MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Mientras que en el mundo hispanohablante cada vez es más difícil insertar en el mercado un libro de cuentos, el mundo anglosajón está disfrutando de un renacimiento del relato corto. Al menos así lo piensa el blogger de The Guardian Chris Power quien califica el 2009 como el Año del Relato Breve. Estas son sus razones:

2009 has proved that rumours of the death of the short story – so often forecast that almost every review of almost every collection seems duty-bound to repeat and thus propagate it – are greatly exaggerated. The consensus running through the end-of-year reviews is that it's been a vintage year for short fiction, and I agree. I come here to praise the short story, not to bury it. Starting at the top, one of the world's greatest living short story specialists, and one of its greatest writers full-stop, took the 2009 Man Booker International prize. Canadian Alice Munro published her 14th collection, Too Much Happiness, earlier this year. A powerful grouping of stories more violent than her normal work, it shows her enormous talent remains undiminished as she nears her ninth decade. Mavis Gallant is already well into hers, and while no new work is forthcoming an edition of her previously uncollected stories, The Cost of Living, has just been published. As for the brand new, this year saw collections from big names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Lasdun, and this parish's own AL Kennedy. [...] This has also been an excellent year for debuts. I read David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned back to back, and while their shared interests – hunting, ichthyology, destructive rages, divorce, abuse and guns – might lie heavily on their readers' psyches, the quality of the writing precludes any chance of leaving them depressed. Both superb, Vann's book in particular suggests the arrival of a significant talent; one who can marry tremendous plot twists to an appealingly downbeat style that fans of Carver and Cormac McCarthy alike will thrill to. [...] Of course, all this jubilation would be Panglossian without some acknowledgement of the short story market's real and present downsides. In the US it's commonplace for short story writers to get a deal for their first collection only on the proviso that a novel follows, a business practice that casts short story-writing as apprentice work. In the UK it's worse still, with story collections treated like dirty secrets to be snuck out in disguise (pace Penguin's strategy with Vann), with only a determined study of the back cover revealing the truth. And I don't know if it's a case of reading practices following publishing's lead or vice versa, but I'm constantly surprised and disheartened by the number of readers who tell me they don't read short stories, as if they were a homogenous type that could be not to your taste like, say, policiers. I do see more reason to celebrate than to mourn, however. Radio 4 broadcasts nearly 150 stories a year; the Atlantic's recent decision to sell short stories via its Kindle store inspires hope for a vibrant market for individually sold shorter works, while flash fiction and sites dedicated to the short story continue to proliferate online. This year saw the US publication of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a particular favourite of mine, whose sharp, hilarious, often minuscule fictions have long had a small but dedicated following. She's the next subject in the short story series I've been writing for the last couple of years, and in the words of the New Yorker her body of work "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal." Hamish Hamilton have just picked up the UK rights, so British readers as yet unfamiliar with her will soon have an even better chance to find out how good she is. It looks like 2010's already shaping up to be another good year.

Etiquetas: adichie, alice munro, blogs, ha jin, inglaterra, ishiguro, NOTICIA

La revista Granta ha dejado a una serie de escritores la posibilidad de escoger cuál ha sido el libro o su lectura favorita del año. Dejo aquí las respuestas de los autores más relevantes para nosotros (todos traducidos al castellano). Eso sí, no esperen encontrar entre los recomendados algún libro traducido. Todas son rarezas o novedades.

Actualización 15/12.- Rodrigo Fresán tiene un serio competidor a la hora de estar actualizado en literatura británica o norteamericana: Diego Salazar, quien me hace una magnífica acotación al post: "Veo en tu post sobre los libros del año para Granta que dices que entre los títulos elegidos por los autores no hay ninguno traducido al castellano. No es cierto, el libro de Grossman del que habla Richard Ford se encuentra en edición de Crítica bajo el título de Un escritor en guerra (2006). El libro de Kate Summerscale que menciona Doris Lessing, y que yo he leído y disfrutado muchísimo, se encuentra traducido: El asesinato de Road Hill (Lumen, 2008). Es un magnífico reportaje en que la autora reconstruye el primer caso mediático de asesinato de la historia y se centra en la figura del detective de Scotland Yard Jonathan Whicher, toda una celebridad de la época victoriana y que fue el modelo real que tanto Dickens, Poe y Wilkie Collins usaron para configurar la figura del detective en sus ficciones. También el libro del que habla Shteyngart se haya traducido al castellano, Y entonces llegamos al final de Joshua Ferris (RBA, 2008). No conozco la traducción, así que no puedo decirte qué tal es, pero leí el original en inglés y es una muy buena novela, con aires de Coupland y Delillo y que me recordó, por el tema "oficinas", al Recursos Humanos de Antonio Ortuño.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The book I most enjoyed reading this year is José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons. The narrator is a dreamy, funny, brilliant gecko but there is nothing gimmicky in this beautiful, poetic novel about an Angolan albino who invents fake pasts for his clients. It is a grown-up story about a country getting to know itself again, and told in such exquisite language that I wished I could read it in the original Portuguese.

T. C. Boyle
My reading this year has mostly had to do with ecology and biology – research for the novel I am now writing. Among many others, I re-read one of the great works on the subject of island biogeography, David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo. If you don’t know this book, you should. It is fluidly and wittily written, very wide-ranging and informative. At present, I am reading an advanced review copy of Blake Bailey’s forthcoming biography of John Cheever, under whom I studied one semester at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. This is a very fine biography indeed, assessing and illuminating a complex life, and written with all the power and persuasion of a novel. I have been taking my time with it, savouring it chapter by chapter as I might linger over a box of chocolates. Or no: I don’t particularly like chocolates. Let’s say a pot of lobsters.

Junot Díaz
The book that most disturbed, moved and stayed with me this last year was Taichi Yamada’s I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While. Yamada is one of my favourite Japanese writers and this is his masterwork. My God what a love story, my God what a ghost story! And Yamada shows us how little difference there is between these two types of tales. I wish I could read this book again for a first time; that’s how fine it is.

Richard Ford
One publication I heartily recommend is Vasily Grossman’s book of cablegrams reporting on the Nazi push toward Moscow and Stalingrad. It’s called A Writer at War: Vassily Grossman and the Red Army, 1941–1945. The writing is (even in translation) extremely memorable as writing – not just for its reportorial virtues – and for the actually haunting pictures it puts into one’s mind. Grossman was a Jew, reporting on Nazis, at the same time as Stalin was exterminating Jews in various precincts of the Soviet Union. His precarious hold on his life, the truth, his profession, his sense of collegiality, his family, his own writing is a subtle but forceful torque in the writing itself.

Doris Lessing
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale has already attracted a lot of attention. The crime – a small child killed – excited Dickens and Wilkie Collins and other novelists of the time. I can’t think of another book which takes you so fast into the smells, tastes and atmosphere of that time. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen is a book that has you making up your own theories about how grunts became speech and songs. Finally, I missed two books in 2003 – The Seven Daughters of Eve and Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men by Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford. Both are truly revolutionary and wonderful.

Rick Moody
Here are a couple of contemporary books I have read and enjoyed greatly in the last year: Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a collection of short stories by Jim Shepard, and Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker.
The Shepard collection, the very best such thing in recent American letters, is historically obsessed, containing accounts of cosmonauts, Australian exploration, the invention of the guillotine and so on. It’s incredibly funny in spots, but also deeply sad. Shepard is known well for his novels and for his love of the movies, but in this book he seems to have set aside all limitations on his ambition. He swings for the fences and, if you’ll pardon a baseball metaphor, connects repeatedly for extra bases. No short-fiction collection, in recent years, has delighted me as much.
The Nicholson Baker effort is non-fiction and it is unapologetically polemical. Using only primary sources Baker purports, in very abbreviated morsels of (largely) quotation, to wonder whether the Second World War had to take place in the way it did. There are no heroes in this account – not even among the anti-war pacifists with whom Baker clearly feels some common cause – and Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler all seem like, at best, liars and dissemblers, and, at worst, bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. The closest analogue to the methodology here is Walter Benjamin, who once made the case for a literature composed entirely of quotation. Yes, Human Smoke is a very strange book, and not one that is designed to delight your historian friends, but it is deeply felt and, in its shape, completely original. Lately, Baker has been fearless in terms of what he’s willing to say in public and I find his work exhilarating.

Gary Shteyngart
Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End is a stunning paean to the declining American workplace. Stylistically brilliant, Ferris gets away with using an omniscient ‘We’ to narrate his tale of a failing Chicago ad agency. As he pokes at the ribs of his corporate crew with a sharp index finger, he still manages to fill the novel with generosity and compassion. As the American economy collapses, we’re going to need helpings of both.

Etiquetas: adichie, boyle, granta, inglaterra, junot díaz, lessing, richard ford, rick moody, shteyngart

En el ADN Cultura aparece una nota sobre el VI Festival de Literatura de Paraty en su más reciente versión, que se llevó a cabo a principios de este mes. Tom Stoppard, Fernando Vallejo, Cees Nooteboom, Alessandro Baricco, Richard Price y Neil Gaiman, entre otros fueron los protagonistas de esta fiesta literaria al pie del mar. La nota es de Leonardo Tarifeño, quien al parecer no se perdió nada del festival. Me hizo recordar a Gastón García y sus endebles mujis de cartulina persiguiendo a todos en el B39. Cuenta Tarifeño:

Martín Kohan, orador de la mesa llamada "Estética de frío", como el título de un libro del brasileño Vitor Ramil. Kohan expuso con sobriedad y altura los procedimientos narrativos que construyen su premiada novela Ciencias morales , el objetivo detrás del origen del libro y su intención de "captar características de la represión en la vida cotidiana". No despertó, ni por mucho, los aplausos que consagraron al periodista inglés Misha Glenny, autor del notable McMafia , quien ante un auditorio de 500 personas pidió la despenalización de las drogas ("empecemos por legalizar la marihuana y ahí veamos si el mundo explota", dijo). Tampoco hechizó al público, como sí lo hizo la bella nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cuando explicó que la historia de su última novela se basa en la guerra entre Nigeria y Biafra, donde murieron sus abuelos. Lo que Kohan logró fue que por la noche de Paraty sobrevolara un aura de admiración e interés, el tipo de sentimiento que se tiene en las clases universitarias cuando un profesor de los buenos toma la palabra. "La rabia es una gran motivadora, siempre y cuando ese sentimiento no domine a la razón -dijo Ngozi Adichie, la más joven de todos los invitados a la FLIP-; ser un artista significa estar siempre furioso, ávido de cambios". En la festiva Paraty, dio la impresión de que -con la excepción de Vallejo- rabiosos había pocos. Tal vez porque la diversidad de estilos, miradas y opiniones dejaron claro que la literatura merece transitar por varios caminos. Las reacciones avanzaron hacia distintas direcciones, pero mantuvieron ese denominador común: Alessandro Baricco contraatacó cuando lo tacharon de "poco italiano" ("no me gusta que mis personajes entren a una trattoria y pidan un Chianti, leí demasiada literatura extranjera y por eso mis influencias son muy diversas"), el estadounidense David Sedaris explicó que no por ser humorista debe tener siempre a mano un chiste sobre sexo, y Cees Nooteboom comentó que los lugares turísticos que más le atraen de sus viajes al extranjero son los cementerios, aún cuando ya no quiera escribir más sobre el tema

Etiquetas: adichie, b39, baricco, brasil, cees nooteboom, kohan, nooteboom, NOTICIA, sedaris

Confirmando el interés que despierta la literatura africana en el mundo, la nigeriana Chimamanda Adichie ganó el premio Orange Broadband para obras de ficción escritas por mujeres por su novela Half of a yellow sun (Medio sol amarillo). Es la primera vez que una autora de ese continente gana el premio.

La novela trata sobre la guerra civil entre Biafra y Nigeria, en los años 60, que cobró más de un millón de vidas.

Al estilo Oscar, la ganadora fue escueta: “''Sólo puedo decirles que soy muy feliz. Ahora tengo que hacer una llamada a Nigeria”.

Etiquetas: adichie, áfrica, inglaterra, orange broadband, PREMIO