Tram 83

 

Tram 83 (Le Livre de Poche, 2019)
par Fiston Mwanza Mujila
République démocratique du Congo, 2014

<< On en a déjà assez de la misère, de la pauvreté, de la syphilis et de la violence dans la littérature africaine.  Regarde autour de nous.  Il y a de belles filles, de beaux hommes, de la bière-de-Brazza, de la bonne musique...  Est-ce que tout cela ne t'inspire pas ?  Je suis inquiet pour l'avenir de la littérature africaine en général.  Le personnage principal dans le roman africain est toujours célibataire, névrosé, pervers, dépressif, sans enfants, sans domicile et traîne toutes les dettes du monde.  Ici, on vit, on baise, on est heureux...  Il faut que ça baise aussi dans la littérature africaine ! >>

(Tram 83, 66-67)

Lucien, un célibataire névrosé qui veut être écrivain, et Requiem, un petit gangster et maître-chanteur, sont vieux amis de fac, mais il y a eu du mauvais sang entre eux depuis cette époque.  Donc ce ne pas vraiment une surprise quand les choses commencent à mal tourner lors de la visite de Lucien.  Heureusement pour eux deux, le Tram 83 - un bar super populaire dans la capitale de la république séparatiste seulement connue comme La Ville-Pays, << une ville devenue pays par la force des kalachnikovs >> (28) - offre un chez-soi loin de chez soi entre une équipe hétéroclite d'habitués composée de creuseurs de diamant, rebelles dissidents, << les filles de moins de seize ans, appellées  canetons >> (23), touristes, ex-Zaïrois et des autres attirés par la musique ou les liaisons sexuelles facilement disponibles dans les toilettes mixtes du bar.  Tram 83, un roman imprégné d'une atmosphère sordide en termes de l'intrigue, est raconté avec beaucoup de flair par Fiston Mwanza Mujila.  J'ai aimé les insultes sur la mauvaise musique parfois entendue au Tram (par exemple, une description sur << un groupe musical qui massacrait, et sans gêne, un morceau de Coltrane, sans doute Summertime >> est suivie par << les jazzmen continuant à prostituer la musique... >> laquelle, à son tour, est suivie par << ce qui alimentait la ferveur de l'orchestre et par conséquent le lynchage de cette belle mélodie >> [22-24]), la répétition du cri de guerre des prostituées mineures (<< Vous avez l'heure ? >>) qui apparaît et reapparaît comme un riff ou une égratignure sur un disque, et le commentaire social mordant (<< La torture est l'un de points de démarcation entre une république bananière organisée et une république bananière chaotique, autrement dit désorganisée >> [183]), mais ce que j'ai aimé par dessus tout étaient les listes la longeur d'un paragraphe et l'analyse sur la cause du décés par métier dans la mégalopole (le dénominateur commun parmi toutes les professions: << maladies sexuellement transmissibles >>), en bref la combinaison d'une sensibilité presque musical avec un air d'expérimentation.  Si mon français était meillure, je décrirais le roman comme une << valse des corps au bord du précipice >>; heureusement pour vous, rien ne m'empêche de citer ces mots de Michel Abescat de Télérama.  Exceptionnel. 

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (République démocratique du Congo, 1981)

Las aventuras de la China Iron

 

Las aventuras de la China Iron (Literatura Random House, 2020)
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Argentina, 2017

Las aventuras de la China Iron [The Adventures of China Iron], a witty, subversive reimagining of Argentina's so-called "national epic" Martín Fierro told from the point of view of the gaucho Martín Fierro's abandoned wife, sure sounded like it'd be right up my "rustic" intertextual alley, but that eyesore of a cover still had me worried until Cabezón Cámara's succession of ace storytelling shenanigans was well underway.  How was I to know that hallucinogenic mushrooms, a delirious critique of the 19th century "civilization and barbarism" discourse popularized by Sarmiento, and a gender-bending orgy scene or two involving the occasionally cross-dressing title character would all factor into the novel's proceedings?  For those not familiar with the 1872 & 1879 Martín Fierro beloved by Borges and maybe worried about the wealth of literary in-jokes likely to follow, suffice it to say that the only thing you really need to know as background for Las aventuras is that its amiable narrator--a teenage orphan won by the gaucho in a card game in José Hernández's original poem but who here calls herself Josephine Star Iron or China Iron or just plain China according to her mood--sets out on a journey across the Pampas in the company of an Englishwoman named Liz, a puppy named Estreya, and a gaucho named Rosa whom they meet along the way.  The destination?  A small fort on the frontier with the Indian territories, where Liz's husband has been conscripted to fight against the savages.  The journey?  Part voyage of initiation, part picaresque adventure saga, part Ema, la cautiva-like knife in the back of the Argentinean canon drizzled with a splash of Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory at the end.  I had a good time reading this.  In her narrator's innocent and often wonderstruck telling, Cabezón Cámara makes it easy to get an idea of the vastness of the Argentinean hinterland before the railroads arrived--"esa casi nada que cruzábamos se iba pareciendo a un cementerio abandonado" ["that semi-nothingness that we were crossing was resembling an abandoned cementery"] she says of one stretch of territory where entire days were spent in the company of weeds and the odd startled hare but without running into "ni una vaca, ni un indio, ni un cristiano ni un caballo" ["either a cow, an Indian, a Christian or a horse"] (34)--but the specificity of the landscape painter episodes is just an appetizer for the full course dinner of artistic license and "licentiousness" that follows.  In other words, both Hernández and that "bestia de Fierro" ["brute Fierro"] (125), i.e. the Martín Fierro author and his artistic creation, "that strange gaucho who believed he was a writer" (117), get skewered as characters here--loved the scene where the blowhard Hernández follows up a racist anti-Indian and anti-gaucho rant about civilization and progress by snickerng that the gauchos he knows, "que suelen ser una mezcla de indio y español' ["who tend to be a mix of Spaniard and Indian"], have so far only turned out "unos Habsburgos retacones y negros y analfabetos y desdentados desde los trece" ["some squat, black, illiterate Habsburgs, toothless from the age of 13"] as a result of the attempts to "mejorar la raza" ["improve the race"] through European stock (108).  Brutal!  Of course, civilization itself receives a similarly scornful treatment once China & Co. break free from convention for a paradisiacal and free love life among the Indians on and around the islands along the Paraná River (note the influx of indigenous language as the novel nears its conclusion).  "Bienvenida a nuestra fiesta, mi querida muchacho inglés" ["Welcome to our party, my beloved English boy"] (151) the female Indian leader Kaukalitrán tells her new lover China, the Spanish feminine endings for "bienvenida" ["welcome"] and "querida" ["beloved"] in combination with the use of the word boy anticipating Liz's own same sex sweet nothings as the lovemaking continues: "Liz me hablaba en inglés y me decía tigress, mi tigresa, my mermaid, my girl, my good boy, mi gaucha blanca, my tigress otra vez" ["Liz was speaking to me in English and was saying 'tigress, my tigress, my mermaid, my girl, my good boy, my white lady gaucho, my tigress' again"] (154).  Mad fun.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (San Isidro, 1968)

More on China Iron

Mandy Wight, peakreads
Mario Skan, QUADERNO RIBADABIA

Storm of Steel

 

Storm of Steel [In Stahlgewittern] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Ernst Jünger [translated from the German by Michael Hofmann]
Germany, 1920

"It was our last storm.  How many times over the last few years we had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind!  Les Eparges, Guillemont, St-Pierre-Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Moeuvres, Vraucourt, Mory!  Another gory carnival beckoned."
(Storm of Steel, 280)

On the second to last page of this insanely high adrenaline memoir, "privately published" in a limited edition of 2,000 copies in 1920 when somebody massively underestimated its popular appeal, Ernst Jünger matter-of-factly relates what it was like to be a survivor of the trench warfare and gas attacks of World War I: "Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me with an even twenty scars.  In the course of this war, where so much of the firing was done into empty space, I still managed to get myself targeted no fewer than eleven times" (288).  His soldier's luck, in combination with good genes, must have carried on well after the war ended because the resilient Tristram Shandy-reading lieutenant lived to be over a hundred years old before he finally passed away in 1998!  In any event, reading about what Jünger called his "adventures," it's hard to underestimate just how fortunate he was to make it out of the war alive.  His memories, based in part on a diary he kept during the hostilities, are extraordinarily vivid.  En route to the Battle of the Somme on the road to the village of Guillemont, for example, Jünger paints a picture which is almost Thérèse Raquin-esque in terms of the sensory overload: "Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses.  You really did have to run for your life in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised - it belonged to there.  Moreover, this heavy, sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement, that only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce" (93).  Elsewhere, the "sweetish, oniony smell" of a British phosgene gas attack in or near the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast serves as the Proustian madeleine for this surrealistic turn: "With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask.  With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude.  Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons.  We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the charted world" (114).  Ironically or not given all the death and destruction witnessed and then depicted by Jünger, he doesn't come off as either anti-war or as an apologist for the war.  There's very little editorializing along those lines.  Which isn't to say that he isn't sensitive to the costs of the war to friends and foes alike as his descriptions of the impact of nonstop bombing--"The villages we passed through on our way had the look of vast lunatic asylums" (127); his account of a skirmish with Indian troops, "who had travelled thousands of miles across the sea, only to give themselves a bloody nose on this god-forsaken piece of earth against the Hanoverian Rifles"--"The whole scene - the mixture of the prisoners' laments and our jubilation - had something primordial about it.  This wasn't war; it was ancient history" (150); and his remorse over a soldier he killed at close range all make abundantly clear: "Outside it [a dugout] lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple.  He lay there, looking quite relaxed.  I forced myself to look closely at him.  It wasn't a case of 'you or me' any more.  I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years.  The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it.  Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams" (241).

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998)

Chicas muertas

 

Chicas muertas (Literatura Random House, 2015)
by Selva Almada
Argentina, 2014

When Selva Almada was just a sheltered teen growing up in Entre Ríos in the 1980s, news of the murders of three other Argentinean girls roughly her own age--Andrea Danne, 19; María Luisa Quevedo, 15; Sarita Mundín, 20--awakened her to a couple of harsh realities: "Adentro de tu casa podían matarte.  El horror podía vivir bajo el mismo techo que vos" ["They could kill you within your own house.  The horror could live under the same roof as you"] (17).  As Almada explains the extent of the shock a page later, "Tres adolescentes de provincia asesinadas en los años ochenta, tres muertes impunes ocurridas cuando todavía, en nuestro país, desconocíamos el término femicidio" ["Three adolescents from the provinces murdered in the 1980s, three unpunished deaths at a time when, in our country, we still didn't know the term femicide"] (18).  Haunted by these deaths even when, as an adult, she realized that young girls were dying all around Argentina in alarming numbers, the author crisscrossed the country in search of some kind of answers to the cold cases still unsolved after decades.  The results of the investigation, as chronicled in the non-sensationalist but still way sobering Chicas muertas [Dead Girls, now out in an English translation], take the form of a hybrid narrative nonfiction/memoir blend which manages to pay respect to the victims and their families while not exactly providing solace for anybody else.  While Almada succeeds in giving a measure of voice to the three victims beyond the forensic reports, through no fault of her own what little "perspective" there is to be found here comes in the form of things--a clairvoyant who denied the help requested by the boyfriend of one of the victims, saying that "él con las cosas del diablo no se metía" ["he didn't get mixed up with things of the devil"] (42); a husband who endangered his wife, another one of the victims, because she was "demasiado linda" ["too cute"] to return to her previous job as a maid after she had a baby: "Tanta belleza desperdiciada entre los vahos de los productos de limpieza.  Así que la mandó a prostituirse" ["So much beauty wasted among the cleaning product vapors.  So he sent her out to turn tricks"] (111-112)--that can only be classified as tough, tough pills to swallow.  A brave piece of work.

Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, 1973)

photo: Pablo Cruz

Los oficios terrestres

 

Los oficios terrestres (Ediciones de la Flor, 2013)
por Rodolfo Walsh
La Argentina, 1965

Un puñado de cuentos, todos menos uno o buenos o muy buenos, dos o tres de los cuales son cuentazos.  "Esa mujer", por ejemplo, es el famosísimo cuento en el que un periodista que se parece a Walsh habla con un militar sobre el robo y traslado del cadáver de Evita.  En menos de diez páginas y sin nombrar a la muerta específicamente, los dos personajes bailan alrededor del tema de manera evasiva: "--Esa mujer --le oigo murmurar--.  Estaba desnuda en el ataúd y parecía una virgen.  La piel se le había vuelto transparente.  Se veían las metástasis del cáncer, como esos dibujitos que uno hace en una ventanilla mojada" (292).  Mientras tanto, el cuentista-- en gran parte a través del diálogo--capta una atmósfera tensa e inquietante en igual medida.  "--¡Está parada! --grita el coronel--.  ¡La enterré parada, como Facundo, porque era un macho!" (296).  En una nota, Walsh añade que "la conversación que reproduce" dentro del cuento "es, en lo esencial, verdadera" (287).  Espeluznante.  "Irlandeses detrás de un gato", que cuenta la paliza que espera el nuevo chico en un internado católico de provincia como rito de iniciación, es otro buen ejemplo del estilo vigoroso y sin tonterías de su autor.  Además de crear una atmósfera donde se respira "el aire asesino" (342) de la violencia pendiente, Walsh parece señalar la inescapabilidad de tal comportamiento en una sociedad que margina a los pobres y juega por las reglas de los "viejos tiempos levíticos" (340).  Nocaut.

Rodolfo Walsh (1927-desaparecido en 1977)

Fuente
Los oficios terrestres, libro que incluye seis cuentos en la edición original de 1965 + dos más en esta versión ampliada, aparece en los Cuentos completos de Walsh (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2013) en las páginas 285-366.

ARLT

 

"ARLT"
by César Aira
Argentina, 1993

An appreciation of Argentinean Literature of Doom great Roberto Arlt penned by fellow Argentinean Literature of Doom great César Aira?  Sort of!  While I'm not sure what prompted Aira (above, photographer unknown) to take up this possibly spurious exercise in literary criticism, he begins his essay with a definition of the methodologies of expressionism and impressionism which I won't go into here.  Arlt, "torturado y pensativo como un alemán" ["pensive and tortured like a German"] (55), is an expressionist, though--the "like a German" line supposedly owing itself to a quote of Goethe's on the nature of the Teutonic temperament.  Moving from the general to the specific, Aira then zeroes in on the theme of "la traición' ["treachery, betrayal"] (57) as an example of how Arlt's expressionist tendencies ooze to the surface in his work.  Although Aira cheekily calls this "a random but a central" example  ["uno cualquiera, pero central"], parenthetically adding that "la elección de ejemplos es una trampa que habría que evitar" ["the choice of examples is a trap that should be avoided"] (!) (57), one wonders why the choice of language is so slippery here given that betrayal and treachery are so foundational to Arlt's fiction.  One possible answer: "Cuando uno se pregunta por las intenciones de un artista, es inevitable que se pierda en un laberinto" ["When one wonders about the intentions of an artist, it's inevitable that one get lost in a labyrinth"] (59).  And another: slippery language is foundational to Aira's own obra.  Whatever one's opinions on Arlt's art, of course, one needn't be a fan of either writer to be amused and/or intrigued by Aira's essayistic antics and conclusions.  One of my favorites among the former comes in the paragraph which begins, "Suele decirse 'Arlt, nuestro Flaubert'" ["As the saying goes, 'Arlt, our Flaubert'"].  Although I've actually seen Arlt referred to by Argentines as "our Dostoevsky," I'd be surprised if Aira didn't make up the "our Flaubert" talk altogether.  It's a great set-up line, though, insofar as our critic goes on to hammer home the points that 1) "Creo que la aproximación es inepta, y no sólo por el abismo que hay entre un escritor maduro y burgués, y el adolescente visionario que fue Arlt...  Yo diría 'nuestro Lautréamont'" ["I believe the approximation is inept and not only because of the gulf that there is between a mature, bourgeois writer and the adolescent visionary that was Arlt...  I would say, 'our Lautréamont'"] and 2) "Lo que en la novela europea se hizo a lo largo de quinientos años y mil escritores, en la Argentina lo hizo Arlt solo, en cinco años" ["What in the European novel was done over the course of five hundred years and by one thousand writers was done in Argentina by Arlt alone in five years"] (63, ellipses added).  Aira, who hides his cards on the matter of how much he esteems Arlt as a stylist or not, loses his poker face when concluding that Arlt's sense of "lo novelesco" ["the novelesque"] has roots in "el folletín truculento" ["the grisly feuilleton"]--something in opposition to "la novela ideológica, la falsa novela" ["the ideological novel, the fake novel"] as practiced by a more conformist writer like Eduardo Mallea: "Es la diferencia entre el gentleman y el Monstruo" ["It's the difference between the gentleman and the Monster"] (62); when pointing out some of the paradoxes of Arlt's style ("Las novelas de Arlt son historias de la inmovilidad, novelas de las que no se sale, pero al mismo tiempo no se explican sino como novelas de viaje" ["Arlt's novels are stories of immobility, novels in which there's no exit, but at the same time can only be explained in terms of travel novels"]) (63); or when finding unexpected parallels between Arlt's suspension of time and sense of perspective and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass.  "Yo mismo, proponiéndome como ejemplo de la singularidad extenuada del tiempo, trepo a la cinta del continuo y corro tras el Monstruo revestido de la figura irrisoria de la explicación" ["I myself, setting out as an example of the exhausted singularity of time, step onto the treadmill of the continuum and chase after the Monster sheathed in the ridiculous figure of  explanation"], Aira writes, purportedly moved by "la introyección feliz de lo imaginario" ["the happy introjection of the imaginary"] and "la recepción del cine mudo de Arlt" ["the reception of Arlt's silent film"] technique, prey to images that dance before his eyes.  "Duchamp la llamó Perspectiva, yo la llamo Inspiración.  Salgo a buscarlas todos los días, en una rutina inmutable, a la perfecta transparencia de lo habitual, a las calles de mi barrio, que es el de Arlt, Flores, a los cafés de los alrededores de la plaza y la estación, donde voy todas las mañanas a escribir" ["Duchamp called it Perspective, I call it Inspiration.  I go out to search for them every day, in an unchanging routine, in the perfect transparency of the habitual, in the streets of my neighborhood, which is the same as Arlt's, Flores, at the cafés surrounding the plaza and the train station where I go every morning to write" (70-71).  Yes!

Source
"ARLT," written in 1991 and published in 1993, appears on pp. 55-71 of the Argentinean journal Paradoxa #7.  People wanting a full account of all the good stuff I had to leave out from it can find a PDF of the piece here.

Notre-Dame du Nil

Notre-Dame du Nil (Folio, 2019)
par Scholastique Mukasonga
France, 2012

Rwanda, au début des années 1970.  Le lycée Notre-Dame-du-Nil, tout proche de la source du fleuve égyptien, est un lycée d'enseignement catholique consacré à << l'élite féminine du pays. >>  Quoique dix pour cent des élèves sont Tutsi selon le quota officiel, les tensions sont fortes entre les Hutu et leurs rivales en raison de la croyance des premiers que << le peuple majoritaire >> sont << les vraies Rwandaises >> et toutes les autres sont << des parasites >> (255).  Pas étonnant qu'un personnage remarquera: << Le Rwanda, c'est le pays de la Mort >> (274).  Dans ce roman, Scholastique Mukasonga (née au Rwanda en 1956) raconte une sorte de répétition générale du génocide de 1994 tandis qu'elle propose le portrait d'une génération qui disparaîtrait bientôt.  L'écrivaine m'a surpris avec le dynamisme de ce portrait.  J'ai aimé, par exemple, cette description torrentielle de la saison des pluies: << La pluie pendant de longs mois, c'est la Souveraine du Rwanda, bien plus que le rois d'autrefois ou le président d'aujourd'hui, la Pluie, c'est celle qu'on attend, qu'on implore, celle qui décidera de la disette ou de l'abondance, qui sera le bon présage d'un mariage fécond, la première pluie au bout de la saison sèche qui fait danser les enfants qui tendent leurs visages vers la ciel pour accueillir les grosses gouttes tant désirées, la pluie impudique qui met à nu, sous leur pagne mouillé, les formes indécises des toutes jeunes filles, la Maîtresse violente, vétilleuse, capricieuse, celle qui crépite sur tous les toits de tôles, ceux cachés sous la bananeraie comme ceux des quartiers bourbeux de la capitale, celle qui a jeté son filet sur le lac, a effacé la démesure des volcans, qui règne sur les immenses fôrets du Congo, qui sont les entrailles de l'Afrique, la Pluie, la Pluie sans fin, jusqu'à l'océan qui l'engendre >> (65-66).  Une seule phrase.  Une telle richesse!  En plus du côté descriptif de Mukasonga, j'ai aussi aimé la complexité de sa vision du monde.  Bien que la dualité Hutu/Tutsi devienne plus prononcée au cours du roman, Notre-Dame du Nil évite la simplification et son point de vue sur la modernité du Rwanda est peut-être mieux illustré par ce commentaire de Kagabo, un guérisseur, sur une sorcière qui allait aider une étudiante Tutsi en danger: << Nyamirongi parle avec les nuages >>, il dit, << mais elle n'a pas de transistor.  Il y a eu un coup d'État >> (266).  Formidable.

Scholastique Mukasonga au Rwanda en 2013
(photo: DR)

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

 

The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Grove Press, 1994)
by Amos Tutuola
Nigeria, 1952

If I understand things correctly, Tutuola's wild The Palm-Wine Drinkard (full title and capitalization in my edition: The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town) was one of the first books out of Africa to be a commercial and critical success in "the West" even though back home in Nigeria the novelist was derided for bringing shame upon the continent or some such on account of his imperfect and "uneducated" English.  "No prophet is accepted in his own country" & etc.  For our purposes, I'll note at the outset that I was pleased to make the acquaintance of this pre-independence Nigerian classic.  A freewheeling odyssey in which the affable narrator--a prodigious palm-wine drinker who occasionally appears to be a human but who claims to be both "a god and juju-man" and likes to refer to himself as "Father of gods who could do everything in this world" (194)--travels among the living and the dead in the company of his wife shapeshifting his way out of one scrape after another with Death, "a full-bodied gentleman" eventually reduced to a skull, a "very dangerous" bush in which "the boa constrictors were uncountable as sand" (222), and other amusing or monstrous oddities and locales supposedly imported from the world of Yoruba folk tales.  A+ for imagination!  As far as the actual writing is concerned, I'm not sure I understand the long ago fuss about its supposed flaws.  Although Tutuola's English is marked by a # of minor curiosities--i.e. his fondness for emphasizing certain words in sentences parenthetically--and repetitions, probably the "worst" mistake I noted was the following: "His both feet were very long and thick as a pillar of a house, but no shoes could size his feet in this world" (282).  Hardly a cause for concern, much less outrage, in a writer navigating a book in a second language, esp. one (book) in which the tradeoffs include scenes of Death tending his yam garden, a cosmovision in which people "and also spirits and curious creatures from various bushes and forests" (201) freely intermingle, and this stupendous intersection between the sensibilities of the olden days and the realities of modern air war: "I could not blame the lady for following the Skull as a complete gentleman to his house at all.  Because if I were a lady, no doubt I would follow him to wherever he would go, and still as I was a man I would jealous him more than that, because if this gentleman went to the battle field, surely, enemy would not kill him or capture him and if bombers saw him in a town which was to be bombed, they would not throw bombs on his presence, and if they did throw it, the bomb itself would not explode until this gentleman would leave that town, because of his beauty" (207).  On a related note, Tutuola's 1954 follow-up, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, is said to be even more unhinged and poorly written than The Palm-Wine Drinkard although of course "poorly written" might not apply to anybody already accustomed to book bloggers' English.  I can't wait!

Amos Tutuola (1920-1997)

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 8/16-8/31 Links

Jorge Barón Biza & family (collage: Infobae.com)

Thanks to all of you who joined us for Spanish Lit Month 2020 and especially to Stu for welcoming me back to the fold as co-host after I took last year off with seasonal blogging disorder.  I had fun as usual--hope you did as well.  Anyway, here's the final batch of reviews to keep you in a good Spanish language reading place until next year's event.  Nos vemos.

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations
Come and see the blood in the streets - notes on Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, and the poetry of the Spanish Civil War

John, The Modern Novel
Roza, tumba, quema (Slash and Burn) by Claudia Hernández
La luz difícil (Difficult Light) by Tomás González

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
The Happy City by Elvira Navarro

Mandy Wight, peakreads
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

Marina Sofia, Finding Time to Write
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Meredith, Dolce Bellezza
All This I Will Give to You by Dolores Redondo

Obooki, Obooki's Obloquy
Spanish Literature Month - Two Books
(on Facundo by Domingo F. Sarmiento and Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier)

Paul, By the Firelight
Capital de la gloria (Glorious Capital) by Juan Eduard Zúñiga

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
Cuatro por cuatro by Sara Mesa

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac
The Desert and Its Seed by Jorge Barón Biza
Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener

Cuatro por cuatro

 

Cuatro por cuatro (Anagrama, 2012)
by Sara Mesa
Spain, 2012

A different type of novel than the stuff I'm used to reading on account of the distinct dystopian vibe it exudes, Cuatro por cuatro [available in English as Four by Four] centers on the strange and increasingly creepy goings on in and around the boarding school of Wybrany College and the nearby city of Cárdenas in Mesa's alternate reality Spain.  While "el colich," as both administrators and teachers from the institution and its mostly middle school age students like to refer to it, is in the business of passing itself off as something of a sanctuary from the chaos of the outside world, various irregularities and the unexplained disappearances of students and staff eventually give way to revelations suggesting that the enemy within the gates may be even more monstrous than any dangers lurking outside.  On that note, nuff said about the plot.  What I will add is that Mesa successfully jostled my expectations in a couple of ways in the service of this smart, moody, fake thriller of hers.  For example, I enjoyed the mix of first- and third-person narration here especially given that the culture of silence about the suicides and the crimes at Wybrany has so much to do with what Cuatro por cuatro is all about.  Similarly, I also was quite mesmerized by the novelist's powers of suggestion.  Was one character's description of Cárdenas--"La ciudad está a punto de explotar...  Grupos de incendarios han tomado las calles.  Todo es muy peligroso" ["The city is on the verge of exploding...  Groups of arsonists have taken to the streets.  Everything is very dangerous"] (146, ellipses added)--proof that "el colich" was surrounded by a post-apocalyptic or Stalker-like Zone or just one more nightmarish image like the hastily-glimpsed/possibly-imagined one of a grown man leading a crying adolescent girl away by the hand?  Whatever, a good read and one told in a fragmentary, time release style that well suits it.

 
Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1976)

photographer unknown

The Testament

 

The Testament [Le Testament Villon] (Northwestern University Press, 2013)
by François Villon [translated by David Georgi]

France, c. 1461

How do I love The Testament?  Let me count the ways.  One of the acrostics, FRANCOYS and MARTHE, appears in verses 942-955 in the section of the poem that David Georgi has translated under the rubric "Ballade from Villon to His Sweetheart."  ("False beauty, your cost is too high by far!" ["Faulse beauté, qui tant me couste chier"] Villon coos.)  Another, VJLLON, appears in verses 1621-1626 within "The Ballade of Fat Margot" where the poet/pimp claims he and his hooker girlfriend are a good match: "like unto like: bad rat, bad cat" ["L'un vault l'autre, c'est a mau rat mau chat"].  In addition to the self-referential fun and games, I was also smitten with the self-propulsive flow of Villon's 2,023-verse kitchen sink of song.  Early on, after raging against poverty and old age, the poet turns his sights on the ubi sunt theme with feeling in the marvelous "Ballade of the Ladies of Times Long Past."  "Mais ou sont les neiges d'anten?" ["And where is the snow that fell last year?"] he repeatedly asks at the end of each octet and quatrain (cf. verses 336, 344, 352 & 356).  A mere "Another ballade" later, Villon uses Charlemagne and other power brokers from the past to remind us that "No man alive can combat death,/or win a court's protection from it" ["Il n'est qui contre mort resiste/Ne qui trouve provisïon"] (verses 375-376).  This, in turn, is followed by an exercise in style using a version of French already antiquated in Villon's time as if to suggest that even words fade away.  Georgi calls the language here "a caricature of the French of an earlier period," full of archaisms, "that an educated medieval reader might have recognized from old chansons de geste, such as The Song of Roland, or from the quest-romances already two hundred years old by Villon's time" (notes, p. 237).  Of course, the hijinx aren't always so highbrow.  In "Ballade for a Lush," Villon pokes fun at Lot for having been "very forward with your daughters" ["De voz filles si vous fist approucher"] under the influence of drink (verse 1241) and in a later stanza he refers to one Marïon la Peautarde, whom Georgi casts as Marion Blisterskin (verse 1781) in honor of her "joke name"--in the translator's reading, Marïon la Peautarde = "Marion, la peau t'arde" or "Marion, your skin burns you" suggestive of "the symptoms of a venereal disease" (p. 255, notes).  Never a dull moment avec Villon, and I haven't even gotten around to any of the Testament's actual bequests, the vile, proto-Rabelaisian "Ballade of Meddlesome Tongues," the geographical puns opposing Montmartre and Mount Valerien--"In Villon's time," Georgi explains, "the abbey of Montmartre was in shambles and the nuns sold wine to get by.  They will be able to sell something else too, Villon suggests" (verses 1551-1558; notes, p. 252) via the double whammy of playing off the Montmartre nuns' licentious reputation and the sound effect goof of Valerien sounding like ne "valent rien" or "they're worth nothing"--the hangman's jokes and the debauched like, or the final verses of the poem where the "poor Villon" ["povre Villon"] showily signs off on his testament with a succession of rhymes ending in "-illon" or "-ullon" in alternating lines (cf. verses 1996-2023 in the original for the full effect).  A tour de force worthy of all the hype.

Source

David Georgi's 2013 bilingual edition of Villon's Poems includes The Testament (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013, 27-163) in Villon's Old French and Georgi's modern English in a facing translation.

Malicroix

 

Malicroix (Gallimard, 2019)

by Henri Bosco

France, 1948

When his great-uncle Cornélius de Malicroix dies sometime in the early 1800s, the 25-year old Martial de Mégremut learns that he stands to inherit his distant relative's inhospitable island home amid the salt water lagoons of the Camargue near the floodwaters of the Rhône as long as he can fulfill two provisions of the old man's will.  The first--a three months staycation in his humble new home far away from his loving and close-knit family in the company of the taciturn Balandran and his dog Bréquillet--seems rather pedestrian in nature although it comes with complications in the form of conniving humans and the unforgiving natural world now surrounding him.  The second, which Martial only learns about much later, will require the young dreamer to risk his life as a man of action in the fulfillment of a supernatural-tinged task which will take place alongside a mass for the dead overseen by his newfound enemies.  Will Martial be the "guest of honor" or remain alive and kicking when that funeral mass is finally celebrated?  Malicroix, a difficult novel to sort out in some respects (and not the quickest thing to read when looking up the translation for words like salicornes or pickleweed, previously unknown to me in any language!), struck me as a strange but alluring tale.  Conceptually, it situates a quest novel or medieval grail romance within a series of meditations on nature and solitude and Gérard de Nerval-like dreamscapes.  Is the action therefore "real," taking place in the narrator Martial's imagination or the product of the fevers and poisonings that beset some of the novel's characters?  Thematically, it's appropriately hermetic in the sense that the road map to understanding it provides mirrors the initiate's search for meaning.  Meaning that wasn't always clear to this uninitiated reader.  Still, it was fascinating to see how Bosco handled some of these genre juxtapositions and narrative misdirections.  Gérard de Nerval and Homer provide two telling examples of Malicroix's rich allusiveness and elusiveness, of the multiplicity of readings it offers.  When the evil notary Dromiols first meets the hero to read him the terms of his great-uncle's will, Martial overhears him talking in his sleep later that night and remarks upon how the thought processes evident "venues de cette vie seconde" ["coming from that second life"] (106) reveal a logical if nefarious intent--a clear reference on Bosco's part if not his narrator's to Gérard de Nerval's famous opening line from Aurélia where he declaims that "Le Rêve est une seconde vie" ["Dream is a second life"].  In a subsequent chapter, we get a multi-page sequence in which Martial lingers over a description of the wind transitioning from a forbidding squall into a full on hurricane.  While the line that caught my eye was the Nerval-like image of disasters gushing forth from the "cités aériennes" ["aerial cities"] above (130), I'm not so sure that the poetic prose can be easily written off as an uncomplicated allusion in light of a certain animism also present in the text: the river itself gets characterized as "un être...un être redoutable" ["a human being...a dreadful human being"] (186) with an agency of its own on one of the many occasions when the rising waters make Martial fear for his life, and to complicate things Anne-Madeleine, Martial's eventual love interest, is introduced as a spirit-like water creature who bears "cette odeur de vent et d'eau vive" ["this scent of wind and flowing water"] (186) wherever she goes.  Nice, mysterious, but lyricism + animism = what exactly?  Of course, the supernatural tension between "ce pays sauvage" ["this wild country"] (35) and a pre-Christian conception of the land of the dead unfolding in geographical proximity to the modern day Occitanie commune of Aigues-Mortes ["stagnant water"] also figures in the scene where Dromiols attempts to scare Martial away from his new home by claiming that many people believe it's a "royaume des Ombres" ["kingdom of the Dead"] (91).  Citing from the Greek, Dromiols' allusion is to Book 11 of The Odyssey, where Odysseus travels to the land of the Cimmerians where he pours libations to and actually speaks with various shades from the underworld.  For those of you as rusty as I am on my Homer, suffice it to say that it's enough to note that this scene sheds light on one aspect of the end of Malicroix even if I have run out of steam to speak of the blind ferryman and the "taureau de combat, d'une stature colossale" ["fighting bull of a colossal stature"] (221) that also haunt its vision literature-tinted pages.  It's all a bit much to process in a single reading.

Henri Bosco (1888-1976)

 photo: Sophie Pacifico le Guyader

Malicroix was the subject of a readalong earlier in the year which I didn't pay much attention to until two or three posts by Dorian and Amateur Reader (Tom) made me realize some of the erudite fun I'd been missing out on.  Here's the complete set of those posts for collectors.

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

The birds, the birds, sir! - visiting the Camargue and other marshes with Henri Bosco
Henri Bosco's mystical Malicroix - the five other songs of silence
but her true name, she hides it still - Malicroix's tricky narrator - "Breathe, sir, the exhalations of the sauce!"
Malicroix's mythology - white bulls, sun gods, east versus west - this evening, there is nothing in the east but night

Dorian, Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau

Malicroix Readalong

"The Old, Wild Blood": Henri Bosco's Malicroix

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 8/2-8/15 Links

Fernanda Melchor

Spanish Lit Month 2020 may be slowing down, but the last two weeks have brought us a number of knockout books & book reviews and a Ramones t-shirt-clad author photo so who can complain about any of that?  1-2-3-4!

Ali, heavenali
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Brian Joseph, Babbling Books
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

Grant, 1streading's Blog
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

Janakay, "You Might as Well Read"
Talking to Ourselves by Andrés Neuman

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog
A Silent Fury by Yuri Herrera
The Bitch by Pilar Quintana

Vishy, Vishy's Blog
Nada by Carmen Laforet

The Involuntary City

 

"The Involuntary City"
by Anna Maria Ortese [translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee]
Italy, 1953

Naples, like Algiers and Marseille, fascinates me even though I only know those cities from history and the arts.  Whatever, I'm not sure that the armchair tourist is the reader Ortese (above, 1914-1998) had in mind when she sat down to write this unsettling 1953 essay.  The first of two pieces of reporting appended to three short stories in her collection Neapolitan Chronicles, "The Involuntary City" uses a visit to "the building known as Granili III and IV"--an enormous bombed-out structure taken over by the homeless--"in the coastal neighborhood that connects the port to the first suburbs on Vesuvius" (73) to fashion a sort of catalogue raisonné of the horrors endured by its 3,000-some inhabitants.  "Three long sewer rats" gnaw on crusts of bread left on the floor of one room.  An improvised funeral takes place when a seven year old boy dies suddenly of unknown causes while playing with friends.  A deformed two year old, who has only seen the light of day once in her life, watches what passes as the world going by from the vantage point of "a cradle made out of a Coca-Cola carton."  Aside from the squalor, one of the most striking things about "The Involuntary City" is the sometimes incongruous way in which Ortese's use of language intersects with her visceral reaction to the suffering.  You can see the stylist's hand at work, if put to unpredictable purposes, for example, in the description of her guide as "a small woman, completely bloated, like a dying bird" (78).  Elsewhere, the mother of the dead boy gets likened to "a yellow thing, somewhere between a fox and a trash bin" (90).  A blind boy, orphaned and reduced to begging, receives this slightly more extended appraisal: "On his whole face appeared an ambiguous, disdainful smile, which contrasted bizarrely with the dead, absent expression of his eyes.  Feeling embarrassed, as if his smile, mysteriously mature, already the smile not of a child but of a man, and of a man accustomed to dealing only with prostitutes, contained a judgement, an atrocious evaluation of my person, I moved a few steps away" (79).  I too wanted to move a few steps away at times while reading Ortese's account, but perhaps that queasiness was the point if one accepts her argument that the existence of Granili III and IV, "one of the most evocative phenomena in the world, and like Southern Italy, dead to the progress of time" should be regarded as less a "temporary settlement of homeless people but, rather, the demonstration, in clinical and legal terms, of the fall of a race" (75).

Source

"The Involuntary City" can be found in Anna Maria Ortese's Neapolitan Chronicles [original title: Il mare non bagna Napoli] (New York: New Vessel Press, 2018, 73-98) in a new translation by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee.  Scott of seraillon has reflections on the full book here and here.

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 7/26-8/1 Links

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara & friends

Now entering our second month of Spanish Lit Month 2020, here are some book review links to keep you busy.  Hope you're discovering some interesting prospects for future reading opportunities on the participating blogs.  ¡Saludos!

Cathy, 746 Books

A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba

Emma, Book Around the Corner

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Grant, 1streading's Blog

The Devil's Trill by Daniel Moyano

Mandy Wight, peakreads

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Marina Sofia, Finding Time to Write

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

Un día volveré by Juan Marsé

Un día volveré

Un día volveré (Debolsillo, 2016)

por Juan Marsé

España, 1982

"Es usted un hombre singular, Mon.  Una mezcla de pensador y de hombre de acción.  Pero tenga mucho cuidado: el hombre que actúa, siempre se ve mal interpretado por el que piensa".

Otra novela de primera del gran escritor barcelonés Juan Marsé, fallecido el mes pasado.  El año es 1959, y Jan Julivert Mon acaba de regresar a Barcelona después de trece años en la cárcel.  Su sobrino y otros chavales del barrio ponen sus esperanzas en el ex boxeador/ex guerrillero/ex pistolero como una especie de héroe popular antifranquista mientras que otros temen el ajuste de cuentas que sin duda sucederá dentro de poco.  ¿Es realmente posible que Mon, un tipo bastante cerrado, ha abandonado sus sueños de venganza y solo quiere retirarse de su vida anterior?  Si es difícil explicar por qué el argumento de Un día volveré me emocionó tanto, sí puedo decir que es una novela en la que se respira la desesperación de los años de la posguerra.  Mon, aprendemos, perdió un hermano a la batalla del Ebro y su padre cuando éste fue fusilado un año más tarde; otro personaje importante solo sobrevivió ser un traidor a la República porque su hermano fue ejecutado en su lugar por error.  Estilísticamente, uno de los éxitos de la novela es la manera en cual su punto de vista narrativo funciona como un espejo para la pérdida de la inocencia y/o del idealismo.  En un momento, por ejemplo, el narrador explica cómo los muchachos del barrio de su juventud añoraban un ángel vengador: "Jan Julivert no había vuelto para refugiarse en su soledad ni para morderse las uñas pencando de plantón en el jardín de una casa de señores, sino para conectar nuevamente con sus antiguos camaradas de lucha y llevar a cabo un estudiado ajuste de cuentas".  Esto, al menos, era el deseo de ellos dado que quisieron "mantener vivo aquel viejo fantasma de la violencia acodado al balcón de su casa con un raído pijama gris".  En otra parte, sin obstante, el narrador opina más tarde que "aquel supuesto huracán de venganzas que esperábamos llegaría con él, y sobre el que tanto se había fantaseado en el barrio" quizás era otro fantasma en la medida en que "el olvido es una estrategia del vivir, si bien algunos, por si acaso, aún mantenemos el dedo en el gatillo de la memoria".  Excelente.

Juan Marsé (1933-2020)

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 7/19-7/25 Links

Javier Marías

Last week's reviews submitted for Spanish Lit Month 2020.  If you'd like to read along with us, please remember that our "month" will continue through the end of August and is more properly to be considered as Spanish-language literature as opposed to just Spanish literature.  Also, some of the discussion of these books is more active on Twitter than on individual blogs these days so look for these bloggers there if that interests you.  See you next weekend!

Grant, 1streading's Blog

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías

J.C. Greenway, Ten Million Hardbacks
The Island by Ana María Matute

Lisa Hill, ANZ Litlovers LitBlog
A Heart So White by Javier Marías

Marina Sofia, Finding Time to Write
Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo

Paul, By the Firelight
La memoria donde ardía (Where Memory Burns) by Socorro Venegas

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Rolling Fields by David Trueba

A Beautiful Young Woman by Julián López

Tony, Tony's Reading List
Feebleminded by Adriana Harwicz
Fracture by Andrés Neuman

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)
by Jean Rhys
England, 1966

Wide Sargasso Sea, long ignored by me as an exemplar of what I wrongly assumed to be English fuddy duddy writing, somehow managed to sneak up on me.  What a fucked-up novel!  Justly celebrated for being something of an intricate prequel to and swipe at aspects of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Dominica-born Rhys' back story of the so-called madwoman in the attic--largely set in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s before removing to Brontë's Thornfield Hall for its devastating intertextual conclusion--is a lush, messy, thorny affair in which the rewards turn out to be a lot more sui generis than I would have gathered beforehand.  Loved, for example, Rhys' naturalist's eye for detail in the representation of the protagonist Antoinette's childhood home; a mere three pages into the work, a dog has been shot in a murder/suicide, a horse has been poisoned and the childhood garden that has gone "wild" gets remembered like this: "The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.  Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green.  Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.  One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root.  Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered--then not an inch of tentacle showed.  It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.  The scent was very sweet and strong.  I never went near it" (11).  So much for a simpleminded opposition pitting Eden against England!  Similarly, I also appreciated the three-dimensional depiction of Antoinette's interior life as an outsider.  If it's easy to sympathize with the character when blacks on the island jeer her and her family for being poor "white cockroaches" or when the Rochester character--never mentioned by last name in the text--baldly confesses that "I did not love her" after marrying her, Rhys doesn't exactly elevate her to sainthood with the revelation that she called a childhood acquaintance a "cheating nigger" in a moment of weakness (14) and even actively subverts the notion about what kind of a catch the damaged Antoinette might have made as a marriage prospect with the details about her childhood fears of finding "a dead man's dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly" (18).  Whatever, splendid, unpredictable stuff and in its evocation of female trauma, more of a piece with something like Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein than the governess novel with which it's usually associated.

Jean Rhys (1890-1979)

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 7/12-7/18 Links

Roberto Arlt

As Spanish Lit Month 2020 rolls on, I'd like to thank everybody who's read along with us so far.  Last week's links round-up is below.  Also, I'm excited to hear that multiple bloggers still have their first reviews for this year's event coming sometime soon--something to look forward to for sure!  Cheers.

Ali, heavenali

The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez

Grant, 1streading's Blog

The Trap by Ana María Matute

A Silent Fury by Yuri Herrera

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

Leyendra negra by Osvaldo Aguirre

Rise, in lieu of a field guide

Notes on The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Vicious by Xurxo Borrazas

Leyenda negra

Leyenda negra (Tusquets Editores, 2020)
by Osvaldo Aguirre
Argentina, 2020

A bank robber, another bank robber's girlfriend, a defense attorney, and a crime reporter for the local newspaper all weigh in on a crime spree set in and around Rosario, Argentina in this high octane new novel from badass rosarino Osvaldo Aguirre.  While the nominal center of attention in Leyenda negra [Black Legend] is the rise and fall of career criminal Dámaso Ferreyra, a non-cookie cutter antihero from Uruguay who finds a Napoleon biography in the prison library and mulls over the lessons to be learned from the notion that the Corsican's best battle tactically might actually have been the one where he suffered his greatest defeat at Waterloo, the gang leader's story only gradually comes into focus via the Savage Detectives-like first person testimony of those who knew him.  Thematically, think of the Arlt/Piglia wing of Argentinean crime fiction as encapsulated in the follow the money trail formula of Bertolt Brecht: "¿Qué es robar un banco comparado con fundarlo?" ["What is robbing a bank compared with founding one?"].  Hugo Arrivillaga: "No miento si digo que en San Nicolás, en Pergamino, estaba la policía más corrupta de la Argentina.  En San Nicolás, en Pergamino, uno iba a un hecho y si no se encontraba con el jefe de la departamental estaba por lo menos el jefe de la comisaría supervisando que todo se hiciera como era debido.  Por lo menos" ["I'm not lying if I say that the most corrupt police in Argentina were in San Nicolás, in Pergamino.  In San Nicolás, in Pergamino, you'd go to a job and  if you didn't run into the police chief, there'd be at least the precinct station head there making sure that things were going as they should.  At least" (ePub, no page numbers).  García Jurado: "Me dicen abogado de delincuentes.  Está bien.  No lo niego, al contrario.  Soy un abogado de delincuentes y lo digo con orgullo.  Si pudiera, lo pondría en la placa, bien grande.  Las mejores personas que conocí han sido delincuentes.  Las más honestas" ["They call me a lawyer for criminals.  That's all right.  I don't deny it, on the contrary.  I'm a lawyer for criminals, and I say it with pride.  If I could, I'd put it on the plaque, nice and big.  The best people I've met have been criminals.  The most honest"].  Aguirre, whose background as a poet and a onetime crime reporter prob. made him uniquely suited to tell this story about what one character calls "los hijos ilegítimos del sistema" ["the illegitimate children of the system"] in the way that he has, has scratched practically all my Argentinean Literature of Doom itches with this anti-law & order thrill ride--which is really saying something to maybe one or two of you at best.  For everybody else, wow.

Osvaldo Aguirre

The Professor and the Siren

"The Professor and the Siren"
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa [translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley]
Italy, 1961

Since it's been a while since I've shared any short story posts here, I thought I'd celebrate my birthday week this year with a few words in honor of this posthumously published racconto by my near contemporary the great Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (above, 1896-1957).  A meditation on the passing of time and the corruption of the flesh told in what eventually takes the form of a perfectly executed fable, "The Professor and the Siren" starts out as the account of a sort of odd couple friendship between a skirt-chasing young journalist and a crotchety 75-year old senator said to be "the most illustrious Hellenist of our time" (5).  Although the story's tone and a certain carnality to the prose initially struck me as somewhat jarring since they were so dissimilar to what I'd remembered of the elegiac The Leopard, I was amused by the Sicilian-centric humor--the senator: "Tell me about our island.  It's a lovely place, even if it is inhabited by donkeys" (10)--and by the "almost obscene metaphors" the classicist traffics in to describe the pleasure of dining on sea urchins: "They are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed" (11).  About ten pages near the end, though, "The Professor and the Siren" takes an unexpected turn when the senator confides in the journalist his "adventure, an uncommon one" from the summer of 1887 in which he fished a Siren out of the sea.  I promise not to ruin things for you by saying any more about the ending, but this old man loved those final ten pages and the briny goodness of a piece of writing which sings of the frailty of human life and the natural wonders of "eternal Sicily" with such storytelling verve.  Lovely.

Source

"The Professor and the Siren" appears alongside two other short stories in the NYRB collection of the same name (New York: NYRB Classics, 2014, 1-38).

Spanish Lit Month 2020: 7/5-7/11 Links

César Aira's El divorcio

Spanish Lit Month newcomers Fernando Contreras Castro and Miren Agur Meabe join SLM veterans César Aira, Andrés Neuman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Enrique Vila-Matas and Juan Pablo Villalobos in the most recent links to reviews for the event.  The participants list has been updated here, and questions can be directed to either me or Stu should you need any clarification about how to party with us book nerds.  Until then, see you next week with more Spanish-language literature chat.

Grant, 1streading's Blog

Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Iliana, Bookgirl's Nightstand
Spanish Lit Month intro

John, The Modern Novel
El divorcio (The Divorce) by César Aira
Única mirando al mar (Única Looking at the Sea) by Fernando Contreras Castro

Marina Sofia, Finding Time to Write
Our Dead World by Liliana Colanzi 

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas

A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe

Fracture by Andrés Neuman