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Synopsis
A haunting, modern-day parable about a mass epidemic of blindness.
Review
On the second page of Blindness, a man goes blind while waiting at a stoplight. For no discernable reason, he can see only white. The thought is terrifying enough, but what happens when the "white blindness" spreads from person to person, quickly becoming a mass epidemic, is even more horrific.
The contagious loss of vision causes life to quickly cascade into chaos, yet at the center of Saramago's story, a group of people ultimately refuses to succumb to the affliction. Interned in an abandoned mental hospital, they band together against overzealous soldiers, who defend their own sight with guns, and other blind victims, whose selfish behavior quickly escalates from theft to rape. Guided by a person whose sight is, miraculously, not lost, they eventually escape to discover a transformed world.
Translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero (who died, the back matter informs us, "before completing his revision of this translation"), the style of Saramago's prose is as important to his story as the plot. The characters and places are never identified by name, sentences cascade into one another with sparse punctuation, no quotation marks indicate when the narrative ends and a character's voice begins, and both description and paragraphs are in short supply. The effect is that we feel blind as we read.
Saramago's overall point here is often achingly transparent, with characters sometimes stating the obvious ("Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are"), but the strength and plausibility of the story keep it grounded; his novel works as a metaphor for so many different situations and events that his message lingers long after the final page. (AD)
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| NONFICTION |
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The Soccer War
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
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| Published: |
1991 |
| Pages: |
240 |
| Publisher: |
Vintage Books USA |
Links:
Kapuscinski bio
Links on Kapuscinski
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Synopsis
A collection of notes from the heart of Third World conflicts by Poland's preeminent reporter, Ryszard Kapuscinski, on an endless search for war and humanity.
Review
Offering an often disjointed narrative that's part memoir, part reporting, and part history, Kapuscinski continually reminds the reader that he is not writing a book, but a plan for a book. The Soccer War is a series of dispatches from the front lines — sweating, fearful, bold stories of war not fit for the telex — mixed with news reports and musings about what he has seen.
The book, or "plan," begins in Ghana in the '60s, where Kapuscinski is
apparently just being a writer. Staying in a raft of a hotel with a cast of odd characters, the start feels like a page out of Miller's Tropic of Cancer — but there is not much discussion of sex, the subject of alcohol is all but dropped, and soon all those characters are left behind, as Kapuscinski goes on the run again, deeper into the bush and closer to the action. The author demonstrates an almost suicidal determination to get inside the areas of conflict for the sake of being the first to report, but also to understand the inner workings of the people and situations behind the destruction.
In addition to providing firsthand reports of everyday farmers, soldiers, and jailers, Kapuscinski also talks about crossing paths with presidents and ministers, before floating off into long, fascinating discussions of the history and politics that draw maps and kill villages.
In Africa, he describes a different world from the West, where enormous stars over the Sahara "sway above the sand like great chandeliers." In the dense jungles are ignorant leaders and endless, senseless cycles of killing and revenge. In Latin America, he witnesses an altogether different aesthetic of "excess and eclecticism" amid abundance and poverty, and again finds himself at the center of a war that he is the first to report on.
Trailing off in a faraway place, steps from death, with no definitive beginning and no clear end, The Soccer War is a commentary on people, life, war, and Kapuscinski himself. (MM)
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Synopsis
Through a series of loosely connected short stories, Drown wanders from the poverty stricken Dominican Republic to northern New Jersey's industrial wasteland as young men struggle to find their place in a world that has overlooked them.
Review
Junot Díaz's Drown aims to define the Latin-American hombre and the forces that create him, whether in the Dominican Republic or New Jersey. Simple relationships are examined as young men accompany their mothers to the mall, pine for their missing girlfriends, or discuss the unspoken rules between older and younger brothers.
Although Díaz has spent most of his life in the States, his text reveals a constant state of translation — between languages and cultures — often dropping Spanish slang for which there is no true English equivalent. The author juxtaposes the Third World with the Northeastern Corridor, as adolescents attempt to filter their new environment through their outmoded understanding of life as it had been, constantly comparing new experiences from one place to another. But beware: these are not sugarcoated, coming-of-age tales. Drown takes us on a tour through crack dens with lost youth and leaves us in a living room with a child as his father disappears upstairs with a mistress.
Each character and each situation has an immediacy that forces you to speculate about whether or not these passages are autobiographical. Some of the same people reappear in different stories. And, although most of the characters are not truly aware of their situation, no one expresses self-pity or apologizes for any behavior. A master of the short story, Díaz grants these characters only a few pages, as if they are forgotten again as soon as he has stopped writing, leaving the reader only to wonder what has become of them. The inevitable conclusion is that they have, hopefully, survived. (JM)
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Synopsis
A photographic exploration of the Indian motion picture industry and its culture.
Review
The cinema business in India is gigantic. Eight hundred films in 15 different languages are made each year and viewed by people from all walks of life, some 14 million viewers per day. Countless authors have written about Indian films and filmmakers, but Israeli-born Jonathan Torgovnik is the first to go behind the scenes and into the streets and theaters with a camera to capture the action and reveal the profound effect cinema has on the Indian people. Five years in the making, Bollywood Dreams unfolds slowly as the photographer explores the touring cinema, staged studio productions, melodramatic performers, and the throng-packed theaters from Chennai to Mumbai.
An introduction to the significance of Indian cinema by Nasreen Munni Kabir, an authority on the subject, sets the stage for Torgovnik's powerful imagery. Using dynamic compositions and available light, he skillfully portrays India's colorful humanity both on and off the silver screen. On the road with the traveling cinema for a week, he engagingly brings to life the toil of projecting film from the back of a truck and the joy of a young boy's first movie. Back in the city, it's all magical make-believe as stars are primped and preened on back lots and soundstages, creating roles that endow the actors with godly attention from the film-worshiping masses.
Torgovnik shows the promotional tools to be nearly as antiquated as the filmmaking equipment, yet nonetheless inventive. Hand-painted posters, which are scavenged to decorate food stalls and used to construct makeshift homes, are plastered all over city walls, and enormous cutout figures, propped by crude branch-like scaffolding, perpetuate the larger-than-life images of the stars, whose likenesses are often as coveted as as those of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and ancient deities. (PL)
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FEATURE
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Having recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, online international literary magazine Words Without Borders has now amassed a significant library of translations — which the mag itself has commissioned — from around the globe. To understand how valuable WWB's work is, you need only read the stats on its website: "50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6% are translated into English." By seeking to convert the work of the best writers around the world into English, WWB strives to remedy this imbalance, opening up previously closed linguistic borders. As our own US borders become increasingly difficult to breach and visas more difficult to obtain, the imperative to open our minds to alternative worldviews grows even stronger. Take some tips from translator Lawrence Venuti, and plunge forth into new territory with fiction, interviews, essays, poems, and more from writers including Adam Zagajewski, Zara Houshmand, Edmund Keeley, Dunya Mikhail, and Najem Wali. (JKG)
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CLASSIC TRANSLATIONS
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POETRY
All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten
by Homer (Christopher Logue)
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All Day Permanent Red is the latest installment of Logue's translations of Homer's bloodiest scenes. The only thing Homeric about Logue's versions are the character names, however, because these are thoroughly postmodern interpretations by a noted British poet.
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POETRY
The Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow)
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Asking poetry lovers which translation of Rilke is the best is like asking Elizabeth Taylor to pick a husband — yet Edward Snow's colloquial Rilke has won many admirers.
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FICTION
A Hero of Our Time
by Mikhail Lermontov (Marian Schwartz)
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Before James Dean — or even Colin Farrell — there was Pechorin, the bad boy hero of Lermontov's famous novella, which has been appropriately modernized by Marian Schwartz, one of our greatest Russian translators.
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FICTION
The Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu (Royall Tyler)
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Murasaki Shikibu's thousand-year-old tale of the Shining Prince finds new life in Royall Tyler's contemporary translation.
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FICTION/NONFICTION: ESSAYS
Everything and Nothing
by Jorge Luis Borges (Various)
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A slimmer Borges volume including many classic short pieces from Ficciones, along with some haunting later lectures. An all-star line-up of translators, including the renowned Donald Yates, lead you through the labyrinth of one of the world's greatest imaginations.
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FICTION
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes (Edith Grossman)
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Edith Grossman's ambitious undertaking brushes the cobwebs off the novel to end all novels. A fluid, sane translation of the ultimate book of madness and fantasy? Now there's a match made in heaven.
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FICTION
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust (Lydia Davis)
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Lydia Davis leads off Viking's project to retranslate all of In Search of Lost Time, with a different translator for each volume. Correcting many of the earlier embellishments, Davis offers a superb, spare version that can make even Proust seem concise.
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POETRY
Collected Poems
by C. P. Cavafy (George Savidis, ed., Edmund Keeley, and Philip Sherrard)
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Savidis' collection is the definitive volume of Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy, who chronicled the everyday in his sensual poems.
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FICTION
The Stranger
by Albert Camus (Matthew Ward)
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Turning his back on Stuart Gilbert's beautiful but heavily ornate British version, Matthew Ward rendered Camus' classic in a sparse American English very similar to Hemingway's thudding prose (which had inspired Camus in the first place).
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POETRY
The Inferno of Dante
by Dante Alighieri (Robert Pinsky)
The Inferno
by Dante
(Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander)
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The spate of English translations of Dante's Inferno in the past decade leaves no doubt which realm of the afterlife we are most concerned with. Two recent versions have left earlier versions wrestling with the tenth commandment — The Inferno of Dante from renowned poet Robert Pinsky and Inferno from the translating team of august Princeton Dante specialist Robert Hollander and his wife, poet Jean Hollander. Pinsky uses slant rhymes to approximate Dante's notoriously difficult terza rima, while the Hollanders abandon rhyme in favor of terse, clean English verse.
Online chat with Hollanders | Robert Hollander's Dante Project | Canto V, translated by Pinsky
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BOOK NEWS
A few notable bits of recent book news and information.
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Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek wins the Nobel (AFP)
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Jelinek, author of The Piano Teacher, is the tenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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2004 MacArthur Fellows Announced (MacArthur Foundation)
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Writers Aleksandar Hemon and Edward P. Jones are among the winners, who receive $500,000 along with the priceless
designation of "genius."
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Rushdie delivers petition to Congress (BBC News)
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It contains 180,000 signatures and asks for the repeal of a law that enables access to book-buying and library records.
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Kirkus to review self-published authors (Christian Science Monitor)
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The trade journal will charge $350 per review for authors without the backing of a publisher, in a move that has drawn some criticism.
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The New Yorker Festival gathered literary lights in Manhattan (Washington Post)
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An insider report from the high-minded summit.
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Literature on the web (NY Times Book Review)
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An annotated sampling of some of the web's most interesting literary sites.
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Random House to publish Korean literature series (Chosun)
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The revamped New York Times Book Review launches (NY Post)
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An amusing exchange between a British writer and his Russian translator (Guardian)
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David Mitchell is the favorite for the Booker Prize (Reuters)
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Françoise Sagan dies (Expatica)
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