Matt's 2011 books: ¿más de lo mismo? Basicalmente, sí

I've enjoyed keeping a running diary of the books I read and will try to keep doing so as time allows. I'm about 800 pages into Les misérables and that's my first priority. Then I've got a list of books that I'll be damned if I don't read this year (some of them I've put off for far too long):

Tadeys--Osvaldo Lamborghini
Paradiso--José Lezama Lima
La música en Cuba--Alejo Carpentier
Ferdydurke--Wytold Gombrowicz
Museo de la novela de la Eterna--Macedonio Fernández
Orlando Innammorato--Matteo Boiardo
Voyage au bout de la nuit--Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Los recuerdos del porvenir--Elena Garro
Don Quijote de la Mancha, II--Miguel de Cervantes
El mundo es ancho y ajeno--Ciro Alegría
La Araucana--Alonso de Ercilla

Then I've got a bunch of books I'd like to read:

Gracias por el fuego--Mario Benedetti
Libro de buen amor--Archipreste de Hita
El Conde Lucanor--Don Juan Manuel
El sueño de los héroes--Adolfo Bioy Cásares
Otras inquisiciones--Jorge Luis Borges
El idioma de los argentinos--Jorge Luis Borges
Cárcel de Amor--Diego de San Pedro
Milagros de Nuestra Señora--Gonzalo de Berceo
Hugoliade--Eugène Ionesco
La luna e i falò--Cesare Pavese
Las fuerzas extrañas--Leopoldo Lugones
La Diana--Jorge de Montemayor
History of the Mongols--Bertold Spuler
Caterva--Juan Filloy
San Manuel Bueno, mártir--Miguel de Unamuno
Yo, el supremo--Augusto Roa Bastos
The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ulysses--James Joyce
Libro de la vida--Santa Teresa de Jesús
Juntacadáveres--Juan Carlos Onetti
Perto do Coração Selvagem--Clarice Lispector
A hora da estrela--Clarice Lispector
Ifigenia--Teresa de la Parra
De perlas y cicatrices--Pedro Lemebel
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr--E.T.A. Hoffman
El entenado--Juan José Saer
Bartleby y compañía--Enrique Vila-Matas
Noticias del imperio--Fernando del Paso
Ragazzi della vita--Pier Paolo Pasolini
La Divina Commedia--Dante Alighieri
Orlando Furioso--Ludovico Ariosto

¡Feliz 2011!

Welcome!

Glad to see you back with us again, Matt!

1. El caballo perdido (The Lost Horse) by Felisberto Hernández

I read all but the last eight pages of this short novella in a coffee shop while my girlfriend was shopping for Christmas gifts. By the time she met me, I felt lost and wondered if I should go back and read it again before finishing. Then, when I picked it back up a few weeks later, I found that the final pages tied things together quite nicely and left me satisfied with the novella as a whole. I wished that I had been less distracted by the shoppers filing in and out of the coffee shop, mixed with the music in my headphones with which I tried to mute their holiday conversations; if I had finished the book in one sitting I wouldn't have felt vaguely dissatisfied with it for the past few weeks. Although, maybe feeling lost in a book called "The Lost Horse" isn't altogether undesirable, and, considering that I found ample reason to appreciate it in the end, I should feel happy for the way I read it. I enjoyed being lost in the memories of Felisberto, especially when his method of looking back at the past made more sense. I'm glad I went ahead and finished this exercise in the recollection and analysis of people, objects and experiences of one's childhood, filtered through the flow of time and the effects of the surrounding world.

The book is divided into two parts, roughly equal in length. The first part is a look back at the narrator's piano lessons with a lady named Celina. He lists the objects in her room and his childhood experiences with them; he talks about Celina's methods of teaching and discipline, and the way that as a child he thought that he was secretly manipulating her to fall in love with him. His mother and grandmother accompany him to piano lessons, and his memories of his family mix with those of Celina and the room where she gives lessons. As he documents his past, he seeks to revisit it and record his memories of Celina and the objects he associates with her, in the way that they have endured in his mind as he ages. I especially enjoyed his explanation of how Celina's memory came to him:

"It was on one of those nights,as I was calculating the sum of years past as if they were coins that I had let slip through my fingers without any great caution, when I was visited by the memory of Celina. This was unsurprising, as would be the visit of an old friend who came to pay me visits now and again. No matter how tired I was, I could always muster a smile for my recently-arrived friend."

The second part is where I started to really feel lost: the narrator is writing his recollections, but he's constantly being influenced by a "partner" as he writes (the word used is "socio," which connotes a business sort of relationship). His partner affects his memories and the way that they enter his mind, making it more difficult for him to put his thoughts on paper in the way that he wants to; his influence is often a nuisance which prohibits the narrator from continuing to tell the story of his past, with Celina and the piano lessons and the things in her house. He's still trying to write about these things, but they're clouded over by the outside influence. This is where the story got pretty cloudy for me as well. At the end, the partner's identity is exposed and reconciled with the story of the narrator's past, along with a few other outside elements that wandered into his memories, shifting and altering them.

Reading this book in conjunction with Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling gave me a pair of glimpses into the author's past, with both books delving into memories of his childhood piano teachers. His thoughtful study of memories and the way that things change in our minds as seen through the lenses of time and experience make me want to consider him a Uruguayan Proust (this based on the meager 250-odd pages of Proust I read in Un amour de Swann); these books also make me want to really get started on À la recherche du temps perdu, because both novellas (El Caballo Perdido and Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling), combined with my cursory understanding of Proust's literary investigations into the past, make me want to believe that I would appreciate his books and that they would in turn help me appreciate Felisberto Hernández even more. I imagine him reading Proust and really digging it, deciding as he thought back on former teachers that he too could riff on times gone by in his own corner of the world.

I found a small collection of anecdotes related to this novella at the following link: http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/fhern... In it, his daughter, Ana María says that "Before his death my father said that El Caballo Perdido was his favorite work." He dedicated a copy of the book to her with the words "The two of us will ride on the back of the lost horse toward our destiny, and we shall never set foot on the ground."

#4: Too bad my local library does not have a translated copy of that one. I am glad you were finally able to get back to it, Matt.

2. Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

I read about this new(ish) translation of Ferdydurke a few months ago and I decided to give it a try, having all but given up on my quest to find a copy of the original Spanish translation. Throughout the years I had encountered numerous references to Gombrowicz and his influence on Argentine literature (in fact, just the other day I read a short note by Roberto Bolaño concerning a Catalan translation of the text), and my curiosity regarding Ferdydurke had grown to great proportions. I find people like Gombrowicz, who leave their home countries and find some degree of fame and notoriety in foreign lands, to be quite fascinating, and Ferdydurke has a mythical quality to it which made me very excited to finally read it, no matter the language. I knew that it was the story of a thirty year old man banished back to his teenage years, and that it dealt with issues of maturity and immaturity, but beyond that, I didn't know what to expect. I was very glad that in her short introduction to the translation, Susan Sontag mentioned that in order to understand the true uniqueness of this book, it's important to remember that it was written in 1930s Poland. In the eighty years since its publication, the cult of immaturity has risen in prominence. One need do no more than turn on the TV and browse the cable offerings to find example after example of immaturity being celebrated. Also, many books have been written in the past eighty years along similar lines as Ferdydurke (The Tin Drum is one example that came to my mind, and this book's protagonist reminds me a lot of Oskar). Maybe this book isn't as weird and revolutionary in 2011 as it was in 1937, but I still found it wonderfully strange, as well as absolutely hilarious.

Joey Kowalski is visited by Professor Pimko, who reverts him back to the age of 17 and sends him to school. At school, two factions representing youthful purity and perverse maturity are at each others' throats, led by Syphon (the chief proponent of purity) and Kneadus (who is on the side of obscenity and also has a strange attraction to farmhands). Joey eventually ends up refereeing a grimace-off between the two leaders, where they make a bunch of faces in an attempt to force the other side into submission.

After the school episode, Joey is sent to live with the Youngblood family. Father Youngblood is an engineer, mother Youngblood is a modern and progressive wife, and their beautiful young daughter, Zeta, is coveted by many men, including Joey. Joey tries to insert himself into a relationship with Zeta, but she's out of his league and not really into him. He also tries to maneuver two other individuals, Professor Pimko (representing age and wisdom and ridiculous maturity) and Kopyrda (the cool, aloof young student who stayed above the initial fracas between innocence and profanity) into a simultaneous midnight rendez-vous with Zeta which he hopes will lead to disaster for both sides. All parties do end up colliding in a potentially explosive faceoff, but Joey ends up being rescued by Kneadus, who has been secretly visiting the Youngbloods' maid and wants Joey to come with him to the countryside in search for a flesh-and-blood cure for his farmhand obsession.

In the countryside, the pair of teenagers stay with Joey's noble family, and Kneadus finds his farmhand. His fraternizations with the peasant class are frowned upon by the nobility, and there's a lot of slapping of faces and other body parts by all those involved (the best part is when Joey slaps Visek, the farmhand: he has to muffle the noise, so he slaps him through a rag!). Kneadus's actions are more and more reprehensible in the eyes of a lazy, gluttonous group of noble men and women whose rigid social mores prohibit any and all socialization with the ignorant peasants who serve their beck and call.

Between the three sections depicting teenage school life, Joey's homestay with a modern, urban family, and their journey into the backward countryside, there are interludes entitled "The Child Runs Deep in Filidor" and "The Child Runs Deep in Filibert," each with their own prologue. I found the Filidor chapter, where the High Filidor, champion of synthesis, does battle with the Analyst (the Anti-Fildor), to be especially amusing.

Even though the book was pretty zany, it provided a surprisingly realistic portrait of 1930s Poland. The three parts concerning the school, the home and the countryside illustrated a series of ideological struggles between different factions of Polish society. The schoolboys fighting over whether they should be innocent or perverse, the modern parents arguing over how their daughter should wield her blossoming sexuality, and the struggle of the conservative rural gentry to maintain their dominance over the subservient peasantry in the wake of the Russian Revolution, are all presented in a relatively comprehensive and easy-to-grasp manner. The author also intervenes a few times to discuss issues of artistic creativity, helping the reader to better understand the literary culture into which the book was born. Everyone might be slapping each other in the mug, or doing other exceedingly odd things as a giant ass is rising in place of the sun, but in the meantime, their social status and worldviews are presented relatively clearly. Reading this book gave me an idea of what Poland was like in the 1930s, and I enjoyed seeing it through Gombrowicz's (or Joey's) eyes. The narrator's perspective as a "mature" adult transported back to the age of 17, forced to look at his world and its occupants through the eyes of a youth, yet with a 30-year old mind fully aware of the ridiculousness of adult life and adult conceptions of maturity, was compelling and hilarious. I've often imagined what it would be like to go back to high school with the knowledge on life and human interaction that I have acquired since then. Having experienced what I've experienced in the past nine years, how would I interact if I were placed back in the hallways of my high school? How would I see the world if I were seventeen again? This book gave me the chance to do just that, and I had a great time as Joey experienced the Poland of his day in an altered, newly-immature body.

Apparently this book presents great challenges to translators: the language is just as crazy as the story, and I can imagine it would be very, very hard to find suitable ways to express Gombrowicz's Polish in any foreign tongue. For example, the author has chosen the word "pupa" to represent something like a butt, but I can only imagine what the word and its connotations originally were in Polish. There is lots of talk of peoples' mugs, farmhand mugs and engineer mugs and old and young mugs, and, while it's basically a face, one wonders what exactly "mug" was in Polish. This is the first direct translation from the original Polish to English, and I found it very enjoyable. If possible, reading this English translation published in 2000 made me even more excited to find a copy of the original 1947 Spanish translation by Gombrowicz, Virgilio Piñera, et al. I think I've figured out how to obtain a copy of that text, and hopefully, I will have it in my possession within the next month or so. Reading it as a companion to the English translation should be a lot of fun, because not only will I experience the story in a new language and with a new set of words to express such bizarrity, but I'll be able to compare the two and get a better idea of what the author wanted to express.

3. Hugoliade by Eugène Ionesco

I don't remember where I first read about this negative biography of Victor Hugo, written by a young Eugène Ionesco, but I thought that at some point during my reading of Les Misérables I might enjoy taking a break and reading Ionesco's reasons for considering its author a pitiful, despicable man, as well as a bane on the world of literature. I don't imagine that I'll ever feel more familiar with Mr. Hugo than I do now, eight hundred pages in to Les Mis, so I decided to give Hugoliade a try. I wasn't looking for reasons to hate Victor Hugo, or to convince me to stop reading Les Mis; I actually thought that seeing the author from a different perspective would help me better appreciate the book I'm reading. I also imagined that Ionesco would find a lot of chinks in the armor of such a "great" man as Hugo, and that I would be heartily amused by a chronicle of his not-so-sterling qualities in life and in literature. Finally, I was excited to read another book by Ionesco, whose Rhinocéros was one of my favorite books from last year.

Ionesco was 26 when he wrote this book, and found the figure of Victor Hugo, author-authority and literary institution, to be distasteful and representative of a type of literary tyranny that went against his own youthful beliefs. Hugo, looking outward on the world and writing about the men and women of his time, never inward to analyze his own soul and his own place in that world, occupies a role quite opposite of what Ionesco believes an author's should be. His poetry, full of ornately constructed metaphors, lacks raw emotion to Ionesco, who believes that the true beauty of words in poetry should lie in their ability to convey naked human emotion. Through his writings and the ever-increasing prestige he garnered, Hugo built himself up into a god-like dispenser of truths; not only literary truths, but political and moral ones as well. Ionesco does not like this man-god of French literature and relishes the chance to tear down the tower of glory that has been built around Hugo. Ionesco is also of the opinion that Victor Hugo is just too damn serious. He writes that the thing that makes him laugh to the point of tears when he thinks about Hugo is his way of taking everything so seriously.

The rest of the book consists of a series of anecdotes which reflect the hypocrisy of one of Hugo's favorite statements: "une bel âme et un beau talent poétique sont presque toujours inséparables." Ionesco illustrates Hugo's various romantic follies with his mistresses, often contrasting the author's sleaziness with his wife Adèle's relative virtue. In one episode of the grotesque life of V. Hugo, his daughter Leopoldine drowns in the Seine while Hugo is off on vacation with his mistress. He uses her death as an opportunity to write a bunch of poetry about death and loss, but he manipulates the dates of his writings to make it seem like he wrote them a few years later. It would have been rather distasteful to spend the first days of mourning on poetry, rather than truly grieving with actual, intense human emotions (which is what Adèle was doing back in Paris). He panders to whichever political faction is in power, royalist, republican, it doesn´t really matter to Victor Hugo. He uses his status as a "pair de France" to extract himself from a sticky situation where he's caught with his pants down with a mistress, while the mistress is sent to jail. Adèle ends up discretely helping the poor woman who has fallen prey to the sleazy literary god. In all, the episodes illustrate a man whose soul is not particularly virtuous, certainly not virtuous enough to stand up to his reputation as a dispenser of truth and poetic virtue.

It's a funny book, and was a welcome respite from all the seriousness of Les Mis. You don't come across many biographies that seek to belittle and defame their subjects, and I enjoyed reading about the dark side of a "great man." There was an essay included after the text on the relationship between Victor Hugo and Eugène Ionesco, written by a man named Gelu Ionescu. It helped situate this book as an important early step in Ionesco's literary career, identifying the Victor Hugo of the anecdotes that make up Hugoliade as Ionesco's first "character." In his re-creation of the 19th century French writer, he's taking a first step toward his later creation of the fictional men and women who occupy his plays. Ionescu also turns the tables on Ionesco in reminding the reader that, while in this book Ionesco is railing on and on against a man who became a literary institution, in the decades after this book was written it would be Ionesco's turn to become an institution himself, as a writer of absurdist theater.

Finally, I enjoyed this book because Ionesco takes part in an exercise that I myself have enjoyed since childhood: the tearing down of idols. I was a huge Michael Jordan fan back when the Bulls won their first three championships, but then I started to hate him, looking for more and more reasons not to like a player who had previously been my chief inspiration on the playground (especially when the Bulls beat my Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals). When somebody dominates something for an extended period of time, the initial wonder wears off and I tend to start distrusting the greatness that I was initially caught up in: was Jordan that great, or did he just get all the calls at the end of the game? Would he have won even a single ring without Pippen? As his playing days have receded into the past, I've tempered my hate for second dynasty Jordan and tend to focus on my memories of the glory of the first Bulls dynasty. I've had similar experiences of the love-hate-acceptance cycle with Gabriel García Márquez, whom I loved as a teenager, hated as a young adult, and now accept as a good and enjoyable writer, if not one of my favorites. I wonder if Ionesco, who wrote this book against Victor Hugo at 26, might not have been able to enjoy Hugo's poetry and fiction in later decades?

4. The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I'd been holding a borrowed copy of this book for about a year, and I wanted to read something I could start and finish in a day as I lay in bed sick last Friday. I was initially intrigued by this book because I've spent some time living in other countries as a student and as a Peace Corps volunteer, and I wanted to see Greene's portrait of expatriate life in a different place (Vietnam, not South America or Mongolia), time (post-WWII, not post-millenium), and situation (war, not peace). I understand now that this book was very controversial in its day, but I didn't know that as I began to read it.

Thomas Fowler is an older British gentleman journalist who covers the French war in Vietnam, smoking opium every night and living with a young Vietnamese woman, Phuong. Phuong's sister wants very badly for her to marry a westerner for economic reasons, and is thus unenthusiastic about her relationship with Fowler, who has a wife back in Britan who won't divorce him due to her religious beliefs. Fowler wants to believe that he can do his job in Vietnam without getting involved in the conflict. One day he meets young Alden Pyle, a young Harvard graduate who has come to Vietnam with the US government's Economic Mission. Pyle is obsessed by the theories of the author York Harding, and talks about the creation of a "Third Force" in Vietnam operating against the twin evils of communism and colonialism. Pyle shares an awkward, arms-length dance with Phuong at the Continental, a fancy expat gathering spot, and is smitten. He announces himself honorably to Fowler as a competitor for her affections, and the two men orbit around her for the length of the book. Pyle and Fowler share some experiences in war when they venture out of Saigon to the front, and they talk a lot about politics. Pyle's idealism clashes with Fowler's pessimistic view of the chances of any western intervention in Vietnam. Pyle also seems to be involved in a bit more than economics, and Fowler does some investigations into his true reasons and motivations for being in Vietnam.

I enjoyed reading about westerners living and working in Vietnam in the years after World War II, and I thought that the story was compelling and satisfying to read in a single sitting. It felt almost as if I were reading a movie, the way that the story was built in a way that would keep me interested as it jumped from action to romance to intense dialogue between people with different viewpoints. In the introduction there was a section describing Greene's love/hate relationship with Hollywood, which perhaps led me to make the connection between the intelligently-crafted movies of the middle 20th century and this book. I imagined George Clooney maybe gaining a bit of weight to take on the role of Thomas Fowler in an attempt to garner an Oscar nod for the film adaptation. In truth, Michael Caine is the most recent actor to play Fowler, with Brendan Fraser starring opposite him as Pyle.

However, I also thought that for a "realistic" novel, the story didn't seem very realistic at all. For one, when Fowler is visiting the front on a journalistic excursion, Pyle shows up in the middle of the night, having traversed dangerous territory, to tell him that he would like to throw his hat in the ring for Phuong's affections. It's hard to believe that he would have made this trip, young and naive as he is, because he couldn't put off this conversation about Phuong for even a couple of days. Even stranger is the fact that a young Harvard graduate, son of a college professor, would be sent on a dangerous and sensitive mission in the foreign service fresh out of college, full of ideas about how the world is but with limited practical (or military) experience. The role doesn't seem to fit the man (he'd have been more likely to be one of my colleagues in the Peace Corps based on his pedigree), and I would have found his presence in the messy, multifaceted political world of Vietnam to be more believable if he were a thirtysomething World War II veteran with actual wartime experience. It was a different time, though, and maybe young American idealists were thrown into political intrigue on a more regular basis in those days.

Anyway, I still thought that this book was worthwhile as a cautionary tale of how wrongheaded it can be for one country to meddle in the business of another. Even if the foreign entity's intentions are good, the end result often turns out to be much different than intended. As I understand it, this book was met with critical acclaim in the communist world and disdain in the American press. Right now, in 2010, it doesn't read very controversially. So much has been made of America's failures in Vietnam and other far off lands where politics and war have been waged, and so many Quiet American-type stories have been told since this book's publication, that it was difficult for me to fully comprehend how it might have been received upon its release. I found the conversations between Fowler and Pyle to be interesting because they showed how the old colonial powers might have tried to give America cautionary advice in the early days of our operations in Vietnam. I imagine it would have been easy for a man of Fowler's age, who had seen and reported on the latter stages of the decline of the British empire, to look at the newly-arrived Americans and wonder what the hell they hoped to accomplish, or how they could have thought that their efforts to mold Vietnam's future to their liking would ultimately be successful.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I last read The Great Gatsby when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I'm 26 now. Last year I re-read a couple of my favorite books from my teenage years (The Moviegoer and The Day of the Locust) and really enjoyed seeing them from a different, more adult perspective. I had certain conceptions of these books in my mind that I had carried with me since high school (I always thought adult life would be similar to how it was portrayed in The Moviegoer), and I could compare my memories with the stories I was reading again more than half a decade later. As I read, I found that the books were very different from how I remembered them, or maybe it was that I was very different from when I last read them; either way, I enjoyed reading about the characters I first met as a teenager again as an adult, and I decided I wanted to keep going back to my old favorites. I'm thinking this year I'll re-read Gatsby, Native Son and maybe Go Tell it on the Mountain.

From the first page, I remembered that I had felt a strong connection with Nick Carraway when I first read this book, and I still do. I can be obstinately nonjudgemental, or simply unwilling to judge other people. In high school I didn't understand as well as I do now what that can mean, because I, like Nick, have crossed paths with some boorish folks (as well as a few Gatsbys) in the past eight years or so, people on whom I wish I had passed judgement based on my initial feelings, rather than continue to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm still happy with the way I am, and I do think it's hard to really understand other people in this world to the point that you can confidently judge them; however, I think I know better now that if you develop a relationship with someone without judging them, sometimes as time passes you wish you had had the strength of conviction to turn away sooner.

Imagining myself as Nick Carraway at thirty when I was sixteen years old implied a lot of experiences in between. Imagining myself as Nick Carraway at 26 implies that I've already had a lot of those experiences. That's a little scary, and reading this book again caused me to look back on what I've done since I last read it. I think Nick mentions that when he came back from the war life seemed boring, or that the war was exciting in a way that returning to America wasn't. I can relate to those feelings, having had the opportunity to travel to different countries to study and work when I was in college and immediately after, then returning to America to try and figure out what comes next. Feeling like I'd reached the end of a certain road, and now had to look ahead in a way that I hadn't before, was difficult. Nick went into bonds, moved to New York, and met his neighbor, Jay Gatsby. He got to go to some cool parties at Gatsby's and hobnob with some rich and famous New Yorkers, and he saw the ugliness of adult life in the bitterness and unhappiness of the husbands and wives who came to Gatsby's to eat, drink and be merry. I remember in high school I thought those parties seemed exotic and desirable, and that being there would be worth it even though they were seen somewhat negatively (or perhaps just realistically) through the eyes of 30 year old Nick. I would still enjoy going to Gatsby's parties now (really, I wish I had friends like that, who could throw opulent parties with full bands and neverending champagne), but I understand the negative underside to it all: weekend after weekend, year after year, partying turns into alcoholism, behaviors become less innocent and more ugly, and life fills with more and more car crashes and DUIs, fights and arguments. I think Fitzgerald's book does a great job of portraying it all in a light that doesn't take away from the appeal and glamour of lives of people like Gatsby and his crowd of partygoers, yet still shows all of the other stuff that lies beneath, peeking out more and more often the older you get.

The other thing that surprised me when I finished this was that, as I read some biographical information about Fitzgerald online, I discovered that the author might have been more of a Gatsby than a Carraway. I always thought of Nick as the author's alter ego, and I knew that Fitzgerald, like Nick, had served briefly in WWI and then returned to the States. However, as I read a short biography of Fitzgerald I began to imagine his wife Zelda as a real-life Dolly, especially considering that he had to prove that he could support her (through the publication and success of This Side of Paradise) in order to secure her hand in marriage (If one is to trust Wikipedia). I imagine Fitzgerald extrapolating the grind of selling stories to magazines, scripts to Hollywood, and books to publishers into Gatsby's shadowy activities, including elements of his romantic pursuit of Zelda into Gatsby's extended yearning for Dolly. Gatsby amasses riches to make him a suitable candidate for Dolly's love, and it sounds like Fitzgerald had to do much the same to win his elite wife. I'm intrigued by the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, especially considering the possible connections between Fitzgerald's life and his fiction, and I would like to read more about the couple.

All in all, I enjoyed The Great Gatsby at 26. I wonder how it will be to read it when I overtake Nick and Gatsby in age and I'm looking back on that stage of life where one's adulthood begins to crystallize and come into clearer focus.

6. Huis clos, suivi de Les mouches (No Exit and The Flies) by Jean-Paul Sartre

I got this edition of two plays by Sartre at the Red Cross book sale in exchange for a coupon for a free book that I brought with me. I remember I was disappointed with their selection of books in foreign languages, which were (strangely) mostly in Polish. However, I'm glad I did at least find these plays, and they were free, so I certainly got more than I paid for.

I didn't know anything about the play Huis clos when I read it, and my ignorance worked to my advantage: it allowed me to experience it in a way that many people, at least passingly familiar with the content of the play, might not have. The reader (or audience member) is introduced into a situation with limited background information, and the particulars of the scenario are revealed as the play progresses. It is a straightforward situation: A man is brought into a room and then a woman and another woman are brought to accompany him. They are to spend some time there together, and they converse. I hesitate to say more than that, because I feel fortunate that I didn't know more myself. It was fun to be thrown into that room along with the first man and only slowly begin to understand why he was there. This play also contains one of Sartre's more famous, well-known statements, and I'm glad I know the story behind it now.

Les mouches is a retelling of the story or Orestes and Electra, the children of Agamemnon who seek to avenge his death. In this play, Orestes has grown up in exile from his hometown of Argos, where his father was murdered by Aegisthus when he was a young child. He is portrayed as an innocent young man who had a good, happy childhood. However, he doesn't feel that he can continue in the life he's led now that he knows the story of his origins, and he understands that he may soon have the opportunity to step into his true identity as the son of a murdered king. He has been wandering from city to city with his tutor, and when he arrives to Argos, the people hide behind closed doors as if in mourning. Flies swarm everywhere, and the only being who will speak to the recently-arrived men is Jupiter. The next day, an event is to take place in town where king Aegisthus unblocks a passageway to the underworld and the spirits of the town's dead are allowed back up into the world, sitting at the tables and sleeping in the beds of the living for one day. The living carry the burden of their dead (the king carries that of Agamemnon) and live in perpetual mourning.

Orestes meets his sister Electra, and they eventually come to know each other's identities. Electra lives as a slave in the palace of the king and his wife, Clymnestra (Clymenstra is Agamemnon's old wife and the mother of Orestes and Electra). She's called on to take part in the annual return of the dead, but instead of playing her part, she dances while dressed in white. This act of rebellion displeases the king, who claims that he will punish her when he is able to (he is not allowed to punish her on this day of mourning). Electra and Orestes talk about whether they should murder the king, along with their mother, and Orestes wonders whether this is the moment where he will finally take control of his life and do more than float through this world ignorant as to what his role in life will be. Jupiter tries to warn Aegisthus of his impending murder so that he can stop Orestes from committing an act that goes against the god's wishes. He also explains the limits of the gods' power over man, and how Orestes will essentially be acting outside of the sphere of the gods' influence when he commits a murder of his own free will. Orestes realizes the gravity of his actions and the implications of his exercise of autonomy, and after he commits the murder of the king and his wife, he stands up to Jupiter, refusing to feel remorse and refusing to consider his crime morally wrong.

I really enjoyed this play and the way it depicted Orestes' exercise of free will and power over the gods. He would not let Jupiter convince him that he should regret his actions or fear their repercussions, and he would not let the Furies who hovered around him to attack him in physical representation of the feelings of regret that he might feel as a result of his crime (which was a just one in his eyes). The whole play was very powerful, with Electra standing up to her captors, Orestes finding his way in life, and a mortal standing up to the king of the gods. I did wonder why, in a play where all the characters are Greek, the god in question was Jupiter, not Zeus. I thought maybe shifting the god forward an era by giving him a Roman name in a play populated by Greeks, was done to emphasize the idea that this wasn't a story of an ancient man's triumph over an ancient god, but of man's triumph over god. Sartre is using ancient characters, but his reinterpretation of the Greek myth is a very modern one. I can't imagine a man successfully acting against the will of a major god in the way that Orestes does here in traditional Greek . The play made me feel a sort of atheistic exhuberance that I last felt as I read Camus' Le peste. It's exciting to read literature from a time when westerners like Sartre were extending literary expression beyond certain restraints placed on it by Christianity, and I enjoyed reading about an Orestes awakened to the limitations of Jupiter's power over him. I'm glad that I found these two plays by Sartre. They have made me curious to read more by him, and they were both eminently enjoyable.

Wow! You have been busy, Matt.

I have been meaning to read The Quiet American for a while now. Thanks for the reminder that I need to get to it.

12: Yeah, I was under the weather for a few days and wanted to read a few books that would hold my attention as I rested for extended periods of time. I felt bad about borrowing The Quiet American from a friend and holding it hostage for so long, and I'd been meaning to re-read Gatsby for a while.

7. Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Voyage) by Silvina Ocampo

I distractedly read an anthology of Silvina Ocampo's short stories the year before last (I was really busy at the time and my reading of her stories lacked the continuity I needed to really get an idea of who she was as a writer), and I remembered her name the other day as I was browsing the Argentine section of the library the other day. I got this nice, new edition of Viaje Olvidado, her first book, thinking that rather than reading a broad retrospective of her stories, it would be nice to go back to the beginning and experience her initial artistic expression. I'm very glad I did: I enjoyed these stories greatly, and thought they were a wonderful bridge between two tendencies in Argentine literature that I enjoy: her language was extremely poetic and often attributed human characteristics and actions to inanimate objects, a lot like in the poetry of Oliverio Girondo or the writing of Ricardo Güiraldes (who worked with her sister Victoria in the publication of the literary magazine Sur); on the other hand, many of her stories--episodes might be a better word to describe the texts that make up Viaje olvidado--investigate the enigmas, mysteries and emotions of childhood in a way that reminded me a lot of some of the earlier stories by Cortázar (specifically those in Bestiario and Final del juego). I am glad that I could spend some extended chunks of time reading this book, because I enjoyed it the most when I was able to immerse myself into the series of fantastic and strange anecdotes from the worlds of children and adults.

Of the nearly two dozen stories that make up this book, none is longer than seven pages. Most are between three and six, and narrate single events or chains of related events in the lives of a wide variety of people: children, teachers, doctors, sculptors, and other men and women in Argentina. They are often difficult to unravel: the first story, Cielo de claraboyas, shifts from a description of an upstairs family to an accident on the street without clearly delineating the change in the events. In another story, two girls whose houses border one another slowly swap places, but in the confusion of the transition, their guardian angels do not make a corresponding switch. This leads to tragedy in the future. Many stories do have a fantastic or supernatural bent, but I think it's fair to say that the majority do not. In many cases, these short glimpses back into the past merely question the reality of what the person saw so many years ago. In looking back in time, meaning is sought but not necessarily assigned to events that happened in the past. I thought these evocations of childhood were compelling and relatable to my own feelings when I look back on strange events from my childhood. I remember that two friends and I once stood on the railroad tracks and threw dozens of rocks into my neighbor's pool. We later had to clean the pool up and pay for the repairs. When I think back on it, I try to remember what I felt while I was throwing those rocks, what strange mix of exhilaration, fear and any number of other emotions went through me as I did something so clearly wrong. And, also, why did I do that? Reading some of these stories was something like thinking back on and analyzing that rock-throwing event from my past. In a story called "El pabellon de los Lagos," a girl's childhood trips to the park are recounted, showing her emotions as she goes to a special pavilion and deposits coins into machines in exchange for prizes. Her pleasure as she takes her friend to this pavilion are doubled by the presence of her admired companion, and she goes on to recount her feelings as they stepped back out to the park and remembered the joy of the boat rides they could take in the lake. In the title story, a girl is told different stories about how babies are made and her reasoned organization of these various revealations is recounted.

I read an article a few months ago summarizing a book by the Argentine scholar Carlos Gamerro, which relates the works of Argentine writers such as Ocampo, her husband Adolfo Bioy Cásares, Borges, Cortázar and Onetti under a common tendency toward a "thematic baroque" (http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-4007-2010-10-03.html): "That which characterizes the group made up of Borges, Bioy, Cortázar and Onetti is a specific and baroque manner of constructing plots with the object of provoking a certain vacilation or confusion in the reader with respect to the constitution of reality, a vacilation that doesn't necessarily require the mediation of a supernatural or fantastic event; a system of oppositions and inversions..." I thought this description of a baroque representation of ideas fit Ocampo's chronicles very well. I associate the word "baroque" with the poetry of Góngora and its lexical complexity, which requires multiple readings to unravel the meaning of tangled, hyperbaton-laden sentences. I will need to read many of these stories multiple times in order to fully understand what I think the author is trying to say, and to make sense of the realities that she wishes to represent. I wish I owned this book so that I could do so at my leisure, but at least I have another three months or so before it's due back to the library. On the first read it was delightful: it established a link between multiple elements of Argentine literature that I enjoy, and the emphasis on things that happened far in the past fit well with all the stories by Felisberto Hernández that I've been reading and enjoying lately.

8. Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun) by César Aira

After Silvina Ocampo's Viaje Olvidado, I decided to read another book about childhood in Argentina. The two novellas and one short story that make up Cómo me hice monja are set in the author's childhood home of Coronel Pringles, Argentina, with a brief sojourn in Rosario as well. I have held a longstanding fascination with the town of Coronel Pringles because I grew up in the United States, eating Pringles and watching Pringles commercials. These stories satisfied my desire to learn more about this town in the south of Buenos Aires province that shares its name with the chips that come in a tube, and one of them also made me laugh much more than I expected to when i picked up this book.

All three stories are told by César Aira, and are about his Pringles and Rosario childhood. He tends to refer to himself in the femenine, although the other characters all treat him like a boy and use masculine endings when speaking to him. The title story was my favorite. It is a chronicle of events from the family's time in Rosario, and they are bizarre and hilarious, told from the child's peculiar perspective. The story begins with her father taking her for her first ice cream, at the age of six, after the family has moved to Rosario, where ice cream is available for purchase (unlike in Pringles). Her father is excited about having the chance to introduce his son to such a delicious treat, and is confident that little César, like everyone else, will like ice cream. César takes his first bite of strawberry ice cream and is disgusted. It's gross, it's absolutely filthy, how can anyone like this? You get the feeling that his father has been confused by his son's progress in life so far, little César has maybe been disappointing or odd in ways that have strongly affected his father, and this is just too much. His father is angry, he berates César, he forces him to take another bite and another, César is bawling, they're lucky there's not a bunch of people around because he's making a scene, he's saying that ice cream is sour and acrid and he hates it, and neither side will give in. Finally, César's dad grabs the melting strawberry ice cream and tastes it, and it's rancid. César ends up in the hospital from the tainted dessert, and his father ends up in jail after violently complaining to the ice cream store owner.

The story continues with a series of incidents where César, an odd little boy, does funny things and exasperates her mother. She has an intense persistence in saying and doing things that are unpleasant or embarrassing to her mom, and the entire story is absolutely hilarious. Young César reminds me a bit of Oskar from The Tin Drum in the way that she imposes her slightly-unhinged will onto the world and people around him. I was slightly disappointed by the second novella, La costurera y el viento (The Seamstress and the Wind), but only because I wanted to read more about little César and her adventures. In the second story, César is the narrator, but the story is about her neighbors in Coronel Pringles, who depart on a mad dash across Patagonia in search of a missing boy. You learn a lot about their backgrounds, their vices and their lives in Pringles, and the various parties streaking across the bleak landscape collide in an increasingly explosive manner. The book then ends with a short story explaining a game that César and Omar (the missing boy in the second story) used to play when they were kids. It's a counting game where they go back and forth naming bigger and bigger numbers. When subjected to detailed analysis, it really is an interesting game, and as César considers the endless variations that they recurred to as they counted numbers, he derives some interesting implications. The ways that they try to outsmart each other and the ways that they determine what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in a game of escalating number counting really have a lot to do with their future adult lives, as well as universal human motivations.

It looks like the title story from my Spanish edition has been translated to English as How I Became a Nun. I would highly recommend this book, and I´m curious as to how the translator tackled the gender issue in translation. Spanish provides a lot more opportunities to differentiate between gender through adjective endings, and I wonder how this could be captured in English.

#15: Too bad my local library does not have that one in either Spanish or the English translation.

9. 62/modelo para armar (62: A Model Kit) by Julio Cortázar

I'm a big Julio Cortázar fan. I read Rayuela in high school, in English, and have read it three or four times in Spanish. I read it while I was a student in Buenos Aires, and can only daydream that some day I'll read it while living in Paris. It's also one of the books I recommend most frequently to my friends. I would like to see a renaissance of Cortázar in the 21st century, because when I read books like Rayuela and 62/modelo para armar, I think that this is what my contemporaries in the young (hipster?) class should be reading: watching themselves in the bodies of Horacio, Ronald, Ossip, Babs and La Maga, Juan, Marrast, Hélène and Tell, growing older yet still as cool as ever, drinking cheap vodka with their creative and witty friends and rambling on about jazz (or rap, these days) as life's responsibilities and tragedies creep in, one loves another and the feelings aren't mutual, a baby dies, a young woman is raped, and loneliness and sadness become overwhelming as they realize that no system, no way of organizing life's events and justifying one's existence, is rigorous enough to stand up to the onslaught of time and provide order to the chaos of life.

This book, built from an idea proposed in chapter 62 of Rayuela, begins with Juan sitting in the restaurant Polidor, analyzing a series of events and images (a fat man ordering a "château saignant," the purchase of a book Juan probably won't read, his being led to a seat facing a mirror, the reflected script of the menu--looks like Russian to Juan--, a bottle of Sylvaner), trying to organize them into some sort of system. He also thinks about a woman, Hélène, as well as the city and the "zone," where his group of friends crosses paths. The possibility for interconnection between random events is tantalizing, but ultimately discouraging in that moments that may have been built through these random occurrences pass by so fleetingly, and one is left wondering if A were truly a unique result caused by B and C, or whether things would have been different had D or E occurred instead, or if they had occurred in a different order.

After Juan analyzes his surroundings orbiting around him, the focus expands, and Juan's group of friends are examined as they orbit around Paris (including extended stays in Vienna and London). Marrast and Nicole (who pines for Juan) are in London, where Marrast is trying to order a large stone to sculpt, Nicole is painting gnomes for a book, and Marrast sets off an absurd daily congregation of neurotics in front of a mediocre painting by slipping a provocative note into their association. Also in London are Calac and Polanco, two Argentines whose conversations are verbally exuberant and who counteract some of the seriousness of the others' relationships. A young laudist, learning French from Marrast, is also in the mix. Juan is working as an interpreter in Vienna, accompanied by Tell, a Danish woman who joins him in obsessing over the odd couple of "Frau Mirta" and a young English woman, following them from hotel to hotel and fearfully stalking their every action. In Paris, Hélène the anesthesiologist is distraught over the death of her young patient and meets up with Celia at the Cluny (another favorite haunt of the group). Celia has run away, and Hélène suggests that she come stay with her until she can find a place of her own. They get drunk on cognac and she watches Celia prepare a bed for a doll sent to her by Tell from Vienna, which reminds her of how she prepared her patient for his surgery in a bed from which he would never rise again. These groupings of characters eventually splinter, with some coming to London to meet others. They eventually all return to Paris.

Their lives and conversations are accompanied by entities known as "paredroi," whom I liked to think of as "absent presences." The paredros concept is introduced in the following manner:

"My paredros was a routine to the extent that between us there was always someone whom we called my paredros, a denomination introduced by Calac which we employed in complete seriousness given that the quality of paredros alluded, as is known, to an associated entity, to a species of compadre or substitute or babysitter of exceptionality, and by extension to a delegation of selfness to that momentary alien dignity, without losing, deep down, any part of our own dignity, like how any particular image of the places through which we passed could be a delegation of the city, or the city could delegate a part of its self (the plaza of the streetcars, the doorways with the women selling fish, the north canal) in any of the places through which we passed and lived in those days."

These ghosts of missing pieces in the puzzle of friends, haunting others' interactions and filling the role of he or she who is not there, are an intriguing presence in the story, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who/what they were. Like, when Calac and Polanco are stranded on the island in the middle of the little pond, who is the "my paredros" who participates in their conversation? Is the paredros a reflection of who's there and who's not there out of the group of friends, such that the paredros would be more of a Juan-type figure as Marrast and Nicole interact in London? I constantly tried to constuct different paredroi in different situations, trying to better understand conversations between different people and the different "my paredros" who accompany them. My efforts, along with my attempts to construct any system providing structure, order, and completeness to this book, were ultimately only partially successful. As I thought about this book as a "model kit" to be assembled by the reader, I wondered if the instructions could be found not only in chapter 62 of Rayuela, but also in Juan's initial meal at that Polidor. I was trying to connect a group of people and their stories, ordering them into a whole as Juan attempts to do with books, mirrors, cities and chateaux sanglants in the restaurant. Does it all add up, or should it?

A final word on why I think this book is great: Cortázar is a master at depicting emotions and relationships. I found myself dogearing pages with passages that I found remarkable for their emotional intensity, then I had to stop, because I was dogearing too many. Maybe the next person to check it out from the library will struggle to understand my dogearing system, adding a new level of complexity/frustration. I thought 62/Modelo para armar was a wonderful representation of life, and will return to it every so often in between rereads of Rayuela.

In reading this book, I found it helpful to have chapter 62 of Rayuela handy. Here is a translation of that chapter:

"For a time Morelli had considered writing a book whose form remained in loose notes. That which most clearly described it is the following: 'Psychology, words with an air of age and maturity. A Swede is working on a chemical theory of thought. Chemsitry, electromagnetism, secret flows of life force, it all comes to strangely evoke the notion of mana; thus, in the margins of social conduct, an interaction of a different nature could be suspected, a billiard ball that some individuals sustain or suffer, a drama without Oedipus, without Rastignac, without Phaedra, a drama impersonal in the measure that the consciences and the passions of its actors only come to be compromised a posteriori. As if the subliminal levels were those that linked and unlinked the ball of yarn made up of the group of individuals compromised in the drama. Or, to give the Swede his due: as if certain individuals affected the profound chemistry of others and vice versa, such that the most curious and inquieting chain reactions came to pass, fissions and transmutations.

In such a situation, a genial extrapolation is enough to postulate a group of humans who believe themselves to react psychologically in the classic sense of that old, old word, but who don't represent anything more than an instance of that flow of inanimate material, of the infinite interaction of what we formerly called desires, sympathies, volitions, convictions, and which here appear as something irreducible to all reason and to all description: inhabiting, foreign forces that advance in an attempt to obtain their right to exist; a search superior to our own selves as individuals, that brings us together for its own ends, a dark necessity to evade the homo sapiens state, moving toward... what homo? Because sapiens is another old, old word, one of those that must be deeply and thoroughly cleansed before attempting to use it with any certain meaning.

If I were to write that book, standard behaviors (including those most bizarre, that most privileged category) would be unexplainable through customary psychological instruments. The actors would appear insane or completely idiotic. They wouldn't show themselves totally incapable of the usual behaviors of challenge and response: love, jealousy, piety and so on; rather, in their persons, a thing that homo sapiens guards in the subliminal plane would open laboriously as a pathway, as if a third eye were laboriously blinking below the frontal bone. Everythying would exist as an inquietude, an unease, a continuous uprootment, a territory where psychological causality would give way disconcertedly, and the puppets would destroy each other or love each other or acknowledge each other, only rarely suspecting that life attempts to change its key in and through and for them, that a hardly-conceivable attempt is being born in man as in other times were born the key-of-reason, the key-of-sentiment, the key-of-pragmatism. That in each successive defeat there lies a rapproachment to the final mutation, and that man is not, rather he seeks to be, designs to be, grasping between words and behaviors and happiness splattered with blood and other rhetorics such as this.'"

And here is a link to an article I found entitled “The privileged horror…of the constellation”: Cortazar’s use of the Gothic in 62: A Model Kit." Its author, Victor Sage, has done a great job of analyzing this complicated book: http://erea.revues.org/134

10. Cantar de Mio Cid by Anonymous

The earliest consolidated version of the Cantar de Mio Cid was written sometime between the middle of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century. El Cid Rodrigo Ruy Díaz de Vivar lived in the second half of the 11th century. This temporal proximity between his life and the events chronicled in this epic poem is rather unique in the tradition of epic poetry. In comparison, La Chanson de Roland, France's oldest surviving epic, was probably first written in the 11th century, but recounts events from nearly three centuries earlier; Homer's Iliad is also distant from the events of the Trojan War that it recounts. What this means is that the voice of Rodrigo, the language he speaks and the language that is used in the telling of the Cantar de Mio Cid, is essentially the same language that El Cid and his men spoke in as they were committing their heroic deeds. Considering that jesters probably related the events of El Cid's exile to communities throughout the region as they occurred, with many of these initial popular "news transmissions" contributing to what over time became the Cantar de Mio Cid, it is tantalizingly possible that the words that El Cid Ruy Díaz (el que en buen ora nasco) pronounces in this epic poem are his actual words, the ones he spoke in exile as he sought to regain the favor of King Alfonso. I found this connection between history and epic poem to be exhilarating. The poem certainly deviates from the truth in various ways (the marriage of his daughters to the infantes de Carrión is fictitious, for one) but in general, it's remarkably realistic. And it had to be, considering that the earliest versions were sung by jesters in the very lands where El Cid lived, to a public familiar with his life and exploits. This sort of public could tolerate embellishments for the sake of drama and entertainment, but the story had to remain faithful to the hero that they knew and loved.

The public would have known of El Cid's youth and his service to King Sancho II, as well as the ups and downs of his relationship with Alfonso VI, who gained the throne after Sancho's assasination during the Siege of Zamora. These events aren't mentioned in the Cantar de Mio Cid, which begins with the hero grieving his impending exile from Castilla. He's broke and dishonored, and has to say goodbye to his wife and daughters. The people of Burgos won't even open their doors to him, due to a letter from the King forbidding any contact with the disgraced hero. El Cid remains faithful to Alfonso despite his unfair exile (his enemies in the court have conspired against him, convincing the King to banish him due to his supposed theft of tributes collected from conquered territories), and sets off with his faithful men to fight their way through southeastern Spain, conquering and collecting tribute from a series of towns culminating in their conquest of Valencia. Special detail is given to El Cid's financial gains as he moves through the region, and he sends realistic amounts of horses and money to Alfonso in tribute and in recognition of his continued allegiance to his King. This documentation of the financial minutiae of El Cid's conquests, along with the repeated emphasis on how he's earning his living through his bravery and military acumen, is rather surprising in a genre not exactly known for verosimilitude. No knights slaying dragons and defeating entire armies with a single swing of their legendary sword, just Ruy Díaz methodically ammassing riches gained through thoughtful military strategy.

Alfonso is eventually won over by El Cid's heroic conquests and his repeated shows of loyalty, and agrees to end his forced exile. He also arranges for Rodrigo's two daughters to be married to the infantes de Carrión, two members of the Castillan high nobility. This will bring honor to El Cid and increase his family's stature. Unfortunately, the infantes are cowards and, after a series of cowardly acts, they severely beat their wives and leave them abandoned in the wilderness, running back to their home in Carrión. What does El Cid do? First he calmly analyzes the situation, then he decides to litigate, litigate, litigate. He sends an emissary to the King, who calls a judicial court so that El Cid can present a formal accusation against the two infantes. In the end, El Cid isn't even present for the judicial duels; his men defeat the infantes as he sits back in Valencia, content in the knowledge that the King has arranged new marriages for his daughters to Navarran and Aragonés royalty.

I was extremely impressed that such a dramatic and heroic epic was written with such restraint. Supernatural and fantastic elements were wholly absent, and El Cid is portrayed as a thoughtful, prudent man. Many historians believe that the original author of this text was a lawyer based on the rigor of the text's legal arguments and the importance given to thoughtful legal action in place of violent reprisals. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this epic poem, sounding out the medieval Spanish as it was sung by the jesters of centuries past, and imagining El Cid (que en buen ora çinxo espada) saying those very same words as he fought to regain the favor of his King.

Thanks for your superb review of 62: A Model Kit, Matt. I'll read this, and Hopscotch, later this year.

19: Thanks! I hope you enjoy them both; Rayuela's a book that I've read and re-read a lot over the years as I moved to different places, and it's always meant a lot to me.

I enjoy reading your reviews too, Matt, although most of the books are inaccessible to me. Please keep up the good work!

11. Mundo animal (Animal World) by Antonio Di Benedetto

I was searching Google for some more information on a book I just read (Cortázar's 62/modelo para armar), and I came upon an exerpt of an interview with Ricardo Piglia. The interviewer is asking Piglia a question about Roberto Bolaño, and he begins by saying: "Because he always mentioned Borges, Di Benedetto, Puig and Cortázar, now some people say that he (Bolaño) was an excellent Argentine author." Familiar with three of the four cited authors, I decided to investigate the fourth. Antonio Di Benedetto was born in Mendoza, and was a journalist as well as an author. His most famous novel, Zama, is considered a classic of 20th century Argentine literature, and he also wrote many collections of short stories. Wikipedia says that he was once involved in a diplomatic dust-up when he ended a ceremonial toast at a NATO meeting with the customary Spanish words "cin cin" (clink clink), which offended the Japanese delegation (chin chin is slang for penis in Japanese, apparently). Wikipedia says that he was later prosecuted for this offense. Wikipedia also says "citation needed" after this statement, leading me to wonder if Antonio Di Benedetto was ever truly prosecuted for this offense, or if any of this ever happened at all. The Wikipedia article in Spanish contains more (and more believable) anecdotes. Di Benedetto was persecuted and tortured by the Videla regime in the 70s, and lived in exile in Spain from 1976 and 1984. While in Spain, he maintained an extensive correspondence with a young Roberto Bolaño, who later wrote a story about his epistolary relationship with Di Benedetto entitled "Santini." After his death, his fiction has been championed by Juan José Saer and many of his books have been re-published. I was intrigued (especially because I've always liked that Bolaño short story), and I went to the library and checked out his first collection of short stories, Mundo Animal.

The first story is about a man who is accused of spitting up blood, but who proceeds to explain how the blood is not blood but instead butterflies. He describes how he saw his donkey eating daisies and decided to try one himself. As he lifts the daisy to his mouth, a butterfly poses on it and he thinks, "why not this also?" as he swallows the butterfly. A second and third butterfly then voluntarily enter his mouth, perhaps in pursuit of the initial visitor. Even though they could fly back out (his mouth is open, nothing is keeping them there), they choose to descend into his heart, where they make their home and have offspring. These offspring, with the curiosity of youth, fly back up through his throat and exit through his mouth; unfortunately, raised in the darkness of his chest cavity, they are blind and flutter helplessly to the ground, where they are mistakenly interpreted as the bloody phlegm of a tubercular man. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

All of the stories contain animals, and most are as bizarre and surreal as the first. A mime has a large rat for whom he collects discarded crusts from white bread (I had forgotten about the Argentine crustless sandwiches de miga, as well as my old ponderings concerning what Buenos Aires bakeries did with all those crusts); a man travels to a land where the people don't know how to read and sells them books, teaching them to read so that they will need them. They prosecute him and condemn him to death, and a ball of millions of ants eats away his flesh, leaving him in bare bones. Unsatisfied, the town obtains another mass of flying ants, who take pity on him and carry him off to another land where there are rivers of milk and wine. He chooses milk and his flesh is replentished. He moves on to wine and eventually decides to attempt to destroy theis new land's idols, and crafts bombs to drop on their monument to the deity of music. He is once again prosecuted in this new land. In another story, a man discusses with another man the capacity of all men to commit beastly acts (perradas), like those that a dog would commit. The story then shifts to the man committing his own perrada, and then he's a dog, and getting into a fight with another dog.

A few months ago I read some books by an Ecuadorean author named Pablo Palacio, and I was impressed by how bizarre and twisted they were, and how effectively he was able to channel such strange perspectives. Reading his books reminded me of listening to Kool Keith albums when I was in high school, progressing from the slightly-deranged Keith of Ultramagnetic MCs through a series of increasingly insane alter egos (Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis, Clifton), using extremely rich and varied vocabulary to create raps that were different from almost all other rappers out there. I'm pleased to find the same sort of intensity and penetration into different, hallucinatory perspectives in the work of writers like Palacio and now Di Benedetto. In the case of the stories in Mundo Animal, I thought that the interplay between human and animal worlds, with characters transforming from human to animal and animals thinking as humans think, allowed for some narratives that would make Kool Keith proud. My favorite story, for instance, was about a cat who lives in a movie theater, which he patrols for rats. The cat starts expounding about how he's been learning things, and how he sees these mothers telling their children not to pet him because it might be dangerous, and he thinks about if there were cats bigger than children, and the cats had to be warned not to play with the children; then he starts talking about how he's done things, about how one of the greatest movies, one that will be discussed in arthouses of the future, was actually written and produced by him; it's his work and future generations will know nothing of this, if only he could remember the pseudonyms he used and what the movie was called...it's bizarre, but it's also exactly what I'd like to imagine my cat thinking as it sits in the corner and broods over whatever it is that cats brood over.

The other comparison I would like to make is with Salvador Dalí. I remember going to the Dalí museum in St. Petersburg when I lived in Florida, and I always thought about how I'd like to find a book that, as I read it, would provide a similar experience to browsing that collection of Dalí paintings. This may be the closest I've come.

21: Thanks! I've really enjoyed cataloging my books on here and leaving reviews as I go...I've enjoyed thinking about why I like the books I read, and how I think they relate to one another.

Hi There

I'm compiling a list of birthdays of our group members. If you haven't done so already, would you mind stopping by this thread and posting yours.

Thanks.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/105833

12. Au château d'Argol (The Castle of Argol) by Julien Gracq

Au château d'Argol is the first book written by Louis Poirier, a Frenchman born in 1910 who wrote under the pseudonym Julien Gracq. Gracq's background was in philosophy and the social sciences, and he was also strongly influenced by the surrealists, having been introduced during his university days to André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto as well as his novel Nadja. Breton was an early champion of this book, which had very limited success from a sales standpoint (130 copies were sold in its first year of publication out of an initial pressing of 1,200). Gracq was famous for being the first writer to turn down the Prix Goncourt, in 1951, and I imagine that as he grew in stature and fame as a writer, more and more people discovered his first novel. I was also intrigued by Gracq's political activities around the time that he wrote Au château d'Argol: he had adhered to the French Communist party in 1936, but severed his ties with that party in 1939 after the Germano-Soviet pact. The second half of the 1930s was an extremely volatile period in European politics, and as I read this book I tried (and am still trying) to make connections between the three characters and the prevailing political ideologies of the time, wondering if perhaps Gracq had intended the book to be a heavily-veiled political allegory representing the interaction in Europe between democracy, communism and fascism, complete with his own prediction of an inevitably violent clash between the three. However, I do tend to believe that all Europeans at that time were completely obsessed with politics (with good reason) and maybe I'm reading too much into Gracq's own background in politics at a time when the Spanish Civil War, along with the rise of fascist Germany and Italy, would have given a French communist intellectual plenty of cause for concern.

The book begins with Albert purchasing the château d'Argol in Bretagne sight unseen, based on the recommendation of a friend. The castle is a strange amalgamation of different architectural styles, and it is described in meticulous detail as Albert arrives and settles in. Albert is a bit of an oddball, brilliant in his investigation of rather esoteric subjects but unable to sustain normal relationships with women. He's going to take advantage of his new rural home to do some studying, but he's also invited his old friend Herminien to come visit him at Argol, along with a mysterious person named Heide, who turns out to be a beautiful woman. There's a bit of a dark undercurrent to Albert's relationship with Herminien, and this dark side will certainly come into play during the guests' extended stay at the château. They do lots of stuff together, like take walks in the woods, swim in the sea, and explore a crumbling chapel in the forest. Each locale is described in rich detail, and I enjoyed the way the the characters' emotions were reflected in their natural surroundings. I especially liked Grecq's manipulation of light in his description of the castle and the forest: the light as it rises and falls illuminates the characters' actions and feelings in a way that emphasizes the sense of foreboding that looms over the Bretagne landscape, the castle and its trio of occupants. Tension builds as Albert and Heide start to get along rather well, and Herminien eventually, inevitably, lashes out. The relationship between Albert and Herminien becomes less and less sustainable, and the reader begins to understand that there will be an eventual showdown between the two old friends.

I went into this book knowing that it was connected to Breton and the surrealists, and I was surprised that it was not as experimental as I might have expected, or at least not in the way I had expected. I was expecting something like Nadja (which I admittedly don't remember very well), or even Huidobro's Altazor (not surrealist, but very keen on innovation); something exuberantly new and innovative. What I got was a very mature sort of surrealism, something that seemed almost like a throwback to the past, a book that could be seen as surrealist but in which traits of other, older literary -isms, such as gothicism or romanticism, were also present. A lot of the books that I've read from the first third of the 20th century seem so new, so fresh and original, with new voices seeking new modes of expression and new perspectives that break from traditional forms of art and literature. Here, I wanted to believe that the new surrealist tendencies were in dialogue with the greater literary tradition of Gracq's Europe. I was having trouble putting this feeling into words, and I was very glad to find that, in the very extensive and well-annotated article devoted to Gracq on Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Gracq), mention is made of a conference at Yale in 1942 where Breton describes the importance that he accords to this novel "where, without a doubt for the first time, surrealism freely looks inward on itself, analyzing its relationship with the great sensory experiences of the past and evaluating, as much from the angle of emotion as from that of clairvoyance, the extent of the ground that it has conquered." I like this idea, that in Au château d'Argol the surrealist movement, in the hands of a young and new writer, begins to find its place in the greater scheme of things, retaking old styles and passions and looking at them with new tools.

I don't know very much about 19th century literature, and most of my knowledge of romanticism comes from a high school class where our teacher had us read, among other books from the 18th and 19th century, The Sorrows of Young Werther. My class didn't like that book when we read it in high school. It was boring and way too emotional, and as a forced reading it was, well, difficult. But high school kids are (often) stubborn and stupid, and I would like to reintroduce myself to a romantic movement that I was turned off of a decade ago in my teenage years. I'd like to imagine that if I re-read it now, I'd find a lot more to like, and find ample ground for comparison between Young Werther and this book written a century and a half later. One of the things that I like about reading is that one book makes you think about so many others, makes you want to understand the different traditions that contributed to its genesis, and makes you want to look back on books that you didn't like a decade ago in a new light.

#25: I have never read Young Werther although I have downloaded it to my Nook. I hope to get to it this year. I will have to see if there is an English translation of the Gracq book available so that I can compare the two.

Edited because I cannot spell.

26: Yes, I think I'll check out Young Werther the next time I go to the library...I always thought it was written around 1830 or so, and was surprised to learn it was published in 1787. I'm intrigued, because it predates what I thought of as the "Romantic Movement" by a number of decades.

13. La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) by Cesare Pavese

La luna e i falò tells the story of a man (known in his hometown as Anguilla, or Eel) who grew up in the Belbo valley of the Piedmont region of northeastern Italy. As he grew up he dreamed about leaving and seeing the world, which he eventually did, travelling through America and ending up in California. After an absence of nearly twenty years, he returns to his hometown. The story mixes present and past, with his present-day wanderings in the hills and valleys of his youth blended with stories from his childhood and adolescence, as well as a few anecdotes from his life in California. He talks with his friend and former mentor Nuto, who was a young musician when he left and who now has a family and land of his own. He meets Cinto, a young boy with a bum leg, and begins to talk to him about the world, encouraging the boy to hope for a better life in the future. Nuto doesn't think he should do this, for the boy's lameness will hinder the realization of any dreams that he may come to have; he would be better without Anguilla's encouragement. In Anguilla's absence, Nuto has seen the death and suffering brought by war, and has seen the people of their town grow older, living and dying with their dreams unfulfilled.

Anguilla was a bastard child, growing up with a family who took him in to receive a government stipend given for the care of such children. When Padrino, the head of this family, sells the family's small vineyard, he moves on to la Mora, a larger farm where he works and earns a monthly wage. The family that owns the farm has three daughters, Silvia, Irene and Santina. Anguilla was about the same age as Silvia and Irene, and he observed them as they grew up and young men began to enter into their lives, seeing how their hopes rose and fell as they grew older and their fantasies were tempered by the reality of their limited potential for social ascension in rural Italy. Their stories rise to the forefront in the second half of the book, which is mostly devoted to Anguilla's memories of his adolescence working at la Mora.

His conversations with Nuto are fascinating because they contrast two starkly different perspectives: Anguilla has left the community and traveled to the other side of the world, returning two decades later to visit his old home town. Nuto has stayed in Piedmont and sacrificed his love of music for the economic stability of farming. He has also survived the war, seeing his friends and neigbors become communists and fascists, soldiers and members of the resistence. As they talk about the town and the world, they share a rather dark and pessimistic outlook, but the paths they've traveled are very different. Anguilla's seen that life is pretty much the same the world over, that everywhere people struggle and life doesn't often live up to their hopes and dreams. Nuto's stayed in the same place and seen much the same thing happen to people he's known his whole life. I enjoyed seeing their community from this dual perspective, through the eyes of the man who departed and also the man who stayed behind. I thought it added a great deal of depth to Pavese's portrait of rural Italy.

I found this book to be an extremely compelling depiction of small town life. I lived in a small community when I was in the Peace Corps, and I spent a lot of time talking to people about the world that extended beyond the borders of their community, province and country. I wasn't born in Mongolia like Anguilla was in Piedmont, but I still related to his experience in his home town. His conversations with Cinto reminded me of dozens of conversations I had with students who were eager to learn about the places I'd been, and would tell me about their own dreams of one day traveling to South Korea or America. It was hard at times for me to reconcile their dreams with the reality of their lives in the countryside, although, unlike Anguilla in his relationship with Cinto, I shared my role as bearer of news of the greater outside world with the television, which brought news, American TV shows and South Korean soap operas into my students' lives on a daily basis. Still, almost every conversation that Anguilla has with the citizens of his home town made me think of my time in Mongolia. My neighbor and his wife had three daughters, and as I read the stories of Silvia, Irene and Santina, I thought about them and wondered how their lives would turn out, how their classmates and childhood friends would become their suitors, and whether adulthood would bring success and happiness or struggles and frustrations. I would like to have had this book with me when I was there, because it would have made me think a lot more about peoples' past, and how the children in my classroom would one day become the adults I saw at the store, in my home and in the countryside. Anguilla can compare the world he sees in Piedmont as an adult outsider to the one he inhabited as a child and adolescent, remembering people as they were twenty years ago while seeing what they have become. I wouldn't have been able to do that, but a book like this would have reminded me that my friends and neighbors possessed a shared past that contributed to their present lives as I saw them each day.

I've been devoting my two fifteen minute breaks at work to reading books in Italian, sitting at my desk and looking up words that I don't know so that I can make flash cards and study them at home. It took me five or six weeks to read this relatively short book, and as I read, I learned a lot of words related to rural Italy, its plants and animals, and farm and vineyard labor. I was excited to read a book with a countryside setting, because I enjoy learning words that relate to rural life.

14. Vida de Santa María de Egipciaqua (The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt) by Anonymous

I'm reading Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora (a series of poetic representations of miracles carried out by the Virgin Mary) this week for my Medieval Spanish Literature class, and when I was at the library I decided to pick up a copy of this poem about another Santa María. I'd read about it a couple of times in relation to other early Spanish texts, and it seemed like an interesting story. And, hey, what better time to read this poem than now, in the midst of twenty five miracles of the Virgin Mary?

María is born in Egypt and is tremendously beautiful, but also tremendously prone to sin. She runs away from home to practice prostitution in the city, leaving her parents sad and disappointed. In the city, men fight with each other for the right to go to bed with her, and the locals marvel at the dichotomy between her virtuous outward appearance and her life of sin. She eventually convinces a shipload of men on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to carry her with them, giving them sexual favors during the boat ride across the Mediterranean. When she arrives to Jerusalem, she continues to practice her trade, and one day joins in a religious procession that leads her to a cathedral. Her entrance is barred by a group of mysterious knightly guards. She sits down and weeps, clawing at her beautiful hair and face and disfiguring the body that was so beautiful during her life of sin. She begins to repent, praying to the Virgin Mary to take pity on her. She receives instructions to cross the River Jordan and wander the uninhabited desert, carrying with her three loaves of bread that will be her sustenance. As the years pass, she consumes small portions of the bread, her clothes slowly disintegrating into nothing and her body becoming more and more weathered. Her outward appearance, once beautiful, is now hideous. Inside, though, the transition from sin to virtue is just as striking, albeit less visible. After forty years of repentant wandering, she is discovered by a monk who lives at a monastery whose members spend forty days each year hiking the wilderness in solitude. He becomes her confessor and follows a series of divine instructions voiced through her. When she dies, he buries her with the help of a lion and returns to the monastery to tell her story. The abbot weeps.

I'm not a religious person, and I sometimes feel that my lack of familiarity with the Bible prevents me from understanding certain elements of religious stories like Vida de Santa María Egipciaca. Nonetheless, I've been enjoying and appreciating this and other medieval stories of sinners repenting and finding salvation from benevolent Santa María. This poem was filled with remarkable passages: María standing on the city wall, high above the city, displaying her beautiful body for all to see from above; her initial repentance and her fervent appeal for forgiveness; and, in the end, the mighty lion descending from the wilderness to help the monk Don Gozimas dig María's grave. The poem presents a stark reminder to its readers (or listeners, as it was originally destined for oral interpretation) that outward appearance and interior virtue are not necessarily directly related. It also presents its audience with a powerful story of repentance and redemption, and I enjoyed reading the story of a woman who decided to change her ways and become a better person. The language of this poem (Spanish, not Latin) reflects that it was written and copied with a popular audience in mind, and I enjoy thinking that, in a world where the educated members of the Church read and wrote in Latin, a story like this was put to paper so that it might be told to those members of society who weren't necessarily literate. I've really enjoyed reading old texts like this, imagining them recited to rural, illiterate audiences in medieval Spain, and thinking about how different I am from the men and women for whom this poem was originally transcribed from French into Spanish.

Libraries are amazing: it's remarkable to think that in the year 2011, in the United States, I can walk to the library on my lunch break and find a copy of a hagiographic poem written in the middle of the 13th century on the other side of the world. Not only that, but I had my choice of a few different editions of this poem. I chose a very straightforward volume, without introductory materials or footnotes, published in Barcelona in 1907. The pages were crisp and clean (reflecting how few times this book has been pulled from the shelf in the past century, I'm sure), and the first page of the medieval manuscript was included in the original Gothic lettering. The text itself was clear and transcribed directly from the original manuscript, with many of the orthographic peculiarities inherent to a period before written Spanish became more widespread and systematized.

I agree with you, Matt, about libraries being amazing places!

15. Milagros de Nuestra Señora (The Miracles of Our Lady) by Gonzalo de Berceo

Gonzalo de Berceo holds the rather remarkable distinction of being the first Spanish poet known by name. In an era of medieval anonymity, he did reference himself as the author of his texts, and left enough biographical details sprinkled through his religious poetry that scholars have been able to piece together a reasonable portrait of his life. He was attached to the Benedictine monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, where he worked as a deacon and later as a member of the clergy. In truth, the religious terms confuse me. In the introduction to my edition of his Milagros, his status is described in the following way: "he was not a monk, rather a priest, a secular clergyman, but literate." So he worked for the church, and he knew how to read and write. He may have studied at the University of Palencia, which was founded in 1212, sometime before 1220.

Berceo's poetry is written in a style known as cuaderna vía, with clusters of four rhymed verses of fourteen syllables each. This type of verse was employed by educated members of the clergy whose practice of writing and reciting poetry was known as the "mester de clerecía" (ministry of clergy). These educated poets' style and verse contrasted with that of the jesters whose style, known as "mester de juglaría" is seen in early Spanish epic poems such as the Cantar de Mio Cid. The jesters generally grouped their verses into thematic units of varying length, and used assonance rather than full rhyme in their verses. The jesters and the clergy in the practice of their poetic "ministries" did find themselves in direct competition for the ears of their popular audience, with both forms often recited orally in public spaces. In the case of a guy like Berceo, this required composing religious stories that would be interesting enough to attract peoples' attention away from the heroic awesomeness of epics concerning heroes like Rodrigo Ruy Díaz and Fernán González. When I was in college, I remember that there were some preachers who would set up shop on campus in central, plaza-esque locations, drawing large crowds of listeners who objected to their baiting, incendiary comments. They had to compete with other student organizations who sometimes gave away free food or other goodies in order to entice people to sign up for their functions or join their fraternal organizations. People passed out fliers. Sometimes there were other forms of entertainment. When I think about the Spain of Berceo, I like to think about him in the same sort of setting, competing for the ears of the townsfolk with jesters reciting epics, as well as monks from other religious orders spreading their particular version of the Word.

There are twenty five Miracles in my edition, and in them, the Virgin Mary shows her capacity to forgive sins and absolve sinners, helping many different men straighten their paths through life and find eternal salvation. They are taken from Latin and possibly French sources, and Berceo often mentions these writings that he has converted into Spanish. In many cases, a sinner, such as a thief, happens to have one virtue: he is devoted to the Virgin and he feels properly ashamed when he comes face to face with her image. When he's made to pay the price for his wicked acts, Mary remembers his devotion to her and comes to his aid, often bringing him back from the grave so that he can mend his ways and return to the righteous path. The fan favorite (in my Medieval Spanish Literature class) is a story where a monk on a pilgrimage lays with a woman, then is visited by a messenger of the devil disguised as an angel. He's instructed that the only way to absolve his soul of his sin is to cut off the offending member, then slit his throat. María comes to his aid and brings him back to life, and the water is once again able to flow through the hose like before. My favorite Milagro is the last one, which is an early telling of the Faust story. A man, Teófilo, sees his position in the community negatively effected by the arrival of a new bishop, and so makes a pact with the devil, signing his name to seal the deal. He of course comes to regret this, repent, and pray to María for forgiveness. She must use the full extent of her powers to obtain the document from the depths of Hell and help Teófilo rehabilitate his soul.

I've enjoyed reading some of the earliest extant Spanish texts over the past month or so, and am beginning to feel more familiar with Spanish as it was written nearly a millenium ago. It's been fun to read through poems and say the words to myself, imitating medieval pronounciation. I'm also beginning to get used to a lot of the images, themes and topoi that are repeated across many of the different surviving texts. I wouldn't exactly recommend books like this or Santa María Egipciaca to my friends, but I enjoy experiencing a language that I love in its earliest written forms.

16. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (The Museum of Eterna's Novel) by Macedonio Fernández

Macedonio Fernández was of aristocratic Argentine stock, and studied law at the University of Buenos Aires. He was also interested in philosophy, and maintained an epistolary relationship with William James which he broke off due to some sort of odd impropriety on the part of the American philosopher. He set off to Paraguay in his youth to found a utopian society in the wilderness, an experience which ended in failure and a hasty retreat to Buenos Aires. He married a woman named Elena de Obieta, who died in 1920, when Macedonio was 36. He wrote a poem about her death entitled Elena Bellamuerte, investigating the relationship between life, death, love and oblivion. If a person survives in loving memory, then death is not of that person, death, in that it exists, is perhaps the most trivial thing that can happen to a person. He also wrote a short correlary to that poem which goes like this:

Love does not conquer all given it cannot
Break the branch with which Death reaches out.
Yet Death conquers little
If in the heart of Love its fear dies.
Yet Death conquers little, given it cannot
Enter without fear in breast bearing Love
For Death governs Life; Love governs Death.

The enduring presence of Elena in his memory, and his desire to utilize the written word to perpetuate her existence, using love and memory to conquer death, was a major motivation in Macedonio's writing. Her death also affected his personal life in a significant way: he spent the next two and a half decades without fixed residence, living in a series of pensions and cheap hotels. And, for a brief period in the 1920s, he was something of a flagbearer for the literary vanguard of Buenos Aires. It's fun to think about a young Jorge Luis Borges running around the city, planting leaflets for Macedonio's bizarre candidacy for President of the Republic of Argentina, or sitting with him late at night in a dirty, cheap pension house, eating alfajores and drinking mate while discussing metaphysics to the music of Macedonio's guitar. The influence of Macedonio on Borges was certainly fundamental to his later career as a writer, and many people go so far as to say that Jorge Luis Borges is himself nothing more than a creation of Macedonio Fernández. Here is an interesting article about the relationship between the two authors in life and literature: http://quarterlyconversation.com/macedonio-fernandez-jorge-luis-borges.

While I can say that I read all the pages of this book, written over the course of many years and published posthumously, I hardly feel that I understood even a fraction of the author's words. He has a way with words, but it's a very difficult, convoluted way. Maybe if Góngora wrote a metaphysical novel it would have been something like this. Sometimes I read ten pages and stopped to think about what had happened, realizing that I had understood nothing. After 150 pages of prolgues in which the author ponders the act of literary creation and the writer-reader relationship from many, many different perspectives, the novel begins (on page 280 of my 420-page edition of this book). By this time I was familiar with the characters that would later live on the estate, leaving one day to conquer Buenos Aires in the name of Beauty: I wanted to imagine El Presidente to be the old Macedonio, the one who lived with his wife and then mourned her death, striving to keep her memory alive through his love. I wanted Quizagenio (Maybegenius) to be Macedonio at the height of his fame, chatting with Xul Solar in neocriollo in a cafe and hovering above the Florida-Boedo literary-ideological conflict as a middle-aged eccentric who possibly was a genius. Eterna as Elena, as she lives on in El Presidente's mind, was familiar to me as a carryover of sorts from the poem, Elena Bellamuerte, that I enjoy so much. And Dulce-Persona? Well, as I was reading this and trying to make sense out of it, I came across an article explaining that, contrary to popular belief, Macedonio Fernández did have another extended relationship after Elena's death, with a woman named Consuelo Bosch. Here is an article about the "secret love" of Macedonio Fernández: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1236429 The writer of this article opines that Consuelo, not Elena, is the Eterna of this Museum of Macedonio. I, on the other hand, want to believe that Macedonio's two loves may relate to two different characters in the Museum, with Elena as Eterna and Consuelo as Dulce-Persona. There is a prologue (among so many others) that documents the only meeting between Eterna and Dulce-Persona, which contains the following paragraph:

"And also one morning Dulce-Persona tried wearing her hair in braids, which she never used, like that of Eterna, and in the end she undid them and went back to her own as she told herself with generous admiration: 'only on her do they look good, although she is 39 and I am 19. May you love her, and caress my head nothing more, but always'."

I imagine Macedonio living with and perhaps loving Consuelo, yet unwilling to forget Elena; I imagine Consuelo willing to share Macedonio with his deceased wife, in a way that she might say something like the statement above. I thought about this possible relationship between life and novel as I read, and it seemed to stand up pretty well, especially in the two female characters' connection with the two leading men, El Presidente and Quizagenio (both of whom I saw as different Macedonios). There is love expressed for both Eterna and Dulce-Persona, and I was interested to see how both of these rather abstract beings were loved by two rather abstract Macedonios. But again, so much of this book made so little sense to me, I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I read it again. No matter who these people are, there is one more relationship between life and literature that I thought about a lot as I read this: Macedonio mentions Cervantes and Don Quijote at least a half dozen times in the prologues. As I think about his life and his work as a writer, I can think of no more quixotic individual in the world of letters. His passion for his deceased wife, along with his musings on the death-defying power of love, both strike me as entirely fitting for a 20th century reincarnation of Don Quijote. This book, and Macedonio's love(s), I believe, should be read in relation to Don Quijote's wanderings and his love for Dulcinea.

While I struggled with the Museum, I had no problem understanding and enjoying the biographical information the Cátedra edition of this book provided, and I now have many more reasons to consider Macedonio Fernández one of the more fascinating authors of the past century. He's justifiably famous for his oversized influence on future generations, and while I did enjoy this book, I think that at a time when I've got a lot on my plate, I need Macedonio in smaller, more digestible segments. Reading El Museo in bits and pieces, in the evenings when I was tired after a day at work, or a chapter (or prologue) here and there, made it extremely difficult for me to feel the connection with the author that I wanted to feel. I think I'll spend some time in the library looking for some books or articles that will give me a better idea of what it was like to know Macedonio Fernández as he existed in his brief time as a godfather figure to the literary vanguard of Buenos Aires. Then, some day, when I've got a lot of time on my hands, I'll take another trip to El Museo.

#32: I already have The Museum of Eterna's Novel in the BlackHole. I am glad to see that you enjoyed the book, Matt. Thanks for a great review!

17. Haute surveillance (Deathwatch) by Jean Genet

I'm a collector (hoarder?), and as I've transitioned from youth to adulthood, my collecting interests have shifted from Marvel cards, baseball cards and basketball cards to books, mostly foreign language books. This is a great time to be a collector, because the internet makes so many books available to you, and with relatively little money, you can buy books that will bring you a great deal of pleasure. I've developed a system of internet search terms that I use to both hunt down the books I already know I want, and also browse collections of booksellers that might have books that interest me. On top of all that, I've got a really great used book store here in town. I imagine the owner almost as a curator: when I walk back in that little cubbyhole where he keeps his foreign language stock, I know I'm going to find a few books that I will immediately buy. Lately he's had an incredible selection of French books, and every now and then I'll find a book in Spanish or Italian that I will purchase without second thought. I generally go in there with a set amount of money I feel I can spend, and walk out with a couple of books. I also make mental notes of the books I'll go back and buy when I've just gotten paid, or when I receive some unexpected financial windfall. And, when all else fails, when I learn of an intriguing new (or old) author I've just got to read, I'll hit up one of the better research libraries in the world (yay for college towns). Sometimes they've got first editions of books that I've seen listed on the internet for hundreds or even thousands of dollars; right now I've got a first edition of Osvaldo Lamborghini's El fiord sitting on my bookshelf, and it's like being able to check out that one Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card I always wanted and hold on to it for a while.

As I shop and browse, I start to see patterns in the availability of certain authors. There are some authors who were so widely-published and (relatively) famous that I will be able to find their books almost wherever I look. Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, I can expect to see their books on the shelves of almost any used bookstore with a decent collection. Then there are those authors who are "cult favorites" and whose books are harder to track down. I once found a reasonably-priced copy of a Roberto Arlt book and excitedly snapped it up. Just the other day I bought a compilation of plays by Alfred Jarry for $4.95 and was pretty happy about it. These are the sort of authors whose books might appear from time to time if I keep making the rounds. Then there are the rare authors whose books I can't find in the stores, and, moreover, their books are always checked out from the library. I've been looking for a copy of Pedro Lemebel's Tengo miedo torero for years, and it's just never there. I had to break down and buy a copy of Elena Garro's Recuerdos del porvenir because I could never get a copy from the library. I'm going to tentatively place Jean Genet between the "cult classics" and the "unobtainables." I read an article about him a few months ago and decided I would like to read either Notre-Dame-des-fleurs or Miracle de la rose; unfortunately, both books have proven difficult to obtain. I looked at the due dates on them at the library and I finally decided I'd go up and have a look through the books that weren't checked out. I chose the short, one-act play Haute surveillance because I liked the cover and the description on the back sounded interesting. I thought it'd be a nice introduction to a new author, and would tide me over until those other books were returned.

Three men share a jail cell: Yeux-verts (Green Eyes) has murdered a woman and will be executed; his cellmates, Maurice and Lefranc, are petty criminals and will be released soon. Yeux-verts is clearly the top dog in the cell due to the weight of the crime that he carries on his shoulders, and the other two men (Maurice, at seventeen years old, is hardly a man) both look up to him in their own way. Maurice fawns over him, while Lefranc hides his admiration behind a mask of contempt. They talk about Yeux-verts' woman on the outside and whether he will confer to them the right to possess her in his absence; they talk about the other big dog in the prison hierarchy, Boule de Neige (Snowball), who has also murdered and who maintains a relationship of mutual respect with Yeux-verts. Boule de Neige never appears in the play, but he does send a few cigarettes Yeux-verts' way, and when the guard drops them off, Yeux-verts tells him that he, the prison guard, can go ahead and have dibs on his woman. His cell mates can't understand how such respect can be granted to someone on the other side. In truth, the guard, a working man who is doing his job and bearing his mediocre lot in life each day as he puts up with the prisoners he watches over, has more in common with Yeux-verts than the petty criminals would believe. Both men are living out the lives they've been thrust into, condemned murderer and working guard, whereas the other two prisoners are jealous of the prestige of Yeux-verts and would give anything to be able to be looked at by others the way they look at him. Maurice and Lefranc keep picking on each other, each one trying to make the other feel bad about what a lowly piece of shit he is. Yeux-verts presides over the room with the enormity of his crime and future death sentence. The ending is a violent one, with one of the other men lashing out in a misguided attempt to attain the level of prestige he attributes to Yeux-verts and his crime.

I really enjoyed this short conversation between three criminals. The plot revolved around the two petty criminals' desire to be like Yeux-verts, and their conversation provided insight into what that would mean and whether they could actually ascend to his level in the way they desired. In social relationships the world over, there's always that one person who everyone wants to be like. Lots of people, both kids and adults, try to follow in the footsteps of those they admire, but they often don't realize that the path they're imitating wasn't necessarily a chosen path in the first place. Maurice and Lefranc badly want to be like Yeux-verts, but they don't realize that half the reason why he's so respected in the prison hierarchy is because he is condemned to die for a savage act committed without premeditation. He didn't plan to kill and be condemned to die so that he could socially dominate two petty thieves in a prison cell while he waits to stand trial. If one of them were to commit a murder intentionally, so that he too could be cool and prestigious as he sat in prison waiting to die, would that really be the result?

I'm happy to have read this book and I look forward to reading more books by Jean Genet. He has an interesting story, and I enjoy literature written by people living in the margins of society. I also learned some cool new 1940s French prison slang. Now I'm ready to read more books by him, and I'm finding that maybe his books aren't as hard to track down as I thought. I just found a copy of his play Les nègres on the internet for cheap, so that'll probably be the next book of his I read.

18. El conde Lucanor (Tales of Count Lucanor) by Don Juan Manuel

I went into this book with low expectations because, after reading the introductory biography of Don Juan Manuel, I wasn't sure how much I would like him and his collection of medieval exempla. He came off as arrogant and super-serious, and his constant political scheming was off-putting as well. I imagined him as one of the haughty noble enemies of El Cid, a product of the conservative high nobility of medieval Spain whose vanity and pride bred conflict with the lower strata of society. I mean, he was the nephew of wise King Alfonso X himself, so he must have come up in the very lap of luxury, consorting with princes, becoming an expert falconer (he loved falconry) and practicing for an adulthood full of political intrigue. Nothing in the pages of this book did much to dispel my mental image of Don Juan Manuel, but as I read, I found myself caring less and less whether I would have liked the man, because I found a lot to like in his writing. He takes himself very seriously, but his conception of morality is less reliant on high birth and nobility and more reliant on good deeds and honor than I expected. Maybe he was arrogant and haughty, but if he wasn't, he probably wouldn't have signed his works, included detailed catalogues of everything he wrote in his prologues, and given so much biographical information about himself in his various manuscripts. It took a man like him (or like his uncle Alfonso X) to rise up out of medieval anonymity, leaving behind a consolidated collection of medieval thought, and also an idea of the writer himself.

El Conde Lucanor is a series of fifty stories with morals, taken from a wide variety of sources. There are interpretations of Aesop's fables, traditional Arabian stories, stories about famous Spaniards like Fernán González and Álvar Fáñez, and other tales from the European tradition. The stories begin with Count Lucanor asking his advisor Patronio for advice on a certain situation he's facing, and each story serves to help him make an honorable and just decision. When each story ends, Don Juan steps in to say that he approves of the message and thought it wise to include it in this collection, summarizing the moral of the story in a few lines of (mediocre) poetry. There were some stories that I especially liked:

--Stories about obtaining honor through one's deeds in life. I was glad to see that Don Juan believed that every man, regardless of his social position, was capable of living a highly honorable life. It reminded me of Sancho Panza's refrain "no con quien naces, sino con quien paces" (not with whom you're born, rather with whom you consort).

--Stories about not resting on your laurels as you grow older because there's a war going on outside no man is safe from, and since doing battle with Moors in Spain is the most honorable thing to do, that's what you've got to do. There were a couple of these where Count Lucanor was like, "hey, I've got all I need right now, let me just sit back and chill." Patronio does not advise him to do this, reminding him that Fernán González once felt the same way, but was convinced of the wrongness of such laziness in the face of Moorish threats in medieval Spain.

--Stories that were especially graphic in nature. There's one where a man succesively butchers his dog, cat and horse in order to illustrate that if his orders aren't followed, there will be consequences. In another, a man is struck with leprosy due to his sins and makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, accompanied by his loyal vassals. He thinks they're disgusted by him, and to prove the point that they love him and are with him no matter what, they drink from a basin of water they've just used to wash his decaying body.

--The story of Don Yllán, an alchemist in Toledo who accepts the Dean of Santiago as his pupil in the dark arts. The Dean keeps getting promoted up the church hierarchy, and promises Don Yllán that he'll repay him for his teachings if he's just patient and stays with him as he moves up the ladder. He never does repay Don Yllán, and eventually he pays a hefty price for his ungratefulness. Jorge Luis Borges included this story in his Universal History of Infamy, and I was surprised and happy to encounter it here.

At times I was bored by the repetition, but the stories are all short and relatively entertaining, so I never had any desire to put the book down. The last collection of exempla I read was a newer translation of Arabian Nights, and I remember that I really enjoyed how, in that book, stories fit inside of other stories like a set of Russian dolls. I missed that here, because in this book, it's just one story after another, with limited connections between the various exempla. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading this collection of popular tales from 14th century Spain, and I hope that I'll recognize little elements of Don Juan's influence when I go back and re-read books I like from the Spanish Golden Age.

After the exempla, there are four more chapters. Don Juan writes that, while his stories are enjoyable and straightforward and all, he's got a friend who has been bothering him to write down some darker stuff. Stuff that the simpler mind might have trouble understanding. So he starts listing proverbs that are more and more difficult to unravel. Some of them are almost like tongue twisters in the way that they build on a specific and repeated word: La razón es razón de razón; Por razón es el omne cosa de razón; La razón da razón. Others, through their syntactic and semantic twists and turns, prefigure some of the complexity of the Spanish Baroque. As a whole, it's quite a collection of proverbs, and I'm glad that Don Juan decided to include this glossary at the end of his book. I'll refer to it when I read Don Quijote again and the proverbs start flowing out of Sancho's mouth, and I'll close with a few of my favorites:

Todas las cosas naçen pequeñas y creçen; el pesar nasçe grande et cada día mengua. (All things are born small and grow; grief is born large and each day lessens)

Todos los omnes se engañan en sus fijos et en su apostura et en sus vondades et en su canto. (All men kid themselves with respect to their sons, their handsomness, their good qualities and their singing voice)

Los cavalleros et el aver son ligeros de nombrar et de perder, et graves de ayuntar et más de mantener. (Knights and possessions are easy to list and to lose, and hard to amass and harder still to maintain)

Qui faze jurar al que bee que quiere mentir, ha parte en l' pecado. (He who takes an oath from a man whom he knows wants to lie, has a part in the sin)

Cuerdo es quien se guía por lo que contesçió a los que passaron. (Wise is he who guides himself by what happened to others in the past)

19. Libro de Apolonio (The Book of Apollonius) by Anonymous

I was at the bookstore the other day and saw a nice, affordable edition of this poem written in Spain in the middle of the 13th century. It was written in the cuaderna vía style (groupings of four rhymed verses of fourteen syllables each) utilized by Gonzalo de Berceo in his Milagros de nuestra Señora, and I was interested to see the style utilized in a different, less overtly religious composition. The story of Apollonius of Tyre may have originally been derived from an ancient Greek manuscript, and was very popular throughout Europe during medieval times. It is thought that the source for this translation was the Latin Historia Apolonii Regis Tyri, although there is also evidence of the influence of other Latin sources. Like a lot of the medieval books I've been reading, the aim of the Libro de Apolonio is to both entertain and educate.

The book begins with virtuous King Apolonio traveling to Emperor Antíoco's court to ask for the emperor's daughter's hand in marriage. Due to his sharp intellect, he's able to determine that the emperor is living in incestuous sin with his daughter, and he conveys this knowledge to the emperor himself, enraging him. Apolonio is now a marked man, and he sets off with a ship full of brave men and supplies. He stops first in Tarso, winning the favor of the locals by helping them resolve a crisis of famine. Then, back on the open sea, his ship wrecks and he is the only survivor. He washes up on the shores of Pentapolín, a poor fisherman gives him some cloth to cover his nakedness, and he plays some ball with the locals (including the King of Pentapolín) on the beach. His virtue and lofty character are apparent in all he does, and the king recognizes him as a noble man. Eventually, after their relationship deepens, the king offers his daughter to Apolonio. Around this time, they learn that Antíoco has died (along with his daughter). So Apolonio is free to come and go as he pleases, and decides to return to his homeland with his pregnant wife. Unfortunately, his wife appears to have died during childbirth, so they nail her into a coffin and throw her overboard. When they reach dry land, Apolonio gives his baby daughter Tarsiana to some old friends back in Tarso, asking them to raise her. He sets off for Egypt and spends more than a decade wandering the desert in peregrination. His daughter has a lot of bad luck: after the woman who has raised her tries to murder her, she's kidnapped and sold to a man who wants to make money off of her body. Fortunately, she is just as virtuous as her father, and is able to use her sharp wits to retain her virtue and make money singing and playing music while she waits to be freed from her captive existence. As the story progresses, the wandering men and women (Apolonio, his not-dead-after-all wife and Tarsiana) are eventually reunited.

This was a fun story. In medieval times many authors represented man's time on earth as a peregrination in preparation for the next life, and Apolonio's odyssey through rough seas and familial difficulties was the perfect vehicle for the development of this "homo viator" theme. I found it interesting that, even though many of the Christian concepts of sin, virtue and salvation are present, and even though this is an overtly religious text meant to instruct its audience on how to live a virtuous life, these characters are not Christian. At one point, the auther mentions that Apolonio would be held in God's highest graces if only he were a believer and a Christian. This caught me by surprise, and as I thought about it, I wondered if I would have ever noticed how the lives of these characters of a bygone, pre-Christian era were so freely and effectively utilized in a Christian text such as this one.

There were other moments in the Libro de Apolonio that I found to be particularly compelling. I really liked the opening scene and the description of both Antíoco's incest and Apolonio's discovery of this mortal sin. The author associates Apolonio's educated upbringing with his ability to discern that the king is living in sin, and the strength of his character prevents him from turning a blind eye to incest. Calling the emperor out certainly brings him a world of trouble, but it also presents Apolonio as a man who is willing to act on his convictions, no matter the consequences. I also enjoyed the story of Tarsiana. Not only did she have to rely on her musical talent and ingenuity in order to maintain her virtue, but in her reunion with her father, which begins with neither one knowing the other's true identity, she engages in an extended conversation with him in which she proposes a series of riddles, hoping to entertain him and bring him out of the abject depression he's fallen into as a result of the supposed death of his only daughter. No matter how many riddles she asks him, he won't cheer up, and she eventually breaks down and tells him the story of her own miserable existence, how she doesn't know her parents and has been kidnapped and sold into slavery, having to resort to her talent in song and music in order to avoid prostitution. Her journey through life, set in the larger story of Apolonio's peregrination across land and sea, was a nice change of pace and made the final family reunion all the more satisfying.

I'm glad to have read a story that is not only relevant to the development of Spanish literature, but is also found in nearly all other European literary traditions. Apollonius's story is included in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, written in 1390, and was later utilized by Shakespeare in his play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Appolonius's story is also used as a source for Shakespeare's plays Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors (according to Wikipedia). So that's cool; I like thinking that, now that I'm familiar with Apollonius and the medieval Spanish iteration of his trials and tribulations, I'll start recognizing his story in other stories written in other languages.

20. Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

When I finished reading Ferdydurke in English last month, I put in a request for an interlibrary loan of the original Spanish translation, done in Buenos Aires in 1946 by the author himself, along with a group of his literary acquantances (including the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera). Suddenly it was here and I only had a month to read it and return it, so I found myself hurriedly re-reading it last week. It's the first time I've ever read two different translations, in two different languages, of the same book. It was interesting; would any translator have dared change the name of the protagonist from Joey to Pepe? Being your own translator, I suppose, allows you a great deal of liberty, given that if you think something should be a certain way, since you wrote it in the first place, your reasoning will be pretty much always be justifiable.

I enjoyed both versions; it felt like the same book, and I suppose that this Spanish translation justified my thoughts that the recent English translation was probably a good one. Gombrowicz's preface was really great, in that he clearly explained what his book was about and why he wrote it. He summarizes his project by stating: "Here the author, confessing his own immaturity, obtains--I believe--greater sovereignty and liberty with respect to form and, at the same time, puts the mechanism of his immaturity on display." He also explains that he doesn't fully believe that his work will be well-received at the time of its publication: "I very much doubt that my reasons will be shared by the consecrated masters of both literatures (Polish and South American), but I fix my hopes in the masters who have not yet been born." He came off as very modest and passionate about writing, and I think he probably didn't give himself enough credit; I have a feeling many of the consecrated masters he spoke of enjoyed Ferdydurke immensely. You can find his preface (in Spanish) here: http://www.literatura.org/wg/ferdywg.htm. In closing, he states:

"I'm thrilled that Ferdydurke has been born in Spanish in this way, and not in the sad workshops of the book business! One last word: it's likely that my book will pass by unnoticed, but surely some of my friends will feel obligated to say a word or two, those sorts of things that are said when an author publishes a book. I would like to ask them to say nothing. No, don't say a thing, because, due to all different kinds of falsifications, the social situation of the so-called "artist" has in our times become so pretentious that everything that you could say to an artist sounds false and, the more sincerity and simplicity you put into your "I liked it a lot" or "I loved it," the greater the embarrassment for the artist and for you yourself. Keep quiet, then, I beg you. Keep quiet in hopes of a better future. For now--if you want to express that you liked it--, simply touch your right ear when you see me. If you touch your left ear I'll know that you didn't like it, and the nose will mean that your judgement is somewhere in between. With a simple and discreet movement of my hand I'll thank you for the attention you have paid to my work and thus, avoiding uncomfortable and even ridiculous situations, we'll understand each other in silence. I give my warmest greetings to everyone."

I once again had a great time reading this book. I also learned that it was made into a movie in 1991. Crispin Glover is in it. I had no idea how Crispin Glover could have managed to get involved in a Polish production of Ferdydurke. I thought, wait, is Crispin Glover Polish? He's not, and it turns out that this movie (also known by the title "30 Door Key") is in English, even though it was filmed in Poland. I would like to watch it, although it looks quite difficult to obtain. Some day.

21. Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto

I've been spending a lot of breaks and lunch hours at the library over the past couple of months, and as the weeks have passed I've amassed a couple of dozen really intriguing books. It's been hard to choose what to read next, and as I began Zama, I wondered whether I would enjoy it, or whether I would end up wishing I'd chosen something else from the embarrassment of Latin American fiction riches I've been stockpiling. Luckily, I was able to devote a couple of hours to this book on a sunny Saturday morning, and as I read, my misgivings melted away. I was engrossed by the trials and tribulations of Diego de Zama in his isolated administrative post along the upper Paraná (I love books set in or around Paraguay), and I spent every free moment over the next couple of days reading this book. It was really, really good!

Zama is an educated employee of the Spanish monarchy who has been assigned to Asunción. His wife is in Buenos Aires, and he would like to be promoted and transferred from his frontier post. His story is split into three chapters: 1790, 1794 and 1799. In 1790, Zama is boarding with a family who has a few daughters, one of whom is having an affair with a man in town. Zama himself attempts to enter into an affair with Luciana, the wife of a landowner who spends a good chunk of his time away from her at his country estate. At the very beginning of the book he accidentally sees her naked as she's bathing, and shortly thereafter her husband challenges him to a duel which is never consummated. He also thinks a lot about his wife and son, and hopes that if he bides his time for just a little while longer, he'll get a promotion and be reunited with them. He feels guilty for acting on his impulses and pursuing Luciana, and is sometimes relieved when things don't work out quite as fully as he would like during their semi-lustful meetings. His job is rather unfulfilling.

Four years later, he's still doing the same thing, but he's got about two years of backlogged pay that never comes. He is in a relationship with a poor widowed Spanish woman who is his maid, as well as the mother of his young son. He says that he wanted to bring a child into the world. He eventually breaks off his relationship with her and moves into a new residence, owned by a man who never gives him straight answers to his questions. He is increasingly running out of creditors who are willing to assume that, since he's employed by the Royal Administration, he'll eventually be good for his lodging and the food he's consuming at local establishments. He eventually comes to rely on the charity of his young secretary, who is also a writer.

Then in 1799 he goes off into the bush in search of a man named Vicuña Puerto who must be brought to justice. He hopes that, where bureaucratic maneuvering failed, military heroism will finally allow him to obtain his much-longed for promotion and a trip back up the river to civilization.

The style is very straightforward and direct, with short sentences grouped into sections rarely longer than two pages, separated by line breaks. I thought about how different this book was from earlier Latin American novels set on the edges of civilization, like Doña Bárbara or José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine: di Benedetto does utilize the occasional guaraní word where appropriate, and he does firmly insert the reader into the world of the upper Paraná region, but he shows no great descriptive impulse to name all of the wonderful and exotic flora and fauna of the region. I read in an article about this book which stated that perhaps it was never translated into English because, during the "boom" years of Latin American literature, it wasn't "magically real" enough. However, it felt very, very real, and just because the surrounding world isn't exuberantly named and described doesn't mean that this book isn't exotic. The breaks in time between the three episodes in the life of Diego de Zama effectively emphasize just how long he's been stuck in Asunción: in each day of each of the three years documented in this book, you can feel his frustration at how life is dragging by, days, months and years passing as he waits for the word from above which will allow him to get on the boat and leave. The book is dedicated "To the victims of the wait," and, as you jump forward first four years, then five, you get a pretty good feeling of what it's like to be one such victim.

I also enjoyed how this book took a very Argentine theme, the struggle between civilization and savagery, and breathed new life in it, nearly a century after authors such as Domingo Sarmiento, Esteban Echeverría and Juan Hernández first told the stories of men and women on the frontiers of Argentina. Zama waits and waits to be called back into civilization, and as he waits, his own civility recedes. In 1790, he's hesitant about betraying his wife and gets excited every time the boat pulls into port in the hope that he will receive a letter from her; in 1794, he explains that he wanted to be a father, again, there where he was living, and so that's what he did. In 1799, he sets off into the wilderness in a Heart of Darkness-style descent into the hallucinatory and savage Paraguayan bush, in search of a Kurtz-like man who is being hunted in indigenous territory by the civilizing Spanish forces. His story fits comfortably into the canon of Argentine literature without feeling old-fashioned or nostalgic. I certainly don't think you would find an ending similar to Zama's in any book written in the 19th century. That ending, by the way, is awesome. Shocking, sad, and altogether fitting, it caps off a remarkable trip into the wild in search of a mysterious and elusive fugitive.

And, while this book treads into familiar territory with respect to civilization and savagery, it also anticipates one of the major themes of Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century: exile. The book documents nearly ten years of Diego de Zama's exile in Asunción as he waits for the word that never comes, which would allow him to retrace his journey down the Paraná to Buenos Aires, and continue on to a more distinguished post in a more civilized and familiar territory. Two decades after this book was written, Di Benedetto was tortured by the Videla regime and forced into exile. Here, long before the military dictatorships and subsequent banishment of a great many Latin American artists, he presents a portrait of life in exile that is just as fresh, if not fresher, a half century after its publication. While this book has never been translated into English, a translator named Esther Allen is apparently working on an English edition that will hopefully be published in the next couple of years. When (if) it is, I hope it finds an audience, because it is a remarkable bridge between old and new, as well as a great existential novel. Maybe the fact that in the 80s he was penpal to a young Roberto Bolaño will bring a little extra press his way if this book is published. I hope so, because Zama is a book that deserves it.

Matt, I always enjoy your reviews. I have barely touched Latin American and Spanish literature, and I use your reviews as a guide for some day when I am brave enough to try more. Right now I am simply trying to finish Don Quijote.

@39: Thanks! Good luck with Don Quijote, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

@40: I'm loving it! I can't believe I waited this long to check it out. At the same time, it's also tiring, since I still regularly consult the dictionary, so I keep taking breaks with books in English that are nowhere near as satisfying but less effort.

22. Débora by Pablo Palacio

In this short novella, published in 1927, Pablo Palacio pulls a character from his mind: "Lieutenant, you've stayed with me for years. Today I tear you from me so that you may be a source of derision for some and of melancholy for others." He then writes about a day in the Lieutenant's life. The man thinks about women and how he'd like to have one, daydreams about money, wanders around the city, and meets a friend of his, who tells him about an experience he had with a woman whom he visited one day. He eats with the friend, and they part ways. Different parts of the city (unnamed, but most definitely Quito) are described in function of their particular importance in the life of the Lieutenant. Night falls, and the Lieutenant continues to wander the city, without having anything in particular to do. A parenthetical section describes an attempted seduction in which the Lieutenant has a series of meetings with the neice of the owner of the building he lives in. Then, in a brief ending, the Lieutenant's fate is described and Débora, for whom the book is titled, is introduced.

Interspersed with the Lieutenant's story, the author makes a series of comments about the art of writing, pointing out flaws in realist conceptions of what is "real." It took me a while to completely comprehend the dual aims of this book (paint a truly realistic picture of a day in the life of a person, while explaining the author's artistic motivation for doing so), and the first couple of dozen pages were confusing. When I went back and read through the book a second time, they made more sense, and I began appreciating the interplay between the Lieutenant's story and the author's artistic affirmations. After systematically illustrating bits and pieces of reality such as it often is, Palacio concludes his attack on realist conventions:

"And the death knell has already begun to sound. The realist novel is painfully misleading. It abstracts the facts and leaves the text full of empty spaces; it gives them an impossible continuity, because the true facts, the ones that they silence, wouldn't interest anybody."

At this point, we've already seen a series of events in the life of the Lieutenant which would surely have been omitted from said realist novels: daydreams, aimless wanderings through the city streets, and his frustrations regarding the lack of ladies in his life. The downside is, banal reality can indeed be boring. Palacio affirms as much, stating when night falls that, "in effect, the night is empty and follows an empty day." The realists, in saying that they're painting a real picture of the world as it is, are actually depicting something of the exception to the rule: the series of exceptional events that very, very occasionally happen in a person's life; the days that might be the least representative of reality in a life filled with petty daydreams, failed attempts to connect with other people, and mealtimes that are looked forward to as the one part in the day when an idle person such as the Lieutenant justifiably has something to do. Luckily, Palacio has a nice way with words and is more than capable of bringing plenty of life and vigor to his combination of boring protagonist and anti-realist author. The strong presence of the creator throughout the pages of this short book as he points out realism's deficiencies complements the Lieutenant's realistic story and the two stand together as a compelling whole, where they might not have been effective as independent texts.

Last week I read an article about Spanish writers' reaction to early Latin American modernists such as Rubén Darío, which in turn led me to a series of two letters that Juan Valera wrote to the young Nicaraguan poet, praising the cosmopolitan spirit he exhibits in Azul in a mildly condescending way (I see, then, that there isn't an author writing in Spanish more French than you...). The letter, as well as the article, illustrates how hard it was for established Spanish writers, often belonging to the realist persuasion, to accept the new currents of modernity, especially when they came from the former colonies across the Atlantic Ocean. I thought that this short book by Palacio would have been an excellent and extremely timely refutation of the artistic aims of Spain's realist writers, had it been written near the end of the 19th century; in 1927, it at first seemed a bit out of place in a world that was already quite modern. I thought Palacio was beating a horse that had been dead for some time. Maybe not, though. I know hardly anything about Ecuador's literary history, and I wonder what kind of books were being written and printed in Ecuador in the early decades of the 20th century. The only other Ecuadorean novel I've read is Huasipungo, by Jorge Icaza. It was published in 1934, and presents a realistic depiction of injustices committed against indigenous communities in the Ecuadorean highlands. I thought that perhaps other earlier works, if not focusing on indigenous issues, could have at least influenced Icaza with respect to his social realism. I've done my usual Google and Wikipedia searches to try and find more information on social realism in early 20th century Ecuador, and I've found enough to believe that, on the national level, Palacio's refutation of realism may have been more timely than I gave it credit for. The writer Luis A. Martínez is credited in Wikipedia with "bringing realism to Ecuador" through his novel A la costa, published in 1904. Maybe, then, in the twenty years between A la costa and Débora, Ecuador saw a steady stream of mediocre realist fiction, troubling Palacio to the point that he decided to unleash his ordinary Lieutenant and voice his own thoughts on the matter.

23. Libro de buen amor (The Book of Good Love) by Juan Ruiz

In the past couple of months, I've read a handful of medieval Spanish texts. They've all been great. I've been taking a class on medieval literature one evening a week, and I've enjoyed not only reading the books, but learning more about medieval Spain and the culture in which they were born. I had taken this class with the rather specific idea that learning more about Spain's medieval literature would help me better understand Don Quijote, one of my favorite books, as well as the picaresque novels and Golden Age plays that I've read and loved in the past. I do think that the next time I read El Quijote, I'll have plenty more to think about; but I've also found books that I will appreciate and enjoy in their own right for years to come. The Libro de buen amor, written by Juan Ruiz (also know as the Archipreste de Hita) has piqued my interest most of all: it is a book, like Don Quijote, so complex that one couldn't expect to understand and appreciate it all the first time through. It's a compendium of medieval thought, but it also has some surprisingly modern characteristics. Its two manuscripts date to 1330 and 1343, and as the title suggests, it is a book about love, about how to serve women and how to love God.

After an extensive preamble in both verse and prose, the Book of Good Love begins with a story about Greeks and Romans. The Greeks, possessors of laws and knowledge, are approached by the Romans, who want them to share their learnings. The Greeks aren't sure the Romans are ready for their knowledge. They decide that, since they don't speak the same language, they'll have a non-verbal debate with both sides choosing a representative to speak in gestures. The Greeks choose a learned scholar, and the Romans choose a fool. The wise Greek points one finger in the air, and the Roman retorts with three raised fingers; the Greek then displays his open palm, and the Roman responds with a closed fist. The debate ends with the Greek debator concluding that the Romans are indeed worthy of the Greeks' knowledge. Afterwards, both men are asked for their interpretation. The Greek explains: I said there was one God, and the Roman reminded me about the Holy Trinity. I showed him my open palm to remind him of God's mercy and benevolence, and his fist reminded me that God is all-powerful. These Romans are obviously on the same page as us. The Roman, on the other hand, interprets it like this: he threatened to poke my eye out, so I showed him that if he did, I'd poke both his eyes out and knock his teeth out with my thumb. He threatened to slap my ears with his palms and deafen me, and I raised my fist to let him know that I'd beat the crap out of him if he tried anything. One story, multiple interpretations. The poet has already called attention to this multiplicity by stating that his book will provide a series of examples on how to practice good (virtuous, spiritual) love; but since many people who read its pages may not be so virtuous, the sinner can also find a multitude of information on the practice of erotic love as well. I'm sure it was important for him to establish this early on, for perhaps not all possible readings of his book would have been smiled upon in medieval Spain. Without establishing these things from the get-go, this book might not have survived to the present day.

Over the next 1,600 quatrains, the author/protagonist has a series of amorous adventures, first on his own, then with an untrustworthy go-between who cleverly usurps his desired lady, then finally with Trotaconventos (Convent-trotter), his procuress par excellence, who uses reason and many, many allegorical examples to convince women to agree to a romantic rendez-vous with her employer. Her greatest conquest is Doña Endrina, whom she wins for Don Melón (for a while the protagonist is Don Melón instead of the Archipreste, perhaps because the poet wouldn't want to associate his own name with Don Melón's behavior). They go back and forth about whether or not it would be a good idea for Endrina to get with Melón for quite some time, with both women utilizing exempla to illustrate arguments for or against joining with the man. The Melón/Endrina story is based on a 12th century Latin text, Pamphilus de amore, and the fate of Endrina is similar to that of Galatea in the Pamphilus story (they are taken advantage of by their suitors). Unfortunately, the meeting between Melón and Endrina was removed from the manuscripts for one reason or another. After their meeting, the amorous protagonist takes a trip to the countryside, where four country lasses have their way with him, inverting the traditional gender roles and taking the sexual lead in their meetings with the Archipreste. Later, Trotaconventos convinces Juan Ruiz that what he really needs is a nun, and she once again debates the good and the bad of a potential love relationship with a nun in a convent. The nun, too, is won over, but she won't let her suitor cross the bounds of morally good love. This time, there is no consummation.

Many other things happen too: the Archipreste has a conversation with Don Amor, where he complains about all the bad consequences that love has, relating love's negative effects to the cardinal sins. It's not really a debate, because Don Amor doesn't respond to the Archipreste's attacks; he instead explains exactly how he should act toward the women he's interested in and how he can serve them in love. After their conversation is finished, Doña Venus comes along and basically repeats what Don Amor said. Later in the play, there's an allegorical showdown between carnal pleasures and lenten chastity, with Don Carnal leading an army of meats against Doña Cuaresma and her army of fish and crustaceans. Doña Cuaresma wins the battle, driving Don Carnal out of town for a while (around forty days). However, he escapes and comes roaring back on Easter Sunday, accompanied by Don Amor. Outside of the major narrative blocs, there are also songs and poems praising the Virgin Mary and Jesus, and a few other odds and ends, such as a short section that explains why small women are ideal.

I was very happy to have read this book immediately after Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor. Don Juan's book is a series of exempla, 51 in total, which seek to entertain and at the same time educate the reader on how to live morally. In a way, the Libro de buen amor is no different: there are fables, parables and assorted tales wielded by the various characters in their interactions with each other. This book seeks to educate and entertain. And, a moral model is presented. However, from the beginning the Archipreste makes it abundantly clear that there is more than one way to read this book, and the lessons that are taken from it will depend entirely on the reader. There is, essentially, one way that Conde Lucanor is supposed to be read. It's a serious book, the moral lessons are serious, and the reader will become a seriously good person if he follows the advice that Patronio gives Lucanor in exemplum after exemplum. The Book of Good Love can also be read seriously, and moral lessons can be taken from it; but it can be read in other ways as well. The multiplicity of readings and the ambiguity of its moral lessons make the Archipreste's book different from any other medieval book I've read. It has an extra dimension that the books I've read up to now haven't possessed.

One of the secondary articles I've read in my class is Hans Robert Jauss's "The alterity and modernity of medieval literature." He mentions that in many cases, the texts that appeal the most to our modern sensibility are often the ones that are most unique and least representative of the medieval literary mindstate. To the modern reader, the medieval writer often appears to be rather unoriginal, relying on source material to create new versions of stories that aren't really new at all. Originality had a different meaning then, and artists were more concerned with perfecting the known than delving into the new and unfamiliar. In our time, we love it when somebody comes along and does something that feels truly new. This may make it more difficult to appreciate a book like Conde Lucanor, where Don Juan Manuel takes a bunch of stories whose sources have been determined by academics and joins them under the fairly straightforward mold of an advisor responding to the questions of a nobleman. On the other hand, it's remarkable to find a book from the 14th century like the Libro de buen amor that requires an active reader, much like the modern reader, to make choices about how to interpret the text.

24. Tengo miedo torero (My Tender Matador) by Pedro Lemebel

As a college student I spent six months studying and living in Santiago, and Chile was the first place outside of my home country I had the pleasure of visiting. I'll always have a warm place in my heart for Chile, because I made a lot of good friends, had a lot of fun, and learned an awful lot of Spanish during my time there. Although I didn't always act like much of an adult during my time in Chile, it was the first time that I really felt like I'd grown up and was doing adult things. I turned 20 there, which I guess seems more significant now, almost seven years later, than it did then. I lived in a student residence in the neighborhood of Ñuñoa and one day while I was reading a book of short stories by Alberto Fuguet, one of the other students living there came up to me and said something like, "why are you reading that trash? Do you actually like that book?" I said that I wasn't really sure what I liked yet, and that I was happy enough I could read Fuguet's book in Spanish and understand it reasonably well. I asked him what Chilean author I should be reading, and he said, "you should get some books by Pedro Lemebel." His books aren't always easy to find, but I recently obtained a copy of Tengo miedo torero (My Tender Matador) through interlibrary loan.

The hero of the story, the princess so to speak, is La loca del frente, a middle-aged transvestite who rents a spacious home in a lower middle class Santiago neighborhood in 1986. His (her) home is soon invaded by a troupe of young college students, who study on the balcony into the late hours of the night, after the curfew has sounded. She falls in love with one of the students, Carlos, and they have a very friendly, flirty relationship. He's the one who deals with her, apologizing for being too loud or staying too late, or asking her to let them store a bunch of crates of "books" in her house for a while. He also takes her on a trip to the countryside to take some pictures for a "class project" out at Cajón del Maipo, and she packs a picnic and wears a fancy hat and yellow dress. Interspersed with the story of Carlos and La loca del frente is the story of Augusto Pinochet and his wife. Pinochet's wife annoys the crap out of him, talking nonstop about fashion and how her gay assistant read her fortune in the tarot cards and so on. Pinochet is haunted by nightmares. The parallel stories, which show two extremes of the deep divide between pro-and anti-dictatorship Chile, intersect in various ways, with La loca del frente sewing ornate tablecloths for military wives, the Pinochets seeing the picnicing couple in Cajón de Maipo, and both Carlos and Pinochet celebrating their birthday with cake and lots of invitees. These parallels grow in magnitude and the tension increases, both in the relationship between Carlos and La loca and in the suspicious behavior of Carlos and his friends.

It's easy to forget that La loca del frente isn't a lovesick young woman, but an aging transvestite. Her relationship with Carlos is really sweet and romantic, which makes you worry from the beginning that it's about to blow up, considering that Carlos may not even be gay, and he may just be using her (him) to gain access to the house where his friends can meet and do their business and store their "books." You can read for pages and almost forget that this is not a traditional romance, but a romance that may not be a romance between a man and an older cross-dressing man, but their identities are always there, and they makes you nervous. I shared in La loca's nagging feeling that the whole thing was almost too good to be true, and I also shared in her hopes that there would be a happy ending, against her better judgement. This book isn't just a love story, but the love story at its center is a very interesting and compelling one.

It was wonderful to be transported back to Santiago, to streets and neighborhoods I had wandered through seven years ago. Reading about Carlos and his friends on the terrace of La loca's house took me back to late afternoons spent on apartment building balconies, watching the sun set over a city of millions set against some of the tallest mountains of the Andes. This book made me remember and miss Chile, and I really liked the way that the author vividly described his hometown in all of its smoggy, beautiful contradictions. I also thought the book provided a very accurate view of how a variety of Chileans felt about the political state of their nation in the 1980s, a time whose echoes I felt in my relationships with Chileans who were barely born in 1986, but whose families were universally affected in one way or another by military rule. This is a very Chilean book in its themes, but also in its language. It alternates between different registers of Chilean Spanish spoken by different sectors of society, and no matter who was talking, aging transvestites or Augusto Pinochet, they all speak as I remember Chileans speaking.

I'm glad I was finally able to find and read this book. I really enjoyed it, and would recommend it for anyone interested in reading about life in Chile during the later years of the dictatorship. As this book was sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, I came across a couple of passages regarding Lemebel in another book I've been reading on and off, Roberto Bolaño's Entre paréntesis (which I think will be published in English this year). Bolaño twice refers to Lemebel as "my hero" and "the greatest poet of my generation." Here's a passage from an essay about his reationship with Lemebel:

"Nobody speaks a Spanish more Chilean than Lemebel. Nobody extracts more emotions from his Spanish than Lemebel. It's not necessary for Lemebel to write poetry in order for him to be the greatest poet of my generation. Nobody goes deeper than Lemebel. And, as if that weren't enough, Lemebel is valiant, that is, he knows to open his eyes in the darkness, in those territories into which nobody dares enter. How do I know all this, you ask? Easy. I read his books. And after reading them, with emotion, with laughter, with goosebumps, I called him on the telephone and we talked for a long time, an extended conversation filled with golden exclamations, through which I recognized in Lemebel the indomitable spirit of the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, deceased, and the images, like flashes of lightning, of La Araucana, dead, cornered, but brought back to life in Lemebel, and then I knew that this gay writer, my hero, may have ended up on the losing side, but that victory, the sad victory offered by Literature (written with a capital L) was his without doubt. When all those who have denigrated him find themselves lost in the gutter or in the empty void, Pedro Lemebel will continue to shine like a star."

As always, fabulous reviews. Sounds like you are reading a lot of very high-quality works.

45: Thanks! I work right down the street from the main library of my hometown university, which means that on my breaks I can wander the stacks and look for books I've always wanted to read. They have a section devoted to Latin American literature, organized by country, and I like spending time there, finding books new and old. Like a kid in a candy shop...

Sounds wonderful. I am so goal-oriented these days that I don't do much browsing. Of course, the libraries are not so convenient for me either, and a stop for books is usually bundled with a bunch of other errands, so no lingering. Organized by country sounds great. What are some names from Panama?

@47: Chris, I remembered the list of Panamanian authors you gave me last year, and I'm going to look some of them up and make an initial foray into the Panama section. I'll let you know what I find...

25. De la elegancia mientras se duerme (On Elegance while Sleeping) by Emilio Lascano Tegui

A long-forgotten book by one of Ricardo Güiraldes and Oliverio Girondo's buddies? Count me in! I'm surprised and happy that this book was translated into English last year, because if not, I might not have found out about it. After I read about the translation, I went to the library and checked out the original Spanish edition, which incongruously bears the markings of the Buenos Aires publishing house Librerías Anaconda on the front cover, and then on the next page those of Editorial Excelsor, Boulevard Raspail 42, Paris. I would assume that this is meant to further plunge the reader into the world of the narrator, a resident of the town of Bougival, on the banks of the Seine. The book is dedicated to "La Pua," a group of the author's friends which includes the aforementioned Güiraldes and Girondo. Tegui writes that, "These pages, which are those that made me worthy of your friendship, mean a great deal to me, and today, as I separate myself from them for ever, as an offering to the literary chronicle of our time, I intimately dedicate them to you." Opposite this brief dedication is a wood cut print of the author in profile. More such prints are spread throughout the book, and I hope that they made it to the English translation, as they add a nice touch to the overall reading experience.

The book is written in journal form, with the narrator beginning by introducing himself and his Bougival home. As a child he gained some notoriety for spotting more dead corpses floating down the Seine than anyone else, and he reveled in this morbid fame. His journal entries show his great powers of observation, and also a disquieting tendency toward the dark nooks and crannies of life. The closest thing to a recurring character is the carriage driver Raimundo, who lets the narrator join him in the front seat of his carriage and tells him stories as he makes his rounds. He tells him about a man of the church surprised by death in the bed of a mistress, and how he helped a woman condition the scene to make it appear otherwise; he also suggests that the narrator write a book in the style of a journal documenting the syphilitic life and death of Don Juan. In between occasional carriage rides, the narrator recalls and reflects on a series of female neighbors and their peculiarities, and conveys his negative and twisted view of the world that surrounds him. You get the feeling that you're reading the thoughts of a psychopath in gestation. The only time the entries stray from Bougival is a brief recollection of the narrator's service in the French armed forces in Africa. When he comes back, he's brought an illness with him.

It was one of Raimundo's stories, about sixty pages in, that fully won me over and made me realize that this book was indeed what I hoped it to be: he tells of how Marie Roger, one of the narrator's neighbors in Bougival, washed her hands of her husband when he lost his mind. He was truly crazy, and could not even remember his name, so his wife and daughter brought him out and convinced him to get into Raimundo's carriage and take a ride to the city. When they reached the city, they got off the carriage and put the man on a bench; they then alerted a policeman on patrol that there was a man who needed to be taken to the asylum, and when asked if they were of any relation to him, they said no. In this way, they were able to undo themselves of their husband and father without incurring any of the responsibilities associated with his illness. These are the sort of observations the narrator makes wherever he looks, and his descriptions of such dark scenes are quite poetic. His expressive language does remind me of some of his illustrious contemporaries, and when I turn back to his dedicatory passage, I imagine him taking these pages to people like Güiraldes and Girondo, imagining them to be kindred spirits and hoping for inclusion into their creative circle.

Again, it's hard to believe that this book was rediscovered and brought to English nearly ninety years after its publication. It belongs to a time, a place and a creative culture that fascinate me, and reading Tegui's journal is something like discovering a lost work written by Roberto Arlt during a trip to the countryside, a book that I wanted to exist but never thought did. I'd like to own a Spanish edition of this book, but I fear that I'll have to add it to my list of books that are easier to find at an affordable price in translation than in the original Spanish. Maybe I'll just have to serially check it out from the library and keep it in a special place on my bookshelf to read a few entries whenever the fancy strikes me. I am quite partial to this old, yellowed first edition, which has its fair share of peculiarities. On occasion, perhaps forgetting himself, the author slips a slight bit of French into the text, an "et" in place of "y" or something similarly minor; I wonder if future editions corrected these along with the other few dozen blatant typos that litter the text.

26. Poesía (Poetry) by Jorge Manrique
27. Laberinto de fortuna (Labyrinth of Fortune) by Juan de Mena

Leer la poesía de Jorge Manrique y el Laberinto de fortuna de Juan de Mena durante una semana ha sido un interesante ejercicio en contrastes. Ambos hombres pertenecen al mismo país y al mismo siglo (el siglo XV), pero su poesía difiere en muchos aspectos. La poesía de Manrique es bastante representativa de la literatura medieval: su poesía amorosa muestra muchos aspectos del amor cortés, y su perspectiva ante la muerte en las Coplas a su padre se encuadra con otras representaciones europeas de la muerte durante el siglo XV. Por otro lado, el Laberinto de fortuna de Mena parte de lo medieval y entra en formas, temas y motivaciones más comúnmente asociados con el Renacimiento. Su ámbito es la España del siglo XV, pero en su poema se notan innovaciones italianas (la influencia de Dante es obvia) y tendencias latinizantes que prefiguran la complejidad del barroco. Me gustó leer los dos libros simultáneamente, y terminé ambos satisfecho; sin embargo, si tuviera que elegir entre los dos, me quedaría con Manrique. Su obra maestra, intitulada Coplas por la muerte de su padre, es y ha sido uno de mis poemas preferidos desde que lo leí por primera vez. Entiendo la importancia del poema de Mena, y aprecio las innovaciones formales y temáticas que incorporó en su Laberinto, pero me quedaré con la perfección y la universalidad de las Coplas: las memorizaré, las recitaré y pensaré en ellas cuando pienso en la muerte.

Mena nació en Córdoba en 1411, y escribió su Laberinto de fortuna con fines propagandísticas: el poema se dirige al rey, Juan II, y indirectamente a Álvaro de Luna, hombre de amplia influencia política en la corte castellana, quien más tarde sería degollado después de la muerte de la primera esposa del rey (aparentemente a la segunda esposa no le cayó muy bien su connivencia política y el favor que experimentaba con el rey). El poema representa una visión de la casa de la Fortuna, donde llega el protagonista para mejor entender los funcionamientos de ella, y su influencia sobre la vida de los hombres. La Providencia, otra fuerza guiadora de la vida humana, sirve de guía al poeta y le muestra tres ruedas representantes del pasado, el presente y el futuro. Cada rueda está dividida en siete círculos, y cada círculo corresponde a un planeta. El poeta y la Providencia examinan los círculos uno por uno, analizando las vidas de los hombres influidos por Marte, Venus y los demás planetas. Hombres griegos, romanos y españoles caen bajo los signos de cada planeta, y sus vidas están narrado cronológicamente, con los reyes y grandes figuras de la antigüedad representados antes que los reyes y héroes de España. Cuando llegan al séptimo círculo, Saturno, el poeta habla de Álvaro Luna y cómo debe actuar a favor del Rey. Una vez terminado el análisis de los siete círculos y los hombres pasados y presentes que se encuentran en cada uno, la visión se desvanece y el poeta pondera una vez más los poderes de la providencia, implorando al rey que actúe en cumplimiento con su destino.

Juan de Mena perteneció al ámbito cortesano, y su representación de las figuras de la política española de su época claramente refleja sus motivaciones políticas. Leer el poema, y con él los extensos notas a pie de página, fue como leer un documento histórico tanto como un poema. Sin las notas, yo no habría entendido más que una pequeña porción de las referencias; con ellas, aprendí mucho sobre las intrigas de la corte y los personajes políticos de la España de Mena. El estilo complejo y latinizante del poema me hizo pensar en la poesía de Góngora. Claro está que no llega al mismo nivel de complejidad, pero de todos modos muestra una tendencia hacia lo barroco y lo latino que lo separa de la relativa simplicidad de otros textos medievales de la península. También hace numerosas referencias a los dioses y héroes de la tradición greco-romana, desde las primeras estrofas (Al muy prepotente don Juan el segundo/aquel con quien Júpiter tuvo tal zelo). Esta inclusión de tantos y tan concentrados elementos clásicos representa una novedad en la literatura medieval española: no es que nunca se vieran referencias a la antigüedad en obras anteriores, pero tales referencias eran más escasas. Aquí, si uno no conoce la tradición greco-romana, el poema básicamente no se entiende. Admito que estos elementos latinos y clásicos me decepcionaron un poco. Me había acostumbrado a un español dirigido a audiencias populares, utilizado por autores medievales para crear obras entendibles por personas no cultas; ahora, vi en Mena un nuevo intento de aburguesar el idioma en un poema solamente accesible a hombres educados. No quiero decir que no me gustara el Laberinto, sino que me hizo sentir una cierta nostalgia por las obras medievales que leí durante los meses pasados.

En contraposición con la obra de Mena, la poesía de Jorge Manrique (1440-1479) es más sencilla con respeto a su forma y lenguaje. Manrique fue poeta y soldado, y su vida muestra una combinación de armas y letras digna de la admiración del ilustrísimo caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha. En vez de los versos dodecasílabos del Laberinto de fortuna, la mayoría de la poesía de Manrique está escrito en octosílabos y otros versos cortos generalmente utilizados para canciones y poesía lírica. No abundan referencias a la antigüedad. Su poesía amorosa es cortesa y, en algunos casos, representa el amor utilizando términos militares. Me gustaron sus poemas de amor, puesto que me dieron una oportunidad de ver otra representación del amor cortés, un poco más consolidado que lo que había antes visto en los textos del siglo XII. Pero, como dice el editor del libro que tengo, el nombre de Jorge Manrique no habría perdurado tras los siglos si hubiera escrito sólo poesía amorosa. Es por las Coplas por la muerte de su padre que su nombre ha adquirido tanta fama y admiración. En una larga meditación sobre la muerte, el poeta pasa de lo general (la muerte de todos los hombres) a lo específico (la muerte de su padre, don Rodrigo Manrique), ilustrando la condición pasajera de la vida humana.
Las lineas más famosas y más universalmente conocidas del poema son las siguientes:

Nuestras vidas son los ríos
Que van a dar en la mar
qu'es el morir.

Cuando leí estas líneas por primera vez, pensé inmediatamente en una bella canción de Caetano Veloso que toma la imagen de la vida como un río para expresar su conexión con su tierra natal:

Onde eu nasci passa um rio
Que passa no igual sem fim
Igual, sem fim, minha terra
Passava dentro de mim

Passava como se o tempo
Nada pudesse mudar
Passava como se o rio
Não desaguasse no mar

O rio deságua no mar
Já tanta coisa aprendi
Mas o que é mais meu cantar
É isso que eu canto aqui

Hoje eu sei que o mundo é grande
E o mar de ondas se faz
Mas nasceu junto com o rio
O canto que eu canto mais

O rio só chega no mar
Depois de andar pelo chão
O rio da minha terra
Deságua em meu coração

Pensé que, de alguna forma, la letra de la canción de Caetano demuestra el poder y la influencia del poema de Manrique: no sé si Caetano conociera este poema o no, pero de cualquier manera, creo que hay influencia manriqueña aquí. Aunque ciertamente no sea la primera ni la única persona que haya representado la vida humana con la imagen de un río que fluye, Jorge Manrique supo consolidar la idea en un poema que ha sido leído por millones de persones durante más que cinco siglos, y cuando escucho a la canción de Caetano, de 1967, siento el peso de las palabras de Manrique, de 1476. Lope de Vega dijo que el poema de Manrique merecía estar escrito en letras de oro, y estoy de acuerdo con él. Es una obra como pocas otras, perfecta, representativa de un momento creativo particularmente inspirado que ha permanecido en el canon de la literatura universal por su consideración acertada de la muerte.

Para mí, ha sido un verdadero placer conocer la literatura medieval de España. Por un lado, me ha dado la oportunidad de encontrar la lengua española en su forma escrita más antigua, y he pronunciado los epítetos heroicos del Cantar de Mio Cid y la poesía de Berceo en voz alto, saboreando cada palabra tan vieja y tan significativa de aquella época tan lejana. Por otro lado, la relativa pequeñez del mundo literario de la península ibérica de los siglos X a XV (en comparación con la inmensidad inabarcable de la literatura moderna), me ha posibilitado una creciente familiaridad con un sistema de temas, símbolos y técnicas literarias específicas a la época medieval en el ámbito europeo. Ahora, cuando veo un árbol en un jardín, pienso en el Razón de amor, pienso en Berceo, y pienso en la crucifixión y un mundo medieval de mitología cristiana. Cuando leo una historia de amor, pienso en el amor como está representado en la literatura medieval, la cortesía y el deseo del caballero de servir a su dueña. Por lo mucho que me ha gustado estudiar la literatura medieval, leer un poema como Laberinto de Fortuna, en el cual puedo vislumbrar el Renacimiento, me da sentimientos agridulces. Sé que lo que vino después es muy bueno, y sé que volver a los textos del Siglo de Oro, habiendo conocido la literatura medieval, me va a gustar mucho. Pero también siento pena al pensar que estoy llegando al final de una época interesante y inspiradora por su otredad, por su ruptura con los clásicos de la antigüedad y por su representación de un mundo tan diferente al mío.

28. Entre paréntesis (Between Parentheses) by Roberto Bolaño

Entre paréntesis is a collection of nonfiction odds and ends written by a middle-aged Roberto Bolaño between 1998 and 2003. It begins with three speeches, moves on to a series of anecdotes related to his return to Chile in the late 90s, continues with three blocs of articles written for the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias (I'd have never thought...I always saw that paper as the trashy alternative to the bigger Santiago newspapers; chalk it up to a young foreigner's ignorance), and concludes with a few dozen other reflections on life and literature, notes on a speech given at a conference, and an interview with Playboy Magazine. Together, the texts in this book give an interesting window into the final years of the life of the author. There's a quote somewhere in this book (by Saer, I believe) about how, in this day and age, one of the most appropriate and effective forms of literary autobiography would take the form of a series of essays about books that the author has read and enjoyed. And that's what you get here, mixed with anecdotes about life in Catalonia, Chile, and wherever else Bolaño finds himself.

Roberto Bolaño comes off as a thoughtful man at peace with himself and the world. The wandering, the hard drugs (depending on what you believe), the alcohol, and the rebellious spirit of his youth as I imagine it are replaced by a family that is occasionally and indirectly mentioned, and the satisfaction that comes with success and recognition. It's hard to believe that this is the writing of a sick man who would eventually die while awaiting a liver transplant. He doesn't seem sad or bitter, but then again, declining health and ascending literary fame are a strange combination, one that may have made him particularly happy in a professional sense and inclined to look at the world of literature in a positive light. He may have felt intense sadness at the thought of leaving behind his family, which in turn may have made it more appropriate for him to look on the bright side of things in the world where his work was becoming more and more accepted. He also may have realized that the artistic recognition he was receiving as his health declined was ensuring the continuing life of his literary creations, and therefore felt less sick, less mortal in the world of books that he inhabits in the majority of these texts. How exhilarating, to write for a recently-conquered posterity! But, then again, how sad to think that your family, your young son, Blanes, the Chile you've only recently returned to, all of that could end soon. I guess the remarkable thing is not that he can write compelling odes to books and authors he appreciates, but that he can look at the world around him, his home in Catalonia and his recently-rediscovered Chile, and encounter so many wonderful things. I wondered as I read his notes from his trip to Chile and a series of pieces about the towns of the Catalonian coast, whether he had an idea that he would be dying soon and that the places he saw, he could be seeing for the last time.

Again, the mix of autobiographical anecdotes and literary criticism was compelling and the variety in the pages of this book held my interest. Some of these pieces I had encountered before in other places, and I liked reading them in a different context. It was interesting to read his story about recovering from heroin addiction in the context of this book, because some of the elements he includes in it are repeated in his chronicles for the Chilean newspaper: the deathly old man defiantly absorbing the sun's rays; the ominous presence of the woman at the beach who reads a book while standing, and whose beach towel seems pointless if she's never going to sit down on it. Bolaño's alleged drug use has been debated since his death, and I have to say that, in the context of this book, Playa feels like a piece of fiction. If so, it's a good piece of fiction. Its single-sentence structure fits well with the mindstate of an individual trying to break a serious addiction, and it does incorporate that odd and compelling standing woman. Maybe it is real, though. The seed of doubt has been planted in me, and it's easy for me to think that Bolaño wasn't ever a heroin addict, and that he wasn't in Chile in 1973. I'll just try not to think too much about that stuff (the thought that he could have lied about his participation in the events that unfolded in September of 1973 is quite troubling) and focus on his reflections on his middle-aged world, as well as his thought-provoking articles on books and their writers. Here are a few moments, among many, that come to mind:

In an article about José Donoso, he expresses his perplexion that the Chilean author would ask to have Vicente Huidobro's Altazor recited to him on his deathbed. Bolaño says that he can't understand why someone would want to hear Altazor while dying, but then, thinking about it again, he decides that he can understand why Donoso wanted this, and that's precisely what's so troubling about the whole thing. I opened the book up to this article randomly, and it made me laugh. Bolaño, as he explains in the rest of the piece, doesn't deny that Donoso was an excellent writer, but there's just something about him...I think more than anything he disapproves of the Latin American author who lives off grants and fellowships and is a comfortable college professor in some sleepy midwestern United States town, continuing to write about a Latin American "reality" that he is more and more divorced from. Donoso's desire to hear a poem that is quite divorced from reality in its own way, while on his deathbed, disturbs Bolaño.

In one of his speeches at the beginning of the book, he mentions the "armas y letras" debate so important to Don Quijote, highlighting the significance of the victory of arms over letters in the context of Cervantes' own life: in his youth, he was a soldier, and in his middle age, he was a writer (and a struggling writer at that). This writer, faced with a choice between his military past and his literary present, sides with glory on the battlefield as being worthy of greater accolades than glory won by the pen. It's a melancholic choice, as Cervantes is essentially saying that his past was more glorious than his present (a present that, as he wrote, was devoted to the genesis of one of the greatest books of all time). But then Bolaño he goes on to explain that the Latin American writers of his generation are faced with a similar predicament: their youth was spent in various left-wing militancies, fighting for a cause that was at that time worthy; and their present, when compared to that time of suffering and struggle, may not seem as glorious. Maybe they've achieved success and accolades as writers, often through their depiction of the world of their youth. But it's easy to see how they might, like Cervantes, examine the balance of their life's work and conclude that their youthful militancy was more honorable than their middle-aged publications. Bolaño doesn't mention it, but I imagine another, more personal ramification of the armas y letras debate: the author's own transition from poetry to prose. In many of the pieces in this book, he expresses his admiration for his poet friends, and his conviction that poetry is, in a way, greater than fiction. I've also read that he made the switch to prose fiction because it was more profitable and he thought he could better provide for his young son as a novelist. And, like Cervantes, he obtained fame and glory in that role. But I believe that, as he considered his life's work, he continued to place more heroic value on his poetic youth than his novelistic maturity. And his melancholy shines through in more than a few of the articles in this book.

On a visit to the home of his friend and idol, Nicanor Parra, Bolaño and the great Chilean poet look out over a forest and Parra asks him which forest he sees; they then discuss various forests that can be seen in the forest that they are both looking at. Parra then directs him to a point in the distance that is the grave of Vicente Huidobro. That melancholy I mentioned before, I felt it here: Huidobro and Parra bookend (in a way) the great poetic tradition of 20th century Chile. Bolaño, a poet turned novelist, looks out over the forest and perhaps understands that his transition from poetry to prose means that he's less a part of that tradition.

His ode to Borges, the valiant librarian, is excellent. He writes of a time when Borges was lucky to come back to America and meet Macedonio Fernández, Ricardo Güiraldes and Xul Solar, men whom he intuited were worth more than their Spanish intellectual counterparts (and he was rarely wrong in such matters). A time when Buenos Aires was booming, and could call itself the Chicago of the Southern Hemisphere without immediately blushing. A time when Buenos Aires had its own Carl Sandberg (a poet much-admired by Borges) and his name was Roberto Arlt...and so on. The tone, the rhetorical flourishes, the gravity of each sentence, they all reminded me of the writing of Borges himself. I imagine that Bolaño, in writing about books, must have been influenced by Borges more than anyone, and his affection for Borges shines through wonderfully. I'd say that after reading this book and learning more about Bolaño's literary loves, it's fair to say that, to some extent, Jorge Luis Borges taught him how to read; that is, how to find meaning both personal and universal in a good book.

I enjoyed reading this book over the course of three or four months, whenever I had a moment to spare at home. I learned a lot about Roberto Bolaño, about Catalonia, and about books that Bolaño liked and that I might like as well. It also gave me a lot of book ideas, and I'm already excited about the copy of Marcel Schwob's Vies imaginaires that I checked out of the library at lunch today.

I am well behind on threads, Matt. Hopefully I can keep up with your insightful reviews for the rest of the year.

I will have to see if I can get a copy of the Bolano book. Thanks for the recommendation!

@52: thanks for stoppin' by, and I'm glad you're enjoying my reviews!

29. Cárcel de amor (Prison of Love) by Diego de San Pedro

Cárcel de amor fue escrito por Diego de San Pedro entre 1483 y 1485, y publicado por primera vez en 1492. Gozó de mucho éxito en España, y después en otros países europeos. Es una novela sentimental, y cuenta el amor desesperado que siente Leriano por Laureola, hija del rey de Macedonia. No fue el primer libro de esta índole que se escribió en España en el siglo XV, pero su fama, que perduró durante siglos, lo hace una de las más importantes representaciones del amor cortés medieval. La vida de Leriano y su fin trágico reflejan unos sentimientos de amor muy ligados a una tradición de cortesía característica de la literatura amorosa durante gran parte de la época medieval en España.

La novela empieza con el encuentro del narrador, un hombre español pasando por Macedonia de viaje, con una extraña pareja de individuos, uno de los cuales es un hombre monstruoso que lleva en una mano una pequeña estatua de una bellísima mujer. Este hombre está llevando al otro como prisionero, y el prisionero, Leriano, pide al narrador que le acompañe y le preste su ayuda en un asunto amoroso de suma importancia. El partido de tres hombres sigue en camino hasta que llega al edificio donde Leriano será encarcelado: la Cárcel de amor. Es una construcción fantástica, y sus partes corresponden alegóricamente a los diferentes estados de ánimo del amante. Está fundado sobre la fe, y los cuatro pilares que forman su base son el entendimiento, la razón, la memoria y la voluntad. El amor, por supuesto, le quita estas cuatro cosas del ser humano enamorado. Sobre el techo, tres banderas están colgadas, de colores leonado, negro y pardillo: se refieren a la tristeza, congoja y trabajo que siente la persona enamorada. Leriano va a pasar la mayor parte de la novela en la cárcel, sufriendo de los efectos de su amor por Laureola.

Lo que sigue, y continúa por el resto del libro, es una larga correspondencia entre Leriano y su enamorada. El narrador actúa como tercero, llevando cartas y mensajes orales desde la cárcel al palacio y vice versa. Lo que Leriano quiere al principio es poco: reconocimiento por su amada a través de una respuesta epistolar desde el palacio, la cual le daría ánimo y esperanza para seguir viviendo. Laureola recela del mensaje del narrador, y reconoce los peligros inherentes de una relación secreta. Eventualmente, Leriano llega a la corte y le besa la mano de Laureola. Persio, otro pretendiente por los amores de Laureola, decide acusar falsamente a Leriano de haberse reunido con Laureola en su cámara, y lo desafía a un justo legal (una práctica que ya no se usaba en la España del siglo XV, pero al parecer--o en la imaginación del autor--seguía vigente en Macedonia). Leriano le corta la mano derecha de Persio durante el duelo, pero el rey intercede antes de que el encuentro termine de manera definitiva. Puesto que sigue con vida, Persio decide seguir con su embuste, y convence (con mucho dinero) a tres hombres de que mientan al rey acerca de la conducta de Leriano y Laureola. El testimonio triple hace que el rey siga firme en su deseo de que Leriana muera por su conducta inmoral, y Leriano manda a su embajador (el narrador) a pedir ayuda de la reina y de otros personajes de la corte. Eventualmente no le queda otra opción que reunir un ejército de nobles y liberarla, en el proceso capturando uno de los testigos mentirosos y torturándolo hasta que admite su mentira. Descubierto el embuste, el rey libera a su hija, pero ella no quiere arriesgarse otra vez con Leriano. Él, desesperado, retira a la Cárcel de amor, sin esperanza y incapaz de seguir viviendo sin ser correspondido en sus sentimientos. Hace pedazos de las cartas de Leriana, y los mete en un vaso de agua. Después de beberlo, así ingiriendo la única muestra física de su amor, muere de tristeza.

La novela no me gustó mucho. La leí porque tuve que leerla; menos mal que no era demasiado larga. La rareza de la cárcel alegórica me intrigó, pero la relación entre Leriano y Laureola no me apasionó y la desesperanza de Leriano, causada por su amor por la mujer que durante casi toda la novela permanece separada de él, me pareció más que un poco ridículo. Sabía (en parte) por qué leía esta novela: que además de gozar de mucho éxito en la Europa medieval, pinta una versión bastante acabada del amor cortés, el amor de Andreas Capellanus y el amor que solemos asociar con gran parte de la literatura medieval. Y pensé que por eso, por representar un concepto de amor de suma importancia en el estudio de la literatura (porque me parece que el amor cortés de la Edad Media sigue siendo importante aún hoy, y sigue influyendo las historias de amor de nuestros tiempos), el libro fue digno de ser leído y estudiado. Así que la terminé y seguí pensando que Leriano era una persona absurda, demasiado perdida en el mundo de la cortesía amorosa y desconectada con el mundo real (aunque aprecié su largo discurso, casi al final del libro, en defensa de las virtudes de las mujeres).

Pero entonces empecé a leer la introducción de mi edición crítica de La Celestina. Y aprendí que, en gran medida, Leriano es el modelo para Calisto. Y que, de la misma manera en que Cervantes utiliza el modelo del género literario caballeresco para crear un personaje, Don Quijote, que hará estallar este modelo al enfrentarse con un mundo (más) real, el amor cortés que Leriano siente hacia Laureola va a ser expuesto a la parodia, Calisto va a ser ridiculizado por Celestina y Sempronio, y después todo va a cambiar, el mundo idealizado del amor cortés no podrá sobrevivir de la misma manera después de enfrentarse con el mundo real de las páginas de La Celestina, con toda su vulgaridad y con todas sus contradicciones y desviaciones de lo ideal.

Así que voy a tener mi copia de Cárcel de amor a mano como voy leyendo La Celestina, y espero que al final del drama (o novela dialogada) de Rojas, pueda entender mejor por qué la novela de San Pedro es tan importante, y por qué el texto de Rojas fue tan revolucionario. Porque, pensándolo bien, es verdaderamente impresionante que Fernando de Rojas, un joven con quizá menos años que tengo yo, hubiera podido, alrededor del año 1500, escribir un libro que enfrentó lo ideal con lo real con repercusiones tan fulminantes por aquel mundo ideal de la cortesía. Y no creo que lo habría podido hacer sin que antes leyera la historia del amor desesperado de Leriano, y además de leerlo, sentir lo ridículo que es. Y quizá sus sentimientos no fueran tan diferentes que las mías, más que cinco siglos después, frente al mismo libro.

30. La Celestina (Celestina) by Fernando de Rojas

Leí La Celestina por primera vez hace tres o cuatro años. Estuve trabajando en Mongolia, y mi familia me mandó unos libros del siglo XVI porque yo había escrito en una carta que me había gustado el Quijote muchísimo, y quería leer más textos de aquella época. Creo que mi madre escribió un email a un profesor universitario especialista en la literatura del Siglo de Oro, y él le recomendó que me comprara La Celestina, Guzmán de Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes y El Buscón de Quevedo. Tuve harto tiempo para leer durante el invierno mongólico frigidísimo, y leyendo estos cuatro textos, llegué a pensar en La Celestina como un punto de partida, una representación del sector bajo de la sociedad española, llena de prostitutas, alcahuetas y criados desleales, que después se repetiría en las novelas picarescas. Recuerdo que la vulgaridad y erotismo del texto me sorprendió, pues tenía la idea de que esas cosas no se representaran en textos del siglo XV. Otra cosa que me gustó de la obra fue el lenguaje, que además de ser muy divertido, me pareció muy realista: me divertí de noche, solo en casa al lado del fuego, pronunciando los discursos de los personajes del siglo XV en voz alto, pensando en lo raro que era, que un estadounidense pasara sus días enseñando inglés y hablando mongólico con sus vecinos y amigos, y sus noches hablando español a sí mismo. Dejé mi copia de La Celestina en Mongolia, pero el año pasado, compré una nueva edición.

El libro fue escrito en los últimos años del siglo XV, y aunque hay diferencias de opinión entre académicos acerca de su autoría, se suele atribuirlo (menos el primer auto, de autor anónimo) a un joven estudiante de La Puebla de Montalbán llamado Fernando de Rojas. Hay evidencia de que Rojas era converso, y esta información ha sido utilizado para explicar el pesimismo del texto, el cual termina con un monólogo negro y lastimero pronunciado por el padre de Melibea, la joven enamorada de Calisto quien se mata al enterarse de la muerte del objeto de sus amores. El libro, como muchos otros libros medievales, busca deleitar y al mismo tiempo dar al lector algunas lecciones aplicables a su propia vida. En este caso, el lector aprenderá por qué no debe actuar sobre sus deseos, verá algunos de los peligros inherentes a las situaciones amorosas ilícitas, y entenderá por qué no se debe recurrir a alcahuetes para resolver problemas de amores.

La historia empieza con el primer encuentro entre los dos amantes. Calisto entra al jardín de la familia de Melibea en busca de un halcón que ha perdido, y cae enamorado al ver la bella joven. Le habla muy cortésmente (aunque también hace cierta referencia a su cuerpo, mostrando los principios de un deseo nada cortés) y Melibea le rehúsa con vehemencia. Calisto se enferma (de amor) y sus criados le aconsejan en cómo proceder. Uno de ellos, Sempronio, sugiere que suprima sus sentimientos amorosos, pues ninguna mujer vale tanto que un hombre como él perdiera el seso. Calisto le responde que hombres más grandes que él han caído bajo los efectos del amor, y que nada de lo que ha escuchado le va a cambiar sus sentimientos hacia Melibea. La solución de Sempronio: ¡llamar a la Celestina! El otro criado, Petronio (algo más responsable y fiel a su amo), no está de acuerdo y le dice a su amo que Celestina tiene mala fama y nada bueno puede venir de introducirla en sus asuntos amorosos. Calisto no le da caso; cree que buscar la ayuda de Celestina es una muy, muy buena idea.

La Celestina es, en las palabras de los personajes de la obra, una puta vieja, alcahueta, hechicera, enemiga de honestidad. Ella conferencia con Calisto, y decide partir a la casa de Melibea y empezar a trabajarla a fin de que los amores de Calisto sean reciprocados. Es una virtuosa de la manipulación, y hábilmente ablanda los sentimientos de Melibea hacia Calisto. Inventa una historia de un dolor de muelas sufrido por el joven, y obtiene un cordón de Melibea bajo el pretexto de que aquél cordón ha estado, junto con Melibea, en muchos lugares santos, en Jerusalén y Roma, y que aliviará el sufrimiento de Calisto (y así ocurre, puesto que Calisto se vuelve absolutamente loco de felicidad cuando tiene la cordón de Melibea en sus mano). En realidad, Celestina quiere hechizar este cordón para mejor guiar Melibea hacia las manos deseosas de Calisto.

En los autos que siguen, Celestina sigue trabajando en los amores de los dos jóvenes de linaje noble; para evitar dificultades con Calisto, se gana a Petronio como coconspirador en su plan de unirle con Melibea, ofreciendo al criado ayuda en su propio asunto amoroso con la bella prostituta Areúsa, prima de Elicia, el objeto de los amores de Sempronio. Esta confederación de criados y mujeres públicas se reúne a la casa de Celestina, quien les habla de los gozos de su juventud perdida, recomiéndoles que lo pasen bien ahora, antes de que envejezcan. Ellos disfrutan de comidas robadas de la bodega de Calisto, y hablan de los prospectos de recompensas futuras por parte del enamorado Calisto. El hecho de que son muchos los que se han metido en el asunto de los amores de Calisto y Melibea presenta la posibilidad de conflictos entre Celestina, Sempronio y Pármeno, puesto que todos quieren su parte de la ganancia.

Eventualmente, las diligencias de Celestina son exitosas y Calisto y Melibea se reúnen, primero hablando por entre las rejas del jardín, y después conociéndose dentro del mismo jardín. Desafortunadamente por todos, el desenlace final es trágico: la avaricia de Celestina, la codicia de Sempronio y Pármeno y la lujuria de Calisto son castigados de forma sangrienta.

Esta vez, La Celestina fue un fin y no un principio. Lo leí después de una breve recorrida de la literatura medieval española, y ahora, en vez de ver un poco de los criados de Calisto y algo de Celestina en los pícaros y pícaras de los siglos XVI y XVII, veo algún que otro rasgo de Trotaconventos en la Celestina, y veo mucho del Leriano del Cárcel de amor de Diego de San Pedro en Calisto. Veo cómo el amante cortés, en las manos del autor (o autores) de La Celestina se ve degradado y corrompido por sus deseos carnales, y qué tan ridículo sus declaraciones corteses parecen. Celestina y los criados de Calisto y Melibea están constantemente expresando su incredulidad frente a la actuación de sus amos en apartes dirigidos al lector/audiencia, y se queda claro que la figura idealizada del amante cortés no funciona en situaciones tomadas de la vida real. Fracasa, y en su fracaso se puede vislumbrar otro fracaso de otro personaje idealizado que ocurrirá más que un siglo después de la publicación de La Celestina: el fracaso del ilustrísimo caballero Don Quijote de La Mancha, flor y espejo de la caballería, quien saldrá a enderezar tuertos, deshacer agravios y servir a su dama por los campos de La Mancha.

Estoy feliz de haber tenido la oportunidad de leer La Celestina de estas dos maneras, como introducción a la picardía de Mateo Alemán y sus contemporáneos, y como culminación de un sistema de pensamiento y una tradición literaria medieval que pronto iba a desvanecerse con la recuperación de la influencia clásica por parte de los artistas del Renacimiento. Es una obra que nítidamente pinta un mundo en transición, mostrando los hondos conflictos entre clases sociales y sistemas de valores de España en vísperas del siglo XVI.

31. Journal du voleur (The Thief's Journal) by Jean Genet

The pages of this journal document Jean Genet's young adulthood of crime, indigence and homosexuality. They are not in all cases true, as the author has stated that he has altered facts and stories in order to best depict situations and people that are not only places, events and characters in his journal but also vehicles through which he expresses his moral stance. Positioning the marginal, criminal world he inhabits in opposition to the conventional world governed by traditional laws and values, he expresses the sublime beauty of a "holy trinity" of values: theft, betrayal and homosexuality. In his novel aesthetic, that which is condemned, disdained and marginalized by "us" is elevated to sainthood by him. The beauty of the criminal and the beauty of the criminal act are expressed with the most exquisite of words by an author whose writing has displaced him from a world that he once inhabited, and which he views in a way that few others would.

His young life on the margins of society carries him from country to country, from Spain to Czechoslovakia, through Italy and Switzerland, to Belgium and his native France. In Spain he leaves the pitiful Salvador for the beautiful one-armed Stilitano, who eventually abandons him. Alone, he crosses borders and is thrown in jails where he meets men, both prisoners and jailers, worthy of his love and admiration. He befriends a policeman, intrigued by the connection between the criminal and the man of the law, seeing them as two sides of the same coin: both are positioned on the outside of a world of men and women who live within the law, and both are stigmatized and often looked down upon due to their status on the outside. Eventually, young Jean arrives to Antwerp, where he meets back up with Stilitano, who is maintaining a woman and selling opium. He continues to admire the one-armed man, but also meets another perfect, brutish figure: Armand. As he commits a series of robberies, posing as a male prostitute then mugging the men who wish to take him up on his offer, he also ponders betraying one of his friend/lovers.

His evocations of his youth are mixed with reflections by Jean Genet at 35 on that past existence and the edifice of values he has created around crime, treason and homosexuality. At 35, his lover is the beautiful and angelic Lucien, whose more-traditional purity stands in opposition to his past lovers, as well as his past self. Genet considers the possibility of corrupting Lucien and what it would mean to initiate him into the life he is documenting in his journal. He also fantasizes about the most perfect of all prisons: Guyana, where the criminal's exile is more complete due to the distance placed between him and the world he inhabited.

Jean Genet, the man as he presents himself in the pages of this journal, is a fascinating character. To have lived the life he documents here, and not only survived but found a very particular and compelling significance in the very places from which so many people turn their backs in disgust, is pretty incredible. I've read books that depict lives and worlds similar to the ones shown here, books that could be considered beautiful in their own right, but never had I read something like this, a book that formalizes a "cult of the criminal." Genet is a man capable of imagining the unimaginable, and giving form to his ideas as a part of a surprisingly compelling system of morals. I liked the way that he created a sort of dialogue between worlds, addressing the reader from time to time and reminding him or her that the world Genet inhabits and "le vôtre," the world from which he was barred, are exclusive. There is one scene where the two worlds come into contact: tourists stream off of a boat and marvel at the Spanish indigents, commenting, "what a life that must be, without a care in the world," or something like that, as they give them money and the bums slip off from time to time to convert that money into booze. Genet, staring at the vacationers, sees them apply the principles of their world (looking at the bums with their schoolboy Victor Hugo conception of indigence) to his world, and conveys to the reader of his journal the ridiculousness of their interpretation of the bums' lives.

As I read, I enjoyed imagining what it would be like to live in a different world, or to live in the same world but be subject to a different set of rules. I like books that penetrate into the margins of our society, or into the dark side of our world. When I was in college, I started studying Spanish and eventually, shortly after I arrived to spend a year in Buenos Aires, someone recommended that I read Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas, by Roberto Arlt. I was captivated by the characters and their crackpot schemes to achieve whatever it was they were after. The Astrologist wants to conquer the world and assembles a group of men who would help him in the construction of a secret society built with the revenue generated by a network of provincial whorehouses; Erdosain wants to invent metallic roses and chemical weapons that will sweep through cities like deadly curtains. The characters who populate Genet's journal are not unlike those of Arlt's books: they too are schemers, and while their plans aren't as grandiose as The Astrologist's, there is a similar desperation in their crimes and betrayals. Jean Genet himself is almost like a character straight out of Arlt. As he wanders Europe, in and out of jail, he's taking notes and fitting the world he inhabits into a system with a set of moral values parallel and opposite to those of that other world of law, trust and normal society. The story of the young indigent who will become the famous author, whose work will be admired by Jean-Paul Sartre, seems almost as unbelievable as the dreams of the characters in Arlt's books; the fact that it's (more or less) true made this book especially fascinating.

This book also made me think about a contemporary art form where an alternate set of values has been assigned to previously-marginalized elements of society: rap music, with its curious and complex set of moral values that start to peek through as years pass and artists come and go: the exhaltation of pimps, hustlers, gangsters, drug dealers, sex and violence over the course of the past thirty years have led to the elevation of many, many heroes who aren't unlike some of the men Genet depicts in his thief's journal. I imagine that many people who read Jean Genet find him to be obscene; the same can certainly be said for a lot of people who listen to rap music. However, as a person who has listened to and loved rap music for most of his life, the author's affirmation of beauty in those people and acts marginalized and condemned by our society and its laws was perfectly comprehensible. True, there are great differences between "hip-hop morals" and "Jean Genet morals:" their views on betrayal, for one, are polar opposites. Nonetheless, I wonder what Genet would have thought had he lived to see the rise of a culture that, in some ways, repeats his exhaltation of a subaltern, criminal world.

I've been experimenting with reading books in French during my work breaks, and in some cases, it's nice. I'm at the computer, so I can look up words and write down new vocabulary to study at home. However, in some cases the episodic pace of breaktime reading impedes my enjoyment or understanding of the book and the author's message. To some extent, I was disappointed with this read. I'd get to fifteen minutes, I'd penetrate deep enough into the story and into the mind of Genet to really start enjoying myself, then it'd be time to go back on the clock. I guess what disappointed me was that I'd allocated an inadequate portion of my time to a book that deserved more. I've been trying to fit different sorts of books into different bits of my increasingly-busy schedule, and this book, with its mix of narrative and philosophical considerations of beauty and saintliness, would have been better read in a more relaxed, focused setting.

So I'll have to return to Journal du voleur when I have a more appropriate chunk of time to contribute to it. But I still found a lot to think about, even from a rather poor reading of the book. I also learned some rather obscene new words, and I watched a French gangster movie the other day and was pleased to understand things I might not have before.

I'll have to look at these reviews in detail next week, both to read about the books but also to practice translating them into English!

57: good luck! I'd like to become more comfortable writing in Spanish, and I'm of the opinion that practicing something is the best way to get better. So I'm definitely "practicing," and am not really satisfied with my ability to express myself in Spanish yet. Still, I hope you enjoy them...

32. Historia de la literatura española: la Edad Media (History of Spanish Literature: the Middle Ages) by A.D. Deyermond

Leímos este texto en la clase de literatura medieval española que cursé durante los primeros cuatro meses de este año, para complementar nuestra lectura de una serie de textos medievales, entre ellos el Libro de buen amor, el Cantar de Mio Cid y La Celestina. El libro, escrito por uno de los más respetados hispanistas del siglo XX, da una panorama de la literatura en español desde las jarchas (poemas escritos en árabe con refranes en romance) hasta La Celestina y las primeras obras de teatro españolas de fines del siglo XV. Es, básicamente, una enciclopedia de la literatura medieval escrita en castellano.

A mí me gustó leer los capítulos de este libro en combinación con los textos y los estudios introductorios de cada uno: Deyermond me situó las obras en la tradición literaria de la península y de la época en que fueron escritas, los académicos que escribieron las introducciones de las obras me dieron una síntesis de la crítica de cada obra y sus propios puntos de vista acerca del texto, y después, podía entrar en los textos preparado para calibrar mis propios pensamientos con los de generaciones pasadas de estudiosos, y tener una buena experiencia con libros producidos en un mundo medieval muy diferente que el mío. Sin la ayuda de Deyermond, no habría reconocido muchas de las características de los textos propias de su época y de los hombres que los escribieron. Conocer el mundo literario de España durante la Edad Media me ayudó a mejor entender los textos, algo que para mí lleva a una lectura más placentera de cualquier libro, y especialmente de los que me presentan más obstáculos al entendimiento. El cristianismo medieval, la mezcla de propuestas literarias y didácticas, y el sistema de símbolos utilizados en textos medievales no siempre son fácilmente comprensibles para una persona como yo; quién mejor que Alan Deyermond para servirme de guía.

Recomendaría este libro a cualquier persona que quisiera emprender un viaje por la literatura medieval de España. Es bien organizado y Deyermond presenta las varias perspectivas académicas sobre asuntos polémicos como la autoría y datación del Cantar de Mio Cid de forma equilibrada. Me ayudó mucho a apreciar los textos medievales que leí.

33. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

I'm not a person who reads a lot of contemporary fiction, and one thing I enjoyed about reading 2666 was its newness, with its recent publication accompanied by a wealth of articles, reviews and profiles of the author and his influences scattered across the internet. It was fun reading a novel that was born into the virtual world, with the initial witnesses of its birth scrambling to explain it and condense its thousand-plus pages into a thoughtful explanatory statement that would inspire others to read this big book. In trying to situate Roberto Bolaño in the vast world of books, I've notice that a lot of his reviewers mention connections between Bolaño and Jorge Luis Borges; in particular, a quote by Ignacio Echevarría concerning The Savage Detectives, that it was "the kind of novel Borges would have agreed to write," is frequently repeated and sometimes extended to 2666 as well. I probably read that quote three or four times before beginning the novel.

Now that I've finished, I've decided that I'm glad to have had Echevarría's statement floating around in my mind. Not because I particularly agree with him (I'm of the opinion that if you were to pick one Argentine to focus on in dissecting influences on Bolaño's 2666, Cortázar would be a better choice), but because it was a funny thing to think about as I read the book (especially the more explicit scenes). For example: Archimboldi and his fellow soldier masturbate as they spy on the Baroness von Zumpe and the prodigiously-endowed Entrescu engaging in a night of rough sex (Borges would have agreed to write that); the murders of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa are described in graphic detail, including one conversation about how many violable orifices a woman possesses (Borges would have agreed to write that); Espinoza, the Spanish academic, has a short fling with a young Mexican who sells souvenir blankets at the Artesanía, buying her lingerie and dressing her up in some "fuck me" pumps before an hours-long sex session at the hotel (Borges would have agreed to write that). It's absurd, thinking about Jorge Luis writing such things. I chuckled, and I also chuckled as I imagined that maybe, underneath the Borges we know and love, there might have been a repressed individual who fervently desired to write such things.

I think it's the phrasing of the quote as much as anything (es el tipo de novela que Borges hubiera aceptado escribir), that it's not the novel he would have wrote, but the novel he would have agreed to write, or been okay with writing, that I found so funny. I'm not saying that Echevarría's statement is unjustifiable or entirely silly, but when applied to certain passages of the book, it made me laugh. Anyway, it was good to have at least one running inside joke with myself to get me through a 1,120 page book.

I really did enjoy 2666, and I'm glad I read it with a group of readers here on this site. It was neat to compare my experience with the text with those of a group of strangers whose backgrounds and reading interests were often quite different from my own. Different people liked different parts of the book, and different people had different complaints about other parts. As most people probably know by now, the book is divided into five parts. The first one tells the story of a circle of four young academics who have become authorities on an author, Benno von Archimboldi, whom they desire to meet. Unfortunately, nobody knows where to find him, and as we learn about their relationships with each other, they eventually travel to Mexico, having been told that their man might be found in the city of Santa Teresa. In the second part, the Chilean academic Amalfitano (who talked to the folks in part one about Mexican literature) lives and teaches in Santa Teresa. He's hung a book about math, written by a poet, in his backyard, and he also worries about the safety of his daughter in a city where women are being murdered. In part three, Oscar Fate, who writes for a Harlem publication, is sent to write a story about a boxing match in Santa Teresa. Once there, he learns about the wave of femicides and has some adventures, seeing hints of the evil and darkness that lie beneath the surface in a city plagued by a horrible wave of crimes against women. Finally, in part four, the crimes come to the forefront, protagonizing a 250-page chronicle of the murders in which many law enforcement officers, journalists, politicians and concerned citizens hover around a slow yet constant stream of deaths. A man named Klaus is also arrested and charged with the murders, and there are some jarring scenes of violence in jail. Then, abruptly, the story shifts, taking us back to the first half of the 20th century and documenting the life and times of Archimboldi, the German soldier-turned-author who has been obsessively studied by the critics in part one.

The structure of the book pleased me, because when my attention started to wane, the perspective shifted and I began a new story. It could have been published in five separate volumes (Bolaño wanted it done that way), and in some ways I think this would have been appropriate. There are a lot of mysterious authors in his books, and a lot of fans doggedly pursuing them. I get the feeling that Bolaño enjoyed the hunt for a good book, and I imagine him spending his life in and out of bookstores, drawing from a mental inventory of books he'd like to find and constantly making minor and major discoveries in different parts of the world, tracking down forgotten books printed in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Spain or Chile. Collecting books is fun, especially when the books and authors are more elusive and hard to find. Had Bolaño not become so famous, it would have been significantly more difficult to track down five different books than to buy a single edition of 2666, especially since I find the Anagrama editions of his books to be aesthetically pleasing and insist on buying those over any other later, American-printed editions. He might have liked the thought of readers hunting for his books, and he might not have been entirely pleased with the ease with which a person can acquire the five stories of 2666 in a single, convenient volume. Maybe the hunt would have added to the reading experience. On the other hand, it was nice to have it all there, ready to be read from start to finish. I don't think the single-volume publication takes anything away from the text, really, and it's also kind of satisfying to feel yourself moving through one very, very thick volume.

There were common themes from section to section, but each part also inspired different and fulfilling trains of thought. During part one, I wondered if this Archimboldi could be a representation of certain authors that Bolaño himself admired, and I looked for connections between the author whom the critics love and study, and the books and authors Bolaño himself read and appreciated. I'd read a collection of his articles about literature, Entre paréntesis, shortly before reading 2666 and therefore had an idea of what books he was reading and enjoying as he wrote this book. In the end, though, I concluded that my efforts might have been slightly misguided. After reading the part about Archimboldi, I decided that maybe my focus was in the wrong place: if anything, I wanted to compare the man I met in the fifth part with that most distinguished soldier-turned-poet of Spanish letters, Miguel de Cervantes.

In the second part, the dangling book in Amalfitano's backyard, a Geometric Testament that is "in reality three books, each able to stand on its own, but functionally correlated by the destiny of the group." made me wonder how this book-inside-the-book related to the greater story; is Amalfitano looking out his back window at a reflection of 2666 itself? And then, when he goes on a little doodling spree, drawing geometric diagrams with different philosophers at the vertices, is he mirroring my attempts to create similar webs of authorial influence as I read the part about the critics' hunt for Archimboldi? I also started to think about Santa Teresa, a fictional transposition of a real place (Ciudad Juárez), in terms of its place in the tradition of Latin American fictional cities. How might it relate to Comala, Santa María or Macondo and the works of those other cities' creators?

During the third part, as Oscar Fate was saving the beautiful Rosa Amalfitano from a potentially dangerous situation with some shady men, I started to think about how chivalrous some of the intersexual relationships of 2666 had been. In the first part, the three male academics hover around Liz Norton, pining for her and wanting her to choose between them but not pressing the issue. At one point, Pelletier and Espinoza have a phone conversation where Liz Norton's name is spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. Normally it's The Lord's name that's spoken in vain, and this extension of the phrase to Liz Norton speaks a bit to the lady worship that's present throughout the book, first with the critics, then with Fate and Rosa Amalfitano (whose safety is also constantly in the thoughts of her father), later in Juan de Dios's relationship with the director of the mental institute, Elvira Campos, and finally in Archimboldi's unwavering love of Ingeborg, the woman whom everyone says is crazy. Of course, this worship of women is paralleled by repeated acts of horrible violence against the women of Santa Teresa. With Fate, the story draws closer to the crimes, and the border city of Santa Teresa starts to move into the forefront.

In part four, I studied the murders of hundreds of women over the course of multiple years along with a cast of more-and less-concerned police officers, using the detailed descriptions of the murders to look for patterns and trends in the crimes. I also thought about how the powers that be, lurking behind the scenes in their walled-off compounds, fit into the tradition of Mexican literature (of which I am a poor student). Near the end, don Pedro Páramo's name is mentioned, as one of the cops exclaims in frustration that people act like this place (Mexico, or his part of Mexico) is just like Pedro Páramo. This made me think about Bolaño's Santa Teresa again in terms of Rulfo's Comala, and how those two fictional places fit together in my mental conception of a country I've never visited. It also made me wonder what other fictional representations of Mexico might have shaped Santa Teresa.

Then, in part five, I finally got to read the story of the elusive author, who grows up in coastal Germany exploring undersea worlds (he loves swimming and diving), then goes off to fight in the war, traveling across Eastern Europe and eventually discovering the journal of a young Ukranian named Ansky, who teamed up with a relatively unimportant writer named Ivanov and accompanied him in some literary adventures that brought Ivanov fame and a signed letter from Gorki. Archimboldi is transfixed by the story of this young man who for a time played a Sancho Panza-esque foil to a Russian Science Fiction writer's Quixote. Archimboldi then starts writing, and some of the titles of his books made me think of some of the themes and motives that I'd seen over the past thousand pages: Rivers of Europe, which is in truth about one river, the Dneiper, reminded me of the murders of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa, which flowed together in one stream of violence and death in part four (which also reminded me of Jorge Manrique, he of Our lives are the rivers/that empty into the sea/that is death); The Endless Rose reminded me of the Rosas who featured prominently in part three and kept appearing in the names of murder victims. As the book drew to a close, there was one final pilgrimage to an insane asylum, after the academics went to one to meet Edwin Johns and Amalfitano's wife hitchhiked across Spain to visit a poet she admired. Then it was over, the book ending with a short and pleasing dialogue between Archimboldi and a man he meets at a café.

I spent my time with 2666 constructing a variety of edifices of meaning based on the connections I saw between Bolaño's books and the literary traditions of the Spanish speaking world. I'm rather obsessed with Spanish and Latin American literature, and everywhere I looked, I saw the ghosts of authors and books past peeking through the pages of this book. I kept trying to order my thoughts into coherent ideas about what it all meant, what the overarching project was, and in the end, the results were mixed. Many of my constructions (really, all of them) were abandoned in a partial state, but I was left satisfied that I'd found so much to think about during three weeks spent with a book that I enjoyed. My final conclusion was that maybe, when looking at the title of a book filled with parallel opposites (sanity and insanity, woman worship and femicide, et cetera), written in the years straddling 2000, it might be best to not only think of a year 666 years in the future, but also to look back over the literature of the past 666 years. I'd read a bunch of medieval Spanish literature in the months before I read 2666, and I saw a lot of little hints of medievality in this book (names with great symbolic value, chivalrous behavior toward women, pilgrimages, rivers flowing into one); then, of course, the recurring mental hospitals and questions about sanity and insanity, as well as the considerations about appearance and reality in Santa Teresa (it appears to be a booming town, with low unemployment and jobs for all in the maquiladoras, but underneath it all, the wealthy pillars of the community, in collusion with the drug dealers, may be complicit in the slaughter of the women who work in the busy factories) reminded me of Cervantes and his Quixote. Skipping ahead to the 20th century (I'm not well-versed in the Spanish language literature of centuries 18 and 19), I found plenty of points of relation between some of the past century's most famous and important Spanish language authors and this book by Bolaño. It occurs to me that maybe he, like Cervantes and García Márquez before him, is attempting a great labor of synthesis, and this book could be seen as his attempt to paint a compelling portrait of the present, inhabited by the ghosts of centuries of literary creations. Everybody says that this was his most ambitious project, and that would certainly be an ambitious undertaking.

That's how I'd read it if I were to read this book again. I'd probably just end up with an even bigger partially-completed construction of meaning when I got to the end. But I'd enjoy it just the same. I'd also probably try to read some colonial literature, especially La araucana, because I'd like to think I'd see little hints of some of the Spanish language literature associated with the discovery of the New World in this book, where a steady progression of characters arrive from Europe and the United States to discover a chaotic and troubled city just south of the border.

And as I think about big books that synthesize literary traditions, I realize it's high time to re-read Don Quixote after a spring spent reading medieval Spanish literature. I know the influences of Cervantes have been traced and retraced, and I'm hoping to get my hands on a better critical edition of his book so that I can really follow not just the adventures of Don Quijote and Sancho, but also the books behind the book, the books Cervantes read and appreciated before he turned the literary world on its ear. The reason I mention Cervantes now is that, after reading 2666 and laughing from time to time about bits and pieces I thought Borges might or might not have been okay with writing, I'm chuckling to myself again as I think of a revision to that statement: that this, 2666, is a novel that Cervantes would have agreed to write if he went on a time travelling adventure to the year 2000. Besides its assimilation of a wide variety of literary antecedents and its nods to divisions between sanity and insanity, and appearance and reality, 2666, like Don Quixote, is a book that's full of readers and writers. Critics, authors, professors, poets and newspaper reporters populate its pages. Even the part about the crimes, in its own way, is about authors and readers: the elusive and shadowy authors of the murders are pursued by a variety of individuals who attempt to read the evidence and draw conclusions based on their interpretations of the happenings in Santa Teresa. Is the idea of a time travelling Cervantes agreeing to write 2666 any less ridiculous than the idea of Borges being okay with writing it? Not really. But it's good to remember just how far Cervantes's shadow extends over all authors writing in Spanish, past and present.

Nice review of 2666, Matt. I read it just last year and very much enjoyed it.

@61: Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. I'm hoping to read Los detectives salvajes soon too; have you read that as well?

34: Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) by Alfred Jarry

In a Wikipedia article about Julio Cortázar, I read that when he moved to France he "came under the influence of the works of Alfred Jarry and the Comte de Lautréamont." Thinking that any literary friend of Cortázar is probably a friend of mine, I bought a cheap copy of Jarry's Ubu plays at the used bookstore, thinking that I'd read through them over the course of the summer. Before opening the book and beginning the Ubu cycle, I also returned to Wikipedia to read up on Jarry. He was quite the interesting fellow. Apparently he was less than five feet tall, and when he joined the army, he was excluded from parades and marching drills because he looked so damn silly in his uniform: they didn't have anything small enough for men of such reduced stature. He also loved bicycles and drinking alcohol, especially absinthe; I enjoy the idea of a tiny, drunk, bizarre man pedaling through the streets of Paris in the final decade of the 19th century. In the Wikipedia article, you can also read about the explosive reaction to the one and only performance of Ubu Roi that took place during his lifetime, and the effect that said performance had on Jarry:

"On opening night (December 10, 1896), with traditionalists and the avant-garde in the audience, King Ubu (played by Firmin Gémier) stepped forward and intoned the opening word, 'Merdre!' ('Shittr!'). A quarter of an hour of pandemonium ensued: outraged cries, booing, and whistling by the offended parties, countered by cheers and applause by the more forward-thinking contingent. Such interruptions continued through the evening. At the time, only the dress rehearsal and opening night performance were held, and the play was not revived until after Jarry's death.

The play brought fame to the 23-year-old Jarry, and he immersed himself in the fiction he had created. Gémier had modeled his portrayal of Ubu on Jarry's own staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). From then on, Jarry would always speak in this style. He adopted Ubu's ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we and called the wind 'that which blows' and the bicycle he rode everywhere 'that which rolls'."

After reading about Jarry, and reading the introductory material provided in my edition of "Tout Ubu," I was excited to begin the play. The title character is based on one of Jarry's teachers, who was fat, ugly and pretty much the ideal person for a group of kids to torment. He was originally christened Père Heb in a play called Les Polonais, which Jarry and some friends performed with marionettes at one of his classmates' home. As an adult, Jarry returned to the character, expanding the story and changing the man's name to Père Ubu. The story of Ubu's absurd adventures takes place in Poland, where he is a military man who serves king Venceslas. He decides to assasinate the king and usurp his throne, which he does quite easily; he then makes all kinds of ridiculous decrees, slaughters nobles and professionals, alters Poland's tax structure in ways that are extremely beneficial to himself, and the whole time spouts obscenities and other bizarre proclamations, eventually leading his country to war with foreign armies displeased by the instability caused by his reign. Père Ubu and a pair of his more loyal followers are eventually driven into a cave, where a bear threatens threatens their lives as

Père Ubu was a great character, all ridiculous energy and absurd outbursts, bumbling along and doing everything that convention would require him absolutely not to do. His most common refrains (Merdre! De par ma chandelle verte! Cornegidouille!) were always amusing and just the right mix between obscene and nonsensical. Every step of the way, he just kept doing the most outrageous, absurd, cowardly and vile things. He reminded me of a friend of mine who, when we used to get drunk in high school, would always insist on smashing beer bottles, throwing them off balconies, onto streets and sidewalks, at parked cars, wherever a bottle could be thrown, he'd throw it. We got so frustrated, because we knew it was absurd; moreover, we knew he knew it was absurd, stupid and incredibly irresponsible, yet he still did it every time. Looking back at it, though, my teenage frustrations at a friend who drinks a few beers and repeatedly does something ridiculous are replaced by laughter. This friend is a smart and complex guy, and his behavior is often strangely compelling. Someday I'll have to ask him what was going through his mind as he threw glass bottles. Maybe I'd be surprised by his side of the bottle-chucking story. Whatever the reason, if I could go back and watch him throw those bottles, or if I could watch another kid like him throw bottles as his appalled friends look on, it would amuse me to no end. And that's the amusement I found in Père Ubu, and what I imagine I would find in a bellicose, absinthe-drunken Alfred Jarry riding around on his bicycle. It pleases me to think that Jarry immersed himself in the character of Ubu, and that he might have brought to life those idiosyncrasies he so effectively sketched out in his play, because I feel that I've already seen a fleeting representation of Père Ubu.

I look forward to reading the next two installments in the Ubu series, and hope that these plays, along with the supplementary information provided in my edition of Tout Ubu, will help me better understand the context in which they were created. One thing that struck me as I read was, as bizarre and off-the-wall as Père Ubu seemed in 2011, I can hardly imagine what it would have been like to attend that opening night performance in 1896. Based on the anecdote above, I imagine the reaction of a portion of the opening night audience to have been similar to my reaction to my friend's strange and destructive behavior. And as I think of that audience, split between laughter and rage, the combination in turn provokes my own laughter, laughter that accompanied me through most of the play.

35. Las Hortensias y otros cuentos (The Hortenses and Other Stories) by Felisberto Hernández

As I've read a series of books by Felisberto Hernández over the past year and a half, I've also spent some time searching the internet for more information on the author. The Centro Virtual Cervantes has a good tribute page (http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/fhernandez/default.htm), and the Fundación Felisberto Hernández has an Official Site with a wealth of information on the author and his works in Spanish (http://www.felisberto.org.uy/) and also in English (http://www.felisberto.org.uy/ingles.html). And, in a 2007 article published in La Nación entitled "Felisberto Hernández y la espía soviética," I learned more about Felisberto's bizarre and turbulent marriage to the Soviet spy África de las Heras, which in turn led me to this collection of his short stories, one of which is titled Las Hortensias. The story is dedicated "to María Luisa, on the day she ceased to be my fiancée." María Luisa is the assumed name of África de las Heras. The story, as described in La Nación, is about a man, his wife and his collection of extremely detailed and life-sized dolls; according to the article, it really makes one wonder just how much the author might have known, or intuited, about his wife and her secret Soviet connections. Felisberto had an odd way of looking at the world, finding life and consciousness in strange places, so I was especially intrigued by how life and art may have interacted in this story, and how his written words might have related to any doubts, hunches or premonitions he might have felt about his marriage to María Luisa. The author of the article, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, concludes that: "Felisberto, in 'Las Hortensias,' discovered the essence of the plot in which he was involved without understanding what the plot itself was, palpating it with his dozen eyes habituated to semi-darkness." This all seemed very intriguing.

The story begins with Horacio and María Hortensia living in a large home with some loud machinery. Horacio has a team of workers set up different still scenes in which life-sized dolls represent moments in the lives of women. Some members of the team write brief descriptions of each scene that Horacio reads after spending a sufficient amount of time in the room. Sometimes the descriptions please him and fit with his conception of the representation; other times they leave a bad taste in his mouth and he tells himself he'll have to have a word with his staff. There's one doll, a Hortensia model made by the expert dollmaker in town, that occupies a special place in their home: it sits at the table with them, they take it for walks in the garden, and it even sleeps with them. Eventually Horacio decides it's time to take things up a notch and he gets his dollmaker to install a hot water bladder in the Hortensia, so that she seems more real. Soon he takes things to another level, and eventually there is a violent confrontation involving the lifelike doll. Then there are other marital problems and other dolls in the life of Horacio, and he continues to observe pre-prepared scenes of other dolls in his home.

I'm inclined to go along with the idea that Felisberto may have known something was up, without knowing exactly what. All the female dolls, all the fighting between man and wife over the dolls, written while the author was entering into a marriage with a woman who was really a Soviet operative, it all seems to point to something, and while I think it's possible that the author realized that his beautiful wife was not who she claimed to be, it's more difficult to imagine that he could have known the whole story. Whatever he knew, on whatever level he knew it, I thought the real-life implications of this story of people and anatomically correct dolls added an extra layer of oppressiveness to what was already a strange, brutal story.

Along with Las Hortensias, this collection had a couple of stories I'd never read and wasn't overly impressed by (Lucrecia and La casa nueva), and two I'd read before and loved: La casa inundada (The Inundated House) and El cocodrilo (The Crocodile). In the former, a down-on-his-luck pianist gets a job rowing a boat for an obese, lonely woman around the waterways of a mansion she has filled with water, possibly in homage to a husband she lost during a trip through Europe. In the latter, another down-on-his-luck traveling pianist starts selling women's stockings as he travels from town to town. One day, a woman observes him crying, and later that day, as he's being rejected by another middling department store owner, he wonders what might happen if he were to cry right then and there. Pretty soon, he has a new and powerful weapon in his repertory. The Crocodile hadn't overly impressed me when I read it in the context of another collection of Hernández's stories, but this time it blew me away. The premise is unique and compelling and the story is fun to read and imagine; just as importantly, in the author's hands the inner world of the pianist, the moment in which the thought of crying crosses his mind, his worries and justifications for his behavior, they all grant the reader entrance into that separate, interior world that interacts with the people who laugh and beg him to cry like he always does. Many of his stories are like this. It would also probably be fair to say that they are at least semi-autobiographical. It seems like three out of every four feature a piano player who gives concerts in provincial cities (three out of five do in this collection), and as I read more and more of his stories, I feel as if, given the privilege of entering the minds of his characters, I'm learning more about the author's world and his memories, seen through his eyes superimposed onto fictional, or not so fictional, men.

In browsing the internet in search of information about Felisberto Hernández, you run into quite a few people who enthusiastically proclaim that he should be more famous, because, why does an author whom Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar all cite as a major influence on their own fictional creations remain lost in an obscurity of occasional translations that nobody buys and fan sites scattered across the internet? I'm more than happy to join them in their enthusiasm, and I'm thankful I have access to a really nice college library that owns pretty much every book by or related to him. I'm nearing the time when I'm going to have to start asking myself: what will I do when I've read all his stories? I think I'll take a step back in time from the Uruguay of Felisberto Hernández to the France of Marcel Proust. In some of the stories of this book, and even more so in some of his novellas, the author investigates a land of memories that has piqued my interest in the work of the French man whom many cite as one of the fundamental inspirations of the Uruguayan pianist-turned-author.

36. Obras completas y otros cuentos (Complete Works and Other Stories) by Augusto Monterroso

My master plan for this summer was to devote every spare reading moment to a progression of big, challenging novels: 2666, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo, el Supremo and Ulysses. I'm on Paradiso now, and I've really been enjoying it. It's a special book, with each chapter granting the reader access to different moments in the history of a Cuban family, utilizing vivid, extraordinary and remarkably inventive language. I've read few books like it. However, after spending my fifteen minute break at work dumbly reading and re-reading the same five pages of Paradiso, barely understanding a thing, I decided that it's a book that must be read (in my case, at least) in moments of extended leisure, when I have at least an hour or so to slowly penetrate into Lezama Lima's overwhelmingly rich text-world.

So I needed something to read at work and in spare moments at home. Over the past few months I'd checked out a handful of books by some renowned 20th century Latin American short story writers, and I decided it'd be best to work my way through them, rather than turn to other novels that required less attention. I started with a book of Felisberto Hernández stories, then moved on to the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso's Obras completas y otros cuentos. The title (Complete Works) amused me, because I pulled it from the shelf of a library where I might very well find an edition of Augusto Monterroso's complete works alongside his book of short stories entitled Complete Works. He mentions characters reading or publishing complete works a couple of times throughout the book, almost like a running joke, before ending his series of short stories with the title story. This recurring theme was handled with humor, and indeed, humor, smart humor, was a constant in these stories.

There is a story about a Guatemalan music buff who finds the lost two final movements of a Schubert symphony, and travels the world trying to convince people that a) they really are the lost movements, and they really were discovered by him in Guatemala, and b) that these lost symphonies should be published, that the world is ready for them. There's a story about Mister Taylor, living in poverty in Guatemala, who is one day handed a shrunken head and goes into the shrunken head business, to great financial benefit. There's a story about a man who watches his daughter perform a piano concert, disgusting himself at the idea that she's not really that talented, she only gets good reviews in the papers because the critics know who daddy is, and why did he encourage her in her pursuit of such a frivolous career in music? One story is often cited as being the shortest short story in the world. There's a story about a religious man captured by cannibals who devises a plan to guarantee his escape. There's a story about the tallest man in the world. And the title story is about the relationship between a respected, admired professor and an aspiring young poet. The professor guides the poet down a road that may or may not be a happy one, and the professor has second thoughts as he drops pearls of wisdom in the young writer's path.

This was a fun book, and I found myself reading it during every spare moment, choosing shorter stories when I had just a few minutes, and longer ones during breaks at work. They were refreshing: clever, thoughtful and entertaining looks at moments in life, some more realistic than others, varying in tone and seriousness, but all sharing a conversational, friendly style that made me want to keep reading. Reading them did not feel like work at all (reading Paradiso feels like work; rewarding, satisfying work, but work nonetheless). Maybe I just haven't been reading enough short stories, or enough books by authors known for their straightforward, humorous interaction with their readers. As I was looking for some background information on the author, I came across the following quote by Carlos Fuentes, referring to a later volume of short fiction by Monterroso:

"Imagine Borges' fantastical bestiary having tea with Alice. Imagine Jonathan Swift and James Thurber exchanging notes. Imagine a frog from Calaveras County who has seriously read Mark Twain. Meet Monterroso."

I agree with this characterization of the author, except that I assume the part about the bestiary of Borges relates more to his later fables than to these stories. Maybe I should give Carlos Fuentes another chance. He seems so boring, and I've tried multiple times to read La muerte de Artemio Cruz but can never finish it (and I don't tend to leave books unfinished). Maybe, since he's at least familiar with my childhood hero James Thurber, I should go ahead and pull that book back off the shelf.

One other thing I noticed about this book: I got it from the library and it had a sticker on the inside of the back cover that stated: "Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide. Treatment Date: June 2002." I thought the way the pages of this book felt in my hands was quite unpleasant, but I was surprised how new it looked, despite being published more than thirty years ago.

#62: I tried The Savage Detectives and gave up on it. I really did not care for the book at all. I may give it another go at some point.

37. Confabulario definitivo (Confabulario and Other Inventions) by Juan José Arreola

I continued my short vacation from the novel with this compilation of short stories by Mexican author Juan José Arreola. It includes stories from Confabulario, originally published in 1952, as well as some additional texts published in a 1949 volume entitled Varia Invención. The author is considered one of Mexico's greatest and most innovative writers of short fiction in the 20th century, and he wrote around the same time as Juan Rulfo that other famous Mexican writer of short stories (and one short novel). Their creative paths crossed in their youth, in the form of the literary journal Pan, which they co-founded. The biographic information included in the introduction to this critical edition notes that Arreola was an enthusiastic reader of Marcel Schwob during his younger years, and he also once took an inspiring trip to Paris; the author once stated that "my life is divided into two parts: before the trip and after the trip." The reference to Schwob made more and more sense to me as I read these stories, some of which are brief portraits of historical figures similar to those I've been reading recently in Schwob's Vies imaginaires. The Arreola-Schwob connetion was also nice to know for another reason, because it reinforced another connection that I'll discuss later.

It took me a while to get into these stories. They were less accessible, less conversational than the stories by Augusto Monterroso that I'd read before beginning this book. One of the first stories is about an entrepreneur, Arpad Niklaus, who is collecting money to conduct an experiment that will involve reducing a camel to a stream of molecules passable through the eye of a needle. The project grows in scale, requiring the construction of facilities and generations of wealthy donors committing steadily-increasing sums of money. The theological implications of the success or failure of Niklaus's experiment are far-reaching, and it was as both possible outcomes were being discussed in terms of God and religion that I realized how much I liked the story, how what had begun as a simple sideshow experiment had been extended to an immense scale that encompassed the fate of all mankind. I hadn't expected it to go there.

Then, a few stories later, I came to "El guardagujas" (The Switchman), in which a traveler buys a ticket for a train then discusses with the switchman whether it will ever come. The railroad industry in the traveler's country is laying down an ever-expanding matrix of criss-crossing tracks, and it has created precise schedules for the running of its trains; however, the switchman has some interesting news for the traveler concerning the possibility that his train may or may not arrive to the station. He tells some fascinating stories about travelers unknowingly sent down the tracks to establish new communities in particularly beneficial locations, trains taken apart and put back together by passengers in order to cross ravines, and people who grow old and die on trains, with the railroad company making funeral arrangements with pride. The story is odd, and I was again struck by how a simple encounter between a traveler and a railroad worker spiraled to a scale I wouldn't have anticipated.

Mixed with these stories are short descriptions of rhinoceros-men and bull-men living in the modern world, historical accounts of men like Sinesio of Rodas, whose theological writings on angels were forgotten during the great wave of Christianity that swept through the western world, and Nabónides, who devoted his life to the compilation of an immense written history of Babylonia. There is one story that is an advertisement for artificial women who replace real flesh-and-blood wives, and in another, a traveling salesman comes to town and offers new wives in exchange for old ones; the town's men all take him up on the deal, except for one, who sticks with his old wife. In the end, nobody is happy. Another story is about an ant who finds a prodigious miligram. This small chunk of mineral matter is eventually worshipped by the colony, but their desire to see divinity in everyday grains of sand leads to their downfall.

As I was getting used to Arreola's more serious and erudite style, I came to a story entitled "Pablo." It's about a normal, boring accountant who one day discovers that he is God reincarnated. God, after creating the world and mankind in his image, exploded himself into bits and pieces that are present in all people, with successive generations representing a slow and steady progression that will end in the restoration of Himself, intact in one human being. Pablo is that guy, and when he realizes his godliness one day at work, he is awakened to a world of possibilities, experiences and human histories that all now belong to him. This brings with it positives and negatives, and in the end, Pablo makes an important decision regarding his fate, and the fate of all mankind.

I thought, wow, this story about a man with suddenly infinite possibilities and memories reminds me an awful lot of Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious." And then I thought that actually, a lot of Arreola's stories made me think of Borges. There are marked differences between the two, most noticeable to me in Arreola's uneasy, complicated depiction of gender relations (besides the two stories about manufactured wives, there are also many stories about unhappy spouses and romantic betrayals), and his frequent use of Christian themes (God, the Devil, angels and other elements of Christianity make frequent appearances in his stories). However, there are also great similarities: Arreola, like Borges, was an avid reader whose education in literature was largely autodidactic; both men exhibit great fascination with the past and the stories of men whom history has forgotten; and both are able to take small stories revolving around simple objects or single encounters between people, and expand the meanings of these objects and encounters to immense, sometimes infinite scopes. I enjoyed these similarities because, as I've been wanting to read more books by Mexican authors, it was nice to begin with Arreola, whose short stories are in some ways analogous to those of Borges. I imagine the two men, who were born a few decades apart at the beginning of the 20th century, growing up at opposite corners of Latin America: Borges, looking out from between the bars of the fence separating his family's Palermo home from the streets filled with hard, savage men, gauchos and malevos distant and fascinating to the young Argentine; and Arreola, growing up in a Mexico far less familiar to me than Borges's Palermo, whose streets I once had the pleasure of walking. Arreola's upbringing would appear to be more Catholic and also humbler (Arreola's biography contains no seven year stays in Switzerland), but as they grew up and began their careers in the world of literature, their short fictions in some ways ran parallel.

Borges wrote his Universal History of Infamy in part inspired by Schwob's imaginary biographical sketches, so the connection Borges-Schwob-Arreola, which I had briefly considered as I started reading the introductory biography of this Mexican author who almost exclusively wrote short stories, ended up being more compelling than I might have expected. This makes me happy. I'd rushed up to the library on my break at work one day after reading an essay about Borges and how some of his writings exhibit the influence of Schwob, and I wanted to get to know this French antecedent to an Argentine author I know and love. Now I've seen how the Frenchman influenced the writing of another author from the opposite end of Spanish speaking America.

After reading this book, I've decided to continue with Mexican literature for a little while, and I started reading Elena Garro's Recuerdos del Porvenir yesterday. It's pretty good so far. I've also got two books by Alfonso Reyes, a Spanish man who had deep literary connections with both Mexico and Argentina. I hope his books will help me understand the ways that both nation's literatures developed and interacted with each other in the early part of the 20th century.

Fabulous review of Confabulario definitivo and description of its author, Matt. I'll look for this one on my upcoming book hunts.

@68: Glad you're interested! The English translation is still in print (or print-on-demand) at the University of Texas Press:

Confabulario

Used copies usually run $5 to $7 online...I know this because I've been looking for a Spanish version, which are significantly more expensive. Anyway, I hope you find it and enjoy it!

38. Los recuerdos del porvenir by Elena Garro

Continuing my literary jaunt through Mexico, I picked up Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir, which I'd ordered online last year after searching for a cheap/used copy for a couple of years. While I'd wanted to read this book for a while, I hadn't done much of the preliminary internet searching I usually do as I prepare to read something by a new author. I knew she was married to Octavio Paz, and I'd heard that this book is considered an early, pre-García Márquez incarnation of Magical Realism. That's about it.

As I began reading, I was surprised to find that the narrator of this book is not a person, but rather the town of Ixtepec itself: in telling the story of its (her) citizens and post-revolutionary military occupiers, the town speaks of "my streets," "my memories, "my past and future." It also inserts itself into the collective "we" when discussing the town's collective struggles or their perceptions of the military men and the other recently-arrived foreigner, the young and mysterious Felipe Hurtado. I liked this unorthodox choice of narrator, and I was glad that it was handled with restraint, with the town staying in the background, occasionally reminding the reader of its identity without overshadowing the characters with its presence. It's a melancholy town, appropriately melancholy considering the grim reality of its inhabitants; but I'm glad that it didn't start complaining too much about the injustice of the world or anything like that.

Ixtepec tells us the story of the Moncada family, whose destiny is intertwined with that of General Fernando Rojas and his soldiers, who have been put in charge of the town and live in Don Pepe's hotel with their mistresses, cloistered away from the townspeople. Their rule is brutal: from time to time, they send one of the citizens, Rodolfo Goríbar, out to do their dirty work, and the next morning a few more bodies are hanging from the tree as an example to those faceless country folk who could potentially take part in an agrarian uprising against the unjust military regime. Don Martín and Doña Ana Moncada have three children: Nicolás, Juan and Isabel. Nicolás and Juan leave town in the first part of the book to work in the mines, while Isabel stays behind, strangely attracted to General Rojas. The general bears an intense, unrequited love for Julia Andrade, a beautiful woman whom he snatched from another town during one of his military campaigns. He desperately wants her to reciprocate his feelings for her, and he spends his nights pleading with her in their room at the hotel, hoping that she will one day accept and love him. He's prone to fits of jealousy, and he's worried by the presence of Hurtado, who seems to be connected to Julia's wild, pre-Rosas past. Often, his failures are followed by fits of anger and brutal orders carried out by Rodolfo. The townspeople see this and come to hate Julia for her power over the general. However, they are also irresistibly drawn in by her beauty and their eyes never leave her when she exits the hotel for a walk around the plaza.

In the second part, a new story comes to the forefront, with the military receiving orders from then-president Plutarco Elías Calles to take over the church and ban religious practices in Ixtepec. The military is later implicated in a violent crime against the town priest, whose bloody body is mysteriously taken from the patrolled streets of Ixtepec. As the tensions between the military and the townspeople build to a crescendo, a group of the Ixtepec aristocracy, including the Moncada patriarch, announce to Fernando Rojas that they wish to throw a party in his honor, showing him that they are willing to let bygones be bygones. The general is suspicious, but agrees to attend their get-together. At some point in the second half of the book, my attention started to wander, but the ending was really strong, and not quite what I expected.

It's a hard book to summarize. There are so many characters and so many different settings. I didn't even mention "El Presidente" Juan Cariño, the mentally infirm proprietor of the town brothel who plays an important role in the final sequence of events, nor any of the other townspeople who collaborated with the Moncadas in the grand old party for the general. I spent the first forty or fifty pages working hard to keep track of all the different names, but I found it was worth the effort, because by the end, I really felt like I knew the town and had a good idea of its various spaces and the way they fit together into a whole. I enjoy portraits of small towns because I once lived in a small town: I didn't grow up in one, I don't live in one now, but I did for about a year and half, and I like to recreate my time in a remote town through the stories of other, similar towns. I like to imagine my old friends and neighbors as characters in the books I'm reading, and create my own mental drama transposing the events of the book to the little Mongolian community where I lived. I think the enjoyment I derived from imagining a story of the forefathers of my Mongolian friends suffering through the Soviet incursion into Mongolia, with the Russians' repression of Buddhism mirroring the Mexican government's repression of the Catholic Church, speaks to the strength of Garro's portrait of Ixtepec. I also think my Mongolian neighbors would really enjoy the idea of a story told by a town.

I was surprised by the focus on post-revolutionary Mexican politics and the social issues resulting from the Mexican Revolution. I didn't expect the story to be so overtly political. In many ways, I saw this book as a compelling literary extension of some of the issues that come to light in Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo. He shows us the rise and fall of the idealistic revolutionary, eventually ending in anarchy, with everyone trying to grab as much money and as many valuable objects as they can. Ms. Garro shows us the spoils of power won by the victors of the revolution, and how they manipulated their military power to rule over the citizens of a small town like Ixtepec, essentially living in a continuation of the looting, freewheeling lifestyle of the revolution's later years. They've taken what they wanted, including the women they want, and they've got them imprisoned behind the walls of the hotel. I saw the looting in the anarchic later days of the revolution depicted in Azuela's book. This book gave me an idea of how life went on after the revolution ended, and how those same people who took what they wanted struggled, often unsuccessfully, to hold onto the power, women and riches they had taken.

I was also intrigued by the similarities between this book, published in 1963, and Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude, published three years later. Garro's novel could certainly be considered an early example of Magical Realism. In it, a town narrates its story, a woman changes into a stone, and a man mysteriously escapes town on horseback at the very moment when you know he is doomed to die. These magical events occur against a very real backdrop of military rule, agrarian uprisings in the countryside, violence, and power struggles between the Catholic Church and the Mexican state. I've never thought of myself as a particular fan of the genre, and my experience with it does not extend very far beyond the books of García Márquez, which I passionately read in high school and periodically return to as an adult. I don't feel particularly qualified to speak on the conventions of the genre, and I'm sure others could explain in greater depth the connection between Garro's book and later works by Latin American authors. What interested me in thinking of García Márquez and his Macondo was the form of this book, and the way it charted the rise and fall of the younger generation of the Moncada family. The book is divided into two parts, and as I finished, I thought that in some ways, the end represented the end of a cycle, the life cycle of some of characters and their time in Ixtepec. In the end, the town mentions the fact that her townspeople's lives would never be the same as they were before. Maybe García Márquez read this book and thought, why stop at one cycle if the political and military regimes keep coming, if young people continue to struggle to fulfill their destinies with each generation rising and falling, one after another, against a backdrop of rural corruption and violence, with rising and falling economic prospects. His book invites the reader to witness the rise and fall of Macondo; I wonder whether he saw some things he liked in Ixtepec and the magical flights from a brutal reality employed by Garro, realizing that he could write about cycles of liberal and conservative regimes and generations of José Arcadios and Aureliano Buendías in his own fictional, magical town.

I'm excited to read more books by Elena Garro. This is her most famous book, considered by many to be her masterpiece. However, Argentine author César Aira disagrees. In his Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos, he states: "looking back on the author's career, critics have continued to refer to this book as her most important work. In reality, the peculiar genius of Elena Garro only timidly peeks out in its pages." I think I'll take Aira's statement as an invitation to check out some of her later books, which I hope to enjoy as much as I did this one.

Great review, Matt! I am off to see if any of Garro's books have been translated since I read and speak muy poco Espanol.

71: Thanks! Here's a link to the English translation, which is in print at the University of Texas Press:

Recollections of Things to Come

I think used copies can usually be found for less than $10 on the internet...

#72: My local college library has a copy so I am going to try and get it from that source.

39: El plano oblicuo by Alfonso Reyes

Hacía mucho que yo quería leer un libro de Alfonso Reyes. Su nombre aparece a menudo en la historia de las letras argentinas por su conexión con una generación de escritores, joven cuando Reyes estuvo en Buenos Aires como Embajador de México, que después logró fama y prestigio internacional, encabezado por la figura de Jorge Luis Borges. Yo sabía que Borges era amigo de Reyes, que Reyes le había alentado en su labor literario, y que Borges lo consideraba "el mejor prosista de lengua española en cualquier época." Esta cita de por sí despertó mi curiosidad, puesto que, cuando uno lee a Borges, sobre todo cuando uno es muy joven, como yo cuando leí a Borges por primera vez, se genera una concepción del escritor argentino como una figura paterna de la literatura de su país: señorial, maduro, un modelo para generaciones futuras de escritores. Para mí, la obra de Borges era algo como un punto de partida, para después ir hacia adelante, hacia un futuro poblado de otros escritores que existieron y siguen existiendo después de él. Nunca pensé que este Borges "padre" tuviera, a su vez, padres y tíos y toda una familia literaria que le diera un modelo para seguir en su escritura. Bueno, sabía de algunas de sus lecturas predilectas; leí a Stevenson, por ejemplo, buscando rasgos de "lo Borges" en Treasure Island y en Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Pero, aunque podía vislumbrar algunos rasgos de la escritura de Borges en la de Stevenson, seguía viendo al escritor argentino como un caso aislado, un hombre único e innovador. Pero, por innovador que un escritor sea, me parece válido pensar que siempre trabaja dentro de alguna tradición, que su originalidad se da dentro del contexto de lo que vino antes, y que todo autor tiene sus antepasados. Y veía a Reyes como un posible antepasado de Borges.

Lo difícil fue encontrar el libro apropiado para iniciarme en el mundo literario de Alfonso Reyes. Compré una antología de su Prosa y poesía, pero tengo una aversión a antologías, para dar un ejemplo nunca he comprado discos "Greatest Hits," y así seguía buscando otro libro que cuadrara con mis deseos por un encuentro inicial con Reyes. Entonces, en la introducción de un volumen de cuentos de Juan José Arreola, leía una breve historia de la literatura mexicana con una mención a la importancia del libro El plano oblicuo en el desarrollo del cuento mexicano. El día siguiente, fui a la biblioteca y saqué Volumen III de las Obras Completas de Alfonso Reyes, satisfecho de haber encontrado un libro-principio que podría darme una idea, una impresión de la inmensa obra del autor-diplómato mexicano que tanto impresionó a un joven Jorge Luis Borges.

El primer cuento, "La cena," fue, a mi parecer, una perfecta introducción a la obra de Reyes, al menos para un lector de Borges. En él, un hombre recibe una invitación extraña y tentadora a una cena: "Doña Magdalena y su hija Amalia esperan a usted a cenar mañana, a las nueve de la noche. ¡Ah, si no faltara!..." El narrador atravesa las calles de su ciudad corriendo, temeroso de no llegar a la hora citada. Una vez llegado, comparte una comida con las dos mujeres e imbibe lo suficiente de vino como para embriagarse un poco y acentuar la rareza del encuentro. Pasan al jardín y el narrador se queda dormido; cuando despiete, escucha cómo las anfitrionas siguen hablando de un ciego que siempre quería ver a París pero que perdió la vista en una explosión durante la guerra, cuando se encontraba en Europa, tan cerca de la ciudad de sus sueños, y su huésped (el narrador) ahora va a poder describir el París que el ciego nunca vio, y se lo relatará al retrato del ciego (ahora muerto), un retrato que se parece inequívocamente al narrador...y el narrador huye, huye de la casa y de la cena que parece un sueño.

Es un cuento difícil de resumir para una persona como yo, con limitadas posibilidades de expresión en este mi segundo idioma, un idioma que manejo todavía muy torpemente. Es corto, y creo que sería mejor dar el enlace siguiente: http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/escritores/a_reyes/antologia/cena.htm, sugeriendo que el lector interesado pase los cinco o diez minutos necesarios para leerlo y formular sus propios opiniones.

Los otros cuentos que componen el libro incluyen una mezcla de personajes y temas de la antigüedad con otro contenido más moderno y contemporáneo: por un lado, por ejemplo, hay un debate delicioso entre Odiseo y Eneas, los dos muertos y llegados a su destinación final, donde disputan sus méritos frente a una audiencia de sus compañeros. Odiseo, con el don de la palabra y toda su experiencia oratoria a cuestas, fácilmente derrota a Eneas, pero justo cuando le apunta a darle el tiro de gracia...aparece el fantasma de Quevedo con unas coplas divertidísimas que vienen precisamente al caso, y después otro fantasma aparece con algunas lineas en francés alabadoras de Odiseo, y todo se desmorona en un coro de risas. Otro cuento relata la historia de un tipo con inteligencia y talento prometedores, destinado a llegar lejos en la vida y apodado "Estrella de Oriente" por sus amigos. Para el final de la cuenta, vemos a la Estrella otra vez, su estado final reflejando un destino algo diferente que lo esperado. A mí me encantó la mezcla de lo antiguo con lo nuevo, con historias de la actualidad (la de Reyes, por lo menos) alternando con otras que presentan seres del pasado, héroes de la mitología greco-romana y también gente común de diferentes momentos de la historia humana.

Los setenta páginas de El plano oblicuo forman, a mi parecer, una muy buena introducción a Alfonso Reyes. En vez de experimentar lo mejor, lo más popular o lo más estudiado de una obra inmensa (sus obras completas son enciclopédicas, divididas en 22 volúmenes) pasé un rato agradable con una serie de cuentos representativos de una época en su vida anterior a su estadía en Buenos Aires. Setenta páginas no son mucho, pero son un principio. Como sigo leyendo más obras de Reyes (en el mismo volumen hay unos Retratos reales e imaginarios que pienso leer próximamente), creo que identificaré más puntos de comparación entre él y Jorge Luis Borges, y espero seguir reconociendo en la prosa de este hombre mexicano algunos rasgos comunes con su amigo argentino. Ahora la obra de Borges me parece menos aislada en mi concepción mental de la literatura en español, y creo poder entender un poco mejor la tradición de cuentos dentro de la cual Borges escribió con tanta originalidad.

40. Yo el supremo (I the Supreme) by Augusto Roa Bastos

Augusto Roa Bastos' loosely interrelated Paraguay Trilogy consists of Hijo de hombre, Yo el supremo and El fiscal. The first book tells the stories of a group of people living in rural Paraguay before and during the Chaco War, which was fought between Paraguay and Bolivia over a wide swath of land in the middle of both countries thought to possess vast oil deposits. It's a favorite of mine. The third tells of a man who sets off to murder a contemporary Paraguayan dictator. I can't remember if Stroessner is specifically named, but the dictator is obviously a representation of him. I read it a number of years ago and remember it being a real challenge, with a complex style that mixes streams of consciousness, extended dream interludes, and a narrator whose grasp of reality seems tenuous at best as he undertook his mission of toppling a tyrant in his home country. That left me with Yo el supremo, which I knew to be about 19th century dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. My friend and fellow Paraguay enthusiast spoke glowingly of it, and I also read a short article by Juan Carlos Onetti that praised Roa Bastos' ability to penetrate into the mind of its subject, postulating that at some moment during the writing of this book, control over the pen transferred from the 20th century author to the 19th century dictator himself, with Francia's thoughts flowing across the pages. I'd been looking for a copy of this book for some time, and finally got ahold of a used Cátedra edition earlier this year.

I was glad to have a critical edition with all the usual footnotes and introductory studies, because this is a very complex book, alternating between many different narrative voices. There are sections of dialogue between Francia and his scribe, Patiño; there is a "Circular Perpetual," in which Francia documents his version of Paraguayan history, including his rise to power and interactions with emmissaries from Argentina, Brazil and England. These sections often contain extensive historical footnotes, completementing The Supreme's perspective with citations from actual texts written by the outside intruders themselves, documenting their often unwilling stays in Paraguay (Francia had a habit of detaining those who arrived from the outside). There are also entries from his private notebook, made up of bitter memories of his Brazilian father, a supposed contrabandist, and also his childhood spent in possession of a cherished human skull. These private interludes are often interrupted, with indications that sections of The Supreme's documents had been lost in a fire that consumed his personal quarters. In some cases, the transitions between private notebook, free-flowing dialogue with Patiño, and Circular Perpetual are difficult to follow. I felt fortunate to have a chart in the introduction that allowed me to check and see what exactly was going on in each of the book´s many unmarked chapters. Without it, I probably would have picked up on the transitions, but I might not have been as aware of what was going on.

Through five hundred pages of Francia, I got to know the dictator quite well. These texts, purportedly composed directly before (or after) his death, are an impressive representation of what a man who'd clung to power in an isolated backwater of South America might have thought and felt as he looked back on his life. It did indeed feel like Francia, not Roa Bastos, was writing the pages of this book, which is testament to the author's ability to penetrate into his subject and manipulate the Spanish language to represent the peculiarities of speech in a bilingual country where Guaraní is spoken alongside Spanish. The introduction to my edition documented a series of elements of Guaraní vocabulary and syntax that were incorporated into this Spanish text, with The Supreme constantly combining, blending and expanding Spanish words in ways that would be appropriate for a person of his patriotic Paraguayan background. You can read an exerpt from the English translation here: I the Supreme. I think it gives a taste of the exuberantly creative vocabulary employed throughout the book.

Right before I read this book, I was listening to an episode of This American Life about a Psycopath test developed for academic purposes and later employed by the prison system in a morally iffy way (i.e. a person who scores high on the test may never get parole, even if he or she is an exemplary prisoner and shows clear signs of rehabilitation). It related some of the questions from the test, and also mentioned that a surprisingly high number of extremely successful individuals (such as business executives) are considered psycopaths by its criteria. As I read, I thought about the example questions from the show, and figured that Francia would probably have been considered a psycopath as well. Unable to relate to the world around him, his conscience corrupted by his desire to protect the country he led from any and all colonialist encroachment, he was increasingly unable to relate to even his most trusted friends, let alone the hundreds of thousands of Paraguayan subjects he professed to love. He ended up alone and hated, stuck in his chamber writing and dictating an interminable stream of memories and political diatribes. It was sad, and the show about the psycopaths was sad too. It's hard to imagine what it'd be like to be unable to successfully relate to other people, and one way this condition was described on the show was, some people are emotionally deaf. Francia seemed that way, and in combination with the absolute power he exercised inside Paraguay's borders, it made for an ugly and increasingly pitiful portrait of a dictator.

But what was the alternative? What he was professing was essentially noble: this is a free country, and I invite you (England, Argentina, Brazil) to formally recognize our republic and enter into formal trade relations with us. We've got abundant natural resources, and they can be transported down the river to Buenos Aires and the ocean with minimal difficulty. We can work alongside each other to form a confederacy of independent, sovereign nations in South America, maintaining mutually beneficial trade agreements with England and Europe. He saw himself as a man of the stature of Simón Bolívar, but he slowly realized that nobody was with him: everyone knew that Paraguay was stuck in the middle of massive countries, isolated in the middle of a continent, and that it had no control over its trade destiny. The mouth of the river was controlled by the British in proxy with the Argentines, and if he didn't accept their unjust terms, there was no way Francia's ships were going to move downstream. Some of the foreign emissaries expressed admiration toward him in the beginning, because he was an effective leader, organizing the country, expanding education greatly and decreasing corruption in the public sector. However, as Francia began to see that the cards were stacked against him, and those same men who originally admired him now presented him with insulting diplomatic proposals unbefitting of a free and sovereign nation, he lashed out at them, holding them prisoner and barring their exit from his country.

He was really in quite a Catch-22, forced to choose between trade agreements that didn't respect Paraguay's sovereignty, or complete isolation from the rest of the world and the economic benefits of foreign trade. His obstinate refusal to bow to the foreign powers who wanted to exploit his country's fertile lands and productive economy ended up ruining him, but what other choice did he have?

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I don't think I've read anything that blends fiction and history quite like this. It's an admirable portrait of a fascinating figure in Paraguayan history. I'd recommend it to all those who are interested in South American history, and also to those who enjoy innovative and challenging fiction. If you'd like more information on this book, there's a top-knotch Wikipedia article written by a professor of Latin American Studies here: I the Supreme.

41. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Driving south on I-65, listening to a woman with pleasant British accent narrate Pride and Prejudice on tape...Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! My girlfriend and I went to the library with fifteen minutes to pick out something to listen to on our road trip, and we agreed on this one. It seemed like a good choice, and it was: we both enjoyed it. I hadn't listened to a book on tape in years, and it was hard at first to get into the story. I kept confusing all the names, and the small portion of my attention I had to devote to cruise controlled interstate driving seemed to prevent me from getting into the book. I persisted, though, and was soon following the story without problem.

As you probably know, it's just Jane Austin's book, with zombies added into the mix. They're popping up out of the moist British soil all over the place, they're referred to as "unmentionables" (which was hilarious when pronounced by the British narrator), and nearly all of the characters are highly skilled in the "Deadly Arts." They practice their skills in dojos and kill zombies with guns and katanas every time they cross paths with them. The addition of zombies to Austen's 19th century themes and characters made for a fun read. We laughed a lot. Maybe it wouldn't have been as enjoyable if I was reading it to myself silently, or if I had other things to do besides sit in the driver's seat and adjust my position every so often when my legs got sore. But it made the long drive go by quicker.

I've never read Pride and Prejudice, which made this zombie-filled experience an odd introduction to Jane Austen. The non-zombie-slaughtering parts were good, though, and I was really hoping things'd all work out for everyone in the end. I'll probably read the original it some day, although I'll probably try another one of Austen's books first. I think I'd like Northanger Abbey, and I might try to check a copy of that one out the next time I'm at the library.

42. Juntacadáveres (Bodysnatcher) by Juan Carlos Onetti

It'd been a while since I last visited Santa María, and I figured it was high time to read Juntacadáveres, which narrates the rise and fall of Larsen's brothel in Onetti's fictional town. The brothel is alluded to in El astillero, when Larsen returns to Santa María to take a job at the shipyard. Here, we learn the back story, beginning with the initial arrangements between the pharmacist/politician Barthé, who has long dreamed of passing an ordinance that will allow the installation of a prostibule in his town, and the conservative members of the Santa María government, who provide him with the votes he needs in exchange for his later approval of another, unrelated ordinance. We follow Barthé's emmissary, Doctor Díaz Gray, who travels to meet with Larsen and convince him that his longtime dream of establishing and maintaning a brothel in Santa María is now attainable. And we read of the arrival of Larsen and three prostitutes, their lives in a blue house down by the river, the townspeople's indignance and their attempts to shame all members of the community who dare enter that house of ill repute, and the barroom arguments between citizens for and against the brothel.

This episode in the history of Santa María is of such significance to so many different members of the community that Onetti is also able to include other corrolary stories involving the town's citizens. Jorge Malabia, the teenage son of the local newspaper magnate, slips out of his bedroom at eleven each night to visit Julia, the widow of his recently-deceased brother Francisco, enacting a troubling nightly routine in which he pretends to be Francisco. Marcos Bergner, the nephew of the town priest, is back in town on a weeks-long bender after the failure of a utopic community he founded with some other young couples, which crumbled as his young wife ran away amidst rumors of wife-swapping out in the countryside. Strangely, he's highly offended by the brothel. Lanza, the elderly newspaper reporter and drinking buddy of Jorge, is writing a chronicle of the brothel episode as it's occurring. Father Bergner is strategically and tactfully working to remove the brothel from Santa María, using the power of the pulpit and Catholic rhetoric to influence his followers. And Larsen, as he runs the brothel and drinks at the bar, thinks back on his younger days and the events that brought him to where he is now, running a brothel in a town too small for anonymity.

These characters' stories are not confined to this book: they relate to Onetti's other books and short stories set in this fictional town on the banks of the Uruguay River, beginning with his 1950 novel La vida breve, in which a bored, dissatisfied man named Juan María Brausen sits in his apartment in Buenos Aires and dreams up an imaginary place up the river. Doctor Díaz Grey plays a large role in that book, and a much smaller one here. I recall that, while reading La vida breve, I enjoyed how Díaz Grey seemed to represent Brausen's fantasies about his own life, about the person he might like to be. I also wondered how much Onetti there was in Brausen, and consequently in Díaz Grey. This potential for alter egos inside alter egos was intriguing, and I thought about it again as I read this book. Maybe there's some Onetti (and Brausen) in Larsen, alias Juntacadáveres, as well. Onetti read and admired Roberto Arlt when he was young, and maybe he imagined himself in a somewhat Arltian light, with those fantasies shaping the future proprietor of the short-lived Santa María brothel. And how about Jorge Malabia, the young man who yearns to control his own destiny, brashly rebelling against his family and his teenage place in life? He could represent the child Brausen (or Onetti) wished they were. Marcos as well: his callous, contradictory character and his out-of-control actions throughout the book reminded me of yet another alter ego from La vida breve, Arce, the man whom Brausen pretends to be as he pursues a violent relationship with his neighbor. Looking at it this way, it might be possible to see Santa María as a town inhabited by men all made in their own creator's image, accompanied by women made in his image of the ideal woman, the woman of his fantasies (the woman Larsen believes himself capable of creating at least once in his life).

And here's where it gets even more interesting: they know it, or at least they have a hunch that they're nothing more than fiction, fantasies of a creator who's placed them in a town where they don't necessarily want to be, and they all want so badly to rebel against it. There's a statue of Brausen in Santa María, and on rare occasion, someone makes reference to the creator. None of them seem entirely comfortable in their roles, and whether they're sleeping with their ex-stepsister and enacting a sick nightly ritual in which the dead husband is reincarnated in the living brother, inviting groups of ex-schoolgirls into their homes to write incendiary anonymous messages to the families of those citizens who visited the brothel, or drowning reality in copious amounts of alcohol at the bar each night, they all seem to be fighting against whatever they interpret their assigned destiny to be. The teenage rebellion of Jorge Malabia is obviously quite distinct from the middle aged rebellion of Larsen, with the youngster brashly writing poetry, drinking with the adults at the bar, and trying his best to get the hell out of Santa María. Larsen already lived those youthful days of rebellion, and his older, more mature rebellion is more a combination of indifference and obstinate pursuit of goals that most other people consider abhorent. They all rebel, but instead of rebelling against God, as humans might in other books written in the Christian tradition, they rebel against Brausen. In Santa María, Onetti has created a fictional world; in Brausen, he's created a god.

I've always enjoyed fictional representations of specific, yet nonexistent places in our world, like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Juan Rulfo's Comala, or even The Simpsons' Springfield. I've been thinking about why I find Onetti's Santa María so compelling. I like how its creation is documented in La vida breve. I like how the creator's presence extends into the lives of the characters, and the characters believe in Brausen's presence in the same way that a lot of people believe in God's presence. And I like the doom and gloom, the bitterness, the nights at the bar, and everyone's desire to be someone else. Because it's not all bad. There's also some hope, the hope that keeps bringing Larsen back to Santa María and keeps everyone going through life, until, in rare cases, as occurs with one of the key characters in this particular episode in the Santa María saga, they can't take it any more and look for a definitive way out.

I'm convinced that if all of the novels, novellas and short stories that take place in Santa María were compiled in a single volume, in Spanish or in English translation, they'd sell reasonably well. I would love to have them all together, because it's really hard to find some of his works in Spanish at a reasonable price here in the United States. It is fun, though, to slowly come across his books, and learn a little more about this fictional world as I read each one.

#77: It is fun, though, to slowly come across his books, and learn a little more about this fictional world as I read each one.

I find that half the fun of being a bookaholic is tracking down the books in which I am interested!

43. El silenciero (The Silence Maker) by Antonio Di Benedetto

El silenciero es el tercer libro de Antonio Di Benedetto que he leído este año, después de Mundo animal y Zama. Aunque no lo sabía, yo había sido introducido al autor hace unos años a través de un cuento de Roberto Bolaño, Sensini, que documenta la relación epistolar entre el joven Bolaño y el viejo Di Benedetto durante una época en la cual los dos vivían en España y enviaron cuentos a concursos provinciales de literatura. Cuando me enteré de la identidad actual del personaje del cuento, empecé a buscar libros de Di Benedetto. No se encuentran fácilmente aquí en los Estados Unidos, pero el año pasado mi novia y yo nos mudamos a una ciudad universitaria, y la universidad tiene una de las mejores bibliotecas en el mundo. De repente, me encontré frente a un anaquel con, entre las obras de muchos otros autores argentinos, todos los textos de Di Benedetto. Empecé con un volumen de cuentos, Mundo animal, y después pasé a Zama. Los dos, el libro de cuentos y la novela, me impresionaron mucho. Decidí proseguir en mis lecturas de Di Benedetto con esta novela corta, que tiene lugar en una ciudad inidentificado, con un protagonista también inidentificado.

Al protagonista le fastidian los ruidos que entran en su casa desde el exterior. Se enferma (con dolores de cabeza) por causa de los ruidos generados por la instalación y funcionamiento en la vecindad de talleres mecánicos y otros negocios manejados por hombres propensos a escuchar a la radio a alto volumen durante todo el día laboral. Fuera de su aflicción, es un hombre común y corriente: trabaja en una oficina, está enamorado de su vecina, vive con su madre, y sale con sus amigos de noche. La normalidad de su vida al principio de la historia contrasta con la peculiaridad de su enfermedad, pero como van pasando los años, su incapacidad de tolerar los ruidos impuestos a su vida privada por la sociedad moderna e industrial lo aísla más y más de las personas e instituciones que lo circundan. Anda siempre en busca de una casa en una área residencial donde no haya ningún negocio ruidoso, pero los ruidos siempre lo acompañan, vaya a donde vaya. Intenta recurrir a la ley, analizando los códigos de construcción comerciales y de zonificación, pero aunque a veces se cruza con oficiales públicos que simpatizan con su condición, la capacidad del gobierno de ayudar al hombre alérgico al ruido es mínima. El hombre se desespera.

El libro relata la vida del protagonista de forma directa, cronológicamente contando la serie de conflictos entre el silenciero y el mundo urbano del siglo veinte, con todos los ruidos sintomáticos de una sociedad industrializada y capitalista. El hombre no puede aislarse de los ruidos que entran desde afuera, y aunque su vida en cierta manera es normal--tiene amigos, y hasta llega a casarse y tener hijos--, su incapacidad de estar tranquilo cuando los ruidos no deseados entran al alcance de sus oídos actúa como una barrera que le separa de las demás personas. Nadie le entiende al hombre que padece una enfermedad que ellos más bien considerarían una manía. Hay una sola persona que se entiende con el silenciero: su amigo Besarión, cuya búsqueda de algún significado espiritual en la vida le lleva a París y eventualmente a construir un sistema de mentiras que disfraza su realidad, una realidad que va lentamente desmenuzándose. Besarión se ilusiona con la creencia de que algún día algo, algo de verdadera importancia, le ocurrirá, de la misma manera que el silenciero se ilusiona con la idea de que una casa exista donde pueda vivir sin ruido. Los dos quieren algo de la vida, y el libro documenta la crisis existencial por la cual los dos hombres pasan, enfocándose en el silenciero, con Besarión en el segundo plano.

Elegí este libro para traer conmigo durante una semana de vacaciones. Lo leí en la playa, y la énfasis que pone Di Benedetto en los ruidos no deseados que circundan al protagonista contrastaba con los sonidos agradables del mar y de la gran variedad de pájaros que vivían en la isla de Florida donde estuvimos. Concluí que este libro aborda el mundo de los ruidos con mucha eficacia. Me hizo enfocarme en cada sonido que oía en cuanto leía: el de las olas chocándose en la arena, el de los diferentes pájaros, el de los autos y el de las pequeñas lanchas de pesca. Pensé que quizá la experiencia no hubiera sido tan agradable si leyera este libro en mi departamento, porque me habría hecho pensar en los ruidos que entran desde afuera, y por consecuente causarme a darme cuenta de los diferentes ruidos desagradables--de la refrigeradora, del aire acondicionado, de los vecinos--que podrían llegar a fastidiarme como ocurrió con el protagonista de la novela. En la playa, todos los sonidos fueron deseados, esperados durante los años que pasé lejos del océano; como resultado, pude apreciar un libro que me franqueara entrada en el mundo de los ruidos.

Esta breve novela, poco más que cien páginas, me gustó casi tanto como Zama. Es como un Extranjero argentino con Di Benedetto, como Camus, contando la historia de un hombre que vive en una sociedad que no lo entiende. En este caso, el silenciero está condenado a sufrir por ser quien es, un hombre que solamente podría estar contento en un mundo menos ruidoso que el nuestro.

44. Mémoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian) by Marguerite Yourcenar

I thought this would be an interesting book to read after finishing Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo el supremo, given that both books aim to get inside the head of historical figures and tell stories from the perspectives of the former rulers themselves, with both rulers writing their memories as they lay dying. I wasn't sure what to expect out of Yourcenar's book, but I thought it might be somewhat similar to Roa Bastos'. It was not. The two men, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (19th century Paraguayan dictator) and Hadrian (2nd century Roman emperor) couldn't have been more different, both in their narrative voices and in their respective stories. The former reached his deathbed haunted by a world populated by enemies and betrayors; the other found a more quiet, reposed end, able to look back on a relatively successful stint in charge of a successful empire. Whereas 26 years in charge of newly-independent Paraguay seemed to have driven Francia insane, 21 years in charge of Rome left Hadrian wisened and aware of the intricacies of the world he'd presided over for more than two decades. In the end, I was happy to have read two portraits of men in very different positions of power.

Hadrian begins his memories with a discussion of the varied pleasures afforded man, mentioning the dangers of overindulgence in food or in erotic pursuits, and utilizing examples from his life and the Roman society that he has led for a quarter century. In his mind, the greatest pleasure is sleep, and he makes a compelling case for rest and repose as the most pure and desired source of pleasure. He then explains his aims in writing a memoire, destined for his heir, utilizing observations of himself, of his fellow man, and of the many books he's read. He tells his life story as he remembers it, recounting his youth in the military, his journeys throughout the known world, his rise to power and his time spent as the leader/caretaker of an empire. He illstrates his efforts to promote peace on the fringes of the empire, refusing to continue expansionist campaigns undertaken by his predecessor and appeasing potential sources of conflict on mutually beneficial terms. He also illustrates one major example of a situation when he had to abandon his peaceful ways. A section of his memoire is dedicated to his greatest and most enduring love, the young Greek Antinous. His sadness at his lover's death never truly leaves him. As the years go by, Hadrian sees his strength and intellectual hunger rise and fall, and his stance with respect to the world he rules gradually shifts as he ages; for example, he stops fighting some customs and traditions that displeased him as a youth and seemed like a waste of time, realizing that he no longer has the strength and years ahead of him to continue to fight these established traditions. By the end of the book, he's ready to die: he spends an extended period of time thinking about his possible successor, and once he's made his decision, he realizes that he no longer wishes to go on living in a deteriorating, weak body.

I was impressed by how measured and refined the language was: Yo el supremo was extremely challenging in its language, with the Paraguayan dictator creating words and playing with language in all sorts of different ways. I didn't think I'd be able to handle something like that in French, but I didn't have to: Hadrian wrote in a clear, straightforward and poetic manner befitting of an intellectual emperor who studied Greek and consorted with some of the foremost poets and artists of his time. His memories, divided into different broad sections related to the different phases of his life, were perfect: no wasted words, and everything in the proper place. My edition included a series of notes by Yourcenar, documenting the genesis of the book. She spent decades picking the project up and putting it down, realizing her inadequacies and immaturity in her younger days and only returning to Hadrian when she felt sufficiently knowledgeable about the ancient world and about mature, adult life. She seemed to understand that it would be impossible to write from the perspective of a man grown old until she herself had progressed through life to the point that she could reasonably walk in the shoes of a 60 year old man and write his deathbed memories. This made a lot of sense to me, and I was happy for her that she was able to stick with this project for so long, eventually producing a mature representation of the memories of an old man.

As I think about it, I'm convinced that one person in particular would really get a kick out of this book: José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. He, like Hadrian, was an inquisitive soul, and he loved reading historical texts about rulers from the past. He wanted to see himself as a combination of the best qualities of the many different great leaders of the past, and I imagine he would enjoy every page, stacking himself up against Yourcenar's Hadrian as he read and seeing reflections of himself and his own supreme qualities in this memoir of a Roman emperor who lived nearly two millenia before him.

45. Cuadernos de infancia by Norah Lange
46. Rosaura (novela corta) y siete cuentos by Ricardo Güiraldes

I often remind myself how lucky I am to have access to a top-knotch university library, because I can just walk up into the stacks and browse shelves upon shelves lined with books I'd otherwise have no chance of finding and reading. A few months ago I spent some time in the Argentina section (one of my favorites!) and ended up grabbing, among other books, Norah Lange's Cuadernos de infancia and Ricardo Güiraldes' Rosaura. I chose the former because Lange's name had popped up in a couple of different places, side by side with those of Oliverio Girondo (who eventually became her husband), Jorge Luis Borges (a fellow member of the "Grupo de Florida") and other literary luminaries of early 20th century Buenos Aires. I'm always looking to expand my horizons, narrow as they may be to begin with, and I judged her to be interesting in part because of the company she kept. I chose the latter because I've long admired Güiraldes' writing, and consider his Don Segundo Sombra one of my favorite books. The last book I'd read by him, Xaimaca, disappointed me because the protagonist of the book exhibited some rather racist attitudes toward Carribean black people. However, I was also impressed by his lush descriptions of a tropical world that brought to life the exotic flora and fauna he saw on his travels. I decided to give him another chance with this slim volume made up of a novella and seven short stories. In general, I find myself drawn to the Argentine literature of the first third of the 20th century because there's such excitement and creative exuberance in the works of writers like Girondo, Güiraldes and the young Jorge Luis Borges, as they bring their nation's literature into the modern era and present authentically Argentine expressions of the world that surrounds them, both at home (in Buenos Aires and the Argentine countryside) and abroad (Girondo and Güiraldes were both rather adventurous souls).

Lange's childhood memories begin with the family moving to Mendoza when she's five years old. They're pretty well-off: her father's a wealthy foreigner, and while Norah's recollections don't contain any information about her father's occupation, his work allows them to live on a nice farm and the children have an English governess along with a series of cooks. The book is divided into a series of short episodes, most between two and four pages and none longer than five. Each episode describes an occurrence, viewed through the lens of memory and elegantly recounted from the author's adult perspective. They feel quite authentic, as in, these are the kinds of things I would have remembered if they happened to me when I was a kid. A poor neighbor's wife dies, and he doesn't feel comfortable asking for anything more than a safety pin to pin his collar closed as he buries his wife alone. Young Norah knew that was poverty, and even as an adult, she looks back on it and realizes her adult conception of poverty remains tied to that event. Other stories are happier, with the five young girls of the Lange family inventing games and studying English and enjoying happy, stable family life in the countryside.

Then the family's circumstances suddenly and tragically change, and they have to move back to Buenos Aires, where they live under very different socioeconomic conditions. Now she remembers not quite having enough to eat, her mother's hair falling out, and the inevitable sale of the cherished family piano. It's jarring and unexpected, because the girls seemed so innocent and so very lucky as they lived in stable familial bliss in Mendoza. Now, as they're growing older and becoming more conscious of what adulthood will be, they're also struggling in ways they couldn't have expected a handful of years ago. I read a review of the Complete Works of Norah Lange that mentioned how these episodes came as a surprise to readers who saw her as a wealthy literary socialite, married to a famous playboy poet and reknowned for hosting a who's who of famous artists at her family's home. Her Cuadernos certainly clash with that image, giving evidence of a less affluent middle childhood than people might have imagined.

Lange wrote a series of volumes of poetry in the 1920s, and she's certainly got a nice way with words. The episodes were a joy to read, and the pages flew by. One thing I noticed was, in a lot of the stories, Lange introduces someone or something as "him," "her" or "it" at the beginning of an episode, but it´s only at the end of the episode that you're explicitly told what she's talking about. For a while, you read along without and slowly put things together, and the final recognition confirms what you've already figured out. I thought it was a nice way of helping me, the reader, paint my own picture of the events Ms. Lange recounts from her own childhood.

And on to Güiraldes...he explains at the beginning of Rosaura that he wrote this novella in response to a request from the young ladies in his family, who wanted him to write something they'd be allowed to read and enjoy. It takes place in the small rural community of Lobos, where every day the citizenry congregates on the train platform to watch the trains come and go, greeting any friends or family that might arrive that day. The young ladies of Lobos enjoy socializing on the platform, and dress up in their best clothes. They treat a trip to see the train pass like young people today might treat a trip to the mall. One day, a mysterious and cosmopolitan young man named Carlos is sitting in one of the cabins, and he locks eyes with Rosaura, one of the prettiest young ladies in Lobos. There's an obvious spark of romance between them, and as time passes, their encounters on the train platform lead to encounters in town and eventually a meeting at a community dance. Carlos is everything Rosaura has dreamt of: a man who's mysterious and dashing and has traveled the world, who could introduce her into a world that's bigger than the little town of Lobos with its train station and slow pace of life. Will it all turn out to be nothing more than a dream, though?

The story was once again a joy to read. The rising and falling emotions of Rosaura are reflected in the descriptions of the changing seasons in the Argentine countryside, and the subtle intrigues of rural courtship are related in a straightforward, amiable manner. Considering his initial motivation for writing thiis book, I imagine that Güiraldes had a good time as he wrote, thinking of the specific family members to whom it was initially destined and shaping Rosaura in their image, using the ups and downs of her romance to teach them about the emotions and dangers inherent to courthship in early 20th century Argentina.

The novella is followed by a series of seven short stories, again concerning life in rural Argentina. One was written for a compilation of Christmas stories, and recounts an unexpected intrusion into a family's Christmas celebration. The prologue mentioned that Güiraldes was the only contributor who chose to represent a hot, Southern Hemisphere Christmas rather than a snowy northern one. In another, none other than Don Segundo Sombra, title character of Güiraldes' most famous novel, makes a cameo appearance, suddenly appearing in the midst of a tense barroom situation to voice a witty retort to a perceived insult. That was exciting, seeing him pop up unexpectedly. I do enjoy intertextuality.

Both Lange and Güiraldes were considered among the most excellent Argentine writers of their time. It was very easy for me to read these books and say yes, these are good, they're fun to read and both authors tell simple stories quite poetically. The time I passed reading them was exceedingly pleasant. However, I feel that I lack the necessary knowledge to pinpoint exactly why their prose is so excellent. I can say that I liked them, but I can't necessarily explain why. I feel that way sometimes when I read poetry as well. The solution, I believe, is more reading, and maybe trying to translate some of these authors' works. I feel like I get a lot better idea of what an author's doing with each and every word as I try to find their English equivalents, and I usually enjoy the mental exercise. In the meantime, I'm happy to have read these two short books: one introduced me to a new and compelling voice in the Argentine crowd, and the other reminded me of how much I enjoy reading books about rural Argentina written by Ricardo Güiraldes.

#80: Matt, if you are interested in another historical fiction book on Hadrian, check out Eromenos. Richard did an excellent review of this book.

82: Thanks! I'll try and check that book out, as I think it'd be interesting to read a story told from Antinous' perspective.

47. Evaristo Carriego (Evaristo Carriego: a Book about Old-Time Buenos Aires) by Jorge Luis Borges

I remember the first time I read this book: I was in rural Mongolia, working as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it was the day after Men's Day, a holiday left over from Soviet times. I'd competed in the Men's Day competitions as a representative of my school (there were only a handful of men working at the school, and I was pretty much automatically signed up for all community events) and I hadn't impressed anyone, especially in the shooting competition. Most Mongolians living in the countryside know how to shoot a gun reasonably well, but I certainly do not. Furthermore, I had underdressed for what turned out to be an all-day activity, and ended up sick in bed. I lived in a family's yard in my own individual ger, and the entire compound was surrounded by a tall wooden fence. My neighbor and a few of his friends came to visit me, and one of them had a black eye from a vodka-fueled Men's Day scuffle that he did not remember, but his friends did.

So I opened up Evaristo Carriego, and read Borges' prologue about growing up in Palermo, how he thought he'd grown up in the neighborhood but in truth had grown up behind a high fence in his family's library filled with innumerable English books. The Palermo of guitar duels, knife fights, and the dangerous, violent men of the Buenos Aires outskirts did not pertain to him, and as he sets out to write about Carriego, a friend of the Borges family whose poems depicted the Palermo on the other side of the fence, his book aims to paint a picture of that Palermo of his childhood that was not his.

I thought about the straight-shooting, tough Mongolian men on the other side of my own fence, and I thought about how similar my isolation was to Borges'. Some of my neighbors had scars from knife fights that might have been similar to those that took place more than a century ago on the dusty streets of Palermo. There was a vast and uninviting steppe beyond the edges of my little town that wasn't unlike the Argentine pampa. And there I was, sitting behind a fence, thinking that my Mongolian friends and neighbors were as foreign to me as Borges' gauchos, cuchillero, guapos and malevos. I sat behind my fence reading Borges, who sat behind his fence reading Stevenson.

I decided to revisit Evaristo Carriego for a couple of reasons: for one, I had bought a copy of Evaristo Carriego's Poesías completas last year and wanted to be able to read the poems discussed by Borges in their entirety; I'd also mentioned this book in another thread, with the idea that it would be a good introduction to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine. His short stories are sometimes about Argentina, it's true, but many of them take place in other corners of the world, or in worlds different from our own. In this book, he begins with a brief history of his neighborhood, Palermo, where Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas built his residence in the mid-1800s. He documents its slow incorporation into the city of Buenos Aires, a process that led to paved streets, new constructions, and a slow departure from its humble beginnings. He refers to Palermo as a suburb, a word that has a somewhat different connotation in English in the 21st century. When I hear the word suburb, I think endless strip malls and everybody driving their cars all the time. In this case, the word connotes poverty and isolation from the central, urban districts of the rapidly expanding city at the mouth of the Río de la Plata. Suburban Palermo was something like a semi-rural slum, with poor apartment communities (Argentine conventillos of that time sound quite similar to American project buildings) mixed with empty lots and open spaces. The community is plagued by social problems such as alcoholism, domestic violence and violent gangs led by neighborhood caudillos who employed cadres of men responsible for strongarming citizens into the voting booths and carrying out general dirty work. Borges, writing at the end of the 1920s, recognizes that the neighborhood is rapidly changing; in fact, by the end of the 20th century, it had become a hip, trendy, rapidly gentrifying part of town. But after noting some of the changes he's seen during his life, Borges returns to turn-of-the-century Palermo, where Evaristo Carriego was consorting with the roughnecks and writing poems that represented life on the outskirts.

His analysis of Carriego's poetry occupies two chapters, each devoted to one volume by the suburban poet. His poems are uniformly about life in the suburb of Palermo: women are battered by their husbands, who later brag about their violent acts to their neighborhood buddies; marriages are celebrated with parties full of guitar playing and family members nervous that things will get out of hand, instructing the groom not to drink too much and enlisting the help of a tough guy to keep the peace; women suffering from tuberculosis ruefully look back on that fleeting moment of romance so many years ago, long since replaced by solitude and handkerchiefs stained with blood; and skilled guitar players pick tunes in bars and on patios, to which dangerous men dance tango figures in pairs (women being discouraged from participating in such activities with men famed for their violence and skill with the knife). Borges admits that Carriego's poetry is not perfect, and he is not afraid to point out its shortcomings, the misplaced allusion to a musketeer at the end of an otherwise exemplary depiction of a guapo (a thug, more or less), or the clumsy collection of images assembled in "La guitarra," a poem deemed by Borges to be unworthy of the poets other, superior compositions. On the balance, though, Borges finds much to admire, and recognizes Carriego's particularly local, neighborhood genius. He was the first Argentine poet to write of the arrabal, that region between the civilization of the city and the barbary of the open plain, and Borges opines that his best poems will endure in the Argentine canon for their accurate depiction of life in that specific place and time.

As I understand it, Evaristo Carriego is the first volume of essays that Borges published and didn't later repudiate. The core texts of my edition (the prologues, the chapter on Palermo, the two chapters on the poet and his works, and the short conclusion) were published in 1930. The book was later reissued, adding a series of supplementary essays about particularly Argentine subjects such as horsemen, the card game truco, and the origins of the tango. These texts are the work of an older, more mature Borges, and they are uniformly excellent. I particularly enjoyed how, after pursuing more universal themes in his short stories of the 1930s and 40s, he returns now to the Argentine subjects but is able to identify each one as a local representation of a universal figure, symbol or custom: the troop of gauchos that attacked the city of Paraná in 1870, made a few victory laps and then rode back off into the countryside, are just another iteration of the Mongolian horsemen who swept through China and razed the great cities of the Jin Dynasty because they were disconcerted by them and did not understand them. The dagger that lies in a box in Borges' desk, inherited from his father and once held by Carriego, is one with the dagger that was used last night in a murder in Tacuarembó, and is also one with the dagger used to kill Caesar. And the hands that make up each game of truco, following the same ever-repeating combinations of cards, represent the generations of Argentines who played those same hands any number of times before. As I think about it, that's one of the reasons why I find this book particularly compelling: it starts with a young Borges, seeking to define the neigborhood on the other side of his childhood fence, and finding it in the poems of a man who used to come around the Borges household from time to time. That young Argentine then wrote stories that penetrated a universe full of possibilities, libraries with all possible books, lotteries that come to represent life iteslf, and men whose memories encompass all of human experience. Then, a few decades later, he returned to his favorite Argentine themes, looking at them with new eyes open to the infinite possibilities he pursued in his fictions.

Of course, I also liked it because it was so relatable to the world I saw on the other side of my fence in the Mongolian countryside. I liked to think of the people in that rural community as the last cowboys, with the vast Mongolian steppe the closest thing to a Wild West that I would ever hope to find. And Borges' essays helped me see the folks who would come into town every so often to buy supplies before returning to their herds as part of a greater, more universal tradition of horsemen who have populated the many steppes and pampas of the world, also reminding me that they often fall victim to civilizing forces, with Chinggis Khaan and his men eventually embracing the cities they conquered and growing old inside their walls. He also reminded me that, no matter how much time I spent hanging out with community members, learning Mongolian and drinking tea and watching Mongolians dominate Japanese Sumo Wrestling on poorly-transmitted TV broadcasts, I'd always be on the outside looking in, like he was as he sat in his family's library in a house surrounded by a fence in Palermo.

48. Los adioses (Goodbyes) by Juan Carlos Onetti

I've always enjoyed obsessively reading the works of a single author, systematically working through a library's collection one or two at a time. In high school, it was Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel García Márquez. In college, I remember a month of Haruki Murakami and later a Roberto Arlt phase. Lately, I've been going through my library's Latin American collection and steadily reading through their holdings of books by authors like Roberto Bolaño, Felisberto Hernández and Antonio Di Benedetto. Juan Carlos Onetti is another one: lately I've been going up to the Uruguay section and checking out particularly compelling editions, like this one, a first edition of Los adioses, published in Buenos Aires in 1954. It had been hardbound by the library, but it still had the same plain yellow cover, the pages were old yet still crisp (certainly not worn from use), and the book felt good in my hands. I was excited to read it, and Los adioses leapfrogged to the front of my long queue of library books.

It's a short book, just under 90 pages. In it, a shop owner/bartender tells the story of a former star basketball player who came to his town in the mountains to convalesce after contracting tuberculosis. He lives in a hotel, and later rents a chalet on the mountainside where he spends his days. Some people think he's up there getting drunk, hiding from everyone. The town is small, and the constant inflow of patients gives the locals a constant source of gossip. They predict who's going to live and who's going to die, they monitor the temporary guests in their rural community, and they draw conclusions about these peoples' characters and lives. The basketball player receives letters from two different sources, and soon he's visited by two separate women, one after another. This, naturally, ratchets the gossip up a notch. As the two women visit a second time, the seasons also begin to change, with New Years coming and going (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), followed by an autumn chill in the air in the book's later pages. The man's condition follows the prognostications of a portion of those people who have been monitoring him and speculating about his health.

The constant question is: do I (the reader) trust the narrator's perspective? The story is built on speculation, rumors and hearsay. The shop owner has a limited number of interactions with the man he's observing. He's friends with a nurse who gives shots to the patients at the hotel, and they talk about the recently arrived man a lot. He drives one of the man's women to the hotel once, and sees both women as they stop by his store during their visits. However, he's not telling the story of people he knows and understands. They're strangers, and he's constructed lives out of the bits and pieces of them he sees. At the beginning of the story, and on a few other occasions, he describes a small portion of a person (the basketball player's hands are discussed for nearly the entire first page, with the bartender explaining that he would have liked to see nothing more than those hands, without seeing the attached person, the first time the man walked into the store), making a series of conclusions based on his observation of that portion of the individual. That initial page, the bartender explaining what he knew about the man by his hands, sets the tone for the next 87 pages, where he tells his interpretation of the story of the man's life, of which he's only seen brief and fleeting moments (and heard a series of rumors).

Also, you begin to wonder if maybe the narrator is telling his own story, or the story of his own fantasies, or the story of his own disgraces, through the tuburcular basketball player. How much has he projected onto the subject of his narration?

When the book ends, you know how the story ends, at least from the narrator's perspective. But you've been given enough information to question the truth of his interpretation, at so many different moments in the story and on so many different levels, that you can just as easily draw any number of other conclusions about what might have happened, and why it might have happened. As I was looking for some other readers' interpretations of this text, I came across an article by a woman named Mary-Lee Sullivan entitled "Projection as a narrative technique in Juan Carlos Onetti's Goodbyes" (http://www.onetti.net/es/descripciones/sullivan). She discusses a lot of the different critical interpretations of the text (Incest? Homosexuality? Self-projection?) and I found her article to be an excellent resource. I almost want to read the book again with the knowledge I now have about different possible interpretations of the text. One thing she mentioned was a back-and-forth between a critic, Wolfgang A. Luchting, and the author. The critic drew a conclusion, and Onetti congratulated him on unraveling a portion of the enigma, making it clear that there are other possibilities that the critic, like the narrator, may not have considered and may be just as possible. Los adioses asks the reader to interpret a story about a tall man with tuberculosis and two women in his life, while reading that story as told by a bartender, as written by Juan Carlos Onetti.

I think I agree with those who see this as one of Onetti's stronger works. He deftly wields a great number of narrational ambiguities in such a way that in the end the reader can believe he knows everything, he knows nothing, or something in between. Multiple readings could lead the reader down multiple paths, each one justifiably possible.

#83: I hope you enjoy the book if you get a chance to read it, Matt.

49. El cojo bueno (The Good Cripple) by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

The name Rodrigo Rey Rosa appeared in a few of the essays by Roberto Bolaño compiled in Entre paréntesis, and I decided to look for some books by him. Within days I'd checked out one book, this short novel, and scooped up a used copy of another book of short stories, El cuchillo del mendigo. I decided to read this one on a Sunday afternoon and ended up going from cover to cover in a matter of a couple of hours. It's the story of the kidnapping of a young Guatemalan named Juan Luis Luna whose father is very wealthy. Four men, two of them former classmates of Juan Luis, conspire to kidnap Juan Luis and force his father to pay a large ransom. A kidnapping didn't seem to me the most unique or inspired of choices: the Latin American kidnapping abounds in books, movies and TV shows from the region, reflecting how common these sort of things are in places with large income gaps. Who knows, perhaps in another generation the kidnapping will enter into the thematic canon of North American literature. It wouldn't surprise me if this became a problem someday in the United States, in fact I'm almost surprised the children of wealthy people aren't kidnapped more often here in the United States. In any case, while the central event of the story wasn't terribly new or surprising, the ways the characters fit into the story, the way the lives of the kidnappers and the kidnapped intersected years later in the opening scene, and the emotions of the crippled victim were not typical of the books and movies I'd read and seen about kidnappings before this one. You don't expect a kidnapping story to start with one of the kidnappers calling the other, freaked out because their former victim had come years later to pay him a visit and have a calm, quiet conversation. You don't expect Juan Luis to act the way he does at a lot of different moments in the story. You keep waiting for him to do something, and instead he does something else that makes sense too, but you weren't expecting it.

As I finished this book, I decided it reminded me a lot of a movie. It took somewhere around two hours to read. there was an opening scene, the type that might go before the credits, followed by a shift backward in time to tell the story that propelled the characters from the opening scene to reunite decades later. The story jumped around, from Guatemala to a brief spell of globetrotting in the United States and Europe, followed by an interlude in Morocco and a return to Guatemala for the closing chapter. There were twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat. And there was a somewhat enigmatic ending, the type of ending that would give the audience one last surprise, one last jarring image in a story where a grenade is thrown at an occupied car and a young man has bodily members cut off and sent to his father to encourage the father to pay his son's ransom. It's a book that could totally be made into a movie, you'd hardly even need to adapt it into a script, and I imagine some young, influential Latino actor or director throwing his weight behind a project based on this book after reading and enjoying it. I actually had this same feeling after reading a few of Roberto Bolaño's books, that someday I'd be seeing them on the big screen and they'd either be critical successes or they'd be mildly disappointing. I usually don't ask too much of the film versions of the books I love. You name the Vonnegut novel, I've loved the movie: Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions (which was apparently critically panned)...It's always fun to see a book you've enjoyed on screen. Just today I was watching an old Leopoldo Torre Nilsson production of Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas. I thought maybe it wasn't that great of a movie, but boy did I enjoy seeing those characters that I knew so well talk to each other and come to life on my computer screen. I digress. If this were a movie, I'd definitely see it and I think it'd be a pretty good one.

I've read other books that I've imagined being adapted into movies. They had the twists and turns that Hollywood audiences and film critics love. They would earn Oscar nominations if they were done right. I'm pretty sure we'll see movie versions of Life of Pi and The Shadow of the Wind in the future. I read on the internet that M. Night Shyamalan was once attached to a film version of Life of Pi and I can't help thinking that M. Night 2011 must wish that M. Night 2003 had decided to make that movie instead of Lady in the Water. We've already seen a movie version of The Kite Runner, although I did not see it because I did not enjoy the book. With those blockbuster books, I ended up feeling almost offended by the thought that the authors were writing books with Hollywood movie dollar signs running through their heads. The film adaptation seemed like the logical and profitable next step, and I wondered if they had it in mind the whole time. But those books were different than this one, they took the customary six to eight hours or so to read and they'd need to be adapted to fit the two hour movie time. They just played with emotions and tugged on heartstrings in oft-predictable ways that made me think of million dollar scripts and test screenings. This book flowed like a movie. I sat down and 100 minutes later I was done. Maybe Rey Rosa was dreaming of movie deals and money too, and maybe this book isn't too much different than the others I vaguely disliked due to their imagined ties to future movie rights. I think what made the difference in this case was the commitment to the experience, the way that the book fit the temporal parameters of a trip to the theater. I read the book as I could have watched the movie on a Sunday, and later that evening I went to sleep.

Great review, Matt!

50. El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) by Gabriel García Márquez

I remember when I was first reading Gabriel García Márquez's books many years ago, I was fascinated by how the early novels and novellas built toward 100 Years of Solitude, introducing some of the characters who would later populate the Macondo of his most famous work and developing a portrait of a Columbia burdened by years of wars and uneven, unequal progress. I was looking at my bookshelf the other day, wondering what book to read next, not wanting to bite off something too substantial since I'm in the middle of a rather demanding read (Georges Perec's La vie: mode d'emploi. I went with this short novella about a military man waiting on a pension, a colonel who served under Aureliano Buendía in the wars later documented in 100 Years of Solitude living in poor health and poverty with his wife in a nameless town in Columbia.

The colonel has a rooster inherited from his recently-deceased son that may be worth a great deal of money when the cockfights of January begin, but it's only October, and the family's money has run out. For fifteen years, the colonel has been waiting for his military pension, going down to the dock each week to wait for the mail to arrive. Unfortunately, the colonel was not on the winning side of the war, and while the armistice signed by Colonel Buendía may have led his men to believe that they would receive compensation for their years of service to a losing cause, the pensions aren't coming, and may never come. The colonel's got stomach issues, his wife's suffering from asthma, they've sold nearly everything they own (and nobody wants the clock nor the painting on the wall), and still the rooster needs his ration of corn each day if he's going to win in January. The colonel is a proud man, and everyone in town is rooting for him, especially his son's friends. How could he sell the rooster? But what else is he to do?

It's a good book, and I felt the hunger of the colonel and his wife as I lay reading it this morning, telling myself I'd wait until lunch to eat anything even though I was really hungry myself. García Márquez does a great job of conveying the little day-to-day aspects of poverty, the exact ways that clothes fall apart from too much wear and the manners through which people trick themselves and their neighbors into thinking they've got enough to get by on. Setting stones to a boil so that the neighbors will think you've got soup to eat, while the chicken is eating the corn feed that your husband bought instead of food...I also enjoyed the author's handling of the political reasons behind the colonel's plight: the lack of mail for the colonel needed no explanation, everyone in the community knows perfectly well that the colonel is not going to get his pension, and his obstinate insistence on checking the mail was equal parts admirable and pitiful. I don't believe I'd ever really thought about how civil wars end, not in the United States in the 19th century, but in a much smaller country in the first half of the 20th century. I think I had the idea that everyone just went back home and went back to life, or something like that, but here there's no life to go back to, just an interminable wait for a pension promised by the victors who twisted your leader's arm into signing an armistice treaty.

I'm glad I chose this book, because it'd been too long since I read a García Márquez book and enjoyed it. Last year I read Chronicle of a Death Foretold and found myself looking for reasons to hate it (why does everyone have to have such a colorful name in this town, why isn't anyone named José or Juan or Pedro), although looking back on it maybe I was being too harsh. I just went back and read my thoughts on that one. I wasn't quite as negative as I remembered. One thing I mentioned then that is worth remembering now is that García Márquez didn't necessarily take his books as seriously as many of his readers did. He mentions in an interview that 100 Years of Solitude is full of gestures to his closest friends and completely lacking in seriousness, and those who seek to decipher the book's contents run the risk of drawing extremely stupid conclusions. This is a little odd now that I think about it, because when I think about the portraits of Macondo and of Colombia presented in 100 Years of Solitude and other books by García Márquez, they are serious, they're full of war and violence and cyclical political struggles for power between Liberals and Conservatives. But I think what he's trying to say is, the success of his books surprises him, and he didn't necessarily set out to write books that would later be assigned such great significance and moral weight by so many people around the world. This book is serious too: the colonel and his wife are starving, they're sick and wondering whether they'll make it through the winter, and the colonel's military pension has been blocked by the ruling political party. However, it's hard to read its closing line without laughing. The book ends with a single word, a word that expresses the colonel's defiance and refusal to compromise his moral rigidity even in the face of extreme hunger. Re-reading this book, I thought: "Of course! Now I remember, that's how this book ends!"

51. Doña Perfecta by Benito Pérez Galdós

Pepe Rey is sent to the town of Orbajosa to meet his aunt Doña Perfecta and cousin Rosario. His visit is preceded by a letter from his father to Doña Perfecta indicating that young Pepe should marry Rosario. So he's going there to check things out and make sure his cousin is a suitable life partner. She lives up to his expectations, but nothing else goes right when the cultured engineer from the big city pays his visit to the Spanish countryside. He bungles his first couple of conversations with Doña Perfecta, a true pillar of the Orbajosa community, and her partner in crime, the virtuous priest Penitenciario. Rather than nod his head and fall in line as the priest employs some mildly offensive sarcasm, Pepe decides to get a rise out of the him by countering his snide religiosity with some wit of his own, bombarding the man of the cloth with some 19th century scientific enlightenment. This was probably the wrong tactic to employ, even in jest, because pretty soon everyone starts calling Pepe Rey a mathematician, an idolater of the German philosophers, and worst of all, an atheist. The hits keep coming, and Pepe soon concludes that powerful forces have aligned against him. He'd leave, but he's become quite taken with Rosario. She's into him too, but you can't just run away from Orbajosa, especially when you're living under Doña Perfecta's watchful eye.

I enjoyed the cast of characters that fill Doña Perfecta's pages with drama and intrigue. Besides the young educated protagonist, the two women of Pepe's family and Patrimonio, there are more than a dozen others who all contribute to the growing conflict between Pepe and the town in their own way, either intentionally or unintentionally. Some are sympathetic to Pepe, but their sympathy only ends up twisting the popular perception of the city boy even further. Eventually the army comes to Orbajosa to set up camp, and the citizenry is able to expand their antipathy and fold Pepe into the entire occupying force, since both come from the big city of Madrid and are hell-bent on destroying or degrading their simple rural way of life. Everybody's scheming, and in the end, somebody dies.

I decided to read two Spanish books this week: this one by Pérez Galdós and Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, martir. I'm planning to investigate 20th century Spanish fiction over the next three or four months, and I thought these two authors would be a great introduction to the literary world of Spain at the turn of the 20th century. I didn't realize that San Manuel Bueno, mártir wasn't published until 1930 (I thought it was from around 1900) but I decided to stick with it, because it still fit my original intent: to see Pérez Galdós' works as a synthesis of the literature of the past, and Unamuno as a forward-thinking innovator in modern Spanish literature. Reading Doña Perfecta with an eye to the past proved to be a fruitful endeavor: the conflicts between the city man and countryside society immediately made me think of Lope's Fuenteovejuna and El villano en su rincón, and I liked imagining Pérez Galdós' novel as a retelling of those Golden Age plays as a 19th century psychological novel. The refrain that provides the backbone for El villano en su rincón is "Él es rey, el que no ve rey" (He is King, he who sees no King). In Lope's play, the countryside noble is content to live far from the court, away from the blinding virtue of the king he does not see. Of course, by the end of the play, this godly Kingly virtue wins him over. But that was a different time. Here in the 19th century, the citizens of Orbajosa are content in their simple existence and don't want to hear what's going on in Madrid, in Germany, in the greater world. Then suddenly there's a Rey in their midst, and they're forced to examine that kingly presence they'd ignored for so long. They don't like it.

There was also an orchard and Pepe Rey was once sarcastically referred to as Melibeo by Penitenciario. It was a funny way of twisting around the names from La Celestina, another canonical work that Pérez Galdós references here. In that book, Melibea is the damsel seduced by Calisto in her family´s orchard. Here too there are scenes of romantic intrigue and action amongst the fruit trees on Doña Perfecta's property.

A good book, all in all, and one I'd recommend to those who are interested in 19th century Spain or 19th century literature in general.

Very nice review of Doña Perfecta, Matt. I'm planning to read your reviews in detail over the next couple of weeks, and see if I can find English translations of any of the books that I'm most interested in while I'm in London and Paris.

@91: Thanks! I hope you enjoy your trip to Europe. I've only briefly visited Paris on two occasions, and hope life gives me the opportunity to return there some day. I can think of few places I'd rather visit!

52. El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference) by César Aira

César Aira solves a centuries-old puzzle involving a long rope that extends into the sea and never shows signs of wear and tear. His reward: a treasure chest filled with a pirate's bounty. He explains how he was not able to solve the puzzle of the rope and the treasure chest because he's some sort of super-genius, but rather because at that exact moment when he found himself in front of the rope he possessed the unique and complex set of experiences and knowledge needed to look at the problem the right way. It's a Sword-in-the-Stone kind of scenario. He proceeds to attend a literary conference in Mérida, Venezuela (which, based on my Google search, looks absolutely beautiful). He's brought his cloning device along with him (it's a hobby he's pursued for years) because he's had an epiphany: what he needs to do this time is clone someone who's better than him, somebody worth following, to whom he can transfer the leadership responsibilities that have become a burden to him in his world filled with inferior clones of his own creation. He figures Carlos Fuentes is a good choice, so he sends a cloned wasp he's become quite fond of on a mission to obtain a cell of Carlos Fuentes that he then inserts in his cloning machine, leaving the apparatus on the top of a mountain on the outskirts of town so that the materials can marinate and a clone Fuentes will come to life some days later. The conference includes a performance of one of César's plays, and since they've given him the option of choosing where he'd like it performed, he chooses the Mérida airport. After returning from the airport, he goes out drinking and meets a young lady and then the results of his Carlos Fuentes cloning experiment make their appearance, forcing César into action.

I read an article about César Aira in Harper's Magazine a few weeks ago by an American writer named Rivka Galchen who travels to Argentina to meet the author. She begins by presenting the reader with a portrait of the artist as a sort of virtuoso-savant capable of creating stories from the most varied and unlikely sources, building them without a clear idea of where he's going, only to eventually end up in a rather logical place by the end of the book, a place that makes sense but that was not pre-imagined as he set off to write the book. I think this is a fair summary, although I confess I don't have the article in front of me. I liked it because it was very personal: she talked about her feelings about Aira and her admiration for him as a fellow author, and she talked about her own life in relation to her professional assignment to visit and interview an Argentine author. I also remember that she highlighted the impressive volume of books he's written: dozens of books published across three continents by a variety of publishing houses. César Aira is a man full of ideas, a creative machine capable of taking a tiny little beginning and spinning it into a book whose logic satisfies you when you finish it and puts a smile on your face.

I'll continue to seek out books by Aira when I feel the need to be entertained and amazed by an author with a strange and compelling skill set. As an author, he's not unlike the César Aira who solves the puzzle at the beginning of this book: a man with a very particular combination of attributes that allow him to both construct and solve unique narrative puzzles.

#93: I will have to see if that book has been translated. It looks like one I would enjoy.

@94: It's been translated as The Literary Conference. If you manage to get a copy I hope you do enjoy it!

53. La muerte y la niña (Death and the child) by Juan Carlos Onetti

My desire to read all the novels and short stories that take place in Onetti's fictional town of Santa María brought me to this book, in which a woman named Helga Hauser is condemned to die in childbirth after being impregnated by one of the townspeople. The presumed culprit is Augusto Goerdel, born in the Swiss Colony that is something of a sister city to Santa María and brought up under the wing of Father Bergner, who sees big things in Goerdel's future as a member of the clergy. Doctor Díaz Grey, who holds the distinction of having been around since the very beginning in La vida breve when Juan María Brausen dreamt up this place where men and women live and die, reprises his customary role of observer and confessor of Jorge Malabia, who pays the doctor more than a few visits and wants to avenge Helga's death. However, it's not completely clear whether Goerdel is guilty or not. It seems that he is, that he should be, but it's never entirely pieced together. To tell the truth I read this book a few weeks ago and am having trouble reconstructing the plot in my mind. However, I do remember a few things that interested me and made me glad I'd read this book:

--Brausen, the creator, takes a much more fundamental role in this book than in other novels set in Santa María. He's no longer merely alluded to with fleeting references to his God-like role. Now he has a stronger, clearer presence in the lives of his creations. Díaz Grey speaks of the presumed murderer as perhaps spending his nights on his knees praying to "our Father Brausen who art in the nothingness." Jorge Malabia tells Díaz Grey that he's interested in learning about the doctor's past, in knowing "who, what you were, doctor, before getting mixed up with the inhabitants of Santa María. The ghosts invented and imposed on this place by Juan María Brausen." In previous books I'd enjoyed the way the characters struggled to understand their place in a world characterized by the vague presence of a creator whose role was something like that of a puppeteer. They yearned for autonomy, they wanted to be more free than they were, but they didn't seem to fully understand the mechanisms that had brought them to Santa María and kept them there. Here it's as if they've figured things out: now they know who they are and who made them, and although they don't (or can't) leave Santa María, they are much more aware of their plight and openly, sometimes bitterly, reference their creator.

--Time has passed. Jorge Malabia is no longer the young man he was when he "suffered over suicidal sister-in-laws and impossible poems" in Juntacadáveres. He's put on some weight and now the newspaper is his. Díaz Grey has also changed, aged by the years imposed on him by Brausen and now aware that one of the forms of his creator's incomprehensible punishment was "to have brought me into his world with an age invariably stuck between feelings of ambition tempered by time and despair." Reading this book gave me a chance to see the characters I'd come to be familiar with at a different moment in their lives, long after the events of earlier books like Juntacadáveres and Para una tumba sin nombre.

--The Swiss Colony comes into the foreground. It's always alluded to, but usually it's stuck on the outside, spoken of by the inhabitants of Santa María but not visited. Here, through the story of Augusto Goerdel, the history of the colony and the lives of its inhabitants are told. Father Bergner and Doctor Díaz Grey visit the colony. Its connection to Santa María and the relationships between the inhabitants of the two cities begin to come into focus.

I enjoyed this book because it gave a different view of a familiar place and showed me the characters of Santa María in a different time and context. I liked how Brausen's presence was expanded to enter into the everyday conversations of his creations. And I liked reading about Doctor Díaz Grey in a different moment of his life, somewhere between the early novels and his final appearance in Onetti's last novel, Cuando ya no importe.

#95: I have checked, but my local libraries do not have the book. Too bad.

54. El matadero/La cautiva (The Slaughterhouse/The Captive) by Esteban Echeverría

I keep stacks of books to be read, library books that I've checked out months ago or books I recently and excitedly purchased; however, sometimes I like to forego those queues and stand in front of my bookcase, choosing a book at random. I decided to take it back to the early days of independent Argentina, and re-read a book I first read as an undergraduate taking a class on Argentine literature the semester before departing for a year of studies in Buenos Aires. As I recall we opened that class with Esteban Echeverría's two most famous works, and my professor introduced the literature with a brief history lesson about Juan Manuel de Rosas and the conflicts between Federales and Unitarios. I remember I thought it was funny that the supporters of Rosas, the Federales, wore the biggest moustaches they could grow (I'd make a lousy Federal), while the Unitarios went rather blatantly moustacheless with giant neck beards that framed their faces in the shape of a "U". Of course, those were serious times, and I may have had to surpress a giggle or two as my professor talked about Rosas' reign of terror and the execution of countless Unitarios by the Mazorca, the strong arm of the Rosas political machine. It's just hard to keep a straight face as you sit in class imagining neck beards. When I finished the class and went to Argentina, I was glad that I'd read a few of the classics and studied them under a professor who could explain them in the context of his nation's history.

As I stared at my bookshelf, I realized I remembered very little about these two works. El matadero is about a slaughterhouse; La cautiva is about a captive, or two captives, and the desert. That's about as much as I could recall. I wanted to reacquaint myself with these two stories (the former is a short story, the latter a narrative poem) because I've become increasingly familiar with Argentine literature since I took this class, and I thought I'd find more to appreciate as I read them for a second time.

El matadero describes the arrival of a troop of cattle to a suburban Buenos Aires slaughterhouse during Lent, a time in which the city is starved for meat and suffering to the point that the benevolent dictator Rosas agreed to allow the recommencement of productive activities at the slaughterhouse. The hunger for animal flesh sets the stage for a later depiction of a different sort of hunger in the hearts of the laborers, who are described in their various roles in the early pages of the story. Echeverría does not recur to flowery and ornate language in this text (he will in La Cautiva), describing the crude reality of the slaughter in all its bloody glory. The brutish laborers, partisans of Rosas' Federal party, are not looked at entirely unkindly: there are hints of admiration in the depiction of their domination of the incoming cattle. One bull breaks loose and runs rampant across the yard. In the process, a young boy meets a violent end in a horrible accident involving one of the tools of the trade. The bull eventually exits the slaughterhouse and breaches the streets, and as he's being brought to submission, the workmen come across a Unitario obliviously passing by on his way uptown. They begin toying with him, and their games become increasingly cruel. Their pursuit of him is not unline their pursuit of the escaped bull. While this book was written around the same time as La cautiva (between 1835 and 1840), it was not published until many years later, after the author's death. It just wasn't safe in the age of Rosas to publish something so overtly political.

In La cautiva the heroic María, knife in hand, escapes from captivity in an Indian camp on the pampa, taking her beloved Brian along with her into the open countryside. They soon find themselves captive once again, this time to the vast and limitless desert. Brian is weak and can barely stand on his own two feet, but María refuses to give up and they push on. They find water, but then a fire sweeps across the desolate landscape. Things do not look good for the couple, and Brian falters more than once, ready to give up and resigned to death. María continues to fight for their survival, eventually taking Brian onto her shoulders and carrying him when he's too weak to walk. Each step of the way, from the late-night drunken revelry of the victorious Indians to the desperate wanderings of Brian and María, Echeverría paints the people and the landscape of his native Argentina into literary being, not always hitting the perfect note (the editor of my book was quick to point out his shortcomings in footnotes), but often writing particularly compelling and original passages. It's a very Romantic (with a capital R) story. The introductory study of my edition recounts the author's years spent in Paris as a young student, during which he was exposed to the Romantic works of English and German authors popular at the time. When he crossed the ocean and returned to Argentina, he looked at the landscapes of his own country with his eyes and mind attuned to a certain interpretation of the plants, animals and people of his homeland.

These stories were thrilling to return to years after I first read them, years during which I read a lot of Argentine literature. The themes are iconic: the civilization and barbary of El matadero, the desert as a vast and inescapable prison in La cautiva, the final image of the ombu tree marking the division between city and pampa. It's amazing how, in two short works, Echeverría was able to prefigure so much of his country's literature. When Borges writes about the desert, he's writing in part about Echeverría's desert; without Echeverría, maybe Sarmiento doesn't write Facundo. They're not perfect, and they probably wouldn't have endured for more than a century and a half if not for their surprising originality. He was able to look at his country and distill it into two short pieces that expressed enduring aspects of the Argentine reality.

55. Insolación (Sunstroke) by Emilia Pardo Bazán

The desire to learn about 20th Spanish (not Latin American) literature has brought me to the major authors of the final decades of the 19th century, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán. I checked out two books by her: Los pazos de Ulloa (her most famous novel) and Insolación, a shorter novel written a few years later, which I decided to read first because I had a couple of days with relatively little work to do and I needed a book that could be read and finished in those two days. I didn't want to leave her longer novel unfinished.

The central episode of Insolación involves an outing to the countryside to see a religious site (the fields of San Isidro) and the whole carnival show that surrounds it, with a cast of street performers, sideshow acts and various lowlifes of the Madrid suburbs in the final quarter of the 19th century. The two participants in the outing are the Marchioness Asís Taboada, a noble widow, and Diego Pacheco, a southerner from Cadiz who speaks with a distinctive accent. Asís met him the night before at a little get-together, and she randomly runs into him as she's heading to the church to hear mass. He surprisingly asks her to go with him to see the sights of San Isidro, and against her best judgement she accepts. He's handsome and he's got a nice way with words, and they have a good time as they head out into the countryside. The night before, people had been talking about the appalling state of Spanish morals, and mention was made of places like San Isidro, where all sorts of riffraff surround a religious landmark. Asís probably didn't imagine herself heading out to San Isidro the next day as she partook in that conversation. But here they are, and the sun is beating down on them, and they stop to eat at a food stall, they drink some wine and are amused by some gypsies who want to read Asís' palm (and get some free wine and money), and it's so hot and the sun is relentless, and Asís feels good but then she doesn't, she's had too much of the sun's brutal rays and she swoons and she's taken for a spell of rest in the home of some poor countryfolk, and Pacheco caresses her, then it's back to Madrid...

The second half of the story relates the romantic and social fallout of Pacheco and Asis' excursion. Asis feels ashamed about the whole thing and wants her new suitor to recede back out of her life. But he's persistent and keeps on showing up and pressuring her to meet him one more time. She has some discussions with her platonic friend Gabriel Pardo about moral issues and he seems to show certain sympathy toward women who have amorous adventures, since men are basically applauded for being Don Juans and romancing the ladies, whereas women are considered sullied by any deviation from honorable chastity. She considers telling him, and he's on the verge of figuring things out on his own, but she never spills the beans. She figures she'll just get out of town for summer vacation early and head back to her provincial home, but she's not able to leave without seeing Pacheco a few more times.

I enjoyed this book. The scenes out in the countryside in the hot sun were intense, almost hallucinogenic, with a cast of grotesques filtering in and out of Asís and Pacheco's contact. In their final meeting, they go to have a meal out in the countryside and they end up being taken to a sleazy lovers' motel room in a sprawling restaurant-entertainment complex. Asís insists on keeping the doors and windows of their supposed lovenest open and the staff of the establishment are confused by these two wealthy cityfolk. There's an old begger asking them to help her daughter obtain employment in the city, and eventually two young ladies show up and Pacheco dances with them, and things get absolutely crazy. These romantic encounters in sleazy suburban locales were my favorite parts of the book, with the hot sun beating down on Asís as she goes against the societal norm and gets involved with a young gentleman from the south.

I also enjoyed the way the author represented rural and regional speech. Pacheco speaks like a southerner, and some of the people the two come across in the countryside are nearly unintelligible. Emilio Pardo Bazán showed me a Spain that I hadn't seen before, something like an extension of the 16th and 17th century picaresque world of Lazarillos and Guzmanes in late 19th century Madrid. She put suburban scenes of rural poverty and moral corruption to good use as the backdrop for a complicated love affair between a wealthy noble widow and a womanizing southerner.

As usual, terrific reviews!

100: Thanks!

56. García Lorca: Biografía esencial (García Lorca: Essential Biography) by Ian Gibson

I went to the library the other day looking for a short biography of Federico García Lorca and walked out happy with this book in hand. Who better to introduce me to the man and his work than Ian Gibson, one of the preeminent García Lorca scholars of all time, a man who has published massive tomes on the life and death of the Granadan poet? My worry when looking for a brief overview of his life and work was that if I chose a mediocre source of information, the events of García Lorca's life and their importance might have been distorted and corrupted; but If anyone knew how to condense it all into 100 pages, it would be Gibson.

I was satisfied with this introduction. It gave me a synopsis of the author's life and work and managed to mix in more compelling anecdotes than I thought would be possible in such a short summary of the life of a prolific creator. I learned that Lorca's family on his father's side was full of avid readers especially fond of Victor Hugo, and that Hugo's complete works may well have been Lorca's introduction to the world of literature. I learned that Lorca was a musician before he was a writer, and that the death of his childhood music teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, was fundamental in his transition from one art form to the other. I learned that he was moved by the poetry of Rubén Darío (who wasn't) and found in the Nicaraguan poet a kindred spirit during years during which he was coming to terms with the personal solitude that went hand in hand with being gay in early 20th century Spain. I learned about his years as a young adult in the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he listened to lectures given by the best and brightest intellectuals in Spain and the western world, and made friends with many classmates who later became famous in their own right. I learned about his friendship with Salvador Dalí and how their relationship affected his art and his life. Gibson doesn't pry much into Lorca's homosexuality, so maybe there were some things I didn't learn about his relationship with Dalí and other men that may have been more than friends; but he doesn't deny or ignore it either. He certainly makes clear that Lorca's sexuality contributed to his strong identification with other marginalized people such as gypsies and American blacks, people about whom he wrote some of his most compelling verses. As the book continues, Lorca's works start coming one after another, and I learned about each work in the context of an increasingly cosmopolitan life. Then the war and Lorca's return to Granada and his death. One anecdote that I found particularly jarring is that Lorca's death came five years to the day after he finished writing a play entitled Así que pasen cinco años (When Five Years Pass).

In about two hours I learned quite a lot about an author whose books I'm preparing to read. I was glad to have Gibson as a guide and I trust his judgement in pruning down the wealth of information available about Lorca into such a short biography. Some day I'd like to read his more extensive works about Lorca's life and death. For now, though, I feel ready to move on to the books themselves. Actually, I've already finished Lorca's first published book, Impresiones y paisajes, which introduced me to Spain as seen through the eyes of an erudite young man leaving his Andalusian home to travel around his country for the first time.

Superb review of García Lorca: Biografía esencial, Matt. I found a longer biography of García Lorca by Ian Gibson in English, but I didn't see the one that you read. I'll look for it over the next few days, though.

@103: I'm not sure if that shorter biography is available in English. I'm the only person who's cataloged the Spanish version here on LT, so I figure it wasn't the widest release...

57. Impresiones y paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes) by Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca wrote this series of essays during school trips across Spain with his classmates at the Universidad de Granada led by their professor, Martín Domínguez Berrueta. They visited and studied places with great historic value in Castilla and Granada, and Lorca's writings exposed me to a Spain that was as new to him as it is to me (I've not read all that much modern Spanish literature). These reflections on the crumbling monasteries, cemeteries and the Castillan and Andalusian landscapes are his first published book, and while he cautions the reader not to expect too much, I though they were quite enjoyable and found it remarkable that they were written by a (rather precocious) teenager.

In some of his impressions, the places they visit are connected to Spain's literary past: they visit Ávila, the home of Santa Teresa, and also the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, where El Cid's wife and daughters stayed while he went and fought the Moors in the south and where Rodrigo himself is buried. I especially liked these, because they showed me Lorca's appreciation of his country's literary tradition. He writes of the legend of Doña Jimena and the eternal image of her awaiting the return of her husband, and his words made me want to grab the Romancero off my bookshelf and remind myself of how she's portrayed in those poems. I thought it was cool to see how Lorca, as he gets to know his own country during his teenage years, classifies what he's seeing according to the books he's read and loved.

One impression I particularly enjoyed was written upon a visit to an orphanage for sick children. Machado has a poem about an orphanage in Campos de Castilla and it's impossible to imagine that Lorca hadn't read that other portrait of a dark, forgotten building where children peek out of windows onto the desolate, barren landscapes of Castilla that surround them. So it's as if Lorca is seeing this place through his own eyes, but also through those of Machado, and it's therefore interesting to see how his essay differs from Machado's poem. Lorca writes how the sight of these sick children awaiting death in an asylum awakens strong desires of equality in him. To me, this note of solidarity, that he wants to live in a world where these people are his equals, goes a step farther than Machado's portrait. I felt that Machado was more of an observer seeking to awaken the world to the bitter reality of the lives of some of its members, whereas Lorca wants to become a participant in the struggle of the less fortunate and share their suffering. That note of solidarity pleased me and made me like the young writer a bit more than I already did.

My favorite, though, involves a trip to a monastery where he plays the organ with two monks. One of them has lived in isolation for most of his life and has never heard the secular classical music that Lorca plays him. As he's introducing the innocent monk to the sounds of the outside world, another monk comes to the door, his face pale and anguished. He asks Lorca to please, please play on; when Lorca finishes playing, or can't go on because he's forgotten the rest of the piece, the monk storms out of the room without a word. He later explains that the sounds he's hearing remind him of an outside life he once, a life he came to see as false and chose to abandon. Lorca is shocked and finds it admirable that a man as wise and worldly as the monk came here to live in the convent (where, amongst others, Unamuno visits him). The first monk's life without music seemed cruel, but the second's determination to leave the world of secular music behind is a more mysterious decision, one that is difficult for Lorca to come to terms with. He, a young man with the world opening up to him, is moved by his conversation with the old man who has left that world behind to come to the monastery where he hopes to die.

Finally, one great thing about this Cátedra edition of Impresiones y paisajes is that it included an appendix with the poet's epistolary correspondence with his family during his travels. While his impressions are sophisticated and refined, his letters express what a good time he's having and how much he misses his family, how he wants to make sure that his little sister Isabel is eating plenty of food, and how his dad really needs to send him more money since he's constantly running out. I wanted to tell him to stop buying so much junk, because he's always talking about buying stuff and he's always asking for money, and I though maybe he could have been a little more economical and passed on some of the local crafts he was constantly buying. Oh well, he wasn't my child, and I guess it was money well spent since this trip across Spain allowed him to see his own country for the first time and inspired him at a time when he was making the transition from musician to writer.

58. El otro (The Other) by Miguel de Unamuno

A man comes to visit his sister, whose husband has gone crazy. He keeps telling people he's not himself--he's the Other. He refuses to respond to his own name, Cosme, and keeps on insisting that he's not who he was, that he's this Other that everybody is tired of hearing about. So the brother talks to him, and he gets pulled into the Other's existential crisis to some extent, and then the Other takes him downstairs and shows him his own dead body...except it's not him, it's the other one, that is, his twin. But who is the murderer and who is the victim (or, as the characters like to put it in this play, who is Cain and who is Abel?) Is he this one (Cosme) or the other one (his brother Damián)?

Pretty soon both wives are interrogating the Other, trying to figure out if he's theirs or the other's. Laura, the woman whom both brothers loved and who chose to marry Cosme, asserts that the Other is hers and she wants him to acknowledge that he is Cosme. She's pregnant and since the child needs a father, the murderous Cain-brother must be her husband. Her character is more soft and gentle than the other woman, Damiana, who presents the Other with a very similar argument as to why he is hers and he should just admit that he's Damian. These two women repeat the struggle between the two brothers, one the conqueror of Laura and the other the vanquished Damian who left town and found his Damiana. Then the mother's suddenly lamenting the whole situation and talking about how God too has an other and the Other clarifies that God's other is Destiny, and his wife is Fate...and the women keep arguing over which one the Other is, and it starts to become unclear whether the one they want is theirs...or the other, the one they have not possessed. Of course, there's really only one way out for the Other, and he takes it in the end.

I read this play as I was re-reading Niebla because I wanted to experience another of Unamuno's philosophical games. In some ways I enjoyed this more than Niebla because the interactions between characters were entertaining (I especially enjoyed Laura and Damiana's back-and-forths) and I felt the emotions of the characters were more authentic and easier to access. I haven't related too well to Augusto Pérez the two times I've read Niebla, and both times I've been quite happy to see him meet his end after discussing his existence with the author. His existential crisis is fascinating and my brain loves the book, especially the way the characters are made to be re-created by each reader who reads it; unfortunately, my heart is not moved by Augusto's person, or perhaps I'm not capable of creating my own Augusto that I can come to love and appreciate. The Other, the man around whom this play revolves, is less developed than Augusto and maybe I just don't have enough time to grow tired of his who/what/why am I dilemma. It was nice to read this book side-by-side with another of Unamuno's works, because I started to get a better feel for the world as seen by don Miguel. I really appreciate the way he delves into questions of human and novelistic existence, even if he occasionally bores me.

59. Castilla by Azorín

These essays/memories of Castilla are a mix of nostalgic history, lamentations of the state of Spain circa 1900 and metaliterature. The last element added tremendously to the first two, and many of the essays I enjoyed the most incorporated characters that were familiar to me from reading books like La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes and Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares. That's not to say I didn't like the rest, though, because Azorín's style is friendly and inviting, incorporating the reader into the texts and including us in his nostalgic project. When a man surveys the town from a high tower, equipped with a spyglass, and the man's lens fogs, Azorín doesn't say that the man cleans the lens, rather, "let us clean it"; he begins another essay "If you wish to go there, to that house in Henar..."; in another, he invites the reader to cross the threshold and enter an austere, furnitureless home where a down-on-his-luck hidalgo shares hard, stale bread with his servant. The essays are smart and polished and show the author's sophisticated grasp of the Spanish literary tradition and its continued presence in everyday life. But they're also just fun to read, and I can imagine reading them in a Sunday newspaper or a magazine and enjoying them whether or not I was able to enter into his web of references.

The first two are about the history of the Spanish railroad system and a rather lengthy period of the 19th century when the railroad was on the verge of arriving to Spain (Cuba even had a railroad) yet ground had not been broken on peninsular soil. Then there's one about the various inns and roadside accommodations that are littered across Spain and have rich histories of mysterious crimes and even more mysterious guests (Don Quijote's presence goes without saying, and needs not be mentioned in Azorín's text). He references an Englishman named Ford who found them to be rather lacking in creature comforts, going so far to call a particular Segovia inn one of the worst in all Spain. Then there's an essay on the bullfights that transcribes a couple of different accounts of these spectacles. As I understand it, the author's rather negative view of the violence of the bullfight wasn't altogether typical of his time, and I enjoyed his ruminations on what a foreigner would think of the bloody event.

Then come some of my favorite essays. First, "Una ciudad y un balcón," where a man looks out on a city and each time he cleans his lens time leaps forward. The spectre of Celestina is seen in the streets at first view, but disappears when the lens is cleaned and centuries pass. The city of the first glance disappears as Spain is slowly pulled into the industrial era and the roads are paved as the city expands outward...and there will always be a man on a balcony with his head rested against his closed fist, looking out on the world, suffering from an incurable melancholy...feeling just like the Quevedo line that begins the essay, No me podrán quitar el dolorido sentir. My friend told me that the man looking out over the city is actually a character from Leopoldo Alas' La regenta, so that's just another layer of literary figures espying other literary figures from towers that stand over cities that change with the centuries yet also remain the same. I was pretty excited when I finished this story and was hoping there'd be more like it. There were.

In "Las nubes" Calixto and Melibea, the star-crossed lovers from La Celestina, are happily married and entering into the autumn of their lives with a single daughter whom they love and cherish. As the clouds cycle through the sky, ever-different yet also ever-repeating, a falcon enters the garden and a young man comes to retrieve it. Calixto can't hear what the young man
is saying to his daughter, but he can guess his words. They're words he's said himself in the beginning of a different story, or a different iteration of the same story that repeats itself endlessly.

In "Lo fatal," the episode of the poor nobleman from Lazarillo is remembered, with the young pícaro observing his starving master with respect and pity, sharing the very stale bread he though he'd never have to eat again when he agreed to enter into the man's service. The hidalgo's story is then continued into a future where he returns to his homeland and finds fortune and wealth yet at the same time becomes aware of the fleeting nature of worldly life as his health degrades. Then two verses from a Góngora sonnet present an image of a different sort of man, a nameless pilgrim wandering across a dark world, a pilgrim who could represent the fate of the nobleman if he didn't return home and recover his name. Then the hidalgo goes back to Toledo to visit his old servant Lázaro and he sits for a portrait. In the portrait, rumored to be made by El Greco himself, there's a flicker of immortality in his eyes.

Then in "La fragancia del vaso," the title character from Cervantes' "La ilustre fregona" returns to the inn where she once worked and came to be known across Spain for her beauty and virtue. Now mature and with a family of her own, nobody remembers her in the place where she once sowed so much happiness.

I really enjoyed the way Azorín utilizes stories from real life and from fiction to construct a multifaceted portrait of Castilla. Those characters are as much a part of the country as the people and events of the historical past. Incorporating both history and literature and drawing freely from both, these essays almost seem "realer" than if they had been purely historical. The people in those books never stopped existing, they're still with us today, and they're as much a part of the landscape of Azorín's Castilla as the crumbling churches and expanding cityscapes. I mean, its greatest and most enduring hero, El Cid, is very much a mix of historical and literary elements, as the events of his life were developed into countless oral adaptations before finally being penned in a form that mixes reality and fiction. I think it was a very inspired decision by Azorín, to write essays that incorporate literary tradition into evocative essays. And again, his style is so warm and friendly that it wouldn't have mattered what he was writing about, I probably would have enjoyed it.

60. Luces de bohemia (Bohemian Lights)--Ramón del Valle-Inclán

Ramón del Valle Inclán lost an arm after injuring it in a fight. I read one account of this incident that blamed it all on an infection caused by his cuff link piercing his wrist skin, and another that denied the cuff link story and cited medical evidence (or was it just medical hearsay) that proved that the fight was more serious than a mere scratch on the wrist. Whatever the cause of the demise of his left arm, for some reason I've had trouble separating him in my mind from the one armed man from The Fugitive. I think I remember the one armed man having a beard, as did Valle-Inclán. Maybe that was it. Although now that I look at his picture again, he looks more like a wizard...anyway, losing an arm probably helps your bohemian credibility, and maybe it helped him get some free drinks and some extra inspiration for this story.

Luces de bohemia is an esperpento, a term coined by the author for this book of bohemian grotesques. The story behind the name is told near the end of the book when Max Estrella, the tragic protagonist, starts talking about the concave mirrors down at the Callejón del Gato and how the heroes of antiquity reflected in the mirror create the esperpento, with the tragic sentiment of Spanish existence effectively conveyed through a systematically deformed aesthetic. As he puts it, the most beautiful images become absurd when seen through a concave mirror. In his rather sophisticated depiction of the grotesque side of Madrid bohemian life, Valle-Inclán follows in the footsteps of men like Quevedo (who used the picaresque genre as a vehicle to play with language in some remarkable ways in El buscón) and Francisco Goya (who painted some truly jarring images of the horrors of war and the general vileness of human interaction). The esperpento is written in dialogue, but with fourteen acts originally published in serial form, it's not a play in the traditional sense of the word. I think more than anything the dialogue form gives the author the opportunity to fully immerse the reader in the language of the bars, jails, back rooms and streets where Max Estrella lives and dies, often accompanied by his drinking buddy Don Latino de Hispalis.

Max himself (full name Máximo Estrella) is based on a real person, the poet Alejandro Sawa, who was a friend of both Valle-Inclán and Rubén Darío. The esperpento begins at home, with Max suggesting to his French wife that they commit suicide after he receives word that he's lost his job as a writer for a newspaper and sees no reason to go on living. His wife wants him to stay alive for the sake of their daughter, and as they're talking about this Latino shows up smelling of booze. He wants Max to go with him down to the bookstore where a man named Zaratustra has sold a handful of copies of Max's book of poems for a pittance. After unsuccessfully angling for more money, Max and Latino move on to the bar, have some drinks, wander the streets, run into some young modernist grotesques who idolize a certain Nicaraguan poet, and end up in jail (well, Latino doesn't, but Max does). In jail Max meets a Catalan proletarian who's in jail for refusing to go to war. Eventually Max is released and he talks to the minister whom he knows from his younger days and who offers him some dirty government money, money that Max pathetically accepts. Then they go hang out with Rubén Darío himself, and then they meet some prostitutes...well, they basically spend the whole esperpento going from place to place, meeting a variety of grotesques against a backdrop of Madrid where social issues are tearing the city apart. The military and the republican guard are patrolling the streets and people are getting shot and killed as Max presses on toward his final fate. In the end, the great star of Madrid literature lies dead in the entryway to his tenement, and Rubén Darío reappears to have a final discussion with the author himself, who appears in the form of the Marqués de Bradomín, a pseudo-autobiographical character from another one of Valle-Inclán's books.

The language was really difficult throughout the play, and I sometimes felt like I was looking at the glossary so often that I was missing the essential pleasure of the dialogues. I'm just not that up on early 20th century Madrid slang. I did, however, truly enjoy the way reality was distorted in a way that spared no one. It was fun to see a Rubén Darío grotesque, for example, and his character still retained a certain beauty and dignity even after getting the concave mirror treatment. Max too was a remarkable character, and I was inspired to go and track down Alejandro Sawa's last book, the one published after his death and the one Max's friends want to publish after his death. The distorted depiction of real people from Valle-Inclán's Madrid really appealed to me, and I'd have to say that I entirely approve of the esperpento genre.

I read this right after re-readin Unamuno's Niebla, and I was struck by how similar the two books were in terms of their structure: in both cases, a man leaves his house at the beginning of the book and wanders around having dialogues with people. Then at the end the author steps in and discusses his fictional creation with one of the characters. Also, both Augusto Pérez and Max Estrella die deaths that can easily be interpreted as self-inflicted. Maybe if the characters in Niebla went down to the Callejón del Gato and spent some time in the mirror gallery, the casual observer would see them as Max, Latino and company.

I also started thinking about another book of grotesques written around the same time as this first esperpento: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. At the beginning of that book one of his characters gives his own definition of the grotesque:

"...in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

The more I thought about it, the more I became intrigued as to whether it would be possible to apply the Anderson definition of the grotesque to the characters of Valle-Inclán's esperpento. In some cases it was almost too easy: the gaggle of modernists converted into grotesques by their passionate embrace of the truth of the Darío Parnassus, Latino made grotesque by snatching up as many truths as he could, the truth of capital and the truth of greed...even Max Estrella, clinging on to the truth of Paris and the bohemian existence. It wasn't a bad fit, and that made me happy. Why did these two men become inspired by the idea of a book of grotesques in the early 20s, one in middle America and one in Spain? Whatever the reason, they both produced works of literature that I greatly enjoyed.

61. Libro de poemas (Book of poems) by Federico García Lorca

In reading Lorca's first published book, Impresiones y paisajes, I got to experience his first baby steps as a writer. He travels around Spain and observes what he sees while on an extended field trip with his university class. His observations were thoughtful and surprisingly sophisticated for a teenager. I don't think I'm capable of expressing myself at 27 the way he did at 17. Now, after reading his second published book, Libro de poemas, I feel like I've experienced his coming of age as a poet. Here, he's putting the world in order, creating systems of poetic expression capable of representing both the world around him and the many worlds of his imaginative fancy, which come to greater prominence in Suites.

This is kind of a work in progress, because while I've read it once through, I'm currently going back and forth between it and Suites, looking for things that catch my eye that I might like to investigate in greater depth. I'm getting really excited about future García Lorca reads in the coming few months, and I'm hoping that my familiarity with his earliest published works will help me better understand the books of poems and plays that I'm preparing to read. I think I'll best be able to comment on this book in a few months, so maybe I'll come back to this review then. For now, I'll say that I appreciated this book because I started seeing certain repetitions of symbols (although not necessarily with fixed, static meanings) and it helped me get a better feel for Lorca's forms of poetic expression. I look forward to re-reading these poems soon.

Great review of Luces de Bohemia, Matt; that sounds like something I'd be interested in. The English version of Bohemian Lights is included in the book Valle-Inclan Plays: 1: Divine Words, Bohemian Lights, Silver Face, which I've added to my wish list. I also found out that New York Review Books will publish his novel Tyrant Banderas in English translation next April, so I'll be on the lookout for it.

I must read more Garcia Lorca...

62. Títeres de cachiporra: tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita by Federico García Lorca

I've fallen woefully behind on my reviews, which is disappointing. I feel that I appreciate books more and I remember them better if I take a few minutes to compose my thoughts. I'm going to try to catch back up, but in some cases I may not remember the books well enough to do them anything resembling justice. My effort begins with Lorca's play for puppets Tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita. Lorca was a practitioner of puppet theater since his youth, and as an adult he wrote and produced a series of plays along with other luminaries of Spanish culture, such as the composer Manuel de Falla, who provided musical accompaniment for some of Lorca's productions. The puppets were a vehicle that allowed him to get in touch with the popular traditions of his native Andalucía, and he used the traditions of his homeland in plays that were innovative and modern in ways that one might not generally expect puppet performances to be. This one is a perfect example: it's enjoyable to read and imagine being performed not just because it's a fun story with an outrageous central character, but it also plays with the limits of reality in representation in very sophisticated and adult ways. A kid could watch it and enjoy it, while an adult could watch it and ponder some larger issues. Isn't that what they say about the Shrek movies?

The play begins with a monologue by a character named Mosquito who explains what's going to be represented and interacts with the audience, talking about how their traveling troupe has fled from educated, phony audiences and is prepared to present this authentic piece of theater, where the characters drink real wine--not fake wine from cobweb-filled goblets--and bring pleasure to real people. The tragicomedy then unfolds: it's the story of a puppet in a world full of puppets, who arranges to marry a young lady and eventually comes to be discovered as nothing more than a puppet by his fellow puppets on stage. The unmasked puppet, Don Cristóbal, is a domineering and larger than life man who carries a big club and uses it to threaten and sometimes attack the inferior people who get in his way or say things he doesn't much care for. He reminded me a lot of Père Ubu, both because of his build (well-endowed in the gut area) and his penchant for violence and yelling. He sees señá Rosita and wants to marry her, which makes her father happy and her boyfriend Cocoliche upset. Rosita sees that she lacks autonomy (as a person) and goes along with the marriage because there's nothing else she can do. She argues with her father about the marriage, but she soon gives in. Don Cristóbal, meanwhile, visits the town tavern and then gets a haircut. The barber is the one who notices that his head's made not of flesh but of wood, not even well-painted wood, which he finds strange and funny. Later, on the day of Don Cristóbal and señá Rosita's marriage, the bombastic groom is stabbed by Currito, the sailor who courted Rosita in the past and returned to town to find her on the verge of marriage. Once he's dead, Cocoliche looks him over and finds him to be a puppet, and Rosita is greatly affected by the whole thing.

It's hard for me to imagine what seeing a production of Lorca's puppet theater might have been like, especially in a world filled with televisions and cinema multiplexes and so many other easy ways to consume imagined stories represented by actors or visual artists. Puppets seem almost inherently silly, and it's hard for me to imagine a serious author like Lorca constructing a story about puppets that asks serious existential questions about the reality of theater and theatrical representations of real people. He did, though, and it pleased both the child in me who is amused by slapstick humor and comically menacing adults who wield clubs, and the adult who likes reading complicated works of theater that play with concepts of reality. Maybe this could be re-made for TV, with robots taking the place of puppets: a group of characters played by robots could interact, and eventually one of the characters is found by his fellow robots to be nothing more than a robot. How shocking!

If I imagine myself more than ninety years ago seeing Don Cristóbal unmasked as nothing more than a poorly painted wooden puppet, it seems like it would have been a tremendously satisfying experience; reading the play in 2011 was a lot of fun, and I'm ready to move on to some more works of theater by Lorca.

63. Niebla by Miguel de Unamuno

I read Niebla for the first time about a year and a half ago, and as I read my thoughts from that first reading, I don't have too much to add. One thing that I really came to appreciate in my second reading was the complete lack of descriptions of the characters. Nobody's physical characteristics are ever mentioned. I have no idea what Antonio Pérez is supposed to look like, nor Eugenia, nor Víctor Goti, nor anybody else in this book. Which is exactly the point: the Unamuno "Nivola" leaves these things in the hands of the reader who re-creates the story each time he opens the book. We're supposed to flesh the characters out ourselves, writing our own mental book where Antonio and his partners in dialogue become the people we imagine them to be. I'm not sure if I recognized the magnitude of this, the way that Unamuno leaves each character as a blank canvas for each of us to paint as we read the book.

I suppose, then, that my failure to enjoy Niebla on certain sentimental levels is my own failure. The next time I read the book, instead of complaining to myself about how boring Augusto is and how annoying his angst-filled conversations are, I should strive to make the Augusto that I'm not annoyed by, the character whose conversations I will enjoy. I've concluded that the problem doesn't lie with the book's first author, Unamuno, but rather with its second author, me. The dual nature of the book, with the reader acting as a second writer or re-writer who gives the book what its first author intentionally omitted, is pretty cool. Maybe it took me two readings just to come to terms with what Unamuno is asking me to do as I read Niebla, and the next time I read it I'll enjoy it more than the first two. I will try and make the Augusto Pérez that I do care about, and hope that things fall in place around him.

64. El sueño de la razón by Antonio Buero Vallejo

This is a really cool play about Francisco Goya. He's gone deaf and has isolated himself from the outside world to paint his Black Paintings, which are projected against the walls of the theater during the play. Different paintings are shown in different moments of the production, and the characters often look at and analyze these paintings. Because Goya is deaf, many of the lines "spoken" by his maid/mistress Leocadia and his doctor are set in parentheses, with the idea that the actor who plays the character will not speak the lines, but rather read them, use them to understand the sentiments being expressed, and convey them using pretend sign language on stage (or they could find stage actors who know sign language, I guess). In a performance of El sueño de la razón, the actor playing Goya would be the only one speaking for long stretches of time. Mixed in with his speech and the other characters' sign language are different verbal and sonic effects, such as a beating sound similar to that of a human heart and a variety of characters whose voices are heard by the painter in his state of madness. That's really the big question: has Goya gone crazy? His paintings certainly seem to indicate that he has, although at one point the priest wonders whether they aren't perhaps the works of a genius who cannot be understood by his contemporaries. Crazy or not, he's gotten into some trouble due to an impertinent letter he sent to a friend of his criticizing King Fernando VII. The king appears at the beginning of both of the play's acts, and he discusses Goya with two different subjects as he does some embroidery. Apparently the king had some serious talent with the needle. Everybody wants Goya to go into exile, but he obstinately insists on staying. His two closest friends, the doctor Arrieta and the priest Duaso, have extended conversations with him in which they seek to understand his mental state and convince him that he needs to get out of Dodge. As they talk (or sign, or write messages on paper for Goya to read), the Black Paintings cycle through the background. Goya really did do a series of paintings directly on the walls of his home, so that's a fairly realistic representation of what a visit to his estate might have been like.

This book was published in 1970, and in it Goya has been deaf for 31 years. Subtracting 31 years from 1970 brings us to 1939. When I realized this, I wondered how much of Franco was in King Fernando, and whether Goya's experience in this play is meant to represent the experience of the Spanish intellectual/artist under the Franco regime. I imagined the artist, haunted by the censors (priest Duaso is a censor in this play) and hesitant to publish or release his works into the world for fear of the repercussions, or because he'd been so beaten down by years of censorship that he knew it was all pointless anyway. Is this play an allegorical representation of the artist's life in Spain after three decades of fascist rule? The internet is not helping me out with information to back up my allegory theory. I thought Google would confirm my suspicions with a simple search. But I read most of the play as an allegory and it never stopped making sense, so I'm going to go on thinking it's so until I'm informed otherwise.

If it is an allegory, and I think it is, it was an incredibly enjoyable one for me because I've been looking at a lot of Goya's artwork this fall. The university here in my hometown has a really good art museum, and they've got original editions of Goya's Caprichos and Los desastres de la guerra in their print collection. The other day I made an appointment to view some of these prints, and I got to see the artist's original handiwork there in person. I wasn't allowed to turn the pages of Caprichos, which they've kept intact in bound book form, but a graduate student helped me page through all the different prints. I saw two different copies of "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos," the print that lends its name to this play. Looking at a book made by Goya more than two centuries ago was a fantastic experience. The viewing led me to this book as well, and reading this play was a pretty solid experience too. It made me want to see those prints again, but I think this time I'll content myself with the virtual versions, rather than request another special viewing. I've got bigger plans anyway: my university also has a second edition of Don Quijote and I'm going to try and view that. Maybe they'll even let me put my hands on that one, but probably not.

65. Réquiem por un campesino español (Requiem for a Spanish Peasant) by Ramón J. Sender

This short novel documents the life and death of Paco, a young Spaniard with a magnetic personality who briefly rose to political prominence in a small rural community. The town priest, Mosén Millán, was present at all the major events of Paco's life, and the story centers on him as he prepares a requiem to celebrate the one year anniversary of Paco's death. I actually read it a few months ago, but I was thinking the other day about the moral dilemma the priest faces when the Francoist opposition takes over. It's easy to hate him as you finish the story, but it's also easy to understand him and wonder if his behavior wasn't justifiable after all. I guess you have to decide whether anybody, even a man of the cloth, can stay above the fray when there's a war going on and people are being killed.

It's a well-structured book, not long, rather complicated but quite readable at the same time. The entire story takes place in about a 20 minute segment of time as the priest is slowly joined for the requiem by the triumvirate of local political power, don Valeriano, don Gumersindo and señor Cástulo. The altar boy drifts in and out of the story, singing a romance that the townspeople have created about Paco during the year since his death. The bulk of the novel is comprised of the priest's memories of Paco at different moments in his life, and through his reminiscences you get a good feel for the town and the locations where people congregated during the years before the Civil War: the homesteads where baptisms and weddings are held, the countryside, the caves where the least-fortunate sectors of society live in abject poverty, and the "Carasol" where the town gossips chat about what was going around around them. Lots of places, and also lots of people. You've got the two central characters, Paco and Mosén Millán, and a large cast of townspeople surrounding them. I especially enjoyed the Celestinesque Jerónima, who does most of the talking at the Carasol, and the communist cobbler, whose thoughts stand in interesting contrast with the rising and falling fortunes of the Republicans and the nationalists. Really, it's surprising to flip back through this book and think about how much happened in so few pages. It went by quickly, but the author had a nice touch in the arrangement of the different people and places as they are evoked by the priest as he thinks back on the life of his former helper.

I've been reading a lot of books from Spain the past few months and this one was a good introduction to fiction about the Spanish Civil War. I found myself looking up historical information to complement my relative ignorance of Spain's history (my knowledge of the war being based largely on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia). This book would be a nice complement to that one, because while Orwell gives you a worldly, intellectual outsider's view of the later portion of the war, Sender's book gives you a rural community whose inhabitants are caught up in the rise and violent fall of the Republic.

66. El arquitecto y el emperador de Asiria (The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria) by Fernando Arrabal

Very strange play. A man (the Emperor of Assyria) crash lands on an island where another man (whom the Emperor baptizes the Architect) has lived in solitude for quite some time. After two years of cohabitation, they've established a nominally teacher-student relationship and spend their days play-acting, with each man taking on a number of different roles. The Architect has great powers: for instance, he's able to communicate with the other living creatures of the island and he can make night fall on command. Their little routines are often obscene and blasphemous, and they're both really emotional. They are pretty crazy.

In the second act of the play, they enact a trial in which the Emperor is accused of killing his mother after having an extended incestuous relationship with her. He plays the role of the witnesses for the prosecution, speaking as his brother, his wife, and a few others who had intimate knowledge of the relationship between mother and son. The Architect is the judge. They sometimes pull off their masks and interject as themselves, and as the trial goes on the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The Emperor finally decrees that, due to his guilt, the Architect is to enact a rather extreme form of justice. The end of the play shows us that this is only one cycle of existence on the desert island.

There are a few books by Fernando Arrabal that I see from time to time in used bookstores and I'd never thought to buy one. I kind of figured that their persistent presence was a sign that maybe he wasn't the most amazing author. I often draw these conclusions based on the idea that if books by certain authors are always at used bookstores, that means they weren't good enough for previous readers to want to hold on to. I bear a mild prejudice against Carlos Fuentes for this reason: when can't you find a Carlos Fuentes book (or have your choice of Carlos Fuentes books) at the used bookstore? But my experience with this play has led me to see the error of my ways. Fernando Arrabal is a really cool guy: he's known for forming the "Grupo Pánico" (as in "Pan," not "Panic!") along with the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and their work is known for its neo-Dada bent. He went to Paris in the 1960s and spent a few years frequenting a cafe where André Breton held court with the old guard of Surrealism, and he went on to write a huge quantity of plays, novels, essays, books of poetry and books about chess. He's had a long career and seems to be one of those special people who never stops creating, or never runs out of ideas.

I've been reading chapters from a book called Modernisms, by Peter Nicholls, that defines and explains the different -isms and explains their place in the greater Modernist paradigm. I've read about Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. The book has helped me understand works of fiction from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (Alfred Jarry really was the man), and it also helped me appreciate Arrabal's play. I had at least a basic conception of Dada ideas on theater and its aspirations to create "great, negative works of destruction" (I think that's how Nicholls put it), so as I read the interactions between the Emperor and the Architect, which were often bizarre, vile, blasphemous, and downright disgusting, I could think of it as not just a unique work whose author isn't afraid of crossing some lines (or crossing every line), but as a play that fits into the European traditions of the 20th century.

Arrabal also has his own web site at http://www.arrabal.org/. It's surprising to see an author who once hung out with André Breton in Paris still alive and present on the internet. Sometimes those modernist movements seem so distant in time, and I enjoyed experiencing in this play a sort of bridge between the European avant-garde of so many decades ago and the 21st century.

67. La plaza del diamante (The Time of Doves) by Mercè Rodoreda

At the beginning of La plaza del diamante Natalia is convinced by her friend to go to a holiday celebration at the plaza, where she meets a man named Quimet who comes on to her pretty strongly. He tells her that he's going to call her "Colometa" (Catalan for "Little Dove") and he asserts that she'll be his wife. This proves to be the case, as he brusquely takes over her life and molds her in the image he desires. Pretty soon they're married and he's raising pigeons on the rooftop and they have a couple of children. She's never very happy with their life (it doesn't really seem like her life) and he's kind of a jerk. It's funny when he gets a really long tapeworm and passes it and comments that now he's given birth, just like her. His work as a furniture maker/repairer isn't going so well, so eventually she has to take a job in the house of a wealthy Barcelona family that lives off the rents from its real estate holdings. It's a strange house, and she never quite feels at ease there. Then the war comes, Quimet joins the Republican forces, and Natalia is left in the city with the children. After the war comes scarcity and hunger, and Natalia is deeply depressed. Eventually things turn around. New people enter her life and she starts to figure out her place in the world of postwar Barcelona.

I really enjoyed this book. Natalia/Colometa is a compelling character and I thought the author did a great job of putting me in her shoes as she progresses through life. I was satisfied by the way she finds herself/comes to some sort of understanding about who she is over the course of the novel. There's an epigraph at the beginning of the novel that states "My dear, these things are life", and much of Natalia's story is told in the context of the objects that surround her and encroach upon her life. Even the novel's opening, where her friend convinces her to go to the plaza, incorporates things, in this case the domestic items that are going to be raffled during the festivities. There's an extended chapter that describes the house where Natalia goes to work and how disorienting its structures are; nothing seems to fit together into a coherent whole, and she eventually admits that she was never able to make sense of that house. The whole book, in a way, is a bit like that: she struggles to fit things together and make sense of a world made up of countless disparate parts, whether they be people or any of the household items that are referenced throughout the book. The beginning, where she loses her identity in a way by meeting Quimet and becoming his woman with the name he chose for her, puts her at zero in a way. She has to figure out who she is in relation to her husband, his family, and her new role as wife and mother. She then spends the book on a sort of individual quest to find herself, eventually ceasing to be Colometa and becoming Natalia again, and coming to understand how she can transcend that other identity, which was imposed on her and which she struggled to mold herself to fit.

I read this book in the middle of a series of Spanish books from the 20th century that were, in a sense, very "Literary": they alluded to other books, incorporated portions of poems and popular songs, and even had real-life figures such as Rubén Darío or Miguel de Unamuno appear in their pages. La plaza del diamante is pretty much free of all intertextual references, unless you want to count the epigraph and the repeated mentions of a painting that hangs on the wall of Colometa's neighbor's home. I liked this nakedness, the way that the text stood alone without making explicit connections to other literary works. The Spanish tradition, with Don Quixote exerting its heavy influence, seems to be full of books that are about other books, and the whole art within art angle is something I really enjoy about peninsular literature. Maybe all countries share this tendency to some extent, but it's my hunch that Spain goes above and beyond in this regard. Also, it may be that I'm just invariably drawn to books that are a part of a certain academic tradition where intertextuality is much-appreciated and-applauded. Here, however, is a book that does not participate in that linking of texts to other texts. It's a sophisticated book, and I really felt like I was experiencing life through Natalia's eyes; maybe the point is that those eyes are much more trained on the objects that surround her in the world than on the letters printed on the pages of books.

68. Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence) by Luis Martín-Santos

I read this book a few months ago and didn't ever get around to writing a review. It's a classic of postwar Spanish fiction, and I went into it with high hopes; they were fulfilled for the most part, although there was something that kept me from being wildly enthusiastic about this book as I read it. Martín-Santos is known for incorporating a lot of modern, Joycean narrative techniques--stream of consciousness, interior monologue, fragmented narration--into his book at a time when that wasn't necessarily what Spanish literature was all about. It is an experimental book, I think it's fair to say, although not to the point that it's impossible to make heads or tails out of what you're reading. The author mixes a very erudite language and constant references to other works of literature and art with a generous helping of irony and dark humor; it was a combination that I very much enjoyed.

Pedro is a scientist trying to find a cure for cancer in a laboratory during the Franco regime. In his spare time, he sits around and talks with the three generations of women who own the pension house he stays at. They've got their eyes on him as the future spouse of Dorita, the youngest member of the clan. In a perfect world they'd like him to settle down, quit working in the laboratory and start practicing medicine, which would make him something of a model husband/provider. Pedro also goes out drinking on the weekends with his buddy Matías; during these benders they hang out first with artists at literary cafes and later make their way to the brothel, where they drunkenly attempt to consummate their evening with a little sex. Because Pedro is unable to obtain the steady supply of mice he needs to keep his experiment going via legitimate channels, he buys them from Muecas (mueca means "grimace" in Spanish), a relative of his lab assistant Amador, who lives in a Madrid shantytown. Muecas, his wife and his two daughters live in rather tight quarters, although he's managed to cobble together a residence that makes him something of a shantytown bourgeois. All four, though, sleep in the same bed. Suddenly, about 100 pages in, Pedro is summoned to the Muecas residence and asked to try and save the daughter's life. Florita (the daughter) was impregnated (by her father) and an attempted abortion failed badly and now she's bleeding to death. Pedro is unable to save her, but his appearance at the Muecas residence has some rather drastic and far-reaching consequences in Pedro's life, mostly due to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings regarding his actual role in the illegal medical procedure.

The book is divided up into nearly forty sections, and it often takes a bit of effort to figure out the perspective of each individual section. Three of them are interior monologues from the perspective of Pedro; others are from the perspective of, for example, Cartucho, the disgruntled admirer of Florita; still others take a more distant, third person perspective when recounting the Madrid cityscape through which Pedro passes. Different characters' back stories are intertwined, and you slowly come to understand how Muecas established himself in Madrid, how the family of three generations of women came to host Pedro, and how a particularly compelling painting by Goya comes to represent a certain class of Spanish intellectual that in turn encounters its maximal representation in José Ortega y Gasset, who gives a conference to a crowd of adoring women after Pedro analyzes the painting. As you progress farther into the book, the way the different sections interact becomes easier to understand. At first it's a little difficult to sort things out, but each section is strong enough in its own right to hold your attention. I especially enjoyed the first depiction of the laboratory, the story of the women in the pension house, and the arrival of Pedro and Amador to the shantytown.

Luis Martín-Santos was a psychiatrist as well as an author, and his background as a scientist in Franco's Spain and as a student of the human mind certainly contributed heavily to the content of this book. It certainly presents a rather pessimistic view of the possibility of glory and personal redemption via science. It also paints a rather dark picture of intellectual Spain in the 1950s, a country isolated from the scientific glory and progress of the United States. Pedro dreams of getting a scholarship to go do research in America, where he'd presumably be able to really accomplish things, rather than progressively killing more and more mice in a ridiculous and doomed attempt to find a cure for cancer and bring glory to the Spanish scientific establishment.

69. Suites by Federico García Lorca

This is another book I read a few months back as I worked my way through the earliest publications of Francisco García Lorca. The poems are built around the idea of a musical suite, with each "suite" providing a series of variations on a single theme. They are for the most part very sparse in their language and simple in their form. A common theme is the pursuit of lyric inspiration in liminal spaces and times: the surface of the water as a space between the depths of the ocean and the air; the surface of a mirror as the space between the image and its reflection; dawn or dusk as the moment between day and night; and the moment between sleep and wakefulness as the stage for a pair of journeys to lands of poetry. I think it's fair to relate the poetic endeavors of Lorca here to the principles of creationism proposed by Vicente Huidobro around the same time. These liminal areas form something like the staging ground for Lorca's development of invented poetic images.

Unfortunately, I returned the book to the library (it's my goal over the holiday to catch up on my reviews), and so I'm struggling a bit to remember specific examples that might help you understand what I'm talking about. Oh well. I do recall why I appreciated this book so much. I'd spent a lot of time reading Libro de poemas, Lorca's first book of poetry, because I saw it as a rather autobiographical documentation of the poet's coming of age, where he repeatedly attempts to encounter something, a poetic voice or an appropriate form of lyric expression. There's a common thread of searching, of paths and journeys, that unites many of the poems in that book. Near the end, there is a series of poems from 1919 where Lorca seems to have found something, or to have become capable of expressing what he's been trying to express all along. Around that time in his life, he wrote some letters where he expressed his conviction that he had become a poet and was indeed suffering "truly lyrical episodes," or something like that. Around the time that he wrote the poems that were destined for Suites, he seemed to be full of confidence and happy to have encountered a mode of expression that he felt to be authentic. So when reading Suites, I felt that I was reading Lorca's first success, the first book that he fully and truly believed in. I would like in turn to see its investigations into liminal spaces and pure, simple images as something of a condensed version of Lorca's beliefs with regard to lyric expression: these are poems stripped down to their purest, most authentic form. His years of growth, development and search for a true poetry culminated in Suites, his arrival to a lyric maturity. Then, after this, he started pursuing other vehicles to create poems that retained something of the pure poetry of his suites, but were constructed around different elements that attracted him or played a central role in his life: the gypsy lifestyle and the popular songs of Andalucía, for example, in Canciones and Romancero gitano, or his rather eye-opening experience in the North American urban environment as reflected in Poeta en Nueva York. I'd like to think that in a way the experience of writing the suites never left him, and that he continued to recall his early poetic endeavors even as he dressed his poems up in new ways and incorporated new inspirations and experiences into his creative processes.

Merry Christmas, Matt! I appreciate your outstanding reviews of Latin American literature, even though I don't comment on them as much as I should, and I look forward to more comments from you in 2012.

@119: Thanks! I'm hoping to be up to date with my reviews by the new year. Thanks, as always, for stopping by!

70. El amante bilingüe by Juan Marsé

The book begins with a scene where Marés, the protagonist, arrives to the apartment he shares with his wife Norma to find her in bed with another man. Her lover is a poor shoeshiner (apparently Norma has a thing for humble, working men), and after she gathers her things and leaves, Marés has a rather lengthy conversation with him. He tells him his sorrows and the history of his relationship with Norma. The shoeshiner is understandably uncomfortable and would like to leave, but since he's more or less trapped he starts shining Marés' shoes. Eventually Marés doesn't have anything more to say, the shoeshiner doesn't have anything more to shine, and he's allowed to leave. Somewhere in there, we learn that this episode represents the last time that Marés and Norma saw each other as husband and wife. When she walked out the door, it was permanent. Since she came from a super-wealthy Catalán background, she leaves the apartment to Marés and allows him to keep living there as long as he needs to.

The rest of the book takes place about a decade in the future. Marés has slowly descended down from the normal, middle class world, and he's now a street performer who earns a living playing the accordion around town. He uses different signs and plays different songs in order to appeal to different sectors of the charitable public. He also got burned somewhere in the ten years that are skipped over, although he's not horribly disfigured or anything too bad. He's obsessed with Norma and wishes he could be back with her. She's a linguist who works on some sort of post-Franco project to document and normalize languages in Cataluña, and Marés calls her from time to time, pretending to be an uneducated Murcian internal immigrant who's wanting to learn how to say some technical vocabulary in Catalan so that he can post signs in his business in that language and avoid discrimination from the patriotically Catalan buying public. He's got a way with voices, impersonations and performances, stemming from a childhood spent with an actor mother and a mostly-absent magician father (or father figure). This ability of his comes to the forefront as the book goes on. During Carnaval, his friend dresses up as a shoeshiner in order to win the affection of his cousin, and when his plan fails Marés swipes his costume and decides to masquerade as somebody else for a night. While his night ends miserably--he encounters Norma and her sophisticated, snobby friends at the bar, and ends up giving her a shoeshine that eventually leads to a breakdown and lots of tears--the night's experience is an important one. He spends the second part of the book pursuing the possibility of becoming other characters and interacting with familiar people under different guises. He eventually faces an important choice as to whether he wants to be who he was, or who he's made himself into.

It was really nice to read a book that was at the same time accessible yet challenging: the story is straightforward, the characters (especially Marés) are interesting and likeable, and the pages fly by. On the other hand, the implications of his escalating game of impersonations are rather thought-provoking. The conflicts between the person he was (and still wants to be) and the person he is, then between the person he is and the people he pretends to be, were what I liked the most about this book. Goodness knows I enjoy books about people who assume names and set out into the world to have some adventures. I'm not often inclined to read books as new as this one (it was published in the early 90s), but as I think about it, I wonder whether there might be a great number of books out there that would appeal to me in the way that this book did: books that are made to be readable and accessible to a wide audience, yet also capable of retaining the interest of the more demanding reader (although I wouldn't like to think of myself as such, I pretty much enjoy every book I read)...books that are less simple than meets the eye. I read this book quickly and kind of rushed to finish it because I had another book I really wanted to read, but I think if I went back and read it again, I'd enjoy it all the more.

Nice review of El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover), Matt. I couldn't find an English translation of it, unfortunately. I have two of Juan Marsé's novels, Lizard Tails and Shangai Nights, which I bought after he won the Cervantes Prize a couple of years ago, but I haven't read either one yet. Have you read them?

122: I haven't...I would like to check out more of his books because I was pleased with the one I read. If you read any of the two you've got, I hope you enjoy them!

71. La araucana by Alonso de Ercilla

This book is awesome! I'd been planning to read it for a long time and I was hoping that I would enjoy its depiction of the war between the Spanish colonial forces and the Mapuche indigenous people in southern Chile, but I did not expect nonstop action and intricate battle scenes. Maybe I expected both of those things, but I somehow expected other stuff too. I was blown away by the epic scope of this first half of La Araucana, a book that feels like the 16th century epic poem equivalent of a 20th century blockbuster action movie. It takes the style of the late medieval chivalric novels and epic poems (like Orlando Furioso, which is alluded to in the opening stanza) and applies them to the historic events of the Spanish conquest. Most of the action is so over-the-top that it's hard to believe that people used to read this book as the true historical record of the Araucanian war, but it's certainly got more truth to it than a lot of its epic poem kin. There aren't any dragons or mythical creatures, at least, although the Greco-Roman gods are often referenced and even invoked by the Mapuche forces as they prepare for battle.

Alonso de Ercilla was born in 1533 and died in 1594. He was born to a noble Basque family, and when his father died, his mother joined the Spanish court as a lady-in-waiting to the Infanta, with young Alonso becoming a page to the prince who would then become King Philip II. He accompanied the king in his European travels, but eventually got wind of the heroic exploits of the Spanish forces in the New World and decided to get in on the action. He was in Chile in 1557 and 1558 and participated in the battles of Lagunillas, Quiapo and Millarapue. His participation in the Arauco war will be documented in part II of La Araucana. In part I he's basically transcribing facts that he's learned from witnesses representing both sides of the action (apparently he spoke to both Spanish and Mapuche participants), and he cautions the reader at one point that the second hand information he's giving may not be as true as the stuff he witnessed firsthand. He claims to have written a lot of this poem in the heat of battle, even affirming that he often found himself distracted by the task of writing about the war and therefore forgot the sword that he clutched in his hand as he fought alongside his countrymen to defeat the valiant Mapuche forces. This seemed like a strange thing to admit to, but maybe he was just trying to appear as honest as possible. In any case, he published his epic poem in three volumes across nearly three decades, first in 1569, then in 1578 and 1589. The first volume was a bestseller that exceeded his expectations and made his reputation as an author. He parlayed his newfound literary fame into an advantageous engagement to a noblewoman, eventually marrying her and cementing his ascendance into the highest levels of Spanish wealth and prosperity (he'd always had the nobility covered, but he didn't have much in the way of money prior to his book and his marriage).

The writers of the introductory study of my Castalia edition affirm that the purpose of Ercilla was not to tell a story, but rather to sing of the heroic deeds of the Spanish soldiers and their opponents in the Arauco war, establishing the colonial conquests as a sort of epic era in Spanish history where men did great and unbelievable things. Admittedly this distinction had a much nicer ring to it in Spanish, where "sing" and "tell" are separated by a single letter (cantar/contar). In any case, I hope I haven't sounded upset that this book isn't historically accurate in its details. That stuff doesn't really matter, especially now that nobody's claiming its truthfulness...its "truthiness" is much better, anyway. The first part is nearly entirely made up of Mapuche victories over the Spanish forces. Their leaders, such as Lautaro (I believe Roberto Bolaño named his son after him), Caupolicán and the wise elder Colocolo (one of the biggest Chilean soccer teams is named Colo Colo, although I prefer la "U" de Chile) are depicted in all their heroic glory as they decimate the Spanish forces using astute military tactics and superhuman physical abilities. The Mapuches are elevated in this way because, in Ercilla's eyes, doing so only serves to further emphasize the glory of the Spaniards in their eventual victory over the indigenous people of Chile. I was surprised to see such a positive portrayal. The first volume of my two-volume set concludes with the tragic death of one of the Mapuche heroes, and also with the journey of Ercilla himself from Peru to Chile. I can't wait to read part II and find out what happens when the author arrives to the war. It'll be kind of like reading an Iliad written by one of the soldiers who participated in the Trojan War.

Excellent review of La araucana, Matt! I enjoyed your description of Ercilla's background, and the story behind the book.

125: Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

72. El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman) by Manuel Puig

Molina is in jail for indecent conduct with a minor. Valentín is a political prisoner. To pass the time, the former tells the latter a series of plots from movies. In between movie sessions they discuss their lives on the outside, take care of each other when they're sick, and slowly become friends.

It's a rather simple story: easy to follow, fun to read and very exciting. The pace varies between the (comparatively) dense movie synopses and the page-turning back-and-forth conversations between the young radical and the older gay man. Around halfway through the novel you start to get some information about how the two men came to cohabitate the jail cell, and the things you learn add a great deal of tension to the whole situation. Puig makes the conversations feel like real conversations between two regular people, using ellipses to represent silences, constant voseo (vos sos instead of tú eres, typical of Argentine Spanish) and colloquial language that doesn't stray too far into vulgarities; something like what you might expect of a conversation between two people from different walks of life who are in prison together. The movies Molina tells Valentín are nicely related to the story. It's not too obvious, it's not like they simply retell or predict what's happening in the jail cell, but they do relate to what's happening between the two men. This technique of cinema exegesis was fun. I enjoyed reading movies as told by one man to another as they passed the time. They'd take breaks and Valentín would interject here and there, and they'd also talk about how they were going to divide the movies up so that they'd best occupy their time in the cell.

I once started reading this book and couldn't get through the first movie summary about a woman who feels a strange attraction to a panther in the zoo. I think I was just busy and had something else I really wanted to read. Looking back on it, it's hard to believe that I put this book down. Once you get going it's a hard book to set aside. It's both a page-turner and a serious, thoughtful book. Some might say it's an especially compelling mix of elements of high, literary culture on the one hand, and low, popular/Hollywood culture on the other. I know this book is quite famous and was made into a critically-acclaimed movie (coming full circle, I suppose, since so much of the book is about movies); I certainly think it deserves it. One other thing that I found particularly interesting about it was its depiction of life in Argentine prisons. I'd read in other books about prisoners receiving supplies from the outside, but it was interesting to see just how important that that stuff (food, mostly) is to people in jail. Molina receives care packages from his mother when she comes to visit him, and he then takes them back to the cell and shares his bounty with Valentín. That food from the outside is so delicious, and makes such a big difference in their life in jail. They reminded me of how I used to feel when I got care packages in the mail when I was in the Peace Corps. The mail comes, you open up the package, and you've suddenly got a bounty of beef jerky, American candy, fruit leather and other delicious specialty snack foods! It wasn't like my everyday food was horrible or anything, and it was certainly incomparably better than the slop Molina and Valentín eat in this book. Still, though, that opportunity to taste the foods you can't access on an everyday basis is really exciting, and I thought the author did a good job of representing it.

73. El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room) by Carmen Martín Gaite

This is another book I read a number of weeks ago and did not write a review for at that time. I really enjoyed it, in fact, it was probably one of my favorite books of the past six months or so. It's a story about a woman who is only identified as C who is suffering from insomnia/writer's block and is trying to fall asleep as she thinks about Tzvetan Todorov's book on fantastic literature. She is then visited by a man in black who bears a resemblance to a man in black in a picture she's got tacked to her bedroom wall. He gets her to talk about her first book, which leads to conversations about her life during the Franco regime. The back room in her family's house was a refuge of sorts for her, but when the war came and went and was replaced by postwar scarcity, it was steadily occupied by the material needs of her family. They had a bunch of poultry in escabeche back there, which seems kind of gross to me, the idea of storing meat in a briny mixture for extended periods of time. Anyway, as she talks to the man in black she mixes in a steady stream of references to popular songs from the Franco era (Carmén Martín Gaite was preparing a scholarly text on postwar love lyrics at the same time as she was writing this novel) and also some references to Robinson Crusoe. There's also an extended phone conversation with a woman who may have been in contact with the man in black. The whole memoir aspect of the book, with the protagonist telling her story to a listener, corresponds to the little boom of such stories in the years immediately after Franco's death when lots of people started wanting to publish their own stories after remaining silent for so many years.

It's really a fantastic book...I'm writing this a few days after I finished reading Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña, and I think they've got a lot in common. They both incorporate popular culture, whether it be the songs that C cites in this book or the movies that Molina tells in Puig's novel, into complicated yet readable stories. They both restrict one layer of the story into fairly tightly-enclosed spaces--the jail cell in El beso; C's apartment in El cuarto--while expanding another layer outward as the people telling the stories do their thing. Molina remembers the movies he's seen and plucks them out of his memory based on what he thinks Valentín should hear at that point in time, while C weaves the lyrics from popular songs into a conversation that leads the reader through a life that encompasses the rise and fall of Franco. Very similar, but also very different. Martín Gaite's book goes a bit farther with the role of the storyteller (C), and from a pretty early stage you're invited to begin comparing the development of the story that's being told with the actual book you're reading.

There was one part that I particularly enjoyed: C is talking about this song where the lyrics are all about this mysterious place called Cunigan, or Cunigan's, or something like that (I returned the book to the library). It's a bar/restaurant or something, but the funny thing is, C was a kid when the song was popular, and when she went to Madrid she was always watching people passing by and wanting to follow them because she imagined that they were on their way to Cunigan, and it might be just around the corner! It was a funny way of representing the way that pop lyrics are interpreted by children who don't necessarily understand what's going on. It also fit well into the context of the story, where fantasy and reality intermingle in subtle ways.

74. Yerma by Federico García Lorca
75. La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca

I concluded my trip through the works of Federico García Lorca with Yerma, and since I never wrote a review for La casa de Bernarda Alba, which I read a few months ago, I'm bundling the two together. They, along with Bodas de sangre, are often considered Lorca's "Trilogy of Rural Tragedies" (I'm actually not sure about that nomenclature...maybe that's what they call them, maybe not), but that consideration is problematic because many scholars don't consider the play to be a tragedy, but rather a drama. I returned my copy of the play to the library so I don't quite remember the argument made in the introductory study to the Cátedra edition (which was a really informative piece of criticism, my memory lapses notwithstanding), so I suppose I'll just move on. But if you want to think of those three plays as a trilogy, you should look to that edition for an argument against such a consideration. The two plays I read do share a lot in common: a rural setting, a female title character, unrequited desires and oppressive home environments. They also have their differences, most notably with respect to theatrical aspects of space and time: the action in Bernarda Alba is confined to the home of the title character, and the action takes place in a relatively condensed period of time; Yerma, on the other hand, wanders into the public spaces of her rural home and the story jumps forward in time on a couple of occasions, moving a total of around three years into the future from beginning to end.

Bernarda Alba, subtitled "Drama of women in the villages of Spain," deals with life in the title character's home in the time of mourning following the death of her second husband. She is all about following the 8 years of imposed mourning with all due strictness, but the rigidity of her rules clashes with the burgeoning desires of her five daughters. The youngest, Adela, is especially rebellious. She puts on a green dress at a time when she shouldn't be wearing anything but black. She also pines for Pepe el Romano, but he's decided that he'd rather marry Angustias, the eldest daughtor and the inheritor of the first husband's estate. She's sickly and frigid, and her sisters don't quite think it's fair that she's going to be the one getting married. Pepe remains absent throughout the play, which is comprised of only female characters. I think this adds a lot to the tension that builds and builds inside the house. The oppressive home life of the five daughters is also accentuated by the enclosed space in which the whole play takes place. I think during mourning you're not even supposed to open the windows, and certain scenes take place in the middle of the day and during the late afternoon. If you've ever been in a home with no central air during these times of day, during the heat of the summer, you know how uncomfortable it is. I can only imagine what it must feel like to see yourself stuck in that rigorous confinement for eight years of mourning. Over the course of the play Bernarda's rigidity clashes with her daughters' inability to live such an austere and penitent existence. She wants to keep everything and everyone bottled up in her home, under her control and away from the prying eyes of her neighbors. Things get more and more intense as the play goes on, right up to the dramatic ending where the whole Pepe el Romano situation comes to a head.

Yerma, like Bernarda, is a woman who's very concerned with honor. She is also very unhappy because she's been married for two years and hasn't become pregnant. She wants a child more than anything else, and at the beginning of the play she still holds on to the faint hope that she'll be able to conceive. Her husband, Juan, works hard and amasses wealth in the form of livestock and rural property. He's not as concerned as Yerma by the whole childless situation, and he tries to convince her to go ahead and get used to things the way they are, or maybe adopt a child that isn't hers. He doesn't, however, want her to leave the house much at all. He's concerned about what the people might say and how the rumor mill might get rolling if she wanders around the countryside. She, on the other hand, can't deal with life in an empty home. The passion has gone out of their relationship, and Yerma's cold and bitter married life contrasts with moments she shares with Victor, her former teenage sweetheart who lives nearby and isn't quite the rural businessman that Juan is. Juan eventually brings in some reinforcements (his unmarried sisters) to keep their eyes on Yerma as he works out in the countryside with the herds. She spends the play steadily losing hope that she'll ever have a child while pursuing a handful of different means of altering her barren fortune. Yermo/a, by the way, means "barren" in Spanish...it's also a good idea to watch for when her name is actually pronounced by one of the characters in the play, because it's easy not to realize that as you read a book where you see the name "Yerma" multiple times every page. Anyway, this play also ends explosively, with the frustration of Yerma finally bubbling over.

It was really nice to read these at the end of a few months devoted to reading Lorca's poetry and theater. I read them after reading some of the more experimental works he wrote while in New York, Poeta en Nueva York and El público. It seems to me that his time in the city was both exhilarating for him as an artist and eye-opening to him as a person and as a Spaniard. He'd tasted success and was probably surprised by how famous he was becoming, and he was willing to push boundaries and take risks in his work; maybe he felt free to worry less about whether he would be understood, since he'd attained the understanding and affection of an audience with Romancero gitano. I had a hard time working through his poetry from New York, but when I begun unraveling individual poems and figuring out at least a portion of his "hechos poéticos," they were really neat and I felt like I came to understand more about how he thought as an artist. No matter what they were about, the poems seemed to be about him; they felt like very personal and direct expressions of who he was at that time. I remembered reading Suites and reading his letters from the years when he was "becoming" a poet, and I thought that the sort of poetry he wrote in New York was rather true to his youthful aspirations. On the other hand, I think maybe being away from his country helped him understand how much he shared with the people of Spain, and when he came back and started doing the whole popular theater thing with "La barranca," his work started to veer back toward forms that could be more easily understood by a greater number of people, perhaps more specifically his Spanish people. I mean, you have to fight through a play like El público, and even when you're done you wonder if you really understood more than a small portion of what he was saying. These plays are simpler in a way. They're good stories. You could represent them on a stage anywhere in the world and they'd be enjoyed by a wide variety of audiences. They're still challenging in the way they weave different poetic symbols into works of theater, and they're a blast to read when you're familiar with Lorca's poetry because you get to see how he incorporates the same elements of the countryside that have formed such an important part of his poetry into a different, narrative form.

Lorca wrote Yerma in 1934 and La casa de Bernarda Alba in 1936, finishing it months before his death. It's really sad that he died so young. The other day I was listening to some jazz music from the 60s, a McCoy Tyner album, and I started thinking how much Lorca would have loved jazz music if he'd survived to hear some of the musicians who were best able to explore the expressive possibilities of jazz music and improvisation in the 40s through 60s. He was so concerned with "pure" expression, and I think some of the music being made in those years would have really inspired him, especially considering his background as a pianist. He was the type of guy who seemed capable of constant innovation, sort of the opposite of a one-trick pony, and I wonder what he would have done had he not been killed at such a young age.

76. Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton

This book provides an excellent overview of 20th century literary theory. It's fairly short and quite readable. What I really liked about it was Eagleton's manner of properly acknowledging the importance of certain figures and theoretical movements for about five to seven pages, then devoting a somewhat lesser amount of time to pointing out their shortcomings. I'd get excited with each new chapter, because I'd see words--Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory--that I was somewhat familiar with. I knew that I'd learn how they fit in to the history of literary criticism and how they reflected changing positions with respect to the text, the author, the reader, literature, genre, politics, passion, psychology and ideology. Just when I was convinced that they were pretty solid tools for reading books, I'd come to the part where Eagleton respectfully demonstrated their often serious flaws. In doing so he doesn't really strip of them of their importance, but rather help you understand why they're not "magic bullets" or "the one right way to read a book."

The book begins by asking what literature is. By the end of the first chapter, every definition proposed by Eagleton has been refuted. Defining what is and isn't literature is highly problematic. After that, there is a chapter devoted to the rise of English departments and the birth of modern criticism in the early part of the 20th century, a chapter devoted to the way that the author, the text, thought the reader and the world all relate to each other in phenomenological and hermeneutic schools of criticism that draw from the work of philosophers like Husserl and Heidegger. Then there's a chapter on structuralism, a chapter on post-structuralism, a chapter on psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, et cetera) and a final chapter where Eagleton presents his conclusion. In a few words, he recognizes that a great majority of the literary theories discussed in his book are inextricably linked to the power structure of modern society, and that all criticism can be seen in this way to be political. He proposes a focus on discourse and a return to the study of rhetoric under the title of "discourse theory." I'm not sure if that does his position much justice, but I felt inclined to agree with him on the idea that students of literature should see their studies as a sort of apprenticeship whereby they gain entrance to a discourse that encompasses all of the movements this book presents and analyzed.

It's a start. I feel like I have a better idea of what literary theory is. I can (somewhat) understand what people are talking about when they talk about a structuralist reading of such-and-such a book, or about the "death of the author" and the "birth of the reader," or stuff like that. Now I would like to begin reading theoretical texts that particularly appeal to me. I'm going to start with Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and a book of Essaies critiques by Roland Barthes. I read both of their names a lot, and I'd like to begin working through some of their critical works so that I can see how they read books. I'd also appreciate any suggestions as to other good "Introduction to Literary Theory" type of books.

77. Los mares del sur by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

I'm not familiar with the detective genre and therefore felt that my reading of Manuel Vásquez Montalbán's Los mares del sur probably suffered from my lack of knowledge of genre conventions. I was, for one, unable to see the ways that Montalbán's protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, fits the detective mold and/or differs from the average literary detective hero/antihero. I had, however, been watching HBO's "Bored to Death," and I did notice that both Carvalho and Jonathan Ames (the protagonist of the show) share a strong affinity for white wine. I'm not sure if this is something of a common ground for detectives, the idea that their livers are shot from all the hard liquor and all they can handle these days is the lighter wines. If I do read more detective novels, I'll be on the lookout for other instances of white wine sipping detectives.

Carvalho has been hired to unravel the circumstances behind the death of Barcelona construction magnate Carlos Stuart Pedrell. He'd been going on and on about how he wanted to escape from it all and voyage to the seas of the south (where Gaugin went, basically), and eventually he did disappear. Nine months later he showed up dead in an empty lot on the outskirts of the city. Carvalho's search puts him in contact with the family, friends and business connections of Stuart Pedrell, and eventually leads him to the lower class, shoddily constructed neighborhood of San Magín. There are a lot of twists and turns, and as the story progresses and the detective unravels the mystery of the wealthy businessman's erratic behavior and disappearance, the reader is taken on an extended tour of post-Franco Barcelona and its inhabitants. Carvalho's got his vices and doesn't lead the most morally sound life, but he's a likable guy. He's not nearly as bad as Nic Cage's character in "Bad Lieutenant" (another detective story I recently watched and enjoyed) but he's got a similar way about him: he's got his faults, but you root for him just the same.

Los mares del sur was a fun read and painted a vivid picture of Barcelona. Carvalho comments a lot on the state of things in Spain, and his investigation dissects the effects of construction boom of the later years of the Franco regime is dissected, penetrating into the poor neighborhood of San Magín in order to solve the mystery of the death of the wealthy man whose money and influence helped build it. One thing that I especially liked about the mystery of Stuart Pedrell was the way that his longing to escape to the south seas represented a desire to burn all his bridges with the wealthy, capitalist class. From the beginning he is described as a man with varied and intense passions that transcend his aristocratic place in society. Wherever he went when he disappeared, the fundamental idea is that he was escaping a life that was no longer fulfilling in order to find a new one. The book, then, investigates whether this is ever possible. Can one burn all their bridges? I believe the most common way to say this in Spanish is "quemar las naves" (to burn the ships), in reference to the erroneous idea that Hernán Cortés burnt the ships that brought his men to America. I like that phrase better for some reason, the idea of traveling across the sea of life to reach some sort of island of your own fancy, and thereafter burning the ship that brought you there...burning bridges makes me think more of somebody closing themselves into the castle they've constructed for themselves and obstinately refusing to come out. In any case, the dead body that opens the story illustrates the ultimate failure of Stuart Pedrell, and Carvalho's investigation into his death comes to show some of the reasons why escape from the worlds we build for ourselves over the course of a lifetime is so very difficult. It's a theme I particularly enjoy, this questioning of whether one can burn all their bridges. My favorite book that investigates a similar attempt to escape is Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, but this one is good too. Carpentier's book tells the story of a man who traveled from a North American metropolis deep into the South American rain forest in an ethnomusicological search for primitive instruments; here, from the beginning, Stuart Pedrell's dead body plants the idea that his escape from his own life never took him out of Barcelona.

One other note of interest: Manuel Vásquez Montalbán died in Bangkok. I found this ironic, that the character he created longed to escape to the south seas, while the author himself did arrive to that South that Stuart Pedrell dreamed of visiting. I haven't been able to determine whether he was residing in Thailand at the time of his death or just visiting, but the connection between the author and the southern world of warm seas and tropical islands creates an interesting parallel with his fictional dead man.

Interesting review, especially re the theme of whether one can ever really escape one's past and start again...

I can't think of any detectives who habitually drink white wine, and I read quite a bit of detective fiction.