I've been lucky enough to review some wonderful books from Other Press this year, so I was happy to agree to try the book reviewed in today's post, especially as it's a fairly short work. Of course, life gets in the way of the best-laid plans (as do other books...), and it spent a few months on the shelves before I finally got around to it.
Which, in a way, is great timing - it's only actually being published today :)
*****
Antonio Skármeta's A Distant Father (translated by John Cullen) is a short novella set in Contulmo, a small town in Chile. It's the home of Jacques, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, whose return home from teaching college coincided with his French father's departure from the family home. Now, stuck in the dull town, alone with his mother in their small house, Jacques spends his days teaching whatever needs to be taught at the local school and his spare time translating poetry for a regional newspaper.
Desperate for a change in routine, he persuades his father's old friend Cristián to accompany him to the town of Angol, where in addition to buying a present for a student's birthday, he'll get the chance to let off steam at the local brothel. The trip turns out to be a memorable one, and not just for the reasons you'd imagine. While roaming the streets of Angol, he discovers something which will turn his small world upside down...
A Distant Father is a beautiful little book, a story you can read through in a single-sitting (I did it twice, a week apart), a work which evokes the melancholy of youth and small-town blues. In a town where everyone knows everyone else, there isn't much to do, and people tend to move away once they're old enough. With few jobs, and a train service which is threatened with closure, it's easy to agree with the comment that the world is not made for small towns.
Cristián is Jacques' link to his father, and his quiet friendship is one of the young man's few refuges from sadness. However, the silent miller has his own ways of coping:
"Cristián is an assiduous drinker of red wine, and his apron is eternally spattered with purplish stains. He always offers me a glass, which however I always decline. Drinking alcohol makes me sad."
p.18 (Other Press, 2014)
With alcohol only exacerbating his melancholy, Jacques needs other ways to escape from everyday life.
One of these escapes is language and literature. Thanks to his father, Jacques is able to speak French, and he supplements his income by translating simple poems for a regional newspaper. Hoping to fool people into thinking his trip to Angol is on business, he takes along his latest literary project:
"And so I've brought along a book by Raymond Quenau that the editor of the newspaper wants to publish in installments. Prose is easier than poetry, but I do get all caught up in the fates of the characters. Maybe that's because so little happens here. We're secondary figures, not protagonists." (pp.31/2)
Again, Jacques is struggling with life away from the bright lights, living an urban life vicariously. The book, by the way, is Zazie dans le métro, a novel about a provincial teen in the big city...
While it's a novella, A Distant Father works very much like a play. Its short chapters act as scenes, and the simple, direct prose leaves much to the imagination. There's a clever plot which is skilfully built up, with secrets involving birthday boy Augusto Gutierrez and his beautiful sisters Elena and Teresa. The clues are there if you know where to look, but I'd rather not say too much more - I don't want to spoil it for you...
In short, this is a great little book with a lot to uncover in its few pages, and while I'm reluctant to give the game away, I'll provide you with one last hint. The cover of the Other Press version has more to do with what happens than the title; the original title was Un padre de película, and the cinema entrance on the cover is a nice touch (I especially like the way the Other Press logo is used as door handles!). OK, that's more than enough from me - go and read it ;)
This is my third review for Spanish-Language Literature Month, but it's a big welcome to a new writer, and a new publisher. Ox and Pigeon are a fledgling online presence with a focus on Spanish-language writers, with three works available so far purely in digital form. After a couple of collections with stories by various writers, their third offering is their first by a single writer - and while it's fairly brief, it's a great way to kick things off :)
*****
Álvaro Bisama's Dead Stars (translated by Megan McDowell, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is a novella in eighty-four brief chapters, and a story within a story. The book begins with two unnamed narrators having coffee in the city, waiting for offices to open (to let them get on with the business of dissolving their marriage...). Their plans are altered, however, when the woman opens the newspaper and sees a photograph of a woman she once knew - a woman who has just been arrested.
Shocked by the picture, the woman then turns to her husband, the real first-person narrator, and begins to tell him all about Javiera, the woman she met during her university days. As the words pour out of her mouth, we learn all about the charismatic friend and her young lover, Donoso. However, Bisama's novella is a story that's just as much about the couple in the café - and the country they live in - as about the woman in the newspaper...
Javiera is, though, the stand-out character of the book, a woman with an impressive past:
"Javiera use to talk so loudly that sometimes you'd think she was shouting. The next day we heard half her life in five minutes, when she asked us to stay after class to choose a student representative. Of course, we immediately elected her. That day, she told us she'd been expelled in the eighties. She told us how the rector had called for her head and she was kicked out of school. She left the country. The rest of us had all been just kids back then. None of our life stories could compete with hers."
Chapter 8 (Ox and Pigeon, 2014)
In a time of caution and moderation, Javiera is a woman who makes no secret of her political leanings. Having suffered horribly under the previous regime, she's determined to make herself heard, the one person who refuses to hide in the shadows.
The crux of the story is her meeting with Donoso in class. The younger man becomes her lover, the start of a tempestuous affair that eventually goes sour. There's an underlying clash of cultures between the die-hard revolutionary and the more pragmatic middle-class, post-Pinochet kid, and the two eventually struggle to really understand each other. Perhaps it's a little too tempting to read a lot into these generational differences, though...
However, as mentioned above, while Javiera and Donoso dominate the story, we constantly return to our nameless, disillusioned couple. From the vantage point of their seats outside the café, they cast an eye back on a different time, the unexpected photograph in the paper reminding them of their own experiences (including depression and addictions). In many ways, the end of the marriage is a suitable metaphor for the crushing inertia felt in the country after the euphoria of a potential change of direction.
While the story is fascinating, Dead Stars stands out mostly for its style. It consists of a series of brief chapters, highly effective, several of them consisting of simple one-sentence gems:
"You remember Valparaíso back then? she said. I said: Yes, the whole city was in ruins." (Chapter 16)
In many ways, it's a recital, an outpouring of memories, and the story of Javiera is representative of a communal need to release the suffering. The story is written in short, plain sentences for the most part, communicating the apathy felt after the draining oppression.
With Chilean authors writing about the years of oppression, there's always an elephant in the room, and there's certainly a Bolaño influence, in themes if not in style. Of course, it would be hard for a Chilean writer not to mine that particular vein given the country's recent history. Dead Stars has a foreword by Alejandro Zambra, a Chilean writer, poet and literary critic, which touches on the era and looks at why the characters would feel and act the way they do. For most Anglophone readers, though, this is probably still not quite enough, and it might be a good idea to briefly look up the history of the era (Chile in the 1980s and 1990s).
In short, Dead Stars is a story of a melancholy time, seen through two relationships, where the hope of the past has gone, leaving ruins in its wake:
"The university was truly the museum of a revolution that never came, a resistance that had been slaughtered in the trenches." (Chapter 19)
Depressing? Grim? Yes - but an excellent little read all the same :)
*****
If you're looking for more from Bisama, Ox and Pigeon give you some tips on their website, including a short story in one of their previous collections. Issue 1 of The Portable Museum contains Bisama's 'Nazi Girl', along with stories by three other Spanish-language writers (including a certain Enrique Vila-Matas...). That's a book I'm sure I'll be checking out soon too ;)
After enjoying The Savage Detectives recently, I was keen to try more of Roberto Bolaño's work (preferably something a little shorter, to begin with). Of course, my wonderful library was able to come to my aid, presenting me with several choices. In the end though, one stood out - mainly because of its connection with Bolaño's longer novel...
*****
Distant Star (translated by Chris Andrews) is an early Bolaño novella, but one that immediately evokes tones of The Savage Detectives. The story begins in Chile in the early seventies, where our young narrator (Arturo B., whom many of you will recognise as Arturo Belano, the shadowy figure at the centre of The Savage Detectives) attends poetry workshops with his wonderfully-named friend, Bibiano O'Ryan. At one of these gatherings, they first encounter Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an enigmatic, handsome poet, who makes an impression on the few beautiful women in attendance.
However, Alberto is not what he seems. Turbulent times are ahead for Chile, and Alberto (or his alter-ego, Carlos Wieder) will be in the thick of them. A military coup ousts the government, and anyone considered a leftist dissident, including many of Belano's poet friends, is in big trouble. Years later, Belano and O'Ryan still think of Wieder and their lost friends, but they're not the only ones. That's right - it's another hunt for a lost poet...
Already, after reading just two works from Bolaño's back catalogue, it's clear that this is a writer whose books form a whole oeuvre, an interconnected series of writings which need to read as a whole, rather than individually. While The Savage Detectives looked at Belano's life in Mexico, and the events that unfolded as a consequence, Distant Star takes you back to his home country to show us the poet-wanderer's beginnings. When he talks, later in the book, about his time in Paris and Barcelona, it brings back flashes of scenes from The Savage Detectives, adding to the richness of the story.
While Belano narrates this story though, the main focus is on Carlos Wieder, a very nasty piece of work. By hanging out in the leftist poet scene, he discovers who the big names are, and when the coup comes, he decides to act (possibly without authority). He then disappears, only to reemerge as a poet with a difference - one who (as shown on the cover of the book) writes his poems, and manifesto, across the sky:
"This time it wrote only one word, in larger letters, over what must have been the center of the city: LEARN. Then, for a moment, it seemed to hesitate and lose altitude, as if it were about to plummet into the roof of a building, as if the pilot had switched off the motor and were giving us a practical demonstration, a first example from which to learn. But only for a moment, the time it took for night and wind to blur the letters of the last word. Then the plane vanished."
p.29 (New Directions, 2004)
Feted by the military and the common people alike, Wieder gets bolder and bolder, using his popularity to experiment with his flying and his art. One day, however, he overreaches, and people get to see his true face. He produces a small photographic exhibition, one which is too much even for the unscrupulous regime he works for:
"Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken - everyone noticed. She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn't find the word. Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone." (pp.86/7)
What was in the room? Something rather... unpleasant. Still, it'll take a lot to bring a man like this to justice...
Distant Star is a quick and easy read, another dazzling display of meta-fiction and reality-blurring quasi-biographical writing. Again, the Borgesian inheritance is palpable, with hosts of poets and publications - some real, some invented - littering the pages. To add another layer to the meta-fictional qualities, Distant Star is actually an expansion (and rewriting) of the final twenty pages of an earlier work, Nazi Literature in the Americas. In fact, the first page of Distant Star has Bolaño explaining how Belano (his alter-ego) was unsatisfied with the first, brief attempt, and insisted on dictating the real story to the author. Got that?
As interesting as it is to learn more about Belano though, the book is more about the events in his homeland, and the way in which monsters like Wieder were able to take advantage of political events to satisfy their lusts and desires. Early in the book, O'Ryan looks at Wieder's name, analysing the etymology and coming up with variants involving 'wieder' (again) and the related word 'wider' (against). One he doesn't mention is the one which is most apt, 'widerlich'. It's a word which can mean (amongst other things) obnoxious, repellent, disgusting and gross. While the flying poet may appear suave and noble, his soul is most definitely widerlich...
Distant Star is not a patch on The Savage Detectives, but that's not really the point. It's a great, quick read and a story which shades in more of Bolaño's fictional canvas, showing the elusive Belano in a new light. I'll certainly be going back for more - I suppose I should really check out Nazi Literature in the Americas and see how the story originally looked. I suspect that I'll find the signpost to the next choice there as well ;)
The latest in my series of library-sourced Spanish-language books is one by probably the biggest name in Latin-American literature at the moment, Roberto Bolaño (writing being one occupation where death is no obstacle to fame). Today's review is of a big book, one with big ambitions, which takes us to the US, Europe and Africa - but it all starts and ends in Mexico...
*****
The Savage Detectives (translated by Natasha Wimmer) is the book which made Bolaño's name in the English-speaking world, and with good reason. It's a 577-page roller-coaster of a novel, a bizarre, chopped-up account of the lives of two poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. From the story's beginning in Mexico City in late 1975, we roam around the world, following the poets on their travels in search of contentment - and running away from something else entirely.
The story is written in three unequal parts. In the first, Juan Gárcia Madero, a university drop-out, describes his first encounter with the two poets, the founders (or resurrectors) of the 'visceral realist' school of poetry. Juan plunges headlong into a world very different from the one he'd experienced up to then, but he has few regrets about leaving respectability behind:
"Also, without
intending to, I ended up thinking about my aunt and uncle, about my life
so far. My old life seemed pleasant and empty, and I knew it would
never be that way again. That made me deeply glad."
p.41 (Picador, 2007)
This section of the book is written in the form of Gárcia Madero's diary, and the sex- and poetry-filled entries lead up to the moment when the three poets speed off into 1976 (and the Mexican desert) with a prostitute called Lupe. They're hoping to escape from the wrath of Lupe's pimp, but soon the trip to save the damsel in distress will turn into another kind of quest - a hunt for a missing poet, the elusive Cesárea Tinajero...
Part Two takes up almost 400 pages, consisting of first person accounts from a vast cast of narrators. Together, the many voices tell us what Lima and Belano did between 1976 and 1996, describing the Quixotic travels of the two poets over four continents. We frequently return to one strand, however; a drunken night spent with a poet in January 1976, where Lima and Belano find out more about the mysterious Cesárea. The third part of the novel then returns us to García Madero's diary, where we find out exactly what happened in the desert. I'm certainly not going to spill the beans here, but rest assured, the events of the following twenty years all stem from what happened in Mexico's north in early 1976...
The Savage Detectives is a mindblowing novel, one which is virtually impossible to really summarise or analyse in one review post. In some regards, it's a highly enjoyable romp, but one which demands intense focus and concentration. With a vast array of characters, both real and made up (this is a book which could really do with a War and Peace-type character list at the front), it will take you until the very end to work out exactly what's going on. Even then, many questions remain unanswered.
What's it all about? You tell me... It's a story of the excesses of youth and the eccentricities of poets - when you talk about being mad, bad and dangerous to know, Lima and Belano fit the bill nicely. The two appear to be carrying a curse (Belano, in particular, seems to bring bad luck wherever he goes), and many of the narrators felt uneasy in his presence:
"...and then I remember too that I looked at Arturo Belano and that he didn't get up from his seat when the Ecuadorean came in, and not only did he not get up, he didn't even pay attention to us, didn't even look at us, would you believe, and I saw the hairy back of his neck and for a second I thought that what I was seeing wasn't a person, not a living, breathing human being with blood in his veins like you or me, but a scarecrow, a bundle of ragged clothes on a body of straw and plastic, something like that." (p.191)
They were right to. Many of the people the two poets encounter end up falling ill, losing their jobs or perishing in car crashes; it's not stretching things to see them as angels of death.
It's also a novel about Mexico and Latin America, and I'm certain that the book would mean even more to people who know the area and the eras described. The novel is full of hints of desperation, world weariness in countries which long for change. The Mexico City of The Savage Detectives is described as a vibrant, violent city - but also as a small town of 14 million people. I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere...
At times, Belaño makes you nostalgic about your lost youth, and you wish you were a seventeen-year-old wannabe poet, sleeping with waitresses and neurotic students. Part one, in particular, had Haruki Murakami undertones, with García Madero taking on the role of the naive, Haruki-esque protagonist wandering through the big city. Of course, the reality of this city is much closer to that envisaged by Ryu Murakami, with its seedy side and ever-present threat of violence. And while we're throwing in random literary references, why not Kerouac's On the Road too? I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see shades of Sal Paradise in García Madero, and Lima and Belano as a two-headed Dean Moriarty ;)
What helps Belaño sustain reader interest in such a long and complicated story is a great cast of characters. Through our initial introduction to Juan, we are allowed to move through the city and meet the writer's other creations: seductive sisters María and Angélica Font (and their mad dad Quim); the flamboyant, bisexual, gorgeous wanderer Luscious Skin; old poet Amadeo Salvatierra; Lupe and her pimp, Alberto (a man with impressive attributes); and, of course, the enigmatic Cesárea Tinajero. It's a lot to get your head around, and you might need to take a few notes now and then to help you get your bearings (I certainly did...).
Surprisingly though, the main men are the ones we know the least. They are always seen through the eyes of others, and this has the effect of turning them into mythical creatures, ghosts of the night. Instead of well-rounded, visible creations, Lima and Belano are the nothing at the centre of the structure, a gap where characters should be - one which the reader spends 577 pages attempting to fill.
Since finishing The Savage Detectives, it has been in my mind constantly. It's an amazing book, one which will have its readers and its critics (in the best possible sense) for a long time to come:
"Iñaki Echevarne , Bar Giardinetto, Calle Granada del penedés, Barcelona, July, 1994.
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey towards solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness, And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy." (p.456)
This short paragraph from near the end of the novel is an apt comment on the book, but also on Lima and Belano (who, apparently, is Bolaño's alter-ego...). The people around the two poets accompany them on their way, but soon or later they end up walking alone...
After enjoying this one so much, I have more Bolaño on the way from the library. Distant Star is an earlier work, one apparently narrated by Belano, and it sounds like a good one to continue my discovery of the Chilean writer's work (I think I'll leave 2666 for another time...). All in all, it's another great library discovery, and time to chalk up another success in my self-education efforts :)
