Portuguese may disappear from the first-year timetable at Cambridge from September next year. The university is considering whether the language should be taught only in the second and fourth year. The third year is spent abroad.
The university has been surprised at the anger this has provoked and has retreated somewhat. Dr Kate Pretty, pro vice-chancellor, admits Cambridge has "gone back to the drawing board as a result of the tumult". The Brazilian embassy had expressed "surprise and disappointment".
Pretty is quick to point out that the proposal was aired because of stretched teaching capacity, rather than falling student demand. "Portuguese will not be axed," she says. "We need to make our provision fit the teaching capacity." There are no changes afoot for other languages, such as Russian and Czech, she says.
Cambridge asks all its applicants to have a language to GCSE level, regardless of which degree subject they want to pursue. "We are different in this respect to many other universities," she says. "Literature is also an important component of our language degrees. Some university courses are primarily language-based, so we have a specialised interest in the sorts of students we want."
Her outlook for modern languages at universities, whether at degree level or as an extra-curricular activity, is mixed.
"I think universities are beginning to see the effects of being able to drop languages at school before GCSE. We have a very active language centre where you can study up to 150 languages at basic to advanced level. More and more students are making use of this.
"At the same time, we used to have a set of lower-level certificates for languages that were the equivalent to a GCSE. Students don't seem to want to do this so much any more."
A guide for those who don't read, but wish they did
By Alan Riding
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Renaud Monfourny/ Les Inrockuptibles
Pierre Bayard, the author of "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read."
PARIS: It may well be that too many books are published, but by good fortune not all must be read. In practice, primed by publishers, critics, teachers, authors and word-of-mouth, a form of natural selection limits essential reading to those classics and best sellers that become part of civilized intellectual and social discourse.
Of course, many people don't get through these books either and, long before Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" is name-dropped, they worry constantly about being exposed as philistines.
Now Pierre Bayard, a Paris University literature professor, has come to their rescue with a survivor's guide to life in the chattering classes. And it is evidently much in need. "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" has become a best seller here, with translation rights snapped up across Europe and under negotiation in Britain and the United States.
"I am surprised because I hadn't imagined how guilty nonreaders feel," Bayard, 52, said in an interview. "With this book, they can shake off their guilt without psychoanalysis, so it's much cheaper."
Here, then, Bayard reassures them that there is no obligation to read. He boasts of getting away with lecturing to students on books that he has either not read or has merely skimmed. And he recalls passionate exchanges with people who also have not read the book under discussion.
To prove he at least knows how to research, he further cites writers like Montaigne, who could not remember what he had read, and Paul Valéry, who found ways of praising authors whose books he had never opened. And he finds characters in novels by Graham Greene, David Lodge and others who cheerfully question the need to read at all.
Having demonstrated that nonreaders are in good company, Bayard then offers tips on how to cover up ignorance of a "must read" book.
Meeting a book's author can be particularly tricky. Here, Bayard said, there is no need to display knowledge of the book since the author already has his own ideas about it. Rather, he said, the answer is "to speak well of it without entering into details." Indeed, all the author needs to hear is that "one has loved what he has written."
Even in literary households, domestic life is another potentially hazardous zone because people often want their spouses and partners to share their love of a particular book. And when this happens, Bayard said, they can both inhabit a "secret universe." But if only one has read the book, silent empathy may offer the best way out.
Students, he noted from experience, are skilled at opining about books they have not read, building on elements he may have provided them in a lecture. This approach can also work in the more exposed arena of social gatherings: the book's cover, reviews and other public reaction to it, gossip about the author and even the ongoing conversation can all provide food for sounding informed.
One alternative, he said, is to try to change the subject. Another is actually to admit not having read a particular book at the same time as suggesting knowledge of the so-called "collective library" into which it fits (as in, "Well, of course, I have read 'Ulysses' and hope to get to 'Finnegans Wake' soon").
However, Bayard's most daring suggestion is that nonreaders talk about themselves, using the pretext of the book without dwelling on its contents. In this way, he said, they are forced to tap their imagination and, in effect, invent their own book.
"To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth more than the universe of books," he writes.
That Bayard enjoys the role of iconoclast is evident in the titles of some of his earlier books, including "How to Improve Failed Literary Works," in which he examines "failed" books by Proust, Marguerite Duras and others, and "Inquiry into Hamlet," in which he sets out to prove that Claudius did not murder his brother and Hamlet's father, the king of Denmark.
With his new book, he is in a sense still more subversive because "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is not really what it appears to be. "It is told by a fictional personality who boasts about not reading and is obviously not me," he explained. "This is not a book written by a nonreader."
But he chose this device, he said, because he wanted to help people conquer their fear of culture by challenging the way that literature is presented to both students and the public at large in France.
"We are taught only one way of reading," he said. "Students are told to read the book, then to fill out a form detailing everything they have read. It's a linear approach that serves to enshrine books. People now come up to me to describe the cultural wounds they suffered at school. 'You have to read all of Proust.' They were traumatized."
"They see culture as a huge wall, as a terrifying specter of 'knowledge,'" he went on. "But we intellectuals, who are avid readers, know there are many ways of reading a book. You can skim it, you can start and not finish it, you can look at the index. You learn to live with a book."
So, yes, he conceded, his true aim is actually to make people read more — but with more freedom. "I want people to learn to live with books," he said. "I want to help people organize their own paths through culture. Also those outside the written word, those who are so attached to the image that it's difficult to bring them back."
Then, he was asked, why did he write a book that could pass as a primer to dumbing-down?
"I like to write funny books," he said. "I try to use humor to deal with complex subjects."
P.S. I was tempted not to — but I did read Bayard's book.
Sam Jordison doesn't think much of Henry James, and told us so on this site recently without any Jamesian syntactical beating about the bush. "Wading through his books seems to me to be the literary equivalent of wearing a very stiff and uncomfortable shirt simply in order to attend an endless speech given by a dull and pompous old headmaster," said the Hammerer of Henry, though the critique was weakened somewhat by his assertion that he had read only three of his novels and by his disappointment in finding that The Turn of the Screw was not "fun".
If Jordison wants straightforward early James, might I recommend The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square? Then perhaps he could move on to the stodgier, often hard-to-assimilate later James - The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. No one who has any serious interest in the evolution of the novel can afford to ignore these books, and James's oh-so-painful efforts to exactly represent human thought and emotion, every shade of it, in prose. It will exhaust you: James said his ideal reader would get through just five pages a day; you will lose his thread in the way you do with Proust's labyrinthine sentences; but you will surely appreciate the art and the ambition.
Jordison, youthful iconoclast that he is, was also exercised by Hardy. "I thought I would never read a clumsier, less convincing or more self-indulgent piece of twaddle than Tess of the D'Urbervilles - until I read Jude the Obscure," he thundered. I have more difficulty coming to Hardy's aid here (not that he, or James for that matter, especially needs my assistance). It's several decades since I read Jude and Tess and, while finding them very powerful when I read them at an impressionable age, a more recent attempt to reread The Return of the Native proved a little sticky. Hardy's mindset and the moral vision of his characters are alien to us; again you have to ease yourself into these books, inhabit them, show some creative sympathy. They are probably not the books for the beach on which Jordison appears, in his picture, to be strolling.
But my real beef with his critique is that it's not a critique. Words like "twaddle" don't offer any substance to a debate about books; such a contribution is basically, well, twaddle. You can't bear James or Hardy ... so what? That's your problem - and your loss. If you don't want to understand late Victorian literature, just ignore it. Alternatively, read and reflect upon the whole of James (most critics would say early, middle and late James almost constitute different writers); read Leon Edel's psychologically probing five-volume life of James; assess his fruitful relationship with Edith Wharton (explored in Hermione Lee's new biography of Wharton); place him in the context of Victorian and Edwardian letters; look at his legacy; read the spate of recent fictions (Hollinghurst, Lodge, Toibin) that have circled round him - and then report back. Maybe with more than four paragraphs, the principal conclusion of which is that he's shit.
Worse still, Jordison's dismissal set the tone for the long, dismal, depressing discussion that followed. Don't get me started, screamed the commenters - about Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Woolf, Joyce, Angela Carter, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Flaubert. Yes, Flaubert! "I am currently ploughing through Madame Bovary," says the Flaubert-basher. "OK, it's an English translation so may be great in French, but seriously, every time I think of it I think I'm going to start crying. Why do people praise boring books? I'm thinking of giving up now (and I hate doing that), but I'm sick of watching crap TV to distract myself from having to read that rubbish." That's a heck of a lot of thinking - best to stick to the crap TV and leave Flaubert alone.
The School of Jordison was in full flow. "Hardy is the pits" ... "Ian McEwan - I just don't get it" ... "Mill on the Floss gave me a rabid hatred of George Elliot" (sic) ... "Ulysses has to be one of the most boring Great Books of all time" ... "DH LAWRENCE! What a lot of rubbish" ... "VIRGINIA WOOLF - self-indulgent nonsense. You're unhappy, I get it. Now shut up about it!" ... "Wordsworth, pile of arse."
It is tempting to ignore these opinions - if they can be called opinions - or to treat them for what they are: rubbish, the pits, a pile of arse. Blogging should offer the possibility of interaction and reasoned discourse; mindless abuse is, surely, not the way to proceed. Leave infantile insults to infants. Read the books and think about them; recognise that they are products of other societies, other mores, other ways of thinking; read them with a sense of the context; and see them as part of a river of literature, flowing ever on, sometimes racing, sometimes meandering, sometimes freezing over, but always eventually carrying us somewhere.
There was one contribution, in the almost 500 on the blog, that I liked; indeed that summed up the wrong-headedness of the whole enterprise. It came from StevenAugustine: "This blog bit is really shaping up to be Yobbo's Corner, isn't it? The sheer genius, craft and wisdom on display in the great majority of the 'can't reads' listed here tells a nice little joke on the posters. It's almost as though some teacher stood in front of a roomful of punters asking, 'How many here can't read?' And the hands went rocketing up." StevenAugustine, I canonise you.
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Centre stage... Helen Mirren is nominated for the best actress gong at the Academy Awards. Photograph: AFP
What do British actors have that US film actors, generally speaking, don't? The question emerges directly from this year's Oscar race. With Helen Mirren and Judi Dench front-runners in the best actress category (which also includes Kate Winslet), and Peter O'Toole the sentimental favourite for best actor, we Americans might find ourselves reluctantly waving a union flag on Sunday night.
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.
Listening to Dench narrate, from her character's perspective, the lurid events unfolding in Notes On a Scandal is like listening to a Stradivarius. You can practically feel her vocal cords luxuriously vibrating as she unfurls a commentary that is at once ruthlessly aggressive and perfectly civilised.
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.
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?
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· Muted celebrations for poet who shunned Britain · Academic interest fails to match popular appeal
Martin Wainwright Thursday February 22, 2007 The Guardian
He was a coward, a bully, a lecher and many other dreadful things, according to his critics. All of which may explain why the centenary of the birth of Wystan Hugh Auden passed yesterday without the fanfare that a giant of Engish literature perhaps deserves.
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.
"Maybe he's too 'popularly popular' for the academic world," said John Rhodes, one of a group of Auden's university enthusiasts who will take the revival a step further on Saturday with a conference at York University on the poet's contribution to verse, drama, film and music. Scholars from Britain will be joined by academics from the United States, where Auden controversially spent the war - adding "traitor" and "coward" to his enemies' vocabulary.
"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
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Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume I At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pages, $23
By: Regina Marler Date: 2/26/2007
At first glance, the cover of Susan Sontag's final book—the almost-complete manuscript she left at her death in December 2004—seems antiseptic and ultra-modern, like an architectural photograph of the Düsseldorf School. Designed by Winterhouse, a small press run by her friend William Drenttel, it features a neutral vertical gray panel beside a photograph of Sontag's face cropped so tightly that neither eye is seen whole.
Still, this is unmistakably Sontag—grave and sensual, with the signature white streak of hair. Closing the book between essays, you confront her off-center gaze, finding it pensive, warm or accusatory, depending on what you've just read. And if you consider that she died soon after she wrote most of these pieces, it makes reading At the Same Time an eerily intimate experience.
Sontag thought her novels represented her more fully than the essays. "The essays, I'm kind of cranking myself up and trying to say something true and eloquent and useful," she told an interviewer, "but they are a bit of a straitjacket." You wouldn't know it to read them. The book opens with "An Argument About Beauty," a playful trouncing of centuries of aesthetic theory. Characteristic of Sontag are the meaty, often portentous assertions—"Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities"—supported by impassioned arguments and odd examples, all nestled in dense, crackling prose.
To the academic reader, these are provocative, even flashy performances. To the common reader, they're like shots of intellectual espresso. You want to tear through the Duino Elegies in time to make it to the Whitney, a fringe production of Aristophanes and a coffee-house poetry reading of a Latvian émigré.
Sontag is at her best when she's advancing her private enthusiasms, like the bookstore bargain-bin discovery of Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden—a virtually unknown novel written with no hope of publication by an obscure, politically disfavored doctor in Soviet Russia. Sontag finds the novel "among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and parafiction." All her admiration and zeal emerge in "Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge," an introduction to his novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and a grim primer in literary politics of the 20th century.
In a forward to this volume, David Rieff—Sontag's son—recalls teasing his mother about her essays of appreciation, which he found "more self-revealing than she perhaps imagined." Her speeches, too, are self-revealing—sterner, stiffer, statelier, as if the face she brought to the podium had to be different from the one she brought to her computer each morning. I endured one of these public talks many years ago and can remember trying to suppress my deep, self-pitying sighs. On the other hand, they include moving passages of reminiscence, in one case a description of Sontag's childhood reading, and in another—for the German Book Trade award, the Friedenspreis—her relationship (as a Jew, as a writer) with German culture: "[M]y entire childhood was haunted by Germany, by the monstrousness of Germany, and by the German books and the German music I loved, which set my standard for what is exalted and intense."
As you would expect, the most challenging works in this volume are about 9/11. Sontag's diatribe against the instant public-relations spin in America was published by The New Yorker immediately after the attacks, drastically edited; it appears here for the first time in its intended form. "The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by nearly all American officials and media commentators in these last days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy," she wrote. "Our leaders have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management."
Two essays that follow demonstrate Sontag's evolving response to the catastrophe. She had been in Berlin on 9/11, glued for 48 hours to her hotel television. "In those first days after my return to New York," she explains in "A Few Weeks After," "the reality of the devastation, and the immensity of the loss of life, made my initial focus on the rhetoric surrounding the event seem to me less relevant."
Sontag was brave to publish her furious first impression of 9/11, which earned her enemies; even braver to temper and expand on it in subsequent statements. Similarly, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and in "Regarding the Torture of Others" (collected here), she shrugged off some of the famous views she expounded in her great classic, On Photography (1977). Her new collection includes another short essay on the subject, "Photography: A Little Summa," in which she argues that photography is not seeing but a way of seeing, and that this characteristically modern way of seeing—this fragmenting and framing, this way of accessing realities beyond our own lives—gives "shape and form to our experience" at the same time that it "denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real."
That is why we need writers, whose job is to be aware—and make us aware—of more: the messy, thrilling world beyond the edges of the photograph. Although this book is full of vigorous arguments on various topics, its recurrent themes are the importance of literature (Sontag defines literature as works not just worth reading, but worth rereading, translating, advocating) and the writer's job. She expects a lot from writers.
"Not to have opinions but to tell the truth."
"To depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture."
"Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently from the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show."
Who will speak over the communal drone, now that Susan Sontag's is gone?
Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.
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A visitor to a São Paulo exhibition, left, listening to music recorded by Brazil's Folklore Research Mission in the 1930s.
SÃO PAULO
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.
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Giles Tremlett in Madrid Tuesday July 17, 2007 The Guardian
Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. Photograph: AP
Nobel laureate Jose Saramago has sparked controversy among his fellow Portuguese by suggesting that they will, one day, be swallowed up by their larger neighbour, and eternal rival, Spain.
"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.
"What do we see when we look at the Iberian peninsula?" he asked. "We see an undivided whole made up of different nationalities, some with their own languages, which have lived more or less in peace."
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.
QUANDO SE TEM DOUTORADO O dissacarídeo de fórmula C12H22O11, obtido através da fervura e da evaporação de H2O do líquido resultante da prensagem do caule da gramínea Saccharus officinarum Linneu, 1758, isento de qualquer outro tipo de processamento suplementar que elimine suas impurezas, quando apresentado sob a forma geométrica de sólidos de reduzidas dimensões e arestas retilíneas, configurando pirâmides truncadas de base oblonga e pequena altura, uma vez submetido a um toque no órgão do paladar de quem se disponha a um teste organoléptico, impressiona favoravelmente as papilas gustativas, sugerindo impressão sensorial equivalente provocada pelo mesmo dissacarídeo em estado bruto, que ocorre no líquido nutritivo da alta viscosidade, produzindo nos órgãos especiais existentes na Apis mellifera, Linneu, 1758. No entanto, é possível comprovar experimentalmente que esse dissacarídeo, no estado físico-químico descrito e apresentado sob aquela forma geométrica, apresenta considerável resistência a modificar apreciavelmente suas dimensões quando submetido a tensões mecânicas de compressão ao longo do seu eixo em conseqüência da pequena capacidade de deformação que lhe é peculiar. QUANDO SE TEM MESTRADO A sacarose extraída da cana de açúcar, que ainda não tenha passado pelo processo de purificação e refino, apresentando-se sob a forma de pequenos sólidos tronco-piramidais de base retangular, impressiona agradavelmente o paladar, lembrando a sensação provocada pela mesma sacarose produzida pelas abelhas em um peculiar líquido espesso e nutritivo. Entretanto, não altera suas dimensões lineares ou suas proporções quando submetida a uma tensão axial em conseqüência da aplicação de compressões equivalentes e opostas.
QUANDO SE TEM GRADUAÇÃO O açúcar, quando ainda não submetido à refinação e, apresentando-se em blocos sólidos de pequenas dimensões e forma tronco-piramidal, tem sabor deleitável da secreção alimentar das abelhas; todavia não muda suas proporções quando sujeito à compressão. QUANDO SE TEM ENSINO MÉDIO Açúcar não refinado, sob a forma de pequenos blocos, tem o sabor agradável do mel, porém não muda de forma quando pressionado. QUANDO SE TEM ENSINO FUNDAMENTAL Açúcar mascavo em tijolinhos tem o sabor adocicado, mas não é macio ou flexível. QUANDO NÃO SE TEM ESTUDO Rapadura é doce, mas não é mole, não!!!
Too narrow a window? ... Gay's The Word bookshop. Photograph: Sarah Lee
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.
Britain does not publish enough gay fiction
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
Andrew Holleran's latest novel, Grief, has failed to find a British publisher highlights, for me, the problem Britain's publishing industry has with gay fiction.
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.
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."
Storyteller The famous novelist on politics, and how writing can change the course of history.
BY EMILY PARKER Saturday, June 23, 2007 12:01 a.m.
LIMA, Peru--"This is a story that often repeated itself," Mario Vargas Llosa says. "If a father was a businessman, he was a man who had to be complicit with the dictatorship. It was the only way to prosper, right? And what happens is that the son discovers it, the son is young, restless, idealistic, believes in justice and liberty, and he finds out that his vile father is serving a dictatorship that assassinates, incarcerates, censors and is corrupted to the bone."
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.
When I meet Mr. Vargas Llosa in his home in Lima, I am not surprised to find that the world-famous novelist is a natural storyteller. He speaks to me in Spanish, gripping his black-rimmed glasses in his hand and occasionally waving them around for emphasis.
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?"
He is relatively upbeat about Latin America today: "I'm not as pessimistic as others who believe that Latin America has returned to the time of populism, leftism." The region has its problems, to be sure, one major one coming from Caracas in the form of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. But according to Mr. Vargas Llosa, perhaps what is most remarkable is what Mr. Chávez has not been able to do.
"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.
There is another disturbing current in Mr. Vargas Llosa's work that is less often discussed--mistreatment of women, ranging from disrespect to outright violence. The abuses are particularly horrifying in "The Feast of the Goat," a novel based on the life of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes traveling to the Dominican Republic and being stunned to hear stories of peasants offering their own daughters as "gifts" to the lustful tyrant. Trujillo and his sons, he tells me, could abuse any woman of any social class with absolute impunity. The situation in the Dominican Republic, which he refers to as a "laboratory of horrors," may have tended toward the extreme, but it underscores a larger trend: "The woman is almost always the first victim of a dictatorship."
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."
We begin to wrap up our interview. We both drink red wine. A room nearby houses Mr. Vargas Llosa's private library--I notice that some of the volumes are bound in leather. He tells me that there are more than 18,000 books. His collection is clearly a point of pride, but it is also a tangible representation of his belief in the power of words. Or as he would say it: "I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated."
Ms. Parker is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
"Alguns dizem que nós jamais saberemos que, para os deuses, somos como moscas que os meninos matam num dia de verão; e outros dizem, ao contrário, que nem um simples pardal perde uma pena que não tenha sido arrancada pelo dedo de Deus." Thornton Wilder
Entramos confusos em 2010. A revelação dos pacotes de dinheiro saqueado dos cofres públicos no mensalão do DEM confundem-se com a busca de corpos dos deslizamentos que parecem ocorrer em toda parte. As imagens do cinismo político são hóspedes não convidados, mas é fácil adivinhar suas intenções. Pior que isso é procurar as pessoas amadas levadas por um desastre natural mudo diante da questão: "Por que minha casa e família?"
Resistimos a tudo, menos ao caos. A ordem não foi feita por reacionários que amam proibir e limitar, mas porque somos um bicho sem pacote comportamental. Um escorpião envenena o sapo que o transporta salvando-o numa inundação porque, como ele mesmo reconhece, ferroar é parte da sua natureza. Nós, humanos, damos nossas vidas pelos outros; ou nos suicidamos pelo senso de fracasso ou de honra. Dizem que ficamos a meio caminho entre os animais que vivem para procriar e, como alguns políticos nacionais, não têm o menor senso de culpa ou responsabilidade, e os anjos que, sendo seres espirituais puros, têm uma agudíssima consciência da moralidade individual e coletiva. Podem ser tentados pelo narcisismo, como foi o caso de Lúcifer, mas não se reproduzem porque, como todos sabem, não têm costas ou sexo. Comparando homens, anjos e animais, ouvi de um velho professor, o Todo-Poderoso ficou um tanto arrependido, se é possível conceber tal tipo de sentimento em quem, como certos intelectuais que conheço, é dotado de onipotência, onisciência e onipresença.
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O fato é que nós não suportamos o extraordinário negativo e não programado. O infortúnio que fere, destrói e mata e que, ao contrário da guerra, não foi planejado pela causa ou pátria. Sobretudo quando ele chega de supetão como nas catástrofes. Remarquei uma vez, num pomposo ensaio acadêmico, que as grandes festividades eram como catástrofes, pois igualmente suspendiam ou subvertiam, como está acontecendo no Haiti e ocorre no carnaval; e como aconteceu em Lisboa, ceifando mais de 90.000 almas, em 1755! ? as rotinas do pão e da água, a cota de trabalho, revolta e sofrimento esperados e merecidos. Mas com uma diferença capital entre eles. É que os ritos são programados e fazem o nosso destino de dentro para fora; ao passo que os acidentes naturais chegam sem aviso ou cerimônia, de fora para dentro, como manda o figurino do imprevisto. Trata-se da velha diferença entre a morte-morrida: esperada e muitas vezes libertadora; e a morte-matada, que leva as almas de modo brusco e sem aviso. O mistério se instala quando esses eventos se confundem, como foi o caso da Ilha Grande, quando o deslizamento ocorreu na virada do ano. Ou na viagem inaugural de um supernavio, como o Titanic.
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Agora, estamos lidando com a fúria desapaixonada do terremoto no Haiti. E, no entanto, não é possível conceber a existência humana sem esses eventos capazes de desmanchar e desconstruir, que nos fazem abandonar as paixões da vida com seus programas e controles, para focar num outro mundo. O lado mais obscuro e não previsto das coisas. Não há quem não tenha perdido um ente querido subitamente, sem que se instale na sua existência a velha e formidável questão que vai além do hamletiano ser ou não ser. Pois o que está em foco na catástrofe é o problema da intencionalidade. Será que aquilo tudo foi feito só para me atingir? O que fiz para merecer tanto sofrimento? Há ali alguma mensagem que eu não consigo decifrar?
No caso de um terremoto, então, a subversão é total. Nele, não é apenas um pedaço da montanha ou do mar que desmorona ou agride, nem uma chuva ou neve que caiu torrencialmente. Não! É o próprio chão que nos reafirma e firma, a própria Mãe-Terra que nos sustenta e agasalha que mata e destrói. Deus do Céu: o que devemos ter feito para merecer essa experiência de ver o chão aberto diante de nossos pés, para assistir ao desmoronamento de nossas igrejas, palácios, monumentos e casas feitas para durar eternamente? Como permanecer desapaixonado diante de perdas que remetem às paixões estranhas e tremendas das eternas despedidas?
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A oração, a reza, a prece, é um modo de lidar com tudo isso. Parece pouco, mas quem somos nós para pretender soluções definitivas? A humilde fórmula verbal que invoca os poderes supremos do universo, e abre uma ponte deste com o outro mundo, permite encaminhar os que foram arrancados de nosso convívio. Ademais, rezar é reintegrar-se humildemente no todo que o aqui e agora das tarefas do dia a dia levam a esquecer. Num sentido profundo, rezar é também reafirmar a nossa ligação com os que perdemos. Eles se foram, sussurramos para a morte que nos espera, mas nós fazemos com que vivam novamente pela aceitação do sofrimento contido na ferida transformada em cicatriz que chamamos de saudade. Esse é o modo humano de honrar a nossa finitude e de assim triunfar sobre o barro inefável do transitório do qual somos feitos.
Fonte - Estado de São Paulo, 20 de janeiro de 2010
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."