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TOPIC: literature

Society

An Atheist's Prayer For Holy Week

Atheists may not have been blessed with faith, but God has graced them with a mischievous wit and a love of the arts that has led to some of the most beautiful depictions of religion.

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — It's the culmination of Holy Week, the most sacred period in the Christian liturgical calendar. Like a religion, atheism has its sects: there are the pious atheists and radical atheists. The latter are its guerrillas, such as the French novelist Émile Zola, who declared civilization would peak once the last stone of the last church had fallen.

Or the German writer Friedrich Nietzsche, who "rushed" to cleanse himself every time a religious man rubbed against him.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that if God wanted to but could not prevent evil, He was not omnipotent. And if He could but would not, then He was plainly mean! Where does evil come from, he asked, if God is willing and able to stop it, and why call Him God if He cannot, or will not?

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From Arrabal To Me — Chance, Forgetting And The Engines Of Creativity

A bit like the playwright Fernando Arrabal who launched an artistic project of decades after spotting a several disjointed phrases, our columnist reflects on the anodyne coincidences that led him to write these words.

-Essay-

MADRID — In art, everything is fortuitous. And so too in the piece you are reading...

In the 1960s, the Spanish playwright and artist Fernando Arrabal founded the Panic Movement, named after Pan, the Greek god of nature — and pranks. The inspiration for the artistic departure came to Arrabal when he placed two books on a big table and opened them at random. The first phrase to catch his eye was "the future acts," and then in the second book, "through coups de théâtre."

Thus a fortuitous adage, that "the future acts through coups de théâtre" or dramatic turns, became a creative spark and strangely presaged the exuberant "chaos" of the riots of May 1968.

Arrabal wanted at the time to distance himself from Surrealism, a current with which he is associated and which is equally fond of disorder. With the help of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and the cartoonist Roland Topor, he duly turned a post-war period still weighed with conservative torpor, into creative years.

Arrabal, who is 90 and lives in Paris, liked to startle his Catholic compatriots, painting himself in the company of Jesus at the Last Supper. He once scribbled 'I shit on the fatherland' (me cago en la patria) on one of his books.

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The Writing World Turns A New Leaf As Authors Enter The Age Of Authentication

The internet has brought about a Golden Age for authors, making it easier to share their work and connect with others in the writing community. It has also led to the rise of new risks, such as large-scale piracy, theft and plagiarism. For writers, the key to a harmonious future may very well reside in a new generation of secure platforms allowing them to publish through authenticated accounts.

In today's digital age, writers have a multitude of options to showcase their work to a global audience. Websites, blogs and social media provide a platform for writers to publish their work, network with other writers, and build their online presence.

But this online ecosystem can also sometimes feel like a lawless jungle, where a writer’s works can be freely copied, plagiarized and reused in all impunity — and without the author being able to do anything about it. To ensure the integrity of their work and protect their interests, it is becoming increasingly essential for writers to turn to authenticated accounts.

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Kafka And Dostoevsky: Was 'The Trial' A Hidden Rewriting Of 'Crime And Punishment'?

A Colombian student of Franz Kafka insists works by the 20th century Czech author, like The Trial, are so close to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as to be versions of it — creating potential trouble for European publishing houses.

BOGOTÁ After years of scrutiny and research, a Colombian mathematician armed with with tables and calculations has made what he says is a shocking literary discovery: The Trial, Franz Kafka's celebrated 1915 depiction of a nonsensical trial for an unspecified crime, is a rewritten version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic Crime and Punishment.

A Medellín-born teacher and fan of detective stories, Guillermo Sánchez Trujillo believes he has solved one of the great literary mysteries of modern times, both in identifying the source of The Trial and the order of its chapters, which seemed to have evaded Kafka students for a century.

The Trial, he says, is a palimpsest, or a "hidden rewriting," of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's 1866 story of a murder investigation set in late imperial Russia.

This astounding conclusion has earned Sánchez a not small amount of disapproval, and even obstruction, from the literary and publishing realms. In 2005, he published "a critical edition" of The Trial (in Spanish), in the order he believed was intended by its author.

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Ideas
Héctor Abad Faciolince

Cancel Culture And Censorship, A Necessary Enemy Of Art

Readers can be unduly critical of authors for a range of reasons, from old-fashioned spite to the modern phenomenon of wokeness. But writers should not consider these people enemies, but rather guides to help dig deeper.

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — There are many types of readers. There is the grammatical one, for example (who chases the ghost of the comma, gerund or misuses of the relative clause), the hedonistic reader (who seeks nothing but pleasure), the studious or critical ones (who will make reading an academic profession).

There is the paranoid reader (who feels alluded to, persecuted and discriminated), the apprentice (for whom a book is a teaching instrument), the insomniac (who uses words to fall asleep or, indeed, stay awake) and the censorious or inquisitorial reader (seeing sins in every passage or an offense to their ideology).

The reader types abound and I have no intention of providing an exhaustive list.

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Society
Odile Tremblay

Ernaux And Despentes: How Two French Writers Reveal Women's Liberation So Differently

French writer Annie Ernaux's Nobel prize in literature took many by surprise, after a career spent largely in the shadows. A different kind of surprise comes in comparing her to another French writer, iconoclast media star Virginie Despentes.

MONTREAL — When Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct. 6, becoming the 17th woman to do so, I was completely taken aback, as this French writer had led a discreet career, never causing much commotion. But I am absolutely delighted to see her clean, clinical, intimate and fascinating work, consecrated in high places.

As early as the 1970s, her minimalistic, bare prose had allowed many women to get a better grasp of the fragility of their own condition.

For she, as a true auto-entomologist who observed the woman within herself, and saw a mirror of all others, is well-deserving of this crown. This now octogenarian author has always despised deception. Did she write novels? Yes and no: Rather, she laid her life bare — her childhood, her fears, her loves, the oppression and shame, all recorded in her perpetually updated diary.

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Ideas
J. D. Torres Duarte

García Márquez And Truth: How Journalism Fed The Novelist's Fantasy

In his early journalistic writings, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez showed he had an eye for factual details, in which he found the absurdity and 'magic' that would in time be the stuff and style of his fiction.

BOGOTÁ — In short stories written in the 1940s and early 50s and later compiled in Eyes of a Blue Dog, the late Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning novelist, shows he is as yet a young writer, with a style and subjects that can be atypical.

Stylistically, García Márquez came into his own in the celebrated One Hundred Years of Solitude. Until then both his style and substance took an erratic course: touching the brevity of film scripts in Nobody Writes to the Colonel, technical experimentation in Leaf Storm, the anecdotal short novel in In Evil Hour or exploring politics in Big Mama's Funeral. Throughout, the skills he displayed were rather of a precocious juggler.

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Society
Manuel Ligero

Orhan Pamuk On Pandemics, Press Freedom And An Eye On Erdogan's Defeat

Nights of Plague is the latest book by the Turkish Nobel Prize winner, a fictional rendering based on historical reality that draws parallels (political and health-wise) between the past and the present.

MADRID — Orhan Pamuk is a kind of Bosphorus Bridge of literature: He unites two continents, two cultures, two philosophical and religious visions that have, over the centuries, tenaciously turned their backs on each other.

In his country, as the authoritarian drift of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deepened, the author and public intellectual has progressively become a thorn in the side of the government. However, his run-ins with the Islamo-nationalist regime have not made a dent in his cheerful and optimistic personality.

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Coronavirus
Wolfgang Schmidbauer*

​​Lord Of The Rings, A Guide​​ For Mending Relationships Damaged By COVID

The pandemic has changed our lives permanently and paranoid fantasies have taken root. But a remedy for the crisis of trust we're facing might be found in an unlikely place — in J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings.

First, there was 2020, the year of the virus. Then 2021, the year of vaccinations. But what will 2022 be? My first thought was “the year of exhaustion.” The second idea — which I like better — was “the year of repairing.”

In our efforts to save lives and keep everyone safe, much has been broken. That was inevitable.

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Society
Manon Laplace

An Epic Mission, Preserving The Ancient Books Of Timbuktu

Mali's "mysterious city" welcomes a new class of students trained in looking after ancient books. From conservation to digitization of these works, a colossal task awaits them to preserve this endangered heritage and the secrets they contain.

TIMBUKTU — In the workroom of the Ahmed-Baba Institute of Higher Studies and Islamic Research, time seems to have slowed down. As the dust and the sound of brushes on paper float by, six students hold in their hands one of the most precious heritages of the region.

Ceremoniously, they repeat the same gestures: lifting the pages, one by one, with the tip of a thin wooden spatula, then, with the flat of the brush, ridding the inks and the centuries-old papers of dust.

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Geopolitics
Mauricio Rubio

New Revelations Of García Marquez's Ties To Cuba And Nicaragua

Like other intellectuals of his time, the celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez admired Cuba's Fidel Castro. What's just been revealed, however, is also, as one text reveals, the Sandinista rebels who have stifled Nicaraguan democracy in past years.

BOGOTÁ — Entirely isolated and criticized by the international community, Daniel Ortega was again sworn in earlier this month as president of Nicaragua.

Ortega has now outdone Anastasio Somoza, the despot he helped topple in his youth, with a record 26 years in power and starting a fifth mandate, including a fourth consecutive one and the second with his wife Rosario Murillo as vice-president.

After Cuba's Fidel Castro, he is the regional tyrant most frequently cheered by Colombia's leftist intellectuals, and praised as his people's emancipator from "yankee oppression."

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Society
Umar Timol

Big Prizes For African Writers Don't Change Balance Of Power In Literary World

Novelists from Africa have been receiving some of the most prestigious literary prizes. But there are still questions around who are the world’s literary gatekeepers and what role writers from the Global South can play, writes Mauritian poet and photographer Umar Timol.

-Analysis-

PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS — In the arena of prestigious literary awards, 2021 was the year for Africa: Senegal's Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won France’s Goncourt Prize, the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the South African Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize (for English-language novels). All are well-deserved recognitions for the continent, but is the success limited by the expectations of Western critics?

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won France’s top literary prize for his novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (“The Most Secret Memory of Men”) and even he recognized how it expanded who could receive the Goncourt: “It is a strong signal [...], a way, also, to show that France is sometimes much larger and much nobler — in any case much more open — than what we can, what we want to reduce it to."

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