Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles
Auteur de Blue Label / Etiqueta Azul (Spanish Edition)
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Photography of Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles by Inírida Gómez-Castro
Œuvres de Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Sánchez Rugeles, Eduardo
- Autres noms
- Sanz, Lautaro
- Date de naissance
- 1967-12-16
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Venezuela
- Lieu de naissance
- Caracas, Venezuela
- Lieux de résidence
- Madrid, Spain
- Études
- Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (BA - Literature, MA - Philosophy, MA - Latin American Studies, MA - Literary Studies)
- Prix et distinctions
- Premio de la Crítica a la Novela (Venezuela 2012, Venezuela 2010)
- Courte biographie
- Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles was born in Caracas on December 16, 1977. He has worked as writer, screenwriter and teacher. He is a member of the Venezuelan Diaspora, a generation of Venezuelan writers and intellectuals who in the last two decades have left the country as a consequence of the political and economic turmoil under the so-called Bolivarian Revolution currently ruling the country. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Andrés Bello Catholic University (2003), a BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (2005), a MA in Latin American Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid (2009) and MA in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid (2010). For many years he contributed to ReLectura a well known Venezuelan Blog. He has been a resident of Madrid, Spain, since 2007.
Membres
Critiques
Liubliana par Eduardo J. Sánchez Rugeles
Liubliana es el nombre de un ciudad, pero también el recuerdo de una pasión; el escondite secreto en el que confían los desesperados; el único reducto esperanzador. Liubliana es todo eso y mucho más. Como el libro que tiene el lector en sus manos: sinergia de la vida, amalgama de lo humano. Este gran relato es un aeropuerto desbordado de historias cruzadas y saturado de imágenes imborrables, una montaña rusa de emociones, un caleidoscopio de vivencias pasadas. Liubliana es una trepidante historia de amor fou en varios tiempos y lugares. Hay en ella la melancolía y la nostalgia propias de toda la historia de crecimiento. Pero también hay humor e ironía a raudales. Y tragedia. Y thriller. Y el retrato de una época plagada de seres que han sido arrancados de su entorno de manera abrupta y que no han sabido manejar ese destierro. Esta gran novela coral es un compendio narrativo que le reportará a este escritor venezolano la consagración definitiva. .… (plus d'informations)
Los estrechos lazos que unen a los personajes de esta novela parecen comenzar a romperse cuando la noticia de una mujer muerta da inicio a esta historia. Así empieza a escucharse la voz de Alain Barral, el protagonista, quien a través de sus recuerdos intenta resolver un crimen que ocurrió en su adolescencia, etapa que el autor utiliza como contexto para presentarnos a unos jóvenes que viven deprisa y al límite, y que se excusan en el sexo, las drogas, los amores iniciáticos y los errores que se arrastran de por vida.… (plus d'informations)
Real Rating: 4.25* of five, rounded up for the pleasures of reading this translation
The Publisher Says: A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.
In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media.
Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando's students suffer from what they begin to call "the Lisbon syndrome," an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets.
The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles's bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review?: The Lisbon Syndrome, in this novel, is defined as "...knowing that the things we love are finite, knowing that there is no tomorrow, knowing that we won’t have enough time to do anything worthwhile, that we will disappear without leaving any kind of mark, because we don’t matter to anyone, because our existence has no relevance." It sounds like a variation on saudade to my old-white-guy ears...but the key to the novel is this sense of existential irrelevance.
It's hard not to see the Syndrome all over the post-January 6th world. It's amazing to me how Author Sánchez Rugeles built this sense of the fruitlessness of expecting change to come and simultaneously supporting the acts of making the world however much better you can where you are, using what you have. A schoolteacher whose wife leaves him in the midst of the awful disasters that follow an asteroid obliterating Lisbon uses drama, à la Station Eleven, to instill humanistic values in...anyone, everyone, especially young anyones. It's exactly what one would expect from a somewhat ineffectual intellectual. It makes a positive difference, too. And that draws attention from the Powers That Be—never a good thing. There is, at the end of Author Sánchez Rugeles's rainbow, a pot of fool's gold guarded by a troop of evil sidhe. Yet the point, the salient characteristic, of this story is Hope. Big, capital-H Hope, the kind that comes from recognizing that yes, it's hopeless, people are bastards and the ruling class is scum, but Sra. Gomez needs help with her garden and little Pepita needs eyeglasses so get it in gear and fix the small things.
Brutal world events and brutal governmental responses to them make this a sometimes disheartening read. "How much more can a human endure?!" I asked myself more than once in these seven chapters. The truth is: A lot more. The novel's inspiration was the astonishingly awful year, 2017, when the Venezuelans threw themselves a constitutional crisis and an acceleration of the protests ongoing since 2014. This explainer will give you some context, if you're curious, but the simple truth is that Author Sánchez Rugeles is fictionalizing, not reportage-ing.
I'm pretty sure a lot of you are staring at the screen wondering if I've lost my mind recommending this read to wobbly weary North Americans in the midst of an unfolding crisis of our own. Permaybehaps. But I'm not doing so in the "eat-your-spinach" Savonarola-of-storytelling mode. I think Translator Paul Filev has done an extraordinarily good job of making this Spanish-to-English story clearly and succinctly Author Sánchez Rugeles's story while imbuing it with English-language prosody of clarity, compactness, and elegance. The subverbal vocalizations of the lines are rhythmic and the sounds of the words used are poetic in the best sense of the word.
Why, when the novel's set in Caracas, is the title The Lisbon Syndrome, and why is the catastrophe that has changed the city set in Lisbon? I'm speculating when I say this, but to me, the sizable Portuguese community in Caracas and its reason for being...Portugal's long, tortuous fascist dictatorship resulting in lots of exiles, which was ended by a revolution that caused chaos and produced more emigrants...gave the author his loud echoes of modern Venezuela and its convulsions.
While it's possible that your battle-weary eyes might not get aimed at such a dark corner of our literary world, I'm here to say I hope you'll visit Author Sánchez Rugeles's "believe me, bad as it is, it could be worse!" story universe. He's done post-apocalyptic fiction right.… (plus d'informations)
The Publisher Says: A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.
In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media.
Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando's students suffer from what they begin to call "the Lisbon syndrome," an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets.
The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles's bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review?: The Lisbon Syndrome, in this novel, is defined as "...knowing that the things we love are finite, knowing that there is no tomorrow, knowing that we won’t have enough time to do anything worthwhile, that we will disappear without leaving any kind of mark, because we don’t matter to anyone, because our existence has no relevance." It sounds like a variation on saudade to my old-white-guy ears...but the key to the novel is this sense of existential irrelevance.
It's hard not to see the Syndrome all over the post-January 6th world. It's amazing to me how Author Sánchez Rugeles built this sense of the fruitlessness of expecting change to come and simultaneously supporting the acts of making the world however much better you can where you are, using what you have. A schoolteacher whose wife leaves him in the midst of the awful disasters that follow an asteroid obliterating Lisbon uses drama, à la Station Eleven, to instill humanistic values in...anyone, everyone, especially young anyones. It's exactly what one would expect from a somewhat ineffectual intellectual. It makes a positive difference, too. And that draws attention from the Powers That Be—never a good thing. There is, at the end of Author Sánchez Rugeles's rainbow, a pot of fool's gold guarded by a troop of evil sidhe. Yet the point, the salient characteristic, of this story is Hope. Big, capital-H Hope, the kind that comes from recognizing that yes, it's hopeless, people are bastards and the ruling class is scum, but Sra. Gomez needs help with her garden and little Pepita needs eyeglasses so get it in gear and fix the small things.
Brutal world events and brutal governmental responses to them make this a sometimes disheartening read. "How much more can a human endure?!" I asked myself more than once in these seven chapters. The truth is: A lot more. The novel's inspiration was the astonishingly awful year, 2017, when the Venezuelans threw themselves a constitutional crisis and an acceleration of the protests ongoing since 2014. This explainer will give you some context, if you're curious, but the simple truth is that Author Sánchez Rugeles is fictionalizing, not reportage-ing.
I'm pretty sure a lot of you are staring at the screen wondering if I've lost my mind recommending this read to wobbly weary North Americans in the midst of an unfolding crisis of our own. Permaybehaps. But I'm not doing so in the "eat-your-spinach" Savonarola-of-storytelling mode. I think Translator Paul Filev has done an extraordinarily good job of making this Spanish-to-English story clearly and succinctly Author Sánchez Rugeles's story while imbuing it with English-language prosody of clarity, compactness, and elegance. The subverbal vocalizations of the lines are rhythmic and the sounds of the words used are poetic in the best sense of the word.
Why, when the novel's set in Caracas, is the title The Lisbon Syndrome, and why is the catastrophe that has changed the city set in Lisbon? I'm speculating when I say this, but to me, the sizable Portuguese community in Caracas and its reason for being...Portugal's long, tortuous fascist dictatorship resulting in lots of exiles, which was ended by a revolution that caused chaos and produced more emigrants...gave the author his loud echoes of modern Venezuela and its convulsions.
While it's possible that your battle-weary eyes might not get aimed at such a dark corner of our literary world, I'm here to say I hope you'll visit Author Sánchez Rugeles's "believe me, bad as it is, it could be worse!" story universe. He's done post-apocalyptic fiction right.… (plus d'informations)
The Lisbon Syndrome is a fascinating read set in more or less present-day Venezuela and in our current world—except for the fact that Lisbon has been destroyed by an asteroid and all the usual complexities of life in Venezuela are further complicated by resulting lack of sunlight due to the heavy particle load in the atmosphere.
Our narrator, Fernando is a part-time teacher at two high schools. He also runs an after-school community theatre for teens. The group's choice of plays has always been influenced by a desire to comment on political repression within Venezuela. Now, in the ongoing winter of the asteroid disaster that oppression is become fiercer at the same time that the teens involved with the theater are becoming more determined to speak out, to risk their own safety, and to engage in more violent forms of resistance.
Watching Fernando navigate his changed world and sharing his thoughts as he adjusts to his his new reality offers a committed, thoughtful perspective, though one that can be blind to the ramifications of some of the events around him. He respects his students' growing resistance to oppression, but also discourages it because of its potential consequences. He knows how narrow the opportunities that face them are in Venezuela, but also keeps trying to convince them (and himself) that they have a hope at accomplishing goals for their own lives that involve meaningful work and a shot at upward mobility.
The book reaches its climax at a moment when Fernando is forced to move beyond his observation of his students' lives to a consideration of what he is and isn't willing to do in pursuit of social justice.
This is the kind of alternative reality title that forces readers to look more closely at the reality they currently inhabit and to ask themselves difficult questions with both local and global implications. If you enjoy titles that challenge your ethical and intellectual norms, this is a title you will will want to read—and may likely wind up reading more than once.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.… (plus d'informations)
Our narrator, Fernando is a part-time teacher at two high schools. He also runs an after-school community theatre for teens. The group's choice of plays has always been influenced by a desire to comment on political repression within Venezuela. Now, in the ongoing winter of the asteroid disaster that oppression is become fiercer at the same time that the teens involved with the theater are becoming more determined to speak out, to risk their own safety, and to engage in more violent forms of resistance.
Watching Fernando navigate his changed world and sharing his thoughts as he adjusts to his his new reality offers a committed, thoughtful perspective, though one that can be blind to the ramifications of some of the events around him. He respects his students' growing resistance to oppression, but also discourages it because of its potential consequences. He knows how narrow the opportunities that face them are in Venezuela, but also keeps trying to convince them (and himself) that they have a hope at accomplishing goals for their own lives that involve meaningful work and a shot at upward mobility.
The book reaches its climax at a moment when Fernando is forced to move beyond his observation of his students' lives to a consideration of what he is and isn't willing to do in pursuit of social justice.
This is the kind of alternative reality title that forces readers to look more closely at the reality they currently inhabit and to ask themselves difficult questions with both local and global implications. If you enjoy titles that challenge your ethical and intellectual norms, this is a title you will will want to read—and may likely wind up reading more than once.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.… (plus d'informations)
Listes
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 9
- Membres
- 39
- Popularité
- #376,657
- Évaluation
- 4.4
- Critiques
- 5
- ISBN
- 9
- Langues
- 1
- Favoris
- 1