Cinema Brasileiro no Festival de Hamburgo

A 15.ª edição do Festival de Cinema de Hamburgo apresenta quatro novos filmes brasileiros.
Baixio das Bestas, realizado por Cláudio Assis.

O Cheiro do Ralo, realizado por Heiter Dhalia

A Via Láctea, realizado por Lina Chamie

e o documentário "Fabricando Tom Zé", realizado por Décio Matos Jr.

Os juris dos prémios Femina e Médicis divulgaram já as listas dos candidados deste ano.

Para o Femina concorrem:
Na categoria de Romance Francês:

• Gilles Leroy, Alabama Song (Mercure),
• Éric Fottorino, Baisers de cinéma (Gallimard),
• Christophe Donner, Un roi sans lendemain (Grasset),
• Dominique Barbéris, Quelque chose à cacher (Gallimard),
• Olivier et Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, J'ai tant rêvé de toi (Albin Michel),
• Claude Pujade-Renaud, Le Désert de la grâce (Actes Sud),
• Marie Darrieussecq, Tom est mort (P.O.L),
• Jean Pérol, Le soleil se couche à Nippori (La Différence),
• Dominique Schneidre, Ce qu'en dit James (Seuil),
• Jean Clausel, Cherche mère désespérément (Rocher),
• Nathacha Appanah, Le Dernier Frère (L'Olivier),
• Amanda Devi, Indian Tango (Gallimard),
• David Foenkinos, Qui se souvient de David Foenkinos ? (Gallimard),
• Linda Lê, In memoriam (Christian Bourgois).
• Na categoria de Romance Estrangeiro.
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Les Disparus (Flammarion),
• Milena Agus, Mal de pierres (Liana Levi),
• Arto Paasilinna, Le Bestial Serviteur du pasteur Huuskonen (Denoël),
• Alessandro Baricco, Cette histoire-là (Gallimard),
• Dinaw Mengestu, Les Belles Choses que porte le ciel (Albin Michel),
• Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls (Phébus),
• Marisha Pessl, La Physique des catastrophes (Gallimard)

Para o Médicis concorrem:

• Charles Dantzig, Je m'appelle François (Grasset),
• Vincent Delecroix, La Chaussure sur le toit (Gallimard),
• Olivier Adam, À l'abri de rien (L'Olivier),
• Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour (Gallimard),
• Antoine Volodine, Songes de Mevlido (Seuil),
• Jean Hatzfeld, La Stratégie des antilopes (Seuil),
• Charif Majdalani, Caravansérail (Seuil),
• Éric Reinhardt, Cendrillon (Stock),
• Jean-Paul Kauffmann, La Maison du retour (Nil),
• Jean-François Haas, Dans la gueule de la baleine guerre (Seuil),
• Jeanne Labrune, L'Obscur (Grasset).

Os vendedores vão ser conhecidos a 12 de Novembro.

Junot Díaz

11 anos depois de Submerso - "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". Mais

"Epifanias" dá D. Diniz a Fernando Echevarria. Mais
E Ana Teresa Pereira, Deana Barroqueiro e Theresa Schedel de Castello-Branco ganham os Prémios Máxima 2007. Mais

Isabel Allende

Com novo livro "La suma de los días", em entrevista.

O Dominicano Junot Díaz autor do excelente livro de contos Submerso (Difel 1999), publicou o seu primeiro romance "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao".

Segue a crítica publicada no NY Times.

A Dominican Comedy: Travails of an Outcast
By Michiko Kakutani

Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.

Mr. Díaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 (“Drown”), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.

Oscar, Mr. Díaz’s homely homeboy hero, is “not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about — he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy” with a million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat, self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction writer, who dreams of becoming “the Dominican Tolkien.” He’s one of those kids who tremble with fear during gym class and use “a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous” when talking to kids who could barely finish high school. He moons after girls who won’t give him the time of day and enters and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears “his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber”; he “couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”

Two of this novel’s narrators, Oscar’s beautiful sister, Lola — a “Banshees-loving punk chick,” who becomes “one of those tough Jersey dominicanas” who order men about like houseboys — and Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s onetime boyfriend, do their best to try to get him to shape up. They exhort him to eat less and exercise more, to leave his dorm room and venture out into the world.

Oscar makes a halfhearted effort and then tells Yunior to leave him alone. He goes back to his writing, his day-dreams, his suicidal thoughts. Yunior (who seems very much like the Yunior who appeared in some of Mr. Díaz’s short stories) begins to think that Oscar may be living under a family curse, “a high-level fukú” not unlike the curse on the House of Atreus, which has doomed him, like his mother, to lasting unhappiness in love.

In due course we also hear the story of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli, a tough, tough-talking woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in a childhood of almost unimaginable pain and loss: her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s thugs; her mother, run over by a truck after her husband’s imprisonment; her two sisters, dead in freak, suspicious accidents.

The orphaned Beli herself was abused and beaten before being rescued by her father’s kindly cousin, and as a teenager she has a disastrous affair with a charismatic and dangerous man known as the Gangster — one of Trujillo’s men, who happens to be married to Trujillo’s sister. That affair culminates in a savage beating in the cane fields, a beating that nearly ends Beli’s life and that will propel her toward a new life in exile in the United States.

Mr. Díaz writes about the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic with the same authority he writes about contemporary New Jersey, the slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a remarkably effective tool for capturing the absurdities of the human condition, be they the true horrors of living in a dictatorship that can erase a person or a family on a whim, or the self-indulgent difficulties of being a college student coping with issues of weight and self-esteem.

Here is Mr. Díaz writing about Trujillo: “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.”

It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves. In doing so, he’s written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.

Fonte: NY Times

Foi desclassificado o dossier do MI5 sobre George Orwell.

George Orwell's left-wing views and bohemian clothes led British police to label him a communist - but the MI5 spy agency stepped in to correct that view, the writer's newly released security file reveals.

The secret file that MI5 kept on the author from 1929 until his death in 1950 is being declassified today by the National Archives.

It reveals that in contrast to the fictional "Big Brother", the cruel and all-seeing secret police of Orwell's classic 1984, MI5 took a surprisingly benign view of the writer.

Orwell savaged the totalitarianism of Stalin's Russia in Animal Farm and 1984.

But he was also a socialist who railed against inequality in earlier works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

The documents show Orwell - whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair - attracted the attention of police in 1936 for alleged "communist activities in Wigan."

Then 33, he had gone to the mining town to research a book about working-class life in northern England.

MI5 had already been watching Orwell since 1929, when he was a struggling journalist in Paris, attempting to write for left-wing publications.

In 1942, Orwell drew police interest again while working for the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corp.

A report by a sergeant named Ewing of Special Branch, the British police intelligence wing, said Orwell had "advanced communist views, and several of his Indian friends say they have often seen him at communist meetings."

"He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours," police noted.

The file shows that MI5 took no action against Orwell over Ewing's report.

In a note, an MI5 officer named W Ogilvie reveals that he phoned Special Branch to ask why Ewing had described Orwell as having "advanced Communist views."

A police inspector replied that the sergeant felt Orwell was an "unorthodox communist."

"I gathered that the good Sergeant was rather at a loss as to how he could describe this rather individual line," Ogilvie wrote.

"It is evident from his recent writings ... that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him," he added.

The Special Branch files on Orwell were released by the archives in 2005. MI5's response had been secret until now.

It was declassified as part of a phased release of MI5 files under the Freedom of Information Act, which was passed in 2005.

Other documents in the file reveal MI5 did not consider Orwell a security risk.

In 1943, it was asked whether Orwell should be accredited as a journalist with Allied armed forces headquarters.

"The Security Service have records of this man, but raise no objection to his appointment," was the reply.

A year earlier MI5 had approved Orwell's wife Eileen as suitable for employment with the Ministry of Food.

Despite his lifelong socialist views, in 1949, a year before his death at 46, Orwell gave the government a list of people he thought were Stalinist sympathisers or "fellow travellers."

The declassified file includes photographs, Orwell's passport application and a 1936 Special Branch summary of his career, which began conventionally - education at the elite Eton College and service as a colonial police officer in Burma - before taking a radical turn.

Special Branch notes that he "eked out a precarious living" as a freelance journalist and moved to France to research Down and Out in London and Paris.

The last entry in the file notes simply that "George Orwell ... died on the 21st January 1950."

Fonte: The Sydney Morning Herald

Prémio FIL 2007

O escritor mexicano Fernando del Paso obteve ontem o prémio FIL 2007, atribuido anualmente no âmbito da Feira Internacional do Livro de Guadalajara.

O prémio conhecido anteriormente como da "Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo", não é atribuído há dois anos com o nome do autor de "Pedro Páramo" (Cavalo de Ferro, 2004) devido a divergências entre a família de Juan Rulfo e a Feira de Guadalajara acerca dos direitos de utilização do nome.

Fernando del Paso nasceu no Distrito Federal, México.
Publicista, locutor, jornalista, desenhador, pintor e diplomata o autor de "Noticias del Imperio" recebeu já outros prémios ao longo da sua carreira nomeadamente, o Xavier Villaurrutia em 1966; o Rómulo Gallegos em 1982; o Casa das Américas em 1985; e o Prémio Nacional de Letras e Artes em 1991, além de ter sido um dos candidatos ao Prémio Príncipe das Astúrias de Letras deste ano, ganho pelo israelita Amos Oz.

A lista de galardoados com o prémio desde 1991 incluí nomes como: Nicanor Parra, Nélida Piñón, Juan Marsé, Sergio Pitol, Juan Gelman, Rubem Fonseca, Juan Goytisolo, entre outros.

Tanto quanto sei Fernando del Paso não está ainda publicado em Portugal.