The Movies of My Life

Rating:
Summary: A really good book.....
Review: A lot of these reviews read like people are trying to write for magazines or in newspapers. It's not my thing to write like that.

When I got this book, I was not too excited. Sure, I read a lot of things. What fun would it be to read a book by someone who styles themselves as NOT writing like someone (e.g. Magical Realists) that I don't like. Having read this book very quickly and cover-to-cover, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it comes together, and how good of a read it was. Fuguet has a great style; the plot continuously moves; and (most) of the characters are well drawn and appear to have bordering on human emotion. He writes to make readers care about his people. It works.

This is a great book; I'm sure it would be an even better book if one new something about either Latin American authors or the movies that he writes about (one of the premises of the story is that it stems from a list of "the Movies of his Life" that the protagonist is writing to impress some girl....) Even without that sort of background, I was surprised with how much I liked this book, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Fuguet's Novel Soars
Review: Alberto Fuguet, I have found in a few research excursions, did something new with Latin American literature. In 1996 he edited a collection of short stories called "McOndo," a book containing stories written by Latin American authors under the age of thirty-five. This may not sound all that impressive, but what Fuguet did was deliver a broadside to magical realism, a literary style that has dominated Latin American literary circles for decades. Fuguet's novel, "The Movies of My Life," is a logical extension of his belief that a novel about South America (in his case, Chile) should tell a story about how people move, work, and think in real life situations. What I know about this type of literature from the Southern Hemisphere could fit on the head of a pin. I have never read Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or any of those other guys who are so well known. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I would vastly prefer spending my time with this type of realistic prose. This book is not merely literary realism; it is so realistic that I couldn't convince myself I wasn't reading a non-fiction biography. I actually looked up Yul Brynner on a website to check and see if he had really married one of the minor characters in the book! Some critics in South America apparently criticized Fuguet and others for internalizing American pop culture or some such nonsense, and on the surface that may look to be the case. Trust me when I say that there is much, much more to this book than such a trite analysis.

"This is one of the drawbacks to being a seismologist: I always look deeper, I search for the cracks, I scan for flaws and resistances." So begins the story of Beltran Soler, a Chilean earthquake specialist born in Chile but who lived in California for a few years before returning to his country of origin at the age of ten. His emotional state as an adult appears to be about as stable as one of the fault lines he examines as part of his job. While taking a trip to a conference in Japan, he learns from his sister that his grandfather died in an earthquake in El Salvador. With this knowledge already eating him up inside, he meets a woman on a plane who tells him about someone who wrote a book about the greatest movies of their life. Suddenly inspired to replicate this feat, Soler stays over in California for a few days and furiously types his own list of influential films in an e-mail to this anonymous woman. What follows is an often painful excursion through the trials and tribulations of a young boy caught between two mutually exclusive worlds. "The Movies of My Life" is fictional, although it is important to note that Fuguet himself lived in California as a youth just as the Beltran character did.

Each movie in the list touches off an intimate memory of some aspect of Beltran Soler's life. The first twenty-five films explore his early life as a Chilean immigrant in Southern California, with a movie like "Woodstock" bringing to the surface a recollection of Beltran's Uncle Carlos's countercultural attitudes. Another film, "Krakatoa, East of Java," provides a memory of his Grandfather Teodoro, the man who influenced Beltran to become a seismologist and the one who died recently in El Salvador. Not all of the films supply such easy connections, and for many pages the reader wonders where it is all going. As the book grows on you, and it will, a picture slowly begins to emerge about why Beltran is the way he is as a grown up. His family life was never easy, with his philandering father and sometimes touchy relatives always creating emotional rifts and fractures. When the Solers decide to pay a visit to relatives in Chile after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Beltran's world suddenly falls out from under him when his family decides to stay there permanently.

The next twenty-five films outline Beltran's life in Chile. An alien world after living in California for so long, the country's language, its schools, and its new leader General Pinochet serve as nearly insurmountable obstacles for the young boy to overcome. The movies continue to focus attention on specific incidents in Beltran's life. Issues hinted at in California now become full blown problems: his father and mother suffer a serious break, puberty arrives on the scene to wreak havoc on Beltran's existence, and he meets his first serious love. The final movie and the memory it brings back is simply devastating in its shocking power. I won't ruin it for you, but you will definitely find it surprising and horrific. Of course, not all of the memories are bad. Beltran remembers the family across the street who went on a television show singing tunes from "The Sound of Music," or the neighborhood friend in California who often recreated films like "The Poseidon Adventure" in his garage using his friends to act out the roles. There is plenty of good with the bad here, just like life, and all of it is so realistic that even now I have a difficult time thinking of "The Movies of My Life" as fiction.

I really got the sense I was reading great literature as I made my way through this book. It is too bad that many of this author's writings have yet to find an English translation. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I passed the book on to a family member who promises to give it to someone else after she finishes it. I am incredibly surprised to see no reviews for this book, but perhaps word of mouth will help spread the word about this marvelous Chilean novelist.

Rating:
Summary: Fuguet's Novel Soars
Review: Alberto Fuguet, I have found in a few research excursions, did something new with Latin American literature. In 1996 he edited a collection of short stories called "McOndo," a book containing stories written by Latin American authors under the age of thirty-five. This may not sound all that impressive, but what Fuguet did was deliver a broadside to magical realism, a literary style that has dominated Latin American literary circles for decades. Fuguet's novel, "The Movies of My Life," is a logical extension of his belief that a novel about South America (in his case, Chile) should tell a story about how people move, work, and think in real life situations. What I know about this type of literature from the Southern Hemisphere could fit on the head of a pin. I have never read Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or any of those other guys who are so well known. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I would vastly prefer spending my time with this type of realistic prose. This book is not merely literary realism; it is so realistic that I couldn't convince myself I wasn't reading a non-fiction biography. I actually looked up Yul Brynner on a website to check and see if he had really married one of the minor characters in the book! Some critics in South America apparently criticized Fuguet and others for internalizing American pop culture or some such nonsense, and on the surface that may look to be the case. Trust me when I say that there is much, much more to this book than such a trite analysis.

"This is one of the drawbacks to being a seismologist: I always look deeper, I search for the cracks, I scan for flaws and resistances." So begins the story of Beltran Soler, a Chilean earthquake specialist born in Chile but who lived in California for a few years before returning to his country of origin at the age of ten. His emotional state as an adult appears to be about as stable as one of the fault lines he examines as part of his job. While taking a trip to a conference in Japan, he learns from his sister that his grandfather died in an earthquake in El Salvador. With this knowledge already eating him up inside, he meets a woman on a plane who tells him about someone who wrote a book about the greatest movies of their life. Suddenly inspired to replicate this feat, Soler stays over in California for a few days and furiously types his own list of influential films in an e-mail to this anonymous woman. What follows is an often painful excursion through the trials and tribulations of a young boy caught between two mutually exclusive worlds. "The Movies of My Life" is fictional, although it is important to note that Fuguet himself lived in California as a youth just as the Beltran character did.

Each movie in the list touches off an intimate memory of some aspect of Beltran Soler's life. The first twenty-five films explore his early life as a Chilean immigrant in Southern California, with a movie like "Woodstock" bringing to the surface a recollection of Beltran's Uncle Carlos's countercultural attitudes. Another film, "Krakatoa, East of Java," provides a memory of his Grandfather Teodoro, the man who influenced Beltran to become a seismologist and the one who died recently in El Salvador. Not all of the films supply such easy connections, and for many pages the reader wonders where it is all going. As the book grows on you, and it will, a picture slowly begins to emerge about why Beltran is the way he is as a grown up. His family life was never easy, with his philandering father and sometimes touchy relatives always creating emotional rifts and fractures. When the Solers decide to pay a visit to relatives in Chile after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Beltran's world suddenly falls out from under him when his family decides to stay there permanently.

The next twenty-five films outline Beltran's life in Chile. An alien world after living in California for so long, the country's language, its schools, and its new leader General Pinochet serve as nearly insurmountable obstacles for the young boy to overcome. The movies continue to focus attention on specific incidents in Beltran's life. Issues hinted at in California now become full blown problems: his father and mother suffer a serious break, puberty arrives on the scene to wreak havoc on Beltran's existence, and he meets his first serious love. The final movie and the memory it brings back is simply devastating in its shocking power. I won't ruin it for you, but you will definitely find it surprising and horrific. Of course, not all of the memories are bad. Beltran remembers the family across the street who went on a television show singing tunes from "The Sound of Music," or the neighborhood friend in California who often recreated films like "The Poseidon Adventure" in his garage using his friends to act out the roles. There is plenty of good with the bad here, just like life, and all of it is so realistic that even now I have a difficult time thinking of "The Movies of My Life" as fiction.

I really got the sense I was reading great literature as I made my way through this book. It is too bad that many of this author's writings have yet to find an English translation. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I passed the book on to a family member who promises to give it to someone else after she finishes it. I am incredibly surprised to see no reviews for this book, but perhaps word of mouth will help spread the word about this marvelous Chilean novelist.

Rating:
Summary: Unreadable.
Review: Alberto Fuguet, The Movies of My Life (Harper, 2003)

A trick does not a book make, no matter how interesting it is. And the trick ehre is interesting; Fuguet takes the structure of a noted director (can't remember who, because my brain is swiss cheese; Elia Kazan?)'s autobiography and turns it into the story of a family trying to make it. The beginning works very well, being a series of emails between the narrator and someone he met on a plane about why he's decided to simply abandon his career and sit in a Los Angeles hotel room writing this, and the structure is intriguing, but beauty is only skin-deep. Once you scratch beneath the surface, you find another Oprah's Book Club candidate ripe for the plucking, a dysfunctional family with no qualities to make it stand out from the rest of the dysfunctional family pack so popular in today's publishing world.

If you like dysfunctional family novels, this will probably be right up your alley. The rest of you can safely avoid it. (zero)

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, lyrical effort!
Review: Beltran Soler, a seismologist from Chile, deconstructs his life and the struggles he went through with his family in the films he watched as a child. He describes the painful things his family endured in L.A., and how the aforementioned past played part to his obsession with earthquakes.

Alberto Fuguet has written a wonderful and lyrical account of a South American family. I've learned many things about Chile -- things I hadn't known about before. It is a wonderful country with an interesting history. Fuguet is known for his involvement with a literary movement called McOndo, a movement that announces the end of magical realism. He is a true literary voice and I look forward to reading his other projects.

Rating:
Summary: Coming of Age in Chile
Review: Fuget's second novel to appear in translation (following Bad Vibes), features a gimmicky framework that actually works well and transcends merely being cute. A somewhat clunky first section introduces the reader to Beltran, a Chilean seismologist traveling from Santiago to Japan, via LA, for a conference. A conversation with a woman on the plane, a snippet of a radio interview heard in a taxi, and the news that his grandfather has died are the catalysts for his holing up in an LA hotel and feverishly writing a memoir of sorts (which forms the bulk of the book). While it is a traditional memoir in that it proceeds chronologicallyófrom Beltran's birth in 1964 and his life in Los Angeles (Inglewood and later Encino) until 1974, when vacation in post-Allende Chile turns into a permanent stayóhis recollections are arranged in a series of fifty brief sections, each corresponding to a movie.

In each case, the movie serves as a launching point for exploring an event from his past and reconsidering it. What rapidly emerges is a picture of a man scarred by both the dysfunction and displacement of his upbringing. While in the LA, his life is relatively normal, and he grows up as a regular American boy, although as he looks back at that time, he recognizes the fragility of his parents' marriage and his father's distinct discomfort at being a father. However, the real damage comes at age 10, when this fully functional pop-culture saturated American boy moves back to Chile, where has a difficult time adjusting to the different language, social rules, and culture. Ultimately, this is a bittersweet and poignant coming-of-age story, as Beltran's friendless adolescence morphs into semi-acceptance as a teenager, and of course, his sexual awakening.

What is clear early on is the connection between his uncertain and capricious childhood and his adult fascination with earthquakes (events that shatter any illusion of stability, get it?). This is a bit of a heavy-handed maneuver, although the presence of a seismologist grandfather makes it all coalesce more than it might have. Throughout, moderately interesting issues of class and culture are raised, amidst this backdrop of films and growing pains. Fuget is the foremost of a loose band of younger Latin American writers who have rejected magical realism, and are attempting to forge a more real, modernist approach to literature. If this book is anything to judge by, it's a welcome change of pace.

Rating:
Summary: The Feel of Two Societies
Review: Fuguet has uniquely captured the feeling of the bicultural individual in this haunting book. His description of Chile in the last part of the Allende regieme is right on. I was living in Santiago in those days and the book brought back powerful memories. However, the reader does not have to know anything about Chile to find this book appealing. Be warned, the book has a highly ironic bent and repays a careful reading with lots of insights.
If you have found other Latin authors a bit hard to access, you should definitely give this book a try. It is a unique and insightful description of a young man's evolution straddling two societies.

Rating:
Summary: A life in Black and White
Review: Reviewing the fifty most memorable movies of his formative years, Fuguet's novel approach delves into the emotional issues that shaped his young life and the man he has become. Chronicling his childhood years in California and his native Chile, each film becomes a vehicle into the past. Now a seismologist of note in Chile, Beltran Soler has buried himself in scientific research and accomplishment, preferring a solitary existence, one with few family ties or sustained personal relationships.

Flying from Chile to Japan, Soler has a stopover in Los Angeles, where, rather than continuing his journey, he settles into a hotel room and a painful journey through the minefield of his childhood. His memories are filled with eccentric family members and folklore, as many relatives immigrate to California, a cultural enclave in the San Fernando Valley, reminiscent of their beautiful Chilean landscape. This extended family is as culturally diverse as any in recent fiction, providing important childhood connections. When his father distances himself from wife and children, Beltran's mother, aunts, uncles and grandparents are a touchstone for the young boy.

Fleeing Pinochet's Chile for Nixon's United States, the family acclimates to California, blending their cultural identity with their new lives, rejecting a description as displaced South Americans "relying on nothing but their foundations of supposedly being white", denying their Latino roots. However, the Chileans are not accepted as white in their new land. Later, returning to live in Chile with his mother and sister, Beltran is particularly influenced by his maternal grandfather, a seismologist with a significant reputation in the scientific community, who guides his grandson's future career.

Although Chile is in constant political upheaval, the family is safely cocooned by their scientific pursuits. As male role models, both grandfathers have a profound influence on Beltran's development, one a frivolous poseur, the other a demanding, if respected, patriarch. Along with his father, these men are distant and emotionally unengaged. When Beltran looks back over those critical early years, it isn't surprising that he is as far removed from reality as a moviegoer, watching the drama unfold on the screen.

Beltran journals compulsively day after day, confronting long-suppressed memories, secrets and anguish never acknowledged. Purging the past, Beltran faces the pain of abandonment that he has so successfully avoided. Clearly, the need to for sustained personal connections is not constricted by place or culture and Beltran is called to participate in his own life; whether he does this as a Chilean or an American is irrelevant. With elegant grace and synchronicity, the author paints a portrait of loss, the importance of family and the reality of cultural identification. Unwilling to live in this sad isolation, Beltran reaches across the miles, reconnecting to those he loves, returning to the affection of time and place that so defines him. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: ¿I look to see if there is a boy in there."
Review: The incredibly creative plot device that steers Alberto Fuguet's novel The Movies of My Life centers around a list of 50 movies that forms a brilliant vehicle to explore a lonely childhood and a dysfunctional family that takes us from suburban Southern California to Santiago, Chile. As Beltrán manufactures his own list, he peppers the descriptions with details remembered from his childhood and in the process, writes a touching memoir of sorts. And like seismology, he always looks deeper, searching for cracks, scanning his family for flaws and resistances. One doesn't have to be a movie buff to appreciate the beauty of Fuguet's writing (and his list) or to understand the role movies play in our lives often even without our knowing.

This is very much a book about the Latin American experience in Los Angeles, and it is a terrific portrayal of a city on the brink of change. From growing up in Inglewood to the Valley, Beltrán gives us a slice of life, that is so inimitably Los Angeles. In those days "Inglewood was a run-down, semi-industrial neighborhood, stacked with bodegas and Laundromats; an expensive, itinerant area that attracted immigrants fresh of the plane. The area was divided between newly arrived South Americans and lower class white Americans."

The Movies of My Life also serves as an ode to a movie lover. The true strength of the novel is the remarkable originality of the storytelling - the way Fuget symbolically weaves the "movies of his life" through the narrative - each movie representing a land mark event IN his life. The book says a lot about movies and the role they can play in our lives, and the movies that really speak to Beltrán are the movies that are really about him. Beltrán admits, that you can even feel a connection to a movie before even seeing it, because people tell you about it, or "because you just know that the film has sunk its claws into you for reasons you can't understand." The important movies of his life are also some of my most memorable - Poseidon Adventure, Logan's Run, Earthquake, Close Encounters of the Third kind and Jaws.

Just life an earthquake fault, his family cracks, and eventually the crack becomes a fault - his philandering father leaves; he becomes estranged from his grandparents. The Solars are in a unique position, back in Santiago, they are without a social class, and so far removed from "the place they once belonged to." The Movies of My Life is a profound, intuitive and highly original piece of work.

Michael

Rating:
Summary: The Joy of Discovering
Review: THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE is an introduction to this reader of the enormously gifted Chilean writer, Alberto Fuguet. Just when you think you are aware of the majority of the truly gifted writers of today (and with a personal philosophy of being an audience for new music, new performers, new films, and first books I try to stay abreast of what is happening at this moment in history)up pops someone of the magnitude of Fuguet to offer a sense of wonder at the seemingly endless line of creativity that bubbles around us.

This book is classified as a 'novel' but it is so richly detailed and so closely parallels the life of the author (as far as where he has actually lived, traveled etc) that it feels more like a memoir. Be that as it may, it is the style of writing that is unique, wholly entertaining, successful on every level of communication with the reader, and inventive in technique that enhances the story. Well-outlined by other reviewers, the story is centered on one Beltran Soler who as an adult seismologist begins the book with a telephone conversation with his sister Manuela, who is in Chile, that hints at a family that is in disrepair. Beltran appears to have put away his past in favor of studying earthquakes, concentrating on the subterranean fault lines that shift and destroy the earth's surfaces (in Chile, California, and in El Salvador ...etc) In a layover in Los Angeles on a trip to Tokyo to lecture on earthquakes he encounters a woman who provides the stimulus for Beltran to re-examine his past life by comparing it to his favorite 50 movies. At this point the book becomes a 'scientifically documented' list of a wide range of movies with names, cast, theater where viewed, year of movie, year of viewing - each only a matter of a few pages that stimulate Beltran to reassemble his past. He lives in Encino, CA as a child then suddenly his family moves to Santiago de Chile where he does not know the language (despite his inheritance), has no friends like those who surrounded him in Encino acting out the movies that were the center of his life. Through these brief memory capsules we learn this boys' entire life, his longings, his approaching into puberty, first love, and the surprising dismembering of his family unit. The memories are at times hilarious, touching, dreamy, tragic and maturing. And beneath it all is his early preoccupation with earthquakes. As he begins his book he writes: "People think these milestones are like earthquakes, the moments in which it all comes down, but the reality is that things are always rumbling. During an earthquake, people feel all the fear they don't feel when, in their everyday lives, the ground is often taken for granted. This is natural. The human body was designed like an anti-seismic building; at most, we intuit that we're moving only because some bad's happening, but something else prevents us from grasping its true dimensions. So, for all practical purpose, for most of us, nothing much happens. Nothing. Some end up with damaged foundations, though the majority manage to weather if well enough. It's only years later that we realize just how much of a tragedy it was that befell us, but by then it's too late." And at the end he writes: "Some people think that we fall out of touch with old friends or lovers or colleagues or relatives because they no longer have much in common with us. But that's not it. We fall out of touch - we avoid them - because they remind us of a time that we have no desire to remember." Small samples of this writer's gift with words and philosophy.

In this thoroughly entertaining 'story' of a family bounced back and forth between Chile and California propelling the move from childhood to adulthood of a sensitive child, Alberto Fuguet manages to impart a rich dose of observations about all of our interactions with our past, our present, our memories and our current realities. It is difficult to find words to express the wonder this young author stimulates on reading this book. A stunning introduction to an author of great importance.