The highlights of Saturday morning were two sensitive, probing and humane interviews of contemporary authors, Paolo Giordano and Mario Vargas Llosa, conducted by one of Colombia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Hector Abad Faciolince. Faciolince is best known for his autobiographical work El olvido que seremos, a searing account of the political violence in Medellín—the second largest city in Colombia—in the 1990s which led to the assassination of his father, a prominent university professor outspoken in his condemnation of para-military, drug-related violence (a work now being translated into English by the prize-winning translator, Anne McLean).
Faciolince is a generous, kind, and erudite man, and his conversation with Paolo Giordano, in Italian, drew out many of the facets of the 28-year old author from Turin, whose novel La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), has been a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Giordano, a physicist who is to present his doctoral thesis next week, spoke about the tormented adolescence of Alice and Mattia (the two principal protagonists), his literary influences (including Ian McEwan), and the process of writing the book itself. For a young man (enviably) caught up in perhaps unexpected global success, Giordano seemed kind, unassuming, reflective and critically aware.
Earlier this year, journalist Toby Muse interviewed Martin Amis for Prospect, at the Hay Festival in Cartegena, Colombia. First Drafts now features the highlights of that conversation as four exclusive web-casts, with Amis expressing views on topics ranging from terrorism and Barack Obama to his new (much anticipated) novel, and the challenges of portraying the sexual revolution in fiction.
You can view Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the Amis interviews at these links, plus a web exclusive article from our arts and books editor, Tom Chatfield, looking at the troubled genesis of his forthcoming book: Martin Amis, return of the master.
In the fourth and final part of our series of Martin Amis interviews, below, Amis remembers an earlier trip to Colombia, and a visit to a home for retired hitmen. Although Amis doesn’t expand on what he found interesting about the “crippled assassins of Cali,” no Amis fan will miss the similarities with some of his classic themes: once ‘terrifying men’ emasculated by physical frailty; and the banality of violence.
With the summit of the Americas due to open in a couple of days, Bogota-based journalist Anastasia Moloney looks ahead to what we might expect from President Obama’s first diplomatic visit to Latin America.
In her article, free to read online this week, Moloney argues that Brazil’s outspoken President Lula (who recently blamed the global economic crisis on “white and blue-eyed people”), will be the lychpin at the summit: a diplomatic bridge between the US and the radical leftist regimes of Venezuela, Ecuador’s and Bolivia. With Venezuela struggling with double-digit inflation and plummeting oil revenues, the regional influence of the combative of Hugo Chavez is waning. Instead, Washington is looking to Lula (the first Latin American leader to get an invite to the White House during the Obama administration) to help it forge a new policy towards the region. Afghanistan may be the US’s top foreign policy priority: nonetheless, ending the 50-year standoff with Cuba is also crucial—and in this, as well as in global trade and climate change negotiations, Obama know that an alliance with Brazil, the world’s tenth largest economy, will prove indispensible.
Share your thoughts on Moloney’s article, and the summit as it unfolds, here.
Day 3 began (for me) with Junot Diaz and Alma Guillermoprieto in discussion about their work. Guillermoprieto’s beautifully written essays for the New York Review of Books will be well known to many Prospect readers: she spoke about her coverage of the conflicts in Colombia and Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, where she reported for the Guardian (Jon Snow and Gerald Martin admiringly recalled her bravery throughout the period). Among her other commitments, she teaches at Garcia Marquez’s school for young Latin American journalists in Cartagena, and spoke of how she has always aspired to write in such a way that her readers feels as though as they are accompanying her to the places she is describing. Diaz spoke about Obama’s decisive Latin American vote, expressing his fear nevertheless that “immigration will be sacrificed for political capital” by the Obama administration over the next few years.
Then a privileged 40 minutes sitting in an armchair next to Martin Amis, hanging on his every word while he was interviewed by a freelance journalist, Toby Muse. Amis spoke of the novel he is currently writing, The Pregnant Widow, about the sexual revolution in the 1970s, and quoted substantial passages from Updike, Nabokov, Conrad et al, while simultaneously rolling cigarette after cigarette between gently trembling hands.
In the afternoon, there was a good debate between Matt Frei, Jon Snow and Alejandro Santos, editor of Colombia’s pre-eminent news weekly, Semana (a bastion of independent journalism), on the state of the world’s media. Frei reflected wryly about how he and others had failed altogether to see the current economic crisis coming but, then, so had the head of the central reserve; Snow, of his sense of moral responsibility—more vivid than ever before—to question and interrogate every step now taken by bankers and our political leaders.
Hay-on-Wye’s sister literary festival in the altogether sunnier climes of Colombia’s Caribbean coast begins next week, and I will be writing a daily blog for Prospect from Cartagena to cover the event, as well as interviewing some of the authors present. There’s an enticing line-up of literary and cultural figures due to attend: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Jon Snow, chief among the British guests, and several of Latin America’s most interesting contemporary novelists also.
The festival takes place in former Spanish colonial buildings, and a stone’s throw from the house of the Colombia’s literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez (whose biographer, Gerald Martin, will also be in attendance).
Rushdie is set to talk about his most recent novel, The Enchantress of Florence, and the influence that Marquez’s magical realism has had on his work. Amis will be in conversation with Peter Florence, director of the Hay festival. And Jon Snow, fresh from the inauguration in Washington DC, is to talk on the theme of viviendo con los gringos, taking in his career covering events from Central America to Iraq. Climate change, the global press and Colombia’s political situation will also receive ample coverage.
Novelists from across Latin America will present and read from their work; Alberto Ruy Sanchez (Mexico), William Ospina (Colombia), Junot Diaz (Colombia) and Alberto Manguel (Argentina) amongst the most celebrated of those present. It promises to be a fascinating encounter.
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