Andres Neuman’s newest novel came out about a week ago. It is a departure from Traveler of the Century in that it is about three people: a dying man, the woman who takes care of him, and their son. In some ways it follows on some of the stories he wrote in Hacerse el muerto (read my review). In addition to the write up of the novel, this article also talks about his relationship with Roberto Bolaño.
Estas vivencias traumáticas han dirigido sus pasos hacia Hablar solos (Alfaguara). Una novela breve, concisa, rauda. Dolorosamente placentera. Fulminante como los pensamientos, desgranados en capítulos en primera persona, de sus tres protagonistas: el moribundo, su cuidadora y el hijo fruto del amor que han compartido y que se desvanece. Porque lo que logra Neuman, en última instancia, es una disección, urgente en las formas y trascendente en el fondo, del amor: de su enfermedad, de su tratamiento, de su agonía y pérdida.
En los orígenes de Hablar solos se encuentra también La muerte de Iván Ilich, de Tolstói. O, más bien, la voluntad de darle la vuelta a aquella narración. De convertir al expirante en objeto y traer a quien lo asiste a un primer plano. “En la road movie o el road book clásico se narra una experiencia masculina. Desde Ulises en la Odisea a Cormac McCarthy. Hay una exclusión, que ha atravesado todas las épocas, del rol de la mujer. Ese rol, como mucho, es el de Penélope: esperar al héroe. Es lo que tantas veces se les pide a las mujeres y a los personajes femeninos: que sean insoportablemente abnegados ”. Por eso, su protagonista femenina se convierte en una suerte de “Doctora Jekyll & Lady Hyde de los cuidadores, una madre preocupadísima por la seguridad de su hijo, una esposa totalmente leal y una cuidadora incansable que, al mismo tiempo, termina siendo una mujer infiel”
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell
Random House, 2010
In reading David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet I kept coming back to one question: what is the purpose of historical fiction? For a writer like Mitchell, it is more than just a nice backdrop with which to overlay an author’s own fantasies of the past. That kind of novel is better called a historical romance than a historical fiction, and little better than the average genre work more interested in plot and adventure. Mitchell is to good an author for that kind of simplicity. He’s more interested in recovering the past and it’s that recovery of a lost something that marks many historical novels. The line between recovery and fantasy, though, is not large and it is easy to move between the two and creating worlds that are only the dream of the foreigner. As José Emilio Pacheco noted, “the past is a different country. They do things differently there.” That otherness should not dissuade the creation of historical fiction, but should be a question ever with the reader. If history itself is capable of projecting the present on the past, then the novelist with the imperative of fiction demanding characters and plot has an even greater task. The issue is even more complicated when an author writes about another culture that has often been misunderstood. And Mitchell, in writing about Japan of the late eighteenth century, has undertaken a complicated and difficult task to balance the exploration of the past with a narrative that fits a modern sensibility.
The Thousand Autumns, at its most basic, is a story of cultures, perhaps not clashing, but learning about each other with all its attendant misunderstandings. Jacob De Zoet is a Dutch clerk on the Nagasaki trading post at the end of the 18th century. A good half of the book is given over to the interchange between the Dutch and the Japanese, how commerce is more or less welcomed, while closer ties such as learning Japanese or travel within Japan are strictly forbidden. In this sense, The Thousand Autumns is at its best showing a historical dynamic and reconstructing a way of life that few would have experienced yet has had profound influence on history. Of particular note is the contrast between the scientific ideas of the westerners and those of the traditional, one might says superstitious. It is an idea that has been explored before and historical fiction about the age of discovery cannot be without it. It could be dangerous ground, too, suggesting a superiority in one side or the other, but Mitchell is even handed in showing the two sides as they were. It didn’t hurt to have one of the central characters be a Japanese midwife (and an outcast) who has opened up to the sciences, which gives the reader a way to bridge the two cultures. Since the Duch are prevented from entering into Japan, Orito Aibagawa the midwife is the device to allow the west into Japan, both in a metaphoric sense as the one who seems the closest to the Dutch, and in narrative terms as the one whose life within Japan the reader gets to follow.
The idea of a clash of cultures creates problems, though, when the story moves into Japan and it becomes a tale of courtly intrigue and sexual slavery. Mitchell frames the story as an elaborate game of Go. It is here that the book becomes a great page turner full of clever tactics as De Zoet and Aibagawa each try to defeat the evil lord abbot of a temple that keeps disadvantaged women as sexual slaves and kills their children and the women when they get too old. It makes for good reading, but it is a stretch too far, as if that clash of cultures is at its apotheosis: the abbot who has no scruples vs. the light of reason. I have no idea if such a temple ever existed. It doesn’t matter. The exploration of the two peoples is side tracked by a samurai tale. It is as if Mitchell ran out of ideas about what the trading life would really be like. Perhaps one of the problems is that since Japan was walled off from the rest of the world for so long, a story about the interaction between the Dutch and the Japanese would necessarily suffer for lack of material. One of the more interesting threads left undone is Jacob De Zoet’s Eurasian son who is just a footnote, but whose story would be quite interesting. Perhaps one of the problems is that since Japan was walled off from the rest of the world for so long, a story about the interaction between the Dutch and the Japanese would necessarily suffer for lack of material.
The question remains, then: what is the purpose of history fiction? For Mitchell it is as much curiosity as something to recover. What you see in The Thousand Autumns is an author trying to get at the complexities of cultures meeting. In some ways he succeeds. The end of the book with its showdown with the British frigate and De Zoet’s subsequent use of that even to strengthen relations with Japan is strong. Yet the complexities of it all are reduced to a few encounters: science vs tradition; the politics of trade; and the perceptions of each others cultures as evidenced in some of the scenes between the Dutch and the Japanese translators. It is disappointing because The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is an otherwise well written novel. And in the end the answer to this historical fiction is, the fascination is in the exoticism of time as well as place. The past is exotic and it is hard to resist its temptations and not loose one’s self in the details (Mitchell is restrained enough not give us every single detail he’s learned). Mitchell is surely a talent, but I think he could stretch a little farther.
La Jornada has a lengthy piece from Elena Poniatowska about the Tlatelolco Massacre. La noche de Tlatelolco is one of her most important books and a new, updated version has been brought out. The massacre was a pivotal moment in Mexican history, one that showed Mexico had a long way to go on civil rights.
Cuarenta y cuatro años más tarde, el 11 de Mayo de 2012 surgió un movimiento que tomó por sorpresa a nuestro país con su espontaneidad y su frescura: #YoSoy132, y Ciudad de México sacudió sus telarañas y su desesperación y todos respiramos mejor. Nació “una pequeña República estudiantil”, como lo dice Carlos Acuña.
Durante esos cuarenta y cuatro años, ¿qué había pasado en el país? Después de Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría impuso a López Portillo; éste impuso a De la Madrid, quien a su vez impuso a Salinas de Gortari por encima del verdadero ganador, Cuáuhtemoc Cárdenas. Seis años más tarde, su candidato, Luis Donaldo Colosio, fue asesinado en Tijuana, el 23 de marzo de 1994, en Lomas Taurinas, Tijuana, y este crimen propició el asenso al poder de Ernesto Zedillo, quien a su vez le entregó la banda presidencial a Vicente Fox, del PAN (partido de oposición), que defraudó a los mexicanos como habría de hacerlo su sucesor, Felipe Calderón. (Una joven estudiante del #YoSoy132 refutó a la candidata del PAN, Josefina Vázquez Mota, y le dijo que cuando ella hablaba de estabilidad económica tenía que recordar que “vivimos en un país con 52 millones de pobres y 7 millones de nuevos pobres en este sexenio: 11 millones en pobreza extrema”.)
Durante estos cuarenta y cuatro años surgió una ciudadanía nueva, alerta, crítica y desencantada, cuyo punto de referencia era la masacre del 2 de octubre de 1968. Varios jóvenes se convirtieron en guerrilleros, varios maestros rurales inconformes canjearon la pluma por el fusil y se refugiaron con sus seguidores en la sierra de Guerrero. (Habría que recordar la mejor novela de Carlos Montemayor, Guerra en el paraíso.) El gobierno persiguió a los contestatarios y conocieron la tortura. A doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra le “desaparecieron” a su hijo Jesús e inició el movimiento Eureka con otras madres que gritaban: “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.” Los desaparecidos mexicanos eran aún más invisibles que los argentinos, porque México había sido el refugio de todos los perseguidos políticos de Chile, de Argentina, de Uruguay, de Guatemala; ¿cómo podía entonces encerrar a sus opositores? El gobierno negaba que hubiera tortura, “separos” y cárceles clandestinas.
The October issue of Words Without Borders is out now. The issue theme is Oil featuring authors from oil producing countries and others talking about the impact of oil. In addition to poetry, fiction and essay, there are a couple of graphic pieces that look good.
This month we explore the role of oil in the international landscape. Oil transforms nations, links disparate political and social ideologies, breeds conflict, and drives governmental and corporate policy; our writers show how this force, both blessing and curse, shapes lives and literature around the world. We begin with an essay by political scientist Michael L. Ross connecting oil wealth and national development. Russian Booker nominee and award-winning short-story writer Alexander Snegiryov presents the (show) business of oil in Russia. In two graphic pieces, Lebanon’s Mazen Kerbaj mourns what’s left of his pillaged country, and Italy’s Davide Reviati grows up in the shadow of Ravenna’s ominous petrochemical plant. Translator Peter Theroux shows how Abdelrahman Munif’s great Cities of Salt runs on oil. Afrikaans star Etienne van Heerden’s solitary South African experiences hydrofracking firsthand, while science fiction writer Andreas Eschbach’s stolid loner taps a sixth sense for oil. In two tales of oil workers, Argentina’s María Sonia Cristoff and Germany’s Anja Kampmann explore solitude, madness, and other occupational hazards. And poet Stephen E. Kekeghe protests the draining of Nigeria.
El Pais has an advance of Javier Cercas’ newest novel, titled Las leyes de la frontera (The Laws of the Border). It is about growing up in Franco’s Spain during the 60’s while a middle class began to grow but there was still great inequality. You can read the first chapter at El Pais also.
“El origen remoto de Las leyes de la frontera es cuando yo tengo 10 o 12 años y vivo en unos bloques de pisos de clase media recién levantados en el extrarradio de la ciudad, justo al lado del río. Una tarde, el utillero del equipo de balónmano del barrio nos lleva al otro lado del río y desde ahí veo otro mundo. Hay unos barracones donde se vivian miles de personas en una miseria espeluznante. Esa imagen se me queda clavada en la retina. Vi que a unos 150 metros de donde yo vivía había un mundo que no se parecía en nada al mío. Ese es el origen del libro: qué pasaba ahí, en algo tan cerca y tan lejos de mi casa al mismo tiempo”.
El Páis has an excellent, must read profile about the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa (lately El Páis hasn´t seemed so must read). I hadn´t heard about him before but as someone who lived in Guatemala for a little bit his work sounds interesting. Bolaño mentioned him as an important author. A few of his books have been published in English.
Sentado en la cafetería de un hotel madrileño, Rey Rosa es a la vez parco, delicado y rotundo, como sus libros, escritos en una prosa sin materia grasa y que rara vez, es el caso, sobrepasan las 200 páginas. El suyo es un estilo sin adornos, pero no frío, en todo caso, “una enorme cámara frigorífica en donde las palabras saltan, vivas, renacidas”, según la descripción de Roberto Bolaño, que siempre señaló a su colega como uno de los grandes narradores de su generación. Títulos como Piedras encantadas, Caballeriza, El material humano o Los sordos han ido pintando poco a poco el mural de contrastes de la Guatemala actual, pero Rey Rosa insiste: ni plan ni tesis. “Hay quien divide a los escritores en dos: los que tratan de explicar algo y los que tratan de explicarse algo. Yo soy de la segunda clase. No sé más que el lector al que estoy hablando. Escarbo mientras escribo”.
[…]
¿Y qué puede hacer la literatura? “En mi caso, enterarse”, responde Rey Rosa. “No creo que la literatura tenga grandes efectos, pero sí puede desatar una reflexión. Un trabajo de ficción serio puede ser un instrumento de conocimiento, no sociológico ni etnológico, simplemente humano. El hecho de tratar de explicarse las cosas ya afecta. No soy optimista y no quiero decir que sea algo bueno, pero sí que la actitud de querer entender cambia la percepción de la realidad. Sobre todo desde el punto de vista de los que somos parte del sistema queramos o no, los que estamos bien, los que vivimos… Quien más quien menos, ahí estamos todos y somos una minoría: yo, los lectores de mis libros… a ellos sí que puedo incomodarles un poco. Eso es lo único que puedo hacer. Sugerir cierta autocrítica. En estos ejercicios narrativos míos hay una especie de autocrítica como clase”. Y añade entre risas: “Pertenezco a una clase bastante desagradable. Supongo que lo que marca la diferencia es decir: pertenezco a ella, pero no me siento cómodo”.
El menor espectáculo del mundo (The Smallest Show on Earth)
Félix J. Palma
Páginas de Espuma, 2010, pg 203
Félix J. PalmaThe Spanish novelist and short story writer Félix J. Palma is probably best known as a thriller/sci-fi/fantastical/historical fiction writer who’s The Map of Time spent some time on the NY Times best seller list. I’m not sure if how well any of those categories work in describing him, but his 2010 collection of short stories El menor espectáculo del mundo (The Smallest Show on Earth) is in a different vain, focusing on the little details of life, the smallest show on earth. However, that smallest show tag is a little misleading because several of the stories are adventures that are just confined to a small space. Still, Palma is attentive to the disappointments and unsaid despair that surround his characters and command of language, expressed in elegant sentences and solid images mark him as a skilled writer.
His skills as a writer are apparent from the opening story, El país de lasMuñecas (The Country of Dolls):
A aquellas horas de la noche, el parque infantil parecía un cementerio donde yacía enterrada la infancia.
At that time of the night, the playground looked like a cemetery where childhood had been buried.
It is an arresting image that begins a story of a girl who looses her doll and her father, like Kafka, writes the daughter a letter each day as if he were the doll. His reinvention of the doll story parallels the story of his failing marriage and the fable for the girl becomes not only the dream that will never be realized for the child, but it is an illusion the father would like to have also. But the doll story is just a story and the narrator can only wish for what he cannot have. It is a typical strategy for Palma to show the illusion of these little shows and then leave the characters aware that those illusions are not real. While The Country of Dolls blends his power of language and his appreciation for literary culture, it also ends disappointingly as the narrator, in crime fiction fashion, destroys the destroyer of his illusions and kills his wife.
Palma also has a good sense of humor which he shows quite well in Margabarismos. The narrator is a looser who has taken to spending his time in La Verónica a dive bar near his home that his wife will never search for him in. One day, he sees a note on the bathroom wall that says he will be hit by a car. He doesn’t believe it, but as he leaves the bar a car hits him. He wakes to see his wife waiting for him and he realizes they have grown apart and he would like her back. Once he gets out of the hospital he returns to the bar’s bathroom to look for the message. It has changed, though, and the writer is his late uncle who has the power to see the future six months of the narrator. They hatch a plan to win his wife back and each step displays a humor based on the clumsy desperation of a man who wants his wife back and has to depend on an unreliable ghost. Without the humor–the idea of finding messages in the bathroom–the story would be flat. Again, Palma takes the desperation of the lonely man and turns a comic ghost story into a moment to explore relationships.
He develops that same theme in Una palabra tuya a story that starts with the narrator’s wife’s last words before leaving the house: can you fix the lamp. When he goes into the closet he gets trapped and through a series of events his daughter ends up being the captive of the desperate upstairs neighbor. Ultimately, he performs his role as a father and saves the child. When his wife returns she says, couldn’t you have fixed the lamp? Of course the joke is he has scaled a wall, saved his daughter, and evaded a crazy woman, just like a superhero. And like the smallest show on earth, the narrator has gone unnoticed.
The best story of the Bibelot takes that hidden heroism of the every day and gives it a less adventurous spin. An encyclopedia sales man finds himself mistaken for the son of an old woman. He doesn’t want to play the role but when she said he hasn’t been by for her last few birthdays he relents. He knows he’s making her happy until her daughter calls. She tells him to leave immediately because her son is dead. He agrees and apologizes and on his way out he meets a neighbor who tells him the daughter also died. Here, again, he has a character doing a simple act, one that is inconsequential to everyone but the old woman. In this story it is not just one person participating in these little shows. It is the most successful story because it avoids the episodic feel that some of the earlier mentioned stories. It also has an excellent ending that is neither a twist or a joke. It is his most humane story.
All of Palma’s stories have excellent writing and show a good story teller in action. His ability to show the human failures that go unnoticed, although occasionally hit with a misplaced levity, is strong. With these strong stories it would be great to see more of his non “genre” writing.
Children in Reindeer Woods
Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Open Letter, 2012, pg 198
There’s a war. It doesn’t matter where or why, but soldiers are fighting it. One of them, a paratrooper, lands on a remote farm, killing all the women and children with a quick spray of his machine gun.
So begins the Icelandic author Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Children in Reindeer Woods. It is a strange novel full of unnamed locations and events that feel familiar at every turn. After the killing that starts the novel the paratrooper, Rafael, makes himself at home and begins life of a farmer and dedicates himself to taking care of the only survivor of the attack, the Eleven-year-old Billie. Rafael is a brute, not so much in the sense of his willingness to use violence, but in his unrefined behavior. Certainly he kills when ever someone threatens his existence on the farm, but he is also an uneducated man filled with strange ideas. Billie, on the other hand, is not a worldly child, but one that seems to have a practicality about her, even if that practicality is wrapped in fables.
Rafael and Billie inhabit the farm together, each learning to understand the other. Rafael is aways tender with her, yet also warns her not to use the phone or go into the kitchen where she could get a knife. Despite their domestic tranquility, there’s a threat of violence. When tax collectors come to the farm Rafael wastes no time in killing them. Billie isn’t horrified, but doesn’t appreciate the killing. Her reaction is indicative of something that runs throughout the book–a kind of muted fear and recognition of reality. Is Billie in great danger? Is Rafael as caring as he seems? As the book progresses their lives entwine more and more: Billie relating the stories of her father the puppet; Rafael taking her with him on futile car trips and to destroy cars, gas stations, or anything that could let the world intrude on them.
Children in Reindeer Woods has the feeling of a fable within a fable. The narration is stripped down, but describes a child like state, as if what you are seeing is a reflection of Billie’s inner state. The narration can be see in the stories she tells about her parents. Her father is a puppet who looses his arm easily and is writing a work of jurisprudence and her mother is nurse who takes care of them. Something is aways amiss with them though. Billie is uncertain but describes what we’d recognize as alcoholism. It makes for beautiful language and Ómarsdóttir, as rendered by Lytton Smith, evokes a magical world that both child and adult can recognize, but is completely unreal:
Her navel protruded like a bullet. Her mother believed that the navel would retreat when Billie entered puberty, when the egg in the ovary wanted to be impregnated. Then the ovaries would haul the navel and the umbilical cord in so they could later cast the cord out from the womb with anew shoot hanging on it. But until then her navel would push out because it was still invisibly tied to its headquarters…
The idea of seeing the story through Billie’s eyes also can help understand Rafael’s strange perception of the world. For example, talking to Agnes Elisabet, a nun who happens on the farm and who sleeps with Rafael, they have the following exchange:
“Can nuns commit suicide?”
“Nuns can do everything. May I play it for you, my love?”
“Why did she commit suicide?”
“My love, why does the sun shine? Do you know the answer?”
“Because otherwise nothing would live.”
“It’s surely good to commit suicide when one has given up on getting attention.”
The conversation is naive, as if the solder had no inner life, had been raised only to kill. Rafael may only be a boy of 18 or 19 as many soldiers are, still as unformed as Billie. Between the two explanations, Ómarsdóttir sees the war, its unsaid location and unstated purpose, as little more than a pointless exercise. Removing the players from the battle leaves them as they truly are: children. Children in Reindeer Woods is a fable can be irritating for its occasional “childishness”, but the depth and beauty of the language and her ability to create characters that express futility is such an enchanting way, make it one of the more surprising reads I’ve come along for some time.
Página 12 has an interview with uan Casamayor Editor of Páginas de Espuma, one of my favorite publishers right there with Open Letter. They specialize in short stories and have published some great works by some of the best in short stories (see my reviews of Navarro and Neuman). The interview talks about the press, its history, and the craziness of the publishing industry, which functions in Spain much like it does in the US.
–Un latiguillo frecuente, dicho por muchos editores, es que los libros de cuentos no venden. ¿Qué diría para desmontar este “mito” o prejuicio?
–El primer hecho incontestable es que trece años después una editorial que empezó partiendo de una pareja que decide buscar un hueco muy especializado ya no es una editorial pequeña por facturación. Páginas de Espuma está facturando en torno a los 800 y 900 mil euros; es una facturación fuerte. Las cifras son públicas. Los libros de cuentos se venden. Otra cosa es que se quiera vender cuentos. Si partes de la filosofía que el libro de cuentos es un descanso de novelista o una cláusula de un contrato, el posicionamiento ya no comercial sino editorial es endeble para vender el libro. Yo hago giras en España por catorce ciudades con un libro de cuentos. Además tenemos un premio de 50.000 euros al mejor libro de cuentos que compite con cualquier premio de novela. Claro que para esto me busqué a alguien que tuviera la plata para poder financiarlo. Ribera del Duero está muy contenta con este premio porque ha posicionado su marca de origen de un vino en un mundo cultural que les ha interesado mucho. No tengo otra vía de ingresos. Aunque mis padres son médicos, soy un poco espartano. Y si bien me dieron un poquito de dinero para arrancar con la editorial, vivo exclusivamente de lo que dan los libros. Algo tiene que vender el cuento para mantener Páginas de Espuma, ¿no?
When I Left Home: My Story
Buddy Guy, with David Ritz
Da Capo Press, 2012
Buddy’s always been one of my favorite blues guitarist, if not my fav. I’ve always loved his frenetic approach and a large number of riffs are his. While he has always complained, as he does several times in the book, that he rarely got to record the blues as he wanted to, all I know the many by are his recordings and one show years ago that I got to see when I was catching all the old blues men. He’s one of the last of that era and few of them either lived long enough or didn’t care enough to get their experiences down on paper (Big Bill Bronsey is one of the few exceptions). An autobiography affords the chance to go beyond the records, the photos, and the occasional You Tube clip and to know where the music came from. Given that the blues has at times a mystic weight put on it, what with the legends of Robert Johnson and blues explosion of the late 60s that was in part a pantheon raising, perhaps an autobiography, despite their vagaries, would bring that past back for a little while.
It’s hard to be a blues man. The life is dangerous, under paid, and given to life shortening excesses, particularly alcohol. That Buddy has survived in good health and enjoying success that eluded him for many years is a combination of luck and a natural shyness that kept him level headed. He grew up in Louisiana and at a young age moved to Batton Rouge where a passing stranger one day heard him playing a bad guitar and offered to buy him something decent. It was the kind of luck that gave him a eventual career. He began playing gigs in Batton Rouge, because you couldn’t live on that. The inability to live well on music runs through out the book as does his constant desire to finally make it. The blues is as much a commercial activity as an art, a word I doubt he’d use. A way of life might be better. Something that is music, feeling, and community. The story of his move to Chicago and his meeting with Muddy Waters the day he was deciding to move back home is well known. But his descriptions of sharing a narrow studio apartment with a friend, spending the night on the streets while he waited for him to sleep so he could go back later, was just one of many hardships.
But Buddy was young and he loved playing and Chicago in the mid 50s to the early 60s was humming with blues and a man could make a living, not a lot, but enough to get by. Buddy also became one of the most sought after side men in the recording studio because he would follow directions, keep his mouth shut, and show up on time. In other words, he was reliable. Unlike his friend Jr Wells he never had problems with alcohol and as was all too common would drink himself into a stupor and would often find himself in jail. Buddy would have to, of course, bail him out. All through the book, Buddy is right in the action but due to his nature he is just one step back from real self destruction. He was also wise enough to know when things were never going to get better and, for example, stopped touring with Wells due to his unpredictability.
The Chicago he describes during the heyday of the Chicago Blues was one of clubs running all night with steel mill workers, going from club to club to play or compete in battle of the bands. The prize was usually just a bottle of whiskey. Buddy didn’t care, though, because he was playing. It was only latter as he married and had more children that he found that the blues and especially Leonard Chess did not pay. For most of the sixties until the blues revival hit at the end of the decade he drove a tow truck and worked in a garage. It is hard to believe that the man who cut some great sides and was a side man to some of the best sessions at Chess was working a day job. What’s interesting is how often he talks about wanting to make it. Despite the fun he was having in the clubs, he had visions of making it big. It can be easy to forget the economic necessities of the musicians once their work has been transformed over the years to a sacred legacy. It is also a realization that the rock ethos of authenticity and the Romantic ideal of the artist and his muse are projections that the critics inject.
Buddy, though, as he tells it was nothing if not responsible. He mentions he wanted stability which is why he married twice, but the blues and touring are anything but stable and both of those marriages eventually failed. It’s not to say Buddy didn’t sleep around, or find himself staring at the knife blade his first wife held over his head one night, he just managed to keep it together a little better. It was with that stability in mind that he opened his first club the Checker Board, thinking he could quit touring and stay at home more. But the club always lost money and he had to invest too much time into it. For a while he had to sleep in it with a gun to keep people from steeling his booze. Not a great success.
If financial success eluded him, so did artistic success. According to Guy it isn’t until the 90’s that he finally got to record the way he wanted to and be successful. I’m not sure that I agree since Stone Crazy from 1981 is probably his best album. All he says about it is it came out without much success. He also doesn’t like much of the Chess or Vanguard catalog. There are definitely some failures (I Digg Your Wig, anyone?), but some of his tracks show both his guitar and vocal talents. He often mentions that he didn’t have the chance to record like he played in the clubs. Yet when you see some of the live stuff, it isn’t too distant from his recorded materials. I can remember being disappointed with some of the live stuff, because he sang so much and worked the crowd instead of playing ala Hendrix or Vaughn. While A Man and the Blues doesn’t rock, the live material from the same period isn’t too distant from it (It is also one of his best, certainly of the period, although a few of the instrumentals leave a little to be desired). To me the 90’s material is OK, but what ever you think about it, he loves it, it part, because it marks his ultimate success and is part of his progression to blues legend.
The idea of the progression to success is typical of the memoir genre. As is all too often common, the book has a story that shows Buddy slowly making his way to success. It is a narrative arc that can down play past successes, such as with his albums, and it can also turn the end of the book, where all the success is recounted, into a formulaic naming of famous names. The last 15-20% of the book begins to slide into that trap. Over and over he talks about playing with Clapton or Vaughn or Santana in some concert. It can get a little repetitive. And since this is an oral history dressed up as a book the writing can be lacking when the subject isn’t strong enough to propel the story.
Ultimately, the book is at its best when he is describing the early days and was a struggling musician. Ritz captures Buddy’s way of speaking quite well and as he recounts the stories (most with a suspicious level of dialogue, another flaw of the genre) you feel like Buddy is telling them to you. The best way to end this review is to quote Buddy’s last visit with Muddy Waters before he died of cancer.
Didn’t wanna mention music ’cause I knew he wasn’t performing or recording. Figure the best thing I could do was just sit and be quiet. Sat there for a long spell.
Muddy was the kind of guy who could read my mind. After a long time he turned to me and said, “Look, Buddy, I’m okay. And I only got one thing to say to you.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Mother fucker,” he answered, “don’t let these blues die.”
Guernica magazine has short story form Quim Monzó called One Night. It is a racy take on Snow White.
Plum in the center of the room, the prince can see the body of the girl, who is sleeping on a litter of oak branches and wrapped round in flowers of every color. He quickly dismounts and kneels by her side. He takes her hand. It is cold. And her white face, too, like a dead girl’s. Not to mention her thin, purple lips. Conscious of his role in the story, the prince kisses her lovingly. He knows this is the kiss that must bring her back to life, the kiss the princess has been waiting for forever, since the witch’s curse put her to sleep. The prince leans his head backwards so he can gaze at her when she lifts her eyelids and opens those large, almond eyes.
I’m not a huge comics fan boy. Superheros get tiresome after a while–they cry about their superpowers way too much. Growing up I read war comics, specifically: The Unknown Soldier, G.I. Combat, and most of all, Sgt. Rock. I had no idea who Joe Kubert was but his creation (I believe he had stopped writing the comic before I came on the scene) was a mainstay for me for several years. I still have all the copies in their less than mint condition–worthless might be a better word–including the Batman-Sgt. Rock team up. I never did get the Superman one that was advertised, but probably for the best. I can’t say it was anything more than escapist fun, but, still, there was a tiredness to the stories, soldiers grinding on through the war. He had a dark element that made the men more real that their tights wearing counter parts. The hallmark of Sgt. Rock was his monthly struggle to keep his platoon together. It didn’t always happen and they lost men, always shown as a classic burial mound, a rifle stuck muzzle down, and a helmet hanging off to one side. Rare was the comic where people died, and give this was a war comic, perhaps more should have. Yet the Rock was still a blaze of glory, his Thompson machine gun roaring, extra ammo hanging off him, his helmet always at a rebellious angle. He was a hero and heroes, despite their creator’s wishes, make war glamorous. I will say, in one of these comics I first read about friendly fire and at a young age it was disturbing to think you could get shot by one of your own. It was an eye opener, one that still sticks with me even after all these years. I believe I was reading after he had been in charge of the war comics (based on the NY Time‘s dates), but I think his influence was felt in those that I still have. According to the NY Times, during his run as head of war comics at DC between 67 and 76, “at the end of each comic, Mr. Kubert directed the typesetter to add a four-word coda. It read, ‘Make War No More.'” Those are fitting words for the end of every war comic, and if I was going to read war comics, those are really the only words the creator of a boyhood icon should have written.
You can see some of his work in an excerpt from a Fantagraphicsbook about his work (pdf).
The Odditorium: Stories
Melissa Pritchard
Bellevue Literary Press, 2011
The Odditorium is just that: a collection of strange and odd curiosities that don’t really have any purpose being together except to titillate. An item could be strange, ugly, beautiful, but that oddness is the key to its existence within the collection. But is oddness in of itself interesting? Perhaps, but what is probably more interesting is the juxtaposition with the expected that leads one not only to see the odd as a curiosity but reflection on what one takes for granted. Oddities, like freak shows, though, can also become little more than facile rushes to exploitation. The shocking becomes little more than that its momentary surprise that fades into the background. While it’s true that Pritchard’s stories don’t fall into the trap of creating the exploitively strange, the stories in The Odditorium are all more interested in their strangeness than finding something deeper or more compelling within them. There are certainly more than enough stories about crappy marriages, and that isn’t what I’m asking for here, but stories that do something with her obvious power as a writer. With each story it was obvious she had fallen in love with her characters, all historical figures, and she wanted to get closer to them, understand who they were. Unfortunately, she mistakes detail for depth and the search becomes and irritating failure.
Take the story Watanya Cicilia which describes the relationship between Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley and how they bonded, becoming father and daughter. In some ways she does describe it, but in others it is so lifeless that it doesn’t seem if there is a story there. It isn’t that she doesn’t flesh out the characters, or give us a new reality, it’s that the story is caught up in its own fragmentary nature, as if the broken pieces of narrative about two 19th figures mimics disjointedness of history. Yet it fails even that task. What it shows is how good Pritchard is at creating moments that overflow with sensory detail. Strip that away and the characters are nothing. Characters aren’t necessary the only measure of a successful story, but since she focuses on them so much it is fair to ask if they serve more purpose than to be a tapestry for her descriptive skills. After finishing Watanya Cicilia, one could be forgiven for thinking, I used to care about Annie Oakley now she just bores. It is a shame because her early evocations of Annie’s life had some potential.
Again in Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Military Hospital, perhaps the most interesting of the stories (really a novella), one gets the sense that she falls into the trap of the historical novelist who cannot let go of historical details because they are so fascinating. Unfortunately, it makes for tiresome reading. The story starts interestingly enough, following an American Captain as he prepares a military hospital for the coming D-Day invasions. He is a dedicated officer and she gives the reader an insight into the tedium of his life, one that he enjoys. In some ways she breaks from her interest in the strange and goes towards the boring. Nothing of note really happens and one could see the story as just the minute examination of a man, but there are also hints at a ghost and at an infatuation with a young French woman. It is a baggy piece and the subtle look at lonely man’s life is there, but she overlays it with hints of the fantastic that what might have been her strongest work, is derailed with needless diversions. She cannot resist the strange and the odd. She even puts a museum of the odd in the hospital so the reader can see how odd everything really is.
At the beginning of each story she leads the reader to think there is going to be something that is going to realize her full skills. The Hauser Variations is a perfect example. It is structured as a song which describes incidents in the life of Casper Hauser as told by different characters. It is a playful mix of her descriptive skills and a floating narrative. It is more an impressionistic piece, given to throwing snatches of song or the occasional bit of religious nonsense into the piece. The effect lends itself well to describing a mysterious man who had spent his early years away from all human contact. Yet time and again one gets the impression she is just too in love with the sound of her own voice. In a book of these kind of stories it is too much and it shows the games and trickery as little more than that.
Variation 2 With poetic sobriety.
I had twe pley horse, and such redd ribbons where I horse decorate did.
-Fragment from Kasper Hauser’s First Autobiography,
November 1828, Nuremberg
Dank grub, cabbage vermin, white, hairless, altrical slug. It scarcely flourished in its cradle plot its solitary necropolis, neither living nor dead, its budded tongue a fleshy club, its legs fwumped and futile.
It’s at times like these that I’m reminded of an essay by Lionel Trilling. He was writing about the flaws in the work of William Dean Howells. The one flaw that has always stuck with me is that Howells was not into the strange and that we are in the age of the strange. While I’m not asking for the reincarnation of the Howells or naturalism for that matter, strange for the sake of strange some times can just lead to a dead end. She has the language down, now go beyond that to something that really touches.
A Complaint
Pritchard has nothing to do with the blurbs on her book, but are some of these people really serious? Some of this stuff is egregious.
In this thrillingly protean collection of stories, Melissa Pritchard has done something profound. By imagining her way into historical moments and illuminating their shadows, she amplifies the music of history so we hear beautifully strange, wondrous notes we never knew were there. These stories resound with a fierce yet playful intelligence and a rare, magnificent generosity.
–Maud Casey
Please answer me this: how are stories generous? (More words per story) I really need to stop looking at these things. They are so silly especially when you completely disagree.
Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America by
Derek Lundy
Vintage Canada Editions, 2011, pg 421
There are two broad kinds of journalism: the dispassionate omnipotent writing that is standard in news papers and most news magazines; and the first person experiential story of exploration and quite often adventure. The latter type lends itself to travel writing quite well since the reader can substitute themselves with the narrator. That kind of journalism can also lead to stunts, or at least just a distracting preoccupation with the narrator. At its best, though, experiential journalism adds subtle insight to reportage, offering little details that in a third person account would feel the wrath of the editor. Experiencing the little frustrations of daily life can be say more than just the broad facts of a story.
Derek Lundy’s Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America is one of the better examples of the second type. Lundy describes his journey along the United States borders with Mexico and Canada on a motorcycle. It is a journey that seems rather simple, but to actually stay as close to the US border is a difficult, annoying and dangerous endeavor. What Lundy is looking for is more than just a travelog of one’s many journey, but a deeper investigation into border culture and the way that shapes and repels part of American culture. He blends his experiences with reporting and history to create a fascinating cultural history of the US border and the politics of the tri-nation region now wedded through NAFTA.
One thing that makes the book worth reading is Lundy is a Canadian and the book is aimed at the Canadian market. The we, the us, the home country is Canada and though Lundy is always respectful to his neighbors there is always a questioning of the hardening of the border–really the militarization or police-statization of it (perhaps its the same thing). Over and over again he crosses the border, especially along the Canadian one, to find the border patrol searching everything he carries on his motorcycle in depth. Free time is not always the best thing. Its always more pronounced in the quieter crossings where the boarder patrol has more time on their hands to do a search. It rarely seems they ever achieve something. Over and over again he returns to the fear and paranoia that are part of the policy making on the border: the untrue story that 9-11 hijackers crossed from Canada (many of his interview subjects seems to think they did); that al Qaeda has crossed undefended borders; that if the US just was more serious about watching the border it could stop illegal traffic. It is these ideas that make every encounter on the Canadian border tedious, and those on the Mexican border part of a police state, where one cannot question the authority of those on patrol. To be fair, though, Lundy meets many Border Patrol officers who actually answer a few questions for him and show a human side. And he rightly points out that it is a dangerous job to be just sitting out there, one or two officers, in the middle of nowhere, uncertain who is coming along. In most of his encounters on the border with the patrol the agents would put their hands on the triggers of their guns when he approached, only letting go when he had taken his helmet off and explained what he was about. Then they would to tell him to leave because it was too dangerous to be on the border where the drug trade has such a strong influence.
Lundy is one never to follow advice to closely and repeatedly he finds himself battling with his motorcycle down some deserted road just to stay close to the border. These are places that days or weeks before there may have been trafficking activities or a gun fight. The book was written early in Calderon’s war and he mentions in an afterward that there are places that he would not go now. He doesn’t go into heavy details about the trafficking, just its ever present danger. The narcos are the biggest danger he faces, but the book is full of the difficulties of ridding a motorcycle cross country and some of his best writing describes the muddy roads, or icy passes he crosses, afraid he will crash at any moment, suffering in the cold or the heat or gale force winds. It is the mix of problems of the border with those of cyclist that propel the book and give it an air of suspense.
Ultimately, though the book would not be a success if it did not show the border issues in all their complexity. Lundy notes that the southern border has always been fluid and that those who still live along the border (with in 15 -25 miles) still expect the ability to go back and forth with ease. Many have families on both sides and it is common for families to have moved back and forth for generations. And for tribes like the Tohono their reservation straddles both sides of the border and has been particularly hard hit by the new efforts at border control (his discussion of the Tohono is particularly distressing in the way drug trafficking has wreaked havoc) . On the Canadian border the same phenomenon exists. There are towns that straddle the border and families and tribes that expect that they should be able to move easily between. It seems the father one lives from the border, the more of a barrier it should be. Of course this was not always true. Lundy understands, too, that immigration brings its own issues and does give a fairly mixed view of the issues. One thing he doesn’t see working well is the fence, which at the writing of the book was still being built. In stop after stop he notes how it is the laughing stock of the whole border region and how easily it is just to go around it or over it.
Lundy’s book is the best kind of travel-journalism. It is part adventure story, but at its core its a well written examination of the American crisis of faith that is the border, one that perhaps only an outsider could write.
Argentine writer Héctor Tizón has died. I’m not familiar with his work, but according to the obituary from El Pais he was a kind of Juan Rulfo from Argentina. He used magical realism, but also had a dry realism. He didn’t like literary games in favor of writing what was “before his eyes as Hemingway would.” Like many writers of his generation he spent several years in exile during the dictatorship.
En el mismo libro comentó también su visión de la escritura: “La mayor parte de la literatura actual se hace con la literatura misma, con palabras y juegos de palabras, es decir, con ‘nada’. Yo prefiero contar otra vez las viejas historias, las que ya han sido contadas, semejantes a sí mismas en todo el mundo. Nunca lograremos contar algo que antes no se haya contado. (…) Lo que verdaderamente vale es el modo de narrar, y los hombres alcanzados por la narrativa vuelven a ser niños a quienes no les disgusta volver a escuchar una y otra vez las mismas historias, para protegerse; historias que nos exaltan y a la vez dignifican”.
“Nunca formó parte de las capillas literarias, pero era muy latinoamericano”, afirma Jorge Fernández. “Siguió la premisa de Borges en el sentido de que no había que tener un propósito por ser argentino, sino aspirar a lo universal. Tizón, pintando su aldea, contando cosas tan pequeñas y tan alejadas de las grandes urbes y el mundo, en realidad pintaba la condición humana”.
The Spanish author Esther Tusquets has died. You can read the notices at El Pais and La Vanguardia. Books on Spain has an excellent run down in English of her impact and relevance. I’m not familiar with her fiction, but her work as a memorialist has seemed interesting. Part of a publishing family, she wrote about the Franco years from the perspective of one of the wealthy supporters of the regime.
“Tengo sensación de final y quiero empezar a ir ligera de equipaje. A mi edad, uno se lo puede permitir todo”. Hace apenas poco más de dos años que la editora y escritora Esther Tusquets (Barcelona, 1936) justificaba así que se hubiera acentuado levemente su siempre latente irreverencia, que dejó en negro sobre blanco en sus últimos libros de memorias, como en Confesiones de una vieja dama indigna (2009). Ese viaje que intuía ha acabado hoy a los 75 años en el hospital Clínico de Barcelona por una pulmonía, punta de iceberg de un párkinson que padecía desde hacía años. Este martes será enterrada en Cadaquès (Girona), el mismo mar de (casi) todos sus veranos.
El Pais has an article where short story authors Merino, Fernández Cubas, Shua, Peri Ross, Hidalgo Bayali and Marsé discuss the best short story writers of today, including those in Spanish. Perhaps it could be a more insightful article, but it does have a few points of interest.
“Poe, Maupassant, Kafka, Borges, Cortázar… ¿Cómo elegir? Y, sobre todo, ¿por qué elegir, si puedo tenerlos todos?”, responde Ana María Shua a la pregunta sobre su clásico básico. Prolífica autora de cuentos y microrrelatos, con títulos como la colección Que tengas una vida interesante (Emecé), la escritora argentina acaba de cruzarse con la obra de tres autores que, en breve tiempo, han sido capaces de imprimir una huella en su memoria: “Edgar Keret, el israelí loco que inventó otra manera de contar; Alice Munro, una vieja canadiense que se cree que un cuento se puede contar como si fuera una novela, ¡y lo consigue!, y Eloy Tizón, el cuentista español que toma al lector de sorpresa y lo derriba en cada párrafo”. Entre los jóvenes talentos que despuntan en lengua castellana, señala dos nombres: “En España, Isabel González, sin duda, con su libro Casi tan salvaje, escrito a estocadas salvajes sin el casi. En Argentina (pero publicada también en España), Samanta Schweblin, una genio, no se la pierdan, nieta literaria de Dino Buzzati. Con menos de 35 años, las dos ya son más que promesas”.
El Pais has a long profile of Mexican author Mario Bellatin. It is quite good and gives some interesting insights into this intriguing author.
Bellatin se considera sufí y cumple con su estética austera. El mobiliario de su hogar es tan esquemático que la casa parece casi deshabitada, o habitada por un fantasma, como dice el escritor que se siente en ocasiones. Siempre lleva su uniforme negro, y conduce un coche negro sin cambio automático ni dirección asistida, cosa meritoria teniendo en cuenta que solo dispone de un brazo. El principal foco decorativo de la sala es un minúsculo cuadro con un derviche —un bailarín sufí— congelado en un instante del giro permanente en que consiste la danza ritual de esta religión.
Esa pared, como todas las demás de la sala y del estudio, estarán cubiertas pronto por enormes estanterías en las que piensa distribuir Los cien mil libros de Mario Bellatin, una obra que también presentará en la Documenta. Se trata de otro proyecto a medio camino entre la literatura y el arte conceptual, consistente en la edición de cien libros suyos en un formato mínimo y con una tirada de 1.000 ejemplares cada uno. Los comercializará por su cuenta, sin pasar por las librerías, intercambiándolos directamente con los compradores “por un cigarro o por 1.000 pesos, dependiendo de mi estado de ánimo”. De momento ha publicado seis, y calcula que con todo lo que ha escrito durante su carrera ya tiene material para 52. “A partir de ahora quiero seguir escribiendo para llegar a 100. Pero igual me muero antes, no importa. Lo importante es que el hecho de que aquí haya 100.000 libros o no haya nada solamente depende de un deseo, y nada objetivo, externo a ti mismo, se puede interponer a ese deseo”.
Como el derviche que gira en un movimiento eterno, lo único que desean el hermano de la chica elefante, el ladrón de bolígrafos, el hijo de la cocinera de hormigas y el dueño del perro Perezvón es que Mario Bellatin permanezca siempre escribiendo.
Ivan Thays also has a brief run down of his four most important books.
El Pais has an interview with Robert Saladrigas who has published a book (Voces del boom) of interviews with authors of the Boom. It is a collection of previously published essays. I’d be curious to see what the interviews are like. Saladrigas has some interesting things to say about the authors in the interview. Rulfo sounds a little unhinged at times, including politically. I wish there was a sample chapter so I could say whether the book is any good.
P. El propio Rulfo decía que aquello no iba a terminar como había empezado. “La Revolución cubana no es ya lo que fue ni lo que prometió ser. En cambio [decía, refiriéndose a la época de Allende, era 1971], Chile está viviendo ahora la experiencia más bonita de Latinoamérica”.
R. Exacto, y hablaba desde México, estaba muy cerca de nosotros… Pero gente como Vargas Llosa, por ejemplo, no decían eso mismo en voz alta. Lo hacía gente como Rulfo, un hombre ya muy mayor que lo veía desde otra perspectiva. Y lo que dice de Chile hay que verlo desde la perspectiva de entonces; desde ahora, claro, se entendería peor.
P. En su libro aparecen ya los rasgos dramáticos de Donoso, Sarduy y Puig, seres que reflejaban una angustia que no se compadecía con su espectáculo exterior.
R. Muy cierto. Fíjate que, además, en el caso de Donoso hoy es casi inconcebible el éxito de un libro como El obsceno pájaro de la noche. No lo leería nadie. Y en aquel momento nos fascinaba. Pero visto en perspectiva, en efecto, el aspecto de algunos de los que has mencionado resultaba patético, alegres y tan tristes.
Heather Cleary, Sergio Chejfec’s translator, has a fascinating take on his approach to language. She notes that he has a way of distancing the reader at the same time he brings the reader in.
Reading Sergio Chejfec, I’m always struck by the way his prose both deflects and draws the reader in, never allowing complete immersion in the narrative: whether explicitly or implicitly, the medium in which the story is told is under constant scrutiny. In other words, I’m struck by the way Chejfec’s language is never “natural.” He discusses this aspect of his work in a beautiful essay titled “Simple Language, Name,” which hinges on the capaciousness of the word “nombre” (both “name” and, grammatically, “noun”). The piece begins with a reflection on the necessary illusion of linguistic transparency, and then delves into the particular kind of access to personal histories and collective traditions that surnames allow.
The full article is worth reading for this Argentine author. (via)
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By The Firelight 