***REGION 8: Central America

ConversesReading Globally

Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.

***REGION 8: Central America

1avaland
des. 25, 2010, 5:11 pm

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***8. Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama

2rebeccanyc
des. 25, 2010, 10:26 pm

Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes 1975, translation?, Mexican

This massive, 778-page novel is unlike anything else I have ever read. Over the past six weeks or so, there were times when I despaired of understanding what was going on, but I persevered because of my admiration for Fuentes' ambition. I started it originally for the May Reading Globally theme read on Mexico, as it is considered one of the masterpieces of modern Mexican fiction.

Terra Nostra translates as Our Earth. In this book, Fuentes creates a world -- or worlds -- that he peoples with characters based on historical and literary figures, characters derived from mythical and mystical traditions, and characters that spring forth from his own remarkable imagination. Then some of these characters seem to be other characters, or reincarnated in some way in other characters, and the timeline of history is fluid, to say the least. It is often unclear, even within a chapter or section, who is who and who is talking. And mixed in with all of this is symbolism galore, much of which probably went right by me, at least as far as understanding what it was about: numbers, especially the power of the number 3, but also 33 1/2, 5, and 20; crosses on the back and six toes on each feet; pyramids that go up and stairs that go down, Catholic beliefs in contrast to "heretical" Christian beliefs, dreams vs. reality etc., etc.

So what is the book about? The first part (The Old World) nominally tells the tale of Felipe, the Senor, based on Phillip II of Spain, the builder of the Escorial, his increasing fanaticism and longing for death, and his interactions with his bizarre family and the schemers of the court -- with the action set in motion by the mysterious arrival of three identical strangers with the said crosses on their backs and six toes on each foot. The second part (The New World) takes us to pre-European contact Mexico, but still involves some of the same characters. The third part (The Next World, which the NY Times review said should have been The Other World) mixes all of this together, along with trips to an even earlier past as well. The end takes us to a vision of the end of the world at the end of the 20th century (the book was written in 1975.)

But that's just the plot. As far as I can tell, what the book is really about is the circularity of history, the repetition of events and people, and the way the church, meaning the rigid Catholic church of 16th century Spain, imprisons us. The writing is lyrical, at times hallucinatory. And in the end, we wonder, was it all a dream?

3rocketjk
Editat: ag. 6, 2014, 3:56 pm

During 2010 I read the wonderful One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta

This is a beautiful, compelling, poetic, horrific book about village life in El Salvador during the worst days of the Death Squads. The book was written in 1980, during the height of the troubles. Told in deceptively lovely language (Argueta was a well known poet before he turned his hand to novels), and through the eyes of several characters, One Day of Life brings us right inside the terror, hope and determination found within a single peasant household. The characters are at the complete mercy of the "Authorities" and their purposeful brutality, yet we see through their eyes a nascent awareness that organizing and fighting for their rights is worth the danger, if only for their childrens' sakes. As the story unfolds, the danger and violence have become so bad that the men of the village are forced to leave their homes and sleep up in the hills rather than risk being dragged away in the night.

As an American, I can recall hearing the stories during the 70s and 80s of these death squads. It's easy to forget, but this book puts a reader right in the middle of that horror, but in a way that emphasizes the humanity of the situation.

Argueta was a well known author when this novel, his third, was published in 1980. The El Salvadorean authorities ordered the confiscation of all copies and forbade the printing of any further editions. Argueta was forced into a 10-year exile in Costa Rica. He is now back in El Salvador where he serves as the Director of Art and Culture at the national university, the University of El Salvador, in San Salvador.

4whymaggiemay
gen. 7, 2011, 6:36 pm

I recommend Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros (read 2010):

This book is narrated by Lala (a/k/a Cheyala), the only girl of the seven children of Inocencio Reyes. The book is composed of three sections, essentially telling first the story of Lala's parents, then the story of her paternal grandparents, and then her own life. The chapters tend to be short, sometimes less than a page, and at first they seem to be like a series of short stories, but they're all weaving the same story in a kind of kaleidoscopic manner. One has to read the entire book to fit all the pieces together. I was amazed at the control of the author in constructing her stories in this manner, which only allowed her to tell each story so far and then to interrupt it to start or finish another. She then has to remember that she has an unfinished story and give you bits and pieces of it in other stories, until she finally reveals the end many pages or even chapters later. At first I didn't like Lala, but by the end of the book I loved her. I also loved her parents and, eventually, grandmother.

This book is a rich story of a family living in the U.S., which spends 3 months of the year in Mexico City so that the entire family can be together as a unit for at least 3 months.

There were many quotes I loved, but the following are my favorites:

"The Awful Grandmother is like the witch in that story of Hansel and Gretel. She likes to eat boys and girls. She'll swallow us whole, if you let her. Father has let her swallow Rafa."

"Once Indians dressed in livery had stood at attention in front of these colonial doors. Once the pearl-and-diamond-adorned daughters and wives of las famalias buenas had traveled to church in tasseled sedan chairs carried by West African slaves. Long ago, the finest days of these residences were already history. Slouched from the spongy shifting of the earth and scuffed from centuries of neglect, they still showed something of their former opulence, though seasons of rain and sun had faded their original brilliance like a gilded dress washed ashore in a tempest."

"God had been kind and bestowed an aura of melancholia about Inocencio Reyes, and this coupled with this intense eyes, dark as Narcisco's but shaped like his mother Soledad's, like slouching houses, would bless Inocencio with the air of a poet or martyred Sebastian without having to undergo either torture."

"A sad, hopeless feeling to the house, like a mouth with missing teeth."

"I'd never ben alone in my life before first grade. I'd never been in a room where I couldn't see one of the brothers or my mother or father. Not even for a borrowed night. My family followed me like a kite tail, and I followed them. I'd never been without them until the day I begin school."

"It hits me at once, the terrible truth of it. I am the Awful Grandmother. For love of Father, I'd kill anyone who came near him to hurt him or make him sad. I've turned into her. And I see inside her heart, the Grandmother, who had been betrayed so many times she only loves her son. He loves her. And I love him. I have to find room inside my heart for her as well, because she holds him inside her heart like when she held him inside her womb, the clapper inside a bell. One can't be reached without touching the other. Him inside her, me inside him, like Chinese boxes, like Russian dolls, like an ocean full of waves, like the braided threads of a rebozo. Whan I die then you'll realize how much I love you. And we are all, like it or not, one and the same."

5msjohns615
juny 2, 2011, 4:43 pm

GUATEMALA

Obras completas y otros cuentos (Complete Works and Other Stories) by Augusto Monterroso

This was a very enjoyable volume of short stories. Monterroso is a funny guy, his humor is sophisticated and his tone is friendly. He received a fair bit of press for writing "the world's shortest short story," included in this collection. Here's what Carlos Fuentes had to say in reference to another one of his books, La oveja negra y demás fábulas:

"Imagine Borges' fantastical bestiary having tea with Alice. Imagine Jonathan Swift and James Thurber exchanging notes. Imagine a frog from Calaveras County who has seriously read Mark Twain. Meet Monterroso."

6msjohns615
juny 9, 2011, 3:45 pm

MEXICO

Confabulario definitivo (Confabulario and Other Inventions) by Juan José Arreola

Arreola's short stories are very different from Monterroso's. They're less conversational in tone, and they often part from simple events, objects or meetings, arriving to conclusions that are surprising in their vast breadth. Some of his stories reminded me of the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. He's considered one of the most influential and innovative Mexican writers of short fiction, the kind of guy who helped propel the national literature of the country into a more universal realm.

The University of Texas press has both this book and Monterroso's Obras completas y otros cuentos in print. You can see their collection of translated Latin American literature and literary criticism here:

UT Press: Latin American Literature and Literary Criticism

7msjohns615
juny 20, 2011, 2:38 pm

MEXICO

Los recuerdos del porvenir (Recollections of Things to Come) by Elena Garro

This book, published in 1962 and considered an early exponent of Magical Realism, tells the story of the town of Ixtepec in the years after the Mexican Revolution. I had been looking for a Spanish language copy for a few years and was excited to finally get a chance to read it. I can think of two compelling connections between this book and other classics of the 20th century:

1) it'd be interesting to read after reading Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs. The chaotic violence of the later years of the Revolution (which is depicted in Azuela's book) gives way to the consolidation of power in military hands, with general Francisco Rosas and his officers desperately and often violently asserting their power over the townspeople, keeping the women they've abducted and taken as mistresses during the Revolution locked behind the walls of the town hotel.

2) I'd also like to read this before re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, because Garro's Ixtepec is a good prelude, or precursor, to García Márquez's Macondo.

8msjohns615
ag. 20, 2011, 4:43 pm

GUATEMALA

El cojo bueno (The Good Cripple) by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

A quick and entertaining read about a kidnapping, filled with unexpected twists and turns. I enjoyed this book, and will look for more books by Rey Rosa. Its content and its pacing (it took me between 100 and 120 minutes to read) made me think of the movies: I felt as though this could be seen as an attempt to "write" a movie, that is, to write a book that the reader could just as easily have watched in the theaters as read at home.

9kidzdoc
set. 6, 2011, 6:39 pm

MEXICO

Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

This novella, which was longlisted for this year's Guardian First Book Award, is narrated by Tochtli, an 8 year old boy whose father Yolcaut is a ruthless Mexican drug lord who resides in a heavily guarded mountain hideout. The boy is similarly isolated, as he does not know his mother and has only met a dozen or so people, nearly all of whom work for or with his father. Other than his father, his closest companions are his teacher, Mazatzin, who provides an alternative view of manhood and morality to his paranoid and ruthless father, and the books that keep him occupied and supplement his advanced vocabulary.

The hideout is filled with exotic animals, but Tochtli wants a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia more than anything else in the world. Yolcaut eventually gives in to his son's demands, and he takes Tochtli to Monrovia, along with his teacher, where they assume false identities and employ a local guide to hunt down the elusive and rare animal.

Down the Rabbit Hole was a mildly interesting read, which held my interest for its 70 pages, but would have been overly tiresome and repetitive had it been much longer, primarily due to Tochtli's repeated use of vocabulary words such as sordid, disastrous and pathetic. This book isn't worth anything close to the £10 I spent on it, so I'd recommend borrowing it if you want to read it.

10rebeccanyc
set. 3, 2012, 3:23 pm

MEXICO

Vlad by Carlos Fuentes

What would happen if Vlad the Impaler/Count Dracula moved to contemporary Mexico City? That's what Carlos Fuentes explores, with humor, horror, and graphic imagery in this novella, published in Spanish several years before his death this spring.

The only other Fuentes I've read is the massive, complex, and brilliant Terra Nostra, so I didn't know what to expect with this story. I think Fuentes must have had fun writing it, and I enjoyed the fact that the reader knows more than the narrator, an upper class lawyer, Yves Navarro, married to a real estate agent, who is entrusted by his aging and imperious boss to find a very specific kind of home for his old school pal, Vlad. The Navarros have a young daughter, but are suffering because their son died in a swimming accident. Fuentes lays on Navarro's obtuseness a little thick, and both Navarro's paeans to his sex life (and his lengthy breakfasts) with his wife and some of the more gory and graphic details later on in the novella didn't work too well for me. And, having reached the end, I really wonder a lot about Navarro's attitude at the beginning, when he refers to his "awful adventure." A little too cavalier?

11StevenTX
nov. 26, 2012, 8:25 pm

MEXICO

The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos
First published in Spanish 1979
English translation by Leland H. Chambers 1993

The Fear of Losing Eurydice is a lyrical examination of literary metaphors and the longings they represent. The chief idea is that of the island.
Island: The sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. Island: image of desire. Archipelago: proliferation of desire. All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago--the archipelago of desire... Every text, everything ever written up to the moment I write these words, outlines the image of that cartography of desire. Every text is an island.
There are two levels of narrative in the novel, distinguished by indentation. In what we might call the outer level, a teacher of French, Monsieur N, is sitting in a café devising a translation exercise for his students. It involves the Jules Verne novel Two Years' Vacation, a story of a group of schoolboys stranded for two years on a deserted island. As he is pondering the notion of the island, Monsieur N is observing a pair of lovers who have rendezvoused at the café and are drinking cocktails. His thoughts turn to the notion of love as a form of island.

The inner narrative is the story of the couple, but in many forms and places. It is a theme with variations, but always with the idea of the island as central, even though the island can be a metaphor for paradise, for love, for death, for despair, for solitude, for eternity, for a labyrinth, for a dream, and for the author alone with her creation. The idea of the text as an island in a dream is always present. "And I write as if I were dreaming. Or dream as if I were writing... The story of love is a dream that is writing me." And the characters live in the dream which is the text: "Expelled from paradise, the couple wanders in the limbo of unformulated words, of expressions scarcely roughed in, until they emigrate from one dream to another. Or, with their desire, they beget that other dream, which is an island."

In the margins of the inner narrative there are quotations from dozens of literary works illustrating the use of the island as a symbol or evocation. The narrative itself incorporates numerous references to historical events and literary landmarks, traveling from the islands visited by Odysseus and Aeneas to the island cities of Venice and New York. The text morphs continually from one story to another. Cortez's first glimpse of the Aztec island city of Tenochtitlan interweaves with elements of the Labyrinth of Minos on the island of Crete to become a scene of lovers watching swans on a lake, then strolling the coast of a tropical island--all within a single paragraph.

"I feel you in my flesh with fingers that are yours because they once felt you." With sumptuous prose poetry like this, Julieta Campos brings us to her conclusion that "To give up telling a love story is to give up telling any story at all, because telling about anything whatever is already to tell a love story: desire begets the tale." The Fear of Losing Eurydice is a work of experimental fiction that won't appeal to those who insist on conventional plots and characters, but it is an exquisite treat for those who enjoy authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

12StevenTX
des. 11, 2012, 3:19 pm

MEXICO

Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro
First published in Spanish 1963
English translation by Ruth L. C. Simms

Two worlds: the world of reality in which we live, and the world of illusion which we create. Two memories: the past and the future. These are the themes and the experience of reading Recollections of Things to Come.

The setting is the fictional town of Ixtepec in southern Mexico. Ixtepec itself is also the narrator, the "I" and "we," of the novel. "I am only memory and the memory that one has of me," says the town, contemplating its own existence. The time is the mid-1920s after the end of the Mexican Revolution. Ixtepec is occupied by a military garrison under the command of General Francisco Rosas, the central character in the novel. An uneasy peace prevails. The town's principal families live on in the shadow of their former splendor, while in the countryside the corrupt administration of President Plutarco Elías Calles is subtly undoing the very reforms that the Revolution had promised. Every few weeks, Indian peasants are executed on spurious charges, their lands confiscated. An air of fear and suspicion pervades the town.

The novel is divided into two parts. In the first half the story centers on General Rosas's mistress Julia. All the officers live in the same hotel with mistresses they have brought from other parts of the country. They walk the streets openly and proudly. Each of the women is beautiful, but none more so than Julia. She has captured the town's imagination just as she has captured the General's heart. But Julia herself is almost silent, listless and melancholic. She gives the impression of living on bittersweet memories, heedless of the present or the future. This remoteness stokes a constant, simmering jealousy in General Rosas, which bursts into an irrational flame when a stranger enters town and dares to speak to Julia.

In 1926 President Calles began a systematic persecution and dismantling of the Catholic church. Counter-revolutionaries known as "Cristeros" fought back, beginning a four-year conflict known as the Cristero War. Its impact on the people of Ixtepec is the subject of the second half of the novel. (The Cristero War is also depicted in Graham Greene's famous novel The Power and the Glory.) General Rosas closes the town's church, destroys the religious artifacts, and converts the building to his headquarters. The parish priest disappears, and the sacristan is hunted down on the streets of Ixtepec and murdered by a group of soldiers. But when they return to take away the sacristan's body, it has disappeared. The hunt for the body brings the town's leading families under suspicion, including the Moncada familiy, whom we met at the beginning of the novel. The decision to submit or resist is especially difficult for the Moncada's daughter Isabel who has developed a secret fascination for General Rosas and the life he represents.

The author, Elena Garro, uses magical realism to depict the duality of reality and illusion. Martín Moncada, Isabel's father, orders the clocks in his house stopped every night at 9:00 PM so that he may retreat into a world in which he is not a failure and his son's don't have to work in the mines to support him. "He did not understand the opacity of a world that had money for the sun in the sky." Illusion and memories of the past protect us from that other kind of memory: the memory of what is to come. A grim and fatalistic Isabel explains to the general, "We have two memories. I used to live in both of them, and now I only live in the one that gives me the memory of what is going to happen." And what is going to happen is that...
One generation follows another, and each repeats the acts of the one before it. Only an instant before dying, they discover that it was possible to dream and to create the world their own way, to awaken then and begin a new creation.... For several seconds they return to the hours that guard their childhood and the smell of grass, but it is already late and they have to say goodbye, and they discover that in a corner their life is waiting for them, and their eyes open to the dark panorama of their disputes and their crimes, and they go away astonished at the creation they made of their years. And other generations come to repeat their same gestures and their same astonishment at the end. And thus I shall go on seeing the generations, throughout the centuries, until the day when I am not even a mound of dust, and the men who pass this way will not even remember that I was Ixtepec.
Elena Garro was a maverick among left-wing Mexican intellectuals. She left her husband, Nobelist Octavio Paz, for self-exile in Paris where she lived in seclusion with her cats. Recollections of Things to Come reflects her unique and dark vision, with its disillusionment, its mixed sympathies, and its pessimistic outlook. But to balance the harsh realities it depicts, the novel offers us the magical and uplifting world of childhood memories, dreams, and the beauty of language.

13avaland
des. 12, 2012, 4:15 pm

Guatemala

My notes on The Polish Boxer, read back in September, "review" posted in October:

"I really don't have time for a proper review, but here are some quick thoughts. This is a five star read, imo. It is a piece of brilliant storytelling, not by way of a conventional narrative but rather a collection of "encounters" between the main character, a literature professor in Guatemala, who happens to have the same name as the author, and others. There is so much packed into this thoughtful, short, self-referential book (perhaps a bit of metafiction, though I'm no expert). Its well-crafted prose, in a translation that is smoother than milk chocolate, serves up thoughts on art, literature, music (jazz, classical and gypsy music, in particular), love, family and inheritance."

Mexico

i also read Down the Rabbit Hole (see kidzdoc's post above). It's a small novella-sized paperback here in the states. It's an odd and interesting read, told from the perspective of a child living in unusual and confined circumstances. I haven't written on it because I'm still mulling it.

14thorold
març 17, 2014, 6:37 am

MEXICO

Como agua para chocolate (Like water for chocolate) by Laura Esquivel (1989)

One of the unexpected pleasures of learning a language is that it gives you an excuse to indulge yourself with a few hackneyed bestsellers of the sort that wouldn't normally be allowed to darken your shelves. I think I must have seen the film, but for some reason I never read this when it first came out, so my campaign of immersion in the Spanish language gave the perfect pretext to read it at last.

The novel is set on a country estate in Mexico during the revolution of 1910-1920. It takes the form of twelve recipes, spasmodically interrupted by a romantic storyline about the cook, the narrator's great aunt Tita. This in turn brings in elements of magic realism, although these feel rather redundant and bolted-on, as though the publishers told her that a story set in Latin America wouldn't sell in the Anglo-Saxon market without magic realism. If you wanted to look for serious justifications for reading it, you could certainly find ideas there about traditional knowledge versus science, strong women who run the world whilst men just run around making trouble for them, the foolishness of organising your life according to the social norms of the Manual de Carreño, etc.

But the real point is that I had great fun reading it: it's pleasurable in a similar sort of way to Alexander McCall Smith's novels, with all the violence and passion made safe and comforting by the kitchen-table nostalgia. And very competently put together. I did have the feeling sometimes that the romantic storyline was only there to introduce an element of suspense into the cookery, which is clearly what the book is really about. Certainly, Esquivel's treatment of the Mexican revolution must count as one of the most off-stage wars in literary history. But it's churlish to pick holes: it does what it does exceedingly well.

15StevenTX
juny 3, 2014, 10:50 am

MEXICO

The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings by Octavio Paz
Essays first published 1950 to 1979
English translations by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos and Rachel Phillips Belash

Octavio Paz is considered Mexico's most important modern poet, but his best-known work--at least in English translation--is this collection of essays. "The Labyrinth of Solitude," first published in 1950, was an multi-part essay examining the Mexican national character. The other, later essays in the collection expand on that theme. "The Other Mexico" looks at the Aztec component of Mexican culture. "Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude" is an interview in which he reassesses his original work. "Mexico and the United States" contrasts Mexico's culture and world view with that of its neighbor to the north (a subject prominent as well in "The Labyrinth of Solitude"). And "The Philanthropic Ogre" looks at Mexico's unique single-party system of government.

The root of Mexico's unique identity, according to Paz, is a synthesis of Spanish Catholic forms with a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican world view. Mexico, he says, is the "most Indian" of Latin American nations. "In the Valley of Mexico man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes, and devouring mouths. Reality -- that is the world that surrounds us -- exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States." There are a number of other ways in which the author contrasts Mexico (communal, fatalistic, collectivist) with the United States (Puritanical, individualistic, self-assured). One of the best examples of contrast is seen in the fact that the North American spends his money acquiring personal possessions, while the Mexican spends his on public fiestas.

Paz also contrasts Mexico with the other countries of Latin America. Mexico, he says (writing in 1969), "lives in a post-revolutionary period while the majority of the other Latin American countries are going through a pre-revolutionary stage." This observation has certainly proven true, as nearly every Latin American nation has, since that time, undergone violent civil wars or military dictatorships. Mexico's (at that time) single-party system of government is unique, according to Paz, in that it is a structure of power without an ideology. While Mexico has political violence and corruption, it has avoided terror; public expression is unimpeded as long as it does not directly threaten the ruling party. This freedom has made Mexico City a haven for decades for refugee intellectuals from Europe and Latin America.

The Labyrinth of Solitude is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Mexican history and culture, but Paz's observations have a wider relevancy. His outsider's view of American culture, for example, is very interesting. And his description of Mexico's single-party post-revolutionary state of the 1970s has many parallels in today's post-Maoist single-party China.

16rebeccanyc
jul. 13, 2014, 7:52 am

El Salvador

One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta
Originally published 1980; English translation 1983



In this at times poetic, at times harrowing novel, Argueta traces the life of Lupe, a grandmother apparently in her 40s, over the course of one day that turns out to be an eventful one. A Salvadoran peasant, her day begins at 5:30 AM when she hears a particular bird and sees a big star reach the hole in the thatch roof of her home. Lupe's story, which is told in chapters titled by the time of day, is mixed with chapters told by other characters, including her 15-year-old granddaughter Adolfina who has become involved in farmer protests int he capital, a local boy who has joined the police and become trained for "special" services, and others. It develops over the course of the day and the novel that Lupe's husband and other men, partly under the influence of younger priests who have taken something of an activist role, have joined a Christian farmworkers organization which has, needless to say, aroused the ire of the large landowners as well as the government which is (although unsaid) supported by the US as part of the global cold war against communism (this novel presumably takes place in the 70s). Several of the men have taken to the hills, Lupe's son has been gruesomely killed, and when the police come calling no good can result. Reference is also made to the events of 1932, when a peasant uprising against a US-supported government was brutally suppressed in what became known as "the massacre."

The strength of this novel lies in Lupe's connection to the natural world and in its depiction of the horrors of this particular time and place. It's weakness lies in its expression of the politics of the situation and in some of the characters' reflections on their personal and political growth -- both tend towards the didactic and can be repetitive. In addition, I noticed a few instances where Lupe used words that no peasant who barely reached first grade would use -- "predilection," for example -- and I found these jarring.

All that said, I found much of this novel compelling, and I appreciated Argueta telling it largely from a woman's point of view (indeed, several women, if you include Adolfina's sections). It also reminded me of historical events, as part of Adolfina's story involves the occupation of the cathedral, and Archbishop Romero plays a role helping the protestors -- as those of us who are old enough remember, he was later assassinated while celebrating mass. El Salvador is once again in the news, along with other Central American countries, with its children fleeing to the US to escape violence, and it is difficult not to see that the issues confronted in this novel have repercussions today.

17rebeccanyc
jul. 19, 2014, 11:21 am

MEXICO

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Originally published 1955. English translation 1994.



"I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there." So begins this brief, complex novella, originally published in 1955, that is said to have been hugely influential for the Spanish-language literature that followed it. The speaker has made a deathbed promise to his mother to return to her hometown, of which she has nothing but poetic memories, and seek out his father, who she feels didn't give them their due. But the Comala the speaker finds is nothing like the the Comala his mother remembered; it is literally a ghost town, inhabited only by the dead who clearly are not resting easily in their graves, as they roam around the town and also talk to each other while in their graves. And what they talk about is what they would have talked about while living -- curiosity about who is saying what about whom.

The narrator, whose name we learn is Juan Preciado, is not the only speaker in this book. Other characters speak about the past (largely in the third person), and it is not always clear, especially at first, who is who and what is happening when. This book bears careful reading. So, from the murmurings of the restless spirits, both the reader and Juan Preciado piece together the history of the town, and the rapaciousness of Pedro Páramo, who became the the town's biggest (only?) landowner through theft, murder, and rape, characteristics which he apparently inherited from his father and passed down to the one son he recognized, a son who was killed while riding his beloved horse. He had one love, a woman who was mad by the time he finally brought her to live with him, but otherwise was obsessed with his own interests. In the opening paragraph, in which the narrator quotes his mother, she says "Some call him one thing, some another." One of those names is surely the devil; it is often remarked how hot it is in Comala and in one sense it is hell, or at least purgatory. (The local Catholic priest plays a conflicted and not very honorable role.)

It rains a lot in this novella, and Rulfo includes many descriptions of the rain's impact on the earth. There are some lovely descriptions of the natural environment too, although death always seems to intrude. As the father of the mad woman Pedro Páramo loves says, "The world presses in on every side; it scatters fistfuls of our dust across the land and takes bits and pieces of us as if to water the earth with our blood. What did we do? Why have our souls rotted away?"

In the introduction to my edition, Susan Sontag quotes Rulfo as saying, "In my life there are many silences. In my writing, too." It is those silences that challenge the reader to figure out all that Rulfo has included in this compelling work.

18rocketjk
jul. 27, 2014, 1:25 pm

#16> I read One Day of Life three years ago (wow!) and also found it compelling. (See post 3 in this thread for more of my reactions.)

19rebeccanyc
jul. 27, 2014, 5:37 pm

Thanks, >18 rocketjk:. I enjoyed reading your review.

20rebeccanyc
ag. 6, 2014, 11:44 am

GUATEMALA

The President by Miguel Ángel Asturias
Written 1922-1932; first published 1946; English translation 1963.



Never named, but based on Guatemala's early 20th century dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the president controls a web of hatchet men and informers (in fact, even ordinary people write to him to inform on their neighbors and others) to maintain his iron control over the unnamed country. Asturias wrote this book starting in 1922 in Guatemala, and then finished it in Paris in 1932, but politics prevented its publication until 1946.

The story begins among the desperate beggars sleeping on the porch of the cathedral; one of them, known as the Zany because of his craziness, kills a colonel who is taunting him. As with the "accidental" killing in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, this sets in motion an effort to frame political enemies for the murder, thus killing two or more birds with one stone. In this case, the enemies chosen are a general, formerly a favorite but who might or might not be siding with the "revolutionaries," and a lawyer who has also fallen from presidential favor; the beggars from the cathedral porch are forced to "confess" that they saw these two murder the colonel. Plot and counterplot take off from there, with others drawn into the conspiracy, sometimes horrifyingly so, as in the case of a poor woman who is thought to be connected to the general and, after being tortured and forced to let her infant son die, is sold to a brothel.

Although there are many subplots, and many characters, the heart of the novel is the president's "favorite," Miguel Angel Face ("He was as beautiful and as wicked as Satan.") and his surprising (to him) developing relationship with Camilla, the daughter of the disgraced general. Originally assigned by the president to help the general "escape," Angel Face involved the daughter in the scheme and either kidnapped her or spirited her away, according to what he told others. Angel Face is by no means an angel, but he does eventually experience the pangs of conscience as he comes to love Camilla.

Asturias was influenced by the French surrealists, and there are a variety of surreal effects and dream sequences in this book, as well as some lyrical descriptions of nature and landscape, some satirical sections, and some terrifying portrayals of the prison experience. Overall, it explores the insanity of dictatorship at many levels: not only how it views the slightest thing as an assault on the government (for example, when an illiterate sacristan accidentally tears down a presidentially important poster instead of the one for an event that has already happened and is thrown into jail as a revolutionary) but also how it affects people psychologically, whether they are struggling to survive, in prison, or (temporarily) a favorite of the dictatorship. It also dramatically explores the use of newspapers in spreading propaganda and information that isn't true but that serves the presidential agenda. Marred only by one anti-Semitic paragraph, this is a complex book and a devastating indictment,

21rebeccanyc
ag. 23, 2014, 12:01 pm

MEXICO
The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal
Originally published 1969; English translation 2013.



This was a fun read, if the reader can get past the multiple dead bodies and repeated use of the f-word, for the protagonist of this 1969 novel, only translated into English last year, is Filiberto Garcia, a former fighter in the Mexican Revolution who is now the Mexico City police department's unofficial hitman. At the beginning of the book, he is summoned to the office of his superior and a person who wants to remain unnamed (but who recognizes as an up-and-coming politician) and is assigned to be the point person working with an FBI agent and a KGB agent to thwart a suspected plot to kill the US President and the Mexican President when the US President visits in a few days. The Russians are involved because they told the Mexicans that they had intercepted news of this plot from their spies in Outer Mongolia, and that it was a plot created by the Chinese Communists. Garcia is chosen for the investigation not only because of his professional expertise but because he hangs out in Mexico City's "Chinatown," a down-and-out street of cheap restaurants and has good relationships with their Chinese owners and workers (he ignores their opium smoking and dealing and participates in their gambling).

As the plot develops, there are hints that all is not as it seems, that the money that supposedly has been sent from China is too much for a mere (!) double assassination; in addition, Garcia develops a relationship with a young Chinese woman, Marta, but was she sent to keep an eye on him? Is it international intrigue, or is it a home-grown plot? And if so, is it drug smuggling or something more sinister? There are many complications before Garcia, more than the US and Soviet agents who tend to condescend to him, figures out what is going on. Everybody is spying on everyone else and some of the scenes with Garcia and the two agents would be hilarious if they weren't so chilling.

Despite being perfectly readable as the satirical noir classic that it is, this book also comments bitingly on some aspects of internal Mexican political intrigue, corruption, and brutality. On the negative side, Garcia can be quite offensive in his characterization of women and his relationships with them (although this is somewhat redeemed by his growing fondness for Marta). I didn't know what to expect when I picked up this novel, but I couldn't put it down once I started it.

22rebeccanyc
set. 4, 2014, 10:06 am

MEXICO

The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibargüengoitia
Originally published 1981; English translation 1983.



This book starts with a car trip in which Serafina, accompanied by three men, travels to a remote Mexican village where she shoots, but doesn't kill, a baker, and the men then set fire to the bakery. Then, Ibargüengoitia takes the reader on a highly enjoyable, if sometimes mildly gruesome, journey, as everything starts to fall apart for Serafina and her past comes to light. Based loosely on a real scandal, in which the bodies of six girls were found buried in the yard of a Mexican brothel, most of the book is written as testimony that could have come from police reports. Nonetheless, it is highly readable.

The reader hears from Serafina and her sister Arcangela (love those names!) who run several brothels, their other sister Eulalia who wants nothing to do with the business but nonetheless becomes involved in it, some of the prostitutes who work for them, some of the people they pay off, an army captain who becomes Serafina's lover and who works ceaselessly to protect them, the wounded baker (who had previously been Serafina's lover), and many more. After a period of building up their business, including the spectacular inauguration of a new brothel which everybody who's anybody in the town attends, everything starts to fall apart for the sisters, dramatically, and their behavior and actions spiral out of control. While telling a compelling tale, Ibargüengoitia satirizes widespread corruption -- everybody is out for her- or himself, getting paid or paid off, implicating others and lying to stay out of jail. He has a mostly matter of fact way of writing that slyly reveals the humor in some of these events.

Once I started this book, I found it hard to put down. It is out of print and I had to buy a used copy; sadly, the only other books by Ibargüengoitia that have been translated into English are also out of print and are wildly expensive.

23rebeccanyc
set. 14, 2014, 9:07 am

MEXICO

The Edge of the Storm by Agustin Yáñez
Originally published 1947: English translation 1963?



This novel started slowly for me, but as I read further, I became totally captivated by the remote Mexican town and the diverse people who live in it. On the eve of the 1910 Mexican revolution, the town is a "village of black-robed women," as the first line of the book describes it, totally dominated by the most rigorous and harsh possible interpretation of Catholicism and the parish priest, Don Dionisio Martinez. Sex is frowned upon, with one of the leading organizations in town called the Daughters of Mary, a group of young women who are committed to remaining virgins, and retreats that focus on death and the world to come, with self-flagellation included, are a regular feature of the town's Retreat House. (Father Martinez flagellates himself every day, as part of his routine.)

But, as could be expected, below the surface much more is going on. Yáñez introduces a variety of characters early in the book, all of whom play an important role as the novel develops: the priest's nieces, Maria and Marta; another relative, Gabriel, who rings the parish's bells so compellingly they move people to tears, and who can barely communicate any other way; Don Timoteo and his troubled son Damian; young Pedrito, whose mother dies early; very unhappy and flirtatious Micaela; Mercedes, the head of the Daughters of Mary; a visiting woman, Victoria, who doesn't always wear black; other priests in the parish; and my personal favorite, the aging Lucas Macías, a tale teller whose stories of the past resonate in the present.

The calendar of the Catholic church informs this novel, as various saint's days roll around with their rituals, and there is a lot of liturgy (in Latin) included in the text. The description of the bells and how they ring is astonishing. The villagers have a fear of outsiders, especially northerners (they are in the Guadalajara region), including those who have been to the United States. The political deputy from the governing party is barely tolerated.

The book is dense and complex, and it jumps back and forth in time over the first year, with major events alluded to but not described until later chapters, creating a sense of foreboding. Often, also, Yáñez uses a chorus of villagers to comment on an event that is happening. As the first year ends, the pace picks up, and there are more references to politics and revolution, "the storm" that is coming, even to this remote town. (The Spanish title of this novel is "Al Filo del Agua," which an author's note says "is a farmer's phrase for the beginning of the rainy season and is often used figuratively to mean the imminence or beginning of an event"; however, the phrase "the edge of the storm" is explicitly used towards the end of the novel to refer to the coming revolution.)

As the novel nears it's end, even the Parish Priest, who has almost single-handedly tried to hold back the future, realizes that he is powerless to do so:

"The old Parish Priest had gradually become convinced by evidence that things were changing and his flock could not escape the changes; it was a feeling in the air, like the warm wind that announces nearby land, like the smell of smoke at harvest time, like the cold air that, one morning or afternoon, is a harbinger of winter. Whereas, before, he had been indefatigable, now Don Dionisio began to feel weary and to look forward to death. He was dissatisfied with himself, and was amazed to notice regrettable changes -- for instance, this repugnant curiosity which made him listen to worldly tales and be disturbed by them, the confusions in his reactions as a priest and an uncle, the depression when faced by worldly troubles, and, maybe, a lack of faith, of that serene blind faith which he had had in Providence." pp. 289-290

One of the beauties of this book is that, despite the apparent oppressive, unchanging order of the town as it is initially described, people do change, struggle with their changes, and even, sometimes, grow.

I bought this book after reading deebee's review a few years ago, and it's sat on my TBR since then until I took it down for the Reading Globally theme read on Mexico and Central America. I'm very glad I did. My edition (and it is sadly out of print) is enhanced by dramatic illustrations by Julio Prieto.

24wandering_star
oct. 15, 2015, 6:43 pm

MEXICO

Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel

Nettel is a contemporary Mexican writer, and this book consists of five short stories in which the protagonist's life becomes entangled in strange ways with an animal (or in one case, a fungus) in such a way that the animal's experience throws a sidelight on their own.

Similarly, the stories have little echoes of each other which make you reconsider what you have read.

So, for example, the first story is about a marriage breaking up, emblemized by the behaviour of the couple's two Siamese fighting fish. The last story features a man who has had an affair, which he regrets - he deliberately buys one snake from a pair which he studies as a sort of meditation on loneliness. The book both starts and ends with images of people staring into the tank of a captive animal.

Unusual stories, which I enjoyed reading and thinking about.

25berthirsch
Editat: oct. 16, 2015, 1:27 pm

.13 avaland

Guatamala-Eduardo Halfon
can not agree enough that The Polish Boxer is a special gem-

A refreshing new voice added to my long list of Latin American literature with the added bonus of Jewish themes. I am sure this is on the reading list of Ilan Stavens but it reminds me, too, of Junot Diaz.
The story, POSTCARDS, is a small masterpiece, the author receiving encrypted messages from a mysterious Serbian pianist and composer that reveal the history and essence of Gypsy culture. ( )

26spiralsheep
feb. 21, 2021, 7:43 am

I'm adding this here too because Monterroso is such a highly regarded author in Hispanophone countries.

I read The Black Sheep and other fables, by Augusto Monterroso, which is a collection of very short fables. They ask questions such as "Was Penelope weaving while she waited for Odysseus to stop travelling or was Odysseus travelling while he waited for Penelope to stop weaving?" and "If faith moves mountains then would fewer people die in landslides if we abandoned our faiths?" Clever, witty, mildly amusing. Readers who didn't receive a classical education might find a few glancing references to Aesop or Horace whooshing over their heads but Monterroso mostly uses ideas familiar to inheritors of "Western" education, e.g. the lion as king, the wise owl, the cunning vixen, etc. 4.5*

27labfs39
jul. 20, 2022, 11:03 am

GUATEMALA



Monastery by Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
Published 2014, 158 p.

The Polish Boxer was Eduardo Halfon's first book to be translated into English and was highly acclaimed. Its narrator, Eduardo, appears again in this series of interconnected stories. Like the author, Eduardo is a Guatemalan Jew who wanders the world, both comfortable in it and the perpetual outsider. The first and last stories take place in Israel, where Eduardo has travelled to attend his sister's Orthodox wedding. Other stories take place overlooking a Nazi submarine bunker in Breton, at a jazz salon in Harlem, and on the border of Belize. Although Eduardo is the constant, other recurring characters include the seductive Tamara and Eduardo's grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.

Beautifully written vignettes, the stories are almost plotless and capture snapshots of life. As the author writes in Prologue at Saint-Nazaire,

I watch a group of children running around on the roof of the submarine base. An outing from some French school, I think, and I think about the word trivial, about the importance of the trivial in art, in literature. Isn't the trivial, after all, the raw materials of the short story writer? Aren't anecdotes that seem trivial—that is to say, insignificant—the very clay with which the short story writer carries out his craft and shapes his art? All of life, I think, is codified in these trivial, minuscule, transparent details—details that seem not to contain anything of importance (a leaf of grass, wrote Walt Whitman, is no less than the journey-work of the stars). A great short story writer, I think as the children play on the old submarine base, knows how to make something immense of the brief, something transcendent of the insignificant, knows how to transform nothing at all into a few pages that contain everything...

Although I don't think it necessary to have read The Polish Boxer in order to enjoy Monastery, I will seek it out simply to enjoy more of Halfon's trivial transcendences.

28Gypsy_Boy
jul. 21, 2022, 6:40 am

It's always wonderful to make a new discovery, to learn about a new writer. Thanks for this review and for the quote. I have some hunting to do!

29labfs39
jul. 24, 2022, 6:43 pm

>28 Gypsy_Boy: Thank you, I hope you enjoy him if/when you get to his books.

30Gypsy_Boy
jul. 26, 2022, 7:02 am

Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes's El Indio reminded me, in a way, of Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (The Villagers), about the brutal subjugation of the indigenous peoples in Ecuador. Lopez y Fuentes is much less vivid, but no less compelling, writing about Mexico in this 1935 novel. The book is written in simple language, almost like a children's story. But this tale, which feels occasionally almost like a parable, it gathers moral force as it proceeds, becoming a damning indictment by the end. I don’t know what Lopez’s reputation is in Mexico today, but I would be eager to read more of him.

31labfs39
oct. 1, 2022, 10:50 am





Canción by Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Danial Hahn
Published 2021 and 2022, 158 p.

Eduardo Halfon's books are a pastiche of experiences, memories, family stories, and invention. His narrator, also Eduardo Halfon, both mirrors him and allows him to go beyond himself. It's impossible to tease out what is fact and what is fiction. And yet, I find it works.

...Imposter, he said in English. I was unsure whether the old novelist had said it in jest or was serious, and smiling, I told him that every writer of fiction is an imposter. Then a journalist in jacket and tie announced solemnly—without looking at me—that he couldn't see what sense it made to recount, there, at a conference of Lebanese writers, the story of a Guatemalan farmer and his herd of cows. An older woman, a literature professor, jumped up to defend me, sort of, telling the journalist—also without looking at me and talking about me as if I wasn't there—that Halfon did the same thing in his writing, that all his stories seemed to lose the thread and never go anywhere. I didn't say anything, though I could have said this: The photographer Cartier-Bresson, in order to determine the artistic merit of an image, always looked at it upside down. Or I could have said this: The best stories as Verdi knew, are written in A-flat major...

To me, the five stories in this book, hang together as a whole, and I was surprised to learn that other publishers internationally have concatenated them differently. This English translation includes The Conference, The Bedouin, Beni, Canción (the longest, comprising half the book), and Kimono on the Skin.

The book opens with the narrator attending the conference referenced above. Halfon's grandfather was born in then-Syria, now-Lebanon and through this tenuous connection, the invitation to speak was made. The irony of a Guatemalan Jew of Syrian descent being asked to speak at a Japanese conference of Lebanese writers is not lost on the narrator, yet it is also not uncommon. The author-narrator has lived in the US, Spain, Paris, and Berlin, and is frequently described in various combinations. The idea of identity being amorphous and changeable runs throughout Halfon's works. This tension of things not being what they appear to be allows the author to play with language in interesting ways.

And this, according to some of his comrades, was one of Canción's most peculiar characteristics: his manner of speaking, his way of expressing himself in short, cryptic, almost poetic phrases. He would rarely utter a long or even a complete sentence, and rarely was the meaning of his words in fact their literal meaning.

Names, identities, stories: everything is a front for something else. Meaning is layered and context-derived.

In the second story, the narrator-author introduces us to his family, rooting the narrative both in Guatemala and in Jewish culture. It also begins the family legend, told over the course of the book, of his grandfather's kidnapping by Guatemalan guerillas in 1967, during the brutal, decades-long civil war. This is the plot thread that hangs everything together and forms the backbone of the next two stories as well.

The final story bookends the work, by bringing us back to the conference. The narrator meets a Japanese woman whose grandfather survived the bombing of Hiroshima. The themes of generational trauma, family secrets, and the societal effects of war are heightened by this extreme example.

I read Halfon's Monastery earlier this summer, and it features this same hybrid narrator who travels widely, yet never strays far from Guatemala. In some ways, they, and I suspect most of Halfon's works, are really extensions and complements of one another. In fact, one publisher has released four of his novels together as one. That said, I liked Canción even more than his early work. It is incredibly rich and hangs together well. I can't wait to read more.

32kidzdoc
oct. 10, 2022, 6:59 am

Canción by Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

  

My rating:

Eduardo Halfon is one of the best known contemporary Guatemalan authors, who was born in Guatemala City in 1971, spent his first 10 years there until he and his family moved to the United States, where he attended North Carolina State University as an Industrial Engineering major, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City. His novels have won or were listed as finalists for several literary awards, including the Guatemalan National Prize for Literature and the International Latino Book Award, and in 2007 he was named one of the 39 best young Latino writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá. Three of his previous novels have been translated into English and published by Bellevue Literary Press, namely The Polish Boxer, his most famous work, Monastery and Mourning, which are all works of autofiction centered on the life of his paternal grandfather, a Jewish man born in what is now Lebanon who fled with his family in 1917 to NYC to escape a devastating famine, and subsequently emigrated to Guatemala in the 1940s.

Canción, which is the Spanish word for ‘song’, begins with the intriguing sentence “I arrived in Tokyo disguised as an Arab.” The narrator, Eduardo Halfon, is invited to a Lebanese writers’ conference in Tokyo, as the organizers mistakenly believe that he is Lebanese, a country that he has never visited. Halfon tells the audience about his paternal grandfather, and he uses this to reflect on his PGF’s past life, particularly his kidnapping in 1967, a few years before Halfon was born. This episode occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996 and was sparked by a coup d’état by leftist soldiers who were in opposition to the military government that came to power after a covert operation by the CIA led to the overthrow of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, after he instituted land reforms to return land to peasants who were displaced after the United Fruit Company, a United States multinational corporation, was given their land by previous Guatemalan leaders. Halfon’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, was kidnapped by guerrillas during an ambush, and he was ultimately released after his family paid a large ransom for his release. In addition to Halfon’s grandfather, the novel is mainly centered on two men: Benito Cáceres Domínguez (Beni), a friend of his grandfather’s and a military man who aids Halfon in his compulsory enrollment in the Guatemalan Army, who is a member of an elite wing of the army during the civil war which brutally massacred the members of an indigenous community in retaliation for a deadly assault on a group of soldiers; and Percy Amílcar Jacobs Fernández, nicknamed Canción, who was one of the guerrillas who kidnapped Halfon’s grandfather. By telling these men’s stories Halfon provides the reader with a compelling look into Guatemala during and after the civil war, and the devastation that it had on the country, and the members of one family.

Canción was a superb novel, the first one I’ve read by Eduardo Halfon, and I eagerly look forward to reading the two other books I own by him, The Polish Boxer and Monastery.

Thank you to Bellevue Literary Press for providing me with an uncorrected proof of Canción in exchange for an honest review of it.

33Gypsy_Boy
Editat: nov. 11, 2023, 12:42 pm

x

34Tess_W
maig 30, 2023, 7:40 am

Mexico

The Tiger Came to the Mountains by Silvia Moreno-Garcia This was a short story that took place in Mexico and was really a comment on the 1905 (?) revolution as played out in the fears of fending off wild animals. 27 pages free Prime reading from March, 2022. In this case, I got what I paid for! 2.5 stars

35labfs39
nov. 4, 2023, 2:19 pm

GUATEMALA



The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
Published 2012, 188 p.

The first novel by Eduarado Halfon to be published in English, it is the third novel by him that I have read. Like Monastery and Canción, the book is a series of interconnected stories that take place all over the world and are the experiences of a semi-autobiographical narrator also named Eduardo Halfon. (Fittingly the epigraph is: "I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write."—Henry Miller.)

The novel opens with the story of Eduardo teaching literature to college students (the author attended college in the US, but returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years). Although most of the students are mediocre, one stands out as exceptional. This was my favorite section of the book.

The next chapter is about the author's experience attending a conference (a common theme in his books), this time on Mark Twain in Durham, North Carolina. I love this passage:

Look, how tragic, Lewis said, pointing to a dead deer on the road. Real common said the driver, to see deer run over around these parts. It occurred to me then, as a limousine carrying a Guatemalan and a Mormon rumbled past deer carcasses toward an academic conference on Mark Twain, that I was in the wrong place. Sometimes, just briefly, I forget who I am.

Several of the chapters feature Milan Rakić, a Serbian pianist who wants to reconnect with his Gypsy roots. The title story is from a conversation Eduardo had with his grandfather, the first time he told him about his experience in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Although each story is seemingly separate, they are held together by the common narrator and themes such as identity in a global world, a search for meaning, and, as Eduardo says, the fact that "there's always more than one truth to everything."

I love Halfon's writing, which is personal yet universal, and often with a sardonic humor. I will happily read anything else by Halfon that is translated into English.