giving away books for free. The film above shows what happened when they took the bookshelf to a bus stop in town.

The project has been such a success that the students are looking for more donations, so if you have some books you no longer need, why not contact them through their Facebook page? I’m sure there are many readers who would appreciate it.

Book of the month: Valeria Luiselli

July 28, 2015 By in Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 9 Comments

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I’ve been on the trail of Mexican writers for the last few months. Conscious that there is a wealth of exciting literature emerging from south of the US border, I was keen to experience a broad range of it and find something that I could recommend to you.

Things got off to a promising start. Having stumbled across Elena Poniatowska being interviewed at the London Book Fair, I read Leonora, her biographical novel based around the life and work of eccentric British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington – whom Poniatowska spent a great deal of time with during her latter years. The book was extraordinary, colourful, alarming and brave.

Next, on the recommendation of my Liveright/Norton editor Elisabeth, I sought out Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera. Striking, rich and odd, this novel brought forth a virtuosic performance from its translator Lisa Dillman. She writes at the end about the efforts she went to to achieve a geographically unmarked English rendering for Herrera’s linguistically playful account of a young woman’s journey to the US in search of her brother.

Either of these books would have been a worthy candidate for Book of the month. However, as both authors are already extensively celebrated nationally and relatively well-known beyond Mexico’s borders, I thought it might be nice to find work by a lesser-known author to tell you about. And, as the majority of my Books of the month have been by men, I decided to seek out work by a woman author.

This is where things got more difficult. A bit of virtual detective work led me to Gabriela Jauregui, a published poet who has turned her hand to novel-writing in recent years. I contacted her through her website to ask if her novel was available in English and if not, whether she could recommend any women authors whose work is not widely known outside Mexico.

Jauregui replied that her novel was only being published in Spanish this September. An English version is not yet on the cards, but she (and I) hopes that this may happen one day.

She had two names for me: Brenda Lozano and Daniela Tarazona. Both young and doing great work, they were not as widely known as more established writers such as Valeria Luiselli or Cristina Rivera-Garza.

I tracked both authors down in that wonderful, global talking shop Twitter and sent them messages. Were their novels available in English? I would very much like to read them if so.

Sadly, as happened so often during  my year of reading the world, the answer was no in both cases. Despite building an increasingly impressive reputation in the hispanophone world, Lozano and Tarazona are off-limits to anglophone readers. (For now at least – if you know of an English-language publishers looking for exciting new Mexican writers, do send them their way, and to Jauregui too!)*

In the absence of anything available in the language I read in by these authors, I decided to go for one of Jauregui’s fallbacks and plumped for Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli. This book has received some great write ups and I was keen to take a look.

Split between Mexico City and New York, the narrative records the attempts of a young mother to write a novel drawing on her youth in the Big Apple. As the scraps of text she generates in between looking after her children build, layer upon layer emerges and we find the narrative consumed by her own fears, concerns and fascination with obscure Harlem Renaissance poet, Gilberto Owen.

The fragmented nature of the narrative makes for a quirky and sometimes surprising reading experience. Many English-language reviewers have remarked on the originality of Luiselli’s style, but those familiar with the work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector will find parallels.

I particularly enjoyed the playful allusions to the reactions of the narrator’s husband, who keeps reading the work in progress and trying to adjust his behaviour in response to it, as though the fictional events described are somehow a comment on him. It was also great fun to read the sometimes contrary comments on the translation and publishing world that pepper the narrative: ‘That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree,’ the narrator observes at one point. ‘It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.’ (And surely this blog post and the way I chose this book are a neat demonstration of the truth of the statement.)

Add to this a range of wry and wise insights into human nature and the way we deceive ourselves about our motives, and it’s rare that you turn a page without nodding in recognition at some observation or other.

What moves the book onto the next level, however, is Luiselli’s technical flair. Rarely does an object get mentioned without reappearing as a plot device later; time and again the narrative turns back to satirize and comment upon itself. The result is that the novel is peppered with payoffs and the last third presents a series of pleasing moments of recognition, where idea after idea is tied up, resolved or complicated.

This demands attention from the reader and it’s fair to say that there are times when the fragmentary narrative is tough to follow. By the same token, the set-up the structure demands can make for some stretches that feel rather devoid of tension and lacking in momentum.

But if you give yourself over to Luiselli and resign yourself to the rare moments when the narratological currents leave you idling in the reeds, you’re in for a joyous ride. Opening up onto stunning prospects and shimmering moments here and there, this novel achieves the rare balance of being at once accessible and profound, funny and wise.

Mexico, we need more from you.

Faces in the Crowd (Los Ingrávidos) by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Granta, 2013)

* An extract of Brenda Lozano’s novel Todo nada, translated by Rosalind Harvey, has already appeared in the México20 collection, featuring work by 20 Mexican writers under 40.

Mexico: food for thought

January 10, 2012 By in North America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

 

If the test of great literature is whether it gets people to think about doing things differently, then Laura Esquivel‘s 1989 novel Like Water for Chocolate is up there with the best. Packed with mouthwatering recipes for all sorts of Mexican delicacies, it tempts readers to leap up and run to the local delicatessen in search of chorizo, chilis and jalapenos on every other page.

There’s a good reason for the intensity of flavours spicing the narrative: centring on the heartbroken Tita, the last child in a family where tradition states that the youngest daughter must remain single and care for her mother until one of them dies, it charts the heroine’s mounting frustrations as she works day after day preparing food in the family kitchen unable to marry her sweetheart Pedro. But no-one has reckoned on the effect that all that pent up passion may have on a person’s cooking, and when Pedro becomes engaged to her sister Tita is unable to help her feelings infusing the delicious wedding feast, with surprising results.

There are many familiar ingredients peppering the pages: a dash of Cinderella here, a dollop of Salman Rushdie’s emotion-infused chutneys in Midnight’s Children there, and a whole handful of Lorca’s Bernarda Alba in the tyrannical figure of Mama Elena. Nevertheless, like the best cooks, Esquivel manages to bring her own twist to these tried and tested staples, creating something deliciously new.

We may think we recognise magical realism in some of the more outlandish features — the tears that flood a staircase, the quilt so large that it drags behind a carriage like a wedding train, the sex so incendiary that it sets fire to buildings (unless I’ve really missed out) — but a closer look suggests that something subtly different is at work.

Rather than magical elements blending with the real world, these events seem to be emotional projections from the characters themselves, which may or may not be happening. ‘The simple truth is that the truth does not exist; it all depends on a person’s point of view’, explains Tita’s gutsy older sister Gertrudis, in an uncharacteristically obvious aside.

Esquivel, however, leaves you to help yourself to the wider philosophical implications as you choose. Her central achievement has been to serve up an immensely satisfying read garnished with wit and originality, and so sensual that it is guaranteed to have you craving Mexican food. Bagsy the Christmas rolls!

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies by Laura Esquivel (translated from the Spanish by Carol and Thomas Christensen). Publisher (Kindle edition): Anchor (2002)