Juan Villoro Research Articles

La escucha (en la) crónica de Juan Villoro

Juan Villoro, consagrado en la Literatura Latinoamericana como narrador de ficción y autor destacado en el mercado editorial de Literatura Infantil, ha desarrollado de manera paralela una notable producción cronística que ha recibido escasa atención crítica. La lectura de estas últimas en conjunto con entrevistas dadas por el autor permitió advertir una autorrepresentación como cronista versado en el arte de escuchar. Tema que constituye la excusa para revisar parte de su producción con el foco en su oído atento a las expresiones y manifestaciones de la cultura masiva. Interesa aproximarnos a la escucha crónica, aspecto característico de su estética, a partir de analizar el lugar prioritario de la voz del locutor futbolístico Ángel Fernández, los vínculos con la contracultura mexicana y la construcción de un mito de origen que abreva de la cultura de masas.

Las huellas de la violencia y el narcotráfico en México: un análisis desde la perspectiva de la crónica periodístico-literaria

La crónica periodística es un género que ha servido para contar la realidad latinoamericana desde diversos puntos de vista. Lejos de buscar la transitoriedad de los datos noticiosos y de intentar deslumbrar con primicias, este género pretende reconstruir con elementos literarios una realidad incomprensible, que muchas veces duele, pero que merece ser narrada, como es el caso de las marcas del narcotráfico y la violencia suscitada en México. En este contexto, lo que proponemos en el presente estudio es un trayecto histórico a partir de una mirada periodístico-literaria. Para ello analizamos tres textos de tres autores mexicanos: Alma Guillermoprieto, Juan Villoro y Alejandro Almazán. El recorrido que trazamos va desde los magnicidios (un cardenal y dos políticos) ocurridos en México entre 1994 y 1995, las influencias del narcotráfico en la sociedad y política de este país, y culmina con la desaparición forzada de 43 estudiantes en el estado de Guerrero en septiembre de 2014. Todo ello a partir de la impronta estilística y abordaje particular de los hechos que han realizado los cronistas señalados.

Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo

for science, we have artists dispassionately utilizing those parts for art. The attempt to connect the two falls flat. At one point we discover that a “modern-day” character is in fact related to Quintana. An artist wants to build a system of guillotines based on plans he’s found from the old sanatorium. It feels, paradoxically, simultaneously like being fed a cliché and not quite getting what the book is trying to say. With clear prose, dark humor, and a sense of humanity tucked behind all the morbidity, Comemadre is an uneven novella with one classic scene and a grim reminder of the disintegration of the body and the even quicker decay of the morality of powerful men. J. David Osborne El Paso, Texas Margarita García Robayo Fish Soup Trans. Charlotte Coombe. Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 226 pages. Having garnered the praise of Juan Cárdenas and Juan Villoro, young Colombian author Margarita García Robayo is being published for the first time in English in a three-part volume entitled Fish Soup. The text includes the novellas Waiting for a Hurricane (Hasta que pase un huracán, 2012) and Sexual Education (previously unpublished) as well as a collection of short stories entitled Worse Things (Cosas peores, 2014). An unnamed, college-aged female in search of middle-class comforts is the narrator for the volume’s opening piece, Waiting for a Hurricane. The novella is set in a Caribbean city in Colombia characterized by rainy days, hazy thoughts, and sensuality, where the narrator continually meditates on the easiest means to get ahead or, at least, get out. The narrator—growing up with “useless” parents whose days are occupied with unfulfilling tasks, living in a city whose leaders consistently fail to build proper infrastructure , and uncertain as to how to forge healthy relationships —typically approaches setbacks with laconic escapism : “When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I’d reply: a foreigner .” Friends and lovers come and go, and the narrator decides she isn’t suited for formal education; the only constants in her everyday life are the rain and a nebulous hunger for something different—the feeling that life will pass her by if she fails to flee. The narrator abandons her studies and begins spending her aimless days with on-again, off-again boyfriends, both hoping for and fearing something that will shake up her unexceptional existence. As she pithily tells a boyfriend: “We’ll always be here, waiting for a hurricane to come.” The narrator eventually resorts to bolder measures and finds work as a flight attendant ; during frequent flights to Miami—a veritable Shangri-La for the Latin American jet set—she unsuccessfully attempts to trick a pilot into impregnating her. The novella concludes with the narrator back in Colombia, very little if anything having been resolved. Both Worse Things and Sexual Education explore similar themes and strike a similar tone. García Robayo’s stories are filled with dysfunctional families at dead ends; the nagging sense of middle-class young adults living protracted childhoods; idiotic contests of sibling one-upmanship; sordid hookups that leave lovers feeling unfulfilled; hypocritical sexual mores that only serve to twist people’s lives into knots. García Robayo’s narratives read like vignettes, ending in ambiguous but enjoyable ways that task us to ponder a single, constant enigma: How can characters get unstuck from their quotidian paralysis? Charlotte Coombe proves herself an apt translator; like the author, she keenly avoids apostrophizing and thus preserves the brusque, even immodest crispness of characters ’ dialogue. All told, García Robayo’s stories are as satisfying and certainly as pungent as the most potent of fish soups. Kevin M. Anzzolin University of Wisconsin–Stout World Literature in Review 80 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 ...

Comemadre by Roque Larraquy

Roque Larraquy Comemadre Trans. Heather Cleary. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 152 pages. Comemadre begins in 1907 in Buenos Aires. A doctor at a sanatorium is in love with a nurse. Other doctors are also in love with the nurse. Other doctors have built a contraption to sever the heads of unwitting (and then willing) patients. The doctors have a theory: if the head can live for a few moments after being severed, perhaps it can see into the afterlife. The aforementioned head-chopper is fitted with a device to allow the heads to talk. The doctors record the results. There are moments in the first half of this novella that ache with a kind of horrifying melancholy. The first to lose her head, for example, is a young patient of the sanatorium. She has wanted to die, the logic goes, so why not put her out of her misery? Then her bereaved lover follows suit. Then there’s a plan, and the heads really begin to roll. Throughout it all our narrator , Quintana, keeps his focus on the nurse. The doctors are mostly unfazed by the large-scale murder. A scene toward the end of the first section, in which a great number of decapitations yield brief descriptions of post-severed utterances, is the highlight of the book. It’s sad, funny, and pitchperfect . The 1907 portion ends on a dark, accurate note, and one can’t help but wonder if the book would have greatly improved from simply ending there. The second half of the novella jumps forward in time a hundred years. A performance artist and his look-alike stage shows featuring severed body parts, eventually their own. It’s in this second half that Larraquy seems to lose a bit of focus. Whereas the 1907 half is darkly comic and focused, the 2009 half feels like it’s falling apart page by page. Which, when put into the context of degeneration and severing and corporeal decay, makes a bit of artistic sense. Comemadre seems to be circling around a point within its second half. Instead of sociopathic doctors scheming to trick people into giving up their heads Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon Conversations on Writing Tin House Books In this small, beautifully crafted book, the conversations range from style to point of view to genre to why we should use “they” as singular. Included are excerpts from the writers Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon discuss , excerpts from her own work, her own translation of Gabriela Mistral, and the diagram of a sentence from George Orwell’s 1984 during a discussion of rhythm. Together, Le Guin and Naimon demonstrate engagement at its finest. Claudio Magris Journeying Trans. Anne Milano Appel Yale University Press Claudio Magris, Italian writer, wanderer , and professor, presents this collection of essays written over the course of his years of travel. His travels have taken him across the world, and each of these essays is titled after where it was written as well as the inspiration that called it forth, giving easy mile-markers to an academic but eclectic volume. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 79 for science, we have artists dispassionately utilizing those parts for art. The attempt to connect the two falls flat. At one point we discover that a “modern-day” character is in fact related to Quintana. An artist wants to build a system of guillotines based on plans he’s found from the old sanatorium. It feels, paradoxically, simultaneously like being fed a cliché and not quite getting what the book is trying to say. With clear prose, dark humor, and a sense of humanity tucked behind all the morbidity, Comemadre is an uneven novella with one classic scene and a grim reminder of the disintegration of the body and the even quicker decay of the morality of powerful men. J. David Osborne El Paso, Texas Margarita García Robayo Fish Soup Trans. Charlotte Coombe. Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 226 pages. Having garnered the praise of Juan Cárdenas and Juan Villoro, young Colombian author Margarita García Robayo is being published for the first time in English in a three-part volume entitled Fish Soup...

Un viaje interminable hacia el pasado. El testigo de Juan Villoro

Juan Villoro transforma escritura y vida del poeta Ramón López Velarde en la trama de una metaficción que reflexiona sobre la literatura y la cultura nacional mexicana. El personaje Julio Valdivieso, que llega a México a seguir los pasos del escritor, acaba encontrándose consigo mismo en la medida en que acepta que el futuro es un viaje hacia el pasado. Villoro, en la mejor tradición latinoamericana, rescata la provincia como metáfora de la nación. Julio, una suerte de Juan Preciado, se interna en el paisaje familiar para aceptar la destrucción de los archivos y la ineptitud de los testigos. Encuentra su destino personal en un desierto donde sólo habitan las vidas desechadas y se escucha las voces de los muertos.

Investigaciones literarias en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea Figuras del lector en explorador del olvido

Inspired by the construction of literary detectives in the works of Ricardo Piglia and Roberto Bolaño, several Mexican writers of the beginning of the XXIst century revisit the topic of the investigation and quest of the forgotten writer, the lost text, the ghosts of literature. They repetitively use a structure – the pattern of the research, of following traces, interpret sign – that is no more an exclusive form of the detective novel and is displaced in other contexts. At the center of the quest of the literary detective there is no crime any more but an absence, an emptiness. What triggers the investigations of the characters of those contemporary novels is the absence of facts, an author’s disappearance, a lost manuscripts. The investigator is a reader who talks to the departed and navigates the murky waters of oblivion, this abyss in which all works inevitably end up. This paper will follow some leads drawn by those characters haunted by the threat of emptiness. In Daniel Saldaña París’s first novel, a university professor follows the tracks and traces of an obscure poet and boxer who disappeared in Mexico at the beginning of the past century, inspired by Arthur Cravan, and will be taken up in an absurd epical adventure that will save him from the boredom of his life. Valeria Luiselli tells in Faces in the crowd (Los ingrávidos) the parallel lives of two Mexican exiles in New York: a young translator obsessed by her own invisibility and the ghost of Gilberto Owen. Juan Villoro explores the figure of the witness in a complex novel whose main character, another professor back from exile in Europe, meets the specters of his past and the Mexican historical past, while working on the life and works of the poet López Velarde. Those narratives decipher the shadows of the past in the present in a disturbing way, showing how deeply our reality is inhabited by the violence that made it possible, and imagining the transformation of the characters who look into the well of oblivion into ghosts themselves.

Notas de lectura acerca de <i>El rey duerme</i>

La frecuentación de textos fundadores es una constante en la ensayística de Juan Villoro (Ciudad de México, 1956). En El rey duerme, crónica hacia Hamlet (2008), el escritor pone en escena un singular acercamiento a la pieza homónima de Shakespeare. El artículo propone una lectura de ese texto en torno al siguiente conjunto de cuestiones: a) las interferencias y tensiones existentes entre crónica y discurso ensayístico; b) las varias figuraciones de la relación maestro/discípulo; c) el diálogo polémico entablado con la interpretación de Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998) y las estrategias textuales implementadas para ese fin; d) el desplazamiento interpretativo propuesto a partir del Hamlet traducido al español por Tomás Segovia (2002) y del último cuento de Jorge Luis Borges (1985).---------------------------------------------------------------------------------NOTAS DE LEITURA SOBRE EL REY DUERMEA frequentação de textos fundadores é uma característica constante da ensaística de Juan Villoro (Ciudad de México, 1956). Em El rey duerme, crónica hacia Hamlet (2008), o escritor põe em cena uma singular aproximação à peça homônima de Shakespeare. O artigo propõe uma leitura desse texto, em torno do seguinte conjunto de questões: a) as interferências e tensões existentes entre crônica e discurso ensaístico; b) as várias figurações da relação mestre/discípulo; c) o diálogo polêmico instituído com a interpretação de Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998) e as estratégias textuais implementadas para essa finalidade; d) o deslocamento interpretativo proposto a partir do Hamlet traduzido ao espanhol por Tomás Segovia (2002) e do último conto de Jorge Luis Borges (1985).---Artigo em espanhol. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a939.

"El disparo de argón", de Juan Villoro: la ciudad bajo la tormenta

“Material images” –the way Gaston Bachelard understands them– constitute a very relevant side of the imaginary aspect of Mexico City; that is to say that images of the four elements profoundly articulate this hypermetropolis’ identity. Juan Villoro, one of the contemporary writers who is most strongly linked to the Mexican capital, significantly senses this dimension of the city. His first novel, El disparo de argon, clearly illustrates this intuition. In this book, matter, urban space and plot are neatly interwoven. Throughout this study, I explore both the role of water and rain in this work and their strong ties to both the main character’s subjectivity and the construction of the scenarios and the narrative itself.

Espacio urbano e imágenes acuáticas en "Materia dispuesta" de Juan Villoro

Recepción: 15 de julio de 2015.Aceptación: 11 de octubre de 2016.En la dimensión imaginaria del espacio de la Ciudad de México pesan mucho las imágenes materiales, en el sentido que Gaston Bachelard otorga al término; es decir, las figuraciones de los cuatro elementos articulan profundamente gran parte de la identidad de la hipermetrópolis. Juan Villoro, uno de los escritores contemporáneos más ligado a la capital mexicana, intuye esta dimensión material de la urbe notablemente. La novela Materia dispuesta es una reflexión sobre el papel de la materia en esta ciudad en forma de Bildungsroman. El personaje principal y la urbe emprenden una evolución sincrónica: sus significados y sus cuerpos se entrelazan. El presente estudio aborda el papel de las imágenes acuáticas en dicha obra literaria.

Juan Villoro y la mala suerte. (Pre)confesiones en Los culpables

El sentimiento de culpa puede mover al silencio o a la confesión. En Los culpables, Juan Villoro recoge siete testimonios de siete personajes apesadumbrados por las circunstancias en las que se encuentran. Si confesar es condenarse, también puede convertirse en el inicio de una vía que conduzca a la salvación. La mala suerte que aglutina a los siete sujetos encuentra su razón de ser en la indecisión de los protagonistas, en los zarandeos que la vida o los demás les causan debido a su falta de dominio. Esta debilidad puede conducir a la queja, como estadio previo a la confesión, o a la vileza y posterior desvelo, para situarse así en la confesión propiamente dicha. A través del análisis y clasificación de estos relatos, se conocerán los conceptos de suerte, culpa, confesión y cambio desde la perspectiva del escritor mexicano.

God Is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World's Favorite Game by Juan Villoro

110 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 follows the very succesful Igazi hősök (True heroes) published a year earlier, and its broad theme is “boldness,” which means pioneering in one field and/or achieving something unusual in another. That includes industrialists, sportsmen, inventors, and soldiers, with the odd writer or artist thrown in for good measure. Nyáry’s time scale is also wide: he wants to save from oblivion both nineteenth- and twentieth-century personalities. The result is thirty “vignettes” of men and women, from all walks of life, some of them truly new discoveries. The great variety of characters presented in this collection is both the virtue and perhaps the weakness of the book. While it contains elements of surprise and is full of otherwise hidden information, Igazi hősök is heterogeneous and rather eclectic. On its pages one encounters individuals fighting against great odds, becoming examples of determination and endurance. For example , the orientalist Ármin Vámbéry, a lame Jewish Hungarian scholar, feted in Victorian England, possessing unusual language skills (apparently he spoke sixteen of them) who traveled in many Asian countries dressed as a Turkish beggar—in countries earlier “closed” for most Western observers . Or one could mention the formidable twentieth-century heroine Sára Karig, who saved persecuted Jews during the German occupation of Hungary and reemerged as a staunch critic of Communist electoral manipulations in 1947, for which she paid with years of hard labor in the gulag. Among the brave Hungarians of the twentieth century, Nyáry lists priests and ministers who defied the racial laws of the wartime years, among whom special place should be allotted to Áron Márton, a Catholic Transylvanian bishop who fought both Nazis and Communists. Others in this category include the army officer Imre Reviczky, the nun Sára Salkaházi, and the Protestant theologian Géza Soos, whose flight to the Allies in Italy in 1944 is rarely mentioned by historians. Thanks to Nyáry we learn the name of a priest who—similar to Bishop Péter Apor—died at the end of World War II for resisting marauding Soviet soldiers (Kornél Hummel) and remember the only person who in 1951 managed to escape from the notorious labor camp of Recsk (Gyula Michnay). Of the thirty stories, eight have brave heroines. Among them Nyáry presents Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer, the first woman pilot in Hungary, also a leader of the European movement of suffragettes who ended her life in the United States, though without American citizenship. As for its presentation, the book is more of an album than just an anthology, with excellent photographs and illustrations. In the appendix , a brief bibliography broadens the mind of those readers who wish to know more about these men and women of the past whose names are well worth remembering. George Gömöri London Juan Villoro. God Is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World’s Favorite Game. Trans. Thomas Bunstead. Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2016. 256 pages. Juan Villoro knows that soccer fans often enjoy rewatching and recounting a spectacular goal more than seeing it for the first time. Reading God Is Round will make fans of soccer and good writing alike wonder how they appreciated either before they read Villoro’s insightful, critical, and ultimately hopeful take on the world’s game (see “World Cup/ World Lit,” WLT, May 2011). God Is Round reproduces the uniquely exciting tension between surprise and order that keeps fans coming back to their favorite sport. Villoro’s return to the Dutch national team of the 1970s, aka “The Clockwork Orange,” combines a reference to Anthony Burgess’s unhappiness regarding the use of his novel’s title with an explanation of Holland’s painful losses in World Cup finals in 1974 and 1978. Germany and Argentina, the respective champions, had suffered more and thus prevailed. History shapes the ninety-minute period during which it seems anything can happen, and its influence takes a variety of forms, including a cursed stadium, the transmigration of childhood play into adult work, and war. A particularly surprising return to the past tells of the Kiev bakers...

En breve: la novela corta en México ed. by Anadeli Bencomo, Cecilia Eudave (review)

Bencomo, Anadeli and Cecilia Eudave, eds. En breve: la novela corta en Mexico. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2014. 342 pp. A friend of mine recently polled the social media collective brain for suggestions about what Spanish-language novellas she could include in an undergraduate literature course. As the responses rolled in--there were many--I was struck by two thoughts. The first was that there is an undiscovered goldmine of short novels out there that could be used in college courses to expose students to a smorgasbord of historical periods, narrative styles, themes, and literary history. Short novels are, in fact, ideal for the classroom: their brevity allows students to read them in relatively little time while simultaneously giving them maximum exposure to the intensity of short fiction and the character development of the traditional novel. Looking back over my own syllabi, I have discovered an appalling lack of these texts which I hope to amend in the near future. The second thought was that, because the genre is formally different from the short story or the novel, I might need to rethink and possibly retool my approaches to teaching. But where to start? And how to best do that? You will imagine my joy and my surprise, then, when a few months later I was asked to review Anadeli Bencomo and Cecilia Eudave's En breve, an edited volume that offers both a wide sampling of short novels from Mexico and an even wider variety of critical approaches to reading them. En breve brings together twenty-one critical reflections on twentieth-century Mexican novelas cortas by a cadre of outstanding scholars. Bencomo herself leads off with a brilliant theoretical introduction that highlights some of the major tensions of the genre, primarily its anti-epic character--which she underscores by briefly contrasting the expansive scope of novels like Palinuro de Mexico with the narrative intensity of shorter texts like Querido Diego--and the importance of what she calls the anomalous subjectivities of marginalized characters--thinking specifically of outlier protagonists from books by a veritable who's-who of contemporary literature including Alvaro Enrigue, Roberto Bolano, Luis Arturo Ramos, Antonio Ortuno, Juan Villoro, and Daniel Espartaco Sanchez. Following this introduction the chapters proceed more or less chronologically from the early decades of the century through the present, from Federico Gamboa's El evangelista to Espartaco Sanchez's Autos usados. The book then closes with a short conclusion by Eudave, who sidesteps a traditional scholarly conclusion, preferring instead to provide insights from her own experience as an author of novellas. This organization allows readers to take in the development of the genre as it moves from early post-revolutionary literature, with its contrasting penchant for belated colonialist desires and avant-garde experimentation, to later postmodern works. Read front to back En breve becomes a subtle alternate history of Mexican narrative in that it eschews any meditation on the novel of the Revolution--no Campobello, Azuela, Munoz, Guzman here which is, in itself, rather refreshing--and instead focuses from the outset on frequently overlooked literary groups like the colonialistas, the estridentistas, and the contemporaneos who played a central role in the formation of national literature but who, nevertheless, get short shrift outside of local literary circles. …

En construcción o en viaje: apuntes sobre la representación de la identidad latinoamericana en la narrativa contemporánea

Travelling or in construction: notes about the representation of the identity in the contemporary Spanish‑American fiction The paper explores the parodic and non parodic image of the collective identity in some exemples of 20th century and contemporary Spanish‑American fiction. From the middle of 19th century to the middle of 20th many essays and novels tended to reinforce the idea of a Latin American citizen rooted in the continental soil and ideologically independent both from the former metropolis and from United States. On the contrary, in the second half of 20th century, when the model of identity shifted from a set of idioscyncrastic and patriotic characteristics to a bunch of heterogeneous attributes, the Spanish American novelist began to include in their fictions an authocritic and ironic attitude towards Latin American cultural myths and stereotypes. The analysis takes into account authors such as Arturo Bryce Echenique, Roberto Bolaño, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Juan Villoro and Yuri Herrera.

Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica ed. by José Ruisánchez, Oswaldo Zavala Ramón (review)

Reviewed by: Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica ed. by José Ruisánchez, Oswaldo Zavala Ramón Vinodh Venkatesh Ruisánchez, José Ramón y Oswaldo Zavala , eds. Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica. Barcelona : Editorial Candaya , 2011 . 479 pp. A perusal of contemporary Mexican literature is incomplete without a studied stop at the work of Juan Villoro. Mexican by birth, but a world writer by trade, Villoro has made a name through timely chronicles, astute essays, and a labyrinthic narrative that encourages the reader to get lost in the pluriversal spaces of a diegetic and fragmented city. José Ramón Ruisánchez and Oswaldo Zavala call Villoro a malabarista, or juggler, as they unveil the many genealogies that the writer balances and combines in his narrative journey. They write how Villoro the malabarista represents “el mayor acto de liberación: la suerte inesperada, el somersault que sorprende en el instante de su aparición” (10). In a similar vein, Ruisánchez and Zavala must be congratulated for this opportune intervention, a perfectly executed somersault of the literary, as they compose a wide-angle snapshot of Villoro’s work and reception through a cogent and carefully selected series of reflections from his peers, cultural voices, and academic critics. The edited collection follows a critical trend to study and examine the work of contemporary Hispanic writers that in many cases are still producing for their avid audiences. We can, therefore, locate Materias dispuestas in a category of monographic criticism that has focused on such names as Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia, Juan Marsé, and Cristina Rivera Garza. The tome is divided into four distinct sections: a compilation of snippets and short pieces by Villoro’s contemporaries, including Bolaño, Javier Marías, Ignacio Padillo, Antonio Skármeta, Carlos Fuentes, and Martín Kohan; commentary from cultural critics such as Mihály Des, Federico Patán, and Chris Andrews; a critical section with incisive essays by the likes of Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Brian Price, Ryan Long, Tamara Williams, Sarah Pollack, and Irma Cantú; and a final section with texts by Villoro himself, as the juggler retakes the word to close out Ruisánchez and Zavala’s perfectly executed somersault. Prior to these porous sections is the editors’ introduction to the writer’s work, as they place his fictions and nonfictions within, outside, and in contact with multiple genealogies and literary/cultural lines of flight. Touching on broad themes extant in Villoro, such as the writing of the urban (experience), the articulation of gender, and the role of the intellectual in relation to the text, Ruisánchez and Zavala articulate a space for the author that transgresses traditional genealogies of a national literature. This process and product is important as the editors establish the significance and stature of the writer at hand, underlining his relevance to the student of all literatures. While they emphasize how Villoro “nos obliga a releer la tradición central de [End Page 286] la narrativa mexicana” (14), they equally highlight the points of contact between his narrative and figures of world literature, mindful of how “el buen malabarista [. . .] nunca lanza al aire piezas que no sabrá recuperar” (20). In what follows, the reader quickly realizes that Ruisánchez and Zavala are master jugglers, as the disparate voices compiled in Materias dispuestas all somehow come together and fit, creating a cogent epistemology for the meandering reader, much like that which is found in the fragmented and mutant city that is depicted in Villoro’s most commented novel that is cleverly included in the title of the anthology. Caveats from the first section of the edition place Villoro amongst his peers. Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, for example, underlines the processes of creation in Villoro, forewarning the reader that at the poetic core lies “esta sensación de recorrer incesamente un texto para encontrarnos siempre en un espacio infinito” (61). More praise comes by means of Bolaño (who applauds the Mexican’s short stories), Marías, Alejandra Rossi (who calls Villoro a “escritor de raza” [83]), Fuentes, and Fabio Morabito. Des opens the second section with admiration of the author’s essays, commenting that...

Terremoti in Cile. Storia e immaginazione intorno ad un evento apocalittico

A number of historical sources chronicle the devastating earthquake that shook the country and destroyed Santiago in 1647, during Chile’s colonial period. More than a century after, Heinrich Kleist published Das Erdbeben in Chili (1811), a fictional relation about the same cataclysm that describes the fatal destiny of two lovers. Surviving the disaster, they are lynched in a church by the fanatic faithful because of their irregular union, that would have caused the wrath and the punishment of God. Kleist’s story is cited also in 8. 8: el miedo en el espejo. Una cronica del terremoto en Chile, an eyewitness account from Mexican writer Juan Villoro, who was in Santiago in 2010, when occurred a terrible earthquake that registered 8.8 on the Richter scale. The author not only describes the people’s reactions to event, but also finds in his experience the impetus for considering how someone who escapes death, having seen it up close, can continue to live. In this context uses the Kleist’s text as a springboard for philosophical reflection on man’s destiny. A apocalyptic disaster can have unexpected consequences depending on the time and place, but also by the interpreter of the facts: in the small and isolated environment of colonial Chile, the will to resist giving in to superstition and to struggle to go on living; in Kleist’s story, abandoning comforting illusions about nature and man’s destiny; in Villoro’s account, awareness that we cannot know how and when the end of the world will arrive, but it lies in wait for us.

Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico by Beth E Jörgensen (review)

Reviewed by: Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico by Beth E Jörgensen Linda Egan Jörgensen, Beth E. Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico. New York: SUNY, 2011. 224 pp. In the first chapter of this critical and conceptual analysis of Mexican non-fiction of the last century, Beth Jörgensen rehearses extant literature on the truth genre to lay the theoretical foundation of her readings. Research discussed in the preliminary chapter includes Western theories of language and representation, poststructuralist and deconstructionist concepts most famously advanced by Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon (to name a few). She links these to the debate twenty-five years ago over the generic identity of such celebrated works as Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío and the curious nature of the then-emerging form called testimonio. She speaks, as well, of those scholars who in the seventies and eighties most pointedly contributed to our understanding today of the binary nature of, for example, the chronicle (literary journalism: reportage and aesthetic impact) or the constructed truths of the autobiography. The theories inform her study of a number of nonfiction genres in the five following chapters: of autobiography, testimonio and ethno-autobiography, the memoir, the historical essay and the modern-day chronicle practiced by Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis and Juan Villoro, among others. Her theoretically-framed readings contribute intelligently to the perceived prominence of nonfiction in Mexico, where citizens may feel a particularly acute need to “impose order on the chaotic events of periods of social crisis through the meaning-making activities of storytelling” (30). [End Page 358] Jörgensen groups her analyses of several autobiographical texts around the organizing topos of the Mexican Revolution. She examines Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente as nonfiction whose language, however, imposes powerful claims to fictional status on the text. Even more putative status as nonfiction is ascribed to Guzmán’s Las memorias de Pancho Villa, a supposedly first-person account which is in fact told by the author. Rediscovered in the seventies, Nellie Campobello’s autobiographical Cartucho appears more fictional than her hero-worshiping biography, Apuntes de la vida militar de Pancho Villa. In Jörgensen’s view, Anita Brenner’s The Wind that Swept Mexico may have the closest “disciplinary affiliation” with nonfiction, if only because her language is or seems to be less studiedly poetic than Guzmán’s and Campobello’s. Readers will glean a nuanced appreciation of the varied faces of both history and autobiography in this chapter. The author continues her examination of the life story in the following chapter, with detailed analyses of the writings of José Vasconcelos and María Luisa Puga. Theories other than the classic Lejeune definition of autobiography are brought to bear on Jörgensen’s new look at old stories, as she explores the paradigmatic guides to reading for a problematical truth genre whose subject is a pre- existing real person but whose treatment of the subjectivity of that person contributes to doubts about the truth of what is being told. Jörgensen applies concepts of memory and intertexuality to the Ateneísta’s Ulises criollo, and to three works by María Luisa Puga: De cuerpo entero: el espacio de la escritura, Crónicas de una oriunda del kilómetro X en Michoacán and Diario del dolor, the last published shortly before Puga’s death. To illustrate the perennially slippery definition of genre for these works—the varied ways in which they are perceived—, Jörgensen includes results of a Dewey Decimal search, discovering that the diverse designations for a book can at times lead it to be “stunningly mis-shelved” (95). No doubt we have all felt that frisson of shock when we find a book we “know” to be literature shelved in the section on history. The works analyzed in this revelatory book seem to wander all over the library in their search for a firm disciplinary label. In another chapter on life writing, the author focuses on the by-now recognized subgenre of testimonio and on...

Arrecife by Juan Villoro

148 World Literature Today reviews the context of other histories, including the ugly legacy of colonization, slavery, and personal deceits. Vassanji ’s prodigious research provides insight into certain details of the German occupation of East Africa, the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania (War of the Waters), the slavery of East Africans and sexual exploitation of African concubines by Indians in Africa, the export of African slaves to India, the resulting African communities in India known as Sidis, and Idi Amin’s atrocities against Asians in Uganda forcing the exodus of Asians to global destinations, including Canada . The narration of the history of Kilwa and German colonization is thrice removed, reminding readers of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Kamal, like many of Vassanji’s characters and the novel’s plot, is a reminder that identity, history, and memory are complex. Vassanji confounds popular understandings of history, refusing to provide readers with black-and-white answers to ambiguous historical questions. Written in poetically intense language with a keen eye for detail, Vassanji’s signature sense of humor enlivens The Magic of Saida. This reader is captivated by the mesmerizing suspense that leaves all readers wanting more from M. G. Vassanji’s magical pen. Asma Sayed University of Alberta Juan Villoro. Arrecife. Barcelona. Anagrama. 2012. isbn 9788433972359 It is no accident that Juan Villoro is classified as a postmodern author. We know that, in general, literary criticism resorts to the postmodern label when it seeks to quickly classify those works that are characterized by a fragmentary style, open endings, and an obsession with the present (mass media, sports, fashion, and entertainment ). These are works that, in other words, deal with frivolous themes in a serious manner. Within this context, Arrecife confirms that Villoro’s postmodernity , far from being an arbitrary label, is an apt classification, yet one that requires a careful reading to be understood. Arrecife’s plot is the following: An ex-rocker, Mario Müller, living in the Caribbean, sets up the Pyramid, a tourist attraction based on violent, but fake, experiences: simulated kidnappings and encounters with narcoguerrillas carried out by hired actors as well as excursions into the jungle in exotic places infested with dangerous beasts. The clients are, of course, bored American and European tourists in search of intense experiences that will shake them out of the tedium of their empty, superficial Pierre Michon The Eleven Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays, tr. Archipelago Books Winner of the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française, Pierre Michon’s agile, rhythmic depiction of the French Revolution is also a bildungsroman. Corentin leads a provincial life until his paintings, commissioned by Louis XV’s mistress, launch him into Parisian society (see WLT, Mar. 2010, 67). Wayne Macauley The Cook Quercus An ultimatum is delivered: youth prison or cooking school. The young protagonist chooses cooking, wanting to show he can succeed after past mistakes. Chronicling the apprenticeship of an aspiring chef, Wayne Macauley’s unique novel focuses on the culinary aspects of the setting while highlighting the personal growth of a character determined to prove himself. march–april 2013 • 149 Nota Bene lives. “The Pyramid was governed by rest, understood as isolation, and diversion, understood as risk. A place where lights and music created a suspended reality and the entertainment programs raised the heartbeat.” Everything goes well until one of the hotel divers is found murdered. From that moment, we discover that behind this exotic resort designed for frivolous tourists, where everything appears to happen in an impregnable bubble, emerges the violent reality of the Mexican drug cartels. The hidden violence that surrounds the Pyramid is the only real thing in the place. The novel takes place in a saturated postmodern environment with an abundance of damaged characters who are eccentric or simply seeking a new opportunity in life, such as Sandra , the ashtanga yoga and Tibetan kung-fu instructor who lives in Mexico illegally; Tony, the ex-drug addict who builds sound systems for the hotel aquariums with help from computers; Mario, the manager, who sees himself as a New Age guru; and Ginger, an American diver who is the member of an extreme-sport club named...

The Method by Juli Zeh

Pierre Michon The Eleven Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays, tr. Archipelago Books Winner of the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française, Pierre Michon’s agile, rhythmic depiction of the French Revolution is also a bildungsroman. Corentin leads a provincial life until his paintings, commissioned by Louis XV’s mistress, launch him into Parisian society (see WLT, Mar. 2010, 67). Wayne Macauley The Cook Quercus An ultimatum is delivered: youth prison or cooking school. The young protagonist chooses cooking, wanting to show he can succeed after past mistakes. Chronicling the apprenticeship of an aspiring chef, Wayne Macauley’s unique novel focuses on the culinary aspects of the setting while highlighting the personal growth of a character determined to prove himself. march–april 2013 • 149 Nota Bene lives. “The Pyramid was governed by rest, understood as isolation, and diversion, understood as risk. A place where lights and music created a suspended reality and the entertainment programs raised the heartbeat.” Everything goes well until one of the hotel divers is found murdered. From that moment, we discover that behind this exotic resort designed for frivolous tourists, where everything appears to happen in an impregnable bubble, emerges the violent reality of the Mexican drug cartels. The hidden violence that surrounds the Pyramid is the only real thing in the place. The novel takes place in a saturated postmodern environment with an abundance of damaged characters who are eccentric or simply seeking a new opportunity in life, such as Sandra , the ashtanga yoga and Tibetan kung-fu instructor who lives in Mexico illegally; Tony, the ex-drug addict who builds sound systems for the hotel aquariums with help from computers; Mario, the manager, who sees himself as a New Age guru; and Ginger, an American diver who is the member of an extreme-sport club named Cruci/ Fiction. All are drifters whose past does not matter at the Pyramid but whose destinies begin to intertwine in a web of dangerous, secret relationships once the diver is murdered. However, Arrecife is also a novel about friendship and redemption. Mario Müller has assigned himself the task of helping his friend, Tony Gongora, who has lost his memory because of drug use. The story of these two friends is also a journey to the past, during which Tony slowly reconstructs his life through his conversations with Mario. It is a difficult and painful trip, where each piece of the memory that Tony recovers can also be an experience that revives forgotten sufferings. Undeniably, Juan Villoro has found in Arrecife an effective and intelligent way of consolidating himself and being taken seriously as a postmodern author in the Spanishspeaking world. A preoccupation with postmodernity has its clear limits, and Villoro knows them well: they are restricted to the purely thematic. With Arrecife, the reader has the impression of being in the presence of an author who exerts himself to be current, to be up-to-date with the themes that characterize any postmodern society. Villoro’s style, however, has nothing fragmentary or experimental about it. This is a great achievement because, on the contrary, it is rigorously conventional . Arrecife turns out to be a deliberate and paradoxically postmodern novel. Marcelo Rioseco University of Oklahoma Juli Zeh. The Method. Sally-Ann Spencer, tr. London. Harvill Secker. 2012. isbn 9781846554278 Sympathy for a terrorist? Rebellion against preventive health-care measures ? In Germany, Juli Zeh is a highly visible political author whose fictional works, essays, and talk-show appearances call for action. Will she be able to spark increased awareness about the implications of health and security measures beyond Germany and in countries that are far from universal health care? The premise of the setting in this highly readable, dystopian novel is that in a few more decades, science and medicine will have eradicated 150 World Literature Today reviews colds, cancer, and other diseases, and pain will be a thing of the past. In order to maintain a disease-free society, the state holds far-reaching control over all citizens, resulting in a dictatorship of health and prevention based on the “method” as its principle of legitimization. The method is always capitalized, suggesting its godlike function in society...

Literatura, Fútbol y Nación: El Último Campeonato Mundial de Pedro Ángel Paloú

This essay is divided in two parts. The first part takes into consideration the work of Eduardo Galeano, Juan Villoro, and Jorge Valdano with regard to the relationship between literature and soccer. The second part grows out of Galeanoss position that “soccer and nation are always intertwined” and focuses on Pedro Angel Palou?s novel El último campeonato mundial (1997) and how, despite depicting a future in which nearly all nations are extinct, soccer still has a nationalist and unifying effect. In such a way, even while taking into account postulates found in the Manifiesto Crack (to which Palou is affiliated), postulates that deny Mexico and national identity as literary themes, the interpretation presented by this essay implicates that though there is no overt nationalism present, the novel contains elements that enable a nostalgia for what a nation represents.

A Conversation with Juan Villoro

A Conversation with Juan Villoro