novelists-from-mexico

"After reading documents and historical treatises, I began to write the novel, and this, for me, is a craft not unlike bricklaying. I’m not thinking of American construction workers, who arrive with ready-made walls and simply put them in place, but about Mexican bricklayers who painstakingly erect a building stone by stone, brick by brick. If you place a rock in the wrong place, it all comes tumbling down. And in a novel, if you put a sentence in the wrong place, the fictional building comes tumbling down."

"if the novel has a power, it’s to touch that consciousness behind words, or before words. There is a kind of poet that always lives there, that lives in a preverbal world, and they work with their words to touch where the words cannot touch. They are always struggling…these two novels, they are nonverbal. They want to touch where words can’t touch. There are many things that cannot be touched by words. In this case, it was the world of the child. (2016)"

"I read the poems quickly, drinking them up, gulping them down, as if to get drunk. Poetry recharges my batteries. When I am rushing to finish a novel, I read poets like Lope de Vega, Jorge Guillén, Quevedo, Sor Juana, almost without reading them. They nourish my ear."

"I am dead, my king," I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. "I am dead, my king. The word will not scorch your mouth because I have been dead to you for some time now. Follow the steps of Dionysus. Your god has abandoned Alexandria. Attended by an ostentatious procession, he left by the eastern gate late at night, awash with music, bearing our laughter with him."

"If we don’t fight for spaces of tolerance and civility, Mexico could become a doomed country, marked by intolerance and fanaticism."

"I never feel that I have to be true to history: I have to be true to my story, so that it holds up. My novels use historical scenarios, but they are not at the service of history: they are neither memoirs nor testimonies. Like all novelists, I like reality, and I also like to betray reality by correcting its flaws and ultimately reinventing it."

"The experience of love led me to poetry—I fell in love and I discovered what had been missing from my poems—; friendship and collaboration led me to theater; and motherhood led me to the novel."

"A visit to the Mexican literary world recalls Dante’s procession through the inferno. I don’t want to point the finger at anyone in particular; it’s a collective evil. Octavio Paz was lucky to have lived in happier times. Though writers were already “yoked to the chariot of power”—the phrase was coined by Margo Glantz—as they have been since independence, their conscience and good names were still intact. I am especially disturbed by the corruption of the craft of the writer—contractors pass themselves off as intellectuals, thugs pretend to be poets—which has been so damaging to our critical conscience. This corruption reached grotesque levels during the term of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. We suffer at the hands of pseudohistorians and corrupt political analysts whose work legitimizes truly sinister public officials."

"They [novels] are a vice. It’s a vice so big that I cannot keep it hidden. I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel. I think it has to do with joy: there’s an immense pleasure in threading or organizing in a personal way those novels, and I also think it has to do with my Catholic training. Because in Catholicism, you learn to worship a superior god that creates, who organizes and creates. And when you do novels, you have this illusion that you are following the model of the creator, that you are playing the creator who has to organize that. It is a vice and a sin, and I like to sin. (2016)"

"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."

"Women are not entirely excluded from public life and positions of power, but there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve equality between the two genders, in the literary world and elsewhere."

"Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine and couldn't stop imagining that the virulent outbreak of flu was spreading far and wide."

"Carmen Boullosa is as playful as a mischievous Puck, making a mockery of every stuffy convention with a powerful imagination that romps through page after page with felicity, fun, and creativity."

""The way our people do it..." says my mother-in-law, and my mother says, "Our people do it differently because.." Well, if there are differences among the Jewish people, they must really be great between Jews and non-Jews."

"The exquisite roses that my father brought over yesterday have totally withered. I felt like I was them. How can he say he loves me if he doesn't care if I'm withering?"

"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."

"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"

"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"

"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."

"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"

"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"

"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."

"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"

"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."

"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."

"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"

"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"

"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."

"There is nothing easier for my people than that quick show of grief."

"Without his walks, the evenings were not the same, and my sidewalks were full of fruit husks, peanut shells, and ugly words."

"here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos..."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos..."

"The brilliant Mexican Rosario Castellanos combines a philosophical outlook with a well-grounded historical perspective in both novels and poems, in which she employs complex striking imagery, as in "Daily Round of the Spinster," another treatment of the theme of the childless woman. A profound student of women's lives, she suggests, as in "Meditation at the Threshold," that the solution, not yet found, requires "Another way to be human and free./ Another way to be." Her powerful utterance opened the way to a new generation of women poets born after 1937, in different countries, but all with a clear apprehension of the contemporary woman's situation..."

"Castellanos is one of the most brilliant writers of the last century, but when the Latin American boom in literature resounded in the United States, it was only the male voices that were heard."

"we see the surprising similarities between the renowned Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos and the young Peruvian poet Giovanna Pollarolo. The lyrical voices in this section subvert and rebel against routine; they speak about it as if it were a prison. The poets rebel through language which casts a light on and makes of their everyday lives a battlefield where objects become the signifiers of disorder and of liberty."

"the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the parts of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo. Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death: “... dadme la muerte que me falta .../give me the death I need . . .” Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death."

"Su silencio le producía vergüenza, como si callar fuera burlarse de los otros. Y como un castigo inmediato crecía, junto a la vergüenza, una sensación de soledad. Teodoro era un hombre aparte, amordazado por un secreto."

"don Agustín, que no tenía afición por la copa ni por el tabaco, que había guardado rigurosamente la continencia, era esclavo de un vicio: la conversación. Furtivo, acechaba los diálogos en los portales, en el mercado, en la misma catedral. Don Agustín era el primero en enterarse de los chismes, en adivinar los escándalos y se desvivía por recibir confidencias, por ser depositario de secretos y servir intrigas."

"(who would you suggest we should be reading more among the women poets, especially in Latin America?) Well, she died already, but in Mexico, there was a poet called Rosario Castellanos. She was very good."

"sonríe ante un amanecer sin nadie."

"The word "love" is used far too frequently and far too imprecisely. It moves heaven and earth, it illuminates the purest of pages, but oh, with what ease it is pressed into service to mask the most infamous of passions, the vilest selfishness, and even crime!"

"Heme aquí, ya al final, y todavía/no sé qué cara le daré a la muerte."

"la visión turbia como si sus entrañas estuvieran latiendo en medio de las cejas."

"Your verses were leafy trees, uncertain roads where the healers nested in the century plant."

"Hablo no por la boca de mis heridas."

"palabras que los vientos dispersan como pétalos"

"No es posible sino soñar, morir,/soñar que no morimos/y, a veces, un instante, despertar."

"Hechizada, contemplo el milagro de estar/como en el centro puro de un diamante."