What Terrifies Teens In Today's Young Adult Novels? The Economy

by Marcela ValdesNPR.org. September 30, 2013.

If you think kids are too young to worry about unemployment numbers, consider this: some of our most popular young adult novels fairly shiver with economic anxiety. Take Veronica Roth's Divergent, this week's top New York Times Young Adult bestseller and a perennial on the list since its publication in 2011. Divergent's heroine, Beatrice Prior, braves hazing, groping and punching in order to enter the militaristic "faction" that she admires. She endures these dangers willingly because in Roth's dystopian, all-or-nothing Chicago, Beatrice would be thrown into the streets if she fails her initiation. There, among the ruined buildings and the reek of sewage, Beatrice would be forced to join Roth's "factionless," the working poor who perform the scutwork of Divergent's society. The prospect makes Beatrice cringe. For her and her peers, she explains, to be factionless is "our worst fear, greater even than the fear of death."

Financial terror also motivates Suzanne Collin's blockbuster novel The Hunger Games. In a world of predatory Capitol-ism, Katniss Everdeen and her family exist on the edge of starvation. Her most famous skills — hunting and foraging — are developed to keep her mother and sister alive. Economic desperation tinges even her romantic connections. Peeta first makes an impression when he throws Katniss two warm loaves of raisin nut bread. Gale meets her while poaching in the woods, and their friendship springs from one shared truth: "Gale and I agree that if we have to choose between dying of hunger and a bullet in the head, the bullet would be much quicker."

Reading these books, I find it hard not to remember that The Hunger Games debuted in September 2008, the same month that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Or that the number of American children living in poverty jumped by more than three million in the four years preceding Divergent's 2011 publication. Financial stress in young adult novels may be nothing new: Louisa May Alcott's 1868 classic Little Women opens with "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." But to me it seems clear that the economic anxieties keeping today's adults awake at night — income inequality, food insecurity, downward mobility, winner-takes-all competition — have also invaded the literature of their children.

Read the full article at NPR.org

The Drug Trade Destroys A Generation — Quietly — In 'Falling'

"The Sound of Things Falling" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Reviewed by Marcela Valdes NPR.org. July 30, 2013.

If I tell you that Juan Gabriel Vasquez's exquisite novel The Sound of Things Falling is about the drug trade in Colombia, a few stock images might arise in your mind: an addict overdosing in a dirty apartment, say, or a dealer ordering the killing of some troublesome peon, or the drugs themselves bubbling in a volumetric flask. Here in America, shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire have taught us how to think about the drug trade, how to imagine it. But Vasquez was born in Colombia in 1973 — the same year that President Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration — and he has a different story for us altogether.

In this novel, nobody overdoses in an apartment. Instead Vasquez gives us delicate renderings of a sonogram ("a sort of luminous universe, a confusing constellation in movement"), of insomnia ("the dew accumulating on the windows like a white shadow when the temperature dropped in the early hours"), of a famous, abandoned car ("the bodywork cracked open, another dead animal whose skin was full of worms"). He gives us the decomposition of a young man's family in the 1990s and the ripening of a young woman's first love in the 1970s. He gives us the birth of the war on drugs and the disillusionment of a generous Peace Corps volunteer. He gives us the sound of planes falling, of bodies falling, of lives falling inexorably apart. He gives us the most engrossing Latin American novel I've read since Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Read the full review at NPR.org

What Did You Do in the Dirty War?

'My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain’ by Patricio Pron Reviewed by Marcela Valdes New York Times Book Review. July 5, 2013.

In the 1970s, during the years that Argentina’s last military dictatorship was busy raping, torturing and killing thousands of the country’s citizens, a large obelisk in Buenos Aires was adorned with this menacing piece of advice: ­“Silence is health.” That dictatorship ended in 1983, but no one recovers quickly from a bludgeon, especially not a child. The Argentine novelist Patricio Pron was born in 1975, a year before the Dirty War began. The nameless narrator of his artful novel “My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain” isn’t merely silent; he’s erased.

For eight years he has been living in Germany, popping paroxetine, benzodiazepines and sleeping pills until his mind is shot through with gaps like a censored letter. Lest we forget we’re dealing with damaged goods, Pron makes the novel’s very structure as perforated as our man’s memory. Holes appear in its numbered fragments — a missing No. 8, say, or an elided 17 — whenever the narrator hits a snag. When he gets sick, the sequence turns feverish: 22, 11, 9, 26, 3.

Only when his father sinks into a coma, in August 2008, does this bruised soul finally return to Argentina. There he finds a photograph that disturbs his willful amnesia: Dad in sideburns next to a woman who is not the narrator’s mother. Below the photo lies a folder thick with clippings about a recent missing-person case: 60-year-old Alberto José Burdisso has disappeared from the town of El Trébol; decades earlier his sister, Alicia, vanished during the military dictatorship.

“You don’t ever want to know certain things,” the son thinks, staring at the photo of his father and the woman, “because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own.” Reason enough to eat another Xanax.

But having discovered Dad’s interest in Alberto and Alicia, the protagonist must find out: Who are these siblings? Why did they disappear? How is his father connected to them? And what, exactly, was Dad doing during those crucial years when Argentina’s democracy imploded? Suspense swells through the early sections, as Pron nests mystery within mystery, carefully tending the big enigma: What trauma drove the narrator to Germany, and into the fuzzy comfort of pills?

Read the rest of this review at nytimes.com

'The Hare' Leads A Merry Chase

'The Hare' by Cesar Aira Reviewed by Marcela Valdes NPR.org. June 26, 2013.

To love the novels of Cesar Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment. His latest novel to be translated into English, The Hare, is set in the Argentine pampas at the end of the 19th century. But don't let any veneer of realism fool you. Despite its gauchos, Indians and lyrical descriptions of Argentina's sprawling plains, The Hare doesn't approach the accuracy of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Aira's last pampas novel to be published here. It's more like an episode of Star Trek, crossed with Lawrence of Arabia.

As in so many of Aira's novels, the hero is an earnest man with a faintly ridiculous mission. Tom Clarke, a British geographer and naturalist, roams the pampas in search of a mythical rabbit that not only jumps but flies. With him ride two Argentine sidekicks: a chatty 15-year-old boy and a taciturn gaucho with his own secret mission. Together the three horsemen visit a series of Indian tribes, becoming more and more entangled in local politics until Clarke is declared commander-in-chief of an Indian confederation and the region erupts in war. Near the book's climax, the Englishman strips off his clothes, dons Indian greasepaint, and watches a flock of giant ducks usher an enormous egg into the ocean.

Even that bizarre synopsis is too solemn for Aira's novel. From The Hare's first chapter, when a drunken dictator pirouettes on the back of a galloping horse, the plot is only loosely attached to logic. Clarke's journey through the pampas resembles a vast space voyage: long rides through desolate landscape punctuated by conversations with extraordinary grotesques. One of the tribes he meets lives underground, indulging in promiscuous sex and bartering coal for liquor. Another speaks in "monstrous sentences" designed to be incomprehensible. For better or worse, such tribes are more ontological experiments than historical re-creations. And Clarke himself is hardly more rational. His war-winning battle strategy? It's "the Great Sine Curve of the Mapuche armies, a line that would have exploded the maps if anyone had tried to trace it."

Read the rest of this review at npr.org

Khaled Hosseini’s ‘And the Mountains Echoed’ is riveting and complex

'And the Mountains Echoed' by Khaled Hosseini’sReviewed by Marcela Valdes The Washington Post. May 20, 2013.

Nuance is rare on the bestseller list. In most cases, ambiguity is stripped away to appeal to the greatest number and lowest common denominator. So it always renews my faith when a popular novelist shows a decided preference for moral complexity. It suggests that readers crave more than simplistic escape. Or perhaps it just means that some writers, like Khaled Hosseini, know how to whisk rough moral fiber into something exquisite.

Hosseini’s first two novels, “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007), spent a combined total of 171 weeks on the bestseller list. He knows how to please a crowd. In his case, the secret ingredient might be intense emotion. I’m not an easy touch when it comes to novels, but Hosseini’s new book, “And the Mountains Echoed,” had tears dropping from my eyes by Page 45.

The killer scene is set in Kabul in 1952, in a home so heavy with fruit trees and privilege that when 10-year-old Abdullah crosses its threshold, he feels as if he has entered a palace. Abdullah is the son of a broke day laborer; his mother died giving birth to his sister, Pari. The previous winter, the cold seeped into his family’s shack and froze his 2-week-old stepbrother to death. Now his father has walked Abdullah and Pari across miles of desert, from their tiny village to the great city of Kabul, in hopes that one brutal act — a bargain with two rich devils — will save their family from the next ruthless winter. Later, Abdullah will think back on that terrible afternoon and remember a line from one of his father’s bedtime stories: “A finger had to be cut, to save the hand.”

Read the rest of this review at The Washington Post

Oil, Chavez And Telenovelas: The Rise Of The Venezuelan Novel

by Marcela ValdesNPR.org. April 11, 2013.

For more than 40 years, the most important book prize in South America has been bankrolled by the region's most famous petro-nation: Venezuela. Yet Venezuelan novelists themselves rank among the least read and translated writers in the entire continent. Over and over again as I worked on this article, I stumped editors and translators with a simple question: Who are Venezuela's best novelists?

"If you were to ask me about Mexico or Nicaragua ..." one translator hedged. A second tried guessing that "there can't be a lot happening in a country that basically represses." A third editor was more frank. "I know zip about the country's literature," she confessed. "How embarrassing."

Yet since 1967, a Venezuelan award, the International Novel Prize Rómulo Gallegos, has been the kingmaker of Spanish-language book prizes. Among the crowned: Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas and Ricardo Piglia. Gerald Martin, whose biography of García Márquez covers more than 70 years of literary history, judges it "the only Latin American prize which does the same for Latin America as the Nobel does for the world."

Read the rest of this article and hear the interview on "Morning Edition" at NPR.org

Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist, dies at 83

by Marcela ValdesThe Washington Post. May 15, 2012.

Carlos Fuentes, the politically engaged Mexican novelist and irrepressible bon vivant who stood at the forefront of Latin American letters for more than half a century, died May 15 at a hospital in Mexico City. He was 83.

Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts announced the death but did not disclose the cause. He was being treated for heart problems.

A diplomat’s son, Mr. Fuentes was working for the Mexican Foreign Ministry when he catapulted to prominence with his first novel, “Where the Air is Clear” (1958). Presenting an extravagant portrait of inequality and moral corruption in modern Mexico, the book established its 29-year-old author as a daring social critic and prose stylist and helped usher in a renaissance in Latin American literature known as the “Boom.”

As his literary career progressed, Mr. Fuentes blended his fascination with politics, and his fervent depiction of erotic couplings, with broader themes such as the inescapable influence of history, the intersection of native and European cultures, and the betrayal of national ideals for personal gain.

Read the rest of this obituary at The Washington Post

Unmanageable Realities: On César Aira

by Marcela Valdes The Nation. April 10, 2012.

Whether or not César Aira is Argentina’s greatest living writer, he’s certainly its most slippery. His novels, which number more than sixty, are famous for their brevity—few are longer than a hundred pages—and for their bizarre, unpredictable plots. In How I Became a Nun (2005) an innocent family outing climaxes with murder. The weapon? A vat of cyanide-laced strawberry ice cream. In The Literary Conference (2006) an attempt to clone the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes causes giant blue silkworms to attack a Venezuelan city, and in Aira’s latest book to appear in English, Varamo (2002), two spinsters get caught smuggling black-market golf clubs.

Aira loves to keep readers guessing—he once said that he deliberately writes the opposite of whatever fans praise—and several of his novels are actually works of probing psychological realism. But for all the variety of his novels’ plots, what has remained consistent during the thirty-odd years he has been writing is his taste for blending genres. Social realism and haunted-house tale mix with architectural theory in Ghosts (1990). Biography, pioneer tale and biogeography melt together in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000). The B-movie plot of The Literary Conference is peppered with asides on myth and translation.

Critics in the United States have typically tried to account for Aira’s oddball complexity by classifying him as a Dadaist or a Surrealist. In this they have followed the lead of Aira, who has praised Marcel Duchamp and declared that he might have been a painter if the job weren’t so tricky (“the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all”). Yet Aira has also said that his books “come from the things I see, that I live,” and that “I’ve never liked surrealism for surrealism itself.” He has even gone so far as to criticize other contemporary Argentine writers for producing novels that are too “frivolous” and insufficiently concerned with Argentina’s “social and economic problems.”

Read more of this essay at The Nation.

'Destiny and Desire' by Carlos Fuentes

'Destiny and Desire' by Carlos FuentesReviewed by Marcela Valdes The Washington Post. February 1, 2011.

Carlos Fuentes is known for writing serious books about Mexico, and despite all its silliness, his latest novel, "Destiny and Desire," is clearly not intended as an exception. The book fairly smokes with acid commentary on Mexican history ("It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance") and political manipulation ("Throughout Latin America homage is paid to the law only to violate it more thoroughly").

Giving himself fuel to burn, Fuentes sets "Destiny" in a law school, a prison, a presidential palace and the headquarters of a telecommunications billionaire who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mexico's richest citizen, Carlos Slim. For those who like a flash of magic, there's also a heaven where angels play poker and a windy graveyard dominated by the ghost of Mexico's old ideals.

The novel opens, however, in a much sweeter location: the postcard-perfect beaches of Mexico's Pacific Coast. There lies our narrator: the decapitated head of 27-year-old Josue Nadal. A bloody noggin may be a surprising choice for raconteur, but Josue's story feels familiar. It starts with his idealistic strivings and ends with his disastrous introduction to the backrooms of Mexican power.

The day that marks his fate occurs when Josue is 16. Bullied by classmates for his long, thin nose - "Anteater snout," they call him, along with "Monster schnoz" and "Elephant honker" - he finally defends his honor by punching the schoolyard leader. He's saved from a retaliatory beating when one of his tormentors suddenly turns coat and jumps to his aid.

Josue's new ally is Jerico, a 17-year-old as mysterious as James Bond: He claims to have no family and no last name. Such freakish isolation might give a normal young man pause, but Josue's domestic situation is equally strange. He has no memories of a mother or father; he's been raised by a chilly guardian who barely speaks, and, like Jerico, his expenses are all covered by an invisible and anonymous "senor."

Having triumphed over the epithet-shouters, Josue and Jerico seal their alliance by committing themselves to a "project for life." Their goal is intellectual independence: "We would not permit anyone to inculcate in us opinions that weren't ours" - no small feat for two lonely musketeers enrolled in a stern Catholic school. Their first step is to debate the merits of Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche in the gym showers. Nietzsche, however, proves a kind of gateway drug. Soon enough, the boys have moved from sharing books to sharing mentors to sharing an apartment to sharing a favorite whore.

What they don't share is Jerico's will to power. The older he gets, the more Jerico craves public position, while Josue aches mostly for love. They might have run happily along parallel courses - one chasing votes, the other chasing skirts - if it weren't for two interfering factors. Powerful men have stakes in their careers. And Jerico likes criminals. "Above all things," he tells Josue, "I admire the man who murders what he loves."

In theory, all of this - cynical social commentary, anonymous benefactors, dangerous friendship - could be marvelous. But the unavoidable fact is that not a single character in "Destiny and Desire" won my affection, or even my curiosity. Fuentes suggests alternately that Josue and Jerico are like the Greek demigods Castor and Pollux or like the biblical brothers Cain and Abel. Sure. The problem is that they feel too much like ideas, not enough like men.

And their female paramours are worse: a mute whore whose husband becomes paralyzed after an energetic sex act; a femme fatale who is all ice and calculation; a drug-addicted nymphomaniac who nicknames one of the boys "Savior." Had these women strutted through an old Chandler novel, I may well have enjoyed them, or at least enjoyed laughing over them. But Fuentes lacks Chandler's lightning style. On being asked by a taxi driver, "Where to chief?" Josue falls into high-toned reverie:

"Where to? It was enough to look outside the car at the vast desert of the Anillo Periferico, the outer beltway that foreshadows the funeral that awaits us if we don't choose to turn ourselves into ashes first. Sacrificed after all, we die on the cement perimeter that reflects and celebrates a new city that has shed its old skin . . ." and on and on for more than a page. Wading through this soliloquy, I found myself empathizing with the cab driver, whom I imagined drumming his fingers on the wheel, impatient for the plot to lurch ahead.

But let's give Fuentes the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he adopts such turgid prose intentionally, to convey something about Josue's character. Something like: Aching to be a great intellect, Josue has trouble seeing reality. Or maybe: Abandoned by his parents, Josue finds reality so painful that he defends himself with abstractions.

Either of these could be true. Nevertheless, the author's job is to make the reader want to stay with a novel page after page. Fuentes never really pokes fun at Josue's self-importance, never gets around the young man's humorless perspective, the way Howard Jacobson got around his narrator's delusions in "The Finkler Question."

Instead, we're trapped inside the mind of a tendentious young man who is by turns boring, pretentious, insightful and ridiculous. Reader, I would have decapitated him, too.

Karen Tei Yamashita's "I Hotel" is a finalist for the National Book Award

'I Hotel' by Karen Tei Yamashita Reviewed by Marcela Valdes The Washington Post. November 11, 2010.

The building at the center of Karen Tei Yamashita's colossal new work of fiction, "I Hotel," is a creaky hotel that once stood on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco. Built after the great quake that nearly destroyed the city in 1906, it had rusting plumbing, dangerous wiring and rats the size of cats in the basement. But for the aging workers and young radicals who found shelter within its deteriorating walls, the International Hotel was both "a fortress and a beacon."

For Yamashita it is also the girder in a tremendous feat of creative engineering, because "I Hotel" is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, "I Hotel" is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. It's also a finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced on Nov. 17. Whether or not "I Hotel" wins the prize, it will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations.

Oddly enough, the novel began with a request from Wisconsin. Provoked by a questionnaire for Asian American writers that she received from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yamashita decided to write a book about the Asian American movement in California during the 1960s and '70s, of which she herself had been a part. Diving into archives and tracking down first-person participants, Yamashita put as much fact-collecting into her "Yellow Power" research as any historian.

When it came to dramatizing her facts, however, Yamashita may well have channeled I.M. Pei. "I Hotel's" table of contents includes a series of drawings that lay out its narrative architecture: 10 linked novellas, each exploring a different narrative technique (pastiche, social realism, cinema verite, etc.) and each focusing on three different main characters. (Yes, Hollywood, that makes for 30 star roles!)

One novella presents the story of a Japanese American criminology professor through a series of FBI-like surveillance reports. Another juxtaposes the marriage of two Third World Liberation Front activists against Ferdinand Marcos's declaration of martial law in the Philippines. My favorite novella features a roast pig contest directed by a Filipino migrant-worker-turned-chef with a taste for tall tales.

All the novellas, in turn, are cantilevered off a larger story about how the International Hotel inspired and protected its inhabitants. The radical intellectuals of the Asian Community Center, the veterans of the International Hotel Tenants Association, the artists of the Kearny Street Workshop and the Maoists of the Chinese Progressive Association: All of them found work space, think space, love space in the crumbling hotel. And all of them fought fiercely against the developers who wanted it demolished.

The term "Asian American" blurs together wildly different linguistic and religious cultures. As one narrator says, "Maybe we all look alike, and maybe the laws lump us all together so we got to stick together, even though we're really different and can't understand each other and our folks back in the old countries hated each other's guts."

"I Hotel" resists this lumping. Its wild narrative architecture springs from a need to delineate separate Chinese, Japanese and Filipino histories, as well as separate aesthetic, political and intellectual positions. It's as if Yamashita wanted to capture the diversity of an entire cultural ecosystem, displaying each distinct species -- idealistic gay Chinese poet, wisecracking Filipino Marxist, Japanese Black Panther strategist -- in all its particular glory, and its particular pain.

"I Hotel" may be a political book, but it's no ideological tract. Yamashita obviously admires the fervor and idealism of the activists in her novel, whether they're demanding more Third World professors at U.C. Berkeley or making charcoal drawings in a Japanese internment camp. But her activists are often as problematic as they are inspiring.

Chen, a dashing professor of Chinese literature, for example, teaches his proteges about Mao's cultural revolution but neglects to mention that "everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed" to fit the revolutionary ideal. Other radicals commit greater and lesser crimes: stealing cars, abusing women, stockpiling guns, sabotaging colleagues they consider too capitalist. Even the most generous characters, like Ria Ishii, who organizes a garment workers' collective in 1973, are forced to confront the limitations of their Marxist aspirations. "I know what you think," one of the old garment workers tells Ria, "but I am not the revolution."

"Yes, you are," Ria replies. The older woman shakes her head. And three decades later we know she's right.

Such scenes of intellectual and physical humbling come faster as "I Hotel" marches through the 1970s. Collectives fall apart. Important battles are lost. Protest chants ("The people united will never be defeated!") begin to sound more and more like wishful thinking. The disappointments might have been overwhelming if it weren't for the zing of Yamashita's prose, which is full of waggish jokes and saucy mash-ups. The sliest of them may be a series of line drawings spoofing the long-standing rivalry between the playwright Frank Chin and the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston.

In the end, the way "I Hotel" accounts for the Asian American movement is both sweet and sour. And for all the losses Yamashita records, there are, we know, great achievements as well. High among them is this beautiful book.

Roger Shattuck Award for Criticism

Last week, I was given an astonishing piece of news: I (and one other, mysterious critic) had been chosen for the first set of Roger Shattuck Awards for Criticism. So I canceled dates, drafted a speech, bought a new dress, and took a train down to The Center for Fiction in New York City. Yesterday I received the award near the end of Center's Conference on Criticism, and found out that the other, mysterious critic was none other than Adam Kirsch.

What follows is the acceptance speech I gave that afternoon.

"Thank you. It is a tremendous honor for me to receive this award from the Shattuck family and from Center for Fiction. It moves me to think that a organization devoted to fiction can value what I try to do.

I’d to begin by thanking a few people who helped to bring me here today. Heidi Julavits at The Believer took a chance on me in 2003, and let me write a 10,000 word essay on Yukio Mishima, at a time when the longest piece I’d ever written ran about 1,800 words.  Ted Genoways and Kevin Morrissey at The Virginia Quarterly Review gave me an assignment to write about Roberto Bolaño and didn’t complain when I turned in a strange, two-headed beast of reporting and straight criticism that looked very little like the article I’d first proposed. John Palattella at The Nation shared my enthusiasm for two-headed beasts, and allowed me to try out more and more complex versions of them while also giving me the privilege of writing about Spanish-language books before they’d ever been translated into English. And, finally, my husband, John Beckman. A novelist and scholar in his own right, he has encouraged and supported me in those unhappy nights when my own confidence has failed, he has cooked me countless dinners when I’ve been on deadline, and he has given me that precious gift: a loving marriage.

I see a few familiar faces in this room, but most of you, I suspect, know very little about me. So I think it’s only polite to tell you a bit about the person who is receiving this award.  My parents moved to this country from Chile in 1974 — not because of the military coup that took place in Chile the year before, but because of my father’s ambition. A practicing doctor in Chile, he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a fellowship to improve his surgical skills.  I was born a few months after he arrived with my mother and older sister.  And, thus, I became the only person in my family whose first words were spoken in English, an experience that has given me an instinctive understanding of the power of words.

Like many immigrant families, mine moved around a lot. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d lived in 6 different cities and gone to 7 different schools. Maybe this is why, ever since I learned to read, I’ve mostly had my head in a book. For many of my formative years, books served me as both magnifying glass and safety blanket. They were my most reliable friends. I could pack  them in a box and take wherever we went next. I could bury my head in them every time I needed to sit down in a new school, in a new cafeteria sounded by faces that were curious, hostile, or just indifferent.

More importantly, books became my way of examining the world. And I wonder if this isn’t an experience that all of us in this room share. Novelists, critics, devoted readers – how many of us have first really learned about love, or war, or grief in the pages of a magnificent book? And how many of us, when confronted with some troubling puzzle – like the psychology of suicide bombers or the persistence of poverty amid wealth or the systematic killing of women in a town in northern Mexico – don’t turn first to the bookshelf for our answers? William Gass once wrote that the writer is a person who “choos[es] to relate to the world through words” – and this is as true of  critics and editors as it is of novelists.

Roger Shattuck himself was a man who was not interested just in French literature or Marcel Proust. In his essay, “How to Read a Book,” he describes three kinds of reading. “We read,” he wrote, “for basic comprehension of words and sentences. We read for literary response to the parts and the whole of a work. And we read for the relations of the work to other works and to life itself.” All three of these kinds of reading, I would venture, correspond to different functions of the critic, and Shattuck’s excellence lay in his ability to deftly exercise all three: to make the complicated intelligible, to heighten appreciation of aesthetic engineering, and to illuminate the thoughts about Art and the World that form the beating heart of every great work of fiction.

I worry sometimes that so much writing about books today seems to dispense entirely with these three functions. We live in the Age of Opinion, but not enough thought is given to the process by which opinions are formed.  One could give a whole lecture on this topic, but it’s late in the day, so I will offer just this one thought:

I believe that all good criticism must begin with a serious attempt at understanding. A critic must endeavor to answer the question “What is this author trying to do?” before she moves to any form of judgment. Understanding will always be imperfect, of course; and it’s not the same as approval. We can all understand a book and loathe it. But without that first step, criticism slides into egoism – and that is the most vulgar corruption of our art.

In recent years, my own attempts at understanding have grown to encompass not just individual authors and particular books, but the post-dictatorship world of Latin America. I can’t help noticing that almost all the great writers, and almost all the great filmmakers, in Latin America today grew up under authoritarian regimes. They grew up, that is, amid deception and repression and torture, even if they themselves were spared the most direct experiences of these political vices. Many of their works grapple explicitly, if not always consistently, with this brutal legacy – it’s no coincidence, I think, that so many of them love detectives.

And why should the rest of the world care? I’d like to offer two reasons. First, because from these dirty wars have sprung another stretch of banquet years. Not since the 1970s have we seen such a profusion of exceptional works by Latin American novelists. Second, because repression and violence have not gone away; maybe they will never go away. And in these books lie clues about how people get through such dark eras to rebuild themselves and civil society again.

Thank you."

Lisandro Alonso: “La Libertad” & “Liverpool”

It’s no secret that Lisandro Alonso is emerging as one of Latin America’s great directors, but it wasn’t until the Harvard Film Archives hosted a screening of his films this weekend that I got a chance to learn what the fuss is about. Let me begin by saying: Lisandro Alonso deserves all the praise he gets.

I hope to write more about him and his work once my Nieman fellowship ends in May, so I won’t say too much now. But for those who haven’t yet seen his films, or who are wondering what he said in the post-film Q&As, I thought I’d share a few details.

Tonight, the Archives screened Alonso’s first feature film, “La Libertad,” which debuted in 2001. (Note to film scholars: The Archives just bought a print of it for their collection.) Blending documentary and narrative elements, “La Libertad” follows a fictional day in the life of a real woodcutter (Misael Saavedra) in the Argentine Pampas. Misreal works alone, and most of the scenes consist of him simply chopping wood, driving, or eating. There is no major drama, no overt conflict, and almost no dialog.

So why is the film so compelling? I think that Haden Guest, the director of the Archives, came close to answer when he observed that though Alonso has often been called a minimalist, his “camera work is anything but minimal.” To which, Alonso replied, with characteristic self-deprecation, that he decided to keep the camera moving almost constantly in order to keep his stripped down story from getting “boring.”

In contrast, in Alonso’s latest film “Liverpool,” the camera barely moves during most scenes. Instead each perfectly-composed shot is held so long that you have time to observe all the minutia of each room the characters inhabit. And that’s the point.

“The environment creates the personality of the character,” Alonso remarked after Saturday’s screening. And in a film that resists psychological interpretations, studying the rooms is as close as we can get to divining the main character’s soul. About him (the main character), I will only say: 1) he works in a cargo ship, 2) he likes Stoli vodka, and 3) when he gets leave to visit his mother, the action is not like anything Hollywood films have led us to expect.

* * *

This month, Alonso will be traveling to New York City, Seattle, and Madrid to attend screenings of “Liverpool.” If you live anywhere near these places, try to check it out. Without a doubt, it’s the most striking piece of film I’ve seen all year.

Seed Projects: The Fiction of Alejandro Zambra

by Marcela Valdes The Nation. June 17, 2009.

When it was published in Spanish in 2006, Alejandro Zambra's novel Bonsai filled just ninety-four generously spaced pages, and its recent English translation by Carolina De Robertis stretches only to eighty-three. Still, each of these volumes should be considered a marvel of book design and production since in interviews the author has let slip that his original text ran only to forty sheets. Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled--and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size. As the venerable Santiago newspaper El Mercurio commented in April 2008, "The publication of Bonsai...marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters."

Reading the book a continent away, I would never have predicted such a fuss, though Bonsai is a delightful work. A love story that's both wry and melancholy, the novel opens in 1980s Santiago, at a study session turned party, where textbooks give way to vodka and two university students fall casually into bed. "Julio didn't like that Emilia asked so many questions in class," Zambra writes, "and Emilia disliked the fact that Julio passed his classes while hardly setting foot on campus, but that night they both discovered the emotional affinities that any couple is capable of discovering with only a little effort."

Such knowing, cynical observations save the love story of these twentysomethings from sentimentality, and Zambra keeps the zingers coming as he traces the development of Julio and Emilia's "conceited intimacy," which allows them to feel not only loved but also "better, purer than others." The relationship withers by page 35, at which point the novel--this little book has been insistently presented as a full-fledged novel in Spain and Latin America--turns poignant. The brief romance, brimming with heartfelt confessions and adolescent posturing, emerges as the one great love of Julio's dispirited life.

Read the rest of this essay on The Nation

Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolano's '2666'

by Marcela Valdes The Nation. November 19, 2008. Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

The Part About the Author

Shortly before he died of liver failure in July 2003, Roberto Bolaño remarked that he would have preferred to be a detective rather than a writer. Bolaño was 50 years old at the time, and by then he was widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist since Gabriel García Márquez. But when Mexican Playboy interviewed him, Bolaño was unequivocal. "I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer," he told the magazine. "Of that I'm absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts."

Detective stories, and provocative remarks, were always passions of Bolaño's--he once declared James Ellroy among the best living writers in English--but his interest in gumshoe tales went beyond matters of plot and style. In their essence, detective stories are investigations into the motives and mechanics of violence, and Bolaño--who moved to Mexico the year of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and was imprisoned during the 1973 military coup in his native Chile--was also obsessed with such matters. The great subject of his oeuvre is the relationship between art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state.

In fact, all of Bolaño's mature novels scrutinize how writers react to repressive regimes. Distant Star (1996) grapples with Chile's history of death squads and desaparecidos by conjuring up a poet turned serial killer. The Savage Detectives (1998) exalts a gang of young poets who joust against state-funded writers during the years of Mexico's dirty wars. Amulet (1999) revolves around a middle-aged poet who survives the government's 1968 invasion of the Autonomous University of Mexico by hiding in a bathroom. By Night in Chile (2000) depicts a literary salon where writers party in the same house in which dissidents are tortured. And Bolaño's final, posthumous novel, 2666, is also spun from ghastly news: the murder, since 1993, of more than 430 women and girls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, particularly in Ciudad Juárez.

Read more of this essay at The Nation.

Windows Into the Night: The collected nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño

by Marcela ValdesThe Nation. March 13, 2008

Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolaño dropped out of high school shortly after he decided to become a poet at age 15. The year was 1968, a time as wild in Mexico City, where Bolaño and his parents were living, as it was in the United States--but much more dangerous. There, student protests, rock 'n' roll and sexual liberation were the pursuits not only of poets but also of activists and leftist guerrillas, and the Mexican government greeted them with a dirty war. Four unlucky students died at Kent State in 1970; some 300 were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Yet for Bolaño, who'd just arrived from a small country town in Chile, the atmosphere of the big city was intoxicating. Years later he recalled that the capital had seemed to him "like the Frontier, that vast, nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are the spectacles of every day."

Bolaño's own transformation began with a five-year period of isolation. Rather than join the party, he shut himself in his bedroom to consume book after book after book. The poet Jaime Quezada, who came to visit the family when Bolaño was 18, recalls that the young writer was living like a hermit. "He didn't come out of his bed-living-dining-room," Quezada has said, "except to go to the toilet or to comment out loud, pulling on his hair, about some passage in the book he was reading."

Young and broke, Bolaño stocked his shelves by shoplifting from bookstores all over Mexico City. His captures included volumes by Pierre Louÿs, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Pepys, Alphonse Daudet, Juan Rulfo, Amado Nervo and Vachel Lindsay. But the book that changed his life was Albert Camus's The Fall, in which a lawyer who hangs out at an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City resigns himself to a life of calculated hypocrisy. Bolaño explains in his essay "Who's the Brave One?" that after reading it, he was possessed by a desire "to read everything, which, in my simplicity, was the same as wanting to or intending to discover the mechanism of chance that had led Camus's character to accept his atrocious fate." Bolaño's library was his own private Frontier.

Read more of this book review at The Nation.

His Stupid Heart: Roberto Bolaño’s Novels Were a Love Letter to His Generation, But What He Had to Say Many Chileans Didn’t Want to Hear

by Marcela ValdesThe Virginia Quarterly Review. Winter 2008.

1.

Any account of Roberto Bolaño’s life has to be divided into at least two stages: before the publication of The Savage Detectives in 1998, and after. Before there was rage, poverty, and obscurity. After, there was rage, security, and fame. In essays, lectures, and interviews, Bolaño’s friends often mention his kindness, his loyalty, his doting love for his two children. There’s no reason to doubt that their statements are true. In private, the man who is now widely recognized as the most influential Latin American novelist of the past three decades could have been a peaceful gentleman. But in public, in print, Bolaño preferred war. Before he died of liver failure in 2003, he told several interviewers, “My motto is not Et in Arcadia ego, but Et in Esparta ego.”

That creed may have come together during the years Bolaño worked as a garbage man, dishwasher, waiter, longshoreman, night watchman, reporter, grape picker, and seller of costume jewelry—all to support his habit of writing poetry. He was forty before he could ditch the odd jobs and live off his writing; forty-five when he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (AKA the Hispanic Booker) for The Savage Detectives. By then, he’d lost most of his teeth. “Bolaño lived through and for literature,” one of his best friends, Antoni García Porta, wrote. He read and wrote fanatically, and if he liked to toss bombs, his targets were usually literary.

Take for example, his 2002 essay, “On Literature, the National Prize in Literature, and the Strange Consolations of Service,” a napalm shower that burned many of Chile’s most prominent writers and included this backhanded compliment to the country’s bestselling author Isabel Allende:

"Made to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. Her glamour of South American in California, her imitations of García Márquez, her unquestionable boldness, her practice of a literature that goes from kitsch to pathetic and that somehow resembles, in a creole and politically correct fashion, the work of the author of Valley of the Dolls, winds up being, although it seems difficult, much superior to the literature of born functionaries like [Antonio] Skármeta and [Volodia] Teitelboim."

When it came to his countrymen, Bolaño was always especially generous with insults, but he didn’t restrict himself to slighting Chileans. He once dismissed Columbia’s Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez as “a man delighted to have met so many presidents and archbishops” and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa as the same sort of sycophant “but smoother.”

Journalists abetted these proclamations, of course—nothing makes better copy than a fight—but Bolaño hardly needed egging on. He appears to have relished the idea of making enemies. A few days before “On Literature” was published, for example, Bolaño sent the text to his good friend, the Spanish literary critic Ignacio Echevarría, who would later edit Bolaño’s posthumous collection of essays, Between Parenthesis. Bolaño attached the following note: “Dear Ignacio: Restif de Bretonne on the barricades or how to keep making friends in Chile. The neo-pamphlet will be the great literary genre of the XXII century. In this sense, I’m a minor author, but advanced.” A few days later, he added: “The reactions, frankly, mean nothing to me.”

Combative, sarcastic, high-handed, Bolaño could sound obnoxious, and the public record of trash talk has naturally led many people to see him as a sort of chest-thumping provocateur. But Bolaño wasn’t just a Norman Mailer-esque showman. His hatred of born functionaries and of people pleased to have met archbishops fits logically into his obsession with evil’s relationship to art, a subject that appears in almost all of his fiction. “Literature,” Bolaño told the reporter Luis García in the 2001, “has always been close to ignominy, to vileness, to torture.” Nowhere is this connection more clear than in Bolaño’s two little novels about Chile—Distant Star and By Night in Chile—a pair of subtle, damning romans à clef that exposed a history of collusion among critics, poets, and the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Read the rest of this essay at The Virginia Quarterly Review

Rules of the Game: A fresh translation of a Portuguese classic offers a poignant portrait of a country's decline

by Marcela Valdes The Nation. December 3, 2007.

As a diplomat who served in England for fourteen years, from 1874 to 1888, the great Portuguese novelist José Maria de Eça de Queirós had no illusions about his country's position in the world during the mid- to late nineteenth century. The five novels that he published during his lifetime--The Crime of Father Amaro (1875), Cousin Bazilio (1878), The Mandarin (1880), The Relic (1887) and The Maias (1888)--satirized the faults of Portuguese society in order to save it. Yet he was well aware that the stratified Catholic society he dissected was already in its endgame.

Its apex had been reached a century earlier, under King João V, who had the good luck of ascending the throne in 1706, just seven years after Brazil began shipping gold to Lisbon. Midway through João V's reign, Brazil offered him another source of booty when diamonds were discovered in Bahía. By then, the tone of João V's rule was well established. He transformed the area around the capital with extravagant churches, palaces and convents. He fathered children with at least three nuns. He built the University Library at Coimbra, where Eça de Queirós would later study law. And shortly after he died in 1750, the country entered a long, precipitous fall.

The first drop came on November 1, 1755, when Lisbon was hit by the worst earthquake ever recorded in Europe. Like the 2004 quake in the Indian Ocean, the Lisbon quake was followed by an enormous tsunami, with waves that reached as far as the Caribbean Sea. As many as 60,000 Lisbon residents died in the ensuing fires, floods, famines and epidemics. In its time the disaster was notorious enough to inspire £100,000 in aid from Britain and a poem by Voltaire.

The next catastrophe marched in from France. In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Portugal through Spain, sending the Portuguese royal family scampering to Rio de Janeiro. In their absence, Portugal's old ally England stepped in to its defense, launching the Peninsular War. Together Portuguese and British soldiers eventually drove Napoleon's army completely off the Iberian Peninsula, but the first three years of battle were fought mostly on Portuguese territory. (The rest were fought in Spain.) By the end of the war, in 1814, 100,000 Portuguese had died and much of their country had been laid waste.

The coup de grâce, however, was delivered by Portugal's own rulers. Having acquired a taste for the tropical luxuries of Brazil, the Braganza monarchy decided to stay in Rio. For fourteen years they ran Portugal like a colony of its colony, leaving Lisbon under the thumb of an autocratic British overseer, William Carr Beresford. In Lisbon, soldiers and intellectuals reacted to this neglect by assembling a Constitutional Cortes, or Parliament, which drafted Portugal's first Constitution. Needless to say, the nobles, the Queen and the Catholic Church were not pleased. But King João VI, who returned to Lisbon to settle the affair, accepted the new government with surprising equanimity--he had a liberal heart.

For a while, it seemed as if Portugal would transform itself into a constitutional monarchy without spilling any blood. Then the prince-regent, Pedro, declared Brazil an independent nation; João VI died; and Pedro's brother, Miguel, usurped the Portuguese throne. The nation plunged into a civil war. Liberal Pedro defeated reactionary Miguel in 1834, with the help of England, Spain and France. A few months later Pedro died, leaving the Portuguese Treasury near bankruptcy and the country irreparably behind England and France in terms of manufacturing, literacy, science and architecture.

By 1845, when Eça de Queirós was born, Portugal had turned into a B-list country. His most famous novel, The Maias--which has recently been given a vibrant new translation by the talented Margaret Jull Costa--reminds us of this situation from its outset. In 1858, it tells us, an ambassador from the Vatican wanted to rent a property in Lisbon called the Casa do Ramalhete. Though its garden was a mess--abandoned to weeds, with a dried-up waterfall, a choked pond and a marble statue of Aphrodite turning black--the monsignor liked the home's interior. The negotiations, however, went sour as soon as a number was named:

The rent proposed by old Vilaça, the Maias family's administrator, seemed to the Monsignor so extortionate that he asked, with a smile, if Vilaça thought the Church was still living in the age of Pope Leo X. Vilaça retorted that the Portuguese nobility were likewise no longer living in the age of King João V.

A Catholic ambassador and the manager of an aristocratic fortune squabbling over who's employer has fallen into worse decline? What a lovely way to begin a book!

Read more of this essay at The Nation.

Spanglish Fly

by Marcela ValdesBookforum. Sept/Oct/Nov 2007.

Culo. Coño. Puta. Mariconcito. Coje that fea y metéselo! The number of obscenities that appear within the first twenty-five pages of Junot Díaz’s second book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, makes it abundantly clear that he’s not writing for Oprah’s Book Club. At the very least, Winfrey would have to bone up on her four-letter Spanish before she could rubberstamp this book, because more than any other author writing today, Díaz sings straight to the heart of urban Spanglish, and he’s not waiting for outsiders to catch up. His Spanish is untranslated, as is his freestyle hip-hop slang. Clearly, he’s writing for his people—Dominicans on the island and around New York City—and as far as he’s concerned, everyone else is just listening in.

In 1997, Díaz told People magazine that Drown, the short-story collection that set his name in lights, “was like a hand of love out to the community.” Love is a word that appears in a lot of Díaz’s interviews, but his affection can be scorchingly unsentimental. Drown’s ten stories spotlight issues that the Latino community mostly likes to avoid: namely, its deep veins of homophobia, in fidelity, racism, sexism, and casual verbal abuse. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao adopts a similarly critical stance, but where Drown delivers its assessments with laconic restraint, Wao bellows them out with a carnivalesque mix of fantasy and gallows humor.

At the center of the novel sits Oscar de León, an obese, Walter Mitty–ish New Jersey “GhettoNerd” who is addicted to science fiction and aches desperately for a girlfriend. “He had secret loves all over town,” Oscar’s friend Yunior tells us, “the kind of curlyhaired big-bodied girls who wouldn’t have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming.” Oscar’s an antidote to the clichéd image of the Latin Lothario, yet almost every character in Wao regards his geeky, no-play ways as an unpardonable offense. You’re not Dominican, they tell him over and over again, as if to disown him. He becomes the butt of everyone’s jokes. “You ever eat toto?” one man asks him, referring to oral sex. “Probably the only thing you ain’t eaten, right?”

Oscar’s social torture reveals why Yunior and the rest of the men in Drown and Wao adopt such fierce, womanizing postures. Deviation from this machista stance invites brutality. (“We pick on our weak,” Díaz told Hispanic magazine.) Yet one of the most perceptive things about Díaz’s novel is the way it shows how machismo can crush both the men who don’t conform and those who do. As the action unfolds, Oscar’s buoyant imagination slides toward bitterness and depression while Yunior, who narrated several of the stories in Drown and proves he’s a real hombre in Wao by sport-fucking his way through Rutgers University, heads toward an equally bleak isolation. For most of the novel, both courses seem absolutely fixed— and that’s where Díaz’s brilliance shines.

So much contemporary fiction revolves around a kind of therapeutic epiphany, where the mere realization that a certain behavior is damaging is enough to catalyze a transformation. Life, we know, is more complicated than that. Metamorphosis is painful—it’s only when problems turn ruinous that most people can give it an honest try. Even then, the effort doesn’t often pan out. This is something that Díaz appears to understand innately, and it’s part of what makes Wao so hard to put down. (I myself opened it for the first time at eleven o’clock one night, thinking I’d read a few chapters before bed, and found myself still hungrily flipping pages at dawn.) Each of Wao’s major characters— Yunior; Oscar; his sister, Lola, and their mother, Belicia; Belicia’s father, Abelard—is pushed at some moment to disaster. Not all of them get through it alive.

For Belicia and Abelard, those moments arrive in the ’40s and ’60s, in the Dominican Republic, during Rafael Trujillo’s thirty-oneyear dictatorship. Trujillo, Díaz cracks in one of his many footnotes, was the DR’s “Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. . . . Outstanding accomplishments include: the 1937 genocide against the Haitian and Haitian- Dominican community,” in which some thirty thousand people were murdered. Díaz, who was once addicted to sci-finovels himself, plays the Trujillo–Evil Master comparison for all it’s worth, studding Wao with references to J. R. R. Tolkien, Jack Kirby, and Alan Moore and suggesting (tongue firmly in cheek) that the DR’s whole bloody, impoverished history may be due to a “fukú,” or interstellar curse. Díaz, thus, combines heartbreaking realism with the wildest sort of comic-book fantasy, moving beyond the surrealism of Borges and Cortázar and the magical realism of Márquez and Allende to break new ground. Call it comix realism— it gives Díaz a tremendous verbal and emotional range.

Because Díaz moved to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic in 1975, when he was seven, because he grew up in Section 8 housing and worked all manner of blue-collar jobs, there has been a tendency among critics to portray him as a kind of outsider, a writer from the margins. But what makes him compelling are not just his flickering portraits of urban alienation but his rich sense of Dominican history, of community. “Way too often,” he told a Other Voices, “writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their ‘otherness.’ I’m trying to figure out ways to disrupt that.” The way out has been lit by Toni Morrison, whom he has cited again and again as the most lasting influence on his work. “Morrison,” he explained to Black Issues Book Review, “is not attempting to translate black American culture for a white audience. . . . That in itself is revolutionary.” It’s a revolution that Díaz himself clearly intends to continue, in his own Latino, African, Dominican, Middleearth, X-Man way.

Campaign Tools

by Marcela ValdesBook Notes. The Washington Post Book World. November 5, 2006

Thousands of people gathered all over the country in late October to have Barack Obama sign copies of his new book, The Audacity of Hope . In San Rafael, Calif., they paid $125 to attend a lunch where the freshman Democratic senator from Illinois spoke for 15 minutes and signed books for about an hour. In Denver, they carried sleeping bags into the streets, lining up at 4 in the morning for an event that began at noon. "It was a love fest," said Margaret Maupin of Tattered Cover Book Store. "I saw one young woman, he shook her hand, and she just started fanning herself like she was going to faint."

The question fueling all this devotion -- will Obama run for president? -- has yet to be answered. (He promises to think about it after Election Day.) This continuing mystery is wonderful for sales. According to Nielsen BookScan, The Audacity of Hope sold more than 69,000 copies in its first two weeks. (That should go some way toward covering his $1.9 million, three-book advance.) But if the prospect of an Obama White House bid has been good for The Audacity of Hope , the book has also been great for his bid. Obama, who won his first election (to the Illinois State Senate) in 1996, a year after he published his memoir, Dreams From My Father , must know in his bones that books help political campaigns. In fact, since 1952 every winning presidential candidate has published a book. Even Abraham Lincoln authorized the writing of two biographies during his successful 1860 presidential run.

"It's like establishing a campaign committee," said Andrew Ferguson, a columnist for Bloomberg News. "It's something you have to do. It almost doesn't matter what the book says."

While any sort of publication may fill the requirement, a well-made book and a savvy publisher can give a candidate an extra political boost. Obama's message is: Red states and blue states, I could unify you. But it's the existence of the book, not its substance, that has snagged him front-page articles, the cover of Time magazine, appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "The Today Show," "Meet the Press" and "Larry King Live."

"We orchestrated all of it," said Tina Constable, executive director of publicity at Crown Publishing Group. Her team spent months coordinating Obama's interviews and his 12-city, campaign-like book tour, for which Crown also footed the bill.

The increased celebrity has made Obama more politically viable. And the late nights of writing may have given him subtler benefits as well: the chance to clarify the vision he might campaign on, for example, and practice in translating arcane policy matters into ordinary language.

Those are the kinds of advantages Steve Wasserman saw conferred on Bill Clinton when Wasserman edited the then-governor's Putting People First (1992, co-authored with Al Gore) and Between Hope and History (1996) for Times Books. The latter volume, Wasserman says, was Clinton's attempt to articulate for himself his underlying vision for reelection. In true Clinton style, he was refining it until the last possible moment. In August 1996, while Wasserman was at the typesetter double-checking the final proofs with Don Bahr, then one of Clinton's chief advisors, the president called asking them to remove a paragraph from the middle of the book. The passage was drawn from a heartfelt speech he had given in Texas about race relations in America. "It was one of the few personal and authentic bits in a book otherwise given to wonkish policy pronunciamentos," Wasserman recalled. But Clinton had decided it was a "downer." What he wanted, Wasserman said, was "an upbeat book that would put some wind in his sails as he embarked on his last campaign for the White House."

No matter how sincerely an author like Obama may approach the task of writing a campaign book, the campaign itself will undermine authenticity in a thousand little ways. Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope himself, his editor, Rachel Klayman, said. But members of his staff read it over before it was published, just as Clinton's staff read over his campaign books before they were published. (John McCain shortens the process by writing all his books, including his memoir Faith of My Fathers, with longtime staffer Mark Salter.) The publicity schedules for all these books were coordinated with rallies and other political events. McCain's memoir was published in September 1999, when the author was already dashing around New Hampshire in preparation for the 2000 GOP primaries. And on his book tour, Obama juggled signings with democratic rallies.

Such political imperatives are probably why "only one presidential memoir has really lasted in history," according to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. It was written by Ulysses S. Grant, long after he left office, while he was on his deathbed with no election in sight.

Embargoed

by Marcela ValdesBook Notes. The Washington Post Book World. October 22, 2006.

It was supposed to be the crowning moment of last month's National Book Festival. More than 1,000 people had gathered under a tent on the Mall to hear Bob Woodward speak. But moments before the bestselling author, an assistant managing editor of this newspaper, came to the microphone, the crowd booed.

They had just been told that Woodward wouldn't talk to them about State of Denial , his provocative new book about the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq. Though information from the book had leaked two days earlier in the New York Times, and though Woodward himself had signed copies of the book at the festival earlier that afternoon, he still couldn't discuss its contents. C-SPAN was broadcasting his appearance, but Woodward had already promised "60 Minutes" that it would air the first book-related interview the next night.

"Even though the book was being sold in stores, even though the whole embargo was broken, he was legally bound not to speak about his own book," says Book World's editor, Marie Arana, who had the unenviable task of breaking the news to the crowd. "It was the apex of the ridiculous extreme that an embargo can go to."

That apex keeps getting higher. Only a week earlier at the White House, the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told reporters he couldn't answer questions about his charge that former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it backed Al-Qaeda's Taliban hosts in the wake of 9/11. The incident, Musharraf said, was recounted in his new book, In the Line of Fire, which was embargoed; he was "honor-bound" not to speak about its contents until the publication date. Incidentally, he'd also promised "60 Minutes" an exclusive interview.

Though book embargoes have been around for a while -- some believe they began with Woodward and Carl Bernstein's 1976 book The Final Days -- they've never been as common as they are now. "It used to be the idea was that you wanted to protect the writer from leaks and get the book out there on a given day," says Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. "Now it really has to do with what TV show has made you promise not to use the material" -- or what periodical has paid thousands of dollars for the right to print the first excerpt.

When Paul Burrell sold pieces of The Way We Were, his second memoir about his job as Princess Diana's butler, to the Mail on Sunday in England, the Mail stipulated that neither the book's title, nor its author, nor even its subject could be announced before the first excerpt ran last September. That meant that Burrell's American publisher, William Morrow, spent all of August asking booksellers to blindly order a title it would describe only as a "world-wide publishing event" and "the must-read-tell-all book for Fall."

But embargoes have also grown popular because they're great marketing tools. Embargoes help publishers synchronize news outlets all over the country and sometimes all over the world. They help books open big, the way Hollywood movies open with single nationwide screening dates. "You don't want a book dribbling out at a slow rate of sale," says W.W. Norton president Drake McFeely. "You want to get the highest velocity you can for the book over a few days around the publication date." High velocities land books on bestseller lists and breed follow-up reports that keep people talking.

Embargoes can make books sound a lot more important than they are. Time magazine's book critic, Lev Grossman, calls those books faux embargoes. "The prime example there," he says, "is the Seth Mnookin book [about the Boston Red Sox]. It had absolutely nothing in the way of bombshells. But they put an embargo on it, and I had to sign something and meet with the P.R. director in person, you know, like on a street corner in disguise." (Simon & Schuster said it had embargoed the book to keep sports reporters from leaking its news.)

Many journalists complain that publishers also use embargoes to manipulate the press in more devious ways. Almost every critic interviewed for this article had a story about either getting around an embargo with a publicist's consent or being barred by a publisher's non-disclosure agreement from sharing a book with their publication's newsroom. Few people want to admit publicly to such maneuvers, but orchestrated leaks are more than just paranoid fantasy.

In 2005, for example, PublicAffairs used an embargo to give the New York Times a big head start on former Guantanamo chaplain James Yee's For God and Country, which charged that the prison's commanding officer knowingly fostered the abuse of detainees. After getting many book review sections, including Book World, to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for pre-publication access to the book, PublicAffairs passed it to reporters at the New York Times. The Post had no inkling that the publisher had purposefully tied its hands until a story based on Yee's book popped up in the Times. When Arana and Warren Bass, a nonfiction editor at Book World, demanded an explanation, "We got an email back saying, 'The story had to break somewhere and we chose the New York Times,' " Bass recalls. PublicAffairs subsequently apologized profusely to The Post for the episode.

Already several editors have made it a policy never to sign such agreements, even if it means missing out on advance copies of important books. Sam Tanenhaus, who edits the Sunday book review at the New York Times, is among those who won't be herded by embargo schedules -- and he refuses to hide embargoed books from the daily news sections. "Just give us the book when you're ready for [the newspaper] to have it," he tells publishers. That policy means he usually doesn't see embargoed books until they're out in stores.

The Times's daily newspaper, however, is notorious for writing about embargoed books early. (The Sunday and daily sections don't coordinate their contents.) Indeed, for many reporters, blowing the lid off of embargoes has become a beat in itself. Barbara Meade of Washington's Politics and Prose bookstore says that she gets loads of calls from journalists begging her to sell them books on the sly. MaryAnn Brownlow of the "L" Street Borders is similarly pestered. "Couldn't I just come in the back and speed-read a book?" she says reporters ask her. Both Meade and Brownlow always say no.

"The irony is that it's journalists who are encouraging the embargos," says literary agent Chris Calhoun, who represents Pakistan's Musharraf. According to Woodward, that's nothing new. "If The Post has a scoop, they put it out in the newspaper," he says. "That's embargoed, effectively. Maybe it's ready on a Monday, and they wait to run it on a Thursday."

He had State of Denial embargoed, he says, to ensure that the book's contents were presented "coherently." It took him two-and-half years to gather all the information in the book. He was conducting interviews for it as late as July 2006. The manuscript was completed only last month. And once his publisher, Simon & Schuster, had made an agreement with "60 Minutes," he wasn't about to break it, no matter what anybody else leaked.

"Wait a minute; wait a minute," Arana told the booing crowd. "This is a guy who's kept secrets for 35 years. You could at least let him keep one for 24 more hours." The crowd grew quiet. Nobody walked out. They must have had the sense that this time the embargo was for real. *