Caravana de recuerdos

Los detectives salvajes

2012-01-25T00:11:00.000-05:00

Los detectives salvajes (Anagrama, 2006)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 1998

Al haber leído tantas novelas maravillosas desde que la primera vez que leí Los detectives salvajes, me alegro decirles que el mamotreto de 1998 de Bolaño siga siendo impresionante la segunda vez. De hecho, joder, debo decirlo más claramente: esto libro me hace indeciblemente feliz. Estructuralmente algo de una "novela puzzle" en la tradición de vanguardia de Rayuela de Cortázar y de La vida instrucciones de uso de Perec, la obra se abre y se acaba con la historia del poeta adolescente hiperactivo Juan García Madero y de su iniciación en el llamado movimiento real visceralista en México a mediados de los setenta. Más tarde, el argumento abarca veinte años y pasa por múltiples continentes siguiendo la pista de Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima (ellos mismos obsesionados con la búsqueda de una poeta mexicana vanguardista de los años 20 que se llama Cesárea Tinajero), los líderes de los real visceralistas además de ser vagos y vendedores de drogas y poètes maudits latinoamericanos, como el movimiento se desintegra. A través de una manera de narrar que es asombrosa y, de vez en cuando, incluso sumamente exuberante por parte de Bolaño--en particular, el uso de una multiplicidad de más que 50 narradores que comparten sus diarios íntimos, historias orales, y monólogos en un mosaico de noventaiocho fragmentos de primera persona (¡que Thomas Bernhard supere a eso!)--un rayo x del alma de una generación de jovenes latinoamericanos perdidos eventualmente emerge de la nube de vapor. Algunos aspectos notables personales. El humor. Con la excepción posible de La literatura nazi en América, esto tiene que ser lo más definitivamente chistoso de todos los libros de Bolaño a pesar del horror que también se nota. ¡La mera idea de una revista de literatura que se llama Lee Harvey Oswald! La oración borracha de Ernesto San Epifano sobre la literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual ("Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo" [83]). La manera distintivamente mexicana de un grupo de amigos de decir "ya basta" a un tipo que está exagerando la historia de una conquista sexual: "-No te la prolongues -dijo Pancho. -No le pongas tanta crema a sus tacos -dijo el hermano" (70). El lenguaje y la oralidad. Además de cómo Bolaño resuelve los problemas de la interioridad y de la perspectiva de sus personajes con la proliferación de narradores --algunos, como Carlos Monsiváis y Michel Bulteau, escritores vivos con caras públicas conocidas --no menos impresionante es la atención prestada al habla de la "vida real" y a la poesía de las pláticas cotidianas. Los mexicanos, por ejemplo, hablan con el abanico completo de útiles palabrotes nacionales como hijo de la chingada, pinche, pendejo, mamón, naco y buey mientras que los argentinos y los uruguayos se diferencian por el uso de pibes en vez de chicos, etcéra. En general, supongo, me gusta escuchar el diálogo de los personajes y también me gusta rendirse a una experiencia cuentística en cual un teenager puede describir a los poetas mexicanos como "mis futuros colegas' y en cual un duelo de sables entre un novelista y un crítico literario puede parecer como lo más natural de todo debido a las otras tragicomedias bajo consideración. En resumen, un cóctel molotov de la ternura y la desesperación. ¡Órale! (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

The Savage Detectives (Picador, 2008)
by Roberto Bolaño [translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer]
Spain, 1998

Having read so many other wonderful novels since the first time I tore through The Savage Detectives, I'm happy to note that Bolaño's 1998 chunkster still impresses the second time around. In fact, fuck it, let me make that more clear: this book slays me. Structurally something of a "puzzle novel" in the envelope-pushing tradition of Cortázar's Hopscotch and Perec's Life A User's Manual, the work opens and closes with hyper teenage poet Juan García Madero's account of his initiation into the so-called visceral realism poetry movement in mid-1970s Mexico City before spanning twenty years and criss-crossing multiple continents following in the footsteps of visceral realist leaders/lowlifes/small-time drug dealers/Lat Am poètes maudits Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima--themselves hot on the trail of a vanished avant-garde Mexican poet from the 1920s named Cesárea Tinajero--as and after the movement implodes. Through ace, often wildly exuberant storytelling on Bolaño's part--in particular, the use of a multiplicity of upwards of fifty narrators who share their diary entries, oral histories, and monologues in a mosaic composed of ninety-eight distinct first-person fragments (top that, Thomas Bernhard!)--an x-ray of the soul of a lost generation of Latin American youth eventually emerges from the haze. Some personal highlights. Humor. With the possible exception of Nazi Literature in the Americas, this has got to be the most laugh out loud funny of all Bolaño's books by far despite the desperation that's also present. I mean, c'mon, the very idea of a litmag called Lee Harvey Oswald! Ernesto San Epifanio's drunken three-page rant on heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual literature ("Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so" [80, in Natasha Wimmer's translation]). The distinctively Mexican way a group of immature young friends razz the guy who's laying it on too thick during the recounting of a sexual conquest: "-No te la prolongues -dijo Pancho. -No le pongas tanta crema a tus tacos -dijo su hermano" ["'Don't overdo it,' said Pancho. 'Don't put so much cream on your tacos,' said his brother"] (73, in my rendering of the Spanish original; Wimmer presents this exchange on page 69 of her translation as "'Spare us,' said Pancho" and "'Cut the crap,' said his brother," which conveys the essence of the colloquial dialogue but doesn't do justice to the second brother's culinary witticism). Language and orality. In addition to how Bolaño resolves the problems of interiority and POV with the profusion of narrators here--some, like Carlos Monsiváis and Michel Bulteau, living writers with established public personas at that--no less impressive is the attention paid to "real-life" speech patterns and the poetry of everyday chatter. The Mexicans, for example, use the full panoply of national curse words like hijo de la chingada, pinche, pendejo, mamón, naco and buey for insults; the Argentineans and Uruguayans speak in terms of pibes in place of chicos for boys and kids, etc. (would that I knew how Wimmer handles all these regionalisms). Mostly, I guess, I just like listening to the way Bolaño's characters talk and the act of surrendering myself to a storytelling experience in which a teenager who can refer to dead Mexican poets as "my future colleagues" and a swordfight between a novelist and a critic on a beach can seem like the most natural things in the world amid all the other tragicomedies on display. In short, a Molotov cocktail of tenderness and despair. ¡Órale! (http://www.picadorusa.com/)

Savage (and non-savage) Readers

Rise of in lieu of a field guide

Amateur Reader (Tom) #1, and #2, of Wuthering Expectations

Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza

Bettina of Liburuak

Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat

Gavin of Page247

Nicole #1, and #2, of bibliographing

Sarah of what we have here is a failure to communicate

Séamus of Vapour Trails

Selena of luxe hours

January Foreign Film Festival and World Cinema Series Links

2012-01-15T17:32:00.002-05:00

Irène Jacob in Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I'll try and put up one of these link collection posts earlier in the month from here on out, but in the meantime here's a page where you can submit January foreign film reviews to either my Foreign Film Festival or Caroline's World Cinema Series. While it'd be great if you could notify both of us whenever you have a film to add to the two lists, in all likelihood that won't be necessary since we'll probably be raiding each other's lists to make sure all reviews submitted for at least one of the events are accounted for on both anyway. In any event, please let me know if you don't want your links added here for some reason. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing which movies have caught your attention this month (note that I will probably list the movies alphabetically by title rather than by country since Caroline and I are defining "foreign film" status in slightly different ways for each event). Cheers!

Comment and connectivity problems? It's been brought to my attention that at least three readers have had problems viewing this blog and/or leaving comments here of late, and I've run into similar problem accessing the comments and links at times when using Internet Explorer as my browser. Until this problem gets resolved, please consider using Firefox or another non-IE browser to view the blog. I'll try to tweak some of the security settings for comments as well, but I'm very hesitant to do that since some anonymous spammers seem to have discovered the blog after several years of my own anonymity. Sorry for any technical difficulties you might have encountered. Edit 1/17: I've decided to disable the threaded comments until Blogger can resolve the problems with its IE interface. Back to the drawing board, I guess, what a nuisance...

January Foreign Film Reviews

Alamak...Toyol! (dir. Ismail Bob Hasim, Malaysia, 2011; reviewer: Nekoneko)
Bar "El Chino" (dir. Daniel Burak, Argentina, 2004; reviewer: me)
Bicycle Thieves [Ladri de biciclette] (dir. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1948; reviewer: Séamus)
Caramel [Sukkar banat] (dir. Nadine Labaki, Lebanon, 2007; reviewer: Caroline)
C'est la Vie [La Baule-les-Pins] (dir. Diane Kurys, France, 1990; reviewer: Guy Savage)
Cuadecuc/Vampir (dir. Pere Portabella, Spain, 1970; reviewer: Obooki)
Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, USA, 2011; reviewer: Caroline)
Everlasting Moments [Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick] (dir. Jan Troell, Sweden, 2008; reviewer: Caroline)
The Fox Family [Gumiho gajok] (dir. Hyung-gon Lee, South Korea, 2006; reviewer: Obooki)
The Guard (dir. John Michael McDonagh, Ireland, 2011; reviewer: Sarah)
Shine, Shine, My Star [Gori, Gori, Moya Zvezda] (dir. Alexander Mitta, USSR, 1969; reviewer: Guy Savage)
Sleepwalker 3D (dir. Oxide Pang, China, 2011; reviewer: Nekoneko)
Soul Kitchen (dir. John Michael McDonagh, Germany, 2009; reviewer: Sarah)
Szindbád (dir. Zoltán Huszárik, Hungary, 1971; reviewer: Dwight)
Torpedo Bombers [Torpedonostsy] (dir. Semyon Aranovich, USSR, 1983; reviewer: Guy Savage)

Bar "El Chino"

2012-01-13T22:38:00.001-05:00

Bar "El Chino" (2004 DVD)
Directed by Daniel Burak
Argentina, 2003
In Spanish with English subtitles

My Argentinophile tendencies notwithstanding, I'm not sure I would have even wanted to see this movie had I been forced to rely on my own capsule summary for guidance and inspiration. Good thing somebody else recommended the film to me first! Martina, a 20-something TV editor, and Jorge, a 40-something independent filmmaker, serendipitously meet at the colorful Bar "El Chino" one night and shortly thereafter decide to combine forces on a low-budget documentary about the historic but down-at-the-heels neighborhood tango bar of the title. A romantic relationship between the unlikely pair somewhat predictably ensues, only to be suddenly interrupted by Argentina's 2001 economic meltdown. Is a job overseas worth giving up being happy at home? Whatever you make of the premise, I'm happy to note that this humble little slice of life is way more satisfying and soulful than it sounds. Leads Jimena La Torre and Boy Olmi have a winning, believable chemistry as the tentative coworkers turned lovebirds, director Daniel Burak takes full advantage of the quasi-documentary nature of the film by including lots of low-fi audio and visual goodness spliced with interviews with fans and performers of the real-life Bar "El Chino," and the ramshackle neighborhood of Pompeya--about as far off the tourist Buenos Aires map as they come despite being one of the birthplaces of tango back in the days of Gardel--emerges as the cultural ground zero for a surprisingly affecting discussion about immigration and emigration, the past and modernity, and how we try and reconcile such forces through the arts. Not at all the slight romantic comedy that I had feared--or at least it doesn't feel like such a thing when set to the strains of that mournful bandoneón. (www.venevisionintl.com)

Jorge Eduardo Garcés ("El Chino")

holding court in front of his famous boliche

Movie Mania

After announcing a year-long "foreign film festival" in the previous post, I found out that Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat is also offering her own World Cinema Series moviefest this year. Please see Caroline's page here for details and please consider participating in both events throughout the year to get your full-on foreign film fix.

Caravana de recuerdos Foreign Film Festival

2012-01-11T23:40:00.000-05:00

Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep

(France, 1996)

Since I hope to work in some occasional movie-related posting here again this year after giving up on that a while back, I thought I'd invite anybody who wants to join me for some movie talk to participate in the first ever Caravana de recuerdos Foreign Film Festival in 2012. Participation is easy, and there are no stupid challenge rules to worry about since this isn't a challenge! You merely a) watch and review one or more foreign films this year and then let me know about it so I can link to your post(s) in a monthly round-up; or b) ignore the invitation altogether. Easy, right? The fine print: For those who want to play along, a film's "foreign" status should be determined by comparing the director's country of origin or residence with your own country of origin or residence (i.e. no Jean-Pierre Melville flicks for the French or Tarantino flicks for Americans; Raúl Ruiz's outstanding Mistérios de Lisboa can count as either a Chilean or a French but not a Portuguese work based on where the director was born and lived). The extra fine print: If any of you would like to "challenge" me to watch one particular film of your choosing at some point during the year, I'll watch it and blog about it as long as a) you're willing to do the same at some mutually agreeable time; and b) I can get a hold of it from my library or through some other source that won't break the bank. This challenge film can be foreign or domestic (your choice) and is only being offered as a participation option--not without some trepidation--as a cinematic tip of the hat to Amateur Reader's infamous so-called "Scottish rules" as set down here. In any event, thanks to both Caroline and Stu for helping me rethink my avoidance of movie reviews of late (whether they realized it or not). Coming soon: a post on a film from Argentina.

Man vs. TBR: Pseudoreality Prevails

2012-01-02T23:58:00.002-05:00

Man vs. TBR #1/12

While I don't anticipate any further bending of the rules from here on out, I've already "revisited" my ridiculous, self-imposed Man vs. TBR book-buying reduction pledge from last month and am now shooting for a grand total of no more than twelve book purchases for the entire year. OK, so I'm obviously willing to cheat to succeed--but what was the first book purchased? NYU history professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman's The Jamestown Project in e-book format, a New Year's Day transaction I practically "had" to make to test drive a certain shiny new gadget that found its way into the house earlier in the day. In non-cheating news, I also wanted to remind everybody that the group read of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives that many of us have been looking forward to for quite some time now is finally due to take place during the last weekend of the month. For more details and/or a look at the list of others who'll be participating, you can check out group read co-host Rise's post here or my post here. Hope you're able to join in on the fun!

Thanks to Jenny Volvoski for allowing us to borrow her cool cover design for The Savage Detectives group read (use of this image as a badge has been approved by the artist). Other rad covers as imagined by Jenny can be found at her art blog From Cover to Cover.

Mi Top 10 de 2011

2011-12-31T12:57:00.000-05:00

Los libros preferidos del año (en orden alfabético por autor)

1) Rayuela, de Julio Cortázar (1963)

2) The Duel [Der Zweikampf], de Heinrich von Kleist (1810)

3) Nada, de Carmen Laforet (1945)

4) The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, de Jill Lepore (1998)

5) Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, de Javier Marías (1994)

6) Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza, de Javier Marías (2002)

6) Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño, de Javier Marías (2004)

6) Tu rostro mañana. 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós, de Javier Marías (2007)

7) Tiempo de silencio, de Luis Martín-Santos (1962)

8) Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo, de Haruki Murakami (1994)

9) Los adioses, de Juan Carlos Onetti (1954)

10) Swann's Way [Du côté de chez Swann], de Marcel Proust (1913)

10) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs], de Marcel Proust (1919)

11) Glosa, de Juan José Saer (1985)

Ok, bueno, hay un libro de sobra. Gracias por visitar y ¡feliz año nuevo! a todos.

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

2011-12-31T03:40:00.007-05:00

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (Ediciones Era, 2001)
por César Aira
Argentina, 2000

Para gente como yo que se aburre fácilmente con la novela histórica, leer Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero es casi como rendirse a un gran chiste surrealista. Me gustó. A caballo entre una biografía ficcionalizada y una novela histórica fingida, esta novela corta de 74 páginas admirablemente cuenta lo que pasa durante un día en los años 1830 cuando el pintor viajero Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858, el artista de carne y hueso retratado en la portada arriba), de paso entre Mendoza y Buenos Aires en la Argentina de las luchas con las fuerzas indígenas, tiene la mala suerte de recibir un rayo en la cabeza. La descripción del narrador es apropriadamente horrorosa. "Como una estatua de níquel, hombre y bestia se encendieron de electricidad. Rugendas se vio brillar, espectador de sí mismo por un instante de horror, que lamentablemente habría de repetirse" (31). Según se verá, el segundo rayo le cae al pobre pintor menos de 15 segundos después del primero con "efectos más devastadores". El hombre y el caballo "volaron unos veinte metros, encendidos y crepitando como una hoguera fría. Seguramente por efecto de la descomposición atómica que estaban sufriendo cuerpos y elementos en la ocasión, la caída no fue fatal" (32). A pesar de la tragedia física de Rugendas, que sobrevive el acidente pero con la cara destrozada y con heridas a los nervios faciales que se hace parecer a un monstruo y que se requiere la morfina, la provocación de Aira se revela cuando el narrador da a intender que la estética del pintor ha cambiado y quizá ha mejorado a causa del accidente. ¿De dónde sale esta nueva inspiración artística? ¿La electricidad, las drogas, o ambas cosas a la vez? No se sabe por cierto, pero sea lo que sea el pintor viajero, en tiempos pasados el representante por excelencia de su género de realismo, ahora descubre que el mundo real es más y más irreal y llena de sorpresas como la escena en cuál un indio aparece con "un descomunal salmón" y indica a Rugendas que parece querer decir "me lo llevo para reproducción" (61). ¿Un poco raro? Sí, clarinete, pero deliciosamente incomformista al mismo tiempo. (www.edicionesera.com.mx)

César Aira

Washington's Crossing

2011-12-29T23:53:00.011-05:00

Washington's Crossing (Oxford University Press, 2006)
by David Hackett Fischer
USA, 2004

David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, like Jill Lepore's über-arresting The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity earlier in the year, is a timely reminder of just what I've been missing out on by doing so little history reading these days. I intend to rectify that in 2012. A superb narrative history of the New York and New Jersey campaigns in winter 1776-1777 when the fate of the young American republic was hanging in the balance, Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning work breathes frigid, lifelike life into Emanuel Leutze's famous Washington Crossing the Delaware portrait by combining a meticulously detailed battle chronicle with some marvelously understated writing about the American, British, and Hessian forces. The result is a reading experience which, while often rousing due to the story that's being told, succeeds as a result of a careful marshalling of the sources rather than a reliance on sensationalistic anecdotes. In a book that Fischer himself contends in his conclusion "is mainly about contingency, in the sense of people making choices, and choices making a difference in the world" (364), I'd like to single out a couple of notable examples of how the historian's own storytelling choices served him particularly well in this effort. First, I was delighted by Fischer's careful attention to regional differences among the American army and various state militias. In recounting a battle scene where a dense fog suddenly arose to provide unexpected cover for a U.S. retreat, for example, Fischer wryly notes: "New Englanders received this event as a 'providential occurrence.' Virginians regarded it as a stroke of fortune" (101). Secondly, Fischer's unobtrusiveness as a narrator makes you really take note on the infrequent occasions when he does command center stage. On Thomas Paine's publication of The American Crisis: "The first sentence had the cadence of a drumbeat. Even after two hundred years, its opening phrases still have the power to lift a reader out of his seat. 'These are the times that try men's souls,' Paine began. 'The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman'" (140). Having not yet even said anything about the complex but essentially favorable portrait of General George Washington that eventually emerges here, I'll merely confess that even this cynic was moved by one of the teachable moments that Fischer, a longtime professor at nearby Brandeis University, produced about the tribulations of Washington and his army near the end: "We celebrate 1776 as the most glorious year in American history. They remembered it as an agony, especially the 'dark days' of autumn" (363). Great stuff--and yet another resounding victory for real history over its watered-down progeny, historical fiction. (www.oup.com)

David Hackett Fischer

The Oregon Trail

2011-12-24T23:57:00.010-05:00

The Oregon Trail (The Library of America, 1991)
by Francis Parkman
USA, 1849

For a book that I'd checked out of the library several months ago and then basically overlooked month after month after month, Francis Parkman's 1849 travel classic The Oregon Trail--a riveting first-person account of the then 23-year old Parkman's trip out west along about half of the Oregon Trail in 1846--delivered all the nonstop reading entertainment that I could ask for during the short amount of time that it was actually in my hands. What a fantastic read. A marvelous--if often merciless--observer, the recent Harvard grad and future eminent historian Parkman's colorful travel diary is laced with anecdotal scorn for almost everybody he ran into during the course of his journey--be they frontier emigrants ("some of the vilest outcasts in the country" [13]), Mormons ("armed fanatics" [333]), or any of the dozens of American Indian tribes he encountered along the trail ("savages" for the adults or "miniature savages" for the children). Given his unabashed racism toward non-whites in general and Native Americans in particular, I should probably note that Parkman's period prejudices, while unflattering in the extreme, actually acount for some of the most fascinating clash of culture moments in the text. He claims, for example, that he had "come into the country almost exclusively with a view of observing the Indian character. Having from childhood felt a curiosity on this subject, and having failed completely to gratify it by reading, I resolved to have recourse to observation" (111). To this end, in one of the highlights of the work, he recounts an extended pit stop spent among the Sioux Indians in the Black Hills country. So what does this representative of Christian "civilization," who has already declared that the Indian soul is "dormant" from a spiritual point of view (99), manage to take away from his anthropological moment in the sun? In one of the more uncomfortable moments, we get this confession:

For the most part, a civilized white man can discover but very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian. With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren of the prairie. Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that having breathed for a few months or a few weeks the air of this region, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast, and if expedient, he could shoot them with as little compunction as they themselves would experience after performing the same office upon him. Yet, in the countenance of the Panther, I gladly read that there were at least some points of sympathy between him and me. We were excellent friends, and as we rode together through rocky passages, deep dells and little barren plains, he occupied himself very zealously in teaching me the Dahcotah language (242-243).

I have to admit that the first time I read this passage, I was more than a little creeped out by Parkman's apparent willingness to exterminate members of a tribe who had offered him hospitality. Upon rereading the passage tonight, I'm now more struck by the mutual mistrust and suspicion that must have marred many potential white-native friendships similar to this one. I think Parkman was very honest in that regard, and it's just this sort of unvarnished candor--more than his observational skills or his often-amusing tendency to badmouth others or the unfortunate racism on display--that helps make his narrative such bracing and compelling reading even today. In any event, an unexpectedly juicy delight. (www.loa.org)

Francis Parkman at age 20

Abandoned Furniture on the Prairie

Parkman's descriptions of his Indian encounters are so fascinating from a historical point of view that it's easy to overlook the way that he manages to make the mundane seem memorable in less adventurous moments along the trail. Here's one of my favorite quiet moments from early on:

It is worth noticing, that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well-waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, many of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Imported, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the remote wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky, then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie (84).

The Widow

2011-12-14T00:37:00.004-05:00

The Widow [La veuve Couderc] (NYRB Classics, 2008)
by Georges Simenon [translated from the French by John Petrie]
France, 1942

Although it's not too difficult to find any number of otherwise sensible people willing to tell you that Simenon's one of the greatest crime writers ever, man, I'm not sure what the eff they're talking about w/r/t the seriously uninvolving The Widow. At its heart a nod to the eternal appeal of both senseless crime and "the stale breath of love" (108), this bleak boy meets girl noir introduces you to an unlikely (and unlikable) couple in the form of the dull Jean, a former rich kid who has just been released from jail for murder, and the equally dull Tati, a middle-aged schemer who spends most of the mercifully brief novel annoying both Jean and the reader with her bossy, jealous, and clingy ways. That things don't turn out happily ever after for the two charmers is maybe nobody's fault but their own, but Simenon himself is definitely to blame for the unconvincing dialogue and a brutal ending that's telegraphed so far in advance as to seem contrived. Note: readers who enjoy Jim Thompson's lesser works and/or an unnecessary amount of attention paid to sordid characters' farmyard chores may find this book much less vachement décevant than I did! (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Georges Simenon

Up for Grabs
If anyone's interested in trying their luck with The Widow, I'd be happy to surrender my ex-TBR copy (bought remaindered in 2009 for $5.99) to the first person who claims it in a comment.

Man vs. TBR

2011-12-09T01:35:00.002-05:00

Now that my book-hoarding prowess has been amply demonstrated for any/all of my book blogging peers to take note of (for the record, the list still isn't quite complete), I'd like to shift gears for a moment and deliver a post that's a conceptual slap in the face to both the holiday shopping season and to excess in general: yes, that's right, I hereby publicly announce a plan to limit myself to a grand total of seven new book purchases between now and the end of 2012. Three reasons why this crackpot plan will fail: 1) I have no willpower. 2) I love buying shiny new paperbacks. 3) Buying books is a noble way to help support the arts--especially if you have no willpower. Three reasons why this voluntary simplicity plan might succeed: 1) I've been so successful at stockpiling cool books that most chain bookstores only elicit elitist disdain from me these days. 2) I have access to a great university library system that I somehow perennially underuse with my usual buy now and ask questions later acquisition methodology. 3) Simon from Savidge Reads went a whole year without book-buying in 2010, thus proving that it's not necessary to have to pepper spray other consumers to get to that IQ84 Murakami endcap--if you have a well-stocked TBR at home. More posts on my experiment in fiscal austerity later and/or when I come to my senses and throw in the towel. Until then, what I hope will be my last three purchases for 2011: Juan Carlos Onetti's La vida breve (Punto de Lectura), José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (Cátedra), and Volume II of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities (Vintage). Hey, it's been zero days since my last book purchase. How about you?

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

2011-12-04T00:13:00.007-05:00

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow [Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne] (The Harvill Press, 1997)
by Peter Høeg [translated from the Danish by F. David]
Denmark, 1992

If you just finished season one of the juicy Danish TV series The Killing and are now looking for another Copenhagen-centered crime drama to keep your genre buzz going, this novel might do the trick in a pinch. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. "Readable" but increasingly implausible crime caper that essentially prostitutes its complex, anti-social title character--a bicultural 37-year old Inuit/Danish loner prone to making trenchant observations about how Greenlandic culture fits in with the post-colonial West in general and post-colonial Denmark in particular--by pimping her out in the service of a not particularly happening storyline which begins with a potentially interesting investigation into a neighbor child's mysterious death and ends with a laughable adventure involving meteorites, otherworldly parasites and mad scientist Bond villains. Noted hack/annoying overactor Tom Wilkinson appears in the late '90s film adaptation of Smilla's Sense of Snow, so it's possible that the movie--now long forgotten by me--is even more of a mixed bag than the book. In other news, spoiler alert! (www.randomhouse.co.uk)

Peter Høeg

Louie Louie

2011-12-01T00:50:00.000-05:00

THE SONICS, "Louie Louie" (1966)

Best "Louie Louie" ever!

The Duel

2011-11-23T23:59:00.008-05:00

The Duel [Der Zweikampf] (Melville House, 2011)
by Heinrich von Kleist [translated from the German by Annie Janusch]
Germany, 1810

Apparently I need to deepen my acquaintance with the smash hits of German literature. Superb long short story/short novella which, in addition to providing an easy way to pad one's reading statistics for the year, dares to investigate the question of whether God's will is at all fathomable to mere mortals. That in itself would be unexceptional, of course, but even godless bloggers will have to admire Kleist's audaciousness in advancing his theme--spinning a spare page-turner of a tale in which a duel pitting one Count Jakob Rotbart, a fourteenth century ladies' man accused of killing his brother the duke but who has a seemingly airtight alibi predicated on the claim that he was otherwise busy seducing an aristocratic woman on the night in question, against Sir Friedrich von Trota, the murdered duke's chamberlain and a valiant defender of the disgraced Lady Littegarde von Auerstein's honor after her denial of Rotbart's claims goes unbelieved even by her immediate family in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, will reveal God's "infallible verdict" in a trial by combat that's binding by law. That the answers provided by the duel can be seen to reflect poorly on God's judgement, man's interpretation of same, the value of honor, innocence, true justice, and mercy, or any and all of the above is just one example of Kleist's slippery winning ways, but I won't dwell on the primal ambiguities since I'm led to believe that most bloggers want only simple solace and maybe a costume drama/retro vibe outta their goddamn historical fictions. While there's little of those things here, on an entirely unrelated note I'm tickled by the fact that the 19th century icon Kleist, at least in the promo photo below, is probably the first author to be featured on this blog who could ever be mistaken for a band member in one of the mid-1980s incarnations of the Fall or the Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain. Yes! (www.mhpbooks.com)

Heinrich von Kleist

Doctor Faustus

2011-11-19T03:45:00.016-05:00

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend [Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde] (Vintage International, 1999)
by Thomas Mann [translated from the German by John E. Woods]
USA, 1947

Doctor Faustus, a German novel written in sunny southern California exile but with the grim presence of World War II serving as the aging Mann's strumpet muse, is a sort of unholy trinity: part intellectual pseudo-biography exploring the link between creativity and madness, part Faust rewrite involving a composer who may have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of uninterrupted artistic greatness, part political allegory of Germany's rise and fall in the period comprising the two world wars. How does one manage to tell such a tale? In the hands of narrator Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D., a lifelong friend of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, the answer seems simple enough: a biography/memoir. It's clear from the outset, though, that this won't just be any ordinary biography as the scholarly Zeitblom here moves from a childhood reminiscence about carefree kids eating berries in the invigorating country air to drawing careful attention to the way that art and fate fought it out in Leverkühn's later life:

I am moved to look back not out of nostalgia, but for his sake and at the thought of his fate, which ordained that he ascend from that valley of innocence to inhospitable, indeed terrifying heights. His was an artist's life; and because it was granted to me, an ordinary man, to view it from so close-up, all the feelings of my soul for human life and fate have coalesced around this exceptional form of human existence. For me, thanks to my friendship with Adrian, the artist's life functions as the paradigm for how fate shapes all our lives, as the classic example of how we are deeply moved by what we call becoming, development, destiny--and it probably is so in reality, too. For although his whole life long the artist may remain nearer, if not to say, more faithful to his childhood than the man who specializes in practical reality, although one can say that, unlike the latter, he abides in the dreamlike, purely human, and playful state of the child, nevertheless the artist's journey from those pristine early years to the late, unforeseen stages of his development is endlessly longer, wilder, stranger--and more disturbing for those who watch--than that of the everyday person, for whom the thought that he, too, was once a child is cause for not half so many tears... I urgently request the reader, by the way, to credit what I have said here with such feeling to my authorial account and not to believe it represents Leverkühn's thoughts. I am an old-fashioned man, stuck in certain romantic views dear to me, among which is the heightened drama of an antithesis between the artist and the bourgeois (27-28).

I've quoted from this passage at length both because it provides a representative sample of the narrator's voice and a measure of the gripping, philosophical way aesthetics and inspiration are engaged with as a matter of course in this work. Leverkühn's life as a man of genius separates him from the pack artistically and socially, but his good friend Serenus is aware of the price that he's had to pay as the result of a life devoted to his music. Is the tradeoff worth it to advance his craft? While fellow Doctor Faustus readers will have to judge for themselves, Mann ups the metaphysical ante in Chapter XXV when the narrator introduces a "secret manuscript" bearing "Adrian's unmediated voice" (237). The subject? A purported dialogue between the composer and the Devil in which extravagant claims are debated at a feverish pitch that may anticipate the title character's looming mental illness and subsequent breakdown: "The artist is the brother of the felon and the madman" (252). "What is art today? A pilgrimage upon a road of peas" (254). "Parody. It might be merry if in its aristocratic nihilism it were not so very woebegone" (257). "Psychology--merciful God, you still hold with that? It is but a poor, bourgeois, nineteenth century thing!" (264).

Although the shaken Zeitblom--perhaps himself an admirer of that "poor, bourgeois, nineteenth century thing" in his role as a middle class traditionalist/scholar trying to understand the human psyche--resumes his narrator role for the rest of the work, his biography is increasingly marked by the way Leverkühn's downfall-in-progress mirrors Germany's turbulent war years. Confronted with his old friend's guilt over a war caused by German aggression, for example, Leverkühn manically opines: "Germany has broad shoulders. And who would deny that such a real breakthrough is worth what the meek world calls a crime!" (325) Later, while working on the score for an apocalyptic work to be performed under the title of The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, the obsessive composer prompts this reflection on the nature of German Kultur from a friend who has seen one man's road to madness parallel a nation's:

Meanwhile a transatlantic general has the inhabitants of Weimar file past the crematoria of their local concentration camp and declares (should one say, unjustly?) that they, citizens who went about their business in seeming honesty and tried to know nothing, though at times the wind blew the stench of burned human flesh up their noses--declares that they share in the guilt for these horrors that are now laid bare and to which he forces them to direct their eyes. Let them look--I shall look with them, in my mind's eye I let myself be jostled along in those same apathetic, or perhaps shuddering, lines. Our thick-walled torture chamber, into which Germany was transformed by a vile regime of conspirators sworn to nihilism from the very start, has been burst open, and our ignominy lies naked before the eyes of the world, of foreign commissions, to whom these incredible scenes are displayed on all sides now and who report home that the hideousness of what they have seen exceeds anything the human imagination can conceive. I repeat, our ignominy. For is it mere hypochondria to tell oneself that all that is German--even German intellect, German thought, the German word--shares in the disgrace of these revelations and is plunged into profoundest doubt? Is it morbid contrition to ask oneself the question: How can "Germany," whichever of its forms it may be allowed to take in the future, so much as open its mouth again to speak of mankind's concerns? (505-506)

A profound and arresting work not least for grappling with these sorts of questions so soon after the war and from the vantage point of a justly defeated people in the narrator's eyes. The fatherland, c'est moi, is it not? (www.vintagebooks.com)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Destiny--or at least a happy coincidence--led me to read Doctor Faustus in conjunction with the German Literature Month program that's now underway here and here. Thanks to Sergio Pitol, whose specific raves about the novel in El arte de la fuga (Mexico, 1996) first led me to become interested in the work, and to Anthony and Caroline and Isabella for more general blogger motivation to check Mann out for the first time.

El gaucho insufrible

2011-11-07T02:55:00.026-05:00

El gaucho insufrible (Anagrama, 2009)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 2003

Ya que siempre había imaginado que El gaucho insufrible figuraba entre las obras menores de Bolaño por alguna razón, vaya sorpresa descubrir que esta recopilación de cinco cuentos y dos ensayos ofrezca dos de las mejores obras cortas del chileno. El cuento titular, por ejemplo, es un homenaje ruidoso a El Sur de Borges que cuenta la historia de un abogado bonaerense que trata de escaparse de la caída económica de Argentina en los años de 2001 y 2002 por refugiarse en un lejano lugar en la pampa. Una vez instalado en el campo, de modo divertido el abogado Pereda se convierte en "el gaucho insufrible" en una tierra donde "ya no quedan caballos...sólo conejos" (27). A pesar del escenario principalmente rural, el sentido de humor malicioso es puro Bolaño: "Es difícil, decía, no ser feliz en Buenos Aires, que es la mezcla perfecta de París y Berlín, aunque si uno aguza la vista, más bien es la mezcla perfecta de Lyon y Praga" (17). Para mí, la otra joya obvia es el ensayo Los mitos de Cthulhu, una polémica sobre la literatura latinoamericana contemporanea en la cual Bolaño grita contra las supuestas virtudes de "la legibilidad" y "la respetabilidad". El ejemplo que sigue es típico de la retórica corrosiva y desenfrenada: "Latinoamérica fue el manicomio de Europa así como Estados Unidos fue su fábrica. La fábrica está ahora en poder de los capataces y locos huidos son su mano de obra. El manicomio, desde hace más de sesenta años, se está quemando en su propio aceite, en su propia grasa" (168). Entre las otras obras, las que más me gustaron fueron el cuento "El policía de las ratas", un noir con roedores supuestamente basado en Josefina la cantora o el pueblo de los ratones de Kafka, y el ensayo autobiográfico Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad, que me dieron risas + crítica literaria + trauma en las dosis esperadas. (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

Since I'd for some reason long harbored the sneaking suspicion that El gaucho insufrible [The Insufferable Gaucho] probably figured among Bolaño's lesser works, what a nice surprise it was to discover that this slender collection of five short stories and two essays contains at least two of the Chilean's best short pieces. Take the title tale, for example, a riotous homage to Borges' "El Sur" which presents us with the story of a Buenos Aires lawyer who tries to escape from Argentina's 2001-2002 economic collapse by fleeing to a remote outpost in the pampas. Once installed in the country, the city slicker Pereda undergoes a super amusing transformation into "the insufferable gaucho" in a land where only rabbits and no horses now remain. Despite the mostly rural setting, the mischievous sense of humor is pure Bolaño: "Es difícil, decía, no ser feliz en Buenos Aires, que es la mezcla perfecta de París y Berlín, aunque si uno aguza la vista, más bien es la mezcla perfecta de Lyon y Praga" ["It's difficult, he used to say, not to be happy in Buenos Aires, which is like the perfect combination of Paris and Berlin--although if one looks more carefully, it's more like the perfect combination of Lyons and Prague"] (17). For me, the other obvious standout is the essay "Los mitos de Cthulhu" ["The Myths of Cthulhu"], a screed on contemporary Latin American literature in which Bolaño rails against the twin nemeses of "legibility" and "respectability" for providing exactly what we don't need from our literature. The example that follows is typical of the corrosive, no holds barred rhetoric: "Latinoamérica fue el manicomio de Europa así como Estados Unidos fue su fábrica. La fábrica está ahora en poder de los capataces y locos huidos son su mano de obra. El manicomio, desde hace más de sesenta años, se está quemando en su propio aceite, en su propia grasa" ["Latin America was the insane asylum of Europe just as the United States was its factory. The factory is now in the hands of the foremen and fugitive madmen supply the labor. The insane asylum, for more than 60 years now, is burning in its own oil, in its own fat"] (168). Among the other pieces, I most enjoyed the short story "El policía de las ratas" ["Police Rat"], a rodent noir supposedly modeled on Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," and the autobiographical essay "Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad" ["Literature + Illness = Illness"], which delivered laughter + literary criticism + trauma in the expected dosages.

Roberto Bolaño, el superhéroe

¿Qué pueden hacer Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo y Ricardo Piglia contra la avalancha de glamour? Poca cosa. Literatura. Pero la literatura no vale nada si no va acompañada de algo más refulgente que el mero acto de sobrevivir. La literatura, sobre todo en Latinoamérica, y sospecho que también en España, es éxito, éxito social claro, es decir es grandes tirajes, traducciones a más de treinta idiomas (yo puedo nombrar veinte idiomas, pero a partir del idioma número 25 empiezo a tener problemas, no porque crea que el idioma número 26 no existe sino porque me cuesta imaginar una industria editorial y unos lectores birmanos temblando de emoción con los avatares mágico-realistas de Eva Luna), casa en Nueva York o Los Ángeles, cenas con grandes magnitarios (para que así descubramos que Bill Clinton puede recitar de memoria párrafos enteros de Huckleberry Finn con la misma soltura con que el presidente Aznar lee a Cernuda), portadas en Newsweek y anticipos millionarios (171-172).

What can Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo and Ricardo Piglia do against the onslaught of glamor? Hardly anything. Literature. But literature's not worth anything if it's not accompanied by something more refulgent than the mere act of surviving. Literature, above all in Latin America but I suspect in Spain as well, is success, social success of course--which is to say big publishing runs, translations in more than thirty languages (I can name twenty languages, but beginning with #25 I begin to have problems--not because I think that #26 doesn't exist but because it's difficult for me to imagine a publishing industry and a few Burmese readers trembling with emotion at the magical realist transformations of Eva Luna), a house in New York or Los Angeles, dinners with business magnates (so that we can thereby learn that Bill Clinton can recite entire paragraphs of Huckleberry Finn by heart with the same ease that Aznar reads Cernuda), Newsweek covers and million-dollar advances (171-172).

One More Fact

2011-11-01T02:43:00.000-04:00

Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs, "One More Fact" (2009)

The Crime of Father Amaro

2011-10-30T19:39:00.002-04:00

The Crime of Father Amaro [O crime do Padre Amaro] (New Directions, 2003)
by Eça de Queirós [translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa]
Portugal, 1880

Since I saw the "steamy" Mexican film adaptation of The Crime of Father Amaro long before I ever got around to reading Eça de Queirós' outrageous Portuguese original, I was pleased to discover how fresh and humorous a novel this is despite the devastation that lies in wait for several of its key characters. Seriously, whoever would have thought that a self-destructive love affair between a provincial parish priest and one of his beautiful parishioners could prove so amusing? Perhaps because Eça was more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of his times than in delivering a traditional morality tale, few people or things are spared when it comes to skewering his victims. Early on, for example, the narrator introduces us to an odd devotional work said to be "both devout and titillating" and "breathing mystical lust"; not content with a full paragraph of such descriptions, he then gleefully blurts out, "it is the canonical Spanish fly!" (88). Elsewhere, malicious Tacitean slander is the weapon of choice used to eviscerate one unfortunate character's reputation ("He always looked rather grimy, and his sallow, effeminate face and debauched eyes spoke of ancient, infamous vices" [144]). Given the novel's focus on sham piety, the characters naturally badmouth each other as well: Canon Dias' joking description of his sister as "a veritable Grand Inquisitor in skirts," while undoubtedly deserved after an excess of religious zeal has led the bitter old maid to burn the personal items once belonging to an unfairly excommunicated romantic rival of Father Amaro's, is entirely typical of the more playful sorts of attacks (269). Aside from the humorous touches and the anti-clerical satire, I just greatly enjoyed Eça de Quierós as a stylist. Here are two almost Proustian soundbites. On the Marquesa de Alegros, one of Father Amaro's patrons: "Her two daughters, having been brought up both to fear Heaven and to care deeply about Fashion, were at once excessively devout and terribly chic, speaking with equal fervour about Christian humility and the latest clothes from Brussels. A journalist of the time said of them: 'Every day they worry about what dress they should wear when it comes to their turn to enter Paradise'" (24). On a lecherous city administrator: "And with that, he turned on his heel and went out onto the balcony in his office--the same balcony on which, every day, between eleven and three, he defiled Teles' wife with his gaze, all the while twirling his blonde moustaches and smoothing his blue cravat" (257). Having talked up Eça's comedic and descriptive flourishes for long enough, I should probably note that the illicit love affair between Father Amaro and Amélia, while well-depicted throughout in terms of the characters' sexual tension, "courtship" and jealousy and startlingly situated against the social backdrop of a Portugal in transition (i.e. the Church and monarchy vs. secularism and republicanism), does take a predictable turn for the worse near the end. While I'm not sure that the novelist really could have written his way out of that 19th century ending, in one sense it doesn't matter at all because he entertainingly keeps you off guard throughout most of the novel--and virtually all of Portuguese society gets blasted by the final page. In short, a fine and unexpectedly edgy read. (www.ndpublishing.com)

Eça de Queirós

Having wanted to read The Crime of Father Amaro for at least two or three years but never quite able to get my act together for it on my own, I'd like to thank Amateur Reader (Tom) for the push provided by his Portuguese Literature Challenge that's now in session over at Wuthering Expectations. Tom, Litlove of Tales from the Reading Room, and possibly one or two others will also be writing about The Crime of Father Amaro on their own blogs sometime soon (update: Litlove's review can now be found here). Until then, here's one more Eça de Queirós broadside for you from pages 123-124 of the Margaret Jull Costa New Directions translation:

What did it matter to him that he had the right to open or close the doors of Heaven? What he wanted was the ancient right to open or close the doors of dungeons! He wanted clerks and Amélias to tremble at the mere shadow cast by his cassock. He would have liked to have been a priest in the old Church, when he would have enjoyed the advantages brought by the power of denunciation and by the kind of terror that an executioner inspires, and there, in that town, under the jurisdiction of his Cathedral, he would have made all those who aspired to the joys that were forbidden to him tremble at the thought of excruciating punishments, and, thinking of João Eduardo and Amélia, he regretted not being able to bring back the bonfires of the Inquisition! In the grip of a fury provoked by thwarted passion, this inoffensive young man spent hours nursing grandiose ambitions of Catholic tyranny, for there is always a moment when even the most stupid priest is filled by the spirit of the Church in one of its two phases, that of mystical renunciation or that of world domination; every subdeacon at one time or another believes himself capable of being either a saint or a Pope; there is not a single seminarian who has not, albeit for an instant, aspired longingly to that cave in the desert in which St Jerome, looking up at the starry sky, felt Grace flow into his heart like an abundant river of milk; and even the potbellied parish priest who, at close of day, sits on his balcony probing the hole in his tooth with a toothpick or, with a paternal air, slowly sips his cup of coffee, even he carries within him the barely perceptible remnants of a Grand Inquisitor.

Bolaño Infra. 1975-1977: los años que inspiraron "Los detectives salvajes"

2011-10-28T04:56:00.013-04:00

Bolaño Infra. 1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes (RiL Editores, 2010)
by Montserrat Madariaga Caro
Chile, 2010

A great little find for fans (and maybe even future fans) of a certain 1998 Roberto Bolaño novel, Bolaño Infra. 1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes [Infra Bolaño, 1975-1977: The Years That Inspired The Savage Detectives] provides a short but thoroughly satisfying account of Bolaño's mid-twenties in Mexico during the time when the then aspiring poet was co-founding the Infrarrealist movement and raising hell with a gang of bohemian friends and sympathizers who would later become immortalized within the pages of The Savage Detectives as the "visceral realists." While part of the fun in reading Bolaño Infra is getting to hear something from and learn something about many of the real life infras who inspired various Savage Detectives characters, an unexpected bonus for me was the faded snapshot of Mexico City's mid-1970s underground art and literature scene that eventually took shape as a result of Chilean journalist Montserrat Madariaga Caro's interviews and research. For example, there are at least two wonderful anecdotes about how the infrarrealists targeted poet Octavio Paz for art terrorist attacks on multiple occasions for the crime of representing establishment culture. In the first such account, José Vicente Anaya tells how "en una de esas reuniones donde discutían sus ataques, se le ocurrió ir con pistolas de salva a un recital de Octavio Paz para disparar y gritar: ¡la poesía ha muerto! Pero la idea se desechó por un posible infarto del señor Paz" ["at one of those meetings where they planned their attacks, it occured to them to go to an Octavio Paz recital with starter pistols to shoot and to shout: 'Poetry is dead!' But the idea was scrapped because of the possibility of Paz having a heart attack" (67). In the second, Paz is remembered reading a poem of his called "La vista, el tacto" ["Sight, Touch"] that plays with repetition of the word luz [light]. An unknown infra begins to interrupt with shouts of "mucha luz, cuanta luz, demasiada luz" ["a lot of light, how much light, too much light"] to which Paz gets up, asks to see who's mocking him, and demands: "Qué es lo que tiene usted contra mí?" ["What is it that you have against me?"]. To which the infra replies: "Un millón de cosas" ["A million things"] before being ejected from the ironically titled "Encuentro de generaciones" ["Generational Encounter"] held at the UNAM bookstore (133). Great story! In addition, there are several memorable word portraits of the young Bolaño. Mexican novelist Juan Villoro, not an infra but a contemporary who became a friend of Bolaño's after meeting him in 1976, describes the Chilean wearing Groucho Marx glasses with hair "agitado por un viento imaginario que conservaría dos décadas después" ["agitated by an imaginary breeze that would still be preserved two decades later"]. "Imposible olvidar sus locuras, el entusiasmo, el disparate, su vitalidad para provocar conversaciones increíbles... Roberto siempre fue muy exagerado y muy elocuente; sus elogios se disparaban hasta el cielo y sus críticas te llevaban al séptimo círculo del infierno, donde están los asesinos" ["Impossible to forget his craziness, enthusiasm, absurdity, his vitality for provoking incredible conversations... Roberto was always very exaggerated and very eloquent; he'd praise things to high heaven, but his criticisms would take you down to the seventh circle of hell, where the killers are"] (101). In one of the nicest surprises of all, an entire chapter is dedicated to the little-known Mexican poet Mario Santiago, the longtime best friend of Bolaño's who was the model for the Ulises Lima character in The Savage Detectives. While details of the Bolaño-Santiago friendship were surprisingly affecting to learn about, one of the heads-up things that the author does with the material is to contrast how the ex-partners in crime approached life and literature after their infrarrealism days. Bolaño, according to some who knew him in his pre-fame Mexico City youth, was a kind of sellout to the cause--a guy who wanted to be recognized as a writer so much that he turned his back on poetry and entered the world of the commercial novelist instead. The eccentric Santiago, on the other hand, chose to live his life as a poem, circulating his poetry among friends and writing poems on apartment walls and other stray surfaces. Which path was more honest? To her credit, Madariaga Caro doesn't render a verdict on the question, instead leaving us with this: "A fin de cuentas, los dos próceres del Infrarrealismo tenían la escritura tatuada en la sien. Ambos vivieron intensamente y codificaron esas sensaciones en poemas, cuentos y novelas. Murieron jóvenes. Murieron sabiéndose deteriorados, como consumidos por sus letras pero aún así escribiéndolas" ["When all's said and done, the two leaders of Infrarrealism had writing tattooed on the brain. Both lived intensely and codified those sensations in poems, short stories and novels. They died young. They died knowing themselves deteriorated, as if consumed by their literature but still writing it"] (124). And this on what Bolaño hoped to achieve with his portrait of Mexico in The Savage Detectives: "Conoció a quienes hacen arte para poder vivir bien, y a los que viven mal para poder hacer arte; en consecuencia, aprendió la naturaleza dual de las cosas y concluyó que 'México es un país tremendamente vital, pese a que es el país donde, paradójicamente, la muerte está más presente. Tal vez solo así, siendo tan vital, puede tener a la muerte tan presente'" ["He knew those who create art in order to live well and those who live poorly in order to create art. As a consequence, he learned the dual nature of things and concluded that 'Mexico is a tremendously vital country in spite of the fact that it's the country where, paradoxically, death is most present. Maybe only like that, being so alive, can it have death so present'"] (140). An unexpectedly inspiring feat of research and one that's even more of a treasure trove for the fan on account of the "Primer manifiesto del movimiento infrarrealista" ["First Manifesto of the Infrarrealist Movement"] and some Bolaño-Santiago correspondence tacked on at the end. (www.rileditores.com)

Photo originally published in Pájaro de calor, ocho poetas infrarrealistas, 1976.

Top: Margarita XX, Mario Santiago, José Rosas Ribeyro, Roberto Bolaño, José Vicente Anaya. Bottom: Rubén Medina, Dina XX, Ramón Méndez, Guadalupe Ochoa, Ramón Méndez.

Montserrat Madariaga Caro

An Un-Review: La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno

2011-10-25T12:20:00.004-04:00

Just so you know, I've been wanting to read more of that crackpot J.R. Wilcock's oeuvre ever since a reread of his "Llorenç Riber" mini-pseudobiography last month reminded me of how devilishly entertaining most of his La sinagoga de los iconoclastas [The Temple of Iconoclasts] was for me a few years back. So imagine my delight when, in aimlessly trolling around the internet last night, I discovered that the still as yet unseen by me El templo etrusco [The Etruscan Temple] that I'd requested for pick-up at the library today comes with this utterly genius descriptive blurb on the back of the book: "Wilcock despliega una vez más su destreza narrativa con una prosa de elegante terrorismo verbal, cuya gran precisión no nos ahorra detalles sádicos, y aun atroces, pero tampoco atisbos de una bellezza indómita" ["Wilcock displays his narrative skill once again with a prose of elegant verbal terrorism, the great precision of which does not spare us sadistic and even inhuman details nor inklings of an untamed beauty"]. "Elegant verbal terrorism"? That, my friends, is a description of a book I want to read--and will soon. However, the Wilcock title that I really, really want to read now is the one pictured above that I just found out about even later last night. La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno [The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell], which sounds like one of the spurious works that appear at the end of Wilcock fan Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, is a book written in collaboration with one Francesco Fantasia and only published after Wilcock's death. What is it about? Duh. However, I love the sound of this thing as described by Guillermo Piro in his Página/12 non-un-review of the 2003 Argentinean edition:

La organización del libro recuerda un poco una famosa escena de Pierrot le fou de Godard, en la que Pierrot-Belmondo, al comienzo del film, se pasea entre la mayoría silenciosa invitada a una fiesta, simplemente escuchando las conversaciones que se suceden a su paso (conversaciones ridículas, en las que todos hablan enunciando slogans publicitarios). En la boda... los visitantes del infierno registran las conversaciones que tienen lugar entre los habitantes del infierno mientras se realizan los preparativos para la gran boda entre Hitler y María Antonieta. Pero María Antonieta duda: Hitler la desea, es digno de ella, pero también Garibaldi cumple con todos los requisitos para poseerla. Y ella duda. Hay un modo de resolver el asunto; una carrera. El primero que llegue será aceptado; el perdedor deberá desaparecer inexorablemente de su vida.

[The book's organization is somewhat reminiscent of a famous scene from Godard's Pierrot le fou in which Belmondo's Pierrot, at the beginning of the film, strolls among the silent majority of guests invited to a party, overhearing the conversations that take place in his wake (ridiculous conversations in which the people that speak do so in advertising slogans). In The Wedding..., the visitors register the conversations that take place among hell's inhabitants while the preparations are being made for the great wedding between Hitler and Marie Antoinette. However, Marie Antoinette gets cold feet: Hitler desires her, Hitler is worthy of her, but Garibaldi also meets all the requisites for possessing her. There's a way to resolve the matter: a race. The first to arrive will win her, but the loser will need to inexorably disappear from her life.]

La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno was published by Emecé in Argentina in 2003 after originally appearing in Italian as Le nozze di Hitler e Maria Antonietta nell'inferno. Man, would I love to get my mitts on a copy of it. How about you?

Borges oral

2011-10-22T03:42:00.005-04:00

Borges oral (Biblioteca Borges, 2008)
por Jorge Luis Borges
Argentina, 1979

En mayo y junio de 1978, Jorge Luis Borges fue invitado dar una serie de cinco clases a la Universidad de Belgrano en Buenos Aires. Cada viernes el escritor elegiría un tema particularmente importante para él --"El libro", "La inmortalidad", "Emanuel Swedenborg", "El cuento policial", "El tiempo"-- y, como resultado de la publicación de las conferencias en Borges oral, los lectores de hoy en día pueden entender cómo sería asistir a un curso dado por el profesor Borges. Pues, ¿cómo sería tener Borges como profe? La clase sobre "El libro" nos da un buen ejemplo de un acercamiento aparentemente sencillo pero que hace reflexionar. Después de decir que le gustaría escribir una historia del libro sobre "las diversas valoraciones que el libro ha recibido" al estilo de la Decadencia de Occidente de Spengler, Borges empieza por explicar que los antiguos "veían en el libro un sucedáneo de la palabra oral" (10). Avanzando al asunto de cómo el Oriente introdujo el concepto de libros sagrados a los griegos y romanos, Borges entonces lleva su historia del libro hasta la modernidad al describir cómo muchos bibliófilos reales tienen interés en el libro como objeto físico y no sólo por su contenido. Dado que esta forma particular del culto de libro no interesa a Borges para nada, él llama la atención a las ironías de cosas como la idea de que los países han elegido obras nacionales paradigmáticas "que no se parecen demasiado a ellos": "Cervantes es un hombre contemporáneo de la Inquisición, pero es tolerante, es un hombre que no tiene ni las virtudes ni los vicios españoles", dice de Don Quijote y España; "Nosotros hubiéramos podido elegir el Facundo de Sarmiento...pero no...hemos elegido como libro la crónica de un desertor, hemos elegido el Martín Fierro, que si bien merece ser elegido como libro, ¿cómo pensar que nuestra historia está representada por un desertor de la conquista del desierto?", pregunta de la épica gaucha y Argentina (17-18). En otra parte, Borges cita a pensadores como Montaigne y Emerson en apoyo de su creencia que la lectura debe ser una forma de felicidad sobre todo. Algunas de sus conclusiones son sorprendentes: "Por eso considero que un escritor como Joyce ha fracasdo esencialmente, porque su obra requiere un esfuerzo" (19). Otras no son sorprendentes: "Les debemos tanto a las letras. Yo he tratado más de releer que de leer, creo que releer es más importante que leer, salvo que para releer se necsita haber leído. Yo tengo ese culto de libro" (21). Qué lástima que sea la hora de acostarme porque hubiera querido hablar un poco más acerca de las otras conferencias en esta tapa de 99 páginas. (www.alianzaeditorial.es)

In May and June of 1978, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to give a series of five lectures at the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires. Each Friday the writer would choose a topic particularly dear to him for one reason or another--"The Book," "Immortality," "Emanuel Swedenborg," "The Detective Story," "Time"--and as a result of the publication of the lectures in the unfortunately titled Borges oral, today's readers can now know what it'd be like to attend a course given by Professor Borges. So what was it like to have Borges as a prof? Borges' plainspoken but thought-provoking lecture on "The Book" gives us a pretty good idea. After stating that he's long wanted to write a history on the reception of the book modeled on Spengler's book talk in The Decline of the West, Borges begins by explaining how the ancients regarded the book as a poor substitute for the spoken word. Moving on to the matter of how the East introduced the concept of sacred books to the Greeks and the Romans, Borges then brings his history of the book up to modern times by noting how the bibliophiles of today often place as much importance on the book as a physical object as on the content of the book itself. Since this particular cult of the book doesn't interest Borges at all, he draws attention instead to ironies like how frequently the paradigmatic works of national literatures are in conflict with the values of the nations that they're said to represent: : "Cervantes is a man contemporaneous with the Inquisition, but he's tolerant, a man who has neither Spanish virtues nor vices" ["Cervantes es un hombre contemporáneo de la Inquisición, pero es tolerante, es un hombre que no tiene ni las virtudes ni los vicios españoles"]) he says of Don Quixote and Spain; "We would have been able to choose Sarmiento's Facundo" as our national book, "but no...[instead] we chose the account of a deserter, we've chosen Martín Fierro, which even though it certainly deserves selection on its merits as a book, what are we to think of our history being represented by a deserter of the conquest of the desert?" ["Nosotros hubiéramos podido elegir el Facundo de Sarmiento...pero no...hemos elegido el Martín Fierro, que si bien merece ser elegido como libro, ¿cómo pensar que nuestra historia está representada por un desertor de la conquista del desierto?"] he asks about the gaucho epic and Argentina (18). Elsewhere, Borges quotes thinkers like Montaigne and Emerson in support of his belief that reading should deliver a state of "happiness" above all else. Some of his conclusions may surprise you: "Because of that, I think that a writer like Joyce has essentially failed because his work requires a real effort" ["Por eso considero que un escritor como Joyce ha fracasdo esencialmente, porque su obra requiere un esfuerzo"] (19). Others may not: "We owe so much to literature. I've tried to reread more than to read, I believe that rereading is more important than reading, except that in order to reread one needs to have read. That's my cult of the book" ("Les debemos tanto a las letras. Yo he tratado más de releer que de leer, creo que releer es más importante que leer, salvo que para releer se necesita haber leído. Yo tengo ese culto del libro"] (21). Too bad it's time to go to bed because I would have liked to talk a little more about a couple of the other lectures in this 99-page appetizer. (www.alianzaeditorial.es)

Borges

The Savage Detectives Group Read

2011-10-21T10:33:00.016-04:00

There's still plenty of time left before 2012, of course, but what the hell: to help put an exclamation point on the end of the 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge and to help usher in the new year in style, Rise of the Bolaño challenge and in lieu of a field guide and I will be hosting a group read of The Savage Detectives (original title: Los detectives salvajes) in January 2012. For those not very familiar with the work, The Savage Detectives is the 1998 novel/pistol to the head of magical realism that provided the commercial and critical breakthrough to set the Chilean Bolaño on his path as the most important writer to come out of Latin America since Gabriel García Márquez. Many Bolaño fans consider it Bolaño's best work--yes, even better than his posthumous, much more critically-lauded 2666--and while I won't get into that argument here, I can see why some people might feel that way given its livewire writing style, narrative experimentation, and scabrous humor. In any event, I hope many of you will consider reading or rereading the novel with Rise and me in what will be the second time around for both of us and the first time I've picked up this personal favorite of mine since those wild and wooly pre-blogging "formative years" of yore--just let us know if you want to read along and then join us for discussion with participating fellow bloggers during the last weekend in January (Friday, 1/27 thru Sunday, 1/29) or thereabouts. P.S. Emily, Frances, Nicole, Tom, others--always the charmer, I'm personally inviting you/calling you out to an under-600 pages de-humiliation party. What do you say?

Savage (and non-savage) Readers
Rise of in lieu of a field guide
Amateur Reader (Tom) of Wuthering Expectations
Amy of The House of the Seven Tails
Anthony of Time's Flow Stemmed
Becky of Page Turners
Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza
Bettina of Liburuak
Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat
Claire of kiss a cloud
Col of Col Reads
Emily of Evening All Afternoon
Frances of Nonsuch Book
Gavin of Page247
Jeremy of READIN
Mel u. of The Reading Life
Nicole of bibliographing
Sarah of A Rat in the Book Pile
Sarah of what we have here is a failure to communicate
Scott of seraillon
Séamus of Vapour Trails
Selena of luxe hours
Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog

The House of the Seven Gables

2011-10-14T23:57:00.270-04:00

The House of the Seven Gables (The Modern Library, 2001)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
USA, 1851

If we can agree that the short story's like the equivalent of a 45 RPM single, the novella's the equivalent of a 12" EP, and the novel's the equivalent of an album, CD, or whatever large data storage file the kids of today are listening to their tinny, overproduced, uninteresting dance music on, then Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is very much like that mediocre second album put out by a once-great band that wowed you with their debut LP. What happened? While I can't blame Hawthorne for electing not to come out with The Scarlet Letter II as the follow-up release to his smash hit, I'm not sure that this wildly uneven "ghost story"/"romance" of his was really the right medium for the morality tale about the Pyncheon family curse he chose to deliver. For starters, even in his preface he's rather heavyhanded about his didactic aims: "Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the Author has provided himself with a moral;--the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;--and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectively convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms" (4). Whatever you make of an author telling you what his story's about before you even get to the story, to my disappointment I found much of the narrative that follows just as clunky and programmatic in tone. Maybe I don't get the guy's alleged sense of humor anymore, but his exposition-heavy passages made me grit my teeth with frequency. Oftentimes striking descriptions shared the stage with awkward, clumsy and flat out mystifying ones like this one: "The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings" (76). Finally, the cardboard cutout characters were a joke, especially in light of the fact that 1851 was also the same year that New England's other newest hit maker gave us the unforgettable trio of Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab. Despite almost giving up on the book about halfway through, though, I'm basically glad I didn't because there's an absolutely fantastic chapter near the end where Hawthorne departs from his mostly boring storytelling style with a night-long vigil at the side of a key character who has just died under mysterious circumstances. The mocking way "the Author" chides and admonishes the deceased character for over a dozen pages is a sight to behold, and for one unbelievably compelling chapter at least I felt like I was in the presence of something electric and special and "classic." Too bad then, with apologies to our dear Hawthorne-loving friend Frances, that so much of the rest of The House of the Seven Gables is as tame and as cloying as any major label power ballad act from the 1980s only without the big hair! (www.modernlibrary.com)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables was read as part of a group read for R.I.P. VI.

Posts by hosts Frances of Nonsuch Book and Audrey of books as food can be found here (F) and here (A).

Borges & Bioy Casares Draw Up a List of Lifelike Characters for Your Reading Delectation or at Least Mine

2011-10-13T11:54:00.011-04:00

Although I was thinking about letting a couple of more days go by before plundering Bioy Casares' Borges diary for yet another almost completely readymade post, its literary shop talk is just too good not to share. I hope you get a kick out of this. The date: Sunday, January 15, 1956. The setting: Borges' house, where Bioy Casares has gone in search of his friend and collaborator and finds that some sort of a "women's meeting" is in session. The set-up: Bioy Casares has just penned a review of L.P. Hartley's 1955 A Perfect Woman in which he makes the claim, cited in a footnote but only touched on in the actual diary, that "Los personajes de Hartley no tienen la sólida realidad de algunos de Balzac, de Don Quijote, de la Luisa del Primo Basilio, de la Sanseverina de Stendhal, pero siempre son verdaderos" ["Hartley's characters don't have the solid reality of some of Balzac's characters, of Don Quixote, of Luisa from Cousin Basilio, of Stendhal's Duchess of Sanseverina, but they are always true"]. This critique naturally leads to a discussion with Borges of various writers' strengths and weaknesses at developing characters, and after some back and forth on Samuel Butler and Dostoevsky and Maupassant, the following list of "personajes verosímiles" [credible, plausible or what I have hopefully not too controversially translated as "lifelike" characters] emerges:

Pinkerton, de The Wrecker; el padre de The House with the Green Shutters de Douglas; el zapatero de Lament for a Maker; la heroína del Primo Basilio; la Sanseverina de La Chartreuse de Parme y Madame de Rénal de Le Rouge et le Noir; el doctor indio de A Passage to India y el bengalí que dice: "Suppose you prosecute" del "Cuento más hermoso del mundo"; don Quijote; Hamlet; Schomberg de Victory; Shylock; acaso el rey Lear (no Macbeth); Babbitt; Roy Richmond de The Adventures of Harry Richmond de Meredith; Watson y no Sherlock Holmes; los personajes de Maupassant; Martín Fierro; Grandet y Eugénie; le père Goriot; M. de Charlus; personajes de Shaw (el poeta y el marido, de Candida; Mrs. Dubedat de The Doctor's Dilemma); Jesús; el conde Fosco y el tío paralítico de The Lady in White; según mi padre, Félicité de "Un coeur simple" de Flaubert y la mujer que hay en El crimen del Padre Amaro.

[Pinkerton from The Wrecker; the father from Douglas' The House with the Green Shutters; the shoemaker from Lament for a Maker; Cousin Basilio's heroine; the Duchess of Sanseverina from La Chartreuse de Parme and Madame de Rénal from Le Rouge et le Noir; the Indian doctor from A Passage to India and the Bengali who says "Suppose you prosecute" from "The Finest Story in the World"; Don Quixote; Hamlet; Victory's Schomberg; Shylock; perhaps King Lear (not Macbeth); Babbitt; Roy Richmond from Meredith's The Adventures of Harry Richmond; Watson and not Sherlock Holmes; Maupassant's characters; Martín Fierro; Grandet and Eugénie; le père Goriot; M. de Charlus; Shaw's characters (Candida's poet and husband, Mrs. Dubedat from The Doctor's Dilemma); Jesus; Count Fosco and the paralytic uncle from The Lady in White [sic]; according to my father, Félicité from Flaubert's Un coeur simple and the woman that's in The Crime of Father Amaro.]

Perhaps inspired by that unexpected Jesus-Count Fosco segueway above, Borges and Bioy Casares then move on to the subject of "real characters who received their reality from books" ["personajes reales pero que recibieron realidad de libros"] like Dr. Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom the diary writer, obviously on a first-name basis with the philosopher, amusingly refers to only as "Jean-Jacques"). However, Bioy Casares then concludes, "muy pronto encontramos que la realidad parece venir, sobre todo, de que sabemos que fueron reales, y que no es ecuánime comparar personajes históricos con personajes ficticios" ["very soon we ran into the problem that their 'reality' seems to come, above all, from the fact that we knew they were real, and that it's not fair to compare historical characters with fictional ones"]. Discussion on lifelike characters over, it's back to business as usual for Borges and Bioy Casares for the diary entry mundanely ends: "Escribimos unos párrafos de nuestro cuento" ["We wrote a few paragraphs for our short story"].

*****

Today's list comes courtesy of the as yet untranslated into English Borges by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006, 154-155.

Bioy Casares and Borges on Eça de Queirós

2011-10-11T13:04:00.007-04:00

In a nod to Tom (né Amateur Reader) and his current Portuguese Literature Challenge being held over at Wuthering Expectations and the fact that I'll soon finally be reading Eça de Queirós' The Crime of Father Amaro as a result of said challenge's call to reading arms, here's a snippet of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges on the high-strung Eça de Queirós lifted from Bioy Casares' smashing Borges diary pictured above:

Martes, 14 de junio [1955]

Hablamos de Eça de Queiroz; decimos que desearíamos que hubiera más libros de Eça; que todo lo que escribía era agradable; que era muy superior a sus maestros, a Anatole France y aun a Flaubert. Borges tiene un instante de duda, cuando menciono a Flaubert; luego dice que Madame Bovary es un libro mucho más pobre que El primo Basilio. Hablamos de Proust...

[We talked about Eça de Queirós; we said that we wished there were more of Eça's books; that everything he wrote was enjoyable; that he was far superior to his "masters," superior to Anatole France and superior even to Flaubert. Borges has a moment of doubt when I mention Flaubert; then he says that Madame Bovary is a much lesser work than Cousin Basilio. We talked about Proust...]

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006, 133)

*****

Proust not being Portuguese, the follow-up anecdote in the sequence had to be pruned from this post. Tsk, tsk. However, even with something like 1,500 pages still to go, I can still assure you that Bioy Casares' diary is filled with juicy literary goodness of this nature as well as the delicious personal dirt that I was hoping to find--as in the story about the crazy ex-flame of Borges' who used to boast of being a big Don Quixote fan but would then qualify it with comments like "pero el verdadero, no el que todos leen" ["but the real one--not the one that everybody reads"] (55)!

Tiempo de silencio

2011-10-08T22:57:00.008-04:00

Tiempo de silencio (Crítica, 2000)
por Luis Martín-Santos
España, 1962

A pesar de su fama como uno de los mejores libros españoles del siglo XX, hay que reconocer que el asunto argumental de Tiempo de silencio es poco prometedor como una diversión: un médico, falsamente acusado de ser culpable de la muerte de una joven durante un aborto ilegal, sufre las consecuencias éticas y legales como resultado de su supuesta complicidad. Sin obstante, vaya sorpresa descubrir que la novela, como si escrita con la ayuda de tinta corrosiva y ojos de rayos x, sea tan deslumbrante como un retrato de Madrid a finales de los años cuarenta. Me gustó enormemente. Aunque todo el mundo habla de la influencia joyceana y/o piobarojiana en la obra de Martín-Santos, por mi parte veo rastros de Francisco de Quevedo en su fervor lingüístico y su debilidad por el tono delincuentemente elevado. En la página 40, por ejemplo, se nota que la llegada del médico Pedro y su ayudante Amador a las chabolas en las afueras de Madrid, adónde se han ido en busca de algunos ratones de laboratorio que se han robado desde su centro de investigación dedicado al estudio del cáncer hereditario, se describe con una pura mirada burlona quevediana: "¡Allí estaban las chabolas! Sobre un pequeño montículo en que concluía la carretera derruida, Amador se había alzado --como muchos siglos antes Moisés sobre un monte más alto-- y señalaba con ademán solemne y con el estallido de la sonrisa de sus belfos gloriosos el vallizuelo escondido entre dos montañas altivas, una de escombrera y cascote, de ya vieja y expoliada basura ciudadana la otra (de la que la busca de los indígenas colindantes había extraído toda sustancia aprovechable valiosa o nutritiva) en el que florecían, pegados los unos a los otros, los soberbios alcázares de la miseria". Dada que esta descripción de las chabolas implícitamente critica a la España franquista, véamos otro ejemplo ácido desde la misma secuencia altisonante (41): "¡De qué maravilloso modo allí quedaba patente la capacidad para la improvisación y la original fuerza constructiva del hombre ibero! ¡Cómo los valores espirituales que otros pueblos nos envidian eran palpablemente demostrados en la manera como de la nada y del detritus toda una armoniosa ciudad había surgido a impulsos de su soplo vivificador! ¡Qué conmovedor espectáculo, fuente de noble orgullo para sus compatriotas, componía el vallizuelo totalmente cubierto de una proliferante materia gárrula de vida, destellante de colores que no sólo nada tenía que envidiar, sino que incluso superaba las perfectas creaciones --en el fondo monótonas y carentes de gracia-- de las especies más inteligentes: las hormigas, las laboriosas abejas, el castor norteamericano!" A veces mencionado como un representante de la llamada novela social española, para mí Tiempo de silencio es un libro tan estilísticamente delirante y sui generis que no puede ser clasificado como una obra representativa. Por ejemplo, no hay capítulos dentro de la obra. Varios personajes "narran" en sus propios monólogos interiores, y otras escenas se narran en la tercera persona omnisciente. El lenguaje emplea la jerga médica y el habla de los pobres y los ricos madrileños además de neologismos cultos y palabras alegremente latinizadas. Es una novela novedosa y, al fin y al cabo, divertida pero también llena del sentimiento trágico de la vida según las palabras de otro escritor vasco famoso. Pedro, caminando en las calles de Madrid, explica todo en este pensamiento suyo que se encuentra en la página 58 del librazo calidoscópico-y-escrito-con-cariño de Martín-Santos: "Cervantes. Cervantes. ¿Puede realmente haber existido en semejante pueblo, en tal ciudad como ésta, en tales calles insignificantes y vulgares un hombre que tuviera esa visión de lo humano, esa creencia en la libertad, esa melancolía desengañada tan lejana de todo heroísmo como de toda exageración, de todo fanatismo como de toda certeza? ¿Puede haber respirado este aire tan excesivamente limpio y haber sido conciente como su obra indica de la naturaleza de la sociedad en la que se veía obligado a cobrar impuestos, matar turcos, perder manos, solicitar favores, poblar cárceles y escribir un libro que únicamente había de hacer reír? ¿Por qué hubo de hacer reír el hombre que más melancólicamente haya llevado una cabeza serena sobre unos hombros vencidos?" (http://www.planetadelibros.com/editorial-editorial-critica-1.html)

Luis Martín-Santos (1924-1964)

Luis Martín-Santos' 1962 novel Tiempo de silencio, a staple on 20th century Spanish graduate reading lists and apparently not without reason, can be found in English translation as Time of Silence as published by Columbia University Press as recently as 1989 (translator: George Leeson). Highly, highly recommended for anyone interested in seeing what great stuff was going on in peninsular Spanish literature during the Boom decade made famous by Latin American authors.

Marcel Schwob's "Bloody Blanche" & "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" (Peril of the Short Story for R.I.P. VI)

2011-10-04T03:00:00.005-04:00

"Bloody Blanche" ["Blanche la sanglante"] & "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" ["MM. Burke et Hare, assassins"]

by Marcel Schwob [translated from the French by Chris Baldick and Marcos Mayer]
France, 1892 & 1896

With people like our good friend Jill so easily grossed out by the playful medieval love poetry of Juan Ruiz, I'm not sure what she or anybody else would have to say about French decadent/Ubu Roi dedicatee Marcel Schwob's truly revolting "Bloody Blanche." A reimagining of the fairy tale as an Oldboy-style revenge fantasy, this gruesome four-page short story's only real purpose seems to be to put its 10-year old title character--both the object and the agent of almost all of the story's violence--in situations where rivers of blood soil her tender young flesh and clothing. Creepy (and not really good creepy if you ask me!) but maybe something to get excited about for fans of the "genre: murder" narrative tradition as one website I came across this weekend laconically put it. After "Bloody Blanche"'s perverse red-on-white excesses, "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" ["Burke and Hare, Assassins"], a fictionalized biography of the real-life serial killers who terrorized Scotland in the 1820s, almost qualifies as wholesome family entertainment in comparison. In any event, I really enjoyed Schwob's arch, surprisingly humorous approach to the material here. For example, after comparing William Burke to a character in The Thousand and One Nights on account of the two men's shared propensity for enjoying storytelling and killing others as the only outlets for their "sensuality," Schowb then devilishly lavishes praise on Burke for his "originalidad anglosajona" ["Anglo-Saxon originality"] in coming up with the more beneficial endgame for his "errabunda imaginación de celta" ["roving Celtic imagination"]: while the fictional slave merely carved up his victims after his crimes, Burke, a much more forward-thinking man, sold his victims' bodies to science for use on the dissection table (277-278). Elsewhere, in what will have to serve as the final words on this piece, Schwob teasingly turns his sights on the art of biography-writing itself when he explains why he'd rather leave Burke and Hare "en medio de su nimbo de gloria" ["in the middle of their halo of glory"] than spell out how the criminals met their end: "¿Por qué destruir un efecto artístico tan hermoso llevándolos lánguidamente hasta el final de su carrera y revelando sus debilidades y sus decepciones? Solo hay que verlos allí, con su máscara en la mano, vagando en las noches de niebla"] ["Why destroy such a beautiful artistic effect leading them listlessly along down to the end of their career and disclosing their weaknesses and disappointments? Far better to picture them still out there, masks in hand, wandering around in the fog-shrouded nights"] (285).

Sources

"Bloody Blanche" appears in Chris Baldick, ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 245-248. "Los señores Burke y Hare: Asesinos" is the last of 22 bios to appear in the Spanish version of Schwob's Vies imaginaires as translated by Marcos Mayer under the title Vidas imaginarias. Buenos Aires: Longseller, 2005, 275-285. By the way, here's a link that I just found to the original "MM. Burke et Hare, assassins" in French. Enjoy!

Libro de buen amor 1606-1617: De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an

2011-09-30T18:56:00.015-04:00

De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an

Quiérovos abreviar la mi predicaçión, [1606]

que sienpre me pagué de pequeño sermón

e de dueña pequeña e de breve razón,

ca lo poco e bien dicho finca en el coraçón.

Del que mucho fabla ríen, quien mucho ríe es loco; [1607]

es en la dueña pequeña amor grande e non de poco;

dueñas di grandes por chicas, por grandes chicas non troco,

mas las chicas e las grandes e las grandes non se repienden del troco.

De las chicas que bien diga el Amor me fizo ruego, [1608]

que diga de sus noblezas; yo quiérolas dezir luego,

dirévos de dueñas chicas que lo avredes por juego:

son frías como la nieve e arden como el fuego.

Son frías de fuera, en el amor ardientes: [1609]

en cama solaz, trebejo, plazenteras, rïentes,

en casa cuerdas, donosas, sosegadas, bienfazientes;

mucho ál ý fallaredes, ado bien paráredes mientes.

En pequeña girconça yaze grand resplandor; [1610]

en açúcar muy poco yaze mucho dulçor;

en la dueña pequeña yaze muy grand amor;

pocas palabras cunplen al buen entendedor.

Es pequeño el grano de la buena pimienta, [1611]

pero, más que la nuez conorta e calienta:

así dueña pequeña, si todo amor consienta,

non ha plazer del mundo que en ella non sienta.

Como en chica rosa está mucha color [1612]

e en oro muy poco grand preçio e grand valor,

como en poco blasmo ya e grand buen olor,

ansí en dueña chica yaze muy grand sabor.

Como robí pequeño tiene mucha bondat, [1613]

color, virtud e preçio e noble claridad,

ansí dueña pequeña tiene mucha beldat,

fermosura, donaire, amor e lealtad.

Chica es la calandria e chico el ruiseñor, [1614]

pero, más dulçe cantan que otro ave mayor;

la muger que es chica por eso es mejor:

en doñeo es más dulçe que açúcar nin flor.

Son aves pequeñuelas papagayo e orior, [1615]

pero, qual[es]quier d'ellas es dulçe gritador,

adonada, fermosa, preçiada cantador:

bien atal es la dueña pequeña con amor.

De la muger pequeña non ay conparaçión: [1616]

terrenal paraíso es e consolaçión,

solaz e alegría, plazer e bendiçión:

mejor es en la prueva que en la salutaçión.

Sienpre quis muger chica más que grande nin [mayor]: [1617]

non es desaguisado del grand mal ser foidor,

del mal tomar lo menos, dizelo el sabidor,

por ende de las mugeres la mejor es la menor.*
*

Is medieval Spanish poetry the book blogosphere's equivalent of box office poison? Although I have the feeling that I'm about to find out, let's get to it anyway, shall we? The Libro de buen amor or Book of Good Love is a poem of over 1700 strophes written circa 1343 by a Spanish poet known variously as Juan Ruiz or the Arcipreste de Hita or both. One of the canonical works of medieval Spanish literature (pun intended: one of the built-in literary and historical ironies of the LBA is that Juan Ruiz might in fact have been a disgraced real-life "archpriest" or cleric himself), the poem is an often ribald affair chronicling the poet's ambiguous efforts to differentiate "good love" (the love of God) from "crazy love" (the love of the ladies) for his readers' benefit. In any event, the twelve stanzas above, from a passage titled "De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an" ["On the Attributes of Little Women"], constitute one of my favorite sections in the poem for their mix of post-Ovidian amatory humor and mock scholasticism.

While I'm not going to provide a full translation of the verses in question, it'd be wrong of me not to share how "De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas an" begins in Saralyn R. Daly's rendering of lines 1606 a-d. To wit:

My lords, I want to make my preaching to you very brief,

For in short sermons I have always found delight and art,

Also in a little lady and in reasoning that is short.

For what is little and well said stays fixed within the heart.**

What follows, as you might be able to imagine from this opening, is a brief "sermon" on the greatness of little women delivered as a parody of the scholastic rhetorical device in which two opposite sides of a question are compared to one another: here, the topoi of the más and the menos (more and less) according to Alberto Blecua's helpful footnote on page 415 of my Spanish edition of the text. Commenting on this beginning, Jeremy N.H. Lawrance wryly notes, "Perhaps only a medieval poet, writing in the scholastic tradition of artificial conceptual correspondences, could introduce the far-fetched comparison between a short sermon and a small woman, even as a joke, with so little ado."*** So what makes little women so great? According to the poet, it has to do with things like the fact that there is great love to be found inside the little woman out of all proportion to her size (1607b's "es en la pequeña dueña amor grande e non de poco"). He supports his argument by claiming that while they may appear to be cold on the outside, in love they are "ardientes" (ardent, passionate) and a great joy in bed (1609a-b). He extends the less is more comparison by referring to the abundant sweetness to be found in a tiny lump of sugar (1610b), the heat to be found in a grain of black pepper (1611a-b), the great amount of color evident in a tiny rose (1612a), and--moving on to the animal kingdom--the parallel to be found in the example of the skylark and the nightingale, which despite being diminutive creatures, sing more sweetly than any other birds of a greater size (1614a-b).

Even though English readers may not be able to appreciate how delirious and giddily propulsive this playful rhetoric comes across in Spanish meter, there's probably little extra translation help needed to understand the dirty wordplay behind Juan Ruiz's skirt chasing persona and predicaçión. The everyday word caliente, for example, used to convey the heat of the grain of pepper in 1611a-b, can also double for the heat of sexual arousal if you're able to read between the arcipreste's carnal lines. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that verses 1611c-d offer up a similar potential double entendre in praise of one of little women's special attributes: using Saralyn R. Daly's translation once again, "Just so, with a little woman, if she grants you all her love,/There's no delight on earth which isn't found in her encased." Near the end of "De las propriedades que las dueñas chicas an," the poet uses some innuendo-laden language of the sermon to preach that little women are without peer as an "earthly paradise" and sexual "consolation" to man (1616b), a "pleasure" and a "blessing" (1616c), and "better in the proof than in the salutation" (1616c). Then, while appearing to poke fun at the tradition that portrays women as the agents of sexual sin and evil, the arcipreste offers this advice to his listeners in the concluding strophe of his homage to the little ones he loves so dearly (translation by Daly once last time):

I've always loved a little one more than the big or tall!

It never has been wrong to flee great evil, I suggest,

"But of all evil, choose the least," so says the ancient Sage.

Therefore, of all the women, littlest women are the best!**

Notes & mini-bibliography

*This part of the poem was transcribed from my battered paperback copy of Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor in the wonderful edition put out by Alberto Blecua for Cátedra's Letras Hispánicas series. See pages 415-419 for the verses presented here and information including notes on the text and textual variants.

**I haven't seen many English translations that do the Libro de buen amor justice. However, Saralyn R. Daly's translation of "About the Qualities Which Little Women Have" that I made use of here is a very nice exception in that regard, wisely offering the facing text in "Old Spanish" edited by Anthony N. Zahareas. See The Book of True Love, pages 396-398, for the bilingual verses in question.

***Jeremy N.H. Lawrance, "The Audience of the Libro de buen amor," 226.

The Poem

Ruiz, Juan (Arcipreste de Hita). Libro de buen amor. Madrid: Cátedra, 2001.

Ruiz, Juan (The Archpriest of Hita). The Book of True Love [translated by Saralyn R. Daly). University Park: The Pennsylvania Stae University Press, 1978.

A Study

Lawrance, Jeremy N.H. "The Audience of the Libro de buen amor." Comparative Literature, 36/3 (1984), 220-237.

Daphne Du Maurier's "Monte Verità" & "Don't Look Now" (Peril of the Short Story for R.I.P. VI)

2011-09-28T19:59:00.007-04:00

"Monte Verità" & "Don't Look Now"

by Daphne du Maurier

England, 1952 and 1971

I love that Daphne du Maurier photo up above. Despite the weird Project Runway fashion statement that she's making with her ensemble, there's something about her expression that makes me feel that I could bond with her--or, more realistically, that makes me feel that I'd at least want to bond with her--should our two worlds ever meet. Unfortunately, my first two reading dates with Daphne didn't go as swimmingly as I would have hoped. For starters, experiencing "Don't Look Now," the 1971 short story of hers which I read first, was a little like watching a cool, edgy Hitchcock thriller for about an hour and a half and then finding out that M. Night Shyamalan had been brought in for the last 15 minutes to deliver one of those lame-o, implausible endings that he's famous for. What the hell, girl and/or "M"? You had me with the creepy old clairvoyant sisters and the sudden reappearance of the beloved but unfortunately long deceased young daughter. You lost me with that ending--particularly the goofball last line which reads like a parody. The 1952 "Monte Verità," at 79 pages maybe more a novella than a short story, was a disappointment for other reasons. A genre splice pairing a mountain climbing adventure and a supernatural mystery focused on a mystical cult of true believers hidden away from the modern world, it all just got a little too H. Rider Haggard She outlandish for me although people more inclined to Brit adventure/supernatural mystery pastiches may naturally have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing. Oddly enough given all this kvetching, though, I'm not at all opposed to seeking out a little more Daphne du Maurier action in the future. If reading her at long last was kind of like being set up on a blind date with a hipster chick and then finding out that the hipster chick in question was not only inexplicably all bent out of shape about R.E.M. breaking up but also wrongly excited about Sting's Back to Bass solo tour, I still think she's a fine stylist in terms of her storytelling mechanics, in drawing attention to the emotional nuances of (and between) her characters, and--despite apparent disagreements with her judgement from time to time--also fairly good company in terms of how many of the supernatural aspects of these two stories are grounded in character reactions that feel realistic for the most part. But R.E.M.? Sting? "Hipster"? WTF?

Source

"Don't Look Now" and "Monte Verità" are the first and last stories featured in Daphne du Maurier's nine-tale Don't Look Now collection, read here as part of the "Peril of the Short Story" festivities for R.I.P. VI. New York: NYRB Classics, 2008, 3-58 & 267-346.

Llorenç Riber

2011-09-26T04:01:00.017-04:00

Llorenç Riber
por J.R. Wilcock [traducido del italiano por Joaquín Jordá]
Italia, 1972

Una de las biografías inventadas más absurdas de La sinagoga de los iconoclastas, de Wilcock (un libro que fue uno de los cianotipos posmodernos de La literatura nazi en América, de Bolaño), Llorenç Riber es una obra re divertida que trata de un director catalán, obsesionado con los conejos, cuyas producciones raras incluyen una versión musical de las Investigaciones filosóficas, de Wittgenstein. Como corresponde a un relato de esta índole, el compilador de este homenaje documenta la vida del artista con carácter juguetón por medio de cuatro reseñas críticas de sus obras escritas por otros y el fragmento de un guión inédito de una obra teatral de Riber que se llama Tristán e Isoldo (una puesta al día gay del clásico medieval). Aunque no tengo la menor idea de cómo ustedes reaccionarían al sentido de humor que se encuentra acá, no podía dejar de reírme a carcajadas con los pormenores biográficos falsos (dicho haber sido devorado por un león en una página, Riber es después llamado "el director prematuramente devorado" en la próxima página [242]) o las varias reseñas simuladas (Tête de Chien tiene tanto éxito en Lausanne que Riber "fue llamado a saludar hasta ocho veces"; sin obstante, el crítico entonces añade que "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" [246]). Al hablar de esto, una de las reseñas fingidas--la reseña escribida por un tal Matteo Campanari para Il Mondo en Roma--es particularmente interesante para razones imprevisibles. Veamos si yo pueda hacer justicia a esta anecdóta literaria poco conocida. Resulta que Wilcock, después de trasladarse a Italia de su Argentina natal, se convertió en un crítico de teatro suplente en algún momento. Tan aburrido por la tarea de ir al teatro, el excéntrico Wilcock comenzó a escribir reseñas sobre espectáculos inventados por un semanario romano bajo un seudónimo. En este momento, ¡no es de sorprender que la revista fuera llamada Il Mondo, que el crítico estrafalario se llamara Matteo Campanari, y que una de las producciones falsificadas fue presentado por un director que esté mejor conocido como Llorenç Riber!

One of the wackier fake biographies from J.R. Wilcock's La sinagoga de los iconoclastas (available in English as The Temple of Iconoclasts and a work that's one of the indisputable postmodern blueprints for Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas), "Llorenç Riber" is a super funny piece of writing that celebrates a rabbit-obsessed Catalan theater director whose bizarre list of credits includes a musical version of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations among several other way off-Broadway oddities. As befits a narrative of this nature, the compiler of this would-be homage playfully documents the artist's life with a selection of four critical pieces on his work composed by others and an extract from Riber's own unpublished play Tristán e Isoldo [Tristan and Isoldo], a sort of gay update of the medieval romance. While I have no idea how many of you would embrace the absurdity of all this as much as I did, I couldn't stop laughing at either the faux biographical tidbits (said to have been killed by a lion on one page, Riber is then referred to as "el director prematuramente devorado" ["the prematurely devoured director"] on the very next one [242]) or the various mock reviews (Riber's Tête de Chien is so warmly received in Lausanne that the director's asked to come out for eight curtain calls; however, the reviewer then cynically notes that "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" ["for a director, being lauded in Switzerland is like receiving a basket of eggs as a gift"] (246). Curiously enough, one of the mock reviews that's most interesting--the one penned by one Matteo Campanari for Il Mondo in Rome--isn't particularly interesting for any of the reasons you might expect from the above. Let's see if I can do this obscure literary anecdote justice. As the story goes, Wilcock at one point in time became a substitute theater critic in Rome after moving to Italy from his native Argentina. However, the eccentric writer was so bored by the chore of theater-going that he started inventing reviews of fabricated plays with made-up facts and casts and submitting the pieces to an Italian weekly under a pseudonym. At this point, it should come as no surprise that the weekly was called Il Mondo, that Wilcock's pseudonym was Matteo Campanari, and that one of the fake directors Campanari-Wilcock wrote about was none other than our good friend Llorenç Riber!

Fuente/source

Héctor Libertella, ed. 11 relatos argentinos del siglo XX (Una antología alternativa) [11 20th Century Argentine Narratives: An Alternative Anthology]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Perfil, 1997, 241-266.

Más

El país de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (La Nación)

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock: Rey iconoclasta (Milenio Online)

Farewell, My Lovely

2011-09-23T19:09:00.004-04:00

Farewell, My Lovely (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992)
by Raymond Chandler
USA, 1940

For anybody keeping score at home, I'm in the early stages of an ever so leisurely reread of all of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels--looking for reading kicks, sure, but also looking to see how well these books hold up against my memories of them from days gone by. So far Chandler and Marlowe are a solid two for two. It's a measure of Farewell, My Lovely's success as an entertainment vehicle, though, that a far-fetched storytelling moment or two, an all too neat resolution of a love triangle and a murder, and some Hardy Boys-style credibility gaps didn't dim my enthusiasm for the novel as a whole. It's a flawed but engaging work. Although brash private detective Marlowe's first-person narration is as snappy as always ("Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food," he memorably describes one goon [4]), one of the things that I'd forgotten about in this novel is that he engages in an unexpected running gag involving some none too subtle Hemingway-bashing: "Who is this Hemingway person at all?" asks the dirty cop who's just had the Hemingway nickname bestowed on him by Marlowe and is quickly getting fed up with the mysterious insult. "A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good," Marlowe retorts (164). Elsewhere, Marlowe's reaction when presented with a photograph of a missing person is typical of the high testosterone yucks to be found throughout the narrative: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window" [93]). What makes this second Marlowe novel so fascinating from a thematic rather than a mere writing standpoint, though, is that Chandler took a genre tale of multiple murders in L.A. and boldly turned it into a kind of oblique commentary on the problems of race in big city America. What was Chandler's message? Thankfully, it's not so simple that I could tell you for sure. However, in a novel where casual racism from white cops, criminals, and even Marlowe himself is often directed at "nigger[s]" (87), "Jap gardeners" (121), "a smelly Indian" (142) and the like, it's both uncomfortable and somehow bracing to see Marlowe's sarcastic indictment of the kind of justice available to blacks vs. whites: "Well, all he did was kill a Negro. I guess that's only a misdemeanor" (118). (www.weeklylizard.com)

Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely was my third novel or novella read for R.I.P. VI.

The next title will likely be either James M. Cain's 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice (also an old fave of mine back in my high school and/or college days) or a short story by Daphne du Maurier (since I appear to be the only guy on the planet who's never read anything by her).

Cecil Taylor

2011-09-21T02:53:00.008-04:00

Cecil Taylor

por César Aira
Argentina, 1987

Cecil Taylor empieza con una escena magnífica y totalmente asombrosa: una prostituta neoyorquina, al volver a su depto después de una noche de trabajo, se encuentra con un grupo de vagos que están mirando algo en la vidriera sucia de un negocio abandonado. ¿De qué se trata? La lucha inminente entre un gato y una rata. De repente, la mujer golpea la vidriera con su cartera, distraendo del gato suficientemente para que se escape la rata. Los hombres se enojan con ella a causa de la interrupción del show, y un hecho de violencia no especificado tiene lugar como resultado. A pesar de ser tan cautivador, es facil pasar por alto la genialidad de este principio porque lo que sigue en lo demás del cuento no parece tener nada en común con ello. En lugar de eso, encontramos la historia del pianista free jazz Cecil Taylor situada en el año de 1956. Taylor, en aquel entonces un cero en cuanto a la fama, sufre la indignidad de ser expuesto a la mofa pública en bares con piano donde todos los clientes son músicos, drogadictos, o alcohólicos; en lugares prestigiosos como el Village Vanguard, donde él tontamente cree que al menos sus collegas los músicos tratarán de comprender sus inovaciones atonales; e incluso en una fiesta privada en la casa de Long Island de la señora Gloria Vanderbilt (los invitados aplauden cuando la heredera dice "para"). Frente al estilo de vanguardia del músico, casi todo el mundo reacciona con desaprobación a su arte atonal o, lo que es peor, con una pregunta sincera sino insultante cómo la del dueño del bar que especializa en el tráfico de la heroina: "¿No habrás querido tomarnos el pelo?" Aunque las desdichas de Taylor nunca paran a lo largo del cuento de 14 páginas, la belleza salvaje y la artesanía del relato se encuentran en la escritura fiera de Aira y en la sugerencia provocadora que el proceso creativo--la realidad vivida en cual los conciertos de Taylor generan una falta de comprensión evidente como "escarnio invisible licuado en risitas inaudibles" [136]--es análoga en alguna manera a la historia de la prostituta y los vagos en cuanto al "fracaso" del artista de sobrepasar lo que se esperaba en la imaginación de la audiencia. Aira, ¡vos sos un capo!

"Cecil Taylor" begins with a magnificently drawn and absolutely striking scene: a New York prostitute, returning to her apartment early one morning after a night of work, runs into a group of lowlifes apparently transfixed by something visible through the dirty windows of an abandoned storefront. What are they looking at? An impending fight between a cat and a rat. Suddenly, the woman strikes the glass with her purse, distracting the cat long enough for the rat to escape. The men then get mad at her on account of the interruption of the show, and an unspecified act of violence takes place as a result. As attention-grabbing as all this is, it's easy to overlook the compositional brilliance of this opening scene because it doesn't really appear to have much in common with the rest of the short story apart from its atmosphere. Instead, we're treated to a hard luck story about free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor set in 1956. Taylor, at that time a virtual nobody in terms of his fame, suffers a series of public indignities in piano bars where the small crowds consist primarily of musicians, drug addicts, and alcoholics; in a disappointing showcase performance at the Village Vanguard, where he foolishly believes that at least his fellow musicians will understand what he's trying to accomplish; and even at a private party given by Gloria Vanderbilt at her Long Island mansion (the guests applaud when the socialite pulls the plug on him). Confronted with the musician's avant-garde stylings, almost everybody responds to his atonal art with either open disapproval or, what's worse, this sincere but insulting question put to him by a bar owner almost exclusively occupied with heroin-trafficking: "Are you sure you're not just pulling our legs?" Although Taylor's misfortunes never let up throughout the length of this fourteen-page story, the savage beauty and the craftsmanship of the tale are to be found in Aira's feral writing and the provocative suggestion that the creative process--the lived reality in which Taylor's performances generate a lack of understanding manifesting itself as "escarnio invisible licuado en risitas inaudibles" ["invisible derision liquified in inaudible laughter"] [136]-- is somehow analagous to the story about the prostitute and the night owl lowlifes in terms of the artist's failure to deliver what constitutes a show in the minds of the audience. Aira, you the man!

Fuente/source:
Juan Forn, ed. Buenos Aires: Una antología de nueva ficción argentina [Buenos Aires: An Anthology of New Argentinean Fiction]. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1992, 129-144.

Arriba/Above: Cecil Taylor; Abajo/Below: César Aira

Ficciones: 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge

2011-09-19T12:14:00.012-04:00

Like blog buddies Rise of in lieu of a field guide (who kindly made me aware of this challenge in the first place) and Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog, I've decided to sign up for Ficciones, a 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge hosted by Jen of Jen and the Pen. Even though I still think most reading challenges (and most reading challenge participants!) are rather dopey, I'm going to try to be less hypocritically strident about that opinion in the future because this is just one of several challenges I've found this year that I'm actually quite fond of and still owe reviews to: Amateur Reader and Nicole's Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity (click here and there for their final posts), Carl V.'s R.I.P. VI, Rise's 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge, etc. For me, though, Ficciones is a particularly interesting addition to the mix because it's dedicated to one of my top three countries in the world for foreign literature (France and Spain, eat your hearts out) and my my fave country anywhere for choripan, empanadas, and many other culinary goodies of that nature (unfortunately not a part of the challenge festivities). So what will be my food for thought for this challenge? Too many options for this glutton to choose from! Since the challenge runs from February 15th, 2011 to February 14, 2012, I'll begin by backdating my participation to include Juan José Saer's Glosa and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela--two of my favorite reads from earlier in the year. I might also turn to some of the titles mentioned in this post here and various titles on my sidebar for other possibilities. But among all the great, non-mainstream choices, some of the main candidates at present include César Aira's Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter], Macedonio Fernández's wacky Museo de la novela de la Eterna [The Museum of Eterna's Novel], Beatriz Sarlo's Escritos sobre literatura argentina (literary criticism on Caravana favorites Arlt, Borges, Ricardo Piglia, and Saer), and, what the hell, the nonfiction War and Peace of recent Argentine letters: Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1600-plus page Borges diary (the undertaking of which will equal my version of an old school no supplementary oxygen ascent of Everest). Plus, a whole mess of short stories even though short stories aren't really part of the challenge format aside from short story collections read as a whole. If you'd like more info on signing up for Ficciones, click here, and if you'd just like a surefire way to get pumped up about the nature of the literature in question, check out Amateur Reader's "Bolaño, Aira, and the Argentinean Literature of Doom" here (you could also just read Aira's bitchin' "Cecil Taylor," as I finally did last night, if you want to know what all the fuss is about). By the way, I'm aiming for porteño status (6 reads, at least one of which must be in Spanish); however, there are saner options available for the rest of you lot. Chau chau.

Works Read for Ficciones

1. Juan José Saer's Glosa [title unwisely translated as The Sixty-Five Years of Washington]

2. Julio Cortázar's Rayuela [Hopscotch]

Carmilla

2011-09-16T23:59:00.017-04:00

Carmilla
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Ireland, 1872

Since there's apparently no, ahem, lesbian vampire category for R.I.P. VI (tsk, tsk--let's hope that was just an oversight), I guess I'll have to count Carmilla as an ever so vague "horror" or "supernatural" entry for Carl V.'s reading event instead. Which is just as well since the supposedly scandalous 1872 novella (first published in the magazine The Dark Blue, later included in Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, and here featured as part of a bonus booklet packaged with the 2008 Criterion Collection DVD of Carl Th. Dreyer's 1932 film, Vampyr, itself partially based on this and another Le Fanu tale) is sort of nondescript and more than a little plodding if truth be told. That being said, Carmilla isn't exactly a total loss even though it certainly doesn't come anywhere close to living up to its shocking rep. Would I read it again? Probably not. But the representation of female/female sexuality must have been edgy for its times, and there's a nice narrative arc behind narrator Laura's early, conflicted reactions to Carmilla's attentions ("It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheeks in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever'" [130]) and her growing appreciation for her attractive friend/predator as time goes on ("I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on," the teenaged Laura says at one moment. To which Carmilla replies, "I have been in love with no one, and never shall, unless it should be with you." The older Laura to the reader: "How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!" [144]). In addition, I also got a kick out of a couple of humorous horror tropes like the one where Laura's participation in the "sweet singing" of a funeral hymn (132) prompts the title character to ask, "Don't you perceive how discordant that is?" Apart from that, though, I don't have much else to say other than that Théophile Gautier's 1836 "La Morte amoureuse," Dreyer's 1932 Vampyr, and Alejandra Pizarnik's stupendously gory 1965 "La condesa sangriente" (all posted on here in 2009, a banner year for the undead it would seem!) all deliver the carnal bite sorely lacking in Le Fanu's surprisingly timid "classic." (http://www.criterion.com/)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

(image at top: Funeral, by Michael Fitzgerald, from the original publication of Carmilla in The Dark Blue)

A Rage in Harlem

2011-09-12T10:00:00.003-04:00

A Rage in Harlem (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1991)
by Chester Himes
USA, 1957

While it took me a good couple of years to finally get around to reading my second Himes title, it only took me about two minutes to lose myself in the pages of this frantic, violently funny crime caper. The first in a series of novels featuring badass Harlem detective duo Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, A Rage in Harlem (originally titled For Love of Imabelle) actually spends far more time following the scams and counter scams swirling in the wake of gullible sucker Jackson after he's swindled out of his life savings by a team of con men who convince him that they can chemically transform his ten dollar bills into hundred dollar bills in his apartment oven. Himes doesn't take his foot off the gas pedal long enough to flesh out the high-octane plot all that much, but in a novel where pace and atmosphere and a delight in the double cross are everything ("Crime doesn't pay," lectures a fake marshal at the tail end of an early shakedown [12]), there's plenty of descriptive glee to be found in the depiction of faces "glistening like an eight ball" (5), cross-dressing Sisters of Mercy imitators selling tickets to heaven to Harlem residents to feed their dope habits, and irreverent preachers who mutter "Lord save us from squares" when some of the more naive members of the congregation come to throw themselves on the Lord's mercy (137). A fun goof all in all--but one in which a graphic throat-cutting scene and a complex take on race relations as viewed from a late-1950s "Negro" underworld perspective ratchet up the pre-Tarantino intensity levels unpredictably. (www.weeklylizard.com)

Chester Himes

A Rage in Harlem is my "mystery" selection for R.I.P. VI. While I'm not sure how much it has in common with other R.I.P. mystery picks this year, I'm guessing that it's probably the only one with as fine a readers imbibing peril line as the one on page 54 in which Himes tells us that "the cold snowy February night was already getting liquored up." Top that, cozy mystery bloggers!

R.I.P. VI

2011-09-05T00:37:00.005-04:00

Image: Melissa Nucera, Flight

Even though it's a well-known fact that most reading challenges are like the book blog equivalent of Loserpalooza, I have nothing mean to say about the annual R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril festivities hosted by Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings (click here for details). In fact, I've wanted to join in at least the last two years in a row prior to this without having been able to get my antisocial act together in time. This year, however, I've decided to give it a go and will be reading and watching a mix of novels, short stories, and movies from the Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Dark Fantasy, Gothic, Horror, and Supernatural wings of the bookstore or videostore during the R.I.P. VI months of September and October (OK, maybe not that fourth genre since the only fantasy I like to indulge in is pretending that cute twenty-something baristas will one day stop objectifying me for my looks when they serve me up my iced lattés and instead concentrate on that stack of Bolaños and Prousts carried in the crooks of my brooding, melancholy, but evidently still manly forty-something arms). So what will I be reading? Not sure at this point. However, I'm looking forward to some classic U.S. crime heavyweights (James M. Cain, Chandler, Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson) for the novels and novellas and some international authors (including some Latin Americans, for sure) to head up the list of the short story writers. Until then, since I forgot to mention anything horror-related in this post, here's some trashy r&r for you as a genre gift from me to you!

Jukebox: Les Sexareenos, "Everybody Sexareeno!"

Tu rostro mañana. 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós

2011-09-02T18:40:00.009-04:00

Tu rostro mañana. 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós (Debolsillo, 2010)
por Javier Marías
España, 2007

La pregunta del día hiza por el lector desinteresado: ¿es que Javier Marías realmente necesitó todas las 1.332 páginas de Tu rostro mañana para contar la historia? A lo que yo diría: sí, ¿Marías no podía compartir al menos 200 páginas más? Me encantó la experiencia de leer este libro y en sumergirme en el brillo de sus digressiones narrativas hasta el punto de que sufrí una versión libresca de la depresión postparto cuando llegué al fin. Qué librazo. Sin querer revelar demasiado, digamos que el Veneno y sombra y adiós del tercer y último volumen se enfrenta con al menos tres temas grandes--nuestra incapacidad para verdaderamente conocer la gente en el círculo más interior de familiares y amigos íntimos; la fuerza imprevisiblemente transformacional de la violencia, incluso cuando aplicada a las "causas justas" como la llamada guerra sobre el terrorismo y la lucha contra el fascismo en la Segunda Guerra Mundial; y, finalmente, nuestra incapacidad para saber cómo nosotros mismos reaccionaríamos frente al trauma o a la pérdida o al mal en el futuro--mientras que evita dando respuestas superficiales y se narra por medio de monólogos interiores, la narracón tradicional, y más monólogos interiores de manera hipnótica. Dado que mis compañeros Amateur Reader y Rise ya han escrito sobre la confiabilidad o la falta de confiabilidad del parlanchín Jacques Deza como un narrador y de cómo Tu rostro mañana se sitúa dentro de las obras completas de Marías, voy a limitarme a mencionar tres cosas sin orden ni concierto que se destacaron para mí en el volumen final de esta híbrida idiosincrática de novela de espionaje y historia sentimental. Primero, para un texto que es esencialmente una elegía en prosa, me gustó el efecto de claroscuro ocasionado por el humor alegre de Marías. ¿Esa escena donde el saco de arena humano y patán De la Garza pone a prueba su talento como un cantante de rap a la embajada española en Londres frente al famoso especialista del Siglo de Oro Francisco Rico? ¡Un clásico de la comedia! En segundo lugar, ¿qué puedo decir sobre la maestría de Marías en cuanto a la creación de personajes de carne y hueso además de don Francisco Rico? Dentro de una obra en cual dos atentados brutales tienen lugar en primer plano, en cual Deza tiene que mirar el equivalente a snuff films grabadas en vídeo desde la guerra sobre el terrorismo, y en cual recuerdos perturbadores sobre las peores infamias de la lucha contra Franco y Hitler más y más son el centro de atención, un par de mis escenas preferidas tuvieron que ver con los momentos calladas y sutíles donde una mano sobre el hombro del padre de Deza y la ausencia de una mano sobre el hombro de su amigo Wheeler explican todo sobre el cariño que el narrador tiene por estos dos hombres que están acercando a la muerte. Una escritura con alma, te digo. Por último, nunca me cansé de pasar tiempo con Deza y los otros personajes y sus historias inacabables. Me gustaron sus pensamientos, sus anécdotas, y el estilo de narración (como un trance) donde todo empezaría con una conversación, seguiría con un recuerdo, continuaría con una escena retrospectiva, y etcétera hasta que el hilo origina reaparecería párrafos, páginas, e incluso capítulos enteros más tarde. En resumen, la única queja que tengo en lo que refiere a esta novela es que se acabó tan temprano. Eso se remedia leyendo el nuevo Los enamoramientos en el mes que viene. (www.debolsillo.com)

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (New Directions, 2011)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]
Spain, 2007

The casual reader might well wonder: did Javier Marías really need 1,332 pages to tell Your Face Tomorrow? To which I might casually reply: I agree, couldn't he have given us just a couple of hundred pages more? Loved, loved, loved reading this thing in all its digressional glory, to the point that I actually went into a bit of a funk after finally finishing it. What a fantastic book. Without wanting to give too much away, let's say that Volume 3's Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes on at least three big ticket items--our inability to truly know those closest to us, be they loved ones or dear friends; the unpredictably transformative power of violence, even when applied to a "good cause" as in the so-called war on terror or in the fight against fascism in World War II; and, finally, our inability to predict how we ourselves will respond to trauma or loss or evil when put to the test--all while avoiding easy answers and seamlessly transitioning from interior monologue to narrative and back again in a tour de force of real time narration. Since fellow readalongers Amateur Reader and Rise have already written insightfully snazzy posts on the voluble Jacques Deza's reliability or unreliability as a narrator and how Your Face Tomorrow fits into Marías' larger body of work, I'm going to limit my comments here to three rather random things that grabbed me about the final installment of this idiosyncratic spy novel/love story. First, for a text that's essentially an elegy in prose, I loved the chiaroscuro effect produced by Marías' playful sense of humor. That scene where loudmouthed beating victim/boor De la Garza tries his rap act out on real life Siglo de Oro expert Francisco Rico in the Spanish embassy in London? A comedy classic! Secondly, what can I say about Marías' range as a creator of flesh and blood characters not named Francisco Rico? In a work in which two brutal assaults presented in close-up, videotaped equivalents of snuff films from the war on terror, and disturbing memories of the worst infamies of a world at war against Franco and Hitler increasingly take center stage in the theater that's the narrator's mind, a couple of my favorite moments had to do with the quiet, understated backstage scenes where a touch on the shoulder of his father and the lack of a touch on the shoulder on his friend Wheeler say more about the depth of Deza's feelings for these two dying men than I'm usually privileged to witness in fiction. A very soulful piece of writing. Finally, I never tired of spending time with Deza or any of the other characters as their stories spilled out seemingly endlessly. Enjoyed all their thoughts, their anecdotes, and that trance-like narrative style in which a conversation would lead to a memory, a memory to a flashback, and on and on until the original point of departure would resurface paragraphs, pages, and even entire chapters later. In short, the only real complaint that I have about this work is that it wasn't long enough for me. Hope to remedy that with a reading of Marías' new Los enamoramientos next month. (www.ndpublishing.com)

Javier Marías

Epilogue/Lost in Translation

Thanks to everybody who participated in the readalong and/or otherwise commented along the way. I loved the novel, had a great time reading all your posts on the work, and look forward to adding all the other readalong posts here sometime soon. Please note that in looking at the Margaret Jull Costa translation for Vol. 3 of Your Face Tomorrow (in the Chatto & Windus British hardback), I noticed that the epilogue material that's included in my Spanish edition is missing from the British one. Amateur Reader has confirmed that the epilogue is also missing from the MJC-translated U.S. New Directions edition as well. So what are you missing? The Epílogo in the Debolsillo paperback I read has a 5-page addendum signed off by Javier Marías called "Los intérpretes de vidas" [literally: "The Interpreters or Translators of Lives"] in which Marías revisits the theme of careless talk and the work of the Tupra and Wheeler group and their translations of people's lives over the years. I read it as a kind of standard but interesting postscript, but I probably should read it again. The really fun stuff comes in what follows, though: three three-to-five page reports on well-known celebrities that alternate between hilarity and viciousness. These include "Informe de Pérez-Nuix sobre Silvio Berlusconi (2002)" ["Pérez-Nuix's Report on Silvio Berlusconi (2002)"], "Informe de Rendel sobre Michael Caine (2002)" ["Rendel's Report on Michael Caine (2002)"], and "Informe de Tupra sobre Diana de Gales" (1996)" ["Tupra's Report on Diana of Wales (1996)"]. Anyone want to take a guess on the only celeb who receives a flattering "interpretation"?

Otros informes

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) #1

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) #2

Frances (Nonsuch Book)

Nicole (bibliographing)

Nicole (bibliographing) #2

Rise (in lieu of a field guide)

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains

2011-08-21T21:11:00.006-04:00

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains (Penguin Great Journeys, 2007)
by Isabella Bird
England, 1879

My own Rocky Mountains adventures having been limited to an infinitely less noteworthy occasion in which I once almost got snowed in at Denver International Airport for two weeks during a Boston-LAX layover, I first picked up Isabella Bird's late 19th century travelogue-in-letters (excerpted from her 1879 A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains) out of pure curiosity--looking for a change of pace from some heavy duty fiction I was reading at the time. So imagine my surprise when less than 20 pages into the account of Bird's journey from San Francisco to the Colorado Territory in 1873, a stranger's anecdote about the Donner Party leads Bird to share a stomach-turning description of how the rescue party found "the German, holding a roasted human arm and hand, which he was greedily eating" (18). Thanks a lot for the suggestion to read something lighter, Jill from Rhapsody in Books! This grisly, "secondhand" moment aside, I should make clear that the rest of Bird's letters (written to her sister Henrietta in a style that's straightforward but animatedly attentive to local color) thankfully concentrate on what it was like for an intrepid single British lady to make her way through some wild and predominantly male-populated regions of the U.S. West, mostly on horseback but occasionally by train, at a time of transition evident even to a foreigner. There are many enthusiastic nature scenes for those who like that kind of stuff, some vivid accounts of local desperadoes who cross the plucky Bird's path, and--perhaps most interesting of all to this reader--a depressing analysis of one of the pressing public policy concerns of the time: "The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilisation. The only difference between the savage and the civilised Indian is that the latter carries firearms and gets drunk on whisky" (93-94). (www.penguinclassics.com)

Isabella Bird

Up for Grabs

My copy of this book, a very short read at 119 pages, is up for grabs to the first person who claims it via comment below. Will ship worldwide.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #2

2011-08-14T16:35:00.013-04:00

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

Having left off my earlier post on/love letter to In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower with a nod to that extraordinarily lyrical scene where the narrator renders homage to the memory of Mme Swann sauntering along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne one fine day in May, "at the glorious height of her own mellow and still-delectable summertime" (215), I thought it might be worthwhile to take an extended look at more of Proust on time and memory. After all, that's one of the reasons we read the guy, right? Even though Part II begins with an off the cuff announcement by the narrator acknowledging his own dislocation in time due to the impact that painful memories of his happier days with Gilberte are having on his present day reality--"life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days" (221)--one of the things that's so alluring about this parenthetical confession from an artistic standpoint is how it ties in with several other perspectives on time and memory and the literary representation of time and memory from various stages of the narrator's life. Three examples of how this problem is creatively engaged in the text follow.

Going back to the early scene where his father essentially abandons encouraging him to pursue a diplomatic career so that young Marcel can take up a life in literature unimpeded by his family's opposition, for example, the narrator writes that this happy news nonetheless made him worry for two reasons.

The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed. The second, which was really only a variant of the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read them of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter (55).

I like this sequence for at least a couple of reasons, the first having to do with the somewhat unfortunate reminder that I was once so young myself that I surely considered myself on "the threshold of life" without realizing my life had already begun. A nice--if bittersweet--touch, that! I also appreciate it for the way that the adult narrator merges his then-youthful awakening to the concept of not living outside Time in a way that draws attention to the character's sentimental regard for the fate of the fictional characters encountered in his wickerwork shelter. This conflation of a person's reading life with one's emotional life outside of literature is something I can rather pathetically relate to, of course, so suffice it to say that the writing really got my attention when the correspondance was extended to a larger concern with mortality in the lines that immediately follow.

Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people's home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past. When my father said, "He's not a child anymore, he's not going to change his mind," etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: "He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside. He has eventually settled down there for good," etc. (55-56)

While any novel called In Search of Lost Time might be expected to deal such with themes, this treatment of time in a text organized in part as a written suspension of time has a lot to say about what's possible from a temporal standpoint when representing "reality" in literature. This is one of the philosophical sides of Proust the thinker that really gets to me just as much as Proust the wordsmith or Proust the visually evocative portraitist of Mme Swann.

In a much later scene, at a time in which the love-hungry Marcel is now fixated on making the acquaintance of Albertine Simonet and the other young girls in flower in her inner circle of Balbec friends and companions, the looming shadows of mortality from the earlier episode seem to have dissipated in the salty seaside air. Still, there's another striking analysis of how our attempts to try and fix a moment in time are often disturbed by the emotions of the moment. In this passage, Marcel speaks of the various things that form the mundane build-up to his much-anticipated introduction to his future love interest at a party given by the painter Elstir:

Being obliged, in order to come eventually to a chat with Mlle Simonet, to follow a route that was not of my own design, which reached a first destination in front of Elstir, before leading me to on other groups of guests, to whom I was introduced, then along the buffet, where I was handed, and where I ate, strawberry tarts, while pausing to listen to music that had just begun to be played, I found myself giving to these various episodes the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle Simonet, which was only one among their sequence, and which I had by now completely forgotten had been, a few minutes before, the sole object of my presence there. Does not the same happen, in busy everyday life, to our truest joys and greatest sorrows? We stand among other people, and the woman we adore gives us the answer, favorable or fatal, that we have been awaiting for a year: we must go on chatting; ideas lead to other ideas, making a surface beneath which, rising only from time to time, barely perceptible, lies the knowledge, very deep but acute, that calamity has struck. Or, if it is happiness rather than calamity, we may not remember till years later that the most momentous event of our emotional life happened in a way that gives us no time to pay attention to it, or even to be aware of it almost, during a fashionable reception, say, despite the fact that it was in expectation of some such event that we had gone to it (450-451).

In this snapshot of the "momentous" event that is about to take place for the narrator and of an event where the narrator's fate will largely be determined by forces beyond his control, we have--in contrast to the ethereal details we might expect from such an obvious romantic--a rather non-romantic description of the everyday moments that surround the high and low points in our lives. The scene is almost pedestrian, in fact--except for the attention that is drawn to how we replay such moments in our memories, overlooking the details not having to do with fortune or calamity. However, pointing out the way in which the scene feels true or false to the reader from a realistic perspective is only part of the equation as what takes place in our minds is just as much reality as what takes place in front of our eyes in many respects. This, at least, is what I think Proust's narrator is getting at here when he writes about his introduction to Albertine and says that "the pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again. Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more in our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present" (451).

Studiously avoiding the fact that I don't really know where I'm going with all this nor know whether Proust has left us an Einstein-like general theory on time anywhere in his extended novel, I have to say that I'm finding reading In Search of Lost Time its own reward and writing about In Search of Lost Time at least partially rewarding in terms of publicly revisiting certain favorite scenes. On that note, I'd like to bid farewell to this post on Proust on time and memory with a fragment from a scene that harkens back to an earlier such scene in Swann's Way. For late in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, walking along a lane in the direction of Les Creuniers with the beautiful Andrée, the narrator discovers something that takes his mind off his plan to win himself a spot in Albertine's affections by showering her with praises to her friend and possible rival:

Then, halfway down the little lane, I stood still, as the soft flutter of a childhood memory brushed my heart: I had just recognized, from the indentations of the shiny leaves overhanging the threshold, a hawthorn bush, which since the end of spring, alas, had been bare of all blossom. A fragrance of forgotten months of Mary and long-lost Sunday afternoons, beliefs, and fallacies surrounded me. I wished I could grasp it as it passed. Andrée, seeing me pause, showed her charming gift of insight by letting me commune for a moment with the leaves of the little tree: I asked after its blossom, hawthorn flowers like blithe young girls, a little silly, flirtatious, and faithful. "Those young ladies left long ago," said the leaves, possibly reflecting that, for someone who professed to be such a close friend, I was very uninformed about their habits. I was a close friend, though one who, despite his promises, had lost touch with them for many years. Yet, just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers. "Yes, I know," I replied, "they go away about the middle of June. But it's a pleasure to see the spot here where they lived. My mother brought them up to see me in my bedroom at Combray, when I was ill. And we used to meet in church on Saturday evenings during the month of Mary. Are they allowed to go here too?" "Of course! My young ladies are actually much in demand at the nearest parish church, Saint-Denis-du-Désert." "One can see them now, you mean?" "No, no, not till the month of May next year." "And can I be sure they'll be there?" "Every year, without fail." "I'm just not sure I can find my way back to this exact spot..." "Of course you will! My young ladies are so gay, they never stop laughing, except to sing hymns--you can't mistake them, you'll recognize their perfume from the end of the lane" (500).

So much to love here in this little conversation between man and hawthorn bush! The rich prose, fragrant with poetry. The wish to latch onto something tangible in the evanescent. The commingling of an aesthetics of beauty with a sort of sensuous spirituality or mysticism. The eternal faithfulness of old friends. Proust is great at having his narrator reflect on time and memory through the lenses of novelists and darkroom photographers. But he's even better when Marcel reflects on time and memory through the lens of his own life story. Now approaching the 100-page mark in The Guermantes Way, I'm loving this novel like you wouldn't believe. (www.penguinclassics.com)

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #1

2011-08-09T23:42:00.014-04:00

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

In the so-called "listless interlude" that forms the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time amid that which might more aptly be called an expanding universe of richly-textured memories, emotions, and dramatis personae orbiting Marcel's teenage years and thereabouts, our young narrator manages to fall in and out of love with Gilberte, to lose his virginity to a woman he doesn't care for, and to fall head over heels in love yet again--not quite reciprocated to this point--with future girlfriend Albertine: a journey of initiation that chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of love from Paris to Balbec with astonishing humor, insight and detail. Sheer bliss. While there's just too much for me to talk about here to even know where to begin, I suppose there's no harm in sharing a grab bag of personal highlights with you tonight and returning for something maybe a little more structured later in the week. To begin with, I continue to be an easy mark for the narrator's catty but ever-observant humor. Writing about the union between the aristocratic Swann and the ex-courtesan Odette that had taken place against all expectations since the events in Swann's Way had transpired, the narrator tells us that "in general, marriages that degrade one of the partners are the worthiest of all, because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to a purely private satisfaction--and, of course, marrying for money must be excluded from the notion of a degrading match, as no couple of whom one partner has been sold to the other has ever failed to be admitted in the end to good society, given the weight of tradition, the done thing, and the need to avoid having double standards." A typical (and not all that humorous) observation with a fair amount to say about the superficiality of the circles these characters move in, gender relations at that time in France, the pressures of conformity, and so on. What takes this to the genius level on the comedic and the descriptive fronts, though, is the sentence or the dagger that follows with such impeccable timing: "In any case, the idea of engaging in one of those crossbreedings common to Mendelian experiments and Greek mythology, and of joining with a creature of a different race, an archduchess, or a good-time girl, someone of blue blood or no blood at all, might well have titillated the artist, if not the pervert, in Swann" (42). A second thing I loved about In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is how, despite the almost ubiquitous humor and the biting observations that are also present as if for adult consumption, Proust manages to tenderly and realistically evoke that teenaged daydreamer's feeling that falling in love with just about any girl is not only possible but maybe even desirable. While the text is nearly perfect at capturing the young protagonist's mood swings between boundless optimism and utter desperation in this regard, I particularly liked this passage where the narrator talks about those moments in his life "when I was not in love but wished I was"--a fragrant time when:

the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me--which, as has been seen, I could recognize in a distant glimpse of any passing stranger who was far enough away for the imprecision of her features not to impede that recognition--was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood, and for which every young girl I met, as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role, appeared eager to be auditioned. In this play, whoever it was I cast as the new star or her understudy for this part of leading lady, the outline of the plot, the main scenes, and even the words to be spoken had long since taken the form of a definitive edition (469).

Finally, in thinking about the narrative tension between the ideal and the real in love and how that frontier is constantly shifting in our memories and imaginations to the point that it's possible to confuse the real object of desire with its "emotional shadow" at times, I have to say that the end of the At Mme Swann's part of this novel--with its focus on Marcel's friendship with Mme Swann rather than his traumatizing break-up with her daughter Gilberte--touched me enormously. Can a scene from a novel be considered poetic merely by virtue of the force of its words and the power of its images? I'll let you decide.

From all sides now, through the liquid transparency and glossy luminosity of the shadow cast on her by the sunshade, Mme Swann was being recognized and greeted by the last of the late riders, who looked as though filmed at a canter against the white midday shimmer of the avenue, members of fashionable clubs, whose names--Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency, and many more--famous to the public mind, were to Mme Swann the familiar names of her friends. So it is that the average life expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those that commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love, the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria (217).

I'll have more to share from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in a day or two. Not sure what I want to touch on next, but I'm not ready to say farewell to this volume just yet. No, not yet. (www.penguinclassics.com)

Marcel Proust

Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk

2011-08-06T22:53:00.009-04:00

Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-Ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk (Penguin Classics, 2008)
by Black Hawk
USA, 1833

"If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place, none of our people would have believed him! What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends?"

(Life of Black Hawk, 46)

In an effort to get my Native American studies reading project back on track with a more unmediated native voice this time around, I decided to take a look at the 1833 Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, which is said to have been "dictated by himself," interpreted or translated by Antoine LeClaire, and finally transcribed by newspaperman John B. Patterson--a collaborative venture that with its uncertain English verb tenses and jarring use of non-autochthonous abbreviations like viz. makes one wonder how unmediated it really is despite the author's alleged approval of the final text as read back to him before publication. That cautionary note on the transmission of the Life of Black Hawk aside, though, perhaps one of the main reasons to read this oral history/"autobiography" of the elderly Sauk war leader (c. 1767-1838) is for the lasting novelty of what J. Gerald Kennedy calls attention to in his introduction to the work: "never before had an Indian addressed the reading public as the survivor of a war of extermination waged by American forces" (vii). So what was on the recently defeated Black Hawk's mind? During the course of nearly 100 pages of plainspoken prose, the proud warrior repeatedly attempts to characterize his military actions during the just concluded 1832 Black Hawk War as a defensive attempt to maintain traditional tribal lands in and around Rock Island in present day Illinois by claiming that they were stolen by, rather than ceded to, the U.S. in the so-called Treaty of St. Louis of 1804 (see Wikipedia image below for the area in question). While it's not clear whom in particular Black Hawk hoped to reach or sway with this appeal to the American conscience, one of the things that's most interesting about all this is that the vanquished Sauk leader, forcibly resettled on the other side of the Mississippi in Iowa at war's end, seemed to want the U.S. reading public to understand his intentions despite his realization that the former days were gone in his acknowledgement that "the tomahawk is buried forever!" (98). It's the land, always the land, that seems to claim his attention and to position itself in the foreground of his memory. In any event, below you'll find three examples of Black Hawk's reflections on his former homeland from pages 56, 87, and 89-90 of his Life to give you at least a sliver of an idea of why the work that bears his name will likely have a continuing appeal for those interested in the "other side" of the history of this continent and of its peoples. (www.penguinclassics.com)

Sauk lands (in yellow) "ceded"/stolen by the 1804 St. Louis Treaty

(author: Kmusser, courtesy of a Creative Commons license for the image)

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil--but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.

On our way down [the river, on a steamboat right after his surrender in 1832], I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety, and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war. I reflected upon the ingratitude of the whites, when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests, and every thing desirable around them; and recollected that all this land had been ours, for which me and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our grave-yards from us, and removed us across the Mississippi.

[On the surprisingly large number of inhabitants of the mountainous stretches of the Cumberland or National Road, observed by Black Hawk during his captivity tour before being relocated to his new home across the Mississippi] I have often thought of them since my return to my own people; and am happy to think that they prefer living in their own country, to coming out to ours, and driving us from it, that they might live upon and enjoy it--as many of the whites have already done. I think, with them, that wherever the Great Spirit places his people, they ought to be satisfied to remain, and thankful for what He has given them; and not drive others from the country He has given them, because it happens to be better than theirs! This is contrary to our way of thinking; and from my intercourse with the whites, I have learned that one great principle of their religion is, "to do unto others as you wish them to do unto you!" Those people in the mountains seem to act upon this principle, but the settlers on our frontiers and on our lands, seem never to think of it, if we are to judge by their actions.

Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño

2011-07-31T23:57:00.022-04:00

Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño (Debolsillo, 2010)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 2004

Javier Marías is such a gifted novelist that my greedy reading self is already beginning to lament the fact that there's only one volume left in Tu rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] after Baile y sueño [Dance and Dream]. Couldn't this be a neverending story instead? In volume 2 of this three-part, post-war on terror "spy saga," the savage beating of a near defenseless man in a nightclub restroom, administered by Tupra and witnessed by Deza, and the long-suppressed story of two Spanish Civil War atrocities, related to Deza by his father after years of keeping quiet on the matter, serve to foreground an increasing preoccupation with violence and victimization on the narrator's part. Where this will lead to is anybody's guess at this point, but the theme is treated in such an unfailingly believable way that the disquieting ending--Tupra's defense of the Kray twins-style manipulation of fear in others and his wish to justify the use of violence to Deza by historical precedents dating back to the fall of Constantinople in 1453--seems to hint that the end justifies the means morality of the spy business and a shadowy new associate described as having the "pinta...de mafioso romano--quiero decir vaticano" (67) ["look of a Roman--or, rather, Vatican--mafioso" (49, in Margaret Jull Costa's translation)] may end up traumatizing poor Deza just as much as the failed marriage that he'd obviously like to piece back together if his estranged wife would only permit it. That being said, it's the writing and the depth of the emotions brought to the surface by the narrative more than the unexpected plot developments that continue to wow me as time moves on--a lot of this due to Deza as narrator. For whether skewering Berlusconi's Italy as the land of "brutales autoridades xenófobas pseudolombardas, aún más lerdas y soeces que las pseudomadrileñas despreciativas nuestras" (31) ["brutal, xenophobic, pseudo-Lombardic authorities, who are even coarser and more oafish than our own contemptuous, pseudo-madrileño ones" (13-14)], sharing a tender memory about separated wife Luisa's amused and genial laugh, or in recounting the extended speech by his father on the horrors of real life as opposed to fictive violence (see fragment below), Deza is one of the most recognizably human characters I've run into all year. What do I mean by that? I actually care about his fate--to the point that I'm a tiny bit concerned that Deza, like the singer in "Streets of Laredo" who figures in one of the more left field digressions in this digression-heavy novel, may already be a dead man walking (emotionally, ethically or otherwise) whose narrative is being brought to us borne aloft on the slipstream of fictional mortality. In other words, way looking forward to volume 3's Veneno y sombra y adiós [Poison, Shadow, and Farewell]. (www.debolsillo.com)

Javier Marías

Deza's Father, Deza, and Cervantes

'Pero mira si han variado las cosas, y las actitudes: cuando se le declaró la Guerra a Hitler, y quizá no ha habido ocasión en que se hiciera más necesaria y justificable una guerra, el propio Churchill escribió al respecto que el mero hecho de haberse llegado a aquel punto y a aquel fracaso convertía a los responsables, por honrosos que fueran sus motivos, en culpables ante la Historia. Se estaba refiriendo al Gobierno de su país y al de Francia, entiendes, y por extensión a sí mismo, aunque él bien habría querido que esa culpa y ese fracaso los hubieran alcanzado antes, cuando la situación no les era tan adversa ni habría sido tan cruento y grave librar esa posible guerra. "En esta amarga historia de juicios erróneos efectuados por personas capaces y bienintencionadas...", así dijo. Y ahora, ya ves, los mismos que se escandalizan por los batacazos de Tom y Jerry y de sus descendientes desatan guerras innecesarias, interesadas, sin ningún motivo honroso, evitando otros recursos si es que no torpedeándolos. Y a diferencia de Churchill, ni siquiera se averguüenzan de ellas. Ni siquiera las deploran. Ni por supuesto se disculpan, hoy no existe eso en el mundo... En nuestro país fueron ya los franquistas, los que crearon esa escuela. Jamás se ha disculpado ni uno, y también ellos desencadenaron una guerra innecesaria. La peor posible. Eso sí, con la colaboración inmediata de muchos de sus contrincantes... Qué exageración fue todo...' Ahora noté que mi padre pensaba en voz alta, más que hablarme, y seguramente eran pensamientos que venía teniendo desde 1936 y quién sabía si a diario, de la misma o parecida manera en que no hay día o noche en que no se le representen a uno en algún instante la idea o la imagen de los muertos más próximos, por mucho que pase el tiempo desde que se despidió uno de ellos, o ellos de uno: 'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo, y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida'.

(Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño, 281-282)

'But look how things have changed, and attitudes too: when war was declared on Hitler, and it may be that there has never been an occasion when a war was more necessary or more justifiable, Churchill himself wrote that the mere fact of having come to that pass, to that state of failure, made those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before History. He was referring to the governments of his own country and of France, you understand, and, by extension, to himself, although he would have preferred that state of blameworthiness and failure to have been reached at a much earlier stage, when the situation was less disadvantageous to them and when it would not have been so difficult or so bloody to fight that war. "...this sad tale of wrong judgements formed by well-meaning and capable people...": that is how he described it. And now, as you see, the same people who are scandalised by the rough and tumble of Tom and Jerry et al. unleash unnecessary, selfish wars, devoid of any honourable motives, and which sidestep all the other options, if they don't actually torpedo them. And unlike Churchill, they are not even ashamed of them. They're not even sorry. Nor, of course, do they apologise, people just don't do that nowadays... In Spain, the Francoists established that particular school of thought long ago. They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war. The worst of all possible wars. And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents... It was absurd, all of it.' I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.'

(Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2: Dance and Dream [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]: New Directions, 2008, 276-277)

Nicole (bibliographing)

Hiroshima mon amour

2011-07-30T02:13:00.017-04:00

Hiroshima mon amour (Gallimard, 1997)
by Marguerite Duras
France, 1960

Having heard the 1959 Alain Resnais-directed film version of Hiroshima mon amour critiqued for being cold and/or impenetrable on multiple occasions over the years, I was pleased to discover that Duras' scénario, published the year after the motion picture's debut at Cannes, is poetic and affecting instead--not at all cold nor impenetrable to my way of thinking. Set in Hiroshima in 1957 and focused on the adulterous fling between a French woman ("Elle") and a Japanese man ("Lui") who meet while la Française is there shooting a film about peace, the screenplay has a sweeping emotional and temporal arc that shifts back and forth between postwar Japan and wartime France and dares to compare the ravages of war with the romantic loss and oblivion of memory that often accompany us during war and peace. Watching the emotionally shellshocked lovers seek to prolong a connection that they know will be impossible to maintain--unless another war breaks out, as one of them grumpily suggests near the end--one begins to sense that they are stand-ins not only for those who didn't survive the war but those who aren't able to connect with others in a lasting way even in times of peace. While all I've said to this point might make it seem as if the work would have to be heavyhanded, Duras manages to avoid that somehow through a deft combination of visuals (both the shots from the film that accompany the script and the detailed cinematographic instructions that accompany--and interact with--the dialogue) and a sure hand in conveying the interiority of her characters' thought processes and memories. And although my rusty French leaves me convinced that I would absolutely benefit from a reread of this work at a more leisurely pace, it doesn't exactly take a genius to appreciate Duras' many subtleties (e.g. three versions of proposed dialogue from Lui in a key exchange near the end of Partie III, versions that Resnais apparently chose to run in succession in the film), the appendix on the movie that adds another layer of complexity to what's to be found in the script (SUR LA PHRASE: "ET PUIS, IL EST MORT": "Riva ne parle plus elle-mème quand cette image apparait. Donner un signe extérieur de sa douleur serait dégrader cette douleur" [ON THE SENTENCE: "AND THEN, HE DIED": "[Emmanuelle] Riva [the actress who plays Elle] herself doesn't speak any longer when this image appears. To give an exterior sign of her anguish would be to debase this anguish"] (628), and the unexpected but touching Casablanca allusion amid the proliferation of images of mushroom clouds and parades protesting the wailing of the "100 000 cadavres envolés de HIROSHIMA" ["100,000 cadavers carried away at HIROSHIMA"] (584). A fine intro for what I hope will be a satisfying long-term relationship between Marguerite Duras and me. (www.gallimard.fr/ecoutezlire/quarto.htm)

Marguerite Duras

I read Hiroshima mon amour as part of the July stop for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong 2011. See her blog here for other posts on the film and print versions of the title. Oddly enough, I couldn't locate a standalone version of the usually easy-to-find screenplay at any of the three foreign language bookstores I checked in Cambridge and NYC during the last month. Weird. Luckily for me, my library had a copy of the deluxe 1,764 page Duras: Romans, cinéma, théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993 (Gallimard, 1997) in which Hiroshima appears on pages 533-643.

Borges, a Character in a Novel by Sabato

2011-07-25T02:14:00.010-04:00

Just had to share this with those of you who participated in and/or otherwise remember the Jorge Luis Borges group reads we did last year and those who, like Amateur Reader, Roberto Bolaño and me, profess more than a passing interest in the "extraordinary riches" of Argentinean literature. So I was reading Ernesto Sabato's 1961 Sobre héroes y tumbas [On Heroes and Tombs, here translated by Helen R. Lane in what I believe is an out of print 1981 edition put out by David R. Godine] the other day when the following previously nondescript Buenos Aires description really grabbed my attention:

They were walking down the Calle Perú; grabbing Martín by the arm, Bruno pointed a man out to him who was walking in front of them, leaning on a cane.

"Borges."

Now, although I had read somewhere that Borges made a cameo in the novel, I had somehow managed to forget that was coming by the time I got to this point almost a couple of hundred pages in. What followed was classic, though, and worth the wait for the increasingly unflattering portrait of Borges that initially emerges:

When they drew closer, Bruno said hello to him. Martín found himself shaking a tiny hand, with scarcely any bones or strength in it. The features of the man's face seemed to have been sketched in and then to have been half rubbed out with an eraser. Borges mumbled something, acknowledging the introduction.

"Martín's a friend of Alejandra Vidal Olmos's," Bruno said.

"Caramba, caramba...Alejandra...that's fine."

He raised his eyebrows, observed Martín with watery blue eyes and an abstract cordiality addressed to no one in particular, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Bruno asked him what he was writing.

"Well, caramba...," he mumbled, smiling a half-guilty, half-wicked smile, with that air that Argentine peasants assume, an air of modest irony, a mixture of secret arrogance and apparent diffidence, every time someone admires one of their horses or their ability to do fine leatherwork. "Caramba...well, in a word...trying to write a page or two that's something more than a scribble, eh, eh?..."

And he mumbled something else, accompanied by a series of clownish facial tics.

And as they walked on toward Rinaldini's, Bruno imagined Méndez saying sarcastically: A lecturer for snooty women's clubs! But everything was much more complicated than Méndez thought (171).

Sabato's apparent comedic malevolence aside, what makes these details so delicious to me--so Argentinean, if you will, within the context of Argentinean literature as a whole--is that this unexpected description of a chance encounter with Borges then segueways into a discussion of what Argentine identity and letters are all about. Introducing Borges as a character isn't a cheap stunt or a sideshow act:

"They say he's not very Argentine," Martín ventured to remark.

"What else could he be but Argentine? He's a typical national product. Even his so-called Europeanism is national. A European is not Europeanist: he's simply European."

"Do you think he's a great writer?"

Bruno pondered the question for some time.

"I don't know. What I'm certain of is that his prose is the most remarkable of any being written in Spanish today. But his style is too precious for him to be a great writer. Can you imagine Tolstoy trying to dazzle his readers with an adverb when it's the question of the life or death of one of his characters? But not everything in Borges's works is Byzantine: far from it. There's something Argentine in his best things: a certain nostalgia, a certain metaphysical sadness..."

He walked along in silence for a time.

"The fact is that people say all sorts of ridiculous things about what Argentine literature ought to be. The important thing is for it to be profound. All the rest is just an added fillip. And if it isn't profound it's useless to introduce gauchos or colorful picaresque rascals into the picture. The most representative writer in Elizabethan England was Shakespeare. Yet many of his works don't even have an English setting" (172).

After a pause in which Bruno makes fun of those who would deny Argentina's European roots and yet touches on the situation in which Latin Americans find themselves to be the inhabitants of a "different, violent continent," the discussion of Borges opens the door for a rant on the notion of originality in literature. Love this talky book stuff:

"So critics want total and absolute originality, do they? Such a thing doesn't exist. Neither in art nor in anything else. Everything is built on what has gone before. Nothing that is human is perfectly pure and pristine. The Greek gods too were hybrids and were infected (so to speak) with Oriental and Egyptian religions. There's a little passage in The Mill on the Floss in which a woman tries on a hat in front of a mirror: and it's Proust. What I mean to say is, it's the seed of Proust. All the rest is simply a process of development. One touched with genius, cancerous almost, but in the final analysis simply a process of development. The same thing is true of one of Melville's stories, called Bertleby or Bartleby or something like that. When I read it I was impressed by its Kafkaesque atmosphere. And that's the way it always is. We're Argentines, for example, even when we reject our own country, as Borges frequently does. Especially when he repudiates it with real fury, the way Unamuno repudiates Spain; the way violent atheists put bombs in a church, that being their way of believing in God. The true atheists are those who are indifferent, those who are cynics. And what we might call an atheistic attitude toward this native land of ours is to be found among cosmopolitans, individuals who live no differently here than they would in Paris or London--they live in a country as though it were a hotel. But let's be fair: Borges is not one of them. I think that in a certain way his heart aches for his country, despite the fact that he doesn't have the sensitivity or the generosity, of course, for it to ache for his country the way the heart of a day laborer in the fields or a worker in a meat-freezing plant does. And that explains his lack of grandeur, his inability to understand and feel the whole of the country, including all its deep-rooted, complex rottenness. When we read Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy on the other hand we feel that total understanding of the human soul" (173).

One brief Roberto Arlt commentary, another extended Borges discussion, and about fifty pages later, young protagonist Martín will feel the full brunt of the complex rottenness of the country when he's a witness to the carnage of the 1955 aerial bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo. Can't wait to get back to the rest of Sobre héroes y tumbas which, despite some ups and downs from a tonal standpoint, is giving me the sense that Sabato's playing for keeps. Not bad for a back-up book, eh, eh?

Snow, Interrupted

2011-07-20T10:59:00.005-04:00

With apologies to the rest of the Wolves and anybody else unfortunate enough to be participating in this month's group read of Orhan Pamuk's Snow, I'm going to be taking a break--maybe a permanent break--from the book to concentrate on books I actually want to read. Maybe the thing gets better after the first 200 pages. At this point in time, though, I can't take any more of the novel's excruciatingly boring blend of Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy III and Dostoevsky's Demons in its pairing of a dopey, lovesick protagonist and an unengaging, hamfisted political farce. "An engrossing feat of tale-spinning," my ass.

Pamuk in Action

Here's an example of dialogue from Pamuk (from page 135 in the Vintage paperback, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely) that only a YA fan, the Nobel committee, or the apparently easy to please Margaret Atwood could find "engrossing." Whatever.

"I don't want you ever to leave me," Ka told Ipek. "I've fallen wildly in love with you."

"But you hardly know me," said Ipek.

"There are two kinds of men," said Ka, in a didactic voice. "The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sorts of stories people tell about her. The second type of man--and I am in this category--can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

"In other words, you've fallen in love with me because you know nothing about me? Do you really think you can call this love?"

"If you fall head over heels, that's how it happens," said Ka.

"So once you know how I eat a sandwich and what I wear in my hair, you'll fall right out of love."

"No, by then the intimacy that's built up between us will deepen and turn into a desire that wraps itself around our bodies, and we'll be bound together by our happy memories."

Rayuela

2011-07-10T02:58:00.019-04:00

Rayuela (Cátedra, 2003)
por Julio Cortázar
Francia, 1963

Una aventura sentimental fracasada, la muerte de un niño, y la casi inevitable llegada de la locura asedian al intelectual frío y reservado Horacio Oliveira durante la marcha de los acontecimientos de Rayuela, esa célebre "novela total" argentina aquí narrada en o 56 capítulos o 155 capítulos o incluso 154 capítulos según la voluntad del lector y el tablero de dirección incluido con el libro que "es mucho libros, pero sobre todo es dos libros" (ojo: uno de los capítulos está diabólicamente escondido en uno de los métodos de leer la maldita cosa). Por supuesto, yo elegí leer el "segundo libro" experimental de Cortázar, empezando con el capítulo 73 (uno de los 99 "capítulos prescindibles" según "la forma corriente" de leer la obra, que se acaba con el capítulo 56) y siguiendo con el primer capítulo antes de dar saltos a lo largo de la rayuela-en-prosa creada por los 36 capítulos "del lado de allá" (la historia de los amantes bohemios Horacio y la Maga en París de los cincuenta y del círculo de amigos que pertenecen al Club de la Serpiente) y los 20 capítulos "del lado de acá" (lo que pasa al más y más preocupado Oliveira después de su regreso a su ciudad natal de Buenos Aires, donde se encuentra con sus amigos Traveler y Talita e incluso un "gato calculista" al circo) y el complemento total de los 99 "capítulos prescindibles". Además de su estructura abierta y la construcción que se parece a un puzzle y sus evocaciones de un distinto tiempo y lugar, había tantas cosas que me gustaron en Rayuela. Por ejemplo, hay docenas de descripciones inolvidables: "París, una tarjeta postal con un dibujo de Klee al lado de un espejo sucio" (132). Capítulos enteros dedicados a la música o que tienen lugar en fiestas donde discos de jazz se cambian de manos en el trasfondo. Hay una variedad de reflexiones metafísicas elípticas: "La vida, fotografía del número, posesión en las tinieblas (¿mujer, monstruo?), la vida, proxeneta de la muerte, espléndida baraja, tarot de claves olvidadas que unas manos gotosas rebajan a un triste solitario" (635). También hay comentarios magníficos sobre la lectura y los lectores, como éste que claramente anticipa a Bolaño en la flor de la vida: "La teoría del libro-más era de Oliveira, y la Maga la había aceptado por pura ósmosis. En realidad para ella casi todo los libros eran libro-menos, hubiese querido llenarse de una inmensa sed y durante un tiempo infinito (calculable entre tres y cinco años) leer la opera omnia de Goethe, Homero, Dylan Thomas, Mauriac, Faulkner, Baudelaire, Roberto Arlt, San Agustín y otros autores cuyos nombres la sobresaltaban en las conversaciones del Club. A eso Oliveira respondía con un desdeñoso encogerse de hombros, y hablaba de las deformaciones rioplatenses, de una raza de lectores a fulltime, de bibliotecas pululantes de marisabidillas infieles al sol y al amor, de casas donde el olor a la tinta de imprenta acaba con la alegría del ajo" (156-157). Además de todo esto, Cortázar también se dedica a una discusón sobre el lector ideal y la teoría literaria como aplicada a su propia novela en los pasajes donde el escritor Morelli habla de la necesidad de la novelista para hacer un "cómplice" del lector activo en cuanto a la creación de "un texto desaliñado, desanudado, incongruente, minuciosamente antinovelístico (aunque no antinovelesco). Sin vedarse los grandes efectos del género cuando la situación lo requiera, pero recordando el consejo gidiano, ne jamais profiter de l'élan acquis. Como todas las criaturas de elección del Occidente, la novela se contenta con un orden cerrado. Resueltamente en contra, buscar también aquí la apertura y para cortar de raíz toda construcción sistemática de caracteres y situaciones. Método: la ironía, la autocrítica incesante, la incongruencia, la imaginación al servicio de nadie" (559-560). Etcétera, etcétera. Entre las pocas cosas que no me gustaron, me limito a decir que algunos de los capítulos prescindibles son inescrutables hasta el punto de ser o pesados o pedantescos de vez en cuando y que también está frustrante a veces seguir en los pasos de che Oliveira, un personaje tan involucrado en su crisis existencialista que él no puede ver el daño que provoca a sí mismo y a otros. Esté, dicho sea de paso, no es una debilidad de la novela sino una fuerte en lo que refiere a la caracterización; de hecho, yo casi lloré al final cuando me di cuenta (o, al menos, pensaba que me di cuenta) de cómo la novela iba terminar. En resumen, otro tomo para ese especial anaquel para libros donde se encuentran Moby-Dick, Proust, La vida instrucciones de uso, y 2666. Espectacular. (http://www.catedra.com/)

Hopscotch (Pantheon Books, 1987)

by Julio Cortázar [translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa]

France, 1963

A failed love affair, the death of a child, and what then seems like an almost inevitable descent into madness haunt cold, distant intellectual Horacio Oliveira during the course of Rayuela [Hopscotch], the celebrated Argentinean "novela total" here narrated in either 56 or 155 or even 154 chapters according to the will of the reader and the "table of instructions" provided for by this book "which consists of many books, but two books above all" (beware: one of the chapters is fiendishly hidden in one of the methods of how to read the damn thing). Naturally, I chose to read Cortázar's experimental "second book," beginning with chapter 73 (one of 99 "expendable chapters" according to the "normal fashion" of reading the work, which ends with chapter 56) and continuing on with the first chapter before jumping about here and there throughout the game of hopscotch-in-prose created by the 36 chapters "from the other side" (the story of bohemian lovers Horacio and La Maga in 1950s Paris and the circle of friends that form the Serpent Club) and the 20 chapters "from this side" (what happens to the increasingly troubled Oliveira after he returns to his native Buenos Aires and meets up with his friends Traveler and Talita and even a "calculating cat" at the circus) in addition to the full complement of 99 expendable chapters. Besides its open structure and its puzzle-like construction and its surehanded evocation of time and place, there were any number of things I loved about Hopscotch. For example, there are dozens of just unforgettable descriptions: "Paris, a postcard with a drawing by Klee next to a dirty mirror" (11). Entire chapters dedicated to music or that take place as conversations set to music as jazz albums change hands in the background. In addition, there's an assortment of elliptical, metaphysical reflections to constantly keep you on your toes: "Life, a photograph of the noumenon, a possession in the shadows (woman, monster?), life, pimp of death, splendid deck of cards, ring of forgotten keys that a pair of palsied hands degrade into a sad game of solitaire" (458). There are also wonderful commentaries on reading and readers, as with this one which clearly anticipates Bolaño in his prime: "The another-book theory was Oliveira's, and La Maga had accepted it by pure osmosis. For her, in truth, almost all books were one-book-less; she would have liked to be overcome by an immense thirst and for an infinite period of time (figured as between three and five years) to read the complete works of Goethe, Homer, Dylan Thomas, Mauriac, Faulkner, Baudelaire, Roberto Arlt, Saint Augustine, and other writers whose names would keep coming up in conversation in the Club. Oliveira would answer this with a sour shrug of his shoulders and talk about the distortions of the Río de la Plata, where a breed of full-time readers has developed, where libraries swarm with old maids who have forsaken love and sunshine, where the smell of printer's ink can end the joy of garlic in a home" (31). To top it all off, Cortázar also engages in a discussion of the model reader and literary theory as applied to his own novel in the passages where the writer Morelli waxes on about the novelist's need for an active reader to become "an accomplice" in the creation of "a text that is out of line, untied, incongruous, minutely antinovelistic (although not antinovelish). Without prohibiting the genre's great effects if the situation should require it, but keeping in mind the Gidean advice, ne jamais profiter de l'élan acquis. Like all creatures of choice in the Western world, the novel is content in a closed order. Resolutely opposed to this, we should search here for an opening and therefore cut the roots of all systematic construction of characters and situations. Method: irony, ceaseless self-criticism, incongruity, imagination in the service of no-one" (396). Etc., etc. Among the few things I didn't care for so much, I would only note that some of the so-called expendable chapters are inscrutable to the point of being boring or pedantic at times and that it was sometimes frustrating to follow in the footsteps of Oliveira, a character so wrapped up in his own existentialist crisis that he can't see the harm he's causing to himself or others. The latter point, just in passing, of course really isn't a weakness of the novel but rather an argument in favor of the strength of its characterization; in fact, I had to fight off tears at the end when I realized (or at least I thought I realized) how the novel was about to conclude. In other words, another volume for that special shelf where you keep Moby-Dick, Proust, Life A User's Manual, and 2666. Absolutely spectacular. (http://www.randomhouse.com/)

Julio Cortázar

Otras lecturas de Rayuela

Emily (Evening All Afternoon) #1, #2 y #3

Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

Table of Contents for the Rest of the Year

2011-07-04T21:08:00.008-04:00

Cortázar

Given how flaky I am, I should probably be the last guy to post my reading plans for the rest of the year like this like your typical OCD blogger. Blogga, please! However, here's a preview in case any of you want a TV Guide-like listing of the probable "niche of despair" programming on the horizon here. By the way, please note that this post counts as one filler post + one list post toward meeting my contractual obligations for the year.

July

Julio Cortázar's Rayuela

Javier Marías' Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño

Orhan Pamuk's Snow (E.L. Fay's pick for the Wolves)

Marcel Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

(Back-ups: Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima mon amour for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi for the recently concluded Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity hosted by Amateur Reader and Nicole [I'll be late to the party, but it's too late to fix that now])

August

Lydia Davis' The End of the Story (Frances' pick for the Wolves)

Javier Marías' Tu rostro mañana. 3 Veneno y sombra y adios

Marcel Proust's The Guermantes Way

(Back-ups: Honoré de Balzac's The Girl with the Golden Eyes or Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla for Frances' Art of the Novella Reading Challenge and Elsa Morante's History for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong)

September

João Guimarães Rosa's Gran Sertón: Veredas

Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah (reread)

Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian (my pick for the Wolves)

October

Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (Sarah's pick for the Wolves)

Javier Marías' Los enamoramientos

Marcel Proust's The Captive

November

Marcel Proust's The Fugitive

Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo el Supremo

Nathalie Sarraute's The Planetarium (Emily's pick for the Wolves)

December

Javier Marías' Negra espalda del tiempo

Marcel Proust's Time Regained

Gao Xingjian's Buying a Fishing Rod for My Father (Claire's pick for the Wolves)

I have lots of other books I'd like to try and squeeze in, of course, but I'm pretty sure that these will account for the lion's share of the priorities for the rest of the year despite all those lovely new pretties on my sidebar. Some notable exceptions: Anthony and Frances and I have agreed to man/woman/man up for a group read of Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet sometime in October, November or December. I have some more Bolaños to read for Rise's 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge. And I hope to finally start my reread of Herodotus' The Histories in that handsome The Landmark Herodotus edition I picked up a few years back. Etc., etc.

Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza

2011-07-01T22:04:00.014-04:00

Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza (Debolsillo, 2010)
por Javier Marías
España, 2002

"¡Qué deshonra es para mí recordar tu nombre! ¡O conocer tu rostro mañana!"

Shakespeare, Enrique IV, II, 2

Jacques Deza, recién regresado a Inglaterra después de pasar unos años en su España natal y separarse de su mujer, aprovecha de sus lazos con los alumni oxonienses para conseguir empleo con lo que parece ser un ramo del servicio secreto británico. Salvo una o dos alusiones a Desde Rusia con amor, lo que sigue no tiene nada que ver con la novela de espionaje típica quizás esperada por algunos. En lugar de eso, el ex profesor Deza (el narrador sin nombre de Todas las almas, de Marías, y aquí llamado o Jack o Jaime o Jacobo o Diego según el que habla y las circunstancias) lanza una interesantísima meditación introspectiva sobre las consecuencias de contar y de callar y, más especifícamente, la fuerza de palabras para traicionar a nosotros y a los demás: una meditación hiza más concreta a causa de los recuerdos de varios personajes acerca de la Guerra Civil Española y el bombardeo alemán de Gran Bretaña en los cuarenta en el pasado y la sombra del ataque contra las Torres Gemelas en el presente. Como podía esperarse luego de leer las otras novelas impresionantes de Marías en este año, dos de los grandes placeres que se pueden encontrar dentro de Fiebre y lanza son ver el estilo a cámara lenta que él ha perfeccionado (Marías sobre Tristram Shandy, una obra traducida por él hace años: "Una de las cosas que aprendí de él es la utilización del tiempo, descubrí que un minuto puede durar ochenta páginas") y mirar el dominio del lenguaje del novelista como ofrece nuevas percepiones psicológicas con gran frecuencia a lo largo de la obra. Aunque no voy a compartir la excelente frase larguísima de tres páginas que me rendió completamente paralizado de asombro (véase las páginas 50-53 de esta edición), lo siguiente es un muy buen ejemplo de cómo, a pesar de los asuntos de espionaje con Sr Tupra y la amistad con Sir Peter Wheeler y a pesar de los paralelos entre el padre del narrador dentro de la novela y el padre de Marías mismo en la realidad (ambos fueron encarcelados por los fascistas a causa de las mentiras de delatores en los primeros años de Franco), la sección Fiebre y lanza de la historia de Deza es una suerte de memento mori que está marcado por el amor y la pérdida del amor y los pensamientos del personaje en cuanto al fracaso de su matrimonio:

Quién sabe quién nos sustituye, sólo sabemos que se nos sustituye siempre, en todas las ocasiones y en todas las circunstancias y en cualquier desempeño, en el amor, la amistad, en el empleo y en la influencia, en la dominación, y en el odio que también acaba por cansarse de nosotros; en las casas en que habitamos y en las ciudades que nos consienten, en los teléfonos que nos persuaden o nos escuchan pacientes con la risa al oído o con un murmullo de asentimiento, en el juego y en el negocio, en las tiendas y en los despachos, en el paisaje infantil que creíamos sólo nuestro y en las agotadas calles de tanto ver marchitarse, en los restaurantes y en los paseos y en nuestras butacas y en nuestras sábanas, hasta que no queda olor en ellas ni ningún vestigio y se rasgan para hacer tiras o paños, y en nuestros besos se nos sustituye y se cierran al besar los ojos, en los recuerdos y en los pensamientos y en las ensoñaciones y en todas partes, sólo soy como nieve sobre los hombros, resbaladiza y mansa, y la nieve siempre para... (48)

Ese pasaje, mis amigos, ¿ese último pasaje arriba? Me mata. (www.debolsillo.com)

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 1: Fever and Spear (New Directions, 2007)
by Javier Marías [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]
Spain, 2002

"What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, to know thy face tomorrow..."

Shakespeare, Henry IV, II, 2

Jacques Deza, back in England after several years away and a failed marriage in his native Spain, takes advantage of his old Oxford connections to land a job with what seems to be a shadow branch of the British secret service. Give or take a sly From Russia with Love allusion or two, what follows has absolutely nothing to do with the typical spy novel that might be expected. Instead, the former academic Deza (the unnamed narrator in Marías' earlier All Souls and here variously referred to as Jack or Jaime or Jacobo or Diego depending on the speaker and the circumstances) launches into an absorbing, introspective reflection on the consequences of the acts of telling and not telling and, more specifically, the power of words to betray us and others--a reflection made more tangible by various characters' recollections of events dating back to the Spanish Civil War and the Blitz and references to the Twin Towers attacks in the present. As is only to be expected from the other impressive Marías novels I've read this year, two of the principal pleasures to be found in reading Fever and Spear are watching events unfold in the deliberate slow motion style that he's practically made his own (Marías on Tristram Shandy, which he translated into Spanish years ago: "One of the things I learned from it was the use of time; I discovered that one minute could last eighty pages") and beholding the novelist's extremely precise use of language while routinely offering up astute psychological insights that get under your skin. While I'll have to spare you a sample of the awesome three-page long sentence that had me giddily transfixed when I tried to isolate a favorite quote from it for this post (see pages 33-36 if at all interested), here's a shorter passage that will give you another really good example of how, despite the spy business with Mr. Tupra or the warm friendship with Sir Peter Wheeler and despite the parallels between the narrator's father within the book and Marías' own father outside of it (both served time in fascist prisons in Franco's Spain on account of informers' lies), the Fever and Spear portion of Deza's story is a sort of memento mori haunted by love and loss and the intimations of mortality suggested by an everyday occurrence as unexceptional as thinking about the aftermath of his own broken marriage:

Who knows who will replace us, all we know is that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in whatever we do, in love and friendship, as regards work, influence, domination, even hatred, which also wearies of us in the end; in the houses we live in and in the cities that receive us, in the telephones that persuade or patiently listen to us, laughing into our ear or murmuring agreement, at play and at work, in shops and offices, in the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and in the streets exhausted from seeing so much decay, in restaurants and along avenues and in our armchairs and between our sheets, until no trace of our smell remains, and they are torn up to make strips or rags, even our kisses are replaced, and they close their eyes as they kiss, in memories and in thoughts and in daydreams and everywhere, I am like the snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops..." (31, translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

That, my friends, that passage right there? Just slays me. (www.ndpublishing.com)

Javier Marías

Más
Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations) + pt. 2
C.B. James (Ready When You Are, C.B.)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Nicole (bibliographing)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2011-06-24T20:16:00.012-04:00

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books, 2007)
by Junot Díaz
USA, 2007

For a novel that falls a mere one annoying pussy reference short of qualifying as a fucking metal album or something, I eventually warmed to Junot Díaz's geek bildungsroman about sad sack Dominican-American virgin Oscar "Wao" Cabral even though its moronic side tended to bug me at times. People who enjoy South Park may appreciate its bicultural literary equivalent more than I did. The thing is funny after all, and I often laughed out loud at its ruthless depiction of college life, the various potshots ("He was a true gangster, gully to the bone, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about" [122]), the wacky footnotes, and the Machado de Assis style interactions with the reader ("A Note from Your Author," on page 284, begins as follows: "I know what Negroes are going to say. Look, he's writing Suburban Tropical now. A puta and she's not an underage snort-addicted mess? Not believable."). I also enjoyed its comically in your face treatment of the "ghetto nerd" immigrant experience, even though I think that some of the heavier flashbacks treating the trujillato in the DR were probably better evoked by Vargas Llosa in his distinctly non-funny The Feast of the Goat. That being said, I ultimately walked away from my experience with this pop culture-obsessed dramedy housed within the worst cover art I've practically ever seen not entirely sure that this was a novel with soul so much as a slickly written attempt to masquerade as a novel with soul. Am I thinking about these things too much? Perhaps. But Díaz doesn't help himself in this regard because, as effervescent as his use of language often is, he's just as often guilty of laying it on thick with a prefab creative writing instructor/über nerd cuteness that makes me doubt his intentions. Worth reading, a diverting story to be sure, just far from a fave. (http://www.riverheadbooks.com/)

Junot Díaz

This was the Wolves' June book of the month as picked by Claire. Please consider joining us during the last weekend in July for a group read of Orhan Pamuk's Snow, an E.L. Fay selection.

Other Opinions
Claire (kiss a cloud)
Emily (Evening All Afternoon)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Rise (in lieu of a field guide)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman + Suspicion

2011-06-13T02:18:00.002-04:00

The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman + Suspicion [Der Richter und sein Henker and Der Verdacht] (The University of Chicago Press, 2006)
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt [translated from the German by Joel Agee]
Switzerland, 1950 & 1951

Can't remember where/how I first heard about the Swiss Dürrenmatt (1921-1990), but anonymous props to whoever it was who turned me on to the guy. Whilst The Judge and His Hangman, about a serial killer who's conducted a lifelong game of cat and mouse with the now terminally ill Inspector Barlach, and Suspicion, about a Nazi doctor who's taken his sadistic delight in anesthesia-free surgery out of the concentration camps and into postwar private practice incognito, both contain over the top moments that will test your credulity, the two novellas are also absolutely feral examples of the crime genre--the twist here being that in addition to Ellroy-like pacing and cynicism a good 30 years before their time, you also get a probing examination of the nature of good vs. evil and man's inhumanity to man in both. Not that God gets off the hook either--as one character bluntly remarks in the second work, "Jehovah was far away, preoccupied with other worlds, or maybe some theological problem was claiming his sublime intelligence, in any case his people were enthusiastically hounded to death, gassed or shot, depending on the mood of the SS, or on the weather: the east wind meant hangings, and the west wind meant now was the time to set dogs on Judah" (127). Brutal. (www.press.uchicago.edu)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

El mal de Montano

2011-06-09T19:55:00.007-04:00

El mal de Montano (Anagrama, 2002)
por Enrique Vila-Matas
España, 2002

Musil parece haber adivinado lo que te estás preguntando.

--Resistentes --te dice--, gente de letras y de catacumba. Luchadores contra la destrucción de la literatura. Me gustaría reunirlos en algún lugar y allí empezar a poner bombas mentales contra los falsos escritores, contra las granujas que controlan la industria cultural, contra los emisarios de la nada, contra los puercos.

(El mal de Montano, 258)

Dada la rara estructura pentagonal de El mal de Montano (una novela en la forma de un diario íntimo, un diccionario biográfico, un discurso sobre la teoría literaria, un viaje sentimental, y un ensayo humilde) y las conversaciones reales e imaginadas de escritores como Kafka, Musil, y Walser que tienen lugar a lo largo de la obra, apenas es de extrañar que el mal del título se explica como lo de estar enfermo de la literatura. ¡Vila-Matas ve los muertos! Por otra parte, sí es sorprendente que esta obra viva se parezca a una piñata dinamitada con toda la despreocupación de Benjamin Péret insultando a un cura católico (por supuesto, el narrador de Vila-Matas protagoniza como Péret y "los enemigos de la literatura" interpretan el papel del cura en este esquema mío). Aunque es más ambiciosa y menos de calidad constante que ese triunfo de la antinovela Bartleby y compañía, El mal de Montano es una obra chistosamente obsesiva que está a su mejor cuando explora las intersecciones entre la ficción y la realidad, la literatura y la crítica literaria. A veces los puntos culminantes vienen en citas jugosas memorables, como en este comentario por Paul Valéry en una entrada biográfica sobre el poeta: "La estupidez no es mi fuerte" (202). En otros tiempos, son más extensos, como el capítulo donde una secuencia dedicada a un ensayo de Alan Pauls sobre el tema de la enfermedad en los diarios del siglo XX se traslada a esta meditación acerca del valor de la sinceridad en la literatura por Witold Gombrowicz: "¿Se ha visto alguna vez un diario que fuera sincero? El diario sincero es sin duda el diario más falaz, pues la franqueza no es de este mundo. Y, a fin de cuentas, ¡la sinceridad, vaya una lata! No es nada fascinante" (145). Entre la abundante proliferación de nombres y obras citados a lo largo de la obra, uno de los momentos más interesantes llega cerca del final en una escena en cual Vila-Matas parece hablar a través de su alter ego literario con la fuerza de un aficionado del modernismo como Gabriel Josipovici: "Me gustan las novelas que no tienen final. El lector que busca novelas acabadas --decía Unamuno-- no merece ser mi lector, pues él mismo está ya acabado antes de haberme leído. Y, en fin, me acuerdo de que Walter Benjamin decía que toda obra acabada es la máscara mortuoria de su intuición" (281-282). La máscara mortuoria de su intuición, ¿me dices? Obviamente, tendré que leerme alguna obra de Benjamin antes de (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

Montano's Malady (New Directions, 2007)

by Enrique Vila-Matas [translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne]

Spain, 2002

Musil seems to have guessed what you're wondering.

"Resistance," he says, "underground people of letters. Fighters against the destruction of literature. I'd like to gather them together and start planting mental bombs against false writers, against the rogues who control the culture industry, against the emissaries of nothingness, against the pigs."

(Montano's Malady [translated by Jonathan Dunne], 189)

Given the unusual pentagonal structure of Montano's Malady (a novel in the form of a journal intime, a biographical dictionary, a speech on literary theory, a sentimental journey-style travel diary, and the humble essay) and the real and imagined conversations of writers like Kafka, Musil, and Walser that take place within it, it's hardly surprising that the titular malady is defined as a species of "literature sickness." Vila-Matas sees dead people! On the other hand, what may be surprising to some is that this lively work resembles an anti-novel of a piñata blown to pieces with all the insouciance of Benjamin Péret insulting a priest (naturally, Vila-Matas' narrator stars as Péret and "the enemies of literature" play the part of the priest in this little formulation of mine). While both more ambitious and more inconsistent than the anti-novelist's earlier triumph Bartleby & Co., Montano's Malady is a comically obsessive work which is at its neurotic best riffing on the intersections between fiction and reality, between literature and literary criticism. Sometimes the highlights come in quick, memorable soundbites, as in the citation of a Paul Valéry quote ("Stupidity isn't my strong point") in the middle of a biographical entry on the poet (145). At other times, they're more extended in nature, like the chapter in which a reference to an Alan Pauls essay on the theme of illness among 20th century diary writers leads to this reflection on the unimportance of sincerity by Witold Gombrowicz: "Has there ever been a diary that was sincere? The sincere diary is without a doubt the most fallacious, because frankness is not of this world. And also--sincerity, what a bore! It isn't even faintly fascinating" (102). Amid the vast proliferation of names and works cited throughout the course of the work, one of the highlight reel moments comes near the end in a sequence in which Vila-Matas himself seems to be speaking through his Josipovici-like literary alter ego: "I like novels that have no end. The reader who seeks finished novels--Unamuno said--does not deserve to be my reader, since he himself is already finished before he's read me. In short, I recall that Walter Benjamin maintains that every finished work is the death mask of its intuition" (207). The death mask of its intuition, eh? Obviously, I need to read me some Benjamin before (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

Enrique Vila-Matas

PESSOA, Fernando (Lisboa, 1888-Lisboa, 1935). Inventó un personaje de nombre Bernardo Soares y delegó en él la misión de escribir un diario. Como dice Antonio Tabucchi, "Soares es un personaje de ficción que adopta la sutil ficción literaria de la autobiografía. En esta autobiografía sin hechos, de un personaje inexistente, está la única gran obra narrativa que Pessoa nos dejó: su novela" (182).

PESSOA, Fernando (Lisbon, 1888-1935) invented a character by the name of Bernardo Soares, to whom he delegated the mission of writing a diary. As Antonio Tabucchi writes, "Soares is a fictional character who adopts the subtle literary fiction of autobiography. In this autobiography without facts, of a nonexistent person, is the only great narrative work left to us by Pessoa: his novel" (130).

Los adioses

2011-06-04T18:55:00.002-04:00

Los adioses (Punto de Lectura, 2007)
por Juan Carlos Onetti
Argentina, 1954

Una novela breve magistral (escrita en los años bonaerenses del uruguayo Onetti), sin ninguna grasa estructuralmente, en cuyas 111 páginas se encuentran un relato devastador y una profunda meditación sobre la inexorabilidad del tiempo y del destino. Ambientada en un pueblo de montaña adonde los tuberculosos van para curarse, Los adioses nos ofrece una visión de otras enfermedades--la soledad, la ausencia del amor, la voluntad para decepcionarse, la derrota--a lo largo de su esbozo de un ex jugador de basketball, ahora un enfermo, marcado por un fatalismo desafiante. "No es que crea imposible curarse", dice el narrador, "sino que no cree en el valor, en la trascendencia de curarse" (12). Al mismo tiempo que todo esto está pasando, el novelista inicia un sutilísimo juego del gato y del ratón con el lector cuando un malentendido acerca de las relaciones entre el enfermo y las dos mujeres en su vida parece reflejar simbólicamente la venalidad de la verdad entre todos los testigos del espectáculo (sólo un recordatorio: nosotros los lectores somos testigos también). En resumen, una especie de tragedia rioplatense hermosamente narrada sin ningún sentimentalismo barato. (www.puntodelectura.com)

Juan Carlos Onetti

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía

2011-05-30T16:37:00.002-04:00

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (Anagrama, 2011)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2011

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía [The Troubles of the Real Police Officer], the latest posthumous release from the man who's rapidly becoming literature's answer to Tupac with a seemingly neverending series of new releases from beyond the grave, is more or less a complete failure as a novel: aimless, out of focus, obscure to the nth degree. However, as a collection of rough drafts (which it essentially is) and/or a series of outtakes from 2666 (which it often resembles), it's juicy enough that I excitedly tore through it in the course of a few days last week. While the skeletal outline of a plot mostly concerns the epistolary relationship between Chilean professor Oscar Amalfitano and Barcelona poet Joan Padillla, former lovers who now carry on a transatlantic correspondence about the novel that the latter is writing called El dios de los homosexuales [The God of the Homosexuals] and the city of Santa Teresa in which Amalfitano and his daughter Rosa now find themselves surrounded by killers, most of what got me geeked up here simply had to do either with the flashes of brilliance of the prose or the new or alternate background info on various 2666 characters. Whether that will be enough to satisfy first-time Bolaño readers is kind of tough to say, but I have a feeling that most hardcore Bolaño veterans will appreciate learning more about what Amalfitano taught his students ["Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo. Que no era más cómodo leer que escribir. Que leyendo se aprendía a dudar y a recordar. Que la memoria era el amor"/"That what literature principally taught was courage, a strange courage, like a stone well in the middle of swampland, a courage similar to a whirlwind and a mirror. That it wasn't more comfortable to read than to write. That by reading, one learned to doubt and to remember. That memory was love" [146]), what kind of friendships J.M.G. Arcimboldi (without the "h" and recast here as a French rather than a German author) maintained with other writers ("Raymond Queneau, al que consideraba su maestro y con el que se peleó en más de diez ocasiones. Cinco por carta, cuatro por teléfono y dos persona a persona, la primera con insultos y maldiciones, la segunda con miradas y gestos de desprecio"/"Raymond Queneau, whom he considered his master and with whom he had quarreled on more than ten occasions. Five by letter, four by telephone, and two face to face, the first time with curses and insults and the second with disdainful looks and gestures" [217]), and things of that nature. Includes several techniques (e.g. fake bibliographies, encyclopedia style entries) and extended passages (e.g. a satirical discourse on the "heterosexuality" of the novel vs. the "homosexuality" of poetry) that are more fully developed in Nazi Literature in the Americas and The Savage Detectives but still enjoyable in the manner of an album full of B-sides by one of your favorite artists. (www.anagrama-ed.es)

This was my second title read for The 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge hosted by Rise of in lieu of a field guide. For more on the novel in Spanish, check out the reviews by Martín of El pez volador here and by Lluís of lecturas errantes here.

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

2011-05-28T23:58:00.024-04:00

What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press, 2010)
by Gabriel Josipovici
England, 2010

Even though it's way too hot to be doing any typing in this house at the moment, I suppose a few cranky words are in order in regard to this uneven but ultimately invigorating example of literary criticism from sometime novelist and longtime Georges Perec fan Gabriel Josipovici. To begin with, Josipovici actually pissed me off early on with a couple of sweeping generalizations like the following one used to assert the importance of Rabelais and Cervantes as 16th and 17th century modernist forebears: "It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted" (34). What the hell, man? Nobody in the world was ever disenchanted before the Protestant Reformation? And what about all the ancient novels like those by Petronius and Apuleius that emerged centuries before the ones described here? They don't rate a mention? Similarly, I was also mildly annoyed by Josipovici's somewhat lazy celebration of Don Quixote as the game changer among all genre-bending novels--not because I don't agee with the sentiment in itself but because Josipovici seemed to rather questionably overlook non-novel game changers like Ovid's 1st century Metamorphoses and Juan Ruiz's 14th century Libro de buen amor in his stressing of the "tradition" that provided authority to "genre-derived" works before Cervantes (65-66). Outside the novel format, the Quixote wasn't actually so novel in that regard (which the writer eventually owns up to in an important later chapter comparing Greek tragedy to contemporary drama). Josipovici also dismayed me on occasion with his hackneyed Old World references to how artistic conventions sometimes "mesh...with the conventions by which bourgeois society lives" (139), but maybe that's just the slovenly middle-class American in me finding a dapper Euro critic's comments about bourgeois society as laughably passé as references to "landed gentry" or some such other nonsense. In any event, these false starts aside, Josipovici clearly rallied as his extended essay progressed. While I don't necessarily share his conviction that "Modernism is a response to the simplifications of the self and of life which Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them" (154-155), it's thankfully not necessary to agree on that point to enjoy the work as a whole. Using examples from the world of art and music to complement his focus on the modernist novel and poetry, Josipovici was frequently at his most insightful and/or provocative when drawing parallels between the nonconformist tendencies of modernists working in different media and eras. Insightful: Using Picasso's 1912-1913 collages to claim that that was the precise moment "when artists grasped that what they were producing were signs or emblems for the external world, not mirrors reflecting it" (114). Provocative: The sequence where Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass occasioned this interpretive nugget: "Duchamp being Duchamp--it is difficult to know whether to take [the boxes of notes that accompany the artwork] seriously or as a spoof. They have of course, like the novels of Thomas Bernhard, to be taken both ways" (134). A few pages later, Duchamp himself contributes a memorable anecdotal highlight of his own in the middle of a sequence where Josipovici has been discussing the way modernists and non-modernists confront "the threshold of boredom" during the creative process: "Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are. Affectueusement, Marcel Duchamp" (138-139). With people like Borges, Jarry, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, and Woolf getting a thumbs up from Josipovici and people like Austen, Dickens, Ian McEwan, Irène Némirovsky, and Philip Roth getting a qualified or even a complete thumbs down, it's safe to say that you might enjoy this book--but I'd definitely hesitate to recommend it to any bloggers contemplating a Library Loot, a Mailbox Monday, or a TLC Book Tours post anytime soon! (www.yalebooks.com)

Gabriel Josipovici

What Ever Happened to Modernism? was the Wolves' May reading pick as selected by the lovely Frances. Please consider joining us June 24th-June 26th for the next pick, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as selected by the equally lovely Claire.

Other Views

Anthony (Times Flow Stemmed) [from August 2010]
E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Litlove (Tales from the Reading Room)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)
Stefanie (So Many Books)

Los informantes

2011-05-18T11:58:00.001-04:00

Los informantes (Punto de Lectura, 2009)
por Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Colombia, 2004

Los informantes, de Juan Gabriel Vásquez, hace una pregunta básica a nosotros: ¿qué harías si supiste que un familiar, digamos tu padre o tu madre, había delatado contra un inocente en un pasado lejano con consecuencias graves como resultado? Dado que la novela se abre con dos citas de Demóstenes como epígrafes, que su tema principal es la traición, y que la traición principal de la obra ocurre a mediados de los cuarenta entre la comunidad de inmigrantes alemanes en Colombia, fue una sorpresa encontrar que su narración en primera persona y su tono fueran tan moderados. Fernando Vallejo, ¿en dónde estás, amigo? En todo caso, me gustó la obra a pesar de, o posiblemente a causa de, la mesura del novelista en cuanto a su acercamiento estilístico. El argumento gira sobre la publicación de un libro de reportaje, Una vida en el exilio, y otro, Los informantes, escritos por el periodista Gabriel Santoro en los ochenta y los noventa, con ambos relacionados con las vidas de inmigrantes judíos y nazis en Colombia durante la época de las listas negras puse en marcha por la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Cuando el padre de Santoro, un conocido profesor de Oratoria, da una paliza al libro de su hijo en público, provoca una reacción en cadena de otras historias entrelazadas que hace hincapié en la dificultad de encontrar justicia para algunos y la dificultad de encontrar expiación para otros. Lejos de ser pesado, Los informantes es una obra divertida e inteligente aunque tal vez sea más interesante por lo temático que por la escritura en sí misma (de todas formas, me gustó suficientemente para tener ganas de leer la Historia secreta de Costaguana, la segunda novela de Vásquez, en algún momento). (www.puntodelectura.com)

The Informers (Riverhead Books, 2010)
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez [translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean]
Colombia, 2004

Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Informers poses an interesting question: what would you do if you learned that a family member, your father or your mother let's say, falsely accused an innocent person in the distant past with dire consequences as a result? Given that the novel opens with two Demosthenes quotes as epigraphs, that its main theme is betrayal, and that the principal betrayal in the work takes place in the mid-1940s among the community of German immigrants in Colombia, I was surprised to discover just how restrained its first-person narration and tone were. Fernando Vallejo, where are you, my friend? In any event, I enjoyed the work in spite of--or possibly because of--the novelist's moderation in his approach. The plot pivots around the publication of one nonfiction book, A Life in Exile, and another, The Informers, written by journalist Gabriel Santoro in the '80s and '90s, with both efforts concerned with the lives of Jewish and Nazi immigrants in Colombia in the blacklist era ushered in by World War II. When Santoro's father, a well-known professor of rhetoric, lambastes his son's earlier book in public, a chain reaction of other stories and events is set in motion which highlights the difficulty of obtaining justice for some and the difficulty of finding atonement for others. Far from being a heavy read, The Informers is actually a fast-moving and intelligent work although the subject matter is maybe more interesting than the writing itself (that being said, I liked it enough to now want to read Vásquez's second novel, The Secret History of Costaguana, at some point). (www.riverheadbooks.com)

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

*Want a second opinion? C.B. James of Ready When You Are, C.B. reviewed The Informers last month here.*

Your Face Tomorrow Group Read

2011-05-14T17:29:00.019-04:00

(New Directions: English translation by Margaret Jull Costa)

In a departure from the usual truculent book you've never heard about/book you probably wouldn't want to read/book you've never heard about but probably wouldn't want to read anyway review format around here (the "you" in question not being regular Caravana readers, of course, but those homogeneity-loving bloggers more inclined to favor a weekly meme/review of a book I'd never want to read/weekly meme posting format on their own blogs), I thought I'd take a moment to mention the three-month long Javier Marías Your Face Tomorrow [Tu rostro mañana] group read some intrepid friends and I will be undertaking in June through August this summer. Marías' novel, the subject of a previous readalong at Conversational Reading last year which drew raves for the book (host Scott Esposito: "It's a testament to Marías' abilities as a storyteller that after 1,000 pages of this book Volume 3 has me more hooked than ever"), is probably one of the most important works in Spanish language literature of the last 10 years judging by its reception by the critics. At the same time, its reception has been such that even people who have embraced its ambition and prose have questioned its overall success as a genre-bending work of art (Stacey d'Erasmo, writing in the NY Times, called it a "magnificent, sui generis three-part novel" but a project that was "both fundamentally troubling and fundamentally troubled"). Care to put these mixed reviews to the test yourself? If so, please join us for one or more of the following dates below (to encourage the participation of fellow procrastinators, I've arranged the discussion schedule for each volume of the novel to fall on or near the last day of each month).

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 1: Fever and Spear (Thursday, June 30th)
Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 2: Dance and Dream (Sunday, July 31st)
Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Wednesday, August 31st)

(Debolsillo: Spanish original by Javier Marías)

Probable participants for one or all volumes

Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations)

C.B. James (Ready When You Are, C.B.)

E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)

Frances (Nonsuch Book)

Rise (in lieu of a field guide)

Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

Stu (Winstonsdad's Blog)

P.S.

It's been an absolutely awesome week for Spanish language literature in these parts. First, Amateur Reader over at Wuthering Expectations has been running a superb week-long series on "The Spanish Issue" of The Hudson Review, which features essays by Bolaño, Borges, and Antonio Muñoz Molina among others in addition to poetry and other stuff. The Bolaño essay, "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" on the subject of Argentinean literature, is prob. the best critical piece I've read all year and typically Bolañoesque in its mixture of entertainment, insight and savage delivery. Secondly, I've just started Enrique Vila-Matas' El mal de Montano [Montano's Malady], which I've been looking forward to ever since I read his amusing Bartleby y compañia [Bartleby & Co.] a few years back. Finally, in addition to ordering the first volume of Javier Marías' Tu rostro mañana pictured above for the upcoming group read, I picked up several Spanish language titles that I'd been craving for a while in a Thursday night jackpot at Schoenhof's: César Aira's Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero [An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter], Roberto Bolaño's nonfiction Entre paréntesis [Between Parentheses, forthcoming in English translation in June, and the source of "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" excerpted by The Hudson Review] and unfinished novel Los sinsabores del verdadero policía [a January 2011 release with no translation date set yet, this features a grab bag of writing about various characters from 2666 and other Bolaño titles], and Javier Cercas' Anatomía de un instante [The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History & Imagination]. Not sure when I'll get around to all this booty, but it has already caused a shake-up in my reading plans for the rest of the month. Exciting times, for me at least!

The Hour of the Star

2011-05-09T02:37:00.011-04:00

The Hour of the Star [A Hora da Estrela] (New Directions, 1992)

by Clarice Lispector [translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero]

Brazil, 1977

Considering what a big deal Lispector is regarded as in non-lemming circles, I was bummed to find out that The Hour of the Star, her supposed masterpiece, is more annoying than interesting. In fact, it was so unrewarding that I'm probably one and done with her. A fake biography of a 19-year old poverty victim from northeastern Brazil named Macabéa, this 86-page novella is at its best offering up cryptic imagery ("it is the same soft drink that sponsored the recent earthquake in Guatemala" [23]) and the occasional lyrical moment ("May, the month of bridal veils floating in clouds of white" [42]) in between bouts of way self-conscious prose, hamfisted dialogue, and the like. At its worst, it's reminiscent of Talking Heads: 77 in terms of its poseur pretentiousness, its labored "artfulness," and its lack of a non-dork mouthpiece. Still, eleven stories less dildonic than The Dodecahedron, for whatever that's worth! (www.ndpublishing.com)

Clarice Lispector

Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo

2011-04-30T20:36:00.012-04:00

Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo (Tusquets Editores, 2009)
por Haruki Murakami [traducido del japonés de Lourdes Porta y Junichi Matsuura]
Japón, 1994

"Todo aquello le parecía una escena fantástica, irreal, pintada por un artista con trastornos mentales".

(Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo, 760)

Tokio, 1984. Tooru Okada, un treintañero que está sin trabajo, empieza a recibir llamadas telefónicas muy raras. Primero desaparece su gato y después su mujer. Sin saber por qué precisamente, es evidente que algo ha radicalmente cambiado en su vida personal. Dentro de poco, el tipo se pone adentro de un pozo seco en la vecindad para reflexionar sobre todos estos cambios turbulentos. Problema número uno: en vez de ser un lugar tranquilo para pensar, resulta que el pozo pertenece a un solar abandonado conocido como "la mansión de la horca" por su mala fama como el lugar donde sucedió el suicidio de una entera familia y aun más mala suerte en los años posteriores. Problema número dos: tal vez el pozo sea una puerta a otras dimensiones o algo por el estilo. Así empieza uno de los mejores libros que he leído en este año y probablemente el mejor de todos en cuanto al despliegue de una imaginación sin trabas. ¡Cómo me entusiasmó éste, mi primer Murakami! Debo aclarar que no me considero un aficionado a la literatura fantástica para nada. Sin obstante, la destreza del novelista en describir la realidad, la irrealidad, y el umbral entre los dos mundos era sumamente asombroso. Además de ser un relato sobre la búsqueda de la esposa Kumiko por el señor Okada, la Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo es una rica mezcolanza de hilos narrativos, estilos, y temas. Conforme con una novela donde los personajes incluyen no uno sino dos equipos de videntes, una "prostituta de la mente", y una vecina adolescente que comunica con el protagonista en persona y telepáticamente, no es de sorprender que algunos de los momentos más psiquedélicos de la obra tengan lugar en secuencias oníricas y/o escenas abiertamente surrealistas. Al mismo tiempo, algunos de los pasajes más llamativos tienen que ver con la presencia de la violencia en la sociedad japonesa: o sea la repentina brutalidad de un hombre moderno que es más o menos pacífico con un bate de béisbol o sea la brutalidad de la Segunda Guerra Mundial (en particular, la violencia de los japoneses contra los chinos en Manchuria y la violencia de los rusos contra los japoneses después del supuesto Incidente Nomonhan). Una lectura inesperadamente jugosa cuya rareza intrínseca está hecha aun más interesante por una especie de ternura hacia los personajes por parte de Murakami. Excelente. (http://www.tusquetseditores.com/)

Haruki Murakami

The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames

2011-04-29T10:45:00.007-04:00

The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames (The Porcupine's Quill, 2005)
by Paul Glennon
Canada, 2005

Man, I fucking hated this book. Lame, lamer, lamest approach to the interconnected short story collection-as-novel idea, the main problem not being the potentially interesting storytelling structure itself but the unvarying flat monotone "I" of the various narrators: whether they're supposed to be weird little kids or grumpy old businessmen, they all sound the same. In addition, the obsession with outlandish conspiracy theories and "clever" plot twists felt really forced to me. While Glennon claims to have constructed The Dodecahedron on "mildly Oulipian principles," something that certainly sounds appealing on paper, I'm sorry to say that I'll definitely remember it more for its unconvincing authorial voice and its dry, androidal prose than for any resemblances to Perec and Calvino. Whatever. (http://porcupinesquill.ca/)

Paul Glennon

Kinder Opinions
Anthony (Time's Flow Stemmed)
E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)
Emily (Evening All Afternoon)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

The Battle of Chile

2011-04-24T10:34:00.021-04:00

The Battle of Chile [La batalla de Chile] (Icarus Films DVD, 2009)
Directed by Patricio Guzmán
Chile-Cuba-France, 1975, 1976 and 1978
In Spanish with English subtitles

All too aware that many of my fellow bloggers would much rather hype multiple shitty film adaptations of 19th and 20th century British novels than talk about any documentary on a Latin American topic, I'd still like to spend a few moments here today in honor of Patricio Guzmán's nearly four and a half hour long The Battle of Chile (note: this expansive four-DVD set also includes a separate disc dedicated to Guzmán's hour-long 1997 doc Chile, Obstinate Memory, a powerful look at memory in that country some 25 years after the events depicted in this, his signature work). Whether you share Guzmán's obvious pro-Allende sympathies or not, this remarkable film--shot in democratic Chile in the year leading up to the Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973 and finished in exile abroad after the director had to flee the country for his own safety--offers up a startling look at a country on the brink of civil war. The footage is fantastic, the images often wrenching. In part one's "The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie," for example, an hour and a half of man and woman on the street interviews about the paralyzing food shortages, the labor and transit strikes, and the massive demonstrations for and against the socialist Allende concludes with the unforgettable scene of an Argentinean cameraman inadvertently filming his own death--shot to death on camera, cowardly and with deliberation, by a Chilean army officer participating in a preliminary coup attempt against Allende in late June. In part two's "The Coup d'État," the democratically-elected president Allende is literally bombed out of office with the military's treasonous daytime attack on the presidential palace in the heart of Santiago. Part three's "The Power of the People," while perhaps lacking a single visual image quite as powerful as those that close the preceding segments, compensates by focusing on the mass rallies bringing hundreds of thousands of Allende supporters to the streets and the behind the scenes strategy debates of those on the left intent on bringing Allende's workers' revolution to the masses. While long and occasionally repetitive in its depiction of the strife that was tearing Chile apart, The Battle of Chile struck me as a raw but staggering achievement in its framing of a situation in which people from both sides were openly confiding that a civil war would likely be the only way to resolve the political stalemate. Riveting. (http://www.icarusfilms.com/)

The Battle of Chile's crew (from left to right): Jorge Müller Silva (director of photography), Patricio Guzmán (director), Federico Elton (production manager), José Bartolomé (assistant director), Bernardo Menz (sound).

In the 1996 novel Distant Star, which alludes to Chile's transition from the troubled democratic state of Allende to the murderous sponsor of state terrorism it became under Pinochet, one of Roberto Bolaño's characters opines that "it seems to me that we are entering into the world championship of ugliness and brutality" ("me parece que estamos entrando en el campeonato mundial de la fealdad y la brutalidad"). Lending a real-life exclamation point to this fictional pronouncement, I feel it important to note that The Battle of Chile cameraman Jorge Müller pictured above was eventually detained and then "disappeared" by the military junta led by Pinochet and supported by the Nixon White House. RIP.