Friday, September 23, 2011
Suzanne Jill Levin translates José Donoso's The Lizard's Tail
"In Barcelona, elderly painter Antonio Muñoz-Roa recalls an earlier time when he dropped out of a popular art movement in the fad-crazed city and fled with his cousin/lover Luisa to Dors, “the most remote village in the world,” with its mystical hilltop castle, Calatrava. There he defends its medieval beauty to the locals, who loathe their stone hovels and crave the modernity of apartment living. But the tide is more than he can stem. Friends of friends start coming, and then an endless flood turns Dors into a tourist center with all the “attractions” Muñoz-Roa had feared—crowds, hotels, and shops, leading finally to madness and crime. Donoso, author of 1970’s acclaimed The Obscene Bird of Night, was the Chilean member of the highly touted Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, so it’s not hard to see a personal parallel in this sad, ironic tale of the loss of Spain’s innocence to commercialism. VERDICT Written as a draft in 1973 and not found until after Donoso’s death in 1996, this highly relevant parable about the vulgarization of art is a wonderful read, handily translated by veteran Donoso authority Levine."—Jack Shreve, Allegany College of Maryland, Cumberland
Friday, September 16, 2011
Forrest Gander's newest book collaboration
With Photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia
Forrest Gander’s Core Samples for the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and haibun (a Japanese form of essay-poem). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander considers tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson” (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review).
I don’t think I’ve read a more ambitious poetry book by an American this year.”-- Anis Shivani, Huffington Post
http://www.forrestgander.com/Forrest_Gander/Core_Samples.html
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