Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo

Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo (Tusquets Editores, 2009)
por Haruki Murakami [traducido del japonés de Lourdes Porta y Junichi Matsuura]
Japón, 1994

"Todo aquello le parecía una escena fantástica, irreal, pintada por un artista con trastornos mentales".

(Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo, 760)

Tokio, 1984.  Tooru Okada, un treintañero que está sin trabajo, empieza a recibir llamadas telefónicas muy raras.  Primero desaparece su gato y después su mujer.  Sin saber por qué precisamente, es evidente que algo ha radicalmente cambiado en su vida personal.  Dentro de poco, el tipo se pone adentro de un pozo seco en la vecindad para reflexionar sobre todos estos cambios turbulentos.  Problema número uno: en vez de ser un lugar tranquilo para pensar, resulta que el pozo pertenece a un solar abandonado conocido como "la mansión de la horca"  por su mala fama como el lugar donde sucedió el suicidio de una entera familia y aun más mala suerte en los años posteriores.  Problema número dos: tal vez el pozo sea una puerta a otras dimensiones o algo por el estilo.  Así empieza uno de los mejores libros que he leído en este año y probablemente el mejor de todos en cuanto al despliegue de una imaginación sin trabas.  ¡Cómo me entusiasmó éste, mi primer Murakami!  Debo aclarar que no me considero un aficionado a la literatura fantástica para nada.  Sin obstante, la destreza del novelista en describir la realidad, la irrealidad, y el umbral entre los dos mundos era sumamente asombroso.  Además de ser un relato sobre la búsqueda de la esposa Kumiko por el señor Okada, la Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo es una rica mezcolanza de hilos narrativos, estilos, y temas.  Conforme con una novela donde los personajes incluyen no uno sino dos equipos de videntes, una "prostituta de la mente", y una vecina adolescente que comunica con el protagonista en persona y telepáticamente, no es de sorprender que algunos de los momentos más psiquedélicos de la obra tengan lugar en secuencias oníricas y/o escenas abiertamente surrealistas.  Al mismo tiempo, algunos de los pasajes más llamativos tienen que ver con la presencia de la violencia en la sociedad japonesa: o sea la repentina brutalidad de un hombre moderno que es más o menos pacífico con un bate de béisbol o sea la brutalidad de la Segunda Guerra Mundial (en particular, la violencia de los japoneses contra los chinos en Manchuria y la violencia de los rusos contra los japoneses después del supuesto Incidente Nomonhan).  Una lectura inesperadamente jugosa cuya rareza intrínseca está hecha aun más interesante por una especie de ternura hacia los personajes por parte de Murakami.  Excelente. (http://www.tusquetseditores.com/)

Haruki Murakami

The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames

The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames (The Porcupine's Quill, 2005)
by Paul Glennon
Canada, 2005

Man, I fucking hated this book.  Lame, lamer, lamest approach to the interconnected short story collection-as-novel idea, the main problem not being the potentially interesting storytelling structure itself but the unvarying flat monotone "I" of the various narrators: whether they're supposed to be weird little kids or grumpy old businessmen, they all sound the same.  In addition, the obsession with outlandish conspiracy theories and "clever" plot twists felt really forced to me.  While Glennon claims to have constructed The Dodecahedron on "mildly Oulipian principles," something that certainly sounds appealing on paper, I'm sorry to say that I'll definitely remember it more for its unconvincing authorial voice and its dry, androidal prose than for any resemblances to Perec and Calvino.  Whatever.  (http://porcupinesquill.ca/)

Paul Glennon

Kinder Opinions
 Anthony (Time's Flow Stemmed)
E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)
Emily (Evening All Afternoon)
Frances (Nonsuch Book)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

The Battle of Chile

The Battle of Chile [La batalla de Chile] (Icarus Films DVD, 2009)
Directed by Patricio Guzmán
Chile-Cuba-France, 1975, 1976 and 1978
In Spanish with English subtitles

All too aware that many of my fellow bloggers would much rather hype multiple shitty film adaptations of 19th and 20th century British novels than talk about any documentary on a Latin American topic, I'd still like to spend a few moments here today in honor of Patricio Guzmán's nearly four and a half hour long The Battle of Chile (note: this expansive four-DVD set also includes a separate disc dedicated to Guzmán's hour-long 1997 doc Chile, Obstinate Memory, a powerful look at memory in that country some 25 years after the events depicted in this, his signature work).  Whether you share Guzmán's obvious pro-Allende sympathies or not, this remarkable film--shot in democratic Chile in the year leading up to the Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973 and finished in exile abroad after the director had to flee the country for his own safety--offers up a startling look at a country on the brink of civil war.  The footage is fantastic, the images often wrenching.  In part one's "The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie," for example, an hour and a half of man and woman on the street interviews about the paralyzing food shortages, the labor and transit strikes, and the massive demonstrations for and against the socialist Allende concludes with the unforgettable scene of an Argentinean cameraman inadvertently filming his own death--shot to death on camera, cowardly and with deliberation, by a Chilean army officer participating in a preliminary coup attempt against Allende in late June. In part two's "The Coup d'État," the democratically-elected president Allende is literally bombed out of office with the military's treasonous daytime attack on the presidential palace in the heart of Santiago.  Part three's "The Power of the People," while perhaps lacking a single visual image quite as powerful as those that close the preceding segments, compensates by focusing on the mass rallies bringing hundreds of thousands of Allende supporters to the streets and the behind the scenes strategy debates of those on the left intent on bringing Allende's workers' revolution to the masses. While long and occasionally repetitive in its depiction of the strife that was tearing Chile apart, The Battle of Chile struck me as a raw but staggering achievement in its framing of a situation in which people from both sides were openly confiding that a civil war would likely be the only way to resolve the political stalemate.  Riveting.  (http://www.icarusfilms.com/)

The Battle of Chile's crew (from left to right): Jorge Müller Silva (director of photography), Patricio Guzmán (director), Federico Elton (production manager), José Bartolomé (assistant director), Bernardo Menz (sound).

 In the 1996 novel Distant Star, which alludes to Chile's transition from the troubled democratic state of Allende to the murderous sponsor of state terrorism it became under Pinochet, one of Roberto Bolaño's characters opines that "it seems to me that we are entering into the world championship of ugliness and brutality" ("me parece que estamos entrando en el campeonato mundial de la fealdad y la brutalidad").  Lending a real-life exclamation point to this fictional pronouncement, I feel it important to note that The Battle of Chile cameraman Jorge Müller pictured above was eventually detained and then "disappeared" by the military junta led by Pinochet and supported by the Nixon White House.  RIP.

Glosa

Glosa (Seix Barral, 2006)
por Juan José Saer
Francia, 1985

but then time is your misfortune father said.

Para disipar cualquier duda sobre si el lector está leyendo una obra que versa sobre el mecanismo de narrar además de contar una historia, el narrador de Glosa, la séptima novela del argentino Juan José Saer, empieza su relato con una efusión de incertidumbre precisa: "Es, si se quiere, octubre, octubre o noviembre, del sesenta o del sesenta y uno, octubre tal vez, el catorce o el dieceséis, o el veintidós o el veintitrés tal vez, el veintitrés de octubre de mil novecientos sesenta y uno pongamos  --que más da" (13).  Dentro de poco, está claro que esta indiferencia irónica al tiempo narrativo ocurre a  imitación del argumento de la novela, que se trata de una larga conversación entre Ángel Leto y un conocido suyo apodado el Matemático durante una caminata de veintiuno cuadras en el día de octubre bajo consideración.  Dado que el tema principal de la conversación tiene que ver con y sigue regresando a lo sucedido a la fiesta de cumpleaños de un tal Jorge Washington Noriega (y que ni Leto ni el Matemático estuvieron allí), no sorprenderá a uno que esta reconstrucción de los eventos en su turno está basada en las versiones fragmentarias de otros invitados de confiabilidad dudosa.  Además de hacer juegos de manos con todas estas cajas chinas con un entusiasmo experimentalista, Saer, o si se quiere, su narrador parlanchín, también llama la atención a las dimensiones humanas de su hilo argumental de manera asombrosa.  Por, mientras que la caminata del día del veintitrés de octubre de mil novecientos sesenta y uno sólo dura una hora y veintiuno cuadras al recordarla, el tiempo está manipulado de tal manera que descubrimos lo que pasa en el año venidero de mil novecientos setenta y nueve también: el año en que un personaje tendrá que refugiarse en Europa a causa de la dictadura militar en Argentina y el año en que el otro personaje va a morir a causa de sus "afiliaciones subversivas".  Como una meditación sobre el tiempo y la mortalidad, Glosa es cálida, divertida y un poco exigente para leer a la vez--pero completamente vale la pena de hacerlo para ver cómo Saer responde al reto de Faulkner ("but then time is your misfortune father said") en la frase de la dedicatoria.  Genial.   (http://www.editorialplaneta.com.ar/)           

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (Open Letter, 2010)
by Juan José Saer [translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph]
France, 1985

but then time is your misfortune father said.

To dispel any doubts over whether the reader might be confronting a work just as concerned with the mechanics of narration as it is with telling its story, the narrator of Glosa [here unhelpfully titled The Sixty-Five Years of Washington], the Argentinean Juan José Saer's seventh novel, playfully begins his tale with an outpouring of precision uncertainty:  "Suppose it's October, October or November, let's say, in 1960 or 1961, October, maybe the fourteenth or sixteenth, or the twenty-second or twenty-third maybe--the twenty-third of October in 1961 let's say--what's the difference" (3).  Before long, it becomes clear that this ironic disregard for narrative time is actually imitating aspects of the novel's plot, which has to do with an extended conversation that takes place between Ángel Leto and an acquaintance nicknamed the Mathematician during a walk of twenty-one blocks on the October day in question.  Given that the main thread of the conversation keeps coming back to what took place at the 65th birthday party of one Jorge Washington Noriega nearly two months earlier, a party in which neither Leto nor the Mathematician was even present, it will probably come as no surprise that the reconstruction of what happened is itself based on competing and fragmentary versions of the events as recounted by other partygoers of varying reliability.  In addition to laying out this series of nested stories with such experimentalist zeal, though, Saer--or if you prefer, his chatty narrator--also draws attention to the human dimensions of his storyline in a rather impressive way.  For, while the remembered walk of the twenty-third of October of 1961 only lasts one hour and twenty-one blocks, the novel's future time is telescoped in such a manner that another sequence of events zooms in on 1979: the year one character will be found taking refuge in Europe on account of the military dictatorship in Argentina and the year the other character will die on account of his "subversive affiliations."  A warm, humorous, and somewhat demanding meditation on time and mortality all at once--but totally worth it to see how Saer picks up the "but then time is your misfortune father said" Faulkner gauntlet that's used in the novel's dedication and then runs with it.  Brilliant. (http://www.openletterbooks.org/)

Juan José Saer (1937-2005)

Retrato del Matemático/Portrait of the Mathematician

Por razones estadísticas, más que de popularidad efectiva, el Matemático se ve obligado, de tanto en tanto, a saludar, ya sea con un ademán rápido, con un movimiento de cabeza, o con alguna fórmula escueta y convencional, a los conocidos que va cruzando  --estadísticas que por una parte desfavorecen a Leto ya que, como vive en la ciudad desde hace poco tiempo, tiene muchos menos conocidos que el Matemático, que pertenece a ella ab origenes, y que por otra parte, desde hace algunas cuadras, considerando el aumento gradual y sistemático del número de peatones a medida que van llegando al centro, acrecientan en favor del Matemático las posibilidades de toparse con conocidos. A decir verdad, únicamente en términos cuantitativos sale favorecido, porque en los planos estético, político, afectivo y emocional, como dicen, ¿no?, y, como dicen también, moral, y si se quiere, y hablando mal y pronto, y como se decía antes, existencial, el Matemático abomina del grueso de sus conciudadanos, en especial los de su propia clase  --la burguesía sanguinaria-- contra la que, desde los ocho o nueve años, un desprecio reconcentrado y un odio inexplicable lo trabajan.  A pesar de sus ideas liberales, sus padres contemporizan con jefes y poseedores los cuales, a su vez, por respeto al nombre patricio y, sobre todo, a la extensión de las tierras alrededor de Tostado, toleran en ellos el humanismo liberal, como en otros miembros de su clase la epilepsia o la pederastia.

(Glosa, 96-97)

For statistical reasons, more so than actual popularity, the Mathematician is every so often obliged to greet, whether with a quick gesture, a nod of his head, or in some terse, conventional way, the acquaintances he passes--statistics that on the one hand are disadvantageous to Leto since he has only lived in the city a short while and knows considerably fewer people than the Mathematician, a constituent ab origine, and that on the other hand, for the last few blocks, considering the gradual and systematic inflation to the number of pedestrians as they approach the city center, increase in the Mathematician's favor the chances of bumping into an acquaintance.  In fact, in only purely quantifiable terms is he favored, because in aesthetic, political, emotional or psychological terms, so to speak, no?, and on moral--as they say, and if you like, and speaking ill and in haste--and existential levels, as I was saying earlier, the Mathematician loathes a good portion of his fellow citizens, especially those of his own class--the bloodlust bourgeoisie--for whom he has cultivated, from the age of eight or nine, a concentrated contempt and inexplicable hatred.  In spite of their liberal beliefs, his parents are friendly with political bosses and landowners who, likewise, in deference to their aristocratic name and, more than anything, to the expanse of land surrounding Tostado, tolerate their liberal humanism, the way they would the epileptics or pederasts in their class.

(The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, translated by Steve Dolph, 77-78).

*E.L. Fay of This Book and I Could Be Friends was less enthusiastic about Saer's work:  for "the dissent," see her review from last year here.*

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (Vintage, 1999)
by Jill Lepore
USA, 1998

Badmouthed in a number of unintentionally funny Amazon 1-star reviews for being not linear, "not scholarly," "post-modern" and (my favorite) "stridently anti-Christian," Harvard historian Jill Lepore's 1999 Bancroft Prize winner The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity is quite simply one of the most provocative and compelling pieces of history writing that I've come across in the last couple of years.  Great stuff.  Taking a thematic rather than a chronological approach to her topic, Lepore looks at the bloody 1675-1676 conflict between Algonquian Indians (headed by the Wampanoag leader "King Philip") and British colonists in New England to wrestle with the idea that the war of words in the event's telling and retelling was just as important as the atrocity-ridden war itself in terms of defining a new colonial identity.  Although I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying what occasionally reads like a disquisition on cruelty, I probably shouldn't have been given Lepore's skill at interrogating her sources and the vibrancy of her prose.  Ironically, in a work in which the primacy of language takes center stage throughout--from Increase Mather's soul-searching May 1676 question "Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us when his displeasure is written in such visible and bloody characters?" (69) to distraught colonist Edward Wharton's assertion that the war's ravages had left English lands "a burdensome and menstruous cloth" (73) and on to a lengthy discussion about how colonial leaders were eventually able to rationalize a policy of extermination or enslavement against "inhuman" native neighbors they had once wanted to "save"--one of Lepore's most potent sequences is visual rather than language-oriented in nature: the revelation that the vanquished Philip's head was left to rot atop a flagpole in Plymouth for decades after the war.  Whether that be your idea of Christian justice or not, I found The Name of War to be a fascinating and complex look at a confrontation model that would be repeated again and again in later U.S. history and just an exhilarating example of close reading by an historian at the top of her game.  Bring it.  (www.randomhouse.com/vintage)

Jill Lepore

Todas las almas

Todas las almas (Debolsillo, 2009)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 1989

Having now been wowed by two Javier Marías novels in a row, presently waiting for another title of his to arrive in the mail, and ever more eagerly looking forward to a three month long Tu rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] group read with Frances and others this summer, I hope you, my longsuffering public, are prepared for the steady diet of Marías and Proust posts that I have in store for you here this year.  If not, don't slam the door on your way out!  Todas las almas [All Souls], like the achingly beautiful Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí [Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me] that would follow it five years later, begins with the sort of emotional bombshell of an intro which Marías seems partial to and which a lesser writer just couldn't pull off: "Dos de los tres han muerto desde que me fui de Oxford, y eso me hace pensar, supersticiosamente, que quizá esperaron a que yo llegara y consumiera mi tiempo allí para darme ocasión de conocerlos y para que ahora pueda hablar de ellos.  Puede, por tanto, que --siempre supersticiosamente-- esté obligado a hablar de ellos" (17) ["Of the three, two have died since I left Oxford and the superstitious thought occurs to me that they were perhaps just waiting for me to arrive and live out my time there in order to give me the chance to know them and, now, to speak about them.  In other words--and this is equally superstitious--I may be under an obligation to speak about them"] (3, as translated by Margaret Jull Costa).  However, not only does the rest of the novel measure up to the challenge presented by this "obligation"  mentioned at the beginning but it even exceeds expectations with the unnamed Spanish narrator's elegiac account of his two turbulent years as a foreign don at Oxford--a span of time in which the weight of long-repressed secrets and the trauma of memory among his small circle of friends and acquaintances will make the character worry that he's more connected to the world of the dead than the world of the living.  While this summary is bound to make the novel sound like more of a downer than it actually is, suffice it to say that All Souls is often quite humorous in its depiction of Oxford life and always graced by that wry observational style of Marías' that makes him seem like a distant descendent of Proust or something.  Maybe not as "deep" or as wrenching as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me but way more than arresting and involving enough to have me lusting after the remainder of Marías' back catalogue.  All of it, that is.  (http://www.debolsillo.com/)

I read Marías in the handsome Spanish edition pictured up top.  An English translation by Margaret Jull Costa was published by New Directions in 2000 in a slightly less garish cover than usual for that publishing house.

La pista de hielo

La pista de hielo (Anagrama, 2009)
por Roberto Bolaño
España, 1993

Digamos que La pista de hielo, el debú de Bolaño como novelista, se parece a un Rashomon novelado o algo por el estilo.  Como con más que una de sus obras posteriores, la obra es una especie de novela policíaca sin detectives y algo en cual la solución del delito es menos importante que el testimonio de los testigos de poca confianza.  Remo Morán, un escritor fracasado chileno, Gaspar Heredia, un poeta fracasado mexicano, y Enric Rosquelles, un exitoso burócrata y malversador catalán,  hablan por turnos; sus versiones de los eventos bajo consideración tratan de un triángulo de amor que incluye una guapísima patinadora rubia, tres cadaveres, y una misteriosa pista de hielo ilegalmente construida dentro de un caserón en la Costa Brava (para los lectores de una sensibilidad particular, también hay una referencia borgiana/schwobiana a una "vida imaginada": la de un libro ficticio, Santa Lydwina y la Sutilez del Hielo, que supuestamente tiene que ver con la patrona del patinaje y de las enfermedades crónicas y, de modo divertido, está atribuido a la pluma de Henri Lefebvre, el intelectual francés asociado con la Internacional Situacionista).  Aunque no es tan inventivo o estructuralmente arriesgado como Los detectives salvajes, 2666, La literatura nazi en América, o Estrella distante, La pista de hielo ya es un libro que me satisface completamente gracias al don de Bolaño en cuanto al habla de sus personajes y por sus secuencias oníricas asombrosas.  (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

The Skating Rink (New Directions, 2009)
by Roberto Bolaño [translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews]
Spain, 1993

As with more than one of Bolaño's later efforts, his assured, atmospheric debut as a novelist is a sort of detective story without a detective and one in which the solution to the crime is less important than the Rashomon-like testimony of its unreliable witnesses.  Remo Morán, a failed Chilean novelist, Gaspar Heredia, a failed Mexican poet, and Enric Rosquelles, a successful Catalan bureaucrat and embezzler, take turns narrating their versions of the events in question in the work, events in which a love triangle involving a beautiful blonde figure skater, three cadavers, and a mysterious ice skating rink illegally constructed within a ramshackle old mansion situated on Spain's Costa Brava figure prominently among the key ingredients (note: as an added bonus for readers of a certain stripe, there's also a fab Borgesian/Schwobian reference to an imaginary book called Saint Lydwina or the Subtlety of Ice which purportedly has to do with the patron saint of ice skaters and the chronically ill but whose authorship here is amusingly attributed to Henri Lefebvre, the French intellectual who influenced the Situationist International).  While not as inventive or as formally risk-taking an opus as The Savage Detectives, 2666, Nazi Literature in the Americas, or Distant Star, The Skating Rink's still a mightily satisfying affair that blends Bolaño's gift for replicating real life speech with those dark night of the soul dream sequences that continue to send chills up and down my spine.  Nice.  (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

Bolaño

This was my first Bolaño read for Rise's 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge, a/k/a "the only challenge that matters," ha ha. I think it's now my ninth Bolaño overall, following in the footsteps of Los detectives salvajes, Estrella distante, Amuleto, 2666, Nocturno de Chile, Llamadas telefónicas, La literatura nazi en América, and El Tercer Reich.  Ah, what fond memories of almost all of them!