January 11, 2023
Félix Calvino's Fiction
Young Love & Other Stories I Cass Moriarty @cassmoriartyauthor
So Much Smoke I Short Film I Elli Iliades
Coming in 2023
My story So Much Smoke has been adapted to a film written and directed by Elli Iliades.
Young Love & Other Stories I StylusLit I Alison Clifton
Young Love and Other Stories
By
Félix Calvino
Arcadia,
2021
Reviewed
by Alison Clifton, StylusLit
In his
masterful new short fiction collection, Young Love and Other Stories,
Félix Calvino explores the shadows, shades, and occasionally shady dealings of
the people who inhabit a village in the Carballo area of Galicia, Spain. The
interplay between light and shade, silhouettes, shadows, and mirrors, is
central to this collection. These stories of village life are set in a liminal
time: post-war but pre-electricity. At the one-room school, the lone teacher
makes annual promises that the shrinking village will be connected to the grid
the following year, while a dwindling group of ageing men gather after the
winter rains each spring to fix the unsealed roads.
This may
seem like a simple existence. Yet the lives of shepherds, trout fishers,
cowherds, basket-weavers, carpenters, healers, and publicans are complex and
multifaceted. Though a character may glimpse the bucolic idyll, threats of
starvation, social exclusion, and damnation loom over the landscape, casting
shadows of potential ruin. To live in a village is to know everyone and be
known by everyone. To have one more cow than a neighbour is to rank above them
in the social order, but also to teeter precariously close to peril. Fields can
flood, livestock can sicken and die, crops can be ravaged by drought. To be
different is to be a pariah, suspect, scapegoat. Yet all is not as stifling as
it may seem.
Calvino
enters into a dialogue with the giants of European art – visual, sculptural,
poetic, prose, and dramatic – who juxtapose light and dark in an eternal,
futile battle. In the Christian universe, the Devil must remain subordinate to
the omnipotent God who created him. Good must ultimately triumph. Yet, this
dichotomy provides the tension in so much of European art and literature.
Italian artists like Caravaggio used tenebrismo in
their paintings. A harsh, dramatic light isolated and accentuated heroic
figures, throwing the spotlight on the struggle between good and evil, Heaven
and Hell, God and Satan. Calvino witnesses the implications and repercussions
of this simplified, fabricated cosmos of chiaroscuro. Yes,
God is Light, but so too was Lucifer the Angel of Light before his fall.
Calvino recognises this kinship and rejects reductive binary oppositions.
Instead, his characters inhabit a world of subtle shades and hues: the greys
brighten to white as often as they darken to black.
Calvino’s
collection opens with “Sunday Lunch” (1-27): a meditative tale of loss and
death that introduces two protagonists who re-emerge in later stories the way
shoots sprout from the soil in spring. When the last female inhabitant of the
village, Avelina, dies, Amadeo and Manuel, the two surviving men, must bury her
in the proper manner. Things do not go as planned. The pair must make do and
mend as they have all their lives. Because it would take four men to shoulder a
casket, Amadeo and Manuel improvise. Thus, “the spectral silence of the
village” is disrupted by “the screeching of the rusty old wheelbarrow” that
will cart the body of their friend to her grave (25).
Meanwhile,
Mateo the dog watches on, a constant companion whose loyalty, dogged persistence,
and bathetic banality mirror the life of his owner, Manuel. Walking alone
through the ghost village at dusk, Manuel lowers his eyes, and the reader is
granted a glimpse into his thoughts: “This was the hour of neither day nor
night, when shadows, malformed, real, or imagined, appeared from nowhere,
silently. Shadows and ghosts were like twin brothers, he thought” (5). Manuel’s
matter-of-fact musings are presented without pomp or flourish. In this twilight
realm, almost anything is possible, and almost everything thought relegated to
the past is capable of re-emergence, regeneration, regrowth, reappearance…
perhaps even resurrection.
Calvino’s
deft touch with free indirect discourse is further evident in the delightful
“Young Love” (28-71). This story alternates between two focalisers – a youthful
Manuel and the love of his life, Amelia, who is lost to him under tragic
circumstances. The word “Carballo” not only refers to the region where the
village is located, but also the oak in the Galician language. Fittingly, one
of Manuel’s “favourite pastimes” is to lie on his back “under the enormous oak
trees” where he dreams of describing to his beloved Amelia the numinous
luminosity of “the sun’s rays filtered through the green leaves” (38). In such
moments, the young man, both tortured and thrilled by his nascent feelings for
his paramour, is dappled with light and shade under the protective, penumbral
oak tree.
Calvino’s
stories are punctuated with such quietly clever moments. His prose is as
unassuming and unhurried as the characters he depicts, yet also as deep,
generous, and abundant as the rivers and streams that flow through this rural
region of Spain.
Again, at
key moments in this story, Calvino focuses his lens on a character’s thoughts
to evocative effect. Manuel heads to a workshop where the young men and boys
gather to discuss the ever-mysterious matters of the flesh, the heart, and the
opposite sex. As he walks, he observes the time of day told through the waning
sunlight: “The afternoon shadows were lengthening, he noted. Shadows had always
intrigued him. They were part of his first recollections” (49). Light and
shadow are mutually dependent Calvino seems to suggest. We need both. We cannot
have one without the other.
Thus, in
“Abel’s Journey” (79-133), the reader learns that the protagonist is rapidly
going blind, his vision obscured by shadows. Abel keeps a gallery of mental
images to retain memories of places lost in the shadows of time. An orphan
passed from house to house, often treated less as servant than slave, Abel is a
figure of the shadows. The children at one house – no different in age to him
but accorded the status of family members rather than an inconvenient mouth to
feed – torment him before a flickering fire. They fill his shoes with “glowing
embers and ash” (85). Fire should provide light and warmth and the means to
cook nourishing food, but it is used to belittle the servant boy and destroy
his meagre possessions.
By
contrast, shadows provide comfort. There, Abel can rest in anonymity and be
certain of the passage of time: “he could always tell the hour by the shadows
shortening in the morning and lengthening in the afternoon on familiar trees or
a wall” (95). However, as Abel is uprooted so often, he is constantly displaced,
rendering everything unfamiliar once more.
Finally,
Abel settles into a family that cares for him and treats him like a son. He has
found a potential wife, Pilar, whose father is dead and whose mother’s health
is failing, meaning that she offers a modest house and land for them to fix and
farm together. However, just as his future appears bright, Abel faces losing
his sight entirely. The doctor despairs. Christina, Abel’s fearful protector
and the matriarch of the household he serves, turns her gaze inwards. She is
torn between risking the wrath of God by taking her ward to a healer in a
nearby village – a woman denounced as Satanic by the Church – and the prospect
of having to support a blind man for the rest of his life. Her husband’s land
can barely sustain their family. She prays. She rues her misfortune. She
considers accepting her fate as ordained by God. Yet, a faint hope glimmers. It
is offered by the healer.
There are
signs that all will be well. The village of Pereiras, where the healer lives,
nestles between hillsides dotted with “ancient oak trees” (126). Again, the
oak, the mightiest of trees according to the medieval Christian concept of the
Great Chain of Being, towers over the protagonists of these pages. The oak was
here long before the roots of Christianity took hold, and a magical, mystical,
pagan presence haunts this region. A spirit of the land predates Christianity,
and Abel is attuned to it.
This
communion is conveyed through the revelation that Pilar loves the “quiet
stability” that Abel brings to her life and his suggestions for “the planting
of trees” on her family’s property (109). In this way, Abel is allied with the
strong, silent oaks that cast their shade over the village, hills, and
waterways of Carballo. He is also a man of the shadows, not bothered by the
villagers’ superstition that they are “the hiding place of ghosts” (132).
Here is
subtle complexity. While Abel finds it strange that “some people were afraid of
shadows,” he also recognises that “shadows had been a source of hope as well as
frustration” for him (132). Shadows are “handy to measure the height of the
church’s bell tower, or a tree,” and they were “inexplicable companions in his
childhood” (132): friendly, if unfathomable. However, Abel also realises of the
shadows that “for many years, he had believed they were hiding the face of his
mother” (132). Orphaned, abandoned, unclaimed by his unknown father and
unwanted by his unwed mother, Abel is a product of shady circumstances. So,
too, is Marcia: the healer who protects his remaining vision. She lives in the
shadows of oppression and persecution. It is unsurprising, then, that her face
becomes obscured by time once Abel’s future is secured: “All his efforts to
install Marcia’s image in his scene gallery had failed” (133).
By contrast, Calvino’s collection is
a triumph. While Calvino eschews binary oppositions and superlatives in his
writing, his readers may find themselves resorting to almost hyperbolic
descriptions of his work. Calvino delivers a superb collection of fiction that
builds upon his earlier work even as it digs deeper into the past and roams
further from his adopted country of Australia. At once profound, comic, and
tragic, Young Love and Other Stories is a
stunningly-rendered kaleidoscope of rare beauty. Not all is monochrome. Warm
and radiant with light. Dark as though diving deep into the hearts and minds of
the people of Carballo. Calvino’s work relies on contrast and contradiction.
That is its power.
Félix Calvino’s Fiction I Luke Stegemann @lukestegemann
These are a delight - four slim
volumes of gentle and austere fictions from Galician-Australian author Félix
Calvino. Wonderful evocations of post-war rural Galicia, and the difficult,
often strange, often comic migrant experience in Australia.
Benengeli 2022 I I Instituto Cervantes Sydney
June 6, 2022
Benengeli in the 5 continents. Realism: Javier Moreno, Andrew Pippos and Felix Calvino
https://cultura.cervantes.es/sidney/en/benengeli-in-the-5-continents.-realism%3A-javier-moreno/152441
Instituto Cervantes I Benengeli 2022
May 25, 2022
BENENGELI 2022 THE LARGEST SPANISH-LANGUAGE LITERATURE FEST IN THE WORLD
Fri Jun 10 2022 at 06:00
pm Instituto Cervantes, 31 W Ohio St, Chicago, IL 60654, EE. UU., Chicago,
United States
INSTITUTO CERVANTES CHICAGO
PRESENTS THE CLOSING ROUND TABLE OF THIS WORLDWIDE EVENT. A DIALOGUE BETWEEN
THE WRITERS MIGUEL GOMES AND FREDERICK DE ARMAS MODERATED BY ROCÍO FERREIRA
Instituto Cervantes in Chicago
is proud to announce that it will be part of the worldwide literary festival
Benengeli 2022 which will take place from 6th to the 10th of June in the five
continents with more than 40 Spanish English and French writers offering their
reflections on the theme of realism.
The Instituto Cervantes in Spain as part of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working on a worldwide literary festival that promotes Spanish literature Benengeli 2022 the International Week of Spanish Literature. Benengeli 2022 will be jointly hosted at the centres of Instituto Cervantes in Chicago (North America) Toulouse (Europe) Casablanca (Africa) New Delhi (Asia) and Sydney (Australia). The central theme of Benengeli 2022 is realism.
Benengeli 2022 closing event at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago on June 10th at 6 pm with the Miguel Gomes conversing with Frederick de Armas about narrative fictions in the 21st century and the weight that realistic aesthetics. Rocío Ferreira will act as moderator of this remarkable event.
Miguel Gomes is a storyteller born in Caracas in 1964. He studied at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and at the Central University of Venezuela. He later obtained a doctorate at Stony Brook University in New York. Since 1989 he has lived in the United States where he works as a graduate professor at the University of Connecticut. Among his titles are the novels Llévame esta noche Retrato de un caballero and Ante el jurado; books of short stories La cueva de Altamira Un fantasma portugués and Julieta en su castillo; and volumes of criticism and essays El pozo de las palabras Los géneros literarios en Hispanoamérica and La realidad y el valor estético: configuraciones del poder en el ensayo hispanoamericano.
https://languages.uconn.edu/person/miguel-gomes/
Frederick de Armas received
his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina. He has
published novels El abra de Yamurí and Sinfonía Salvaje as well as several
critical essays including “El retorno de Astrea: Astrología mito e imperio en
Calderón” “La astrología en el teatro clásico europeo” and “Cervantes'
Architectures: The Danger Outside.” He has served as president of the Cervantes
Society of America and the International Association Siglo de Oro (AISO). He
currently holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at the University of Chicago.
https://rll.uchicago.edu/frederick-de-armas
Rocío Ferreira
https://las.depaul.edu/academics/modern-languages/faculty/spanish/Pages/rocio-ferreira.aspx
Rocío Ferreira is Associate
Professor of Latin American literature culture and cinema and Chair of the
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She
earned a doctorate in Latin American literature and in Women’s Gender and
Sexualities Studies from the University of California Berkeley. She specializes
in nineteenth-century and contemporary literary and visual culture written by
women. Her areas of research are foundational narratives and journalism of the
19th century war literature (XIX-XXI) and contemporary issues related to the
configurations of memory in literature culture and cinema. She has participated
in numerous international congresses has published critical articles in
specialized books and scholarly journals and critical editions in addition to
her monograph De las Veladas literarias a la Cocina ecléctica: mujeres cultura
y nación en el Perú decimonónico. She is currently writing a new book on women
writing on the Peruvian internal armed conflict entitled Las mujeres disparan:
Imágenes y poéticas de la violencia política (1980-2000) en la cultura
literaria y visual peruana contemporánea.
Voices of great aesthetic power such as those of Piedad Bonnet (Colombia) Katya Adaui (Peru) Magela Baudoin (Bolivia) Carlos Cortés Zúñiga (Costa Rica); Selva Almada (Argentina) Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Venezuela) Evelio Rosero (Colombia) Fernanda Trías (Uruguay) Vicente Luis Mora (Spain) Mayra Santos Febres (Puerto Rico) Carlos Franz (Chile) Ronaldo Menéndez (Cuba) Pedro Crenes (Panama) Antonio José Ponte (Cuba) Santiago Gil (Spain) and Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador) will present the elements that constitute the axis of their work and the relationship of love distance or rejection that each one of them experiences in front of the realistic discourse that seems to define a good part of the universal narrative of this moment of the 21st century.
Outstanding narrators such as
Valeria Correa Fiz (Argentina) David Toscana (Mexico) and Spaniards Juana
Salabert Daniel Gascón Bárbara Mingo Costales and José Ovejero will talk about
their most recent books; titles that constitute a living landscape on the
fictional recreation that marks current times.
Impossible to forget the
presence of the Lima writer Fernando Iwasaki who will offer small spoken
portraits on the play with reality that authors belonging to various traditions
and territories and who have adopted or maintained Spanish as their artistic
language make. We will thus get to know the work of Siu Kam Wen Fabio Morabito
Ioana Gruia Kalman Barsy and Mónika Zgustova.
As the dialogue between diverse literary
traditions is one of the main attempts of Benengeli 2022 the activities will
also include the presence of writers such as Lydie Salvayre (France); Ken Bugul
(Senegal) Andrew Pippos (Australia) Félix Calviño (Spain/Australia) and Geetanjali
Shree (India).
Benengeli 2022 an initiative
of the Cervantes Institute whose curator is writer Nicolas Melini has the
support of institutions and cultural entities from Buenos Aires Lima La Paz
Bogota Caracas San Jose de Costa Rica San Juan de Puerto Rico Panama City Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria Santa Cruz de La Palma Seville and Madrid.
Between June 6 and 10 in
addition to the on-site activities in each of the five cities of Benengeli 2022
the virtual programming of this festival will be available through the
Instituto Cervantes in in Sydney New Delhi Toulouse Dakar and Chicago You Tube
channels the Podcast channel of the Cervantes Institute and through the
following link: https://cvc.cervantes.es/benengeli22/. As mentioned at the
beginning of this information the content will be available not only in Spanish
but also in dubbed or subtitled versions in English.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/benengeli-2022-the-largest-spanish-language-literature-fest-in-the-world-tickets-348204558207?aff=ebdssbdestsearch