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Addicted
March 28, 2007
As you might be able to devine from my last post, I'm on a bit of a Latin American fiction jag, with a touch of other literature translated from Spanish, but not from Latin America. (I know I promised to write more about magazines, and I will, I swear...we have all the time in the world.) And it happens that I've been reading a great many New Directions titles, because they have a great list of books from the Spanish.
After Bolano, I moved on to Cesar Aira, whose short novels Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and How I Became a Nun are breezy reads that get surprisingly intense. The first is about a painter who, after a serious injury, ends of stalking around South America in search of an indian raid to paint. The second, which I'm still reading, is about a girl whose first taste of ice cream almost ruins the rest of her life. Aira is doubtlessly a strange writer, and I hear he's written dozens of books.
I also gobbled Javier Marias' The Man of Feeling, about an opera singer who falls in love with a strange depressive who is entangled in a terrible and unusual marriage. Marias' prose, at least as it's rendered in this translation, is stunning and subtle. It's no wonder people say he's Spain's great hope for the Nobel.
Then I've got Cortazar's Hopscotch on my shelf. And a copy of Borges' Labyrinths on deck. And a 9-5 job. And a wife and friends. And I need to get some sleep at some point...
Posted by Craig Morgan Teicher on March 28, 2007 | Comments (0)
