S henever opine favorably Alberto Manguel about a contemporary author should be given some attention. These statistics do not tend to hover so often. He rarely says that everyone should read what you like and, as discovered with Borges, venture to compare him everything:
"It was the only experience I had in my life to be inside the head someone who was reading, because the comments that Borges did when listening to these readings were for himself. I was there, but really had not had the right to listen. I realized that there was a freedom, a kind of interpretation to which I dared but with great modesty. Borges was Agatha Christie and partnerships such as Plato, who had shocked my elders. "
Aleksandar Hemon The surprising thing is how accidental they discover their new home. Something very similar to what happened to Gombrowicz while visiting Argentina. The latter, however, never adopted Castilian as a literary language and finally left Buenos Aires for a number of cities to come to Vence on the French Riviera. Hemon tells their stories in English and seems to have found the formula to create amazing books, as examined by the many writers.
Manguel's review is on recent English translation of "Love and Obstacles" originally published in 2009. Something that makes them cousins \u200b\u200bto Manguel is that Hemon and sustained personal past memories that have been gradually fading. Them away from their hometowns and talking in another language. Sarajevo, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Mondion, no matter ... ***
A lesson on the art of fiction
Alberto Manguel - 19/02/2011 BABELIA
Q erhaps there are certain narrative forms under the spirit of an era: the seventeenth-century epistolary novel, Balzac and XIX saga, fiction requires the complicity of the reader, to XX. If so, I suggest that one of the ways chosen by the writers of the century to give voice to our time is the fragmentary novel in which, in the form of individual stories, the characters play themselves, fragment in the fragment, larger roles or less. In recent years, The Bride from Odessa Edgardo Cozarinsky, Daniel Kehlmann Fame and now Love and Aleksandar Hemon obstacles are splendid examples of this genre.
Love and obstacles is the story, eight stories, a young Bosnian whose name changes according to the nicknames that give the different characters that are (Trabuquillo, Dirigent, Command), is in Kinshasa, in Sarajevo, in Hamilton, Chicago. From story to story, his features are emerging: a teenager lost in the African night, is a young man who writes poetry and stories, is a boy who listens to Led Zeppelin and reads Rimbaud, is an American magazine salesman who longs a haven for mediocrity, is an immigrant community over exyugoslava in exile, living among crooks and gangsters, is a new literary star comes to publish in The New Yorker, is a student of English in Chicago, whose parents are in Sarajevo and in some other times in Zaire and Canada, is a writer who is older and famous writers, both Bosnian and American, is an innocent young man and also a middle-aged man riddled with experience. The Bosnian protein is as a sort of critical witness of our time. Continue reading
Photo: © Dario Φ Ipofisi
