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Text of the page (random words):
s like cigarettes that leave no cancer as the second part of molina s quote indicates however clean stories stories without residue are about as impossible as cigarettes that leave no cancer stories whether real or imagined will always be messy and it is in the act of writing the effort of imposing meaning that something vital is lost this is not quite the same as the familiar argument that language is imprecise always groping towards a reality that it can never quite capture and therefore a pale shadow of that reality this is something slightly different the idea that designing a pattern will always cast out something that doesn t fit or in ortega y gasset s words to define is to exclude and to negate to express that sentiment we have these memorable lines when we write we wash everything clean as if by doing so we could advance toward something we ought to simply describe those sounds those stains on memory that arbitrary selection nothing more that s why we lie so much in the end that s why a book is always the opposite of another immense and strange book an illegible and genuine book that we translate treacherously that we betray with our habit of passable prose p 125 so it is that the writer s relationship with claudia is a mutual writing of a story that retrofits their childhoods into their present as the writer notes we discover coincidences that bring us back to real life to our youth to childhood because we can t we don t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore the moment has come when movies and novels don t matter only the time when we saw them read them where we were what we were doing who we were then p 83 but the curious part about this story is that its creators do not see themselves as protagonists but rather as secondary characters who simply need to be in a story this perhaps speaks to a narrowing of horizons under the suffocating atmosphere of a long lasting normalised dictatorship under pinochet there are no heroes only secondary characters who grope their way forwards engaging like raul in marginal acts of resistance although even this is revealed to be significantly more noble and courageous than the writer s own parents who keep their heads down and do nothing at all and so the effect of the dictatorship is not only the deaths and the disappearances and the repression but an imprisonment of the mind where even the imagination is caged as the writer notes wryly in echoes of walter benjamin s lament for the detritus of history we are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded and which nonetheless we collect obsessively p 99 thus even what you can retrieve from the wreckage left by the dictatorship are stories of containment and this is the sense that we are left with at the end of the novel a haunting sense of foreclosed possibilities and frustrated horizons where all that s left is the narrow ways of going home leave a comment filed under latin american fiction tagged as alejandro zambra chile latin american fiction february 3 2026 2 35 pm tragedy as anti political nicole loraux s the mourning voice if you d give me a gap year with no responsibilities money to go with it and tell me that i could use it to study anything i want i d enrol in a classics programme throughout my life i ve had tantalising access to flavours from this bouquet in college i read english translations of the greek plays in various cities in the world i ve gotten to watch performances including one in ancient greek of some of the more famous representatives of the canon such as antigone i spent a year while at oxford auditing various courses on greek and roman literature i ve come at them obliquely through other writers such as ismail kadare and so on i ve just never been able to study the classics systematically much like my previous forays i came to nicole loraux s the mourning voice without planning i came across the book through alberto toscano whom people probably know better as a scholar of fascism but as always i loved what i did find in the mourning voice loraux essentially argues that contrary to the prevailing views at the time that she wrote tragedy in classical athens performed what she calls an anti political function that is it was a vehicle to express sentiments emotions and ideas that were contrary to the dominant ideology of the city state and which could not be expressed in political life loraux demonstrates this in a fascinating way by focusing closely on a unique feature of greek theatre the chorus on the lyrical nature of the plays as opposed to the content of what is being said and on the non verbal as opposed to the verbal she argues that without paying close attention to these essential features of greek tragedy you cannot fully understand what it is doing who it is speaking to and what it is speaking for in the process loraux reads afresh and reads against the grain some of the classics that i thought i knew somewhat well antigone elektra trojan women etc and completely reorients our understanding of these plays and the context in which they were performed the close reading is an absolute delight to follow even though the sheer granular detail sometimes makes it hard and in the process you understand not only the plays themselves but also the world in which they were performed the book reminded me of two of my favourite works adam parry s essay the two voices of virgil s aeneid which argues that the aeneid has both a public voice the familiar celebration of rome s greatness but also in an undercurrent a private voice which is more uncertain more elegiac and questions some of the normative frames that the public voice celebrates and the second is lila abu lughod s veiled sentiments which shows how bedouin women use poetry to express the subversive and anti patriarchal sentiments that they cannot express in more regular prose conversation in the public sphere as with those two books the mourning voice brings to us the unique joy of immersing ourselves in the delightful open textured character of literature and the beauty of discovering all that literature can do and be in creating shaping and nurturing an expansive life leave a comment filed under greek tragedy tagged as greek tragedy january 19 2026 3 53 pm an eternal wanderer of life and his ordeals victor serge unruly revolutionary by mitchell abidor i have long been fascinated by the life and work of victor serge ever since i read the stunning unforgiving years many decades ago i have tried to read everything i can by and about him a project facilitated by nyrb republishing a lot of his novels as an artist as an anarchist and as a person my view of him is i think a view shared by many others deep respect tinged with admiration primarily for a man with moral integrity who refused to compromise on it and who paid a staggering price for his refusal i came across unruly revolutionary through a boston review interview with the author mitchell abidor as the title turncoat radical suggested the interview promised to upend this widely held view about serge after reading it i came across the book itself at the world book fair i bought it with some trepidation i was expecting revelations that would create the kind of jarring dissonance i felt when i read patti smith casually talking about playing a harmony concert in tel aviv in the 1990s never meet your heroes and never find out too much about them either this impression is fortified when you read the book s introduction where abidor is almost apologetic about what follows and yet the book itself is not quite near the character deconstruction that the interview suggests to start with let me note that it is an excellent biography rigorous detailed excellently written and as biographies of such figures should do crystallises the era in the person and the person in the era now as for serge himself the book does not so much deconstruct him as much as it humanises him abidor does an excellent work of setting the context through which a lot of serge s writing and actions which might otherwise seem inconsistent make sense what emerges is in anarchism s classic formulation neither a god nor a master but a human being with all his human flaws flaws that are accentuated and amplified because of the nature of the times in which serge lived thus we do not excuse for example his support of the bloody suppression by the soviet union of the kronstadt rebellion but we can understand it an understanding that is informed by his subsequent and public change of a view a change that he paid a high price for the most serious charge that abidor claims to lay against serge is that towards the end of his life he became not just anti stalinist but anti communist to the point where akin to george orwell he was involved in making lists and reflexively supporting the us unlike orwell however serge died in 1947 an early death hastened by privation and exile at the time he died institutional and governmental communism was stalinism other variants had been stamped out from the vantage point of 2025 we can distinguish the two but in 1945 that would have been a much more difficult task at the time even mccarthyism had not yet entered the picture one thing about serge that this book brings out very clearly is his ability to change his mind as the reality around him changed with that quality there is no reason to believe that confronted with reality of the cold war and of the militant decolonisation movements that swept the world in the 1950s and 1960s serge would not have changed his mind again i rather believe he would have we will never know but perhaps abidor here is a victim of his own success the portrait he paints of serge is so nuanced and despite everything sympathetic that both at his best and at his worst he is a figure that we can continue to admire as quintessentially human and bearing the best of human courage as well as on occasion the worst of human short sightedness but never human evil for that alone and for everything else this is a book worth reading leave a comment filed under biography russia victor serge tagged as biography victor serge january 7 2026 7 54 pm what i most like is literature that is written like a letter alejandro zambra s not to read alejandro zambra s not to read is on first glance a disparate collection of critical work reviews essays and reflections on writing taken by themselves the individual pieces are deeply enjoyable the style is reminiscent of some of the fragmentary episodic writings of eduardo galeano there is a dry biting and sometimes caustic but never ungenerous wit and you get to learn about an entire set of latin american writers that the boom does not normally consider zambra has no time for literary canons and that is something that makes this book unique more than that however as you read certain themes emerge zambra is deeply skeptical of literary establishments and of literature as a profession manuel puig he writes has created a literature outside of literature of an oeuvre that is simultaneously legible and inscrutable one that calls the nature of the literary into question in one of the most memorable essays in the collection on pedro lembel he writes his work was forged in the night in the barrio in life and not in literature there are traces here of joseph andras still later he writes ribeyro writes to live not to demonstrate that he has lived and perhaps towards the end the kicker books say no to literature some others the majority say yes they obey the market or the holy spirit of governments or the placid idea of a generation or the even more placid idea of a tradition i prefer books that say no sometimes even i prefer the books that don t know what they are saying reading this you get the sense that for zambra the phrase full time writer would be a contradiction in terms you cannot write without the stuff of life and that comes from living the mirror of this is another theme that shines through the essays for all his humour and wit zambra takes writing and the practice of writing very seriously early on he writes of a compatriot i want us to have writers like him again forthright committed beautiful forever young cultured generous loud mouthed the word choice especially the words that i have italicised seems significant again on pedro lembel he notes that lembel reminds us that literature is not offensive that it s not mere decoration that it does something to society to give him the nobel prize would be to honour that it would be i think a collective prize this is not a call of course for didacticism zambra is again careful with his words and does something to society is not prescriptive about what that something should be but that is not to say either that this is an amoral practice zambra s philosophy of writing or perhaps it would be better to say that the meaning he seeks in and through writing is echoing vaclav havel to find oneself with the weight of words to reconquer their necessity search incessantly even when they the words have become ever more transitory more perishable more erasable than ever so you can read this book at multiple levels as an insight into the craft of reviewing and of criticism as a guide to a collection of latin american writers that you might not instantly find displayed in a bookshop but above all else i think a reflection on how even within th is pile of debris that grows skyward writing remains necessary leave a comment filed under literary studies criticism theory tagged as alejandro zambra essays january 7 2026 7 15 pm we wore the memory of our past as we would a scapular alba de cespedes her side of the story i ended 2025 with alba de cespedes her side of the story after my mid year journey through elsa morante s lies and sorcery this was my second tragic bildungsroman novel set in mid 20th century italy focusing intensely on women s lives their rich interiority their friendships and confrontations with patriarchy in the context of a violently changing world both lies and sorcery and her side of the story presage themes that you can later find in elena ferrante and it s of little surprise that ferrante herself acknowledges her debt to these two writers in fact some of the early parts of her side of the story set in a tenement complex in rome reminded me of the brilliant hbo tv adaptation of ferrante in how it communicated the suffocating atmosphere in these tenements and of the patriarchal violence that lurks just underneath the facade of forced marital and familial civility in the apartment above ours the one next to it the modern white buildings rising up beside ours in all the buildings in rome all the buildings in the world i saw women awake in the dark behind the unscalable walls of men s shoulders early on in the novel the protagonist s mother caught between an unhappy marriage she cannot escape from and a love affair that she cannot escape int...