Other Work
This animus bubbles up frequently, with devastating results.
Never before have things seemed so hard for Hispanics. The signals are stark and dire: A drowned father, cradling a dead daughter. A lone mother, defending herself against an armed Border Patrol agent, with a terrified toddler at her side. A diatribe hectoring whites to purge the country of a rising brown tide. A Walmart in El Paso, strewn with the dead. Caravans of the hopeful willing to suffer indignities, splinter their families, cower in cages, risk life itself for a distant dream. And looming over it all: a president who shrugs when a voice in the crowd shouts , “ Shoot them! ” and who tells Hispanics with roots in this country to go back to the cesspools where they belong. The ground seems to have shifted in this land of the huddled masses.
In a mean era for the tango — in the days of papal condemnation, of Queen Mary’s censure — De Robertis sets her potboiler of a novel, “The Gods of Tango.” And it is into the overcrowded conventillos of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, those squalid slums filled with luckless immigrants and the stench of plonk, sweat and foul meat, that she thrusts her virginal heroine, a 17-year-old Italian bride named Leda. Read the review.
1) De derecha a izquierda, Marie con Senna, Señora Leonor y Henrri en La Rinconada, Perú, el asentamiento humano más alto en el mundo (5.600 metros sobre el nivel del mar). Por favor, no reproducir estas imágenes sin permiso.
2) Mineros en La Rinconada
Marie y Senna
Fotos: Gina Nemirofsky, 10×10.
Fecha de estreno: Marzo 7, 2013.
En enero de 2012, Marie fue invitada por el director Richard Robbins, de Los Ángeles, para escribir la sección suramericana de una película sobre niñas que viven en la pobreza en lugares peligrosos de todo el mundo. Robbins, cuyo último documental, “Operation Homecoming”, había sido nominado al Oscar de la Academia, estaba intrigado por la evidencia planteada por los científicos sociales de que si una comunidad en riesgo educa a sus niñas, experimentará un cambio notable: las chicas instruidas se casan más tarde, tienen menos hijos, ganan más dinero, son mucho menos vulnerables al abuso y la explotación sexual, vacunan a sus hijos y educan a la próxima generación, y así comienza un efecto dominó que transforma familias, comunidades y países enteros.
Respaldado por Documentary Group, empresa con sede en Los Ángeles y Nueva York, Robbins se embarcó en un proyecto para capturar este fenómeno en el cine. El resultado es un poderoso nuevo documental, “Girl Rising” (Muchacha en crianza).
Marie fue invitada a escribir un guión centrado en la historia de una joven de 14 años de edad que vive en La Rinconada, Perú, el asentamiento humano más alto del mundo. La Rinconada se sitúa a 18.400 pies (5.600 metros sobre el nivel del mar) en la cima de una montaña de los glaciares en Los Andes. Es una de las minas de oro más ricas de Perú, uno de los principales exportadores de oro en el planeta. En contraste, es una zona sin ley, con más de 50 mil hombres, mujeres y niños viviendo en chozas de hojalata sin agua, alcantarillas, ni los servicios más básicos. Envenenado por mercurio y cianuro, plagado por la esclavitud sexual, el SIDA y el alcoholismo desenfrenado, La Rinconada no es lugar para niños.
Y sin embargo, cuando Marie viajó a esta cima de montaña tóxica y poco oxígeno, conoció a Senna, una joven cuya pasión por la poesía y determinación para ir a la escuela contrastaban sorprendentemente con la miseria a su alrededor. Ella era ideal para “Girl Rising”. Marie completó el guión sobre Senna en la primavera de 2012 y el segmento se rodó a finales de mayo. Senna es la única representante de América del Sur en esta película escrita por 9 autoras sobre 9 niñas en 9 países de todo el mundo.
Puede encontrar más información sobre este fascinante proyecto y la extraordinaria campaña que promueve en la página de la película: 10×10.
The irony of Latin American letters is that the torch has not passed to the living. It has gone from dead giants of the boom — Paz, García Márquez, Cortázar, Borges — to a fresher voice, a voice that speaks to millennials — except that that voice, too, belongs to a dead man. Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003 and whose fame skyrocketed soon after, has become Latin America’s trendiest literary lion in a whirl of posthumous publication. From one international triumph to another — “By Night in Chile” to “The Savage Detectives” to “Nazi Literature in the Americas” and “2666” — his frantic, fearless and perceptive narratives have captured something about the Latin American zeitgeist that the living have not. Bolaño is, for all his mortal remove, the region’s most vibrant expositor: an acid-tongued, truth-telling, peripatetic genius, who lived all too briefly, wrote in a fever and did not go gentle into that good night. Read more here.
There are authors who write in tidy, classifiable, immediately recognizable genres — Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, to name a few — and then there are those who adamantly do not. These others can surprise us with story lines and settings that are guises to be worn and shucked after the telling. Masters of reinvention, they slip from era to era, land to land, changing idioms, adapting styles, heedless of labels. They are creatures of a nonsectarian world, comfortable in many skins, channelers of languages. What interests them above all in their invented universes is the abiding human heart.
Kazuo Ishiguro is such a writer.
He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, was raised in England from the age of 5, and, for all intents and purposes, is English. But his sensibility is neither Japanese nor English; it stands apart from any one culture. Best known for his achingly astute novel “The Remains of the Day,” about a consummate English butler in a fading postwar manse, he is esteemed, as Joyce Carol Oates put it, as “one of our most eloquent poets of loss.”
Read more here.
Saramago’s just published and long-neglected novel is a sketchbook for the superb work that Saramago would ultimately produce. And yet, there is no shortage of wonders to be found in it. More . . .
“Skylight”
By José Saramago
Review by Marie Arana
“The journey never ends,” José Saramago once wrote. “Only travelers end.” We may proclaim the voyage over, but we know in our hearts it isn’t true. There will always be the need to see all we’ve never seen; see again what we saw before; see in spring what we saw in summer; see in daylight what we saw at night.
Now, in a twist straight out of a Saramago novel, a traveler begins long after his life is over. “Skylight,” a manuscript penned in the 1940s and stranded in an editor’s drawer for almost 40 years, has just been published in translation. In it, we see what Saramago called “the green that preceded the harvest” — the beginning of his brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning career.
Although Saramago tinkered with fiction as a young man, a publisher’s blatant inattention to his early manuscript brought him to a creative standstill. He didn’t attempt to write another novel for 20 years. Nor did he garner international fame as a novelist until he was 60, with the wildly successful “Baltasar and Blimunda.” He had been born into humble circumstances in a tiny village in Portugal, the grandson of illiterate pig farmers, and he came of age in 1930s Lisbon, where his father worked as a police officer. He started out as a garage mechanic, became a welfare agency functionary, then moved to printing, proofreading and eventually journalism. Fired from his job at Diário de Notícias for his passionately communist commentary, Saramago began writing novels as a last resort. He was 52.
“Skylight” by then was all but forgotten, a book he had written in his 20s and submitted to a Lisbon publisher when he was 31. The work had languished in editorial limbo well into Saramago’s successful career as a novelist — before he got a telephone call from an editor who had stumbled upon it, found it delightful and was interested in publishing it. Saramago refused the offer, collected the yellowed original, brought it home and deposited it on his desk, where it sat for more than 20 years. Read more
Almost 500 years ago, the newly formed Empire of Spain — forged by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, blessed by the pope, and unified by the eviction of Moors and the forcible conversion of Jews — issued a declaration that would forever define the Americas. It was called the Requerimiento, and it stated unequivocally to natives of the New World that the land on which they stood belonged to the Spanish Crown, that they would henceforward be Christians, and that any effort to resist would be met with war, seizure and enslavement. Never mind that no indigenous American understood what was being said. Never mind that the declaration went unheard as it was shouted from hilltops, bellowed from ships or roared as conquerors gave chase after fleeing Indians. It was law in the Americas, and though called into question by conscientious Spaniards and human rights activists of the day, it became the legal basis for rampant bloodshed and slavery.
Few made efforts to spare the cruelty. One of the most notable defenders of Indians in Americas North and South was the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spaniard who earned his sympathies the hard way: He had once been a slave to Indians himself. Read more.
Nestled into the title of Haruki Murakami’s new novel are the words “Years of Pilgrimage.” It’s a common enough catchphrase for a coming-of-age story, and easy enough to dismiss as mere packaging. But as we peel the onion of this remarkable novel — as it takes us on a spellbinding descent through the rings of hell in Tsukuru Tazaki’s young life — that spectral phrase takes on new meaning.
Soon it is clear that Tsukuru’s “years of pilgrimage” are an echo of Franz Liszt’s masterwork for the piano, “Années de pèlerinage,” especially its elegiac solo “Le mal du pays” (or “homesickness”), a melody that worms its way into the heart of our hero and suffuses his story with an exquisite sadness. Add to its haunting strains Liszt’s inspiration for that music — Goethe’s groundbreaking 19th-century novel about disillusionment, “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” — and “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki” becomes a virtual symphony of literary and musical referents. Murakami’s wizardry lies in his ability to pack all that cultural and spiritual resonance into a book that is as tightly wound as a Dashiell Hammett mystery. Read more here.
If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity. Her best known work, “Away,” was an epic adventure set in the early 20th century. In it, a Jewish mother survives a devastating Russian pogrom, comes to America, becomes a famous actor’s mistress, then traverses the country, joins the African American underworld, and crosses Alaska and Siberia in search of her daughter. There are few who feel the immigrant impulse as keenly as Bloom. There are fewer still who understand that Americans are the “lucky us,” the anointed ones who can shuck the past again and again until, by dint of wit and will, we reinvent ourselves. “It’s good to be smart,” a character in Bloom’s new novel tells us; “it’s better to be lucky.”
“Lucky Us” is a bustling tale of American reinvention. Like Hugo, Bloom fills her narrative with surprising twists and turns, betrayals, passions and no little scandal. But unlike Hugo’s, Bloom’s work is blessedly short and suffused with a modern sensibility. Although the setting is World War II and the action takes us from Ohio to Hollywood to Brooklyn, not to mention American internment camps and the bombing of Dresden and Pforzheim, there is nothing old about this story. It moves like today’s news. Read more here.