Categoría: English
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On the Experience of Fiction
Long before we learn the first things about books and specifically novels, we are already fully acquainted with the most sophisticated devices of narrative fiction. Books belong in libraries and bookstores, novels can be the stuff of rarefied criticism, but fiction is everywhere all the time, as permanent a feature of daily life as the…
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Lessons of winter
A student from Lima tells me that the chief lesson New York has taught him is the change of seasons. “In Lima the weather is always more or less the same, with a difference of maybe ten degrees between summer and winter.” Until he came here he had never worn so much clothing; never knew…
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Unacceptable clarity
To canonize Camus on the obvious occasion of his centenary is to attempt what his worst enemies could not do: domesticate him, or bury him in irrelevance. The causes he cared about – Algeria and Hungary, among others – are now forgotten. It is easy to pick a few catchy quotes and put them under…
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Indonesian night
In a depraved parallel universe, veterans of the SS or of the death squads in Argentina grow old amid the admiration and respect of their neighbors, and appear on TV interview shows to public applause. They proudly accept invitations to act in films, where sometimes they play the role of torturer and sometimes, bedaubed with…
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Bicycle lives and death
The bicycle is a literary machine. No sooner was it invented than it began to show up in novels. In Valle-Inclan’s Misericordia, which was published in 1887, one character rents a bicycle to ride around Madrid. It is interesting to think of the Madrid of those days — the brutal poverty, the crude injustice and the gritty…
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Parallel lives
I was reading Dionisio Ridruejo’s Russian notebooks, when by chance I found another book that is almost its exact reverse. In 1941, when Ridruejo enlisted in the Blue Division, Ferran Planes, a lieutenant in the Spanish Republican army, had found a provisional refuge in the South of France. Dionisio Ridruejo was a famous young firebrand…
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The Lighthouse at the End of the Hudson
For some time, I went down to the edge of the Hudson, to run along a path that then reached north to 125th Street and now extends up to the George Washington Bridge. Heading south, the path borders the river through Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan. My home is near the river, on West…
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Big industry
The other day an article on Iceland brought home to me the curious fact that in Spain, with its rich cultural heritage, there is a very general contempt, public and private, for any kind of intellectual or creative work. In Iceland, a land with a non-existent architectural heritage and a language that nobody else speaks,…
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On the trail of Juan Gris
In the grey December of Madrid, about the hottest color is the red dress of a woman painted by Juan Gris. Gris went off to Paris in 1906, at the age of 19, not so much to paint as just to get away from the conscription that would have sent him off to the war…
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Reluctant warriors
A book by the British historian James Matthews has reminded me of some older men I knew when I was a child, as I helped them gather olives, or dig potatoes. The book is called Reluctant Warriors, and looks at a little-treated aspect of the Spanish Civil War: the conscript soldiers who fought in it,…