Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Un asunto sentimental by Jorge Eduardo Benavides

2014; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2014.0183

1945-8134

César Ferreira,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

Ulrich Baer Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai Earnshaw Books Humorous and candid, Ulrich Baer’s first book of fiction gives the reader an experience of Shanghai most tourists never encounter. From the girl who wore her sister’s pants for a day to the love-struck American student begging to stay in the city, these seven short stories portray people’s daily experiences in the midst of a rapidly changing city. Robert Antoni As Flies to Whatless Boys Akashic Books A visionary engineer with a utopian goal, John Adolphus Etzler enlists a handful of London citizens to establish a collective in Trinidad. Everything goes wrong when the men separate from the group to build their settlement in a remote swamp. Robert Antoni gracefully combines layers of idealism, love, and a plague of the Black Vomit in this historical novel. Nota Bene a distinctive narrative voice. She has struggled with heroin addiction in the past, and alcoholism dogs her throughout the novel. These problems have plagued the former Soviet Union’s poorer areas for decades, but they rarely get exposure in popular culture, and almost never from a female point of view. Ala, along with the struggles of her past and the precariousness of her country’s present, centers the novel on an authentic and unique experience, foreign but relatable. Even as the novel piles on plot twists, each more improbable than the last, this authentic core anchors the narrative and compensates in cultural perspective for what Down Among the Fishes lacks in literary value. Bradley Gorski Columbia University Jorge Eduardo Benavides. Un asunto sentimental. Lima / Madrid. Alfaguara. 2013 (©2012). isbn 9786123090739 / 9788420414140 Jorge Eduardo Benavides is a Peruvian writer who, like Santiago Roncagliolo and Fernando Iwasaki, left his homeland in the early 1990s during a time of political unrest, hyperinflation , and violence. Once settled in Spain, he began producing significant works of fiction, such as a trilogy of novels—Los años inútiles (2002), El año que rompí contigo (2003), and Un millón de soles (2007)—that are based on Peru’s recent political history. A shorter work, La paz de los vencidos (2009), evokes his life in Tenerife. By then, it became clear that Benavides ’s writing draws upon not only contemporary Peruvian history but also his own self-imposed European exile. The result? Lengthy and complex narratives that often bring to mind the concept of the novela total in Latin American literature. Once again, exile is at the center of his latest book, Un asunto sentimental (A sentimental affair). A splendid tour de force, the novel is at first glance a lengthy and complex love story. On one level, it is the story of Albert Cremades, a Catalan writer whose troubled love life is as intense as his passion for writing; but even as he suddenly hits it big and is well on his way to becoming an international best-seller, the novel also tells the story of an aspiring Peruvian novelist by the name of Jorge Benavides, who meets and falls in love with the enigmatic Dinorah Manssur during a visit to Damascus. A Syrian exile who grew up in Peru, Dinorah (or maybe Dina or Tina) may have been involved with the “Shining Path” guerrilla movement while a student at a Peruvian university and could now be linked to an Islamic fundamentalist group. Troubled and obsessed by such an enigma, the character Benavides abandons his novel and embarks on an extended trip, which spans over a dozen cities, from Venice to Istanbul May–August 2014 • 101 102 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews and New York to Lima, as he tries to discover the beautiful Dinorah’s whereabouts. Meanwhile, thanks to his bestselling book, Cremades’s fame as an author continues to accelerate. The competing narratives by Cremades and Benavides quickly begin to show coincidences and differing versions of the novel’s assorted events and characters (Albert, Belén, Tina, Jorge, Dinorah); so much so that despite the numerous references to specific places, such as city streets, bars, and hotels, and characters with the works of Latin American and Spanish writers , the distinction between fiction and reality, and even between author and character, is the...