García Márquez and literature classes

  The Mundo Today, the most pertinent false news journel in the Spanish language, entitled the death of Gabriel García Márquez: "That writer from the Selectivity dies". Selectivity is the colloquial name given in Spain to the entrance exams to the university. Garcia Marquez was one of the canonical writers of many types of exams like these. Literature professors worshiped him.
  

  We all have some kind of anecdote related to "Gabo". The anecdote I can tell you is at Almudena’s (Grandes) house the day she was giving a party to celebrate her birthday. Benjamin (Prado) had invited me, Luis (García Montero) who wanted to surprise his wife and was going to bring home "Gabo" (Gabo), and he made it happen thanks to Joaquín (Sabina). They asked the guests to please not overwhelm him or confuse him with Ernesto (Cardenal) and ask him questions about the brawl he had with Pope John Paul (II). But nobody told me anything and I asked him about Pantaleon (and the visitors) and he replied sourly that he was always confused with that fucking bastard Mario (Vargas). Almudena called me a fascist and threw me out of the house "sine die".

  Ok. I will start again. My real story with García Márquez is also quite rough but less exquisite. It was the year of grace of 1985. I was 15 years old and was in second year of something that had the stupid and pompous name of Bachillerato Unificado Polivalente (for the uninitiated, BUP) and then was replaced by the stupid name ESO (that?). In the last literature class before Christmas, the teacher asked us to prepare a paper on "any book" that we felt like reading during the holidays. I chose "Cien años de Soledad" (One Hundred Years of Solitude).

   Like most readers of the time, I too was fascinated by the novel. Of course I had not read anything like it. The names. It seemed like a story extracted out of the beginnings of time. Excited, I did the paper (unheard of in me) and I presented it with great satisfaction the day we returned back to school. Weeks later I got my score: "zero". Zero?? When I asked my teacher the reason for my grade, she blurted out, "I do not believe you have read One Hundred Years of Solitude".

  Anyway, the thing was that I was a rather weak student (but not disastrous), but an experienced reader and also a writer at my level. Since I was fifteen, these two activities and some that decorum prevents me from mentioning, have accompanied me. At that age I had already read Niebla (Mist), Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Afternoons with Teresa), El nombre de la Rosa (The Name of the Rose), El Mago de Lublin (The Magician of Lublin) ... just to mention some titles that I remember.

   My experience was the first milestone on a path which was then reinforced with loathing. Literature classes are to books, what ants are to sugar: it makes it impossible to swallow. My literature classes during those years consisted in learning the names of books and gentlemen we were supposed to know. When we were starting a book, the teacher would previously give ​​us a "spoiler", telling us the beginning, middle and end. To make matters worse, sometimes the version was false, like when we had to believe that millstones that interpreted "La Celestina"(The Matchmaker) as an example of "courtly love".

  Not only did they rip apart the stories of books and manipulate them, but they also told you what you had to read. Forcing you to read something is as absurd from my point of view as making you like hugging people or red prawns. Can you be obligated to enjoy? A particularly dapper and smug teacher snapped at us that we had to read these authors now, because otherwise we would never do it.

  Forgive me for being smug, but in retrospect I have confirmed what I suspected before, I liked books more and read more than my deficient literature teachers. How do people who didn’t like literature try to pass on the love of books? In this reckoning I must save a book: "Course of European literature" by Vladimir Nabokov, and Dora Català, professor of Catalan literature at the Miguel Hernández Institute of Alicante, who skipping the official class program devoted an entire course for us to read together (without dogmas or gibberish)  "Crim de Germania” by Josep Lozano.

  The criteria of the books "to be read" changes so much, and we can say that what was "imperative" years ago, is now just after a few decades forgotten. In my day "those-who-understand" worshiped "Tiempo de Silencio" (Time of Silence) or "Rayuela"(Hopscotch), for instance two books that were on the altars and that nobody in their right mind would now read. I recently saw a list of recommended books for students of ESO and it included three Ruiz Zafon books, which is like studying the history of rock music by analyzing Maná. Which is it then, is there a criteria or not?

   If the criteria is measured in posterity, then it is a "fake" like the literature classes. It’s true that Gabriel García Márquez will be remembered for centuries, and me, hopefully, I will be remembered for a few months, and probably not for good reasons. But at the end you are dust and dust letters you will become. The remains of Lope de Vega were thrown who knows where because they had to make room to bury a recently deceased cleric, although in the Church of San Sebastian of Madrid a plate falsely insists that the remains are there.

   Do great writers always live in the hearts of their readers? Julian Barnes says in his book "Nada que temer" (Nothing to be Frightened Of), that at some point, irremediably, a writer will have his last reader. It may be many years from now, when the Real Madrid celebrates in the Cibeles Martian fountain its 84th Champions League. And then what?

  Isaac Bashevis Singer told Edmund Wilson that he believed in some kind of survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, "If survival is predicted, then you will have no alternative."



Gabriel García Márquez

El Señor Gordo

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Translation by Amanda Perri

Sir Alfred.

  He adorns this blog, inspires it and is the patron saint. But (upps!), I still haven´t dedicated him a line. It was not due to ingratitude. So much has been written on Hitchcock that I did not feel like paying tribute to him with an entry that seemed copied from Wikipedia or the style of the great experts in movies like, the Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro ("yes ... I love movies, I would go when I was a child to the double session, ate sweets without Tax etc ").

 With your permission, I will save you of the phrases of one of the great directors of the seventh Art blah, blah, blah, his blond actresses blah, blah, blah, the magician of suspense blah, blah, blah, I assume you know that part of the chatter and will get to the main part.

   The Independent has published the restoration of a documentary about the Nazi Holocaust edited by Hitchcock and it remained almost entirely unpublished. The material was shot in 1945 by the Film Unit of the British Army. Not surprisingly, the filmmaker was affected by the images of the victims of the Nazi atrocities and that still shrinks the heart of anyone.

   This film enriches the work and biography of the creator of an extraordinarily complex personality. It is curious that for years he was considered just a good manufacturer of entertainment films. A filmmaker who, as it has been stressed over and over again, only received, despite being the creator of masterpieces, an honorary Oscar.

  Personally I always loved Hitchcock films, but three "experiences", to use a fashionable term, made me appreciate them even more. The first is a fun book full of some interesting reflections spiced up with some lies of the filmmaker, making it even more suggestive. The second was a conference at the Master of Cinema at the University of Valladolid and the third cannot be told without offending your modesty, my lovable and idle reader.

  The book I´m talking about is a collection of interviews that Francois Truffaut had with ​​the British filmmaker. In Spain it was published under the title "The cinema defined by Hitchcock," but there seems to be a later edition called "Hitchcock/Truffaut". They think Sir Alfred is not completely honest about the anecdotes he tells nor on the keys that masks his films. But they reveal the tricks he wants to make public, like a retired thief who tells curious people how to open safes, keeping out some secrets of their profession. This book describes in detail his famous and funny idea McGuffin, so beloved in his political version by manipulators.

  The second "experience" as I mentioned was a conference. It was given by Professor Jesús González Requena. He made an approach from the point of view of psychoanalysis of the filmography of the true Fat Man. They say that Freud told Dali that he had no interest in the subconscious of his works, but what he did knowingly. The same thing happened to me. Maybe for the teacher the multitude of keys that Hitchcock leaves in his films (birds, anachronistic horse carts) could have a psychological interpretation. With all due respect to the master, I interpreted the secrets that the teacher was revealing more as the story of a thief who plays with the police leaving hidden clues that must be interpreted, like unconscious products of a boiling mind. For me, his films were like his McGuffin.

  Time is demonstrating that his films are still entertaining, intriguing, sophisticated and fun. The relentless time, this however, destroys some director’s filmography, that aren´t old enough to enter a retirement home. It´s true that the tricks in his films to 2014 know it all viewers, may seem too obvious, perhaps naive. This detail, however, I do not think that makes them unworthy. On the contrary, with this artificial detail stylized sometimes claims an artist.

I'm going to see "North by Northwest", which is my favorite. My debt has been paid.

Spanish version

El Señor Gordo

El humor está aquí, en alguna parte

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Translation by Amanda Perri

Julian Barnes: Nothing to be Frightened of

  Julian Barnes says in his unclassifiable book called "Nothing to be Frightened of", which as its name doesn't suggest is dedicated to the theme of death, that when he began to write fiction he set two rules: “Neither dreams nor climate." "As a long term reader, a significant meteorology has always irritated me, storm clouds, rainbows, thunder in the distance, and I was also tired of significant dreams, premonitions, and appearances and other". He even thought about calling his first novel "Without climate."
 

  I read Barnes for the first time when I was about eighteen. "Flaubert's Parrot". I still have the volume. This was the moment I decided to become a writer. I was marveled by his sense of humor, erudition and tenderness with which he treated his characters. Then the laziness and lack of ideas made me stop my project, ridding the world of a handful of printed pieces of paper.  So at least I've avoided a comment like his mother once made: "I have two sons, one (the philosopher Jonathan Barnes) who writes books I read and do not understand and the other (Julian) who writes books that I understand and do not read."

 

  Barnes shares with fellow British professional colleagues some more or less contemporary features. It's as funny as Nick Hornby, but his humor is more subtle and is not intended to be as "cool". It may be ironic as Martin Amis, but is far more compassionate and less smug. Instead of pulling his teeth he would drink a bottle of Burgundy. It is no coincidence that he abides by the reminder of Flaubert: "be methodical and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, to be violent and original in your life”. He is so capable of expressing the world of small things like Paul Auster, but not as pretentious or "serious" as the American, which is why the latter is more popular in Spain, where if a writer is not stupendous, he or she will not be taken seriously. His books are just too fun to deserve the Prince of Asturias Award. Perhaps they could give it to his alter ego, crime novel writers.

  Even though he is such a Francophile guy, Barnes has always seemed the quintessence of British virtues to me, although not having sympathy for the French is precisely the least of the English virtues. A feature of exquisite extravagance. Barnes is for all audiences. Being as erudite as he is, you can read it as easily as John LeCarré. You will never have shove in your face that he was educated in Oxford. I bet you didn´t know? I bet it never crossed your mind? It is obvious that it terrifies him to be a literary celebrity as Somerset Maugham or Arthur Conan Doyle, who he dedicates one of his finest novels. He really proposes a "this has occurred to me, what do you think?”

 

But, on he has a ten year old picture hung on his website. We will investigate this dark side.

  

  I give a series titles of Barnes. I have not used a particular criteria, just used my memory and taste.
 

• Flaubert's Parrot
• Engand, England
• Talking in over
• Love Etc
• Arthur & George
• The sense of an ending

 

For more information I enclose some links:

• Bibliography
• New York Times: Julian Barnes and the Emotions of Englishmen
• NewYorker: The Sense of and Ending

 

El Señor Gordo

El humor está aquí, en alguna parte

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Translation by Amanda Perri

Ten reason not to read Singer in the summer (or never)

  Isaac Bashevis Singer (Leoncin - Poland 1904 - Florida, 1991) is the most universal Yiddish writer known (all his work that we have read, for those of us who don´t speak Yiddish, are “translations” to English that he did himself). As you can see the guy was everything but simple. He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. However, this fact should not lead us to mistakenly thinking that it will be harmless or even beneficial to read his work. Here are ten reasons for not reading his work:

1. When reading Singer you enter in a dangerous treatise on the soul of the Jewish people. If you are Jewish you will find that the author can fuel some of the most ingrained anti-Semitic criticisms. Needless to say, the Zionists don´t get better treatment. Instead, if you are anti-Semitic, it goes without saying that your ideas will be exposed and starkly portrayed.
2. Progressive, rightists (sorry neoliberal), and in general all those who embrace any ideology, will be shaken by a discharge of skepticism at the same level. It is true that Singer did not look over his shoulder with his enlightening political or moral wisdom "on the way of the truth" but, of course, do not expect a pat on the back of their most deeply-held convictions.
3. If you are someone who reads to raise your spirit, get rid of doubts and find certainties in exemplary characters, you must avoid Singer at all costs. His characters live lives that are convulsive like currents and if anything lacking certainty.
4. Sex and passion seeps from every pore on every page of Singer. A spanking for the Puritans. But don’t sing victory yet. Refrain romantics and fans of "Pretty Woman". Although the desire constantly shakes, like a gale to Singer's characters, you will not find any erotic scenes that writers of "erotic novels" like.
5. People that are Politically correct, please refrain. Extending the previously stated. The relationships between men and women in his writings are very complicated. You could say the same about family relationships. The passion is often so stark that the characters in his novels would, if they lived in Spain nowadays, spend their days in court.
6. If you are someone who thinks that everything that is written and told should have a special prevention. Singer is a story teller. Stories that advance furiously live raging waves. The dialogues are so witty and dry, like the best of Chandler. Refrain all who like reading ten pages that describe a worm crossing a carpet.
7. If you are someone who loves to "identify" himself/herself with the characters, you must take particular care, because, although you probably will not be a Polish Jew or American, passions, trials and tribulations of the characters will seem sometimes extracted from your deep secrets. In that case, sometimes what you discover is not very nice.
8. As a devious Jew, Singer wrote delicious stories for children. He generally hated them. Nothing to say about them. They are delicious and fun, without being childish or violent. Even the most radical psychologists against popular tales would approve them. But be careful. They are hooks. From here, the small reader could continue to the novels.
9. The reflection, religion, spirituality and even the hidden forces and spirits is present in many pages. If you think these issues have been overcome, you should not be exposed to being a skeptic or a believer. Stay away from Singer!
10. Finally, a generic recommendation. Regular readers of Ruiz Zafón, Almudena Grandes or Paulo Coelho, my recommendation is to stay away from Singer´s books. Instead, Woody Allen and the Coen brother’s fans will find happy coincidences.

If, despite all these recommendations you insist on the crazy idea of reading and entering the stormy world of Isaac Bashevis Singer, here are some tips and recommendations warning that its use can lead to addiction.

 

• “Shadows over Hudson”
• “The slave”
• “The certificate”
• “The magician from Lublin”
• “Jewish tales of the village Chelm” (Children’s)
• “Enemies, a love story”
• “A life”. Florence Noiville. Biography

PS: The fiction begins in the books inner cover, which gives significant biographical information, but wrong about his life. Which one?

 

 

 

El Señor Gordo

El humor está aquí, en alguna parte

Síguenos en Facebook y Twitter
 

Translation by Amanda Perri