Gabriel Garcia Marquez unable to write, brother says

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is suffering from dementia, which has made him unable to write, his brother says. "Dementia runs in our family, and he's now suffering the ravages prematurely due to the cancer that put him almost on the verge of death," Jaime Garcia Marquez, the author's younger brother, told students in Cartagena, Colombia, the Guardian reported Saturday.

"Chemotherapy saved his life, but it also destroyed many neurons, many defences and cells, and accelerated the process," Jaime continued. "But he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is now in his mid-80s, is best known for his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude," first published in Spanish in 1967, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. With it, he ushered in the genre known as magic realism, which combined fantastical elements and the real, and became closely associated with literature from Latin America.

"He has problems with his memory," Jaime said. "Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him." Jaime is head of the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation, founded by his brother. As a young man, Gabo worked as a journalist in Colombia, Rome, Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Caracas, Venezuela; New York; and Mexico City.

During his life, Marquez has been overtly political in his life -- he fostered a friendship with Cuba's Fidel Castro -- and his writing. The novel "The General in His Labyrinth" caused an uproar when it was published in Colombia; it presented an ailing, delirious Simon Bolivar. Calling the book "anti-patriotic," Roberto Belandia, secretary of the Colombian Academy of History, told The Times, "He uses history to darken the prestige of our institutions and heroes." Marquez disagreed, telling The Times, "I haven't tried to destroy anything but to show the man. All the veneration and all the respect that he gets as a myth are greater if he is seen as a human being." It's sad to think that Marquez himself may be facing a similar fate.

Marquez's other major works include the novels "Love in the Time of Cholera," "The Autumn of the Patriarch," "The General and His Labyrinth" and the novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." He has written one memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale," intended to be the first book in a series. His brother says that he does not expect he will be able to complete the story.

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Photo: Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 2006. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Raghad Saddam Hussein shopping her father's book manuscript

Raghad Saddam Hussein, the eldest daughter of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, is said to be looking for an international publisher for a manuscript written by her father. The handwritten manuscript is a memoir, according to Al Arabiya news.

Raghad's lawyer told the network, "These are the only real memoirs Saddam Hussein wrote by hand and they will be released as soon as we find a publishing house."

Saddam Hussein served as president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003, when his government collapsed after the invasion by the United States. Hussein's tenure, which outsiders have called a dictatorship, was characterized by extreme brutality and even genocide. He was tried and executed in 2006.

Saddam Hussein had five children with his first wife, Sajidah Talfah, who is seated next to him, above. There were two sons, Uday and Qusay (above, standing, center and second from right), and three daughters: Raghad (standing, in blue), Rana (left), and Hala (in front of Raghdad). Uday, Qusay and Qusay's 14-year-old son were killed by American forces in 2003.

Raghad Saddam Hussein has been living in Jordan since 2003, where she, her sister Rana, and nine children were given sanctuary after her father's government collapsed. (Hala and her mother are thought to be in exile elsewhere). Upon Raghad's arrival in Jordan, she blamed aides for her father's downfall, telling Al Arabiya news, "He was betrayed by the closest and most trusted.... They betrayed not just Saddam, but Iraq. History will condemn them."

Al Arabiya news reports that in 2009, a 480-page Arabic language book, "Saddam Hussein from the American Cell: What Really Happened," published by a lawyer on Saddam Hussein's defense team, was based on interviews with Hussein while he was being tried and awaiting punishment. It includes letters and poems by the former Iraqi leader. Raghad had opposed the book and some of its claims.

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Photo: Saddam Hussein with his first wife and family in an undated photo. Raghad is standing, in blue. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Salon's charges of CIA ties to the Paris Review? Read skeptically

In 1953, three American writers living in Paris — George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Howard L. Humes — founded a literary magazine, the Paris Review. Matthiessen, who won the 2008 National Book Award for fiction, has admitted that he worked for the CIA at the time — that's not news.

The Salon news is principally about the Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A cultural outpost during the Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was designed to win the hearts and minds of international players who might be tempted by the lure of communism. Among other things, it created and supported magazines in Europe and the former Axis powers of Germany and Japan. It was secretly funded by the CIA, a fact that came to light later, in a 1967 article in the New York Times.

Researching in the Paris Review archive at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, what Joel Whitney has found are ties between the Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Plimpton sought support for special projects from the organization, and the magazine syndicated its interviews with famous American authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, to the magazines the Congress for Cultural Freedom supported in other countries.

While the piece is interesting for the window it provides into the cultural aspects of the Cold War, that window seems to be installed askance. For example, Whitney writes:

As several of the Morgan letters, never reported on before, indicate, the CIA would augment the meager literary quarterly pay — and the ways to work together had already become multiply evident. The Review was to coordinate the hiring through “friends of the Congress.” The Paris Review’s candidates were Frederick Seidel, the New York poet, and Roger Klein.

The passage is not technically untrue — the CIA was a funder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the letters were describing an arrangement in which a new Paris Review editor would also hold a Congress for Cultural Freedom job in order to make ends meet. But since the relationship between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom wasn't known at the time, it might not be an entirely fair leap. The letters weren't about the CIA augmenting pay, they were about the Congress for Cultural Freedom providing a day job.

If this CIA connection is a stretch, this one is evidently clear: Whitney has found consistent and real evidence of a literary magazine struggling to support itself financially.

By the time he drops in a mention of George W. Bush's war in Iraq, the threads of the article have become unsupportably tenuous. (The connection is Daniel Bell, a man who was suggested, but apparently did not serve, as an interviewer of the above-mentioned Klein and Seidel; a few years later, Bell went on to co-found the conservative magazine the Public Interest).

While Whitney allows that the Paris Review writers may have been unaware of the connections between their magazine and the CIA, he writes, "a secret patronage system, paid for by the taxpayer with no public debate, appears to have existed." Before getting huffy about American tax dollars going to pay for distributing interviews with Nobel Prize-winning authors around the world with "no public debate," take a moment to consider the Pentagon's classified, undebated black budget, reported in 2008 to be $32 billion. Is cultural funding really so terrible?

It might be, if the magazine's independence of thought was threatened. Whitney implies that this is the case, noting that while the Paris Review sought the Congress for Cultural Freedom's support, other magazines, such as the Evergreen Review, aired criticisms of American policies. This is a concluding note, not particularly detailed — if it were, there might have been space to mention that the Evergreen Review published its interview with Che Guevara in 1968, a year after the connection between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA had been revealed in the N.Y. Times report, altering its role and its name. It's not clear when, exactly, the Paris Review stopped receiving funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The basics that Whitney lays out from his research are fascinating, but his conclusions — including asides like this that mention the CIA's most insidious activities, such as assassinations — overreach. Read, but read skeptically.

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Photo: George Plimpton (and friend) in 1977. Credit: Nancy Crampton

Sarajevo with tears: Another walk down Logavina Street

Twenty years ago, war raged across the former Yugoslavia, killing 100,000 people. The Bosnian war was the first in Europe in nearly half a century and, coming after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a shock to those who expected those events to yield a lasting peace. What they got instead was the horror of ethnic cleansing at a level not seen in Europe since World War II.

Sarajavo, a relatively modern European city, was the subject of the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, lasting from 1992 to 1995. The city that had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984 became a prison for more than 300,000 people who were trapped with little food, running water, electricity or heat. Residents were subjected to constant mortar attacks and sniper fire from Bosnian Serb gunners on the hills overlooking the historic city.

Barbara Demick, now perhaps best known for her groundbreaking book on North Korea, "Nothing to Envy," was a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer during the siege. She and photographer John Costello moved into Sarajevo and filed a series of dispatches from one six-block-long stretch of the city called Logavina Street. About 240 families -- Muslims, Christians, Serbs and Croats -- had lived easily together on this street unified by their common identity as Sarajevans until the war tore that apart.

Demick received the prestigious George Polk Award as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her reporting from Sarajevo. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. In 1996, her book, "Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood," was published and received excellent critical notice.

Last month, she and hundreds of other reporters who covered the war had a reunion in Sarajevo to mark the war's beginning in April 1992. A revised edition of "Logavina Street" was recently released with a new preface, final chapter and epilogue.

We talked to Demick, now the Beijing correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, about the process of revisiting, in her book and in person.

Jacket Copy: What was the original idea for your reporting from Logavina Street?

Barbara Demick: To allow readers to grasp the enormity of what was happening, I picked one street and followed the residents as they tried to cope under the siege. Logavina is a beautiful street with slender, white minarets over red rooftops, rising into the mountains from the old downtown. Near the foot of the street are Catholic and Orthodox churches and a synagogue. We followed a teenage girl whose parents had been decapitated by a mortar shell as they collected water, a volunteer policeman and his young sons, a doctor, a dentist, a general who happened to be an ethnic Serb. Although Bosnian Serb nationalists were responsible for the siege, Logavina still had quite a few Serb families who remained during the war and rejected ethnic extremism. The project was very innovative at the time. Although many others had covered the hardships of Sarajevo, we always wrote about the same people so that readers came to know them. It was a bit of a soap opera set in wartime.

Barbara Demick continues after the jump.

Carlos Fuentes, 83, has died

Renowned Spanish-language novelist Carlos Fuentes died Tuesday in Mexico City at age 83, authorities announced. Fuentes was a prolific, politically engaged writer, best known in the U.S. for books including “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” “Aura,” “Terra Nostra,” “The Good Conscience” and “The Old Gringo,” which was made into a film starring Gregory Peck. In an interview published Monday in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Fuentes said he had just completed a new novel, titled "Federico on His Balcony."

In that interview, Fuentes said, "My system of youth is to work a lot," and that he had a project pending. In 2006, after the death of his 29-year-old daughter, Fuentes told The Times, "It was very painful.... It puts a premium on your own soul. How do you go on living? How do you make people go on living within you? It nullifies you or sends you into work. Work saves you."

Born in Panama City in 1928 to Mexican parents, Fuentes lived in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, France, Mexico, England and the U.S., where he had taught at Brown, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. He was often spoken of in conjunction with other writers of his generation from Latin America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both of whom have won the Nobel Prize; although Fuentes received many prestigious awards, the Nobel eluded him.

"At home, Fuentes remained until the end outspoken on issues of the day," our World Now blog reports. "His most recent column — about the presidential election in France — was published Tuesday in the daily Reforma newspaper. Disdainful of many Mexican politicians, he tacked a note at the end taking aim at the tone of Mexico’s own presidential race, which he said sacrificed discussion of big issues for candidates’ petty attempts to knock each other down."

Between 1992 and 2011, Fuentes was interviewed five times by KCRW's Michael Silverblatt. The first four interviews were directly related to books. In the most recent interview, posted in two parts, the two discuss culture, politics and writing. All the interviews can be streamed online.

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Photo: Carlos Fuentes in 2008. Credit: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Thousands follow Russian writers in protest walk

Thousands took to the streets of Moscow on Sunday to follow a handful of writers taking a "stroll" as a literal protest against efforts to thwart public gatherings. The poet Dmitry Bykov, detective novelist Boris Akunin, children's book writer Eduard Uspensky, bestselling author Lyudmila Ulitskaya and eight others had come up with the idea just four days before.

The N.Y. Times reports:

No one knew quite what to expect on Sunday. But when the 12 writers left Pushkin Square at lunchtime, they were trailed by a crowd that swelled to an estimated 10,000 people, stopping traffic and filling boulevards for 1.2 miles. Many wore the white ribbons that are a symbol of opposition to Mr. Putin’s government. The police did not interfere, although the organizers had not received a permit to march.

“We see by the number of people that literature still has authority in our society because no one called these people — they came themselves,” said Lev Rubinstein, 65, a poet and one of the organizers. “We thought this would be a modest stroll of several literary colleagues, and this is what happened. You can see it yourself.”

“I don’t know how this will all end, but I can say that no one will forget it,” he said.

Recent protests in opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin, who was inaugurated again Monday, have been subject to increasing crackdowns from authorities. Hundreds have been arrested, some for doing nothing more than wearing a white ribbon, a signal of opposition to Putin's government.

The authors said they wanted to walk across Moscow “without being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions.” A pending measure in Parliament would impose fines of about $50,000 and 740 hours of compulsory labor on public protesters.

Sunday's walk began at a statue of writer Aleksandr Pushkin and ended across town at a statue of playwright Aleksandr Griboyedov. According to organizers, 10,000 joined in the stroll; police set the number of participants at 2,000.

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Photo: Supporters of the writers' walk in Moscow. Credit: Sergey Ponomarev / Associated Press

LéaLA celebrates Spanish-language books this weekend

Here’s a trick question (at least for non-Spanish speakers): What’s North America’s most book-loving city? New York? Los Angeles? Toronto?

A good case could be made for awarding the bibliophiles’ prize to Guadalajara, a metropolis that many U.S. tourists associate only with mariachis and tequila.

The beautiful baroque-colonial city, Mexico’s second-largest, annually hosts what is reputed to be the largest book fair in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. Formally known as La Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, or FIL, the yearly convocation draws tens of thousands of visitors as well as hundreds of the world’s preeminent Spanish-language authors, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires.

This weekend, Angelenos will be flocking to the 2nd annual edition of  LéaLA, Feria del Libro en Español de Los Ángeles, a kind of scaled-down version of Guadalajara’s massive book festival, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Backed by the University of Guadalajara, and free and open to public, LéaLA aims to promote Spanish-language and Spanish-translated literature through book publishers’ sales-displays and readings and talks by distinguished authors.

Simultaneously, the festival is intended to bolster a growing cultural connection between Southern California’s enormous Mexican American/Latino population and Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco, the ancestral home of more L.A. Latinos than any other Mexican state.

Finally, LéaLA attempts to help make amends for a bizarre L.A. cultural phenomenon: the city’s near-absence of Spanish-language bookstores. Apart from public libraries, university bookstores (which stock course-related titles) and a handful of small shops like Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar and the Libros Schmibros bookstore/lending library in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles -- with the United States’ largest Spanish-speaking population -- has virtually no place to find and buy Spanish-language books.

In only its second year, LéaLA already has become one of the largest Spanish-language book-related events in the United States. Last year it drew 36,000 people to its inaugural edition. This year, with 200 individual exhibition stalls, up from 84 last year, and four times as much total floor space, festival organizers expect an even larger turnout.

Among the boldface names at this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, are the best-selling Mexican-Spanish writer and novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II, crime writer James Ellroy, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and Mexican political analyst and intellectual Enrique Krauze.

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The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It's hypnotic.

That's partly because it's a simple, elegant interface. But it's also because it shows what books other people are purchasing, and that's inherently interesting to people who like books. As novelist Antoine Wilson wrote on Twitter, the titles reveal "A never-ending catalogue of desire, desperation, and hope." It's true, there are a lot of self-help books in the mix.

The Book Depository is England's largest online bookseller. It offers mostly English-language books and ships them, free of charge, to more than 100 countries around the globe. The list includes Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands — and the U.S.

In July 2011, Amazon announced its acquisition of the Book Depository. Booksellers and publishers in the U.K. protested that the purchase would mean a de facto monopoly in online bookselling, but the deal was officially given the go-ahead in October, in part because the Book Depository's international (map-demonstrated) growth.

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Tehran Book Fair versus the literature of Iran's streets

Readers walking into the Tehran Book Fair will not find "Memories of My Melancholy Whores";  the Gabriel Garcia Marquez book has long been banned. Yet if they can find a street stall, called nayab foreshi (Farsi for "forbidden items"), that book, and others, will be for sale.

The 10-day Tehran Book Fair, which attracts an average of 550,000 visitors per day,  calls itself "the most important publishing event in Asia and the Middle East." It features publishers from the Islamic world, which are, like those in the West, struggling. Their troubles include the trafficking in pirated, banned books, reports our blog World Now.

[O]n Revolution Avenue, street vendors sell Farsi translations of “The Right to Heresy,” a dense text about religious reformation that became popular with reformists after defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi suggested it. The book, once sold for less than $2, has nearly tripled in price after being banned.

Those prices have made sellers willing to take the risk of hawking banned books instead of approved titles. Several booksellers told The Times they had been locked up for anywhere from six months to two years, yet went on selling once they were freed.

“I can show you hundred titles of the books Xeroxed or on CDs sold in massive numbers right here in the sidewalks opposite Tehran University,” lamented Majid Taleghini, a publisher in Tehran. “We publishers are bankrupt and book smugglers are making a fortune. So what is the use of censorship?”

Frustrated writers say getting books past the government gantlet can take years, making it hard to eke out a living, even as the black market flourishes. Books must be submitted to the Cultural and Islamic Guidance Ministry, which picks out any offensive words, phrases or even whole paragraphs and insists on changes before texts can be printed.

The 25th annual Tehran Book Fair, which takes place at the Grand Mosque Mosalla, began today and continues through May 12.

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Photo: Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 2006. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Germany prepares to publish Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' after 70 years

Adolf Hitler's malevolent manifesto, "Mein Kampf," will be published in Germany again in 2015, 70 years after it last appeared there in print.

After World War II, publication of "Mein Kampf" ceased. The German state of Bavaria, which owns the copyright, had kept the book from returning, anew, to shelves. Yet it has decided to bring it back one last time before the copyright expires at the end of 2015.

That's because it hopes one last "unattractive" edition, with additional commentary, will put Hitler's writing in perspective. The Independent reports:

We want to make clear what nonsense it contains and what a worldwide catastrophe this dangerous body of thought led to," said Markus Söder, the Bavarian finance minister. He said the state's version would contain additional information which would debunk and "demystify" the manifesto.

Bavaria said it would also publish a school version, an English language edition, an e-book and an audio book.

The decision follows a change of heart by Germany's Central Council of Jews. Stephan Kramer, its general secretary, recently backed the idea of publishing a scholarly edition of Mein Kampf, explaining its role in encouraging Nazism.

The Internet was a reason behind his changed stance: "It is all the more important that young people should see the critical version when they click on to Mein Kampf on the Web," he said.

Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf," which means "My Struggle," while in jail in 1924 after attempting to stage a coup. The BBC describes it as "part biography, part political and racist rant."

A number of English-language translations of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" are available through major retailers such as Amazon.com.

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Photo: Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" shown at a news conference announcing the upcoming publication. Credit: Lennart Preiss / Associated Press