Mi Top 10 de 2011

Los libros preferidos del año (en orden alfabético por autor)

1) Rayuela, de Julio Cortázar (1963)

2) The Duel [Der Zweikampf], de Heinrich von Kleist (1810)

3) Nada, de Carmen Laforet (1945)

4) The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, de Jill Lepore (1998)

5) Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, de Javier Marías (1994)

6) Tu rostro mañana. 1 Fiebre y lanza, de Javier Marías (2002)

6) Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño, de Javier Marías (2004)

6) Tu rostro mañana.  3 Veneno y sombra y adiós, de Javier Marías (2007)

7) Tiempo de silencio, de Luis Martín-Santos (1962)

8) Crónica del pájaro que da cuerda al mundo, de Haruki Murakami (1994)

9) Los adioses, de Juan Carlos Onetti (1954)

10) Swann's Way [Du côté de chez Swann], de Marcel Proust (1913)

10) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs], de Marcel Proust (1919)

11) Glosa, de Juan José Saer (1985)

Ok, bueno, hay un libro de sobra.  Gracias por visitar y ¡feliz año nuevo! a todos.

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (Ediciones Era, 2001)
por César Aira
Argentina, 2000

Para gente como yo que se aburre fácilmente con la novela histórica, leer Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero es casi como rendirse a un gran chiste surrealista.  Me gustó.  A caballo entre una biografía ficcionalizada y una novela histórica fingida, esta novela corta de 74 páginas admirablemente cuenta lo que pasa durante un día en los años 1830 cuando el pintor viajero Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858, el artista de carne y hueso retratado en la portada arriba), de paso entre Mendoza y Buenos Aires en la Argentina de las luchas con las fuerzas indígenas, tiene la mala suerte de recibir un rayo en la cabeza.  La descripción del narrador es apropriadamente horrorosa.  "Como una estatua de níquel, hombre y bestia se encendieron de electricidad.  Rugendas se vio brillar, espectador de sí mismo por un instante de horror, que lamentablemente habría de repetirse" (31).  Según se verá, el segundo rayo le cae al pobre pintor menos de 15 segundos después del primero con "efectos más devastadores".  El hombre y el caballo "volaron unos veinte metros, encendidos y crepitando como una hoguera fría.  Seguramente por efecto de la descomposición atómica que estaban sufriendo cuerpos y elementos en la ocasión, la caída no fue fatal" (32).  A pesar de la tragedia física de Rugendas, que sobrevive el acidente pero con la cara destrozada y con heridas a los nervios faciales que se hace parecer a un monstruo y que se requiere la morfina, la provocación de Aira se revela cuando el narrador da a intender que la estética del pintor ha cambiado y quizá ha mejorado a causa del accidente.  ¿De dónde sale esta nueva inspiración artística?  ¿La electricidad, las drogas, o ambas cosas a la vez?  No se sabe por cierto, pero sea lo que sea el pintor viajero, en tiempos pasados el representante por excelencia de su género de realismo, ahora descubre que el mundo real es más y más irreal y llena de sorpresas como la escena en cuál un indio aparece con "un descomunal salmón" y indica a Rugendas que parece querer decir "me lo llevo para reproducción" (61).  ¿Un poco raro?  Sí, clarinete, pero deliciosamente incomformista al mismo tiempo.  (www.edicionesera.com.mx)

César Aira

Washington's Crossing

Washington's Crossing (Oxford University Press, 2006)
by David Hackett Fischer
USA, 2004

David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, like Jill Lepore's über-arresting The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity earlier in the year, is a timely reminder of just what I've been missing out on by doing so little history reading these days.  I intend to rectify that in 2012.  A superb narrative history of the New York and New Jersey campaigns in winter 1776-1777 when the fate of the young American republic was hanging in the balance, Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning work breathes frigid, lifelike life into Emanuel Leutze's famous Washington Crossing the Delaware portrait by combining a meticulously detailed battle chronicle with some marvelously understated writing about the American, British, and Hessian forces.  The result is a reading experience which, while often rousing due to the story that's being told, succeeds as a result of a careful marshalling of the sources rather than a reliance on sensationalistic anecdotes.  In a book that Fischer himself contends in his conclusion "is mainly about contingency, in the sense of people making choices, and choices making a difference in the world" (364), I'd like to single out a couple of notable examples of how the historian's own storytelling choices served him particularly well in this effort.  First, I was delighted by Fischer's careful attention to regional differences among the American army and various state militias.  In recounting a battle scene where a dense fog suddenly arose to provide unexpected cover for a U.S. retreat, for example, Fischer wryly notes: "New Englanders received this event as a 'providential occurrence.'  Virginians regarded it as a stroke of fortune" (101).  Secondly, Fischer's unobtrusiveness as a narrator makes you really take note on the infrequent occasions when he does command center stage.  On Thomas Paine's publication of The American Crisis: "The first sentence had the cadence of a drumbeat.  Even after two hundred years, its opening phrases still have the power to lift a reader out of his seat.  'These are the times that try men's souls,' Paine began.  'The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman'" (140).  Having not yet even said anything about the complex but essentially favorable portrait of General George Washington that eventually emerges here, I'll merely confess that even this cynic was moved by one of the teachable moments that Fischer, a longtime professor at nearby Brandeis University, produced about the tribulations of Washington and his army near the end: "We celebrate 1776 as the most glorious year in American history.  They remembered it as an agony, especially the 'dark days' of autumn" (363).  Great stuff--and yet another resounding victory for real history over its watered-down progeny, historical fiction. (www.oup.com)

David Hackett Fischer

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail (The Library of America, 1991)
by Francis Parkman
USA, 1849

For a book that I'd checked out of the library several months ago and then basically overlooked month after month after month, Francis Parkman's 1849 travel classic The Oregon Trail--a riveting first-person account of the then 23-year old Parkman's trip out west along about half of the Oregon Trail in 1846--delivered all the nonstop reading entertainment that I could ask for during the short amount of time that it was actually in my hands.  What a fantastic read.  A marvelous--if often merciless--observer, the recent Harvard grad and future eminent historian Parkman's colorful travel diary is laced with anecdotal scorn for almost everybody he ran into during the course of his journey--be they frontier emigrants ("some of the vilest outcasts in the country" [13]), Mormons ("armed fanatics" [333]), or any of the dozens of American Indian tribes he encountered along the trail ("savages" for the adults or "miniature savages" for the children).  Given his unabashed racism toward non-whites in general and Native Americans in particular, I should probably note that Parkman's period prejudices, while unflattering in the extreme, actually acount for some of the most fascinating clash of culture moments in the text.  He claims, for example, that he had "come into the country almost exclusively with a view of observing the Indian character.  Having from childhood felt a curiosity on this subject, and having failed completely to gratify it by reading, I resolved to have recourse to observation" (111).  To this end, in one of the highlights of the work, he recounts an extended pit stop spent among the Sioux Indians in the Black Hills country.  So what does this representative of Christian "civilization," who has already declared that the Indian soul is "dormant" from a spiritual point of view (99), manage to take away from his anthropological moment in the sun?  In one of the more uncomfortable moments, we get this confession:

For the most part, a civilized white man can discover but very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian.  With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren of the prairie.  Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that having breathed for a few months or a few weeks the air of this region, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast, and if expedient, he could shoot them with as little compunction as they themselves would experience after performing the same office upon him.  Yet, in the countenance of the Panther, I gladly read that there were at least some points of sympathy between him and me.  We were excellent friends, and as we rode together through rocky passages, deep dells and little barren plains, he occupied himself very zealously in teaching me the Dahcotah language (242-243).

I have to admit that the first time I read this passage, I was more than a little creeped out by Parkman's apparent willingness to exterminate members of a tribe who had offered him hospitality.  Upon rereading the passage tonight, I'm now more struck by the mutual mistrust and suspicion that must have marred many potential white-native friendships similar to this one.  I think Parkman was very honest in that regard, and it's just this sort of unvarnished candor--more than his observational skills or his often-amusing tendency to badmouth others or the unfortunate racism on display--that helps make his narrative such bracing and compelling reading even today.  In any event, an unexpectedly juicy delight.  (www.loa.org)

Francis Parkman at age 20

Abandoned Furniture on the Prairie

Parkman's descriptions of his Indian encounters are so fascinating from a historical point of view that it's easy to overlook the way that he manages to make the mundane seem memorable in less adventurous moments along the trail.  Here's one of my favorite quiet moments from early on:

  It is worth noticing, that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well-waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak.  These, many of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes.  Imported, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the remote wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky, then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon.  But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated.  The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie (84).

More on Parkman

Amateur Reader (Tom) has written four interesting pieces on Parkman to date.  They can be found here, here, here, and here in the order they were written (all recommended, natch).

The Widow

The Widow [La veuve Couderc] (NYRB Classics, 2008)
by Georges Simenon [translated from the French by John Petrie]
France, 1942

Although it's not too difficult to find any number of otherwise sensible people willing to tell you that Simenon's one of the greatest crime writers ever, man, I'm not sure what the eff they're talking about w/r/t the seriously uninvolving The Widow.  At its heart a nod to the eternal appeal of both senseless crime and "the stale breath of love" (108), this bleak boy meets girl noir introduces you to an unlikely (and unlikable) couple in the form of the dull Jean, a former rich kid who has just been released from jail for murder, and the equally dull Tati, a middle-aged schemer who spends most of the mercifully brief novel annoying both Jean and the reader with her bossy, jealous, and clingy ways.  That things don't turn out happily ever after for the two charmers is maybe nobody's fault but their own, but Simenon himself is definitely to blame for the unconvincing dialogue and a brutal ending that's telegraphed so far in advance as to seem contrived.  Note: readers who enjoy Jim Thompson's lesser works and/or an unnecessary amount of attention paid to sordid characters' farmyard chores may find this book much less vachement décevant than I did!  (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Georges Simenon

Up for Grabs
If anyone's interested in trying their luck with The Widow, I'd be happy to surrender my ex-TBR copy (bought remaindered in 2009 for $5.99) to the first person who claims it in a comment.

Man vs. TBR

Now that my book-hoarding prowess has been amply demonstrated for any/all of my book blogging peers to take note of (for the record, the list still isn't quite complete), I'd like to shift gears for a moment and deliver a post that's a conceptual slap in the face to both the holiday shopping season and to excess in general: yes, that's right, I hereby publicly announce a plan to limit myself to a grand total of seven new book purchases between now and the end of 2012.  Three reasons why this crackpot plan will fail: 1) I have no willpower.  2) I love buying shiny new paperbacks.  3) Buying books is a noble way to help support the arts--especially if you have no willpower.  Three reasons why this voluntary simplicity plan might succeed: 1) I've been so successful at stockpiling cool books that most chain bookstores only elicit elitist disdain from me these days.  2) I have access to a great university library system that I somehow perennially underuse with my usual buy now and ask questions later acquisition methodology.  3) Simon from Savidge Reads went a whole year without book-buying in 2010, thus proving that it's not necessary to have to pepper spray other consumers to get to that IQ84 Murakami endcap--if you have a well-stocked TBR at home.  More posts on my experiment in fiscal austerity later and/or when I come to my senses and throw in the towel.  Until then, what I hope will be my last three purchases for 2011: Juan Carlos Onetti's La vida breve (Punto de Lectura), José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (Cátedra), and Volume II of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities (Vintage).  Hey, it's been zero days since my last book purchase.  How about you?

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow [Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne] (The Harvill Press, 1997)
by Peter Høeg [translated from the Danish by F. David]
Denmark, 1992

If you just finished season one of the juicy Danish TV series The Killing and are now looking for another Copenhagen-centered crime drama to keep your genre buzz going, this novel might do the trick in a pinch.  Otherwise, I'm not so sure.  "Readable" but increasingly implausible crime caper that essentially prostitutes its complex, anti-social title character--a bicultural 37-year old Inuit/Danish loner prone to making trenchant observations about how Greenlandic culture fits in with the post-colonial West in general and post-colonial Denmark in particular--by pimping her out in the service of a not particularly happening storyline which begins with a potentially interesting investigation into a neighbor child's mysterious death and ends with a laughable adventure involving meteorites, otherworldly parasites and mad scientist Bond villains.  Noted hack/annoying overactor Tom Wilkinson appears in the late '90s film adaptation of Smilla's Sense of Snow, so it's possible that the movie--now long forgotten by me--is even more of a mixed bag than the book.  In other news, spoiler alert!  (www.randomhouse.co.uk)

Peter Høeg

Louie Louie

THE SONICS, "Louie Louie" (1966)

Best "Louie Louie" ever!