Book Fever
By Marcia Loy September 26, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Book Fever travels to South America

Maybe she knew that nothing is seen until the writer names it. Language permits us to see. Without the word, we are all blind. —Carlos Fuentes

This is a novel as full of fizz as a giant pack of sherbet, witty, wise and wonderful in equal proportions. —Sunday Times

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa, 1977. Of the 75 books I’ve read so far in 2008, this might be my favorite. The main character is an 18-year-old who works at a radio station in Lima and the aunt in the title is his aunt by marriage. The scriptwriter is a Bolivian, Pedro Comacho, hired to spice up the soap operas. There’s also a policeman, a Peruvian Lolita and lots of other memorable characters.

First paragraph: In those long-ago days, I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharán, in Miraflores. I was studying at the University of San Marcos, law, as I remember, resigned to earning myself a living later on by practicing a liberal profession, although deep down what I really wanted was to become a writer someday. I had a job with a pompous-sounding title, a modest salary, duties as a plagiarist, and flexible working hours: News Director of Radio Panamericana. It consisted of cutting out interesting news items that appeared in the daily papers and rewriting them slightly so that they could be read on the air during the newscasts. My editorial staff was limited to Pascual, a youngster who slicked down his hair with quantities of brilliantine and loved catastrophes. There were one-minute news bulletins every hour on the hour, except for those at noon and at 9 p.m., which were fifteen minutes long, but we were able to prepare several of the one-minute h
ourly ones ahead of time, so that I was often out of the office for long stretches at a time, drinking coffee in one of the cafés on La Colmena, going to class now and again, or dropping in at the offices of Radio Central, always much livelier than the ones where I worked.

The enchanted and enchanting account of a contemporary Scheherazade, a wide-eyed South American teller-of-tales who triumphs over harsh reality through the creative power of her own imagination. . . . —San Francisco Chronicle

Eva Luna, Isabel Allende, 1987. The author is Chilean but was born in Peru and now lives in California. The House of the Spirits is her most famous book and considered by many to be her best. The title character narrates this novel and tells the story of her life, starting with her parents.

First paragraph: My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions. She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me.

The Savage Detectives gave us the first real signs that the parade of Amazonian roosters was coming to an end: it marked the beginning of the end of the high priests of the Boom and all their local color . . . it also introduced us to an astonishing writer who reminded us how much deep joy there was in the passion of reading and, at the same time, spent his days at the edge of an abyss that no one else had ever noticed. —Enrique Vila-Matas, Le Magazine Littéraire

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño, 1998. Bolaño was born in Chile, grew up in Mexico City and died, at the age of 50, in Spain. The book is neither savage nor inhabited by police inspectors or private investigators. It is, instead, about a group of young poets in Mexico City who call themselves the visceral realists. The protagonist, like Vargas Llosa’s, is a young law student who wants to be a writer.

First paragraphs: 

November 2 

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

November 3

I’m not really sure what visceral realism is. I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I registered for class in the law school’s hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio César Álamo’s poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerrealists or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Álamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Álamo would critique, another p
erson would read, Álamo would critique. Sometimes Álamo would get bored and ask us (those of us who weren’t reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Álamo would read the paper.

Next week Book Fever moves to the Caribbean for more Latin-American authors. Happy reading!









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