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I’m a fan of conspiracy theories in literature. I love the antiquities and the act of imagining what secrets have been lost to history — or hidden from history. My problem is that I’m a bit ignorant of the best books on the subject, whether fiction or nonfiction, that have fun but are well written, appropriately dark, and interesting aside from being about some secret (suggestions are welcome). We are given the wrong impression that if one wants to deal in historical secrets hidden in plain view, one has to read Dan Brown and his like (I have gone there, I admit), but those types of cookie-cutter books don’t get the job done. I’m happy to say that I found what I was looking for in The Cyclist Conspiracy (Fama o biciklistima, 1988; tr. from the Serbian by Randall A. Major). I mean, who among us can resist a book that begins, “Endless are the secrets of provincial libraries.”
Review copy courtesy of Open Letter.
The Cyclist Conspiracy is a fun, mad-dash read through letters, lost manuscripts, research papers, stories, poems, dialogues, diagrams, and anything else you can imagine compiling for a book about some secret and ancient cult of cyclists.
The first thing in the book is an Editor’s Preface, signed by S.B. Here S.B. briefly tells about an autumn evening he spent looking through the piles of books and papers in the cellar of the Municipal Library in Bajina Bašta, where he had retreated to take “refuge from sadness the cause of which I still cannot mention.” There he came across The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale, published in Zürich in 1903. This book, which has taken who knows what path to get to the cellar of the Bajina Bašta’s Municipal Library, is the third of only six copies printed. Indeed, publishing six copies and then sending each copy someplace in the world where it would find the right reader seemed was to be the book’s standard mode of dissemination because that right reader would then publish six copies and send them around, etc. S.B. has breached this protocol — any one of us can buy and read this book now – but he did this for a purpose:
In handing this collection over to the reader, I realize that several years ago, searching for colored pebbles, I came across a pearl, but also that the pearl had been awaiting a proper owner and found an improper one instead, who would turn it into a glass bauble by reduplicating it in an insufferably large number of copies. The only justification is that, in our time, which falls within the autumn of the year of years (about which Captain Queensdale speaks), even the sparkle of a glass bauble shines through the darkness gathering on the horizon.
The book then steps back into history to the reign of the apocryphal king (because he himself wrote history so that he would appear to be apocryphal (or he really is apocryphal)) Charles the Hideous, a man who can see the future and the past. One day, a group of Two-Wheelers exiled from Paris come to Charles’ court. They bring a clay tablet containing The Book of Javan the Son of Nahor (“to those yet unborn”). They tell him of a great project: the Tower of Babel will be rebuilt. This is just the beginning. Charles invokes Freud, and later it turns out Freud himself is a member of the conspiracy and a character whose writings will appear in this book.
Much of the fun to be had here (but not all) is in finding new characters and following their relationship with the cyclists. For example, who is Captain Queensdale, whose manuscript S.B. found at the beginning? He was a ship captain who, in 1761, was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He ended up on an island north of Iceland where he finds a community of cyclists. Who published that manuscript in Zürich in 1903? That was Rheiner Meier, another of the novel’s characters, and a bit of a skeptic. Here is his introduction to the six volumes he had published and sent around the world:
It is possible that the whole thing is a joke. Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people.
We are also pleased to find a missing Sherlock Holmes story, entitled “The Final Case of Sherlock Holmes: The Maniacal Cyclist.” A small piece to the puzzle that is The Cyclist Conspiracy (though the first where we see a cyclist going around smashing random clocks), this brief story was a large part of the fun.
And it keeps going through journals, treatises, illustrations, constellations, symbology, etc. We learn about a master plan to build the Grand Insane Asylum, which will have capacity for 20 million. Indeed, the conspiracy is so large that one can be part of it and never know it. The pieces of the puzzle keep coming and with them come switchbacks, half-truths, contradictions, blatant misinformation — in other words, history.
So, yes, this is a fun, though intricate (requiring some give and patience) read, but there’s more to it, a darkness suggested about the workings of men and the presence of history in the present. There are many reasons the bicycle is the chosen symbol to represent so much, but we know it could have been almost anything else. What feels right, fated, even fore-known, is arbitrary, and the Grand Insane Asylum, whose details are lovingly described by a certain inmate, seems a good fit for more than 20 million. Indeed, why didn’t S.B. just retreat to that library cellar? Because no matter what the sadness was that drove him there to begin with, there’s something invigorating about chasing down darkness on this scale.
I’m officially underway in my effort to read most (probably not all) of this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlist (it’s a very long list, at 25 titles) (the complete list here). I now have 18 of the titles and have finished reading five with Juan José Saer’s startling Scars (Cicatrices, 1969; tr. from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, 2011).
Review copy courtesy of Open Letter.
I say “startling” not only because of the central event in the book — a husband and wife walk out of a bar and he turns and shoots her twice in the face with a shotgun — but also because of the book’s strange structure . . . well, and the fact that Saer goes into detail about billiard strategies and punto banco baccarat rules and succeeds in keeping the book interesting while using these tangents to build upon the book’s strange structure.
Scars is laid out in four parts, each narrated by a man, each laid out around the aforementioned murder. The first part covers a large span of months and its narrative continues into the time beyond the crime; the second, shorter, part covers a smaller period of time; the third, even shorter and smaller; until we get to the fourth, which is the shortest and is a narrative of just one day — the day of the murder – from the perspective of the murder. The fact that the book has such an overt geometrical structure that gives the reader a bit of whiplash reminded me plenty of Roberto Bolaño, though I’d certainly say that Scars is a bit more straightforward (you don’t actually have to draw a diagram to see the geometry, though it would be interesting nonetheless).
Our first narrator is Ángel, an 18 year old just making his way in the field of journalism. His first job is to cover the weather. He has no idea how to read the instruments, so most days the weather simply reads, “No change in sight” – and the weather is always terrible.
Ángel still lives with his 36-year-old mother. It’s a tenuous and charged relationship to say the least. Ángel’s only connection to the murderer is thanks to a judge who lets him sit in on the murderer’s deposition. Surprising everybody, one moment the murder is in his seat for the deposition and, after the sound of breaking glass, the murderer’s chair is empty — he’s jumped to his death.
Ángel spends most of his days talking to the same people, trying to seduce some girl, fighting with his mother. We readers are pulled into the repetition until that glass breaks. The chapter ends, beautifully, with Ángel walking down a street, running into his double, someone who may be living out the same life Ángel is, but what kind of life is that? That last bit is not meant to be a moral question; we only sense Ángel through the doldrums of his fairly vapid life — the breaking glass feels like the only time we’re dealing with someone partially awake. It worked well, for me.
The second section is narrated by a washed-up prosecutor named Sergio. He once knew the murderer, but they’ve been out of touch for some time. But instead of focusing on that time, Sergio’s section focuses on Sergio’s deep addiction to baccarat, which he plays nightly (and which we play with him nightly). He asks for money from others. Quite upfront, he lets them know that the only reason he’s asking for the money is so he can gamble, that he’s pretty sure he will lose it all, and that it will be very difficult for him to pay them back. One person who gives to him freely (she’s been saving) is his fourteen-year-old maid. Though in this section Sergio spends a great deal of time explaining the rules and strategy behind baccarat, further distancing the narrator from his reader, it never became dull to me. After all, punto banco baccarat is a game of chance, so any explanation of strategy actually says much more about the speaker than about the game itself.
The third section is told from the point of view of Ernesto, the judge in the murder case. It’s he who allows Ángel to come to the deposition, due to a little crush as it turns out. Not quite as engaging to me as the minutia about baccarat, I still found the judge and his character compelling. Here’s a man who essentially despises everyone. As he drives around the city (and, again, we are treated to the minute details of the journey), he looks around and simply sees gorillas going about their lives (again, if you can call it life).
It’s only in the last section that we actually hone in on the crime itself. We finally meet and hear from the man who killed his wife. Luis Fiore is a man in his upper-thirties, and he, his wife, and their daughter have gone out hunting. We already know how this day is going to turn out, and we cringe each time a bottle of gin is lifted up, more so when the sexual energy is heightened.
She goes on reading. I sit down next to her, on the running board, and wrap my arm around her shoulder. She doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s an arm around her shoulders. I start to exert pressure, pulling her heavy body against mine.
– Come here, next to me, I say.
– Come on, Gringuita, I say.
– Stop, she says.
– I said stop it, she says.
– Are you going to stop or not? she says.
But then she relaxes and falls into my shoulder. There’s the meadow ahead of us, extending toward the lake. It’s empty. My arm slides from her shoulder to her smooth, white neck. Her open mouth presses against my hard jaw. I can feel the dampness of her soft lips against my jaw. Difficult to erase.
In a low voice she says, I’m going to keep you up late tonight.
Since we know where this is going, the point is not what happened. The book also fails completely to tell us why — and that’s, at least partly, the point. None of the first three narrators knows why the murder happened — they barely breathe above their own repetitious lives. Worse, though the tale of the murder (from multiple sources, including a batch of witnesses) is repeated several times throughout Scars, it doesn’t seem that Fiore, whose section is told in the present tense, knows how to make sense of all that’s going on around him. Yes, this reminded me of Bolaño, too.
Such a strange book, it gives a lot to think about as nothing is resolved. I appreciated that immensely, though that and the repetition will surely turn off some readers. That said, thank goodness that, after over forty years, this book has finally made its way into English.
“Approaching his fiftieth birthday, the narrator in My Two Worlds is wandering in an unfamiliar Brazilian city, in search of a park.” When I read that on the back of this book, I really couldn’t pass it up. A few of my favorite books have just such a wandering motif: Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (my review here) and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (my review here) come first to mind. I’ve also wandered my share of Brazilian cities and have loved that country’s parks. So it was with great anticipation that I sat down to read My Two Worlds (Mis dos mundos, 2008; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson, 2011).
Review copy courtesy of Open Letter Books.
This is a short but slow book. I mean “slow” in a good way, though I certainly wasn’t expecting to take as much time to read it as I did. It begins as our narrator is about to turn fifty and is going to deal with it, in part, with a book:
Only a few days are left before another birthday, and if I’ve decided to begin this way it’s because two friends, through their books, made me see that these days can be a cause to reflect, to make excuses, or to justify the years lived.
He is in Brazil to attend a literary conference following the publication of his most recent book. However, he has just received an anonymous email that his book has been getting bad reviews. He’s going to deal with this by doing what he has always done: go for a walk to the park. That will offer just the right mood:
For me parks are good when first of all, they’re not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through space that’s at once alien and familiar. I don’t know if I should call them abandoned placed; what I mean is relegated areas, where surroundings are suspended for the moment and one can imagine being in any park, anywhere, even at the antipodes. A place that’s cast off, indistinct, or better yet, a place where a person, moved by who knows what kind of distractions, withdraws, turns into a nobody, and ends up being vague.
But initially his plans to walk to the park are frustrated. His map shows the roads and paths but doesn’t take into account hills, barriers, retaining walls, etc. Just when the thinks he’s closing in, he finds he’s directed another way. It’s an intriguing set up to a book that will take place almost exclusively in the park and in the narrator’s head as he sorts through a variety of thoughts, many taking him in the opposite direction. This process of switching back begins early on. The narrator loves walking, or, at least, the narrators walks; it had “become one of those addictions that can mean either ruin or salvation.” We expect him to build on this some kind of nostalgia for a heightened state of being, particularly when he comments on the pace: “it was optimal for observation and thought.” However, we may be surprised when he speaks personally and says that ”for some time now walking has been losing its meaning.”
This walk in the park, then, becomes almost the exact opposite of what we’re lead to believe (and what walking often represents in literature and life).
I allowed myself to be carried away by clichés of living ruins and well-preserved artifacts, and the experience must have left me with the kind of sensibility that is conditioned, I suppose, to search wherever I’m walking for traces of forgotten days, even when finding them is rarely worth the effort.
Our narrator, rather than searching for some heightened state of being, seems to be longing for the opposite. Throughout the book, he frequently undercuts what he’s saying with noncommittal phrasings, like a teenager saying “or whatever.” He’s no great success with people, as is particularly noticeable with women who always have and continue to ignore him: ”Something about the way I speak must cause this; it’s probable that my lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times.” Walking is a way out of himself; interestingly, he says walking has also protected him from “the danger of not being myself.” This does make sense as it explains him even as it shows him trying to get away from the past. This attempt to become “vague” or get away from the past comes up often, and the narrator explains what he thinks he’s getting at when he goes for a walk:
I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia.
He then begins to list his faults (a long list) and sums it up this way:
[I]n short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.
To walk and nothing but.
The book and the narrator become “gloomier and more fatalistic” as it goes on, but there’s much else to it, a sense of presence and of discovery. The narrator finally finds the park, and as he wanders, considering the nature of his wandering, he’s also commenting on what he’s seeing around him (though he mostly likes to look at the ground, which give a great sense of the present). Some of my favorite parts of the book are his descriptions of the Brazilian park and what’s going on around it. In particular, when he described the men playing their multiple games — and, therefore, endless game — of dominoes, I was taken to the place and realized just how much the narrator’s ring true.
I must say that when I finished the book (it’s been a little over a month now), I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), and takes longer than one would expect to go a such a short distance (which works perfectly with the book’s plot), and sometimes while reading the narrator discuss the Internet or his convoluted thought process I found myself drifting away from the book. But, as time has passed and I’ve had a chance to think about it more and to reread quite a bit of it, I find its power growing. This is Chejfec’s first book to be published in English. He seems to be well known in respected circles of Spanish-speaking writers, and I say let there be more! I’ll read whatever comes right when I get my hands on it — it’s that kind of slow-building power I’ve found here.
I’ve seen Mercé Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves on several respected lists of favorite books. That said, I have never read it, despite its being on my periphery for some time. This past summer Open Letter Books published the first English translation of Rodoreda’s last work, published in Catalan after her death, Death in Spring (La mort i la primavera, 1986; tr. from the Catalan by Martha Tennent, 2009). Reviews have spoken about this book’s look at the oppression Rodoreda experienced in Franco’s Spain, and that’s a good way to look at it; however, it is so much more universal, an archetypal fable in fact. The cover, an image of a tree made out of bones, is macabre and compelled me to read the book as soon as it came in the mail.
Review copy courtesy of Open Letter Books.
Here are the first lines. Tell me if, thanks to the title, you get a similar feeling as I did:
I removed my clothes and dropped them at the foot of the hackberry tree, beside the madman’s rock. Before entering the river, I stopped to observe the color left behind in the sky. The sun-dappled light was different now that spring had arrived, reborn after living beneath the earth and within branches. I lowered myself gently into the water, hardly daring to breathe, always with the fear that, as I entered the water world, the air — finally rid of my nuisance — would begin to rage and be transformed into a furious wind, like the winter wind that nearly carried away houses, trees, and people. I had sought the broadest part of the river, a place farthest from the village, a place where no one ever came. I didn’t want to be seen.
When I first read this, the tone and phrases such as “the air — finally rid of my nuisance,” led me to believe this young narrator — a fourteen year old boy – was just about to step into the river to commit suicide. Turns out I was wrong. Kind of. The narrator is going for a swim. But the deathly tone is present throughout this beautifully written novel — this beautifully written and very very strange novel.
Death in Spring has favorable comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Here we have a civil society that feeds on violent, superstitious rituals. The village is built upon the rocks that cover a section of river. Each year, one of the village men is selected by lottery to swim under the city to see if the river will take the town. This invariably leads to the victim’s death or mutilation. Those who live mutilated are called the faceless ones. Here is one of Rodoreda’s accounts of this brutal ritual:
Two very old men had already prepared the hollow tree trunk with the short sticks. All of the sticks had sharp tips, except one, which ended in a fork. The man who drew the forked stick was forced to swim under the village. The faceless men, the noseless, the earless, all of them shut themselves into the stables so as not to dishearten the others. The one who drew the forked stick needed to be brave, brave as the sun. The hollow tree trunk with the sticks inside was painted pink, inside and out. It was repainted every year, just like the houses. The men and older boys had to run past the trunk and seize a stick. When a sharp stick was drawn, everyone was silent. When the forked stick was drawn everyone burst out laughing and the children jumped up and down.
A boy who was not much older than me drew the stick. His face was like others’, but his nose was straighter, his cheeks more delicate. When he glimpsed the tip of the stick, he turned pale with the pallor of fear, and everyone knew — even before seeing it — that he had chosen the forked stick. Always, always, the one who drew the forked stick turned pale.
The blacksmith and a group of men accompanied the boy to the upper edge of the village, where the water from the river thurst itself downward, toward darkness. The boy stripped, and they gave him a drink; while he drank, his eyes wandered from one man to the other. He took too long to dive into the water, and the men had to throw him in, alone and naked.
Our young narrator grows up with this yearly ritual, but this is only part of the brutality. When he was younger, each year all of the adults would lock the children up into the small spaces beneath the stairs while they went to the forest. As it turns out, this is the forest of the dead. When a person dies (and no one is allowed to die with dignity), they are entombed in a tree full of sap with a shovel full of cement shoved down their throat. Overseeing this oppressive society is the Senyor, an old man who lives above the city. But before you think he’s the cause of the trouble, I don’t think it spoils the book to reveal that he is as much a victim as anyone else.
This brutality is juxtaposed with beautiful language describing the wisteria that chokes the village, the bees that menace the inhabitants, and the soap bubbles that turn to glass. This book also has the most beautiful and aching account of a burial I’ve ever read. It is hauntingly beautiful, extremely unsettling. Those trees that house the bones of the dead come to represent cocoons of death, a kind of place where death dwells, waiting to be released. This motif is a surprising and illuminting way to examine life.
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