2012: Classics in Their Own Country--Latin America and the Caribbean

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2012: Classics in Their Own Country--Latin America and the Caribbean

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1arubabookwoman
Editado: Jan 19, 2019, 6:44 pm

ETA

2019 Welcome

I decided to continue the year-long Classics in Their Own Country read for 2019 in the 2012 thread because there is a lot of good information in this earlier thread. I will shortly post a 2019 intro and updated author/book list ins paragraphs 10-15 below. In the meantime feel free to peruse the 2012 entries.

From 2012:

Welcome to a year-long read of "Classics in Their Own Country." We are all familiar (or at least have heard of) many of the classics in the Western Canon. But what about the classics of Uruguay or Cuba or other countries around the world? I was prompted to suggest this topic by a curiosity, maybe even a need, to know what other great books there are out there in the world that I might be missing.

But first, how do we know that a book is a "classic"? Is it a book people "praise and don't read" (Mark Twain), or "a bludgeon for preventing the free expression of beauty in new forms," (Oscar Wilde)?

All kidding aside, I like Italo Calvino's definition: "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." In Calvino's view, whether a book is a classic is personal, and classics are not limited to books widely accepted as such: "There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics."

Some other definitions of classics:

Ezra Pound: A book is a classic "because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."

Michael Dirda: A classic "can be read again and again with ever-deepening pleasure."

Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve: "A true classic...is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step....{Books are classics} not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy."

My suggestion would be that as we read these "Classics in Their Own Country" we consider and discuss:

--Is the book a classic, and why?

--What about the book is universal, and what is unique to its country or region?

--Are the themes, characters, and/or plots familiar or alien? Timeless or dated?

--Are these books similar to those of classics in the Western canon, or are they new or different?

--What is the context of the book--what was it influenced by or was it entirely novel? What influences did it have on subsequent literature?

--Would you include this book in your personal "library of classics"?

Above all: ENJOY!

3arubabookwoman
Editado: Dez 29, 2011, 6:11 pm

5msjohns615
Editado: Jan 10, 2012, 9:54 pm

Wow, this is a pretty excellent list! I'll try and add some more classics as they come to mind. For starters, the University of Texas Press has published a lot of great works in translation. Here's a link to their Latin American literature section:

Latin American literature and literary criticism books

A few that caught my eye:

ARGENTINA
Woven on the Loom of Time by Enrique Anderson-Imbert

BRAZIL
Family Ties by Clarice Lispector
Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos
The Devil's Church and Other Stories by Machado de Assis

CUBA
Sab and Autobiography by Gertudis Gómez de Avellaneda

MEXICO
Confabulario and Other Inventions by Juan José Arreola
The Edge of the Storm by Agustín Yáñez
A Rosario Castellanos Reader
Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro
The Burning Plain and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

PERU
Birds Without a Nest by Clorinda Matto de Turner
Marginal Voices by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

GUATEMALA
Complete Works and Other Stories by Augusto Monterroso

URUGUAY
Ariel by José Enrique Rodó

VENEZUELA
Iphigenia by Teresa de la Parra

6Rise
Editado: Mar 18, 2012, 6:57 am

Stories by Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was primarily known as a novelist but his short fiction was equally accomplished.

The stories I've read of Machado are: the 10 collected in Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006, ed. K. David Jackson), one called "Midnight Mass" from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997, ed. Roberto González Echevarría), and the two online (link, trans. Clifford Landers) from Words Without Borders (one of which was in an earlier translation in Oxford Anthology).

Most of Machado's stories are acknowledged as "masterpieces of world literature". However, a substantial number of them are yet to be translated and collected in a comprehensive English edition. The primary source translations of his short stories are found in:

Brazilian Tales (1921, trans. Isaac Goldberg, stories by four Brazilian writers, in Project Gutenberg),

The Psychiatrist, and Other Stories (1963, trans. William L. Grossman and Helena Caldwell),

The Devil’s Church and Other Stories (1977, trans. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu), and

A Chapter of Hats (2008, trans. John Gledson).

The novella The Alienist (formerly "The Psychiatrist") is set to be reissued by Melville House publisher later this year.

Readers are almost always privileged to read/hear a Machado story. This privilege arises from the confession of a secret that weighs heavily on a conscience. The narrators often feel they must set the record straight. The mystery cannot be long suppressed.

In "The Nurse" (also translated as "The Attendant's Confession" in Brazilian Tales), the title character writes his confession from his death-bed:

So you think that what happened to me in 1860 can be printed in a book? Do whatever you please, but with only one condition: do not divulge anything before my death. You will not have to wait long, perhaps a week, if not less; I am incurable.
    Look, I could tell you about my entire life, during which time other interesting things took place; however, in order to do that, one needs time, spirit, and paper, and I have only paper. My spirit is weak and time resembles a night lamp at dawn. It will not be long before the sun rises on another day. It is the sun of demons, as impenetrable as life. Good-bye, my dear sir. Read this and wish me well; forgive me for whatever seems improper to you. Do not mistreat the rue if it does not smell like a rose. You asked me for a human document, and here it is....


The reader asks for a story, and it is given, began in earnest, imparted in a unique voice. The story is of great human interest, a satiric display of unstable emotions resulting to a crime of passion. The nurse is caring for the sick Colonel who has a serious attitude problem—"If he had only been grouchy, it would not have been so bad; but he was also mean." The nurse is honoring his own end of the bargain, telling the secret story in graphic details (a characteristic of a Machado story). The reader will have to keep the story to himself, for it is a privilege to be told this by a nurse harboring a criminal past.

In "The Secret Heart", one is privileged to encounter another secret. The opening is a domestic scene.

Garcia, who was standing, studied his finger nails, and snapped them from time to time. Fortunato, in the rocking chair, looked at the ceiling. Maria Luiza, by the window, was putting the final touches to a piece of needlework. Five minutes had now passed without their saying a word. They had spoken of the day, which had been fine, of Catumby, where Fortunato and his wife lived, and of a private hospital that will be explained later. As the three characters here presented are now dead and buried, it is time to tell their story without pretense.

The true story is then recounted with characteristic linguistic verve and, as promised, without pretense. The pertinent details of a "love triangle" and "forbidden love" (favorite Machado topics) are laid bare. We are once more treated to priceless instances of beastly and saintly human behavior. The stories are generous in the serving of delicious gossip.

    The sharing of a common interest tightened the bonds of friendship. Garcia became a familiar of the house. He dines there almost every day, and there he observed Maria Luiza and saw her life of spiritual loneliness. And somehow this loneliness of hers increased her loveliness. Garcia began to feel troubled when she came into the room, when she spoke, when she worked quietly by the window, or played sweet, sad music on the piano. Gently, imperceptibly, love entered his heart. When he found it there, he tried to thrust it out, that there might be no other bond but friendship between him and Fortunato. But he did not succeed. He succeeded only in locking it in. Maria Luiza understood—both his love and his silence—but she never let on.

It's fascinating how in a single paragraph the writer propelled the plot from easy friendship to familiarity and then to love. "Gently, imperceptibly", the story is coaxed forward and the scene set up for the great conflict. Machado had a way with inner psychology, sometimes tactless, sometimes full of tact, always attuned to the quick transformation of feelings. But he also had the propensity to mix the lyrical with the ugliest of human tendencies.

"The Secret Heart" not only captures the unraveling of a secret love but that of corruption inside men. Readers had to endure a sickening description of animal mutilation. Within the spaces allotted to tenderness and infatuations, Machado had prepared a place for the baseness of humanity—"It was like a moral tapeworm, which, although torn into many pieces, always regenerated itself and kept on going."

The mastery of Machado's fine short stories is contemporary. His words and metaphors are exquisite at the level of the sentence. A story ambles along, then is cut to the quick, exceptionally, efficiently told.

    He came back to the house, and he did not go away. Dona Severina's arms enclosed a parenthesis in the middle of a long, tedious sentence of the life he led. And this added clause contained a profound, original idea specially invented by God and the angels for him alone. He stayed on, and his life went on as before. Finally, however, he had to leave, never to return. Here is how and why. ("A Woman's Arms")

The "how and why" is the very resolution of the story in question.

The milieu and contexts of Machado are important in the appreciation of his shorts, all period pieces. His nudge to the years the stories were set in is a permanent marker.

Just imagine that it is 1813. ("Wedding Song")

This was the selfsame explanation that was given by beautiful Rita to her lover, Camillo, on a certain Friday of November, 1869, when Camillo laughed at her for having gone, the previous evening, to consult a fortune-teller. ("The Fortune-Teller")

The above scene took place on the Rua da Lapa in 1870. ("A Woman's Arms")

It was May 1882, and Venancinha hadn't seen her aunt since Christmas. ("Dona Paula")

The lawyer died two years later, in 1865. ("Wallow, Swine!" and "Justice Unbalanced")

The years are fixed but they might as well happen in 2016. Machado seems to be writing specifically for posterity. The mischief in his tales is the mischief a week ago. The active lust of his characters does not go out of date. His depiction of male and female, free and slave, old and young, wants and needs is astute. Irrespective of century, incorporated in each story is the tangibility of dreams and desire.

(cross-posted)

7almigwin
Editado: Dez 12, 2013, 10:28 pm

I know that Manuel Puig is important but I am not sure of his country of origin or his birthdate. He wrote the kiss of the spider woman which was made into a film. Another of his books is Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

Is it too early to count 2666 by Roberto Bolano from Chile?

Would Isabel Allende be considered too 'pop' to be a classic for house of the Spirits
he Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez is, I believe, from the Dominican Republic.

8.Monkey.
Dez 13, 2013, 5:16 am

>7 almigwin: All you have to do is check Wikipedia. Puig was Argentine, December 28, 1932 - July 22, 1990.

Modern works are not classics.

9rebeccanyc
Editado: Dez 13, 2013, 7:21 am

Nice to see you here in Reading Globally, Miriam. You might be interested in our current theme read on South American literature. I know Puig and Bolano have been mentioned there. And next year, in the third quarter, we'll be reading Central American and Mexican literature.

10arubabookwoman
Jan 19, 2019, 6:29 pm

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