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The first W.G. Sebald book I heard of was The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Satrun, Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1998). Something in the tone of the recommendation and the title of the book made me start to imagine how the book would feel and how I would feel about it — you’ve been there too. I tried to avoid such imaginings, but with all of its positive criticism it was hard to hold back my expectations. About a year ago I began my Sebald project (to read all four of Sebald’s books of “fiction” in the order in which he wrote them), and Vertigo and, particularly, The Emigrants just made my anticipation for this book all the more acute.
When I began reading The Rings of Saturn I knew next to nothing about the book. Sure, I knew that it was structured as as walking tour around Norfolk, in eastern England. I knew from the other two books I’d read that this walking tour would be replete with ruminations on the past, complete with documentary photos. But the main theme? I didn’t know what this one would be about.
The title, with no context, did little to help. What do the rings of Saturn have to do with East Anglia or even with modern history in general? I see it now: a lot, in a very beautiful metaphorical sense. This is a book about the ravages of time, about destruction, particularly the destruction (self- or otherwise) of human endeavor. East Anglia was once the scene of thriving communities living off of some of the most important ports in Europe. Today, little of that remains. The fishermen Sebald encounters facing the east, sitting on the beach ”just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.” That line alone, and the orientation of the fishermen, nicely sums up the book. The rings of Saturn were once large moons in orbit, but through time and great destruction they’ve been reduced to an ephemeral dust — something tragic, something whose trace haunts the present with its reminder of the past — yet it’s beautiful.
And that’s one of the best ways I can think of to describe this book — tragic, yet beautiful. Sebald begins the book in his unassuming manner; he’s just finished a project that entailed a lot of work (I see many think he’s referring to his book The Emigrants), and he wants to relax and settle down again by taking a walking tour around Suffolk:
At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.
What follows would be very difficult for me to summarize in any decent way in the space I’m giving myself here. It’s a walking tour, so Sebald encounters many people, many sights, and many artifacts. During such encounters, he lets his mind roam through his own personal past as well as into the history of the region — and of the world (I particularly liked the segment on the silk worm’s migration). One of the firs things he encounters is the skull of Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century physician (whose father was a silk merchant). As a doctor, Browne was very interested in the human body, but his other interests also brought in the natural world. Sebald briefly discusses Browne’s book Urn Burial. In this book, Browne describes an ancient Roman burial site found in Norfolk. Urn Burial becomes very melancholy when Browne discusses mortality and destruction. Browne’s view (which reminded me of Yeats’ view) is that “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.”
Over this burial ground, over the centuries, battles were fought and forgotten — or remembered with a slant, as this one Sebald describes from a painting:
This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. I requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?
As with the other two Sebalds I’ve read, The Rings of Saturn has no strong narrative. Sebald goes from topic to topic at will. Yet the book is held together wonderfully by melancholy and that central theme of destruction. It’s got a beautiful, respectful tone. And it is full of wonderfully rendered scenes, my favorite being that of a massively destructive storm that Sebald witnessed first-hand — fantastic writing (and translation). I think this may change at times through my life, but right now my favorite Sebald book is still The Emigrants, but I can see how The Rings of Saturn could swap positions — they are both marvelous works, full of insight and beauty as they force us into astonishment as we gaze at a great void.
For those of you who have been interested in but wary of Roberto Bolaño, you might find a friendly meeting place (more friendly than, say, 2666, which was my meeting place) in Monsieur Pain (1999; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2010). This is one of Bolaño’s earliest works — that’s not to say “easy” works, but I think it is more accessible than anything else of his I’ve read. It was published as Monsieur Pain only in 1999, but it was written in 1981 or 1982 and titled The Elephant Path, an apt title that connotes both trailblazing and following, though I can’t say that is why the title was used. Under this title it won a few awards in Spain; under another, it won some more. Though it’s an early work, and one in which we can see seeds of what would sprout in his later books, I would hesitate to call this an apprentice novel. To me, that means the novel is useful primarily to the author, helping him or her develop something else that is of benefit to readers. That is not the case here, though, because in Monsieur Pain we see an already mature author. More than an apprentice novel, then, it is a fully developed point of departure. Rather than follow the elephant track created by other writers, which he shows he can do in this book, he shows he is also going to create his own elephant track through the bushes. In his later books he starts knocking down the trees.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Of the works I’ve read, this is Bolaño’s most traditional prose piece. He sets up what appears to be a fairly conventional story set in Paris in 1938. In fact, the setup (and Chris Andrews’ excellent translation) seems to come from this period in literature. It adheres to formal constructs while showing an awareness of what’s going on underneath the text. Here are the first lines in the novel; they reminded me, to my pleasure, of modern European literature:
On Wednesday the sixth of April, at dusk, as I was preparing to leave my lodgings, I received a telegram from my young friend Madame Reynaud, requesting, with a certain urgency, my presence that evening at the Café Bordeaux, on Rue de Rivoli, relatively close to where I live, which meant that if I hurried, I could still arrive punctually at the specified time.
The narrator is Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran of the first world war, in which, he says he might have been a deserter had he not nearly died when his lungs were burned out by gas. He doesn’t have much direction in his life, but since his convalescence he has stumbled into a profession of sorts.
From then on, supported by a modest invalid’s pension, and perhaps as a reaction agains the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man’s career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnestism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.
At the beginning of the book, as is seen in the first quote above, Pain receives a telegram from the young widow of one of his ex-patients. Pain rushes out of his apartment to meet her, but on his way out he is surprised to run into two men who are speaking Spanish. When they see him, they go quiet and stop going up the stairs. They also don’t move aside to let him by easily. They seem confused by his presence or by his leaving, and do not hide the fact, even as he is walking out the door, that they are watching him. The narrative then interrupts a bit, and we go back to the short week when Pain was treating the widows husband, truly trying to save this admirable man’s life even though he knew it was too late. This interruption is one of the novel’s highlights, in my opinion — he, of course, falls in love with the widow, but he can never tell her. He and the widow have met several times in the intervening months, but this telegram is unprecedented. When he meets her, she requests his assistance:
“Pierre,” she repeated, stressing each word, “you must see my friend’s husband, professionally, it’s urgent.”
I think I ordered a glass of mint cordial before asking what illness Monsieur . . .
“Vallejo,” said Madame Reynaud, adding, with equal concision, “Hiccups.”
Throughout the remainder of the novel, Pain tries to meet with this man dying of hiccups. The first time, he is thwarted by doctors who scoff at him and his strange trade, though they can find nothing wrong with Vallejo. But even after Pain has left, thinking his assistance will not be needed, the two men speaking Spanish show up and ask him not to treat the dying man. They offer him quite a large bribe to just go away.
I can already tell that if I try to recount even just a little bit more of the novel I’m going to describe something the novel is not. Yes, Pain continues to attempt to meet and treat Vallejo, but that is not really what the story is about. Pain is an interesting character in Bolaño’s universe because, though like others he is seeking an elusive target through strange mazes, he does not have the ability to ascribe meaning to his search — he’s no poet, in other words. He tends to reflect the following description of mesmerism well:
For me, mesmerism is like a medieval painting. Beautiful and useless. Timeless. Trapped.
Still, he is an interesting character to watch as he becomes increasingly paranoid, and perhaps delusional (we’re not really sure if the horrors he believes are coming are really on their way). The book becomes surreal and dreamlike at times, and we’re sailing smoothly on Bolaño’s flowing prose. Interestingly, I wouldn’t classify the other Bolaño books I’ve read as surreal. Here, the disorientation he conveys is more akin to Kafka’s type of absurdity; his later works tend to show a disorientation brought on by an empty shock caused by violence or loss. Perhaps, because of its surrealism, it also feels more conventional. But even while this seems more like a conventional novel, within it are the fascinating rifts, subtly placed, the anti-climactic dead ends that leave his character (and his reader) wondering what the buildup was for, that show what Bolaño will be capable of when he throws convention out. If you cannot tell, I am becoming more and more a Roberto Bolaño fan.
It’s been a few months since I read anything by Bolaño, but every time I finish a book my first urge is to pick up another of his. The only reason I don’t is for the sake of variety and to make sure I can have some Bolaño left for the future. This month Monsieur Pain comes out, and in the Spring Antwerp comes out, both from New Directions here in the U.S. And I still have a few of his already published books to read, so I thought it was safe to pull out Distant Star (Estrella distante, 1996; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2004).
You probably don’t remember, but when I reviewed Nazi Literature in the Americas I said in my last paragraph that “his conclusion is its own reward,” meaning that the conclusion was so outstanding that reading the book was worth the conclusion alone. Well, here’s the introductory paragraph in Distant Star:
In the final chapter of my novel Nazi Literature in the AmericasI recounted, in less that twenty pages and perhaps too schematically, the story of Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman of the Chilean Air Force, which I heard from a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions, who tried to get himself killed in Africa. He was not satisfied with my version. It was meant to counterbalance the preceding excursions into the literary grotesque, or perhaps to come as an anticlimax, and Arturo would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirror or explode others, would be, in itself, a mirror and an explosion. So we took that final chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where, guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel. My role was limited to preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the reuse of numerous paragraph with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Ménard.
Besides being an exhilerating paragraph in its own right, the paragraph explains that Distant Star is basically a stand-alone expansion to that final brilliant (anti-climactic??) chapter in Nazi Literature in the Americas. That’s both true and misleading, which I think was Bolaño’s intent. Distant Star is not a rewrite of that last chapter; rather, it is an expansion on the ideas, on the horror, we witnessed in that last chapter. It is also another perspective to the horror of the Pinochet regime and the failed revolution shown to us in what is still my favorite Bolaño: By Night in Chile. So, where The Skating Rink was a diversion from all of this, Distant Star took me back to familiar ground. That’s not to suggest that there are no similarities to The Skating Rink; in some ways, this is a literary detective novel too. I really can’t wait to read all of Bolaño so I can get a better picture of how his work ties itself together.
Here is how the book begins; we meet the demon himself, Carlos Wieder:
I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.
At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein’s poetry workshop in Concepción, the so-called capital of the South. I can’t say I knew him well. I saw him once or twice a week at the workshop. He wasn’t particularly talkative. I was. Most of us there talked a lot, not just about poetry, but politics, travel (little did we know what our travels would be like), painting, architecture, photography, revolution and the armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era, so we thought, but which, for most of us, was like a dream, or rather the key that would open the door into a world of dreams, the only dreams worth living for. And even though we were vaguely aware that dreams often turn into nightmares, we didn’t let that bother us.
At this time the narrator is a young eighteen-year-old, and Wieder is probably twenty-three, or close to that. Augusto Pinochet is looming on the horizon, but this group of young poets continues in its youthful pursuit of the ideal, never knowing that in their midst is a monster. When Pinochet takes power, and Chile is a very dangerous place for these young idealists. ”In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”
Wieder disappears, but in the clues the narrator realizes that Wieder has become something truly terrible and has even murdered some of their friends. Another of their friends, Fat Marta, is so afraid of disappearing herself that she becomes manic, almost insane:
The main thing was to keep active (any kind of activity would do, like moving a flower pot five times in half an hour, to stop herself going mad) and to look on the bright side, tackling problems one by one, instead of all at the same time, the way she used to do before.
They don’t know where Wieder is (at this point, they really don’t know who he is), but bits keep linking together until we find that he is probably the man responsible for writing poetry in the air. Indeed, this pilot becomes famous for his new art. “[H]e was called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary.” The art show is Bolaño at his horrific best.
In Distant Starwe also see Bolaño at his darkly comic best. Here is a story from within this story:
Once upon a time in Chile there was a poor little boy . . . I think the boy was called Lorenzo, I’m not sure, and I’ve forgotten his surname, but some readers may remember it, and he liked to play, and climb trees and high-tension pylons. One day he climbed up a pylon and got such a shock that he lost both his arms. They had to amputate them just below the shoulders. So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable.
Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it’s hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot.
Distant Star is, to me, not as good as By Night in Chile, but it is a brilliant work, another look at Pinochet’s Chile. Bolaño’s writing, translated fluently by Chris Andrews, is wonderfully paced, always running right off the page. I feel I am now ready to read The Savage Detectives; after all, here we have a strange detective story of poets seeking poets, and I can hardly wait. Before we move on, though, it is no spoiler to allow everyone to savor the last lines in this novel:
We stood there for a while on the edge of the pavement waiting for a taxi, not knowing what to say. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I confessed. That’s not true, said Romero very gently. Worse things have happened to us, thing about it. You could be right, I admitted, but this really has been a dreadful business. Dreadful, repeated Romero, as if he were savouring the word. Then he laughed quietly, grinning like a rabbit, and said, Well, what else could it have been? I wasn’t in a laughing mood, but I laughed all the same.
I just read Dylan Thomas’s prose/poem “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1954) and thought recommending it would nicely accompany my holiday greeting. The phyiscal book itself is striking. The high-quality paper is visible in the picture below as are some of the woodcuts that we find throughout this short but impactful book. It’s a book best read in one sitting, and perhaps with little more foreknowledge than this: “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” begins with childish mischief in the form of snowball fights and ends with a nice Christmas night.
I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
Merry Christmas!
Earlier this year I reviewed Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear, and I didn’t quite know how to go about that task. I’m afraid it’s no easier trying to review the second volume, Dance and Dream (Tu rostro mañana, 2, Baile y sueño; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, 2006). Ah, but what a fascinating book to think about! And now that volume three is available in English, it’s the perfect time to find out just why these books are so difficult to speak about. (Incidentally, if you are in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area, Javier Marías is around you this week — details on New Directions’ webpage).
These volumes are dense, intimidating, full of sentences that weave in and out of themselves and each other — this is a remarkable feat of writing and translation. However, don’t get me wrong: I’ve found the books to be the type that, while intimidating and complex, is still approachable and incredibly gratifying. Perhaps — and I don’t know if I can really do this — I can show a bit of the sentence level style by divulging a bit about the overall structure of this volume.
The book begins where the last one ended: it’s night-time, and some woman who has been following Deza has just call him from the street. She wants to ask a favor, giving the book it’s opening lines:
Let us hope that no one ever asks us for anything, or even enquires, no advice or favour or loan, not even the loan of our attention, let us hope that others do not ask us to listen to them, to their wretched problems and their painful predicaments so like our own, to their incomprehensible doubts and their paltry stories which are so often interchangeable and have all been written before . . .
This sentence goes on for sometime before there is an end-stop, though it flows wonderfully, all the pieces tying together in a kind of spiderweb of clauses and phrases. But that is what the plot is too. From the encounter in the night, we shift to another evening when Deza is out with his boss, Bertram Tupra, entertaining a foreigner and his wife at a nightclub. Something goes wrong, and Deza is surprised when in the bathroom Tupra wields a sword and is threatening someone else with it. That particular part with the sword goes on for something like one hundred and twenty pages. Indeed, this is an example of where the global and local structure of the book mimic each other — there is a major delay before the end-stop comes. And intermingled in this scene that really lasts only a few seconds are dozens of tangents, each taking their cue from the story while at the same time priming the reader for what is to come. In a way the tangents teach the reader a number of perspectives for the actual action.
So what’s the point? Well, this is only volume two and, like volume one, it leaves many many things unanswered. But this is a fascinating narrative because the mind of Deza is always at work, analyzing and categorizing. That is why he has this secret job for the government — or so he thinks. Turns out there are private clients as well, so the job itself is part of the disturbing but ambiguous elements of the story.
I was glad to see that in the action, while a man wields a sword against another, Deza is able to find moments to devote to his wife. They’ve been separated for some time, and my last review ended with a very touching line about Luisa and Deza’s fading role in her life, the life they’d been doing together. Here is a sentence that takes us back to the first lines in the book while still moving the narrative along, taking us into their relationship and into some of the deeper themes in the novel:
Luisa did not get caught or entangled, but she did, once, become involved because of a request and a gift of alms and she involved me a little in both of these things too, this was before we separated and before I left for England, when we had not yet foreseen the deepening rift or our backs so firmly turned on each other, at least I had not, for it is only later on that you realise you have lost the trust you had in someone or that others have lost the trust they had in you — if, that is, you ever do realise, which I don’t really think you do; I mean, that only afterwards, when the present is already the past and is thus so changeable and uncertain that it can easily be told (and can be retold a thousand times more, with no two versions agreeing), do we realise that we also knew it when the present was still present and had not yet been rejected or become muddied or shadowy, how else would we be able to put a date to it, because the fact is we can, oh yes, we can date it afterwards with alarming precision: ‘It was the day when . . .’ we say or remember, as people do in novels (which are always heading toward a specific moment: the plot points to it, dictates it; except that not all novels know how they’re going to end), sometimes when we are alone or in company, two people summing things up out loud: ‘It was those words you came out with so casually on your birthday that first put me on my guard or began to distance me.’
And because, like I said, it is so very difficult to review this book intelligibly (you’ll just have to trust me and read them), I will end this review with another sad line as Deza mourns his loss. I think we’ll get quite a bit more of Luisa in the next volume.
They would last only until the disappearance once more of my renewed realisation that Luisa was not going to say to me: ‘Come, come back, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me, here’s your pillow which now bears not a trace, somehow I just couldn’t see you clearly before. Come here. Come with me. There’s no one else here, come back, my ghost has gone, you can take his place and dismiss his flesh. He has been changed into nothing and his time no longer advances. What was never happened. You can, I suppose, stay here for ever.’ Yes, that night would pass too, and she would still not have said these words.
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.
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