Offprinted from

MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

VOLUME 112 , PART 1
JANUARY 2017

© Modern Humanities Research Association 

 Reviews
close textual readings and a steady sense of history. e study reveals how
the de- piction of Borges has changed over time, responding to different
historical/political junctures. It maps a sure path through the complex and
labyrinthine nature both of Borges’s own work and of the critical, oen highly
polemical, responses to Borges, with one scholar, Beatriz Sarlo, offering particular
guidance. For it was Sarlo, and colleagues such as Ricardo Piglia, who, during and
aer the military dictatorship in Argentina, encouraged critics to think
through and beyond such Manichaean categories as Europe/Argentina,
elite/popular, placing Borges in the productive, liminal, space of ‘las orillas’, on the
borders between genres, languages, and cul- tures. A particularly fruitful application
of Sarlo’s insights comes in Chapter , ‘El desaforado caminador’, which explores
how Borges fictionalized and mythologized the streets of Buenos Aires and how, in
turn, ‘the figure of Borges is constructed and narrated in the life and spaces of the
city’ (p. ). e entire study turns on the observation made by Borges in
the aerword to his book of stories, El Hacedor (), which speaks of a man
who sets out to draw a world. He peoples it for many years with kingdoms and
mountains before discovering at the end of his life that the ‘patient labyrinth of lines
traces the lineaments of his own face’. Draw the world that is Argentina, this
book convincingly demonstrates, and the face of Borges will always appear, will
always be appropriated and disputed.
As I write these lines in May , I read that the pope has recently quoted a
line from Borges’s s ‘urban’ poetry—analysed in Chapter —in his apostolic
exhortation ‘Amoris Laetitia’. Media sources have unearthed a photograph—the
focus of Chapter —from , when Borges travelled to Santa Fe to give a class on
gauchesque literature at a Jesuit school at the invitation of a young scholar, Jorge
Bergoglio, who, many years later, would be elected pope. e handshake
between Borges and a shy, baby-faced priest, captured in a photograph now travelling
across the world, points to the enduring relevance of this fascinating study.
U  W J K

e Child in Spanish Cinema. By S W. Manchester: Manchester University

Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––.
Given the child’s perennial presence in Spanish cinema since its inception, it may
come as some surprise to those not working on the topic that Sarah Wright’s
book is the first monograph to treat this expansive and vital subject. Wright’s
excellent book does not simply fill a heretofore glaring gap in scholarship on the
child in film, both more generally and in the (particularly rich) Spanish context.
It also provides valuable insights into the ways Spain’s cinema continually turns
to the child in order to work through the legacies of the nation’s violent and
authoritarian past, to reflect new political, social, and economic realities that arise
in its present, and to forge investment in the child’s symbolic futurity.
Admirably wide-ranging—in terms both of the genres and periods of films it
explores and of the theoretical and critical frameworks it adopts to examine them
—
e Child in Spanish Cinema is a foundational text for the field, demonstrating
 MLR, .,  
how Spanish film alternately brings the child to life (as child, but also as doll,
as monster, as automaton) and condemns the child to death on screen. Wright
tackles the daunting task of addressing the child’s central role in several decades
of Spanish cinema with impressive economy, condensing her treatment into
four chapters plus an Introduction. Aer an overview of the book’s arguments
and what Wright mod- estly terms a ‘brief, imperfect, potted pre-history of the
child in Spanish cinema up to the s’ (p. ) the four chapters move in
broad chronological strokes, each centred on a key theme, performer, or motif
of the respective historical moment, varied in scope and diverse in theoretical
framing.
Chapter  takes on the child in the cine religioso of the s, pivoting
around the film Marcelino, pan y vino (dir. Ladislao Vajda, ) and its
figuration (and celebration) of the child’s death as glorious sacrifice under
Francoism. Its engage- ment with the repeated trope of the dead, helpless, or
orphaned (boy) child links up the historical realities of both early Francoist
National Catholic ideology and the incipient consumerism of the desarrollismo
years, and a final section on the voice and dubbing shows how in bringing the
child to life as loving automaton, this cinema might also be robbing him of his
own breath and voice (p. ). Chapter  centres on child star Marisol (Pepa
Flores) and the intense, troubling, public scrutiny of her child’s (and later,
woman’s) body as she grew up in and was metaphorized by the public sphere
under both dictatorship and democracy. Employing theories of trauma and
cultural amnesia, it traces the repetition of Marisol’s function as exchange
commodity (living doll) passed between older men, unfolding several parallel
analyses to further problematize uses of children and their bodies in Spanish
film.
Chapter  takes Víctor Erice’s iconic  El espíritu de la colmena as a
lens through which to read the child’s gaze—and the child as object of the gaze
—in art- house and horror cinema from the end of Francoism to the present. It
proposes that the child in this film (and its inheritors) can help spectators
recuperate historical memory or work through the traumatic past by generating
what Alison Landsberg has called ‘prosthetic memory’—a key concept for
Wright, who dely negotiates its contradictions throughout. Looking at the
child’s connection to the monstrous, and the child as monster, it shows how the
‘child and the Spanish Civil War’ genre is both reified and deconstructed in recent
films. e final chapter explores adoles- cents in contemporary cinema,
focusing close attention on two films exemplifying ‘wound culture’ (see Mark
Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October, 
(Spring ), –) in Spain’s cinema of the present century. Reading
Achero Mañas’s  child-abuse film El Bola alongside Camino, Javier
Fesser’s  cancer drama-cum-Opus Dei critique, the chapter examines marks
le on adolescents’ skin as well as how their bodies’ on-screen abuse can
engage the viewer in an ethical relationship to the child. In circular fashion, we
return through Camino to the martyrdom of the child seen in Chapter ,
revealing the lingering legacies of Francoism that persist down to the present
day.
Much of the book speaks to this re-emergence of the past in the present via the
figure of the child. While theoretical approaches relating to (historical) memory
 Reviews
and its recuperation predominate in the book, Wright also carves out space for
a variety of rich parallel analyses using a range of theories from Film Studies,
psychoanalysis, and queer theory, among others. e multiplicity of
approaches mirrors the book’s multiple children: across this diverse material,
Wright resists the impulse to claim that the child is or does one particular thing
in Spain’s cinema.
e study will therefore be of great value to scholars and students of
Spanish culture and film, not only as a survey of the child’s presence therein but
also as an engaging series of creatively theorized close readings that enrich
understanding of films canonical and otherwise.
B U S T

e Foreign Passion/La pasión extranjera. By C A. Trans. by B B.

London: Influx Press.  pp. £.. ISBN ––––.
Since the s, Argentinian poetry has been a major point of reference
across the Hispanic world. e combined impact of political turmoil
and openness to cultural avant-gardes has resulted in a potent tradition that
ranges from inter- nationally acclaimed authors such as Juan Gelman or
Alejandra Pizarnik to the neobarroco experiments of Osvaldo Lamborghini or
Néstor Perlongher, and to the younger generations of authors that bridge past and
present, such as Fabián Casas, Washington Cucurto, and Martín Gambarotta.
However, as Ben Bollig rightly argues (pp. –) in the Prologue to this book,
this creative diversity has not been reflected in a balanced circulation and recep-
tion. Authors based in the provinces—what is usually called ‘el interior’, the
inland territories—tend to receive less attention than those who work from the
main literary cities, in a clear example of that tension between ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ studied by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, among many others.
e work of the poet Cristian Aliaga (b. ), born in Buenos Aires
but based in the southern region of Patagonia, has been marked by this spatial
imbalance, which Bollig calls ‘a form of internal exile’ (p. ). Logically, space
plays a central role in Aliaga’s poetry, as the expression of political and economic
practices that shape both human and physical landscape. is concern is
palpably clear in e Foreign Passion, which emerged aer a visiting
professorship that Aliaga took at the University of Leeds in . In fact, the
book’s structure resembles a travelogue or a travel diary, as every text is rooted in a
geographical reference—most of them in the north of England, but occasionally in
continental Europe. In this process of travel and displacement, Aliaga isolates spaces
and reworks them, turning them into a set of symbols: children playing in a military
museum embody the unex- pectedness of war, while a pub and its multiple
micro-scenes become a parable of resistance against the hardships of daily life.
Bollig suggests a certain affinity (p. ) with the ‘harshness’ and ‘brutality’ of
omas Bernhard’s e Voice Imitator, although the fiercely
monotonous and grinding voice of the Austrian is replaced here by a disposition
for wonder: events