In the meantime

After a while her tears only reflected light but did not flow, and she dropped into silences, and then these, too, gradually lost their resentful edges. [...]

They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

Still here, still traveling with Pynchon...

Silence

Juan Valdez announces a special coffee in honor of Colombian poet Aurelio Arturo. Just another excuse to discover one more writer (if there must be gimmicks, make them more like this). And so...

Silencio

Cabelleras y sueños confundidos
cubren los cuerpos como sordos musgos
en la noche, en la sombra bordadora
de terciopelos hondos y olvidos.

Oros rielan el cielo como picos
de aves que se abatieran en bandadas,
negra comba incrustada de oros vivos,
sobre aquel gran silencio de cadáveres.

Y así solo, salvado de la sombra,
junto a la biblioteca donde vaga
rumor de añosos troncos, oigo alzarse
como el clamor ilímite de un valle.

Ronco tambor entre la noche suena
cuando están todos muertos, cuando todos,
en el sueño, en la muerte, callan llenos
de un silencio tan hondo como un grito.

Róndeme el sueño de sedosas alas,
róndeme cual laurel de oscuras hojas
mas oh el gran huracán de los silencios
hondos, de los silencios clamorosos.

Y junto a aquel vivac de viejos libros,
mientras sombra y silencio mueve, sorda
la noche que simula una arboleda,
te busco en las honduras prodigiosas,
ígnea, voraz, palabra encadenada.

(English translation)

The metaphor of what we've always been

Lo que importa es el rito
La metáfora de lo que siempre hemos sido
La memoria del primer sonido vocal
“el lenguaje secreto de los pájaros
del primer día”

Destemplado es el hombre de hoy
Ha olvidado las palabras.
Alguien balbuce algo
Y todos llegan, es el ritual
La transición
El recuerdo,
la sustitución,
La metáfora en fin
¿Qué extraña analogía es el hombre?

Nada dice el poeta,
Pero de su garganta sale un ser vivo
Invisible, que sólo tiene sonido
Y una música antigua.
Recordamos entonces el sonido original
El primer ruido del mundo
Cuando la palabra se hizo sangre
Y alimento colectivo.

~ Álvaro Marín, de "El primer ruido"

(English translation)

Dreaming of thought

Treena at Sleek Clouds on "A Letter from Li Po":

Aiken expresses that time exists in a place "such as imagination dreams of thought." This is how we see things, isn't it? At least, it's how we see those elusive things that come to mean so much to us: inklings, epiphanies, limits. And it is, perhaps, the only way we can express those thoughts of which our imaginations can only dream: by expressing meaning in images directed at the sub-conscious, perhaps even by-passing the brain's logic. [...]

Here, constrained by (or in) the bottleneck of Time, we as lovers of literature must seek something divine in all this--and Aiken helps us when he declares, "all is text, is holy text." It passes into poet after poet...

Gertrude Stein's work is memorable, and gives off a similar vibe: text into text, text out of text... But Aiken hides meaning "individually" in every single line--and we find it. Whereas, with Stein meaning is a general impression we have of the text. Yet both make literature an event worth attending because we know that these writers will probe the questions worth asking. They are like the calligrapher Chang Hsu who "needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning," and on whose scroll "wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, [till] the sky opened upon Forever."

I'm well into the 200s in Against the Day--behind schedule, but enjoying it (which is, after all, the point). Today has been quiet. Reading these entries have helped fill the day with meaning. I learn to keep these windows open and expect more from the sky.

Tori and the Light Princess

I've loved George MacDonald's books since childhood and The Light Princess, a very funny and moving little story about a gravity-deficient princess, is my favorite fairy tale of all time. Someone is forgotten (inevitably) at the christening, resulting in a curse of weightlessness and an irreverant lack of inner gravity (she has never cried).

And so it was with great delight that I read Undented's report of a recent development:

In the Daily Mail (a UK newspaper) this morning (Friday 22nd June) there was a small but intriguing piece about Tori:

“Watch out for… Tori Amos, the singer, who is collaborating with dramatist Samuel Adamson on a hoped-for production of The Light Princess, George McDonald’s story (which was illustrated by Maurice Sendak) about a princess cursed by a witch. The National Theatre has commissioned Ms Amos and Mr Adamson to see what they come up with.

“Adamson, by the way, has also adapted Pedro Almodovar’s great film All About My Mother for the Old Vic, and Diana Rigg has joined the company, along with Lesley Manville, Joanne Froggart, Colin Morgan and Charlotte Randle. Performances begin on August 25.”

I actually squealed. This is going to be good.

Newness

Bright and shiny things on the Internets:

• Bud has revamped Chekhov's Mistress, and it not only looks good, but the new direction he's taken will help to broaden the scope of what litblogs can do.
• My dear friend Treena has set up shop in her own little corner of cyberspace. She's tackled Annie Dillard's enigmatic Holy the Firm and Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading (and this in only her first two posts!). Another great litblog to keep an eye on.
• Over the Rhine has overhauled their own site--japanese lanterns and all. Lovely.
  

Life's for the free and fearless-- / Death's for the bought and sold!

I've thrown myself headlong into Against the Day and am thoroughly enjoying myself. Why did I ever let myself forget how wonderful Pynchon is? (Note to self: Never again let anything you hear intimidate you out of reading something for yourself. It's the only way of really knowing anything.)

From the first page's mention of the World's Columbian Exposition, I'm thrown back to my old fascination with Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin". Rereading it seems to be great groundwork for the discussion of the theories and forces that come into play with the Chums of Chance, et al--"physics stark mad in metaphysics" indeed:

Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or histories,--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. [...]

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

And then there is light, sound, the luminiferous Æther, and Miles' admission of "peculiar feelings" that sometimes surround him...

"...like the electricity coming on--as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how...how everything fits together, connects. It doesn't last long, though. Pretty soon I'm just back to tripping over my feet again."

Then there are invocations of the great Edison vs. Tesla "war," William Blake's "Jerusalem," and my suspicion that Lew's storyline will get tangled up with Vanderjuice's out in Colorado. Merle's affinity with the Ætherists resembles Lew's inexplicable feeling for the "Anarchists"--and the fact that Pynchon uses comparisons of "church" for both perhaps alludes to what will take place further along. The tug of community on the alienated and displaced individual resonates strongly. Throw in "a keen sympathy for the invisible" and the vanishing of the American frontier, and you have a remarkable novel that pinpoints the American condition in the uncannily accurate way that Pynchon does so well. And all this in only the first 70 pages!

Meanwhile, this is what happens when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is set loose in "the heart of the vaudeville and black entertainment district" in ca. 1893 Chicago:

"What here are you looking at, you wish to steal eine...Wassermelone, perhaps?"

"Ooooo," went several folks in earshot. The insultee, a large and dangerous-looking individual, could not believe he was hearing this. His mouth began to open slowly as the Austrian prince continued--

"Something about...your...wait...deine Mutti, as you would say, your...your mamma, she plays third base for the Chicago White Stockings, nicht wahr?" as customers begin tentatively to move toward the egresses, "a quite unappealing woman, indeed she is so fat, that to get from her tits to her ass, one has to take the 'El'! Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no, no, lady, this is the World's Fair, not the World's Ugly!"

"Whatchyou doin, you fool, you can get y'ass killed talking like that, what are you, from England or some shit?"

"Um, Your Royal Highness? Lew murmured, "if we could just have a word--"

"It is all right! I know how to talk to these people! I have studied their culture!"

Out on a limb

Inexplicably, I've been waking up at 3.00am every morning--mind buzzing and disappointingly alert. So I reach for The Maytrees and lose myself in the wee smas until the sky lightens over the sea, satisfied. (And only then can I rest.)

I have many things to do that are not getting done, but I suspect it's due to the current lack of structure of these few vacation days. So (deep breath) I'm toying with the idea of reading Against the Day (my dusty sage version), finally. I figure that having a goal of about 70 pages per day should carry me through the next couple of weeks, and I could post any random thoughts bullet-style. Yes, it's been done before by better bloggers...but I think it will go a long way towards giving these jelly days a spine. (And this sort of plan has helped me before: the week after graduating college, I took up The Brothers Karamozov at 100 pages a day. A week with Dostoevsky did me incalculable good...especially in the loose-cannon days after college and the beginning of my job search.)

Because aside from a couple personal projects I should be working on, there are also some drafted posts that have been drafts for a little too long. Such as,

• a book-to-film comparision of Mario Mendoza's Satanás (yes, I actually took feverish notes in the theatre--y sí, creo que voy a escribirla en español)
• my little stack of remaining post-it notes to the glorious Cloud Atlas
• mini-reviews to books read this past term (including the break)
• thoughts on Auster's The Book of Illusions
  

Meanwhile, Over the Rhine is nearing the release of a new album. I stumbled on a serendipitous link to the gleefully naughty "Trouble" and the warm country vibe of "If A Song Could Be President" today. (This music + a Peroni + dusk gathering over the ocean under the balcony helped inspire this post.) I owe this band quite a lot (not the least of which includes my introduction to Dillard during my 18th year).

from The Seventh Elegy

It is breathtaking simply to be here. Girls, even you
knew, who seemed so deprived, so reduced, who became
sewers yourselves, festering in the awful alleys of the city.
For each of you had an hour, perhaps a bit less,
at worst a scarcely measurable span between while and while,
when you wholly were. Had all. Were bursting with Being.
But we easily forget what our laughing neighbor
neither confirms nor envies. We want to show it off,
yet the most apparent joy reveals itself only after
it has been transformed, when it rises within us.
    My love, the world exists nowhere but within us.
Withinwarding is everything. The outer world
dwindles, and day fades from day. Where once
a solid house was, soon some invented structure
perversely suggests itself, as at ease among ideas
as if it still stood in the brain.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
translated by William Gass

Cosmic realism

Marilynne Robinson reviews The Maytrees (and completely, marvelously gets it):

Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and momentary sense of life lived.

The Maytrees is about wonder -- in the terms of this novel, life's one truth. It is wonder indeed that is invoked here, vast and elusive and inexhaustible and intimate and timeless. There is a resolute this-worldliness that startles the reader again and again with recognition. How much we overlook! What a world this is, after all, and how profound on its own terms.

My copy actually arrived on Saturday (!), and my friend (visiting from Jamaica) was able to read it before she left. I am starting it today, but don't want it to be over. I own every book she's written. They've been read and reread and then reread some more... When I've reached the last page, I'll turn back to the first and begin again. (This is my consolation.)

According to New York Magazine, Annie Dillard's done with writing. The statement is basically the same as what's up on her website, but I did smile at this last touch:

She did mention one, possibly tongue-in-cheek idea for further work: “To take all my never-used metaphors and just throw them up in the air for other writers to use.” Grab Bag, by Annie Dillard? “I like the title Free-for-All,” she says.

I'm all for her getting away from the hoopla surrounding book releases to sequester herself with her reading. And given that her works are indeed "celestial events," who knows when the next one will shoot across our sky?

(both links via Ed)

Celebration

William Gass has written one of the greatest definitions of poetry I've ever read:

The poem is thus a paradox. It is made of air. It vanishes as the things it speaks about vanish. It is made of music, like us, "the most fleeting of all" yet it is also made of meaning that's as immortal as immortal gets on our mortal earth; because the poem will return, will begin again, as spring returns: it can be said again, sung again, is our only answered prayer; the poem can be carried about more easily than a purse, and I don't have to wait, when I want it, for a violinist to get in key, it can come immediately to mind--to my mind because it is my poem as much as it is yours--because, like a song, it can be sung in many places at once--and danced as well, because the poem becomes a condition of the body, it enlivens our bones, and they dance the orange, they dance the Hardy, the Hopkins, the Valéry, the Yeats; because the poem is a state of the soul, too (the soul we once had), and these states change as all else does, and these states mingle and conflict and grow weak or strong, and even if these verbalized moments of consciousness suggest things which are unjust or untrue when mistaken for statements, when rightly written they are real; they themselves are as absolutely as we achieve the Real in this unrealized life--are--are with a vengeance; because, oddly enough, though what has been celebrated is over, and one's own life, the life of the celebrant, may be over, the celebration is not over. The celebration goes on.

Greater than logic

Am thoroughly enjoying William Gass' discussion and translation of Rilke. Such rich work to sink my teeth into.

Not all properties of the conceptual systems we use to describe experience are characteristics of experience itself. Obviously we can use the German language to talk about the world, to say Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist, or employ arithmetic to measure a room, or use a thermometer to take the temperature of the roast. But Nature does not speak German, the space of the room is not infinite just because between any of the numbers used to measure it there are an infinite amount more, and 20°C is not twice as hot as 10°C to the leg of lamb. Logical connections do not exist in Nature, only in Logic. And poetry is merely...merely poetry.

This is the first of Gass' work that I've read, and I'm thrilled (yet again) by how my expectations are being exceeded. I hope to write (quote) more soon, but his blow-by-blow account of his word choices in translating Rilke--in the face of 14 other translations of the same work--is revelatory. (And his unfailing sense of humor keeps everything in perspective.)

I've long thought that poetry transcends logic--that although it is a contruct (being a "created" thing), it makes much more than "sense." I'm reminded of Walker Percy's "Metaphor as Mistake" and the mystery of how literal "lies" (a living heart cannot actually be made of ice) come closer to truth than "factual" renderings. It's a favorite line of thinking that I'm finding traces of in what Gass is exploring in Rilke.

Another goldmine.

Remembering

As Dan Green mentioned,

[B]eware the inevitable obituaries and other discussions of Rorty's contributions to philosophy that will bemoan his malign influence as a "relativist." Its all bs.

Scott McLemee's provides additional insight:

“My sense of the holy,” wrote Rorty, “insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.”

Rorty admits he has “no idea of how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. This mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things.” As McLemee concludes,

I’m not sure whether that counts as a religious vision, by most standards. But it certainly qualifies as something that requires a lot of faith.

More translation goodness

Scott Esposito has a couple more translator interviews over at his place, with more on the way. Even before "Reading the World" (and the emphasis placed on such work this month), there's always been a lively interest in translated literature in the litblogosphere. It's wonderfully encouraging.

Katherine Silver, translator of Jorge Franco's Paradise Travel:

Paradise Travel is narrated by the main character, whose subtly idiosyncratic voice—part idiot savant, part idiotic innocent—gives the novel unity and depth. Finding and maintaining that voice in English was perhaps the most overarching challenge. I also enjoyed working through the linguistic dilemmas arising from the interpenetration of cultures/languages (Spanish here, English there, Spanglish everywhere) and among dialects in Spanish (Colombians trying to understand Mexican Spanish, for instance).

Karen S. Kingsbury, translator of Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City:

The cinematic analogy works because literary texts are usually loaded with visual and aural imagery: we can think of this material as existing “inside” the text. The musical analogy works because even a silent reader voices a text internally, and thus hears some set of phonic qualities, which usually have a considerable, though subtle influence on whether or not the literary experience is “good” or not. This phonic experience is largely, though not entirely “outside” the text. Thus, a literary translator has to go “inside” the original text, grab all those images and ideas and whatnot, then come back out and set up another “external” linguistic structure that that can contain and convey that material while still sounding good. And the goal, of course, is to not only “sound good,” but to sound somehow similar to, or at least analogous to, the original.

Coffee-break post

Report cards are done, Thursday's the last day of school, and a dear friend arrives tomorrow from Jamaica for a visit. Hope to make more headway in some personal projects before classes start up again in July, and my end-of-term reading list should be up by the weekend. Here are some other things that made me happy this morning:

New York Magazine finally asks about other books that should be translated into English.

Carrie of Tingle Alley recommends what to pick up during the current McSweeney's and Soft Skull book sales.

Stephen Mitchelmore explains why it's not a cockroach: "Openness is everything."

fade theory falls in love with García Márquez again:

After re-reading the final paragraph, I closed the book. I looked at it without seeing it, and, with my right hand holding my left, and my left hand holding the book, I held my cheek to the cover. For a brief moment, I wondered why they don’t make books edible. It seems that this book only taking up part of my mind isn’t enough.

Laura Restrepo

I dove back into Cloud Atlas yesterday after taking a break from it (to make it last) and finishing both Laura Restrepo's Delirio (because it was so wonderful) and Mario Mendoza's Satanás (because the movie came out last Friday). I spent an hour compiling my notes on Restrepo's novel, and couldn't stop smiling. It's a truly wonderful book.

Delirio helpfully informs my reading of Cloud Atlas due to its style and narrative structure, which puts the reader in the place of piecing together its timeline. We get Aguilar's view of events, and then a passage of Agustina's from the past will help explain what he's seeing. The story literally unfolds. Memory triggers aspects of Agustina's madness so what occurred in the past affects the present, and then the present is explained via Agustina's own memories in the past.

While I realize that comparing contemporary Latin American writers to modernist authors of yore has been done many (many) times, I couldn't help but think of Faulkner and Woolf as I read Restrepo. I was reminded of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and The Waves, not only because she shifts backwards and forwards in time, but because the first-person narration of four characters (and the third-person narration of a fifth) lack dialogue punctuation and switch voices and tenses continually--even in midsentence. Not only does the reader have to determine who is speaking and when, she also must figure out to whom. I found these little "mysteries" almost as engaging as the central mystery itself. Restrepo rewards readers willing to engage in such close reading and pay attention to the details of the narrative, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed reading it so much. She truly respects the reader's intelligence and this creates a unique sense of camraderie between the reader and her main characters. I found myself caring about what was happening to them--even the less-than-noble ones (which includes just about everyone). I will most certainly be reading this one again.

Although the structure is rather intricate, it wasn't difficult to read. I was amazed by the effortles fluidity of the prose, the voices and images were so vibrant and immediate. Restrepo puts the music and rhythm of the language to powerful use. I particularly loved the scene where Agustina's mother, Eugenia, has a huge fight on the phone with Aguilar, while Agustina yells, "No quiero hablar con ella porque su voz me enferma" in the background over and over and over again:

Oiga, señora, el problema es sumamente serio, Agustina está mal, está en un estado de agitación incontrolable y usted me viene con que pretende llevársela a hacer meditación zen, Y quién es usted, señor, para decirme a mí qué es lo que le conviene a mi hija, al menos tenga la cortesía de preguntarle a ella si quiere o no quiere, Agustina, pregunta tu madre si quieres ir con ella a unos baños de aguas termales en Virginia, escúchale usted misma, señora, Agustina está diciendo que lo único que quiere es que colguemos ya el teléfono.

This goes on for two pages. Without exclamation marks or descriptive adjectives, Restrepo brings the frenetic urgency of the domestic conflict to life in the reader's mind. (The first few pages of Natasha Wimmer's translation are generously excerpted at Doubleday, for those interested.)

There are so many facets to this novel: Agustina's younger brother, the family scapegoat...the abuse...Aguilar reads Saramago's Memorial del convento (in English as Baltasar and Blimunda) while he's away...her twisted relationship with her father...Agustina "parece sacada de las páginas de Jane Eyre"...her obsession with ceremony, water, and blood...the doorman who died in front of her child eyes, stabbed nine times...her only success as a psychic...she has no true self, no true insight--all is motivated by fear and dread...death and blood irrevocably tied to her developing womanhood...the bizarre love triangle (or square?) between her mother's parents and a young apprentice...her madness is far from simply genetic...Midas' devestatingly accurate take on Pablo Escobar...the bombs (like the one I experienced in Medellín in '92)...the literal "turn of the screw"...memory echoes forwards...how the family was destroyed on a Palm Sunday afternoon..."crónica de un fracaso anunciado"...the cream and avocado for the delicious ajiaco...the secret behind her mother's own particular insanity and repression...Agustina's way of speaking ("like the Pope") that augments her own dissociation, all in capital letters...her grandfather Nicolás' lost sister, like her brother Bichi...how Aguilar finally reveals why he's wound up selling dog food for a living...Kawabata invoked...Eugenia's devestating denials of reality...Nicolás' fascination with "la enigma de la sangre derramada"...the trigger that truly sent her over the edge, from Midas' disbelieving perspective...how his avalanche of words aggravates her state...how Aguilar finally understands how enough lies could drive one mad...and how laughter breaks the evil enchantment..."Que me perdone Voltaire pero esto es un milagro."

Another great moment occurs when Agustina enters a cathedral to light a candle and pray to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (the founder of Bogotá) for the restoration of her sanity, rather than to a saint. It's a nice tip of the hat to Cervantes, because of the theory that he based the character of Don Quixote on this traveling adventurer.

Needless to say, I loved this novel and was not a little dismayed when I discovered David Ulin's review of Delirio for the LA Times (via SPLALit):

Such a construct has potential, but difficulties arise from the outset, beginning with Restrepo's inability to bring Agustina to life. She is, or so the novel tells us, special, touched with psychic abilities — a kind of healer — but this seems contrived. Rather, she's most memorable as one of those people who drives others crazy: haughty, demanding, mercurial. Wealthy, with a powerful father and deep, if elusive, ties to Colombia's narco-underground, she drifts across the surface of existence, untouched by consequence. Even her madness seems self-indulgent, with no weight, no depth.

I can't help but wonder if he missed the irony of Restrepo's epigraph--Gore Vidal's commendation of Henry James' advice that writers should never make a lunatic the central character of a narrative because since a lunatic cannot be made morally responsible, there can be no real tale to tell.

Agustina is no true psychic or "healer," as the story makes clear. She is superstitious from childhood, believing that she has magical powers that can save her younger brother from their father's physical and verbal abuse. As a young woman, she tries to save the life of her unborn child by reading "messages" in the folds of her bedsheets. Any reading that takes her seriously as a clairvoyant will of course see it as "contrived" because it's the role that she's created for herself in order to forestall the pain of reality. Yes, she has one success in this role (which forged her "reputation" in this line), but her childhood belief that she trucks with the forces of the unseen spins a thread that ultimately binds her to the instability that characterizes her adulthood.

And "untouched by consequence"? The violence she witnesses as a child (both inside and outside the home) only contribute to her condition. As a child, she overhears her mother's side of a telephone argument with her father, and becomes fascinated with the heated wire of her mother's hair dryer. She places her tongue inside. Her developing sexuality is warped by her mother's shame and horror on the day she begins mensturating (in a scene that permanently links sexuality to death and blood). As a teenager she learns that the only way she can provoke her father to notice her is by staying out late and having sexual encounters with one man after another. Her world is hermetically sealed by the isolation of privilege and the nearly fascist censure of her parents, and her existence marked by what happens to her younger brother during her 17th year. But it's ultimately the nature of familial betrayal that thwarts her identity and womanhood.

When Restrepo tries to root the novel by invoking the most vehement realities — narco-terrorism, roads and cities rendered unsafe by insurgents, the terrifying presence of Escobar — she doesn't write as if she feels it, as if these are her concerns in any fundamental sense.

Ulin speaks of her casualness in recounting these matters, but I would hazard to guess that he doesn't understand how mundane and normal these situations were in daily life. She recounts the dangers of the road to Sasaima in the same tone as someone from the States would discuss the annoyances of heavy traffic. These realities had been so embedded in the identity of the culture that its strangeness would never be remarked upon. As for Escobar, Midas' retelling of his encounters with the drug lord (and the one-liners that Escobar later became famous for) are related with deep sadness and a stunned shock at the inevitable result of such dealings. I don't see any of this as Restrepo trying "to root the novel by invoking the most vehement realities". The root of the novel is the devastating nature of family secrets and the lies on which we base our lives. The peripheral context is important, but not the main focus of the work.

Ulin also complains,

For Agustina and the other characters, life is oddly distanced; there is nothing here to make us care. "[T]he plain truths keep getting caught in the honeyed ambiguity that smoothes and civilizes everything until there's no substance left," leaving us to experience "Delirium" as if through a scrim of gauze.

I find it particularly telling that Ulin would use a line that intends to decry this form of existence and turn it against the book itself. His views on the matter are clear, but I can't believe that this "gauze" is entirely the fault of the author. A reader is not merely a spectator as with television or film, but an active participant. If that sense of immediacy and clarity isn't there, the reader has to check his or her own limitations of understanding, especially when it comes to a work of translation.

Ultimately, I find it curious that he neglects to mention any stylistic or structural elements at all. I found these to be the main reasons the novel was so engaging and worthwhile. Perhaps they served to distance rather than engage him? Some comment on these aspects of the work would've given this review more credibility.


Related note: Laura Restrepo spoke at the PEN World Voices "Don Quixote at 400" tribute in 2005. She has some wonderful things to say about Quixote's context and the modern world's latent insanity.

Annie Dillard excerpt and audio clip

NPR's summer reading list comments on Annie Dillard's second novel, The Maytrees, and also provides both an excerpt from the novel and an audio clip of her reading a passage:

Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his Letters, called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police." Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere — not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: "Shun this hell." From some book he copied: "How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners?" She was outside his reach.

Her website says, "NPR in June will air some tiny segments about THE MAYTREES taped long ago". So there will be more!

This is the first book I've ordered directly from Amazon to be shipped internationally (worth every penny). It should be here the first week of July...hopefully.

(via Counterbalance)

Translation goodness

Issue 8 of The Quarterly Conversation is up and I very happily read great interviews with three Spanish-to-English translators: C.M. Mayo, Natasha Wimmer, and Chris Andrews. Also, there's Javier Moreno's excellent essay on his Bolaño diagram (which I spent some time with earlier), Derik Badman's review of The Last Novel by David Markson, and many more good things. I've quoted some highlights below, but all of these interviews should be read thoroughly. Fascinating stuff.

C.M. Mayo:

The whole idea of Tameme is to make the literature accessible to someone who reads only English, and at the same time, accessible to someone who reads only Spanish. So writers are together whom, normally, would not be. For example, the first issue of Tameme featured Margaret Atwood and Jaimes Sabines. These are great names--yet many even very well read Mexicans have never heard of Margaret Atwood, while few English speaking readers have heard of Jaime Sabines. At the same time, having the text side-by-side makes the reading experience that much richer. Many people have told me they read Tameme to help them improve their Spanish. It's also an exercise for literary translators. Literary translation is an art; five literary translators would translate a given piece in five different ways. So, as a translator, one can engage with the text critically. I find the translator's notes the most interesting.

(Thanks to this piece, I've added a couple items to my wishlist and have discovered the wonder that is Tameme. I look forward to the day when something similar exists for Colombia.)

Natasha Wimmer:

There are lots of things I try to avoid, but I mostly try not to slavishly adhere to general rules--translation is all about exceptions. Often, though, I try to avoid automatically using cognates when there might be a better translation of a particular word. I'm not generally too worried about putting too much of my own voice into the translation--I don't think there's really much space for that, except possibly in dialogue, which tends to require a freer translation than expository prose. When it comes to words and phrases in the original language, I certainly try to avoid the Spanglish effect, but I think a few carefully chosen expressions left in Spanish (and most place names, too) are inevitable and even desirable. [...]

One of the main challenges of the translation was getting the rhythm of Bolaño's sentences right. He is never predictable and can be intentionally awkward, and sometimes it was hard to strike the right balance in English--I often felt an urge to smooth over ungainly constructions, but restrained myself, then realized in reading them over that they were perfectly calibrated. Ultimately, this was probably one of the most satisfying parts of working on the translation, too. Otherwise, I loved the humor. It's always more fun to translate something funny.

Chris Andrews (on the translator "getting in the way"):

I mean producing a translation that is unduly distracting, which I guess can happen if it isn't quite complete, so that the syntactic patterns of the source language creep into the target language a bit too much and make the translation more syntactically odd than the original, or if the translation goes over the top and becomes showy. But I don't much like pronouncing on this sort of thing because I'm no doubt guilty of under- and over-translating myself, and the whole business of translation studies can be a distraction from the works themselves, which are way more interesting in the end.

I loved his recommendations. More authors to pick up... Now that I've finished reading novels by Laura Restrepo and Mario Mendoza, I'll keep an eye out for the writers he mentioned: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Juan Villoro, Antonio José Ponte, and others. It helps me hope that it's only a matter of time before the advantages of being able to find and read these works in the original Spanish will outweigh the disadvantages of having limited access to English-language titles.

Traveling books

I've joined the "sisterhood," because a) I'm desperate, and b) I love its premise:

Are you unable to walk into a bookstore without buying a book? Do you love book clubs, or discussing books with friends? Would you rather save the money and get the book from a fellow blogger, without spending anything more than the cost of postage by sending a book to another grateful reader?

If so, you are hereby cordially invited to join a little project we’d like to call “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Books.”

Check, check, check.

Shelley and Jessica of Readers Without Borders have started a fun and very practical project:

If you are living abroad, or living at home - wherever - and you like to get new books, but want to spend less money, this is it! All it costs is postage, and meanwhile you’ll be receiving books as well. I’ll let you take a look at the new site to read the “instructions”.

In order to participate, you have to donate a book, which just makes sense. But don’t worry, the book will collect a “heritage” of notes and postcards, etc, from the women who read it. Eventually, at the end of the list, it will be sent back to you, and you will see who all has read and enjoyed it.

I think this is a brilliant idea. The month-long mail waits could get to me, but I plan on not dwelling on it and letting the books arrive as packaged surprises. I used to be an avid letter-writer, but have gotten out of the habit due to how far a way I am and the ridiculous cost of merely mailing a letter. This will make up for a lot, though. A wonderful development. Consider this your open invitation to an international book-swapping group! (In spite of the title, everyone is welcome.)

By train to Macondo

After 24 years, Gabriel García Márquez returned to Aracataca...on a train painted with yellow butterflies. The train left from Santa Marta late this morning and passed our school during lunch recess. Everyone flocked to the fence to watch history float by. Some of us stood on tables, while a hundred children raced to the end of the school grounds to watch that "magical train" pass. One of my students was riding it. She is nine.

Every recess just before lunch she sits by me while we watch the kids play soccer. She tells me stories from her week and the funny or startling things she's seen and heard. She began slipping me scraps of fiction at the beginning of the year, and I was so delighted and amused by her unconventional stories, I told her that although I'll treasure them forever, I don't want her to lose such great work. I found a blank notebook and she spent nearly an hour eagerly copying down her tales of the beautiful witch who jilted a hapless prince at the altar and flew to Rome and became a millionaire instead...of the girl who murdered the devil because he had once told her that he was her father, and then later (absentmindedly) told her to kill her father...of the man who walked out his front door, hit his head, and promptly forgot who he was...of the lonely sun and the lonely moon who found each other by chance, while the stars first ridiculed them, then attended their wedding... (There are also poems and songs.) It was only last week that I found out who her great-uncle is.

I look forward to sitting on that wooden balance beam tomorrow, watching the kids play soccer and listening to her tell the story of today. Maybe I'll even ask her to write it down.

Disconnect

Scott McLemee on the need for good criticism:

“With the very text of Germinal before him,” as the journalist puts it, the student “was so concerned with showing that he knew how to read his book with a modish approach that he simply could not recognize the most obvious quality of Zola’s great novel — which was its force. He felt no necessary connection between his experience and that described in the novel, but he had brought in wholly arbitrary connections, couched in a critical vocabulary that he had learned by rote, whose historical applications and limitations he did not understand. He was like a tourist in a foreign country; he could imitate the language but not understand it.”

Readers (and students) need to understand that reading is an experience. But I know that academia looks down on personal observations...and God forbid that you're actually moved by a work of literature. Such "emotion" clutters the scientific precision of the criticism, right?

At last

I've been finally able to adequately air my issues with Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics over at Callie Miller's fantastic litblog, Counterbalance. There's a roundtable discussion taking place, in which I humbly offer Part III. (See also Part I and Part II.) All enlightenment, affirmation, and disagreement welcome!

Ill

I think I'm going to be sick...

But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

Which libraries did he go to? How many? Had he even heard of the various charities that donate books to inner-city schools, decimated school libraries in New Orleans, or even the camel bookmobile in Kenya? (There's even a certain little school on Colombia's northern coast that is pretty desperate for books as well.)

I'm really sorry, but I just have to say it: ¡Qué gringo tan tonto!

(via Maud)

UPDATE: Tod Goldberg elaborates on the additional insult they've been heaping on this already grievous injury.

Living literature

Anne Fernald (English professor, Woolf scholar, and fellow litblogger) is currently examining the textual edits that Woolf herself made to Mrs. Dalloway. The adventure begins at the Lilly Library...

The proofs came out of the vault magnificently wrapped, in a gold or bright orange slipcase--fabric covering hard boards--with a red spine. From this, the archivist extracted a folder of the same golden cardboard. Within that folder, a cream-colored box made of thin paper, like a file folder. Finally, within that, the proofs themselves.

She dives right in...and we soon learn that "minor differences" can mean a great deal.

Then she discovers something much more than a "minor" change:

In all of the proofs, there is only one page where Woolf crosses out a whole paragraph and substitutes a (significantly longer) typed page. That single instance is the paragraph in which Septimus kills himself. Seventeen lines in proofs have been crossed out and two typed pages have been added, making the paragraph now twenty-eight lines long. In addition to many small changes, the chief addition here comes toward the beginning of the paragraph, with the addition of Septimus scanning the room for possible means of suicide before deciding to throw himself out the window.

That, it seems to me, gives everyone a lot to think about. To know that, at the very last minute, Woolf was rethinking the book’s climax, giving it greater depth and a slower pace, is to know something about the centrality of Septimus to the novel.

At UCLA, Anne spends time with a personal set of proofs, hand-sewn and bound by Woolf. She continues her work, and amid the hours of detailed reading, something happens:

Then, suddenly, I see something I haven’t seen before--another instance in which her revision falls into a pattern. I hear a resonance and now have a phrase to check--is it an allusion to something?

Today it was birds. What about all the birds? I figured I could do something with the flowers in the books--roses and carnations, hyacinths and lilies--but, until today, I hadn’t thought about the symbolic weight of the birds. Swallows and nightingales I can do (going back to Ovid and the story of Procne and Philomel), but what about sparrows and thrushes?

I dearly love watching this textual drama unfold and hearing about the details of such a painstaking process. As a former proofreader, it isn't just that I enjoy reading about a one-time dream job, it's the ever-evolving process of discovery and the idea that even a novel as famous and studied as Mrs. Dalloway still contains a wealth of insight for those who care enough to look. Books like this are alive--speaking to us from across the years.

I love these glimpses into Virginia's writing process. Looking forward to hearing even more...!

Unavoidable

I've been avoiding news about the new Brontë film because, well... Why go there? But the BrontëBlog points to a piece in today's Telegraph & Argus that actually made me crack a smile about the whole thing:

Charlotte Bronte, played by Michelle Williams, stands and tosses her hair.

Charlotte: "God damn it, Dad! Potatoes again? This is doing nothing for my attempt to get into that 00 frock for the prom, you know."

Patrick (seething): "Don't take the Lord's name in vain, missy! That's my Goddamn job!"

Charlotte storms out. Bryce Dallas Howard is Emily Bronte, absent-mindedly pushing a potato around her plate with her fork.

Emily: "Dad, I think I'd like to go for a walk on the moors. Get some inspiration from the blasted heath for me writin', donchaknow."

Patrick (glowering): "That's the worst Goddamn British accent I ever heard. That's worse than Dick Van Goddam Dyke."

Satan

El Tiempo has a marvelous multimedia spread on the recent film adaptation of Satanás, a novel by Colombian author Mario Mendoza. There's even audio of Mendoza reading a scene from the novel and then the director, Andrés Baiz, reading the same scene from his screenplay.

I was lucky enough to see the trailer yesterday and discovered that it's produced by the same people who did María llena eres de gracia and Rosario Tijeras. Looks like I now know which novel to pick up next--I'll definitely read this one before seeing it.

Related notes:

• Informal film review at the IMDB (in English).
• Don't know if this novel has been translated into English yet (I think not), but there's an article about it at Amazon. Here's what you get without paying the requisite $5.95:

  THE TITLE of Mario Mendoza's recent novel Satanas uses Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a leitmotiv. Set in contemporary Bogota, there are various manifestations of evil to explore, such as can be found in any big city: robbery, rape, and violence of various kinds. Since narcotraffic does not inform the story, the protagonists are universal and, in their struggles between good and evil, come to represent a sort of Everyman/Everywoman. The careful structure of the novel presents the reader with four clear protagonists: Maria, Andres, and Padre Ernesto, who strive toward good but are at times overwhelmed by their circumstances and desires [...]

Cloud 9, pt. II

Am about to begin the sixth story in Cloud Atlas, and (again) have a bunch of scribbled notes to post (if for no other reason than to slow down my time with this wonderful book)....

• Mrs Latham wears Nefertiti earings. (Eve's black horse is named Nefertiti.)
• Cavendish reads the MS of Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery with v. amusing results (pp. 158, 164, 169).
• This reminds me that the news article re. Sixsmith--if it were really published in a California paper--would put periods in the titles (e.g., Dr., Ms.). But it doesn't. Don't know if this is intentional or a mistake on the part of the copyeditor. Actually, if the MS is really by a "Hilary V. Hush," she may not have known the difference, and so the mistake is hers, right? (Clever but not Clever enough, as Mr. Cavendish would say.) (Does the US edition correct this, I wonder?)
• Cavendish encounters delays, much like Sixsmith.
• Saffron Walden and Cambridge--Cavendish passes through Frobisher's territory.
• Cavendish uses "Mater" and "Pater" exactly like Frobisher (p. 165). I think I know where all this is going...
• The little boy Cavendish encounters at Ursula's house says, "Don't move a muscle or I'll mackasser you and put you in a stew!" Uh oh. Now I'm not quite sure. The scrambled reference to Frobisher's old prof Mackerras doesn't come from Cavendish's lips...
• Cavendish: "My fellow passengers' features melted into forms that were half familiar..." Curiouser and curiouser.
• His bitter musings on the book trade made me laugh aloud: "The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. 'Admire me, for I am a metaphor.'"
• p. 173, "A howling singer on the radio strummed a song about how everything that dies some day comes back." Does this section have the most commentary on this sort of thing because it's the first to not be immediately identified as a document (not journal, letter, or novel)--i.e., it's more self-aware? (It's only in Sonmi~451's section that we discover it's a film.)
• Love that this Sonmi is "451." (I'm sure Bradbury would enjoy this book immensely.)
• Love how it's the fairy tales that inspire hope and a longing for something better. (Very Chestertonian.)
• p. 204, the birthmark resurfaces
• p. 206, evolving language = growing intelligence
• Sonmi~451 reads Cavendish's beloved Gibbon (who's even referenced obliquely on p. 5 in Ewing's section. I'm sure all these inter-references work forwards as well as backwards, which means I'll just have to read this one again).
• I like that a "Suleiman" is the true author of Boom-Sook's thesis.
• Amused by the lack of "gh" in all words where they're supposed to be...and the proper nouns that have become common nouns in Sonmi's universe (ford, disney, starbuck, etc.). I don't think we're that far from the latter, though...which is a bit "fritening" to think about.
• So The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is a film and it's Sonmi's turn to comment on the prior work and what actually happens when the story cuts off... Think it's very funny she labels him a "book thief."
  

Nearly halfway through and I just...need...to...s l o w...d o w n...!

Cloud 9

I'm about to begin the fourth story in Cloud Atlas ("The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish") and have decided to post some random notes from my reading. I'm tickled by the fact that my first-time experiences with such lauded authors (Barth, Markson) are turning into these love-fests. I'm not gushing because everyone else says they're great (although they are). I'm gushing because I'm finding so much to enjoy, appreciate, and admire in the work of contemporary writers. Fiction is alive and well, folks (as if there were really any doubt). You just have to know where to look. And it's no coincidence that I first heard of Markson and Mitchell via litblogs. I know I'm missing out on so many more wonderful books, but thank God I've at least made it this far. For such remarkable recommendations (and myriad other reasons), litblogs will always have my undying gratitude and devotion.

Ok. So I've got a borrowed copy and can't write in it, but the post-its are getting filled up too fast too soon. To whit:

• I can't help but think that the reference to Psalm 81:7 means more than Ewing thinks it does ("the secret place of thunder"). It's also on this page that that he encounters more humming--this time of the insect variety, as opposed to the swarm of natives on p. 6. Language and non-language both equal sound and communication. Looking forward to see where this theme goes.
• p. 21--J.E.'s footnote. Suspicions as to this individual's identity confirmed (?) in the next section (Frobisher's).
• Although Ewing is well-intentioned and his journal is interesting in a Mysterious Island, Sea-Wolf sense, I couldn't get away from the creepiness of his "Ailment" and the fact that the ship is called "Prophetess."
• Javier and Dr. Moses have got to be related.
• Is locker No909 a reference to Mitchell's previous novel (Number9Dream)?
  
• I'm intrigued by the judgements of later readers on former writers: Frobisher's estimation of Dr. Goose and Ewing's supposed gullibilty, and Luisa's take on Sixsmith's portrayal in Frobisher's letters. But I love reading the actual "documents" prior to their discovery. I think this is the first time I've seen this (as opposed to discovery and then inclusion, as in most novels). I enjoy making my own judgments on the characters in their writing before I encounter the judgments of later readers--it makes the story that much more complex.
• I think that the "birthmark" issue is the same sort of thing as Ewing's "Ailment" somehow...
• Funny that Luisa's mom lives in Ewingville. Love how intentional all these details are.
  

Also very happy to discover that El atlas de las nubes exists, translated by Víctor Úbeda. There is no way I'm keeping this one to myself.

The happy dance

A fellow teacher and I got to talking about the book scarcity dilemma, and when he mentioned that he just finished reading Cloud Atlas, I nearly fell over (and probably did a good job of scaring him). We decided to loan each other books, and so this morning I received a British paperback copy of Cloud Atlas (!!), and I am thrilled. I've been wanting to read this one for a very long time, and just heard at the beginning of the week that I would not be able to get it in from Bogotá. This is marvelous. (Delirio --which I am enjoying very much--will just have to share her place in my mochila for the time being.)

I try to keep this blog focused on books and not my personal life (but for book-related things), but Sylvia kindly added me on to this meme, and this morning's good news has left me feeling giddy enough to participate.

Eight random things...

• I'm the eldest of five children.
• I was born at home.
• I took ballet lessons for nearly ten years.
• I've lived in 13 cities in three countries since the age of 11.
• As with Dorothy, I "hate, loathe, despise, and abominate" shopping for clothes.
• I once stood in line behind Alister McGrath at a corner store in Oxford.
• I did not pass out or feel queasy while listening to Chuck Palahniuk read "Guts."
• My first job out of college was at The Saturday Evening Post (and I lived to tell the tale).

Because it's already been around a bit, anyone who'd like to pick this up is more than welcome. Meanwhile, I'll hold Cloud Atlas in my hot little hands and gloat as if I'd just won a trip to Tahiti...

A bibliophile's plight

Well, my light at the end of the tunnel is rapidly going out. I heard back from that bookstore in Bogotá, and of the few books I requested, they only have one: The Raw Shark Texts. The problem? The quoted price is $92,000 pesos, which equates to $46 ($46!) US dollars (and this is before shipping costs). But I'm so desperate for a new novel, that I just might go for it. (Those of you who've read it--would it be worth it?)

Amazon doesn't even ship to Colombia, but Powell's does--if I'm willing to pay $14 for shipping and wait two months. [Correction: Just found out that they do ship here, but we're not mentioned on their country list.]

I've been thinking long and hard about getting an ebook reader, and learned a lot from this ebook reader review--including the fact that the iLiad comes with a stylus (great!) and a $700 price tag (not so great). The pros and cons of the Sony Reader (since it's priced at a more "modest" $350) seem to all cancel each other out. Or do they? Although they don't have many of the books on my overly-optimistic future reading list (and tons of bestseller crap), I did find 5 books out of a starter list of 20. And although they're all basically full price, I can have them immediately and not bother with shipping fees or waiting forever. The fine print scared me ("Use of companion CONNECT eBook Store limited to US residents"), but a user's review explains how this is due to billing purposes. It won't lock me out because of my ISP (as is now the case with Pandora--a tragic loss as far as I'm concerned, which doesn't help the situation).

Meanwhile, all this readerly angst is distracting me from what I do have: I'm really enjoying Laura Restrepo's Delirio and the narrative style, which seems to draw a lot from Faulkner and Woolf (more on this when I finish the book). I'm trying to keep things in perspective, read all I can here, and strategically plan a list of used books that my father can bring on his August visit.

If anything, I hope this situation helps many of you to never take interlibrary loan for granted again. Seriously.

But any advice you could give would be very welcome (even tips on helping me deal with my withdrawal symptoms)...

(ebook review via Conversational Reading)

UPDATE: More conversation over at lowebrow.

Chesterton and Borges

In pointing to a recent (and very interesting) discussion about Orthodoxy, Ed declares,

"Let me add G.K. Chesterton (along with Maugham) as one of the most needlessly dismissed writers of the 20th century I’d like to write about sometime. (And, incidentally, he had quite a lot to say about Dickens, which was one of the first critical books I ever read.)"

I've read and loved GKC since I was a kid. One of my favorite literary discoveries over the years has been his influence on Jorge Luis Borges. As an undergrad, I stumbled on Enrique Anderson Imbert's lengthy essay, "Chesterton en Borges," in a copy of El realismo mágico y otros ensayos. In it, he relates how Borges encountered Chesterton’s writing in 1914 while living in Switzerland, and read him so frequently (along with Stevenson and Kipling) that he could recite entire passages off by heart. Borges' earliest reference to Chesterton is found in his 1932 essay, “El arte narrativo y la magia” (“Narrative Art and Magic”), where he praises the strategies of surprise in his short stories.

Borges references Chesterton in “The Book of Sand” where he writes, “Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.” This is probably a direct reference to Chesterton’s story “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” where Father Brown says, “Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. [. . .] If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest.”

Borges also specifically mentions Chesterton’s story “The Blast of the Book” in a 1935 essay in which he recommends that this (as well as other works of Chesterton’s) be anthologized. This story shares quite a few themes and elements with "The Book of Sand." While Borges' story relates the dilemma of a man who receives a mysterious book (infinite in that it can never be read the same way twice and seems to have no beginning or end) from a Presbyterian Bible salesman, Chesterton’s tale revolves around a mysterious book that has contributed to the dramatic disappearances of five people. The book's owner is a Scottish missionary who tells the skeptical professor, “I’ve got to tell my story to somebody who knows, because it’s true. And, all joking apart, it’s tragic as well as true.”

Both stories deal with an obsession with pattern and order--the potential for madness due to the illusion of attainable solution. After ceaseless investigation, Borges’ narrator finally comes to the realization that his book “was monstrous. What good did it do me to think that I [. . .] was any less monstrous? I felt that the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself.” He had become consumed with systematically attempting to discover some order or pattern to the “devilish” volume. He relates, "A prisoner of the book, I almost never went out anymore. [. . .] I set about listing [the illustrations] alphabetically in a notebook, which I was not long in filling up. Never once was an illustration repeated. At night, in the meager intervals my insomnia granted, I dreamed of the book." He soon intentionally loses it in an immense library, abandoning his need to plumb the depths of its mystery in an effort to attain freedom and preserve his sanity.

Similarly, Chesterton’s professor comes to the point where he is impelled to tell Father Brown “every detail of this monstrous mystery” and the priest reveals the truth of the matter by pointing out how the pattern of “disappearances” was a deception. He tells the professor,

“I suppose the hardest thing is to convince anybody that 0 plus 0 plus 0 = 0. Men believe the oddest things if they are in a series; that is why Macbeth believed the three words of the three witches; though the first was something he knew himself; and the last something he could only bring about himself.”

By being wholly preoccupied with the similarity of the facts of each disappearance, the professor had been trapped by his own rationality--much like Borges' narrator. Although the resolution of Borges’ story does not come by way of outside intervention as does Chesterton's, the abandonment of excessive (obsessive?) order creates freedom in both cases.

Related notes:

• I love that Borges' story begins with an epigraph from George Herbert's poem "The Collar."
• Maximus Clarke (aka Mr. Maud) created a fascinating interactive puzzle inspired by "The Book of Sand."
• A simple search of "Chesterton" via Bud's newly implemented feature at MetaxuCafé brought up six pages of hits. Evidently, there's much more good litblog reading to be found.
• Meanwhile, A. and I are reading El hombre que fue Jueves. (I love rereading favorite books in their Spanish translations.)

A detectiveless detective story

It's been amazing to see the current English-speaking world's fascination with the work of Roberto Bolaño. It makes me wonder about all of the other Spanish-language writers (past and present) who would be similarly heralded (although possibly not hailed as icons) if their work would only be translated into English. Of course, there also exists the sense that being translated into English is the goal of those who mainly seek mainstream success, not a worry of the serious writer. Nevertheless, Bolaño's novels Los detectives salvajes and 2666 wound up as numbers 3 and 4 (respectively) of Semana's list of "the 100 greatest Spanish-language novels of the past 25 years." (For the sake of comparison, Estrella distante emerged at #14, while the more well-known La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón came out as #88 and García Márquez's Memorias de mis putas tristes was #91.)

I recently finished one of Bolaño's earlier novels, La pista de hielo ("The Ice Rink"), because it was the only one I could find in my (tiny) local bookstore, but it also seemed like a good place to start. Three (unreliable?) narrators take turns telling their version of the events leading up to a brutal murder in Benvingut Palace, an abandoned mansion in an unnamed small coastal Spanish town near Barcelona. From the very first page's passing reference to Jack the Ripper (which turned out to be more of a tip-off than I initially realized), I knew I had to pay close attention to each of these narrative strands.

Remo Morán is a Chilean one-time writer who wound up doing odd jobs to survive and eventually began a few small businesses (hotel, shop, campsite). Gaspar Heredia, a Mexican poet-drifter and past acquaintance of Morán's, lands a job as a night watchman at Morán's tourist campsite. Enric Rosquelles is a native Catalan who holds a position in the city government and is a self-professed confidant of the mayor (always making casual references to "Pilar").

Things begin taking shape when Rosquelles falls hard for competitive ice skater, Nuria Martí. Using public funds, he converts the mansion's empty swimming pool into an ice rink, where Nuria begins to train. What follows in the "day in the life" confessions of the three men is not only information about their lives and hardships (with certain details conveniently left out), but also unsensationalized clues and observations that contribute to the overall picture. There is no "detective" in this story and nothing to intentionally "solve," but the reader is left to puzzle through these accounts, (unnecessarily?) suspicious of everything. (I felt misdirected not only in the matter of the killer's identity, but in that of the victim as well--you don't know that you really don't know.)

Certain motifs and similarities of description can be found in all three accounts: mentions of cold air, velvet voices, hell, purgatory, etc. What's interesting is how the meaning or tenor of the phrases change depending on the different contexts (and characters) in which they're mentioned. This clued me in to the nuance of what Bolaño has achieved because, ultimately, the three men remain the unsolved enigmas of the novel. The events and circumstances of the story seem to be catalysts for the exploration of their characters, because although all three have good intentions, one is left wondering if they'll ever successfully leave behind their own personal roads to hell.

Marcelo Ballvé's observations on two of Bolaño's other novels also serve as perfect descriptions for what occurs in La pista de hielo:

• For Bolaño, Latin America is not only a geographical expanse; it is a state of mind. It is the pieces, the ghosts, exiles took with them as they scattered around the world.
• Bolaño always dealt with the impacts of violence in the private realm.
• Bolaño spun his characters' muddled testimonies into fiction. His usual narrative technique was to write as if his characters or narrators, typically speaking in the first person, were giving a deposition on their personal histories to an invisible stenographer, or as if they were talking to a detective taking witness statements.
• In Bolaño's fiction the scope of the testimonial is expanded as it collects material from the unexamined corners of inner lives, from characters' experiences on the fringes, the margins of the actual "action." His characters are not generals or patriarchs, leaders or dictators. They are victims, witnesses, obscure operatives, bystanders; what they know is usually fragmentary or unreliable.

See also: Rodrigo Fresán's article in The Believer and Wendy Lesser's essay, "The Mysterious Chilean" for The Threepenny Review.

Bitterness

Author Fernando Vallejo, most famous for his novel La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, on which Barbet Schroeder's film is based), has emphatically renounced his Colombian citizenship:

"Colombia shut its doors to me so I that I couldn't make a decent living that wasn't in the government or politics, which I despise, and made me sleep in the street, covered with newspapers and alongside the homeless of 7th Street and the abandoned dogs."

Since then, "I consider my brothers to be" the dogs, the writer immediately pointed out, who said that he does not feel Colombian.

He became a Mexican citizen last week, where he's lived since 1971.

I refuse to judge him, as I cannot fathom the effects of such a life, but I find the whole portrayal of the situation (and Vallejo's hatred) to be unbearably sad.

Dangerous reading

Maud points to Martin Konrad's brilliant "conceptual series highlighting constraints on freedom of expression," "Dirty Books." (Click through the series beginning with the first usual suspect, Steinbeck.)

Inspired by both this and Maud's additional mention of the "school board member in Illinois District 128" who "objected to Flannery O’Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' because of 'violent imagery,' 'racial slurs,' and — my favorite part — 'anti-Christian language,'" I'll toss in another book that meets the criteria...

"...contains profanity..."
"...sexual and social explicitness..."
"...demoralizing..."
"...excessive violence..."

Related: Darby's initial reaction to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

from "His growing thought"

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages [...]

I write in South Molton Street what I both feel and know,
In regions of Humanity, in London's opening streets.

~ William Blake, Jerusalem


(The Digital Blake Text Project: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake)

Books on the floor no more

After weeks of my stacks sadly sitting on this side of the balcony, we found the perfect bookshelves. The last time I bought shelves (Boston, 2003) a friend and I lugged the ridiculously heavy box home on the T. This time (Santa Marta, 2007) I rode home (with the same kind of ridiculously heavy box) in a taxi from one end of town to the other. A white sticker on said box proclaims, "Línea California, Hecho en Colombia." (As I dragged the box through the front door, I realized that those words could be used to describe me...)

I am home and very happy to be organizing books again.

Inborn expectations

A very informative and measured post by Sarah Weinman on the controversy surrounding Chabon's new novel:

[I]t was and always will be Chabon's right to write the book he envisioned in the way he saw fit, and the end result is that THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION is, on balance, a page-turner with extra philosophical weight. But I am probably the only person among litbloggers, book reviewers and other literary types whose first language is Yiddish - or certainly, the only person of my generation who is a native Yiddish speaker (even though, I admit, I understand the language better than I speak it these days.) Which meant that even though I enjoyed the book, I couldn't quite shake the inborn expectations I had in hoping somehow that there would be a more living, breathing personification of a Yiddish-speaking homeland instead of the more ersatz, mainstream-friendly result that is winning Chabon a lot of praise from my critical peers. There's no trace of anti-Semitism (a very silly argument put forward by a gossip section, anyway) but there is, to my mind, a rather cavalier attitude about Yiddish as a closed-in, precious culture that falls away upon closer examination of the culture in question.

The entire post is a well-considered piece definitely worth your time.

Reader on Cervantes

[cross-posted at 400 Windmills]

I tried to slow down while reading Reader's Block. I tried. I put it down several times, attempting to prolong the experience (especially as it's the last unread contemporary novel I had left). Unfortunately, my self-control was only good for two days. This is a book that brought back the best memories of undergrad life: breathless excitement about literature and that sense of (for lack of a better term) chummy intimacy with the giants on whose shoulders we supposedly stand--a shared burden and understanding of the failure and beauty that besets us all. (Yes, this makes David Markson another deserving hug-recipient.) It's an addictive, sad, exhilarating, frightening, compassionate work. On the back cover, Kurt Vonnegut calls it, "Hypnotic...a profoundly rewarding read." Yes.

Somehow, I began keeping track of all of his Cervantes references (any mention of Don Quixote always makes me smile) and wound up with 13:

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.

And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.

...

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.

...

Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, a Tuesday.

Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, a Saturday.

The difference being between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian. Cervantes died ten days earlier.

...

Then we will have Homer and Don Quixote, and then we will have saunter and chat, and one more laugh before we die.

Said William Cowper, who was mad through most of his life.

...

Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

And that Alexander was born on the same night.

...

Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.

...

Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote, said Gissing.

...

El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

...

Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.

...

Salvador de Madariaga propounds strongly suggestive evidence that Cervantes may have been a Sephardic Jew.

...

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

...

Pierre Menard.

...

A Christ of our neighborhood, Ortega called Don Quixote.