Some of you will have seen the recent posts on my visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and as I said in the first of those posts, the main reason I went was to catch up with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego to hear what he had to say about his first novel in English. Casariego turned out to be a nice, happy sort of man, which was good to see - especially as his creation is anything but...
*****
Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy (translated by Thomas Bunstead, review copy courtesy of Hispabooks) is written in the form of the diary in which a thirty-two-year-old Spanish lawyer decides that the time has come for him to set depression and pessimism to one side:
"Enough is enough. I don't want to be a pessimist, or a victim, any more. I reject the status of black hole. This notebook, which I address and dedicate to Vidor Mallick, inveterate gambler and amateur loan shark, is proof of my will to optimism, that is, my great desire to become a man with a sunny disposition, happy, normal, one of those guys who springs out of bed every morning and has answers for pretty much every single one of life's many questions."
p.11 (Hispabooks, 2014)
A noble ambition indeed, but what can Antón do to achieve this goal? And, more importantly, why does he feel the need for this radical step?
In pursuit of optimism and happiness, Antón decides to begin the search in books, and his family is happy to help out: elder brother Zoltan provides an armful of self-help tomes while younger sister Bela points him in the direction of the classic philosophers. However, with family disputes and a major contract to work on, finding enlightenment isn't going to be easy. And then, of course, there's the small matter of a woman who claims to be the mother of his unborn child...
Right from the start, Antón Mallick... was a book that just clicked with me, and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent in the world of the confused Spaniard. What Casariego offers the reader is a picture of a man who understands that he isn't happy and has decided to do something about it. First, though, he has to understand what exactly this elusive ideal he's chasing is, and he quickly realises that happiness is far easier to talk about than to identify:
"...happiness can be everywhere, except right here, the one place in which you and I find ourselves. It is therefore, an invention, an imaginary refuge, a mirage in the middle of the desert, and it vanishes the moment you get close." (p.190)
As Antón progresses in his search for happiness, both in his reading and (mis)adventures outside his apartment, the reader feels sympathy for his hopeless cause.
As mentioned above, Antón isn't completely alone in his quest as his brother and sister are keen to offer bibliographic support; however, Zoltan and Bela aren't exactly models of happiness themselves. The brother is a psychologist, one whose professional exterior hides a slightly disturbing character, while Antón's intelligent, charming sister is trapped in a stifling relationship with a lazy American 'writer'. In fact, the only happy member of the family seems to be the Vidor Mallick Antón mentions in his diary entry. It's a shame, then, that Vidor, supposed author of the book Confessions of a Once-Hungarian Spaniard, has been dead for well over a century...
Part of the success of the book is the way in which Casariego constructs his novel, using Antón's diary entries to both inform and deceive the reader. It's a sort of therapy, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trusting Señor Mallick and taking his assertions at face value. However, in reality (as Casariego mentioned during his talk at the festival), the diary format allows Antón (and the writer) to be a little economical with the truth. The careful reader will see contradictions and sense certain omissions, some (but not all) of which will make sense later in the novel.
The diary format in itself could get a little old very quickly, but the writer mixes things up by including several other text types. In addition to Antón's thoughts on the books he's reading (sometimes considered, occasionally flippant and insulting), we see copies of e-mails, transcriptions of conversations on Skype and an unusual take on the life story of a Soviet satellites expert. It does make sense, I promise. Sort of...
Tony Messenger, over at the Messengers Booker blog, recently posted on this book and was a lot less enamoured with it, not even managing to get half-way through the novel. However, while I can see why he didn't like it (it was around this point in the story that I had a few doubts myself), I think a lot of the flaws he pointed out were actually deliberate. Antón is meant to be an unreliable narrator, and many of the more absurd plot developments are mere distractions, taking both the narrator and reader further away from the true centre of the book, the reason why Antón needs to go on this journey of discovery in the first place. For me, at least, it does all eventually come together.
Which is not to say that all the threads are neatly gathered up. It's true that the mystery of the woman-with-child is solved, and that the family manages to come together (and we do eventually find out why Antón Mallick isn't happy), but I wouldn't say that the end of the novel brings the closure I'd expected. Which is why my question to Casariego at the festival session was about whether he'd ever considered writing a sequel (he hadn't, but I'll take the credit if he changes his mind...). After all, the search for happiness is a rather long-term project, and I doubt that Antón will be reaching his goal any time soon...
Friday the 22nd of August was a beautiful late-winter day in Melbourne, and it also happened to be the day for my annual visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival. I only go in for one day, but I do my best to make the most of it, and this year I managed to fit four events into about five-and-a-half hours. And what, exactly, did I see? Well, stick around, and you'll find out...
*****
One of the main reasons I ended up making the trip in to the big city was the (free) event with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego, whose novel Antón Mallick Wants to be Happy I read a few days before heading to the festival. This was actually a late addition to the programme after the cancellation of another event, and many of the people who attended were actually unaware of this - the printed programme still had the old details...
The event was MCed by local academic and translator Lilit Thwaites, and considering that the majority of the people in the small ACMI Cube room had heard of neither the book nor the writer, it all went fairly smoothly. Both Thwaites and Casariego read short extracts from the novel, and they then discussed the book, particularly in relation to similarities between the writer and the eponymous hero of the novel.
The book (which I will be reviewing in early September) is the diary of a man seeking happiness, and one way in which he does so is through an analysis of self-help books and classics. Casariego said that the reading was perhaps the best part of the writing process; however, he's not a fan of self-help books himself, believing that they're rather aggressive and help to create egotistical monsters. As for the other books he read in the search for Antón's happiness, he actually preferred some of the more pessimistic ones...
Antón Mallick... is a funny book, something which Casariego says isn't true for all of his works. One of his biggest challenges was to temper the use of humour in the book, lest it overpower and overshadow the story (certainly, the early sections have a lot of scenes where getting a laugh is the main focus). The style of the novel, written in the form of a diary, is also important as it allowed the writer to play with the reader. For one thing, he was able to be a little less politically correct than is normally the case as Mallick is writing for himself, with no need for self-censorship. However, it also allows him to be a little tricky as there's no guarantee that Antón is telling even himself the whole truth...
Never one to hold back, I asked Casariego a question at the end of the session. You see, with so many loose ties at the end of the novel, I was wondering if the writer had ever considered a sequel to Antón's quest for happiness. The answer was a fairly firm 'no', but now that the idea had come up... ;) If Antón Mallick does return for a second outing, then, you know who to thank/blame :)
*****
After a thirty-minute break spent chatting to Lilit, getting my book signed by the author and cramming a sandwich down as fast as possible, it was back to the cube for the second of the day's events. This was one of the four City-to-City events designed to give insular Australians more information about some of our Asian neighbours, and the first in the series was on Shanghai. Author Nic Low was the moderator, and the guests were famed Sino-Australian writer Ouyang Yu (Sino-Australian in that he's lived and worked here for a good while) and two fellow Chinese academics, Gong Jing and Hongtu Wang.
In all honesty, this was by far the weakest of the four sessions I attended. As an ESL teacher, I've spent many an hour listening to Chinese students reading a prepared script while other students struggle to understand what's being said, and this hour was like a flashback to presentation moderations of times past. Jing, in particular, merely read a text talking about her life in Shanghai and then barely offered a word in English for the rest of the hour. When you add to that the fact that the session actually had very little to do with literature, you can imagine how disappointed (and bored) I was for the most part...
Luckily, the third member of the panel was a far better, and more charismatic, speaker, and Yu entertained and informed the small audience with his Shanghai experiences. From his anecdote about his introduction to Australian literature (when getting his first academic position, all he knew about it was that in Patrick White's fiction "people farted a lot"), to the poems he wrote on his return to Shanghai, about a cheap hotel room and a student who simply could not master a point of English grammar ("She wrote 'Aftering I finished the exam, I felting bad.' - I felt bad too."), Yu was a relaxed, witty speaker - I really must get around to reading one of his books...
Still, it wasn't quite enough to make this a session I would recommend to others, and I walked out hoping that the rest of the day would be better. The good news? It definitely was - but you'll have to wait until next time to find out why ;)
