Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Horacio Quiroga / The Son


THE SON
by Horacio Quiroga
BIOGRAPHY


Horacio Quiroga / El hijo (A short story in Spanish)

It is a powerful summer day in Misiones with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. The wilderness, fully open, feels satisfied with itself.

Like the sun, the heat, and the calm of the environment, the father also opens his heart to the wilderness.

"Be careful, chiquito," he says to his son, abbreviating in this sentence all his observations, which his son understands perfectly.

Book Reviews / Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

 



BOOK REVIEWS

Astonish Me

Maggie Shipstead

Review by Stephenie Harrison

April 2014


BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2014

The title of Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish Me, is a fitting one indeed. It’s a request, a demand, a dare, all wrapped up in two little words, heavy with promise. And like the prima ballerina at the heart of the novel itself, Shipstead delivers a glorious story that does exactly what it says it will.

Superficially, Astonish Me is about the world of professional ballet: It is the story of Joan, a woman whose life is first shaped by her love of dance, and then by her love for an extraordinary Russian dancer (and defector). We follow Joan back and forth through time, from girl to grown woman, watching as passion propels her forward, heedless of the consequences and pain that are the ultimate fallout from such explosive affaires de coeur. As Joan’s pirouettes slowly morph into downward spirals both on and off the stage, the novel becomes a deeply thoughtful meditation on the relentless pursuit of perfection and just how far we’re willing to go for love.

Astonish Me is an awful lot of fun to read—the plot moves at a quick clip and is deeply engrossing—but it has a satisfying weight and delicious darkness that undercuts the sudsier elements. Shipstead’s writing isn’t showy, but dazzles nonetheless with vivid imagery and startling turns of phrase. Given that her last novel, Seating Arrangements, won the Dylan Thomas prize, there is a lot riding on this follow-up; far from a sophomore slump, this novel proves that Shipstead’s star is still on the rise as she pushes herself to exhilarating new heights. For those who might dismiss the book as “chick lit” masquerading as serious fiction, rest assured that Astonish Me is as nuanced and delightful as any reader could ever hope for a book to be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Maggie Shipstead for Astonish Me.

BOOKPAGE




Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Horacio Quiroga / The Feather Pillow


The Feather Pillow
By Horacio Quiroga


Horacio Quiroga / El almohadón de plumas (A short story in Spanish)
Horacio Quiroga / A almofada de penas (A shor story in Portuguese)


Alicia's entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers. A blonde, angelic, and timid young girl, the childish fancies she had dreamed about being a bride had been chilled by her husband's rough character. She loved him very much, nonetheless, although sometimes she gave a light shudder when, as they returned home through the streets together at night, she cast a furtive glance at the impressive stature of her Jordan, who had been silent for an hour. He, for his part, loved her profoundly but never let it be seen.
For three months--they had been married in April--they lived in a special kind of bliss.

Monday, April 28, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 32 / Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)



The 100 best novels

 writtein English

No. 32

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)


Joseph Conrad's masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth 

Robert McCrum
Monday 28 April 2014 07.00 BST



Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, inspired by Heart of Darkness. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

So far, on this list, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland (No 18 in this series)Heart of Darkness is probably the title that has aroused, and continues to arouse, most literary critical debate, not to say polemic. This is partly because the story it tells has the visceral simplicity of great myth, and also because the book takes its narrator (Charles Marlow), and the reader, on a journey into the heart of Africa.
Our encounter with Marlow's life-changing journey begins on the Thames in London, the great imperial capital, with his recollection of "the uttermost ends of the Earth". With brilliant economy, Conrad transports him to Congo on a quest that the writer himself undertook as a young man. There, working for the shadowy, but all-powerful "Company", Marlow hears of Mr Kurtz, who is described as a first-class Company servant. Once in the dark continent, Marlow is sent upriver to make contact with Kurtz, who is said to be very ill, and also to safeguard the security of the Inner Station. What he finds, after a gruelling journey to the interior, is a fellow European, who may or may not have gone mad, and who is worshipped as a god by the natives of the primitive interior. Kurtz, however, has paid a terrible price for his mastery. When Marlow finds him on his deathbed, he utters the famous and enigmatic last words: "The horror! The horror!"
This line is often said to refer to the atrocities Conrad himself witnessed in Congo as it suffered under the colonial administration of the Belgians. He himself is said to have remarked that his story was based on "experience, pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case". The metaphorical force of the story and the indifferent contempt of the African who announces "Mistah Kurtz – He dead" (brilliantly expropriated by TS Eliot) gives Heart of Darkness the most modern air of all the books that make up the movement called Modernism. Welcome to the 20th century, possibly English and American fiction's golden age.


A note on the text

Conrad's first and second languages were Polish and French, with his third language, English, not acquired until he was 20. English, however, was the medium he adopted to explore his youthful experience as a riverboat captain in Belgian Congo. Part of the work's strange hallucinatory atmosphere comes from the writer's struggle with a language that was not his mother tongue. He sometimes said he would have preferred to be a French novelist, and that English was a language without "clean edges". He once complained that "all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions". This, paradoxically, is perhaps what gives the book its famously enigmatic, and ambiguous, atmosphere.
Conrad finished writing Heart of Darkness on 9 February 1899. It was originallypublished as a three-part serialisation in Blackwood's Magazine from February to April 1899 (a commission for the 1,000th issue of the magazine), where it was promoted as a nautical tale by a writer whose work was at first (mistakenly) associated with the sea.
Heart of Darkness comes down to us in three other primary texts: a manuscript, a typescript and the final, revised version published in 1902. Not exactly a long story, and certainly not a novella, at barely 38,000 words long, it first appeared in volume form as part of a collection of stories that included Youth: A Narrative and The End of the Tether. It has become Conrad's most famous, controversial and influential work. The English and American writers who fell under its spell include TS Eliot (The Waste Land), Graham Greene (A Burnt-out Case), George Orwell (Nineteen-Eighty-Four) and William Golding (The Inheritors). It also inspired the Francis Ford Coppola 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a work of homage that continues to renew the contemporary fascination with the text.
None of Conrad's other books have inspired such veneration, especially in America, though some (including me) might want to place Nostromo (1904) higher up the pantheon. Critics have endlessly debated it. Chinua Achebe denounced it, in a famous 1975 lecture, as the work of "a bloody racist". Among the novels in this series, few novels occupy such an unassailable place on the list. It is a haunting, hypnotic masterpiece by a great writer who towers over the literature of the 20th century.

Three more from Joseph Conrad

Nostromo (1904); The Secret Agent (1907); Under Western Eyes (1911).

THE GUARDIAN


THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Horacio Quiroga / The Decapitated Chicken

Illustration by Alberto Breccia

The Decapitated Chicken
by Horacio Quiroga
BIOGRAPHY
  

Horacio Quiroga / La gallina degollada (A short story in Spanish)
Horacio Quiroga / A galinha degolada (A short story in Portuguese)

  All day long the four idiot sons of the couple Mazzini-Ferraz sat on a bench in the patio. Their tongues protruded from between their lips; their eyes were dull; their mouths hung open as they turned their heads.
     The patio had an earthen floor and was closed to the west by a brick wall. The bench was five feet from the wall, parallel to it, and there they sat, motionless, their gaze fastened on the bricks. As the sun went down, disappearing behind the wall, the idiots rejoiced. The blinding light was always what first gained their attention; little by little by little their eyes lighted up; finally, they would laugh uproariously, each infected by the same uneasy hilarity, staring at the sun with bestial joy, as if it were something to eat.

Horacio Quiroga / The Decapited Chicken and Other Stories / Review



THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN 
AND OTHER STORIES
by Horacio Quiroga

Uruguay author Horacio Quiroga’s fiction is quite tame compared to his tragic life. There are a number of differing variations between biographical sources, but since he led such an unusually active and tragic life, I felt it useful to piece together a brief and accurate account. (By "accurate" I mean that I have omitted the contradictory side-notes or or details.)

Horacio Quiroga
Born in 1878, Quiroga was just over two months old when his father, returning from a hunting trip, accidentally shot himself. The wound proved fatal and he died shortly thereafter. In 1901, the year that witnessed the publication of his first book, two of his brothers died of typhoid fever. Later that same year his best friend was preparing for a duel, and with the intention of helping him, Quiroga accidentally shot and killed him. He was arrested for the incident and imprisoned, but after investigators deemed the killing an accident, he was released and later exonerated. Quiroga married Ana Maria Cires, one of his teenage students, and they relocated to the jungle in 1908. The couple had two sons. Quiroga’s insistence on making their life in the wild environment led his wife into a deep depression, and in an attempt to take her life she consumed arsenic. She was violently ill for several days and finally died a painful death. A few years later Quiroga fell in love with seventeen year-old Ana Maria Palacio, but his insistent pursuits only forced the girl’s parents to take her away. He then fell in love with another teenager, Maria Elena Bravo, who married him in 1927 when he was forty-nine. Quiroga returned to the jungle with his new wife and they soon had a daughter, Quiroga’s third child. Shortly thereafter the writer’s position with the state was revoked and, unhappy in the jungle, his wife fled from home, taking their child with her. After many years living with acute pains, Quiroga was eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer and hospitalized. There he discovered that a highly deformed patient was kept locked away in the hospital’s basement, and urged that the man, Vicent Batistessa, be released and allowed to stay with him in his room. Batistessa was grateful and proved faithful to his saviour, and helped him to locate and consume some poisonto end his own life. (He used either arsenic or cyanide, depending on the source, though some cyanide compounds may contain arsenic.) Both of his sons, on separate occasions, later committed suicide as well. Quite the legacy. Amid all of this Quiroga worked many years as a state official, and produced a number of plays and short stories, as well as a few novels, mostly dealing with unrequited love.

Friday, April 25, 2014

García Márquez / Five must reads

Gabriel García Márquea by David Levine

Gabriel García Márquez: five must-reads

The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez found his voice with his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We round up the key texts from the master of magic realism

The Guardian, Friday 18 April 2014One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional village of Macondo. This tale of prophetic gypsies and incestuous lovers was an instant bestseller, launching García Márquez into worldwide fame and igniting a global boom in Latin American literature.

The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
García Márquez spent ten years researching dictatorships from Pinilla to Trujillo and from Franco to Perón – and then tried to forget everything he had heard and read to invent this story of a self-styled "General of the Universe". The novel opens with the discovery of the tyrant dead on the floor of the presidential palace, "older than all old men and all old animals on land or sea", before exploring moral decay and political paralysis in what the author called a "poem on the solitude of power".


Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
Inspired by the extended courtship of his own parents, Love in the Time of Cholera tells how the love between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by Fermina's marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be rekindled more than 60 years later.

The General in his Labyrinth 1989
This acount of the final months in the life of Simón Bolívar, who liberated Colombia from Spanish rule in the early 19th century, caused a storm in South America when it was first published. Charting the revolutionary leader's journey from Bogotá to the Colombian coast, García Márquez paints a portrait of a man who is physically and mentally exhausted, reflecting on his memories of conflict and struggle.


News of a Kidnpapping 1996
García Márquez always continued working as a journalist, arguing that it kept him "in contact with the real world". Here he examines a spate of kidnappings organised by the Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel in the 1990s.



Latin America reacts to death of literary colossus Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez
by Rufino Luque

Latin America reacts to death of literary colossus Gabriel García Márquez


Singer Shakira joins presidents of Colombia and Mexico, as well as Bill Clinton, in paying tribute to Nobel prize-winner

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
The Guardian, Friday 18 April 2014

The death of Latin American literary giant Gabriel García Márquez prompted immediate reaction from across the continent and beyond, almost as soon as the first rumours hit the internet early on Thursday afternoon.
Politicians weighed in quickly with Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, tweeting: "A thousand years of solitude and sadness after the death of the greatest Colombian of all time," referring to the author's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The novel has reputedly sold 30 million copies since its publication in 1967.

Gabriel García Márquez tributes celebrate life and work of literary giant

Gabriel García Márquez tributes celebrate life and work of literary giant


From Bill Clinton to Isabel Allende, people pay their respects to Colombian Nobel laureate who died in Mexico City on Thursday
  • The Guardian, 
World leaders, fellow writers and Hollywood stars have paid tribute to the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, following his death on Thursday at 87.
Figures from Bill Clinton to Mia Farrow and Ian McEwan expressed sorrow at the passing of the Nobel laureate, who was widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest Latin American novelists.

My hero / William Shakespeare by Susan Cooper

William Shakespeare

My hero: William Shakespeare by Susan Cooper


Shakespeare was one of those astounding happy accidents that redeem our imperfect race

Susan Cooper

F
orm 1 at Slough High School for Girls. In English that year we did Julius Caesar, and the next year it was A Midsummer Night's Dream, and every subsequent year another Shakespeare play. Being a shy child who mumbled, I had very small parts in the class read‑throughs (I think I was Wall in The Dream) but I fell in love for life with the characters and the words. And with their author.

He was one of those astounding happy accidents that redeem our imperfect race. He was born 450 years ago; today, his speed and inventiveness, and his brilliance at adapting other people's plots, would have seen him gobbled up by television, and we'd never have had The Tempest or As You Like It or King Lear. And I'd never have seen Olivier's Henry V or Gielgud's Benedick or Scofield's Richard II or, or …
He was a working dramatist within a community of actors, and by the time he died at the age of 53 he had written more than 35 plays, many of which are masterpieces still performed all over the world. Whatever people do to them, they work beautifully on stage. We know remarkably little about his life, which leads some into the folly of claiming he was actually Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, but its emotions blaze out of his characters and his 154 sonnets.
Above all he was a man in love with the English language, so how can he not be the hero of an English writer? Shakespeare delighted in playing with the sense and the music of words; he was a creative lover of words, and unwittingly we quote him every day as we speak the ever-evolving English he helped to score. I wonder if he knew quite how extraordinary he was. Perhaps he guessed at it, now and again:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016