YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: LITERATURE: SPANISH

SPANISH: Latin America. Andrs Rivera's El farmer was a best-seller in 1996. The novel concerned the declining years of the legendary 19th-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. The work was centred on a winter's night of recollections, with Rosas's rambling monologue bringing back to life for him the glories of his reign and the perfidy of his enemies. In the process he articulated fragments of a modern ideology of authoritarian control. Tununa Mercado's La madriguera focused on the author's childhood. The work was not autobiographical in any common sense of the word, however, but rather involved a feminist theory of memory. Jorge Salessi's Mdicos maleantes y maricas: higiene, criminologa y homosexualidad en la construccin de la nacin Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871-1914) exemplified the work being done to provide an adequate social history for Latin America, which often meant dealing with topics that official scholars had avoided. Salessi's work was concerned with the public discourse regarding sexual deviance and the police and with medical responses to it. Reina Roff's El cielo dividido interwove the stories of seven Argentine women. The account of their lives, in addition to being an impressive attempt to record a mosaic of women's history in Argentine society, connected their personal narratives with national political discourse. In the process Roff provided a lucid explanation of the way in which history in Argentina has referred only to the lives of men or to women only as figures in the lives of men. Gabriel Garca Mrquez's Noticia de un secuestro was published simultaneously in numerous Latin-American centres, a growing practice with authors of his stature. Continuing his interest in violence and codes of masculinity, Garca Mrquez explored the kidnapping of a prominent woman ordered by the drug czar Pablo Escobar. The author combined documentary sources and narrative re-creations to fashion a testimonial on the social contradictions of Colombia. Fernando Vallejo's Chapolas negras was a biography of a short-lived 19th-century Colombian poet, Jos Asuncin Silva. The poet was associated with the beginnings of a decadent, bohemian cultural tradition in Latin America, and Vallejo's interest in him continued the series of explicitly homosexual novels he had published. First published in Spain in 1995, Reinaldo Arenas's posthumous Adis a Mam was published in the U.S. in 1996. A few of the stories were written in Cuba before Arenas's escape with the Marielitos, but most were written during the 10 years he resided in the U.S. These bitter stories, which reflected Arenas's interest in his later works with exile and with the lives of homosexuals, had to do with individuals who were unable to identify with the dominant social structures and felt a sense of alienation. Rafael Loret de Mola's potboiler Alcobas de palacio was one of the fiction hits of the year in Mexico. The author's trashy novel exemplified one more element of U.S. influence: the luridly sexual as an index for political corruption. Elena Garro continued as the reigning matriarch of feminist writing in Mexico. Her Busca mi esquela & Primer amor consisted of two short novels. The first related an erotic relationship between a young woman and an older man, a theme that Garro treated with her customary acerbic view of the limits of human aspirations. The second had a post-World War II setting in a summer vacation retreat in France at which the ugly history of the war could not be kept at bay by a newfound hedonism. In late 1995 Carlos Fuentes published La frontera de cristal. Fuentes had in his fiction established a vast mosaic of contemporary Mexico, and he examined various social and political issues via stories and novels that continued to bear his customary mark of sharp insight and fluid storytelling. The stories of the collection dealt with migration, the issue that continued to sour relations between Mexico and the U.S. The ways in which Mexicans viewed U.S. border policy--as racism, economic exploitation, and linguistic and cultural jingoism--were represented. Magali Garca Ramis's Las noches del Riel de Oro was a collection of short stories that developed the author's interest in the cultural and social contradictions of Puerto Rico's divided identity as a Latin-American country that was also a political unit of the U.S. Garca Ramis emphasized women's lives. Mayra Santos Febres's Pez de vidrio was a fine collection of short stories describing the experiences of women in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. There had been a considerable amount of women's writing in recent years in Puerto Rico, and this collection confirmed the interest of those authors in turning away from the representation of women in traditional women's spaces (the home, the church, the school, the convent) and placing them instead not only in strategic positions in public life but also in urban life, where so many changes in women's lives in recent decades had taken place. (DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER) TURKISH Turkish literature had a lively and controversial year in 1996. Yashar Kemal dominated the news when a court sentenced him to a deferred 20-month jail term for alleged seditious statements. He received numerous international awards. Orhan Pamuk published several essays in Turkey and elsewhere. He received the literary award of Le Comit Franco-Turque for the French translation of his novel Kara kitap ("The Black Book"). The most impressive achievement in poetry came from Hilmi Yavuz, who celebrated his 60th birthday with a collection entitled l ("Desert"), a culmination of his synthesis of traditional, mainly Ottoman, sensibilities and modern culture. In fiction Ahmet Altan's Tehlikeli masallar ("Dangerous Tales") was a runaway best-seller. Singer, columnist, and politician Zlf Livaneli published Engererin gzndeki kamasma ("The Viper's Eye Dazzled"), a striking novel dealing with Ottoman history. Critics praised Ahmet mit's Sis ve gece ("Fog and Night") as the first Turkish detective novel of distinctive literary merit. The complete short stories of Orhan Duru became available during the year. Two major prizes went to women, Erendiz Atas (novel) and Ayse Kulin (short stories). TYAP (the Istanbul Book Fair) honoured woman novelist Peride Celal, whose literary career had started in 1936. Ayla Kutlu published a remarkable new novel about women's plight in rural society. Translation activity was brisk as usual. The translation event of the year was Nevzat Erkmen's courageous undertaking of a Turkish version of James Joyce's Ulysses. The poet Cahit Klebi received the President's Award, and the Turkish Language Association's prize for fiction went to the novelist Erhan Bener. (TALAT S. HALMAN) MATHEMATICS The year 1996 was notable for the successful application of recent advances in mathematics to such practical concerns as the coiling of wire and the manipulation of digital images. In one instance a team at the Spring Research and Manufacturers' Association in Sheffield, Eng., employed methods of data analysis derived from chaos theory, which studies apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in physical systems governed by deterministic laws, to develop a novel quality-control test for wire used in spring manufacture. For decades the spring industry had faced the problem of predicting whether a given sample of wire had good or bad coilability. The new test was carried out in a few minutes by a machine called a FRACMAT, which coils a long test spring, measures the spacing of successive coils with a laser micrometer, and analyzes the resulting numbers, using methods originally developed to find chaotic attractors--geometric descriptions of the behaviour of chaotic systems--in the behaviour of fluid flow. Other novel applications were based on a mathematical technique called wavelet analysis. The technique was introduced in the early 1980s and was established firmly in 1987 by Ingrid Daubechies, then at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J. Wavelet analysis represents data in terms of localized bliplike waveforms called wavelets. The resultant, often greatly simplified representation of the original data is called a wavelet transform. Perhaps the best-known application of wavelet analysis to date derived from the U.S. FBI's decision in 1993 to use a wavelet transform for encoding digitized fingerprint records. A wavelet transform occupies less computer memory than conventional methods for image storage, and its use was predicted to reduce the amount of computer memory needed for fingerprint records by 93%. Some of the most recent applications of wavelets involved medical imaging. In the past two decades, medical centres had come to employ various kinds of scanner-based imaging systems, such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, that use computers to assemble the digitized data collected by the scanner into two- or three-dimensional pictures of the body's internal structures. Dennis Healy and his team at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., demonstrated that a poor digitized image can be smoothed and cleaned up by taking a wavelet transform of it, removing unwanted components, and "detransforming" the wavelet representation to yield an image again. The method reduced the time of the patient's exposure to the radiation involved in the scanning process and thus made the imaging technique cheaper, quicker, and safer. His team also used wavelets to improve the strategies by which the scanners acquired their data at the start. Other researchers were applying the data-enhancement capabilities of wavelets to such tasks as improving the ability of military radar systems to distinguish objects and cleaning up noise from sound recordings. (IAN STEWART) This article updates analysis; information processing.