Books

New German Literature in the TLS

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The TLS recently had a review of some new German novels. All of these were published this year and, of course, are not available in English yet (I hope they are some day). Three of them deal with the GDR and the third, from Switzerland, deals with the Rawandan Genocide and Swiss complicity.

Three of the books sound very intriguing. ADAM UND EVELYN by Ingo Schulze, DER TURM by Uwe Tellkamp, and HUNDERT TAGE by Lukas Bärfuss.

Schulze’s novel is formally impressive. It consists almost entirely of snappy, naturalistic dialogues, portioned out in tasty little morsels in chapters of a few pages each: that the reader is able to deduce the plot events is in itself no small feat.

And the Bärfuss sounds tough but intriguing.

In a final childish burst, wanting to prove to Agathe that he isn’t like the other white people and won’t run away at the first sign of trouble, he hides in his garden as the last foreigners are evacuated. The horrors of the ensuing hundred days are born of order, not chaos: “I know now that perfect order rules the perfect hell”, David says. Bärfuss takes the reader step by step down the path to genocide. He emphasizes the role of Western – and particularly Swiss – aid in supplying the modern tools of organization and communication that made atrocities on such a scale possible: “we gave them the pencil with which they wrote the death lists . . . we laid the telephone lines over which they gave the murder commands . . . we built the streets upon which the murderers drove to their victims”.

Bolaño Reviewed in the TLS

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The TLS has a good review of 2666. The review isn’t as fawning as some and tries to locate the source of Bolañomania. Like a previous El País article, the review finds similarities between Bolaño and the American literary tradition.

The author’s exuberant, informal voice echoed that of several American classics; while he cited Huckleberry Finn as an inspiration, the book clearly bore the imprint of On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye. In addition, many of his themes resonated with the puritan and romantic impulses of the American literary tradition. Bolaño’s world is open to self-invention and redemption, but also pervaded by ineradicable evil. It is bracingly egalitarian in its range of cultural references: The Savage Detectives borrows from the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon as well as from Mark Twain; 2666 references both Herman Melville and David Lynch; figures in his poems include Anacreon, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Sam Peckinpah and Godzilla. Readers of all tastes could thus feel at ease with this disquieting writer, and many sought his other translated works.

If you are still on the fence about 2666, the review is worth a read.

Penguin Book Covers

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There is a great flicker sited with over 800 cover photos of Penguin books. If you like books it is worth a look.

Embroideries

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Embroideries
Marjane Satrapi

Embroideries is no Persepolis, but that is not to say it is without the same humor that Persepolis had. What makes this book funny are not Satrapi’s adventures, but those of her grandmother and her friends. The women range in ages from their 60’s to their 20’s and the book takes place after a meal when all the women sit together and talk and complain and laugh at the way their marriages and love affairs have gone. Although some of the women have been forced into arranged marriages (in one the man was 69 and the girl 13) and the men have used their power to have affairs, the women have an irrepressible spirit that allows them to laugh at the men and talk about their own fantasies and adventures. The stories are not just ribald humor, but a means to exercise power where there is little. On the first page it is clear what the role of women in society is when Satrapi notes that her grandmother always called her husband by his last name because one should respect one’s husband. Yet once the stories begin, the respect disappears and the verbal vengeance begins. For the reader the conversations are not just humor and power relationships, but a chance to see the hidden lives of Iranian women. It shows there is more to the Iran then just the mullahs.

Graphically speaking, the book doesn’t have quite the style as Persepolis. The black and white line drawings are still there, but at times pages are almost completely filled with words and perhaps a head to indicate who is speaking. The lack of drawings is a shame because her almost block print style is an effective way to tell an understated story. Let’s hope the next book has more drawings.

Arabic Translation – A History

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The Complete Review has a link to a review in the National of a new history of translation and Arabic, Prison-house of Language. The author raises some interesting issues about translation and power, but what caught my eye was this paragraph.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

I have had the feeling at times when I read a story that was originally writen in Arabic, that it is so different in style and approach from the common ways of writing stories in the US and Europe that I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it good? Os it considered good there and I just don’t understand? Hassouna Moshbahi’s The Tortoise in Sardines and Oranges is a perfect example. Using the refrains “that was my first adventure” and “they beat me” the story mixes day dreams, boyish adventures and descriptions of everyday life in Tunisa. There is no ephinanic moment, no Frytag’s triangle, so what is going on? At such moments I think of the reverse, too, when Nagib Mahfouz talks about looking for models for his fiction. In each case, the cultural associations on each side make it difficult to know what the tradition is.

El País Reviews Bolaño and Bolanomania Again

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El País has another article about Bolanomania in the United States. (You can see a previous post I did on the subject here). It talks about some of the reviews he has received, how most talk about his biography as much or more than the books and notes the controversy over his heroin usage. The article also notes that one’s reputation after death is based on luck. The author notes that the translation into English has created a different Bolaño, a Bolaño that Americans read from within their own cultural framework. Nothing surprising there. He goes on to compare Bolaño to Kerouac and suggests Americans are placing reading Kerouac and the Beat’s vitalism into Bolaños vitalism and from this reading they are culturally locating Bolaño.

Probably the North American reader recognizes a diction en these novels that es not dissimilar and lets the reader make the book their own, with local flavor and its riches. In English the books are not only very literary and miticulous, pasionate and brillant; they are, over all, vitalist.

The grand tradition of North American vitalist prose, in effect, has been the setting where the various styles of fiction characteristically Yankee were defined. The greatest stylist of this style is Jack Kerouac, and his On the Road, written in 1951 and rejected by 19 publishers before its publication in 1957, is a a modern classic. Even though the Beat Generation ended up being devoured by its own reputation, its works are more serious than the image of its authors, simplified to the point of being taken granted, and converted into merchandise. The brilliance of that vibrant, radiant, fluid, and unpredictable prose echoes like a spell in the pages of Bolaño.

Probablemente el lector norteamericano reconoce en estas novelas una dicción que no le es ajena, y que le permite hacer suya, con apetito local, su riqueza. En inglés no son sólo muy literarias y minuciosas, apasionadas y brillantes; son, sobre todo, vitalistas.

La gran tradición de la prosa norteamericana vitalista, en efecto, ha sido el escenario donde se definen los varios estilos de la ficción característicamente yanqui. El mayor estilista de este estilo es Jack Kerouac, y su On the road, escrita en 1951 y rechazada por 19 editoriales antes de su publicación en 1957, un clásico moderno. Aunque la generación Beat terminó devorada por su biografía popular, sus obras son más serias que la imagen de sus autores, simplificados al punto de darse por leídos, convertidos en mercancía residual. El brillo de esa prosa vivaz, irradiante, fluida, imprevisible, resuena como un conjuro en las páginas de Bolaño.

Alaa Al Aswany Reviewed in the New York Times

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The New York Times has a mixed review of Alaa Al Aswany’s new book. The reviewer doesn’t like it quite as much as the The Yacoubian Building. The book, which takes place in the US, does sound a little off and not as interesting as The Yacoubian Building.

Al Aswany writes about his Egyptian characters with charm, gentle humor and genuine conviction. It’s his depiction of Americans in their natural habitat that baffles. A beautiful young black woman is fired from her job at a shopping mall, supposedly because of her race; unable to find work, she succumbs to the indignity of posing as an “adult lingerie” model — for $1,000 an hour. A middle-aged woman, shunned by her husband, ventures into a sex shop to buy a vibrator and is treated to a lecture on the G spot and its role in female emancipation (“A woman is no longer a tool for man’s pleasure or his physical subordinate”), complete with bibliographic citations (Gräfenburg, Perry and Whipple).

El País – Best Books of 2008

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El País has published there list of the best books of 2008. It is an interesting list and comparing it to the lists I’ve seen in major English language presses it is quickly obvious who many translations made the list. Chelsa Beach is number one on their list.

Sea of Poppies

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Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies, much like Glass Palace, is what one might call post-colonial recovery fiction, a novel that not only takes on the British colonial system with all its prejudices and injustices, but seeks to recover or reimagine the lives of people who left no records. In doing so Ghosh has created a trilogy with a large cast that represents the range of Indians and British whose lives either depended on or were disrupted by the colonial system. The novel’s scope and language are ambitious and one can easily get lost within the intertwining stories and arcane language. The question I had as I was reading the book, though, was if the history of it was enough? Sea of Poppies is richly plotted and all the threads of history and characters come together beautifully, but in recapturing the lives of the forgotten, are the characters really recovered?

The short answer is it is hard to say: the wealth of research is strong and obviously the details are quite good. And the scope the historic sweep of the novel is very accurate, something Ghosh does very well. And unlike the Glass Palace, there didn’t seem to be any dead spots in the novel—every scene was important to the story. Yet if there are no records then what are you recovering? One can recover the facts—rates of pay, living conditions—but the internal lives of the characters is much more difficult. So when one reads about the spiritual beliefs of one of the characters—especially when you are completely unfamiliar with the culture—are you rediscovering what they really thought, or what we’d like to think they thought? For the western and wealthy Indian characters, Ghosh is accurate in their portrayal. For the villagers and the Lascars, though, it is difficult to know, and, most likely, it will always be difficult to know. So the inner life is a best guess (true all inner lives are best guesses, but some can be based more closely in the actual), one that serves the story and that is not a bad thing, just a limitation.

Keeping those limitations in mind, the novel then is a fictionalization of the great colonial enterprise and if the inner lives of the characters are just guesses, the destruction of so many lives is exposed at the macro level, not in the emotional struggles but in Dickensian horror—the description of the opium plant is the perfect example and will make it clear how horrible the trade was. At times, the politics of the trade takes center stage and underscores the focus of the book. As one British characters says, “We need only think of the poor Indian peasant — what will become of  him if his opium can’t be sold in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore.”

Yet for all the callousness of the British characters, it is not a harsh world in its fictional outcome. Certain characters are living in poverty and don’t have a much of a future, but there is never an overwhelming sense of impending doom or urgency, and just when one of the main characters is threatened with death, something will come along just in time to save him. Instead, Ghosh makes clear from the beginning that all the main characters will be in Deeti’s shrines, suggesting that everything is going to work out just fine. The lack of narrative tension, perhaps, is the result of so much history, not only the details, but telling the story as if it already had happened. The experience of reading is not about what is going to happen next, but where is everyone going to end up in the end, since you know it is all going to work out anyway.

Sea of Poppies is an impressive bit of writing and worth the read and I hope the rest of the trilogy is written soon. The novel may feel a little preordained as it seeks to fulfill its purpose, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting.

Author Interview Shows – El publico lee

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I was watching El publico lee on Canal Sur the other day and I began to think about who this show differed from some of the others I’ve seen in the recent past on in the US. For those of you who don’t know, El publico lee is a Spanish author interview show. But it also has people from the general public who have read the book and ask the author questions. Between the sets and the seriousness Canal Sur gives to the author it makes for, perhaps, a better show than those I’ve seen in the US. That said, I’ve never thought Book TV on CSPAN2 was that bad, except that it doesn’t cover any fiction. If you understand Spanish I would give it a look. My one complaint is they don’t archive more than two weeks of shows, so if you miss it, that’s too bad. I never did get to watch the end of the interview with Najat el Hachni and the book sounded interesting.

Bolaño, Enrique Lihn, and Jorge Edwards

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I found one review and one story whose discovery were perfectly timed. The first, is a review in Letras Libres of a new book by Jorge Edwards. The second is a short story Meeting with Enrique Lihn by Bolaño in the New Yorker. The two items coincide nicely because the Bolaño story, although not particularly evident in the story what role Lihn performs in Bolaño’s personal pantheon, he is obviously someone, unlike Paz, worthy of moving through a dreamscape.

Edwards book, according to Edmundo Paz Soldán, uses a character based on Lihn to represent a generalized view of one whole generation, the generation of the 40’s and 50’s, before Bolaño and after Neruda. The book has many similarities to The Savage Detectives: the bohemian life style, the traveling here and there, the nightlife, the disgust at the established poet, in this case Neruda. But unlike the savage detectives, the Poet’s writing is what takes center stage.

En Los detectives salvajes, Belano y Lima son la periferia de la neovanguardia, hombres en fuga que para resistir al sistema, a la institución de la literatura, se entregan a la poesía como una experiencia vital. Para el Poeta de Edwards, la experiencia es intensa, pero la obra se antepone siempre a esta: “En los últimos días había empezado a escribir de nuevo en uno de sus cuadernos escolares. Eran hileras de versos que se curvaban, se entrechocaban y se desplomaban por las orillas, asomándose a veces en el otro lado de las páginas.”

In the Savage Detectives, Belano and Lima are peripheral to the neovanguard, men in flight to resist the system, literary instruction, and to live poetry as a vital experience. For Edward’s poet, the experiences are intense, but the work is always first: “In the last few days I had begun to write again in a student’s notebook. They were lines of verse that curve and chatter and tumble down by the shore, peeking out at times on the other side of the page.

It is an interesting article and gives a wider frame of reference to Bolaño, especially given the story in the New Yorker. It seems Bolaño wasn’t the only Chilean poet to reject so throughly what came before.

On a different note, the opening sentence is a great little capsule of Chilean literary controversies of the last few years.

El mundillo literario chileno suele alborotarse cada tanto con polémicas genuinas y otras que son más bien gratuitas. En las últimas décadas le tocó a Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gómez debido a la antología McOndo, y a Roberto Bolaño y Diamela Eltit, enfrentados por unas declaraciones nada diplomáticas del primero; este año el turno ha sido de Jorge Edwards (Santiago, 1931), ese escritor de modales tan finos que es fácil confundirlo con un diplomático (de hecho, lo ha sido durante muchos años).

Horacio Castellanos Moya Interviews

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I was on the Talpajocote blog and found links to some interviews with Horacio Castellanos Moya. Each are ten minutes long and worth watching.

In the first, from a Spanish TV station, he talks about how he traveled around Central America when he was young, hoping that the country would become democratic and eventually gave up and moved to Mexico. He returned to El Salvador 10 years later, but left again, disillusioned. He also talks about Tirana memoria his latest book. He mentions the title comes from something a character at the end of Donde no estén ustedes says, which along with Desmoronamiento, is part of a trilogy. He describes what he sees as the focus of the book is: the growing liberty and awakening of a woman while her husband is in prison, as if his imprisonment is her liberation.

In the second, more literary, but a little bit more difficult to understand, he talks about how he sees Mexico as the capital of Meso America, and Salvador as one of the small provinces of the area. Central American and Mexico are not as different from each other as Central America is to South America. He also mentions that a lack of literary tradition in El Salvador has led him to use the language itself as tradition. It is liberating, because unlike a Mexican of Argentinian he has no wave of tradion he rides on. Instead he can search the world over for what he wants to use as an influence, such as Thomas Bernhard.

Ana María Matute in El País

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Ana María Matute has a new book out and El País has given it a great review. If you have never read her work, she is definitely worth it. Her sparse short stories are excellent. Her name often comes up around Nobel time (although that may just be in Spain). If you are unfamiliar with her, the description from the article is a great synopsis.

Aunque perteneciente, cronológicamente, a la llamada generación del medio siglo, con cuyos más destacados miembros comparte determinados trasfondos temáticos (la Guerra Civil española, la desolación como paisaje moral de los años de posguerra, la rememoración de la infancia como irreparable pérdida de la inocencia edénica, y el descalabro humano reinante en una sociedad en la que los más débiles sucumben bajo la impiedad de los poderosos), la escritura de Ana María Matute siempre se ha regido por un talante despegado de las consignas tanto ideológicas como estéticas de la época.

Although she belongs, chronologically, to the mid century generation, whose most well know members share certain thematic overtones (the Spanish Civil Way, the desolation as moral voyage through the years after the war, the child’s memory as the irreparable loss of an Eden like innocence, and the reigning human misfortune in a society where the weakest succumb to the impunity of the powerful), the writing of Ana María Matute has always been marked by a talent not tied to ideologies but the aesthetics of the era.

Mexico’s Bestsellers for 2008

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The LA Times has a list of Bestsellers in Mexico for 2008. Mostly they are are imports from the US (3 different Stefanie Myers books) and histories of Mexican Politics. Only one book really caught my eye and that is Jorge Volpi’s El Jardín Devastado.

Labyrinth of Solitude – 50 Years Latter

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As Scott at Conversational Reading noted, there is a long review of the 50th anniversary of the Labyrinth of Solitude in Letras Libres for those of you who can read it, it is worth the time. If you only read English, I’ll give a quick summary. I haven’t read the book since I was in college at The Evergreen State College in Olympia where I took a class on e quarter (at Evergreen this means my only class of 16 credits for ) called Mexico Since the Revolution. Labyrinth, along with classics of Mexican fiction by Rulfo, Fuentes, Azuella and Yañez, and more anthropological titles like the outdated Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico were on the reading list. In this context Paz, though unique in his approach, did fit within a tradition, which the article makes clear.

Alejandro Rossi, the author, first talks about the publishing history of the book. In its first run it only did 3000 copies and it took another ten years for a reprint to appear, not unlike Rulfo’s Pedro Parama. It wasn’t until the masquers of the students in 1968 did the book gain a wider readership outside of writers. The book first written at the end of the forties, was written in a period of great activity and followed Eagle or Sun, a book of poems which also explores, in part, Mexicanness. (It also includes the wonderful My Life With The Wave)

Rossi goes on to talk about the how Paz used Plato’s conception of the cave to frame his argument. Men crave societal relations which they find in the cave, but to gain insight one must leave the cave, which, of course, breaks the relationship. When the man comes back to the cave he is now an outsider, but through the outsider status they can help lead the group, since they now have special knowledge. Using this metaphor, Paz saw Labyrinth as a way to examine, or leave the cave, of society. What makes this approach unique, is that Paz writes a book that is not academic.

Rossi covers several salient points, but most important for Paz’s relation to Mexican intellectual history of that time, is how Paz sees Mexican History and its relation to the mythic solidarity of the past. (This article was difficult to translate so my apologies if it seems a little choppy.)

La nostalgia de la comunidad no es el anhelo sentimental por una comunidad cualquiera, no, tampoco es la nostalgia de Platón frente a la polis de su época, no, se trata de la nostalgia de la Edad de Oro, que sería precisamente la edad sin máscaras, el sitio, entre otras cosas, donde se da el verdadero amor, el amor sin velos, el amor que es lo contrario del amor rodeado de convenciones, se trata del amor revolucionario, una idea que le viene del surrealismo. […] Pero siempre que habla de autenticidad, piensa en la Edad de Oro. Y la Revolución Mexicana es para Octavio el momento de la sinceridad histórica, sería el momento de la recuperación de este ser original que él intenta descubrir en El laberinto de la soledad. Y dentro de la Revolución Mexicana será el zapatismo el que más se acerque a la autenticidad anhelada. La Revolución restablece el tiempo original, la Revolución busca la fundación de un tiempo mítico anterior.

The community’s nostalgia is not a sentimental longing for whatever community, neither is it the nostalgia of Plato facing the polis of his era, no, it is about the nostalgia of the Golden Age which would be the age without masks, the place, among other things, where they give each other the true love, the love without veils, the love that is the the opposite of the love that is surrounded by conventions; it is about the revolutionary love, an idea that comes from surrealism. […] But always talking about authenticity, you think about the Golden Age. And the Mexican Revolution is, for Octavio, the moment of historical sincerity. It would be the moment of regaining the original being that he wanted discover in the Labyrinth of Solitude. And within the Mexican Revolution perhaps is Zapatismo, the thing closest to the longed for authenticity. The revolution reestablished the original time; the revolution searched for the foundation from a previous, mythic time.

Although Paz does not idealize the Revolution, he does see in it a mythic narrative for Mexico, much as he sees forging of relationships between the Indians and the Spanish through the Catholic church. It is a search for something within the history of Mexico, not something to bring from the outside. These ideas are not unique among those of his generation and there is a desire to fashion something new and unique from the recent past, a breaking of the pre-revolutionary, more Eurpoean, with the more Mexican. Paz, himself, does not see Zapata as the ideal, it is the communal ideals tied up in Zapata that create a national myth and joins the Mexicans in Plato’s cave together.

I’m not sure what Paz thought of the national myths himself, but he does write about them in Eagle or Sun (the title refers to the Aztecs, and by extension, Mexico itself). Taken together, they form a mythic ideal of Mexico, which was also being written by Rulfo in a darker manner.

I don’t know if I’ll read Labyrinth of Solitude again, but the article made me think it was time to look at it again.

Tirana Memoria (sp)

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Tirana Memoria
Horacio Castellanos Moya

Tirana Memoria is the latest novel by the El Salvadoran novelest Horacio Castellanos Moya, who also published a translation of his novel Senselessness (Insensatez) in English this year. Tirana Memoria, although fictional, is about the 1944 overthrow of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and takes place over a month and a half period when a failed coup led to reprisals which ultimately led to the general strike that forced the general to flee the country. Part diary, part convicts-on-the-lam narrative, it alternates between comedy and tension as the characters elude the army and the police and attempt to survive post coup repression.

The novel opens as Haydée, the wife of Pericles, relates in her diary that Pericles has been taken to prison again. Pericles is a newspaper editor known for writing essays opposing the government and imprisonment is nothing new. Haydée writes of going to the prison each day to have lunch with him and bring him daily necessities like cigarettes. She is an upper class woman and even though she doesn’t like going to the prison, she has become used to the daily task. However, she is not a political person and all she wants from her visits are to see her husband and find out when he will be released. She is so unpoliticized and accustomed to his imprisonment that when she thinks Percilies will be released she goes to the hairdresser so she will look nice for him. The sheltering has created a woman who, though dedicated, is not consciously aware of the dangers, almost as if the constant imprisonments are part of an annoying game. She has an almost naive sense of entitlement and only midway through the novel when her political consciousness has awakened does she begin to understand what has shaped her.

Nunca he participado en política por iniciativa propia, sino que siempre he acompañado a Pericles en sus decisiones, con la absoluta confianza de que él sabe lo que hace y por qué lo hace, y con la certeza de que mi deber es estar a su lado. Así fue cuando decidió convertirse en secretario particular del general luego de que éste diera el golpe de Estado que lo llevó al poder, o cuando dos años más tarde aceptó la embajada en Bruselas, o cuando decidió romper con el Gobierno y regresar al país, o cuando debimos salir hacia el exilio en México. Iré a la reunión donde doña Chayito con este mismo espíritu; en cuanto pueda hablar con Pericles le contaré sobre ello y seguiré sus dictados al respecto. Admiro a mujeres como Mariíta Loucel, que luchan en primera fila por sus ideales políticos, pero ella es de origen francés y tiene otra educación. Yo me debo a mi marido.

I have never participated in a political event by myself. Instead, I have always gone along with Pericles decision’s with the absolute confidence that he knows what he is doing and why, and with the certainty that my duty is to be at his side. It was this way when he decided to become the general’s general secretary after the coup that brought him to power, or when two years later he accepted the position of ambassador en Brussels, or when he decided to break with the government and return home, or when we had to leave for exile en Mexico. With this same spirit I will go to the meeting with Doña Chayito. As soon as I can talk to Pericles I will tell him about it and will suggest he give his respects. I admire the women like Mariíta Loucel that man the barricades for their political ideals, but she is French and was raised differently.

Not only does the entry describe who Haydée has been and what she believes her role is, it gives one a sense of who Perciles is. Their relationship, despite his politics, is quite traditional and she has spent most of her life raising her family and supporting him. In the entry, too, one can sense a timidness in the changes she is beginning to experience. By the end of the novel she will begin to use her privileged status to slip through cordons of soldiers who might otherwise stop someone not as well off, and deliver funds to the strikers. But when she writes this she still has more to learn.

While Haydée narrates the happenings in San Salvador, her son Clemen and nephew Jimmy try to flee the country. Clemen is a drunk and wastrel who in a rash moment exuberantly backs the coup while on the radio. He even goes so far to insult the general and now is a wanted man. Jimmy, on the other had, is a captain in the army and had led a soldiers against the government during the coup. Now they are both fleeing, hoping to escape to Honduras. At first they are hiding in the attic of a priest’s house. It is obvious from the beginning they do not get along and Clemen, so used to drinking and doing as he pleases, is unable to sit quietly in the attic and wait for darkness. They argue constantly and the fights form the comic relief of the novel. In the most comic section of the novel, they take a train dressed as priests and Jimmy who is always calm attempts to give confession to a soldier while Clemen holds his rifle. As they continue to flee North the arguments increase until they almost kill themselves in contest between the the spoiled kid from the city and the hardened soldier. If Haydée is just beginning to find something she did not know she had, Clemen is the opposite. He cannot even go one day without a drink and as you learn towards the end of the novel his inability to suffer for even just a moment will lead him to support what he opposed at first.

The contrast between the two narratives not only breaks up with multipul voices what could have turned in to monotonous diary entries, it highlights a divide between the more worldly and cynical Clemen and Jimmy, and Haydée who not only finds a new political voice, but can represent the voice of the country as it rebels against the general. Clemen and Jimmy are two poles of the same idea: a certainty in the way the country should be run, for Jimmy a the point of a gun, for Clemen as a playground for the wealthy. Although different, the certainty leads back to the same assumptions about power where some sort of strong man will make everything better; what ever better is. Haydée, on the other had, is change, but is an amorphous change, because she has no plan. How can she? She has never had the opportunity to work out her ideas. And in the same way, the country rises up against the General, some because he is a blasphemer, some because he is ruining the coffee trade, but there is no plan beyond the coup.

Castellanos Moya plays a bit of a trick on the reader because he ends the first part of the novel on the day the General flees the country. The reader is left with the euphoria of success and if not careful could assume that everything will work out for the country. But there are too many unanswered questions about the future and one only has to look at El Salvadoran history after the coup to realize euphoria never lasts long. The euphoria at the end of the section, becomes fleeting and like the history of so many failed governments, the ideas that motivated the rebels quickly dissipate and the old animosities return. When Haydée writes, God has heard our prayers, you have to wonder if he really has.

So far everything I have mentioned occurs in the first part which makes up the bulk of the book There is, however, a 30 page coda set in 1973. At first it seems a strange addition and, maybe, a bit lazy because Castellanos Moya reviews the the lives of the major characters in the intervening years. Yet despite the awkwardness of the device, there is one very important feature: Pericles speaks for himself. Until the the second part, Pericles is the image Haydée creates in her diary. It is a powerful image, yet an image that lacks real depth. Haydée describes her affection for him, but she doesn’t describe him: what he believes, why he does what he does. Yet he is ever present. All the reader can really know is he has gone to prison many times for his beliefs, which sounds admirable, but what are they? The last section confronts the reader with the true Pericles and asks what character did you create in absence of information? Is it like this man? Since reading, to some extent is projection, the second part does a raise an interesting questions.

Tirana Memoria while not covering new ground in the Latin American novel is a good addition, as Javier Fernández de Castro has mentioned, to the genre of the Latin American strongman. With its different voices and deemphasis on the strongman himself it expands the genre and centers it anxious uncertainties of the ruled. I hope the book makes it into English

Four Inches of Borges and Bioy Casares

~ bythefirelight

I just got a copy of Borges by Bioy Casares. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time ever since I read the review in Letra Libres a year or so ago. When I read it was 1600 pages I didn’t realize how big that was, but I have a long delightful road ahead of me. It mostly covers the years between 1949 and his death, which I suppose is natural since Bioy Casares was quite a bit younger. I would have liked to know what he was like when he was writing Laberintos.

On first leaf through it is pretty funny often he says, come en casa Borges (ate at Borges’ house).

Beginnings In Chinese Novels

~ bythefirelight

Paper republic has a great post about the beginnings of Chinese novels. According to Howard Goldblat, a thirty year translator of Chinese novels, the Chinese don’t try to open a novel with a catchy first line, instead, they often refer to place. Golblat suggest that since place and history are so important to Chinese culture, references to place are so much more important than they are in western writing. Nothing is a 100% as Golblat points out, but it is an interesting insight. Well worth a read.

New Arabic Literature

~ bythefirelight

Literary Salon has a nice write up of an interesting link to a new book on modern Arabic literature. It sounds interesting and has great promise.

When I was reading the article I went to the publisher’s site and if you are interested in Arabic literature the next year has some promissing offerings. I think the volume on post modern arabic literature looks the most intreging. Give Saqi Books a look if you are interested.