A Spanish Book Reading Resource

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kanewai
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Mon Mar 28, 2022 9:53 pm

I came to this thread to bump it up & reactivate it with some new recommendations, but first I need to respond to this:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Those I read or tried to read and did not like were
2666, El amor en los tiemps del cólera, Rayuela (a “wasn’t Paris great? Book, to me, very dated), El tiempe entre costuras (a shaggy dog story, seemed to go nowhere), La catedral del mar (something for a Catalan familiar with the history, perhaps), Corazón tan blanco (reading as being strangled by a boa constrictor), Los detectives salvajes (just way, way too long).
I haven't attempted Rayuela yet, but I am on the same page with you regarding the others. They all came so highly rated, and I did not care for any of them. It's nice to see I'm not the only one.

Spanish novels I've read over the past couple years that I enjoyed and can recommend are:

Fernando Aramburu, Patria. The story of two families in the Basque region, and the impact of the conflict on their lives. Made into an HBO series.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El italiano. A romance and adventure story set in Gibraltar during WWII.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Travesuras de la niña mala. The life story of a "bad girl" from Peru, told through the eyes of a man who loved her when they were younger.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Mar 28, 2022 10:46 pm

kanewai wrote:Spanish novels I've read over the past couple years that I enjoyed and can recommend are:

Fernando Aramburu, Patria. The story of two families in the Basque region, and the impact of the conflict on their lives. Made into an HBO series.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El italiano. A romance and adventure story set in Gibraltar during WWII.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Travesuras de la niña mala. The life story of a "bad girl" from Peru, told through the eyes of a man who loved her when they were younger.

I look forward to taking a look at each of these. For me, Pérez-Reverte is usually a fun read, Vargas Llosa's Tía Julia y el escribidor was first-class. Aramburu is unknown to me, so I would like to make his acquaintance.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Wed Jun 08, 2022 8:34 pm

As usual with Spanish, I didn't like the highly-rated bestseller, and enjoyed the collection of short stories by an author who is, strangely, rarely if ever translated into English.

Let's start with the good: Santiago Posteguilo, La noche en que Frankenstein leyó el Quijote: La vida secreta de los libros (2012).

frankenstein.jpg

I loved the title, and I loved the cover. The book is a series of semi-fictionalized anecdotes regarding the "secret lives" of books. From the blurb:

¿Quién escribió las obras de Shakespeare? ¿Qué libro perseguía el KGB? ¿Qué novela ocultó Hitler? ¿Quién pensó en el orden alfabético para organizar los libros? ¿Qué autor burló al índice de libros prohibidos de la Inquisición? Estos y otros enigmas literarios encuentran respuesta en las páginas de La noche en que Frankenstein leyó el Quijote, un viaje en el tiempo por la historia de la literatura universal de la mano de Santiago Posteguillo.

As for the best seller: Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, Tuareg (1980)

tuareg 2.jpg

It's an adventure novel about one of the last "authentic" Tuareg. One day one of his guests is assassinated by government officials, and another abducted. The Tuareg needs to protect the sacred laws of the desert, and sets out on a murderous vengeful odyssey. The author is good at capturing the feel of the desert, but his descriptions of the Tuareg culture don't go much deeper than "protectors of the sacred law" and "true sons of the desert." It's like Rambo in the Sahara. I only read half, then jumped to the end.
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Thu Jun 30, 2022 10:01 pm

A few updates:

Juan Rulfo, El llano en llamas / The Plain in Flames (1953)

This is a collection of short stories set in post-Revolutionary Mexico, set in the rural villages that the Revolution forgot. The writing was sparse and beautiful. Apparently Rulfo is famous in Latin literary circles (from the BBC: Jean Rulfo: The great Latin writer you may want to know about), but he was new to me.

They were also very difficult - there was a touch of early magic realism, and Rulfo uses a lot of regional Mexican Spanish. There were many words that weren't in my dictionary, and phrases that left me scratching my head wondering what they meant. I ended up needingan English translation to help me through the text. Luckily the newer translation by Ilan Stavans is excellent. There's an older translation I looked at that was clumsy and awkward.

Photo: self-portrait of the author
rulfo.jpg


I tried to follow up with Manuel Puig, La traición de Rita Hayworth / Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968). I love the title, but the writing was too abstract and experimental for me to follow. I was starting to feel like maybe I didn't actually understand Spanish at all, and I put the book aside for another day.

And so I've moved on to Mario Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977). It's refreshing to read a novel that's actually linear & comprehensible!
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby BeaP » Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:11 pm

I can only recommend highbrow literature.

This is a good blog with daily recommendations and reviews. You can click on the tags to narrow down your search to books originally written in Spanish.
http://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com

This YouTube channel has good videos with recommendations. (The ones about Carmen Mola describe how prizes are awarded. Quite eye-opening.)



Some other interesting channels:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Trotalibros
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCMNS1CiwLymXPLt6IWUL1w
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS5cq5uDrH2gynzwIVC9iKA/featured

I've also read a lot of reviews on goodreads. Based on all the information I've gathered I have the following authors on my list:

Spain: Enrique Vila-Matas, Luis Landero: Juegos de la edad tardía, Isaac Rosa: El país del miedo, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Antonio Muñoz Molina (Marías: the most famous, but not always recommended: http://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2017/10/por-que-algunos-no-nos-gusta-marias.html Also, several reviewers say that his novels are very similar, you read one and you've read them all.)
Lat-Am: Sara Gallardo, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Antonio di Benedetto
(And the obvious: Márquez, Cortázar, Puig, Carpentier, Donoso, the list can be continued, see this forum: https://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/index.php?threads/best-100-novels-in-spanish-in-the-xxth-century.58867/)

Those who seem to get the most praise (beside the obvious classics) are Vila-Matas and di Benedetto (Zama / El silenciero / Los suicidas).
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Thu Dec 01, 2022 8:27 pm

BeaP wrote:I can only recommend highbrow literature.
This is a good blog with daily recommendations and reviews. You can click on the tags to narrow down your search to books originally written in Spanish.
Marías: the most famous, but not always recommended: Por qué (a algunos) no nos gusta Marías. Also, several reviewers say that his novels are very similar, you read one and you've read them all.)
I've now failed twice to finish a book by Marías ... after 125 pages I stalled out on Corazón tan blanco.I kept waiting for a plot, or maybe a character study, or at least for one or two of the dazzling insights into the human heart that so many reviews mention. Each page was well written, but it never came together as a whole. The reviews state that the novel eventually comes together after a couple hundred more pages, but I ran out of patience.

I'm moving on to Revolución, the new novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte set during the Mexican Revolution. Pérez-Reverte is more my style of writer - intellectually rigorous, but knows how to tell a good story.

GUEST_2c06ccda-7e55-4570-b63a-941d448b7d55.jpg


From Goodreads:

Ésta es la historia de un hombre, tres mujeres, una revolución y un tesoro. La revolución fue la de México en tiempos de Emiliano Zapata y Francisco Villa. El tesoro fueron quince mil monedas de oro de a veinte pesos de las denominadas maximilianos, robadas en un banco de Ciudad Juárez el 8 de mayo de 1911. El hombre se llamaba Martín Garret Ortiz y era un joven ingeniero de minas español. Todo empezó para él ese mismo día, cuando desde su hotel oyó un primer disparo lejano. Salió a la calle para ver qué ocurría y a partir de ese momento su vida cambió para siempre...

Revolución es mucho más que una novela sobre los dramáticos acontecimientos que sacudieron la república mexicana en el primer tercio del siglo XX. Es un relato de iniciación y madurez a través del caos, la lucidez y la violencia: el asombroso descubrimiento de las reglas ocultas que determinan el amor, la lealtad, la muerte y la vida.
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:34 pm

Update: Revolución is possibly my favorite novel yet by Pérez-Reverte. The main character is a young Spanish engineer working in the mines of northern Mexico when the revolution breaks out. He is an expert in dynamite, and he ends up working with Pancho Villa, first against his will, and later as a willing participant in the fighting.

Pérez-Reverte is great for giving us a great adventure story while also exploring the emotional and moral dimensions of the adventure. And his novels only seem to get better year by year. I never finished his early novels like El capitán Alatriste or El club Dumas, though maybe I should revisit them now that my Spanish is better.
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Re: A Spanish Book Reading Resource

Postby piotr » Wed Jan 04, 2023 11:01 pm

SCMT wrote:If anyone has recommendations of non-fiction books, I'd love to see them.

Specifically, I would like to find works on Mexican and Latin American history, both modern and ancient. There are of course thousands of titles available about everything from the Aztecs to the drug trade, but I have no way of sorting the good from the bad.
I don't know if this is what you're looking for but recommend the trilogy of historical novels by William Ospina:

Ursúa, 2005
El país de la canela, 2008
La serpiente sin ojos, 2012

I liked most the second part, El país de la canela -one of the best books I've read in my life-, which can be read independently without having first read Ursúa. My order of reading was in fact El país de la canela -> Ursúa -> La serpiente sin ojos.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_pa%C3%ADs_de_la_canela

Technically speaking, this is a novel but based on historical facts so there's more history than fiction. ;)
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