'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 ;)

'Dead Stars' by Álvaro Bisama (Review)

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 ;)

'Paris' by Marcos Giralt Torrente (Review)

Time for my second contribution to Spanish-Language Literature Month, and today's offering is from a publisher who deserve to be highlighted this month.  Hispabooks is a fairly recent addition to the ranks of publishers who focus on literature in translation, with their speciality being... well, Spanish literature :)  I've already reviewed a couple of their titles, and this book is one which comes very highly recommended indeed - an intense story made (mostly) in Madrid...

*****
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."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2014)

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?

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...

'Paradises' by Iosi Havilio (Review)

Over the last couple of years, I've discovered many great books and writers, mainly in translation, but it's always nice to return to old favourites.  However, in some cases, these discoveries have quickly become old favourites, with sequels appearing within a decent space of time.  Good examples of this are Jon Kalman Stefansson with his Icelandic sagas, Karl Ove Knausgaard and his very public midlife crisis and (of course) Elena Ferrante's bitter, twisted and compelling tales of two women in Naples :)

Let's see if today's post, my first for this year's Spanish Lit Month, can add another name to that worthy list...

*****
Iosi Havilio's Open Door was a novel I enjoyed a few years back, and Paradises (translated by Beth Fowler, e-copy courtesy of And Other Stories) is a follow-up book, featuring the same protagonist.  It picks up several years after the events of the first book, with our nameless heroine still living on the old farm in the country.  However, right from the start, Paradises shows us that things will be a little different this time around - her partner, Jaime, has just been killed in a hit-and-run incident, and our friend decides that it's time to head back to the big bad city.

However, things are a little different this time around.  First, she lands a job at a zoo, mainly thanks to Iris, a Romanian migrant who lives at the same lodging house.  Then, Eloisa, her oversexed friend from the country, manages to track her down.  Oh, there's one other thing - did I forget to mention her four-year-old son, Simon?

While the story and setting are different from those of Open Door, the style is very much the same.  It's just as detached, just as world weary - and just as lacking in sentiment:

"In this new Jaime, the final Jaime, who I'll only see this once, in addition to his stillness, the smell of alcohol or formaldehyde, I'm not sure, I suddenly discover an oddity that bears little relation to death.  Instead of his lips being sealed, as was his habit, somewhere between resignation and embarrassment, I catch sight of a small opening at the right-hand corner of his mouth, a sarcastic, sly smile, as if death had caught Jaime mocking something."
(And Other Stories, 2013)

We don't waste too much time grieving poor Jaime.  Instead, his departure merely marks the start of a new stage in his widow's life.

She moves on, then, just as she arrived, without leaving a trace, and with all contacts left behind.  Simon is one addition to her baggage, but he too is quiet and unassuming, not a boy to overcomplicate her life.  However, for the first time in years, she has to find a job, entering the world of work once more.  From the country to the city, you might think it's back to reality - the truth is that none of it seems real...

In fact, Paradises is pervaded by a dreamlike, grotesque quality at times, and when she moves into an old tower block, it's almost like a journey into a twisted fairy tale.  Not that you'd find much like this in a kids' book:

"But the thing that keeps me from sleep more than anything, adding to the insomnia of recent days, is not the noise from the street or the music or conversations, but those strange murmurs produced in the bowels of the building and which at times I think might be in my head.  Metallic sounds, wind-like, flushes, hums, sputters, like the secretions of a decomposing organism."

What awaits her there does remind the reader of certain of Grimm's Tales, though.  There's Tosca, the gigantic, cancer-ridden, morphine-addict matriarch of the building, watching over the goings on with the help of her mentally handicapped son.  Together, they sit at the top of a society of drug dealers, drag queens and other assorted human jettsam in a squat with unreliable power and water...

It's inevitable that Eloisa, the most memorable character from the first novel, crashes back into the life of the main character.  The younger woman is as mad as ever, but slightly different in this new environment, and this actually sums Paradises up nicely - it's very similar to Open Door, yet very different at the same time (if that makes sense...).  While the older woman is happy to see Eloisa again, she's never quite sure whether to go along with her stunts or cut her off.  There's some excellent interplay here, and for readers who remember the first book, the sexual tension between the two is skilfully drawn out.

Havilio's style is simple, but hypnotic.  While the plot is quite ordinary, the author's handling of it makes it seem as if it's happening a world away.  It can all seem hidden behind a veil of fog - you see, the main character just isn't quite on our wavelength:

"Simon has taken advantage of those seconds of distraction to escape from my sight.  He's hiding or being hidden by the landscape.  One of the two is using the other.  I'm not going to shout, I wouldn't know how.  I wait, to see if he appears, surely he'll appear, but he doesn't appear.  I stand up and walk without alarm, accommodating my flip-flops between the holes and the stones."

She seems incapable of strong emotions, no matter what life throws at her, and her inability to really get upset adds to the dreamlike feel of the novel.

While I'm not quite sure Havilio is up with the writers I mentioned at the start of the post, Paradises is very enjoyable and well written with a good translation (one with a noticeably British-English feel).  In truth, it's not really about the story, it's all about the 'vibe' - it's a mellow book, with occasional (deliberate) jarring tones of swearing and drugs, just enough to keep the reader on their toes.  Enough of my thoughts though - I'll leave the last words to our anonymous friend, words which sum up her style perfectly:

"I offer no opinion, nor do I contradict her.  I prefer to let things follow their natural course, then I'll see."

And that pretty much sums her (and the book) up ;)

The City of the Dead

It's week four of Spanish Lit Month, and that means that I have the fourth of my reviews to delight you with today - and it's another intriguing one.  When I requested a review copy of Lorenzo Mediano's The Frost on his Shoulders from Europa Editions, I was lucky enough to be offered another Spanish-language book to review, Santiago Gamboa's Necropolis (translated by Howard Curtis) - an offer I couldn't refuse ;)

*****
Necropolis begins with a famous writer living in Rome, who is recovering from a lengthy illness.  One day, he unexpectedly receives an invitation to speak at a conference in Jerusalem, from an organisation he has never heard of, on a topic on which he is far from being an expert.  His interest is further piqued by the generous remuneration offered and the fascinating variety of invitees, including an ex-con, a porn star and a stamp collector (now why don't I get invited to conferences like that?), and before long he is on a plane making its way to Israel.

When he arrives, Jerusalem is a city under siege, and the conference is held against a constant backdrop of gunfire and explosions.  In the middle of the chaos, the delegates continue with their talks on the theme of words and biographies, with one of the most successful being that told by José Maturana, a former convict and murderer who turned to religion after an encounter with a charismatic preacher.  However, just hours after his contribution to the conference, he is found dead in his hotel room - suicide?  Possibly...

The previous two paragraphs give you a rough idea of the background of Necropolis, but they don't tell you just how extraordinary the book actually is.  While the story starts plainly enough in the words of the writer (presumably a variation on Gamboa himself), it then becomes intermingled with chapters detailing Maturana's life story.  Once we get into the second section, one third of the book is devoted to three more stories told by the delegates, none of which appear to move the story on at all.  It's only when we get to the final section that some of the relevance of these tales become apparent - but only some.

The conference is all about life stories, and a major theme in Necropolis is the twisting and intermingling of stories and life.  This idea is foregrounded right from the start when the writer is choosing some books to take with him to the conference:

"...I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact that they had been turned into words, into filled pages destined for people almost as desperate as themselves..." p.29 (Europa Editions, 2012)

His musings about the blurred line between real life and what gets written down about it set the scene for the way we need to approach the many stories we experience later in Jerusalem...

The one story that we have to analyse in detail is that of the unfortunate Maturana.  When we first hear it, spread over three chapters sandwiching the writer's experiences at the conference, it sounds plausible enough, the story of a man redeemed by a modern saint who himself turned out to be fragile and only too human.  However, once he is dead, the writer (and the reader!) is able to hear several different sides to the story, forcing him to use his judgement as to how 'true' each of them is. 

The only thing we can be sure of is that when a story is told, we are learning what the storyteller wants us to hear.  Some of the stories are deliberately shocking, using brutal 'honesty' to win over the audience; others are deliberately underplayed, hoping to make the reader respect the speaker's intelligence; others, perhaps, are not quite as based in reality as they are made out to be - the line between fiction and biography is a rather unclear one...

Necropolis is another excellent, fascinating piece of Spanish-language literature, but I did have a couple of issues with the book.  While the various stories were excellent, and an integral part of the book, I did find that they distanced me a little from the core narrative.  On finishing a chapter (and most of them were fairly lengthy), I rarely felt like immediately pushing on with the book - the self-contained nature of the sections often left me treating Necropolis as a collection of short stories rather than a novel.

A much bigger issue though was one which, in some ways, is coming to typify my Latin-American reading experience.  Throughout Necropolis, there is a sense of machismo which is hard to ignore, no matter how related it is to the story.  Women only appear to exist as sexual objects, with none of the female characters (with the possible exception of the porn star...) coming across as real people, and the stories contain references aplenty to prostitutes, orgies and rape.

While some of the context justifies it, I thought that it went a little overboard at times, and the character of Marta, a highly-sexed Icelandic journalist who is a walking cliché of Nordic sexual attitudes is one that pushed things a little too far for me.  There's no doubt that there is a purpose behind the sensationalism, and I'm sure that the idea of making the most of life in a city where bombs are falling would explain some of this away, but I'm not sure that everyone would buy into these excuses.

Despite these misgivings though, I thoroughly enjoyed Necropolis and would recommend it.  Just as in last week's offering, Dublinesque, the expected separation of life and fiction is playfully tampered with, forcing us to look forwards, backwards and outside the text to fully understand it.  What we come away with is an understanding that each story is special in its own way, regardless of who it's about or what that person has achieved.  As Gamboa says:

"What there is at the end of a life is irrelevant, it isn't the result that makes a life exceptional, but the path trodden..." p.162

Something to ponder as we go about making our own life stories... 

Big Time Intertextuality

He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary bloggers - this is the thought which (somewhat ironically) crosses Tony's mind as the sound of the car taking his wife and children away slowly fades, leaving him free to wander into the study and finally sit down to the computer whose siren call he has been avoiding for the past few hours.  He picks up the book he has just finished, noting the aptness of the cover - a man in the process of taking a giant, life-defining leap...

Reading Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas' stunning novel of a publisher's trip to Dublin to bury the age of print literature and work out what to do with himself next, has been an exhilarating, absorbing journey through modern literary history, a novel so awash with references to other artists and their works that Tony has stayed up late into the night, stopping here to open his copy of Ulysses (forced into rereading Chapter Six by the obvious parallels with Vila-Matas' book), pausing there to refresh his memory of Joyce's short story The Dead (another work frequently referenced in Dublinesque).  Now, as the rest of the world goes about its business, Tony's brain is still twisting and turning, his mind still searching for elusive threads of meaning.

He walks over to the window, looking for signs of good weather, anything to keep him away from the computer, but mid-winter Melbourne rain continues to flow down, concealing the further edges of the garden and gradually causing the study windows to steam up, leaving Tony isolated in his warm, dimly-lit room.  With a sigh, he sits down at his desk, clicking three times on the mouse with practiced ease and turning on some music to help him focus (Franz Ferdinand - how apt), before opening a Word document - which he proceeds to stare at for a while as the music washes over him...

He tries to concentrate on Samuel Riba, the central character, a former literary publisher whose sudden, irrational decision to fly to Dublin for Bloomsday with some friends shakes his life out of the rut it was in.  The way the writer blends elements from Ulysses, structuring parallels with Joyce's famous novel, the way he draws on thoughts and images from an astonishingly wide variety of sources...  Tony turns to his copy of Dublinesque, pulls out the scrap of paper with the scribbled notes he has made, and begins Googling images - Hammershøi's painting of The British Museum in fog, Edward Hopper's Stairway (another song plays on the computer, The Police's Wrapped Around your Finger) -, but he's getting nowhere.  He sighs and continues thinking...

He decides that he needs to distract himself, and he eases himself, not without difficulty, out of the chair he feels so comfortable in, standing up, slowly looking around, as if expecting help to come from someone (even though there is nobody there), before walking out into the kitchen.  He does the washing up to clear his head and then makes a couple of pieces of raisin toast, pouring himself a mug of soya milk to go with his impromptu second breakfast.  Back in the study, he becomes tired of the music and puts on an old Powderfinger CD, and as the strains of Waiting for the Sun ring out, he sits back waiting for inspiration - in vain.  In fact, the only thing he can think of is the irony in the fact of the book about Riba (a publisher deeply disillusioned by the success of 'gothic' - i.e. vampire - fiction), being published in English by the same house that brought out Fifty Shades of Grey...

Musing that if Riba was waiting for the return of the real reader, he was probably well out of the publishing game, Tony decides to browse online book shops for other works and writers mentioned in Dublinesque: Finnegan's Wake (of course), Paul Auster, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett...  Tony pauses, leaning back in his chair, feeling that he has come to the crucial point of his cerebral meanderings at last; for if the first part of Dublinesque has Riba's life parallelling the events of Ulysses, the final section moves from the high of Joyce to the low of Beckett.  Tony sighs.  In that case, it's a shame that he has never read anything by Beckett...  As he continues to stare blankly at the mockingly pristine document on the computer screen, the feeling of being watched grows ever stronger, compelling him to turn and look out of the window.  Nothing.  Just a man in a blue jacket, hurrying down the hill in the rain, head fixed straight ahead, in no way looking in Tony's direction.

Rubbing his eyes, Tony manages to stand up again, now feeling the familiar dry feeling in his mouth from last night's wine, wanting a glass of water to ease the headache he can sense beginning.  He starts to pace the study, walking around in circles while his thoughts go around in the opposite direction.  Dublinesque is a great book, a wonderful book, a seamless read, a credit to the writer and to his translators into English, Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean.  But - (Tony's pacing slows as he struggles against the thoughts coming the other way) - what am I actually going to say about it?  How can I construct a coherent review describing its brilliance while including the feel of the novel?  Should I simply type out 600 words with a brief overview of the plot and a recommendation to just read the book?

Gradually the pacing slows eventually coming to a complete stop as gravity inertia weight of years and the force of the counterbalancing train of thought combine to bring him to a halt Tony looks up and for the first time we see him with a smile on his face as he realises that there is only one way to do justice to the book while concealing his inability to truly understand truly get to the heart of what it actually is Vila-Matas wants to say and he says to himself in the middle of that warm dark room he says that's what I'll do I'll just write it as I think it should be written I'll style it as if it were taken from Vila-Matas Joyce whoever intertextuality yes intertextuality and people can read into what they will what they want what they feel or is that too obvious perhaps no it's a good idea better than the usual rubbish anyway will I won't I and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The Danger of Giving Someone the Cold Shoulder...

After my (ad)venture into classical Spanish literature, it's time today for some more contemporary fare, although the setting is actually anything but modern.  There is a connection though - today's hero is tilting at some pretty big windmills...

*****
Lorenzo Mediano's The Frost on his Shoulders (translated by Lisa Dillman, review copy kindly sent by Europa Editions) is a novella set in the Pyrenees shortly before the Spanish Civil War.  The story begins when the inhabitants of the small mountain village of Biescas de Obago become aware of an article in a regional newspaper, dredging up old history and besmirching the name of the town.  Infuriated, they charge the local teacher with writing a response to the article, determined to refute the allegations made.  The teacher takes on the task, but is reluctant to do so for several reasons: firstly, he knows full well that it's a waste of time; secondly, he also knows that the article is much closer to the truth than the tales spun by the villagers.

After fulfilling his useless task, the teacher then decides to secretly write down what really happened, the story of a young shepherd boy, Ramón, and his wealthy beloved, Alba.  It's a story of star-crossed lovers, two young people who can never be together - not because of any animosity between the families, but because the very idea of love straddling the social divide is so dangerous that it could tear the whole village apart...

The Frost on his Shoulders is a fascinating story of what happens when one man decides to stand up against what fate and tradition have decreed to be his future.  Although it starts a little slowly, what begins as a potentially predictable story of thwarted lovers soon becomes something much more than that, a tale of history at a crossroads.  The teacher explains to his audience that:

"...it's all well and good for a shepherd to be able to count, so he can tell if any sheep are missing, and the fact that everyone here can sign his name lends our town a bit of prestige; but that's enough.  Because any more than that and people start dreaming, wishing things were different than they are..." p.36

The way they are is, to be honest, feudal.  A handful of wealthy families own all the land surrounding the village, and anyone not lucky enough to be an heir to one of these houses is a nobody, a possession.  The local workers are bound by unwritten rules, stuck working in the same place and unable to marry as they are needed to labour for the rich families.  Even if they were, the local tradition of disposing of many female babies at birth (women are only needed for producing heirs...) ensures that there aren't enough women to go around.

Against this background then, the slightest sign of insubordination is seen as a threat, a challenge to the status quo, and our story bears this out.  Ramón, educated above the normal degree for a rural worker, decides that he wants to rise above his station, earn money and marry the delicate, beautiful Alba, heiress to the richest house in the area.  The ruling class decides that he must be crushed, denying him the opportunity to work, but as Ramón undergoes immense hardship in the mountains to make it on his own, the undertrodden villagers slowly begin to support him, seeing in him a role model, a symbol of change and progress - exactly what the landowners feared...

The story builds to a stunning, and slightly unpredictable, climax, with the reader willing Ramón on to achieve the unachievable, all the while knowing that the odds are against him.  Allowing the young upstart to attain his goal will open a crack in the carefully-constructed social edifice which sustains the profitability and survival of the village against the harsh, unforgiving environment it is surrounded by.  In a tension-filled village, with violence only ever a heartbeat away, it is inevitable that there will be bloodshed...

As mentioned earlier, the story is narrated by the teacher, an outsider who acts as a sort of guide through the alien culture of the villagers.  He has had to adapt to a place where life seems stuck in the 1620s, not the 1920s, and he is our voice in the wilderness.  However, it's probably best not to trust him too much...  His version of the story is just as subjective and personal as that collected from the accounts of the villagers, and most of what he recounts is hearsay.  He is, to say the least, more than a little biased ;)

*****

I enjoyed The Frost on his Shoulders, but there was one thing I was confused by.  The cover of my edition has a blurb on it, "A gripping piece of eco-fiction set in the Pyrenees Mountains", a comment which I initially found puzzling and rather superfluous.  I had never heard of eco-fiction, and I really couldn't see any environmental influences in the book.  Then, last night, I was flicking through a book on literary fiction (a work I've been slowly perusing for the last few months), and it all suddenly became clear.

Ecocriticism is a strand of literary theory which looks at literature from the viewpoint of nature, putting the environment, usually seen as merely the setting for events, in a central position.  Instead of focusing on what the characters do, we look at how the environment they live in has shaped them, and The Frost on his Shoulders is a perfect example for this train of thought.  Life in the mountains is hard, precisely because of the isolation and the extreme weather conditions, and the type of society which exists there has been forced upon the villagers by the problems the environment poses.

However, Ramón, while rebelling against society, is actually supported by nature.  The harsh conditions make it possible for him (with a lot of hard work) to make a success of his life, and his upbringing in the mountains allows him to find food and shelter - and survive - in a place where many people would simply keel over and die...  This idea of the book as a work of eco-fiction is new to me, but it's a very interesting one, and extremely apt here :)

Whether you buy this idea or not, the setting is of paramount importance to the story.  Our narrator excuses the brutality of life in the village by referring to the difficulty of life there:

"Try to understand, dear reader, that these innocent jokes, though cruel, are less so than life in the mountains; and if village women want to know every little thing you're up to, it's only because they lead empty lives; and if we make light of everything, it's only to keep from crying." p.39

I think that by the end of the book, anyone who tries The Frost on his Shoulders will know exactly what he means...

Have Sword, Will Travel

Stu of Winstonsdad Blog and Richard over at Caravana de recuerdos have decreed July to be Spanish Lit Month, and who am I to argue!  I originally thought that I'd struggle to find anything to review this month, but as it turns out, I'll be a lot more active than I could ever have imagined.  More on that later in July :)

To start off with though, I thought I'd use the opportunity of a fiesta of Spanish-language writing to have a look at a book which has been sadly neglected on my bookshelves for a good while now, gathering dust and fading in the sun over a period of years.  What makes my neglect even more criminal is that the book is not only a mainstay of Spanish literature, it's one of the true classics of world literature - I think you might have guessed its name by now...

*****
Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is a monster of a book, around 800 pages in my Wordsworth Editions version, but nearer 1000 in other versions I've seen.  Despite its size, however, it's actually a very accessible book, less a densely-plotted novel than a continuous series of stories held together by the seemingly-insane adventures of our titular hero, Don Quixote de la Mancha, the Knight of the Woeful Figure/Lions.  A satire on improbable contemporary novels of knights-errant, Cervantes' book is a funny, page-turning work, one which can be recommended to any reader.

Our hero is a modest, relatively well-off man whose brains, after decades of reading sixteenth-century pulp-fiction, become so addled that he actually believes all the improbable events he reads about.  Eventually, he decides that his life is worthless unless he does his duty to the world in becoming a knight-errant, a wandering righter of wrongs.  Therefore, dressed in ancient and dubious armour, he sets off armed with a sword and his love for the semi-imaginary Dulcinea del Toboso (in reality, a peasant woman he has never met...), supported, initially at least, only by his trusty steed Rozinante.

He soon realises that a knight-errant needs a squire to take care of the incidentals in life, a right-hand man to bear witness to his heroics, and this is where the short, squat, simple figure of Sancho Panza fits in.  A villager who is more than happy to leave his wife and children at home for a while, Sancho's greed for the treasures he expects to gain from his work with the noble knight lead him to saddle up his donkey and ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote in search of adventure - and what wonderful adventures they are :)

The legendary tilting at windmills is one of the first of Quixote's madcap antics, but his noble attack on the army of sheep is another which sticks in the memory.  The poor man is completely delusional and sees enchanters and giants everywhere he goes, each traveller he comes across a potential supplicant - or enemy.  It's little wonder that Sancho appears to lose it himself before long, believing his master will eventually become an emperor and grant him his own island.  That could never happen - could it? 

Although Don Quixote is a long work, it's divided into two parts (of which the second is better than the first), and each of these is subdivided into dozens of chapters, making it an excellent book to pick up and set down as the mood takes you.  I tended to take it in small chunks, reading on if the story was continued in the next chapter, as was often the case.  On a cold, wintry Melbourne day though, it was often all too easy to just stay in my armchair and keep going...

The translation in my edition is provided by Peter Motteux, and despite withering criticism of this version (a note on the Don Quixote Wikipedia page describes it as "worse than worthless"), I found it surprisingly good reading, especially when you consider that it dates from the start of the eighteenth century.  If you're looking for something a little closer to the original text though, there are many versions to choose from - it seems that there has been no shortage of knights-errant willing to tilt the windmill that is translating Don Quixote ;)

I could go on and on, but I'd just be repeating myself.  While some may prefer to analyse the book and scrutinise its importance to world literature, for me Don Quixote is best read as a humorous rambling collection of stories, one anyone will enjoy.  It's a book I'm bound to come back to at some point, so I'll leave deeper analysis until then :)  One word of warning before I leave you though.  Be careful with all the reading you do this month - you don't want to end up like poor Don Quixote...