And in front of the door that I hadn’t crossed in so many years, I remembered the small key, short and round, and how to turn it to open; the tiny hand of the door knocker, the mail box, the wood, the cord to open the door without knocking. At the end of the street, … Read more
The Guatemalan Writers Side Note:
For being such a tiny banana/coffee writers republic, Guatemala does produce and export quite a few good writers. I have mentioned some of them in this site like Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Pepe Milla, Ronald Flores. But, I have not done enough to talk about the great Guatemalan Literature written by its many excellent writers. Thanks to a comment by Coltrane_Lives about the possibility of his adopted Guatemalan daughter becoming a writer, I can point out a great Guatemalan novel written in English by Francisco Goldman, a respected journalist whose work appears often in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s (source: literaturaguatemalteca.org [ES]). “Francisco Goldman won accolades and international recognition with his extraordinary first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts… ” (source: amazon.com). Another great contemporary novel is Ruido de fondo (background noise) by my dear friend Javier Payeras. Javier Payeras is one of the clearest and loudest voices of this generation and his poetry and prose has won the recognition in and outside Guatemala. Ruido de fondo has been reissued by the Guatemala’s Government Editorial Cultura to be required reading for High School students in Guatemala. For those who are fluent in Spanish, I leave the link to one of my favorites poems by Payeras: Soledadbrother.
Many Guatemalans might regard thrillers and serial killers films as light and interested pieces of fiction because we are confronted with ultra violent headlines in newspapers like Nuestro Diario and Al Día, sensationalist rags that, like mirrors, show us every day how savage we can be. Ironically, Nuestro Diario boasts the largest circulation of any … Read more
Before what we know today as Guatemala vanishes into the fragile realm of memory, I am glad I can take some mementos to help me remember once I become yet another winter sleeper. I know it is very difficult to love or even understand this tiny banana republic, full of contrasts and contradictions. I know, … Read more
We don’t love our land because of its great size and power, because of its weakness or tiny size, because of its snow and white nights or its solar rain, We love it, simply because is ours. — Luis Cardoza y Aragón Luis Cardoza y Aragón is another great Guatemalan writer, born in La Antigua … Read more