Sunday, May 22, 2011

My 2010 Readings: Lenoir, Kant, and the Latin Americans


L'Oracle della Luna
and the Value of
Historic Religious Novels

Yesterday was the day signaled by some living Christian prophets and Bible teachers as the judgment day or the day that would mark the end of the world, based on their interpretation of the biblical scriptures. A few weeks ago, I visited the New York Public Library next to Bryant Park, at 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue, to donate a copy of my book Alma Mater I. I then encountered an on-going event called Three Faiths, related to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. The exhibition was quite interesting as I got the chance to see original biblical documents such as scrolls, polyglot bibles, and learned about impressive religious art, where I can recall colorful bibles with gold ornaments, Egyptian Coptic crosses and bibles magnificently decorated, Ethiopian bibles and documents, and Muslim and Hebrew scrolls of great historic value. Historic religious books on the other hand have become more popular, as much as there are more historic religious movies, either to somehow criticize or convey a message to individuals or entities involved, usually for good.
Like in America, in France, there are many writers, and very few will become well-know world-wide. I had personally briefly met writers such as the former Colombian Ambassador Pierre de Boisdesffre (author of Histoire de la Littérature Française), Jacques Gillard, a well-know critic of García Márquez, and Dominique Lapierre, then a young French novelist. A few months ago, I was greatly impressed by one of my 2010 readings: L'Oracle della Luna, a novel by French novelist Fredéric Lenoir, whose title reflects the syntax of the relevant time. The novel narrates the tragic life of Giovanni Trattore, a peasant and then an initiated monk, and his love for Elena, his disgraceful marriage to a Jewish woman, and the changes he undergoes after he kills in self-defense, for love, and is condemned to death by fire. The story develops in XVI century era, over several parts of the world, including Europe (Venice), North Africa (Algeria and Chipre), and the Middle East (Jerusalem). The story overlaps with the presentation of scrolls and somewhat encrypted messages that attempt to describe the astral chart of Jesus, focusing on the straight alignment of the moon, the sun, the earth, and all planets in the solar system known until then. Giovanni Trattore sees himself as the carrier of a secret message. This astral view is considered a heresy within the book, and only five of the scroll messages are revealed, leaving the reader with the intreague about the message in the other two.noir is the author of about 30 books some of them with in conjunction with other Christian Catholic writers and philosphers. However, he has converted to the Tibetan Buddhism, in my opinion a way to search futher spirituality and a pragmatic method to attain a higher stage of the mind and the spirity, in contrast, to our Western perception of spiritual growth and belief. L'Oracle della Luna certainly shows his great belief in Jesus, and contemplates the overlapping astronomical events, including the revelation of the new messenger of the time, Martin Luther, around the year 1484, who is described in contrast by monks and priests as a “personnage altier et grossier”. The narrator also suggests in relation to the Prophet Mohammed that indeed he encourages Muslims against Christians, which is not really accounted for in detail. And Muslims in the area disagree with this point of view. My only reading of the Koran occurred at 14, on one or two days when I visited the Normal School Library in Barranquilla, where I encountered a copy, which I read in great portion. It seemed to me just a book of worship, with a style close to that of the Psalms. When I visited the Three Faiths exhibition, I got the chance to see various copies of the Koran, mostly, historic ones in its original language. While Giovanni Trattore's story is the central story, the leit motif is still relevant to the Oracle of the Moon, in relation to Jesus astral chart. Also, the narrator gives the moon as special meaning as an earth satellite.

While I am deeply Catholic, and this is a core value of my education and spirituality, I thought that the message is interesting in the sense that the author seeks to provide a historic explanation on the perception of Christian belief, and the nature of cosmic value in that belief, and presents the religious leaders confronting such a perception that fortunately did not diminish their faith.

The other readings of the 2010 that I can highlight, include, my review of Kant's philosophy, in particular, Critic of the Practical Reason, and other books on Kant by other authors, giving him great responsibility and value to modern European and Western philophies in general. However, a recent reading of the current issue of a leading French literary magazine, suggests that Hegel is in fact the most important German philosopher to Western philosophies since G. Leibniz, based on the value of his humanism on Phenomenology of the Spirit, the finite nature of man, and his object-oriented view of cognitive psychology, opposite to that of Kant where subject is the measure of knowledge in learning.

2010 also allow me to review Latin American writers like Cortázar (Rayuela), García Márquez (Memoria de mis Putas Tristes), and Nerudas poetry in a comprehensive fashion.

It took me several months to read L'Oracle della Luna in French; it took Lenoir about 20 years to write his 700-page novel. This novel has been compared in nature to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Lenoir's website is: http://www.fredericlenoir.com.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Rescuing my Early Works (II)


My Brief Essays as a Young Man

Around 1985, I posted several brief essays on my literary billboard (Notas y Letras) at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. Most of these essays were related to literary content and analysis. I had typed these essays using an American typewriter that I got from my father, and it was most likely an Epson. Although I always wanted an IBM Selectric III, which sold in Colombia under the name of IBM 21, my father was unable to find it, probably due to the name discrepancy or perhaps it was too expensive, since it was in fact a business machine that I had seen in various businesses during my early working years. I also used a old Remington to write some of these essays, which I probably somehow got from the Escuela Normal (Normal School.)
The pictures below show some some excerpts of two important essays:

The former one describes literary writing as a work that requires courage. The title was probably derived from the series Profiles in Courage on JFK, which was being presented on Colombian TV at the time. It contains some epigraphs from Plato on the incomprehensible nature of poetry and on the psychological reason for writing and the kinesthetic nature of poetry. The latter discusses the so called Esthetic Distance, a term that was coined and used by some critics to explain and discuss García Márquez's lenghy exhile from his native Colombia.





The First Page of an Essay on the Courage to Write


The First Page of an Essay on Gabriel García Márquez's Esthetic Distance

Friday, May 6, 2011

Sábato Expires Just Before Reaching One Hundred Years of Age


Light at the End of The Tunnel



Over a week-end full of exciting global events, such as the magnificent royal wedding between British Prince William and Katherine of Middletown, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, followed by the beatification of Pope John Paul II, and the killing of mastermind terrorist Usama bin Laden, the Latin American literature lost one of his greatest contemporary writers, Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sábato, the author of El Túnel, a novel considered by international critics as one of the greatest masterpiece of contemporary Latin American literature, and as a unique book of universal creative value in gender, content, and style.

The story of painter Juan Pablo Castel and María Iribarne starts with the connection they made through a small window in one of the painters’ paints, which remains unperceivable to others during an artwork exhibition, except for her. Juan Pablo Castel, the starring and narrator of The Tunnel suggests softly that there is a interior tunnel in his life, a psychological and somber one where internal passions confront what he sees as life hypocrisy on human relations based only on personal interests as he seeks himself.  Indeed, this entire perception goes far beyond Balzac’s social event in life or Dostoievski’s romanticist psychological analysis of Raskolnikov personality and feelings or Agatha Christie’s thrilling dramas.

In real life, Sábato is greatly afflicted by the turbulence derived from the atomic bombs blast in Japan and his scientific research as a physicist, which he abandons after attaining a PhD in Physics in Argentina and post-doctoral research work in France.

The Tunnel is one of the preferred readings for young Latin American literature students, and in fact a book that is attractive to the entire Spanish-American nation, and a masterpiece of grace and universal magnitude.  This was a novel that I read several times and on which I had a comprehensive literary analysis.

Sábato was greatly involved with human rights in particular in Argentina, his country of birth. Sábato’s gender had influenced several contemporary young generations of writers all around the world, but most significantly in South America.

Sábato’s works involve:

Novels
   1948: El túnel (Translated by Harriet de Onis in 1950 as The Outsider and again by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1988 as The Tunnel.)
   1961: Sobre héroes y tumbas (Translated by Helen R. Lane in 1981 as On Heroes and Tombs.)
   1974: Abaddón el exterminador (Translated by Andrew Hurley in 1991 as The Angel of Darkness.)
Essays
   1945: Uno y el Universo (One and the Universe)
   1951: Hombres y engranajes (Men and Mechanisms)
   1953: Heterodoxia (Heterodoxy)
   1956: El caso Sabato. Torturas y libertad de prensa. Carta abierta al General Aramburu (The Sabato Case. Tortures and Liberty of Press. Open Letter to General Aramburu)
   1956: El otro rostro del peronismo (The Other Face of Peronism)
   1963: El escritor y sus fantasmas (Translated by Asa Zatz in 1990 as The Writer in the Catastrophe of our Time.)
   1963: Tango, discusión y clave (Tango: Discussion and Key)
   1967: Significado de Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Significance of Pedro Henríquez Ureña)
   1968: Tres aproximaciones a la literatura de nuestro tiempo: Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Sartre (Three Approximations to the Literature of our Time: Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Sartre)
   1973: La cultura en la encrucijada nacional (Culture in the National Crossroads)
   1976: Diálogos con Jorge Luis Borges (Dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges) (Edited by Orlando Barone.)
   1979: Apologías y rechazos (Apologies and Rebuttals)
   1979: Los libros y su misión en la liberación e integración de la América Latina (Books and their Mission in the Liberation and Integration of Latin America)
   1988: Entre la letra y la sangre. Conversaciones con Carlos Catania (Between Letter and Blood. Conversations with Carlos Catania)
   1998: Antes del fin (Before the End)
   2000: La resistencia (The Resistance)
   2004: España en los diarios de mi vejez (Spain in the Diaries of my Old Age)
Other Works
   1964: Itinerario (Itinerary)
   1966: Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle. Cantar de Gesta (Romance of Juan Lavalle's Death. Cantar de gesta)
1984: Nunca más. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la desaparición de personas (Never Again. Report from the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons)