Cultura Crashers 
Recent Posts
- Rueben Martinez adds "professor" to his list of honors
- Which books will be hot in 2009?
- Spain Wonders Why Bolano is so BIG in the States
- The Night Before Christmas, Spanglish style
- Lambda Libros and Breakfast in Bed
- Children's Books for Christmas
- New Blog on the Block: Voces
- Latino Authors Book Picks for 2008
- NY's French & European Publications Bookstore Closes
- Latino Literary Venues Bloom in New York
Recent Comments
- AMoon on Oh, No...Rudy has been banned again.
- Acsacalos on Shakira, Santillana, Bare Feet, Rock& Roll
- Melita Garza on New Blog on the Block: Voces
- Dante Hugo Juan Roque on My Day with Edith Grossman, Translator Extraordinaire
- bruz on "I am the Julio Iglesias of literature"
Most Commented On
- My Day with Edith Grossman, Translator Extraordinaire (6)
- Shakira, Santillana, Bare Feet, Rock& Roll (3)
- Alma Flor Ada: A Lifetime for Kids Books (2)
- Obama's Face in the Sand (2)
- One Latino Publication Closes and Another Opens (2)
Archives
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
Blog
Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)
Bogota Book Party
I attended a book party in Bogotá, Colombia last Thursday night. Álvaro Robledo's award-winning first novel, Nada importa (Nothing Matters, Villegas Editores, 2008), was being re-released by Villegas so the event was held at that said publisher's bookstore in the Zona Rosa of the city. The book was a finalist for the Premio Herralde in 1998, the same year that Roberto Bolaño won it (not shabby company for a debut novelist). As book types and their stylish friends drizzled in to the pre-cocktail event before the reading, they huddled into the white tent set up outside the bookstore serving wine and refreshments to go with the cigarettes. Then three erudite and bespectacled men in their thirties (including Robledo) waxed nostalgic about the makings of this 159 page coming-of-age novel and its meaning to all of them. Before it was published by Planeta in 2000, an excerpt of the novel was published in El Malpensante, say, Colombia's equivalent of The Believer. They read segments of the book, a recent essay written about it in the literary magazine Arcadia, and talked about how they passed it around to each other to tweak and shorten the novel into this fresh edition. The narrator of Nada importa is a Latin American traveling in Europe in the late 90's, ripe, after the best of high school educations. He and his four buddies crawl the pubs and countryside of Liverpool and Dover, on the road, Kerouac-style, in a red '74 Mustang in search of the mythical farm where Jethro Tull made their deubt. There are mentions of U2, Bukowski, bookstores in Hay-on-Wye, surviving seeing Potemkin in a state of romantic and solitary anguish. No magic realism, no urban realism in this novel. Nor the Colombian violence or narcotrafficking dramas pivotal to the works of popular contemporary Colombian novelists like Jorge Franco, Fernando Vallejo or Mario Mendoza. Robledo's narrator is countryless. He's a South American, a foreigner finding himself in the United Kingdom's strangeness. There's music, women, and hours of inquisitive, soul-searching conversation; as if the world were their oyster.
Does this matter? Álvaro Robledo and yours truly, wide-eyed, at Librería Villegas in Bogotá.
Bogota Book Party
August 24, 2008
I attended a book party in Bogotá, Colombia last Thursday night. Álvaro Robledo's award-winning first novel, Nada importa (Nothing Matters, Villegas Editores, 2008), was being re-released by Villegas so the event was held at that said publisher's bookstore in the Zona Rosa of the city. The book was a finalist for the Premio Herralde in 1998, the same year that Roberto Bolaño won it (not shabby company for a debut novelist). As book types and their stylish friends drizzled in to the pre-cocktail event before the reading, they huddled into the white tent set up outside the bookstore serving wine and refreshments to go with the cigarettes. Then three erudite and bespectacled men in their thirties (including Robledo) waxed nostalgic about the makings of this 159 page coming-of-age novel and its meaning to all of them. Before it was published by Planeta in 2000, an excerpt of the novel was published in El Malpensante, say, Colombia's equivalent of The Believer. They read segments of the book, a recent essay written about it in the literary magazine Arcadia, and talked about how they passed it around to each other to tweak and shorten the novel into this fresh edition. The narrator of Nada importa is a Latin American traveling in Europe in the late 90's, ripe, after the best of high school educations. He and his four buddies crawl the pubs and countryside of Liverpool and Dover, on the road, Kerouac-style, in a red '74 Mustang in search of the mythical farm where Jethro Tull made their deubt. There are mentions of U2, Bukowski, bookstores in Hay-on-Wye, surviving seeing Potemkin in a state of romantic and solitary anguish. No magic realism, no urban realism in this novel. Nor the Colombian violence or narcotrafficking dramas pivotal to the works of popular contemporary Colombian novelists like Jorge Franco, Fernando Vallejo or Mario Mendoza. Robledo's narrator is countryless. He's a South American, a foreigner finding himself in the United Kingdom's strangeness. There's music, women, and hours of inquisitive, soul-searching conversation; as if the world were their oyster.Does this matter? Álvaro Robledo and yours truly, wide-eyed, at Librería Villegas in Bogotá.
Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on August 24, 2008 | Comments (0)
Advertisement
Advertisements
