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 ;)
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 ;)
