BANCA DE TEXTO. UMA BIBLIOTECA PESSOAL. BY/PAR/POR STARK! Uma grinalda de Andrea Carvalho STARK
Theatrical training is the standard answer for what distinguishes our acting cousins from across the pond. And it's hard not to marvel at the virtuosic command of speech; the way Dench, Mirren and O'Toole make music out of spoken thought. Steeped in Shakespeare and a culture committed to live performance, they have by necessity developed their physical instruments and, in particular, that region of the body that lies between the back of the throat and the tip of the tongue.
And in Venus, when O'Toole's Maurice recites - no, verbally caresses - Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") to the young woman he has fallen haplessly in lust with, storm-clouds of emotion blow in, as if his articulation carried the very beauty and loss animating the poem's vision.
But it's not just glorious sound that sets British veterans apart. It's their ability to wring complex meanings from a single line. They invite us not just into their characters' minds but into their intricate thought processes as well. Still, it's not a strictly realistic affair. These talents are drawn from a theatrical heritage that recognises drama as more than a slice of life. Too many US actors have become enslaved to a form of behavioural banality in which the highest value is placed on mimicking everyday life; at its worst fetishising the commonplace at the expense of the revelatory.
Let's face it: realism for realism's sake grows tedious. But don't blame the Method, whose greatest practitioners, such as Marlon Brando, were master stylists, selecting and distilling their actions to endow an appearance of reality with interpretive understanding. When Dench's Barbara, a human-scale villain with Shakespearean cunning, mordantly describes the pupils in her school as "proles", one assumes that not only has this fearsome history teacher read George Orwell, but the actress herself is conversant with the author - and knows how to italicise a cultural marker for maximum effect. The same is true for Winslet in Little Children, who, in playing a passionate woman trapped in a suburban New-England version of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, conveys a fine-grained literary understanding of her situation that's appropriate to her over-educated character.
One doesn't get this sort of intellectual frisson from, say, Leonardo DiCaprio - not because he doesn't read (I'm sure he had plenty of Joseph Conrad to dip into on the set of Blood Diamond) but because the roles that often come with his level of stardom have little interest in these, shall we say, more delicate values. Action films don't have time to revel in the inner life, never mind the colour, nuance and literary rumblings of words. Distracted by irony for too long, an adventure hero could easily find himself with a bullet in his brain.
So maybe the difference has as much to do with the types of independent films British actors are likely to star in as it does with the qualities the best of them bring to their work. There's something mutually reinforcing about this scene, which is of course nourished by a long-standing and still vibrant theatrical tradition that accepts ageing and doesn't need to prettify everything for a big, phony close-up.
Of course, the Brits and Yanks aren't the only ones in contention for best actor and actress honours this year. Spain's Penélope Cruz, the muse of Pedro Almodóvar's hypnotic, if rambling, Volver, and Canada's Ryan Gosling, who definitely earned the praise heaped on him for the otherwise uneven Half Nelson, are also in the running. And, yes, there are homegrown talents who can go toe to toe with anyone. Forest Whitaker, who has struggled to find parts commensurate with his gifts, is allowed, in the British film The Last King of Scotland, to present a depiction of humanised villainy that doesn't lose track of historical atrocities. And Meryl Streep inspires us to once again pay homage, as she offers glimpses of crow's feet and genuine misery in the over-the- top fashion-world comedy The Devil Wears Prada.
But there's something quintessentially American about The Pursuit of Happyness. It's the grand narrative of rags-to-Wall-Street-riches, based on a real-life African-American success story. It's the American dream, in other words, and not the great American drama, the latter having traditionally set out to puncture myths rather than reinforce them. Will Smith delivers a winning performance but, as gritty as this role may be compared with his Men in Black character, there's something prepackaged about its sentiments. We know our cues to cry, and the tears flow out of compassion for hardship rather than from any insight into ourselves.
By playing a senior-citizen lothario with problematic post-op plumbing in Venus, O'Toole is venturing into territory that makes us not quite sure how to respond. We don't really want Maurice to obtain the object of his affection, who is, after all, a teenager. Sympathy mixes uneasily with shame. We've entered a realm of ambivalence in which the dramatic conflict leaves us in a state of bewilderment. Philosophy, as Aristotle told us, begins in wonder. And Venus forces us to ponder the revivifying enchantment and destructive chaos of Eros.
Nothing is more involving than observing a figure lost in thought. Don't believe me? Take Hamlet from your shelf. Mirren exploits this brilliantly in The Queen, which requires her character to maintain a stoical majesty even as her world is threatening to come apart at the seams after the public outcry over the royal family's muted response to Princess Diana's death. "Nowadays, people want glamour and tears, the grand performance," she says to Michael Sheen's Tony Blair. "I'm not very good at that. I never have been. I prefer to keep my feelings to myself. And foolishly, that's what I thought the people wanted from their queen - not to make a fuss or wear one's heart on one's sleeve. Duty first, self second. That's how I was brought up; that's all I've ever known."
As Mirren speaks these words, you see the battle between tradition and modernity subtly writing itself across her face. But that's not all you get. You're also given a view of an actress able to subsume herself so wholly in a part that it becomes, not a vehicle for the star, but a vision of a woman it would have seemed impossible to ever really know.
Our protagonist has two tearful moments, and neither extracts more from the situation than is suitable. The first occurs during a private moment of breakdown on the grounds of Balmoral. The Queen is swaying under pressure to ratchet up the public display of her grief. But her poise is restored by the sight of an imperial stag reminding her of her own - increasingly vulnerable - glory. The second comes when she visits a neighbouring estate to pay homage to the recently hunted-down animal. Eyeing the carcass, she notices that the creature was badly wounded. "Let's hope he didn't suffer too much," she says sombrely. And then, without further ado, she crisply remarks: "Please pass my congratulations to your guest."
Mirren knows we're not supposed to warm to her character. She's playing a queen, not a chum at a barbecue, and her mission isn't to seduce but to clarify. Ironically, by proceeding with such scrupulous British tact, she manages to accomplish both.
February 22, 2007 08:30 AM
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/02/on_good_authority.html
The great and not good ... Allen Ginsberg reading his poetry in Washington Square, August 1966. Photograph: AP
A couple of weeks ago, Howard Jacobson wrote a typically lucid piece about the independent Jewish voice. As usual, I felt myself getting all twisted up about what I really thought about the actions of Israel. Then he mentioned Amos Oz and David Grossman. A gentle feeling of relief fell over me. I thought: the novelists will know the right thing.
But I soon realised that I had made the automatic assumption that modern novelists are good. It was an instinctive extrapolation: if someone writes brilliant prose, they must be an unimpeachable human being.
Think of the great moral dilemmas of the age - terrorism, global warming, multiculturalism. The ethical climate is not set until the novelists have spoken. On September 12th, 2001, it was the novelists who got whole pages to themselves. I remember the same sense of relief: Amis has spoken, McEwen has set it in context. We did not want to hear from the politicians, or the defence experts, or the philosophers even; paradoxically, it was the fiction writers who were needed to frame the most outrageous non-fiction event of our time.
It is not only that we expect writers to navigate the choppy waters of moral confusion; we expect them to be good in private. The Bloomsberries slept with everyone with a pulse; now, there is a huge fuss if a writer so much as changes his agent. William Boyd is almost as famous for his happy marriage as he is for his novels. If Zadie Smith decided to make like the Beats, ingesting every substance known to man and getting into bar brawls, there would probably be questions asked in the House.
It was once enough that the words alone dazzled. Everyone is talking about Auden this week; we are reminded of his naughty dash to America at the first hint of war. I forgive him that just for the first verse of Lullaby. I slightly wish that TS Eliot had not skirted the edges of anti-Semitism, had not been unkind to his wife, but he left us Prufrock; the mermaids singing are absolution enough. I even forgive Hemingway the misogynism, because he invented Lady Brett Ashley.
There is the Parker paradox in all this. By modern standards, Dorothy Parker was not at all good. She drank too much and cut her wrists and let her dogs shit all over her bedroom floor. But she also fought like a tiger for Sacco and Vanzetti, and declined to dance to HUAC's tune. Even if it were not for the poetry and short stories, I still say Mrs Parker 1 - The Rest 0. But she has still gone down in popular imagination as one of the flakes, gin at lunchtime and dodgy love affairs.
Maybe we are asking too much of the writers. It's hard enough to attend to plot, and perfect prose, and playing with the form, without having to be a moral paragon. Should the expectation of goodness not be confined to the page?
But the cocktail party and several small soirees which honoured his memory may mark the start of a fightback by enthusiasts for a man whose complications have led to a uniquely split reputation.
"He has been much criticised for leaving Britain when he did," said Dr Rhodes, who lectures in literature and visual culture at Sussex University. "Traditionalists condemned him for that while the left and radicals denounced the way he changed his views, his religious conversion and the way he seemed to retreat into lyrical poetry. But it's hard to see those opinions accounting for the lack of interest among today's students."
There are smaller initiatives which attest to Auden's enduring appeal. In York taxi drivers have adopted the poet for a Culture Cab scheme, in which drivers memorise Auden's work to make visitors feel welcome to the city where he was born. It is an initiative typical of what academics call the "Four Weddings phenomenon", which has given Auden - or a small number of his 400-plus poems - a mass audience, while specialist work dwindles on his life and verse.
Hugh Haughton, lecturer in English and related literature at York University and another speaker at the conference, said: "It is a mystery that he is not more studied, but this could be a reason. We are comfortable with modernists, or with poets of the everyday such as Larkin. But what do we do when faced with someone who could do both? Auden's ability to travel between different types of poetry and to master them all seems to be hard for us to digest. It is like dealing with two people - a parallel with the problems people have in coping with his Marxist early years and conservative views later on."
The revivalists welcome both controversy and the likes of York's Culture Cabs as aides to Auden studies, along with developing campaigns for a memorial in York. The city's W H Auden Society yesterday raised Camparis to the poet's memory at his birthplace - now a chartered accountants' office - at precisely 6pm, when Auden always had one.
The society's president, Hugh Bernays, who runs a local arts centre, said: "He regarded cocktails at 5.55pm as impossible and at 6.05pm as outrageously late."
The betrayal and the brilliance
When I was a student in the 60s, people who cared about poetry would fight their corner passionately. Some thought that all virtue lay with the Black Mountain poets, or with William Carlos Williams, or with the Beats. Most acknowledged Eliot somewhere in their pantheon. There were many fanatics for Pound. Not many were as enthusiastic as I was about Auden.
You could say he had betrayed his gift - which is what Larkin said - when he went to the States. You could say he had betrayed Modernism itself, by not taking seriously enough the command to Make It New. You could say he had ruined poems with revision, or suppressed his best work, such as Spain.
What happened after his death in 1973 was very interesting: a gradual process by which all kinds of Auden poems found their way into public consciousness. The old rows we used to have were forgotten. Auden's new readers came at him with a less prejudiced eye.
We began to learn more about his life, and more about his work. There is an amazing amount of it, including a great body of prose writings. It is still in the process of being published. The question mark that hung like a cloud over his reputation has moved on, and hangs over others. Auden at 100 seems well vindicated. Happy birthday, Uncle Wiz!
James Fenton
| Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume I By: Regina Marler
|
From the mid-1930s onward, the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax led expeditions into the Deep South, searching for authentic blues and folk singers. Thanks to those efforts, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie made their first recordings and a template for American popular music was set.
Early in 1938, Mário de Andrade, the municipal secretary of culture here, dispatched a Folklore Research Mission to the northeastern hinterlands of Brazil with a similar objective. His intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and film began transforming the region's distinctive culture.
Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes and even children at play.
But the Brazilian mission's collection ended up languishing in vaults here. Only now, after nearly 70 years, is the registry of what de Andrade called a "prodigious treasure doomed to disappear" finally available, in the form of a six- CD boxed set that documents the roots of virtually every important style of modern Brazilian popular music, from samba to mangue beat.
"This is an important event because all of the main tendencies, whether European, African, or Indian in origin, are represented and are detectable," said Marcos Branda Lacerda, the director of the CD project, organized by the government here in Brazil's largest and most prosperous city. "Everything is encompassed, and when you listen, you can hear the influences that would radiate outward" and make Brazilian music the global force that it is today.
The CD set, called "Música Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste 1938," consists of more than seven hours of music, drawn from the 1,299 tracks by 80 performers, totaling nearly 34 hours, that the folklore team recorded in five states in northern and northeastern Brazil during the first half of 1938.
Many of the styles documented on the records proved to be major influences on the Tropicalismo movement, which emerged here in the 1960s and today has international admirers who include David Byrne, Beck and Devendra Banhart. The founders of that movement, mainly Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, currently Brazil's minister of culture, come from the interior of the northeastern state of Bahia and openly acknowledge their debt.
"This is the music I heard as a kid in my father's store, and it's where all the richness and strength of Brazilian popular music comes from," Zé said in an interview. "As sons of the Portuguese, Caetano and Gil and all the rest of us tropicalistas absorbed this folk influence, transmuted it and then took it to the world."
Zé also noted that the music of the Brazilian northeast that came from Portugal was itself a result of cultural mixing, especially from the Arab domination there during the medieval era. The lyrics of some songs in the compilation date back to troubadours' tales from that era, but the Arab presence manifested itself mainly in a vocal style characterized by a fondness for bent notes.
"That influence is still there in Brazilian popular music today," he said. "I hear it most clearly and beautifully when Caetano sings. He has developed a sophisticated, inventive way to use these modulations that were quite common in the singers we heard there in the backlands of the northeast."
Though the expedition's main focus seemed to be on rhythms, guitarists are likely to be especially interested in the third and fourth discs, which include field recordings of duos known as repentistas. Like the blues, this guitar-based genre emphasizes call and response and often employs the mixture of braggadocio and insults that Americans know as "the dozens."
Thirty years ago, after a visit here, this reporter played some recordings of repentistas for the American primitivist guitarist John Fahey. As someone interested in folk music around the world, Fahey expressed curiosity about the tunings and scales they used and pointed out that some of the gruff, raspy, somewhat nasal vocals reminded him of Son House and Bukka White.
"It gives me chills just to think of the similarities" between American blues and the music of the northeast, Zé said.
Of the three main cultural streams that have blended to make Brazil what it is, the Amerindian element is less represented on the discs than the European and African components, Lacerda said. But the collection contains songs performed by bandas de pifano, the fife and drum groups that are Indian in origin, as well as recordings of praias, a largely Indian musical ritual that has all but vanished from modern Brazil.
The original project was the idea of de Andrade, one of Brazil's most prominent intellectuals in the 20th century. A poet, novelist, critic, art historian, musicologist and public official, de Andrade had studied to be a pianist but in 1923 became one of the founders of the modernist literary movement, which dominated Brazil's cultural scene for decades to come.
"By the 1930s, Mário de Andrade and others felt an urgency to register popular manifestations of culture before it was too late," said Flávia Camargo Toni, a musicologist who wrote part of the liner notes for the set. "Life was completely isolated, and few people had traveled. So he felt he had to take advantage of the moment."
During World War II, copies of the recordings were sent to the Library of Congress in Washington. A decade ago, Rykodisc released a single disc sampler, co-produced by Mickey Hart, drummer of the Grateful Dead, and called "The Discoteca Collection," as part of the Library of Congress' Endangered Music Project, but it was not until 2000 that restoration efforts began here.
"When I first saw the material back in the 1980s, the roof was falling down, water was leaking in, and I thought we were going to lose it all," Lacerda said. "But I was greatly surprised when I found most of the 78s to be in good condition, and when they weren't, we were lucky enough to find duplicates that we could copy straight to CD and then eliminate a lot of the hisses."
During its travels, the Andrade expedition also collected musical instruments and other objects, and filmed and photographed dances and festivals. The result of those undertakings have been put on display at the municipal cultural center here, including the team's notebooks from the field, the recording equipment that it used, and transcriptions of interviews with performers.
At the time the recordings were made, Brazil was ruled by a dictatorship that had outlawed Afro-Brazilian religious practices. As a result, the folklore team required a letter of authorization from the police in order to do its work, and "a goodly portion of the objects they collected, especially the drums, came from confiscated material at police stations," said Vera Lúcia Cardim de Cerqueira, a curator at the center.
For all of Brazil's musical sophistication and exposure to international styles of music in recent years, that heritage continues to be relevant. Zé referred specifically to "What's Happening in Pernambuco: New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast," which will be released on Byrne's Luaka Bop label on Feb. 7 and which he said was saturated with rhythms derived from those the folklore expedition documented.
In the past, Brazil "has not had a culture of preservation," Camargo Toni said, complicating efforts to place the country's musical evolution in its proper context. But with the mission's recordings available at last, she said, Brazilians now have "the possibility of listening to the past thinking of the future."
"We can show what we were, what we are today and how that came to be," she said.
 |  Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. Photograph: AP |
"It is inevitable that we will end up joining with Spain," the author of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis told the newspaper Diario de Noticias in Lisbon at the weekend.
Saramago, who has lived on the Spanish island of Lanzarote for the past 10 years, said a united Iberian peninsula of some 55 million people would benefit both Portugal and Spain.
He denied that the Portuguese people, or their culture, would lose out in a union with Spain. "We would not stop speaking Portuguese or writing in our language and, with 10 million people, we could do nothing but gain from such closeness and territorial, administrative and structural integration," he said.
The 1998 Nobel prize winner, who left Portugal in the early 1990s after a row with the then conservative government over his controversial novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, denied he was motivated by anger with his home country.
Critics, however, claimed Saramago was giving vent to anti-Portuguese feelings.
"Saramago's vision belongs to the 19th century, not the 21st," former foreign minister and Madrid ambassador Martins da Cruz, told Diario de Noticias yesterday. "It is very easy to hate Portugal from abroad. What is difficult is to defend our interests, and that is what Saramago fails to do."
Any attempt to unite Portugal with Spain would run into considerable opposition. Portuguese commentators already complain loudly whenever major Spanish banks and companies buy up Portuguese counterparts.
The two countries also row over water, with Portugal complaining that too much is taken out of shared major rivers such as the Tagus and the Douro by the Spaniards.
A poll carried out three years ago found the Portuguese considered the second most important date in their history to be the day in 1640 when they regained independence from Spain. Only the 1974 Carnation Revolution, ending a 40-year rightwing dictatorship, beat it.
Saramago is not the only so-called "iberista" in Portugal, however. A poll in the Sol weekly newspaper earlier this year revealed that 28% of his countrymen were in favour of union with Spain.
A similar poll in Spain's Tiempo magazine found 45% of Spaniards would approve of union - as long as Madrid was the capital and republican Portugal could be persuaded to take on Spain's royal family.
Saramago confirmed his own union with Spain yesterday, marrying Spanish journalist Pilar del Río at a ceremony in her home town of Castril, near Granada, according to the Cadena Ser radio station. The small civil ceremony was reportedly carried out because they had failed to register an earlier wedding in Lisbon.
I usually recoil from having my writing defined by my sexuality. But a recent blog post here has given me pause for thought.
I am the author of a book featuring a gay main character and was recently asked in an interview if I considered myself to be a gay writer. My first impulse (after realising the question was not meant literally) was to pontificate. I answered along the lines of "I don't want to be pigeonholed ... my book isn't geared towards any specific readership ... I hope it has something to offer everyone". In other words, the usual crap.
It was only a few of days later, after reading Justin Gowers' blog about the dearth of published gay fiction, that I began to feel guilty about the river of truisms I had instinctively spewed at my hapless interviewer. It was not that what I'd said was untrue exactly, but rather that I hadn't even properly considered my answer before I gave it. It occurred to me that maybe it wasn't even my place to figure out whether or not I should be labelled a gay writer. But in rejecting the term, what was I saying about the validity of gay as a specific genre - and indeed why had I automatically assumed that the genre was limiting?
Ideologically, there ought to be no shame in being branded a writer of gay fiction: in fact it should be the opposite. As pointed out in many of the postings in response to Gowers' blog, gay writing is a difficult genre to define, but is nonetheless one that has attained considerable literary kudos, with luminaries that include Jake Arnott, Alan Hollinghurst and Sarah Waters (I categorise these authors thus a little hesitantly, since I don't actually know whether they object to the term or celebrate it - or care one way or other).
On the flipside, it can hardly escape anyone's attention that there is no "straight" genre, or at least that if there is then it needs no label because it encompasses everything but gay - and sometimes even that. It makes one question what good all this endless compartmentalising does anyway. Isn't that why Stephen King gets upset about not being taken seriously? Why, it's almost enough to drive a writer into an anarchic frenzy - screw those fools who feel the ridiculous need for a system of classification in order to navigate their libraries and bookstores!
Anarchy aside, if I'm totally honest my real problem is that I have one eye perpetually trained on book sales. Given my precarious position as a first time author, the last thing I want to do is rock the boat by discouraging potential readers: who cares if they end up deciding the only thing the book is good for is propping up tables? So long as they've bought it. But is it really ethical to mislead the non-gay into buying my novel by waxing vague about its genre?
Still, if I'm really going to be that mercenary about it, my position probably ought to reflect the places my book has so far got the most reception: it is the gay-oriented magazines and papers that have shown the greatest interest in it. And since it is notoriously difficult for new novelists to get reviews and attention, if for no better reason, I think I'm going to define myself out of gratitude. So do I be a gay writer? Hell, yes.
Gay books with the potential to sell to a mainstream audience are the only ones UK publishers seem interested in. We could and should do a lot better.
Not enough on the shelves ... Gay's the word bookshop in London. Photograph: Graham Turner
That
Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, an instant gay classic, was published by one of this country's most distinguished literary imprints, Jonathan Cape, back in 1979 and remains in print today. Grief received ecstatic reviews on publication in America and beat The Night Watch by Sarah Waters to win the 2007 Stonewall Book Award for literature, but no British publisher wanted to take a punt on it.
Holleran's latest novel is a quiet book, unlikely, perhaps, to set the cash tills ringing, but I am still at a loss to understand why it was passed over by UK publishers. Nor is this a one-off. The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, whose biography of Patricia Highsmith was shortlisted for a Whitbread prize in 2003, was rejected by every mainstream British publisher before finally being picked up by the an independent (Canongate). Yet the novel had already been sold to Simon & Schuster in America, notched up a clutch of foreign sales and attracted interest from several movie producers by the time Canongate made their offer. That Wilson found a British publisher at all was due largely to the perseverance of his heavy-hitting literary agent, Clare Alexander.
Why are so few quality gay-themed novels published every year in this country? It isn't because there aren't gay men in positions of influence within the British book trade. And yet when I worked in publishing, I noticed that gay men would pass on gay books crossing their desks. My late boss, the literary agent Desmond Elliott, rejected a manuscript titled Better to Reign in Hell by Dennis Pratt. It was subsequently published by Jonathan Cape in 1968 under the title The Naked Civil Servant.
American publishing houses such as St Martin's Press, Carroll & Graf, Suspect Thoughts Press and The Dial Press are bringing out books by promising, exciting gay and lesbian writers like Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Patrick Moore, John Weir, Patrick Ryan, Bett Williams, Glenn Belverio and Barry McCrea. In this country, you are more likely to discover exciting new gay writers in the blogosphere, or in queer literary magazines like Chroma, than on a publisher's list.
British publishers, it seems, are only interested in gay writers who will cross over to a mainstream market. But American publishers have shown that gay publishing can be a potentially lucrative market. The Back Passage by James Lear, the nom du porn of British author and journalist Rupert Smith, was turned down by every British publisher before it was snapped up by an American publisher, Cleis Press. The Back Passage, and Lear's follow-up novel, Hot Valley, are currently at numbers one and two on Amazon UK's lesbian & gay bestsellers list.
Perhaps it is wrong to lay the blame for the lack of gay and lesbian titles available to bookshop browsers at the feet of publishers, however. I think it's true to say that we get the books we deserve. And sadly most young gay men today are more likely to read celebrity airhead Paris Hilton's Confessions of an Heiress than a generation-defining novel like Holleran's Dancer from the Dance.
Today I have so much to do
I must kill memory once and for all
I must turn soul to stone
I must learn to live again
Unless...Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I've foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.
These words are from Anna Akhmatova's poem "The Sentence," translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer. Akhmatova was a remarkable woman whose deeply felt poems chronicled Stalin's Terror, World War II, and what is called the Thaw in Russia after Stalin's death. She also explored her own local fame, her fall from grace, and her international renown shortly before her death.
With poems far tighter and more powerful than any history, Akhmatova brings readers in with color, emotion, and confession.
When it comes to Russia, all expatriates - from the most fearless investors to the most knowledgeable scholars - are humbled. Most acknowledge that this ancient country nearly 20 years after the fall of Communism is a steep learning curve. No expat self-help text is worthy of this messy epic.
For those moving here, it might be suggested that the appropriate preparation is a lifetime of study. For most of us, it's too late for that. The next best thing is delving into the poems and life of Akhmatova, a confessional, romantic, provocative poet who gave a voice to millions of Russians in the 20th century. Her poem "The Sentence," part of her moving "Requiem," was finally published in 1989, 100 years after her birth.
Akhmatova's own "sentence" was to see her son, lovers and friends nearly destroyed by the Soviet authorities for their "anti-Soviet" natures. Her first husband, Nikolay Grumilyov, was executed. Her son Lev was imprisoned, and even a poem praising Stalin did not win his release. Her friends Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov died after being tormented by the authorities; she eulogized them in her poems. She watched horrified as her prodigy Joseph Brodsky was arrested for "parasitism." Akhmatova herself lived like a vagabond, hand-to-mouth, in disgrace with the party, for many years.
Yet there is triumph to Akhmatova's own tragic story. Elaine Feinstein's book, "Anna of All the Russias," offers up a thoughtful portrait. Feinstein makes it clear that Akhmatova is iconic, "not of dissidence and resistance alone but as a poet of womanly feeling in a brutal world." In an introduction to her poems, Brodsky wrote: "They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always survives history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that."
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Mr. Vargas Llosa could have plucked this scenario from his personal recollections of living under dictatorial rule in Peru. But he tells this story to make a more universal point: Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons.
Mr. Vargas Llosa's bold ideas and expressive language may make him one of Latin America's finest writers--"Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," "The Time of the Hero" and "Conversation in the Cathedral" are just a few of his classic works--but those same traits didn't necessarily serve him well at the polls. After running for president of Peru in 1990 and losing to Alberto Fujimori, Mr. Vargas Llosa decided to devote his full attention to writing. He now lives in Lima for about three months of the year, spending the rest of his time in Europe.
"I am not going to participate in professional politics again," he says. And he doesn't have to. Mr. Vargas Llosa has found an effective way to expose the destructive nature of dictatorships, while underscoring the importance of individual liberty and free will. He just picks up his pen. "Words are acts," he says, echoing Jean-Paul Sartre. "Through writing, one can change history."
During the 1990 presidential campaign Mr. Varga Llosa emphasized the need for a market economy, privatization, free trade, and above all, the dissemination of private property. He didn't exactly receive a welcome reception. "It was a very different era, because to speak of private property, private enterprise, the market--it was sacrilegious," he says. "I was fairly vulnerable in that campaign," he continues, "because I didn't lie. I said exactly what we were going to do. It was a question of principle and also . . . I thought it would be impossible to do liberal, radical reforms without having the mandate to do them."
Now, almost 20 years later, the landscape looks very different. Mr. Vargas Llosa explains that he was propelled into politics when then-president Alan García, at the time a socialist and a populist, attempted to nationalize the banks. Today he is running the country again, but "now, the same Alan García is the champion of capitalism in Peru!" Mr. Vargas Llosa laughs merrily. "It's funny, no?"
"We have a big problem with Chávez," Mr. Vargas Llosa admits. "He's a demagogue and a 19th century socialist. He is a destabilizing force for democracy in Latin America, but what he thought would be so easy hasn't been so easy. There has been a lot of resistance."
One of Mr. Chávez's major errors was his refusal last month to renew the license of popular Radio Caracas Television, or RCTV. "International hostility was enormous," Mr. Vargas Llosa notes. "For me, most important was that the protests in Venezuela were very strong, in particular the sectors that were once very sympathetic to him, for example the students in the Central University of Venezuela, not only the students in the private universities."
It is such infringements of free speech that highlight why in places like Latin America, reading a good novel can be much more than just a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. "I think in countries where basic problems are still unresolved, where a society remains so traumatized by deep conflicts--as in Latin America or in Third World countries in general--the novel is not only a form of entertainment, but it substitutes for something that these societies are not accustomed to seeing--information, for example," Mr. Vargas Llosa says. "If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on." Literature can also be a form of resistance, perhaps the only way to express discontent in the absence of political parties.
This all sounds true enough, but in a dictatorship, wouldn't literature be censored as well? "In undeveloped countries, censorship doesn't reach that point of subtlety, as it did in Spain for example," Mr. Vargas Llosa explains. "Because in undeveloped countries, the dictators are, well, functioning illiterates that don't think that literature can be dangerous."
To give one example, Mr. Vargas Llosa's first novel, "The Time of the Hero," about life at a military school in Lima, was burned publicly in Peru by a military dictatorship in the 1960s. But the authorities apparently didn't find the book enough of a political threat to ban it outright, and in the end it was Mr. Vargas Llosa who reaped the benefits of the public burning. "It became a best seller!" He exclaims, laughing.
Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. "I went to Iraq after the invasion," he tells me. "When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects. . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions." He concludes: "Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes."
Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq? "I was against it at the beginning," he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. "Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin." He changed his mind about the invasion: "Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt."
Mr. Vargas Llosa's broad, visceral hatred of dictatorships in part stems from personal experience, in particular growing up in 1950s Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. "All the political parties were prohibited, there was strict censorship of radio and the press," he explains. "The university had many professors in exile and many student prisoners . . . this is the atmosphere in which a boy of my generation entered adulthood."
This period is the backdrop for "Conversation in the Cathedral," which Mr. Vargas Llosa said would be the work that he would rescue from a fire. The brilliant, four-volume novel rarely addresses Odría directly, rather zooming in on relationships between ordinary Peruvians from all levels of society. With unembellished prose, Mr. Vargas Llosa plunges you right into the heart of a nation without hope. "It's a novel in which I wanted to show what I lived through in through in those years, how the dictatorship didn't limit itself to censorship or prohibiting political life, no!" Mr. Vargas Llosa tells me. "The dictatorship created a system that impregnated every act of life."
And herein lies the power of Mr. Vargas Llosa's work: He finds that tyranny takes its toll in places we hadn't even thought to look. As for the value of freedom, perhaps he puts it best in "The Feast of the Goat": "It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will."
Ms. Parker is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
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