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, oen 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 aer 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 aerword 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. Aer 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 dely 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 aer 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