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I was really anxious to read Never Any End to Paris (París no se acaba nunca, 2003; tr. from the Spanish by Anne McLean, 2011) when it came out at about this same time last year. Indeed the opening pages pulled me in pleasantly. But something happened and I hit a stall somewhere in the middle. I put it down and didn’t pick it up again until recently when it became a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. Now, there is a lot here. This is the perfect book for someone out there, but I still had a hard time getting through it.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Back to that great beginning though. Our narrator — a man who clearly resembles Vila-Matas himself — tells us about a trip he made to Key West, Florida, to enter a Hemingway look-alike contest:
I don’t know how many years I spent drinking and fattening myself up believing — contrary to the opinions of my wife and friends — that I was getting to look more and more like Hemingway, the idol of my youth. Since no one even agreed with me about this and since I’m rather stubborn, I wanted to teach them all a lesson, and, having procured a false beard — which I though would increase my resemblance to Hemingway — I entered the contest this summer.
He is disgraced and comes in last; or, rather, he doesn’t place at all since he is disqualified, not in resembling Hemingway in the slightest. The narrator is telling this story from a lectern. This book is, in fact, a three-part lecture about irony that the narrator is presenting — well, more like rambling. That’s not a criticism. He is improvising:
You’ll see me improvising on occasion. Like right now when, before going on to read my ironic revision of the two years of my youth in Paris, I feel compelled to tell you that I do know that irony plays with fire and, while mocking others, sometimes ends up mocking itself. You all know full well what I’m talking about. When you pretend to be in love you run the risk of feeling it, he would parodies without proper precautions ends up the victim of his own cunning. And even if he takes them, he ends up a victim just the same.
The principle part of the narrators lecture on irony consists of his experiences in the mid-seventies living in Paris in a flat he rented from Marguerite Duras. His fascination with Hemingway already in full swing, he lived there trying to relive the famous author’s experiences related in A Moveable Feast (from which this book gets its title): “Well, when I was fifteen years old I read his book of Paris reminiscences in one sitting and decided I’d be a hunter, fisherman, war reporter, drinker, great lover, and boxer, that is, I would be like Hemingway.” His life, like his personages, does no such thing. Not even his time in Paris is like the great writer’s; while Hemingway says he was poor and very happy, the narrator’s time in Paris is poor and very unhappy. But it does stick with him.
This whole set up is fascinating. Indeed, the whole book is fascinating as the narrator recounts an intellectual coming-of-age, encountering a variety of Paris intellectuals (one of my favorites being the one with Georges Perec). The narrator certainly doesn’t hold himself bound by the topic of his lecture, freely going wherever his story takes him. Indeed, the narrator hardly holds himself bound by the structure of a lecture. The books itself, at 197 pages, has 113 sections, some more and some less related to other sections.
Also, hopefully from the few quotations above, it’s obvious the writing is impeccable, propulsive, the translation fine as can be. So what was my problem? It’s totally my problem, though one I think many others will share. Much of this book is told to other insiders. I’m not quite there, I’m afraid. Perhaps with some more knowledge of mid-1970s Paris and the intellects at work then this would have been more compelling to me. I still really did enjoy this book, it just turned out it was one I could put down and not pick up again, never quite feeling a loss. I’m glad I’ve now finished it, and I hope it finds its way to its proper readers.
I know that there is some criticism toward publishing anything we can find written by Roberto Bolaño. The most recent, The Secret of Evil (El secreto del mal, 2007; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, with Natasha Wimmer, 2012) is actually composed of some stories and sketches (many obviously incomplete) found on Bolaño’s computer after he died in 2003. Whatever criticism levelled by others, I’m one who gratefully receives. His is such a unique voice, and even the short sketches here exhibit his vim and clarity as he leads his characters to the abyss. It’s particularly refreshing to get a few stories in here with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. And, to be honest, who cares if these stories conclude? It’s not as if even in his published works Bolaño gave us any real sense of resolution, so what we get here is Bolañoesque. Hey, many of these inconclusive pieces may actually have been finished for all we know. After all, the title story begins like this:
This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an ending.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The Secret of Evil contains nineteen potentially incomplete pieces (some are obviously incomplete) that, so says the preface, Bolaño was working on in his last months. It’s a little treasure, filled with openings and meanderings I wish others could write now that Bolaño is gone. A sign of the appetite for more Bolaño, many of the pieces have been seen recently elsewhere. Three — “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom,” “Beach,” and “Sevilla Kills Me” – were published in Between Parentheses (my review here), one — “Labyrinths” – in The New Yorker (my thoughts here), one — “Scholars of Sodom” — in The New York Review of Books (full text here), and one — “I Can’t Read” — in Harper’s (full text here). And Granta (which also published “Beach”; the abstract here) went so far as to make a graphic HTML experience for the incredibly violent “The Colonel’s Son” (click here), which they published last year in their horror issue (my review here).
Let me briefly give a sense of a few of the pieces. First, “The Colonel’s Son,” which I hadn’t read when I posted on Granta‘s horror issue, is a very disturbing and apparently complete piece of horror fiction. While much of Bolaño’s fiction can be called horrific, I mean that this one has zombies — well, kind of. The piece begins, “You’re not going to believe this, but last night, at about four a.m., I saw a movie on TV that could have been my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on this bitch of a planet.” The movie our narrator watched that so resembled his life is a violent B-grade zombie movie. The remainder of the piece describes the movie in detail, examining the motives while maintaining the narrator’s voice. It does indeed sound like a fairly typical zombie movie, but given the story’s first sentence, and given that this is Bolaño, we know there’s a bit more here. For example, the HTML movie has as its disclaimer: “The following HTML5 movie contains the sort of images that you see every day in the news, and thus might not be suitable for children.”
A particularly chilling but realistic piece is “The Room Next Door,” which begins, “I was once, if I remember rightly, present at a gathering of madmen.” Another, “Scholars of Sodom,” contains two parts. The first is an incomplete start to story about V.S. Naipaul. Part II is a look back at that story:
Many years ago, before V.S. Naipaul – a writer whom I hold in high regard, by the way — won the Nobel Prize, I tried to write a story about him, with the title “Scholars of Sodom.”
This Part II proceeds to tell what the story might have been meant to tell, and, in a brilliant way, brings up for criticism Naipaul’s strange essay accusing Argentina as being a country full of sodomites.
As this short book proceeds, the pieces seem to get shorter and more evidently incomplete. But these also contain some real gems, such as “Death of Ulises,” which, if you’ve been following Bolaño, you know is about Ulises Lima and Bolaño’s alter-ego Arturo Belano. It begins, “Belano, our dear Arturo Belano, returns to Mexico City.”
And one of my favorite pieces may be the shortest and most incomplete of all. It’s “The Days of Chaos,” the book’s last entry. It begins, “Just when Arturo Belano thought that all his adventures were over and done with [. . .].” We find out that Belano’s handsome young son Gerónimo ”had disappeared in Berlin during the Days of Chaos.” The story contains seven short paragraphs; three of those are simply “This was in the year 2005.” Obviously, Bolaño didn’t live to see 2005, but this is a sort of cast out into the future, and it ends up by taking us to the past, almost making a journey with Bolaño return full circle:
This was in the year 2005.
Gerónimo Belano was fifteen. Arturo Belano was over fifty, and sometimes he could barely believe that he was still alive. Arturo had set off on his first long trip at the age of fifteen too. His parents had decided to leave Chile and start a new life in Mexico.
And that’s the end. To me it’s as if I’ve just finished Finnegans Wake, and I’ve just been escorted back to the very beginning. How’s that for the poetics of inconclusiveness?
Bolaño’s body of work is too complicated to be contained in one or two complete, published works. Each piece, even these small ones, are part of a larger puzzle that is well worth the time considering, even if we’ll never get to the end.
I love it when we get something by César Aira newly translated into English. There simply is no way to predict what it is going to be about (often even when you’re three-quarters of the way through the book), but you’re guaranteed a strange ride through beautifully strangeness. My first venture with Aira was with a landscape painter through Argentina in the 19th century. I’ve been with him in a the skeleton of a haunted condominium that is being constructed, on a trek to clone Carlos Fuentes, to a sunlit ice cream parlor where the strawberry ice cream contains arsenic, on a windy trip to Patagonia. In Varamo (2002; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), Aira takes us to Colón, Panama, in 1923, where we go through a rather eventful night with a lowly government clerk named Varamo.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
I think it’s worth relating an anecdote here. I began reading this book one night just before going to sleep. I was very tired and soon I was reading the same sentence over and over though my mind seemed to keep the story going forward. Eventually I woke myself up enough to put the book down. The next morning I couldn’t help but chuckle about where my mind had drifted the night before: some taxidermist executing his plan to pose a fish playing a piano, only quite a ways into the project realizing that fish anatomy doesn’t suit playing a piano. What a bizarre dream, I thought. Of course, the development felt just like a dream; here I had some strange idea that went on for a while before I realized that anatomical flaw and finally moved on. But at breakfast the next morning, a thought: this is Aira. I might not have been dreaming.
You already know, of course, that I wasn’t dreaming. Such is the joy (a part of the joy, that is) of the work of Aira.
So what is this book?
It begins at the end of a workday when Varamo stops to pick up his salary from the government.
In the interval between that moment and the dawn of the following day, ten or twelve hours later, he completed the composition of a long poem, from the initial decision to write it up to the final period, after which there were no further additions or corrections.
The poem, The Song of the Virgin Child, is declared a masterpiece of modern Central American poetry. It’s the only thing fifty-year-old Varamo had ever written, and he never wrote again. There was just something about that night after picking up his paycheck: “The action contained the inspiration, and vice versa, each nourishing and consuming the other, so that nothing was left over.”
The book Varamo is, from one perspective, a venture through that night seeking what created the poem. Though, playfully, the way we find out what happened is by deducing, “in the most rigorous sense of that word,” from the poem. Aira is playing here, once again, with the creative act in the writing process.
Picking up his salary ushers in a frenzied night of creativity. There is a reason, and it’s one of the fun parts of the book. When Varamo picks up his money, he immediately realizes that it is counterfeit. He cannot, therefore, go out and use the money. On the other hand, he cannot charge the government with giving him counterfeit money. It’s not long after this that we enter a new episode (the one I thought I was dreaming) when we see Varamo engaged in his taxidermy. And the night goes on.
As with his other works (particularly How I Became a Nun and The Seamstress and the Wind), the story plays out in a series of episodes, and the thread holding them together is sometimes rather flimsy, even if that doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter that we get seemingly important (or completely insignificant) facts rather late in the book. For example, we get this at about the half-way point, causing us to rethink our mental image of Varamo:
His mother was Chinese; he was Chinese; therefore he had to be her son; there could be no doubt about it. The conclusion was irresistible in Panama, for overwhelming demographic reasons.
Varamo is a strange book, and I do think it better for readers new to Aira to start with An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter or Ghosts (two that I think have a lot more substance to them than the rest, which are brilliant mediations on form and style, with excellent episodes, but which, for me, are not as fulfilling). One has to just let Aira go and trust that in the end it will be quite an experience, even if it’s hard to make sense of.
I also think it pays to know a bit about Aira’s creative process, which is a frequent theme in his books. For example, I think some may be disappointed that Varamo’s poem itself is hardly discussed in the book, though it is the whole reason we care about Varamo’s life at all (Aira is always brings something up and then drops it). We don’t read a line of The Song of the Virgin Child. Because we never really discuss the poem itself, it feels like a mere plot device, which can be frustrating. That said, the poem also the device that allows Aira to discuss some of his ideas about the creative act in the writing process, and, in particular, how to achieve “immediacy,” which, as Varamo is told, “is the key to good style.” (Immediacy is one thing Aira always achieves in his books.) Varamo is a great look at the mixture of form and substance and the life that creates each.
I should have posted this yesterday, but at the stroke of midnight December 23 – 24 I got incredibly sick. I agree: being sick on Christmas Eve is no fun. But I must say it was better to be sick on Christmas Eve than to go through what Gogol puts his characters through in The Night Before Christmas (Noch, pere Rozhdestvom, 1832; tr. from the Russian by Constance Garnett, 1926).
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
It begins peacefully:
The last day before Christmas had passed. A clear winter night had come; the stars peeped out; the moon rose majestically in the sky to light good people and all the world so that all might enjoy singing kolyadki and praising the Lord.
That peace doesn’t last long. Within a couple of sentences a witch has taken off and is stealing all of the stars from the skies. To make matters worse, the devil steals the moon. Such is anadolu yakasi escort bayan the setup to a type of romantic comedy. The town blacksmith, Vakula, is in love with Oksana, who, “like a beauty, was full of caprices.” Oksana’s father, Tchub, doesn’t like Vakula – not at all. But he does like Vakula’s mother, Soloha (who happens to be the witch). Unfortunately for Tchub, the devil also desires Soloha.
No one has an easy time with these relatioships. Soloha actually does desire Tchub (not the devil), but everyone is after her. Furthermore, if Vakula manages to wed the shallow Oksana, that will make it impossible for Soloha to wed Tchub (custom prohibits the parents of the young couple from wedding themselves). Not that it’s likely Vakula will be able to win Oksana’s heart. For one thing, she does not love him. For another, to make it impossible, Oksana has said that the only way she’ll marry Vakula is if he brings to her “the very slippers the Tsarita wears.”
Surely we can see where this is all going. Now that Vakula’s interests are aligned with the devil’s, they manage a way forwad.
The Night Before Christmas is a lot of fun. No, it’s not much more, but it is certainly worth the short time it takes to read it, even if holiday cheer doesn’t necessarily ring through it.
Merry Christmas to all!
Last year I reviewed Albert Cossery’s 1975 novel A Splendid Conspiracy (my review here). It was one of the Cossery books that sparked a bit of a Cossery rival (at least, among the blogs I follow, if not among the general public). It was published by New Directions at about the same time NYRB Classics published Cossery’s The Jokers (which I have but have not read). This season, both publishing houses are at it again, with NYRB Classics publishing Proud Beggars and New Directions publishing Cossery’s final novel, The Colors of Infamy (Les couleurs de l’infamie, 2000; tr. from the French by Alyson Waters, 2011).
When I read A Splendid Conspiracy, I was thrilled by his fantastic talent as a writer, but I had a bad taste in my mouth due to Cossery’s ”elevation of idleness to an art form” (that’s from The London Times), particularly as that idleness, in order to thrive, seemed to depend chiefly on taking advantage of others, often women. It was funny, and certainly a lot of it was tongue in cheek, but I didn’t feel good joining in on the mirth. Despite my initial feelings toward A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy has convinced me to keep reading Cossery. This little book was fabulous.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Written 25 years later, when Cossery was almost 90 years old, The Colors of Infamy had many of the same ideas floating around that I found in A Splendid Conspiracy – anti-materialism, anti-capitalism, subversion of authority, a deliberate refusal to become another cog in a wheel — but I found the presentation of these ideas much more palatable. For one thing, the central characters, as similar in some ways as they are to Teymour in A Splendid Conspiracy, have some kind of awareness that stretches beyond their self-satisfaction. As before, they feed off of the corrupt system and find their joy in observing the ridiculousness of it all, finding male camaraderie. However, the men in The Colors of Infamy are not held above reproach, which I felt was the case in the earlier novel. Consequently, I was able to enjoy the incredible wit and irony without flinching.
Like most of Cossery’s novels, this one is set in Cairo. As we begin, in fact, our central character, Ossama, is observing, with fascination (and a bit of gusto), the crowd around Tahrir Square, moving around in a strange state.
Resolutely circumventing every obstacle, every pitfall in their path, the people, discouraged by nothing and with no particular goal in mind, continued their journeys through the twists and turns of a city plagued by decrepitude, amid screeching horns, dust, potholes and waste, without showing the least sign of hostility or protest; the awareness of simply being alive seemed to obliterate any other thought. Every now and then the voices of the muezzins at the mosque entrances could be heard emanating from loudspeakers, like a murmuring from the beyond.
Ossama is 23 years old, and, “More than anything, Ossama enjoyed contemplating the chaos.” He grew up incredibly poor. Unfortunately, he had a relatively healthy body with no wounds or malformations, so he could never compete properly with other beggars. One day, as he’s waiting to throw himself under a cart large enough to ensure a quick death, he meets Nimr, the master thief. Nimr is impressed with Ossama and takes him under his wing, training him in the art of theft. At 23, he is excelling at his craft. Here is how Cossery introduces him:
Ossama was a thief; not a legitimate thief, such as a minister, banker, wheeler-dealer, speculator, or real estate developer; he was a modest thief with a variable income, but one whose activities — no doubt because their return was limited — have, always and everywhere, been considered an affront to the moral rules by which the affluent live.
But Ossama has found out a way perform his craft with minimal risk. He has “instinctively grasped the flaw of a society based on appearance.” When we meet him, he is dressed very well because “by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed robbers of the people, he could elude the mistrustful gaze of a police force that found every impoverished-looking individual automatically suspect.” One evening he is at a nice party and he hones in on one particular large guest. Expertly, he gets the man’s crocodile wallet and a letter. As it turns out, the letter is evidence of bribery and corruption in the ministry, and now Ossama just needs to figure out what to do with it.
It’s an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, Ossama (to be a proper Cossery protagonist) isn’t particularly interested in the money he could earn. Furthermore, he understands, with the help of some trusted friends — Nimr and Karamallah, a man who lives in his family mausoleum – that this sort of corruption is expected and forgiven. It’s not like he can actually start a revolution, if such a thing were desirable. No, the real predicament is how he can use the letter to get the best entertainment, which is interrogating and witnessing the absurdities of the system first-hand.
It’s a funny story, full of that wit that has given Cossery the title “the Voltaire of the Nile.” However, in the middle of the comedy there’s a bit of seriousness. Before Ossama has even nicked the fat man’s wallet he is found by Safira, a 17-year-old prostitute who has fallen in love with him. She finds him honorable and considers him a thief like Robin Hood. While he’s had sex with her, and was surprised by how little she charged him, he is not attracted to her and finds her a threat to his trade. Still, as badly as he treats her, a bit of compassion prevents him from being truly cruel, much to his chagrin:
In truth, his compassion for the girl prevented him from viewing her through his usual prism of ridicule and condemned him to seeing a reality whose tragic aspect he normally actively denied.
This was the sort of awareness that I felt A Splendid Conspiracy lacked. I’m still not convinced that Cossery’s ideal world could ever exist, or that it would be all that it’s cracked up to be if we managed it, just as he’s not convinced business can exist without “corrupt networks,” but at least in this novel there was, for me, a bit more heart behind the ideas. Furthermore, it seemed to leave some of the ideas open-ended, giving room for thought. As Ossama, Nimr, and Karamallah, figure out how to best handle the letter, the discussions they have make this a novel of ideas and not a polemic.
Finally, as a piece of entertainment — as someone who advocates not taking life too seriously, Cossery wants us to enjoy his book — it is wonderful. With the relative absence of derision toward the females (which really prompted me to take A Splendid Conspiracy too seriously for its good), I was able to sit back and drift pleasantly along with the prose. In fact, though I said above this is a novel of ideas, the ideas are light and presented mostly for our amusement — which perhaps makes them all the more poignant.
I’m a little late in bringing up the latest Roberto Bolaño book, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998 – 2003 (Entre parentesis, 2004; tr. by Natasha Wimmer, 2011). It came out earlier this year, and beyond the first week after its release I haven’t really heard much about it. I’m behind in getting to it for a couple of reasons: (1) I have had less time to write reviews, so I have a pile of books I’ve read and want to review but just can’t, (2) while this book has been a joy to dip into, it’s not exactly the easiest book to “review”; enjoying it, even understanding much of it, may depend a great deal on how one feels about Bolaño and his work. However, so much has Bolaño’s work grown in my estimation since I first read and reviewed 2666 (my review here) that I had to get some thoughts down here and bring Between Parentheses up again, especially if people missed in when it first came out.
Between Parentheses is a large catch-all. It purports to collect “most of the newspaper columns and articles Roberto Bolaño published between 1998 and 2003.” There’s no quality control, then, and that has upset some people. Of course, there are those (and I’m one of them) who wouldn’t have it any other way. Bolaño, even when writing off-the-cuff about things he may know little about, is at his worst still full of infectious energy. Further, most of the pieces here are very short and can be quickly skimmed or skipped altogether if necessary.
The date span, 1998 – 2003, is the approximate span of time when Bolaño was a living literary superstar. He’d published books and won some minor awards before 1998, but that was the year The Savage Detectives was first published. Between then and 2003, when he died at fifty, what he thought mattered, and he was basically given free rein to write for various publications on various topics. And here they are.
The book isn’t arranged by chronology but rather loosely by theme in six parts: 1. Three Insufferable Speeches, 2. Fragments of a Return to the Native Land, 3. Between Parentheses (Bolaño’s column in Chile’s Las Últimas Noticias), 4. Scenes, 5. The Brave Librarian, and 6. The Private Life of a Novelist. Within are speeches, interviews, long essays, brief thought bubbles, sketches for books, book reviews, etc. All the stuff we’d expect the author to have been involved in within the literary world that could be written down.
I have two favorite parts. First, the book reviews and author portraits Bolaño wrote for his column. He writes about writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Turgenev, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Harris. Some of my favorites were short but insightful pieces about a few of my favorites: César Aira (“an exceptionally perceptive chronicler of mothers (a verbal mystery) and fathers (a geometric certainty)”; you can read my reviews of Aira books here), and Horacio Castellanos Moya (“[His book El asco's] acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer”; you can read my reviews of Castellanos Moya books here). The number of authors brought up in these pages, under praise or high criticism, is large. I don’t know it, but it’s enough to keep one reading through life.
My other favorite parts are the little tidbits that give insight into Bolaño’s strange and unique work. If you haven’t read Bolaño, some of this may not make much sense, but in a piece on exile Bolaño discusses “the photographic negative of an epiphany, which is also the story of our lives in Latin America.” I cannot think of a better way to describe his work and the sensation upon finishing — “the photographic negative of an epiphany.”
Bolaño also discusses his experiences in the early 1970s when as a twenty year old he was in Chile during Pinochet’s coup. Afterwards, Bolaño was arrested and spent eight days in captivity in a schoolhouse (an event recounted a few times in his fiction). He succinctly relates how those days after the coup felt: “full days, crammed with energy, crammed with eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen.” If finishing a Bolaño book feels like looking at the photographic negative of an epiphany, reading one feels like how he describes this time in his life: “The experience of love, black humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death were condensed into no more than five interminable months that I lived in a state of amazement and urgency.” That condensing: that’s his literary work.
Bolaño’s work is powerful, and it can be powerfully confusing and off-putting. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that, while I can admire (greatly) individual pieces in his oeuvre, Bolaño’s project was greater than any single work, and each work built up toward his lofty ideas. Between Parentheses is a great companion piece, essential, I think, to anyone who really wants to dig in. It’s not that it adds up to greater comprehension (though I think it can); it’s that it continues to rearrange the puzzle pieces in interesting ways.
It’s been a couple of years since I started reading this trilogy. Though I enjoyed every bit of it, for whatever reason — no, I know the reason: the third volume is huge! — I put off reading the end. The unfortunate result is that I have also been putting off reading other books by Marías that I have been looking forward to. I just couldn’t bring myself to read them when I hadn’t finished this massive work. But now I have, and I can move on, though my suspicion is that someday I’ll return here again. These are impressive books that, no matter how intimidating they may seem and no matter how dense and circular, are surprisingly quick reads.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
This is how this trilogy begins: “One should never tell anyone anything.” Over 1,000 pages later, it ends with Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Tu rostro mañana, 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós , 2007; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, 2010). Obviously, there’s a lot this narrator has to say, and he has many many different ways to say it. This final volume is a wonderful culmination of the themes of language and power (my review of volume one here; of volume two here).
This review will not reveal any significant spoilers about this book or the prior ones, but I do want to bring up one of the central events in book two, Dance and Dream. In that book, Jaime Deza, our narrator, spends a substantial amount of time telling us, from every angle imaginable, about the night he and his boss were entertaining a foreign dignitary and his wife at a dance club. Deza and Tupra, remember, are employees of a secret agency that has as its inception the great wars of the twentieth century. It may have even once been an official government agency, but it is now private; Tupra doesn’t really know who sits at the top of the agency, yet he uses his incredible skills of deduction and induction to interpret people — people like foreign businessmen or politicians — for their clients.
As the night progressed at the dance club, a cocky man dances a bit too, uhm, harshly with the foreign dignitary’s wife. The man is a creep with a ponytail, and Deza doesn’t hesitate when Tupra tells him to get the man into the handicapped bathroom. When they three of them get to the bathroom, Deza is surprised and disgusted when Tupra wields a sword and threatens to decapitate the man. For dozens of pages Deza narrates the frightening moment when it looks like Tupra is going to kill the man (it doesn’t — or didn’t to me — get boring). As it turns out, Tupra doesn’t kill the man, though they leave the man badly injured. Deza leaves the club disgusted and tells his boss as much. This third volume picks up about there. Tupra tells Deza to come to his home; he wants to show him something and defend himself:
You criticize me for some trifling, unimportant thing that I did, but you live in a tiny world that barely exists, sheltered from the violence that has always been the norm and still is in most parts of the world, it’s like mistaking the interlude for the whole performance, you haven’t a clue, you people who never step outside of your own time or travel beyond countries like ours in which, up until the day before yesterday, violence also ruled. What I did was nothing. The lesser of two evils. And it was your fault.
What Tupra shows Deza leaves him even more shocked than the episode at the night club. I suppose it would be possible to criticize this angle in the book as something a bit trite or moralizing, but it doesn’t come off that way. We may get a glimpse at the horrors otherwise decent people do to maintain their power, but this books really delves into the different ways someone can manipulate others — or himself — with language. For example, here is how Deza responds after he sees what Tupra has to show him:
[. . .] the images slipped inside me like a foreign body that caused me immediate pain and a sense of oppression and suffocation and the urgent need for someone to remove it (‘Let me sit heavy on thy soul’), but you cannot root out what enters through the eyes, nor what enters through the ears, it installs itself inside you and there’s nothing to be done about it, or else you have to wait some time in order to be able to persuade yourself that you did not see or hear what you did see or hear — there’s always a doubt or the trace of a doubt — that it was the imagination or a misunderstanding or a mirage or a hallucination or a malicious misinterpretation [. . . ]
Deza has never been entirely comfortable with this job. Really, he took it because two of the people he most respects in the world, Toby Rylands and Peter Wheeler, were a part of it their whole lives; in fact, for all Deza knows, Rylands and Wheeler started the whole thing. Still, these revelations with Tupra lead Deza to repulsion. When he really starts looking into the evil the program is trying to grapple with, it is a poison entering into him.
To me, all of this was fascinating, but then Marías takes the book to an entirely different level. In my prior reviews of this trilogy I mentioned the fact that some of my favorite passages dealt with Deza’s estranged wife. She is hardly a character in the first two volumes, though her impact on Deza is felt all over the place. This is her volume, and all of the themes come together in a very personal way as Deza struggles to fight what he now knows he’s capable of while he saves her from an abusive relationship that she may, in fact, be welcoming. I loved it.
I’ve had Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellanállás melankóliája, 1989; tr. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, 1998) on my shelf for some time now. I have been anxious to read it, but its 314 pages of single paragraphs (there are a few breaks) left me wary. But along came Animalinside (my review here); at just over thirty pages, it was a great way to read a bit of Krasznahorkai without having to commit to such a long text. I liked it so much that almost immediately I pulled down The Melancholy of Resistance and, never-ending paragraphs be hanged, plunged in. It took me a while to read, but it was time well spent — it was an experience.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
First things first: I’m happy to say that once began, the single paragraph thing wasn’t a hurdle at all. The first section of the book is simply amazing, and I was pulled into the book and propelled forward, even though it was late at night and I was just dabbling with the idea of starting the daunting book.
It begins on a train platform. The train is late, and Krasznahorkai shows how such a thing can bend our perceptions, making it “reality, only more so.” The tension builds nicely, much as it does when you’re waiting for a late train and a bit of unwelcome chaos disconcertingly enters the day.
To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass [. . .].
Is that exaggerated? I’m not so sure. On the platform stands Mrs. Plauf, one of the unfortunate victims of the late train, and she accutely feels the threat. She’s at a strange platform simply trying to get home, and this train is going to get her there uncomfortably late at night. That is, if it comes at all.
It’s such a familiar event, the delayed train, yet Krasznahorkai goes underneath the surface and shows just how familiar the physical anxiety (that we tend to forget once the event is past) is as well, how a late train, particularly at night, takes someone out of their daily reality into some threatening altered reality. The concept is nice, and Krasznahorkai brings it out in exceptional prose, filled with long sentences and digressions that force the sentence to pivot and either tighten or loosen up, taking the familiar and bending it.
Anyway, the train does arrive, and the tension deflates a bit, though Krasznahorkai doesn’t let go of the bewilderment, doesn’t allow us to forget that something is amiss.
[. . .] they all relapsed into a jokey indifference, the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain facts, which simply goes to show how people behave when, having failed, infuriatingly, to understand something, they try to suppress the fear caused by genuine shock to a system which seems to hvae been overtaken by chaos, the nerve-rackingly repeated instances of which may be met with nothing but withering sarcasm.
Mrs. Plauf, slightly relieved, but, as the passage above shows, still shocked, takes her seat on the train. It only gets worse. On the crowded train, one man in particular has his eye on her. I won’t go into details, but it’s a terrible train ride home for Mrs. Plauf — everyone is tired and on edge, and some things happen she can hardly believe — but it’s a superb section for the reader.
I began this review with this section of the book for a couple of reasons. Obviously, this is how the book begins, so it seemed appropriate (as usual) to start the book review there too. However, this train ride is not necessarily essential to the narrative we’re about to read. In fact, the narrative we’re about to read can be summarized almost more succinctly than the train ride. On its most simplistic level, this book is about a small Hungarian town that is put on edge when a tiny circus comes to visit. The circus’s main attraction is a giant, dead whale. The circus also brings with it a gang of rabble, drawn on by The Prince, a member of the circus crew who quietly speaks gibberish that is then translated by a factotum. The residents are afraid, but one in particular, Mrs. Eszter, sees an opportunity, provided there are hostilities.
Mrs. Eszter is truly an awful character, wonderfully rendered here. One of the first scenes with her shows her first having sex with the chief of police and then, when he’s gone, simply sleeping. We spend a few pages watching the room around her ugly form as she sleeps, completely out of control, completely out of character, a harmless human lump completely inert.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time in the book by now, and a lot of time in this review, without actually introducing two of the principal characters: György Eszter, Mrs. Eszter’s estranged husband who has retired completely from society, and Valuska, the “terminally lunatic” son of Mrs. Plau. We will follow Eszter and Valuska’s perspectives through the largest section of the book, “The Werckmeister Harmonies.”
Valuska is the village idiot. He’s known best for his emotional treatises on the sun and moon, for the beauty he finds in their order, and for the confidence he has in beauty and purpose. Eszter comes from the other side; he once directed the music school and has since completely given up on any idea of order or harmony. He and Valuska are unlikely friends, each trying, kindly, to convert the other.
There is so much to discuss, so best if we move along. The whale. It echoes Moby-Dick (my review here); it is unknowable, you can’t see it all at once, etc. That much is explicit. But even more, the whale brings to mind The Leviathan, Hobbes’s treatise on anarchy and central power. We know it’s coming; soon the rabble becomes uncontrollable (perhaps The Prince uttered a command — but The Prince doesn’t command) and the whole town is overtaken by anarchy. There’s a powerful passage where one of the rabble describes their chasing a man, his wife, and their daughter through the town. They delight when they see the scared man begin to doubt his fear (they wouldn’t do anything to him and his family), but they delight even more in not completely allowing his fear to subside. It’s awful, and reading it is a visceral experience of the highest kind.
The anarchy is inexplicable, even to those creating it: “however we looked for it, we could not find a fit object for our disgust and despair.” Much of the book is self-contradictory. It often baffled me, but not in a bad way; after all, being baffled is part of the point.
Beyond the ideas, beyond the long, fantastic sentences, there are the unforgettable images. I mentioned that terrible train ride, but we later walk home with Mrs. Plauf as she sees the dirty streets and a sign announcing the arrival of the whale. We looked briefly at Mrs. Eszter sleeping; we later see her eating brandy soaked cherries. That might not sound like much here, but in context it is certainly memorable.
Each time a New Directions catalog comes in the mail, the first thing I look for is a new title by César Aira, so much have I loved what I’ve read by him. Thankfully, it seems New Directions is not slowing down their Aira releases, and we can now read the bizare The Seamstress and the Wind (La costura y el viento, 1994; tr. from the Spanish by Rosalie Knecht, 2011). Now, naked ghosts roaming a construction site, lightning striking a painter, the Macuto Line giving way to treasure, and cloned silk worms invading a city notwithstanding, I’d still say that How I Became a Nun (my review here) was the strangest Aira I’d read — until now. So it was nice to learn that when The Seamstress and the Wind was first published in Spanish, it appeared in the same volume as How I Became a Nun, whose opening pages of a childhood scene turned nightmare (we’ll get some of this in The Seamstress and the Wind, too) I still read with glee.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Why do I love reading Aira? Well, his books are incredibly immediate. We get the sense (and we’re right on the money) that Aira is writing these events on the fly, as if he’s watching the events occur as he dramatically narrates them to us. There’s so much energy behind his scenes. I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth remembering Aira’s writing process. He sits down in a cafe in the morning and writes whatever comes to mind, even allowing the events in the cafe to invade the story (like a fly, or a drunk man). In this way, his story is not only a story but also a record of its own production. He’ writes himself into puzzles and then writes himself out of them the next day, refusing to make things easy on himself by allowing extensive revision. Not just anyone can pull this off, by which I mean that few writers following this method could come up with something anyone would want to read, but somehow Aira does it, creating something not simply entertaining and certainly not simply interesting because of the method of its production; besides this, he comes up with something meaningful and thoughtful, often something haunting.
On to The Seamstress and the Wind. I just mentioned how Aira writes in a cafe and includes whatever is going on in the writing; well, here we open the book to find Aira in a cafe in Paris, writing about what he’s thinking about as he writes in a cafe in Paris. It’s the new book:
These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.”
It’s a little tricksy, sure, but writing about whatever he’s doing also serves to introduce one the issues he plays with in this book: memory; or, rather, forgetting, losing, maybe never having. We find out that the title he clings to is the result of a dream he had. It was a brilliant dream, a vivid story, a marvel he couldn’t wait to write down, and it had something to do with a seamstress and the wind.
However, when I woke up I had forgotten it. I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it. In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something . . .
So the story itself is gone, if it ever was there. Aira knows it’s pointless to try to remember, but he resists letting it go “and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself.” Aira goes on to explain how this “taking control of forgetting” is “consistent with my theory of literature.” He expresses a perhaps hypocritical disdain for writers who rely on memory and says, “Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful.”
Which leads Aira to a childhood memory that has its moment of loss and forgetting. He is playing with his friend Omar near a truck’s trailer. Aira is startled to find his friend has disappeared. He’s shocked. Omar was there and now he is not. Aira wanders home and finds out that it is much later than he thinks. Everyone is, in fact, worried about him – he had disappeared, and now he cannot remember the afternoon. He has no idea what happened to that time (even now), but the fact that so much time has passed causes him even more anxiety. After all, he has arrived, and Omar is still missing: “It wasn’t me, they were wrong . . . it was Omar who’d disappeared! It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken. And now, I though in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling. I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.”
Omar’s mother is Delia Siffoni, the local seamstress. She’s working on a wedding dress for the pregnant school teacher when she hears Omar is missing. She freaks out, takes her sewing kit and the wedding dress, jumps in a car and tells it to go! She’s certain that her son is in that trailer and on his way to the abyss — Patagonia. “What else could she do?”
Now, this is where the story gets whacked, and I mean that as a technical term. Coming home to find his wife missing since she’s fled to find their missing son, Ramón Siffoni takes off too. And then someone else takes off after them, and it’s a mad race to Patagonia. There’s a wreck, flight, a monster child, and the wind eventually falls in love. To be frank, it was a bit magical and, for me, incoherent. That’s not to say it isn’t fun, but I admit that it left me a bit baffled at times, and not in a good way. It’s says a lot for the book, then, that I came away still feeling I’d been through something powerful.
There’s a moment with Delia: ”Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?” Indeed. Who is she? What is any of this? I don’t know if there is a symbolic meaning to the monster child or the wind or any other of the strange things we encounter in this book. But there’s the forgetting, the loss, and the chase, and Aira doesn’t leave those alone, and they become a powerful look at his own childhood experiences and, perhaps, into the Argentina of his childhood. What was threatening? What was forgotten? What was lost, that perhaps never was? I will close with a passage I loved from early in the book that I think shows that, despite the whimsy, Aira is talking here about something more serious. The passage shows peace, a near surety of peace, yet a peace threatened by something, perhaps only something imagined but that, imagined, is becoming real:
How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related? A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us. Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction.
When Animalinside (2010; tr. from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, 2010) arrived in the mail, I didn’t know what to make of it. It’s a beautiful book, even though it’s staple-bound (this was published by New Directions in collaboration with Sylph Editions for Sylph Editions Cahier Series — see an example here), it is still one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve seen this year (nicely following New Direction’s releases of Robert Walser’s The Microscripts and Anne Carson’s Nox last year). When you open the matte cover, inside are a series of wonderfully textured pieces of art by Max Neumann (the back of the book says that they used “a deluxe seven-stage printing process . . . to reproduce the stunning Neumann images”). Accompanying the images are 14 short texts by Krasznahorkai. This book (or booklet, if you like) came about when Krasznahorkai wrote a response to one of Max Neumann’s paintings that Krasznahorkai had hanging up. This, in turn, inspired Neumann to create more art pieces, each using the armless, lunging hound-like creature you see below. Krasznahorkai then wrote short segments for each of those pictures, and we are fortunate to benefit with their end product.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Two of Krasznahorkai’s books are available in English from New Directions, and another is due out later this year. However, I haven’t read them yet. That’s a big yet there; so much did I enjoy what I found in Animalinside that I’m sure I’ll be reading The Melancholy of Resistance and War & Warvery soon. Still, I’m writing this post as a reader who has, on the one hand, no experience with Krasznahorkai I can use to engage with this little book; on the other hand, I also no preconceptions about Krasznahorkai’s work and can say that, if you haven’t read him either, that shouldn’t stop you from reading this one.
On the topic of reading Animalinside: this is a limited edition. Only 2,000 copies are out there. I’m sorry; I will be keeping mine and keeping it safe.
Back to when this book arrived in the mail and I didn’t know what to make of it. After the short preface by Colm Tóibín I find a strange picture of a simple three-dimensional space. Hulking there is a solid black, two-dimensional beast (it’s not the armless one above yet); it stands in the room at some strange angle that is all wrong. Under the image is the first section, and I give the first few lines a skim:
He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened there by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing else to do but howl, and now and forever he shall be nothing but his own tautening and his own howling, everything he was is no more, everything that could shall never be, so that for him there is not even anything that is.
I was certainly intrigued, but also a bit wary. Is it going to be a bit too artsy for my tastes? Would this abstract text accompanying the (fantastic) abstract images open up for me? Is this going to be a run-on rant?
Quickly, though — very quickly, despite a bit of wariness – I was taken in, propelled forward by the text and the images on the page. It’s a beautiful nightmare; a very unique experience.
Before I had any idea what was really going on (and I admit, it’s not necessarily all clear to me even now), I was simply enjoying the imagery and the prowling menance that, at first, is locked up in that room. The first section is told in the third person, but soon the beast is speaking, and he’s speaking to the reader, speaking right to the reader’s disorientation.
[. . .] you know nothing, nothing, but nothing, about anything, because you don’t even know that you’re thinking about me, because you don’t even know if you should be afraid now or not, or if you should be terrified or if you should be anxious [. . .]
It’s important to remember that all of this is accompanied by images that are themselves disorienting. There’s a calm surface, but details and just the strangeness of the images subvert any calm to build up, initially (before it gets downright terrifying in its imagery), a slight anxiety. We don’t hear the creature howling, whether in mourning or to threaten, but how can we look at the image and not imagine it.
Krasznahorkai’s text does not necessarily remain abstract. This beast is threatening absolute destruction, and not just physical: ”no verb at all shall ever be heard again[ . . .]”
But that’s just the narrative. It’s how Krasznahorkai (with Neumann) gets to that ultimate destruction and what we see there when we get there that makes this book a work of art and not just an accomplished post-apocalyptic image. The short segments are filled with repetitions, in the best sense. Apparently Krasznahorkai told his translator, “There are many repetitions in the text, and this is very important; repeat everything exactly as it is in the original regardless of what the English language WANTS.” I’d say it was successful; even in translation, there’s a rhythm throughout that intensifies or retreats slightly, depending on the moment.
Animalinside is also filled with contradictions, and these supply what to me is the most interesting and worthwhile substance here. At first the beast is ranting because he’s imprisoned somehow, in the next he covers infinite space — and he’s coming! And in one moment he’s coming from the outside, in the next he’s already inside us. There, he’s predicting the end of all things and then here he is lamenting infinity. Finally, we get that last section when “no verb at all shall ever be heard again.” Of course, he’s speaking and we are listening, so what has really been lost? What is the significance? And that is the frightening answer.
I don’t believe Animalinside will be for everybody, though I think it’s one of the more interesting books I’ve read (and looked at) this year, and I’d certainly recommend it even to those wary of it.
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