Lost in New York

One of the (many) reasons I love living here is all I'm learning about Colombian literature and film. Ever since seeing Rosario Tijeras, Jorge Franco has been on my TBR list and I've finally been able to read both Don Quijote de la Mancha in Medellín and Paraíso Travel. Although I had been aware of this latter work, it wasn't until I read Scott's interview with translator Katherine Silver that I bought the novel (in its original Spanish). (Of course, hearing that a film adaptation was in the works helped too.)

I finished reading it on the road to Cartagena (with A. striving valiantly to not tell me too much--he considers the last spoken line to be one of the best he's ever read) and we went straight to Teatro Heredia in the old city (after checking in) for the first event we were able to attend at this year's Hay Festival.

In the novel, Marlon and Reina are a young couple that immigrate illegally from Colombia to the U.S. and get separated in New York City, lost to each other among the millions. Marlon’s narrative alternates between three different parts of the story, which dissolve into a single strand once the reader realizes where Marlon is going and to whom he’s actually speaking. (I was reminded of Laura Restrepo’s more complicated structure in Delirio.)

As I got further into the book, I remembered what Katherine Silver had to say about Marlon, “whose subtly idiosyncratic voice—part idiot savant, part idiotic innocent—gives the novel unity and depth.” She’s certainly right about the “unity and depth,” but I was a little surprised to find my perception of Marlon to be so different from her own. He is young, scared, slightly superstitious, and in love—for the first time in his life. He is also helplessly (and illegally) lost in a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t realize that tossing a cigarette on a sidewalk could, say, get you unwanted attention from a couple of nearby cops. He wanders the streets for days without food or shelter; the fear and utter exhaustion cause a nervous breakdown, which will fill him with self-doubt later on (“Le eché la culpa al cansancio, hasta pensé que los días en que no fui yo me habían causado un daño cerebral, o que definitivamente era imposible entenderse en Nueva York.”).

As Junot Díaz says, there is nothing to compare it to: the immigrant experience (particularly the illegal immigrant experience) is so far removed from the typical frame of reference that the only thing that can really even come close is science fiction. But Franco isn’t writing science fiction, simply the thoughts and experiences of a bewildered young man, lost in a foreign country. (As Marlon’s friend Giovanny tells him, “Aquí lo que funciona es la observación: tenés que mirar y seguir, mirar y luego imitar, y obedecer, así creás que no te están vigilando, porque siempre están mirando.”) It isn’t even until much later in the novel that he is finally able to articulate his fear and confront himself and truth of his situation.

Yet he is innocent (in a sense), filled with idealism, blind faith, and, yes, obsession when it comes to Reina. As far as he's concerned, she's alive, lost, and waiting for him to find her. Perhaps saying he is “idiotic” is really just something he’d say of himself:

Ahora estoy seguro de todo lo que uno tiene que ver con su propia suerte. Si de algo he de lamentarme no es de mi mala estrella sino de mi estupidez: seguir a alguien por enamorado tiene más de torpeza que de honestidad o de ceguera.

But idiotic or not, he expresses the tragedy of the immigrant/exile (self-imposed or otherwise) and the misapprehensions of the homeland that can lead to a devastating confusion:

Cargaban en su expresión la desesperanza y el cansancio de haber agotado todas sus posibilidades en este país. Este país, así lo llamamos todos, con una pronunciación despectiva que acompañamos siempre de una mueca desagradable. Como si este país fuera un trapo sucio, ajeno, y no lo que todos hicimos de él. [...]

Se van mermando las esperanzas, se va uno acostumbrando a la prisa, uno comienza a ser desleal con sus sueños, se deja de llorar pero también de reír y finalmente termina uno padeciendo la maldición del emigrante: uno no se quiere quedar pero tampoco quiere volver.

His insight into his own plight extends into an awareness of wider issues:

También hubiera querido decirle que la infamia no era una exclusividad de los colombianos, que todos los seres humanos, sin excepción, somos infames y que por eso es que estamos irremediablemente perdidos.

Ultimately, he goes from glimmers of understanding (“Reina, Monterrey, Reynosa, todo tan monárquico”) to knowing what it is to “mortgage [one's] existence to another’s will.” He learns what identity and patria really mean, summing it up in a beautiful passage (whose impact I won't spoil by posting here) that will leave you wanting to pass this book on to someone else.

Another aspect of the work that I enjoyed were small, revealing details that Franco included. Marlon is hopelessly besotted with Reina, but even though there’s plenty of mention of his attraction to her and the physical aspect of their relationship, it isn’t until page 180 that a particular phrase is used...

Yo no sabía si agradecerle o reprocharle que me hiciera contarle mi historia. Me sentía cansado y liviano a la vez, como si acabara de hacer el amor.

...and he isn’t talking about Reina.

Something else I loved was his inclusion of a character whose loss of identity is mirrored in the letters lost from his name—from Rogelio Peña to Roger Pena:

—¿Usted no se llama así? —le pregunté.

—Primero perdí la eñe. Aquí esa letra no existe.

Hubiera querido preguntarle cómo se podía hablar sin una letra en el abecedario y cómo se decía coño en inglés, pero él estaba decidido a contarme sólo cinco segundos de su historia.

What Marlon doesn’t mention is that “pena” is also a word for shame, sorrow, and hardship in Spanish. Could this have something to do with Roger’s past?

Roger was also a pretty steady source of amusement:

—¿Y para dónde nos vamos? —le pregunté mientras trataba de recoger lo mío.

—I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so.

—¿Qué está diciendo, Roger?

—Yo, nada. El que lo dijo fue Eliot.

Back in Cartagena, we stood in line outside the theatre, the wind off the sea chilling us (or at least me) on this festive night. Although the film had opened in theatres the week before, it felt like a premiere—especially with the perambulating newspaper boys announcing it and the aproned (theme-appropriate) women pretending to mop the floor in and around the line of people. (We joked with one of them that it was all part of the experience, and she agreed.)

In the Q&A session after the screening, Jorge Franco and Juan Rendón took questions from the audience. Franco explained how he became attracted to the immigrant story and how a “what if” idea led him to imagine certain scenarios and explore different types of people and the reasons behind their choice to leave one country for another.

Most of the questions were pretty dull or obvious (“by people who haven’t read the book,” as A. observed), but I liked the last one. Someone asked why he tends to have such strong female characters (referencing both Rosario Tijeras and Paraíso Travel) set against weaker male counterparts. He acknowledged the trend, but thought that things changed considerably with Marlon. He sees him as a more developed character who “emancipates” himself throughout the novel.

I plan on seeing the movie again, but I was a little disappointed with how sure of himself Marlon was in the film. It was a tougher read of the character than I was expecting. One of the questions asked about certain differences between how the characters were written and how they were portrayed onscreen. Franco said it was true that some actors changed certain aspects of their characters, but added that this was their art and their contribution to the form.

The film itself is an excellent production. Some of the changes were improvements (emphasis on the tragedies of the border crossing) and others diluted the experience (the absence of Marlon’s mental breakdown and extreme suffering—he doesn’t even have beard by the time he finds shelter at Mi Tierra Colombiana). The three narrative threads are pared down to two, two characters are conflated into one, and the ending doesn’t have the emotional depth and clarity of the original. But the actors did excellent jobs and (just barely) kept John Leguizamo from stealing the show (his Spanish has improved considerably as well!). I can now forgive him for Lorenza Daza (almost).

I also really liked the depth the filmmakers added to the character of “La caleña” and how they emphasized the differences between herself and Reina.

Just today I thought of the question I should’ve asked. Orlando is a character in Franco’s novel that reminded me exactly of the character of Don Fernando in María Full of Grace. Turns out that Orlando Tobón who plays Don Fernando is the associate producer of María and is also "known as 'The Mayor of Little Colombia' in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York." Although another actor portrays him in the Paraíso Travel film, I found it moving that Franco uses his actual name in the novel. It would’ve been interesting to hear if he’s met Orlando Tobón and how he came to put him into his novel.

Thus ends the account of Friday night at the Hay Festival. On Saturday morning, A. went in search of parts for his electric guitar and I spent two hours in one bookstore (hence my lovely finds). Our next event was Saturday afternoon with Anne Enright. (The Irish were definitely well represented in the audience—we were surrounded!) My notes may be slow in coming, but I am determined to post on each event throughout the coming week. And if you’ve made it this far, my sincere congratulations!

...and more books

While I finish up my little essay on Paraíso Travel (the novel) and share the photos from the first Hay Festival event we were able to attend (the film adaptation), here's a list of the books I was able to find while in Cartagena:

• René Girard...Los orígenes de la cultura (Conversaciones con Pierpaolo Antonello y Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha)
• Vincent van Gogh...Cartas a Theo
• Antonio Muñoz Molina...En ausencia de Blanca (inspired by The Literary Saloon's review)
• A Spanish translation of Daniel Wallace's Big Fish (for A.)
• Guillermo Martínez...Borges y la matemática

Everyone was sold out of Enrique Vila-Matas, so El mal de Montano will have to wait for another day...but I am quite pleased with myself for finding these.

Still glowing

We got in from Cartagena last night--what a wonderful, wonderful time! Lots of photos and many pages of notes to share. Alice Walker couldn't make it due to a medical issue (which we were told wasn't anything to be too worried about) but we heard Jorge Franco, Anne Enright, David Crystal, Kiran Desai, Aminatta Forna, Monica Ali, Cristina García, Andrew Ruhemann, Antony Beevor, Ana María Moix, Piedad Bonnett, Enrique de Hériz, José Ovejero, and Juan Gossaín.

In the meantime, check out the fantastic Cartagena Hay Festival 2008 blog. It'll make you wish you had been there--and might inspire you to attend next year's.

Another one for future reference

Imani discusses the Summer 2000 issue of the Paris Review and shares Massimo Bacigalupo's solution to the whole "translating poetry" quandary:

Italian, of course, is a language that has long words, so if you’re translating poetry, as I have done with The Prelude, you have to choose whether to break up Wordsworth’s pentameters to keep the lines short or, as I do, maintain a roughly line-to-line correspondence.

In Italy (unlike France) it always has been customary, with poetry, to print the original facing the translation. So a translator should modestly seek to perform a service (we call it “traduzione di servizio“), offering a “guide” to the original rather than “poetry.” At least, I find that the more unambitious the approach the better. Quasi-poets should not use translation as a means of expressing their poetic souls. The closer you look into an original the more poetry you find — even in a translation. When I tackled The Prelude, it took me several years to do. I published some of the sections as I went along in little magazines, and it was amazing how readers were fascinated by what was to them a new poem. This is one of the possibilities of translation — you can reveal a great unknown quantity to a readership that was unaware of it. Quite a responsibility.

It has a eureka quality to it that makes me wonder why I hadn't read much on this (sensibly obvious) approach before. (Of course, come September, I will have no excuse...)

If this back issue hadn't already been sold out, I would have ordered it right away. It's a shame for this stuff to go out of print and not be reproduced online. (Perhaps it's something they're slowly moving towards?)

Complicated lives

Since reading The Silent Woman and her defence of Franny and Zooey, I've had a great respect for Janet Malcolm, as controversial and imperfect as some her work may be perceived. Aside from her brilliant penchant for asking the questions behind the questions, her sensible, down-to-earth honesty is always refreshing to read. In her recent Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, she's completely open about her shortcomings as a reader:

All three [scholars] prefer Stein's "real" writing to the "audience" writing, and when I confessed--as I am often obliged to--that the "real" writing is not congenial to me, they looked at me pityingly. "Well, you're honest," [Ulla] Dydo said kindly on one of these occasions. On another, while talking about the Thornton Wilder-Gertrude Stein book, I said in passing that I liked Our Town, and Dydo gave me a dark look. "Is it too sentimental for you?" I asked. "Ugh," she said, and shuddered. At these times I feel like someone who has ordered a cheeseburger at Lutèce.

I was thrilled to finally get my hands on a copy. (The fact that it's designed to look like a book published ca. 1940 only added to my glee.) Despite the rigorous questioning that goes on regarding how Stein and Toklas survived WWII, she seems to have (for the lay reader, at least) a wonderful grasp of Stein's writerly intentions ("She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly. She would rather groan and beat her breast than impose a false order on disorderly complexity."). She also does a good job of demonstrating why Stein's work is especially relevant now (while dicussing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas):

For forty years Stein has been working as a twentieth-century modernist innovator. But now she is obliged to consider the possibility that the nineteenth century did not end when she and everyone else thought it did, but is only ending now, with the arrival of barbarism. "Realism was the last thing the nineteenth century did completely. Anybody can understand that there is no point in being realistic about here and now . . . it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter." And yet, paradoxically, something tells Stein that there is great point in being realistic now, that life is indeed real and earnest and that she must try to rouse herself. "The horrors the fears everybody's fears the helplessness of everybody's fears, so different from other wars makes this war like Shakespeare's plays." Stein knows better than to try to write like Shakespeare, but she also senses that the occasion demands that she not try to write like herself, either. Modernist experimentalism will not express what she wants (and doesn't want) to express.

I believe the allusion to Longfellow is intentional (with the unspoken hint that perhaps the grave is its goal), and that life necessitates a both/and approach to art, as opposed to an either/or. I would think that "modernist experimentalism" would be the perfectly precise mode of expression for the times, but it seems that one thing shouldn't always be excluded at the expense of the other.

Yet there was one unaddressed issue that left me deeply curious. Stein sympathized with Franco, but was friends with Picasso ("she loved the Republican Party, she hated Roosevelt, and she actually supported Franco."). Picasso doesn't figure into Malcolm's book very much--I supposed that if he did, it would be a whole other book. It just left me wondering how that relationship worked. (How did they discuss Guernica? What could she have even said?)


As it is--all historical and biographical musings aside--Malcolm's thoughts on Stein's writing was the part I enjoyed the most (like this bit on The Making of Americans):

Stein's vocabulary is small and monotonous. When she uses a new word it is like the entrance of a new character. It is thrilling. "Every word I am ever using in writing has for me very existing being," she writes. "Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling. . . . There are only a few words and with these mostly always I am writing that have for me completely entirely existing being, in talking I use many more of them of words I am not living but talking is another thing, in talking one can be saying mostly anything, often then I am using many words I never could be using in writing."

Stein seems to be transcribing rather than transforming thought as she writes, making a kind of literal translation of what is going on in her mind. The alacrity with which she catches her thoughts before they turn into stale standard expressions may be the most singular of her accomplishments. Her influence on twentieth-century writing is nebulous. No school of Stein ever came into being. But every writer who lingers over Stein's sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.

Related items:

• Brendan Wolfe's thoughts on the matter.
• Mark Thwaite approves.
• Elizabeth Bachner's solid review at Bookslut.
• The Antipodean enjoyed it (and adds a shot of the Australian cover).
• And for good measure, Ron Silliman's review of Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934 by Ulla Dydo.

For future reference

Natasha Wimmer answers a few questions and gives some excellent tips:

How much time - if any - do you spend on the Web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Way, way too much time, mostly on food blogs, which definitely count as a distraction - to the extent that I had my husband set up a complicated system that cuts off my access from 9 to 5 every workday. But when I use it for legitimate purposes, it’s incredibly helpful. I do lots of research on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and I use the Real Academia Spanish dictionary. Urbandictionary.com is a godsend for slang assistance. And when I’m not sure whether a phrase is colloquial or not, I’ll Google it - a 21st-century translator’s trick.

(via Counterbalance)

To burn or not to burn?

According to Inside Higher Ed,

The son of Vladimir Nabokov is weighing whether to carry out the late novelist’s request that his final, unpublished work — currently in a Swiss bank — be destroyed. An article in Slate reviews the issues involved and how they relate to the question of who really owns literary work.

Ron Rosenbaum explains,

What I'd like to do is convey to Dmitri the best of your responses to this (literally) burning question, since he deserves to know the sentiments of the intelligent reading public as well as those of the close-knit coterie of Nabokovians greedy to view the body of [The Original of] Laura's text.

Maud points to reactions by Laila Lalami and Stephany Aulenback. Bookninja has something to say (as well as many thoughtful commenters). Michael Orthofer discusses a troubling point.

I'm reminded of the controversy that swirled around Alice Quinn's publication of Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Many thought Quinn should've left well-enough alone--especially Helen Vendler:

It will be argued that Bishop could have burned all these pieces of paper if she did not wish them to see publication. (I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts.) But burning one's writings is painful, and Bishop kept her papers, as any of us might, because the past was precious to her. Bishop did not expect to die when she did, in 1979, at the age of sixty-eight; her death was sudden and unforeseen. (Even if she had left instructions not to publish her papers, she could not rely on their being obeyed: Max Brod disobeyed Kafka's explicit command to destroy his writings. But some poets have been obeyed: Hopkins asked his sisters to burn his spiritual journals, and they did.) Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified "No."

I suppose I could resign myself to the destruction of those infamous index cards if Dmitri were to answer Rosenbaum's plea and tell us a little bit more about it:

Tell us what you want to tell us about Laura (including the "real" name of the original). Tell us why you think it's the "distillation of [your] father's art." Tell us, please, what that can mean. Or explain why Laura is such a "radical" departure from his previous work.

I guess we won't have too long to wait.

UPDATE: Scott at Conversational Reading and Dan of The Reading Experience also discuss the issue.

Social suffocation

Thanks to the wonder of online library catalogs (and the trusty library card I always carry with me), a lovely stack of books was waiting for me at my parents' house this Christmas. Natsuo Kirino's chilly Grotesque (translated by Rebecca Copeland) was the first one I dove into: an unreliable narrator pile-up filled with social suffocation and what it feels like to be trapped in the mind of a thwarted woman-child.

Each version of events lends itself to reinterpretation and further distrust of the principal narrator’s account. The supplementary material the narrator adds to her story (Yuriko’s diary, Kazue’s diary, Zhang’s deposition and account of his past) flatly contradict her own perceptions. Although what occurs at the end should serve to lend more sympathy to the narrator, the very fact that she’s allowed other voices in undermines her tale, leaving this reader merely annoyed with her pathetic posturing. But whose telling is really “true”? Isn’t it simply a matter of both/and rather than either/or? And given the social context in which she finds herself, could the narrator have chosen any other way?

Kirino elegantly exhibits the difference between truth and fact, while making it clear that compassion is needed for both.

UPDATE: I decided to use the handy litblog search engine over at MetaxuCafé to see what others had to say about it.

• Callie points to Junot Díaz's recommendation (which helped influence me to pick it up in the first place--and led directly to my reading Francisco Goldman's latest...but I'm getting ahead of myself).
• David Thayer's thoughts on the novel.
• Sarah Weinman mentions Sophie Harrison's review for the NYTBR ("Uh-Oh Kitty"--nice).
• Michael Orthofer's masterful collection of reviews, as well as his own (he gave it a B, which I would completely agree with).
  

Notes to self

• Post quotations and thoughts on the 12 books read over Christmas vacation.
• Finish reading Paraíso Travel before heading off to Cartagena on the 25th.
• Pack digital camera for the Hay Festival. Takes notes, but refrain from attempting to post lectures word-for-word and instead write brief summaries of each.
• Add all new books to LibraryThing account.
• Read Philip Pullman's post, "Milton in 2008" (via Maud). (Try to find a copy of his forward to read and add it to my new little stockpile of Milton material.)
  

Bioy Casares' invention

I finished reading La invención de Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares this weekend (published in English as The Invention of Morel, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms). From the outset, my expectations were high due to Borges' enthusiastic prologue: "He discutido con su autor los pormenores de su trama, la he releído; no me parece una imprecisión o una hipérbole calificarla de perfecta." He places it in the same league as The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, and Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur la Terre (as far as I can tell, this last has not yet been translated into English), and declares it a literary renewal of a concept found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Sudden Light":

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore...

The novel is the (footnoted) diary of an escaped prisoner, stranded on an island that is rumored to be infested with a fatal disease that causes the loss of one's hair, nails, and skin. Any discussion of the plot would detract from the experience of encountering it for the first time, but suffice it to say that it involves obsession, immortality, fame, love, the parallel destinies of men and the images they create, and a woman named Faustine (which made me think of Goethe and deals with the devil). The invention itself is something we're on the verge of today--I was stunned when I flipped to the copyright page and discovered that it was first published in 1940 (!).

I look forward to reading it again. It's one of those books that demands a rereading for all of the missed clues from the first time around...

In his acceptance speech for the Premio Cervantes in 1990, Bioy Casares relates that before he finished reading the first chapter of Don Quixote, he knew he wanted to be a writer. Indeed, many literary essays have surely been written on Don Quixote's influence on La invención de Morel: the narrator suffers from a condition very similar to that of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

Lagging behind

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post muses:

Instead of waiting for the English version to come out, I wish American media outlets would follow the lead of the TLS and others and review untranslated books. It would be great if major media outlets wrote about great international authors irrespective of the release of a new title in English.

Granted, this is never going to happen, but that also means that we’re almost always going to be lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of reading and discussing great literature. For better or worse, English is a colonizing language, and our resistance to other languages and cultures just means that the rest of the world is passing us by.

(I'm reminded of an interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o I read last week:

First, let me say that what I really oppose is all forms of monolingualism. It's not good for any society--American society or any other society.)

Post is also collecting a list of titles for a potential "Best Translations of 2007" list. (I suggested that Natasha Wimmer's translation of Delirium by Laura Restrepo be included. I read and enthusiastically admired the original earlier this year. Wimmer's translation looks excellent as well.)

Colombian litmag

Over the weekend, a friend told me about Colombian cultural magazine El Malpensante. Definitely something to keep an eye on:

El Malpensante es una revista literaria, pero no académica. Se fundamenta en el texto escrito de manera refinada, inteligente y perspicaz, y aunque por ello tiene un objeto paralelo al que estudia la academia, no suscribe una visión rígida de las letras. Preferimos aquellos textos, inclusive de actualidad, que a nuestro juicio no dependan de la moda o de la coyuntura presente y que puedan leerse casi con el mismo interés uno o dos años después de publicados. Por otra parte, El Malpensante considera una obligación descubrir nuevos talentos y rescatar escritores olvidados.

That simple loop

Richard Powers, The Echo Maker:

To be awake and know: already awful. To be awake, know, and remember: unbearable. Against the triple curse, Weber could make out only one consolation. Some part of us could model some other modeler. And out of that simple loop came all love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts, each one a frantic proof that I was not it... We had no home, no whole to come back to. The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light. But if nothing inside was ever fully us, at least some part of us was loose, in the run of others, trading in all else. Someone else's circuits circled through ours.

I finished this one today and now look forward to reading all of the posts and roundtable discussions that followed on the heels of its release. (Another thing I love about litblogs--the discussion is never over.)

Turning the last page on a Powers novel is an immensely satisfying feeling--as if the experience has left the soul searched, acknowledged, and accepted in some indefinable (yet wholly necessary) way. I've only read three of his novels--wonderful to know that there is still so much of his work left to discover.

Someone should write a book

that examines Philip Pullman's retelling of Paradise Lost in His Dark Materials and that objectively, dispassionately compares his reading of Milton with those of C.S. Lewis and Stanley Fish. Blake should also be tossed in there (particularly a reading similar to Annie Dillard's in "A Field of Silence"). Also, how does Pullman read Paradise Regained? Would it clarify or confuse the issues raised in his trilogy?

Basically, with the renewed interest in Pullman due to the film release of The Golden Compass, I'd love to see exchanges that have more to do with literature than religious polemic. (Granted, polemic has its place, but it seems that it is more and more difficult to find assessments of such polarizing work that are free of agendas, pro or con.)

Improvise a kingdom come

Linford Detweiler, "Only in America":

We want to move in closer, lean in together, improvise a little slow dance. So let’s move from the horns to the sound of the piano. Let’s find an old piano with a broken heart, like the upright piano we had at church, a piano full of prayers spoken and unspoken, a piano that makes the old hymns sound like they’re being played next door to a saloon. Let’s tell the truth. There were two taverns located right across the road from that little white wooden Protestant church where my father was minister. And as Karin likes to say—after what we grew up seeing in church, having a stiff drink nearby is the sort of convenience that makes America great. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first time I heard a piano. I can still see it. My mother has taken me to visit one of her friends who has adopted a boy a few years older than me. We walk into the living room, and there he is seated like God himself on a bench in front of a small wooden house with elephant-ivory keys, and pedals like a car. And that sound, the sound of a piano, that loud, infinitely happy/sad sound, that universe being born as he touches the black and white—I can’t believe my ears. I haven’t been walking all that long, but I walk as quickly as I can with unpredictable knees over to the corner of the bench and steady myself, and get the palm of my right hand up on the keyboard to slap the miracle and help it come out. The adopted boy glares at me and gives me a push. I find my seat on the living room floor. I joke now that I learned at a very early age that music was a cutthroat business: He was up, and I was down—and he wanted to keep it that way.

My mother grew up on an Amish farm with no electricity. She dreamed of owning a piano. Her second-grade teacher helped her cut out a cardboard keyboard and carefully draw the black and white keys. My mother, as a girl, would sit in her bedroom, one of 12 children, and play her cardboard keyboard, and hear the music that was only inside of her.

This is why the internet exists

Currently exploring the excellent new issue of The Quarterly Conversation. So far, I've read through the brilliant pieces by Marcelo Ballvé, Scott Esposito, and Javier Moreno. And there's even more to get to...

Mute

Yesterday, I stood transfixed while reading the entirety of Ingrid Betancourt's October letter to her mother.

Javier Moreno says it all:

Esos soldados que hablan y hablan pero no podemos escucharlos. No nos alcanza su mensaje, pero lo imaginamos (un saludo a mi madre, a mi mujer, a mis hijos, aquí estoy, aquí sigo, no puedo decir más, estoy bien, no se preocupen por mí). Es indignante, también. Y triste. Y todo lo demás.

Las FARC no quieren negociarlos ni cambiarlos ni entregarlos, no les interesa, nunca ha sido esa su intención, es lo único que tienen. Las FARC sólo juegan con el sufrimiento de los secuestrados y sus familias. No podemos seguir cediendo a la sucia manipulación.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Unless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

~ Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level

An epic elegy

Beowulf opened this weekend in Santa Marta and we went to see it last night. I wasn't overly impressed, but it certainly could have been worse (and there were some nice touches). One of the great things about it was how it sent me straight back to the text--and to what Tolkien had to say: "Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man’s precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable victory of death."

Cheery, huh? I guess that may be one of the reasons Gaiman and Avary chose to end the film in the middle of a choice. They were right in attempting to show the hollowness of "heroism" (although the hero's own demise is undeniably "heroic" and the result is more cautionary tale than lament). In the original, the battles with the three monsters only take up about one-third of the poem, making it more of an elegy than an epic.

And upon the hill-top        the warriors awoke
The mightiest of bale-fires.        Rose the wood-smoke,
Swart above the blazing.        And the roar of flame
Blended was with wailing,        as still the winds became,
Till, hot unto his heart, it broke        the Geat’s bone-frame.
Unglad of mood, in grief they mourned        their great Chief dead.
And his Wife, with hair bound,        her song of sorrow said,
Over and over:        how ‘t was hers to dread
Days of harm and hardship,        warriors’ fall and grame,
The terror of the raider,        captivity and shame.
        The sky the reek had swallowed.

The people's agony before Beowulf's pyre blends with the roar of the blaze until it becomes one keening force that quiets nature ("the winds") with its power. The grief and the fire become indistinguishable from each other, blurring the boundaries of physical fact and spiritual need to the point that it is unclear whether the disintegration of Beowulf’s body is the direct result of the flames, or the effect of his people’s agonized wailing, "hot unto his heart." It isn't just the loss of their hero that they're mourning, but the end of their way of life, the senselessness of war, and the void left by their gods. (I found it quite telling that the screenwriters decided to throw in Christ with the rest of them--he is notably absent from the original.)

I was lucky enough to hear Seamus Heaney speak while I was in college. His phrase, "Poetry is a plow that turns time up and over" brilliantly applies to the necessity of works such as Beowulf. He said that through poetry we are able to more fully comprehend the sorrow of an ancient people facing unconscionable tragedy. Contemporary news via the media slips past us much too easily to be absorbed. The agony of nations is effortlessly offered on the silver platter of the 30-second sound bite. Because worldwide suffering dwarfs modern society’s ability to assimilate it, we need art and poetry to help us keep hold of our humanity.

Boxed

I have officially finished packing my books and have entered each one into a LibraryThing account while I was at it. (I've placed one of their nifty "cover" widgets a little further down the sidebar on the right.)

Now all I've got to do is move them...

Faulkner on poetry

From "Verse, Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage":

Life is not different from what it was when Shelley drove like a swallow southward from the unbearable English winter; living may be different, but not life. Time changes us, but Time's self does not change. Here is the same air, the same sunlight in which Shelley dreamed of golden men and women immortal in a silver world and in which young John Keats wrote "Endymion" trying to gain enough silver to marry Fannie Brawne and set up an apothecary's shop. Is not there among us someone who can write something beautiful and passionate and sad instead of saddening?

Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

Hay watch

Busy, busy, busy. Tomorrow is the very last day of school, so there is much to do (grading exams, finishing report cards, meeting with parents, sitting in staff meetings, packing, cleaning classrooms, planning for next year, etc.). Also, next week marks the end of my stay in the lovely apartment by the sea, which has been my home since April 2005. The 30th is the day I officially move out. I will miss it.

It doesn't feel much like Thanksgiving, but there is much to be thankful for. The program for the January 2008 Hay Festival in Cartagena is supposed to be up today. Nothing so far, but I will be updating this post as soon as I see it. (There was also a refreshing little article on Medellín in Newsweek.)

UPDATE: Still no news (11.25pm). Maybe tomorrow?

UPDATE 25.11.07: Still nothing. Maybe next month?

UPDATE 26.11: News! They've postponed the program unveiling for 3 December.

UPDATE 3.12 (4.00pm): Nothing yet...

UPDATE 11.12 (7.45am): Big surprise... Nothing. (I really hope this just means that they're getting some last-minute answers on their invites...)

UPDATE 15.12: It's here!! (Apparently, it went up early this week, but due to travel I didn't see it until just now. AMAZING line-up!! Now, to begin planning...)

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird
Or an old horse.

~ Wallace Stevens

James Longenbach on "Nuances of a Theme by Williams" in The Resistance to Poetry:

Stevens is entering an inevitable dialectic in which the power of a word's untidy activity depends on our inability to recognize it dependably, in which the power of self-forgetfulness is contingent on the specter of self-loathing--the inability ever to forget ourselves. To deny a metaphor's ability to distract us from what it also says is to place ourselves at odds with the pleasure of poetry. But if the language of poetry were not haunted by failure, by its inability to distract us, we could never forget it.

Haunting humanity

(cross-posted at A Curious Singularity)

After reading Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" I was struck by the narrator's awareness of his own isolation and role it plays in his descent into "madness":

Yesterday after doing some business and paying some visits, which instilled fresh and invigorating mental air into me, I wound up my evening at the Theatre Francais. A drama by Alexander Dumas the Younger was being acted, and his brilliant and powerful play completed my cure. Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

But almost immediately after admitting this to himself, he does an about-face and makes some pretty cold remarks about people:

July 14. Fete of the Republic. I walked through the streets, and the crackers and flags amused me like a child. Still, it is very foolish to make merry on a set date, by Government decree. People are like a flock of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: "Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the Emperor," and it votes for the Emperor; then say to it: "Vote for the Republic," and it votes for the Republic.

Those who direct it are stupid, too; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, a course which can only be foolish, ineffective, and false, for the very reason that principles are ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, whereas in this world one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is deception.

Earlier this week, I read "Ghost Calf," a short story by Marcelo Ballvé, and had a realization about how easily we rationalize ourselves right into inhumanity and how "hauntings" can function as an echo of that lost humanity--either as a reminder of what's being lost or as an act of vengeance against our calloused perceptions.

As Litlove writes,

What this story performs so well is the loss of control it posits as one of the great fundamental fears of mankind. Our narrator finds the possibility of other races so convincing because he thinks of humanity as so weak, vulnerable and flawed. It would not take very much to create a race of beings superior to us, who would not be so limited or so powerless. It’s not much more than the thought of this that transforms our narrator, over the course of thirty pages or so, from a wealthy, advantaged young man to a gibbering wreck, half out of his mind with terror. The imagination – the power to invent this story, as well as the power to envisage new possibilities for mankind – is the internal instrument of our own disintegration as well as one of the greatest features of the human race.

Unfortunately for our narrator, the realization never comes. After setting fire to his own house, he hears

[A] cry, a horrible, shrill, heart-rending cry, a woman's cry, sounded through the night, and two garret windows were opened! I had forgotten the servants! I saw the terror-struck faces, and the frantic waving of their arms!

He remembers other people only when he has destroyed them. It is too late to save anyone, and so, without any evidence whatsoever, he makes the snap judgment that the Horla has survived and so he (the narrator) must kill himself. His guilt is so great that it is obvious to the narrator that his nemesis has survived. Of course he has. By severing his own last link to humanity (causing the death of his servants), he is utterly lost to the figure of his own demise.

P.S. Interestingly, it seems that this story helped inspire H.P. Lovecraft and was later "adapted" (read: mutilated) to film in 1963, starring (who else?) Vincent Price.

Never alone

Junot Díaz in conversation with Michael Silverblatt:

JD: What I want is people to read and remember that reading--while we may practice it alone, in solitude--it arose out of a collective learning and out of a collective exchange. And that if somebody encounters a word--sure, you can go to Wikipedia, that's the short-circuit. If you encounter a word you don't know, or a phrase, that's a short-cut. That's ok. But part of me is hoping that that will encourage people to look up some of the books that this book is referencing, the book is mic-checking. Ask people what some of these things mean, return to the notion that it's not just you, a monk alone in a chamber--that it's you reading out of a collective, from a collective, you know. And I love that idea 'cause I never forgot how I learned to read.

MS: How did you learn to read?

JD: With a group of people--with teachers. I learned to read in kindergarten when I first moved to the United States, watching other kids make mistakes, do things right, and having access to a group of teachers who were committed. That moment--in A Wonderful Life--do you remember? The husband of the teacher punches him and he goes, "My wife taught your children to read!" And it is a debt--reading is a debt we owe to a collective, while we may practice it alone.

It's a marvelous interview, and this segment immediately reminded me of one of the reasons litblogs are so vital these days. It's about conversation, sharing--reading in conversation with other books and other readers as well. (John Donne has been right all along.)

(via Counterbalance)

Exile, revisited

In a response to a passage of William Gass', Brian Crabtree wondered,

While we have benefitted from modern life in many ways, it seems to have pushed us from the beauty we once viscerally knew to be there, hidden in the lines. We no longer toil, collectively, over the lines of a popular ballad, committing the pulses and unexpected variations of sound and color to memory--we don't even hear them; we no longer take words in, imbibe their many shades of meaning, taking joy in them all the while. Hart Crane seems emblematic of Gass' theme, use is abuse. You've got to quit trying to solve his words, trying to impress your own meaning. They simply are.

On a side note: if you're looking for it, you can almost hear echos of Orwellian ideology--who are we if the center of self is lost to us?

I'm reminded of another aspect of the situation. Elsewhere in "Exile" Gass admits,

This claim of mine concerning the centrality of the spoken word, is, of course, not believed. In our picture perfect time, who should believe it? So on your next date, draw a picture of your passion. Thus explain your needs. How far into real feeling will it take you? Will it not inadvertently possess a certain lavatory style? When next you are alone, and pondering some problem (should you call him? will she or won't she? does he like the amplified guitar better than the cradled bass? in what will she prefer that I express myself, chalk or crayon?), try posing your questions in terms of the flickering image so many say they love and is the future's salutary wave. Think through anything. Start small. Continue simple. But doodle the solution into being.

(From Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile)

Like ice cream

Neil Gaiman on the history of fairy tales and Stardust:

I was fortunate in having Charles Vess, to my mind the finest fairy artist since Arthur Rackham, as the illustrator of Stardust, and many times I found myself writing scenes - a lion fighting a unicorn, a flying pirate ship - simply because I wanted to see how Charles would paint them. I was never disappointed.

The book came out, first in illustrated and then in unillustrated form. There seemed to be a general consensus that it was the most inconsequential of my novels. Fantasy fans, for example, wanted it to be an epic, which it took enormous pleasure in not being. Shortly after it was published, I wound up defending it to a journalist who had loved my previous novel, Neverwhere, particularly its social allegories. He had turned Stardust upside down and shaken it, looking for social allegories, and found absolutely nothing of any good purpose.

"What's it for?" he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living.

"It's a fairytale," I told him. "It's like an ice cream. It's to make you feel happy when you finish it."

I don't think that I convinced him, not even a little bit. There was a French edition of Stardust some years later that contained translator's notes demonstrating that the whole of the novel was a gloss on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which I wish I had read at the time of the interview. I could have referred it to the journalist, even if I didn't believe a word.

(via Crooked House)

["And Into Faerie" image from Charles Vess' "Stardust Print Suite"]

Exile

The exile that I personally know about is an exile far less gruesome than the fate which befell Saturn's children; it is not at all dramatic like the epic of Oedipus, not a bit lyric, either, like a ballad bemoaning the old days from the lute of a Slavic poet. It does not even concern the exile of a person whose speech was found to be offensive, and who was sent away where his message could be heard no more. I am talking about the loss of a use of language, in my opinion its fundamental employment--the poetic in the broadest sense--and how that limb of our language has been cut off and callously discarded.

This has been, of course, my subject all along. And someone may ask, so complete has been its disappearance, what is this special use of language, and what makes it so special? Alas, to answer would require another essay and an honesty absent from most hearts. It is, first of all, a use of language which refuses to be a use. Use is abuse. That should be the motto of every decent life. So it treats every word as a wonder, and a world in itself. And it walks between them, even over dizzy heights, as confidently as a worker on beams of steel. And it does not care to get on, but it dwells; it makes itself, as Rilke wrote, into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator. It reaches back into the general darkness we--crying--came from, retouches the terrors and comforts of childhood, but returns with a magician's skills to make the walls of the world dance.

~ William H. Gass, "Exile," Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile

Quiet Saturday

Representing the human

From Boldtype's interview with Junot Díaz:

Everybody always says, "I hate these footnotes, they jump me off the page." That's the point. This is a book about the terror of the single voice — of the dictatorship — and the footnotes completely undermine that authority. So unlike a lot of the postmodern white boys who use it to reinforce authority, to show their erudition, these footnotes are constantly undermining it. They jump in to give you some nonsense gossip or to say, "I got that thing in the first chapter wrong... oops!" But there's also Oscar himself. Fact is, among all these multiple voices, Oscar never really appears. We never encounter any of his direct words, and only at the very end do we get a letter from him. He's as big a ghost as his vanished ancestors, but the voice distracts you from that. It's a book about what happens when you are vaporized. Can you exist again? Can we use language to bring back what is gone? There's all these "Dr. Manhattan" jokes because in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan is a vanished man. He pieces himself together again, but he's not human. When he reconstructs himself, an element is fucking missing. You know? And it's the same thing with Yunior and Oscar: no matter how hard he tries, something is missing. This book is not attempting to give you a real fucking human. It's attempting to give you Dr. Manhattan — this blue, ethereal ghost. In a way, that's as close as we can come as artists to representing the human. We can put the experience together, but it always comes up short.

There's also an execellent review of Samedi the Deafness.

Giddy

I am thrilled that my copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao arrived safely today (and in under a month)! I am trying to get these exams graded asap so I can begin...

Some great (and lengthy!) conversations with Junot Díaz can be found on YouTube and at the Borders Media site. Also, last week Callie posted about what it was like to attend a reading (and includes a list of online reviews).

One of my biggest disappointments with the Hay Festival in Cartagena last January (aside from Chimamanda Adichie and David Mitchell not appearing at their scheduled discussions) was having to miss Junot Díaz. We just could not get off work early enough to make it when the events started during the week. I'm eagerly awaiting the program for the 2008 festival, which should be available 22 November (our last day of school!). Maybe he loved it so much that he'll want to come back to Colombia? (This time, work be damned!)

Loving Rilke

Yesterday marked the beginning of Rilke Week at Chekhov's Mistress. In his introductory post, Bud mentions what sparked the idea and remarks, "I don’t suppose Rilke is too controversial – either you love him or don’t know him." Too true.

My own little contribution went up today. Which poems do you love? Why? What is it about Rilke that has inspired and resonated with so many of us? I really look forward to reading imminent posts and all of your own thoughts on his work.

An embarrassment of riches

On Saturday, I turned 30. Of course, I still feel like a provincial, naïve 19--but there you have it. A. and I celebrated by traveling to Barranquilla (or as Johnny Cash called it, "bear-uhn-KILL-uh") and buying books--so many books! (We also caught Neil Gaiman's Stardust--dubbed, but as it has yet to arrive to Santa Marta, we happily took what we got--and ate at my beloved Crepes & Waffles.)

To wit:

La lengua ladina de García Márquez...Margret S. de Oliveira Castro
Don Quijote de la Mancha en Medellín...Jorge Franco
La vida breve...Juan Carlos Onetti
La invención de Morel...Adolfo Bioy Casares
La suma de los días...Isabel Allende
Canción de cuna y otros poemas...W.H. Auden
Matadero cinco...Kurt Vonnegut
La importancia de llamarse Ernesto y El abanico de Lady Windermere...Oscar Wilde

The Vonnegut was for A. (he's in the middle of the Spanish translation of Powers' Galatea 2.2) and the Wilde for his sister (a lover of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Brontës, Dumas, Eco, and even Margaret Mitchell). I nearly bought some translated Auster, but those were quite pricey. (Alas, no Nabokov in sight.) The Auden is a parallel translation, and I read him a couple of my favorites the next day. (All of these books are such beautiful editions!) And the García Márquez dictionary will come in handy when I finally tackle El otoño del partriarca.

In addition to all this, a fellow teacher recently arrived back from a trip to the U.S. and brought back (eagerly requested) copies of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness.

In my few days off, I plowed through Shantaram, Lolita, and recently finished Azar Nafisi's memoir. There are so many things to write about...but I realize that I'm unable to write unless I've flooded my mind with reading. I have to reach that "too full" feeling before I can write anything. And once I've done that, I can only head straight back into the reading again.

There is a post on César Aira's El mago in the works. I need to finish Saramago's childhood memoir so I can pick up Jorge Franco's Paraíso Travel. Pynchon is still patiently waiting (he is very good at it, I've found).

And now, back to the books.

On second thought

As some readers may or may not remember, Fernando Vallejo renounced his Colombian citizenship back in May. This weekend, he announced that he's changed his mind and is initiating the process of regaining what he so bitterly scorned only five months ago.

The interview is highly entertaining (he was quite himself and then some), but I found myself strangely moved by the whole thing. Sure, it could've all just been one big publicity stunt, but I think his strong feelings get the better of him. Many think he's crazy. I just think he's an artist.

A small sample:

Usted también se ha convertido en un defensor de la lengua española. ¿La ve amenazada?

Hoy la lengua española es un adefesio. Un inmenso desastre anglizado. Este idioma perdió su expresividad, su gracia, su riqueza y hoy sólo queda pudriéndose, el cadáver de lo que fue. En cuanto a los escritores, ni siquiera se han dado cuenta de que cada idioma son dos: uno escrito y otro hablado. Uno muy vasto que es el de la literatura; y otro, pobre y limitado, que es de la lengua coloquial.

¿Quiénes serían la excepción?

Hay escritores como Azorín que sí sabían del oficio. Para no alejarnos del presente, un escritor como Fernando del Paso y entre nosotros William Ospina, cuyo libro 'Ursúa', está escrito en el más rico idioma literario. Los demás no saben escribir. Tienen un lenguaje paupérrimo respecto al vocabulario y paupérrimo respecto a la sintaxis. Y lo que es peor: no tienen nada que contar. Son alfeñiques que quieren levantar pesas.

¿Pierdo el tiempo si le pregunto qué le gusta?

(Ríe). Me gusta la música, me gusta Mozart, Debussy, Maller, José Alfredo Jiménez, Chavela Vargas, los tangos, los boleros... Me gusta y me hace inmensamente feliz ver que un perro vaya con su dueño alegremente por las calles y me hace inmensamente infeliz ver un perro abandonado.

Por último, ¿qué opina de Hugo Chávez, el presidente venezolano, ahora mediador del conflicto?

Está muy alzado. Hay que darle una buena paliza en las nalgas.

Delirium revisited

Insightful commentary into Laura Restrepo's Delirium can be found over at Five Branch Tree:

While social and political commentary towards Latin America exists, as well as perceptions into a person’s psychological vulnerabilities, ultimately this is a work of literary art that explores the torments of insatiable desires and obsessions that stem from the darker side of Eros. Largely sexual, but also inclusive of the many variant forms striving can take to attempt satisfaction, which has the novel take turns into much more disturbing corners than I was expecting, inclusive of both physical and emotional violence. Fortunately, Restrepo is able to infuse the writing with just enough warmth to counterbalance the painful social occurrences which surround the character’s lives. One gets the sense that Restrepo is not interested in providing any optimism towards the delirium of Columbia [sic], but through compassion and care, and new forms of structuring, a much different outcome that can be provided for the individual.

He even discusses which composer would be perfect for a potential film score.

(Here are some more thoughts on this complex novel.)

Hermosa Cartagena

I've had many reservations about the adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera (none the least of which is the horrible poster), but this "behind-the-scenes" glimpse was encouraging.

(We'll see how long it takes the film to arrive here on Colombian screens--so far, it doesn't look like it'll make it down before the end of the year. There will be something a bit surreal about having to finally see it with Spanish subtitles, but I'll do my best to lock the jury out until after the credits have rolled.)

UPDATE: As of today, we're looking at a 16 November release date here in Santa Marta! (Nerve-racking excitement ensues. Also, Callie has her own worries.)

Scattered notes on ephemeral illusions, Part III

(Last page of notes on The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster...with spoilers. Parts I and II here and here.)

• Travels in the Scriptorium: a novel by Martin Frost in a film by Hector Mann (supposedly destroyed) in a novel by Paul Auster. It is also another novel by Paul Auster. (And I'll bet that the reference made Auster's film too. Whew!)
• After thinking about Berkeley, I began to wonder if the entire Book of Illusions isn't some sort of illusion itself (with "Tierra del Sueño" being the clue from the very beginning). Some of the joke is at Martin's expense: "The chair appears to be solid, but no sooner does he lower his weight onto it than it splinters into a dozen pieces. Martin goes tumbling to the floor."
• Martin Frost (giving in to Kierkegaard):

  Claire was asking me to make a leap of faith, and rather than go on pressing her, I decided to close my eyes and jump. I had no idea what was waiting for me at the bottom, but that didn't mean it wasn't worth the risk.

• Claire quotes Kant to Martin:

  ...things which we see are not by themselves what we see...so that, if we drop our subject or the subjective form of our senses, all qualities, all relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish.

• Martin burns his work...destroying it to save her instead. The work dies to keep Inspiration/the Muse alive. If the work is finished, she is gone. Obviously, the film works as a philosophical object lesson. But what does it say about the other burned work in this novel? Of Hector's 14 films, supposedly destroyed? Were they destroyed? This particular film of Hector's demonstrates how Hector himself was able to survive. (And it's filmed in his own house, mentioning he and his wife by name.) So The Inner Life of Martin Frost is then itself destroyed. These films have kept Zimmer alive...they're destroyed...yet the parallels break down when he loses Alma as well. But does the fact that Auster has given filmic existence to Martin Frost prove that something survived the burning? Later, Zimmer muses, "For better or worse, it seems that the philosophers were right. Nothing that happens to us is ever lost." In the next paragraph, he and Alma eat cheese sandwiches after watching the film...
  
• And then comes Doubt #2:
  

  They had worked together for only four days, but in that time they had established a tradition of sharing cheese sandwiches in the stockroom during their half-hour lunch break. Now she continued to show up with the cheese sandwiches, and they continued to spend those half hours talking about books.

  This passage is from page 135 and describes Hector and Nora O'Fallon. More echoes, allusions, illusions. What's really going on here?
• In that same paragraph where Alma and Zimmer eat cheese sandwiches, he muses,

  Martin burned his story in order to rescue Claire from the dead, but it was also Hector rescuing Brigid O'Fallon, also Hector burning his own movies, and the more things had doubled back on themselves like that, the more deeply I had entered the film.

  But how deeply does Zimmer actually enter into it and how much is actually doubling back on Zimmer?
• His realizations of what's been going on all along (pp. 240-243) chillingly reflect back onto himself and the book that no one is supposed to see until after his death.
• Standing in Alma's bathroom, he casually mentions the Chanel No. 5. But... (Doubt #3)

  As luck would have it, I had given [Helen] a fresh supply of Chanel No. 5 for her birthday in March. By limiting myself to small doses twice a day, I was able to make the bottle last until the end of the summer.

• It's possible that I'm reading way too deeply into this. But could it be a coincidence that we get repeated mention of certain objects in different contexts (either parallel or inverse)?
• Alma titles her biography-in-progess, The Afterlife of Hector Mann.
• The explanation of "Blue Stone Ranch" is equally chilling...a life "founded on an illusion."
• Frieda's act of destruction against Alma parallels what Martin does to save Claire, but it's a grotesque inversion.
• Yet the last word of the novel is "hope." He believes the films survived--that part of what he witnessed at Tierra del Sueño was an illusion, a deception. But the fact that the book itself is in my hands means that Zimmer is long gone. Did he ever learn the truth? Does Auster's act of providing us with The Inner Life of Martin Frost substantiate Zimmer's hope?

Scattered notes on ephemeral illusions, Part II

(Second page of notes on The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster)

"We might not have met until yesterday, but we've been working together for years." ~ Alma

Thanks to Brian (of the excellent Five Branch Tree) for mentioning this brief interview with Paul Auster and his new film, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. (It's a good interview, but rife with spoilers—so beware.) To be honest, I got goosebumps when I read his comment. This post has been in draft form since the beginning of the month, as I was about to discuss...The Inner Life of Martin Frost. To discover that Auster had recently made this into a film was a bit unnerving.

• Page 217: "At some point, we notice that the philosopher's name is written out in block letters across the front of the sweatshirt: BERKELEY--which also happens to be the name of her school. Is this supposed to mean something, or is it simply a kind of visual pun?" Both, of course.
• As an undergrad, I was able to visit Berkeley Castle while studying for a term in England ("Where Edward II was murdered, where the Barons of the West gathered before Magna Carta and where Queen Elizabeth I hunted and played bowls."). There are many stories connected to the place--and it's where I learned that UC Berkeley (and the town) was actually named after the philosopher, George Berkeley (although the British pronounciation is "BARK-ley" and the American is "BERK-ley"). Even though Zimmer doesn't seem to be aware of this, Auster certainly is. (Wheels within wheels within wheels...)
• Claire reads from The Principles of Human Knowledge:

  And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together, cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. And again: Secondly, it will be objected that there is a great difference betwixt real fire and the idea of fire, between dreaming or imagining oneself burnt, and actually being so.

• My first real (conscious) encounter with Berkeley's thought came from reading Through the Looking-Glass—actually, The Annotated Alice (brilliantly edited by Martin Gardner), which explains the scene of the Red King sleeping underneath the tree as Alice argues with Tweedledum and Tweedledee about the nature of existence:
  

  “I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.
  
  “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
  
  Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
  
  “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
  
  “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
  
  “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
  
  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
  
  “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”
  
  “Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
  
  “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
  
  He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”
  
  “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”
  
  “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
  
  “You wo’n’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”
  
  “If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
  
  “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
  
  “I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.”

• As Gardner aptly notes,

  This well-known, much-quoted discussion of the Red King’s dream (the monarch is snoring on a square directly east of the square currently occupied by Alice) plunges poor Alice into grim metaphysical waters. The Tweedle brothers defend Bishop Berkeley’s view that all material objects, including ourselves, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of God. Alice takes the common-sense position of Samuel Johnson, who supposed that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone. [...]
  
  An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other [...].

• Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World is another obvious example of Berkeley's philosophy at work in fiction. (There are many, many more—feel free to list them in the comments.)

Staying gold

I really enjoyed reading Dale Peck's examination of the literary references in The Outsiders. He provides example after example, elucidating exactly why Hinton's book is so important:

The intertextual musings come to a head when Johnny tells Pony that Dallas reminds him of the Southern men in “Gone With the Wind,” which the two boys have been reading to combat boredom while they hide from the police. In Johnny’s view, Dally’s refusal to turn in his friend Two-Bit for vandalism is like the Confederate rebels’ “riding into sure death because they were gallant.” Pony initially rejects this reading, but something about it nags him: “Of all of us, Dally was the one I liked least. He didn’t have Soda’s understanding or dash, or Two-Bit’s humor, or even Darry’s superman qualities. But I realized that these three appealed to me because they were like the heroes in the novels I read. Dally was real. I liked my books and clouds and sunsets. Dally was so real he scared me.”

This is good stuff — great stuff for a teenager. Dally’s “realness” is made apparent by characters in a book; by contrast, the other members of the gang, who’ve limited themselves to playing roles they’ve picked up elsewhere, are suddenly seen as less real, enabling Pony to understand why, at the beginning of the novel, Cherry Valance shyly declared, “I kind of admire him.” What goes unsaid until the end of the story is that Pony, like Dally, needs a book to explain him, but is forced to write it himself.

(via Maud)

Now I've got The Innocence Mission's lovely song "Walking Around" swirling in my head...

Rain happens into my room at night,
when there is so much time to miss you.
Beautiful changes I've seen sometimes,
the clouds changing into reindeer and flying
to places clear of sorrow.

Walking around.
You know I've had enough of this trouble
following me high and low. Now it can go.

Some boy I knew said, Hang on, stay gold,
before he left here for England.
Beautiful changes I feel sometimes,
in the middle of the late morning dishes
when you say I might do anything at all.

Walking around.
You know I've had enough of this trouble
following me high and low. Now it can go.

Inside another world

The most recent issue of Literature Matters, the British Council’s newsletter, is now online. The issue centers around the 30th Cambridge Seminar on Contemporary Literature, and includes an enlightning interview with literary translator Maureen Freely:

When I sit down to translate a novel by Orhan Pamuk, I know it will not be enough to find the correct words. I need to be sure they are also the right words – the words that will conjure up the imaginary world in which it is set. So I myself need to believe in that cloistered world, to believe myself inside it. Only then can I hope to find the words that will make it visible in English.

This is not as easy as it sounds, for there is a very great distance between Turkish and English. There is no verb ‘to be’ in Turkish, and no verb ‘to have’. There is only one word for ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’. Turkish is an agglutinative language: a root noun in a routine sentence will often have a string of six, seven, or even eight suffixes connected to it. It has many more tenses than English does. It can dart between the active and the passive voice with grace and ease. It loves clauses beginning with verbal nouns (the doing of, the having been done unto of, the having being seen to have something done to someone else…..) In an elegant sentence, there will often be a cascade of such clauses dividing the subject from the verb, and that verb appears so close to the end of the sentence that it often serves as a punch line, reversing the expected meaning of all that has come before it. To be overly clear is to be crude. To write well is not the say the obvious, but to suggest what lies beyond it. So Turkish is not just another language: it is another way of looking at the world.

Scattered notes on ephemeral illusions, Part I

(First page of notes on The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster)

Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery. ~ Chateaubriand

• He says he "stuck to a close reading of the films themselves" and on the same page is the first reference to "Tierra del Sueño" (Land of the Dream or Land of Dreams). Page 3, and I already know I'll have to pay careful attention to this one. Is George Berkeley alluded to from the very beginning?
• He soon invokes "Proudhon's well-known anarchist dictum: all property is theft" (p. 31).
• "Everything from Meister Eckhart to Fernando Pessoa would be included"... I've fancifully thought that Pessoa could be the figure that inspired the character of Hector Mann (or, at least, a way of thinking about or interpreting him). His physical description immediately made me think of this portrait of Pessoa by his contemporary José de Almada Negreiros, but the issue of heteronyms brought me further. (This article explains things more thoroughly.)
• Zimmer's translation of Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe goes from Memoirs from Beyond the Grave to Memoirs of a Dead Man. Obviously, this extends to Mann's work and what eventually happens in the novel, but it also applies to The Book of Illusions itself--something we're reading only because Zimmer himself has left the stage. Self-referential echoes haunt the characters as they eventually become what they initially only pursue.
• And then I creeped myself out by noticing that Chateaubriand wrote his introduction to Memoirs of a Dead Man on 14 April 1846: "Ruination Day." Gillian Welch's songs "April 14th, Part I" and "Ruination Day, Part II" off Time (The Revelator) revolve around disasters that have occurred on that date: Lincoln's assassination, the sinking of the Titanic, and Black Sunday (the worst storm of the Dust Bowl era).
• "Death does not reveal the secrets of life." ~ Chateaubriand (Although there will be some answers offered at the end of the novel, they reveal themselves as conjectures on closer inspection and only provoke even more questions.)
• Alma = Soul (Zimmer trying to reclaim life...)
• Brigid is found "lying facedown on the rug in front of the sofa." But does this make sense if she was actually shot in the face? (Doubt #1)
• "It felt like some cunningly devised form of punishment, as if the gods had decided that I wouldn't be allowed to have a future until I returned to the past. Justice therefore dictated that I should spend my first morning with Alma in the same way I had spent my last morning with Helen. I had to get into a car and drive to the airport, and I had to be rushing along at ten and twenty miles over the speed limit to avoid missing a plane." The ability to see symmetry (or patterns) in the events of one's life helps to make life liveable. (But too much of this can become a form of psychosis.)
• There's an excellent discussion of Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" on pp. 103-104.

The answer to the question

David Zimmer on translation:

Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing The Silent World. Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house.

~ from Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions