A Book That Puts All My Pet Peeves Under One Cover

I recently read a volume entitled Antología: Escritores africanos contemporáneos, which manages to rub me the wrong way… in ALL the wrong ways. It’s not the fault of the authors, though. They just wrote the best stories they could, and in some cases, the stories were really great.

The first thing that irritated me was the geographical limitation of the author origins. Having read dozens of books where there was a limited demographic, be that people from a specific geographic region, or from a specific race, gender or sexual orientation, the resulting collection is always lessened by its lack of diversity. Choosing stories from a small selection of writers forces editors to publish work that would never have made it if everyone had been allowed to participate. Demographic limitation works in directo contraposition to quality. It’s common sense, but more than that, I’ve seen it in dozens of collections.

(and yes, I know why this is done, and I don’t care. Intentions are noble, but the end product is inferior).

My second pet peeve is that I HATE reading anything in Spanish that wasn’t originally written in Spanish. Translations into English are always of higher quality for some reason (I suspect that is because there is much more competition in the English-language market, so the cream rises to the top) but, even worse, almost all of these stories were ORIGINALLY published in English.

But I received the book as a gift, and it seemed to be off my usual reading paths, so I read it out of interest, promising not to hold the translation and the limited demographic silliness against the authors.

I’m quite glad I did. There are some good stories in there (some turkeys, too, but no collection is perfect), and if you can only read Spanish, this one is worth looking at to read some work set in Africa (having work set in Africa is, to me, much more interesting than forcing that work to be written by locals).

Best of the lot is “The Lost Suit” by Siphiwo Mahala which starts as a relationship tale before slipping delightfully into that zone which doesn’t quite allow us to define whether it’s magic realism or not. I liked this one, despite the fact that the protagonist isn’t meant to be likable.

Your enjoyment of the others will have to do with your tolerance for both literary fiction (inane domestic fiction knows no geographic boundaries), and your tolerance for trying to make fiction political (inane political ditto), but they are well-written in the MFA sense f the term. O Henry Prize Award winners, they’re not (although, they might be in today’s strange world, just on the strength of having been written by an underrepresented group), but they aren’t bad by any means. And they’re definitely interesting.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book of literary fiction is entitled Safe and Sorry, a tome which intertwines a series of short stories into a single narrative. You can check it out here.

Spanish Mag… Spanish Cars

One interesting thing about Spain is that it had its own, extraordinarily unlikely, homegrown auto industry. We all know about SEAT, or at least Europeans do, but there were countless other attempts to build cars in the country, from the glorious Hispano-Suiza to the rather less memorable Authis.

Other than Hispano-Suiza and Pegaso, Spanish cars were mainly low-priced affairs aimed at mobilizing the masses in a country with strong protection against the entry of anything fun. Populist governments are always very earnest about creating a strong national car industry, whether they lean left or right. Franco wasn’t the exception.

So you’ve basically got uninspiring bread-and-butter people movers.

Which is why that SEAT 124 Sport on the cover is so cool to see. These truly are interesting cars, and they’re vehicles unlikely to be covered by a car mag from another country, so it’s wonderful to see them here. Good-looking little things, too.

The rest of the mag is fun, too, and that Citroen on the cover is also a nice article. But the true wonder of these publications is that they look into truly obscure corners of motoring history. In this particular case, that corner is the Rörh brand of cars from the prewar era. I don’t remember having even heard of these… but they built some very interesting vehicles.

So these Motor Clásicos are a pleasure every time, and I’m glad I have a little pile of them to share with you.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina whose latest book is a science fiction thriller called Colony. You can check it out here.

Night of the Hunter: All that was missing was a Dali Dream Sequence

Night of the Hunter is another strange film. Directors were, in 1955, probably quite convinced that the noir genre was done to death, so if you wanted to make a splash with a film there, you had to work outside of the usual. The Phenix City Story was an attempt at going the true-crime route, while Night of the Hunter Adopted a kitchen sink approach.

So, in the first place, the bad guy is a bizarre figure. A serial killer who is a preacher. Not a cult leader, either, but just a wandering, earnest fire-and-brimstone type with a beautiful bass singing voice. Then you’ve got the very non-noir trope of children being the endangered parties.

“What else?” the producer probably asked, fearful of not getting back the investment.

They also tossed in a vision-like trip down a river in which the two children were allegorically delivered to a saint (or something along those lines, mid-century symbolism isn’t my strongest suit). Whatever the deeper meaning of it all the film is also filled with religious allegory. It’s not quite the Dali dream sequence… but we’re close.

“Not enough!” the producers screamed.

So they brought back Lillian Gish. Yes, the same actress who thrilled silent-film audiences with classics like Way Down South, Broken Blossoms or Birth of a Nation (you’ll have to go back to LiveJournal to see my thoughts on those!).

I, for one, am glad they did. She proves to be a brilliant talkie actress as well… and she was utterly convincing as a kind-hearted, soft-singing matron. Beautiful.

In summary, this one is a valiant effort to stand out. The results are somewhat mixed, with some beautiful moments and strong tension slightly let down by the sense that the film was trying to do too much, and the weird moments. It’s memorable without being, in my opinion, good.

And perhaps that was the whole point.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a science fiction thriller entitled Colony. You can check it out here.

R&T’s Annus Horribilis Continues

So, after the glories of the old Road & Track, I reported my impressions of a more recent issue a few months ago.

In summary, I wasn’t impressed, and am even less so now that I’ve seen another from the same period.

Looks gorgeous, doesn’t it?

But beauty can be only skin deep. Horrors lie within.

First, let’s be fair. The past fifteen years have been brutal for newspapers and magazines. Everything, it seems, has moved online, and a ton of content has become just-in-time reporting. No one is going to wait four months to read the Le Mans report in R&T anymore. And as readership contracts, so do advertising dollars, which means it becomes harder to justify expenses like road trips and journalists who write well.

The direct consequences of those trends are the ridiculous number of pages and the lack of competition reporting. And the barely-disguised advertising features. Also, the fact that this issue is, horror of horrors, valid for two months. We get it. It’s awful, and we wish things were different, but we get it.

But then there are the self-inflicted wounds.

I sometimes get the impression that some utter moron in the upper realms of Road & Track‘s corporate overlords decided that what a car magazine needs is for the content to be approved by a bunch of humorless millennials who are either too poor to own fun cars or too sanctimonious to believe that anything with an internal combustion engine can ever be other than immoral. Hell, for all I know, they’re militant vegans, too.

Let’s be very clear: turning any decision over to people like that is a recipe for disaster… but a car magazine? Worse than you can possibly imagine.

For the entire first half of the issue in question, there is no mention of 0-60 times. None. It’s almost like some person who hates cares dictated that 0-60 times are from the devil, and will no longer be mentioned. Hell, she probably thought, Cosmo doesn’t need to list 0-60 times, and it sells a lot more than R&T, so lets run with it. Besides, she continued, taking a sip from her soy latte, I hate fast cars. They’re for men who are compensating for something. What they need is to become joyless conformists… like me!

Fortunately, the second half of the issue speaks a slightly different language. But the scars from reading several articles about sporting models without any mention of their performance will stay with me, both as an example of how not to write about cars and as a reminder of what happens when you put milquetoast manager types in charge of a product for enthusiasts. People whose passion is Twitter politics or accounting are never going to understand people who are passionate about something that matters.

Anyway, I’m kinda looking forward to and kinda dreading reading the issues of the new-style R&T. They look even better… and nothing can suck as much as these 2020 issues, can they?

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a science fiction thriller about a human settlement on an inhospitable world. When the settlement comes under attack, the colonists have no choice but to prepare for all out war. But first, they need to find the enemy. Oh, and knowing what the hell the enemy actually is would help. You can check out Colony here.

More Classic Mag Reading From Spain with a British Twist

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any magazine with an Austin Healey on the cover cannot be a bad thing. In this case, the beneficiary is Motor Clásico number 99 (from April of 1996).

We’ve given an overview of my thoughts on this mag in general, and this issue continues the saddle-stitched format of the first 130 or so issues of the mag (later, they become perfect-bound. I’ll let you know).

So what’s inside? The cover stories, of course, are great. I have a particular soft spot for small European sedans from the thirties to the sixties, so that Peugeot 201 piece was another article that I read with particular interest (and took my time to stare at the photos).

But the best part of the magazine was a history article not about cars but about the Osborne Bulls. Anyone who’s ever driven in Spain will know what I’m talking about. From every highway in the country, you’ll eventually see, somewhere up on a hill, the silhouette of a black bull in the distance. Those bulls are enormous and have become symbolic of Spain itself, even though they were originally created to promote a liquor company.

Another nice thing about this Spanish mag is that, unlike other classic car magazines, it acknowledges that many people love both two- and four-wheeled machines. They always have an article about either a bike or a rider. Good stuff.

Anyway, I’m enjoying working my way through this pile (dare I say it) even more than the old Road & Tracks. There is never anything less than enjoyable in these.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina who writes almost exclusively in English. His latest novel is an action-packed science fiction thriller of colonization and war against an unimagined foe. You can check out Colony, here.

Classic Christie, in One of Her Preferred Locations

Agatha Christie achieved her status as the Queen of Crime via several different methods. One of them that she seemed to relish was to put readers either in very familiar locations or the very exotic.

To English-speaking readers, no matter if you’re in Coventry or in Shanghai, there are few settings more familiar–and which put the reader at his ease quicker–than the English countryside. But for readers in early to mid-century England, “exotic” means going somewhere hot. A Caribbean Mystery falls into this second group.

The first thing that caught my interest here is that I was convinced I’d read something about this book earlier. It turns out I was right. Nemesis, which I read a while ago actually builds off of the events of this book.

Other than that, what sets this book apart from other Christie novels is the fun of watching Miss Marple out of the rural English setting. Unlike Poirot, who is comfortable everywhere–in fact, often more aware of local traditions than the natives themselves–Miss Marple is most definitely NOT a cosmopolitan creature, and that throws a bit of a wrench into her plans.

Of course, the main fun of these is to try to guess who the murderer is, and perhaps in this one it’s a little easier than in others. The misleading elements are there, of course, and you’re never sure… but I imagined who the murderer was. It was a little more lineal than others.

Nevertheless, these are fun to read, so it’s always a welcome sight when a Christie novel cycles to the top of my TBR list.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina whose latest novel is a science fiction adventure entitled Colony. You can check it out here.

Old Cars+ Spanish… a New Combo

Those of you who read all the way to the bottom of these posts (that little italicized paragraph at the bottom which says who writes these things and where to find their latest work), will suspect that I speak Spanish in my daily life (despite writing in English).

So why are all the car magazines I write about in English? Easy: most Spanish-language car magazines are really, really bad. Bad enough that I don’t waste time with them and focus on the good stuff when I do happen to read one.

There’s one exception, however, and it’s one I stumbled on almost by accident. In the late 90s, the Spanish magazine Motor Clásico sent a boatload of unsold issues to Argentina, and they were being sold cheap on newsstands all over Buenos Aires.

Cheap enough that I shrugged and bought one.

I enjoyed it enough that I ended up with a pretty decent collection of them from the 90s and 2000s, so I’m now backfilling the earlier ones. Number 79, from 1994, is the earliest one currently in my collection.

While Motor Clásico is unlikely to every rival the colossal high-quality and design perfection of Classic & Sportscar, it is a pleasant magazine with nice big photos of wonderful old cars and a very Spanish writing style. I’ve always liked reading these and looking at pictures of cars that aren’t necessarily in the multi-million dollar range.

This issue does that, and also visits a museum in France and talks about Spanish motorcycling heroes. It’s a lovely change of pace from the perfection that sometimes makes other magazines feel a bit distant. This is one that, at least in the 90s (I haven’t seen a new issue), made you feel like you could just call them on the phone to chat about old cars. They were that approachable.

If you are a Spanish-speaker, you’ll like these.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a science fiction adventure of space colonization and war against an incomprehensible foe. It’s entitled Colony, and you can check it out here.

Helen MacInnes: The Queen of the Cold War Spy Novel

Helen MacInnes isn’t famous today, as far as I can tell. Unlike other Cold War thriller superstars such as Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth, her work isn’t constantly reprinted today. In fact, the subject of today’s post, The Salzburg Connection, seems to have been last reprinted in 2013 and is now only available as an ebook.

This is surprising as major thriller writers–despite the howls of the critics–are, if nothing else, consistent sellers.

A part of this is that MacInnes was born twenty or thirty years before the writers who became her “contemporaries”. This is reflected in both her style and her most prolific era. In the fifties and sixties, the formula for the page-turning Cold War thriller had yet to be perfected (that happened in the seventies), and she was one of the writers laying the groundwork for it.

But there’s another reason she probably isn’t as widely read today as she was before: her style is somehow less compelling than that of other writers in the genre. Her chronological contemporaries include Ian Fleming, and if you compare her work with Fleming’s, you’ll find the James Bond novels much more difficult to put down. Yes, Fleming is one of the immortals… but that’s what you have to compete against if you’re aiming for authorly immortality.

So it took me a while to get into this one, which is a pity because, plot-wise, this is a good book with some very interesting elements and an unusual setting. While many thrillers take place in either dense cities or remote secret installations with conveniently located dark and menacing forests nearby, this one takes place on essentially a mountain meadow (I’m simplifying, of course, but not by much). It is a reasonably memorable and entertaining book.

But it’s not quite at the level that I’d prefer with this kind of book, which is read purely as entertainment.

Still, if you’re in the mood for a bit of a different voice and a slightly earlier phase in the development of the spy thriller, this one is good enough, and it is early enough to actually have Nazis in it as a credible threat.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina whose latest novel is entitled Colony. It’s a fast-paced, tense story of space colonization, desperation and war. You can check it out here.

New Book Launch: Colony

My latest science fiction book has been released. This one is entitled Colony.

Here’s the back cover text to tempt you:

Humans escaping an interstellar war have founded the aptly named colony of Hope. They soon learn the planet they’ve settled is occupied by advanced lifeforms who see the humans as lower organisms, nothing more than subjects for their deadly amusement.

Hope is attacked and the surviving humans must fight for their existence or face becoming electronic slaves.

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, you can purchase Colony here.

An Early Attempt at a Chilling Topic

No matter how many documentaries one watches about the Holocaust, it’s impossible to become inured to the subject. Or at least it is in my case.

So it’s no surprise that Alain Resnais’ short documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) made such an impact in 1956 that it was included in the 1001 Films list a half-century later. This one pulls no punches except for a single artistic decision made by the filmmaker to emphasize that the events were not a purely German phenomenon: none of the scenes are filmed in Germany. The deportation scenes are from France, while the concentration camps depicted are in Poland.

If 2022 audiences are shocked by the brutality despite having seen the images before, people in 1956, some of whom were viewing the content in cohesive story form–outside of newsreels–for the first time, must have been overwhelmed. It’s a skillfully built film created from probably the most powerful imagery of the 20th century. Even more to the point, it spoke of wounds that were still very early in the healing process.

One example of this, outside of the obvious question of countless families torn apart and lives ruined, is how the French censors of the time responded to the film. As I mentioned, the deportation scenes were shot in France. Some of the images showed Vichy (French) officials in the scenes. The filmmaker was threatened to have the film itself banned (on other grounds) if those uniformed officials were not removed from the edit. He had no choice but to accept.

Regardless of what war movies might have been made afterwards, this film brings the story of WWII to a close. While there are other films on the 1001 movies list that show events in and around the war (whether documentary or fiction), and there are excellent documentaries about the actual fighting, my opinion is that there are only two films about WWII that everyone should watch in order to understand the war. Night and Fog is the second of those films; the first is the chilling Triumph des Willens. Watch them in that order, and your mind will easily be able to understand how the war, and its consequences came to be.

Neither was created during the war, and neither deals with the fighting. But they make you understand.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is a science fiction adventure entitled Colony in which a human settlement is created on a planet whose unseen previous inhabitants see humans as little more than playthings. You can check it out here.