The Movies of My Life

This book felt autobiographical; the narrator is so very like the author. He uses a catalog of movies seen as a child and teenager to frame vignettes of his life. Sometimes the movie has a direct influence on his life and sometimes it is just an event coincident with some critical event. The narrator recalls his initial childhood in California as a child of Chilean parents who return to Chile in his early adolescence. His grandparents are an important part of his life; his entire extended family makes frequent interesting appearances in the book and in his life. His parents have an unhappy marriage and his father leaves them, something that the boy doesn't really absorb until he is an adult. The narrator and his grandfather are both show more seismologists and the instability of the earth in Chile and California are an important thread, being perhaps a metaphor for the cataclysms of family life.
It was an interesting book, if for no other reason than because the author is writing Latin fiction that is international in tone and escews the magic realism that is nearly formulaic in so much other work written after Borges/Amado/Garcia Marquez. show less

I read The Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet yesterday. Fuguet is one of the leading representitives of McOndo ( a pun on the mythic region of Garcia Marquez's Cien Anos) which is known for being hyperviolent, bilingual and self-referential. The book started strong, noting the mindest of the seismologist protagonist. It has an unconvincing turn and then the subsequent narrative appeared under-developed. That said, I remainc urious about this contemporary movement. I am unsure where to proceed next

I was intrigued by the structural conceit of this novel (a narrator looking back at his childhood and adolescence through the lens, as it were, of movies seen at critical junctures), but have ultimately been disappointed by the execution. The various movies are submitted more or less by title and not really integrated into the story, and while I understand that Fuguet rejects magic realism as a literary style, I feel the flat tone of this novel borders on the merely boring.
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This novel has chapters as different movie titles that relate to the character's life. Brilliant right?! That is where the brilliance ends. Not good.

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