Library - Services

The British Bulletin of Publications on Latin America, the Caribbean, Portugal and Spain

The British Bulletin of Publications has been published continuously since 1949, and is now in its 114th issue. It presents details of recent publications in English on a wide range of subjects relating to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. Each issue of the Bulletin includes books reviews of around a hundred new titles and an equal number of short book notices, together with a selection of recent periodical articles. The reviews and article listings, which are organised in regional and country sections, aim to give some indication of the range of relevant material being published. The longer book reviews offer a critical as well as a purely descriptive approach. The editors' hope is that the British Bulletin of Publications will provide a useful reference resource for regional specialists and enthusiasts alike. Four specimen reviews are given below.

ALLEN, Christian Michael - An industrial geography of cocaine. Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, England. 2005. xi, 150p., figs, tables, photos, maps, bibliog., index. £50.00/$95.00 Hardback. (Latin American studies: social sciences and law) ISBN: 0 415 94940 8.

This is a study on a subject that is in a constant state of flux, with only two fixed aspects, production and the consumer. Between production and the consumer there is a series of stages. Christian Allen seeks to address these intermediate stages, mainly from geographic and economic perspectives (as in the running of a business in a specific market), as well as looking at production and the consumer. He focuses on the US market to the exclusion of European and South American markets, but he does, however, cover virtually every movement of the merchandise from manufacture, through procurement, the middlemen, and on to the user in the US market. Allen starts with economic geography (as in classic textbooks for this subject), and goes on to globalisation and strategies of criminal organizations, the manufacturing process, brief country studies of Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia, marketing in the USA, and an analysis of policy implications. He has resurrected the Cristaller theory of places, to explain some of the concepts in his book. His research materials include The Economist, various official US publications, and a number of English-language publications. Where his publication is weak is in the lack of Spanish-language publications (about two on Bolivia, listed in the bibliography). Allen's text is based largely on US texts and therefore lacks a balanced overview. Some of his conclusions are fascinating, and suggest that Colombian criminal organizations have a chameleon-like dexterity and ability to adapt to new circumstances, and are superior in this sense when compared with Mexican, Peruvian and Bolivian criminal networks. However, he underestimates or simply ignores Venezuela, Brazil and the Guianas as processing, transit, and laundering countries, with the exception of a few scattered references. An Industrial Geography of Cocaine is nonetheless a useful first step towards understanding the growing of cocaine and the general narcotics trade, at least between Colombia and Mexico and the US. The editing seems rather slipshod: witness "Columbian" (sic) in every headline of chapter four, and the inexcusably poor-quality maps and figures (particularly the lack of tint differentiation in figure 3.2, page 39).

WILLIAMSON, Edwin - Borges: a life. Viking Penguin, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA. 2004. xviii, 574p., photos, glossary, notes, bibliog., index. £25.00/$34.95 Hardback. ISBN: 0 670 88579 7.

Borges believed that ultimately 'all literature is autobiographical', and even told an interviewer in 1967 that his 'stories' were "about myself, my personal experiences". Edwin Williamson's prodigious, lucid and compelling work starts from his own understanding that "the career of Borges was a quest to discover what it meant to be Borges". Williamson sets out to get behind the "dull and regular" outer life of the "anaemic bibliophile" that so many portraits have suggested, and one is immediately struck by the immense range and depth of scholarly research undertaken in pursuit of this task. Much of it is new material, such as evidence from Borges's early life in the 1920s and 1930s and, more recently, extensive interviews with his widow María Kodama, including insights into Borges's passionate affair with her in the last two decades of his life. Williamson's chronological approach to Borges's life skilfully develops along parallel themes: his childhood experiences and traumas, especially his relationship with his mother and his inherited obsession with family honour which pervaded his aesthetic, literary and political developments throughout his life; the link, from the earliest times, between his literary output and his relationships with women; his understanding of Argentine history and the development of Argentina as a nation, and his sense of nationhood, and the impact of these on his writing and political stance; and the influence of all of these on the development of his literary oeuvre. The result is a balanced and insightful view of what Borges's life was like, a very accessible introduction to the man and his work, skilfully placed in the complex context of Argentine cultural and political development during the twentieth century. Readers would need to look elsewhere for more detailed critical analysis of Borges's writing, but Williamson's work is an essential preliminary for anyone wishing to understand the context, influences and motivations behind the man's work. Despite the broad range of this study, the reader may be left unfulfilled in a number of areas. There is perhaps insufficient reference to the Latin American and European literary contexts in which his life and work were developing. His relationship, both literary and personal, to contemporary Argentine authors such as Güiraldes, and particularly Bioy Casares with whom he worked closely for a period, could be developed further. Williamson tends to see the complex and fundamental changes in Argentine politics, particularly the rise of Perón and Peronism, too much from Borges's somewhat narrow and conservative point of view. Although Borges's hatred for Perón is well covered, Borges's seemingly inept and extreme public statements on the Franco and Pinochet dictatorships and his consequent vilification by the left, could be better developed. Although the impact of Borges's childhood is meticulously covered, some follow-through into a more studied analysis of his psychological make-up could have been attempted from the evidence which appears to be available, particularly because the relationship between his aesthetic/metaphysical worlds and his obsessions is well charted, albeit somewhat superficially. Still, the reader will be left more than adequately able as a result of reading this book to follow these issues up for him or herself. After all, Borges did, as Williamson's book describes, somewhat leave it up to his countrymen in Argentina to work out why he chose to die in Switzerland - his final 'magical act'

FONTOVA, Humberto - Fidel: Hollywood's favourite tyrant. Regnery Publishing, One Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001, USA. 2005. x, 229p., table, bibliog., notes, index. $27.95 Hardback. ISBN: 0 89526 043 3.

The author was born in Cuba and moved to the United States at the age of seven, growing up in New Orleans; he has a master's degree in Latin American studies from Tulane University. While it is crucial to have a range of reporting and analysis in order to build a balanced picture of Castro and his regime, and the voice of the Cuban diaspora certainly needs to be heard, it is perhaps unfortunate that Fontova has chosen to use a voice of such seemingly uncritical Right-wing polemic. To use his own words: "liberals, and the liberal media and liberal Hollywood, get away with the most outrageous lies about Cuba and Cuban Americans. This book is meant to bust their myths with truth". From this (and it is entirely typical of the tone of the book) one can see that this is a popular rather than an academic work, and, though that is not necessarily a bad thing, in this case Fontova has almost certainly limited his audience to a marked degree, and the sound of an axe being ground is very loud indeed. It does not help that many of the author's quoted comments or descriptions of events lack any sort of supporting attribution or reference. To take but one example: Fontova spends some three pages describing in Grand Guignol manner the capture, torture, and execution of the "enem[y] of Fidel", Tony Chao Flores, who in this unattributed account comports himself as a patriotic hero throughout. Then in direct comparison Fontova writes: "Compare Tony's death to the arch-swine, arch-weasel, and arch-coward Che Guevara's. 'Don't shoot!' whimpered the arch-assassin to his captors. 'I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!'" (no source given). But these exact words are given as an after-the-fact report of what Che Guevara said when he was captured, not what he said when he was finally executed, which give a completely different picture of his final moments (see, for example, Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: a revolutionary life [Bantam Books, 1997], p. 733 and 738-9). Overall, this book is a wasted opportunity.

HECHT, Tobias - After life: an ethnographic novel [with portions based on the narrations of Bruna Veríssimo]. Duke University Press, USA. UK address: Combined Academic Publishers, 15a Lewin's Yard, East Street, Chesham, Bucks, England. 2006. 183p., notes, photos. £11.99 Paperback. ISBN: 0 8223 3788 6.

Tobias Hecht tells us in his introduction that he originally intended to write an "ethnographic biography" of the adolescent transvestite street child Bruna Veríssimo, whom he first met in Recife in 1992. But in the decade and more that Hecht worked with Bruna he became more aware of a blurring between truth and imagination in her contributions to his research (that veracity was in question, given her adopted name of Veríssimo, is somewhat ironic). Accordingly, Hecht decided to use his own and Bruna's stories as the basis for this "ethnographic novel", the first part of which introduces us to Zoë, a young anthropologist on sabbatical from an American university, now back in Recife to undertake field work on the plight of street children there. Almost as soon as she sets foot in the city, however, she begins to wonder why she is there; Hecht skilfully builds an atmosphere of alienation and anxiety around Zoë that is rooted in her mother's recent death and her own illness that has destroyed any chance of having children of her own. Then she meets Aparacida, whom she had known on an earlier research trip as Beto:
"Beto died. I am Aparecida now. ... If you want, I can tell you what we really think."
"Tell me what who thinks?" Zoë says.
"Nós, os maloqueiros."
Hecht takes a risk in opening with the actions of a central character so detached and almost dysfunctional as Zoë appears, but he just about manages to make it work. It is in the second section that Zoë and Aparecida begin to record the latter's violent life on Recife's streets, and this of course is where Hecht makes most - and very effective - use of Bruna's words. The final section of the novel to some degree continues Bruna/Aparecida's narrative, but Hecht also grapples with a number of related themes along the way, including sexual diversity/perversity, characters rewriting their authors (citing Lispector's A Breath of Life in relation to Zoë and Aparecida's changing relationship), and the nature of the relationship between ethnographer and subject. At one point, Aparecida suggests that "they begin taking photographs of prostitutes at night, secretly". Perhaps echoing this, small photographs of the streets are dotted throughout this text, somewhat in the manner of W.G. Sebald's books, and presumably intended to likewise blur the boundary between invention and actuality. Very different writers and books of course, but Hecht has little or none of Sebald's subtlety; what he does do, however, is deliver an engaging, vivid and informative account of life on Brazil's mean streets.

Note: Summaries and descriptions in the Bulletin do not necessarily represent the views of Canning House.