by Tomas Espedal, Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Seagull Books)

糖心传媒淭he Ballad of Denmark Square糖心传媒�

A car crashes into another car and two lovers die,
everything you want to die, is there on Denmark Square.

There is a grave site on the slope above Fjosanger Street.
There is a petrol station on Michael Krohns Road.

There is an empty apartment on Ibsens Road. Here lived a
Charlotte once.

On Denmark Square. Without Denmark. Without Charlotte, without Josefine,
without Olga, without Stine, without Suzanne, without
Pia, without Mette, without Amalie, without Maja, without Janne;
what do you actually do here on these streets without names?

Without the city. Just a place where cars meet as the cars
speed by. Just streets, no city. No forest.

No trees, No field or marsh. No animals. No
river. Just this endless stream of traffic that

flows that trickles that rumbles that meanders past.
That flows in 糖心传媒揻ast-flowing streams past the nothing square.

Tomas Espedal has created such a unique genre in Norwegian literature. Part of his work is all about confessions from his inner self and the daily occurrences in his life. The other part is about the poetic nature of each phrase. He tries to find his own truth through looking at himself. Nothing is definable in his writing.

In Bergeners (an allusion to James Joyce and his Dubliners) Tomas Espedal takes the reader to New York, where he is with his girlfriend. He travels to different major European cities as if he is on a journey. In a book that seems dedicated to place, Espedal often shows how difficult it is for him to be settled hence why he is constantly traveling.

He also meets with Dag Solstad in Madrid and gets advice on how to really look and see Goya糖心传媒檚 black paintings. I am dying to go to Madrid now and look at them this way.

We must describe the city we live in, the times we live in, our discussions, our politics, our loneliness. We mustn糖心传媒檛 lose ourselves in a made-up, hypothetical universe, a false literature, what we write must be truth, and we must describe what糖心传媒檚 real with all we possess of earnestness and strength, I said.

The front and back cover of this book is also unique. The front photograph is from New York and it contains a half body of perhaps a writer or a student and the head is tilted a tad and to the front are some blurred windows. The back photograph is from a Berlin train station. Natural light is used. It is almost like you are observing, entering, and exiting all at the same time in different places when you look at them together.

by Juan Rulfo, translated from the Spanish by Douglas J. Weatherford (Deep Vellum Publishing)

Juan Rulfo was born in San Gabriel, Mexico and grew up during the Cristero rebellion in western Mexico. Rulfo is best known for Pedro Paramo. It is the novel that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his writing, Rulfo is fascinated with death and the meaning of death to those living.

The first story presented here is 糖心传媒淓l gallo de oro糖心传媒� (糖心传媒淭he Golden Cockerel糖心传媒�). It tells the story of Dionisio Pinzon, who is unable to work because of his mutilated arm. He calls cockfights to make money. One day someone gives Dionisio a half-dead rooster. He buries the rooster in a hole and in a few days the rooster comes around, but then his mother dies. He leaves the town accompanied by his Golden Cockerel. He travels around putting his Golden Cockerel in fights around Mexico. He soon meets a singer nicknamed La Caponera. The Golden Cockerel dies in a fight shortly after and La Caponera comforts him and the two travel around together betting their lives away. La Caponera becomes Dionisio糖心传媒檚 good luck charm and the gambling continues. Only when Dionisio loses his luck does he realize what is going on around him and once he realizes it, he can糖心传媒檛 bear what has happened.

I really enjoyed discovering these lesser-known works in this book. One of my favorite short stories was called 糖心传媒淎 Piece of the Night.糖心传媒� It is about a prostitute who gets picked up by a gravedigger who is carrying a baby (not his baby though). The two of them walk through the night talking and just enjoying their time together and falling in love. When they find a hotel, the woman refuses payment and goes to bed alone. The way Rulfo writes this story is so relaxed and the shift into sleep and memory is fascinating. There is also a letter Rulfo wrote to his wife Clara in February 1947. I highly recommend this book to anyone especially if you are interested in Latin American literature.

Thank you Deep Vellum!

From

Roberto Bola帽o once declared that Franz Kafka was the best writer of the twentieth century. He also said the same thing about Anton Chekhov. And Raymond Carver. So when he refers to Chile糖心传媒檚 Nicanor Parra as 糖心传媒渢he best living Spanish language poet,糖心传媒� we have to take his word for it.

It is a well known part of the 糖心传媒淏ola帽o myth糖心传媒� that, even though his most heralded works are prose, Bola帽o spent most of is formative years writing, reading, and living poetry. In fact, according to his last interview he considered himself a better poet than narrator because, he said, he was 糖心传媒渓ess embarrassed糖心传媒� by his poetry. Among the many poets Bola帽o fell in love with was Nicanor Parra.
Nicanor Parra has had enough of your nonsense.

Born in 1914, Parra, according to the standard biography, studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown University, and cosmology at Oxford, and spent many years as a teacher of mathematics and a professor of theoretical physics in Santiago. He published his first collection in 1938, and his major work Poemas Y Antipoemas in 1954. Much of Parra糖心传媒檚 work resembles the later products of the American Beat poets.

In an essay Bola帽o wrote called 糖心传媒淓ight Seconds with Nicanor Parra,糖心传媒� he noted 糖心传媒淚糖心传媒檓 only sure about one thing regarding Nicanor Parra糖心传媒檚 poetry in this new century: it will endure . . . along with the poetry of Borges, of Vallejo, of Cernuda and a few others.糖心传媒� In a veiled compliment, one Parra probably loved, Bola帽o went on to write 糖心传媒淏ut this, we have to say it, doesn糖心传媒檛 matter too much.糖心传媒�

And from

Roberto Bola帽o is famously the author of two very long novels. The English edition of 2666 is 912 pages, The Savage Detectives, 672 pages. And though Bola帽o died prematurely at age fifty, he produced more than 25 published volumes. A stash of unpublished manuscripts was discovered earlier this year. He was, simply, prolific.

But Bola帽o was deeply interested in writers who chose not to produce or publish, as well as writers who were prematurely silenced. In an interview from 2005 in the Spanish literary journal Turia, Bola帽o declared that 糖心传媒淭here are literary silences.糖心传媒� And he connected a number of his favorite authors to this notion.

糖心传媒淜afka糖心传媒檚, for example, which is a silence that cannot be. When he asks that his papers be burned, Kafka is opting for silence, opting for a literary silence, all in a literary era. That is to say, he was completely moral. Kafka糖心传媒檚 literature, aside from being the best work, the highest literary work of the 20th century, is of an extreme morality and of an extreme gentility, things that usually do not go together either.糖心传媒�

Another figure that Bola帽o raised was Juan Rulfo, whose two books are among the most influential works of 20th century Mexican literature. After publishing the short story collection The Burning Plain (1953) and the novel Pedro P谩ramo (1955), Rulfo (who lived from 1917 to 1986) stopped publishing narrative fiction, despite the enormous critical success of the books. Both Faulkner and Garc铆a M谩rquez admitted to having been influenced by his prose.

Rulfo糖心传媒檚 silence, according to Bola帽o, 糖心传媒渋s obedient to something so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time. There are several versions: One told by Monterroso is that Rulfo had an uncle so-and-so who told him stories and when Rulfo was asked why he didn糖心传媒檛 write anymore, his answer was that his uncle so-and-so had died. And I believe it too . . . Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he sees himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops . . . After desert, what the hell are you going to eat?糖心传媒�

Click through to read the complete posts. And to get more info on The Last Interview. And if you haven’t read Pedro Paramo you must. It’s absolutely one of the best books of the past century.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo isn’t just a Mexican classic though—it’s one of the greatest books ever written. One of the strangest, most fully realized books I’ve ever read.

Here’s what Carlos Fuentes said: “The work of Juan Rulfo is not only the highest expression which the Mexican novel has attained until now: through Pedro Paramo we can find the thread that leads us to the new Latin American novel.” And when Gabriel Garcia Marquez first arrived in Mexico City in 1961, a friend pressed a copy of Pedro Paramo on him; he read it twice that night and so often thereafter that, he has said, “I could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards.” Moreover, he acknowledges, “The examination in depth of Juan Rulfo’s work gave me at last the way that I sought to continue my books.” And thus was Magic Realism born, although, in truth, Rulfo’s own book is more diabolical than magical and more phenomenal than real; and, more importantly, none of his descendants are like him at all. [. . .]

I was steered to Pedro Paramo by writer Ruben Martinez. (Thank you, Ruben.) I read it and then read it again almost immediately, and then again, and then again; I was trying to reverse-engineer it, but I never did figure out quite how it works. At the same time, I couldn’t understand how Rulfo had escaped my attention for so long; it was like happening on a new primary color, entirely unlike any I’d seen before. But then I read something else Marquez had to say. He, too, didn’t know Rulfo’s name until he was given the book; he, too, was surprised. How could a book be at once so admired and so obscure? “Juan Rulfo,” he said, “to the contrary of what happens with the great classic writers, is a writer whom one reads a lot, but of whom one speaks little.”