'Texas: The Great Theft' by Carmen Boullosa (Review)

A recent addition to the family of publishers translating fiction from foreign languages is Deep Vellum Publishing, a small press working out of Dallas.  The energy behind the venture is Will Evans, a man distinguished by his energy in setting up the project (and his moustache, which would go well with a Stetson).  Perhaps, then, it's apt that Deep Vellum's first offering is a book that looks at life in a multicultural society - and also provides a glimpse into the frontier past of the Lone Star State...

*****
Carmen Boullosa's Texas: The Great Theft (translated by Samantha Schnee, electronic review copy courtesy of the publisher) takes place in 1859, some time after Texas was annexed by the United States.  We're down on the border in the town of Bruneville (on the American side of the Rio Grande), and it's high noon in a dusty, sun-baked street.  Now that's an ominous sign if ever there was one...

... and we're not mistaken:

In the market square, in front of Café Ronsard, Sheriff Shears spits five words at Don Nepomuceno:
  "Shut up you dirty greaser."
(Deep Vellum Publishing, 2014)

It doesn't take a genius to work out that Nepomuceno, one of the most respected and powerful Mexicans in the region, isn't likely to take kindly to the insult.  It's also fairly clear to see that once the shooting starts, it's going to be hard to stop.  Life in Bruneville is about to become a whole lot more interesting - and, for many people, rather short.

Texas: The Great Theft is a novel that looks at the border region in a time when matters were still unsettled.  The Mexicans are still unhappy about the way their land was stolen, both by force and by legal tricks, while the Americans are in a constant state of unease, aware that they're living life on the edge.  The high tension evident in the region means any spark can ignite an explosion.

So, a story of Yanks against Mexicans?  It's not quite as simple as that - this is a rather diverse region:

"On the other side they also have people of all stripes - Indians, cowboys, bandits, Negros, Mexicans, gringos - as well as profitable mines and endless acres of land, but it's different.  The Río Bravo divides the world in two, perhaps even three or more.  No fool would say that the gringos are all on one side and the Mexicans on the other, with separate territories for the Indians, the Negros, and even for sonsofbitches.  None of these categories is absolute."

The cosmopolitan towns make for a political nightmare, forcing both the Americans and the Mexicans into shifting, temporary alliances with the various native tribes.  It's a case of everyone trying to stay one step ahead of everyone else.

From the start, the average reader assumes that this will be a story about gun fights; in fact, the novel takes a good while to get moving in terms of action.  Texas: The Great Theft is much more a description of the world the incidents take place in, and as the sheriff's words travel from mouth to mouth, through the town, across the river and out to the Indian settlements, Boullosa paints a picture of the time.

Of course, the 'incident' is the backbone upon which all of the description hangs, and the Mayor of the Mexican town of Matasánchez isn't the only one who sees the dangers ahead:

He curses up and down, left and right.
When he's vented this string of insults he asks loudly, "And now what are we supposed to do?  There's no doubt that Nepomuceno will retaliate, and how!  Where does this leave the rest of us?"

By the time we return to see what Nepomuceno actually does about the insult, dozens of pages have passed, and we are now acquainted with the majority of the cast who will play out the aftermath.

Eventually, the action does get underway, with Nepomuceno retreating across the Rio Grande/Río Bravo to plan his next move.  There's tension on both sides of the river, but that doesn't stop normal life completely - the card sharps keep playing, the drunks keep drinking, the whores keep whoring.  All the while, everyone knows that soon something big is going to happen...

Texas: The Great Theft is a fascinating story, one which is well told.  There isn't a great amount of descriptive, literary writing, but it's not that kind of book.  Boullosa's story is one that balances description with action, and does it well on the whole.  It doesn't have the magic of some writers, but it's fascinating enough to keep drawing the reader ever deeper into Nepomuceno's struggle.

Schnee's translation is excellent, bringing across the tone of the book, casual, light story-telling (with a dry, disinterested narratorial voice).  Events start off slowly, but they do eventually turn ugly, with atrocities from both all sides.  Interestingly, the tone stays fairly casual, even when the killing increases - this is Texas, after all...

I enjoyed Texas: The Great Theft immensely, but I can't help thinking that it's a daring move for a new publisher based in Texas.  This is a book which, despite the bitter actions and language of all sides, probably has the Americans coming off worst (I do wonder if this one might be a hard sell up in Dallas...).  However, it's well worth trying, and hopefully, Deep Vellum will gather enough support to continue with their plan to bring translated literature to Texas - and beyond :)

'Sidewalks' by Valeria Luiselli (Review)

It's the last day of August, and that means that we've reached the end of the official proceedings for Women In Translation Month (although you're free, of course, to carry on reading as many works of translated fiction by women as you like).  My reviewing month started off (a day early...) with my post on Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd, so with a liking for symmetry, I decided it would be nice to come full circle to finish the project off.  Let's all go for a cycle through the streets of Mexico City ;)

*****
Sidewalks (translated by Christina MacSweeney), a collection of short essays about life, death, language and pushbikes, was Luiselli's debut work in Spanish, but it appeared in English at the same time as her novel.  This was probably a wise move - it's unlikely that the general reading public would have had a lot of interest in a series of musings from an unknown female Mexican writer, a book that barely scrapes past a hundred pages...

...and that, of course, would have been a shame because Sidewalks is a lovely little find, a book which takes very little time to read, but is one you'd like to dip back into at a later date.  The structure of the essays is deceptively simple, with each chopped up into shorter sections, often a matter of a paragraph or two, and they often start off talking about one topic before flitting off on a tangent to look at another - and then circling back to where we began.

A good example is 'Alternative Routes', in which an early-evening bike ride, ostensibly in search of a Portuguese dictionary, turns into a discussion of the word saudade and its possible equivalents in other languages.  This turns into a lengthy digression on the idea of melancholy, including the origins of the word, and the way in which old notions have become new illnesses, treatable with pills:

"Bastard daughter of melancholy, the term nostalgia inherited the characteristics of black bile but never achieved its former divine status.  The magic humours of mother melancholy evaporated in the three dry syllables of her aseptic daughter: nos-tal-gia."
'Alternative Routes', p.44 (Granta Books, 2013)

A bit of melancholy, a touch of nostalgia - and then the ride is over, and we arrive back where we started, in search of the dictionary :)

This isn't the only piece which has Mexico City at its heart.  One of the most impressive sections is titled 'Relingos', which, as Luiselli explains, refers to the empty spaces left at the heart of a city by bad planning or good fortune.  As the writer thinks about these voids at the heart of her home town, she also compares the idea of relingos to the work of a writer.  What else is writing if not creating words and ideas in the vain attempt to fill a void...

A few of the pieces also touch on the experiences the writer has when moving around from country to country (as she has done all her life).  'Flying Home' starts with an air journey back to Mexico City, with thoughts of home interspersed with musings about the Mexican capital's (lack of) urban planning, stories of disappearing canals and old maps jostling gently with the frustration of the aeroplane inching slowly across the screen in front of her seat.

Then, in 'Return Ticket', we look in on the writer unpacking at a new flat, moving her personal library to its new home.  Even when thumbing through old books, though, Luiselli is still thinking about cities:

"Going back to a book is like returning to the cities we believe to be our own, but which, in reality, we've forgotten and been forgotten by.  In a city - in a book - we vainly revisit passages, looking for nostalgias that no longer belong to us.  Impossible to return to a place and find it as you left it - impossible to discover in a book exactly what you first read between its lines.  We find, at best, fragments of objects among the debris, in comprehensible marginal notes that we have to decipher to make our own again."
'Return Ticket', p.85

Once again, we return to the nostalgia that we saw mentioned earlier.  Having spent her childhood overseas (and her adult life shuttling between Mexico City and New York), perhaps Luiselli is looking for something that can never be found - or wasn't really there in the first place...

Sidewalks is a beautiful little book, a wonderful way to while away an hour or so, and it's one of those rare works where you're constantly stopping to jot down an observation or copy an interesting line.  The writing is witty and laconic, cleverly looping around on itself, and the foreword by Cees Nooteboom is rather apt as Luiselli has a similar style and eye for detail to the (much older) Dutch writer.

It is a very short book, though, even shorter than the 110 pages it officially runs to (there are several blank pages between the pieces), and with Faces in the Crowd also a fairly brief novel, those wanting to immerse themselves in Luiselli's writing don't really have a lot to choose from.  However, if you are interested in learning more about the writer, I do have a few suggestions...

Firstly, I recently came across this video interview (in Spanish, with English subtitles) in which Luiselli talks about her upbringing.  Also, for those whose Spanish is passable, the writer has a monthly column for the El País newspaper, a series of short observations on life in New York.  Finally, if your language skills are really good, her third book is already out - La Historia de mis Dientes is available in Spanish now (the rest of us will have to wait until the end of 2015...).

Off you go, then ;)

'Faces in the Crowd' by Valeria Luiselli (Review)

Some of you may be aware of Three Percent's World Cup of Literature, which ran parallel to the FIFA shindig earlier this month, and it came as no surprise that Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile was the eventual winner (the judging panel was stacked with Bolañistos...).  More surprising though was that the beaten finalist was Mexico, represented by a relatively unknown contemporary female writer.

What better way is there, then, to finish off Spanish-Language Literature Month in style while also ushering in the next big blogging event, Women in Translation Month, than giving this one a go?  None, that's what.  Off we go to Mexico City, or perhaps New York?  Bear with me - it's about to get a little confusing...

*****
Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd (translated by Christina MacSweeney, published by Granta Books) starts off with a writer sitting at home in Mexico, jotting down memories of her younger days in New York in the few minutes she can snatch from her domestic duties.  It seems to be an ordinary, albeit interesting, story of a woman frustrated to be tied down by daily life when an artistic spirit is aching to be released, and as it is, it's a great read.  However, this simple, alternating pattern of now and then soon develops into something more.

The catalyst for this is a chance discovery in a New York library which sets the younger narrator off on an obsessive hunt for traces of a dead Mexican poet.  As the interest in the elusive Gilberto Owen grows, he begins to have a voice of his own, and the voice of the present-day narrator also fractures, with extra strands added where events take a different turn.  By the end of the work, we're no longer sure exactly whose voice is controlling the novel any more...

Faces in the Crowd is a wonderful piece of writing, elegant, poignant and light when it needs to be:

"I worked as a reader and translator in a small publishing house dedicated to rescuing 'foreign gems'.  Nobody bought them, though, because in such an insular culture translation is treated with suspicion."
p.1 (Granta Books, 2012)

Very true, as we're all aware, but a good example of an odd bit of bite.  The book is actually many stories in one all jumbled up, intertwined but separate, and it's up to the reader to both separate them and work out how they interconnect.

The initial focus is the writer looking back at her youth, focusing on regrets and memories from the vantage point of her older self.  She talks about her New York friends - Moby, the literary forger, Dakota, the singer, Pajarote, the student -, but we're not sure how true it all is:

"All that has survived from that period are the echoes of certain conversations, a handful of recurrent ideas, poems I liked and read over and over until I had them off by heart.  Everything else is a later elaboration.  It's not possible for my memories of that life to have more substance.  They are scaffolding, structures, empty houses." (p.4)

The longer the novel goes on, the more we begin to doubt the stories we are told about the time in New York.  We're told that a novel is being written, and there's a sense that the writer's 'memories' are just as fictional as her fiction.

We definitely can't trust her (we're not even that sure who 'she' is), and it soon becomes clear that we don't even know whose story this really is.  While initially the woman relates events from the life of Gilberto Owen, a (real-life) Mexican poet who walked the streets of New York decades before the woman's time there, later the tables are turned, and Owen appears to be seeing the women himself.  He gradually takes over the book, his ghost seeping through the pages, parallel lives threatening to overlap...

If there's one idea that suffuses Faces in the Crowd, it's that of ghosts - the novel is full of them.  The most obvious one is the spirit supposedly living in the writer's house in Mexico (cleverly named 'Without'), but the characters themselves fulfil the role of ghost for each other.  The title comes from seeing faces on the subway, in windows of passing trains, and everything has echoes of the past, resting places for ghosts - even if that's not such a good thing:

"There's nothing so ill-advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate things.  If you think the condition of a plant in a pot is a reflection of the condition of your soul, or worse, that of a loved one, you'll be condemned to disillusion or perpetual paranoia." (p.13)

There are plenty of examples of this in the book - books themselves play a major role here...

Faces in the Crowd is an excellent piece of writing and a well-mapped out novel.  I wasn't quite sure initially when the book took a turn towards Gilberto and away from the female narrator, but the complexity of the structure definitely added to the book, and I was convinced by the end of the story.  There's beautiful, terse writing throughout, and I have to admit that I spent a lot of my first half-hour's reading alternating between perusing pages, then noting down quotations ;)

In terms of influences and similarities, Luiselli's book owes debts to several literary ghosts.  While the first third has several echoes of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, there's also more than a hint of a more imaginative Knausgaard (albeit it in far fewer words!).  However, a book that also came to mind was Teju Cole's Open City, especially in the way that Owen and the narrator unwittingly follow the same paths, leaving their own faint traces on the streets of New York.

Luiselli is a talent that doesn't need to hide behind comparisons, though; I loved this one, and I already have Sidewalks on hold at the library.  While I'd heard of it before, I'm not aware of it having been up for any prizes, which is fairly surprising as this is a very good read.  I hereby prounounce Faces in the Crowd as the Costa Rica of The World Cup of Literature, the one story most neutrals will be taking out of it.  Hopefully, more people will now be aware of how good it is :)

*****
Christina MacSweeney's translation was a good one, a major part of the book's success, but I just picked up on one thing which may (or may not) have been an error in translation.  It has to do with a film the family were watching, 'Raining Hamburgers' - which is a literal translation of Lluvia de hamburguesas, the Latin-American title of a certain animated film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs... I wonder if that was intentional?  If anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know ;)

'Calling All Heroes' by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Review)

Last year, when I was lucky enough to review two books by Japanese writer Tomoyuki Hoshino, the publishers (PM Press) were kind enough to slip in one more piece of translated fiction, a slim novella which has been... shall we say 'resting' on my shelves for a good while?  Anyway, it was high time to give it a go - and it turned out to be a great little read :)

*****
Calling All Heroes - A Manifesto for Taking Power (translated by Gregory Nipper) is a short work by Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II in which he works through his frustration at the failure of the 1968 student protests.  Although short, it's an action-packed read, a book that looks at what might have been and then tries to make it so...

We start off in January 1970 with our central character Nestor, a journalist recovering in hospital after being attacked by a knife-wielding murderer.  With time to think, he decides that the moment has come to make the government and the police pay for the atrocities committed during the Tlatelolco crackdown (or massacre...), and to this end he dictates a series of letters, summoning an army of legendary freedom fighters to Mexico City to carry out his quixotic mission.  The actions of a deluded invalid?  Perhaps...  But what if all these heroes actually came?

Calling All Heroes is a chaotic, adrenaline-charged story, initially confusing, but eventually simply exhilarating.  The book consists of thirty-one short parts, alternating between two strands.  In the first, an unknown narrator addresses Nestor in the second person, describing the events as the bitter journalist plots his attack on the unsuspecting authorities; in the second, letters to Nestor (letters he has requested) describe his character and history, also hinting at what happened in the crazy few days at the end of January 1970.

Taibo's book is effective as an historical novel, looking at the disappointment felt by students after the government crackdowns of 1968, and several of the letters portray the feelings of helplessness and loss that followed the defeat.  What is described is a city attempting to recover from a traumatic battle:

"In the city the tanks had been replaced by solitude, with similar effects.  The wounds would seem not to have closed.  We would belong to a generation of idiot princes, hemophiliacs, whose skin the blood flowed down at the slightest cut."
p.15 (PM Press, 2010)

In fact, we later see examples of this in the story of a worker who one day decides, in the middle of the street, to set fire to himself in the hope of raising awareness of the plight of the workers...

...which may all sound like grim reading.  However, Calling All Heroes is anything but, sweeping the reader along with a story straight out of an adventure book.  You see, the band of mercenaries Nestor is summoning from around the world is not an anonymous band of guns for hire - there are some very familar names amongst these soldiers of fortune:

"The next sign that the conspiracy was thriving came on Friday, when the doctor, after pointing out that with a period of pleasant convalescence you would be in the clear, took from the pocket of his hospital coat a telegram from Dick Turpin, which gave the number of the Braniff International flight on which he would arrive in Mexico." (p.52)

Yep, that's right - Mr. Stand-and-Deliver himself.

The legendary English highwayman is just the first of many legendary figures to enter the fray, and many of them are not even real.  Still with Sherlock Holmes, Winnetou and the Light Brigade (who do a fair bit of charging) on your side, things are bound to be very interesting - and even when things do get hairy, there's always another legend of classic literature (or four) to save the day ;)

It all makes for a wonderfully-entertaining and (more importantly) well-written story, a personal catharsis disguised as a Boys-Own yarn.  The different strands work well, and a whole variety of voices come through in the letters Nestor receives from his friends.  It won't take you very long to finish Taibo's book (an hour if you're a quick reader), but it'll stay with you a lot longer than that - revolution and comic-book carnage: what's not to like?

*****
Before I leave you, I just thought I'd draw your attention to some similarities with another famous Latin-American writer, a certain Roberto Bolaño.  Last year, I read a couple of his works, including The Savage Detectives, and after finishing Calling All Heroes I couldn't help but compare the two.  The setting is the same, of course, and the letters to Nestor act in the same way as the interviews people give describing the enigmatic Lima and Belano.  The two books also contain their fair share of artists - and wry humour:

"...and René Cabrera, who wrote brilliant poems and then used the paper to fill the holes in his shoes so the rain wouldn't get his socks too wet." (p.25)

Given then that this appeared in English in 2010, a clear example of strong influences and jumping on Bolaño's coat-tails, no?  Not exactly...  You see, Taibo actually got there first - in 1982.  In the words of the writer:

"Under these deplorable conditions, this shortest of novels was created.  brewed in the midst of a premature divorce, following a premature marriage, of a political crisis, of an era of hunger and underemployment, the novel became a pretext, a vendetta, dealing with Power by other means.
 Then it was put away in a drawer and rewritten three times during the following twelve years." (Appendix Two, p.118)

I'm not an expert on Latin-American literature by any means, but it seems possible that Bolaño may have had a quick read of this one at some point ;)

*****
To finish today, a bit of music (something Stu, of Winstonsdad's Blog likes to do from time to time).  I was wondering what could possibly suit a crazy story like this, when it appeared of its own accord, unbidden - and it became clear that there was only one choice...

Childhood Corrupted

As a father myself, I'm a big believer in childhood as an age of innocence, a time to explore and discover the world from beneath the shade of a sheltering environment.  Sadly, this is not always the case, and literature frequently throws up examples of less-than-perfect childhoods, ones which make you hope you're not doing the same to your kids.  So, while you ponder today's offerings, I'm off to play with my daughters :)

***** 
And Other Stories is another of my favourite little indie publishers, purveyors of fine translated fiction, and one of their most popular books so far is Juan Pablo Villalobos' Down the Rabbit Hole, translated by Rosalind Harvey.  This very slim volume (which I received as an electronic review copy!) is a three-part story told through the eyes of Tochtli, a young Mexican boy.  Our friend has the usual issues faced by kids - spending as much time on computer games as he can, avoiding his lessons wherever possible, and trying to convince his dad to get him a pygmy hippopotamus.

Wait a minute...

Unlike most kids, Tochtli's dad happens to be a Mexican drug dealer, which (as well as making the hippo thing a real possibility) means that the young boy is witness to a lot more things than most kids will ever have to see.  The further we slip down Villalobos' titular rabbit hole (an apt expression seeing as Tochtli actually means 'rabbit'), the more we find out about Tochtli and his father - and the more disturbing it becomes.  Is it possible to grow up normally in such an unusual environment?

Down the Rabbit Hole is wonderfully narrated by the macho little boy, a character who uses a style of language which is one part arrogance to three parts naivety.  His first words - "Some people say I'm precocious" - tell us that he is living in a cocoon, kept away from the real world.  In some ways, his statement is true, as his casual acceptance of certain unpalatable experiences shows.  For a young boy, he is certainly at ease around guns and corpses...

In other ways though, he is just a boy.  His vocabulary is limited, and he constantly repeats the same four or five adjectives to describe anything from tasty food to third-world hotels.  He is also oblivious to certain activities happening under his nose, such as the reason for the frequent visits of attractive women - and their long disappearances into his father's room.  While he is aware of certain aspects of life, he doesn't really understand them, and the fortress-like environment he is raised in by his paranoid father is not the best one for setting him straight on them.

As a portrait of what happens when a horribly-twisted nurture triumphs over nature, Down the Rabbit Hole is a disturbing masterpiece.  A translation which doesn't read like one, it's compelling, page-turning reading, a book which will only take an hour or so to read, but which will stay with you for a good while longer.  Just don't talk to me about the hippos...


*****

Leaving Mexico, we turn our attention to Japan, a tranquil country where children live happy, carefree lives and would never think about death and...  oh.

Yes kids, it's another one about psychotic minors, this time set in the land of the rising sun.  Yukio Mishima's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea (translated by John Nathan) is a tense novel set in the Japanese port town of Yokohama, and it is centred upon an unlikely trio of protagonists: Noboru, a thirteen-year-old boy; Fusako, his widowed, but still young and beautiful, mother; and Ryuji, a sailor Fusako meets and falls for.

In the first part of the story, we see the unfolding of the relationship between Ryuji and Fusako, one which Noboru views with mixed emotions.  While unwilling to share his mother, he is fascinated by the sea and has a kind of grudging respect for the weather-worn sailor.  However, when he discovers that Ryuji is just as tedious as he and his friends consider all fathers to be, his opinion changes, and he decides that Ryuji will not do.  It's what happens next which is rather harrowing...

The key issue in The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea is the importance of a strong father figure, and the damage that can be done to a young boy's character when there is no older man around to keep him on the straight and narrow.  It's probably not a viewpoint shared by all today, but Mishima certainly believes that the absence of a father, either through death or neglect, can lead to behavioural problems.  Or, in Noboru's case, an unhealthy interest in his mother's sex life.

This is actually shown more clinically in the character of The Chief, the leader of the gang of boys Noboru hangs out with.  Intellectually advanced for his age, he has an almost pathological hatred towards adults (especially fathers), despising their weakness and their willingness to conform.  He has a strong influence on the impressionable Noboru, and Ryuji's decision to attempt to become a father figure for his lover's son sets tragic events in motion, leading to a sickening denouement...

Typically for Mishima, beautiful writing is matched with horrible, horrible characters, making this novel another of those book which are a joy to read but, at the same time, slightly disturbing.  That's bad enough, but taken together, Down the Rabbit Hole and The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea really do make you think about your role as a parent.  The two books remind us that children are very delicate creatures.  If they are to grow up happy and well adjusted, it's up to the parents to make sure they have the right environment to achieve this.

And if this means no peep-holes into their mother's bedroom and no pygmy hippopotamus for their birthday, that's just the way it will have to be...