Claudia Piñero’s novel “Las viudas de los jueves” is fascinating precisely for its use of discrete space. The residents of Altos de la Cascada, a gated community 50 kilometers from Buenos Aires attempt to create a homogenous, controlled and sanitized utopia which encapsulates both the ideals and the anxieties of their middle-bourgeois social class. These two emotions: idealism and anxiety, play off [...]
Archive for February, 2008
Las viudas de los jueves and the suburban panopticon.
Posted in Span505 on February 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »
El turno del escriba-same shit, different historical pile.
Posted in Span505 on February 12, 2008 | 3 Comments »
This week’s reading, El turno del escriba, by the argentine writers Graciela Montes and Ema Wolf puts a rather imaginitive turn on the “writing about writing” trend that has virally infected thousands of promising new books turning them into tepid treatises on navel gazing. As much as I despise writing about writing (its one of the few [...]
La hora azul: Good TV, so-so fiction
Posted in Span505 on February 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Alonso Cueto’s novel La hora azul like Bayly’s novel seems as though it was written for television. It’s structure seems quite episodic with rising and falling sequences of drama and action, pithy social commentary, sound-bite history and a plot more suitable to being doled out in 45 minute chapters, lacking the cohesion of good fiction. This text [...]
