Zero to One

Muriel Barbery: cats, philosophy, and still life

2016-01-15T00:13:00.000+13:00

Full title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Author: Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 325 pages, paperback
Publisher: Europa Editions (2008)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Read The Elegance of the Hedgehog and you’ll find yourself in the proximity of a writer who’s got a score to settle first with the knowledge industry, and then with life in general.

In the tone of intelligent social satire and with the lexical swipe of a philosophical treatise gone mainstream, the novel has been an enormous success ever since its first French print, in 2006 (Gallimard). Even parts where the prose goes hardcore-existentialist, pondering the likes of Edmund Husserl, appear to have found good acceptance among the cohorts of readers whose diversity can only be vaguely surmised.

The novel has an ease about it in regards to the inclusion of serious, philosophically pertinent, critically astute, commentaries on cultural demeanors of the modern world. Barbery, former teacher of philosophy and so utterly at home with at least the general aspects of twentieth-century critical thinking, leaves numerous clues in the novel as to her inclinations. One might find traces of Jean Baudrillard, for instance, in her treatment of the issue of house pets. Baudrillard, who drew clear lines between tamed animals of the household type and inanimate objects, classified both in his “System of Collecting,” and went as far as to say that “pets are a category midway between persons and objects.”

In Barbery’s novel, where cats feature prominently, the issue of sentimental attachment leaves no doubts as to its role in the creation of the modern pet. Renée Michel, concierge in a Parisian apartment building, has always named her cats after Tolstoy characters. Monsieur Kakuro Ozu, the rich Japanese tenant whose move into the building changes the course of the other characters’ lives, also calls his cats Kitty and Levin – no-brainer references to Anna Karenina. These onomastic sports indicate precisely the sentimental connotations of the modern humans’ relationship to their pets. Renée’s philosophy is, for this reason, very precisely Baudrillard-inspired. Proof:

“The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting,”

says the concierge; and a little further in the text she continues:

“I concede that the difference between the vacuum cleaner and the cats is that a cat can experience pain and pleasure. But does that mean it has a great ability to communicate with humans? Not at all. That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects.”

The precaution mentioned here is, of course, not unlike that feeling of existential embarrassment discussed by another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who found a way of talking about continental philosophy by means of an incident in which his cat watched him emerging naked from the bathroom.

But to get back to The Elegance of the Hedgehog, what is immediately noticeable, I’m sure, is the way the afore-mentioned character (one of the two protagonists sharing the dual-narrative pattern of the novel) speaks. She is intelligent beyond affectation and interested in things of the world only insofar as they serve good, hearty reflection. In other words, Renée does not sound at all like a concierge. And that’s precisely the point. Barbery, with her thinly vailed agenda of satirizing artificially engendered brainpower, has two autodidacts as the main speakers in the novel. A concierge all her life, Renée has found her way of learning freely by hiding behind the social conventions that make her invisible to the bourgeois sycophants. There, she’s always been free to muse about the shortcomings of the world, while at the same time enjoying the pleasures of serious reflection. The other protagonist, the young Paloma Josse, comes from a different class order but shares with Renée the same feeling that the world is not her match. Unlike Renée, she is thinking of suicide. A precocious child, at less than twelve Paloma challenges her French teacher on principial grounds and has well-groomed feelings about everything that surrounds her. Unlike Renée, who appears to militate (if only internally) for an aristocracy of the mind, Paloma is of a seemingly socialist streak. She hates her parents’ well-to-do condition, as well as the pretense of her sister’s and her sister’s boyfriend. She knows how to see the holes in the impeccable armor of those who inhabit her immediate environment and is quick to see the merit of the silent concierge.

Muriel Barbery. Source: Semana

These two characters, though, have a lot in common. First of all this tendency towards transgressing their own milieus. To her family, Paloma appears as a strange child who hides all the time and refuses to participate in “proper” social intercourse. To the same, Renée is an invisible entity: a concierge who cannot be regarded as anything but what her profession indicates. But what truly unites the two protagonists is their love for Japanese simplicity. Renée launches repeated exegeses on Oriental aesthetics and emphasizes the importance of understanding that beauty is an event. She contrasts this to the Western taste for monumentality, for things made to survive, for history as a series of recorded actions. Contrary to this, the Japanese tea ceremony or the simplicity of Japanese art are the definition of what art should be: carpe diem at its purest. This is why she is so surprisingly fascinated by a very European genre: Dutch still life of the seventeenth century. It is there, in the ephemerality of a scene that’s set up for the pleasure of another, that Renée identifies the source of beauty.

Just like Renée’s passion for the ephemeral, Paloma is struck by the thought of procrastination, in fact another way of bringing up the tension of the present moment, a constant problem for European culture:

“If you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?”

Kakuro Ozu, who also happens to bear the surname of Renée’s favorite director (Yasujiro Ozu), knows Tolstoy inside-out, understands Paloma’s rebellious tendencies, and shows sympathy towards the destiny of both his French friends. He manages to persuade both of them out of their self-destructive tendencies, so that Paloma ends up convinced that suicide is not the way to go, while Renée agrees to come out of her protective cocoon. Their friendship is cut short by the novel’s unhappy ending but it shines so bright while it lasts: a perfect triangle of French love that’s not sexual but intellectual in nature.

The trio performs against a background which Barbery is very careful to describe as culturally destitute and incompetent but socially patronizing and self-aggrandizing. This is the society made up of the inhabitants of 7, rue de Grenelle, the novel’s only spatial setting, situated at the very center of Paris. The humans that make up this society are invariably dumbed down by the protagonists’ remarkable intelligence. They’re utter biological loss, if we trust the verve of Paloma’s diatribes. Out of reach of good ideas, burdened by social conventions and common tastes more than any wish to gain access to knowledge, the tenants form a small-scale replica of the thing known as humanity. From Paloma’s parents to the deceased food critic Pierre Arthens, the protagonist of Barbery’s first novel, translated into English either as The Gourmet or Gourmet Rapsody, and from them to the entire fauna of simple-minded bourgeois who boast credentials gained for all the wrong reasons, the world described in The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an enclosed ecosystem which allows readers to feel at home.

This is, perhaps, why the book has been such a success. Because – let us admit – don’t we love to partake in criticisms of a world system from which we invariably abstract ourselves? Freed of sin by way of being on the critic’s side, we’re going to love the game that shows us the defects we refuse to acknowledge. And that, in itself, is a perfect recipe for success. Muriel Barbery is a winner. Agreed.

Guadalupe Nettel (almost) writing herself

2016-01-02T06:21:00.000+13:00

Full title: The Body Where I Was Born

Author: Guadalupe Nettel, translated by J.T. Lichtenstein

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 208 pages, paperback
Publisher: Seven Stories Press (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The Body Where I Was Born (with a title borrowed from Allen Ginsberg) proposes a simple, fairly linear story, but with a complex narrative agenda. (Hence my focus on only a handful of features. Plenty more remain to be discovered, interpreted, or simply invented, as the needs of the reader may be.)

The book is a bildungsroman, and that’s enough said. All there is to it: a young girl, and her life in Mexico, interrupted by a period spent in France, where she and her younger brother have to accompany their mother, enrolled as a doctoral candidate in Aix-en-Provence. Simple, straightforward.

But.

The text is constructed in line with the rules of autobiography, and that tinge of self-writing is quite appealing to a reader whose interests lie in the factual aspects of fiction. The narrator herself is a woman who recounts her younger age growing up in ever-shifting circumstances. She experiences seismic transformations, from uprooting to up-growing, and from being left without a father to being left without a country (an “untouchable,” as she calls herself at some point). That’s why references to the infamous earthquake of 1985, which transformed Mexico City itself, come as no surprise (a real seism from a world overwhelmed by its reality).

Often in the novel events make room for reflections and generalizations. The idea of continuous transformation (an essential feature of any bildungsroman and, therefore, of this one) features prominently among these reflections.

“From what I have been able to observe, it seems that when an event hurts us there are two general tendencies in confronting it: the first being to go over it an infinite number of times, like a video we project again and again on a screen in our minds. The second is to tear apart the filmstrip and forget indefinitely the painful event. Some of us employ both techniques in the editing of our memories.”

The editing of memories is an important issue in this novel. It being a largely autobiographical text, setting the record straight about expurgations is a necessary task.

Guadalupe Nettel. Source: Minima et Moralia

The task is also made necessary by the fact that the novel tells the story of a book about to be written. The narrator, a writer with a bad case of writer’s block, recounts the events of her life to an invisible psychoanalyst addressed sporadically under the name of Doctor Sazlavski. This is important! The sessions with the doctor gather up as only a series of oral confessions. What we are reading (the text of The Body Where I Was Born) is material that hasn’t been written down. What the narrator struggles with is the task of starting work on the novel that will contain all the events she has been reporting to Doctor Sazlavski. You see what a Tristram-Shandyesque enterprise this is: a book telling the story of a book that hasn’t been written and of events that haven’t left the privacy of confession. Reading The Body Where I Was Born is, for this reason, like gaining access to inexistent knowledge.

To tantalize the reader even further, due to the same autobiographical element, the protagonist is conceived among real events and real people. As a writer with certain connections among the writers’ guild, she encounters recognizable figures. She meets Alejandro Zambra in Santiago de Chile, Octavio Paz in Paris, and a host of other Mexican writers and artists. Given this aspect, the question “Who is Doctor Sazlavski?” becomes a red herring that plays on the reader’s nerves. I wonder if there’s any connection between this almost-real doctor and the famous Marcelo Chiriboga, the made-up novelist of the Latin-American Boom, who features in the works of José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, or Eloy Urroz. In those books, the technique is similar: a fictional character evolves among real persons and so he too takes up the features of a real person. The hint injects a necessary element of doubt in the very midst of autobiography, and thus the novel becomes a territory of exploration where no firm footing can be said to exist.

To give the narrative even more weight, Nettel inserts numerous references to literary texts. To mention just a few:

Her mother calls her ‘La Cucaracha’ (the Cockroach) and this calls for an immediate parallel to Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
The narrator’s search for a stable destiny recalls, at another point, the searches of Captain Ahab.
Life with a controlling grandmother, the epitome of a patriarchal superstructure that upsets the narrator’s evolution, is promptly linked to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

About the last in the list: the situation described in Eréndira (a girl forced into prostitution by her grandmother tries by various means to kill the evil grannie) matches perfectly the situation of the narrator in The Body. The parallel is pointed out in one of the psychoanalytic sessions:

“Doctor, this discovery, as exaggerated as it sounds, was like meeting a guardian angel, or at least a friend I could trust, which was, in those days, equally unlikely. The book understood me better than anyone in the world and, if that was not enough, made it possible for me to speak about things that were hard to admit to myself, like the undeniable urge to kill someone in my family.”

It’s from the same relationship with this invisible psychoanalyst that other symbolic aspects are revealed throughout the novel. For instance, the narrator suffers from an eye disease which forces her to wear a patch throughout her childhood. Like a Cyclops, or even better – like a spy –, she develops a taste for voyeuristic pleasures.

“Our apartment was in a building complex, and our neighbors’ windows offered an almost limitless menu. The magnification of my binoculars wasn’t very powerful, but it was enough to see close-up what went on in our vicinity. I don’t know if it’s what my parents had in mind, but for me the binoculars were a kind of compensation for all the time they had limited my sight with the patch. Thanks to this marvelous instrument, for years I was able to enter the homes of others and to observe things to which nobody else had access.”

This “entering the homes of others” is the job of a novelist, is it not? It’s either the narrator or Guadalupe Nettel herself who takes advantage of this ability to peer into the lives of others while, at the same time, giving readers a glimpse of what their own lives might be.

All in all, this juggling game, in which certainties and uncertainties take their turns in dominating the front stage, makes the novel more than interesting, the story more than believable.

With Cormac McCarthy you end up admiring the villain

2015-12-11T00:31:00.000+13:00

Full title: Child of God

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 208 pages, paperback
Publisher: Vintage (1993)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

One recognizable feature of Cormac McCarthy’s novels (his trademark, some would say) is graphic, bare-bones violence. Child of God is no exception. The lonely outcast who impersonates justice in a weird, criminal way, occupies pretty much the entire novel. His name is Lester Ballard and he’s a solitary dweller of the nearby forests, a champion of the rifle and a savage to the bone. He’s accused of a rape he’s never committed and, enraged by the injustice, he starts on a rampage, killing, raping, and stealing every step of the way, and thus reserving himself a sure place in hell.

This is, briefly put, the plot line of Child of God, Cormac McCarthy’s third novel (first published in 1973).

But the plot isn’t everything.

There are far more interesting things to be said about the novel’s stylistic matter.

Child of God is written as a series of episodes. Short, cinematic, often independent from each other. These episodes are either third-person narrations from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator or first-person accounts from various minor characters who recall having met Ballard at different moments in time. While the former are concerned with the progression of the story itself, the latter deal with the issue of character (not as in ‘personage’ but as in ‘psychological profile’).

This episodic structure makes it somewhat hard for the reader to disprove of the protagonist’s outrageously criminal actions. How? Well, if we add to the picture McCarthy’s tendency towards not providing moral relief after the numerous murders, rapes, and break-ins, it becomes difficult for the reader to realize a trajectory for their own appreciation of Ballard’s crimes.

The narration addresses Lester Ballard all the time. He is, in other words, the protagonist. Trained through previous moral protocols likely to have choreographed one’s readerly response into sympathizing with the protagonist, one might find oneself in the strange (certainly un-Christian) situation of takin the side of evil. That, in itself, is worth paying attention to because the general purpose is to elude ethical expectations. If McCarthy’s protagonist lives in an environment where he kills and rapes without being sanctioned by that usual moralistic narrative voice we’re used to, this is because Ballard’s progression doesn’t take place in the realm of social morality but in the realm of story-telling, where the same principles don’t operate in identical ways. In fact, when things are considered from a narrative perspective, it should be ethically sounder to give all characters the chance to behave as points of focalization, without their actions being constantly weighed by an intrusive voice that guarantees the pursuit of morality. This should be the case at least for the sake of equality, knowing that stories are built on anything but that (what with the protagonist-antagonist distinction and the firm lines drawn between minor and major characters).

Cormac McCarthy. Source: Flavorwire

In other words, Cormac McCarthy’s novel is no didactic material. Although I can understand how some readers, used to seeing evil through the lens of what it means rather than what it does, might be upset by McCarthy’s technical relativization of ethics.

The effect of this turn away from moralization is that, no matter how appalling his crimes, we tend to invest our emotions in Ballard the way we invest them in all protagonists of literature. We’re out there with him all the time, we feel the cold he feels when winter or rain overtake the landscapes, we almost burn alive in a fire that consumes his cabin. What’s even more significant, our hearts skip a beat when Ballard is on the verge of being spotted by his victims. I mean – how sick is that? And I’m not talking about McCarthy here but about us! Us, readers. Blinded by straightforward narrative ideologies, we turn into acolytes of a criminal.

Towards the end of the novel, while trying to shake off the sheriff and his crew, Ballard gets lost in a maze of caves and underground galleries, deep under the thick forest, miles away from any help, teased by the sounds of life he can hear above his head and yet trapped there, in the cave, at the mercy of a greater logic. Ballard starts thinking about his own death. When he does so we’re there with him. It’s only us and him. Not the pursuers, who have lost him and have given up on ever finding him again. Us. We are the only ones apart from Ballard who participate in the ordeal. We feel for him. We share his claustrophobic thoughts. We wish he can get out of there as soon as possible. We wish it, we wish it like we mean it. Otherwise, the prospect of what might happen to him (to us?) is terrifying.

“In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they’d nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brains had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl. He’d cause to wish and he did wish for some brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep.”

That’s how graphic McCarthy can be. The prospect of the protagonist’s death drips slowly, drop by drop, onto our own skulls until, as in the infamous Chinese torture, we give in. The narration goes on and on, addictively, adding one more detail here, one more highlight there, one more complication to a situation that was pretty complication to start with. Through these accumulations of details, we are led to forget the evils Ballard has committed and concentrate on what’s in front of us: the current situation.

But wait; there’s more.

McCarthy is capable of incredible metaphors and similes. The paragraph above is a case in point. It shows his favourite technique of accumulation of details, this time at the lexical level, so as to provide a rich texture to the story. A rich texture it is, and one that raises yet another question. How come a text full of adjectives and adverbs can be so cinematic in nature? Any creative-writing tutor would advise complete abstinence from such devices because they are unsuited to narrative progression. Adjectives stop action, adverbs make it uninteresting. And yet, this is precisely where McCarthy goes. He offers a baroque model whereby the reader is suffocated by the abundance of grammatical and stylistic decorations. Take another example, where the central idea is to create a chromatic medley:

“The hardwood trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watches through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.”

Phew. You need a big breath after this. Not just adjectives but polysyllables of all sorts, neologisms of McCarthy’s own making, contribute to the formation of this solid, thick structure. And yet, if one looks at it carefully, one might be able to notice that the passage goes contrary to description. It narrates. It generates action. The few verbs found here and there have that special evocative power that makes a narrative become narration, unfolding of events. The landscape unreels, as in a cinema theatre. The camera is somehow invited to pan through the clouds, through darkness, through the twisted trees, to discover what lies behind the dramatic scene.

What’s also interesting to see is how McCarthy makes gruesome scenes look beautiful, by shear manipulation of metaphor. Here’s Ballard in his cave, where he’d been hiding the corpses of his victims:

“Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.”

One image like that and our preconceptions are shuttered.

Only a few pages further down the track we see Ballard in one of his most intriguing instantiations: dressed in women’s attire, crossing the fields at night like a phantom from an underworld of horror:

“A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.”

I need to admit, there’s something attractive in this description. Something that makes me pause for a second, maybe longer, to admire the text that obstructs the sight. And so I want to be where Ballard is for a little while because, in fact, I want to admire the poetry his presence promises to generate.

That’s how I read Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.

A bridge between times

2015-11-23T22:46:00.000+13:00

Full title: Purge

Author: Sofi Oksanen, translated by Lola Rogers

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 320 pages, paperback
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

There’s a bridge between times. Something to discard, something to remember. But the funny thing is memories we want forgotten return, in the way Freud must have imagined his Uncanny. And when they come they demand that we take them seriously. Very seriously.

This is, in a few sentences, the gist of Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, the novel that’s made her known to the whole world, translated into at least 25 languages and made into a topic of discussions from book clubs to academic circles. Purge is divided into hemispheres meant to meet each other at various point, repeatedly. The intertwined stories take place in two different times but converge spatially in one and the same Estonian village, where history is written and rewritten at the same time. On the one hand, there’s this story about the Russian occupation after World War Two, and concentrated between the 1940s and the 1960s, which takes roughly half of the book’s length. The other half is occupied by a narrative set in the time after the fall of the Soviet empire, in the 1990s, when the independence of the former Soviet Republic of Estonia comes with the strings that cannot but attach it to its irrevocable past.

Once this aspect of the setting is agreed upon, in come the characters. Two of them stand out, because it is by means of their stories that the big narrative is carried on. They also stand out because they cross paths in significant ways, running into each other in 1992. On the one hand we have Aliide Truu, an old woman with a history of collaboration with the Soviet regime, as well as a secret big as her entire past. On the other hand, there’s Zara. She’s young, beautiful, and terribly scared. She’s come to Aliide’s house in search for sanctuary, after having just escaped from a life of forced prostitution.

Zara’s motives and background are the true engines of the novel. We find out that she used to live in Vladivostok, in a kolkhoz, along with his mother and grandmother. The two older women had been born in Estonia, in the very village where Zara is now forced to seek protection in the house of Aliide Truu. About Aliide she knows one crucial aspect: that she is her grandmother’s sister. But that is the whole extent of Zara’s knowledge. Her head is full of questions. Why had her grandmother been so laconic about Aliide? Why does Aliide say that she’s never had a sister? What is behind this silence that separates the two old sisters, and why has the grandmother never agreed to come back to the Estonian village of her birth?

Sofi Oksanen. Source: Ilta Sanomant

It is the purpose of the rest of the novel to provide answers to all these questions. All veiled in the mystery brought about by the fact that Aliide has absolutely no idea who this young stranger is, and what she’s doing, collapsed, one morning, in the grass at the back of her village house.

In order for the necessary clarifications to come about, the novel uses the impact of a solid realist plot in which suspense leads the way. That makes for a strong narrative cocktail, which keeps the reader with eyes peeled and assures the page-turning effect pursued throughout the novel. Without going into details, suffice it to say that the secret in Aliide’s past is the element towards which the novel moves, so as to bring light to Zara’s current strife. In the process, Sofi Oksanen produces some powerful pages in which she proves her knack for the horrific and the violent. There’s torture involved, there’s forced prostitution, there’s incarceration and interrogation and powerlessness and escape and inhumanity and loss of hope and regaining of the same. The story shocks and at the same time redeems. Aliide, whose unrequited love forces her to turn into a monster, is paired, in a twisted way, with Zara’s pseudo-love. They are both connected, through invisible threads, by means of this relation that’s erotic and impossibly pornographic at the same time.

Aliide, who has the objective distance of her experience of the two worlds, is able to recognize the repeatability of history. She remembers and relives. The uncanny aspect of her story is given by the fact that history returns as painful as ever, as violent as ever:

“Everything was repeating itself. Even if the ruble had changed to the kroon and there were fewer warplanes flying over her head and the officers’ wives had lowered their voices, even if the loudspeakers on the tower at Pika Hermanni were playing independence songs every day, there would always be chrome-tanned boots, some new boots would arrive, the same or different, but a boot on your neck nevertheless. The foxholes had been closed up, the shell casings in the woods had tarnished, the secret dugouts had collapsed, the fallen had rotten away, but certain things repeated themselves.”

This passage sounds like the last, concluding, movement of a symphony centered on the destiny of an entire nation: the kind of story that has emerged abundantly from all the Eastern-European countries formerly quashed under the communist (Soviet or not) iron curtain.

Sofi Oksanen is half Estonian, half Finnish. But more importantly, she is a writer who writes from the aftertime of the communist catastrophe. You can feel all this in the tone of her stories: informed to the point of becoming overly exact, curious with the curiosity of a tourist who’s there for the first time.

This whirlwind of memories that come and go is not only unsettling. For the main characters, memory is the place where they return to find comfort, where the good things of life had taken place and where, therefore, they want to be again. Aliide’s unrequited love, Zara’s boyfriend whom she hasn’t seen for a number of years. Sometimes, this provocation of the past makes it necessary to look for comfort in a deeper form of existence: a form of becoming-mineral, of becoming so small, so invisible, that one’s physical presence turns into molecules (the utmost invisibility, the ultimate bliss of existence). Zara experiences this in a moment when she wants to hide from the danger that keeps following her.

“She had to close her eyes, deep within the room, to think herself to someplace else, she was a star, an ear on Lenin’s head, the hairs of Lenin’s whiskers, pasteboard whiskers on a pasteboard poster, she was a corner of the frame of the picture, a chipped plaster frame, bent, in a corner of the room. She was chalk dust on the surface of a chalkboard, in the safety of the classroom, she was the wooden tip of a pointer…”

The major difference between Zara and Aliide resides in the fact that the former is a defeated person, one who needs to hide away, one who needs protection; while the latter is a conqueror, a woman who’s been through the most unpleasant forms of life and has managed to come out of everything alive (like a Machiavellic cat of nine lives who always falls on her paws and never breaks a bone).

The previous quote outlines pretty well Zara’s destiny. There’s one that defines Aliide’s too:

“If they’re coming, they might as well all come – Mafia thugs, soldiers – Reds and Whites – Russians, Germans, Estonians – let them come. Aliide would survive. She always had.”

The discourse of a winner, this is, albeit one veiled in a sense of resignation. A bitter discourse, for Aliide’s solutions to her troubles have been on the wrong side of morality; and these troubles have made her stone-like, cynical. This is, therefore, the discourse of a survivor. A survivor like Zara who, half a century after Aliide’s tribulations, succeeds in staying alive when life itself is at odds with her.

On how Valeria Luiselli builds cities of absences

2015-09-29T01:24:00.003+13:00

Full title: Sidewalks

Author: Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Genre: Nonfiction
Attributes: 110 pages, paperback
Publisher: Granta (2013)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Reading Valeria Luiselli after Patrick Modiano is something worth trying. They have one major thing in common: the crucial role played by places in their writing. Sidewalks, a volume released almost simultaneously with Luiselli’s other debut volume, Faces in the Crowd, is a collection of essays in which location is all that matters. She moves from Venice, in search for Joseph Brodsky’s burial place, to Mexico, in search for maps or lost libraries, and then back to Venice, so as to end full-circle. Her wanderings trace peculiar maps, which are based not on solid landmarks but rather on gaps, empty spaces, urban cavities. There is a name for these gaps. A Spanish word. Relingos. A word to the explanation of which Luiselli dedicates an entire essay: “Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces.” The origins are not clear, but the word seems to mean this: urban spaces left unattended. Or better still, absences left in the fabric of a city. This is the kind of no-mans-land in the middle of an urban expanse, with a rondo left for flowers that will never be planted, or a pile of rubbish left to guard the peace (or war) of passers-by.

“A relingo – an emptiness, an absence – is a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by imagination and inhabited by our phantom-follies. Citied need those vacant lots, those silent gaps where the mind can wander freely.”

This is what Valeria Luiselli searches for throughout the volume: manifestations of the figure of the relingo, the urban absence par excellence, the hole. That explains why the book starts with an essay about tombs, about a silent argument between the grave of Ezra Pound and that of Joseph Brodsky, two holes in the ground.

In the second essay, “Flying Home,” where the focus advances quickly from airplanes to maps, the most prominent image is that of an enormous book containing a nineteenth-century cartographic representation of the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The scale of the map is so large, the book contains pages upon pages of emptiness, designating spaces between the two countries where no distinctive trace is noticeable. The essay prompts a parallel between the work of a cartographer and that of an anatomist, in the style, perhaps, of Gilles Deleuze, whom Luiselli quotes at some point in relation to language. The work of the two professionals is equally concerned with incisions, with the creation of gaps, of openings. For them, signification is done by means of cutting-through.

“In essence, an anatomist and a cartographer do the same thing: trace vaguely arbitrary frontiers on a body whose nature it is to resist determined borders, definitions and precise limits.”

Valeria Luiselli. Source: The Telegraph

The shortest essay, included almost as an afterthought or maybe as a gap-filler (to keep in line with the profile of the book), is also the most powerful insofar as poetic power is concerned. It is only half page in length and is the story of a crime that took place close to the entrance in the building where Valeria Luiselli once resided in Mexico City. A man is shot. Homicide police takes over, as it must. What’s left, once the investigation is concluded, is the outline of the victim’s body. The outline, a sort of map left on the footpath, a gap of sorts, a delineation of a territory where once there was a body, where now there is an absence.

“The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard – instead of numbers, we add up bodies.”

And so, Luiselli seizes the opportunity to bring up the central element of her system every time she finds it ready to be milked.

A neighbour (someone who reminds the reader of a similar character in Faces in the Crowd) digs a hole in the interior garden of the apartment block where the author lives. The hole itself warrants attention because it is a hole. And also because it motivates imagination.

In her childhood, inspired and also saddened by the idea that she could reach China if she kept digging, Luiselli ended up planting several holes in the backyard, which she then filled with aid-memoirs (toys, maps, and so on) for a future that’s uncertain at best. These holes too merit attention.

But gaps are not to be found only in cities. They also exist in language. Silences, like those in music, between sounds. And because these language gaps do exist there’s a sense that a writer herself will have to understand the hole-digging business that writing is. Luiselli has surely understood this already. Otherwise she wouldn’t say:

“Writing: drilling walls, breaking windows, blowing up buildings. Deep excavations to find – to find what? To find nothing.
A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.
Writing: making relingos.”

There’s yet another memory that stays: that of an earthquake in Mexico City, another episode from the author’s childhood. An earthquake causes chaos. It is, in essence, the force that alters maps. It leaves behind ruins, buildings reduced to rubble, holes, other absences. The reality of the threat that comes after the cataclysm, that the earthquake might return, creates the necessary connections between landscape, language, and anatomy, the three signposts of Luiselli’s concerns, the three stars of a writer’s person:

“We are in the process of losing something. We go round leaving bits of dead skin on the sidewalk, dropping dead words into a conversation. Cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction. But this constant threat of earthquakes is all that’s left to us. Only that kind of scene – a landscape of rubble piled on rubble – compels us to go out and look for the last remaining thing. Only under that threat does it again become necessary to excavate language, to find the exact word.”

And speaking of signposts, it must be mentioned that all the essays in the collection have this thing in common: they are interrupted by titles. Titles that are sometimes names (“Joseph Brodsky,” “Marcelino Giancarlo”), sometimes traffic sings (“Stop,” “Pedestrian Crossing”), sometimes civic warnings (“Use alternative routes,” “Watch your step”), sometimes business titles and messages (“Open all hours,” “Real Estate”), sometimes GPS-like directions (“Turn left at Durango,” “Continue along Orizaba – ride on sidewalk to avoid traffic”), sometimes just numbers. What’s important about these titles is that they seem arbitrary. They don’t bring about any necessary division.

The texts would work absolutely well without these titles. They aren’t enriched by them or better structured by them. But they play a role, these titles, that brings unity between structure and content: they create holes in the texts, absences where the reader’s imagination, as the author says, can wander freely.

Gradual revelations define the style of Patrick Modiano

2015-09-21T11:35:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Night Watch

Author: Patrick Modiano, translated by Patricia Wolf, revised by Frank Wynne

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 130 pages, paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The hero of The Night Watch is a young man who has to deal with a fundamental dilemma: to work for the French Gestapo or for the Resistance? He is in a dilemma because he has been offered both options and he’s taken both, each for its separate advantages: on the one hand the pecuniary gains of a life among criminals, on the other hand the chance to become a hero. So he spends a lot of time tossing the options in search for the right answer, and although the right answer doesn’t quite arrive, at least his evolution means something. It means a kind of awakening.

But Modiano doesn’t make things easy. In order to arrive at the conclusion one needs to follow the winding path of the narrator’s own tosses and turns. Modiano’s trademark technique is a slow revealing of essential details. We start off with a narrator in a moral slum. We find no difficulty in not liking him. He’s a textbook petty criminal turned traitor. He’s well aware of his condition but doesn’t seem to be bothered by the nature of his various lucrative, if despicable, jobs. At this stage in the novel he doesn’t even seem resigned. He simply notes down self-observations as if they were notes in a log book:

“Night was drawing in, but my job as informant and blackmailer has accustomed me to darkness.”

Nicknamed ‘The Swing Troubadour’ (after Charles Trenet?) the young man is employed as part of a hoard of former convicts to act as the underground wing of the French Gestapo. It is much later that we find out his motivation: coming from a poor family, he’s been lured by the easy money he could make in the criminal branch. As a result, his morality is simple and aimed exclusively at personal gain.

“It was in the pawnshop on the Rue Pierre Charron (my mother would often go there, but they always refused to take her paste jewellery) that I decide once and for all that poverty was pain in the arse. You might think I have no principles. I started out a poor and innocent soul. But innocence gets lost along the way.”

Here one can already perceive the seeds of self-awareness. But as he grows accustomed to the voice of testimony, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ also gets to the point where he can declare with laudable sincerity the true psychological mechanism behind his actions:

“There is only one emotion of which I have firsthand knowledge, one powerful enough to make me move mountains: FEAR.”

Slowly, slowly, the young man becomes conscious at least of the dubious nature of his profession. Even if he rejects it for a length of time, and even if he cannot find the will to leave the band of bastards who are providing him with the luxury otherwise forever unavailable to him, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ is uncomfortable as a criminal.

Patrick Modiano. Source: The Telegraph

But, as already mentioned above, to reach this stage one needs to read the novel in its peculiar manipulation of chronology. The narrative voice moves back and forth within a relatively tight chronotope, but one generous enough to permit chronological arabesques. Not only does the narrator relate events that didn’t occur in a straight line, he also includes real characters and situations from times that don’t coincide with the narrative’s zero time. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century personages and their deeds (mostly criminal) are mixed with contemporary episodes, in an urban landscape that seems to level all differences and make these cross-chronological encounters possible. All this might sound like an exercise in the universalisation of criminality, maybe in the fashion of Borges’s History of Infamy, although the parallel must not be stretched too far.

Modiano’s narrative oddity appears to be facilitated by the general setting of the novel: Paris. A city with multiple layers of history and mentality, it distributes past and present in ways that make them seem to coincide. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century criminals and WW2 serial killers are brought together, sad apparitions in a tableau of sad colours, described in a future that is outside of the novel’s present-tense narration.

“There are ghosts here, but only those of Monsieur Philibert, the Khedive, and their acolytes. Stepping out of Claridge, arm in arm, come Joanovici and the Count de Cagliostro. They are wearing white suits and platinum signet rings. The shy young man crossing the Rue Lord-Byron is Eugene Weidemann. Standing frozen in front of Pam-Pam is Thérèse de Païva, the most beautiful whore of the Second Empire. From the corner of the Rue Marbeuf, Dr Petiot smiles at me. On the terrace of Le Colisée: a group of black marketeers are cracking open the champagne.”

This passage indicates yet another aspect of the novel: the rapid move between locations. There are numerous moments when the narrator limits the story to a listing of places. As the protagonist moves, the locations too reveal themselves, as if what one is reading were not a novel but the representation of a map of Paris. The progression of the story is thus made to imitate the progression of an urban traveller, a flâneur or picaro who, like Moll Flanders in the eighteenth century, are led forward by the trajectories of their criminal pursuits.

Surrounded by depravity and petty interests, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ has to find his own way through the labyrinth that leads to decency. It takes a different kind of awakening to bring him to the realization that he might have a better role to play in life. And that is the moment when he is employed to infiltrate a Resistance cell. It is now that a profound transformation takes place. As he starts spying on the cell, the protagonist learns to admire their heroic determination, their rectitude, and their friendship. The transformation is substantial. He is given a new name (the curiously feminine ‘Princess of Lamballe’), welcomed, trusted, asked to spy back on the Gestapo. And that’s when the young man seems to crack under the weight of the dilemma.

“Two groups of lunatics were pressuring me to do contradictory things, they would run me down until I dropped dead from exhaustion. I was a scapegoat for these madmen. I was the runt of the litter. I didn’t stand a chance.”

This dilemma keeps him on edge for the rest of the novel. But the end doesn’t bring concrete relief to him. Only reassurance to the reader that the right shape of things is about to be brought to light. The Resistance cell is gunned down and Lamballe’s double game discovered. Then everything ends in a hot pursuit, the young man driving a car towards the Swiss border, with enough cash to start a new life, but weighed down by an apocalyptic tiredness. We never know if he’s made it. Modiano stops his game of slow revelations and leaves everything on a cliff-hanger. To make things more interesting but also, perhaps, to relativise the trope of the converted criminal.

Have you heard of Milan Kundera?

2015-09-12T21:52:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Festival of Insignificance

Author: Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 115 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Harper (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Milan Kundera is 86 years old this year. Before publishing The Festival of Insignificance he hadn’t published a single book in 13 years. The communist realities he used to write about have turned into memories so distant you can’t even scare kids with them anymore.

One may or may not ignore these facts. If one doesn’t, one is likely to go on reading this novel so as to enjoy it. If one does, though, one will certainly make the mistake of expecting to find in it the Kundera of a few years back, when he was writing book after book with ease, and most importantly, when what he was writing about mattered to the world.

The first and most important impression I had from reading The Festival of Insignificance was that Kundera wrote it being aware that all of the above were problematic things. And he wrote so as to lay some traps. But traps that have gone, with the occasional exception, largely unnoticed.

The novel is about four friends who get together at a party thrown by a fifth man, who doesn’t quite sit well in their company but who offers them the right pretext for their meeting. In counterbalance, the novel also follows an episode involving Stalin, Khrushchev, and Kalinin. Present and past, France and the Soviet Union, friendship and comradeship, freedom and tyranny – these are trademark things in Kundera literature.

But it’s the question of insignificance that makes the book what it is, from title onward. Stalin lost in the usual (for Kundera) game of memory and forgetting, the queens of France immortalized as statues barely acknowledged in the Luxembourg Gardens; references to Hegel and Kant that lead nowhere; a party that doesn’t acquire anything of note. All these episodes and images form a collection of insignificant things. But this is not the insignificance of daily life, where a lot gets lost in a sea of small significances. On the contrary, we’re in the territory of historical insignificance, where things, when put in perspective, are likely to mean little. That’s why, perhaps, the most important episode of the novel is the party thrown by a man who pretends he’s about to die of cancer. His lie is in itself a question of individual significance. His party, a question of social insignificance. That party is placed against another one, in which Stalin tells an anecdote about some partridges he shot when he was young. This one is even closer to the essential questions regarding significance: when the world was a mess, with the Stalinist regime at a peak, what his acolytes find important is the truthfulness of his anecdote; not reality (the history before their eyes) but fiction (a reality from an uncertain, highly insignificant past). Stalin tells his acolytes how one day in his youth, when out hunting, he saw twenty four partridges perched on a tree. He aimed to shoot but realized he had only twelve bullets. So when he shot, only half of the partridges fell to the ground. He rode back home and came back a few hours later with twelve more rounds, and shot the rest of the birds. His attendants listen to the story and, in the spirit of the Stalinist cult, fake admiration. But when they’re alone, in the toilets built especially for them in the Kremlin, they express their outrage. They are enraged by the story. They find it ridiculous as well as cruel. But all things considered, nobody sees the joke in Stalin’s anecdote. And as Kundera suggests through his novel, one requires historical perspective to be able to see the obvious. It’s only years later, in Paris, when the four friends discuss the Stalin episode, that the essence surfaces:

“After a pause, Caliban says: ‘The one thing I find unbelievable in that whole story is that nobody understood that Stalin was joking.'

‘Of course not,’ said Charles, and he laid the book back on the table. ‘Because nobody around him any longer knew what a joke is. And in my view, that’s the beginning of a whole new period in history.’”

The period Charles is talking about is later described as “the twilight of joking,” or better still, “the post-joke age.”

One needs to read this time-after-the-joke knowing Kundera, because with this book he makes statements about himself. These statements are hidden. They need to be found if one wants to read the book adequately.

The insistence throughout the novel on the fact that the new generations don’t know who Stalin was, that they’ve never heard of Kant or Hegel – all this is self-referential. Behind these suggestions lies the actual question: have you heard of Milan Kundera? It’s like a little piece of bait thrown to the critics. Is it not?

“Time moves on. Because of time, first we’re alive – which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witness now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes.”

I’m not sure that the critics have seen this. When I first read the passage, as though it were about Stalin, I thought: okay, this must be Kundera being nostalgic (at the end of the day he started his career as an enthusiastic supporter of the communist cause). But reading it again I changed my mind. This is not about Stalin. This is about Kundera himself. Read it again through this filter and you’ll see.

Milan Kundera. Source: RTE

Some reviewers have expressed their discontent. They didn’t like the style of the novel, they didn’t like its lack of newness. But at the same time they didn’t see the joke: Kundera putting himself into the book, one character among the others (not only among the French friends in contemporary Paris, but also as a participant at the Soviet meetings, back in the Stalinist era). As the center of a joke, he becomes the center of the very age when the right allusion (the essence of a punch line) is no longer at hand; when the joke itself needs to be dug out of history, dusted, polished, and told again.

There are other clues in the novel that point in the same direction. One of them is the metanarrative element: the intervention of the narrative voice at random points in the story, and also the characters’ awareness that they are mere characters, that there is a “master” (they use that word a couple of times!) who handles them as if they were marionettes (see above). All this is about Kundera himself, can’t you see it? Arrows pointing back at him, as if in saying I’m here, it’s me you’re reading about. Precisely because he’s used these techniques so many times before it becomes, once more, important to see that The Festival of Insignificance is mostly about something characteristic to his work, something about him.

I don’t know why the reviewers avoid discussing these things. The narrative elements, the games played under the surface of the actual story, the references to things that are not there. Is that because they’re stuck in the insignificance of Kundera’s old age, the insignificance (in 2015) of his past, the insignificance, of course, of his present? Of the fact that this is, perhaps, his last book? And of the other, more significant thing: that maybe he wrote it knowing that this might be his last book? If such is the case then let’s read The Festival of Insignificance again. Let’s read it as if it were a book of ill laughter and of un-forgetting.

The curious complications of Manuel Gonzales

2015-09-07T23:05:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Author: Manuel Gonzales

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 304 pages, paperback
Publisher: Riverhead (2013)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

It’s pretty hard to find a word able to satisfactorily define the kind of prose Manuel Gonzales writes. One might be tempted to say fantasy, because there’s a lot of out-of-this-world stuff in the volume (zombies, werewolves, swamp monsters, unicorns etc.), but the term wouldn’t do justice to anything in its proximity. Fantasy is about Lala-lands (I’m sure there are better words than these to name them, but what the heck), with no connections to the one we’re in. Well, that definition wouldn’t even scratch the surface, because most of Gonzales’s style relies precisely in the realistic effect they deliver, in spite of all the crazy things he makes up. Then how about magical realism? That would explain pretty well the mix of reality and less-than-reality that scream at you from every single story. But wait. Magical realism goes about doing things so as to avoid drawing anybody’s attention to the artificial nature of the ‘magic’ involved. A magical realist who writes short stories (let’s say in the tradition of Julio Cortázar and/or Gabriel García Márquez) would have butterflies filling a room just like that, or an inundation in an apartment overflowing into the street – and there would be no wink addressed to the reader. But with the stories in Gonzales’s collection the reader is constantly given that friendly nudge in the ribcage: the got-it? kind of jolt that indicates that hey, don’t forget, this is a work of fiction.

Here’s how a story by Manuel Gonzales takes place. We’ve got a situation. A crazy situation. I mean a crazy-crazy situation. Like a music composer speaking through his ears. That’s just to bring a simple example to the table. Then, once the reader has rolled his/her eyes, the party starts. Everything that follows is a series of reinforcements to the framework of this outlandish situation. In most cases, the situation is so out of touch with reality (I was going to say so schizophrenic) that the reader’s attention is almost guaranteed. And once you’re in, Gonzales can work on further complications. They are pretty good pieces of narrative work, these complications. And they manage to build a universe of Gozalesque atmosphere, where everything is possible and everything is likely to turn really bad.

Ok, now. My favorite. We’re talking about a story only six pages in length, but an excellent example of a narrative complication that would look great in a film. “Cash to a Killing” is about these two guys, professional hitmen by the sound of it, who are observed while burying their latest victim. That’s the gist. One can see it with ease. But things get complicated. And more complicated. And more complicated. So everything evolves from bad to worse to disastrous, only to finish in a comic twist so sad that it’s actually tragic. Summarizing the story would be cruel and an unpardonable spoiler to boot. So I guess I can only recommend it. Anybody interested, remember: “Cash to a Killing.” Luckily, it’s been published in 2007 in the Esquire, so available online.

Manuel Gonzales. Source: The Daily Beast

Now, to speak of the title story, let’s say it’s a modern version of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput. As the title indicates, though, the little men have been replaced by the narrator’s wife, who’s turned small because the narrator himself, a mad scientist of sorts, has done it to her. Complications appear here too. The wife doesn’t like being belittled so. Literal diminution wouldn’t sit well with anybody, male or female, would it? So she sets up traps for the husband, he isolates her in a miniature house, she cheats on him with a colleague who’s miniaturized himself to do the job, he wants to kill her, she wants to kill him, and the story goes on and on. It doesn’t even reach a clear conclusion, if that helps. But that’s exactly what makes it interesting: the whole infrastructure of events and incidents that seem absolutely okay once we have accepted the idea that there’s a character turned into a mini-person.

What’s also noticeable in the volume is the series of so-called “Meritorious Lives.” Five of them. They are short pieces that outline the life of fictional characters but in ways that mimic the tone of biographies. Hence their titles, of course. Take this one for an example: “Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life.” Could the character mentioned in the title be the author? No it cannot be. Not only because of the extra Juan in the appellation but also because the character is said to have lived a couple of centuries ago (1804-1848). An innkeeper and a forger of letters, this Juan Manuel Gonzales participates in a comedy of situations that, in the spirit of the collection’s many twists, turns out to be a hard-to-distinguish conundrum between humor and tragedy. Once again, complications upon complications, in a story whose central event is an epistolary exchange between two young lovers whose love is interdicted by the boy’s tyrannical father. Juan Manuel Gonzales is not the protagonist of the story. And yet, he gets caught up in the tangle and becomes important; although his importance is somehow put under a question mark by the surprise in the end. With a story line that emulates the classic narrative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century romances, this piece brings about mistakes and misunderstandings to levels similar to say, some of Borges’s twists. And all in no more than three pages.

With all this, in nine cases out of ten, it looks as thought the author had a helluva lot of fun writing. You get this feeling that he enjoyed adding layers and incidents to a text so much that he just couldn’t stop. That’s why stories rarely end where the reader expects. There’s often one more thing to say, one more detail to add. And so, as it sits, the collection might very well be unfinished. At the end of the day, there’s so much more a story can contain.

Narrative appetizers by Sheila Heti

2015-08-29T19:53:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Middle Stories

Author: Sheila Heti

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 160 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2012)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

You know you’re in for a feast of fiction when you open a book to titles such as “The Princess and the Plumber,” “Mermaid in a Jar,” “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” or “The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates.” Thirty such titles are lined up at the start line in Sheila Heti’s second edition of The Middle Stories. The volume, boasting nine additions to the cast of characters of the first take (2001), is a collection of minuets in prose with roots in the tradition of fairy tales and with branches in various offshoots of postmodernity.

By employing an identical tone and a unitary spatial and chronological progression, Heti managed to solve one of the most threatening aspects of short-story collections: unity. All her texts sound the same. I don’t mean this in a bad sense but on the contrary, as a tribute to the positive qualities of her prose.

There is a rhythm proper to fairy tales, in which sentences rise and fall so as to accommodate the reader/listener to the tempo of the telling. That rhythm, repetitive and ritualistic, has its proper utility: it is meant to reassure the reader/listener that they are in familiar territory, that what’s going to happen won’t do them any harm. That’s precisely what one finds in The Middle Stories too. Random example, the near-iambic scansion in the following opening paragraph, with special emphasis on the first sentence (“The Favorite Monkey”):

“They lay under the tree in the morning June air and breathed in each other’s whispers. That’s how romantic it was under the tree – under any tree! And nobody made them leave or come out of it or shake it off.”

This is what makes the stories familiar. This, as well as the easy embracing of the fantastic, in ways that keep no secret of their affiliation to fairy tales. At least these two elements make the collection a ride worth taking. And speaking of rides, I assume the brevity of the pieces collected in the volume is likely in tune with what we like to call ‘the modern life.’ Taken in isolation, these texts are tiny morsels of storytelling for the use of the hurried commuter, who has only this long to finish one text, and who needs to reach resolutions before reaching destinations. The Middle Stories delivers this sense of quick fixes lined up in a continuum of little episodes to be consumed like appetizers between this stop and the next. Mostly two to three pages in length, the stories manage narrative timing with a specialist’s exactitude. One wouldn’t find it hard to spot the austere style, the dialogues that don’t have much time to dwell on deep psychologies, the generous time lapses, the preference for outlines rather than full portraitures. All this is good and feels good when read, because it rings that familiar bell of fairy tales which, short and specific, take no prisoners in the battle for efficiency of expression.

Sheila Heti. Source: The Times-Picayune

Also from the fairy-tale molds emerges this noticeable tendency towards titles that grab (see above), followed by introductory sentences that pursue the lead announced by said titles. To illustrate, here’s the story called “The Giant,” and more specifically the way it starts:

“There was a giant in their town. His name was Sal. Everybody laughed as he walked by and said things like, ‘Hey, giant!’ and waved and grinned and elbowed their dates and stuff like that, which the giant tolerated only because he was a giant. It was part of his lot to be way bigger than everybody and teased mercilessly for being so.”

And so, following the above, there’s no doubt as to what the stories are about. The title makes it clear; the opening paragraph makes it clearer. Once again, a busy commuter must appreciate the slight of hand, although they have a wee bit of work to do for themselves before they can say the stories have been well comprehended.

Heti rarely describes characters through references to their physical features. When those are present, they’re often limited to very elusive hints. It’s often more important that “Eleanor was fond of ice cream” (“Eleanor”) or that “there was sweat under her arms” (“A Few Adventures of the Young Fornicator”) or that “Marcus was getting a headache” (“Janis and Marcus”). Or, when further narration is involved, it’s more important for things to go like this: “One boy was taller, and the three went slowly down the street, and it was cold” (“The Girl Who Planted Flowers”). Or like this: “A little old woman who never stopped smiling walked into the kitchen from her garden” (“The Raspberry Bush”). The pleasure the author takes in playing the good cards of brevity is noticeable throughout.

On another hand, connections between elements are often short-circuited in the manner just illustrated through the last two sample sentences. As a result, whatever stands in the place of description is puzzling, dazzling, nonplussing. But that’s exactly what gives the stories the flavor they have: this sense of rapid fires after rapid fires, this economy of means, this austerity.

Heti prefers to make her characters perform little sketches in front of their readers, because she wants to use narration as a means of description. Some stories are entirely conceived as such, although these portrayals are well disguised behind plot lines. How does one know, thought, that they’re only disguises? Because a lot of these stories don’t have conclusions. They make full use of the cliff-hanger trick to remain suspended in the reader’s mind and to create tiny tornadoes in their consciousness. They don’t distribute well-chewed closures, and when there is anything resembling moralitas at all, one can be sure that it is done in order to enforce sarcasm.

And so the general musicality of the thirty pieces in the collection is mostly jocular. In spite of the fact that many situations depicted in them are on the sad side of things (read again the opening to “The Giant”), the telling doesn’t feel depressed. This rhythmic parade lifts the texts to that innocent skipping-rope realism that characterizes fairy tales, in which even the most outrageous fantasy is understood to be real. Because that’s what the story dictates.

Valeria Luiselli’s narrative hide-and-seek

2015-08-21T22:21:00.000+12:00

Full title: Faces in the Crowd

Author: Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 150 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Granta (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

“If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.”

(Faces in the Crowd)

Things get complicated in Faces in the Crowd every time it comes to spatial and chronological transgressions. The female narrator meets (or thinks she’s met) the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen on the New York subway. Owen himself meets (or thinks he’s met) Ezra Pound, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Joshua Zvorsky. The latter, a made-up character, is an impersonation of Louis Zukovsky (it takes only a few clues to figure it out). Valeria Luiselli plays expertly the game of who’s who in a style that smacks of Borges. This is a style that doesn’t bring any light to the puzzle represented by the text but, on the contrary, complicates every instance of uncertainty. It all goes crazy, until the reader gives up diagramming connections and accepts to play the game only for the pleasure of it. Of course, tracing the relations between characters is not an impossible task. The aha moments, when you recognize Chekhov’s gun before it gets fired, are everywhere. Hence the pleasure that comes with this novel. But the crux of the matter is this: time and space are relative, fictional chronotops allow intermixing of characters and interweaving of narratives.

Identities and settings are, therefore, crucial, as they provide the foundation of the entire story. Not only is the text split in two, with two narrative voices at two different moments in time going their mildly separate ways (one: a female writer/translator in Mexico City somewhere in the late 2000s; two: Gilberto Owen, decades earlier, strolling the streets of Harlem); it also features a nosy reader who keeps upsetting the progression of the narrative – up to a certain point, when he upsets no more. This intruder is the writer/translator’s husband, who has been peering over her shoulder while she’s been writing this novel that we’re reading. The husband comments every time he finds the occasion, picking on details of the story that involve himself or his wife’s amorous adventures. The role of this intruder is to shift the focus of narration and to highlight the artificial aspect of the fiction. He disagrees with certain episodes, questions others, and appears to be influenced in his actions by what he’s reading in his wife’s novel. Because of this character, a further complication of the narrative occurs. There is the level of the actual novel on the one hand, and the time-zero of narration on the other hand. The latter is still a fiction to us, the actual readers, but it acts as a real-life situation to the fictional reader who intervenes in the story.

Valeria Luiselli. Source: Translatable

You see how things get difficult to follow. Or should I say difficult to explain in a few lines? Faces in the Crowd (with a title taken, at least in its English rendition, from Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro” – so here’s another complication) needs to be followed closely to be truly enjoyed. It’s not the kind of book you hear about and decide you don’t have to read because you’ve got the plot, so why bother. Its intricate intertextuality and the network of relationships and trajectories make it a game worth playing, an exercise in readerly attention.

It’s quite something to follow the way Luiselli twists events like a well-trained puppeteer, giving them a different connotation or a chance to be seen from a new perspective. I’m all for the following example, a fragment where she imagines Ezra Pound at the very moment when he is struck by the image that will produce “In a Station of the Metro.” Note, this is Gilberto Owen (1904-1952) speaking.

“The first thing I do remember is the face of Ezra Pound in the crowd waiting on the platform for the train. Of course it wasn’t really him. The doors opened and there he was on the platform, leaning against a pillar. We looked each other straight in the eye, as if in recognition, although he couldn’t possibly have heard anything about me, a young Irish-Mexican, neither red haired nor good looking, more bastard than poet. I was transfixed – instead of getting off the train, I let the passengers leave and be replaced by others, identically ugly, overheated and ordinary. Pound didn’t board the train. He was lost among the crowd of faces on the platform, faces like the wet petals of his poem.”

For those who don’t remember Pound’s poem, here it is in its entirety:

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The fragment by Luiselli describes a look from the opposite side of a train platform, seeing Pound as he sees the incoming trains. It calls for some good courage only to go there.

What else. Well, this: unreliable narrator. A trick that can look cheap when handled by certain realist authors, is given a major part to play, and to remarkable effects. The female narrator (I hate the fact that she doesn’t have a name, so I have to keep calling here this) makes no secret of the fact that she’s a liar. She’s faked translations of poems by Owen, pretending they’d been done by Zvorsky (a fictional character himself, so another case of lying); she’s also lied to her husband about her sexual encounters; she’s lying through her teeth every time she has the opportunity. And yet she is the one whose story has to be believed. Everything hinges on the issue of truth: of how hard it is to acquire it, of how complicated the most straightforward form of truth could sometimes be. And guess what? The reader does believe her. We believe the story precisely because we know it’s based on lies, illusions, hallucinatory ideation. We believe the story because we know it’s fiction. That’s the greatest achievement of this little debut novel, the reason it has been so excitedly received by critics. That, of course, plus the author’s talent, her proficient handling of literary references, the intricacies of her architectonics, the tricks she plays on us, readers, when she pulls a stint of citation of which we might not be aware.

It’s sometimes nothing but a game, a game of guessing, a game of reading enjoyments. Best described in a passage like the following, where the female narrator, the metanarrative guarantor of the story, insinuates her condition in the form of a childish game:

“We play at hide-and-seek in this enormous house. It’s a different version of the game. I hide and the others have to find me. Sometimes hours go by. I shut myself up in the closet and write long, long paragraphs about another life, a life which is mine but not mine. Until someone remembers that I’m hiding and they find me.”

It’s this constant search for the characters, for their connections and their functions, that gives the novel that special air of a labyrinth (o, Borges, you again!), of an experiment well played. The others in the fragment just quoted – who could they be. Us, of course, the readers. The story is all about us, like it was in Last Year in Marienbad, a film Luiselli quotes, I think (now I can’t be sure but what the hell), so as to throw yet another allusion at us.

Allusion taken.

Dylan Horrocks and the aesthetic of incompleteness

2015-08-14T09:38:00.000+12:00

Full title: Incomplete Works

Author: Dylan Horrocks

Genre: Comic strips
Attributes: 192 pages, paperback
Publisher: Victoria University Press (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

What’s left after an artist has published everything deemed publishable? This is the question that imposes itself in relation to Dylan Horrocks’ collection, Incomplete Works. The volume is an anthology of things scattered about, of morsels almost forgotten. The detail is important because these pieces (not debris, not rubbles, not wasted effort) draw attention to the importance of remainders. The things left behind gain a voice of their own by means of such exercises in remembering.

The mood is often gloomy in the earlier comics. They occupy themselves with the sad figure of a cartoonist away from home (living in London but dreaming always of New Zealand), whose art struggles to take shape and who lives through bouts of almost-depressive writer’s blocks

"When night came the moon hung like a ball of antarctic ice, reminding me of home."

There’s rarely a happy moment in these pieces, dark and inundated by shadows, with characters resembling the author’s physiognomy and with the tools of his trade looming like self-harming weapons:

“The long afternoons wear on; work slows. Inspiration is not forthcoming. Dates and deadlines evaporate. Where does it all go – all the wasted time, the infertile hours? How does a week become a day, an hour… ?”

And to explain, there’s a simple definition to be read, the kind of thing capable of making one turn one’s back to London in order to have one’s eyes facing distant home, lost somewhere in the opposite hemisphere (of the world, of the brain?):

“Nostalgia is simply memory detached from time – moments from the past turned into lazy eternities… […] Trying to catch up… and failing. Only the past is free of that constant queasy sense of time-driven guilt.”

There’s a lot of existentialist angst in these first cartoons, in the vein just exemplified above. Not unlike the tone of voice that comes from any immigrant who’s ever put his ache into words.

The mood is forced on by the sounds of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, with its provoking silences, its obsessive returns upon the central theme, its sense of being on the way of saying more.

Dylan Horrocks. Source: Victoria University Press

Some of Horrocks’ strips read like that. They are multi-themed because they are fragments. They’ve been collected from an unstated portfolio that contains failed projects, minute exercises, topical gigs, miscellaneous jobs. Put together as such, they draw a familiar kind of itinerary, an autobiography in comic strips that needed to be gathered in one place in order to be remembered as a whole.

The scope of the collection is ample. Chronologically, it covers a period of just over a quarter century (26 years, to be more precise, i.e. 1986 to 2012). Generically and thematically, it moves from memoir-style reflections to dream-like formations that tap into the fantastic and the other-worldly, and from contemporary one-page photographic records to sketches of historical events.

The autobiographical pieces stand out for that unique quality ordinary readers look after when reading artists’ memoirs: their access to secrets of the trade, to biographical details. That’s how a piece like “The Last Fox Story” (of 1990) becomes of interest. The longest of the pieces in the collection, it tells, in single-panel drawings, the story of Horrocks’ stay in London and his artistic tribulations. It is a series of sketches, plans, reproductions, and sometimes text-only descriptions of his struggle to make it through.

There’s a description attached in the Notes section at the end of the book, which is worth quoting in full, so as to let clarification materialize out of the author’s own words:

“THE LAST FOX STORY (1990): mostly drawn in ballpoint on memo paper and first published as a 104-page A6 mini-comic, printed on the office photocopier at Waterstone’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London (where I was working at the time). I began writing it for the final issue of Fox Comics (sadly never published), in which contributors were invited to tell stories about their own relationship with comics.”

That describes it pretty well. The piece moves elegantly from crude notations to reflections on home and distance, with the occasional despair that comes to irk an artist who hasn’t been allowed to roam the stratospheres of art:

“I am in London, alone & without much money. I am to become a professional cartoonist, but so far no-one seems able to understand my work.”

Of course, Dylan Horrocks has moved away from that. Or so it seems from the rest of the comic strips, where he exercises confidence and where he takes up vast projects without thinking twice, in spite of the fact that some of them showed slim chances of success to start with. Throughout his career but mostly in the latest years, Horrocks has also shown more than an artist’s interest in comics. He teaches art and he researches art. As it becomes apparent through some of the pieces in the collection, he’s worked on several projects dealing with the history of New Zealand or the history of New Zealand comics. Such is the case of his study of Barry Linton (“To the I-Land”), his references to Eric Resetar, a pioneer of New Zealand comics, or the allusions (comical or serious) to Captain James Cook’s travels of discovery in the eighteenth century, which led to the discovery of what is now New Zealand.

To end with, one must know that Dylan Horrocks is not just a local champion. He has featured on the world scene of his art in various ways. “A Cartoonist’s Diary,” the last piece in the book, was serialized in 2012 on The Comics Journal. His own website appears to be a hit too. He has been a constant presence at conventions and conferences, has contributed to collections, has given public lectures, and has been massively promoting the art that’s been keeping him busy for so long. All this makes the volume so much more interesting, especially to those who are trying their hand at the art of drawing. They will learn from Horrocks, and they will find solace, if needed.

Hats, decapitations, and hippopotamuses

2015-08-07T19:57:00.000+12:00

Full title: Down the Rabbit Hole

Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey

Genre: Novella
Attributes: 74 pages, paperback
Publisher: And Other Stories (2011)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole exhibits the essential attributes of Narcoliteratura. It has at the centre of the narrative a Mexican gang doing its deeds, armed to their teeth, killing, bribing, intimidating, making a lot of money and focusing almost exclusively on the protection of the immediate family. It is against this background that a young boy by the name of Tochtli (with very few exceptions, the characters have Nahuatl names that signify animal species; Tochtli = rabbit) leads his secluded life. The narrative is told exclusively from his perspective. The proximity of a person so young to violence of that magnitude is likely to upset some readers. Too bad for them, because Villalobos does a great job at giving the narrator a voice that’s innocent in spite of all that lies behind his life. And that voice makes everything interesting and worth reading. Not to mention the complexity of the text itself, a short but incredibly dense novella that exploits the experimental nature of the topic to incredible extents.

Like all young boys, Tochtli goes about getting wise about the world. For that purpose, his father, Yolcaut (= rattlesnake), the head of the gang, also known to the media as The King, has hired a private tutor. So Tochtli learns things. But he doesn’t do so the official way, not like other kids his age who attend proper schools with proper teachers teaching proper disciplines with proper learning outcomes. Mazatzin (=deer), the tutor, turns out to be an infiltrated journalist, but one who’s had the chance to put some seeds into the boy’s mind. His influence, however, is minimal, since the dominant figure is the father, who always speaks to the boy in the language of gangs and who teaches Tocthli almost everything he knows.

Juan Pablo Villalobos. Source: And Other Stories

The two of them play macabre games in which dead bodies and killing techniques are made to sound as innocent and child-like as a game of What’s the Time, Mister Wolf?

“One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.‘One bullet in the heart.’‘Corpse.’‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’‘Alive.’‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’‘Too early to tell.’”

Speaking of things that might upset some readers, this is father and son having quality time together. Tochtli spends his childhood thus, mostly bored by the seclusion that’s the only thing he’s ever known. From his father, he learns how to count and how to account. He learns that the essence of things stands in numbers, whether the number of bullets that can kill a person or the number of killings shown on tv, or the amount of money that can buy someone’s silence, or simply the taking into account of the family’s possessions:

“[O]ur palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcault’s business room and five more empty rooms we don’t use.”

From his father, Tocthi also learns a nationalist sense of pride and a macho way of assessing self-worth.

“What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m said Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:‘Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.’”

The entire novella has this tone of accountancy under the sign of maturity about it, the narrative voice recording life as if it were a ledger, with its various tables and categories and classes, their use, their worth, their applicability. Tochtli lists his desires the way he lists the rooms in the palace in which he lives. Whatever it is that he wants, he registers no apparent change in emotional intensity. He wants hats, he wants a samurai sword, he wants a Liberian pigmy hippopotamus, and all his wishes are granted. In what counts as his normality there’s a very short distance between desire and fulfilment. And because of that desire itself doesn’t stand out as anything special. It’s just a thing that exists out there, a list of wants, another list.

In spite of all this, though, Tochtli doesn’t sound like a spoiled child. He catalogues the world this way because this is how the world is to him. He doesn’t throw tantrums, he doesn’t stomp his feet while requesting things, he doesn’t ask for the impossible. What’s more, he’s intelligent and sympathetic. He’s capable of humour and of reason. When he acquires the hippopotamuses he’s been dreaming of (yes, there’s not just one but two, a pair), he calls them Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria. Black humour, as it turns out to be, but humour nonetheless. And for all these things Tochthli sounds likeable, clever, congenial. Clever as the author who wrote him up, and who made this truly brilliant parallel between decapitations, of which the book is full.

Violent zoology: Walton Ford’s watercolours

2015-07-31T12:13:00.000+12:00

Full title: Pancha Tantra

Author: Walton Ford. Edited by Bill Buford

Genre: Art
Attributes: 304 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Taschen (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Walton Ford’s watercolors aren't meant to be viewed. They're meant to be read. There's a pregnant narrative quality to every single one of these tableaux vivants, where animals partake in a silent show full of arrested action. They are fables and not quite fables. They have the diction of animal tales meant to be read as allegories (as something other than they are). But this fableness of theirs has a problem when it comes to moralitas. You don’t get the this-is-what-happens-if-you-do-that kind of lesson from these watercolours. The message is much more invested than this early-childhood, easy-morality tone.

Taking their inspiration from books researched by Ford (see quotes written across painted surfaces, scientific denominations, various references, research notes), these paintings do the intelligent work usually ascribed to quotations. They are not illustrations, but rather references. They point at events as well as their unexplored possibilities.

But let’s talk about the subject matter. Animals, yes, but what animals?

Trapped animals.

Indeed, a lot of Ford’s creatures are caught in all manner of setups: snares just about to close around their necks, hooves on the point of being severed, the mouth of a snake swallowing a whole flock of birds like a cage about to close forever. This idea of imprisonment leading to death is everywhere: a domestication-in-the-making, the approaching of the hour of becoming-food, deaths by riffles or by fangs. These, as well as their multiple variants. There’s a cow being killed by a jaguar, monkeys eaten by crocodiles, birds swallowing fish larger than their own bodies, a parrot strangled by a macaque, a secretary eating a cobra while at the same time many other cobras are trying to eat her. An entire zoology of violence takes place in Ford’s works. There are killings every step of the way, there are things animals do to other animals, things that are aimed at annihilation.

But there are also the violent acts enabled by civilization, and these are of much more import. One example: Pantherausbruch, a haunting description of a hunt for a panther escaped from a Swiss zoo, with the animal in the foreground, a close-up on its panic, winter fog laced around its mouth; all against the background of an Alpine village, humans carrying torches, their noises lost in the distance but approaching ever so slowly, the killing machine closing on the animal step by step.

Even more striking (already observable in Panterausbruch) is the placement of animals within human environments. Just as the original texts quoted by Ford were records of first-hand witnesses, Ford’s canvases too are interested in putting the animal between quotation marks (symbols of the alphabet, traces of signification, distributions of human power against natural order).

In Le Jardin, a rather faithful rendition of George Catlin’s 19^th-century painting Buffalo Hunt (minus the bull’s posture: disarticulated, near-expired, in Catlin’s version; only tired, still capable of glory, in Ford’s), the animals are placed in a colonial garden. The only spectator to the carnage, a crow perched on top of a stone vase. Given the background, the composition takes on an interesting conceptual quality. It’s within the human frame that the incident unfolding in the centre converts into calamity. As made apparent by a quote from Catlin’s own notes, the event becomes a tragedy only when regarded by the human observer, who forces the establishment of an improbable relationship only for the sake of a story told in anthropocentric terms:

“I rode nearer to the pitiful object as he stood bleeding and trembling before me, and said to him, ‘Now is your time, old fellow, and you better be off.’ Though blind and nearly destroyed, there seemed to be evidently a recognition of a friend in me, as [the buffalo] straightened up, and, trembling with excitement, dashed off at full speed upon the prairie, in a straight line.”

In Ford’s version, the human gaze is replaced by human signs. The garden, with its pointed hedge structures and its vastness bounded by stone fences, does not need the gaze; the human is there in every object. The human, symbolized, with great irony, by the watching crow.

One needs to check the details of these paintings, because a lot of the story lies in these particulars.

Take the example of La Fontaine: a life-and-death battle between a lion and an alligator. Once again, the scene is placed in a distinct human environment. Another garden, another arena. But it’s not only the fountain that makes the human presence apparent. Scattered all over the foreground there are flowers, squashed or simply fallen to the ground; flowers that appear to have been part of a lost bouquet. In other words, flowers picked by a human hand (violence done to vegetation for a presumed aesthetic purpose). And to make things more explicit, there lies, in the lower left corner, a fan. Likely to have been dropped to the ground when the terrible affair between the two animals came centre-stage. Humans vacating a scene of animal violence, but a kind of violence that takes place precisely within the precincts of a human structure. See the stone fence visible in the background, and like a joke, like a terrible irony, a passageway left open – the promise of an escape that won’t take place. This is a case of perverse return upon origins, a circular tale that confuses stages in order to highlight the crux.

But that’s not all. It’s not just any human that’s left traces in the landscape. The fan is a woman’s object. One meant to suggest fragility. The fragility of the female race, their animal-like condition: tamed by the male, reduced to aesthetic fatality, chased out of the social sphere. What was the woman doing here? Here, in this arena where the animals fight their ultimate battle? Must there be a connection? There must. There is. Two tragedies of the same imprisonment, two types of escape.

These are the references made by Walton Ford’s watercolours. He doesn’t stop at the fable stage. His works are not field notes either. No. His paintings are references to the human that once decided to bring the animals into their circle of violence. Panchatantra in the twenty-first century.

Thomas Bernhard, the reluctant prize-winner

2015-07-23T12:34:00.000+12:00

Full title: My Prizes. An Accounting

Author: Thomas Bernhard; translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Genre: Non fiction
Attributes: 130 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Thomas Bernhard was the controversial writer par excellence. Reading him is like finding out that nothing’s worth anything, that death takes all, that life, and especially life in the shadow of the state and its institutions, is an evil that must be rejected, even when it’s singing your praises in the choirs of public glory. The self-explanatory title of this collection of narratives (memoirs would perhaps be a better word to describe them) says it all: the volume takes to task literary prizes in nine stories about awards offered Thomas Bernhard during his life. To be more precise, nine stories about prizes and the scorn with which the recipient took them.
What must be said, if only as a parenthesis, is that the moments illustrated in these brief texts are moments of the last century. The solemnity Bernhard describes in them (and takes good care to ridicule) needs to be regarded with that chronological distance in mind. And it must also be regarded with the mind on the Austro-Hungarian festiveness and its must-do conventions: brass bands, public speeches, bratwursts, pints of cold beer, this and that. Of course, not all of the above is described as such in the volume, but some elements are pretty strongly implied, and to good humorous effect. What we witness with every such event are gatherings designed to consolidate that special kind of place known as Mitteleuropa, which celebrated writers for their compliance with the rules of Central-European provincialism.
Which is precisely what Bernhard despised the most.
But despising the spirit while at the same time accepting its prizes is likely to put one in a delicate situation. Hypocrisy springs to mind. It certainly did cross the minds of Bernhard’s contemporaries, especially the ones who missed no opportunity to cast their criticizing nets into his nonconformist oeuvre.
But Bernhard didn’t deny the allegations. On the contrary, he made them himself. Throughout these pieces Bernhard not only reminisced about events, he also remembered the strange state of acceptance-rejection that accompanied the news of yet another award, of yet another festive requirement:
“I had a constant empty feeling in my stomach whenever there was a question of accepting a prize, and my mind balked every time. But I remained too weak in all the years that prizes came my way to say no. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character. I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money.”
This passage pretty much synthesizes the entire volume. The short texts give off this constant feeling of uneasiness, even when the voice that narrates lists the advantages that came with the prizes generously offered by the Austrian State: money, fame, and the usual incentives.
So why take those prizes? Why refuse them? There’s a schizoid situation, right there: a demand to choose between two extremes. Bernhard, though, knew better than getting lost in some conceptual Manichaeism. He took the all-or-nothing approach and chose the easiest shortcut, so as to avoid idealizing his scorn. Take the money and run was his philosophy, albeit not literally so.
What’s also interesting to note is how Bernhard refused almost programmatically to write himself up as a writer; a choice likely to contain the answer to all the questions regarding his dualistic approach to prize-giving. The narrative voice of his mini-memoirs is not the voice of a writer.
Exclamation mark!
With very few exceptions (two or three if I remember correctly), the person who speaks is not caught up in writer-like activities. He never writes. He never reads. He talks to his editor once only. He doesn’t give speeches outside the prize-giving ceremonies. He doesn’t participate in public readings. What he does is in itself provincial and lame: he spends time with his aunt (the person who appears in every single one of the texts), he purchases, drives, and wrecks a car, he buys a derelict farmhouse and forgets about it, he hires a suit for one of the ceremonies and spends most of the time reflecting on the suit and almost no time on the literary qualities that had brought him the prize in the first place.
These are the actions that define the narrator of these texts. He’s not concerned with any of the life-and-death situations of Bernhard’s literary texts. And this is where the irony of the volume lies. A person who doesn’t act as a writer is given the honors associated with the profession. He takes them like a simple citizen, almost always surprised by the decision, almost always disgusted by the award-giving committees.
It’s significant to note that the only award he did accept with a degree of pride was the Literary Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce. The reason he felt good about this one in particular?
“From the beginning I associated this prize not with my activities as a writer but with my activities as an apprentice salesman [the profession Bernhard had before his writing career] and during the ceremony, which had no connection whatever to the city of Salzburg […] the only thing spoken of by the gentlemen of the Federal Chamber of Commerce who had given me the prize was Bernhard the apprentice salesman and never Bernard the writer.”
So yes, Thomas Bernhard did feel the urge to class himself outside of the literary elite. Which explains the contempt in his tone. But one must not understand him as a total misanthrope. It’s not the literary world as a whole that he despised. He speaks highly of minor but honest Austrian and German writers, and brings up the issue of the eccentric viewpoints that attracted public scorn against him and Peter Handke. It’s precisely because he identified himself as part of a group of intellectuals who did literature for the sake of it rather than for the sake of regional recognition, that Bernhard found pleasure in denying his affiliation to the trade of writers:
“I felt tremendously well among the worthy gentlemen of the merchant class and the whole time I spent with these gentlemen I had the impression I didn’t belong to literature, I belonged to the merchants.”
The message is clear. It stands out as an exercise in disparagement. Thomas Bernhard, a man who worked by Mitteleuropäische Zeit, a time of his own: not chronology but simple passing of time; not history but honest routines.

Yuri Herrera from narcosphere to immigrations

2015-07-16T23:47:00.001+12:00

Full title: Signs Preceding the End of the World

Author: Yuri Herrera

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 128 pages, hard cover
Publisher: And Other Stories (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

I watched this documentary the other night, called Narco Cultura. It's about this Mexican popular epidemic of cultural products grown around drug cartels and the lives of drug traffickers south of the American border. This taste for outlaws and their adventures has birthed a literary offspring of its own. It's called Narcoliteratura or, even better to an English-tuned ear that’s familiar to the notion of the Latin American Boom, Tragic Realism. It deals with the same topics as the larger Narco Cultura phenomenon: violence, criminal acts, small-town glories based on fear and territorial claims, all forming what might be called a narcosphere, where everything revolves around the handling and using of drugs, plus the implications of such undertakings.

Yuri Herrera's novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, takes the genre and goes with it to a certain extent. The novel starts in a poor Mexican village where everything seems to be regulated by small cliques debating their turf. In the village there's this young woman, Makina, who has a problem to solve: she needs to cross the border to find her brother. It soon becomes apparent that the operation is easier said than done. She wouldn't stand the slimmest chance of succeeding by herself, so she has to go the 'natural' way, i.e. the way of the criminal factions that run the businesses of her home place. They're up for the task, since they have a whole network in place: men to facilitate the crossing, men to provide accommodation, men to protect her and men to introduce her to other men, who can also introduce her to other men, who can etc. etc.

The network works perfectly but there's one grand obstacle: the lure of the place Makina is going to. Her brother, as it turns out, has settled north of the border. We don’t know exactly where, because none of the places in the novel is called anything recognizable. The search for a brother who doesn’t want to return gives the young woman a bigger problem to deal with and a bunch of thoughts to mess up her mind.

To Yuri Herrera, this novella offers the opportunity to do many things. For instance, to practice the dynamics of a typical narrative scheme: protagonist, antagonist, dispatcher, helpers, destination, denouement. All these plus many other elements of Proppian morphology are identifiable at a mere glance. Textbook Formalism, to put it otherwise. Herrera hasn't made it a hard task for his readers to find these elements and enjoy their familiar feel.

Yuri Herrera. Source: Malinche

Then, at a conceptual level, he's got the chance to explore North-American mestizaje, and especially its tex-mex variety. He does so in a poetic manner that reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa. Like her, Herrera contracted a passionate leading character who's given this unique opportunity to put her in-betweenness to the test. There's a scene (recognizable, I'm sure, to people in the US-Mexico border area) in which a frustrated cop, the usual patriot-cum-chauvinist who uses authority to express his scorn for 'illegal aliens.' The scene is powerful. It forms what's likely to have been intended as the climax of the novel. The cop has forced a group of Mexicans to kneel in front of him and he mocks one of them who was carrying a volume of poetry. The cop rips a page out of the book and demands that the would-be poet write down something in English. The man is lost for words, humiliated, embarrassed, mortified. And here's where Makina, who speaks well the "Anglo tongue," intervenes and recites a chant of the humiliated immigrant.

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take our jobs, who dream of wiping our shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”

The words of the barbarian put the cop to silence. A battle is won. A symbolic one, of course, but one all the more important as it is on foreign territory.

Then there's another passage where Herrera gets even more Anzalduesque, exploring the picture of the border people, the Chicanos, speakers of two tongues, makers of two cultures, people of complexity and simplicity all in one bundle. It's the protagonist speaking again:

“More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongues is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugate latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there.”

All this is said and done against the background of narcoliteratura's own turf. The criminal life of the Mexican as well as American undergrounds loom over all these episodes with the weight of a cloud about to burst and crash everything underneath. But nothing bad really ever happens. The text is peppered with traffickers and pushers and all manner of mischief-makers, but the essence isn't there. Crime is not the major purpose. The novella deals with criminality as a liminal space: a sort of in-between that allows passage of people and destinies, highlighting only as much as it's needed to understand the passage of other things: of cultures and cultural allegiances, of politics and political dirty works; but most importantly, of stories and storytelling.

Sydney Padua and the computer that almost existed

2015-07-09T23:41:00.001+12:00

Full title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Author: Sydney Padua

Genre: Graphic novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Pantheon (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The book’s a jaunt through Victorian pretty-much-everything. To be more specific (…ish…): 1. Fashion (a lot of it, to keep the reader well immersed in the ‘spirit of the era’; btw, you’ve got to see the drawings to understand); 2. Technology (the book’s concerned primarily with this, since it’s set out to contemplate a possible alternative reality centered on a technological near-miss: the invention of the computer); 3. Historical facts (tons of them, every page explaining details about the era through copious references to primary sources, citations, encyclopedic blowing up of minute biographical details, etc. etc. etc.); 4. Mores and thereabouts (from literary salons to scientific soirées, a lot is being covered and presented with gusto).

Of course, as they say in Germany, Victorian times call for Victorian measures. Meaning: being so steeped in these times of ours when we take delight in all manner of reenactments, we might as well take pleasure in contemplating some Steampunk vogue (itself a conglomerate of fashion, mores, and all things Victorian). Which makes the Babbage case (see below for clarifications), with the addition of characters such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his crazy plans for the employment of the steam engine, pretty spot-on, since they’re prime material for the exploration of all of the above.

So Charles Babbage. A man who went down in history as the first who had an inkling of what a computer (called by him a “difference engine,” for a better-made philosophical case) might have looked like. Also, on the less fortunate side of his destiny, as one who proposed measures for the replacement of human workers by automated operations and/or machines. It’s said in the book:

“As I outlined in Machinery and Manufactures (6s. bound in cloth), true savings in labor costs arise from de-skilling complex tasks, so they may be done by any easily replaceable ignorant menial!”

In which by the menial is meant (symbolically first, actually later) an apparatus devoid of soul; in other words, a machine.

Good material for the Luddites to exercise their counter-arguments in their revolts. There are pages in the book that capture the protests of the masses, and they must be taken into consideration as well. At least for historical color.

Ada Lovelace, the other name in the title, has a story of her own too. Daughter of Byron (yes, the Byron), she was trained in sciences rather than the poetic reverberations of her father, who seems to have advised her strongly against his own profession. Or that’s what some letter fragments say. So she became a quite astute mathematician, met Babbage, worked with him for a while (some saying she was behind his calculations, as a do-all high priestess of the Difference Engine), but then their relationship broke, Lovelace died at the age of 36 (the same as her father’s! damn destiny!), while Babbage lived on to die a poor, bitter man, with none of his dreams fulfilled.

Sydney Padua. Source: Forbidden Planet

These are the facts. But Sydney Padua builds a parallel story. Of course, her art permits such escapades. And so we see Lovelace and Babbage succeeding in building that proto-computer that never got built in reality. And once they see it working they put it to use. More precisely, they sort out a financial crisis, get to work on manuscript corrections, go nuts about mathematical possibilities, and more, and more. As it’s easy to see, a lot of fictional stuff. Yet isn’t fiction, as they say in Magna Germania, the meat and bone of progress?

But to get back to Lovelace. Padua suggests she was powerless against the Byronic legacy (and she may not be the only one to suggest so); powerless in the sense of unable to avoid the fictional aspect of mathematics, the storytelling inherent in numbers, the narrative lure of formulae and theorems. Ada soliloquizes at some point:

“Nonsense! The most advanced mathematicians accept unquantified symbols in their realm! In any event, I am a historical figure, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Humanities!”

We appreciate the joke, but that’s exactly the point, madam la comtesse. Being made into a comic character, you’ve been moved away from the fact factory of overly-exact historicism and dropped into the melting pot of fiction.

Sydney Padua, it has to be said, does a very good job at balancing the two.

The book as a whole is a series of complexities. On the one hand, it reads like a straight-up comic book: panels following panels, the narrative organized in a mostly linear way (in the serialized fashion to boot), the drawings telling the story when the words aren’t that capable.
But wait, there’s more. Almost every page has footnotes, containing mostly true facts. In addition, these footnotes have their own notes, at the end of each chapter/installment, which bring about more information, more story, more insight. And just to complete the picture, the book ends with a thick section (almost sixty pages) containing two appendices: one made up of cutouts from primary documents (mostly mid-19^th century newspaper articles and “trivial yet amusing snippets”) and the other one offering a comic’s explanation (with illustrations, of course) of the Difference Engine, its operations, its logics, its many-many cogs and wheels. The first representation, it seems, in a long, long, long, long, long time.

But wait, there’s even more.

A page from the book, outlining the early-childhood destiny of Ada Lovelace.
Source: www.sydneypadua.com

There are special appearances by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and other Victorian celebrities I’m likely to have forgotten, depicted in their attire and typical gestures; and also some more cameos by Karl Marx and a bunch of Russian-looking revolutionaries (not sure if I spotted Lenin there or if it was just an illusion), who witness the crushing of ideology under the weight of progress. Chronological mismatches don’t matter, of course, because this is a multiverse, where time and space often coincide in the best ways possible, so as to generate an outcome equal to the input of fair judgment plus conceptual match-making.

There’s a meeting between Ada Lovelace and George Eliot I am tempted to draw attention to (and I will), when something I’d like to call “poetics of data” is brought up. The way Lovelace explains to a desperate Eliot that the words she’d thought destroyed by the machine are safe and well confers upon the topic an elegant lure, if tinged here and there with well-intended pretentiousnesses (yes, my plural is well intended too, if slightly odd):

“Despair not! Your words are not destroyed! On the contrary, they are shedding their earthly form! They have become transcendent! They have become… Data! Liberated from the static shell of the material, transliterated to the purely symbological, sublimated into a state entirely new! It can be filed, indexed, converted, replicated, searched, shared, shuffled, linked, remixed, recombined, archived, analyticated… resurrected!”

And to complete the picture in the same avant-la-lettre fashion, here’s what might sound even more familiar to a contemporary (i.e. of 21^st-century descent) reader:

“Imagine… with the eventual integration of Wheatstone’s telegraph, the difference engine will convey, transcribe, analyze, and store forever the deepest thoughts, the most profound conversations of our greatest philosophers!”

Sounds familiar? That’s because Lovelace is endowed by Padua (her favorite of the two characters, you can tell) with this special foresight that enables her to see the computer materialized when it was nothing but a technological dream, and even that a failing one.

So here’s to a multimodal book, where the weighing of historical accuracy takes place not in terms of a contradiction between True and False, but as an exchange of energies between truth and fiction. May the game (not a contest!) be won by both sides!

An apocalypse of penises: another Chuck Palahniuk idea

2015-07-02T22:57:00.003+12:00

Full title: Beautiful You

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 224 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Doubleday(2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As Chuck Palahniuk has already proven so many times, his narrations are nothing if not verging on the outrageous. Most of the time they hang onto some crazy idea which he works on until a world unlike anything we know comes out. And then everything seems normal, because it’s made to work like a world that we know. Case in point, Beautiful You. The subject matter: orgasm. Exactly what I was talking about.
The mad scientist type, one by the name of Cornelius Linus Maxwell (abbreviated, for mass media purposes, to Climax-Well), launches this whole line of personal care products designed to satisfy the world’s female population with the intention of changing forever the fabric of society. As the quote on the dust wrapper makes apparent, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced” by these wonderful inventions. And indeed, Beautiful You, the name of the new line of products, makes female orgasm possible without the input of men. The idea is met with more than enthusiasm (and not only by women). But not before we're given some solid information to chew on for thorough edification.

Crazy items bearing crazy names and performing crazy feats of electronic self-manipulation are tested on the protagonist, Penny Harrigan, a young (somewhere in the twenties) Midwesterner with dreams of making it big as a lawyer in New York. She meets Climax-Well, thinks she’s become her girlfriend but finds out quickly that she is in fact his test subject. There’s a mocking reference, of course, to Fifty Shades of Grey: same social gap between protagonists, same focus on aberrant sexuality, same media involvement, etc. etc. Once the reference is figured out, Palahniuk moves on to something more complex. He plays with biblical dimensions. He emulates the apocalyptic narratives that inundate literature and film nowadays. By having pleasured Penny to an extent never experienced by other women (with the exception of the President of the United State – yes, there’s a first US woman president on stage, which places the novel in a future setting – and the Queen of England – not the current one, of course, but a puppet manipulated by the billionaire, so another fictitious character – plus a film celebrity whose career stops in full bloom), by having pleasured Penny, then, Palahniuk makes sure we understand what Beautiful You is capable of. And once we got the point, he makes the crazy billionaire launch his products to hysterically enthusiastic crowds. Here's where the Zombie-like atmosphere comes to the front stage, to tick the box of futuristic, apocalyptic, mob-crazy explosion. The women of the world, grown so quickly fond of the self-fondling equipment given them by Climax-Well's company, reach a stage of universalized hysteria that takes them out of social and economic schemes of things and plunge them into self-obliterating, intense, continuous sexual arousal. Which makes the world a hell devoid of women. What takes place in New York (the setting of first choice) is akin to Zombie-ridden cityscapes. For example:
"Those thousands of desperate women surged forward and crashed against the pink-mirrored façade of the building, hammering at the glass with the clunky helps of their ugly shoes. They wielded their worn erotic tools as truncheons. They beat with their fists until ominous cracks raced in every direction and the windows and doors bowed inward, ready to collapse."
And so the Big Apple is taken by a storm of overly-excited yet insufficiently-pleased women, asking for more sex toys the way their Zombie counterparts would ask for more brain.

There’s social and cultural commentary to be had here, with a de-rigueur sarcasm that suits so well Palahniukean texts.

“Artificial overstimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. Whether the victims were men or women, arousal addiction seemed to have become the new normal.”

The novel also takes pleasure in imitating forensic and medical drama. The parallels are to be found in the narrative voice, which provides descriptions of anatomical parts with a care for details that would make the producers of House, Bones, or Body of Proof blush with embarrassment at their shallow knowledge of biology.

Chuck Palahniuk

Those who don’t want to accept such exercises in emulation will perhaps miss the play with similarities that Palahniuk appears to be offering his readership. There’s a scene, for instance, where book burning is referenced as well. Yet in the scene the flames don’t consume volumes; they devour artificial penises. All caught on camera (the 21^st-century version of Inquisition’s all-seeing eye):

“The camera drew closer, and Penny witnessed what looked like any male’s vision of hell. Innumerable multitudes of severed penises were writhing in the conflagration. Phalluses squirmed in the intense heat, blistering and twisting as if in prolonged torment. Aflame, some suffering man-parts crept, inchworm-like, from the fire as if attempting to escape to safety. They flopped. Flipped. Jumped and twitched. As if in agony. These were caught by the surrounding men and summarily flung back to their doom. Still other dongs erupted in the heat, spouting pink molten lava.”

Palahniuk is quite vivid. We’ve got to give him that. It has to be said, though, that there are moments when it isn’t quite clear that what he's doing is pure mockery of popular genres or just a lack of will to finish this work well. To climax it well – if you get my pun (lol). There is the matter of motivation, for instance, that needs to be clarified. No spoilers are going to be provided, but the denouement isn’t as fabulous as one would expect – a rather common way of finishing a story, something not unlike certain Hollywood productions that handle endings in terms of unexpected discoveries and dues-ex-machina resolutions (old tricks in use since Greek comedies). There’s also the question: why the hell is a female mystic living in the Himalayas needed at all? Because one such appears, out of the blue, and even features in the end, where she dies dramatically, but not before having the chance to tell the story of everything from a perspective we haven't been aware of. I know it sounds familiar. Because it is. Mockery again? Point taken. But still: why? And why, also, the continuous postponing of the ending? The story misses (metaphorically speaking, if we take this to be intentional) three or four chances to finish, but every time more seems to be the case. This is not the classic multi-ending narrative but rather a story which refuses to end. Hold on. There’s something that just struck me, as I was writing the line above. Is this continuous ending meant to be something akin to a never-ending orgasm? Which is what happens to the women in the novel? Since Palahniuk likes to play with possibilities, it’s likely we’ll never get an answer to these questions. But what a thought! The never-ending orgasm and all that...
So let's leave it here.

Computers and cigarettes

2015-06-25T23:30:00.001+12:00

Full title: My Documents

Author: Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 244 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Alejandro Zambra has always acted as a writer who writes about a writer's life (Hemingway updated, Roberto Bolaño’s re-embodied?). His latest volume, the collection My Documents, goes about peering again into things that make up the profession’s paraphernalia. For Zambra, the most important of these things are books and computers. Books have their special place, close to the Platonic ideal, so nothing’s changed in the library area; admiration, respect, veneration: all untouched, all good and (strange to say) ordinary. What is out of the everyday (narratively speaking) is the presence of computers. Still young in spite of their half-century of supremacy, PCs and their offspring seem to be slow in taking a place in literature. There’s a sense that they don’t have much to add to a story, that their presence is more likely to cause harm than charm.

But computers do have a role to play. For one thing, they provide memory, which is what writing has always been about, and which is what writing is always going to be about. In "Memories of a Personal Computer," the protagonist and his girlfriend experience the machine as a novelty with potential. They write up their poems on it, they love and hate each other under the PC’s gaze. When the computer works, their relationship works too. When the computer breaks, they too go each their separate way. What’s left of their adventure is a computer memory from which all data has been erased. The story ends with the PC in this state of purity: a blank hard drive deposited in an old carcass. The protagonist's son, an adolescent already over-versed in computer work, takes the object given to him as a gift to an underground location, symbolic setting for a work of disremembering.

"[He] went to the basement to find a place to store the computer, where it has been ever since, waiting, as they say, for better times to come."

With an ending like this, fairytale-style, the story reads like a fable about memory. It’s a story in which the computer too is a protagonist: we find it newly-born in the beginning, and we see it decrepit in the end, its narrative cycle gone full circle.

Alejandro Zambra. Source: Acabo de leer... Y me gusta

If computers are aids to memory, cigarettes are aids to other things that writers do. "I Smoked Very Well" reads like a praise to the vice in the title. The protagonist has just managed, via chemical intakes, to hinder his urge to smoke his lungs off. But what he finds at the end of the tunnel is not joy; it’s the opposite. If there was ever a connection between computers and cigarettes, it becomes clear when the protagonist (a writer with a smoker’s problem or a smoker with a writer’s problem) realizes that the chemicals in his medical treatment have made it impossible to enjoy at all his former love for smoking:

"I feel perplexed, and bruised. It's as though someone were gradually erasing all the information related to cigarettes from my memory. And that strikes me as sad.
I'm a very old computer. I'm an old but not entirely broken computer. Someone touches my face and keyboard with a kitchen rag. And it hurts."

Smoking-is-important-to-writers is the message conveyed throughout the story. The cigarette doesn't only serve as a prop; it isn't only something a writer holds in one hand while with the other hand he's writing. The cigarette marks a fundamental difference between a writer and the rest of the world (a question of status as much as a question of profession):

"What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth, with the skill of an anxious puppy, the pack of cigarettes he had hidden in the sand. Non-smokers don't understand these stories. They think that they're exaggerated; they read them cavalierly. A smoker, on the other hand, treasures them."

The fear of losing memory, addressed at point blank in "Memories of a Personal Computer," reaches here the same traumatic height, but its weight is different, because it is made much more personal. Smoking, a vice that threatens the body, puts the soul in a greater impasse when it ceases to be near. Zambra writes up a credo to mitigate this loss, but one that feels sad rather than hopeful:

"I remember that brilliant and unequivocal phrase of Italo Svevo's: 'Reading a novel without smoking is impossible.'
But it's possible, it is. I don't remember anything I read, though. I read badly. I don't know if I've just read a good novel badly or a bad novel well. But I read, it's possible."

The protagonist, who has lost appetite for reading and writing, who has been thrust into this despair of growing sad when the body is cured, makes the cigarette part of the syntax of creation. He's grown wise enough by now (this is close to the end of the story) to see with clarity the link between smoking and composition:

"Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.
I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or the absence of an answer. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon."

And so poetry arises from despair, metaphors from lack of punctuation, a writer’s angst from running out of smokes. What’s left, then? As always, memory. Of how writing must be done, of what cigarettes taste like, of what computers are good at. Almost every story in Alejandro Zambra’s collection has a reason to reflect on the above, because at the end of the day being a writer makes one dependent on these props. No writer is free. They all must be set up/upset by some rituals.

Vargas Llosa’s two trilogies at one stroke

2015-06-18T20:52:00.001+12:00

Full title: The Discreet Hero

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 326 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The novels of Mario Vargas Llosa should come with instruction manuals. Not because he indulges in obscure matters, but because his constant play with references is so intricate and so personalized that a new text, like The Discreet Hero, risks passing as a mere exercise in simplistic storytelling flavors with an exhibitive soap-opera character. Knowing the author’s penchant for narrative experimentations, a lot of this is likely to have been done on purpose. But confusion does look like a real possibility when it comes to readers.

The review in The Guardian, for instance, all but ignores the cross-referential nature of the novel, which brings together allusions to earlier novels by Vargas Llosa. Francisco Goldman’s account, in The New York Times, is much better informed and better situated critically in its balanced view of the Peruvian author’s literary and political views (paying attention to matters of plot significance, as well as following his ascending career, from the socialist devotee of the early works and convictions to the aristocratic conservative known, since 2011, under the hereditary title of 1^st Marquis of Vargas Llosa).

The Discreet Hero is an interesting case of double closure, a really curious and highly original hybrid. It stands as the third volume in two different trilogies: the one taking place in Lima and featuring Don Rigoberto and his immediate family (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and In Praise of the Stepmother) and the other one set in Piura and featuring Sergeant Lituma (The Green House and Death in the Andes).

This hybrid is not at all surprising if one considers Vargas Llosa's distinctive attention to narrative interweaving and plotting, based precisely on shooting references across pages and across texts.

His favourite technique shows, at a local level, throughout The Discreet Hero: alternative chaptering. As in so many of his previous books, Vargas Llosa refuses, almost programmatically, to stick to a one-plot narrative. And for that reason his cast of characters is, as always, impressive. Every chapter has its own plot, with their respective subplots and parallel developments, each following the performance of specific characters. The most important of them are, of course, Don Rigoberto and Sergeant Lituma. They don’t know each other, and when they do meet (very late in the novel) there is no outstanding exchange between them. Only the reader is satisfied to see the convergence of the two lines of plot and to admire, perhaps, the author’s art of bringing them together. Otherwise, Rigoberto is the same aristocrat disgusted by the mundane flavor of life, who featured, with his strange rituals of ablution and sexual oddities, in The Notebooks and in The Stepmother. Lituma too remains true to his narrative destiny drawn in the previous novels: poor but honest, victim of coincidences and misunderstandings, the only policeman in town who has never taken a bribe and who, for precisely that reason, is, in his own words, “the only one that's still a poor beggar and will be a cop forever.” Both Lituma and Rigoberto, must be noted, are secondary characters in this novel. The chapters in which they feature are dedicated to Felícito Yanaqué and Don Ismael Carrera, respectively, business owners of different calibers but of similar providence, who find themselves the victims of their relatives’ rapacity.

But we know that Lituma and Rigoberto are the men to look for, because they are the ones who help finishing the trilogies.

Mario Vargas Llosa. Source: The New York Times

The chapters woven into each other play the obvious role of keeping the reader’s attention in check. With the spirit borrowed, doubtlessly, from the popular telenovelas of South America and also, perhaps, from the Greek and Roman Menippean satire, this technique relies on the good old effect of well managed cliffhangers: tension builds up, a climax becomes possible, then very likely, then unavoidable, and suddenly the curtain falls and we move to the next chapter. Where the action starts anew and builds up towards the same resolution. And so on and so forth.

One wonders if this technique, now anything but new in Vargas Llosa's work, is a narrative strength of his or just a sign of weakness. I believe both options have equal chances to be the winner. I would not completely dismiss the view that this spectacular intermingling of narratives turns almost all of his novels into collections of short stories. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nobody said novels must be monological. On the contrary. And in fact the novels of Maria Vargas Llosa always find subtle, surprising ways of connecting those stories and sub-plots in ways that give them a true novel feel. But still, that demon of doubt...

In The Discreet Hero, it's not only stories that are sewn together but also genres. From drama to tragicomedy and from 19^th-century melodrama to 20^th and 21^st-century telenovelas, a broad spectrum of possibilities is activated every step of the way. At times the novel feels like the work of a debutant who is trying his hand at as much narrative material as possible.

A tad too much soap opera? Maybe. Albeit the message is clear: here’s life imitating art and art imitating life.

“My God, what stories ordinary life devised; not masterpieces to be sure, they were doubtless closer to Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexical soap operas that to Cervantes and Tolstoy. But again not too far from Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, or Benito Pérez Galdós.”

Until the moment of the reunion of the two narrative threads, though, almost everything has that cheap allure of unexpected encounters, events whose levels of likelihood would, under normal circumstances, be very low, situations and accidents that seem, well – too accidental to be taken seriously. Kind of like eighteenth-century novels. Something à la Tom Jones, if you like, or the pseudo-romances of Samuel Richardson, where characters run into trouble in the most artificial of ways, all in the name of a transparent spectacle.

But it’s clear that Vargas Llosa has planned, with this his latest novel, a take on genres as much as a take on his eternal concern with Peruvian life. And since we’re in the eternity department, let’s finish with another quote concerning telenovelas:

“The soap opera isn’t over, it goes on and on and gets harder to understand every day.”

That’s Don Rigoberto for you, the aristocrat who ends the novel in a plane, flying his family to Europe, where he has planned to disappear amidst bourgeois intellectual pursuits like a man who has been planning his withdrawal from a book.

The ingenious prose of Nic Low

2015-06-11T22:48:00.000+12:00

Full title: Arms Race

Author: Nic Low

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 250 pages, paperback
Publisher: Text Publishing (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Being a character in Nic Low’s first collection of short stories would be nothing short of a great vacation. You’d be taken places you never imagined or never thought of visiting during your lifetime. India. Laos. Mongolia. The Australian desert. A New Zealand coast town. San Francisco. London. Melbourne. New Zealand again. And some more. Wouldn’t your character life look like a traveler’s map if you took the journeys advertised by the volume?
Pick and choose – Master Low will take you there in a few pages and give you the ride of your life.

Not only do the stories in Arms Race grow beautifully in such geographic amplitudes, you’d also be given the chance to travel multidimensionally. Like, for instance, getting to a London of a future where all you can consume to stay alive is megabytes. This is the case of “Data Furnace,” a story where Low shows the traces of a true master storyteller.

What is a master storyteller? Someone who leaves the reader wondering how the hell he’d come up with that or with that or with that.
Going into details would ruin the pleasure of reading, I know, I know. But unfortunately you can only talk about Nic Low’s stories if you commit, repeatedly, the crime of giving the show away. That’s how good you feel after having read, one after the other, the twelve stories in the volume, asking, at the last page, if there were any more of them on the way.
So beware: the following may contain spoilers.

To take “Data Furnace” as a model and give it a brief summary, what have we got? We’ve got the city of London caught up in an apocalyptic winter. First stop, take a look at how he describes the city:

“I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned spires of the City: they’re all so deformed by frost they look like they were designed by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.”

Good, isn’t it? Atmospheric to the point where you feel your bones penetrated by cold.

And this is just to give a taste of what all the texts in the volume read like: with aplomb, with wit, with clarity, with a baroque tendency of exaggerating the contours, but only lightly, with a candid touch not to make the landscapes too foreign. There is, indeed, a sense that, no matter where you are in these stories, no matter what the location or the situation or the purpose, you’re never in need of a compass: you can do it on your own; you can journey through these places like a pro.
If there’s one element that stands out in Nic Low’s stories, it’s got to be his associations. In descriptions, you’re always driven away from the ‘natural’ course. The “gutted apartments” – who would have thought of using that adjective to describe an empty habitation? It’s the adjectives that do the job, of course. Adjectives, those no-no’s of creative writing classes, are Low’s best allies. He knows how to deploy them and deploys them to get the best effect. Like in an arms race for the conquest of readership.

Source: Te Karaka

But to return to the story. Temperatures have gone so low and for such a long time that people have been leaving the streets, the houses, the whole urban space. All but a few; to be more precise: the narrator, his beautiful colleague Umi, and the opportunistic homeless figure known under the name of Old Man Canary. The first two work as IT specialists in a company that has just shut down its last server room. They refuse to leave the city when everyone else is running for the airports like crazy. They stay and they come up with a brilliant idea. Since there’s nothing else to burn to keep themselves warm (every single tree in London has been cut to pieces and consumed in domestic fires), they will use data. They will get the servers to heat up.

This is one of those situations where the reader goes, Oh, I see. Because we all know that computers do give off heat (that’s why they’re equipped with coolers!). But in order to generate enough heat in the servers, the two of them need traffic. They need to get the servers working like never before. Solution: shoot a YouTube video and wait for it to go viral. Easy to say, not so easy to do, since online audiences are best known for their volatility and unpredictability. But a new brilliant idea pops out of Umi’s head. She connects a terrarium to the servers. In the terrarium there’s a tropical frog. The frog needs warmth just like the humans. But there’s a trick to it. As we are told a little earlier (by way of a story that sounds like an urban myth), if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it in cold water and heat that water gradually, it will stay there, allowing itself to be cooked to death. This is where the ingenious idea resides. With a few videos and some hacking that brings traffic to a decent level, the terrarium starts getting warmer and warmer. The heat from the server is transferred to it. It grows hotter and hotter as the viewers turn the event into a share frenzy of epic proportions. Everything’s broadcast live and soon bets are placed on whether the frog will jump out or not. It’s this betting that gets the traffic flowing. The world is taken with the madness of this new form of entertainment. And behind all this – the logic of data flooding:

“We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.”

I have to stop here, though. “Data Furnace” still has an ending that needs to be read, not overheard. But after all this effort to summarize, I think there's one thing that can be said about Nic Low with some degree of certainty: his stories are imaginative like you haven’t seen for a long time. The pleasure with which he tells these stories, the succulent texts full of images and metaphors that make your mouth froth as you read along, the pace of the narration – all these things make the collection impossible to ignore. As also impossible to ignore must be Nic Low’s current project, set to be launched in 2016.

The last novel of Philip Roth

2015-06-05T00:00:00.000+12:00

Full title: Nemesis

Author: Philip Roth

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 304 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When Philip Roth declared, in 2012, that he had given up writing, Nemesis had been the last novel published under his name (2010). So far, he has kept his promise, and by the looks of it he’s just as determined to shut his creativity shop as he was, in the past, determined to write like there was no tomorrow. So now, knowing that this is his last novel, Nemesis has the aura of a closure. But truth being said, there is nothing in it that suggests some end-of-the-road proclamation. So I believe we need to get back to where it all started, i.e. back to the novel itself, and read it as it should be: as a novel with only itself to stand by.

Nemesis is a book of hostilities. Set in 1944, when Europe and the Pacific were being blown to small pieces by WW2, it follows closely the brief career of Bucky Cantor, a teacher and playground director in a Newark Jewish community. What’s singular about Bucky Cantor is that he has the ill luck of being contemporary with an epidemic of polio. Roth follows at a painstakingly slow pace the evolution of the illness, which makes the account all the more appalling. Kids disfigured, reduced to having to breathe through machines, with their limbs twisted and paralyzed, the children under Bucky Cantor’s care enter the stage and leave it as if they had never existed, casualties in a war without weapons. We get a quick glimpse of them and then they’re no more.

Several characters in the novel make the obvious connection between the Jewish origins of this community and the historical destiny of the Jews at large, especially at the time of the then-unfolding WW2, when the concentration camps in Europe were still running. As Dr. Steinberg, one of the prominent figures in the community, declares, the destiny of those children killed by polio was equal to the greater destiny of the Jews in the world, and that in its turn was equal to the destiny of humanity in general:

”I’m against the frightening of Jewish kids. I’m against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.”

Bucky is conscious of the weight of this destiny and the power of this fear. He sees, around him, parents growing paranoid, impatient, and unfair. Some get as far as screaming out, with the power of a slogan: “Disinfect everything!” Others, confronted with this implacable destiny that seems to be unwilling to take any prisoners, find consolation in the pathetic illusion that salvation can come from signs:

“Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn’t there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn’t there a quarantine sign protecting my children?”

The panic grows continuously, and Bucky Cantor is a hopeless witness of the growing devastation. Caught in the centre of the epidemic, he finds it his duty to stay and fight the right fight to the end. But there’s a fiancé as well; she is in a holiday camp away from the polio catastrophe, and she insists that he join her. Bucky gives in and he leaves the city at a time when the epidemic had already reached biblical proportions. But once in the safe haven of the Pocono Mountains, where everything is bucolic and out of harm’s way, he starts having second thoughts. He is in a constant strife with himself: a man overcome by his own morality, a teacher with the constitution of a hero but the fortune of an apostate. He comes out of all this scarred for life, a victim with a story to tell.

Philip Roth. Source: The Reader's Room

Bucky’s tragedy is that everything for him works the other way round. He is not like the others. He is an orphan whose mother died giving birth to him. His father, a thief, disappeared from his life when he was too young to even notice him. He is athletic by nature, fully prepared to face the world, but because of his poor eyesight he is not accepted in the army, and so, fails to enlist in America’s wars against Germany and Japan. While others his age are fighting in a real war, he is caught up in this fake, humiliating, war against polio, which is far crueller, more unfair, and less glorious than any other war he can imagine. And while those who have fought the honourable fights come home, he finds himself on a hospital bed, ridden with polio, more wounded in his soul and more maimed in his body than those who had seen Normandy or Pearl Harbor.

Bucky’s tragedy is the tragedy of someone who’s never been given the chance to become a hero.

He is engaged in very many battles, but each of them seem to be the wrong one. He battles polio when everyone else is battling the Germans or the Japanese. He battles god when everyone else is battling destiny. He battles his own demons when everyone else has an external cause to fight for. Bucky is always misplaced, always at the mercy of an incoherent fate:

“Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.”

Because God, indeed, is an uncomfortable notion for Bucky: the entity he blames for the entire disaster, for the polio as well as for for everything else. God, a fixation that hurts, an obsession that insists on meaning nothing reasonable:

“His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two – a sick fuck and an evil genius.”

This gives the novel an air of revenge. If anything, Philip Roth's last novel is a book about the unfairness of the world, about heroism that just doesn't happen, and also about the failure of an ideology based on patriotism and duty. America at its most vulnerable: this is the working topic of Nemesis.

"The ping and the pong of America"

2015-05-28T23:24:00.001+12:00

Full title: The Making of Zombie Wars. A Novel

Author: Aleksandar Hemon

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When you see the title you know straight away that there’s fun to be had from reading this novel. And the fun begins alright, yet slowly, gradually – because nothing can proceed unless we have some good introductory chapters first. So here it goes: Joshua Levin, a young would-be writer based in Chicago, is facing the mother of all creative impasses. He’s tried his hand at various genres, but after a while decided that film scripts are the go-to enterprise. So he proceeds to writing them. No success. Projects die one after another. He’s joined a group of other would-be’s, with whom he shares this destiny of being in an eternal bottleneck. They get together to discuss writing that never takes place and end up, almost invariably, with their minds assaulted by sexual ideation or drowned in cheap oxidized wine.

Case in point, the following dialogue:

“’American movies always have happy ending,’ Bega said. ‘Life is tragedy: you’re born, you live, you die.’
‘This could be like a European art-house movie. Which would be good because you could show tits,’ Graham said, pausing to picture the tits.”

Of course, what Hemon wants to point out here is the cultural break that divides these two cultures he’s concerned with: the Easter-European one (a culture of immigrants who have too many stories to tell and no chance to do it properly) and the American one (where things make sense only if they’re showy, over-the-top, kitsch). In fact, Bega, the Bosnian, doesn’t lose a single opportunity to highlight, in his accent-ridden voice, this division. He does so with the typical air of contempt that behooves respectable immigrants:

“’I was thinking, Josh,’ Bega said. ‘Why America now must have superheroes? Why can’t you just have normal heroes? John Wayne was not good enough, now you must have Batman?’”

And a couple of pages further down, again, because nothing is sweeter than the taste of cultural revenge:

“’Tell me why is that,’ Bega said, ‘last eight presidents have simple names: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, two with Bush. You used to have Washington, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, and then something happened. You can’t elect your president with complicated name anymore. Idiot voters have to be able to spell fucking name.’”

Mocked, Joshua flexes his artistic muscle even harder, trying to achieve the impossible. He keeps a record of all the ideas that cross his mind at various points in time. There are many of them. He has them numbered, neatly catalogued in the memory of his personal computer. He brings them out every now and then as personal reminders that work needs to be done if artistic immortality is desired. But there’s no joy in the exercise, because he never gets to the point of materialization. His writing sucks, to put it bluntly; and he knows it. Nothing has come out yet from under his unconvincing finger tips. Nothing, that is, except this script idea for a film called Zombie Wars.

Aleksandar Hemon. Source: KCET

Steeped in American dullness, Joshua has a life best described as minor. His food is bland, his family is concerned with inconsequential Jewish problems, his whole life’s a sub-product better imagined as part of a low-budget B-series movie. He can’t even enjoy the prospect of dreams.

“Joshua hated sleeping, but waking up was worse. Nightmares were not the problem: he never really had any. Nobody ever bothered to chase him in his dreams; he never plunged from a tall building to wake up just before exploding like a pomegranate, nor did he ever experience even the vaguest presence of death. There was little violence, only occasional vanilla sex, his dreams damp rather than wet, his subconscious a Wilmette where he was forever sleepily immortal.”

Trapped in this dreamless Americanness, it’s a miracle Joshua doesn’t turn into a Norman Bates or some solo-act of Bonnie and Clyde.

Truth is he doesn’t have a chance to become wild, simply because he doesn’t have the guts. He flees conflict, avoids his mad landlord, avoids his family, avoids the happiness that seems likely to catch roots in the company of his near-perfect Japanese girlfriend, avoids – ultimately – writing the script of his own life. Hence the general feeling of his being completely and utterly (excuse the word) fucked: a looser in the most specific sense of the word, eligible to feature in the world’s best galleries of all-time losers.

After a while, though, things get moving and everything that was dull in the beginning turns into a fast-paced Hollywood-like production. There’s drama (Joshua’s father discovering that he has prostate cancer), romance (a lot of it, but of the problematic kind, with the Japanese girlfriend gone from perfect match to utter hater, aided by a Bosnian contender impossible to resist), adventure (featuring the colourful landlord by the name of Stagger, who brandishes a samurai sword and gets his butt kicked big time, and not just once), and even bits of thriller (with a bunch of other Bosnians in close-up, just to make sure we don’t forget who Aleksandar Hemon is).

With action cropping up at superhighway speeds, The Making of Zombie Wars turns hilarious and sad at the same time. A sympathetic reader will surely feel for the protagonist’s sorry ass, but will LOL at the encounter with Stagger, the novel’s best, if not only, truly comic character (“If ever a man was entitled to a cape and light saber, it was Stagger.”)

Then one must admire Hemon’s talent for destroying every cliché that ever comes his way. There are moments when one is reminded of those comedies in which a seemingly melodramatic plot ends with a turntable scratch that makes the audience aware that this ain’t nothing but a joke. Take this, for instance, for a ruined bucolic:

“All across the wide world, spring was landing on its fairy feet. Everywhere, trees were budding and coming into leaves, ground thawing and earthworms stirring, dog shit defrosting and releasing the pungent stink that brought back memories of springs past.”

As per example, Hemon knows irony well, and proves to be a good adept of the new American wave of novelists, who take the Mickey out of everything but do so with intelligence, elegance, and sophistication. (See Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz etc. etc.) Some of Hemon’s metaphors, let’s admit it, rock. Take “clouds floated like meringue zeppelins” for an example. But metaphors aren’t everything that stands out. Hemon also engages perfectly with the critical vein of the American club, seeing where America is weak and hitting precisely there, for maximum effect:

“Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive. On the other hand, it was cheap and everywhere. Hope and war: the ping and the pong of America.”

There would be numberless other occasions to quote Aleksadar Hemon, now at his sixth book, already a victor of American letters. Part of his talent is that he knows how to scatter quotable bits throughout the text. The novel expertly apes the prose of religious sermons, it mimics Spinoza, it offers brilliant philosophical gems, it mixes script excerpts into the novelistic fabric. It does all sorts of novel-writing prestidigitation, and a lot of it comes out well. A multi-voice enterprise, The Making of Zombie Wars is a novel worth keeping in one’s personal library for some time.

Michael Ondaatje: “Images only from memory”

2015-05-21T22:40:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Cat's Table

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 293 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (2011)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel (four years old at this point in time) is a book of passages. It tells the story of three boys travelling between Sri Lanka and England on the transoceanic Oronsay, during the summer of 1954. It tells the story of what went on, during that three-week journey that’s been never forgotten. It tells the story of how the people on board passed from one small island at the end of the Indian subcontinent to a bigger island at the end of Europe.

A sense of a spectacle full of surprises mixed with water and patches of moon permeates through the narrative suppleness and the poetic subtleties of Ondaatje’s prose. The ship itself is a big floating stage, where the passengers play their roles in a space where there is, really, nothing else to do. Once the boys are boarded and the Oronsay starts floating on, they find themselves in a different world, one of freedom but also one of apprehension, where they are “no longer free of the realities of the earth.”

Because of this encounter with the unprecedented (born in Colombo, not far from the sea, they still remember their homes as grounded certainties: territories of earth, not of water), the passengers gather together to construct a universe whose meaning is limited to the time and space of the ship. The narrative gives sufficient hints to inform the reader that nothing of what they are witnessing is the characters’ normal way about things.

The voyage is a game; a game for the boys, who see through events as if they did not matter beyond their immediate happening; a game for the other passengers too, who put on various masks in order to enjoy a short-term life of differences and quasi-anomalies.

The passage, the narrator insists in this story told years later, was not what one might call splendid. Not in its original unfolding. Like all formative events, the formativeness of this passage becomes significant only in hindsight:

“It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.”

It is important that we keep this in mind while reading The Cat’s Table, because this way the question of childhood (inexperience, naivety, and everything else that comes with it) can be brought up again and again. Now, at maturity (the novel’s ‘time zero of narration’), the events are recounted to minds as young as those of the protagonists, participating in the unlikely formation of this generation that grew after the events.

What we’re made to understand from this series of stories remembered as if they were coming from a different world, is that everything – everything – is the product of memory. Impractical, restorative, unreliable memory.

“For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the Oronsay exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory.”

This state beyond documentation lays the ground for fiction. It is, in fact, the perfect incubator for fantasy and for imagination. Without facts, the universe is open to speculations: forms of creative remembering.

Michael Ondaatje. Source: University of North Texas

Autobiographic by default, every writing gesture questions the relevance of memory and its ability to go back to a beginning that is forever fragile. “Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence,” the narrator says at some point. The impermanence of events is the one true theme of The Cat’s Table. Impermanence aided by the fact that this voyage towards an unknown place is recounted as an event in itself: a series of incidents with their own internal logic, held together not by linear biography but by a floating device. That’s why the novel ends at the arrival. In three pages, the episode of Michael’s meeting his mother (who has been waiting for him in London all this time) is done with; without emotional charge, without a mother-son love collision.

That’s because what really matters is not the reunion but the breaking of the party: the fact that the journey ended and, with it, the magic of the show broke up as well. At the arrival, certainty takes front stage again. No more room for fantasy and artifice, no more imagining about. All of that was the ship’s magic, a thing of the past. Now, giving the sea its due, the land puts everybody’s feet to the ground; literally, ordinarily, most prosaically.

But let’s return to the voyage. Given the lack of means to record the events, the narrator’s recollections will have to be regarded as the only accounts of the journey, the only reliable (to an extent) sources of information about a three-week period that was never memorised otherwise.

And so, the boys seem to be under the constant pressure of a duty to witness. Throughout the voyage, they watch and listen. They stand hidden in the darkness of a life boat, covered by the tarpaulin, furtively seeing and listening to events as they unfolded. This sense of witnessing becomes apparent everywhere in the novel. Sometimes, it suggests confusion – like the confusion in the minds of the young protagonists:

“We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility.”

At other times, the sense of testimony appears as a necessary training for a future when the events are meant to gain significance:

“Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

This is the core of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table: the facts of fiction adding memory to existence.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, together (again)

2015-05-14T22:38:00.001+12:00

Full title: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Mexican Modern Art
Author: Helga Prignitz-Poda

Genre: Exhibition catalogue
Attributes: 144 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Skira Rizzoli (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As we speak, the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is hosting (February 26 – May 31, 2015) this almost obligatory exhibition of Mexican Modern Art, at the centre of which stand the works of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Full title: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection & 20^th Century Mexican Art from the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Collection. The book I’m looking at here is the catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Helga Prignitz-Poda, a Kahlo expert and curator specialized in Mexican art. The book is an object as well as an event. It makes apparent the exhibition’s coherence and its spirit, surveying works by the sonorous representatives of Mexican muralism, José Clemente Orózco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, or by many of the Surrealists who, like Rufino Tamayo or Francisco Toledo, have given modern Mexican art its distinctive flavors, twists and fantasies, as well as its solid Zapotec roots.

But the centre of this vortex is, obviously, the two-headed hybrid Kahlo-Rivera. The book starts with them and somehow, in the readers’ subconscious, ends with them.

Classed, almost against their wish, as Surrealists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are doubtless the most famous of Mexican artists of all times. They differed a lot, and the book wastes no opportunity to point this out. The couple, who somehow came down in history as near-archetypes of love, are described here from the point of view of separation. Artistic separation, to be sure, because this is what the catalogue is really interested in; the rest of their story having already become legend.

“When Kahlo painted surrealistically she took the iconography of everyday life and created estrangements in order to describe the surreal quality of her own reality. When Rivera painted in a surrealistic manner, he took found objects in the landscape, contemplated them, and exaggerated their peculiar forms of appearance.”

To illustrate this statement, the author mentions Landscape with cacti (a Rivera of 1931), and also Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939), their most iconic canvases. But there are plenty other examples to confirm the story of their divergence.

Yes, the differences between the two are their most apparent artistic feature, but also a feature that appeared just as relevant in life. Rivera, masculine, grand, dominant, worked on a scale that transgressed the human dimension. His choice, later in his career, of mural painting (which is, perhaps, the turn that’s made him really famous) is indicative of this domineering outlook. Big, but also capable of sentiments – of big sentiments, that is –, his work impresses by scale but also by quantity.

“Rivera’s catalog of works comprises several thousand oil paintings and more than forty-three thousand square feet of murals.”

This was, no doubt, a man who painted beyond necessity; a man who painted like there was no tomorrow.

Kahlo, on the other hand, worked diminutively. One finds out from the catalog that only 140 of her works are extant now, and most of them are paintings on a small scale. There’s an explanation for this:

“Kahlo’s oeuvre remained small because the act of painting was physically difficult for her, despite almost thirty operations undertaken to counteract her gradually worsening state of health.”

Because of this, perhaps, Kahlo represented herself more than anything else. Her self-portraits, where she appears and disappears in waves of realism and surrealism, are indicative of an obsession with the self that’s narcissistic, but of a strange kind of narcissism, which is not precisely self-glorifying but rather self-exploring. One can see that in the decorativeness of her poses, in the static (doll-like) qualities of her face, in the flamboyance of her colour schemes.

Source: BBC

With Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the centre of everything, the Mexican art of the twentieth century has always found its recognition. And, as the catalogue seems to point out, it will be long before the place of honour is taken by someone else.

The girl in evening gloves

2015-05-07T23:26:00.000+12:00

Full title: The Adventuress

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Genre: Graphic Novel
Attributes: 144 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (2006)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

A girl wearing only a skirt and a pair of elbow-long gloves: this is the protagonist, the Adventuress. She lives on aquatint plates, courtesy of Audrey Niffenegger (best known for The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the film, of course), and that’s why she’s such a beautifully monochromatic creature. The whiteness of her skin provides all the contrast needed; she rises on every page not unlike the light of the moon on a dark sky.

In a little blurb at the end of the book, Niffenegger confesses that she started everything in the 1980s, in the form of a scrap book. The plates made then were loosely connected; the protagonist was, then, a creature without a coherent story. Some of that has been preserved in the book version too. The Adventuress (let’s call her that, via the title – otherwise her author doesn’t give us a single clue: she’s “she,” “her,” nothing nominal, pure anonymity) traverses the book – i.e. her own story – as a victim. To start with, she’s not begotten but manufactured. Her father, an alchemist, makes her the way he must have made a philosophical stone or two. Governed, as it seems, by that masculine ambition of creators who create without a single care about the creature’s destiny, the father, contented as only an alchemist can be, clasps his hands in admiration when the girl emerges on the page, as well as in his life. Emergence – would that be a good word to describe the act of coming-to-life that isn’t birth but something else? Why not?

She learns, of course, things of alchemy. There are caterpillars and butterflies that circle her in tight loops. Caterpillars and butterflies which, of course, are creatures of metamorphoses, creature that challenge the logic of coming-to-life.

The father watches while she learns. He’s content once more.

This is the first man in the Adventuress’ life. Soon, though, the second man appears: the powerful Baron von K., a man dipped in shadows and surrounded by servants who do everything for him, while he’s enjoying the necessary invisibility of his authority. The Adventuress fares badly in the castle of this mysterious baron. Like female subjects the world over, she too is surrounded by eyes. Her being is the target of many a gaze.

There’s nothing she can do about those pupils watching her moves. But there’s something else she can do. She can burn the castle down; which is exactly what she does, leaving the Baron to burn inside. When the castle is in flames, the Adventuress fleas, but she’s quickly apprehended, brought back, tried, convicted, imprisoned, shamed, subjected by the patriarchal authority once more.

Given the prison and the promise of an eternity spent there, the alchemist’s daughter finds escape in fantasy. In the barren cell to which she’s been consigned, she fashions a cocoon. A former companion of caterpillars, what’s it to her to turn herself into a chrysalis, just like that? She weaves the cocoon from threads she’d unraveled from her skirt (which makes her, obviously, naked). She spends the winter in the cocoon and then, when spring comes, evades through the rails of her cell – metamorphosed into a moth.

The subsequent episodes see her encountering none other than Napoleon Bonaparte; yet a different Napoleon, who doesn’t go to wage a war but to accomplish another manly feat of infidelity. Meantime, the Adventuress gives birth to Maurice. Maurice – a black cat! Extracted from her uterus like a white rabbit from a magician’s hat. Betrayed, the Adventuress finds consolation only in the presence of Maurice. Maurice, who sees her to the very last moment – to the moment of death. Maurice, who, once the Adventuress is dead, brings her back to Napoleon for an improbable resurrection.

Audrey Niffenegger. Source: Creative Tourist

This is all there is to the book. The story is simple – very simple. Like a montage with abrupt cuts, the episodes are distinctively separated and there seems to be no attempt at hiding the seams.

The same can be said, of course, about language. What stands out is a forthright lack of metaphors. Somewhat, somewhere, the impression has been formed that graphic novels with any modicum of metaphysical background must have layers of meaning, evidenced in a language that requires deciphering (if you don’t put your mind to it, you miss the point). But Niffenegger doesn’t do intricacies. She speaks so plainly, there’s almost nothing quotable in her book. Only the end, perhaps, stands out:

“Her spirit flew out into the night
And the sky reached down
And drew her up,
And she was filled with light…
And she is happy.”

But even this cannot be quoted unless there’s room for the story to be transported somewhere else. The change in tense indicates that there must be another dimension, an outside where the character keeps leading a life in which she’s finally happy. And that’s, perhaps, where the story must be looked for now.