For Wit: In Search of Spanish Lit

For Easter Wit and I went out in search of decent used bookstores. The one I’d been told about, Henderson’s Books, was unfortunately closed for the day (this is one of my pillars against religion…that it closes bookstores on arbitrary holidays). However, we still made it to Village Books and eventually found one single open coffee shop (my life has become a constant search for good books and good coffee…neither are easily found).

This post isn’t really about searching for books though, but is for Wit, who shares my interest in Spanish language literature. I pointed out a few books at Village Books, but here is a better list of some of the gems I’ve found.

First, and definitely foremost, is Garcia Marquez. Of all the Spanish language writers, Marquez soars above all others. Winner of the Nobel Prize and worshipped like a God in Mexico and Columbia, he would almost certainly get my vote for greatest writer on the planet. After Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude an entire generation of writers attempted to follow and recreate the magical realism he achieved in his great novel. It’s never been replicated. Not that folks haven’t stopped trying.

If you like magical realism, there are many writers worth checking out (very few Americans though, where we are stuck with our modernist, realistic streak). Give Kafka a whirl if you like the dark side, and also Jorge Borges, who is truly mind blowing, Donald Barthelme if you like absurd humor…but the truth is the true original is Marquez.

Marquez wrote three genuine masterpieces. Given that most great writers only produce one, that’s a pretty good output. They are One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch. This last is my personal favorite, a long, weaving narrative about an undying South American dictator whose godlike control over his people extends to him selling off the very ocean along their coast to foreign governments for money (literally…in the novel, the ocean is sold and gone, leaving only a vast desert).

The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, which we looked at, is another great writer. However, we didn’t see his masterpiece at VB. Look for The Death of Artemio Cruz, which he is known for. My favorite Fuentes piece, though, is a novella called Apollo and the Whores, found in the collection The Orange Tree. It is one of the raunchiest and most hilarious pieces of literature I’ve ever read, and was the first thing I read by Fuentes.

One of the best single novels to come out of Mexico in recent years is The Night Buffalo by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote the screenplay Babel. Arriaga is a fine novelist, and Buffalo is one of the eeriest and subtly creepy novels I’ve found in a long time. Not an out and out horror novel, it is a novel about madness and paranoia and betrayal. It is also quite short, only a few hundred pages.

Julio Cortazar stands out as one of the giants of Spanish language literature. His novel Hopscotch, which I haven’t read, was groundbreaking in its day. The book is structured like those old Choose Your Own Adventure stories, allowing readers to Hop-Scotch around the story (although to be sure, Cortazar’s novel is far more complicated than CYOA). His influence on later Latin American writers is enormous.

If you wanted to look for actual Spanish writers (from Spain), Pio Baroja and Jose Cela stand out (as does, of course, Cervantes). I don’t run into Baroja or Cela much in bookstores, but if you’re in the city you should have a better chance finding them.

Certainly worth checking out is Alberto Manguel, whose non-fiction work The Library at Night, is a fascinating and inspiring meditation on libraries, books and the imagination.

Finally, I’ll again put in two-cents for the non-Spanish writer Jose Saramago (Portuguese ain’t that different from Spanish), another Nobel Prize winner who simply blows me away. He has quickly become one of my favorite writers, and his style is completely, utterly his own. Read Blindness first, and then its quasi-sequel Seeing. Then find a copy of his newest novel Death With Interruptions.

Anyway, hope this leads you to some good books. I’ve got an extra copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I can send you.

Oh, and you’ll notice I’m reading Bolano’s new book 2666. It’s good so far.