Amuleto

Amuleto (Anagrama, 2007)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 1999

"Yo soy la amiga de todos los mexicanos. Podría decir: soy la madre de la poesía mexicana, pero mejor no lo digo. Yo conozco a todos los poetas y todos los poetas me conocen a mí. Así que podría decirlo. Podría decir: soy la madre y corre un céfiro de la chingada desde hace siglos, pero mejor no lo digo. Podría decir, por ejemplo: yo conocí a Arturito Belano cuando él tenía diecesiete años y era un niño tímido que escribía obras de teatro y poesía y no sabía beber, pero sería de algún modo una redundancia y a mí me enseñaron (con un látigo me enseñaron, con una vara de fierro) que las redundancias sobran y que sólo debe bastar con el argumento.

Lo que sí puedo decir es mi nombre". --Amuleto, p. 11

No sé donde empezar con esta novelita corta, pero supongo que debo notar que el personaje que habla arriba se llama Auxilio Lacouture y es uruguaya de nacimiento. Al mencionar el hecho de que Auxilio es la narradora uruguaya de una obra ambientada en México y escrita por un chileno que vivía en España, sólo quiero subrayar la idea de que Amuleto tiene que ver con asuntos latinoamericanos tanto con asuntos mexicanos. O sea, que el agujero negro de su desesperación es de alcance internacional. Construida como una obra testimonial en primera persona, la narración ofrece una visión traumatizada de los trece días que Auxilio pasó "encerrada en el lavabo de mujeres de la cuarta planta de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras en septiembre de 1968" (51): en otras palabras, los recuerdos de una testiga a los días sangrientos de '68 cuando centenares de personas perdieron las vidas a las manos de los granaderos y tanques del gobierno de México. Aunque no voy a decirles lo que la pobrecita vi durante ese período, Bolaño lo logra con su don de diálogo (Auxilio sobre un joven escritor: "la novela era mala, pero él era bueno" [39]), sus sorpresitas cuentísticas (el capítulo donde la narradora, sufriendo de escalofríos, hace pronósticos raros sobre el futuro de varios autores es divertidísimo), y una protagonista tan "fidedigna" en cuanto a sus fragilidades humanas que casi salta de las páginas del libro. Aunque uno nunca está seguro si Auxilio es un poco loquita o borracha además de ser aterrorizada por sus experiencias a UNAM, esta incertidumbre no disminuye el horror de una historia en la cual México, DF parece convertirse en la boca del infierno de una generación entera. En resumen, otra obra maestra total por parte de Bolaño. (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)
*
Amulet (New Directions hardcover, 2006)
by Roberto Bolaño (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews)
Spain, 1999

"I am a friend to all Mexicans. I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but I better not. I know all the poets and all the poets know me. So I could say it. I could say one mother of a zephyr is blowing down the centuries, but I better not. For example, I could say I knew Arturito Belano when he was a shy seventeen-year-old who wrote plays and poems and couldn't hold his liquor, but in a sense it would be superfluous and I was taught (they taught me with a lash and with a rod of iron) to spurn all superfluities and tell a straightforward story.

What I can say is my name." Amulet, pp. 1-2

I'm not sure where to begin with this short little novel, but I guess I should note that the name of the character speaking above is Auxilio Lacouture and that she's an Uruguayan by birth. On mentioning the fact that Auxilio is the Uruguayan narrator of a work set in Mexico that was written by a Chilean who was then living in Spain, I only wish to draw your attention to the idea that Amulet has to do with Latin American matters as much as Mexican ones. Or rather, that the black hole of its despair is international in scope. Constructed as a work of first-person testimonial literature, the narrative offers up a traumatized vision of the thirteen days that Auxilio spent "shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of Philosophy and Literature in September 1968" (54)--in other words, the memories of a witness to those bloody days in '68 when hundreds of people lost their lives at the hands of the Mexican government's tanks and riot police. Although I'm not going to spell out just what the poor creature saw during that time period, Bolaño pulls it off with his gift for dialogue (Auxilio on a young writer: "The novel was bad, but he was good" [38]), his little storytelling surprises (the chapter where the narrator, suffering from feverish chills, makes weird predictions about the future of various authors is totally entertaining), and a protagonist so "lifelike" in regards to her human frailties that she almost leaps out of the pages of the book. Although one's never sure if Auxilio's character is a little crazy or drunk in addition to just being terrorized from her experiences at UNAM, this uncertainty doesn't lessen the horror of a story in which Mexico City seems to transform itself into the mouth of hell for an entire generation. In short, another complete masterpiece from Bolaño. (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

Bolaño

Note: This review is based on the original Spanish version of the novel. Although I've only read selected chapters from Chris Andrews' New Directions translation, I've borrowed his translations here to give non-Spanish speakers a taste of Bolaño in English.

Las batallas en el desierto

Las batallas en el desierto (Era libro de bolsillo, 2007)
por José Emilio Pacheco
México, 1981

"Miré la avenida Álvaro Obregón y me dije: Voy a guardar intacto el recuerdo de este instante porque todo lo que existe ahora mismo nunca volverá a ser igual. Un día lo veré como la más remota prehistoria. Voy a conservarlo entero porque hoy me enamoré de Mariana. ¿Qué va a pasar? No pasará nada. Es imposible que algo suceda. ¿Qué haré? ¿Cambiarme de escuela para no ver a Jim y por tanto no ver a Mariana? ¿Buscar a una niña de mi edad? Pero a mi edad nadie puede buscar a ninguna niña. Lo único que puede es enamorarse en secreto, en silencio, como yo de Mariana. Enamorarse sabiendo que todo está perdido y no hay ninguna esperanza". --Las batallas en el desierto, p. 31

Hermosísima novela corta sobre el primer enamoramiento del narrador, Carlitos, y la fragilidad de la memoria. Relacionando los recuerdos de su juventud como un "niño de la colonia Roma" en México, D.F. (14) con todas las transformaciones del país en aquel entonces en los años 40 y 50, el adulto Carlos regresa al "paraíso perdido" del pasado en la época cuando México ya era en la antesala de modernización. La prosa de Pacheco es engañosamente sencilla, pero él tiene un estilo impecable y la conciencia de un poeta en cuanto a lo que significa estar enfermo de amor. El resultado es una especie de bildungsroman a la mexicana que critica varios aspectos de la sociedad mexicana con un tono agridulce y elegíaco. Una obra sumamente conmovedora.
*
Battles in the Desert (Era paperback, 2007)
by José Emilio Pacheco
Mexico, 1981

"I looked at the avenida Álvaro Obregón and told myself: I'm going to maintain the memory of this moment intact because everything that's existed until now will never be the same. One day I'll see it as the most remote prehistory. I'm going to preserve the instant in its entirety because I fell in love with Mariana today. What's going to happen? Nothing will happen. It's impossible that anything will come of this. What will I do? Change schools so I don't see Jim and therefore don't see Mariana? Look for a girl my own age? But at my age, nobody can look for any girl. The only thing that you can do is to fall in love in secret, in silence, as I have with Mariana. To fall in love knowing that everything's lost and that there's no hope whatsoever." --Battles in the Desert, p. 31

Beautiful, beautiful novella about narrator Carlitos' first time falling in love and the fragility of memory. Relating his childhood memories as "a kid in the barrio Roma section of Mexico City" (14) to all the transformations that were going on in the country at that time in the 1940s and '50s, the adult Carlos returns to the "paradise lost" of the past when Mexico was still on the brink of modernization. Pacheco's prose is deceptively simple, but he has an impeccable style and a poet's feel for what it means to be lovesick. The result is a kind of bittersweet Mexican bildungsroman that criticizes various aspects of Mexican society with an elegiac tone. A very moving work.

José Emilio Pacheco

Próxima parada en el subte de Orbis Terrarum:

Gran Bretaña (Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), Líbano (Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra), o ??? (???).

Note: I chose this 68-page novella to represent Mexican literature for both the Exploration: Latin American Reading Challenge and the Orbis Terrarum 2009 bilingual mini-challenge. New Directions put out an English translation of the work in 1987, but I'm not sure whether it's still in print or not. The rough translations above are mine--sorry for any harm done to the original text's meaning or phrasing.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Oxford University Press hardcover, 1997)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa)
Brazil, 1881

"For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 7

Like Machado de Assis' equally entertaining Dom Casmurro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a fake autobiography--written with "a playful pen and melancholy ink" (5)--concerned with events that take place in the late 19th century Brazil of its one-time upper crust protagonist. It's also a tragicomic send-up of the man of letters revealing the mysteries of life through literature, the twist here being that its voluble narrator, dead of pneumonia at the age of 64, inexplicably chose to launch his writing career from the other side of eternity. Chapter 1, "The Author's Demise," covers many of the essential autobiographical details, but elsewhere in his book of life Brás Cubas recounts his ill-starred love affairs and failed political ambitions with great panache, an unbridled wit, and a generous dollop of pessimism. He has a poetic way with words ("I was holding the binoculars of the imagination," he quips in a typical moment [100]), but he also knows when to take a breather when necessary (chapter 139, "How I Didn't Get to Be Minister of States," has no words at all, only telling ellipses). In short, he's almost everything you could want in a narrator except that he knows things about the modern reader that you might not want to hear. A great jab in the eye of conventional fiction/memoir writing marred only by some of the worst proofreading (typos every few pages) I've ever seen in a university press book. (http://www.oup.com/)

"I'm beginning to regret this book. Not that it bores me, I have nothing to do and, really, putting together a few meager chapters for that other world is always a task that distracts me from eternity a little. But the book is tedious, it has the smell of the grave about it; it has a certain cadaveric contraction about it, a serious fault, insignificant to boot because the main defect of this book is you, reader. You're in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration, a regular and fluid style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall...

And they do fall! Miserable leaves of my cypress of death, you shall fall like any others, beautiful and brilliant as you are. And, if I had eyes, I would shed a nostalgic tear for you. This is the great advantage of death, which if it leaves no mouth with which to laugh, neither does it leave eyes with which to weep... You shall fall." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 111

Machado de Assis: For more on "Brazil's most important novelist," a grandson of freed slaves, see Marc Bain's "Speak, Memory" in Newsweek here.

Next port of call on the Orbis Terrarum Challenge 2009: Canada (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin), Cuba (José Lezama Lima, Paradiso), or ??? (???).

In the Time of the Butterflies

In the Time of the Butterflies (Plume paperback, 1995)
by Julia Alvarez
USA, 1994

Have you ever seen a really bad movie about a totally interesting subject? If so, you'll probably be able to relate to my frustrations while reading this mid-'90s historical fiction bestseller. To be fair, there were certain things I liked about the book. The U.S.-born/República Dominicana-raised Alvarez is a decent enough storyteller, and the subject matter--the lives of the four Mirabal sisters who became resistance leaders in the time of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo's oppressive regime--is certainly deserving of a wider audience. Structurally, I admired the author's ambition in letting each sister tell her own story via diary entries, flashbacks, etc. I also enjoyed the vaivén between the past and the present during the 60-year sweep of the narrative. On the down side, I never really connected with the idea that there were four distinct narrators here. Alvarez' intricate attempt at a chorus approach notwithstanding, I found In the Time of the Butterflies rather clumsy in this regard--presenting types rather than differentiated characters and artificial rather than convincing dialogue. Although less problematic, I was also taken aback by Alvarez' apparent fixation with almost all of her protagonists' menstrual cycles. I imagine her aim was to present the sisters as "real women" in addition to heroines, but the amount of space dedicated to the topic was disconcerting: one minute I'd be reading a so-so novel about a brutal dictator, and the next I'd be reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret! Not really the way I wanted to end this review nor the way I wanted to start the Latin American Reading Challenge. Rating: 2.5/5 stars. (http://www.penguin.com/)

Julia Alvarez

Exploration: Latin American Reading Challenge

Katrina of Katrina's Reads is hosting a Latin American-themed reading challenge during the first four months of 2009 (details = here). Although I'm not sure how geeked up I am about the whole challenge thing these days, this one looks right up my Mexican-American alley! Anyway, here's a list of the four books I'm thinking about reading as part of the challenge:

• Roberto Bolaño, Amuleto
• Julio Cortázar, Rayuela
• Rodrigo Fresán, Mantra
• Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

If you like book lists and/or modern literature in general, make sure you check out Semana.com's 2007 suggestions for what they consider las mejores 100 novelas de la lengua española de los últimos 25 años. From what I've read off that list, those people know what they're talking about.

2009 EDIT: Actual Books Read Below

• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies (review)
• Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (review)
• José Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto (review)
• Roberto Bolaño, Amuleto (review)