He wrote some of the worst full page Op Eds I have ever seen on El Pais, just extremely wrong takes and infused with this awful pompous air… part of the reason I stopped looking at that paper like 10 years ago.
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I think it’s more a matter of him being persistently annoying and omnipresent for decades, as Tombo describes, he seemed to always chime in with the same shit again and again inescapable.
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anyway not a lot of the old crew still around. Isabel Allende, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska and who else? That generation is leaving us
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in case it isn’t clear this is a joke directed toward myself, not yeso
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Just to check I wasn’t unjustly talking shit of the recently deceased, I looked at his latest columns, and uhm…
Why do Latin American immigrants go looking in the US for that which they reject in their home countries? It is a flagrant incoherence, and absolutely lamentable. It would be easier if, given the enormous difficulties they have in settling in in developed nations, they defended the model of private property and private investment in their own countries, instead of rubbishing it and then going to look for it in the sad wire fences that reject them.
Oof. Basically, he equates socialism with poverty, capitalism with safety, and with a very broad stroke implies all of South America deserves its current misery for repeatedly voting the wrong way.
His other pieces are him “reviewing” recent books which just so happen to ‘show the cruelty of the Soviet Union’ or of Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, etc.
Also a dozen articles about how Putin made a grave mistake and is about to lose the war, any day now, since 2022.
Anyway… RIP.
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Mario Vargas Llosa is in bourgeois heaven where everyone agrees with his smart opinions and he’s a special guy
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I’ll be in the even nicer section of bourgeois heaven, where we make fun of his opinions and lower status
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Easily the best book on hypochrondria I’ve read. Literary and holistic without being too heady, grounded without being condescending. Draws from a vast range of historical and contemporary sources yet contains it all in pithy little essays of a few pages each.
Highly recommended if you too suffer from the spleen
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Was reading back through the thread to remember what I’ve read so far this year and had a hearty lol when I came upon this gem again
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Just this morning I finished Mike Duncan’s (the History of Rome and Revolutions podcast guy) Hero of Two Worlds book about Lafayette and I loved it!! He has a really nice and readable prose and did a lot of research–a this walk through of the American and French Revolution(s) through the lens of this really fascinating and iconoclastic figure was really lovely; I couldn’t put it down
highly recommended if you’re looking for a great little bio
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Recently i have read Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Capentier (which i liked) and it left me wondering about how books of fiction can be read in the context of both the times presented in the story and events recent to the book publication.
Like a book on colonial efforts had bigger inpact on the readers living in the period of decolonialization of africa and asia (book is from 1962).
As for the content of the book itself, it is interesting but uneven.
While the story keeps an eye on the changing politcs of both France and Spain before and after the French Revolution (colonial agenda included) but the oppresed people are not given a voice (and are decribed in dehumanising words, at least in polish translation), possibly because of using written records of the times made with the influencial real-life french characters in mind.
But this makes the rebel forces of haiti revolution a faceless mob of people, but could it be any different if the book is from the perspective of rulers?
The book has a epic feeling of tackling a serious and important event and yet is also about personal drama of its characters and the even more personal inner strugle of the main character making the whole thing really heavy to balance even if i would call it mostly a success in that regard.
Do you think that a book writen from the point of view of the opressors can be emphatic toward both sides of a conflict (as the protagonists are usually relatable)?
What are some other interesting historical fiction books?
I have read Ismail Kadares work and he is also mixing storytelling with history in interesting ways, and there are different books of Alejo Carpentier but i don’t know if i should read them.
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I highly recommend Half of a Yellow Sun by Ngozi Adichie. Thickly layered novel set during the Nigerian civil war. Might not be as macro-level as the Carpentier book but it has a incisive focus on colonial/postcolonial politics and society, might be worth a read to compare with Alejo. Might be a good cornerstone to answering those question you pose.
To my shame I’ve never read Carpentier though post colonial literature is a keen interest!
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thanks for posting this. i will let others more knowledgable on post-colonial lit than myself chime in (i was gonna tag you @Bonsai but i see you’re already here 
), but coincidentally i was reading about new criticism the other day and thinking about the different ways we read (and the different ways i read).
i would never be so bold to answer any question like this with a flat yes or no, but it would need to be done exceptionally well to be justified. not quite the same, but i am thinking of books like the leopard, which at its core is a closet drama about an aristocratic family during a period of change but is so lush and speaks so beautifully about what it is like to be alive (imo), that is a worthwhile piece of art despite being apolitical or even conservative in its approach.
as for historical fiction books – two that come to mind are forum favorite zama and personal favorite tun-huang (@saddleblasters or @wickedcestus have either of you read tun-huang? if not i think you both would like it)
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Looks interesting, i have never read a novel from Nigeria (or african one really) mostly because of how neglected they are by the publishing world.
I didn’t see my post as one about strictly colonial literature but that sounds like a cool direction to go.
Alejo Carpentier is really recommended by me (indifferently to my criticism) Explosion in a Cathedral is beautifully written (i saw online that many people needed dictionaries during reading in english but that might have been polished out of during translation into polish language (i deserve prison for this pun)) and there is surprisingly big range of emotions that to be found here.
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in addition to eating tacos in illegal quantities, i’ve been able to get a lot of reading done with my wife out of town. i read some more ciroan (great), some zizek (okay), some kenzaburo oe (genius), but i want to talk about another book i read -
kingdom come by jg ballard.
@yeso mentioned ballard in a spirited discussion we had a while ago. ballard had previously been one of those “i will probably like them, i just haven’t read them yet” type authors to me (a category which honestly can sometimes make me a little reluctant to read them–if i already like them, why bother?). i really liked the story yeso recommended, so when i was checking out his books, this one caught my eye because of the description:
Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down by a deranged mental patient in a vast shopping mall outside Heathrow Airport. When the prime suspect is released without charge, Richard’s suspicions are aroused. Investigating the mystery, Richard uncovers at the Metro-Centre mall a neo-fascist world whose charismatic spokesperson is whipping up the masses into a state of unsustainable frenzy. Riots frequently terrorize the complex, immigrant communities are attacked by hooligans, and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies.
the book is pretty much about just that, so there’s no point in adding further descriptors, but man this one really left a mark on me. it reminded me of don delillo’s strongest period in that the book dipped into both the surreal and the obvious, but it did so heavily enough that the surreal became mundane and the obvious became surreal. there was a quivering violence underneath every paragraph, a strange momentum powered by an unfamiliar engine.
like delillo, i would also say this didn’t feel like a “real novel” in terms of character and setting and all those other handholds we like to use when we read. despite the immediacy and sensationalism of the text, it was held at arms length, again feeling like an alien object with particular goals. this was a scary, bleak book. to use another point of comparison, it was the type of book houellebecq wishes he could write. a portrait of where we’ve been and where we’re going.
highly recommended!
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I’m also one of these people, but the main thing stopping me from participating in this thread is writing my thoughts down.
But speaking of, I just finished reading Simone Weil’s Oppression and Liberty earlier today. In contrast to Badiou’s criticism of Levinas, Weil has a much clearer idea of what she’s criticizing, and if you’re willing to ignore the mystical elements, that results in some pretty strong theoretical challenges to Marx, EG the problem of how factories can build up the proletariat as a viable force as they grind their spirits down to nothing.
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starting with his last book I see interesting. This is where his “The suburbs dream of violence.” passage is from if I’m not mistaken. He hit that one on the head lol. He has a much earlier novel with a similar setting and theme but the permutation is quite different and less dour The Unlimited Dream Company. Yes as we discussed a while back his short fiction is often excellent. For as acclaimed and famous of a writer I think he’s a little underappreciated, or at least the full breadth of his work gets elided. Lots of strange cul de sacs to get turned around in. You have the apocalyptic and increasingly surreal natural disaster novels that peak with The Crystal World, the cold war nuclear bomb cargo cult stories, the metaphysical anhedonic stories about dead astronauts, the avant garde formally experimental The Atrocity Exhibition + Crash + what he was publishing in Bananas, etc. yeah great stuff
hey that’s part of the appeal!
did you read it in English?
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Oh, Ballard is on my reading list i even bought kingdom come 3 weeks ago, i should around to it soon.
No, i have read the 1966 polish translation, which wasn’t directly mentioned in the post you replied to but was in the one before about Alejo Carpentier, i should probably made it more clear there even at the cost of the joke.
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yeah, that is where the suburbs dream of violence comes from. i think part of what made the book so compelling was i got the sense ballard wasn’t trying to write something speculative or predictive, but rather tried to reimagine what was happening at the time he wrote it through a lens both naked and distorted. it turns out being predictive, of course, but in ways that both fail and succeeded unintentionally. really great. i’ll be reading more ballard for sure, though likely his short fiction. small quibble but i hate how BIG the book is. can’t really read that thing on the couch.
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