The first hundred days

Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• Only a game: football and identity politics
    So much has happened since the Champions League Final held in Cardiff on June 3rd: the London Bridge attacks (that same night); the general election; the Grenfell Tower fire and the Finsbury Park attack. A football game is a mere trifle. But the issues that struck me on the evening of the European Champions […]
• The Funhouse at Hell’s Edge: The Reef by Juan Villoro
    But one day I shall find a land corrupted and depressed beyond all knowledge, where the children are starving for lack of milk, a land unhappy, although enlightened, and cry: “I shall stay here until I have made this place good.” Malcolm Lowry. With The Reef (Arrecife, in Spanish) Juan Villoro has achieved something […]
• Fiction Fiesta welcomes Andrés Neuman, Juan Villoro and Niall Griffiths to Cardiff
  Now in its sixth year, the fiesta celebrates literature and football with events in Cardiff over 31st May and 1st June. In The Latin American Short Story, acclaimed international writers Juan Villoro (Mexico) and Andrés Neuman (Argentina) will be in conversation with Cardiff University’s Director of Creative Writing Richard Gwyn. Both writers are acknowledge […]
• We are all immigrants
  I have always had a thing for borders; grew up on one, and chose eventually to live on another. So it was no surprise that Kapka Kassabova’s account of lives in the Strandja forest – yes, half the size of Wales – which straddles Bulgaria and Turkey, stirred something in me that I have often […]
• ‘The opposite of love’ and the abuse of power: with Gérard Depardieu and John Berger
  I missed the film Welcome to New York, a thinly disguised account of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, when it was released a couple of years back, but watched it last night with Mrs Blanco. The film stars Gérard Depardieu as ‘Georges Deveraux’ and the first twenty minutes of the film are pretty ghastly, with a […]
• Leaving the Atocha Station and the personality of the translator
    Someone bought me, or recommended that I buy – I forget precisely – Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, and it’s been a long time since I laughed so much while reading any book; so thanks, whoever you are. The novel is especially good at describing the kinds of mental contortions a language learner goes […]
• John Berger and ‘bearing witness’
  On page 29 of and our faces, our hearts, brief as photos, Berger describes a landscape that lies before him as he is raking hay in a field: a small hillock on which stand three neglected pear trees – two in leaf, one leafless and dead, the dead tree flanked by the two living ones – […]
• John Berger and symmetries
  Following the death on the 2nd January of John Berger, a favourite writer and an inspirational human being, I was led to read (or re-read, if the annotations in pencil were truly in my hand, even if my memory of reading the book itself has vanished) his essay and our faces, my heart, brief as […]
• Reasons for his Absence
    Reasons for his Absence by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (Colombia)   If anyone asks after him, tell them that perhaps he’ll never come back, or else on returning no one will recognise his face; tell them also that he left no one any reasons, that he had a secret message, something important to tell them but […]
• Notes from a Catalan village: full circle
  We were told some months ago about the boulder in the tree, by Lluís Serrano of Cantallops. So we made an excursion of it, trekked up past the castle of Requessens (of which more in a future blog) and up early autumnal paths to view the wonder. Lluís is a great source of information about local history – both […]