Click 
I’ve been looking forward to this book all year but not because I knew what it was about. No, I admit that in this case my anticipation was built up by something that could very well have been a mere gimmick. B.S. Johnson, who committed suicide in 1973, was an experimental novelist. Sometimes experiments in literary form are interesting only because they are unique but lack any other quality — in other words, they are experimentation for experimentation sake, and not because the unique form fits the subject and enhances a reader’s experience with that subject. Worse, experimentation can detract from the subject. So I was excited about this book, but I was afraid of being let down. By all accounts, though, Johnson knew what he was doing and garnered comparisons to Joyce and Beckett (though I actually found him to be much clearer). One of Johnson’s more famous literary experiments was Albert Angelo (1964). While reading, readers have the opportunity to glance at later passage in the book since many of the pages have holes cut into them. I haven’t read it, but reviewers I respect have, and they recommend it. This fall, New Directions has reissued B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a book in a box.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The Unfortunates comes in a box because it is a book with no binding. The first section and last section are marked, but the 25 sections in between, which range from a paragraph to 12 pages, are meant to be read in any random order the reader chooses. As we read them, in whatever order, the events coalesce into something congruent. That’s not entirely unique in today’s world of post-linear narrative. However, the fact that we the readers have a hand in ordering this randomness — that we get to exercise, and thus witness, arbitrary whims — does have an effect on our reading.
But still, here is the question I had upon approaching the book: Does the form become the subject, or does the form illuminate the subject? Johnson’s intent in experimenting with form was to mimic the randomness of memory. One bit of the past may pop up at one moment. In the next moment, any other can pop up in its place. Though random and arbitrary, the order in which memories pop up can have an effect on the way we remember something.
But the form here isn’t perfectly fit to convey the intended feeling. After all, if my mind is randomly retrieving memories while I walk around a city full of associations with my past, each discreet memory is still laden with the weight of all of the memories collectively, even those I’m not conscious of at the moment. But while we read these memories in random order, we don’t have the benefit of the whole until the end. So the first time we come across, say, Wendy, she’s completely new to us, and we do not know her relationship with the narrator. The way we’ve been taught to read books leads us to make assumptions and await further revelations, but that first passage of Wendy is completely unburdened by any even that came before or after the one we are reading. I don’t know how one could accurately mimic this in writing because, at least sentence by sentence, writing is linear when read even if the narrative is nonlinear.
Here the overlying narrative is simple. The narrator (Johnson himself) is a disenchanted (if he ever was enchanted) sportswriter. His latest assignment is to cover the City vs. United match in a city he hasn’t visited in a long time. Upon arriving he finds himself haunted by painful memories associated with the place. In particular, he remembers his friend Tony’s death from cancer. As we read, we might read first the touching short section wherein Tony dies, or perhaps the one just before Tony’s death when the narrator is standing by Tony’s bedside rushing a bit because his car is running and waiting for him outside (his life will go on). Or we might read first about a moment of hope, either the one when the doctors thought they had removed the cancer, or this one where we learn that before treatment, they hoped the lump would just go away:
But it did not, had gone on growing, when he eventually went to another doctor it was a month later, in Chester, he had been so busy and tired out with looking for somewhere for them all to live, he was in digs himself: and it had grown larger, rapidly, and this doctor, the new one, knew bloody well what it was, at once, was astonished that it had grown so quickly, sent him to hospital at once, they too had never, he said, known a tumour to grow so fast, and I clinically noted that yet again everything to do with him he believed to be the biggest, the most important, unique. And he ended tritely, with a warning, saying if ever I myself had a lump, which grew, or any lump, to go to a doctor straight away, not worry about overworking him, and not to hope, not to imagine it would go away of its own accord, for speed is of the essence, he said, the cliché, even a few hours, apparently, and it might be too late.
The arrangement of words in that passage deserves a post all on its own. Johnson’s abundant use of commas would be annoying in someone less skilled, but look how he uses them to interrupt us, forcing us to interpret what he’s written before he adds a new dimension by continuing the sentence. There’s the part, “And he ended tritely,” which, when I hit that comma, I took to mean that his death was trite. I believe Johnson intended the reader to think that, if just for a moment, though we see that phrase was really leading to this: Tony ended the conversation with a trite instruction and a trite cliché. There is also the “and not to hope,” which, set off by commas and then iterrupted from its flow by “not to imagine,” takes on a deeper meaning that ”not to hope . . . it would go away of its own accord.” It is on the local sentence level that Johnson really succeeds in mimicing the multifaceted randomness and revisioning of remembering.
That’s not to say that the book’s global form — the random sections — is ineffective. On the contrary, I think it was ingenious. It’s just that it’s more like we have stumbled onto an assortment of painful ruminations randomly ordered in a box. But it is also more than that. One reason this randomness works is because it mimics the randomness of emotion. At one time the narrator can be happily recalling times before Tony was diagnosed with cancer, a time when Tony and his wife and the narrator and his girlfriend were young and banking on the future. The next moment can be melancholy. The next cynical. The next acerbic.
However, there is a deeper, subversive current in this book on life and death where the experiment with the global form really hits the mark. The randomness enhances some underlying premises the narrator fully believes in: life is random, death is arbitrary, and both life and death through the passage of time are meaningless. And whatever the case, life and death definitely are not ordered. This worldview pervades the entire book, every section, every memory, every activity the narrator engages in. Giving the reader a hand in this arbitrariness also invites us to consider meaninglessness. One of my favorite sections in the book is the one where the narrator is composing his article on the incredibly dull City vs. United soccer game. As he composes and revises he constantly wonders if the way he arranges the words even matters, if the way he organizes the story matters, if the story itself even matters. Of course it doesn’t.
As a final coda to this review, I would like to disclose the final lines in the book. It is not a spoiler, but I think they showcase some of Johnson’s fine skill in arrangement (so strange to find such well executed organization in a “random” book). There are multiple ways to interpret this sentence because of the commas and the various ways we can rearrange the phrases with the other parts of the sentence, which is perfectly acceptable when the commas supposedly set-off non-restrictive phrases. But, more importantly perhaps, this sentence showcases the variety of tone and the depth of emotion that this book carries because of the multiple possible interpretations based on association.
Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us.
Have you ever started a book thinking that the title and the blurbs disclosed too much? That though it still promises to be well written and interesting, you wish the ending hadn’t been alluded to? That’s how I felt when I started The She-Devil in the Mirror (La Diabola [sic: Diabla??] en el Espejo, 2000; tr. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, 2009). It’s a murder mystery monologue by a “fabulously unreliable” narrator, the “she-devil.” I was very wrong to think that I knew how this book would play out. As I’ve found in many of New Directions’ publications, the subject is never quite so easy to pin down.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
As I said above, this is a murder mystery delivered as a kind of dramatic monologue, like, for example, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Though I liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I think She-Devil used the device to much greater effect. In other words, I thought The Reluctant Fundamentalist had a great story and great bits about identity and emotion, but the monologue felt forced and more like a gimmick in the end, though I do understand why it was used; She-Devil, on the other hand, never felt gimmicky. And in the end, the device effects quite an illuminating surprise. Here’s how it begins:
How could such a tragedy have happened, my dear? I just spent the whole morning with Olga María at her boutique at the the Villa Españolas Mall, she had to check on a special order. I still can’t believe it; it’s like a nightmare.
Our narrator, that “fantastically unreliable” narrator, is Laura Rivera, a thirty year old woman and apparently the best friend of the murdered Olga María — at least, that is what she says, and we have no reason to doubt her, really. Something I didn’t expect from this Latin American novel is that Laura is upper class: “I’ve had only BMWs for about twelve years now, ever since papa gave me my first car when I turned eighteen and entered the university.” Most of the Latin American books I’ve read lately have dealt largely with the commoner, and they’ve been largely political because of that perspective. This one has a different feel because of the different perspective, though the political elements are present. This is post-civil war San Salvador, and it’s effects have drifted out into the populous, even those who are in many ways oblivious, like Laura.
Laura is in a state of shock as the book begins; after all, she has just found her that her best friend has just been murdered. However, due to the gossipy feel of her monologue, we get the feeling that the shock is just as much the effect of her having been with her best friend only hours before. It’s the proximity to death, in other words. The indignity she shows feels feigned. However, in Laura’s defense, she is genuinely shocked about the manner of the death. Olga María was killed in cold blood, in her own living room, in front of her young children. There is no apparent motive:
That’s when little Olga told me about the murderer and how all he wanteed was to kill Olga María: she told him to take the car, whatever he wanted, just don’t hurt them, especially not the girls; but he didn’t want anything, he just wanted to kill her, like someone had sent him, like he’d been given explicit insructions. Something smells rotten, because Olga María couldn’t have any enemies.
The bulk of the book is Laura’s attempts to rationalize the murder, to try to find something in the little she knows about Olga María’s past that could explain the death. She comes up with some pretty good theories, as outlandish as they may at first seem. The outlandishness is part of the point. But, Laura says, “I’m not paranoid.”
There is so much to admire in this book. Castellanos Moya’s narrator is wonderfully rendered. We can feel just how out of touch she is as she talks about the past or even the murder but then gets hung up on what someone is wearing. She’s a fan of the melodramatic Brazilian telenovelas, and we’re not sure how much of what she’s saying is based on ideas and emotions shes learned from these pastimes. But it’s not just this aspect of Laura’s personality that is well done. I thought this next paragraph was particularly enlightening:
After I hung up, after all the excitement of having solved the case, I got paralyzed. It was like I saw a blinding light. I felt this terrible dread, as if my discovery, that I’d solved the case, could cost me my life. I didn’t want to keep thinking. So, instead, I called Doña Olga.
Here’s Laura – maybe paranoid, maybe not; maybe correct about her theory, maybe not — avoiding her own ideas by calling Olga María’s mother. This is a great mystery novel, but more than that, it is a great look at how the paranoia permeating post-conflict societies,even those purporting to be democratic, can influence even those who are, for the most part, untouched and out-of-touch. I had no idea going in just how powerful this book would be.
Earlier this year I bought all of W.G. Sebald’s “fictions” and decided to read them in chronological order, starting with Vertigo. I was incredibly affected by that book, where the narrator seemed capable of making the past tangible as he roamed paths where Stendhal, Cassanova, and Kafka wandered. It was hauntingly real. However, having now read Sebald’s second book (the first published in English), The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1993; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1996), I feel as though Vertigo were more of a tutorial, a primer, preparing me for the richer, even more tangible past in The Emigrants.
In The Emigrants time and space again contract as our narrator, whom I’ll call Sebald, traces the steps of the dead, going to their home, listening to or reading their stories, and — it’s beautiful — looking at their photographs, which are embedded in the text. And though in Vertigo Sebald managed to make everything very intimate, in The Emigrants the intimacy is much more intense. Yet still I’m reading about people I know nothing about; their experiences are not part of my heritage.
The Emigrants is divided into four accounts: that of (1) Dr. Henry Selwyn, whose family emigrated from Lithuania from England, a secret he kept from his wife for a while; (2) Paul Bereyter, a quarter-Jew, still discriminated against though he served in the Wehrmacth, who taught Sebald in school and, later in life, emigrated to France; (3) Ambros Adelwarth, Sebald’s great-uncle, who travelled the Near East with a great friend but who, when that friend was committed to a mental institution, then went to be the butler to that friend’s family in Long Island; and (4) Max Ferber, a painter in Manchester, who ended up in Manchester when his parents succeeded in sending him away from Germany on a plane in 1939 but then failed to get themselves out.
The book begins with a picture of a cemetery, the same one showed on the cover above. It is 1970, and Sebald is driving around the English countryside with his wife, taking everything in, apparently, though not fully understanding the weight of everything he sees. At least, he doesn’t know how much he will eventually be affected by Dr. Henry Selwyn, the husband of his new landlord. Dr. Selwyn is surprisingly open to Sebald, telling him about a past friend named Naegeli, with whom he climbed mountains:
I can still see him standing at the station at Meiringen, waving. But I may only be imagining it, Dr Selwyn went on in a lower tone, to himself, since Elli has come to seem a stranger to me over the years, whereas Naegeli seems closer whenever he comes to my mind, despite the fact that I never saw him again after that farewell in Meiringen.
Naegeli disappeared, and they think that he was buried in the snow. Dr. Selwyn doesn’t cease divulging to Sebald there. In a later visit, he tells more of his past, “prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick,” Sebald says. Interestingly, the fact that Sebald himself is an emigrant stays underneath the narrative most of the time. Dr. Selwyn tells Sebald of his emigration to England (they thought they’d landed in New York, got off the boat, and, realizing their mistake, decided to stay). Henry Selwyn’s name was Hersch Seweryn. When Dr. Selwyn finally divulged this information to his wife, their relationship changed. Now, he thinks his secret is what made them drift apart. Sebald finds out later that Dr. Selwyn eventually took his own life. As shaking as this must have been, Sebald says, “I had no great difficulty in overcoming the initial shock.” Years pass.
But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.
Many times throughout the book we find the past encroaching on the present, whether in the lives of the subjects or Sebald:
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
As he grows older, he begins to feel the weight of history. Or, perhaps more exact, he begins to understand the nature of time as it moves through people, and he begins to devote his time to finding the past these people left behind, the past they themselves have tried to forget. One of tales is told primarily by Mme Landau, and she talks about “the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget. . .”
But Sebald suggests they don’t forget. In fact, it’s all they can remember, and it follows them everywhere, to their death. This is a fantastic book, and while I’d love to keep paraphrasing the accounts and quoting Sebald, I think the best thing is to say you should read this book.
I love it when I read two books that seem to be speaking to each other. Badenheim 1939 dealt with a group of ordinary middle-class civilians who were forced to confront violence and death. Now we in North America can read The Armies (Los Ejércitos, 2007; tr. from the Spanish by Anne McLean, 2009; winner of the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Award) (it was published in Great Britain earlier this year). As Badenheim 1939, in The Armies we watch as the residents of San José, a rural Colombian village, struggle to survive as their livelihoods are increasingly disturbed and ultimately destroyed by the senseless violence of battles that have nothing to do with them.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
That is not to say that if you’ve read Badenheim 1939 you have already read The Armies. They are very different. The Armies, for one thing, is much more violent. Yet if violence disturbs you, you might be surprised at how compassionately, tenderly Rosero’s narrator recounts what he’s seeing.
We first meet Ismail Pasos, our seventy-year-old narrator, while he is up a ladder picking oranges, peering over the wall at Geraldina, the wife of his neighbor, Eusebio Almida. She is carelessly lying naked in the sunshine while macaws laugh nearby. Ismail’s wife, Otilia, is “further back.” In his old age Ismail has lost his ability to be discreet, and everyone knows why he spends his time peering over a wall. His wife thinks he’s pathetic, but says she cares more for her fish and cats. Eusebio and Geraldina think he’s harmless.
Ismail and Otilia are both retired school teachers. They are established in the community of San José, and though their daughter keeps imploring them to move away to live with her, they have no intention of leaving. At first this seems strange, given the frequent violence in the city brought on by “the guerrillas, the paramilitary, the army and the drug traffickers”:
The hundreds of hectares of coca planted around San José in the last few years, the “strategic location” of our town, as those in the know classify us in the newspapers, have made of this territory what the protagonists of the war also call “the corridor,” dominion over which they fight tooth and nail, and which causes the war to surface in everyone’s pores: this is what people talk about in the street, in furtive hours, and they talk in words and curses, laughter and laments, silence, invocations.
However, we soon learn that Ismail and Otilia are used to violence. They met in a train station. They were sitting there when a fat man in a white suit, sitting near them, was shot and killed by an eleven or twelve year old. When teaching school one of the students was “not yet twenty when he was killed, in the street, by a stray bullet, without anyone knowing who, where from, how.” Ismail and Otilia still visit one of their neighbors on the anniversary of the day her husband disappeared. And only two years ago, dynamite exploded in the church, killing fourteen and wounding and wounding sixty-four. Knowing this makes Ismail’s following question and answer very interesting:
Where have I existed these years? I answer myself: up on the wall, peering over.
Ismail and Otilia cannot comprehend what they are about to witness, though. One morning, Ismail got out of bed early, wandered around town, and got arrested. He knows the presence of the soldiers is bad news, but he is released and is anxious to tell his wife the story. On his way home, he finds that the army (who knows which one) has taken away Eusebio, his neighbor, and two of their children. Several people are trying to comfort Geraldina:
“But do you know what this is like?” she asks him, with sudden force, as if rebelling.
“I know, we all know,” the doctor replies, looking around.
We all, in our turn, look at each other, and it is as if we did not really know, as if in a surreptitious way we understood, without shame, that we do not know what this is like, but this not knowing is not our fault, this we do seem to know.
She has turned back to me.
“He came in at midnight with other men and took the children, just like that, profesor. He took the children, saying nothing, without a word to me, like a dead man. The other men held guns on him: I’m sure they had forbidden him to speak, don’t you think? That’s why he could not say anything to me. I don’t want to think he couldn’t speak out of pure cowardice. He himself took the children by the hand. . . .”
It becomes worse for Ismail himself when he goes home and can’t find Otilia. She has gone looking for him, and now he’s always a step behind her. It’s truly tender how he searches and searches and talks to Otilia. Here is a wonderful passage, a good example of the quality of the prose and of Rosero’s ability to play with rhythm and imagery to make it all tangible.
My arms and legs swing with no rhythm whatsoever as I proceed along the streets as if through piles of cotton, what bad dream do these empty, uneasy streets belong to; down each of them I am pursued by physical, floating, dark air, although I see that the sun weighs heavily on the streets: why did I not bring my hat?
That last little bit there about the hat — it is a perfect coda to this great, weary sentence, bringing the dreaminess back to the quotidian. In fact, several times while searching for his wife and witnessing unspeakable violence, Ismail is embarrassed at his preponderance to be distracted by, say, a woman’s thigh. He’s humiliated and he cannot seem to help it, yet in him we recognize a humanity that is worthy of emulation.
In case it is not apparent in this review, I found this book to be masterful. McLean’s translation is flawless, definitely worthy of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Rosero’s writing and story are beautiful and worthy of our time. I read it in one very busy day, and in the end I wanted to sit in reverent silence for the wonderful writing and especially for the tragic story it tells.
It’s a great time for English readers. After years of neglect, Robert Walser’s novels have now all been translated into English, the last being his first : The Tanners (Der Geschwistern Tanner, 1907; tr. from the German by Susan Bernofsky, 2009 — click here for an interview with Susan Bernofsky by Jed Lipinski). The others are The Robber, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten. We can finally know what those famous German writers – including Kafka, Hesse, Benjamin, Sebald, and Handke — have been talking about and admiring. Of course, there is still a lot of work to do: these novels represent only a small fraction of Walser’s output. He mostly wrote short stories. I’m excited for the work to continue — this was only my introduction to Robert Walser!
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Well, my real introduction to Walser was in the wonderful W.G. Sebald essay, which New Directions packaged with the novel. Of course, the essay includes fantastic insights as Sebald traces his personal connection to Walser as well as Walser’s achievements in prose. And there are a few pictures. It’s a treasure, alone worth the price of the book. Walser’s biography, which Sebald touches on, is fascinating and tragic — as exciting as most books I’ve read lately.
That’s not to say the novel The Tanners isn’t worth the price of the book. It’s worth buying two! What we have here is the first novel written by someone who must be one of the best writers of the twentieth century. I had read of Walser’s reputation before I read this book, and I armed myself with what I thought to be an appropriate amount of scepticism — to avoid disappointment – but I was blown away by the light sentences. The precision with which Walser captures the seasons and the times of day makes the experience of reading these impressions almost surreal. Truly, Susan Bernofsky did a fantastic job translating this book.
On its face, the book is an account of the five Tanner siblings: Klaus, Kaspar, Hedwig, Emil, and Simon. Simon, “the youngest and the one who occasions the fewest hopes,” is the principal character; we follow him throughout the book as he seeks for jobs and encounters his siblings. The siblings come into the narrative only now and again, though all are masterfully real, even Emil whom we hear about in only a couple of small passages late in the book. Simon is a wanderer, a loafer, he cannot submit to working for anyone for very long. He’s funny, and yet we never forget there is a lot of sadness under the light prose.
At the beginning of the book Simon is seeking a job with a small book shop. He seems to be forthright: “to be perfectly truthful, any inquiries concerning my person you might make will only result in your hearing bad reports.” This chapter seems to be a nice introduction to a lengthy book about Simon’s struggles in a bookshop. The owner is, as are most all characters, alive in the prose — at least, alive enough I expected his relationship with Simon to continue. But within just a few pages, Simon has quit this job. When the indignant owner asks what Simon could possibly be thinking, Simon launches into a long monologue about how the job is below him. Just as he charmed the owner into giving him the job in the first place, Simon now thoroughly offends him for giving Simon a job beneath his dignity — but it’s still rather charming to us readers. And that is the last we hear from the owner; Simon moves on. Similar episodes occur frequently throughout the novel. Here is a later example:
When I found myself running late today, I merely felt angry and annoyed, I was by no means filled with honest conscientious concern, nor did I reproach myself, or if I did so, it was only for still being such a cowardly fool that I leap to my feet at the stroke of eight and start running like a wind-up clock that runs whenever it’s wound. I thank you for having the energy to dismiss me and request that you think of me however you please. You are surely an admirable, commendable, great man, but, you see, I too wish to be one, and that’s why it’s good you’re sending me away, why it was so advantageous for me to comport myself today in a manner one might call unseemly.
A few sentences later, this boss discusses Simon’s reference letter. Here is Simon’s telling response:
I am glad to be leaving you without a letter in hand, for a reference from you would only remind me of my own cowardice and fear, a condition of sluggishness and relinquished strength, of days spent in idleness, afternoons filled with furious attempts at escape, evenings dedicated to sweet but pointless longings.
We quickly learn that Simon often launches into such rambling though pointed and beguiling monologues (“But it’s my habit to say anything and everything that comes to my mind, even if it should happen to be, for example, self-praise.”). The length of these monologues is the only gripe I have about the book, and it’s not a true gripe; they were just some of the more difficult and slower passages for me. Some paragraphs run on for pages, and Simon, though eloquent, is also frustratingly contradictory — we never know when he’s being honest and when he’s just saying something to please himself with his cleverness. So this cause for a gripe, it turns out, is instead a strength in the story. Walser, very aware of Simon’s preponderance to speak at length, comically inserts at one point, “At just this moment when he was preparing to launch into a monologue, a scream rang out in the corridor, followed immediately by the loud crash of crockery falling to the ground.”
Despite his flippancy and fickleness, Simon is a likeable — even admirable — character. He has an attractive joie de vivrethat at once is the cause and excuse of his failings. He wakes in the morning and finds the new day beautiful and promising (and Walser describes these moments with his own joie de vivre). Simon wants to live for the present. He has no interest in the future or in the past. Walser’s prose — the diction and syntax – seems to emphasize this in a very strange way. In his introduction, Sebald says that Walser writes each sentence to make us forget the preceding sentence. I found this hard to comprehend (I still do), yet it was very much my experience when reading The Tanners. Walser’s writing is so potent and vivacious, it is consistently trampling over itself with new delights and moments of lucidity. As the prose moves one, characters also come and go with little fanfare, frequently upsetting the readers’ expectations since the characters become so real and tragic. Yet for all of this forgetting, it makes the novel hold an impression of the weight of living — without ever becoming impressionistic! In the following example we meet Rosa, one of Simon’s friends. Simon is about to leave her, but I expected him to return to her after only a few pages.
Rosa held out her little hand to her young friend, who kissed it, said good night and departed. When he was gone, little Rosa sat there for a long time crying quietly to herself. She was weeping over her beloved, a young man with curls on his head, an elegant gait, an aristocratic mouth, but a dissolute lifestyle. “And so you love the one who doesn’t deserve it,” she said to herself, “and yet should I love out of reason, out of wishing to assign value? How laughable. What do I care about what is valuable — all I want is what I love.” Then she went to bed.
Except for a few brief scenes, Rosa, who has now gained the reader’s sympathy, leaves the narrative. We almost forget about her and her unrequited love for the unworthy Simon. When she does return, we again sense how pathetic her feelings are: ”She was delighted to see him again after such a long time, but called him wicked and disloyal for having abandoned her like that, saying these things more in a pouting than an aggrieved tone of voice, and she would not be dissuaded from giving Simon a glass of red wine to drink, saying it would strengthen him for his nocturnal journey. She also quickly fried a sausage for him on her gas stove . . .” (By the way, that nocturnal journey Rosa refers to is fantastic.)
Simon’s lust for life, as can be seen in the brief encounters with Rosa (whom he leaves again quickly after she has fed him), forms part of the book’s tragedy. The other Tanner siblings (Emil excepted, presumably), worry about Simon. They all have professions of some sort, and they hope Simon will get his feet on the ground and anchor himself to some fulfilling profession. However, the siblings, particularly Hedwig, also find Simon’s lifestyle attractive. One winter, after ignoring his sister for years, Simon moves in with Hedwig. She works as a school teacher in the country and makes little money, but together they are happy passing away the evenings talking. Nevertheless, Hedwig feels unfulfilled herself. One evening (she’ll see things differently in the morning) Hedwig says: “I almost have the impression there’s something like a thin but opaque wall cutting me off from life. I can’t even manage to feel sad about it, just pensive. . . .” Though she is established in a country community, Hedwig longs for some change. Simon becomes more than just a brother to her; he becomes a life-filled companion with whom she longs to remain, though she knows he’s a usurper: “What a pity you can’t be more to me: This too you’d do willingly; for I see you nodding your head.” In the end, Hedwig sends him on his way, saying, “Neglect me, just as you used to neglect me.” Comforting herself, she says some lines that echo in the novel: “You haven’t the slightest talent for leaving behind memories. You don’t leave behind anything at all.” Their relationship, the subject of only a fraction of this novel, is touching, twisted, comic, sad, and tragic.
In this review I’ve managed to touch on only a scintilla of what this plotless, meandering book offers. Emil, “who is unfortunate and nothing more,” for example, adds a whole new dimension to the story in his brief, late introduction. He’s the mad brother, and it is suggested that “perhaps madness just ran in the family.” There are many other wonderful characters that leave behind ghosts of themselves when the leave the narrative. Their vague feelings make them all the more realistic.
After experiencing a wonderful connection with Bolaño in By Night in Chile I was excited to receive a copy of his next book to be translated into English: The Skating Rink (La Pista de Hielo, 1993; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2009). And now that I’ve finished that, though it wasn’t as impressive as others, I can’t wait to read more. Perhaps I’m turning into — or simply uncovering the fact that I am — a visceral realist. Whatever the case, I’m definitely enjoying what happens to me when I read Bolaño. First, I welcome the disorientation as I try to figure out just what is going on, who is speaking, and what is important in the details. Then, as all of that becomes clear — well, not necessarily clear, but the pages do turn — I enjoy the satisfying feeling of putting pieces together. And then, and this is strangely the best part, I enjoy the nameless feeling I experience when I realize that all of the pieces fit together to form yet another puzzle; or rather, that the pieces I put together don’t quite get to a solution but fit together in countless other ways, and I’m not sure any of those ways of piecing together will get me to a clear and final resolution either.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Scott Esposito, in a fantastic review of this book, said it reads like “a stripped-down version of The Savage Detectives.” I have not read The Savage Detectives yet, and I’m thinking that The Skating Rink might be a good gateway to that much larger, much more complex work. For those who’ve read and loved The Savage Detectives, this book might be a disappointing step backwards — of course that makes sense because it was written before The Savage Detectives. However, for those who’ve determined to be a Bolaño nut, this early work shows the seeds of what was to come. All of this comparison to The Savage Detectives might muddle the independent merits of The Skating Rink. It’s a great, complex story in its own right.
In this book, three narrators (not dozens as in The Savage Detectives) recount the events of a summer season in Z, a resort town close to Barcelona. Remo Morán is a Chilean businessman, successful and rich. He has an affair with the beautiful ice skating star Nuria Martí. Gaspar Heredia is a roaming poet whom Morán knew when they were both young (The novel’s fist lines: “The first time I saw him, it was in the Calle Bucareli, in Mexico City, that is, back in the vague shifty territory of our adolescence, the province of hardened poets, on a night of heavy fog, which slowed traffic and prompted conversations about that odd phenomenon, so rare in Mexico City at night, at least as far as I can remember.”). Heredia’s wanderings and needs have brought him to Morán who, despite Heredia’s illegal status, offers him a job as a watchman at a campground. The third narrator is Enric Rosquelles, a corrupt municipal bureaucrat in charge of the Social Services Department. He’s fat and whiny and in love with Nuria. In the abandoned Palacio Benvingut, he constructs for Nuria the skating rink of the title, from public funds (“Or, no, they did care about the money, of course they did, but not enough to work overtime trying to find out where it had gone.”).
From page one we know something bad has happened, a murder most likely, though none of the narrators addresses it straight-on until two-thirds of the way through the book. Or rather they are addressing it straight-on; we just don’t have enough of the important details to put it all together and know what they’re talking about (it almost certainly requires a second reading, which in my case was even more pleasureful than the first). Nevertheless, the murder is, in the words of Morán, the reason they are telling this story. As a reader with certain expectations, I thought the book would introduce a cast of characters, any of whom could be the murderer or the victim (we don’t know who’s killed until that two-thirds point) and then the clues would start to come together until — ta-da — the murderer is found, his or her motives are cleared up, and the narrators drift away, glad that their confession has lightened the burden of that summer. Or, and perhaps even better, the narrators never get that sense of closure they hoped for, and that, in itself, is a form of closure for the book. But who’s concerned about closure here? Not only that — who’s concerned about the truth? Especially when it’s primarily made up of dry facts, like who killed whom (both of those questions are cleared up with little fanfare).
The men are telling this story independent of one another, so often the accounts differ in tone and even in facts. They add up only to a certain degree, and the rest remains inexplicable. But that’s part of the puzzle — and the puzzle is the point. The men are telling this story to figure out how that summer affected them, and they can grasp it no better than the reader can. One might suspect a book like this would be highly frustrating. Indeed, I was frustrated at the end of 2666 for some of these reasons (though there it felt as if even the puzzle were missing). However, The Skating Rink is a complete book. The puzzle and its pieces are there.
A central part of the puzzle is a character named Caridad, a vagabond who wanders around Z with an old opera singer and carries a kitchen knife around under her shirt. Heredia is infatuated with Caridad and “got into the habit of walking around town in the vague hope of running into Caridad.” One night he follows her to the place where she has been camping out – the Palacio Benvingut. While wandering around the maze of passages, Heredia finds the cold wind that directs him to the skating rink. Nuria is there skating and Rosquellessits on the side watching. It’s a haunting passage, and important, though on a first reading one might not understand the depth of emotion — it’s almost terror — Heredia felt at the time.
Each of the three narrators eventually finds his way to the skating rink. One comments on the walk through the palace where “the passage formed concentric circles around the skating rink.” This leads to one of the principal passages in the book — a passage that describes the setting, the themes, and the book’s structure all in one go:
From that vantage point I had a panoramic view of what looked like a labyrinth with a frozen center . . .
For those interested in venturing into the world of Bolaño for the first time, this might be the best place to start. It’s short and fairly direct in its abstractions, and it just might open the door to Bolaño. For those who’ve been reading Bolaño, this book is another piece in the larger puzzle and design and, therefore, indispensable.
When I got this title in the mail I had no idea what to expect, but it sure looked intriguing. I know nothing about Hebrew literature, though earlier this year there was an excellent short story translated from Hebrew published in the New Yorker. The cover of Curriculum Vitae (2007; translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole, 2009) is excellent, I think. Throughout the book, Hoffmann has illustrated passages with simple yet remarkable line sketches, and they adorn this cover. Seeing the pages populated by those drawings made the book even more compelling.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
What I found alongside those drawings was a very strange little book. Hoffmann has written an elusive memoir/novel in tiny episodes that span his life — from his early days in Palestine to his two marriages to his fascination with Japanese Buddhism. The life sketches remark on the big moments and on the banal ones. Together, the discussion of these moments give a nice feel:
In those days, Van Gogh’s picture of boats on the shore hung on everyone’s wall. Bus drivers earned more than ministers, and civil servants, literally, kicked the citizens around. The sun was formed from thousands of colorful pieces of cloth at the Lodzia factory.
My father’s father, Isaac Emerich, rose to the heavens on invisible stairs and took a seat there at a weightless café. On the earth’s surface, his widow, my grandmother Emma, bought herself a new coat.
At times the episodes seem random and even pointless: “A woman named Mina Katznelson, from Kibbutz Kinneret, sold me five beehives.” Such sentences are common, and often they are followed by a similarly random tidbit from Hoffmann’s life that seems to have no significance other than the fact that it’s one of his memories. While the randomness could get tedious, the purpose shines through. For example, after the above sentence about the beehives we get this nice rumination:
I put the hives in five wooden boxes and placed the boxes in an open field near the village of Gush Halav.
The bees, which clearly had heard of onomatopoeia, buzzed ceaselessly. Sometimes they gathered near the entrance to the box like Jews in front of a synagogue on the high holy days.
Some of them found (by means of color, thus confirming Carnap’s theory) distant fields of wildflowers, and they returned to the box and called the others toward those fields.
The heart can’t bear these words (“distant fields”).
Stairwells make us weep. And small kitchens. Sometimes you see a fork and you just want to die.
There is no limit to the beauty of things. Stooped people. Trees. All sorts of things in the courtyard (an old motorbike, for instance).
I remember a man crossing the waiting room at the train station.
After a nice passage like that, I was less skeptical about Hoffman’s purpose in putting into words his treasured memories.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the integration of “what is fiction” into the memoir. Hoffman is not simply discussing his life; he is also interested in this account of his life: how it affects his readers, what it says about him, how it transforms experience into bit-sized tidbits, and — most intriguing to me — how his fragile memories bear the risk of becoming banal when put into words. He recognizes that this account will not give us readers a correct vision of his life.
I say thank you to the dear souls who have bound themselves to my life and send them forth from literature into the deep regions of the heart that it — art — cannot enter.
If I were able (by means of a deeper covenant than that which exists between author and reader) to fall on people’s necks and say to them Come, let’s sit while the tea is steeping, then drink, and you’ll tell me about your lives and I will tell of mine, I’d toss this manuscript into the trash and do precisely that. In such a world the law would forbid the making of fiction.
Interestingly, at the same time he seems to want to connect with his readers, he purposefully hides things from us, most likely because putting them on paper and spreading them to the world makes them less special. We know that some of the characters in the novel are not real — or, at least, they are not given their real name. His reasoning for doing this actually gives this book its emotional weight. It’s there that I connected to his story. It’s there that I connected to him; when we read these passages, the abstract Mr. Hoffman, whose sometimes trivial life moments are streaming past us, becomes someone we relate to at the very same time that he is hiding from us:
Life is a sacred gift and literature a profane one. If my first wife had brought a catfish up on her hook, and the catfish had crawled across the ground and gotten under her dress, then the catfish and dress would be here now. But not the woman within the dress. I won’t condemn her to a life on paper.
Since I’m still trying to work out how I felt about the book as a whole, I’ll leave these passages and thoughts for you without giving any sense of a final verdict. It pleased me and touched me frequently, but it also became at times tedious and at times fleeting. My memory of those parts are fading quickly, though — what stays is the feeling of reverence for the beauty of life — even when it is tedious or fleeting — and that was conveyed nicely, perhaps even perfectly.
I’m getting on better with Roberto Bolaño now than I was before. By that I mean that I am converted. After finding 2666 a brilliantly written mess and Nazi Literature in the Americas a horrific human mess (again, brilliantly written), I wanted to go back and read the first of his books translated into English: By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile, 2000; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2003). What I found here was a clearer vision of the savage politics of the last century, particularly of Latin America. Bolaño has a way of presenting the politics in an almost farcical way . . . for a while – and then it becomes a horrific climax (sadly missing in 2666; but there the horror was throughout in clinical understatement).
In a way, By Night in Chile is the first conventional novel I’ve read by Bolaño. It has a beginning and an end and narrative cohesion. Still it is not that conventional. On a first look, stylistically it reminded me of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child – both are powerfully stated first person narratives laid out in a virtually unbroken style. By Night in Chile is a 130 page single paragraph (Kaddish is around the same length but was mostly one long sentence — but it did have a few paragraph breaks!). This might be offputting, or at least intimidating, to some people. It is both to me because somehow you have to navigate through all that text. What I’ve found time and again, however, is that the authors who attempt this style are usually very good at utilizing it for purpose, and somehow they pull it off without making it a cumbersome mass.
Here, the style is definitely not cumbersome. It produces a narrative pace that gives the reader little time to breath, let alone think, an effective device in this context where the speaker doesn’t want you to have time to consider his words to see what he is and is not saying. Our narrator is Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a priest who has served the church, even entering the ranks of Opus Dei, and who has served the Chilean government. Sometimes he has served one through the other. He’s pulled himself up on his death bed, “propped up on one elbow” and lifting his “noble, trembling head,” to offer a final confession.
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say. I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace. But it all blew up unexpectedly. That wizened youth is to blame. I was at peace. I am no longer at peace.
The confessional tone, however, is misleading because ultimately he admits to no wrong, and we know he’ll be ellusive from the start. In the middle of the first page we see that we are dealing with someone who is weighed down by something he is unwilling to name and therefore unwilling to accept.
One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate.
Father Urrutia Lacroix then narrates his youth, and we know that he recognizes he was a more innocent person then, indeed he constantly feels chastized by his memories of his youth. But even at this point of his narrative he avoids responsibility for what was to follow:
And a year later, at the age of fourteen, I entered the seminary, and when I came out again, much later on, my mother kissed my hand and called me Father or I thought I heard her say Father, and when, in my astonishment, I protested, saying Don’t call me Father, mother, I am your son, or maybe I didn’t say Your son but The son, she began to cry or weep and then I thought, or maybe the thought has only occurred to me now, that life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.
While attending seminary and after, our narrator wanted to be a literary critic. He had enough talen to become attractive (mentally and physically) to the prominent critic Farewell. Through Farewell he meets the other prominent figures of the arts and politics of his youth, including Pablo Nerruda. There is something compelling in these people, and it affects how he feels about his responsibilities flowing from his station in the church.
And I heard one of the women saying Father, won’t you try some of this or that. And someone was talking to me about a sick child, but with such poor diction I couldn’t tell if the child was sick or dead already. What did they need me for? If the child was dying, they should have called a doctor. If the child had already been dead for some time, they should have been saying novenas.
This back story eventually leads our narrator to a special assignment to help preserve the European cathedrals, which are being soiled by pigeon droppings. When he arrives in Europe, Father Urrutia Lacroix is surprised but unaffected by the manner the custodians of the cathedrals have chosen to fix the problem: they have become falconers, and they send their hawks up to violently purge the area of the pigeons (the irony of the church’s killing doves is not lost in the text).
This episode leads directly to the next episode both literally and figuratively. In a way, Father Urrutia Lacroix’s assignment can be seen as a primer for more important political work that is no less violent and disturbing. It ultimately leads him to Maria Canales, whom he now says was merely an acquaintance, no one he knew well, no one who knew him well. (Maria Canales is a stand-in for Mariana Callejas.) This is the horrific climax. This is the complicity our narrator seeks to strip from himself. However, though we never know just how complicit our narrator was, whether he had an active role in the horrors is a side note for Bolaño. Much more important to him here (and in Nazi Literature in the Americas) is his and others’ passive role in the horrors, particularly those who can hide under aesthetics. Our narrator sums it up nicely in one line:
That’s how literature is made in Chile.
What a puzzling book! Or rather – what a puzzle of a book. How to review it? I think a good way to start is by contrasting it to books that failed me where it succeeded. About a year ago I reviewed Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist. My feelings toward that book have declined sharply, in part because it has come to represent — surely unfairly – something I despise. To me, it was obfuscated solely for the sake of appearing more substantial than it was, mistaking opaque for profound. That is about as bad in my book as being clever just to be clever. I like inovative and unconventional and even obfuscated style, but it should serve and not detract from the substance of the book. When I started Inger Christensen’s Azorno
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The first line is very interesting. It also introduces the loose boundaries of the text and the uncertain nature of the facts presented.
I’ve learned that I’m the woman he first meets on page eight.
I admit, I didn’t wait to read pages one through seven before skipping to page eight to see who was talking. Strangely, there is no encounter of this sort on page eight, so either that first page is not talking about this book or it is lying. Disoriented, I read on to discover what it was talking about. A writer named Sampel is working on a book. Azorno is the main character. The woman who wrote this introductory sentence thinks she is the inspiration for the lovely woman Azorno meets on page eight of Sampel’s book. In the next section, another narrator takes over, though at the time the transition is not apparent. It soon becomes obvious that we are dealing with multiple narrators who are writing letters to one another. But then come the contradictions:
But if the truth is finally to come out, there’s one thing that can’t have two meanings: Yesterday I was with Azorno here in Rome. It was the first Sunday in May, and the noon hour was unbelievably hot.
It was the first Sunday in May and the air was unusually cool. I had just said good-bye to Azorno and wasn’t sure which direction to walk now that I was alone after three uninterrupted days with Azorno, who always decides which direction to take . . . .
Slowly, despite the uncertainty of who the women are and where they stand in relationship with each other and with Sampel and Azorno, the women take shape in the minds of the reader. Then Christensen blurs the image, and we’re just not sure (and I never was again sure) who was real and who was imagined, who was writing what I was reading and who was the potential pseudonym. Was one of the women writing this book under an assumed name? Was Sampel himself writing it? Is it Sampel’s wife? Is it Adorno?
This might sound frustrating, and I suppose it could be if approached with the wrong expectations. However, as I alluded above, the technique is not without its purpose. Furthermore, the story itself is very compelling. See, there are five women in all. The one who is silent for the first part of the book takes a greater role in the second half. This is Bet Sampel, Sampel’s wife. Here is a heartbreaking thing she says when she finally gets her voice and is not merely the subject of the other women’s letters.
As early as page eight I noticed a very incisive and loving account of the woman Azorno, the main character, meets.
At first I was flattered to think that Sampel had used me as a model for this compelling description, but gradually, as I read on, it became clear that he was describing someone else.
Trying to figure out just who is the inspiration for that fabulous description, Bet narrows it down to four candidates and, using a telegram from Sampel, invites them all to their house while Sampel is away. Sampel has been away for months, and during this time Bet has found out she is pregnant with his child. All four women show up, and all of the other four are also pregnant. Christensen doesn’t let this go to melodrama, though, and the scene where the women sit awkwardly around while Bet analyzes them is fantastic. It also ends bizarrely, alluding to the possibility that someone is insane, perhaps institutionalized. And maybe someone has been murdered. Maybe not. Figuring out the truth is not the point.
There is nothing to be solved, but something to bind. Bind one to the other. Bind yourself to a random person whose random circumstances cause you to no longer recognize yourself simply as a human being, but rather as a human-made being.
I’m rocketing through César Aira’s books available in English (others reviewed here and here). Which is not hard since they are incredibly short, and there are only three readily available (The Hare, published in the U.S. in 1997 is cheapest used on Amazon at a mere $363, so I don’t count it). It also helps that their plots are wild, taking turns at corners the reader can’t see coming. How I Became a Nun (Cómo me hice monja, 1989; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2007) is no exception. In fact, of the three I’ve read, it is the wildest yet.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
How I Became a Nun is different from the other two in that it starts with the sense of immediacy the others built up to. The opening thirty pages are intense and worth reading in and of themselves. In them we meet our narrator, a young boy (or girl, if you rely on her account) named César Aira, who has just moved from a small interior town to a larger town. To his father’s delight, ice cream is available in the larger time, and, remembering his own excellent experiences with ice cream, the father is taking the young son for his first taste. Shockingly, touching his first spoonful to his mouth, César hates it, can’t even manage to swallow it so awful is the taste. The unbelieving father becomes indignant and finally outraged. How can anyone not like strawberry ice cream? This incident becomes somehow very important to the narrator’s development:
My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life: I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil.
Once this excellently rendered episode is over, the narrator takes us into a chilling fever dream, complete with doppelgänger parents, wherein the narrator is able to step out of the story for a moment in order to see from the outside her story moving onward (all of the ellipses in the following quote are Aira’s own):
Over all these stories hovered another, more conventional in a way, but more fantastic too. Separate from the series, it functioned like a “background,” always there. It was a kind of static story . . . a chilling episode, with a wealth of horrific details . . . It filled me with dread, making the four-part delirium seem like light entertainment by comparison . . . Except that it wasn’t just one more element, a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky . . . it was everything that was happening to me . . . everything that would happen to me in an eternity that had not yet begun and would never end . . . I was the girl in an illustrated book of fairy tales; I had become a myth . . . I was seeing it from inside . . .
This section is so different in form from the first section that I began to wonder just what kind of story I was entering. Then the next section came along, and it was very different from the first two. Again, that is part of the creative process that is on display in the form of the novella. And again, Aira ties this process into the substance of the themes underlying the strange narrative: creation of a personal narrative, identity, mimicry, parental figures’ role in all of the above.
The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupil’s abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me.
Like the other two novellas, this one is packed with pleasure and intellect. My only problem was that each section is so separate and distinct from the one preceding it that it felt episodic and, therefore, lacked of the powerful forward thrust in the other two. But . . . as annoyed as I was that every ten pages or so I was thrown out of the narrative and dropped into a strange new place, once I settled down and thought about the form (form is so important to Aira, which I find ironic since his works seem so formless and ad hoc), things started to make sense. These gaps in the narrative are fundamental to the strangeness of Aira’s themes. That they are not discussed (or even, apparently, recognized) by the narrator is just as strange as the fact that he never seems cognizant of the little gender discrepancy so often apparent to the reader but never remarked upon in any way by any of the characters.
Aira gives me the impression that for him writing is a discovery process, and he doesn’t mind making the reader come along the way. As polished as his novels are, they come off feeling like the spiritual cousin to an old fashioned essay—the intial “trying” brings about a complete result where both author and reader are fulfilled.
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