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| 1609454251
| 9781609454258
| 1609454251
| 4.07
| 428
| Oct 01, 2016
| Sep 19, 2017
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liked it
| This Savage Parade [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade" wrote Arthur Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (here illustrated by Fernand Lége This Savage Parade [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade" wrote Arthur Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (here illustrated by Fernand Léger). It might almost have been the epigraph to this novel by Santiago Gamboa, who brings in the French poetic genius as either its presiding deity or devil. I might simply have translated sauvage as "wild" as opposed to "tame," but in this case the cognate is more appropriate; there is a savagery in Gamboa's storytelling be reckoned with; he does not deal with the deer and rabbits of the world, so much as its tigers and vultures. Ten thousand bodies lie fallen in the mud, while above them, another twenty or thirty thousand are still fighting, still alive. The bodies become deformed. Blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body and suddenly something bursts. A foul-smelling stream gushes out on top of the mud. The birds circle, pulling out eyes, the worms rise to the surface. That's what the soldier sees in battle: the bare bones of his friend, the amputations, the perforated skulls. What he has seen remains on his retina. Nobody who has contemplated such horror can ever be the same again.Why did I pick up this book? It had a strikingly atmospheric cover. It was published by Europa Editions, a firm I have come to trust. It was by a Latin American author from Colombia whom I did not know. And its flap promised an intriguing combination of characters, three living Colombians and a dead Frenchman. In a more or less regular sequence of chapters, we have an expatriate writer, known only as The Consul, summoned from Rome to Madrid by a woman from his past. We have the tormented childhood of another woman, Manuela, including time in a reformatory, but who somehow emerges from it all as a poet of striking originality. We have a frankly incredible character calling himself Tertullian, claiming to be the son of the Pope (yes, the then Cardinal Badoglio), and building a career as a motivational speaker. And we have episodes in the life story of Arthur Rimbaud, who set the literary world ablaze while still in his teens, but gave up poetry altogether when he was only 21, and spent the last 16 years of his life wandering as an exile in the tropics. Gamboa writes engagingly, and there is no doubt that each of these stories, expect perhaps that of Tertullian, captures the imagination. But we are in for some stormy waters. No sooner does the Consul get to Madrid than the Irish Embassy is occupied by Boko Haram, who start cutting the throats of the hostages. The Consul himself gets involved in violence and ends up in a prison hospital. Manuela's childhood includes abuse by her mother's lover, and a gamut of sexual experiences, many of which are described in detail, but she also finds support and joy from two older women who believe in her talent. Tertullian's methods, no matter the justification of his cause, seems very close to Fascism. And Rimbaud's history is what it is: utter brilliance, together with a flouting of all social norms, including a two-year affair with the poet Paul Verlaine, passionate love, drunken quarrels, drugs and gunfire. The passage I quoted above is safely in the realm of history, describing the Franco-Prussian War. But the modern story is no more palatable, seeming to take delight in denying moral norms. Each of the major characters engages in something ethically unexpected at the least, morally unconscionable at worst. And the minor ones too. To cite one small example, a Colombian priest tells his story to the Consul; he seems a sympathetic enough character. Yet we are shocked to see him denounce a parishioner to an anti-Communist hit-squad on the basis of what he has heard in confession only minutes before—and we are expected to excuse his betrayal because he leads to someone even worse. If Gamboa did not write well (or Howard Curtis translate with less brilliance), it would be easy to throw this book away in disgust. As it was, I kept reading, though the disgust remained. What ties all these threads together? The Consul, Manuela, and Tertullian eventually all meet up in Madrid, so there is a tenuous plot connection. In the last third of the book, they all return to Colombia, I suppose the "dark valley" of the title. For Colombian readers, I suspect that the whole book and the Colombian return adds up to a critique of the new prosperity that seemed to flow like magic from the peace accords of 2016, but it is hard to parse this if you don't know the country. For me, the real link was Rimbaud, the only character who has no literal part in the story. This kind of intertextuality, using the work of a dead writer as a moral (or here anti-moral) sounding-board for contemporary issues, seems to be a Latin-American speciality; Gamboa's compatriot Juan Gabriel Vásquez wrote The Secret History of Costaguana against the background of Conrad's Nostromo, and Roberto Bolaño made a career out of similar techniques. What really intrigued me here was not any of the fictional threads, but the one that was true: the life of Arthur Rimbaud. The rest of Gamboa's work, it seems to me, was merely a matter of breaking Rimbaud's life down into separate aspects, and inventing modern characters to act them out. The novel even ends with something that has no justification whatever in the modern story, but has a poetic appropriateness to the old one: a return to the city of Harar in Ethiopia where Rimbaud lived before his final illness. [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 28, 2018
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Sep 06, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0140039112
| 9780140039115
| 0140039112
| 3.80
| 5,258
| 1973
| Jan 07, 1975
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liked it
| Not the Best, but Indubitably Greene Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where Not the Best, but Indubitably Greene Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of the sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.Who else but Graham Greene? The sense of world-weariness in that opening is palpable. So long as you don't analyze it too closely; the images seem both too forced and too imprecise to trigger that response, yet the emotion still strikes a chord. The Honorary Consul is one of Graham Greene's later works, and far from his best; nonetheless, it has all the master's fingerprints. The distant setting: here a city (probably Rosarios) in Northern Argentina, across the river from Paraguay. The eternal expatriates: Doctor Plarr is the son of an English father and a Paraguayan mother, a citizen of a country he has never seen. The background of a political thriller: the plot concerns the attempt of a group of Paraguayan freedom fighters to kidnap an American Ambassador for use as leverage against the right-wing dictator General Stroessner. And Greene's typical fascination with Catholicism. The plot fails, because the kidnappers take the Honorary British Consul by mistake, a harmless old alcoholic called Charley Fortnum, who probably has never set foot in England either. The leader of the group, León, is a former priest who has abandoned his calling and married. In the second half of the book, it works out that both Charley Fortnum and Eduardo Plarr are his prisoners, inside a hut in a poor quarter. With the police closing in, and death of one sort or another seeming increasingly inevitable, it is no surprise that their thoughts should turn to the last things. There must be fifty pages of theological discussion between the defrocked priest, the agnostic Plarr, and the atheist but surprisingly perceptive Fortnum. This will bore some readers, but fascinate dyed-in-the-wool Greenies. One technical aspect of the book that somewhat interested me was the way in which Charley Fortnum, who seems to be a minor character despite his title billing, gradually gathers substance through what others say about him. Then there is one chapter in which he suddenly emerges into the light, so that you wonder whether he, not Plarr, is in fact the leading character after all. But I soon came to see this as a weakness, because it became hard to keep a clear focus. In Greene's theology, the most interesting character should have been León, the ex-priest who can never be entirely ex. Doctor Plarr, the person we know most about, turns out to be hard to know after all. And old Charley Fortnum, treated almost as a comic character at first, seems the closest to reaching a genuine state of spiritual grace. Normally, we wait for Greene to pull out a brilliant ending which will pull the threads together in an action climax that is an epiphany at the same time. You can see it coming as the police close in, and the discussion inside the hut moves from theological to pragmatic. But the actual events of the climax are so confused that I had to read the relevant pages twice. And I still had no sure idea of who did what to whom, even after reading the postmortem in the final chapter. So no Greene epiphany—and without that, the Greene mechanics and Greene atmosphere are pretty empty. Unless you're a real fan. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 09, 2018
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Sep 13, 2018
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Jun 22, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0811226700
| 9780811226707
| B07JZJHRZ2
| 3.92
| 1,072
| 1946
| Mar 27, 2018
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really liked it
| Drowning in Sensation, or Lost in Translation? [image] The young Clarice Lispector (photo: Paulo Gurgel Valente) Sensation: So far as I know, the chande Drowning in Sensation, or Lost in Translation? [image] The young Clarice Lispector (photo: Paulo Gurgel Valente) Sensation: So far as I know, the chandelier of the title is mentioned once only, on page 10. It makes as good a place to start as any: Without knowing why, she’d nonetheless halt, fanning her bare thin arms; she lived on the verge of things. The parlor. The parlor filled with neutral spots. The smell of an empty house. But the chandelier! There was the chandelier. The great spider would glow. She’d look at it immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life. That icy existence. Once! once in a flash—the chandelier would scatter in chrysanthemums and joy. Another time—while she was running through the parlor—it was a chaste seed. The chandelier. She’d skip off without looking back.The "she" is Virgínia, a young girl living on an estate in the country, Quiet Farm. where she grows up worshipping, but also dominated by, her older brother Daniel. The long middle section (there are no chapters) will see her as a young woman in the city, getting to know other men. Towards the end, she will return home for a while, only to change her mind and go back to the city. Apart from the stunning final pages, that is basically the entire story. The few lines I quoted above contain it all: the chaste seed, the terror, the chrysanthemums and joy. This is something I realize only now; while actually reading, I was reeling from the delirium of words. For Virgínia may "live on the verge of things" as a girl, but the feelings that flood from her awareness of everything around her take total possession of her, inside and out; she is drowning in sensation. Here is another example, from near the beginning of her life in the city. Lispector is writing in longer sentences now, but there is still that extraordinary use of language: She opened the door of her little apartment, penetrated the cold and stuffy surroundings of the living room. Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness. She screamed low, sharp—but they’re lovely!—the room was breathing with half-closed eyes in the silence of mute pickaxes of the construction sites. The flowers were straightening up in delicate vigor, the petals thick and tired, damp with sweat—the stalk was tall, so calm and hard. The room was breathing, oppressed, asleep.Lispector apparently said that her writing was "trying to photograph perfume." Almost literally so here, the boundaries totally erased between the woman and the flowers, their scent, and the absence of sound from the street. Inanimate things take on feelings; the woman becomes one with the things. Translation: But such writing does make it an extraordinarily hard book to read. Take the second sentence in the passage above, "Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness." It reads almost like a parody, doesn’t it, as though spit out by Google Translate unaltered.* On the very first page, when Virgínia is described as looking down at a river "with her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge," and that word "branch" appeared again a few pages later, I got hold of the original Portuguese text online for comparison; could it mean "railing"? But no. I read Spanish, not Portuguese, but that was enough to suggest that, for the most part, the translators, Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards, have indeed stuck close to the original. But close or not, it left an uneasiness in my mind: if I could not totally trust the translation, what was the point of reading on? I continued, though, but in a more rapid fashion that did not leave time to agonize over details. Halfway through, I stopped to read the marvelous review in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal. Here’s what she says about Lispector’s language: No one sounds like Lispector—in English or Portuguese. No one thinks like her. Not only does she seem endowed with more senses than the allotted five, she bends syntax and punctuation to her will. She turns the dictionary upside down, shaking all the words loose from their definitions, sprinkling them back in as she desires (along with a few eyelashes, toast crumbs and dead flies)—and doesn’t the language look better for it?Sehgal also points out that the editor and co-translator here, Benjamin Moser, is also the author of the 2009 biography of the writer that did much to put Lispector back on the map of modernist originals, so it seems I am wrong to complain. All the same, I have a sneaky feeling that closeness to the original is not necessarily the best criterion for those who do not know the original. If an author makes her reputation by rearranging the syntax and dictionary in her own language, surely the best kind of translation would be one that takes similar scissors and tongs to English, without being constrained by the patterns of Portuguese? Submission: Parul Sehgal quotes Moser as saying "in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." She goes on in her own words: "The Chandelier is uniquely demanding—it’s baggy, claggy and contentedly glacial." It is that; the sensation of reading it was like struggling with a dream from which you cannot wake. But I could sense that this second novel of Clarice Lispector (1920–77), written when she still under 25, heralds a truly original artist. You might think of a Latin-American Virginia Woolf, except that I now know she had not read her at the time, so very much her own person. I surrendered as though submitting myself to sleep. One more example must suffice. It comes at the end of a scene between Virgínia and her lover. Everything he says and does (typical male!) is all in mental quotes, as he imagines how he will describe it to a friend later. But then Lispector switches back to her: She suddenly felt pain commingle with flesh, intolerable as if each cell were being stirred and shredded, divided in a mortal birth. Her mouth abruptly bitter and burning, she was horrified, rough and contrite as if in the face of spilled blood, a victory, a terror. So that was happiness.Such immediacy, such violence! From this point on, the novel seemed to accelerate—whether because Lispector had her foot on the pedal or I was just getting used to her driving. But the last few pages—again I thought of Virginia Woolf—were simultaneously a tour-de-force of modernist abstraction and totally, devastatingly clear. * Here is the sentence in Portuguese: Leve mancha ondulava num dos cantos, expandia como uma luz frescuras quase apagadas. And here is what Google Translate does in fact spit out: "A slight spot rippled in one of the corners, it expanded like a light, almost obliterated." A lot more normal, isn't it? I have noticed that the translators seem to go almost out of their way to use less usual words ("stain" is a particular favorite), and odd syntactic constructions, such as the omission of articles and strange plurals. Google simply ignores the word "frescuras" (coolness). Moser and Edwards get it in, but so awkwardly. Surely translation can do better than this? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2018
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May 15, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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| 0062268546
| 9780062268549
| 0062268546
| 3.46
| 2,620
| Jul 02, 2013
| Jul 02, 2013
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liked it
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It's In the Cards Physically, this is a unique book. Appearing on the left-hand page before each of its 52 short chapters is one of the cards of the Me It's In the Cards Physically, this is a unique book. Appearing on the left-hand page before each of its 52 short chapters is one of the cards of the Mexican game Lotería, illustrated in full color by Jarrod Taylor in vibrant popular style. Lotería, apparently, is the Mexican form of Bingo, where the dealer calls out each card with a little riddle or "dicho," and the players try to match it on their individual boards. The subjects are both simple and varied: spider, canoe, jug, guitar, skull, basin, sun, moon, frog. Since the cards (and in some cases the card backs) take up at least a quarter of the book's 270 pages, and the pages themselves are quite small, this is a very quick read, made even more so by the pleasant kick of anticipation you get every time you turn over the page to a new picture. The narrator is an eleven-year-old girl named Luz, born in America to Mexican parents. She is in some kind of detention center, following an unspecified tragedy, possibly a criminal act, that has affected her entire family. Her father, apparently, is in jail; her sister Estrella is in hospital; her mother does not seem to be in the picture, but Luz has an aunt Tencha (Hortensia) who visits from time to time. Her counselor suggests that, in order to help her father and help the authorities know what to do with her, Luz should keep a journal, using the Lotería cards at random to trigger memories. And so a story comes out, in random flashes, jumping about in time, but always as vivid as the cards themselves. It tells of a mostly happy childhood in relatively poor circumstances. Luz loves her father, a steelworker who shares jokes and songs with her and takes her hunting; but there are times when she knows to keep out of his way, as he can become violent when drunk. Luz is a very attractive character, maintaining an innocent optimism throughout. She writes in a very direct style, but readers should be warned that it is sprinkled with untranslated Spanish words and phrases, rather in the manner of Junot Diaz. Many of them, I think, must be colloquial, for although I know standard Spanish, I had to pass over a good number of these getting no more than the general sense. Still, it did not reduce my enjoyment. So again, a unique book physically, and probably unique in its narrative structure also. But two questions: what can Zambrano do for an encore, and what would the story be like without the gimmick of its presentation? The first is the author's business, not mine, but the second gives me pause. Is the story really rich and dimensioned enough to stand on its own? I fear it may not be. Even though I was absorbed throughout by this unusual experiment, I would still have to wait before passing judgment on Zambrano as a writer per se ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 21, 2013
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Nov 22, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 9780811215862
| 0811215865
| 3.93
| 12,560
| 1996
| Dec 01, 2004
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really liked it
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Literary Keyholes In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro painted an England as seen by the butler of a large house, whose keyhole view of the world, Literary Keyholes In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro painted an England as seen by the butler of a large house, whose keyhole view of the world, circumscribed by the minutiae of place-setting and gong-ringing, is so narrow that the truly great events—the approach to World War—can be seen only in narrow glimpses. Roberto Bolaño also writes of horror, but his particular keyhole is literature, especially avant-garde poetry and literary criticism. Almost all the books of his that I have read or read about, from his very brief Antwerp to the enormous 2666 , contain references to writers and critics and tiny literary magazines, some made up, a few well known, and others real but so obscure that they might as well be made up. His most extreme excursion into this genre is probably Nazi Literature in the Americas, a catalog of ultra-right-wing or fascist writers in both continents, political fiction displayed through the medium of bibliographic fact. Distant Star is an expansion of the final section of that earlier book. If you ignore a few details here and there, the plot is entirely literary. It opens in Chile in the early 1970s, during the socialist Allende regime. The author-narrator is a university student in Concepción, attending weekly poetry workshops run by Juan Stein, though occasionally attending the rival workshop of Diego Soto across campus. He is part of a group of friends, all of whom are would-be poets, among them the beautiful and talented Garmendia sisters and an elegant young man rumored to be the lover of at least one of them, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. Ruiz-Tagle is always insightful and courteous in the workshops, but his own polished poems are strangely impersonal, as though they were not really his at all. But then comes the right-wing coup of September 1973. Many of the original group of poets (including the author) are arrested or disappear. Some survive, some resurface in other parts of the world, some are never seen again. Ruiz-Tagle, meanwhile, reappears under his real name, Carlos Wieder, as a daring air force pilot who writes his poems in smoke in the skies of Chile, and makes a sensational impression as a photographer. For a while, he is the talk of the town, but then he too disappears, and the rest of the novel (like the first few hundred pages of 2666) is a literary search for traces of him, taking the writer ultimately to Europe. Dry cerebral stuff, you might think. But no. The novel has more humor than most Bolaño books that I have read, and he is unfailingly interesting even when he pursuing minor literary movements (including an almost-plausible French one involving defecating on great books in order to achieve "total assimilation" with the classics). And in fact, all the literary discussion is a cloak for something else: those "few details" I studiously ignored in the previous paragraph. A couple of episodes only, no more than ten pages in all, but they are what give the book its true impact. The strategy certainly worked for me, but perhaps not quite so well as his later By Night in Chile, which deals with the same period, also beginning in a rarefied literary world but drilling longer and deeper into the dark side of the Pinochet regime by the end. All the same, a keyhole view of horror can be more suggestive than a door opened wide. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 10, 2014
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Jan 11, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0811216306
| 9780811216302
| 0811216306
| 3.88
| 3,915
| 2000
| May 25, 2006
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really liked it
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An Encounter with the Infinite This very short 1996 novella by Argentinian writer César Aira is easy and enjoyable to read but hard to figure out after An Encounter with the Infinite This very short 1996 novella by Argentinian writer César Aira is easy and enjoyable to read but hard to figure out afterwards. I am left asking "What on earth was that all about?" and far from confident that any of my tentative answers make any sense at all. [image] It is a historical novel based, so far as I can see, on documented fact. In 1837, the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, already famous from his previous paintings of Brazil, crossed the Andes from Chile, heading eastwards towards Buenos Aires. That great city, however, was not his principal goal; he was most interested in experiencing the dead center of the vast Argentinian pampas, with unbroken plains reaching to a flat horizon on all sides. Accompanied by younger German artist Robert Krause, Rugendas sets off in late December, taking time to draw and paint the striking mountain scenery around Aconcagua, and spending the early weeks of 1838 in Mendoza, on the Argentinian side of the Cordillera. In due course, the two artists start their journey East, but shortly after entering the true pampas, they are caught in a cataclysmic electrical storm which changes Rugendas' life for ever—and more particularly, the nature of his vision. Retracing their steps, they end up near Mendoza once more, where Rugendas witnesses other cataclysmic events, but this time of human origin. [image] I am not quite certain whether Rugendas' quest is motivated by aesthetic principles or by personal ones. Aira makes much of his indebtedness to the great geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (whose own explorations in South America are treated in Daniel Kehlmann's wonderful novel Measuring the World ). Humboldt was a proponent of what he called "landscape physiognomy," in which the artist would concentrate on a limited number of features, beginning with the natural vegetation, whose growth and abundance would demonstrate the qualities that gave each place its particular identity. He urged Rugendas to concentrate on the tropics, whose vegetation was immensely more vigorous and varied. Was it in reaction against Humboldt, therefore, that Rugendas sought out the rugged mountains and barren plains? [image] Or was it simply a personal quest for extremes of experience of all kinds? On his first visit to Mendoza, Rugendas was disappointed not to witness an earthquake or an Indian raid. Later on, he would experience the savagery of both man and nature, almost losing his life in the process. It was no longer a matter of composing arrangements that might convey the intellectual idea of a landscape, but of grasping its extremes: both its immensity and its detail. As a former art history professor, I see some analogy with two phases of Romanticism, the picturesque giving way to the dramatic, the ideal to the specific. But it is also the story of a man so altered by a close encounter with the Infinite that, having survived, he is prepared to risk his life to collect any further experiences available to him. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 11, 2014
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Jan 12, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1594631719
| 9781594631719
| 1594631719
| 3.62
| 2,856
| Oct 31, 2013
| Oct 31, 2013
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really liked it
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An Elusive Mystery We all know about unreliable narrators, but we don't so often come upon unidentified ones. Quite early on in this novel about a youn An Elusive Mystery We all know about unreliable narrators, but we don't so often come upon unidentified ones. Quite early on in this novel about a young actor in a South American country who goes on tour with a political theater troupe, we gather that his story is being put together out of interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues some time after the events described. The interviewer, who is also the storyteller, seldom intrudes in the first person, but we become curious as to who he or she might be. We will discover eventually, but that is only a step towards and even greater mystery: why is this person piecing together the story now? What has happened to make the young actor such a figure of interest, and why cannot he speak for himself? The novel is filled with foreboding, and there are many times when we just know what is going to happen—except that the author immediately steers us away again, leaving us to come up with other expectations, which are again proved incorrect. A typical murder mystery starts with a crime and gives you the rest of the book to figure out who committed it. But this is the opposite: you sense there is going to be a crime, or at least a tragedy, but spend the entire book figuring out what it will be. Peruvian American author Daniel Alarcón has come up with a most ingenious framework for his story. And what of the story itself? There is not much I should say. The young actor, Nelson, is a recent graduate from theater school. He gets a chance to audition for Henry Nuñez, the once notorious founder of a politically-engaged theater group called Diciembre that was active during his country's civil wars in the 1980s, until Henry was thrown into prison. Now in 2001, with the war over, Henry wants to take Diciembre on the road again, and is looking for a younger actor to play the role of his son in the three-man cast of his play The Idiot President. Nelson gets the job and, leaving behind his widowed mother and semi-estranged girlfriend, goes off into the remote towns and villages of the Andean highlands. Acting becomes life, and things get complicated. I can't say I am sure what the book is about, so I had been thinking four stars. But although Daniel Alarcón has lived in the US since the age of three, he is clearly writing in a Latin American tradition, and one of the reason I read Latin American novels is precisely because they don't tell their stories in obvious ways. Alarcón has an original approach to narrative, as I mentioned. You can see the shadow of the dirty wars that are the subject of so many novels from the region, but Alarcón is of a younger generation, and the subject remains just a shadow. There is great interest in the way he uses the theatrical idea, not merely as a form of political criticism, but as a metaphor for the roles we play in life and how we shape our own realities; in that sense, this is an existential novel. More than anyone else, Daniel Alarcón reminds me of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, in a book such as The Sound of Things Falling. I may not fully understand the inner meanings of either author, but at least I get it that the fault is most likely to be mine. ...more |
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1
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Feb 04, 2014
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Feb 07, 2014
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Jul 17, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0062277324
| 9780062277329
| 0062277324
| 3.44
| 316
| Feb 06, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
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it was amazing
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An Alternate View of Horror Already in his narrative poem Bill of Rights, Fred D'Aguiar has explored the 1978 cult-suicide at Jonestown in his native G An Alternate View of Horror Already in his narrative poem Bill of Rights, Fred D'Aguiar has explored the 1978 cult-suicide at Jonestown in his native Guyana, in which 909 members of the People's Temple were led to drink cyanide-laced Kool Aid under the aegis of their charismatic preacher, Jim Jones. Now he returns to it in novel form, lightly concealing the proper names, and offering an intimate viewpoint with a touch of magic realism thrown in. He assumes, I think, that his readers will know the outlines of the story; I can't imagine how this would work for those that don't. But even if you read up all the details, they merely provide the background to D'Aguiar's story, which starts in a different place, has a different focus, and leads—possibly—to a different ending. Daringly, D'Aguiar opens not with a human being but with a gorilla, Adam, the Preacher's pet, kept in a cage in the middle of the compound. One of a group of children playing too close to the cage is grabbed by the gorilla and apparently squeezed to death. Until she is "resurrected" by the Preacher the next day as further proof of his charismatic powers. This is Trina, a twelve-year-old who becomes the focus of a group of children in the story, just as her mother Joyce becomes the adult protagonist. With her MBA, Joyce is valuable to the Preacher in a variety of practical ways, some of which involve boat journeys to the capital, during which she strikes up a friendship with the Captain that begins to erode her unquestioning loyalty to the commune. Trina becomes a special favorite of the Preacher, but both she and her mother discover that his favor can be as quickly withdrawn. Jim Jones aimed to set up a Marxist commune, run ostensibly on Christian principles. The unnamed Preacher of the novel doesn't mention Marx, but the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship gradually become apparent as the disciplinary steps taken to keep the commune in order veer towards brutality and outright murder. I found myself thinking of Orwell's Animal Farm as the Preacher's peculiarities turned into paranoia; eventually the closest fit was to the North Korean Dear Leader in Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. And like Kim Jong Il, D'Aguiar's Preacher keeps his people in line through his manipulation of words, in compulsory nightly sermons. These set pieces are absolutely brilliant; my one complaint is that there are too many of them. As the novel enters its final stretch three plot lines converge. One is the near-breakdown of the Preacher (who, apparently like Jones in real life, is a drug addict and serial sexual abuser). Another is the approach of the US Congressional delegation whose arrival in the real Jonestown, was the catalyst for the murders and suicides. And the third is the one in which the reader is surely most invested, the gradual coalition of a group of dissenters around Trina and Joyce, who make their own plans for escape. As we turn the pages faster and faster, we wonder how far D'Aguiar will go in rewriting the history of the real Jonestown. What he gives us is an extraordinary ending that could only have come from a poet. Many readers might think it fanciful or frustratingly enigmatic. But I found it perfect. ...more |
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Feb 07, 2014
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Feb 10, 2014
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Jul 17, 2016
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| 1594487480
| 9781594487484
| 1594487480
| 3.83
| 19,317
| May 2011
| 2014
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it was amazing
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Taking Flight Let me introduce a marvelous Colombian novel that sucked me in and made me give up everything else to finish it. It has something of the Taking Flight Let me introduce a marvelous Colombian novel that sucked me in and made me give up everything else to finish it. It has something of the structure of Gatsby, or perhaps the Ancient Mariner: a younger narrator, and an older man whose story he tells. Whose story he finds out, actually, piecing it together as we hear about it. The older man, Ricardo Laverde, is no millionaire, but a solitary individual worn down by life, whom the narrator met in a billiard club in Bogotá, and got to know at least as a regular drinking companion. This is back in 1995, when the writer, a young law-school lecturer named Antonio Yamarra, is just thinking about settling down. Except that Laverde both intrigues and threatens him, as though he represents something in the history of his country that he would rather avoid. He learns that Laverde is or was an airplane pilot, that he has spent many years in jail, and that he had an American wife whom he hasn't seen in all this time. But by the time Antonio is actually writing, in 2009, Laverde is dead. As we will later find out, his death has deeply affected Yamarra also. The entire book is his attempt to piece Ricardo's story together and answer questions in his own mind that have prevented him from moving forward. It will tie together many real episodes: an accident at an air display in 1938, the American Airways crash near Cali in 1995, the rise and fall of drug lord Pablo Escobar and the private zoo on his fabulous estate, the idealism of the Peace Corps volunteers in the sixties, and fallout from the Vietnam War. But this is no history, but a human drama. Vasquez focuses on a few characters that will become very close to us: the younger Ricardo and his wife Elaine in the sixties; and a quarter-century later, Antonio, the woman he lives with, and Ricardo's daughter Maya. It is a story of young love and boundless hope—but also, sadly, of the decay of love and loss of hope. And yes, it is set against the early years of the drug war, and Colombia's entry as America's largest supplier of marijuana and later cocaine. But in no way is it an issues book; these are real, warm people, and even if they get involved in bad things, their motives are understandable, even sympathetic. One thing I loved about the book was its pacing, in six perfectly-shaped chapters of around 40 pages each. I admit that there was a slight glitch about half-way through, when Antonio stops reporting on his gradual discovery of the story, and tells a whole chunk in the kind of detail he could not possibly have known at that time. But this is a small thing. The sense of place—temperature, scent, sound, texture—is palpable throughout; danger aside, I would like to go there. I would also mention Vasquez' use of poetry to reference an intensity that would be out of place in his more measured prose. The book's first big climax is set against the reading of a poem by Colombia's late 19th-century poet José Asunción Silva: One night all heavy with perfume, with murmurs and music of wings [...] your shadow, lean and languid, and my shadow, cast by the moon [...] were one single long shadow.And the ending of the novel quotes a 1929 poem by Aurelio Arturo: ...It burned amid forests of flame, and the cupolas fell and the walls fell, over the beloved voices and over the broad mirrors [...] ten thousand howls of pure resplendence!Neither poet was known to me, but I have bookmarked them both in Spanish. And although already somewhat interested in Vasquez after his Secret History of Costaguana, I will most certainly look out for him again after being so thrilled by this. ...more |
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May 29, 2013
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May 30, 2013
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Jun 03, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1590516982
| 9781590516980
| 1590516982
| 3.52
| 65
| Jan 01, 2014
| Sep 23, 2014
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liked it
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Panamerican Politics Edgard Telles Ribeiro's novel about South American politics from the Sixties to the present won the Brazilian Pen Prize for the be Panamerican Politics Edgard Telles Ribeiro's novel about South American politics from the Sixties to the present won the Brazilian Pen Prize for the best novel of 2011. I can see why. It is a well-written and sober account of the rise of a Brazilian diplomat in the last third of the Twentieth Century, and his involvement in some of the most reprehensible regional regimes. But I also wonder whether it will achieve equivalent success outside Brazil. There is a detachment to the narrative style that removes it totally from the genre of political thriller. It requires, I think, that its readers recognize references to events in their national past that carry their own charge of fascination or terror. It is a commentary on history, rather than history itself. One small example: there is frequent mention of "Itamaraty," apparently a term to conjure with. I had to Google it to discover that it refers to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, but I can only guess as to its associations to Brazilian ears: are we talking Langley or Foggy Bottom? The diplomat is Marcílio Andrade Xavier, generally known as Max. Already an up-and-coming man in the early Sixties, he manages to shift allegiances with remarkable dexterity at the military coup of 1964, and his continued ascent is secured. Although there are a few setbacks to his rising career, he always manages to come out of them on top, including a further switch of sides in the return to democracy of the early Eighties. Stylish, cultured, and adept, he is the very model of the successful diplomat, but becomes increasingly a figure of fear to those who know, or guess, his true connections. I must admit to knowing next to nothing about Brazilian history, and still less that its own experience with right-wing dictatorship reinforced by torture became a commodity for export to other countries in South America: Uruguay, Chile, Argentina. I have read much about the Dirty Wars in those individual countries, and rather less about the fact that this was a coordinated clandestine effort of Panamerican scope—codenamed Operation Condor—and supported by the CIA. And I did not know anything about Brazil's part in this at all. In this respect, the novel was eye-opening. But it is not a history, and most of these events are referred to offstage in passing: tortures taking place in other basements, coups simmering in other countries. Indeed, there is an oblique quality to the entire book that at first gave it an air of distinction, but ultimately alienated me. Max's story is told by a younger colleague, a close friend who gradually became disaffected. His narrative begins with a brief overview spanning four decades, then loops back to zero in on particular facts learned later from other sources. So there is a curious third-hand air to the whole, as though Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby were to withdraw himself almost entirely from the story (until the very end), and get most of his information from, say, the Buchanans. At first Telles Ribeiro's novel reminded me of Roberto Bolaño, or even more of Juan Gabriel Vásquez. But there is less action than either of those authors, and frankly less tension—at least that I could perceive from my viewpoint as a foreign reader. ...more |
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Oct 12, 2014
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Oct 14, 2014
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May 30, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0307700682
| 9780307700681
| 0307700682
| 3.44
| 1,062
| May 2011
| May 21, 2013
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really liked it
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Fathers’ Day What must the novel my father wanted to write have been like? Brief, composed of fragments, with holes where my father couldn't or didnFathers’ Day What must the novel my father wanted to write have been like? Brief, composed of fragments, with holes where my father couldn't or didn't want to remember something, filled with symmetries—stories duplicating themselves over and over again as if they were an ink stain on an assiduously folded piece of paper, a simple theme repeated as in a symphony or a fool's monologue—and sadder than Fathers' Day at an orphanage.The writer returns to Argentina from Germany where he has spent eight years to attend his father, who is in hospital, deprived of speech and memory, and believed to be dying. Among the papers on his father's desk, he finds a file of papers relating to the 2008 disappearance, later ruled to be murder, of one Alberto José Burdisso, a simple janitor in La Trébol, the father's home town, in agricultural land north-west of Buenos Aires. The section in which the writer goes through the contents of the file is the longest of the four in the book; it is also the most dispassionate. In some ways it reminds me of "The Part About the Crimes" in Roberto Bolaño's 2666, only much more compressed. The numerous newspaper reports appear to be verbatim translations; those that I have been able to find in Spanish online are exact down to the last comma; this, at least, is not fiction. This meticulous documentation poses two questions: why did the disappearance of such an obscure figure so engage the local community, and why did the writer's father take such an interest? Anyone who has read recent fiction about Argentina will guess that the answer must somehow relate to the Dirty War of thirty years earlier, when liberals and suspected activists were simply "disappeared" by government forces. But unlike any other book on the subject that I have read, this one contains no accounts of tortures or executions, no revelations from beyond the grave, no doomed romance. Its four parts approach the subject in strikingly different ways. The first tells of the writer's return to what is almost a foreign country to him, his memories blocked by a self-induced amnesia. He prowls around his parents' home trying to find clues to who they are, but many of these may be too subtle for the foreign reader; two chapters, for instance, are devoted to a listing of books on the shelves, mostly on Peronist subjects, with a notable absence of right-wing writers—but you need to look them up to work that out. Then come the newspaper clippings. The third section turns surreal, with speculation about a novel that the writer's father was apparently writing, accounts of old movies on late-night TV, and a succession of the writer's fevered dreams, mostly involving bizarre cruelty to animals. The final section grants a series of epiphanies that are all the more moving because of the oblique way in which they have been approached. "I hadn't returned to the country that my parents had wanted me to love, the one called Argentina, but rather to an imagined country, the one they had fought for and which had never existed." Now at last he begins to understand his father and, beyond him, the struggle for lost ideals that defined an entire generation. This is a difficult book, in many parts a dry book, but it reaches depths that are the unique result of applying the mind of a novelist to the minute facts of the real world: As I thought all this standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn't deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they'd done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm.====== A word about that curious possessive in the title, My Fathers' Ghost… The Spanish is El espíritu de mis padres… , where "padres" means both "parents" and "forefathers." It is certainly more than just the ghost of his father, singular, male. Yet the focus of the book is singular, entirely upon the son trying to understand his father before he dies. So the placement of the apostrophe in English is a kind of compromise, sort of true to the original, yet knowing that most people will misread it as Father's. ...more |
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May 21, 2013
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May 23, 2013
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May 27, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0679737413
| 9780679737414
| 0679737413
| 4.03
| 3,163
| 1965
| Dec 03, 1991
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really liked it
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In the Heart of a Different Darkness My only previous encounter with the late Peter Matthiessen was his final novel, In Paradise, which impressed me im In the Heart of a Different Darkness My only previous encounter with the late Peter Matthiessen was his final novel, In Paradise, which impressed me immensely. So I went back almost fifty years to this novel of 1965, and was thrilled to see many of the same themes, yet treated in a strikingly different way. The protagonist of In Paradise attends a conference on the site of Auschwitz; a Gentile among Jews, he is joined by those of other faiths and some of no faith at all, none of which emerges unscathed from the moral issues that are raised. In At Play, Matthiessen tackles another genocide, or at least a potential one—that of Indian tribes in the upper Amazon—viewing it through the eyes of several different Christian missionaries, as well as at least one non-believer who may exhibit a truer humanity than any of them. In the opening scene, Martin Quarrier, his wife Hazel, and nine-year-old son Billy fly over what I take to be the Peruvian Andes to a small frontier town on the headwaters of the Amazon. Martin is an evangelical missionary from North Dakota, sent to convert the Niaruna (four syllables), a savage tribe on the Espíritu river. He is met by his immediate superior, Leslie Huben, a gung-ho perennial boy scout, and his beautiful wife Andy. Also at the airstrip is Padre Xantes, representative of what Leslie persists in calling the Opposition, and the local administrator, Commandante Guzmán, a venial character whose comic manner conceals a real danger. Parked on the field, Martin notices a beat-up aircraft with "Wolfie & Moon Inc., Small Wars & Demolition" painted on the side. This belongs to two soldiers of fortune, nominally American, but persona-non-grata in most countries that they go; Guzmán intends to use them for his own conquest of the Niaruna. Between them, these nine people (but especially Martin Quarrier and Lewis Moon) comprise most the cast of the rest of this substantial novel, other than the indigenous characters that will play an increasingly important part later on. Matthiessen wrote this some three decades before Barbara Kingsolver came out with The Poisonwood Bible, that other now-classic novel about a missionary venture gone wrong, and I am sure that comparisons will have been made. The back cover makes the inevitable link with the Conrad of Nostromo and of course Heart of Darkness. But the author I thought of most strongly at first was Graham Greene, especially in the scenes involving Padre Xantes, whose debates with the evangelicals are a masterpiece of theology disguised as worldly comedy. But he is a relatively minor character. Matthiessen's main focus among the Christians is the dynamic that grows between Martin, Hazel, Leslie, and Andy, as each reacts in different ways to the conditions in which they find themselves. I know the Les Hubens of the world from years of listening to delegates to the Worldwide Missionary Convention that was one of the summer highlights of my seaside town while I was growing up, and have long since come to see through their rhetoric. At first, I thought that Martin would be made out of the same stuff, but no: he is too brave, too intelligent, and too honest: You see, a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces. […] I needed badly to talk to someone who didn't refer each problem to the Lord.This is Martin talking near the end of the book to Lewis Moon, who is in many ways his spiritual opposite, but is perhaps the most like him as a man. Moon plays a fascinating role in the novel, and may actually turn out to be its real protagonist. Conrad went upriver, glimpsed the fringe of his Heart of Darkness, and retreated exclaiming, "The horror, the horror!" Matthiessen, on the other hand, goes deep inside. In a series of chapters that may make or break the book for many readers, the author uses Moon as a kind of spirit guide, first into the recesses of his own psyche in a near-fatal overdose of a hallucinogenic drug, and then by having him penetrate the tribe of the Niaruna themselves. I won't say how this comes about, but the sections among the Indios raise ethical issues at a more basic level that makes the concerns of the missionaries seem petty and self-serving. Moon is half Cherokee, though he feels himself to have been a bad one; this background gives him a respect for tribal ways that the others simply do not possess. We must not forget, too, that Matthiessen is an award-winning naturalist and ethnographer; while his account of life among the Niaruna is presumably imaginary, it is imagination guided by observation and intelligence. As in life, this story is a tragedy. Several of the original nine characters will end up dead or incapacitated. Some faiths will be lost or shaken. It is clear that the cards are stacked against the Niaruna or other tribes retaining their way of life intact. Yet I admired the way that Matthiesen ended the novel on a moment of balance. It would have been so easy for him merely to condemn or squeeze out his last drop of blood. I found his alternative, in the last three or four chapters, both moving and beautiful. ...more |
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Dec 20, 2014
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Dec 23, 2014
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May 17, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1593081936
| 9781593081935
| 1593081936
| 3.81
| 17,208
| 1904
| Oct 25, 2004
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it was amazing
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A Wonderful Book to Have Read The tense of my title is deliberate. Virginia Woolf described Nostromo as "a difficult book to read through." A Conrad bi A Wonderful Book to Have Read The tense of my title is deliberate. Virginia Woolf described Nostromo as "a difficult book to read through." A Conrad biographer called it "a novel that one cannot read unless one has read it before." I take both these verdicts from the excellent introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition by Brent Hayes Edwards, and they come as some relief. I generally find that introductory essays give away too many plot points, and this is no exception. But having read a little over half the novel without it, I was desperate for some help. It was not just me. Conrad really does jump all over the place in time, telling the story first from one angle then another. His characters really do play on a half-lighted stage where nobody is quite as they seem, apparent power may vanish in smoke, and some of the most significant events occur in the wings. Early though this is (1904), it marks a distinct break from the late Victorian novel, coming closer to Woolf or even to Faulkner. Its exotic setting, political theme, and moral concerns look forward to Hemingway and Greene, though without their directness of narrative. Conrad's layered chronology, and not just his Latin American locale, more than once had me thinking forward to Gabriel García Márquez. While I might have fallen into the rhythm of the narrative eventually, Edwards' essay helped me put the novel into a modernist context, so I could take the rapid shifts in viewpoint in my stride and not be fazed when Conrad does something extraordinary like jumping a decade into the speculative future. Conrad's own landfalls in South America as a Polish seaman aboard a British ship were brief, and apparently left little impression; he had to call upon others for help with the setting. All the same, it is amazingly well realized, with detail and atmosphere that convince me, even with my rather longer visits to those parts. His invented country of Costaguana might be anywhere between Costa Rica and Guyana, as the introduction remarks. The specific locale is the port of Sulaco, the San Tomé silver mine in the mountains above, and the surrounding region, isolated from the rest and known as the Occidental Province. When yet another revolution breaks out in the country, the province, protected by its mountains, attempts to secede. You might think of Panama seceding from Colombia in 1903, except that Conrad rearranges his geography to suit his story; this is not history under a pseudonym. It is an unstable country, with new regimes replacing each other more or less violently every few years. Most of the major characters, though, are of European origin and outlook: Charles Gould, the English owner of the mine, and his recent bride Emilia; Don José Avellanos, the former ambassador, of pure Spanish descent, and his lovely niece Antonia; Martin Decoud, Antonia's admirer, who is introduced as a Parisian flâneur, but becomes a political activist in his own right; Monygham, the embittered Irish doctor; and the title character, Nostromo, an Italian seaman who has earned universal respect as the man who can be trusted to get things done. The name means "bosun" in Italian, but is also a contraction of "nostr'uomo," or "our man." Though a secondary character until quite near the end, he may be the moral touchstone of the story, but even he is not entirely as people see him. Conrad is not primarily a novelist of personal relationships; his characters tend to be seen as individuals reacting to the ethical or political situation around them, often in surprising ways. Nostromo is not a denunciation of colonialism, as Heart of Darkness (1899) had been. Those battles are over; Costaguana has gained its independence. But not its stability, and most of the settlers who, like the Gould family, have been there for generations, are anything but settled. It is one of the earliest novels to explore the post-colonial age, and in some respects it goes even further than that. In the barely glimpsed but distantly present American industrialist Holroyd, who funds the mine from his stronghold in San Francisco as the first step towards establishing a North American foothold in the region (and even promoting his particular brand of Christianity), we see distinct pre-echoes of the modern era of colonization by corporations and of politics as a kind of moral evangelism. These are only a few of the topics that Edwards points out in his introduction; the reader will discover many more unaided. Nostromo is a difficult book, requiring intense concentration to read, but it provides much food for thought. And as the curse of the San Tomé silver propels the novel to its tragic but poetic conclusion, it is impossible not to recognize it as a great one. ...more |
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Apr 22, 2011
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Apr 26, 2011
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May 12, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1612194230
| 9781612194233
| 1612194230
| 3.51
| 176
| Mar 2013
| Jun 02, 2015
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liked it
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Crunching Crostini With this, I initiate my new "abandoned" shelf. I don't quite know how to proceed. Not write a full review, obviously, but perhaps t Crunching Crostini With this, I initiate my new "abandoned" shelf. I don't quite know how to proceed. Not write a full review, obviously, but perhaps to indicate why I picked the book up in the first place and why, reluctantly, put it back down. The great Roberto Bolaño called Pauls "one of the best living Latin American writers." Yes, Latin American, for despite his name, Alan Pauls is Argentinian and writes in Spanish, translated here by Ellie Robins. The novel, which runs from the mid-1960s into the present century deals with a tumultuous period in Argentinian life, including the so-called "dirty wars" and catastrophic devaluation of the currency. It seemed to offer much promise, and besides it was short, under 200 pages. But those 200 pages are pretty dense, with long paragraphs, no dialogue, and no chapter breaks. The protagonist is a 15-year-old boy when the novel opens, living with his divorced mother's new family. Laid out in a coffin is the body of the first dead man he has ever seen, a friend of the family whom he has come to hate for his habit of pinching crostini at the dinner table and crunching them while he delivers monologues on one subject or another. He died apparently in the mysterious crash of a helicopter over the sea; no trace remains of the briefcase he was carrying stuffed with money to end a strike. In sharp contrast is the boy's father, who comes to take him for a month at the beach, and who always carries his money around with him in a fat wad. He, however, has a gambling habit, which was the proximate cause of the divorce. There is potential in this situation, certainly, but after 75 pages, I wondered why I was still clawing my way through the dense narrative in which almost nothing actually happens. That is, beyond the image of the rich fixer crunching crostini. ...more |
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Jun 25, 2016
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Jun 26, 2016
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May 12, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 8433924648
| 9788433924643
| 8433924648
| 3.89
| 13,874
| Nov 2000
| Nov 01, 2000
|
it was amazing
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The Critic at the Judas Tree I am afraid that, in describing this book, I may make it seem oblique, abstruse, or difficult. Yes, it is all of these—but The Critic at the Judas Tree I am afraid that, in describing this book, I may make it seem oblique, abstruse, or difficult. Yes, it is all of these—but it is also fascinating, horribly compelling, and virtually impossible to put down. Written in one unbroken paragraph, in short phrases often strung into sentences that can go on for pages at a time, it is the death-bed musings of one Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean Jesuit and, under a pseudonym, one of his country's leading literary critics. At its most obvious level, this is a book about literature. Pablo Neruda makes occasional appearances, and the book is laden with references to writers alive and dead, from a 13th-century troubadour to the Chilean author of a contemporary hit. Chilean readers would surely pick up on the many references almost as codes: the rumored homosexuality of this writer, the suicide of another, the fascist leanings of yet a third. This is a book that could easily be swelled to twice its size with footnotes, except that notes would break the sprung rhythms of Bolaño's prose; sometimes a hypnotic incantation, sometimes working on the reader like an itch, it exerts its own power, and the sense of layers and layers lying beneath the surface is a large part of that. What I have seen of Chris Andrews' translation (published as By Night in Chile ) truly catches Bolaño's style, though reading the book in Spanish did add an extra veil of darkness. The Spanish title is Nocturno de Chile, but this nocturne is no soothing music to go to sleep by, rather a waking nightmare in which names and memories rise up from the darkness to accuse and condemn. Urrutia is haunted by a "wizened youth" (joven envejecido) who forces him to face the past. Brilliant and cultured though he is, he realizes he has been the plaything of others. He is taken under the wing of the leading critic of the day, a wealthy homosexual known as Farewell. He is sent to Europe by two right-wing businessmen whose names, Oido and Odeim, are the Spanish words for "hate" and "fear" spelled backwards. His task is to study the preservation of crumbling churches, but what he finds is a series of priests who hunt the defecating doves with trained falcons, heedless of the symbolism of the Church killing the Holy Spirit in its zeal for self-preservation. Returning to Chile, Urrutia sees a huge flock of falcons crossing the ocean with him. Back home, indeed, the birds of prey are already in full power, with the murders and abuses as the Marxist government of Allende is overthrown by the ultra-right Pinochet. Some time later, Urrutia is recruited for a secret task, to give classes on Marxism to Pinochet and his generals, so they may better extirpate their enemies. It is chilling how the literary and political strands interweave. Two real-life poet-diplomats, one Chilean the other German, argue about art in occupied Paris while their mutual acquaintance, a Guatemalan painter, starves to death. Urrutia talks literary theory with Pinochet while his generals set their sights on a dangerous young activist writer, Marta Harnecker. The intellectuals of Santiago gather weekly in the salon of a mediocre author, María Canales, waiting out the all-night curfew, while her American husband does work for the state in the basement: "We never heard anyone yell; the electricity just cut out and then came back." [This is actually based on a real case of a CIA operative named Michael Townley]. Towards the end of the book, Urrutia dreams of standing beneath a huge tree in the center of a Renaissance square, a single falcon perched in its branches, barren of all leaves. He recognizes the tree of Judas, the symbol of his country, and his personal Calvary. Rightly so. ...more |
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Feb 2011
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Feb 03, 2011
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May 11, 2016
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Paperback
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| 081121706X
| 9780811217064
| 081121706X
| 3.66
| 462
| 2004
| Dec 17, 2007
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it was amazing
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The Child's Garden of Horrors Father and mother. Ball. Car. These might be the only words that were still intact when I learned them. […] A ball is a tThe Child's Garden of Horrors Father and mother. Ball. Car. These might be the only words that were still intact when I learned them. […] A ball is a thing that rolls and sometimes bounces. A father is a man who stays taller than you for a long time. Before my father goes to confession, he shaves and puts on a clean shirt. If a person wanted to play ball with someone's head, only the nose would get in the way.A small girl growing up in a middle-class family in an unnamed Latin American country, presumably Argentina, tries to assemble her impressions of childhood. Her father who works in a white palace downtown. Her mother with eyes the color of water, who puts her to sleep with the Brahms Lullaby. Her beloved wet nurse, resembling "a faerie with green slanting eyes." The gardener who goes on a long vacation and never returns. The assemblies at school, saluting the flag. The sound of tires going pop in a nearby street. Her friend Anna with tall stories about lovers shooting each other in suicide pacts. Angels falling from a sun-washed sky into a steel-gray sea. Words which mean one thing and then another, or nothing at all. Erpenbeck's novella is mesmerizing from beginning to end. It is only a child's imagination, after all, and the hints of violence are nightmares she will presumably get over. But she doesn't. Her world gradually contracts, as the people in her life are suddenly there no more, only to return to visit her without heads or hands but happy as ghosts. Grass grows between the paving stones where she played hopscotch; a statue of her father's friend is erected in an empty park. Suddenly, with a surprising lurch, we discover that she has become a whole lot older than her voice would indicate, old enough for her father to share secrets she had been too young to understand. Now looking through the book again from the beginning in order to write this review, I am hard-pressed to find a single paragraph that is not already tainted with foreknowledge of those secrets. But Erpenbeck is masterly in her pacing (until perhaps the end), and you go along willingly with her nameless little girl, simply unable to put the short book down. Susan Bernofsky is an assured translator, leaving me in complete confidence that her abrupt shifts from childish prattle to fractured syntax must exactly match the German (which I have not seen). She also writes an informative afterword, placing the book in a historical and geographical context far better than I could do myself. As she suggests, the setting appears to be that of the Argentinian "Dirty War" of 1976–83; what I have been able to read up since shows that even Erpenbeck's more extraordinary images may be based on fact. But Bernofsky also makes the point (quoting, for example, the numerous folk songs in the text) that this is also a very German book. By writing about a totalitarian regime on the other side of the world, Erpenbeck is also commenting on the two other such regimes that devastated her own country, East Germany, in the second and third quarters of the 20th century respectively. Having now read all three of her books [then] published in English,* I can see that Erpenbeck's search for oblique means of examining this national pathology has been an abiding concern. The Book of Words (2004) thus fall midway between The Old Child and Other Stories (1999) and Visitation (2008) in style as well as time, having something of the surreal symbolism of the one without yet attaining the lucid surface unity of the other. But she is a writer of the greatest power, and all three books (which just get better and better) are well worth reading. + + + + + + *I would now add The End of Days (2012), larger and more assured than any of its predecessors, equally innovative in technique, and further extending the theme of the innocent growing up in a politically-compromised world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 04, 2011
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Jan 05, 2011
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May 11, 2016
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Paperback
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| 087286622X
| 9780872866225
| 087286622X
| 3.62
| 94
| unknown
| Sep 09, 2014
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really liked it
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To live in my country Look up pictures of the Malecón in Havana, that long road along the sea wall, over which the waves break in storms, blowing spume To live in my country Look up pictures of the Malecón in Havana, that long road along the sea wall, over which the waves break in storms, blowing spume onto the decayed grandeur of the buildings behind. "I looked at Havana, bordered by miles of ocean, but for the first time I felt the water was besieging us. […] What we can do is look out over the waves, which exist as a promise of the rest of the world." Mylene Fernández-Pintado's short novel is full of people who leave Cuba, eager to explore that promise. There are those who leave, those who yearn to go, and some who return, with a kind of regret. Yet the first-person narrator, Marian, a thirty-something professor of freshman composition, is committed to stay. She believes that "being here is more important than the superlatives of over there. It doesn't seem crazy to want to live in my country." If you define a novel only in terms of plot, then this one would not rate especially high. But as an account of ordinary life in Cuba from the Revolution to about 2006, when the author began writing, it is incomparable. It does not paint pictures either of hardship or faded romantic dreams; it leaves both politics and sociology in the background. Yet it does not sugar-coat either; you feel that everything Marian tells us is both normal and true. As a university professor, albeit a low-profile one, she is perhaps better placed than most. But her voice (at least as translated by Dick Cluster) is wonderful: objective, wryly humorous, simultaneously principled and pragmatic, and surprisingly sexual. And the book is full of marvelous characters: her off-and-on-again lover who is about to marry a Panamanian heiress and move with her to London, his mother who calls round now and again to boast of her son, an outspoken and fiery female painter who nonetheless shows a remarkable strength of loyalty, and an older gay man who lives in a rooftop shack and makes money writing letters for lovesick girls. The story, such as it is, concerns Marian's affair with a young author fifteen years her junior. Her department head asks her to write a preface to this young man's book; she agrees, and eventually meets the author, only to find him intolerable. But first impressions are so often deceptive, and their next meeting ends very differently. Did I believe in their passion? Not entirely; it is not enough to hold the novel together by itself. For a while, I felt that the many other characters introduced, with their back-stories and histories—not to mention the various asides on different aspects of Cuban life and outlook—were distractions from the pursuit of what I took to be the main subject. But in the second part of the book especially, I came to realize that these were the main subject, and I would be unlikely to find a more authentic picture of life in Cuba anywhere else. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 10, 2015
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Mar 11, 2015
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May 11, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0804138788
| 9780804138789
| 0804138788
| 3.97
| 9,937
| Feb 11, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
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did not like it
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A Deceptive Cover Sometimes I don't understand publishers at all. They give a book a cartoon-like cover, with cheerful silhouettes of waving cactuses a A Deceptive Cover Sometimes I don't understand publishers at all. They give a book a cartoon-like cover, with cheerful silhouettes of waving cactuses and palms and a girl's head emerging from the petals of a rose… and expect the readers to think what?* The book certainly begins a bit that way, in the childish voice of a pubescent girl named Ladydi Garcia Martinez, talking about growing up in a small village in the Guerrero province of Mexico. It is a simplistic, short-breathed voice that annoyed me too much to draw me into the story, but I suppose it fits the cover. Though even at the beginning there are contrasts. This is a land where all the adult men have emigrated illegally to the U.S., and where girls are brought up as boys when young and made to look ugly when older, lest they get stolen by the narcos and trafficked into various kinds of crime. As indeed does happen, notably to one of Ladydi's friends, Paula, "the most beautiful girl in Mexico," who returns covered in cigarette burns and semi-catatonic. Ladydi's route is somewhat different, but it also puts her in the midst of drugs, sex, betrayal, and murder, a very far cry indeed from the folkloric book cover. I'm afraid Jennifer Clement lost me by this point. I can accept that the lives of many young women in some parts of Mexico are a tragedy waiting to happen, but the author did not overcome my reluctance to being dragged into the darkness with them. + + + + + + *Let me explain my remarks on the cover. A book jacket engages in a dialogue with the reader before purchase, and with the text of the book itself once reading has begun. Yes, I had read the opening paragraphs and knew a little of what the novel would be about. I was reluctant to order it. But then I looked at the cover and assumed that either there would be some constructive contrast between the naïveté of the style and the repulsiveness of the subject (there wasn't), or that the character would somehow keep her innocence throughout or be transformed in the end. Well, if Ladydi keeps any innocence, it is only in contrast to the degradation around her, and although Clement does seem to be aiming at some uplift at the end, it is tiny and temporary at best. So no dialogue between cover and text, except in the most crassly contrasting way, and any dialogue with the reader turns out to be highly misleading. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 04, 2015
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Apr 05, 2015
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May 09, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 061877341X
| 9780618773411
| 061877341X
| 3.41
| 239
| 2005
| Feb 05, 2007
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it was amazing
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Displaced Persons The book opens with a simple image of surprising potency: a piano recital in Connecticut in 1876 at which a ten-year-old girl plays s Displaced Persons The book opens with a simple image of surprising potency: a piano recital in Connecticut in 1876 at which a ten-year-old girl plays some pieces by Mendelssohn. The girl, known as Punnie, is the daughter of an Inuit couple (here called Esquimaux, in nineteenth-century fashion) who have been taken to England as curiosities, presented to Queen Victoria, and most recently brought back to the Arctic as members of a near-fatal expedition in which a group of nineteen starving people marooned on an ice-floe drifted for six and a half months before being rescued. The de facto leader of that group, Lt. George Tyson, has written a book about their ordeal and is popular as a lecturer. Punnie is thus a local celebrity, but the skills which the audience applauds are not those of her native culture. The theme of displacement sounds throughout Steven Heighton's magnificent book as a powerful undertow. Much of the novel is based on fact. In the central section, a 200-page description of the ordeal on the ice, Heighton quotes long excerpts from Tyson's actual book. But his main focus is on another character, a German immigrant named Roland Kruger, who served as second mate on the expedition. Once a minor celebrity also, Kruger becomes a pariah after the publication of Tyson's book, which portrays him as the villain of the piece, stealing from their precious stores, fomenting the men to near mutiny, and having inappropriate relations with Tukulito, Punnie's mother. But by skillfully contrasting excerpts from Tyson's journals with his published account, and setting both against his own storytelling, Heighton creates a shifting texture of overlapping narratives in which sympathies will change and change again. Though led by an American, the expedition is peopled by expatriates: four Germans, a German-Russian, an Englishman, a Swede, a Dane, a Negro cook, four adult Esquimaux, and several children. It is chilling to see how, once the normal lines of authority break down, the men revert to their former nationalism, dominated by the German contingent (though not including Kruger), and rehearsing the history of the next seventy years in miniature. But eventually conditions on the rapidly-shrinking ice-floe take precedence over everything, and the moral lines shift again in the light of several striking acts of individual heroism. Despite Heighton's excellent powers of description, this middle part can be tough going. But the most original part of the book is its extended final section, Afterlands, which traces the later story of Tyson, Tukulito, and especially Kruger, who moves as far away from the Arctic as possible, to live among the Sina Indians in the Western Sierra Madre of Mexico. Here, the theme of displacement takes on a different meaning as he (himself an emigrant from two countries in succession) encounters a kind of ethnic cleansing, as forces loyal to the central government or commercial interests attempt to exterminate the indigenous people from their lands. Kruger will find reserves of moral heroism that he did not know he had, and reach a kind of personal redemption. The ending of the book is as satisfying as it is sad. Though written earlier, Afterlands has many similarities to Richard Flanagan's Wanting, which also links a story about arctic exploration to another about an aboriginal girl (in this case Tasmanian) brought to London as a curiosity. I have long recognized the theme of displacement as a major concern in Australian literature—both the displacement of the emigrants making a start in a new land, and the tragedy of the native inhabitants whom they displaced—so it is not surprising to see it in Canadian writing as well. It gives the literature of both countries a profound moral sensibility. I am also in awe of the many Canadian novelists who are also poets*—Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, and Jane Urquhart also come to mind—and who not only write beautiful prose, but find in poetic structures new ways to organize a novel. This book by Steven Heighton is as allusive and thought-provoking as they come. + + + + + + *See my review of Heighton's recent poetry collection, The Waking Comes Late. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 29, 2010
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Jun 2010
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May 08, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0811221105
| 9780811221108
| 0811221105
| 3.76
| 752
| 2007
| Jun 26, 2014
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it was ok
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The Book of the Movie My title, of course, is facetious, for there is no movie made of Aira's book. But its entire 88 pages consist of a conversation r The Book of the Movie My title, of course, is facetious, for there is no movie made of Aira's book. But its entire 88 pages consist of a conversation remembered by the sleepless author between him and an intellectual friend about some unnamed movie that they had both watched in snatches on television the night before. It begins by Aira observing that the Hollywood actor playing an impoverished Ukrainian goatherd is seen wearing a Rolex watch. The conversation—or at least the conversation as replayed and reshaped by the insomniac author—soon passes over the obvious explanations, such as an omission on the part of the continuity person, and becomes philosophical and aesthetic: Hence, he continued, my error consisted of me having limited myself to a static concept of verisimilitude. He proposed a different, more dynamic one. According to this concept, and seen within the movement of creation, verisimilitude could be, and was, a generator of stories. […] If the goatherd in the story had a Rolex, and we had posited that the "error" had been committed, it had to be fixed, that is, made verismilar. The story's interest and novelty would emerge from such an operation. Only then would the story be rendered worthwhile. Without the "error," things narrowed considerably. Who would be interested in the coherent life of a goatherd? Or of a coherent tycoon with a big gold watch? The interest arose, a priori, from their coexistence. [trans. Katherine Silver]Somewhat to my surprise, by choosing a passage to illustrate the texture of the book and transcribing it, I begin finally to get some sense of what is being said. But it is by no means that easy when actually reading, and the philosophical juggling tricks put me into a state of dizziness pretty much throughout. Fortunately, from the one previous Aira novella that I have read, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, I was aware of his interest in questioning the roles of reality and fiction—and his practice of writing himself into holes just to see if he can get out of them. But that book was tied to the life of a real person in a real place; this, by contrast, is abstract and speculative, building postulate upon postulate in a tottering tower of absurdity. It all comes crashing down at the end in a wild parody of a Hollywood blockbuster (with a curious foreshadowing of the movie Argo, which did not come out until five years later). Here, and only here, could I make any sense of the Paris Review endorsement on the cover: "A wildly funny novel." But it was a long haul to get there. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 16, 2015
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May 17, 2015
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May 07, 2016
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my rating |
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Sep 06, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Sep 13, 2018
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Jun 22, 2018
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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May 15, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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| 3.46
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liked it
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Nov 22, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Jan 11, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Jan 12, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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| 3.62
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really liked it
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Feb 07, 2014
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Jul 17, 2016
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| 3.44
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it was amazing
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Feb 10, 2014
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Jul 17, 2016
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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May 30, 2013
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Jun 03, 2016
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| 3.52
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liked it
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Oct 14, 2014
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May 30, 2016
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| 3.44
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really liked it
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May 23, 2013
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May 27, 2016
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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Dec 23, 2014
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May 17, 2016
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| 3.81
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it was amazing
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Apr 26, 2011
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May 12, 2016
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| 3.51
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liked it
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Jun 26, 2016
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May 12, 2016
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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Feb 03, 2011
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May 11, 2016
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| 3.66
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it was amazing
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Jan 05, 2011
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May 11, 2016
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| 3.62
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really liked it
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Mar 11, 2015
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May 11, 2016
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| 3.97
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did not like it
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Apr 05, 2015
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May 09, 2016
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| 3.41
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it was amazing
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Jun 2010
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May 08, 2016
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| 3.76
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it was ok
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May 17, 2015
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May 07, 2016
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