Días de combate

Días de combate (Lecturas Mexicanas, 1986)
por Paco Ignacio Taibo II
México, 1976

Días de combate, la primera de nueve novelas policíacas que presenta al detective mexicano Héctor Belascoarán Shayne en el papel principal, no es innovador en cuanto a su material gráfico ni a su argumento: como de costumbre, hay una especie de juego de ajedrez entre un detective y un asesino en serie, un desenlace que se puede prever de lejos, etcétera.  Por otra parte, lo que practicamente garantiza que yo voy a leer otra novela de Taibo II en el futuro es 1) la pulsación anárquica de la prosa del novelista y 2) la calidad artística de la imagen del DF pintada dentro de sus páginas.  Por lo que se refiere a éste, este mini retrato es típico del estilo afiebrado de la obra: "En los últimos minutos, los ruidos del tránsito habían comenzado a crecer; el torrente de la jodida fiesta de humo y claxonazos, escapes aullando y semáforos en rojo: la sinfonía de las siete de la noche" (11).  Y algunos buenos ejemplos de la mirada mordaz del protagonista incluyen las descripciones de la Ciudad de México como un "pozo sin fondo" (25), "la olla de agua sucia de siempre" (29) y "el monstruo urbano" (144).  Aunque PIT también tiene el alcance descriptivo a tomar las medidas a una chilanga guapa de manera memorable ("A la luz de la mañana lucía como esas apariciones de película francesa que dejan al espectador envidiando al actor durante un minuto", [142]), estoy seguro de que lo que verdaderamente no vaya a olvidar hasta que haya transcurrido mucho tiempo son las descripciones de México como una metrópoli monstruosa --"como el vientre fétido de una ballena, o el interior de una lata de conservas estropeada" (25)-- y como el escenario del crimen politizado de modo inequívoco --"La policía utilizaba sus métodos tradicionales: la mexicana alegría (torturar a cuarenta lúmpenes, soltar 100 pesos a cien chivatos del hampa policiaco y aumentar el número de patrulleros nocturnos)" (20).  ¿La tapa?  Fea, de pacotilla.  ¿El libro?  Jodidamente divertido.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Los Fantasmas

Los Fantasmas (Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1990)
by César Aira
Argentina, 1990

How would you write a ghost story that's "realistic" and yet a fucking ghost story at one and the same time?  I'm glad you asked because that's just one of the trick questions that César Aira has up his dapper, impish, conjurer's sleeves in the improbably mesmerizing 1990 Los Fantasmas [Ghosts].  To help explain, it's the last day of the year at the construction site at la calle José Bonifacio 2161 in the barrio of Flores in Buenos Aires.  Various families who will own new homes in the building once the work is finally finished are gathered together with the construction workers to help usher in the new year with the usual assortment of roast meats, wine, friendly ribbing of one another, and fireworks.  As early as the second page in the novel, though, the narrator casually lets slip that "el calor era sobrenatural" ["the heat was supernatural"] (8).  Later, the reader will learn that the building is filled with what one character irritably describes as "esos payasos enharinados" ["those flour-dusted clowns"] (57)--dozens of seemingly harmless (if predominantly nudist and extremely well-endowed specimens of male) ghosts who float around mostly doing what ghosts will do while not drawing any undue attention from the humans who cross their path.  However, things take a dramatic turn once a couple of the ghosts start speaking to teenaged Patricia Vicuña and invite her to a New Year's Eve blowout of their own.  The only catch for young "la Patri"?  In the words of one of the spirits, "Claro que tendrás que estar muerta" ["Of course, you'll have to be dead"] (82).  Dead?!?  The unpredictable Aira, who disappointed me twice last year with the boring cartoonish violence of La prueba and the boring cartoonish sci-fi of El congreso de literatura [The Literary Conference], does everything but saw a body in half here to redeem himself with Los Fantasmas.  A dream that la Patri has about the unfinished building she's sleeping in, for example, leads to a fairly unhinged "analogía arquitectónica" ["architectural analogy"] of a digression on "lo no-construido" ["the unconstructed"] in the arts (47-48)--part of which wryly equates the written word's construction of reality with the scaffolding of an empty building.  What does that have to do with our ghost story?  The narrator proposes conceiving of a form of art in which "las limitaciones de la realidad" ["the limitations of reality"] are minimized to the extent that "un arte instantánamente real y sin fantasmas" ["an art instantaneously real and without show-offs"] is created as if out of thin air: "Quizás existe, y es la literatura" ["Perhaps it exists, and it's called literature"], he (or she) waggishly adds (the analogy is aided and abetted by an apparent play on words insofar as fantasma can mean both the usual "ghost" and "show-off" in Spanish).  Elsewhere, the intrusive narrator judiciously picks his/her spots for editorial asides to the audience.  Right before la Patri gets invited to "El Gran Reveillon de las doce" ["the midnight New Year's Eve blowout"], for example, the reader learns that the teenager perceives an "insinuación de temor, de lo desconocido" ["an insinuation of dread, of the unknown"] emanating from one of the uninhabited rooms.  Still, she hesitantly goes to investigate what's going on, which elicits this ironically pained reaction from the narrator: "Eso es típico.  El miedo no cuenta cuando una mujer, en una película por ejemplo, va hacia un cuarto misterioso que no se atrevería a hollar el más osado de los espectadores" ["That's typical.  Fear doesn't come into play when a woman, in a movie for example, heads toward a mysterious room in which not even the bravest of spectators would dare to tread"] (77).  As you might imagine, la Patri's decision on whether or not to attend the party with the ghosts hinges on how much she can bear to say goodbye to her family in order to accept the once in a lifetime invitation offered by the fantasmas.  What you might not be able to imagine is the perverse glee with which the novel compares "los hombres de verdad" ["the real men"] in the character's life with the virile-seeming ghosts--and what distress la Patri's mom causes her when she says that "los fantasmas son maricas" ["the ghosts are queers"] (99)!  Should this untoward comment matter to the young girl?  I won't give away the secret.  However, in one of the closing sequences, the narrator draws a great comedic parallel between the knowledge absorbed by the young girl from her surroundings and the knowledge obtained by a typical reader of fiction: "Supóngase una de esas personas que no piensan, alguien cuya única actividad sea la de leer novelas, actividad para él muy placentera y en la que no pone ni una sola gota de esfuerzo intelectual, sólo el dejarse llevar por el placer de la lectura" ["Imagine one of those people who don't think, whose only activity is reading novels, a very pleasurable activity but one in which he doesn't expend a single drop of intellectual effort, only allowing himself to be carried away by the pleasure of reading"], he/she begins.  "De pronto, en algún gesto, en alguna frase, por no decir 'en algún pensamiento', muestra que es un filósofo malgré-lui.  ¿De dónde le ha venido el saber?" ["Suddenly, in some gesture, in some phrase, if not to say 'in some thought,' he demonstrates that he's a philosopher in spite of himself.  Where does the awareness come from?"] (103).  After explaining that it would be absurd to expect that type of novel, as opposed to those of say Thomas Mann's, to offer any such enrichment, the narrator moves in for the satirical coup de grâce and embeds it in a well-placed parenthesis: "Con la televisión, el ejemplo se habría hecho un poco abusivo" ["In the case of television, the example would have been a little abusive"] (104).  In short, both a fearless and a funny demonstration of Aira's literary sleight of hand--or, as one character says about an unrelated realist plot twist contained in Zola's L'Assommoir, "¡Qué rudo golpe para el lector burgués!" ["What a terrible blow for the bourgeois reader!"] (13).

The phantasmal César Aira

(photo: Javi Martínez)

El rufián moldavo

El rufián moldavo (Emecé, 2004)
por Edgardo Cozarinsky
Argentina, 2004

Una muy buena novela, narrada con reserva y sin sensacionalismo alguno a pesar de su título y materia, relacionada con la inmigración judía a la Argentina del temprano siglo XX.  El argumento se centra en un joven investigador sin nombre, cuya búsqueda de información en cuanto a una obra de teatro de los años treinta llamada El rufián moldavo lo conduce a descubrir que muchas de las mujeres judías que llegaron al país desde la Europa Oriental al principio del siglo pasado fueron patrocinadas por la sociedad Zwi Migdal  -- una organización tenebrosa supuestamente dedicada al "socorro mutuo" de la comunidad ídish-hablante pero en realidad dedicada a la explotación de mujeres a través de la prostitución forzada.  ¿Cómo podía haber sido un éxito una obra como El rufián moldavo en un tiempo cuando según se afirma Roberto Arlt se presenció "la resistencia" de la comunidad judía en carteles bonaerenses que decían "no se atiende a rufianes" en los negocios y "prohibida la entrada a rufianes" en los teatros?  (Las citas vienen de la página 47, pero no sé si ellas constan de hechos.)  La respuesta dada por el narrador, que en algún momento dice que su pesquisa fue guiada por su "temperamento detectivesco" (143), se encuentra menos en los archivos dedicados al teatro en ídish y más en una serie de historias familiares presentaba por "personajes y ambientes para mí más novelescos que cualquier ficción impresa" (46).  Por ejemplo, la hija del dramaturgo de El rufián moldavo explica que "la colectividad estaba en pie de guerra contra [los de Zwi Migdal]: después de la Semana Trágica del '19, cuando grupos nacionalistas salieron a matar judíos por las calles del Once y de Almagro mientras la policía miraba hacia otro lado".  ¿La razón?  "Era urgente mantener limpia la reputación de la paisanada: ni comunistas que querían repetir la revolución rusa a orillas del Plata, ni proxenetas" (119).   Lo irónico de todo esto es que, en manos de Cozarinsky, la novela, en vez de parecer como una obra de ficción cualquiera, se parece más a o una crónica narrada por su "detective" archivesco o una obra híbrida en cuanto a su mezcla de ficción e historia.  Por lo menos, la obra de Cozarinsky me recuerda a W.G. Sebald por lo que se refiere a los fantasmas de la historia del siglo XX aunque la siguiente descripción, sobre una muchacha que llegó a la Argentina sabiendo cómo "escribir una sola palabra: Zsuzsa, su nombre" (53), sea más directa que el alemán en cuanto a la vida de "un cuento de hadas malignas" (91) de algunos entre el elenco de la oleada migratoria: "Está enferma, tose y no sabe el nombre del mal que pocas semanas más tarde acabará con su vida" (62).  Recomendada.

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Sobre todo empezó, poco a poco, a hablar.  Al principio, de las casas donde tocaba, en Bahía Blanca, en Coronel Pringles, en Ingeniero White.  De él mismo, más tarde.  A veces ella no entiende todo lo que dice, pero se da cuenta de que esas confidencias no las regala a cualquiera.  Así se ha enterado de que Samuel nació en Buenos Aires: fueron sus padres los que llegaron desde el otro lado del mar; tienen una colchonería en Paternal y lo echaron de casa cuando aprendió a tocar el bandoneón en vez de seguir las clases de violín que el padre le pagaba.  "El bandoneón es tango y el tango es mala vida."  Samuel se ríe, pero Zsuzsa le ve en los ojos mucha tristeza cuando cita la frase de ese padre tan respetuoso de la música a pesar de ser medio sordo, sobre todo de un violín que, aunque apenas pueda oírlo, sabe que es el único instrumento para un chico judío decente...  (En Tarnopol, aprendiz en el taller del abuelo, se había perforado con una aguja de colchonero el oído derecho para escapar a la conscripción obligatoria en el ejército imperial.)

(El rufián moldavo, 57-58)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (The Library of America, 2010)
by Shirley Jackson
USA, 1962

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is fairly tasty, more or less satisfying aesthethically and yet still puzzlingly popular fare--the reading equivalent of being promised an old school hearty meal along the lines of a juicy steak and a Caesar salad and then having to settle for a high end chicken pot pie "with an incredibly flaky crust" and no salad whatsoever.  Whatever, why I'm not bummed that I read the book: 1) Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, the 18-year old narrator who spends much of her time fantasizing about taking her loved ones on a ride to the moon, is an undeniably fascinating creation: at once adorable--you may even want to protect her--a bit of a kook, and a sick puppy.  For example, a revenge-minded line like "I wished they were all dead and I was walking on their bodies" (429) might seem like typical teenage sass when taken out of context except that Merricat has already confided that "I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom.  Everyone else in my family is dead" (421) and "I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully.  I wished it on the village" (426).  Get the picture?  2) For a dark fable that can be read as a somewhat cynical anti-bullying but pro-poisoning attack on our notions about the nuclear family, conformity, and the idea of small town community, the loving relationships between Merricat, her older sister Constance, their sickly Uncle Julian, and even Merricat's pet cat Jonas are warmly and not at all cynically observed.  Humorously, too: crazy old Uncle Julian's loaded remark to Constance--"You have been a good niece to me, although there are grounds for supposing you an undutiful daughter" (465)--is exactly the sort of thing I would have wanted to hear from the eccentric uncle who survived the arsenic poisoning that killed off most of the rest of his family and for which his niece was accused but acquitted of committing. Why the book isn't anywhere near as big a deal as its legions of admirers maintain: 1) Cousin Charles Blackwood, the money-hungry (and would-be romantic) threat to the Blackwood sisters' family dynamics, and almost all of the town villagers are mostly caricaturish types as villains.  2) In a novel in which the narrator's fairy tale-like interior life requires more than the usual amount of suspension of disbelief from the reader but offers such extravagant joys in return, how disappointingly ironic that the act of "realistic" violence that turns the Blackwood home into a castle in ruins near the end of the novel is so totally unconvincing and lacking and pedestrian from a storytelling standpoint.  It completely breaks the narrative spell.  Why so many bloggers are willing to bestow their highest Zagat ratings on books that have little more than an incredibly flaky crust to offer: you tell me, comfort food readers!  Chicken pot pie for the soul?  Yes, that must certainly be the answer to the We Have Always Lived in the Castle popularity question for, as one emo Amazon reviewer has so earnestly put it, "Anyone who reads this novel and is not deeply affected emotionally is simply not human."

 Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)

The edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle referred to here appears on pp. 419-559 of the LOA Shirley Jackson anthology, Novels and Stories (New York: The Library of America, 2010).

O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis [The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis] Group Read

Having been persuaded in large part to add this 1984 novel to the 2014 Caravana de recuerdos Readalong list by other things that Miguel of St. Orberose has written about it in the past, I must admit I had a good, good laugh about an hour or two ago when I reread trickster Miguel's most recent comments on the work and saw that he'd called it not only Saramago's longest title "but also one that, uncharacteristically, has almost no plot."*  Man, does Miguel know how to help me pimp a group read title or what?  That being said, the novel's actually not all that long at all at somewhere around 300 pages and its fictional biography dedicated to a 1936 Portuguese "poet, doctor and monarchist" who "existed only as a figment of Fernando Pessoa's fanciful imagination" until Saramago came along sounds like a more than promising enough premise in exchange for a measly lack of plot.  In any event, if you care to join us for either the group read or just the discussion, please come back here and to the other participating blogs somewhere around March 29th through March 31st to follow the no-plot, run-on sentence hijinks (*note: Miguel, whose wide-ranging The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis post can be found here, also claims that the book puts us "in the company of a master storyteller," but I'm pretty sure that was just a concession to entertainment-minded readers that needn't trouble a no-plot purist such as yourself).

Probable Other Readers

Richard, Shea's Zibaldone

Rise, in lieu of a field guide
Scott, seraillon

Journalism, Duplicity and the Art of Contrasts

 

"Journalism, Duplicity and the Art of Contrasts"
by Edward Timms
England, 1986

The significance of the emblems which Kraus placed on the cover of Die Fackel in April 1899 will by now be clear.  The mask is the all-pervasive symbol of fin-de-siècle Vienna.  In Kraus's design the grinning mask of comedy and the goatish face of the satyr not only proclaim the intention of comic and satirical stylization.  They also convey an acute awareness of the elements of theatricality and disguise in Austrian affairs.  And the rays emanating from the flaming torch are thrown forward in a pattern that suggests the boards of a stage.  The aim is clearly to break through the clouds of mystification and shed light behind the scenes.  But the configuration of images leaves open the question of the role the editor himself will play in the satirical masquerade.

(Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna, 29)

The passage above, the closing paragraph from chapter 1 of Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, sets the stage so to speak for a shift in focus from the broader panorama of Viennese life c. 1900 to a tight close-up of Kraus's evolving role as an attacker of the Viennese and Austrian media.  Chapter 2, "Journalism, Duplicity and the Art of Contrasts," traces Kraus's transformation from a would-be theater critic to an "increasingly uncompromising" voice intent on attacking "the corrupting influence of the press itself" (35).  What led to Kraus's "increasingly uncompromising" stance?  To help explain things, Timms points to the era as one in which the press achieved "a greater domination over public affairs than in any period before or since" (30) and one in which the Austrian press in particular functioned as either a mouthpiece for the highest bidder or as a front for the state.  "It was the era of the 'newspaper baron' - the owner-editor who had control both of share capital and of editorial policy," he explains.  "Individual owners could exercise almost feudal power over an apparatus whose technological sophistication belonged to the  modern age" (Ibid.).   On the newspapers' collusion with the government, he adds: "The net result of this collaboration was to subvert democratic government, falsify public opinion, and add a further dimension of unreality to Austrian life" (31).  Never shy about pulling a revealing anecdote out of his pocket, the author then illustrates his point with the example of Die Presse founder August Zang, who "is quoted as saying that his ideal would be 'a newspaper that did not contain a single line that had not been paid for'" and mentioning the fact that "the device of printing advertisements disguised as news items was accepted journalistic practice" (32).  As an explanation more concerned with matters of style than the duplicity of the newspapers themselves, Timms also explains the influence of satirical forerunners Ferdinand Kürnberger and Daniel Spitzer as models for the early Kraus.  According to Timms, the former, who memorably retorted to readers who complained that he was injecting too much politics into their arts section by asking, "Am I writing about politics?  [...]  I am writing the theatre review of the Austrian tragedy" (33, love it!), eventually wins out over the latter as a more suitable role model for Kraus given the increasingly violent and unstable atmosphere near the end of the 1890s.  Ever insightful about his subject, though, Timms takes this opportunity to make what I think is a terrific, nuanced observation: "The contrast between Kürnberger and Spitzer defines a polarity that runs through the work of Kraus himself - the tension between vigorous polemical commitment and self-absorbed verbal artistry" (34).

Moving on from Kraus's influences to his early work in Die Fackel, Timms then explains how the future apocalyptic satirist was able to maintain an "independent voice" (35) in such a turbulent atmosphere for the press: Kraus's father covered the publication costs of the first issue of Die Fackel, and its status as an instant hit made it financially self-sustaining afterward.  Ironically, while not above making disparaging comments about the "tip-receiving classes" (34), Kraus's own personal economic well-being and privilege resulted in a journal which was "explicitly reformist" despite its "polemical vitality and wit" during the first five years or so of its run.  As Timms stresses, Kraus's aim at this point was "amendment, not entertainment" (36-37).  Why is this an important distinction?  First, Kraus's "mission as a satirist was to attack ideological thinking in all its forms, not merely those he happened to personally dislike" (37).  Second, it explains another "paradox which runs right through Kraus's writings.  As a reformist critic he certainly wished to raise the standards of Austrian journalism; but as satirist he proclaims that the press is irredeemably corrupt" (41).  If I understand the ensuing argument correctly, Kraus's recognition of this "paradox" eventually resulted in a renunciation of such reformist tendencies in favor of a more pure polemical outlook as time went on.  But in the early days at least, the future crank was almost an optimist: Timms claims that Kraus "wanted to teach people to read - to read the public prints with scepticism and mistrust" and that he even seemed "to entertain the hope that a revival of civilization as a whole might be achieved through the growth of critical enlightenment."  The enemy?  In Kraus's marvelous phrasing, "a civilization corroded by printer's ink" (41)!

For those who have read Kraus before and who are maybe wondering along with me how much of his vituperative brilliance was due to artistic purity and how much was due to him just being a bit of a nutjob, Timms has some extremely interesting things to say about the satirist's personality or predispositions--in particular about Kraus's apparently heightened sensitivity to masks and other forms of duplicity.  "Kraus's whole mode of perception seems to have been shaped by a sensitivity to masks and disguises," he writes, a "subjective factor" (44) that helps explain the motif of the mask as "a unifying principle underlying [Kraus's] writings" when those same writings are "so diverse" in themes in the early years of Die Fackel that its readers may well be left "with an impression of fragmentation and incoherence" (42).  To explain this, Timms zeroes in on the fact that "it is not simple inhumanity, it is the more complex phenomenon of duplicity that Kraus attacks" in a series of articles on a coal miners strike (Ibid.).  Beyond that, "it is this seminal image of the mask which gives a structural coherence to Kraus's early writings, particularly to his critique of the press.  What he attacks most forcefully is not its financial corruptness, but the discrepancy between its shady financial dealings and its resplendent cultural prestige."  Or, as Kraus puts it, "the press is a prostitute which in Austria wears the robes of a priestess" (Ibid.).  According to Timms, for Kraus, "this theme of duplicity finds its most intense focus in the problem of Jewish identity...  The Jews of Vienna found themselves caught between two cultures: the traditional Judaic community and modern secular society.  This was made embarrassingly evident by the fact that many Jews had two different names" because "a decree signed by Joseph II in 1787 had imposed German surnames on Austrian Jews" (43, ellipses added).  The upshot of all this as it pertains to the Die Fackel firebrand?  "For Kraus," himself an assimilation-minded Jew apparently troubled by both antisemitism and Zionism, "these assimilated names were a disguise.  When Felix Salten tries to establish himself as authentically Viennese, readers of Die Fackel are reminded that behind that aristocratic-sounding name there lurks an immigrant from Budapest called Zsiga  Salzmann."  Ouch!  "Indeed, there were so many Samuels masquerading as Siegfrieds that Kraus could with some justice speak of a 'pseudonymous civilization'" (Ibid.).  With a young Adolf Hitler waiting in the wings of this "polyglot Empire," it's no surprise that Timms points to the "rich" but "problematic" nature of Kraus's "satire on the duplicity of names"--while stopping just short of calling Kraus out for hypocrisy (Ibid.).  However, I like where he takes it from there in terms of the satirist's work as whole.  Kraus, supposedly "wavering between what he calls 'social' satire and a more 'literary' style that would be modeled on the work of earlier authors," in October 1907 describes his métier as follows: "I am a satirist, and my gaze is caught by contrasts.  What matters is not what I think about the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, but what I think about the type of person who ought to be thinking about the compromise" (44-45).  Timms, explaining the importance of "Kraus's preoccupation with duplicity" as something that "provides a structural explanation for what appears to be an ideological bias," gets the last word here in response: "At times Kraus's sensitivity to disguises obstructs his perception of the historical balance of forces.  And it certainly impairs his political judgement.  But for one task it left him admirably equipped: for the writing of satire and polemic.  It is here that his antithetical sensibility comes into its own.  For satire is the art of contrasts" (45-46).

"Journalism, Duplicity and the Art of Contrasts," chapter 2 in Edward Timms's Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna, appears on pp. 30-46 of the work (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986).  Chapter 1, "Vienna 1900," is recapped here.