Bahia is a state in Brazil. It was the landing spot for captive Africans, imported to work in the sugar cane, coffee, and cocoa plantations in a nation that was the last in the Americas to emancipate its enslaved people. As in the South, emancipation did not mean freedom, but a continuation of de facto […]
Nicaragua does not have a happy history. It has endured centuries of domestic strife and civil war that more than once have resulted in the landing of US Marines. It suffers deep impoverishment–it is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, eclipsed by only Haiti. Misrule has charactarized Nicaragua for over a century, with […]
Reading a handful of Latin American novels scarcely makes me an expert, but it’s hard not to detect some common threads in the literature south of the border. These range from the continuing influence of the Catholic Church; the omnipresence of abject poverty; a culture of machismo that generates misogany and homophobia; the residual impact […]
Apparently eight percent of the population still keep diaries. At least that’s what the Internet says. I can’t imagine why. The thought of another daily obligation feels overwhelming. The thought of the self-obsession underlying and energizing the effort baffles and repels. But then again, maybe this blog is a kind of diary. In thinking about […]
I’m starting this post with a shoutout to the 92nd St Y. During the pandemic, the institution began a program called Roundtable, offering a spate of courses on literature, history, politics, art, and food. Roundtable engages experts to instruct the Zoom audience. The classes range from one to eight sessions; each session is taped so […]
According to scholars, Cecilia Valdes or El Angel Hill by Cirilo Villaverde is Cuba’s most important novel. They also consider this novel one of the most important works of nineteenth century Latin American literature. So popular is Cecilia Valdes in Cuba that a statue of the heroine has been erected in Havana where the bulk […]
I never knew what self-possession meant until I read The Eye Of The Sun by Egyptian novelist Adaf Soueif. Self-possession means to be confident, independent, and decisive, and it starts with self-knowledge. Asya, Soueif’s protagonist, does not take possession of herself until close to the end of this 780-page novel. We initially meet Asya in […]
How does a Chinese novelist win a Nobel Prize for literature? Mo Yan earned the prize in 2012. I picked up Red Sorghum, his breakthrough novel, partially because I’ve read very little Chinese literature but mainly because I was curious about how a writer in one of the most repressive countries in the world was […]
Like me, you probably never heard of Annie Ernaux until she was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. You might have automatically assumed obscurity bore an inverse relationship to quality. That assumption is wrong. The Years wowed me. This slender work is unlike anything that you have ever read. It is an “impersonal autobiography” […]
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. Pamuk’s entertaining doorstopper A Strangeness In My Mind proved great company for an arctic January in Chicago, when going outdoors was something to be avoided. The novel narrates the story of Mevlut who arrives at age twelve in Istanbul in 1969 from a […]
Second Chances 