The Movies of My Life

This is another of Alberto Fuguet's intense and incisive works of fiction. He breaks with the myth of the "good Chilean exile" by having his protagonist closely relate to Pinochet supporters. His criticism is subtle and therefore more effective. His outsider's perspective on both Chile and the U.S. offers very unexpected insights on both countries and cultures. As much as I can rave about the book I must complain about what amounts to the worst edition I have ever seen coming from an American publishing house - and this is Harper Collins! I was exited about the Rayo concept - books written by Hispanic authors appearing both in English and Spanish versions. Naturally, I was looking forward to reading my first of these. However, the Spanish edition is so bad it has probably a typo per page. It is a shame that Rayo was unable to hire Spanish speaking editors of quality. As if they did not exist. Makes me wonder if Latino editors get the same income as their English language counterparts.

A lot of these reviews read like people are trying to write for magazines or in newspapers. It's not my thing to write like that. When I got this book, I was not too excited. Sure, I read a lot of things. What fun would it be to read a book by someone who styles themselves as NOT writing like someone (e.g. Magical Realists) that I don't like. Having read this book very quickly and cover-to-cover, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it comes together, and how good of a read it was. Fuguet has a great style; the plot continuously moves; and (most) of the characters are well drawn and appear to have bordering on human emotion. He writes to make readers care about his people. It works.This is a great book; I'm sure it would be an even better book if one new something about either Latin American authors or the movies that he writes about (one of the premises of the story is that it stems from a list of "the Movies of his Life" that the protagonist is writing to impress some girl....) Even without that sort of background, I was surprised with how much I liked this book, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a good read.

Beltran Soler, a seismologist from Chile, deconstructs his life and the struggles he went through with his family in the films he watched as a child. He describes the painful things his family endured in L.A., and how the aforementioned past played part to his obsession with earthquakes. Alberto Fuguet has written a wonderful and lyrical account of a South American family. I've learned many things about Chile -- things I hadn't known about before. It is a wonderful country with an interesting history. Fuguet is known for his involvement with a literary movement called McOndo, a movement that announces the end of magical realism. He is a true literary voice and I look forward to reading his other projects.

Alberto Fuguet, I have found in a few research excursions, did something new with Latin American literature. In 1996 he edited a collection of short stories called "McOndo," a book containing stories written by Latin American authors under the age of thirty-five. This may not sound all that impressive, but what Fuguet did was deliver a broadside to magical realism, a literary style that has dominated Latin American literary circles for decades. Fuguet's novel, "The Movies of My Life," is a logical extension of his belief that a novel about South America (in his case, Chile) should tell a story about how people move, work, and think in real life situations. What I know about this type of literature from the Southern Hemisphere could fit on the head of a pin. I have never read Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or any of those other guys who are so well known. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I would vastly prefer spending my time with this type of realistic prose. This book is not merely literary realism; it is so realistic that I couldn't convince myself I wasn't reading a non-fiction biography. I actually looked up Yul Brynner on a website to check and see if he had really married one of the minor characters in the book! Some critics in South America apparently criticized Fuguet and others for internalizing American pop culture or some such nonsense, and on the surface that may look to be the case. Trust me when I say that there is much, much more to this book than such a trite analysis. "This is one of the drawbacks to being a seismologist: I always look deeper, I search for the cracks, I scan for flaws and resistances." So begins the story of Beltran Soler, a Chilean earthquake specialist born in Chile but who lived in California for a few years before returning to his country of origin at the age of ten. His emotional state as an adult appears to be about as stable as one of the fault lines he examines as part of his job. While taking a trip to a conference in Japan, he learns from his sister that his grandfather died in an earthquake in El Salvador. With this knowledge already eating him up inside, he meets a woman on a plane who tells him about someone who wrote a book about the greatest movies of their life. Suddenly inspired to replicate this feat, Soler stays over in California for a few days and furiously types his own list of influential films in an e-mail to this anonymous woman. What follows is an often painful excursion through the trials and tribulations of a young boy caught between two mutually exclusive worlds. "The Movies of My Life" is fictional, although it is important to note that Fuguet himself lived in California as a youth just as the Beltran character did.Each movie in the list touches off an intimate memory of some aspect of Beltran Soler's life. The first twenty-five films explore his early life as a Chilean immigrant in Southern California, with a movie like "Woodstock" bringing to the surface a recoll

Vengo leyendo a Fuguet desde la epoca en que escribia como Enrique Alekan, y aunque se podria decir que el autor a veces peca de autoreferente (si, Matias Vicuna tambien aparece aqui), en este libro se aprecia una forma de escribir y de estructurar la novela mucho mas depurada. El paralelo entre la sismografia y los "terremotos personales" de cada uno, la encontre excelente. Creo que es lo mejor que ha escrito, aunque con esto no quiero menos preciar sus otros libros: Tinta Roja y Mala Onda son relatos con merito propio.Desde mi punto de vista, creo que Fuguet logra lo que Matias Vicuna (de nuevo) describia despues de leer The Catcher in The Rye. Una identficacion tal con el personaje que a uno le gustaria sentarse a conversar con el, y saber que fue de su vida, que que paso despues del punto final... Lo recomiendo sobre todos a aquellos que han criticado a Fuguet por la crudeza de algunos relatos, y lo decadente de alguno de sus personajes. Excelente lectura.