International fiction

A few related points (and links) to share in a brief post before I resume getting ready for work:

This weekend, I was pointed to a couple of posts on Tor.com's site written by authors Brian Francis Slattery and Jo Walton (with a second, related post by Slattery on Arab-American literary exchange). Each of them dealt with the issue of SF that isn't that of an Anglo-American flavor. The discussions are quite interesting (and I participated a bit in both, but not as much as I would have wished due to quite a few work-related projects I'm doing right now) and I encourage others to check them out.

In addition, you'll notice a few additions to my Non-English section of the blogroll. Thanks to Argentine author/editor Sergio Gaut vel Hartman for providing me with those links to Spanish-language fictions, especially that of the microfiction variety that I like to read on occasion.

Yesterday, I received my first shipment from Weird Tales after I finally remembered that I wanted to subscribe to it. To my surprise and joy, it took less than two weeks for it to be processed and I received the issue I feared I wouldn't receive due to my tardiness in subscribing: The September/October 2008 issue is subtitled "The International Fiction Special," and it contains short stories by Zoran Živković (astute readers will remember my love for his "suites"), Sara Genge, Nir Yaniv, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Juraj Červenák, Chiles Samaniego, and Alistair Rennie, as well as an excerpt from Ekaterina Sedia's excellent 2008 novel, The Alchemy of Stone. Time permitting, I'll try to have a mini-review of this and future issues every so often.

Finally, I have a few orders outstanding that ought to be arriving soon. I browsed again through the Reading the World 2008 website and chose books by Elias Khoury, António Lobo Antunes, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. In addition, I also bought newer fictions by Jorge Volpi Escalante and Romulo Gallego that I hope to have by the end of the month.

So...anyone care to comment on the state of "international" (i.e. non-Anglo-American) literature? Or perhaps to recommend even more authors to me, particularly Latin American authors outside the Boom Generation? I'm somewhat familiar with the Crack Manifesto and McOndo writers, but am very willing to expand my reading horizons in Spanish and perhaps Portuguese (although that'll involve a few struggles for me here and there).

The Crack Manifesto

Despite the understandable reluctance to abide by them or to stomach the umpteenth reiteration of worn-out rhetoric, literary manifestos can be fascinating. Although I've been aware of this particular "group" since 2004, for some reason I never thought to blog about the Mexican Crack Manifesto group until after reading yet another post commenting on that person's wariness of such manifestos.

The link above discusses each of the five authors involved in this ad hoc group. I have read two of them, Ignacio Padilla and Jorge Volpi, and I would hold them up against most writers today. Best of all, much of their work skirts around the boundaries of Anglo-American "speculative fiction" without ever being "Magic Realism" (a term against which they were rebelling in 1996, incidentally). Below is an excerpt from one of the five authors' comments about why they were publishing such a manifesto:

Consistent with its life project and its future, the Crack novel longs for renewal in the last spot to be visited: another walk through the Crack’s fair, with the same willingness for failure, as shown in the following tetralogy:

1. The Crack novels are not small, edible texts. They are, rather, a barbecue: let others write the steaks and the meatballs. Between that which is disposable and ephemeral, the Crack novels oppose the multiplicity of voices and the creation of self-ruling worlds, which is not a tranquil task. First commandment: “Thou shall love Proust above everyone else.”

2. The Crack novels are not born from certainty, which is the mother of all creative annihilations, rather from doubt, the older sister of knowledge. There is not one kind of Crack novel, but many; there is not one prophet, but several. Each writer discovers his own breed and shows it proudly. Descendants of champion fathers and grandfathers, the Crack novels take all their risks in stride. Second commandment: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s novel.”

3. The Crack novels are ageless. They are not novels of formation, and Pellicer’s phrase reemerges: “I am old, and believe that the world was born with me.” They are not, therefore, the first works of their authors, sweet temptations of autobiography; they are not about first loves or family histories, which underline everything. If the writer’s most valued possession is the freedom to imagine, these novels go much further, demanding more from their narrators. Nothing is easier than to write about oneself; nothing is more boring than a writer’s life. Third commandment: “Thou shall honor schizophrenia and listen to other voices; let them speak through your pages.”

4. The Crack novels are not optimistic, rosy, adorable novels; they know, as much as Joseph Conrad does, that being hopeful in an artistic sense does not necessarily imply believing in the world’s kindness. Or they search for a better world, being aware that such a fiction can exist only in a place we will never know. The Crack novels are not written in the new Esperanto, which is the language standardized by television. It is the celebration of language and a new baroque: of syntax, lexicon, and the morphological game. Fourth commandment: “Thou shall not take part in a group that accepts you as a member.”

Needless to say, A-MEN to #4. Thoughts on this? If I have time later this week, I'll blog about another Latin American "group" from the late 1990s/early 2000s that have produced some interesting works. For now, just know that I think Padilla and Volpi deserve greater recognition among the gringos (and yes, Padilla's The Shadow Without a Name and Volpi's In Search of Klingsor are available in English translation and presumably in at least a few of the major European languages).