Around the World in 32 Countries: Colombia

Number of recognized regional languages: 68
Main languages: Spanish, (in the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina) English

Independence: 1810 (declared from Spain)

Colombia and Panama (and, for a while, even more states) used to be joined as the Republic of New Granada, the Granadine Confederation, and then the United States of Colombia, in the 19th century.

"[... T]he Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903, leading to Colombia's present borders."

Laguna de la Cocha (El Encano)
Photograph by G. Parra (attr.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Capital City: Bogotá

Surface area: 1,141,748 km2 (larger than Bolivia, smaller than Peru)

Currency: peso
Driving side: right

Main trading partners: United States, China, EU, Latin American countries

Main exports that are food: fruit and other produce, sugar and sweets
Main exports that are not food: mineral fuel, oils, plastics, precious stones, metals, lumber, electronics, clothing, glass, etc.

Information taken from "Colombia" and "List of countries and dependencies by area" [Wikipedia]

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For Colombia, I read two books.

A Hundred Years of Solitude requires little introduction! Of course it made Gabriel García Marquez one of the giants of world literature. I did not finish it because I objected to some of the content, but it is undoubtedly great literature and an absorbing world to sink into.

It is an epic of multiple generations who begin a backwoods life in the remote forests of Colombia and found a town. Their community is visited by itinerant eccentrics who pierce it, they see the fading traces of the conquistadores of long ago, and disperse at times amongst the men who (for whichever reason) linked up to civilization again by signing up to fight in its wars.

Rocas del abra Zipaquirá
- Landscape in the Zipaquirá archaeological zone, Colombia
Photograph by S. Iizarazo, c. 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Because Marquez's genre here is magical realism, magic rules his characters' existence, whether it is the magic of science or the magic of alchemy.

The descriptions of rural life are not the elite explorations of national history and culture that often characterize 19th century literature to which one is used. The choice of milieu, characters and themes feel symptomatic of the author's leftwing sympathies. There is a distrust of the faraway centres of national authority, which filters through to the attitudes of the characters.

The reason I stopped reading it is that an adult male character becomes infatuated with a 9-year-old girl; even the character recognizes that this is weird, but either way I thought 'I'm out of here.'

Pendants by the lost Tairona people
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Photo by R. Müller (2006)
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

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La Casa de la Belleza was written decades later, first published in 2015.

It transplants us to modern times in urban contemporary Colombia. Written by a journalist, Melba Escobar de Nogales, it explores Bogotá (a city of over 7 million people — more than Berlin's population) through the lens of a set of women who frequent the eponymous beauty salon. It looks pessimistically at gender relations, class, and racism, and the imperfections of the privileged class. Women and everyone else exploit others as they are exploited themselves. Not unexpectedly, since Colombia is still over 70% Roman Catholic, the book also casts a jaded eye on the rampant violence and moral corruption amongst the purported Christianity of the elite.

Of course the author's theme is the ridiculous juxtaposition of a society's obsession with beauty and material luxury, with the perpetration of ugliness and degradation.

The novel itself was a quick success internationally, translated into multiple languages from the original Spanish. I read it in Spanish and found the vocabulary quite specialized in parts; but now I know what sancocho, avena and aguardiente are.

Escobar writes this passage in La Casa de la Belleza: 

"Al ponerse en rojo, mendigos, desplazados, forajidos, drogadictos, tullidos, saltimbanquis, desempleados, analfabetas, maltratados, mutilados, niños y mujeres preñadas asaltan los vehículos en un performance diario tan repetitivo y predecible que ya a nadie sorprende. O a casi nadie."

(Rough translation: When the traffic lights turn red, beggars, displaced, outlaws, drug addicts, cripples*, charlatans, the unemployed, illiterate, and maltreated, children and pregnant women attack the cars in a daily performance so repetitive and predictable that no one is surprised any more. Or almost no one. [*I'm using this term as it appears to be the closest translation, but I am not sure if it is appropriate to use it in English.])

Karen is the heroine. She grew up in the seaside city of Cartagena as the daughter of a teen mother in the slums, or the barrio. A single mother, saving tips from her work in the Bogotá beauty salon to pay for a better life for her son, dark-skinned and attractive, her warm heart and capacity to care for others are badly repaid with betrayal and rape. A whole network of characters who all know each other begins having a noxious effect on her life. Eventually she becomes an ambiguous figure herself — or does she?

I think this book is a thriller rather than an elaborate literary novel, and it is also frankly just grim to read; I couldn't wait to have it over with and would only recommend it to someone who is neutral-about to fond-of reading about murder and violence against women. It treats its characters too strictly to gather the scope or insight of great literature.

I speak from little relevant experience, but my impression is that the book also splits and founders on a central paradox. It presents itself as critical, fearless and progressive. But the narrative voice complains about minor fishes, never landing real hits on the power figures who bear the most responsibility for the social/political/economic problems that face Colombia. Although she does try to portray individual members as pathetic and frail. In the end it feels more passive-aggressive than iconoclastic.

The book also 'borrows' grievances from Afro-Colombian women — the whole spectrum of racism from the daily torments of straightening hair to look 'respectable,' up to the more violent manifestations — when it might be better to read a book by Afro-Colombian women about this phenomenon instead.

(At the end, I'll note as a disclaimer that a Colombian woman, perhaps in her 30s, was once invited into my high school Spanish class in around 2001 — she was the friend of my teacher. She stressed that many people around the world had a totally wrong view of Colombia: it is not all drug lords and warfare.)

El Salto de Tequendama
Photograph by J. Cufiño (attributed.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence

January 2021 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

First of all, it feels appropriate to pay tribute to Jan Morris. An adventure-loving journalist and non-fiction author who broke the news of the ascension of Mount Everest in 1953, foe of political correctness and friend of many who admired her, host to pilgrimages to her rural home long into her old age, and a transgender woman in the public eye many decades before anti-trans bigotry became controversial, she died in Wales in November 2020. 

It feels strange to single out just one of the thousands of witty and insightful passages that she wrote for a good half century, but one that stuck with me was quoted by Jonathan Kandell, writing for the New York Times, in his obituary. Kandell summarized that "The more she was treated as a woman," (Jan Morris presented as a woman beginning in the 1970s) "the more she behaved — in her own estimation — as a woman."

“If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming,” she wrote. “If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.” She added, “I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them."

(Like Jane Austen's quotation in Northanger Abbey: "The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance.")

Here is another passage, from a Tumblr blog for her book Contact! (2012):

I shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. [...] it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: ‘I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?’

Twenty-five cents for a doughnut.  Even Americans bleed.

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Regarding daily reading, I am still hoping that sooner or later it will be safe to commute to the office again. In that case, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane will shoot to the top of the list as the customary S-Bahn reading.

In January, the author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up will release another book for young readers, Concrete Rose. It goes back in time to visit the early life of the father of the girl who was the heroine of The Hate U Give, and how he breaks free from a gang. While she was still writing it, Angie Thomas touted it on Twitter as her best book yet; so I am looking forward.

In the meantime, I am reading a whimsical and intelligent book about donkeys and humans, Esel (2013) by Jutta Person, in German. My godfather gave it to me for my birthday because I have a well-known weakness for donkeys. It comes in a nice grey hardcover binding, from an independent publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin!

Besides, more books from the NPR best books of 2020 list are tempting me to read them:

Cover of Blacktop Wasteland, via Flatiron Books

Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) is a crime novel by S. A. Cosby, about a car mechanic in the southern US who is drawn into petty crime against his will. What really 'sells' the book for me is the way that Adam Lazarre-White narrates the audiobook and the suspenseful writing. Lazarre-White brings detail and life to the phrases, lending a little softening and gentler pace to the terser prose, which has a masculinely direct and clear-cut 'voice.' It's also a tribute to Cosby's literary judgment that I don't object to his metaphors (which in my view often descend into cliché or kitsch in prose) in for example this passage:

Seconds ticked by and Beauregard felt a hollow opening blossom in his chest. He could see the gears working in Warren’s head and for a moment he thought he was gonna pass. But Beauregard knew he wouldn’t. How could he? He had talked himself into a corner and his pride wouldn’t let him back down.

[Update: I didn't finish this novel because it quickly became too graphically violent for me, but literarily it still seemed great.]

Eat a Peach, a popular 2020 memoir by David Chang, was on NPR's list. It inspired me to look at Chang's other books. Momofuku, where the New York Times food writer Peter Meehan helped with the text, is of course a cookbook and was written in an appropriately chef-like, profane and macho style in 2009. Its biographical introduction traces the Korean-American chef's early years cooking in the US, then his journey to Japan where he yearns to learn the art of the ramen noodle, and back to New York City. There Chang opens up a no-frills restaurant featuring, mostly, noodles. His later restaurants were popular enough that I heard of them by following New York media in the early 2000s. Eat a Peach sheds a deeper, troubled perspective on the life that is lightly sketched in Momofuku.

More information: "Momofuku (restaurants)" [Wikipedia]

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Barack Obama's A Promised Land needs no introduction. I bought a large hardcover edition at Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus here in Berlin; and I am glad to have made the 'investment' because the book is so insightful, humorous, and re-readable. It also requires no advertising: it was stacked everywhere on the ground floor even of this bookshop across the Atlantic.

Cover of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You
via NPR

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an earlier work (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi, an American professor and anti-racism-expert who survived a stage 4 cancer to become a bestselling author and spokesperson against racism with the May 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the public eye. It has also been adapted for children in a new book collaboration with Jason Reynolds. How to Be an Antiracist (2019) — a book that argues that it is more helpful to be actively antiracist, than to simply declare one's self free of racism and hope for the best — was also especially popular in 2020.

Lastly, I began listening to an audiobook of an English translation of Cho Nam-Joo's novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. It is written in the third person, in straightforward, deadpan sentences. The titular character is a young mother who begins to fall apart in a perturbing, at times darkly funny, but understandable way, because of all of the pressures that are put on her by a sexist and generally dismissive social environment.

A Toast to Winter, Part V: Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant

When I was a child in Canada, I read The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. The tales that stayed with me were "The Happy Prince" itself — the tale of a golden statue that beggars itself to mend the inequality of rich and poor in late Victorian London — and "The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Selfish Giant."

What is "The Nightingale and the Rose" really about? — is it about people pouring out their heart's blood for the sake of love only to find out that it is lost, or if it is about people sacrificing themselves for art? I haven't figured it out yet and it isn't wintry.

"The Selfish Giant" is very wintry, however. It has been turned into a film and, despite its simplicity, appears to hit a fundamental chord with readers still.

"[P]late illustrating a story 'The Selfish Giant' in Wilde's
The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Nutt. 1st ed." (1888)
Picture by Walter Crane (1845-1915)
via Wikisource

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The villain-turned-hero of the tale is a giant who keeps neighbouring children out of his yard. That is why he is selfish.

(Given how ogres behave in many fairy tales, presumably the infants can count themselves lucky that they didn't feature on the giant's dinner menu that evening. But Wilde doesn't see gianthood that way.)

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

ONE DAY the children break in through the wall and visit the garden sneakily. Spring creeps in after them and the trees begin to flower again.

The Giant's heart is softened at the sight. He sees that one of his little visitors hasn't been able to perch in a tree like the others, so he lifts the disconsolate boy into the branches.

At that gesture, the neighbourhood children see their formerly grumpy neighbour in a different light. His garden is teeming with frolicking youth for the rest of the giant's life.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The. birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing.

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The Christian subtext (the echoes of "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" when the giant helps the boy, the stigmata later in the story, etc.)  and Victorian worship of childhood innocence here, might be a little too saccharine for modern tastes.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

It is only 16 days until 2020 is over and my chance to read the 25 books I promised to read for Goodreads has passed. But in the meantime I am still 'cramming in' more books. Aside from listening to Alien Oceans to the very end, I also finished listening to the audiobook recording of Brian Stelter's Hoax.

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Trembling on the verge of the passing of the Trump presidency as we are, any non-fiction book centred on the 45th President runs the risk of anachronism. But I think that Hoax bypasses the risk.

Brian Stelter begins with the President but ends up largely discussing Fox News, and the President is only an especially noisy watcher.

"Rupert Murdoch - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2007."
Copyright World Economic Forum (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

It makes sense anyway that the book's focus would be on television rather than governance: Stelter once ran the website TVNewser and now commentates the American press on CNN's show Reliable Sources. He is a media reporter through and through, and says of himself that he has tracked Fox News for 16 years.

But also, to borrow a phrase from the comedian Stephen Colbert and his former show Colbert Report, often American politics are more 'Videri quam esse' — seeming than being.

The 45th President took this motto more to heart than most: he was, as others have said, a television president.

He set aside 'executive time' in which he watched Fox and Friends and other political television when he should have been doing presidential tasks. If people wanted to influence him or to be hired by him, they would angle to appear on Fox rather than meet him in person. Long before he ran for office, he would feed stories to journalists and be credited as a 'source close to Trump.' He was altogether obsessed with ratings and with fans, rather than with sound policy and consensus. Stelter doesn't mention it directly as far as I recall; but it was quite sick that Trump reportedly used to track how popular his coronavirus briefings were, as if they were a television soap opera. ("Trump, Citing TV Ratings, Says Daily Coronavirus Briefings Will Resume" [New York Magazine])

It appeared that he had never grown out of his reality show, The Apprentice.

And, of course, the real estate magnate-turned-politician also took to heart the idea of 'seeming rather than being' when he fudged 'facts.'

Stelter recapitulates more trivial controversies that showed Trump's mendacious tendencies, like the 'crowd size' debate at the presidential inauguration in 2017.

But the main controversy that clearly weighs most on Stelter's mind is the Administration's and Fox's poor approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the first doses of a vaccine are being distributed there, beginning yesterday, it is worth keeping in mind that as of December 13th, 2020, the US suffered 16,062,299 confirmed cases, with 297,818 residents dying with Covid-19, according to Wikipedia.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part I

Early this month, the website for National Public Radio published a list of top books for 2020 par excellence. I took it as a very, very long series of reading prompts, and below are some of the results:

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A few books were interesting but I decided to skip reading the rest of the book after reading the introduction. (Also because this leaves me with a better chance of finishing over a hundred others...)

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is a memoir of a time when the author, Paul Lisicky, took up a position as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, further away from his family. It was in the early 1990s and AIDS was breaking out, and even before then the author (and his mother, perhaps exaggeratedly so) was conscious of his social vulnerability as a gay man.

It is about family drama as well as the author's individual life. It's also not light reading: molestation, suicide, and marital disagreements already appear in the introduction. [And, to be very clear: I only read the introduction, so the rest of this review should be taken with a grain of salt.] So I'd suggest that perhaps the memoir is best suited for readers who will find the depiction of this kind of dysfunction cathartic or interesting, rather than unsettling or too personal.

For example, he writes how his mother has, to a degree, given up on life. Rather than die by suicide, which would be too dramatic for her, she ekes out her existence in a half-life:

Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.

It's an interesting line of thought, not far from Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I'm sure the mother was asked for her consent to have her inner life described in the book. Is this a topic that should be published for the entertainment of the masses, however, or is this a topic that you can talk about over dinner to close personal friends? I'd go with the latter.

In any case he's indubitably an excellent writer and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of him before; perhaps he's a writer's writer whom one hears about more in professional circles. He's also published a memoir before, The Narrow Door.

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Paul Lisicky
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020

Cover of Later, via Graywolf Press

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Travelling from the coast of New England to the southern US, a collection of humoristic short stories about working- and middle-class Americans by George Singleton also looked really good; it was a little bawdy.

You can find three of his stories on the website of the Atlantic Monthly here to get an idea.

You Want More: Selected Short Stories of George Singleton is published by the independent Hub City Press.

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Cover of Alien Oceans, via Princeton University Press

In the end, I've been reading two books. The first is this, published by Princeton University Press:

Alien Oceans: The Search For Life In The Depths of Space

Written by a Californian professor with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this non-fiction book explores the ideas we have of oceans on other planets or moons.

Kevin Hand begins by telling anecdotes of the time when, as a graduate student, he took a submarine to the ocean floor in the company of Hollywood film director James Cameron. But the rest of the book so far is unsensational, and like a nice undergraduate lecture series.

He takes us from one moon in the orbit of Saturn to the other, and I was thrilled to learn that there are ice volcanoes (cryovolcanoes) on moons like Enceladus, and that such a small moon (500 km in diameter, I think) was already visible to scientists in the 18th century. Besides there are introductions to spectroscopy and a few other staples of astrophysics methodology.

Any person with a Grade 10 level of science, and no great inhibitions or feud against science, can follow it, I think. Even better: despite my analogy to undergraduate lectures, there is no need to do tests, tutorials, or lab work. The analogies — like the metal detector in airport security — are committed to and well spaced apart, so I didn't feel the bored bewilderment that I did when I read an Einstein biography that bombarded me with one analogy for special relativity after the other.

I could imagine a few post-graduates or professors in Chemistry or Physics wanting to thump their heads on their desks if they read Alien Oceans, because sacrifices of accuracy have been made to help general readers understand scientific concepts. But because these professional peers are not the target audience, they'd have to go out of their way to inflict this pain on themselves.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (Oct. 28, 2015)
"NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus
for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region."
via Wikimedia Commons

On another note: As a humanities student, I have met examples of the Ivory Tower Ego. When I was at UBC, a professor had released a bestselling book that was turned into a documentary film. It's unfair to say this as I only saw the man once; but when he strode through the streets with his briefcase and took the bus along with hoi polloi, I felt it was with a strikingly self-conscious air. Not to mention a few other professors who also evidently saw themselves as mini-celebrities of the lecture hall, on far slighter grounds.

But in Alien Oceans, Hand portrays a collaborative research world in which long-term effort and sound thinking are as important as flashy brilliance. He honours Cassini and other NASA excursions for providing the data for scientists to work with. He mentions to which researchers (sometimes his friends) we owe which findings. And he forebears from saying anything ostentatiously modest about 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

In general I like feeling that Alien Oceans mirrors the atmosphere that I sometimes felt when my father was working in physics or biology departments: real contentment in sharing knowledge with each other and asking each other for advice, and patiently putting in (lab) time day after day to figure out the puzzles they have set themselves.

(I am listening to the audiobook, so am not going to say anything about the prose as prose.)

October/November 2020: Books I'm Reading

As the Black Friday shopping season has brought with it mountains of workplace drama, I have barely had time or energy to read anything challenging. My Goodreads yearly book target also looks like it will not be fulfilled.

However, I finally finished the grim Colombian thriller La Casa de la Belleza, leaving me free to read more of A Hundred Years of Solitude and then South African books, to continue my journey around the world.

This week, Barack Obama's presidency memoir A Promised Land came out. Albeit a little daunted by the length, I might finally begin reading a book of his for the first time. 

In terms of topical political reading, the biography of Nero by Suetonius also seems relevant again.

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For lighter reading in the train on the way to voice coaching lessons, I have been reading Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem, which uncle M. kindly let me order through him at the bookshop where he works.

Written by an ex-Londoner who grew up in the countryside, who now in her early forties traipses along the foreshore of the Thames (often during low tides) in search of historical bric-a-brac, it is a charming read. It is amazing how many unexpected treasures washed out of the banks and beaches: Roman tiles and pots, Tudor clothing accessories, Georgian coins, Victorian medicine bottles, grain-sized red 'Thames garnets,' and so on.

Cover of Mudlarking, via the publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Her mudlarking has an ethic. It would have been irrelevant to the original Victorian mudlarks who fished coal and whatever else they could find from the dangerously dirty river to make a living. But one requires a permit in the 21st century. And Maiklem herself eschews the Schliemann-esque force of metal-detecting and digging, and instead trusts to luck to see things that are lying on or lodged in the surface. Important finds are shown to the Museum of London, for example, and the government rules on treasure are observed.

Besides, washing and sorting the finds is a demanding workload, with which for example a 17th-century pirate might hardly have bothered when he retrieved his own treasures from a boarded ship. I felt secondhand anxiety at the thought of the finds that Lara Maiklem must order and store, or give away. How many medieval roof tiles can one display in one's dining room before they begin to be too much of a good thing?

Mudlarking — in the USA it is called Mudlark — honours and celebrates the history of Britain. At times it even eschews modernity altogether.

It has become a Sunday Times bestseller, but I mentally associate it with the Daily Telegraph.  Of course I have no idea of the author's private politics. But the book has the aesthetic order often found alongside old-fashioned, right-wing ideology although I suspect it also appeals to a strain of British reserve across the political spectrum.

(It is a fine book to read during these times, too, for a superficial reason: it is liberating to read about people who spend hours outdoors!

It is also an excellent companion read to Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways — I broke off that book during the first Berlin lockdown in March, but plan to take it up again once taking the U-Bahn to work regularly is safe. The scene of the mouth of the Thames in a fog in Maiklem's book is reminiscent, for example, of the more ominous scene of vast tidal flats in MacFarlane's.)

Whether they own the book or not, anyone can glimpse Maiklem's finds as she presents them engagingly on her Twitter account.

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Additional information taken from "Lara Maiklem" [Wikipedia]

Around the World in 32 Countries: Spain

It has been surprisingly difficult to gather a list of Spanish books that I would like to read that feel representative of the country and its history.

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes requires no further introduction. This tale of adventure and knighthood is not nearly as tough to read for an Anglo-German speaker like me as, for example, some 19th century Spanish-language literature. It is also reassuring to have a massive yellow-covered Langenscheidt dictionary at hand. That said, I am still reading all of the prologues and state censors' notes and dedications, so I haven't yet reached even the opening phrase:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

[Loosely translated: In a village in the Mancha, whose name I cannot be bothered to remember, not so long ago there lived a knight of somewhere, who had a lance put away, an old shield, a thin workhorse and a coursing greyhound. A pan of something more inexpensive beef than mutton, cold cuts most nights, eggs with bacon or sausage on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, scrapings in addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his pension.]

15 pages down, perhaps 1300 to go.

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Reading a sound biography of Federico García Lorca — a German one, by Karen Genschow — and a translation of The House of Bernarda Alba has also been good as an 'encapsulation' of Spain. I did this a few years ago, however.

García Lorca's life ended prematurely in the 1930s, the era of Spain's Civil War. Leftist intellectuals and workers fought General Franco and the Church; Pablo Picasso was inspired to paint the gruesome violence of a Guernica that had been wasted by the aerial bombing of his countrymen; and the fascist brutality of World War II was foreshadowed. But his biography also spans a traditional upbringing in the late 19th century, the leftist stirrings of the early 1900s, as well as his generation's endeavours to explore and uphold Spanish regions' cultural identities. (Much like the Andalusian, Sevillan, etc. dances that Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados were composing during García Lorca's lifetime, to speak of music instead of literature.)

In terms of media, García Lorca delved not just into traditional/modern poetry, theatre, etc. but also into the fledgling art of film.

Mujer 1: Los pobres sienten también sus penas.
Bernarda: Pero las olvidan delante de un plato de garbanzos.
Muchacha 1: (Con timidez) Comer es necesario para vivir.
Bernarda: A tu edad no se habla delante de las personas mayores.

(First woman: The poor also have their sufferings.
Bernarda: But they forget them as soon as they see a plate of chickpeas.
First girl: (timidly) Eating is necessary to live.
Bernarda. At your age one does not speak in front of older persons.)

"Parroquia Nª Sª de la Granada, Moguer. (Huelva, España)."
Church in the village of Moguer, where Juan Ramón Jiménez was born.
© Miguel Angel, via Wikimedia Commons

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