I was following it all from a distance (I was living in Brazil at the time), via Mexican radio, especially thanks to the excellent coverage provided by Carmen Aristegui and her correspondent in the States, Dolia Estévez – both of whom, incidentally, ended up being fired by the station, yet another illustration of the climate of censorship in Mexico at the moment (but that’s a topic for another article).

Thinking about these kids, looking at the few photos of them slowly filtering through into the media, touched a very deep nerve in me: it made me compare their fate with my own kids’, also immigrants in their own way albeit, luckily for them, ‘luxury immigrants’. Making such a comparison might seem frivolous, crass, even, but I’d like to defend myself and say that every child should have the same opportunities and enjoy the same rights; nevertheless, this is not how things are (they are very far from being this way) and there is, in fact, a chasm between the realities of these young immigrants and of my children.

Around then, a few timely coincidences came together when Michael Benoist, editor of Medium’s Matter magazine, suggested I travel to Los Angeles to interview a few of these kids and tell their stories. Mike had read my novel Down the Rabbit Hole, in which the narrator is a boy trapped in the violence of the drugs trade, and he wanted me to tell the story of these boys in their own voices, from their perspective, ‘erasing myself’ as a writer.

I went to Los Angeles, and with the invaluable help of the NGO Carecen (especially Tessie Borden) I met Alex and Cristhian, who told me of the odyssey that took them from Guatemala and Honduras to the United States, where they were arrested by the immigration police. Alex had run away from an alcoholic father and a life with no hope in a poor village in Guatemala. Cristhian was fleeing the gangs of San Pedro Sula, one of the most violent cities in the world. I met them in the homes of the families who had taken them in. Despite their messy legal situation, they were calm and content; they seemed to think that the worst was behind them.

On their journey, accompanied by a coyote – as the person who smuggles people across the Mexican border is known – they had to deal with (among other things) regular harassment from corrupt Mexican police, who did nothing but extort them repeatedly in return for allowing them to continue their travels.

Incredibly, neither Alex nor Cristhian feel at all bitter towards Mexico, and nor do they speak or act like victims, perhaps because their story was on track to have a happy ending, and managing to escape violence and most probably an early death has given them a perspective that we, from our safe, secure positions, do not have: a perspective that plays down the negative and in which the hope of a new life seems to justify any suffering.

‘I’d be dead by now,’ Cristhian said to me on more than one occasion as he recalled that, shortly after he left, two of his best friends were murdered on the football pitch where they used to play together. He said it with the sadness of someone who’s lost a friend and with the relief we all feel when we think, ‘It wasn’t me, I escaped.’

Something very serious happens when the fate of a great number of children and young people in Latin America is divided between ‘the ones who managed to escape’ and ‘the ones who didn’t live to tell the tale’, when their only options are ‘flee or die’. We are doing something very wrong when we deny the most basic of rights to entire generations, whether it’s in their home country or the one they emigrate to: the right to a decent life.

Read Alex and Cristhian’s stories on Medium, in Spanish or English.

Buy Juan Pablo Villalobos’s books from Foyles.

The post The long road home appeared first on English PEN.

Additional Information
Read the original piece in Spanish.

About the author
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel Quesadillas was published in English in 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

About the translator
Rosalind Harvey lives in Bristol where she translates Hispanic fiction. In 2011 she was one of the first translators in residence at the Free Word Centre in London. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She is a committee member of the Translators Association, a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, and also runs regular translation-related events in and around London. Her most recent translation is Villalobos’ Quesdillas, with And Other Stories. 

The post Instructions for writing a corrupt novel appeared first on English PEN.

But after the initial impulse – what is the reality for publishers of translated fiction? There is a general feeling in the UK and US that more people are publishing literature in translation and that there is a growing acceptance of it. Is everything sorted now, then? Well, not quite. Our third birthday seems a good moment to talk about the publishing of literature in translation, focusing particularly on our case as it is what I’m qualified to talk about.

A number of publishers have been doing great translated books for decades, but it is also a good sign that new presses are springing up, including Peirene Press, Stork Press, Clerkenwell Press, MacLehose Press and ourselves, all in the last six years.Each press that publishes in translation is different, publishing different proportions of translated literature and different kinds of books. Some publish translations occasionally, such as Old Street Publishing’s recent Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh; Harvill Secker does roughly 50% of its list in translation; our list is currently roughly 70% translated, while Peirene Press and Stork Press publish only translated works. Some focus more on crime and popular fiction and some more on literary authors whose writing might take many readers out of their comfort zones. Some find room for both.

My sense at the start was that there was no lack of publishing houses bringing out crime in translation (and publishers who could tell their Stieg Larsson copycats from the genuinely interesting French, German, Cuban and Japanese crime writers). What I felt we lacked in the English-speaking world were enough publishers of extraordinary, surprising writing.

I knew that to publish the kind of fresh, often foreign, mind-blowing fiction that I and many other people often thought was missing in the English-speaking world, the only sensible option, financially, might be not to have a normal commercial set-up. If the publishing house was not going to tailor its offering to Richard & Judy’s taste, we should plan to do without extra overheads (such as an office) and appeal to like-minded readers for their support.

And Other Stories registered as a Community Interest Company or CIC in 2010. It was limited by guarantee, but with not-for-private-profit characteristics.  A social enterprise, in other words. This makes clear at a fundamental level that our aims are different to investor- or shareholder-driven publishing companies where all decisions are ultimately about increasing profits and keeping the investors happy. Of course, in order to be able to continue our work in the long-term, we can’t lose money. The ‘community interest’ mission in our case means publishing works of literary value, re-investing profits in the company in order to pay translators well, and developing and mentoring new talent in the publishing industry, including debut writers and emerging editors and translators. (For at least half of our foreign-language authors we have commissioned great translators’ first book-length translations, giving them a foot in the door.)

The not-for-private-profit nature of the company has meant it has been (somewhat!) easier to apply for and receive funding support. In our current credit-crunched decade of austerity in the UK, the Arts Council’s funds have been cut repeatedly by the government. Established organisations find they are no longer regularly funded and must apply to the same National Lottery-funded Grants for the Arts pot that we are applying to. The competition is intense. We received two Grants for the Arts in 2010-2011 and 2012. This year we were recommended for funding by the Arts Council’s application assessor who applauded our work, but in the end the funding did not stretch to cover our project. Of course, we have sent another application in to the Arts Council already. And we are looking to follow the American arts model and appeal for philanthropy and private donors, as well as continuing to apply to other institutes to fund at least some of the translation costs. Thanks to English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, the translation of Villalobos’ second book Quesadillas was funded and we were able to bring the author to England for a brilliant week of events in Norwich, Bath and London that culminated in a performance to an audience of over 200 people at Rich Mix, East London, that almost had a cow on stage. (Almost!)Not only is funding uncertain these days; sales are too. In 2012, during the crisis that almost led to Waterstones’ demise, orders dried up for publishers. Something similar could happen again. Moreover, fiction at the literary, surprising end of the spectrum does not tend to sell well unless the author has been shortlisted for major prizes or is a public figure. Maybe because it takes a few years for people to work out what the surprising author is doing. We were over the moon that our English author Deborah Levy was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Swimming Home. However, translated works are not eligible for the Man Booker, which does not help sales prospects for most of our brilliant literary authors. (When Down the Rabbit Hole became the first translation to be on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist it helped immensely. It has sold 8,000 copies so far.)

With funding and sales uncertain, an area of support that has been invaluable to us from the start is subscriptions. We now have around 700 people subscribing in advance to each of our books. I had seen some American publishers like Open Letter Books and Ugly Duckling Presse offer subscriptions of their books and remembered subscribers’ names at the back of some very, very old library books and it seemed like something we could do and link to a community of readers, writers and translators. To show our genuine gratitude for their up-front support, we thank subscribers by name in the back of the books; send them their books in advance of the retail publication date; invite them to special social and literary events for subscribers; give them free tickets to public events (such as Villalobos’ Rich Mix event) and extra goodies now and then (for example, postcards designed by our authors). It is a club of like-minded people whose broad support allows us to take creative risks and not be reliant on investors’ agendas.

Necessity breeds invention and we feel we are part of a wave of innovative publishers of literary translations, including Peirene Press and Berlin-based Frisch & Co who choose to publish fiction that is neither easily definable nor an easy sell: Peirene’s first book in 2010 was Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea – about a struggling mother killing her two children. It was not an immediate bestseller, but it is becoming a real favourite with discerning readers. Frisch & Co’s first books are just out this year and contain real gems: including Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun which I am keen to read, having already heard great things about it from our Argentine author Iosi Havilio and some knowledgeable Buenos Aires booksellers. Peirene Press pioneered direct-to-reader approaches such as pop-up shops and literary salons; we started translators’ reading groups to find great books and set up a subscription model in addition to retail sales; Frisch & Co have looked to make books economically possible by partnering with translators and foreign publishers and only publishing them as ebooks.

It is no exaggeration to say that for us, with our kind of new literary fiction, mainly in translation, our subscribers keep us going. They trust us to find new writers for them. The next deadline for new subscribers is our third birthday: 5th October 2013, for anyone who wants to help us publish the Albanian writer Elvira Dones’ novel Sworn Virgin. And that is something we will be celebrating.

About the author
Stefan Tobler is the publisher at And Other Stories, a young publishing house whose acclaimed books include Swimming Home and Black Vodka by Deborah Levy and Down the Rabbit Hole and Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos. Stefan Tobler is also a literary translator from Portuguese and German.

The post Three Years Old: the reality of publishing translated fiction appeared first on English PEN.

Imagine you were born in a country called Mexico. Imagine you’re a novelist, that you want to write fiction. Imagine that your stories take place in Mexico, that your characters are Mexicans, that they speak Spanish. Imagine you tune in to a Mexican radio station each morning (you don’t actually tune in, what you actually do is activate an app on your mobile phone). Imagine what you hear: that twelve people have disappeared from an after-hours nightclub in Mexico City, that no one has the slightest idea what happened. They simply vanished. Just imagine. And that day you have to write a story, you’re writing a story for an American magazine. A detective story, this is what they’ve asked you for: a story that describes ‘the contradictions in Latin America’. And you think: what shall I write? But on the radio the ex-wife of a Supreme Court judge is talking about how she has spent a year in jail, her husband’s revenge on her for a lawsuit over the amount of child maintenance he has to pay. For children, moreover, who have autism. Just imagine. Then you remember it’s your little sister’s birthday, the one who still lives in the town where you were born and raised. And so you call her to say happy birthday and after the usual phrases for marking birthdays, you ask her how things are down there. An innocent question. And your sister tells you that last weekend six youths disappeared from the town (your sister says ‘kids’, not youths). Just imagine. She says that so far this year, twenty five people have disappeared.  In that town where nothing ever happened. In that boring town where your second novel was set. And you have to write a story. And what’s more, you’re writing your third novel, a novel that is also about Mexico. How to write? What to write? How to defy reality with literature, when reality is slamming into you and crushing you and making you feel that your poor, ordinary imagination can never catch up with it, can never even get close? Imagine writing fiction in Mexico. You recall a few facts: eighty thousand deaths and twenty five thousand disappearances in the ‘war on drugs’ from 2006 to 2012; eighty journalists murdered. Then you think of your brother, who suffered extortion. Of your best friend, your childhood friend, who was abducted and pushed to the ground in a field of corn with a pistol to his head, waiting for the coup de grace. Just imagine. Imagine being pushed to the ground in the middle of the countryside, listening to someone shouting at you: If you move I’ll fuck you up! Then they tell you to get up and start walking away. With your eyes shut. And you get up and you try to walk but you trip and you fall and you trip and you fall again. Because you’re convinced they’re going to shoot you in the back. You have no doubt you are going to die. Imagine you’re going to die from being shot in the back. Then they say: You, open your eyes, asshole. And finally you can move and you walk and they don’t shoot you, they’ve only stolen your car, your money, a laptop, an iPad, a mobile phone. You’re still alive but something died inside of you (Mexico died for you, imagine that, your own country dies inside your body), and you become paranoid. And when the following day someone calls you in the middle of the night – a wrong number – you swear you’re being spied on, so you pack a suitcase and go straight to the airport and you get on a plane that will take you anywhere, somewhere far away, while you swear, you swear on your mother’s life that you’re going to get the fuck away from Mexico, that you’re going to go to Canada, or the United States, or Europe, who cares. Just imagine. You, sitting there, thinking about the plot of a story and a novel while all this reality comes down on you, obliterating you. The page in front of you blank due to all the accumulated rage. How do you get rid of this rage? How about by speaking out? What about that time you spoke about the terrible things happening in Mexico at an event abroad, what about that look the cultural attaché from the Mexican embassy gave you – remember? – what about the hour-long speech he gave about the indisputable achievements of the government you had to put up with while he drove you to the airport. One hour of listening to figures from this fantasy country, maybe now you’ll wise up about what’s really going on there. Just imagine. Demagogy travels in Mexico’s fleet of diplomatic cars. But the radio keeps on going and there’s more news: your favourite newspaper has just apologised to a corrupt state governor for not having provided enough proof of the corruption scandal it had uncovered. The governor’s lawyers are more powerful than the lawyers of your favourite newspaper – what’s new, this you can no doubt imagine. You listen to the editor-in-chief of the paper, whom you admire, coming out with what you don’t think he believes, a mollifying statement, because otherwise the governor’s vultures will swoop down onto the newspaper and take away its last cent. What’s important is that the paper survives, that it tries to continue informing people about what is happening in the country. Even if it means saying sorry. Just imagine. Your rage spills over. You cannot write in this state. It’s impossible even to think. Impossible to live. It shouldn’t be possible to live. But it is, yes, it is. It has to be possible. You have to write. And so you take a breath, and you look at the blank page in front of you. You pick up your pen. And you start to write.

About the author

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has done a great deal of market research and published travel stories and literary and film criticism. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He now lives in Brazil and has two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children.

About the translator

Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Quesadillas is her translation of Villalobos’s most recent novel, and her previous translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award. She is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

Additional information

Read the original piece in Spanish.

Find out more information about Juan Pablo Villalobos’s new book, Quesadillas.

Juan Pablo Villalobos and his translator Rosalind Harvey will be appearing at Waterstone’s Norwich this evening September 3rd, at 7.30pm.

He will also be appearing at Mr B’s in Bath on September 4th at 7.00pm

Juan will be speaking with Deborah Levy, at Keats House, London, September 5th 7.00pm

Finally, please join English PEN, and And Other Stories for Juan Pablo Villalobos in conversation with DBC Pierre, at the Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, London, on Friday September 6th, from 7.00pm. This event will be hosted by Shane Solanki with music from special guest DJs Moshi Moshi Records.

The post Imagine – Writing fiction in Mexico appeared first on English PEN.

And Other Stories – Stefan Tobler, Publisher

In 2013 we will pursue our slightly mad idea of publishing mainly translations, alongside some select books originally written in English, among them Deborah Levy’s astounding collection of stories Black Vodka in February.

Our first translation this year will be Oleg Pavlov’s Captain of the Steppe (April 2013, translated by Ian Appleby). The winner of the Russian Booker Prize and Solzhenitsyn Prize, among others, Pavlov is a highly acclaimed author. Think Kafka’s The Trial meets Catch-22: this is a largely comic novel that vividly exposes the absurd and tragic circumstances of an all but forgotten military camp where the guards are almost prisoners.

We will follow a new edition of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s incredible, Guardian First Book Award shortlisted Down the Rabbit Hole (April 2012, translated by Rosalind Harvey) with his second book, Quesadillas (September, also translated by Rosalind Harvey). Quesadillas is a novel for our moment – about social issues such as inequality and poverty; about what happens when a minority of powerful people mess everything up for everyone else. It’s also about growing up in a big family (where all the children have Hellenic names like Aristotle and Orestes). It’s more punk than Down the Rabbit Hole and the humour is even blacker.

Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs are Blue (August, translated by Zöe Perry and myself) is a fiery and humorous tale of life in a Rio insane asylum – and never has an asylum had a more engaging, amusing guide. Our narrator appears more worried about his widening girth and the Rio funk blaring from the nearby favela that keeps him awake at night than anything more sinister. He’s loco-lite. All Dogs are Blue burst onto the Brazilian literary scene in 2008. Its raw style and comic invention were something entirely new. But as fate would have it, it would be the last masterpiece Rodrigo de Souza Leão wrote. He died that year, aged 43. His work is currently being filmed. Our editor Sophie Lewis and I had come to the book independently and loved it. It was an easy choice.

Iosi Havilio’s Paradises (October) is our final translation of 2013, translated by Beth Fowler. This intriguing, brilliantly new novel from Iosi Havilio takes up some themes and characters from his debut Open Door(which we published in 2011). Its rebellion is in writing a story about a woman with a young child, who just wants a normal life. If that is possible. Havilio and Paradises in particular have already been singled out by the most influential Argentinean critic, Beatriz Sarlo (author of the study Borges). Havilio finds just the right, understated tone as he presents real, complex people in the full mystery of their unexpected reactions and interactions. His books divide their readers – you’ll love them or hate them! And I think that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Arcadia – Gary Pulsifer, Publisher

The two new titles I am especially excited about this year are Gunnar Staalesen’s latest crime novel Cold Hearts, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and set in Norway’s second city of Bergen, and Africa, My Passionby Corinne Hofmann, translated from the German by Peter Millar. We will be reprinting earlier EuroCrime titles by Staalesen to coincide with release of the new novel, as well as a reprint of Hofmann’s The White Masai – Hofmann’s memoirs have sold over 150,000 copies for us and millions worldwide.

We are also reprinting They Were Counted, Book I of Count Miklos Banffy’s marvellous Transylvanian trilogy which charts the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as seen through the eyes of two very different cousins.  Paddy Leigh Fermor provided the foreword and the trilogy has taken off across Europe with Chinese rights most recently sold.  A true classic of world literature.  The translation from the Hungarian is by Countess Banffy and Patrick Thursfield, winners of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Book III.

Bloomsbury – Bill Swainson, Senior Commissioning Editor

In 2013 Bloomsbury will be publishing three very different but outstanding novels from Cuba, France and Israel – each also an exceptional work of translation:

Delphine de Vigan: Nothing Holds Back the Night (July – translated from the French by George Miller) – The third novel to be published in English by the best-selling author of No and Me, Nothing Holds Back the Night was nominated for eight of France’s top literary prizes, winning two of them (including the FNAC). It marks a huge step forward for this gifted novelist, combining humour, intellectual honesty, emotional sensitivity and a disarming clarity of expression in a masterpiece of autofiction about the author’s mother.

Zeruya Shalev: The Remains of Love (August – translated from the Hebrew by Philip Simpson) – Zeruya Shalev’s electrifying new novel – she is the author of Love Life, Husband and Wifeand Late Family – is at once a meditation on the state of modern Israel and a profound exploration of family, yearning, compromise and the insistent pull of the past.

Carlos Acosta: Pig’s Foot (October – translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne) – Carlos Acosta is best known as one of the world’s top ballet dancers, spellbinding audiences with towering performances in the likes of Spartacus and Romeo and Juliet. Pig’s Foot, four years in the writing, sets out to tell an alternative history of Cuba from the slave trade to the revolution and beyond as seen through the eyes of its less than reliable narrator, Oscar Mandinga. Rumbustious, darkly funny, defiant and ultimately moving, it’s an astonishing first novel.

Doubleday – Jane Lawson, Editorial Director 

If I Close My Eyes Now by Edney Silvestre (May), translated by Nick Caistor, a prize-winning Brazilian debut in the tradition of I’m Not Scared and Stand by Me. Set in 1960s small-town Brazil, two boys discover the body of a dead woman while playing near a mango plantation. They refuse to accept the official line about her death and together with an old man and a nun, they uncover the real motives behind her murder. Compelling and moving, this tale of loss of innocence coupled with a riveting crime plot and social commentary marks a new phase in contemporary Brazilian writing.

Europa Editions – Daniela Petracco, UK Director

Viola Di Grado: 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (January, translated by Michael Reynolds):

Viola Di Grado was 23 when her debut novel was published in Italy.  It was a runaway success and went on to win the Campiello First Novel Award and was shortlisted as a finalist for the Strega Prize.

The tragic death of her father plunges Camelia and her mother into a depression so deep it stops time and voids words of meaning, and only decapitating flowers and morbidly customising clothes offer relief. A budding romance with shop owner Wen seem to offer a way out, and as he teaches her Chinese ideograms, Camelia comes to see the world anew. But Wen has troubles of his own…. and as Camelia is left behind by her mother’s recovery, the story winds up to a devastating conclusion.

Ioanna Karystiani: Back to Delphi (March, translated by Konstantine Matsoukas): Ioanna Karystiani is one of Greece’s foremost writers, author of The Jasmine Isle and winner of the Greek National Book Award.

Viv Koleva is a woman with a heavy secret.  The novel opens as she takes a trip to Delphi with her grown-up son Linus.  They wander among the ruins, Viv single-mindedly trying to infect her son with her enthusiasm for the ancient art and myths.  But Linus remains taciturn and withdrawn.  By degrees we find out that Linus is a convicted criminal. And his mother too has a lot to answer for. Back to Delphi is a powerful novel about the responsibility parents carry for the actions of their children, and their ultimate helplessness.

May will be busy for Europa. We are kicking off our Noir Season with the reissue – and Europa UK launch, having recently secured UK rights – of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy: Total Chaos, Chourmoand Solea(Total Chaos used to be published in the UK by Arcadia but it’s been out of print for some time now, Chourmo and Solea have not been published before in the UK).  With a brand new Introduction by Massimo Carlotto and translated by Howard Curtis.

The Marseilles Trilogy, featuring ex-cop Fabio Montale, is a classic of European crime fiction, the catalyst for the foundation of an entire literary movement, Mediterranean Noir.

The trilogy’s plot centres on ex-cop Fabio Montale and his fight against villains in the grittier side of Marseilles.  Innocence is fleeting, everyone is flawed and everything is in flux. Izzo’s novels show us the simmering anti-immigrant sentiments flowing through southern France as the intersections of competing interests of right-wingers, the mafia, and Arab immigrants combine to wreak havoc onto Montale’s increasingly complicated life.

We are also launching Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil, a little book of unpublished/selected writings by Jean-Claude Izzo, a love song to Marseilles, its inhabitants and the earthy flavours of its cuisine.

Also in May, we will publish the new novel by Massimo Carlotto translated by Antony Shugaar. At the End of a Dull Day is a wonderfully sleazy story of crime and corruption in which Carlotto proves just how good he is at creating a central character, both morally dubious and unsympathetic, and compelling all the same.

Giorgio Pellegrini has been living an “honest” life for eleven years.  But his lawyer has been deceiving him and now Giorgio is forced into service as an unwilling errand boy for an organized crime syndicate.  A sharp insight into the intersecting worlds of corrupt politics and organised crime.

Another title to watch in our Noir Season is Patrizia Rinaldi’s Three, Imperfect Number(August, translated by Antony Shugaar). Two bodies, one a celebrity’s, the other unidentified. Each is found in a football stadium, in the foetal position and without signs of violence. A daring challenge left by a psychopath for the police? Unassuming Commissario Martuscello is in charge of the investigation, with the aristocratic inspector Liguori, and superintendent Blanca Occhiuzzi, who, blind from birth, relies on her intuition to see much farther than her colleagues. Saturated with an exotic musicality, this is something different for fans of crime fiction and lovers of literary fiction alike.

Faber and Faber – Lee Brackstone, Editorial Director, Fiction

In 2013 Faber will publish three new writers in translation for the first time, from wildly different corners of the globe. The first of these will be Sicilian writer Giorgio Vasta’s incendiary debut, Time on my Hands, translated by Jonathan Hunt, set in Palermo in the late ’70s. Ian Thomson reviewing the Italian edition in the TLS said it is ‘without question one of the most important novels to emerge from Italy in the past ten years.’

In May, a month after Vasta, we will publish the young Argentine writer, Patricio Pron. One of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, Pron’s novel, My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain translated by Mara Lethem, is again set in the ’70s during Argentina’s dirty wars. The ambition and style of the novel bring to mind early Kundera, and Juan Gabriel Vasquez has called it ‘a moving exploration of guilt and memory, and an unflinching study of what history can do to us.’

Finally, in the summer, we will publish the epic German bestseller and winner of The German Book Prize, In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge, translated by Anthea Bell. In unforgettable style, Ruge documents the social, political and cultural history of East Germany through the prism of one family across the best part of the twentieth century. There are shades of Jonathan Franzen here, but Ruge’s novel is definitively its own thing over almost 600pages of shimmering prose.

Granta/Portobello Books – Laura Barber, Editorial Director 

This year brings new books from two Granta authors who made their English-language debuts last year: Peter Stamm, who follows his acclaimed novel Seven Years with a collection of stories called We’re Flying (translated from the German by Michael Hoffman), which charts with extraordinary precision the impulses that determine the course of ordinary lives. And from the young Latin American author of the novel Faces in the Crowd comes Sidewalks (translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney), a series of literary journeys around the margins of metropolitan life that demonstrates Valeria Luiselli’s equal virtuosity as a writer of non-fiction.

Portobello welcomes three new authors, from France, Italy and Japan.  A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli (translator tbc) – an English-language debut for a prize-winning French writer, this novel is a miniature masterpiece: a sparse, stunning story of three SS officers who share a meal with their Jewish prisoner and face a chilling choice. Fabio Stassi’s Charlie Chaplin’s Last Dance(translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley) is a brilliantly inventive novel about the final years of Charlie Chaplin’s life, which is both a vivacious portrait of a comic legend and a love letter to the era of silent cinema: a must-read for fans of The Artist. Strange Weather in Tokyoby Hiromi Kawakami (translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) – just long-listed for the Man Asia Prize, already a best-seller across Europe and soon to be a movie, this is a short, simple and incredibly touching story of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance.

And finally, a Portobello book that shows not so much what is lost in translation as what is found: Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors.  Masterminded by Adam Thirlwell and featuring an all-star international line-up of writers from Zadie Smith to Alejandro Zambra, via Javier Marias, Etgar Keret and Jeffrey Eugenides, this is an ingenious game of literary Chinese whispers, in which stories pass from hand to hand, from language to language, changing all the while, with surprising, thought-provoking, and frequently funny results.

Harvill Secker – Liz Foley, Publishing Director 

Revengeis a collection of short stories from one of my favourite writers, Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, which we will publish in January. These are beautifully dark and creepy. Hilary Mantel calls her ‘original, elegant, very disturbing’.

On the thriller front, we have the The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg in March. This is translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith. It’s the first in an international crime trilogy that we’re very excited about. It centres around a young woman who gets caught up in the activities of two warring crime families and finds that the police force investigating them is as dangerous as the criminals themselves.

In April we have the second volume of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s magnum opus, A Man in Love.Everyone in the office is obsessed with these books – they are completely addictive in a way that it’s impossible to explain. The first volume, A Death in the Family, was broadly about the author’s father’s death and this one is about love and marriage, but again it’s actually about so much more than this and is everything you want from a novel. This is translated by Don Bartlett.

In May we have Harvill favourite Manuel Rivas’ All is Silence, translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne. This is a novel about young friends growing up in Galicia and becoming entangled with the local crime lord. This book was shortlisted for the Rómulo-Gallegos-Prize.

Finally our lead translated title for the year is, unsurprisingly, Jo Nesbo’s Police (translated by Don Bartlett), which we have scheduled for the autumn. We’re also excited to be publishing the second Harry Hole book in the series, Cockroaches, later in the year so that the series will finally be complete for English-language readers.

Pushkin Press – Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director

This year Pushkin Press will continue its focus on international fiction, but from a wider array of languages.  In January we publish the powerful, timely yet also funny and sensuous The Silence and the Roar by Syrian writer Nihad Sirees, translated by Max Weiss.  In April, for the first time in English, we publish a wonderful century-old Greek book called A Tale Without a Name by Penelope Delta, translated by Mika Provata-Carlone – a fable for our times if ever there was one, about a corrupt kingdom brought to its senses by a prince who realises that if only people would work together the world would be a happier place indeed.  In May, something completely different as acclaimed cult Japanese writer Ryu Murakami comes to the Pushkin Press list for the first time. We’re thrilled to be publishing Murakami’s major new novel From the Fatherland, with Love translated by Ralphy McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Tapley Takemori, alongside the first UK publication of his modern classic Coin Locker Babies, translated by Stephen Snyder, and two other titles.  If you haven’t yet experienced a Murakami novel, you’re in for a shock and a treat!

Weidenfeld & Nicholson – Kirsty Dunseath, Fiction Publishing Director 

In July next year we are publishing the English translation of Gregoire Delacourt’s fantastic novel The List of My Desires (La liste de mes envies), translated by Anthea Bell. Set in the French town of Arras, it is the story of Jocelyne who runs her own dressmaking shop. She’s 47, overweight, a little bored with her husband, and perhaps a little disappointed with the way her life has turned out, measuring it against what her teenage self had imagined. But then is she really unhappy? She has her weekends away, her friendships, her sewing blog, her work and its small pleasures… Then her best friends persuade Jocelyn to enter the Euromillion lottery and she wins. She could do anything with the money, change her life completely, but what does she really want? And what if changing your life isn’t all it is cracked up to be…? La liste de mes envies has been a number one bestseller in France, on the bestseller lists now for ten months, with rights sold in 27 countries.

The post Publishers’ highlights for 2013 appeared first on English PEN.

My refusal came from a fear of helping to reinforce what – in my opinion – is a reductionist reading of contemporary Mexican literature, which, when you look beyond the cliches and stereotypes, is tremendously diverse. Far from the clamour of the literature of violence, there is another Mexican literature, a literature of intimacy and the body, of identity and memory. Here are a few examples.

Written as a diary, El animal sobre la piedra [the animal on the rock] by Daniela Tarazona is an exploration of metamorphosis as a medical symptom. After the death of her mother, the protagonist goes on a trip to the beach as a way to deal with her grief. There she meets a man – who is to become her ‘partner’ – and his ridiculous pet Lisandro (an anteater), who will witness her transformation into a lizard. In Tarazona, the fantasy genre seems a ‘natural’ result of somatization:

‘After shedding my skin I should have gone to the doctor. But I didn’t, because this event and all the subsequent ones, which defined me as a mutating being, have been beneficial. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. The hallucinations, however, obey their own logic, and maybe this is why there are days when I don’t understand how I lost my identity. Am I no longer a person?’

Bodily mutation is also the theme of El cuerpo en que nací  [the body I was born in] by Guadalupe Nettel. However, what in Tarazona is a hallucination, in Nettel is the critical employment of memory, uttered in the psychiatrist’s office.

‘The body we are born in is not the same one we leave the world in. I don’t just mean the countless number of times our cells renew themselves, but to its more distinctive features, the tattoos and scars that with our character and our convictions we gradually add to it, feeling our way, as best we can, without guidance or tutoring.’

An autobiographical novel or what some theorists call autofiction, it tells the story of the author’s childhood and adolescence in a progressive family. The concepts of open marriage, alternative education and sexual freedom, advocated by her parents, undergo the trial of personal history, that intimate court from where children contemplate their parents.

The body vanishes in Los ingrávidos by Valeria Luiselli [Faces in the Crowd in Christina MacSweeney’s English translation]. The narrator, a mother of two small children, is pretending to write a novel about the writer Gilberto Owen while watching her marriage fall apart. Her tale weaves together two ghostly existences: her own youth, and that of Owen, separated in time but which encounter each other by chance as spectres in the New York subway.

‘I wanted to have a professional photo taken (…)  just to see whether people can see me or not,’ Luiselli’s Owen says. ‘The owner of the studio sat me on a stool (…) She made a first attempt, and a second. She readjusted the height of the stool, tried again. She changed the backdrop. At the fourth attempt, she apologised. I can’t take your portrait, sir, something’s wrong with our equipment.’

Just like the photograph of Owen, Faces is the simulacrum of a novel that is not being written; it is not a novel of ghosts, it is the ghost of a novel.

A body that mutates, a body that scars, a body that vanishes: three wonderful novels by three writers from a country where, sadly, we speak less and less about bodies and more and more about the corpses on the ground around us.

About the Author
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

About the Translator
Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

Additional Information
Daniela Tarazona: El animal sobre la piedra, Almadía: Oaxaca, 2008.

Guadalupe Nettel: El cuerpo en que nací, Anagrama: Barcelona, 2011

Valeria Luiselli: Los ingrávidos, Sexto Piso: México D.F., 2011. Faces in the Crowd has just been published in the UK by Granta.

The post Bodies not corpses appeared first on English PEN.

La palabrita es un neologismo desgraciado cuyo uso pareciera inevitable hoy en día al hablar de la literatura mexicana actual: narcoliteratura. Como buen neologismo, surge de la necesidad de nombrar un fenómeno nuevo. En realidad, en este caso el fenómeno, la literatura que aborda el mundo del tráfico de drogas, no es nuevo, pero sí lo es la necesidad de nombrarlo. En México, el término se impuso sobre todo en los medios de comunicación – un poco menos en la academia, donde no goza de unanimidad –, ante la proliferación de libros en torno a este tema.

Nombrar es un primer paso para intentar identificar, definir, encasillar, clasificar o agrupar, entre otras actividades igualmente reduccionistas. La dichosa palabrita es una especie de saco, muy amplio, donde parece caber todo: novelas policiacas, biografías de capos o crónicas amarillistas, por citar tres tipos de libros que abundan desde hace unos años en las librerías mexicanas.

Su uso – y su abuso – está produciendo algunos efectos negativos sobre la recepción de la literatura mexicana. Para comenzar, provoca una cierta desconfianza en los círculos intelectuales ante las obras que abordan el tema. “Otra novela de narcos”, es una frase despectiva que puede oírse con regularidad, como si existieran temas despreciables en sí mismos, lo que supone ya una lectura prejuiciosa. Pero lo más importante es que el término no ayuda en nada a entender la literatura que hoy en día se está haciendo en México, empobrece el debate y oscurece el aporte de algunos de los mejores libros que se han escrito en los últimos años.

Trabajos del reino, la primera novela de Yuri Herrera, es citada sin falta dentro del incipiente canon de la narcoliteratura. La historia de las peripecias de Lobo, un joven cantante de corridos, en el palacio de un poderoso narcotraficante llamado El Rey, es una alegoría de las relaciones entre el arte y el poder, una apología del arte como pureza, como medio de salvación: “Lo único extraño era él, que veía todo desde afuera. El único especial era él. Fue tan lindo comprenderlo, fue como un suave brillar entre la gente, un como sentir que las cosas son mejores cuando uno entra en un cuarto”. Decir que Trabajos del reino es una narconovela es negarle su filiación: la prosa elegante de Herrera se inserta de manera contundente en la rica tradición novelística latinoamericana del siglo XX, de la que supone una continuidad. Herrera pertenece a la estirpe de Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos o Juan Rulfo y se erige como un heredero directo de la literatura del boom, igualmente influido por la tradición narrativa norteamericana.

Si el término narcoliteratura opaca la aportación de Herrera, Julián Herbert y Carlos Velazquez se quedan, felizmente, en sus márgenes, resistentes a la clasificación, a pesar de haber escrito dos libros donde la droga es la gran protagonista.

Cocaína (Manual de usuario), el brillante libro de relatos de Julián Herbert, explora el otro lado del fenómeno: el consumo. Con una ironía seca y sórdida, Herbert se propone, entre otras cosas, redactar el prospecto de uso de la cocaína, en el hilarante “Manual de usuario”: “1. ¡¡¡Felicidades!!! Por haber adquirido la mejor oferta del mercado. Durante cien años hemos contado con la preferencia de un sinnúmero de clientes a lo largo y ancho de la geografía internacional, así que no exageramos al decir, con orgullo, que nuestra mejor carta de recomendación es la historia reciente del mundo”. Sus personajes se debaten entre la euforia química y el insomnio, las crisis de abstinencia, el abandono hedonista y el propósito de rehabilitación: el mundo no es un pañuelo, es un papelito en el que reposa el preciado polvo blanco, y el camino es una larga raya.

La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) de Carlos Velázquez es el apocalipsis narco. Plagado de neologismos, infectado sin remedio por el inglés, autorreferencial hasta donde es posible serlo, cayendo a veces – hay que decirlo – en el chiste fácil, Velázquez crea una geografía propia, su mapa imaginario de Coahuila y Nuevo Léon, las zonas controladas por la Biblia Vaquera. “El díler de Juan Salazar” narra el infierno de la abstinencia cuando el dealer falla: “Su regresión se contaminó por las teorías de los relatos de cantina acerca de San Pedroslavia. Una tierra mágica. La droga no se termina nunca. Todo mundo es díler. La heroína es baratísima (…) Decía de la abstinencia que era como mascar un chicle sin sabor. El cuarto menguante de la malilla rápido alcanzaría los límites de la luna llena y la estación completa se poblaría para él de vampiros aztecas”.

En el fondo, hablar de narcoliteratura parece más propio de quien quiere vender el fenómeno, y una cierta idea de país, que de quien quiere leer libros. Es la lógica del tráfico versus la lógica del consumo.

Desgraciadamente, nuestros mejores libros no vienen con manual de usuario.

Información adicional

Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008.

Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

The post Contra la narcoliteratura appeared first on English PEN.

Translated by Rosalind Harvey

Narcoliteratura: this little word, meaning literature about drugs, is a vile neologism whose use seems inevitable nowadays when we come to speak of contemporary Mexican literature. Like all good neologisms, it arose from the need to name a new phenomenon. In actual fact, the phenomenon in this case – the literature that deals with the world of drug trafficking – is not new, but the need to name it is. In Mexico, the term rose to prominence above all in the media (somewhat less in academia, where it has not been unanimously adopted) in the face of the proliferation of books on this theme.

To name something is the first step in attempting to identify, define, categorise, classify or bracket it, amongst other equally reductionist activities. The blessed little word is a kind of sack, a very roomy one, into which everything appears to fit: detective novels, biographies of drug lords or sensationalist non-fiction, to mention three sorts of books that for some years now have been in plentiful supply in Mexican bookshops.

The term’s use – and abuse – is having some negative effects on the reception of Mexican literature. For a start, in intellectual circles it inspires a certain suspicion towards novels dealing with this topic. ‘Another drug novel’ is a derogatory phrase that is regularly heard, as if there were themes that were contemptible per se, which presupposes a prejudiced reading. But the most important point is that the term does not help at all to understand the literature currently being written in Mexico; it impoverishes the debate and obscures the contribution made by some of the best books written in recent years.

Trabajos del reino [Kingdom Cons], the debut novel by Yuri Herrera, is cited without fail as part of the nascent canon of narcoliteratura. The story tells of the exploits of Lobo, a young corrido or ballad singer, in the palace of a powerful drug trafficker called El Rey [The King], and is an allegory of the relationship between art and power, an apologia of art as purity, as a means of salvation: ‘The only strange thing was he, who saw everything from the outside. He was the only special one. It was so wonderful to realise this, it was like something softly shining among people, like a feeling when one enters a room that things are better.’ To say that Trabajos del reino is a drug novel is to deny where it comes from: Herrera’s graceful prose fits emphatically into the rich 20th century Latin American literary tradition, of which it is a continuation. He comes from the same line as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos and Juan Rulfo, and establishes himself as a direct heir to the literature of the Boom, influenced just as much by the North American literary tradition.

If the term narcoliteratura overshadows Herrera’s contribution, Julián Herbert and Carlos Velázquez remain happily on the margins, resistant to classification, despite having both written books in which drugs are the main protagonist.

Cocaína (Manual de usuario) [Cocaine: A User’s Manual], the brilliant collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, explores the other side of the phenomenon: abuse. With pithy, sordid irony, Herbert sets himself the task of, among other things, writing the directions for use of cocaine, in the hilarious story ‘User’s Manual’: ‘1. Congratulations!!! You have acquired the best product on the market. For a hundred years we have been the preferred choice for countless numbers of international customers around the world, and so it is not an exaggeration when we say with pride that our best letter of introduction is recent global history.’ The characters swing between chemical euphoria and insomnia, hedonistic abandon and attempts at giving up: the world is not an oyster, it’s a twist of paper in which the precious white powder lies, and the way there is a long line.

La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) [The Biblia Vaquera (A Triumph of the Ballad over Logic)] by Carlos Velázquez is the narco apocalypse. Riddled with neologisms, hopelessly infected with English, as self-referential as it is possible to be, lapsing at times – it has to be said – into facile gags, Velázquez creates a geography all his own, an imaginary map of Coahuila and Nuevo Léon, the regions controlled by the Biblia Vaquera. ‘Juan Salazar’s dealer’ tells of the hell of cold turkey when the man’s dealer doesn’t come through: ‘His regression became contaminated by the theories surrounding the barroom stories about San Pedroslavia: a magic land where the drugs never ran out, everyone is a dealer, and heroin is incredibly cheap (…) He used to say that withdrawal symptoms were like chewing a tasteless piece of gum.  The last quarter of his cold turkey would soon reach the size of the full moon and the whole station would become filled just for him with Aztec vampires.’

Essentially, speaking of narcoliteratura seems to be something done by those who want to sell the phenomenon, and a certain idea of Mexico, rather than those who want to read books. It is the logic of the trafficker versus the logic of the consumer.

Unfortunately, our best books do not come with a user’s manual.

Read the original text in Spanish here: Contra la narcoliteratura

About the Author
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

About the Translator
Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

Additional Information
Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008. (To be published later this year by Faber and Faber in a translation by Lisa Dillman)

Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

The post Against Narcoliterature appeared first on English PEN.

Creo ciegamente que los escritores mexicanos estamos condenados a decepcionar a nuestros interlocutores extranjeros. Escribí una novela que ha sido traducida a varios idiomas y cada vez que tengo una entrevista o que participo de una lectura en el extranjero acabo con la sensación de no haber cumplido con la expectativa, frustrado por no poder ser suficientemente auténtico, lo que en el caso de México quiere decir folclórico. Me siento justo como el narrador de “Amigos mexicanos”, el divertidísimo y lúcido cuento de Juan Villoro, en el que un famoso periodista estadounidense, Samuel Katzenberg, contrata a un escritor mexicano para que sea su “contacto hacia lo genuino”, para que le ayude a diferenciar lo que es horrible de lo que es “buñuelesco”, para que le muestre el verdadero México. Al describir el México que Katzenberg quería conocer, Villoro resume a la perfección el abismo que separa a mexicanos y extranjeros al construir la imagen de nuestro país: “Él deseaba una realidad como los óleos de Frida: espantosa pero única”.

En los últimos años la situación no ha hecho más que empeorar: la llamada “guerra contra el narco” del presidente Calderón ha provocado alrededor de 50.000 muertes violentas en el país. Nuestra realidad se ha vuelto espantosa, a secas, sin que tenga absolutamente nada de “única” o fascinante. De manera paralela a la escalada de violencia, ha surgido una escalada literaria, porque un número importante de escritores ha intuido la necesidad – social, diría yo – de buscar un lenguaje para narrar la violencia. Se escriben por igual novelas, cuentos, obras de teatro, guiones de cine e incluso poemas o performances, que recrean nuestro horror cotidiano. Comenzaré por el cuento.

Narrar la violencia supone narrar el mundo del crimen organizado, las entrañas del monstruo aficionado a la decapitación. En el genial “Ese modo que colma”, Daniel Sada relata la fiesta de un grupo de narcotraficantes, fiesta que se suspende porque en una hielera de cervezas se realiza el hallazgo de tres cabezas humanas. Las páginas transcurren mientras las viudas pican hielo para evitar que las cabezas se pudran y apesten, los narcotraficantes comienzan a indagar quiénes son los traidores y las mujeres piensan en cómo dar sepultura a las cabezas: ¿en un féretro chiquito?, ¿en una caja de fruta? Sada culmina el cuento con una admonición escalofriante: “eso de las decapitaciones se estaba poniendo de moda”, “una moda que podría durar varios años”.

¿Qué nos ha pasado?, ¿cómo llegamos aquí?, son dos preguntas terroríficas que nos agobian. La realidad nos obliga a volver a pensarlo todo, a regresar, incluso, a lo elemental, a la definición de las cosas, para tratar de descubrir dónde nos hemos perdido. Francisco Hinojosa cree necesario, y lo es, citar el significado del verbo descuartizar en “Lo que antes eran calles”, cuento en el que un sicario con dislalia, apodado El Bóiler, termina descuartizando, por calentura, a la novia que lo ha engañado: “Descuartizar. Verbo transitivo que significa cuartear, hacer cuartos, despedazar, hacer pedazos, desmembrar, destrozar. Dividir en cuartos, a modo de castigo, el cuerpo de una persona”. Y sigue.

Hay que volver a nombrar las cosas, narrarlas, porque ya no son lo que eran, o porque ya no son lo que parecen, o porque ya no parecen lo que son. En “Ojos que no ven” Iris García relata el reclutamiento de actores para un película entre los borrachos asiduos a una cantina. Su papel en el filme consistirá en declararse miembros del Cártel de Sinaloa culpables de algunos asesinatos. Delante de la cámara, a fuerza de golpes y balazos para dar realismo a la escena, porque no hay presupuesto para maquillaje, acabarán descubriendo que están siendo usados por el Cártel del Golfo para que se culpe al cártel rival de “todo lo que pasa”. Uno de los borrachos reclutados chilla una frase que bien podría decir cualquier mexicano que ve invadida su cotidianeidad por ese tipo de violencia que antes solo veíamos en el cine o la televisión: “Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película”.

Algunos empezamos a delirar con visiones apocalípticas. Antonio Ortuño imagina en “Historia” que un país extranjero decide invadirnos, debido “al tráfico de drogas, el contrabando de órganos, el secuestro y homicidio de extranjeros, el estado de anarquía que priva y la migración masiva”. El protagonista del cuento intenta huir al tiempo que nos relata el miedo de los varones locales a que sus mujeres se ofrezcan a los soldados invasores para tener hijos rubios. Al final, justo antes de sucumbir al ataque de los tanques enemigos, se salva al encontrar refugio tras una puerta que le abre una mujer “gorda y renegrida”, “el cabello teñido de rubio y los dientes cubiertos por casquillos de oro”.

Es la patria.

Posdata: a los extranjeros aterrados con el presente texto, me gustaría transcribirles, para tranquilizarlos, una frase de Burroughs que Villoro repite en el cuento citado: “No te preocupes: los mexicanos solo matan a sus amigos”.

Sobre el autor

Juan Pablo Villalobos nació en Guadalajara, México, en 1973. Después de ocho años en Barcelona ahora vive en Brasil. Tiene dos hijos mexicanos-brasileños-catalanesitalianos. Su primera novela, Fiesta en la madriguera, fue publicada en 2010 y está siendo traducida a catorce idiomas. Su segunda novela se publicará en septiembre en español y en inglés durante el primer semestre de 2013. Escribe para diferentes revistas, periódicos y blogs de México, España, Brasil y Colombia.

Sobre la traductora

Rosalind Harvey ha vivido en Lima y en Norwich, donde se enamoró del español y de la traducción, respectivamente. Actualmente vive en Londres, donde traduce ficción en español. Su reciente traducción de Fiesta en la madriguera fue nominada al premio de primera novela del diario The Guardian. Es co-traductora, junto con Anne McLean, de El olvido que seremos de Hector Abad y de Dublinesca de Enrique Vila-Matas. El pasado otoño fue una de las primeras traductoras en residencia en el Free Word Centre.

Información adicional

Juan Villoro (DF, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” en Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” en Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010.

Francisco Hinojosa (DF, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” en El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” en Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.

Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” en La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010.

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