Word: spanishness
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...also hooked up with a Spanish woman who didn't understand a word of English. How did you manage that...
...bladder, head-all of it. Along the way, he tells the tale of Galicia, a cold, rainy, and stubbornly independent piece of Spain on the Atlantic Ocean. It is "a patchwork of small, low-intensity farms...real working countryside" and home to Don Quixote's Miguel de Cervantes, longtime Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, and the Castro family (of the Havana Castros). Barlow's gastronomic travelogue manages to make the place sound utterly depressing and enchanting at the same time...
...Lowdown: Galicia is the non-Spanish Spain. It's typically not warm, not anywhere near the Mediterranean, and far from the foot-stomping, castanet-clanging, torero ole-ing that characterizes the nation's more well-known southern coast. As Barlow writes it, Galicia is a misty, mysterious place full of cagey old coots and rustic food fanatics. What better place, then, to embark on a semi-ridiculous, typically male journey. With good humor and shameless enthusiasm, he has written a delicious meat mash note...
There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolaño than Bolaño himself, which is a shame because he's dead. At the time of his death, in 2003, Bolaño was a major writer in the Spanish-speaking world but virtually unknown and untranslated in English. Why that should be is not much of a mystery. Bolaño was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as the head of the Swedish Academy has annoyingly but rightly pointed...
...husband and father, Bolaño decided to kick the smack and take up writing fiction in the hope of supporting his family. His prose turned out to be better than his poetry. In 1998 the publication of The Savage Detectives vaulted him into the first rank of Spanish-language literature, right up there with all those writers he had mocked as an infrarealista. But by then he was already suffering from the liver disease that would kill him at age 50. He had all but completed 2666 when he died...