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Cuba on the Edge presents recent short stories by twenty-one of the
best writers on the island. The title refers both to Cubans'
awareness of living on the brink of an unknown future, and to the
edginess with which they negotiate their way through uncertainties.
These twenty-one perspectives reveal very diverse responses to the
challenges of daily life. Some stories are set in Havana, while
others depict rural or small town Cuba. Many analyze gender roles
and gender politics, as well as depicting economic stress and
ingenious coping strategies. Some tales are dark, while others are
hilarious. Some voices remember the past, and others imagine the
future. Many stories address contro-versial topics: prostitution,
crime, exile, disillusionment, skepticism. But the predominant tone
is of reaffirmation of human ties and survival, and of celebration
of the complex strata of Cuban experience.
In 1908, Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru 1852-Argentina 1909), a
lifelong journalist, feminist and writer, traveled to Europe: Viaje
de recreo (Pleasure trip) is her account of her vivid impressions.
She was particularly interested in the education of women and in
women's career opportunities, but she was also fascinated by the
cultural differences between the West European countries. Her
analysis and descriptions will fascinate anyone interested in the
genre of travel accounts, in museum studies, in feminist history,
or, of course, in Matto's life and writings. In Viaje de recreo,
Matto analyzes the cultural displays of Spain, France, England, and
Italy in great detail, and comments on Switzerland and Germany as
well. She is particularly intrigued by museums, art, architecture,
and cultural productions. She speculates at length about the
differences between the European countries. Viaje de recreo is both
a perceptive travel memoir and a lively autobiography of personal
reflections. Matto was profoundly moved by English honesty and
honor, disappointed that French feminism did not meet her
expectations, impressed by Spanish women writers and activists, and
deeply impressed by the beauties of Italy. She frequently compares
Roman ruins with Incan heritage in Peru, lamenting their
replacement by less tolerant societies. She is impressed by new
technologies - cars, trams, trains, electrical devices, escalators,
factories - but even more fascinated by women's lives and presence
in each country, and by the ways each country has preserved and
displayed its cultural history. This new edition includes extensive
footnotes as well as an introduction to the book and to its author,
with bibliography. The editor, Mary G. Berg, is author of a dozen
articles about Clorinda Matto de Turner, and has edited Matto's
novels Indole and Herencia (Stockcero). She is a Resident Scholar
at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center, and is
finishing a biography of Matto.
Mecha Iturbe, published in Buenos Aires in 1906, is the most
ambitious and longest of Cesar Duayen's five novels about the
transformation of Argentina into a contemporary state in the early
part of the 20th century. Cesar Duayen, pseudonym of Emma de la
Barra (1861-1947), was the author of Argentina's best seller,
Stella of 1905, and Mecha Iturbe, too, was greeted with great
excitement. A record number of copies were printed, and the author
was paid an unprecedented amount. There were many editions, but
none has been available in recent years. In Mecha Iturbe, elements
of national reform and modernization are portrayed and debated in
an even more complicated failed love story, also set in both Buenos
Aires (drawing rooms, congress, the opera, a labor union rally) and
in a utopian factory town. The central character, Mecha Iturbe, has
just come from Europe so Argentina must be explained to her, and
shown to her. But Mecha, from whose point of view everything is
seen, is a very traditional Argentine-born woman who resists
modernization --she likes being an upper class, affluent, Catholic
conservative, she likes organizing charity balls and buying
fashionable new clothes-- and who has the misfortune to fall in
love with a reform-minded, idealistic medical doctor who expects
her to want to change and improve Argentina. The other major woman
character is a surgeon, who eventually marries an up and coming
politician and labor leader, but continues to practice medicine.
With a prologue and notes by Mary G. Berg, this novel would be a
discussion-provoking addition to any class on Argentine, Southern
Cone or Latin American 20th century history, women's studies, or
literature
The 20th century's first Argentine best seller was Csar Duyen's
novel Stella of 1905. "Csar Duyen" was quickly revealed to be Emma
de la Barra (1861-1947), who besides founding the first
professional school for women in Argentina, the national Red Cross,
and a model factory workers' community, published five
extraordinarily sucessful novels about Argentine society in the
early part of the century. It was a time of economic anxiety and
eagerness to redefine the responsibilities of citizens, both men
and women, in this new era of rapid technological change and
shifting global relationships. Traditional identities are outdated,
and the existing social elite (embodied in Stella by the Maura
Sagasta/Quiroz family) must modernize or slip into moral and
financial bankruptcy. The central character of the novel is a young
woman who engages in an uphill battle to educate and transform not
only her own upper class family, but everyone. It is a love story
that never quite happens, a portrayal of an Argentina that does not
quite manage to enter the modern age, either in upper class urban
society or out on the family ranches where obsolete methods go
unchallenged. The heroine's efforts to instill European efficiency,
egalitarian morality and a determined work ethic are part of a
lively and appealing story. It explores the possible roles for
modern women in an Argentina that now offers improved women's
education and professional possibilities, as well as dramatizing
the dilemmas of a 19th century nation confronting rapid changes.
This centennial edition of Stella has been updated with plentiful
footnotes and a critical introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of
many studies of Latin American women writers and their times. This
novel would fit well into courses on Latin American narrative,
women writers, Southern Cone history, gender and cultural studies,
and nation-building.
Mi vestido verde esmeralda by Alister Ramrez Mrquez recounts the
life story of Clara, born poor in isolated, rural Colombia in 1900,
who makes her way, after a mythic journey through forests,
mountains and swamps to the western region of the Quindo, to the
city of Armenia, now the heart of coffee and banana production.
This remarkable novel, first published in 2003, is the tale of
Clara's adventurous journey and subsequent rise to prosperity as
the owner of a farm and restaurant and mother of six, ending with
years of political strife and the dissolution of her family. The
novel provides an overview of a century of dramatic strife and
change in Clara's personal trajectory and in the history of the
nation. Alister Ramrez Mrquez is from this area of Colombia, but
lives in New York; he is the author of a number of books, and Mi
vestido verde esmeralda is his first novel, fusing familiarity and
nostalgia in this tale of a journey through the twentieth century.
This novel would be engaging reading in courses on Colombian
history or literature, and in courses on topics of search for
self-definition (personal and national), fluctuating cycles and
rhythms of a century of transitions, life as a journey, or the
meaning of progress. This edition of Mi vestido verde esmeralda
includes extensive annotation of the Colombian references, and a
prologue and bibliography by Clara E. Ronderos and Mary G. Berg,
professors of Latin American literature in Massachusetts.
Herencia (1895) set in the city of Lima during the last decades of
the XIX Century, is the third deliberately controversial novel
written by Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru, 1852-1909), well known
by then for her novels, Aves sin nido (1889) and Indole (1891),
which take place in rural Andean Peru. An experienced writer of
essays, historical fiction and biographies, Clorinda Matto had a
sociologist's sharply observant eye, but by 1895, when she
published Herencia, Clorinda Matto's days as an aggressive
journalist in Lima were numbered. Only a few months later, she fled
into exile in Argentina and never returned to Peru. Herencia, an
analysis of class and gender in Lima, told through the stories of
six women's interwoven lives, can be read as Matto's
no-holds-barred expos of what she really thought of Lima society of
the late 1880s, a society in the throes of major changes. In the
aftermath of the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-83), Peru's
ruling classes struggled to regain and retain their social and
political power, but they were challenged by many new
circumstances. A flood of modern ideas and commercial products, as
well as new immigrants, forced changes, and Lima evolved rapidly,
despite resistance. In a world of new department stores, economic
possibilities, trains, sewing machines and modern mores, Matto's
women characters struggle to define their lives as they succeed or
fail in this society in flux. Matto was fascinated by the new
sciences of eugenics and evolution, and the central issues of the
novel are related to unresolved debates about the relative
importance of Nature (genes, biological inheritance) vs. Nurture
(education, environment). Considered shocking and even pornographic
at the time, because of its depiction of women's sexuality,
Herencia remains a vivid analysis of upper, bourgeois, and lower
class women's lives in Lima at a time of unprecedented dramatic
social changes. This novel, extensively annotated, with an
introduction and bibliography by Mary G. Berg, would be a lively
addition to courses on 19th century Latin America, 19th century
Women's History, the rise of mercantilism and commerce, a history
of women journalists, or an Upstairs/Downstairs approach to the
analysis of history and society.
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Indole (Spanish, Paperback)
Clorinda Matto De Turner; Edited by Mary G Berg
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R806
R666
Discovery Miles 6 660
Save R140 (17%)
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Clorinda Matto de Turner's second novel, Indole, was published in
Lima in 1891, two years after her Aves sin nido shocked the
Peruvian reading public with its forthright criticism of Church and
state corruption. Like Aves, Indole dramatizes the liberal
reformist anticlericalism of late nineteenth century political
debates, and is also set in a small Andean town surrounded by
outlying haciendas. But in Indole, the town is a stable and
basically happy one, where indigenous people, mestizos and
landowners of Spanish descent live harmoniously in a beautiful
Andean valley. Matto's journalistic ambition to document people's
appearance and behavior in detail, and her close attention to the
dynamics of gender, race and class, produces a vivid analysis of
small town life in 1858, complete with an army batallion sweeping
through at the end on its way to retake Arequipa for Ramn Castilla,
placing the fictive town of Rosalina in a historical national
framework. Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909) was born in Cusco,
grew up on a rural estate speaking Quechua, married an English
businessman and settled with him in Tinta, a town very much like
Indole's Rosalina. After his death, when she was already a
well-established writer, she became the editor of the newspaper La
Bolsa of Arequipa, and later of El Per Ilustrado in Lima. Her
liberal reformism and activism made her many enemies, and in 1895
she had to leave Per, and she moved to Buenos Aires, where she
founded another newspaper, Bcaro americano. She published thousands
of articles and editorials, legends, tradiciones and biographies,
as well as three novels in which she sought to define models of the
ideal citizens of a rapidly modernizing Peru, and in which she
denounced corruption, immoral behavior, and laziness. This edition
of Indole has been updated with plentiful footnotes and a critical
introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of many excellent studies of
Latin American women writers and their times. This novel would fit
well into courses on Latin American narrative, women writers,
Peruvian history, gender and cultural studies, and nation-building
in the nineteenth century.
In 1875, Juana Manuela Gorriti hurried to finish her new novel,
Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, in order to include it in the
two-volume collection, Panoramas de la vida, published in 1876,
dedicated to the women of Buenos Aires. Peregrinaciones is both the
story of a young woman's dramatic liberation and self-discovery,
and a critical travelogue of conditions in southern South America.
The narrator, Laura, tells a close woman friend about her escape
from her home in Lima, where she was dying of tuberculosis, and the
series of adventures that stimulated her into health, independence
and energetic engagement with the welfare of others. As she
travels, she witnesses the horrors and glories of 19th century
society, from bandit attacks, civil wars, and indigeneous
rebellions to the cruelties of slavery. She journeys through varied
terrain, from mountain peaks to the jungle, where she dresses in
male clothing for self-protection. At this time when national
identity was being defined, Laura assesses the populations and
problems of the Southern Cone nations, with the help of the friends
she makes during the course of her travels. Juana Manuela Gorriti
(1818-1892) is one of the best known and most eloquent 19th century
writers of fiction. Born in Argentina, she went to Bolivia with her
family after her Unitarian father was defeated by Juan Facundo
Quiroga in 1831. She settled in Peru, began to publish stories and
novels, and established a literary salon attended by Lima's leading
intellectuals. Ever restless, like the protagonist of
Peregrinaciones, she traveled frequently and wrote about it, very
aware of changing conditions as Peru, Chile and Argentina
modernized. She died in Buenos Aires, where many of her books were
first published, including Sueos y realidades, Panoramas de la
vida, El mundo de los recuerdos, and many others. This edition of
Peregrinaciones has been updated with plentiful footnotes and a
critical introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of many studies of
Latin American women writers and their times. This novel would fit
well into courses on Latin American narrative, women writers,
Southern Cone history, gender and cultural studies, and
nation-building in the nineteenth century.
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