Guadalajara International Book Festival

"Y mi vida se detiene en la hoja de un libro."
["And my life stops on the page of a book."]
"Tres," Claudia Barreda Gaxiola

I just got back from four days at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL, in its Spanish acronym), the largest book festival in Latin America and the second largest in the world after Frankfort's. This year's highlighted region was the city of Los Angeles (some 53 writers from the city were in attendance) and so the gringo presence was notable. In addition to hundreds of booths and thousands of exhibitors there were lectures and conferences, informal conversations with writers and editors, presentations of books, a film festival, music and theater performances, academic study groups, and being in Jalisco wandering groups of mariachis. And of course muchos escritores, especially from Latin America: Carlos Fuentes, Monica Lavin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, as well as political and social figures like Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, frontrunner for the PRD presidential candidacy in Mexico's 2012 election...perhaps the biggest event within the event was news that the great Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco had won the Cervantes Prize, the most significant literary award in the Spanish language, just weeks after winning another biggie, the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesia Reina Sofia. The day after the announcement I saw Pacheco walking through the international area and though he bears his 70 years, he still eminates a vibrancy that comes from being so in touch with the human condition.

It's amazing how at an event so huge one still runs into old friends and acquaintances. I caught up with Adriana Hidalgo, director of a publishing company in Argentina that bears her name and puts out some of the most interesting and cutting edge novels on the continent; Myrna Ortega from UNAM, director of its killer website descargacultura.unam.mx; Ana Clavel, a Mexican writer whom Aliform has had the privilege of publishing (Desire and Its Shadow, Shipwrecked Body), there to present her new novel, El dibujante de sombras; Trudy Balch, a writer and translator from New York; and other people I bumped into while looking at books or grabbing a glass of wine, or a shot of mezcal.

Besides sitting at the American Delegation's collective table with some of my translations (a special thanks to David Unger, who strongly encouraged me to come when we saw each other at the Americas Society in NY last April), I attended a number of panel discussions and presentations. Two of my favorites were with Cheech Marin (yes, of Cheech and Chong), who talked about how he became an art collector, particularly of work by Chicano painters. He explained how their work juxtaposes "the Mexican experience and the American experience," which in many ways was emblematic of the fair's theme this year, with Los Angeles the guest of honor. My favorite hour of the trip was an often funny conversation between David Kipen of the NEA and Jane Smiley, who in a more serious moment said, "The arts are the social institution that expresses freedom." That's a pretty good way of summarizing the importance of FIL.