Brief resurfacing

Today was my last in this little office, running an EFL program to support several small groups in the elementary school. On Monday, I'll cover for the resident librarian for two weeks before embarking on my postgraduate work in literary translation. Here are a few things I've been gathering in the meantime...

• The magician escapes: Levi Asher's take on Paul Auster's new novel and Ed's recent conversation with Auster. (Bat Segundo continues to amaze...and make me wish that I could listen to them go on for a couple more hours at least...)
• (I would love to ask him about the Chanel No. 5 and the cheese sandwiches in The Book of Illusions--I think they tear a small hole in the narrative and upend what the conclusion appears to be.)
• Fun discussion of "meta-murders" by Sarah Weinman
  
• A "multimedia adaptation" of The Waves! (via Maud)
• Sicheii Yazhi's interesting discussion on Amazon's recent purchase of Shelfari and Abe Books and what this means for LibraryThing (my favorite). (Tim Spalding responds in the comments.)
• Wyatt Mason on Nabokov's last
  
• Daniel Samper Pisano considers the effect of global warming on global politics.
• Inara and Martha
  
• NPR presents concerts from the Newport Folk festival, which include sets by Calexico, Gillian Welch (finally, a recording of "Throw Me a Rope"!), Jakob Dylan, She & Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), and Steve Earle, among others.
• Maud discusses ten books that would make great films.
• Robert Pinsky on John Milton

Midweek links

• The Bat Segundo Show may be no more. I can't even begin to talk about what this podcast has meant to me--especially as someone who lives outside the U.S. The loss is incalculable. Update, 18 July: There's still hope--lots of it.
  
• Open Book, a collaborative online "writers on writing" project by Slate and NYU, posts its maiden episode: an insightful interview with Junot Díaz. Although the interview feels a little rushed, I loved how openly in debt he is to his reading. While working on a draft, he thinks of the books he loves and if they would say, "This page can't hang out with us"--into the trash it goes. (via The Millions)
• Matthew Tiffany quotes from a recent interview with the inimitable Wendell Berry.
• Miriam Burstein discusses Jennifer Egan's The Keep, perfectly describing my own frustrations with it.
• Anne Fernald reads Woolf's letters and has her grandmother to thank.
  
• Tim of Baby Got Books questions potential misreadings of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances.

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.

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...!

Of interest

• Literature Matters (e-zine of the British Council's literature department) enumerates their "Projects in Prospect," where I discover some extremely interesting news...

  Hay Festival
  Where: Cartagena
  When: Jan 2007
  Three UK writers (tbc) invited to perform.

  UPDATE: Found the site for the new program, although the schedule has not yet been posted.
• Some timely discussion of Helen Vendler at The Reading Experience
• The Complete Review analyzes Against the Day.
• Scott McLemee recalls his discovery of a letter by Thomas Pynchon.
• Maud draws attention to some troubling background information on the state of literature in translation; The Literary Saloon offers more. (Thank God for Words Without Borders!)
• A Curious Singularity has pressed on to Katherine Mansfield.
• We've embarked upon the next section of chapters in Reading... The Red and the Black. (Stendhal was a pretty funny guy--never expected to grin so much while reading this one!)
• Anne has begun collecting "mentions of, allusions to, and debts to Woolf in contemporary culture."
  
• Joanna Newsome's new album, Ys, has finally arrived! Largehearted Boy raves.

Trapped in text

Between reading Richard Powers, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Hawking, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, my mind is buzzing with thoughts on space/time/perspective/the nature of reality and the way in which we attempt to apprehend it with words. All of these texts inform each other in one way or another--I'm sure someone in some grad school somewhere has probably written a thesis that encapsulates these works, linking a private human understanding of "truth" with books that plumb the depths of reality's features in one way or another. I have always found books that tinker with space and time to be fascinating experiments where words are the tools that scratch at the skin of truth.

I've just finished Jealousy (Maud piqued my curiosity), and although I have no experience in talking about this sort of writing at all, here are some preliminary neophyte thoughts...

The first-person narrator (who never says "I") meticulously describes everything he sees and hears, while the reader becomes rapidly aware that he suspects his wife of having an affair with a neighbor from the next plantation. Certain events are described over and over again in the narrative (with slight differences each time) and I felt like I was witnessing an endless memory-loop in an obsessive mind. The narrator's almost clinical detachment becomes increasingly creepy as the excuses he makes for the other two ("It was only a piece of bad luck, without consequences, an incident of no seriousness, one of the minor inconveniences of colonial life.") slowly give way to descriptive fixations that become slightly more obscure and chaotic the more his selective memory jumps around. The coldly "objective" observations undermine themselves as linear time is confused for absolute space. (Precise location and situation are the only things that can be known through his gaze--there is even a diagram mapping out the house and the locations repeatedly mentioned in the novel. Time becomes hazy and one has to read carefully to distinguish between 6.30am and 6.30pm.)

With each paragraph, I had to reorient myself to the narrator's switched subjects and erratic descriptions--my only immediate point of reference for this was The Waves (and, basically, Virginia Woolf's writing in general). The reader has to be constantly alert to subtle cues and shifts in the observations, because the shocks are sudden and come without much warning. I went into the novel with the understanding that a murder takes place. After finishing it, I can't even tell you if that's true or if one or even two people are murdered. But I love this sort of thing--when an author demands to be read carefully, creating close readers of us all. I know that if I'd paid closer attention, compared each page of "action" (or nonaction, as the case may be) with the diagram, counted the number of times that smashed centipede was mentioned (and the single mention of its removal), and noted the discrepancies among the narrator's own versions of events, a much more defined story would've emerged.

In his essay "Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet," Roland Barthes declares:

For Robbe-Grillet, the function of language is not a raid on the absolute, a violation of the abyss, but a progression of names over a surface, a patient unfolding that will gradually "paint" the object, caress it, and along its whole extent deposit a patina of tentative identifications, no single term of which could stand by itself for the presented object. [...]

Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.

Meanwhile, the internal is externalized to the extent that all supposed "subjectivity" is banished to nearly scientific precision of visual description. It's uncanny to read, but a remarkable glimpse into yet another way of viewing the world.

Here is a 2003 interview with Robbe-Grillet (via This Space).

Woolf discussion

Devoted to discussing one short story a month, A Curious Singularity has chosen Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" for October. The discussion got started yesterday... Anyone is free to chime in.

Here is the rest of their tentative schedule:

Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens” (1919)
Katherine Mansfield, "At the Bay" (1922)
Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1924)
Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
Delmore Schwartz, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (1937)
Kay Boyle, "Winter Night" (1946)
Jean Stafford, "In the Zoo" (1953)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool” (1953)
Isak Dinesen, “The Blank Page” (1957)
James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (1957)
Flannery O'Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1961)
Frank O'Connor, "My Oedipus Complex" (1963)
John Cheever, "The Swimmer" (1964)
Patrick White, “Dead Roses” (1964)
Grace Paley, "A Conversation with My Father" (1974)
Alice Munro, "How I Met My Husband" (1974)
Jean Rhys, "Sleep it Off Lady" (1976)
Raymond Carver, "Where I'm Calling From" (1983)

Excitement

Anne's book on Virginia Woolf is now available!

According to Amazon,

"This study argues that Virginia Woolf taught herself how to be a feminist artist and public intellectual through her revisionary reading. Fernald gives a clear view of Woolf's tremendous body of knowledge and her constant references to past literary periods."

Congrats, Anne! What an amazing year this has been for you!