Nadirs

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:01:00 +0000

By Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug

The first impression upon commencing Herta Müller’s collection of semi-autobiographical short stories Nadirs is one that is characterized by a child’s hybridized view of a world which is intensely real and also hauntingly and disconcertingly surreal. Nadirs illustrates Müller’s perspectives in Banat, her native German-speaking region of Romania. Nadirs was first published in Berlin in 1988. Sieglinde Lug, professor of German at the University of Denver, provides the English translation.

Müller’s transitions or segues between realism and surrealism are so seamless that it is not until you are deep into her stories that you realize some of the most interesting stories in Nadirs deal direct with the family and many times in fantastical language. For example, Mueller describes the preparations of family for the usual Saturday night movie in “The Swabian Bath,” where each family takes a bath in the water of the person preceding them. Another story entitled “The Funeral Sermon” describes the central character attending her father’s funeral where you learn the views of the father from certain members of the community and the child. Was the father a war hero or a rapist? The child is charged with the task of giving a eulogy in the midst of these tales being exchanged, and it is the fear described by Müller and confusion by the prospect of giving the eulogy in front of the townspeople that lends the story its memorable surrealism.

As the two aforementioned stories indicate, within each of Müller’s tales, one progresses from an initial assumption of what to expect and is quickly deposited into unfamiliar territory containing the lucid, vivid and sometimes frightening descriptions of events that you don’t imagine usually reading of, but are still very intrigued. Nadirs, in each of its segments and in its entirety, as one of the first of Müller’s forays into the literary world remains a testament to her current Nobel Laureate status and also to the significant likelihood that her works will endure.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, January 24th 2010

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0000

By Gerald Martin

Alfred A. Knopf

In his exhaustively researched biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Gerald Martin, who spent seventeen years examining every aspect of Marquez’s life and interviewing over 300 people, beautifully takes the reader through the life and times of one of Latin America’s most influential writers, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most popular novelist in the last fifty years.

Martin traces Márquez’s (or “Gabo” as he is affectionately referred to throughout the biography) early beginnings back to Aratacata’s early days and to the life of Colonel Nicholás R. Márquez Mejia, Gabo’s maternal grandfather, who played an influential and supportive role in the young boy’s life until he was swooped up by his nomadic parents at nine years old. It’s during that time, Martin writes, that the inspiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude was born and where Gabo learned of magic via his superstitious grandmother.

Living with his parents, Martin writes of the antagonistic relationship with his philandering father, his secondary school years where writes poetry and is acknowledged as a brilliant young scholar, to his University days as a law student, who has no interest in the law, but in literature.

Martin painstakingly examines Gabo’s career as an investigative journalist, his travels to Europe and later to Mexico, where he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel was published six years later, catapulting Márquez to fame, fortune and friendships with notable leaders of the left including Spain’s Felipe Gonzàlez, France’s François Mitterand, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro—a source of controversy and criticism for the author who has been a lifelong Liberal.

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life is a magical and intoxicating book that is much more than one man’s life story; it is part history, part cultural studies, and part political science. Gerald Martin provides a mesmerizing tribute to an extraordinary writer.

Written by: Rebeca Schiller, June 28th 2009