2666: La parte de Archimboldi

último round del readalong dedicado a

2666 (Anagrama, 2007)

por Roberto Bolaño

España, 2004

Queridos amigos:

No voy a pasar mucho tiempo con ustedes esta noche porque justo terminé de leer La parte de Archimboldi, y ahora todo lo que me siento es una tristeza profunda.  Quizá se debe al libro mismo.  Quizá se debe al fin del readalong de 2666, que era una experiencia mucho más rica de lo que esperaba.  En todo caso, no quiero que mis emociones se conviertan en una suerte de sentimentalismo barato.  Merecen más que esto.  Lo que sí les diré es que La parte de Archimboldi me impresionó mucho.  Después de tantas páginas de pistas y referencias parciales, era grato poder aprender tanto sobre la vida del hombre Benno van Archimboldi (né Hans Reiter).  Podría dedicar 20 entradas al personaje sin llegar al fondo de su historia, pero lo importante de él es su presencia a un holocausto en Europa y a otro, de mujeres, en México.  ¿Era ya otra baja de la violencia del siglo XX, un ángel exterminador, o la personificación del griego Tánatos?  Parece que hay razones para las tres cosas. Sean lo que seas sus opiniones sobre éso, también me gustaron los retratos de Lotte, Ingeborg, y la baronesa: tres personajes femeninos complejos trazados con una ternura que sobraya los cientos de tragedias al centro de La parte de los crímenes.  Sin decirlo tan abiertamente, Bolaño parece recordarnos que la guerra y no la paz es el estado natural del género humano.  Que la injusticia es el rey de este mundo.  Que las estrellas mismas son una especie de aviso tipo ubi sunt a los vivos.  Aunque él ofrece el concepto del Arte como una salida posible, no es muy convincente con respecto a esto: una señal de su propio talento artístico en mi opinión.  Con un libro que trata de las relaciones entre la vida y el arte y el arte y la historia de manera tan visceral, supongo que la melancolía que la siento a la conclusión de 2666 es mas o menos normal.  Sin obstante, tengo muchas ganas de releer la novela en el futuro.  Era estupendo.

Saludos,

Richard

*

Dear Friends,

I'm not going to spend much time with you here tonight because I just finished reading The Part About Archimboldi, and now all I feel is a sense of profound sadness.  Maybe it's due to the book itself.  Maybe it's due to the end of the 2666 readalong, which was a lot richer experience than I'd anticipated.  In any event, I don't want my mood to decay into a sort of cheap sentimentalism.  You all deserve better than that.  What I will say is that The Part About Archimboldi did a number on me.  After so many pages of clues and elliptical references, it was completely gratifying to learn so much about the life of Benno von Archimboldi (né Hans Reiter).  I could spend 20 blog posts on the character without getting to the bottom of his story, but the one thing that really struck me about him was his presence at one holocaust in Europe and at another, of women, in Mexico.  Was he just another casualty of the violence of the 20th century, an avenging angel, or the personification of the Greek Thanatos?  I think you could make a case for all three of those things if you tried.  Whatever your take on that, I also enjoyed Bolaño's portrayal of Lotte, Ingeborg, and the Baroness: three complex female characters drawn with a tenderness that underscores the hundreds of tragedies at the heart of The Part About the Crimes.  Without actually saying it, Bolaño seems to want to remind us that war and not peace is the natural state of man.  That injustice is king.  That the stars themselves are a sort of ubi sunt warning to the living.  He offers up Art as a possible escape route, but as a testament to his own artistry he isn't really convincing in this regard.  In a book that deals with the relationship between life and art and art and history in such a visceral way, I guess I shouldn't be surprised to walk away from 2666 feeling so remarkably blue.  However, I look forward to reading it again in the future.  It was tremendous.

Best,

Richard

Bolaño

"Jesús es la obra maestra.  Los ladrones son las obras menores.  ¿Por qué están allí?  No para realzar la crucifixión, como algunas almas cándidas creen, sino para ocultarla". //"Jesus is the masterpiece.  The thieves are the minor works.  Why are they there?  Not to highlight the crucifixion, as some naive souls believe, but to hide it."  (2666, p. 989)

Más post míos sobre 2666:

La parte de los críticos

La parte de Amalfitano

La parte de Fate

La parte de los crímenes #1, #2, #3, #4 y #5

Más entradas del grupo del readalong sobre 2666:
Evening All Afternoon (Emily)
2666: The Part About Archimboldi
kiss a cloud (Claire)
The Part About Archimboldi
Nonsuch Book (Frances)
the part about archimboldi: the final part of bolaño's 2666
Page247 (Gavin)
The Part About Archimboldi--2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Regular Rumination (Lu)
2666 Readalong--Part V: The Part About Archimboldi
This Book and I Could Be Friends (E.L. Fay)
2666: The Part About Archimboldi
2666: The Part About Archimboldi (continued)

October Reading

Anarchy in the U.K., 1859-1860

(La dama de blanco)

Argentina, 1997

(Money to Burn)

Spain, 1626

(The Swindler)

Norway, 1920-1922

Note: It's not too late to join the Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong that Emily from Evening All Afternoon and I will be hosting from now through December.  Any and all who want to read a big fat 20th-century Scandinavian classic in the company of other readers are welcome to read along with us.  For details, see Emily's post here or mine here.  Emily and I will be linking to all participants' posts on our two blogs sometime near the end of each month during the readalong, but Bethany from Dreadlock Girl Reads has been kind enough to set up a third space, a book group dedicated to the shared read at the Book Blogs Ning over here, that may be a great way to discuss the trilogy prior to our collection of all your links.  Thanks a bunch to all of you who have already expressed enthusiasm for the readalong in the comments and on your own blogs.  Should be fun!

Untitled #1

La pregunta del día: ¿Qué haría Des Esseintes?

La guerra del fin del mundo

La guerra del fin del mundo (Punto de Lectura, 2007)
por Mario Vargas Llosa
Perú, 1981

Uno de mis blogueros favoritos me dijo recientemente que La guerra del fin del mundo le gustó tanto que no quería terminar el libro: ¡es por eso que decidió volver a leer la novela desde la mitad cuando solo le faltaban 30 páginas para el final!  Mientras que no reaccioné de la misma manera, comprendo cómo él se sintió.  Aunque La fiesta del chivo de Vargas Llosa probablemente es más vistoso que La guerra del fin del mundo en cuanto a los artilugios de narrar (los narradores multiples, los juegos de tiempo, etcétera), me gustó este libro más por su historia misma: una ficción épica sobre la guerra de Canudos, un hecho histórico donde la nueva República de Brasil sojuzgó una rebelión milenaria en el pueblo de Canudos, estado de Bahía, en los años 1896 y 1897.  Para explicar cómo me atrapó esta historia, debo notar que la materia que Vargas Llosa eligió para narrar no tenía que ver con una guerra cualquiera.  Los rebeldes, la mayoría de quiénes eran análfabetos, fueron una gente distinta a causa de su pobreza extrema y su devoción fanatica a un tal Antônio Conselheiro (abajo): un místico errante que creyó que el nuevo gobierno republicano era una amenaza al cristianismo, un gobierno compuesto de esclavistas, y los secuaces del Anticristo.  Inexplicablemente, la mezcla surrealista de ex bandidos, personas marginalizadas, y ascetas religiosas que siguieron al "Consejero" se defendieron contra el ejército brasileño en cuatro batallas de creciente violencia: batallas luchadas con matices apocalíptcos por un lado y con prejuicios de clase por el otro lado.  Mientras que el desenlace nunca está en duda dado nuestro conocimiento de los eventos históricos, Vargas Llosa tiene tanta destreza narrativa que este mundo lejano se describe con un brío casi cinematagráfico durante las 921 páginas del libro.

One of my favorite bloggers recently told me that he loved The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) so much that he didn't want it to come to an end--a point he proved by stopping 30 pages short of the finish line only to read it again from about the middle of the book on!  While I didn't have quite that extreme a reaction, I understand the sentiment.  Although Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del Chivo) is probably flashier than The War of the End of the World in regards to its use of storytelling tricks (multiple first-person narrators, temporal perspectives, etc.), I enjoyed this work more for its story itself: an epic fictionalization of the young Brazilian republic's brutal putdown of a millenarian revolt in Canudos in the state of Bahía in 1896-1897.  To help explain the novel's grip on my imagination, I should note that this wasn't just any war that Vargas Llosa took on for his subject matter. The besieged, mostly-illiterate villagers who squared off against the government were a people apart both for their extreme poverty and their fanatic devotion to one Antônio Conselheiro (below), an itinerant mystic who viewed the new republican government as a threat to Christianity, as promoters of a return to slavery, and as agents of the Antichrist.  Against all odds, the surreal mix of ex-bandits, social outcasts, and religious ascetics that surrounded "the Counselor" stood up against the army in four increasingly violent confrontations waged with apocalyptic overtones on the one side and extreme class prejudices on the other.  While the outcome's never really in doubt thanks to our knowledge of how the historical events unfolded,Vargas Llosa's storytelling gifts are such that he manages to bring this strange, distant world alive with almost cinematic verve throughout the 921 pages of his book.

Un rodeo bibliográfico.  Aunque la historia de Vargas Llosa me impresionó mucho (mi única queja formal es una escena innecesaria hacia la final que tiene que ver con una violación), me gustaría parar por un minuto para mencionar Os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha del año 1902: un clásico brasileño de no ficción (traducido en español como Los sertones: Campaña de Canudos y en inglés como Rebellion in the Backlands) que fue la fuente principal de la novela del peruano.  Si no es necesario saber algo de Los sertones para disfrutar la lectura de La guerra del fin del mundo, ya sospecho que cada uno complementaría el otro para los que se interesaría hacer una lectura comparada sobre el tema.  El poco que he leído de Da Cunha hasta este punto da una introducción a la geografía y la gente de Canudos de manera espesa y minuciosa, y el brasileño mismo tiene una presencia vestigial en La guerra del fin del mundo como un personaje (un periodista miope sin nombre que acompaña al ejército durante las dos expediciones finales contra los del sertón).  Desgraciadamente, la prosa de Vargas Llosa era tan emocionante que no podía acabar con la lectura de Los sertones antes de escribir esta entrada.

A bibliographical detour.  While Vargas Llosa's storytelling wowed me (my only serious complaint was the introduction of a rape scene late in the novel that seemed complete unnecessary), I'd like to pause for a moment here to mention Euclides Da Cunha's 1902 Os Sertões: a Brazilian nonfiction classic (translated in English as Rebellion in the Backlands and in Spanish as Los sertones: Campaña de Canudos) that was the Peruvian's primary source for his novel. While it's not necessary to know anything about Rebellion in the Backlands to enjoy The War of the End of the World, I suspect that each book would complement the other for anyone interested in doing some comparative reading on the subject.  The little that I've read of Da Cunha so far provides a dense, meticulous introduction to the geography and the people of Canudos that's almost completely missing from Vargas Llosa's version of the events, and the Brazilian himself has a sort of vestigial presence in The War of the End of the World in the form of the character, an unnamed nearsighted journalist, who accompanies the army on the last two expeditions against the backlanders.  Unfortunately, I was so carried away by Vargas Llosa's prose that I was unable to complete my side-by-reading of Rebellion in the Backlands in time for this post.

Porque ambos la historia detrás de La guerra del fin del mundo y el personaje del periodista me fascinaron, probablemente no será sorpresa que la intersección entre la realidad y la representación de la realidad es uno de los temas fundamentales de la obra de Vargas Llosa.  O, como dice un personaje al hablar de los rumores de la guerra de Canudos: "La fantasía inventada...es más verosímil que la historia real" (468).  Y aunque el periodista es un símbolo perfecto con respecto a esto (¿es digno de confianza el testigo de un personaje que pasa mucho tiempo en la batalla final asustado como un niño e incapaz de ver a causa de la pérdida de sus lenteojos?), esto es sólo una parte de una matriz genial que también incluye las técnicas épicas dentro de su esquema de narrar.  Entre un elenco de personajes memorables (el ex esclavo João Grande, un anarquista escocés llamado Galileo Gall, el feroz João Abade--un ex asesino anteriormente conocido como João Satán antes de conocerse con el Consejero), uno de mis personajes preferidos es un enano tubercular que canta los cantares de gesta de los troveros portugueses sobre materia del ciclo carolingio.  Si es sorprendente descubrir la presencia de una chanson de geste sobre Roberto el Diablo en una obra que tiene que ver con una guerra civil en Brasil a finales del siglo XIX, es sólo un ejemplo más de la maestría narrativa de Vargas Llosa en La guerra del fin del mundo.  Magnífico.

Since both the history behind The War of the End of the World and the journalist character fascinated me, it probably won't come as a suprise to find out that the intersection between reality and the representation of reality is one of the great themes of Vargas Llosa's work.  Or, as one character puts it when discussing some of the rumors about the war, "the invented fantasy...is more credible than the true story" (468).  And although the journalist is a perfect symbol of this myopic tension (how reliable is his testimony given the fact that he spends much of the final battle cowering in fear and unable to see after the loss of his glasses?), this is just part of a rich matrix that also integrates epic storytelling techniques within a realistic framework.  Among a colorful cast of characters (the ex-slave Big João, a Scottish anarchist named Galileo Gall, the fierce Abbot João--a reformed killer once known as Satan João before falling under the Counselor's sway), one of my favorites is a tubercular circus dwarf who survives by singing the Carolingian-themed epics of Portuguese jongleurs.  That a chanson de geste about Robert the Devil would have anything at all to do with a civil war in late 19th-century Brazil may surprise you; however, it's just another stirring example of Vargas Llosa's storytelling artistry in The War of the End of the World. Superb.

(http://www.puntodelectura.com/)

Mario Vargas Llosa en 1981 (foto: Alicia Benavides)

Otros caminos a Canudos

Mario, Quaderno Ribadabia, #1 y #2

Gracias a Ever por recomendarme este libro con tanto entusiasmo y a Mario por prestarme la imagen de la novela con la tapa amarilla y por otra ayuda archivesca.//Thanks to Ever for recommending this book to me with such enthusiasm and to Mario for lending me the photo of the novel with the yellow cover and for other archival assistance.

Gérard de Nerval

"Le Rêve est une seconde vie".  --Gérard de Nerval (above), Aurélia

"The Poet"
by Théophile Gautier
France, 1867

I'll probably get around to posting about the rest of Gautier's My Fantoms at some point, but I wanted to pause for a moment here to sing the praises of its concluding chapter first.  Although translator Richard Holmes insists on calling "The Poet" a "story" for reasons that are beyond me, Gautier's affectionate tribute to his lifelong friend (originally published simply as "Gérard de Nerval") is decidedly more factual than fictional.  Gérard de Nerval's own life was apparently not so clearly defined in his mind, a type of fiction in its own right that was spent shuttling back and forth between the dream world and cold reality until he finally decided to hang himself one night on the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.  If the poet's tragic end clearly traumatized Gautier, who was tasked with identifying the body in the morgue, you, the 21st-century reader with multiple reading choices at hand, need have no such fears on your part.  While the biographer's retrospectively aware of the many signs of madness that Nerval's friends were late to recognize "in those days of literary eccentricity" then in vogue in Paris (161), this doesn't stop him from illustrating Nerval's "otherness" with the choicest of anecdotes: the wonderful story about the big Renaissance bed that Nerval bought and restored in honor of his infatuation with a woman he was too timid to approach in person, the Frenchman's travels in Goethe's Germany and the "Mohammedan" Orient, the unforgettable day the poet innocently chose to walk a live lobster on a blue silk ribbon through the gardens of the Palais Royal.  Gautier's also splendid at evoking an insider's picture of bohemian Paris (for example, the riots at one of Hugo's plays) that fans of the City of Light and/or writing about writers won't want to miss.  In short, excellent reading for any of you tired of our own day and age's regard for generic but media-savvy authors who peddle their boring wares via blog tours and tweets on Twitter and the like.  Source: Théophile Gautier (translated by Richard Holmes).  My Fantoms.  New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2008, 151-173.  (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia & Other Writings (Exact Change) with that lovely illustration that haunts me all the more because my French version of the novella from Le Livre de Poche is so unbearably ugly.

"Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?" he used to ask quietly, "or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk?  I have a liking for lobsters.  They are peaceful, serious creatures.  They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do.  And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad."  There were a thousand other reasons, each one more ingenuous than the last.
--My Fantoms, 163

La condesa sangriente

"La condesa sangriente"
por Alejandra Pizarnik
Argentina, 1965

No sabía mucho de la poetisa argentina Pizarnik (1936-1972) hasta recientemente, pero su relato "La condesa sangriente" era algo que lo veía mencionado en varios lugares hace un par de meses--casi siempre relacionado con el surrealismo francés o ese subgénero de narrativa erótica  ("La Morte amoureuse" de Gautier, "Carmilla" de Le Fanu, etcétera) que trata del vampirismo femenino.  Despertada la curiosidad, finalmente decidí de leerlo esta semana.  Resulta que "La condesa sangriente" no es un cuento sino una especie de poema en prosa sui generis que funciona como un texto en sí mismo y como un comentario sobre otro texto: un libro de 1963 de Valentine Penrose que se llama Erzsébet Báthory, la comtesse sanglante.  Báthory fue una condesa húngara acusada de asesinar más de 650 muchachas de manera singularmente horrenda, y Pizarnik pasa mucho tiempo en estas páginas describiendo los crímenes con detalles totalmente sangrientos: "Han habido dos metamorfosis", escribe de la condesa en uno de los momentos más moderados.  "Su vestido blanco ahora es rojo y donde hubo una muchacha hay un cadáver" (377).  En otra parte, ella documenta el entusiasmo de Báthory por producir géisers de sangre, por matar a sus víctimas por agua helada en la nieve, y de otras torturas "barrocas" que se les dejo a la imaginación.  Aunque los epítetos literarios que introducen cada uno de los doce fragmentos nos proporcionan un poco de contexto poético por lo que sigue, la autora siempre evita tratar de explicar el comportamiento de la condesa a favor de concentrarse en los hechos mismos.  Si es difícil saber lo que Pizarnik quería decir con todo esto (¿es un homenaje al tópico surrealista de "la belleza del crimen"?  ¿quería sugerir ella que los lectores, atentos al relato de manera voyerística, comparten rasgos sádicos con la condesa, la que contemplaba los espectáculos en vivo?), es muy facíl apreciar la hermosura de la escritura, las imágenes vivas, y las ráfagas de penetración psicológica.  De hecho, "La condesa sangriente" incluye uno de mis pasajes preferidos de todo el año: un momento interior donde algunas conjeturas sobre el lesbianismo de la condesa preparan al terreno a un paréntesis sobre la melancolía ("el mal del siglo XVI") que es sumamente conmovedor y, quizá, autobiográfico (384-385).  Pizarnik se suicidó menos que diez años después de la publicación de esta obra, un dato triste que prueba que el mal del siglo XVI sigue invicto hasta nuestros días.
*
I didn't know much about the Argentinean poet Pizarnik (1936-1972) until fairly recently, but I kept seeing her tale "La condesa sangriente" ("The Bloody Countess") mentioned all over the place a couple of months back--almost always in relation to its ties with French surrealism or that subgenre of erotically-charged literature (Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse," Le Fanu's "Carmilla," etc.) concerned with female vampirism.  Intrigued, I finally decided to read it this week.  It turns out that "The Bloody Countess" isn't a short story at all but rather a gory, genre-bending poem in prose that functions as both a text in itself and as a commentary on yet another text: a 1963 book by Valentine Penrose called Erzsébet Báthory, la comtesse sanglante.  Bathory was a 16th-century Hungarian noble accused of killing over 650 young girls in singularly horrific fashion, and Pizarnik spends much of her time in these pages describing the crimes in full Technicolor detail: "There had been two metamorphoses," she writes about the Countess in one of her more restrained moments. "Her white dress is now red, and where there was a girl there is now a cadaver" (377).  Elsewhere, she documents Bathory's fondness for generating geysers of blood, freezing her victims to death in the snow, and other "baroque" tortures perhaps best left to the imagination.  While the literary epithets that introduce each of the twelve fragments provide some poetic context for what follows, the author studiously avoids trying to explain the Countess' behavior and concentrates on the deeds instead.  If it's difficult to know what Pizarnik hoped to achieve with all this (Is it a homage to that familiar surrealist topos of "the beauty of crime"?  Did she wish to link the reader's voyeurism in following this tale to the Countess' sadistic enjoyment contemplating such real life spectacles?), it's not hard at all to appreciate the beauty of her writing, the vividness of her imagery, or her flashes of insight.  In fact, "The Bloody Countess" includes one of my favorite passages I've come across all year: a rare interior moment within the work where speculation about the Countess' possible lesbianism leads to a beautiful meditation on melancholy ("the evil of the 16th century"), perhaps autobiographical in nature, that's moving in the extreme (384-385).  Pizarnik killed herself less than ten years after publishing this work, a sad fact that proves that the evil of the 16th century lives on unconquered to our day.

Fuente: "La condesa sangriente".  Alejandra Pizarnik, Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, edición preparada por Cristina Piña.  Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1994, 371-391.

Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong

Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong Invitation Below!

¡Invitación al Readalong de Kristin Lavransdatter abajo!

The 2666 readalong that Claire and Steph put together has been so rewarding for so many of us that a number of the participants, including yours truly, have started openly bemoaning the impending end of Roberto Bolaño's 1100-page masterpiece. To help make up for that loss, Emily from Evening All Afternoon and I thought it might make sense to try to fill the void with yet another 1100-page doorstopper: Sigrid Undset's 1920-1922 Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which we'll be reading at a one book a month pace from October through December. You, the bloghopping connoisseur of contemporary fiction, are personally invited to read along with us. Might you be interested?

To help you decide, here are a few things you might want to consider. First, Undset's trilogy is both Nobel Prize-certified and absolutely wildly acclaimed on a certain online book dealer's customer review database. I don't put any particular stock in either of those things myself, but I'm very intrigued by the mix of this Norwegian author's fan base. Second, Kristin Lavransdatter has the reputation of an early 20th century classic that had fallen out of prestige for a while before starting to make its recent comeback. Also interesting. Perhaps even more importantly for me, Undset's trilogy is considered a foundational work in contemporary Scandinavian literature--a slice of the world literature pie often overlooked by comp lit fans and definitely hardly ever sampled by me. Tiina Nunnally's award-winning English translation is also supposed to be quite the big deal, but there's no shortage of versions of the work available to suit all tastes and pocketbooks.

Emily has a great entry about the trilogy, with more details on its specific literary claims to fame, over at her readalong post here. I won't bother to repeat those details, but suffice it to say that the main reason Emily and I wanted to propose another shared read was the great group of friends we met through the Bolaño readalong: friendly, insightful readers who made the readalong experience so much richer than it would have been otherwise. Plus, we thought that Claire and Steph deserved a break after all their organizational toils. Thankfully many of those same enthusiastic bloggers are continuing on with us here, and you--regardless of whether you maintain a blog or not, regardless of how casual your interest in literature is--are welcome to join in on the fun. I hope some of you will consider participating!

Logistics

October read, Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath

November read, Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

December read, Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

(All posts, whether reviews or mere impressions, should be shared around the end of each month, so that the other readers in the group can visit your blog and make comments. If you're running a little ahead or behind or just want to read along without posting anything, that's fine, too. Please note that Emily and I will be keeping a running list of participants on each of our blogs, so just let one or the other of us know if you'd like to join the readalong. P.S. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a huge crush on Emily's blog, so please check that out and those of the others in the group regardless of your interest in the readalong as a whole! )

The Readalong Group

Emily (co-host) of Evening All Afternoon
3M, 1morechapter
Amy, New Century Reading
Bea
Bethany, Dreadlock Girl Reads & Orbis Terrarum Challenge

Claire, Kiss a Cloud
Dana, Scraptherapy
Dawn, She Is Too Fond of Books
Don (no blog)
The Duck Thief, Great White North

E.L. Fay, This Book and I Could Be Friends

Frances, Nonsuch Book & Lost in Translation Reading Challenge

Gavin, Page 247

Jackie, Farm Lane Books

Jason, Moored at Sea
Jill, Rhapsody in Books
Katrina, Katrina's Reads
Lena, Save Ophelia

Lu, Regular Rumination

Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
softdrink, Fizzy Thoughts
Susan, Pages Turned
Tuesday, tuesday in silhouette

Valerie, Life Is a Patchwork Quilt

*Explanación de esta entrada*

¡Hola a todos mis amigos hispanoblantes! Voy a leer Kristin Lavransdatter, una trilogía noruega escrita por Sigrid Undset (ganadora del Premio Nobel) en los años 1920-1922, con un grupo de bloggers de habla inglesa mayormente compuesto de mis amigas del readalong de 2666 de Roberto Bolaño. Si algunos de ustedes quisieran leer Kristin Lavransdatter con nosotros, favor de decirme y ¡bienvenidos a la fiesta! Se supone que haya una traducción en castellano disponible. Si ustedes no quieren participar en el readalong pero les gustaría ver mis cursis entradas bilingües sobre las distintas partes del libro, favor de decirme eso también. En cuanto al horario, el plan es que vamos a leer un libro de Kristin Lavransdatter cada mes, empezando en octubre y terminando en diciembre y publicando nuestros posts a finales del mes correspondiente. Mientras tanto, ¡saludos a todos!