Writing
Fuguet's work is characterized by a United States/Chilean hybridity, with constant cross-references to the popular cultures of the two nations. In 1996 he co-edited (with Sergio Gómez) the anthology McOndo, whose title combined McDonalds with Macondo, the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez. McOndo represented popular culture while largely rejecting the use of magical realism in contemporary Latin American fiction.
Fuguet's other books are the short story collections Sobredosis and Cortos; the novels Mala onda, Por favor, rebobinar, Tinta roja and Las películas de mi vida; and the non-fiction collection Primera parte. Mala onda, which narrates a week in the life of a Santiago teenager in 1980, has received wide acclaim. Tinta roja has been made into a film. Las películas de mi vida is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Chilean seismologist who grew up in California and later returned to Chile. Its protagonist recounts his life with references to movies he has watched. Some of Fuguet's work, including Mala onda and Las películas de mi vida, has been translated into English and published in the United States.
2007 saw the release of Road Story, a graphic novel illustrated by Gonzalo Martínez based on one of the stories in Cortos. Under the Alfaguara imprint, the book is claimed by Fuguet and by his sometime-collaborator Francisco Ortega to be the first Chilean graphic novel issued by a major publisher.
Read more about this topic: Alberto Fuguet
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes—learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it’s time to start writing again—that I’m not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.”
—Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.”
—Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618)