Amulet is my third Roberto Bolano book after Nazi Literature in the Americas and Third Reich, all first-rate fiction from … More
Tag: Latin American Literature
The Political is Personal: Roque Dalton’s Poetry
Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, edited by Hardie St. Martin and published by Curbstone Press, is a selection of poems from throughout Dalton’s poetic career. Included here are poems from 10 of Dalton’s books — a virtual chronicle of the maturing of Dalton’s poetic talents. Rightly so, the poems in here form a record of his development as a writer who has step by step combined political commitment as a revolutionary fighter and as a poet.
Some Thoughts on the Death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I wrote this reflection for the Philippine Online Chronicles. I was reading the final pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Of … More
On Pablo Neruda’s Ascent to the Heights of Macchu Picchu
Allow me to begin from the very beginning, which is the beginning not only of my encounter with Pablo Neruda … More
Jorge Amado’s Violent Land: A Land Fertilized with Human Blood
The title tells it all – Jorge Amado’s Violent Land is about brutal cacao warlords in Bahia, Brazil fighting over … More
The Feast of the Goat: Dissecting a US-backed Latin American Dictatorship
All great works of art are revolutionary. Beyond inaugurating formal stylistic transformations, such works represent a demystification and condemnation of … More
Artemio Cruz: The Quintessential Big Comprador-Landlord
Following in the vein of old Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz takes … More
The End of the Game
This one’s about one of my favorite authors written a few years ago when I was studying Management in Cebu. … More
Carpentier’s Account of Revolution and Negation of the Postmodern Mood
Do all revolutions inevitably lead to the establishment of even more repressive regimes than the one it sought to replace? … More
Women’s Resistance and the Antigonean Power of Mourning in Ariel Dorfman’s Widows
In acts of defiance evocative of Antigone in Sophocles’ classic tragedy, the women protagonists of the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s … More
Taibo’s Four Hands
The beauty of it all was managing to weave it all together in a braid that would move through time … More
Asleep in the Sun: A Peculiar Love Story
“I was looking for a rest cure and in some way I realized that for man there was no better … More
