reseña del libro: El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre, por Daína Chaviano (absorbente e iluminador)

David Evans5 Comments

Conseguí este libro en forma de audiolibro de la biblioteca y me gustó bastante.  Aqui es lo que escribí para Amazon:

El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Autores Espanoles E Iberoamericanos)

ilustración absorbente de la vida en la Habana hoy: la intensa privación yuxtapuesta con el amor por una ciudad maravillosa

En este libro, Daíno Chaviano narra de una forma absorbente la búsqueda desesperada para la comida en la Habana de hoy.  (Bueno, se escribió hace diez años así que es la Habana de aquel entonces, pero no me imagino que la situación se ha mejorado mucho.) 

La protagonista del cuento es la mujer Claudia, una estudiante de la historia del arte que deja su trabajo en un museo nacional cuando ve que los artefactos históricos de la patria se están vendiendo del museo a cualquier que tiene la plata.  De allí Claudia pasa por varias relaciones románticas: una relación de amor apasionado, otra de conveniencia (o sea, un hombre que le da carne para su hijo en cambio a su compañía), y – por fin – se vuelve jinetera (la palabra cubana para una prostituta) para los turistas extranjeros.  La degeneración en la vida de Claudia refleja la degeneración de la vida en la Habana a través de los años. 

Si eso no fuera suficiente, a la mitad del libro aprendemos que Claudia puede ver a varios espíritus y comienza a viajar a través del tiempo a ver la Habana antigua.  Cada viaje se vuelve más al pasado y Claudia ve cómo la Habana se ha surgido de la selva. En describir la Habana del pasado y del presente, Chaviano presenta una carta amorosa a una ciudad que obviamente le encanta pero que se ha vuelto duro y difícil. 

Hasta el momento final del libro, Claudio tiene que hacer decisiones muy difíciles para poder proveer comida a sí misma y a su hijo: estas decisiones son un símbolo para la gran decisión entre quedarse con una ciudad que le queda muy cerca al corazón o dejar su ciudad materna para buscar la comida en otro país. 

El lenguaje del libro es bello y es particularmente eficaz cuando Chaviano lo usa para describir la comida deliciosa que Claudia desea pero que se encuentra tan elusiva, tanto para ella que para sus compañeros cubanos.  Este libro me impresionó tanto que pienso ahora leer los otros tres libros en el serie de libros «La Habana Oculta»: Gata encerrada, Casa de juegos, y La isla del amor infinito. 

Escuché el audiolibro producido por RecordedBooks y narrado por Tatiana Vecino and Raul Duran.  Los dos son buenos lectores. 

[Una nota con respecto al contenido: El libro en parte describe la vida de una prostituta y – aunque no sea extremadamente explícito – tampoco dora la píldora, así que vemos algo de sexo.]

book review of my last book of 2007: the thirteenth tale, by diane setterfield

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A friend gave me this for my birthday some months ago, and I read it (mostly) during our Christmas vacation in Florida.  (It – inexplicably – edged out my non-fiction tome describing horrific tortures carried out by British imperialists in Kenya in the 1950s.)

good thriller (gathers momentum from okay to exciting) with an inspired twist and a satisfying finish

The backbone of this story is Vida Winter, the best-selling, captivating, masterful novelist of her generation, telling the secret story of her life to her chosen biographer, a reclusive bibliophile and occasional biographer Margaret Lea. The principal challenge for an author with writing a book in which a masterful (captivating, eloquent, powerful) storyteller tells her story is that you expect the story within the story to be, well, masterful. And when it isn’t, you’re disappointed. (It’s kind of like the old Tom Hanks-Sally Field movie Punchline where Hanks plays an excellent stand-up comic, but the stand-up comedy in the film isn’t that funny.)

This novel starts out that way. The storytelling isn’t masterful, and Ms Winter – as she tells her story – displays the annoying habit of describing all sorts of feelings and exchanges that she would have no way of knowing about. She describes the dialogues and sentiments of members of her household that took place before she was born or when she was just a baby (without providing a plausible way for her to have learned of them). Maybe other stories make this mistake, but it stands out here, perhaps because Ms Winter is telling her story TO A BIOGRAPHER who realistically would not unquestioningly accept this kind of speculation. At other times, when other characters are telling their stories, the author takes explicit pains to explain why the narrative seems smoother or more omniscient than it should. Those explicit cases (sometimes a little over-explained) make Ms Winter’s inappropriate omniscience stand out even more.

Although this is no The Shadow of the Wind [1], the plot picks up with twists and turns and red herrings, and finally the author adds a clever plot twist worthy of the film The Sixth Sense, a twist that allows the reader to turn back and re-interpret the entire story. Crafting a credible twist of that nature is no small feat, and Setterfield does it well.

I also enjoyed the ending. The author clearly subscribes to the adage: Give the audience what it wants. She ties up the loose strings and lets us know what happens to all the key characters with a wink and a nudge to her audience, indicating that she knows she is stepping beyond the immediate scope of the story but that she also knows we’re interested in the next step of the characters’ stories.

Well done. Not perfect, but well done.

[Note on content: The book has a few non-explicit references to sexual violence (no descriptions).]

[1] I actually read the original Spanish version of The Shadow of the Wind, La Sombra Del Viento (by Carlos Ruiz Zafon), and adored it. I have heard many rave reviews of the English translation. By no means should you listen to the English audiobook, which I tried to listen to but couldn’t for its over-the-top music and accents.

economists and the history of vegetarianism (+ a little nudism)

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My wife and I were reading aloud The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times on a recent road trip, and I was interested to see the role that economists have played.

First off,

the economist Adam Smith took on board the doctors’ discovery that meat was a superfluous luxury and this provided an important cog in the taxation system of his seminal treatise on the free market.  (p. xxiv)

More interestingly,

As environmental degradation and population growth became serious problems in Europe, economists turned to the pressing question of limited natural resources.  Many realised that producing meat was a hugely inefficient process in which nine-tenths of the resources pumped into the animal were wastefully transformed into feces.  (p. xxv)

And this has nothing to do with economists (be grateful), but

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley joined an eccentric network of nudist vegetarians who were agitating for social revolution.  (p. xxv)

Any connection to his wife’s writing of Frankenstein, I wonder?

sad election news in Kenya

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Together with the terrible news in Pakistan from last week, Kenya seems to have had lots of election fraud and violence in its presidential election last Thursday.  Here are a few bits from a BBC article:

On the violence:

Scores of people have been killed across Kenya in violence blamed on the disputed presidential election.

A BBC reporter has seen 43 bodies with gunshot wounds in a mortuary in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu. A witness said police shot protesters.

There have been running battles in Nairobi slums. The local KTN television station says 124 have died nationwide.

And the fraud:

European Union election observers have raised doubts about the officially announced results.

The government has banned live broadcasts linked to the election.

Chief EU election observer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told the BBC that his monitors had been barred from counting centres in the Central Province.

He also said that results from one constituency had been declared by the Electoral Commission of Kenya in Nairobi, which were different from those announced in the same constituency at local level.

He said the anomalies amounted to 20,000-25,000 votes in just one constituency.

Mr Kibaki’s national margin of victory was 230,000 votes.

Sad days.

la palabra de la semana (porque no voy a hacer esto cada día): acosar

David Evans2 Comments

¿Ya sabes que quiere decir?  ¡Sea honesto!  La oí en el audiolibro que estoy escuchando en estos días: «El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre» por Daína Chaviano.Quiere decir «Perseguir, sin tregua ni reposo, a un animal o a una persona: acosar a una presa, a un fugitivo» o «Perseguir, fatigar a alguien: el abogado nos acosó a preguntas».

o – en inglés – «to harrass» o «to pester».  El «acoso sexual» es «sexual harrassment».  (Cuando escogí esta palabra, pensé que quería decir algo más como «pursue relentlessly»; bueno, así es.)

Expanding Horizons Challenge

David Evans4 Comments

I’ve decided to participate in one more reading challenge over the coming months, the Expanding Horizons Challenge, hosted by Book Nut.  By the end of April, you either read six books from six different cultures or four books from one culture which is not your own. (Here are the details.)

I’m enjoying El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre (Man, woman, and hunger), by Cuban writer Daína Chaviano (who can resist a writer who looks this intense).  It’s part of a series called The Occult Side of Havana, so I’ll try and read the other three books in the series, plus one book in English (Julia Alvarez writes in English even though she started her life in the Dominican Republic).

So here’s my list:

  1. Casa de juegos (House of Games), por Daina Chaviano
  2. Gata encerrada (Cat in a Cage)
  3. La isla de los amores infinitos (The Island of Eternal Love)
  4. Before we were free, by Julia Alvarez

I’m excited to read several books by the same author in Spanish.  And Julia, well, she had me at In the time of the butterflies.

the africa reading challenge + my preliminary list

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The other day a friend told me he was considering doing the Russian Reading Challenge for next year, in which you commit to read several Russian novels and you share them with a community of readers.  As I poked around on-line, I found many reading challenges (mostly linked from the Ex Libris blog).  But despite searching, I could find no reading challenges focused on African literature or books dealing with Africa issues.

So I’m hosting one.  The guidelines are at the Africa Reading Challenge page, where I’ll be hosting a list of participants and links to their comments on their books.

Here is my preliminary list for the challenge:

  1. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah (memoir, Sierra Leone)
  2. You Must Set Forth at Dawn, by Wole Soyinka (memoir, Nigeria)
  3. A Krio Engagement and Other Stories, by Nana Grey-Johnson (short stories, The Gambia)
  4. Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent, by Pepetela (mystery, Angola)
  5. I Will Marry When I Want, by Thiong’o (play, Kenya)
  6. States and Power in Africa, by Herbst (political analysis, continent-wide)

This list may change and I may add to it, but it’s a start.