After the success of Art
NEW PROTOCOL BEFORE A BAD CRITIQUE
There's a fancy new protocol for when an author gets a bad review: Mention it on Twitter, but don't link to it, with humor and sportsmanship (and alluding, perhaps, to the fact that it's a rarity among many good reviews). Jia Tolentino did it when Lauren Oyler spent some 3,000 words in The London Review of Books destroying her False Mirror, and Mariana Enríquez repeated it a few days ago when Sam Byers published an unambiguously negative review of her revered Our Part of the Night in The Guardian. “Well today they reviewed me in The Guardian and they hated Our Part. Everything cannot be done, ”admitted the Argentine author, to which her fans responded with love and memes. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but in the face of this criticism, so dissonant from what was said about that novel in the Spanish-speaking world, and the rather lukewarm review that The New York Times made of Alejandro Zambra's Chilean Poet, also received as a milestone in Spain and Latin America, it is worth wondering if something is being lost in translation and what happens so that these widely read and celebrated novels in Spanish find it hard to gain a foothold in the Anglo market. Or at least among the critics.
HARRY, MOEHRINGER Y LOS 'DADDY ISSUES'
On the cover of the long-awaited autobiography of Prince Harry, which in Spanish will be titled Spare: in the shadows, only appears, and in huge typography, the name of the heir (who signs like this, "Prince Harry", and not Harry Windsor or something like that), but it has already transpired who has been the ghostwriter who has been in charge of writing them, and far from disappointing (wow, so a celebrity with no experience in writing has not sat down by himself to order and write hundreds of pages?), the fact has increased interest in the book. J.R. Moehringer, author of The Bar of Great Expectations (Duomo), also wrote Open, the memoirs of André Agassi, whose cover closely resembles that of Spare, the prince's memoirs. All the books of the author and journalist have in common that they deal with the issue of daddy issues since he himself had a complicated relationship with his father, and much of that is also expected in Spare.
WHAT ABOUT THE STAR ARCHITECTS IN QATAR?
The World Cup in Qatar is proving to be a great test to deal with in ethics classes in high schools. Federations, brands and others are facing a series of fairly simple questions: do you care about human rights? How much do you care? To the point of losing dollars? How many dollars? Also the big architecture firms that designed the stadiums in which more than 6,000 workers have died and many more have worked in conditions of slavery now face some uncomfortable questions. They are not few. Zaha Hadid Architects, who is also behind the controversial Neom project in Saudi Arabia, commissioned the main stadium, Al Wakrah, Norman Foster of Lusail Arena, BDP Pattern of Al Rayyan Stadium. Hadid, who died suddenly in 2016, responded when asked about it: “it is not my obligation as an architect to deal with it, I cannot do anything about it because I have no power over the issue, it concerns the Qatari government”, and she later sued architectural critic Martin Filler, who accused her of being an accessory to the deaths of 1,000 construction workers at Al Wakrah.
WHAT A LAUGH THE STASI
The filmmaker Leander Haußmann has spent his entire career trying to make humor of things that Germans would not laugh at a priori. In 2002 he filmed a comedy about the last days of the National People's Army, the GDR army, and another about a comedian who escapes from the Nazis in 1938 and ends up involved in the KGB. Movistar premiered his latest film on November 8, which leaves everything quite clear in the title: A Stasi comedy. The action starts in the present, when at a family party a former political police agent from East Germany prepares to open the dossier he has managed to recover, and moves to 1980, when the protagonist infiltrated a group of bohemians in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg and began to live a double life, half poet, half informer.
