Thanks for that good work, fbaezer!
Many of them I've read...
OK. Mexican prose writers.
Juan Rulfo. He only published 2 books in his life (and burned the rest of his works), Enough to grant him first place among Mexican prosists. Pedro Páramo, his novel, is dry, haunting, passionate, covered with death-in-life. His writing tecnique and his (also dry) command of the Spanish language, are both amazing. El Llano en Llamas is a collection of short stories, with the same elements predominant in Pedro Páramo.
Agustín Yáñez wrote an absolute masterpiece, Al Filo del Agua ("The Edge of the Storm"), about love, politics and social life in Mexico before the Revolution. Yáñez had a great ear, and his words sound both true and musical. He wrote other very good novels, but none as Al Filo del Agua.
Carlos Fuentes is a very prolific prosist, and has written some classics: La Región Más Transparente, La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, Aura, Las Buenas Conciencias, novels, and Cantar de Ciegos, short-stories rank among the best. He has ordered all his works around a gigantic project of social Mexico. Fuentes is incredibly talented, and, IMHO, would be a masterpiece machine if he took longer to polish some of his works and leaned less on both linguistic and social commonplaces.
José Emilio Pacheco is known, mostly, for his poetry, but has written an incredible novel, Morirás Lejos, about the Holocaust, a very nice novelette about his childhood in Mexico City, Las Batallas en el Desierto and several astonishing collections of short stories: El Principio del Placer and El Viento Distante are among the best of the latter.
Jorge Ibargüengoitia is about the funniest, wittiest and most acid author a Mexican can read. As we say "he left no-puppet with its head". The heroes of Independence (Los Pasos de López) , the Revolutionaries (Los Relámpagos de Agosto), the Boy Scouts ("Falta de Espíritu Scout" in his collection La Ley de Herodes), all fell victims to his wit. You could be laughing your ass up while reading the story of murderous matrons (Las Muertas) , would be saviours from a Caribbean dictatorship (Maten al León) or girls who'd die at the moment of their first orgasm (Estas Ruinas Que Ves). His series "Instrucciones Para Vivir en México" is a sarcastic, and true, description of our societal ills.
Héctor Aguilar Camín is, mostly, a political writer. La Guerra de Galio is a more than fine novel, very helpful for understanding Mexico at the end of the XX Century.
Another important, and superior, socio-political writer was José Revueltas, a Communist. His short-stories collections Dios En la Tierra and Dormir en Tierra, are both beautiful and terrible.
Other important prosists are José Agustín, Fernando Del Paso and Angeles Mastretta.
And last, but not least, I think Nobel Prize Winner Octavio Paz, a poet, is also the best prose writer in Mexico (and perhaps the continent). His essays not only spill erudition and understanding of human nature and culture, but also a fluent, beautiful language. Paz couldn't help being poetic even if his most prosaic moments.
I've only read Fuentes, and only articles of his in English, though I do have an art book on Cuevas by him that I bought at some store in the Zona Rosa in the sixties. Couldn't read it, of course, since I don't read spanish past elementary sentences.
Yanez sounds like someone I'd appreciate. I'll see if there are any english translations. Ah, translations. Sometimes they are very good, but I know it isn't the same.
Looks like there is an english translation through this Amazon link -
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0292701314//102-8809696-1476962?condition=all
Nuts, now I need to fill my cart with more books. Thanks, fb.
Another brilliant writer is Paulo Coelho from Brazil.
One of his books "The Alchemist" is such a joy to read,
or "By the river Piedra I sat down and wept".
Carlos Fuentes' little novel, Aura, is a piece of magic. I immediately connected with it at the beginning where we meet the hero sitting at a table in Sanborn's restaurant in the center (near the Zocalo) of Mexico City. I used to have breakfast there regularly. From there the work moves into a magical realist world of wonder.
Thanks for bringing the thread to my attention, Osso.
Omigod, you had breakfast at Sanborn's??
(I still have a wood carving from that exact store, probably the same trip where I wandered into the book place and bought the Cuevas book. What years did you have breakfast there, you cafe hound? (I can say that, I do that too.)
In the meantime, I've just ordered a bit of Borges, Rulfo, Cortazar, and Yanez through the a2k amazon link.
This'll keep me out of trouble for a while.
I've heard of the Alchemist, though have no memory of why.
Will add it to list.
No, I lied apparently. My Sanborn's was the one by the Zona Rosa. I guess we didn't pass in the day in the sixties.
<I admit to having once owned an Amado novel in paperback and not reading it, for no good reason>
fbaezer What do you think of che Guevara? and the story in Motorcycle Diaries?
So, listen, I am toying with moving south, after our gallery lease finishes and the natural life of our business finishes, south, where I could regather with some warmth and perhaps some real estate equity from northnorth.
I went to visit Dys and Diane recently, a three-plane trip, and it was a flightlong day of beauty and pleasure. However, there was a certain piquance, in the last stuffed tourist cabin, when I was in the middle between a woman reading Mario Vargos Llosa and a woman reading Bill Clinton's autobiography. I was reading some pabalum called High Maintenance that I bought in the SF airport and finished shortly, and doodling in my so called diary. I enjoyed the cavelike ambiance in that instance, especially when I got to leave the plane and see great day downing light.
Not to skewer the thread, but to bring up Mario Vargos Llosa... no cheapo books available on amazon...
I'm afraid I am illerate in Latin American literature, but my claim to "legtimacy" rests with my wife's doctorate in Spanish literature. In Mexico City (UNAM) she actually took a course with Agustin Yanez.
Oh, JL, can you nudge her to comment? We'd really like to hear what she remembers.
That's the Autonoma, right? (I visited the autonoma in guadalajara, at least the med school).
I'd rather nudge a large bronze statue than her. I can say that she remembers very fondly her graduate studies in Mexico (classical languages), especially the Spanish intellectuals who blessed Mexico when they were chased out Spain by Franco. Her doctorate in Spanish Lit was earned at a major midwestern university decades later. She considered the level of expertise there vastly inferior to that of graduate studies in Mexico. And this is not an expression of Mexican nationalism on her part. She has very little.
Sorry to babble when I expected she might not want to sally forth here with comments, JL.
Hmm, we should invite joefx to join in here, no?
and superjuly is from brazil, maybe she'd be interested, lips notwithstanding.
That was in 1955-56, when I studied at San Carlos (painting) and UNAM (music). But over the years I gravitated to that haunting place regularly.
