Julio Ortega - Böcker

Together with the late Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate, stands at the pinnacle of Latin American literature. His work, in the words of Julio Ortega, "contains its own 'deconstructive' force-a literary power capable of reshaping natural order and rhetorical tradition in order to 'carnivalize' the Borges' library and allow us to hear the voices-and the laughter-of a culture, that of Latin America." This reshaping force invites us to read the works of GarcÍa MÁrquez in a new way, one that bypasses the traditional, inadequate approaches through Latin American politics, history, and "magical realism." In Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez and the Powers of Fiction, noted scholars Julio Ortega, Ricardo GutiÉrrez Mouat, Michael Palencia-Roth, AnÍbal GonzÁlez, and Gonzalo DÍaz-Migoyo offer English-speaking readers a new approach to GarcÍa MÁrquez's work. Their poststructuralist readings focus on the peculiar sign-system, formal configuration, intradiscursivity, and unfolding representation in the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in several of the author's short stories. Also included as an appendix is a translation of GarcÍa MÁrquez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America."

Too often literary criticism is academic exercise rather than creative act. For the multifaceted Julio Ortega-respected poet, dramatist, and novelist in his own right-the act of criticism becomes profoundly creative, his incisive readings of the text far transcending the pedantry that may falsely pass for imagination, intelligence, and rigor. Nearly every Spanish-American writer of consequence, from Paz to Fuentes, CortÁzar to Lezama Lima, has extolled Ortega’s criticism as not merely a reflection but an essential part of the renaissance that took place in Spanish-American letters during the late twentieth century. Poetics of Change brings together Ortega’s most penetrating and insightful analyses of the fiction of Borges, Fuentes, GarcÍa MÁrquez, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cabrera Infante, and others responsible for great writing from Spanish America. Ortega concerns himself most with the semantic innovations of these masters of the modern narrative and their play with form, language, and the traditional boundaries of genre. Mapping their creative territory, he finds that the poetics of Spanish-American writing is that of a dynamically changing genre that has set exploration at its very heart.

José Donoso was the leading Chilean representative of the Latin American “Boom” of the sixties and seventies that included Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Manuel Puig, among others. Written as a draft in 1973, set aside, and forgotten, The Lizard’s Tale was discovered among Donoso’s papers at Princeton University by his daughter after his death. Edited for publication by critic and poet Julio Ortega, it was published posthumously in Spanish under the title Lagartija sin cola in 2007. Suzanne Jill Levine, who knew Donoso and translated two of his earlier works, brings the book to an English-language audience for the first time. Defeated and hiding in his Barcelona apartment, painter Antonio Muñoz-Roa—clearly Donoso’s alter ego—relates the story of his flight with Luisa, his cousin, lover, and benefactor, after his scandalous desertion from the “Informalist” movement (a witty reference to a contemporary Spanish art movement and possibly an allusion to the Boom as well), in which he had been a member of a certain standing. Frustrated, old, and alone, the artist looks back on his years in the small town of Dors, a place he unsuccessfully tried to rescue from the crushing advance of modernity, and on the decline of his own family, also threatened by the changing times. In Levine’s able hands, Donoso’s clear prose shines through, forming a compact, powerful, and still-relevant meditation on the commercialization of art and the very places we inhabit.