Mario Vargas Llosa

Anna Kushner

Ruben Gallo

Conversation at Princeton

An anthology of writings, combining literary essays and urban reportage, by various authors, depicts life in Mexico City, describing places and elements old and new, the Metro, monuments, eating and drinking, urban renewal and its disasters, the earthquake, maids, corruption and bureaucracy, the city at its margins, and more.

The Mexico City Reader

Mexico City is one of Latin America’s cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of "Cronicas"—short, hybrid texts that are part literary essay, part urban reportage—about life in the capital. This is not the "City of Palaces" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic urban space of the1980s and 1990s—the city of garbage mafias, necrophiliac artists, and kitschy millionaires. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader will be constantly surprised by the visions encountered in this mosaic of writings—a textual space brimming with life and crowded with flâneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The essays included in this anthology were written by a panoply of writers, from well-known authors like Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibagüengoitia to younger figures like Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Juieta García González, all of whom are experienced practitioners of the city. The texts collected in this anthology are among the most striking examples of this concomitant "theory and practice" of Mexico City, that most delirious of megalopolises. “[An] exciting literary journey . . .”—Carolyn Malloy, Multicultural Review

Depuis qu’il a découvert que Marcel Proust avait été l’intime de plusieurs figures latino-américaines installées à Paris au tournant du XXe siècle, une intuition guide le travail de Rubén Gallo, universitaire mexicain reconnu : ces amitiés ont laissé des traces dans la vie de l’auteur de La Recherche et cette ouverture à un monde lointain, exotique, a façonné son imaginaire.De cette assertion audacieuse, iconoclaste, Gallo tire un livre savoureux en forme d’enquête culturelle et littéraire. À travers les portraits des Latino-Américains les plus proches de Proust, son amant, le Vénézuélien Reynaldo Hahn ; le fantasque secrétaire argentin du comte de Montesquiou, modèle de Charlus, Gabriel de Yturri ; le poète cubain José Maria de Heredia ; et le sulfureux critique littéraire mexicain Ramón Fernández, Gallo s’attache à établir la présence forte de l’Amérique latine dans la vie de Proust et dans la construction de son œuvre. Loin du dandy parisien, on y découvre un Proust plus spontané, plus tropical.En tentant de démêler les liens de ces deux mondes, leurs apports réciproques, Gallo livre aussi un beau texte sur l’altérité en art, et une réflexion puissante sur le rapport ambigu de la France, à l’époque phare culturel incontestable, à ces étrangers, si brillants soient-ils.Rubén Gallo, docteur en littérature comparée et responsable du programme de Latin American studies à l’université de Princeton, est un universitaire et essayiste mexicain, spécialiste de Proust et de la psychanalyse. Il a été repéré en France suite à la publication, en 2013, de son ouvrage Freud au Mexique aux éditions Campagne première. Proust Latino est son premier essai à paraître aux éditions Buchet-Chastel.

Proust latino

A secret history of Mexican modernity told through five artifacts—cameras, typewriters, radio, cement, stadiums—and the radical transformation of art and literature they brought about in the 1920s and 1930s. In Mexican Modernity, Rubén Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artifacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanization of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication; cement architecture and its celebration of functional internationalism; and the stadium and its deployment as a mass medium for political spectacle. Gallo traces the ways artists and writers, armed with these artifacts, revolutionized representation by breaking with the traditional modes of production that had dominated Mexican cultural practices: Tina Modotti rose against the conventions of "artistic" photography by promoting a radically modern photographic aesthetics; typewriting authors rejected the literary precepts of modernismo to celebrate the stridencies of mechanical writing; and young architects abandoned older building materials for the symbolic strength of reinforced concrete. Gallo uncovers a secret history of Mexican modernity that includes a number of fascinating episodes: the pictorialist backlash against Modotti and Edward Weston; the postcolonial Remingtont typewriter; Mexican radio in the North Pole; the campaign to aestheticize cement through journals and artistic competitions; and the protofascist political spectacles held at Mexico City's National Stadium in the 1920s.

Ruben Gallo

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