Tag
South America
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Conflicted Futures, Convex Literatures
“The novel’s distinctive capacity for revealing unexpected links can shed new light on how we consider and counter crises.”
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The Art of Protest
I marched with thousands on the streets of New York, asserting that “Trump is Not Our President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” So far we are free to assemble on Union Square in New York, to march up Fifth Avenue, to shout our anger, our fear, and our resolve. The street and soil are still ours to share. As I…
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The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR—a good illustration of the Soviet tendency toward…
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Loss in Translation
Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay “The Task of the Translator” claims that “translation is a form,” an artistic act in its own right. For Benjamin, both text and translation yearn toward a mystical “pure language,” a kind of aesthetic state that transcends mere communication. This pure language comprises a rich constellation of texts and textual possibilities,…
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Rio, Capital of Disaster Capitalism
The Olympic rings loom large over Rio de Janeiro. Seven years after the city won its bid to host the games, the impending two-week extravaganza has swept changes across the Marvelous City, as Rio is known, dividing its already conflict-riven social, political, and economic urban landscape even more deeply. In contrast to the heady days…
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Caravaggio’s Hair
Human hair, as Álvaro Enrigue points out in Sudden Death, is the only part of the human body that does not rot. It accordingly plays a starring role in the novel, which is as interested in the persistence of human bodies as in their destruction. The tennis ball fiercely batted between the Spanish poet Francisco…
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The Inventor of Nature
In 1869 the centennial of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was celebrated around the world, including in New York City, where bands and speakers gathered in Central Park to honor his legacy. He was hailed as the most brilliant explorer since Alexander the Great, a scientist equal in stature to Charles Darwin, and a genius who…
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Following the Money
“The cultural meaning of money and the many personal touches we give to our exchanges of it can’t be overlooked.”
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The Essential Gratuitousness of César Aira
It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of…
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All Eyes On Brazil
With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the country—and its far-flung corners—than ever before. Be it David Beckham’s trip into the Amazon for BBC television, or writers “slumming” it…
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The Hope and the Horror
In 1953, a young Jean Franco set sail from Europe for Central America. She arrived in Cuba a few days after Fidel Castro’s ill-fated assault on the Moncada Barracks. Continuing to Guatemala, she witnessed the US-backed military overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s reform government, a coup that placed the country on the road to genocidal oppression.…
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Her Own Audience
Gloria, the heroine of this film, has no fear of the grande geste. If her date’s ex-wife won’t stop calling him, Gloria will drop his cellphone in his soup. If, before making love, she must remove the abdominal binder that gathers in her boyfriend’s excess flesh (a consequence of his gastric-bypass surgery) she will do…
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Latin America’s Left: Between Demos and Kratos
On March 5, 2013, the Venezuelan government announced the death of president Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. In the New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the most perceptive commentators on Latin American politics, wrote that he “mostly left behind a void.” It could not be otherwise, since Chávez “was All.” His loss, for…
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Collateral Melancholy
Two children meet by chance on the night of a historic Santiago earthquake, develop a brief, tentative friendship around a secret task that neither of them understands too well, and then, years later, meet up as adults, both attracted and estranged by the silences and intersecting threads that had earlier entangled them. Alejandro Zambra’s third…
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Bolaño to Come
The English-speaking world has canonized Roberto Bolaño with astonishing rapidity. It’s not surprising that this consecration has begun to provoke skepticism among Spanish-speaking critics who concede Bolaño’s importance but detect a condescension to Latin American writing in the fervor of the Anglo acclaim. Some caution does seem warranted: when a writer earns comparisons to Coltrane,…
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Choking on Poverty: Inequality and Environmental Suffering
In the summer of 1978, a trucking company illegally dumped 31,000 gallons of used transformer oil along hundreds of miles of roads in Warren County, North Carolina. The location was no accident: This was the poorest county in the state, and the majority of its residents were black. Adding insult to injury, the state decided…
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Lives at the Urban Margins
“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the…
