|
If I were to list the movies of my life that made an impact, they would include The Wizard of Oz (for it touched off my imagination), Ron Howard's Parenthood (my first date with my first real girlfriend), and Phenomenon (the first movie I saw with my future wife). For Beltran Soler, the main character in Alberto Fuguet's wonderfully inventive novel THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE, they would include The Sound of Music, Dumbo and The Poseidon Adventure.
This novel is a memoir of sorts --- the biography of Beltran, a seismologist on his way to a conference in Tokyo. He pens his memoirs holed up in Los Angeles by naming the movies that influenced him at critical moments in his life. There's Bullitt, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Krakatoa, East of Java. Each movie highlights a particular aspect of Beltran's life, whether it's the relationship he has with his father, his burgeoning interest in seismology, his love life, his mother, or Chile and the social ramifications of living there and in the United States. It's a highly inventive way of creating a fictional memoir.
Fuguet, a central figure in a loose group of young Latin American writers who identify themselves in opposition to magical realism, is a fun writer to read. When writing about movies, he explores the fact that South America (and the world, for that matter) is inundated, drowning in the culture of America. Some, of course, would argue that America has no culture in and of itself; it is just a cobbling together of all the cultures of the people who live here. Movies though have a way of transcending all of this. They can be watched by Cubans and Swiss alike, and both parties can take whatever they want from them.
Some readers may not like the novel's structure (the chapter headings are movie titles and each chapter is very short). This is, however, what I like about Fuguet's book. Memories don't come to us in long flowing rivers. They don't begin at age 5 and continue on to the present day chronologically. They come to us in brief snippets and from different times. Memoirs, fictional or otherwise, are better for it if they refuse the standard conventions of A to B to C. It rings more true if it's a hodgepodge of thoughts, images and memories. Fuguet has figured that out, and THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE will certainly have readers thinking about the movies of their lives.
--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
