A novelist you especially like...
We asked the following six novelists [Luis Felipe Lomelí, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Diamela Eltit, Gonzalo Torné, and Carlos Cortés] if they could recommend a novelist they especially liked. This is what they answered.
Alberto Barrera Tyszka:
Joseph Roth is a fascinating writer. He led an excessive and often tortured life. “Where things go wrong, that’s my country,” he wrote in a letter in 1930. An orphan of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jewish, a militant alcoholic, politically erratic (although he was able to denounce from early on the danger which Hitler represented), Roth was above all a journalist and narrator. He wrote to live. And lived always by the day.
His style is direct but not flat, without texture. On the contrary, his texts are full of surprising literary moments. He’s a wonderful combination of a war correspondent with the sensibility of a writer. His books constantly exude acute observations on the human experience, always facing its limits. His obsession with subjects such as war, the struggle for power, the mismatch between man and his social and political reality, makes him impressively contemporary. But he’s also extraordinary when he faces intimacy. His copious correspondence (especially the one he held with Stefan Zweig) could also be read like a moving novel.
He lived always on the edge. He also died that way. He never stopped writing. His work, luckily, is faithful to that strange miracle of desperation and beauty.
Recommended books:
Radetzky March, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Tarabas, Job, The Spider’s Web, The Flight Without End, The Emperor’s Tomb, Triumph of beauty
Luis Felipe Lomelí:
I like many, of course. But since I’m a rancher and ranchers are prone to being egocentric, I’ll talk about someone from this area, a guy who’s so local that he’s turned out to be everywhere else now: David Toscana. I like his novels because, to begin with, one can’t find a single disappointment from Estación Tula to La ciudad que el diablo se llevó and, to finish, he always makes us want to keep reading?. There is always such dramatic tension that you don’t want to turn off the light to go to sleep, his characters are kind of clumsy, endearing and savage, like any guy from the semi-desert; and in that manner, with that barbaric candor, they take upon themselves great enterprises and philosophic rants: such as winning back Texas from the gringos in El ejército iluminado, purging universal literature in El último lector, or going face to face against the Nazis and the Euler topology in Los puentes de Köningsberg. In other words, besides from keeping you in suspense, this guy makes you think for quite some time. What did that drunkard mean? What did that campesino plastered with avocado mean?
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara:
I recommend María Moreno, single-novel novelist: El affair Skeffington, a dazzling artifact consisting of three boxes. In a trip to Europe, the narrator, who speaks a diaphanous Spanish, distant from the porteño the author is used to cultivating, finds the manuscript of an unknown -and imaginary- poet, Dolly Skeffington. As an introduction, because this is a novel that has a poetry collection in its middle, she tells the life of the character, one of the women from the Paris-Lesbos of the 20s, her liberty, her larger-than-life love-life, her countess friends with whom she shared a bed, cross-dressing and nights of drunkenness and inter-class sex in the workers’ bars. And, in the end, the poems, of which I’ll leave you a fragment of one, “The future of socialism”: “As I climbed the legs of my uncle Merril / he wouldn’t let me reach the end. / “These are the keys of the city” he’d say / placing the hand on his bulging length of buttons / and when I reached one of his knees / he’d make me roll unto the carpet / closing his robust young man’s legs / for all work. // Did I understand then that he denied me / not the reserved masculine flower / nor the fatal distance of the blood / but the fierce secret of love among men?”.
Diamela Eltit:
In it’s own way, this is a Bolivian novel of the new times…
I met the Galán family in the city of La Paz several years ago. A cultural family that kept strong ties of solidarity between them and who carried out performative, critical, and disruptive interventions in different spaces of the city. This picture seems to me important and more so strategic in order to think of national identities, bodies, encounters, and also to undo certain stereotypes -perhaps to generate others-. My Bolivian friend, David, graduate student of literature and member of the family, introduced me to this scene, which seems crucial to me. I spent a good amount of time with them in La Paz and later in Santiago and I recognized the importance of new ways of conceiving communities, and in fact I wrote a text about the family’s interesting structure. Along with the renowned work of Mujeres Creando, in Bolivia there are porous, refreshing zones, always dazzling.
Gonzalo Torné:
Well, a writer I’m excited about is Rubén Martín G. He only has two books: one is of “fiction criticism” (to put it one way) and the other, Menos joven, I wouldn’t know how to summarize. Both are indispensable. Two hundred pages of great style, imaginative, perverse, sensitive to social and intellectual hierarchies, with a mocking and violent humor. In a country where the avant-garde is identified with the sleep-inducing disciples of Juan Goytisolo, the fact that a real avant-garde writer shows up is almost an irreverent act. With him, one recovers the excitement of never knowing where you’re being taken or where you’re going to end up.
Carlos Cortés:
The life of certain great writers becomes so intertwined with their literature that it seems taken out of it. That’s one of the elements which fascinates me of Graham Greene, as well as the special relationship he had with Latin America, evident in works like The Power and the Glory (1940), Our Man in Havana (1958), The Comedians (1966), and his memoirs about the Panamanian general Omar Torrijos, Discovering the General (1984), which is one of my favorite books.
García Márquez said of him that he taught him how to decipher the tropics, which is not a small thing. Like Conrad or Lowry -authors I also could have chosen-, Greene is of the lineage of travelling Aglo-Saxon writers who traverse the world in order to reveal its interior as they struggle between moral dilemmas and the abyss.
Perhaps he’s no longer as popular as he was when living, and the Swedish Academy denied him the Nobel prize for two aspects which were suspicious in the XX century: being entertaining and being a Catholic. Beyond the controversy, his unforgettable characters live on, such as Harry Lime in The Third Man -script, movie, and novel-, a subjugating style and the talent to create a world of his own starting from a dazzling mix of politics, crime, and human misery.
Previous entries:
An artist you especially like... [Miguel Antonio Chávez, Juan Villoro, Mónica Ríos, Maurice Echeverría]
A poet you especially like... [Alan Mills, Jerónimo Pimentel, Laura Wittner, Ana Merino, Leonardo Sanhueza, Luis Felipe Fabre]
A short story writer you especially like... [Antonio Ortuño, Ana María Shua, Guillermo Barquero, Sergi Pàmies, Andrea Jeftanovic, Slavko Zupcic]
Beers with a character... [Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
Alberto Barrera Tyszka:
Joseph Roth is a fascinating writer. He led an excessive and often tortured life. “Where things go wrong, that’s my country,” he wrote in a letter in 1930. An orphan of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jewish, a militant alcoholic, politically erratic (although he was able to denounce from early on the danger which Hitler represented), Roth was above all a journalist and narrator. He wrote to live. And lived always by the day.
His style is direct but not flat, without texture. On the contrary, his texts are full of surprising literary moments. He’s a wonderful combination of a war correspondent with the sensibility of a writer. His books constantly exude acute observations on the human experience, always facing its limits. His obsession with subjects such as war, the struggle for power, the mismatch between man and his social and political reality, makes him impressively contemporary. But he’s also extraordinary when he faces intimacy. His copious correspondence (especially the one he held with Stefan Zweig) could also be read like a moving novel.
He lived always on the edge. He also died that way. He never stopped writing. His work, luckily, is faithful to that strange miracle of desperation and beauty.
Recommended books:
Radetzky March, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Tarabas, Job, The Spider’s Web, The Flight Without End, The Emperor’s Tomb, Triumph of beauty
Luis Felipe Lomelí:
I like many, of course. But since I’m a rancher and ranchers are prone to being egocentric, I’ll talk about someone from this area, a guy who’s so local that he’s turned out to be everywhere else now: David Toscana. I like his novels because, to begin with, one can’t find a single disappointment from Estación Tula to La ciudad que el diablo se llevó and, to finish, he always makes us want to keep reading?. There is always such dramatic tension that you don’t want to turn off the light to go to sleep, his characters are kind of clumsy, endearing and savage, like any guy from the semi-desert; and in that manner, with that barbaric candor, they take upon themselves great enterprises and philosophic rants: such as winning back Texas from the gringos in El ejército iluminado, purging universal literature in El último lector, or going face to face against the Nazis and the Euler topology in Los puentes de Köningsberg. In other words, besides from keeping you in suspense, this guy makes you think for quite some time. What did that drunkard mean? What did that campesino plastered with avocado mean?
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara:
I recommend María Moreno, single-novel novelist: El affair Skeffington, a dazzling artifact consisting of three boxes. In a trip to Europe, the narrator, who speaks a diaphanous Spanish, distant from the porteño the author is used to cultivating, finds the manuscript of an unknown -and imaginary- poet, Dolly Skeffington. As an introduction, because this is a novel that has a poetry collection in its middle, she tells the life of the character, one of the women from the Paris-Lesbos of the 20s, her liberty, her larger-than-life love-life, her countess friends with whom she shared a bed, cross-dressing and nights of drunkenness and inter-class sex in the workers’ bars. And, in the end, the poems, of which I’ll leave you a fragment of one, “The future of socialism”: “As I climbed the legs of my uncle Merril / he wouldn’t let me reach the end. / “These are the keys of the city” he’d say / placing the hand on his bulging length of buttons / and when I reached one of his knees / he’d make me roll unto the carpet / closing his robust young man’s legs / for all work. // Did I understand then that he denied me / not the reserved masculine flower / nor the fatal distance of the blood / but the fierce secret of love among men?”.
Diamela Eltit:
In it’s own way, this is a Bolivian novel of the new times…
I met the Galán family in the city of La Paz several years ago. A cultural family that kept strong ties of solidarity between them and who carried out performative, critical, and disruptive interventions in different spaces of the city. This picture seems to me important and more so strategic in order to think of national identities, bodies, encounters, and also to undo certain stereotypes -perhaps to generate others-. My Bolivian friend, David, graduate student of literature and member of the family, introduced me to this scene, which seems crucial to me. I spent a good amount of time with them in La Paz and later in Santiago and I recognized the importance of new ways of conceiving communities, and in fact I wrote a text about the family’s interesting structure. Along with the renowned work of Mujeres Creando, in Bolivia there are porous, refreshing zones, always dazzling.
Gonzalo Torné:
Well, a writer I’m excited about is Rubén Martín G. He only has two books: one is of “fiction criticism” (to put it one way) and the other, Menos joven, I wouldn’t know how to summarize. Both are indispensable. Two hundred pages of great style, imaginative, perverse, sensitive to social and intellectual hierarchies, with a mocking and violent humor. In a country where the avant-garde is identified with the sleep-inducing disciples of Juan Goytisolo, the fact that a real avant-garde writer shows up is almost an irreverent act. With him, one recovers the excitement of never knowing where you’re being taken or where you’re going to end up.
Photo by Alfonso Rodríguez Barrera
Carlos Cortés:
The life of certain great writers becomes so intertwined with their literature that it seems taken out of it. That’s one of the elements which fascinates me of Graham Greene, as well as the special relationship he had with Latin America, evident in works like The Power and the Glory (1940), Our Man in Havana (1958), The Comedians (1966), and his memoirs about the Panamanian general Omar Torrijos, Discovering the General (1984), which is one of my favorite books.
García Márquez said of him that he taught him how to decipher the tropics, which is not a small thing. Like Conrad or Lowry -authors I also could have chosen-, Greene is of the lineage of travelling Aglo-Saxon writers who traverse the world in order to reveal its interior as they struggle between moral dilemmas and the abyss.
Perhaps he’s no longer as popular as he was when living, and the Swedish Academy denied him the Nobel prize for two aspects which were suspicious in the XX century: being entertaining and being a Catholic. Beyond the controversy, his unforgettable characters live on, such as Harry Lime in The Third Man -script, movie, and novel-, a subjugating style and the talent to create a world of his own starting from a dazzling mix of politics, crime, and human misery.
Previous entries:
An artist you especially like... [Miguel Antonio Chávez, Juan Villoro, Mónica Ríos, Maurice Echeverría]
A poet you especially like... [Alan Mills, Jerónimo Pimentel, Laura Wittner, Ana Merino, Leonardo Sanhueza, Luis Felipe Fabre]
A short story writer you especially like... [Antonio Ortuño, Ana María Shua, Guillermo Barquero, Sergi Pàmies, Andrea Jeftanovic, Slavko Zupcic]
Beers with a character... [Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
