*****
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris (translated by Margaret Jull Costa, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is an excellent, psychological novel, a book which looks at the weakness of memory and the dangers of reliance on a single person in your life. It's written in the form of a monologue told by a middle-aged man looking back to his childhood and, in particular, events surrounding his ne'er-do-well father and his enigmatic, saintly mother.
While the pair have long since parted, there was a strange attraction between the two, one which even the father's spell in prison failed to break, and this forms one of the central issues the narrator attempts to get to the bottom of. However, he's also fascinated by something which he will never be able to learn the whole truth about (his mother, the only one with full knowledge, is suffering from dementia and has no memory of earlier events). He believes that the key to the final breakdown of his parents' relationship lies in the time his mother spent in Paris, a time which could reveal several secrets - but it's possible that there are other, darker truths out there, just waiting to be brought into the light...
Paris is intense and powerful, and the combination of great writing and an intriguing secret makes for an excellent novel. It was the unanimous winner of the 1999 Premio Herralde de Novela (a Spanish prize for debut novels), beating Andrés Neuman's Bariloche into second place. For a first novel, it's a surprisingly complex and developed piece of writing. However, the flip side of that is that it should come with a warning - you'll need a lot of concentration to stick to the task at hand.
The novel centres on the figure of the mother, a portrait of the mother as a martyr to her family. She's a woman who's very good at keeping secrets, holding her true feelings deep within:
"Talking about herself would have meant allowing her "self" to surface, and that was something she simply could not allow. What she felt and how she really was had to be covered up, concealed beneath hundreds of protective veils - either learned or innate - that established a distance between her and the suffering or hopes that were watching and waiting inside her."The author develops his picture of the mother with a slow, steady build up of details. A controlled, measured woman who knows her man will disappoint her, she wants to believe in him, despite knowing full well that he will never change. Which rather begs the question - why does she stay with him for so long? And, more intriguingly, does she have a few more secrets of her own?
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2014)
As much as the novel is about the mother, though, there's also a lot to discover about the narrator, a man searching for truth among the rubble of half-remembered events. He's never really sure of the events he discusses, constantly talking around the facts, either because he can't remember them or because he never knew them in the first place (in several places he explains that he was never privy to the whole truth). In fact, the same is true for the poor reader as we are strung along a little, never really knowing what, or whom, to believe.
While calling him an unreliable narrator might be a touch extreme, it's true that caution is called for when trying to get to the bottom of the story. His mother's loss of memory fuels his obsession with the past:
"I can no longer separate what she told me from what I know now, from what she gradually confided to me in later, lonelier years, and from what I've since found out for myself, what I dared to think, or what I made up." (p.64)
Much of what he tells us is 'pieced together later', the product of his imagination, although he is the first to admit the problematic nature of his conclusions. The language used reflects this; it's incredibly tentative and halting, full of conditionals and modals. The text abounds with phrases such as 'must have been', 'may have said' and 'I will never know if...'. Still, that doesn't mean he isn't playing with us...Paris is also about subjectivity, and Giralt Torrente discusses at length the way in which we can confuse facts and feelings:
"Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events. What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences. We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once." (p.37)Which doesn't stop the writer, and narrator, from trying to pin down the essence of those distant events. We are drawn into this game too, tempted to judge the characters - the mother, the father, the narrator, his Aunt Delphina. The problem is that with only a few of the facts, we can never be completely sure that we're right.
The writing is excellent, with a style reminiscent of Saramago and Marías (there are definite shades of A Heart So White here). Paris consists for the most part of long, precise sentences, full of complex clauses, constantly folding back on, and contradicting, themselves. Of course, this is all aided by the choice of translator - Jull Costa, as always, does a wonderful job, meaning that the book never reads like a translation.
Paris is a very good book, and for those who like his style, there's more out there from Giralt Torrente in translation. His story collection The End of Love is already available, and Father and Son (which, as Tiempo de Vida, won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2011) will appear in English in September. So is he the next big thing in Spanish? Well, there's certainly a lot to like. Paris is a fascinating, complex novel - even the cover, while initially plain, reveals something about the plot. It's definitely not an easy read, but it's certainly a rewarding one :)
*****
Before I finish, there is one little issue I want to address here. This is my third Hispabooks work, and all three have had British translators (Rosalind Harvey, Jonathan Dunne and Margaret Jull Costa). While the translations definitely feel very British, for some reason, the books use American spelling conventions, plus the occasional, jarring Americanism. It's a trend I'd already picked up in the first two books, and reading Paris merely confirmed it.
These (rare) Americanisms particularly stand out in Jull Costa's excellent translation. Examples include 'jelly' instead of 'jam', 'wash up' instead of 'wash his face'/'have a wash', 'bills' instead of 'notes' and 'Mom' instead of 'Mum'. It's not a huge thing, but it seems an odd stylistic choice to me, almost as if the publishers are hedging their bets with the variety of English. It's likely that most people wouldn't notice, but I like to think that when it comes to translations, I'm not most people ;)
Any thoughts? I'd love to hear if anyone else has noticed this trend - and what you make of it...
