Historia de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma

Historia de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma (Cátedra, 2008)
by Catalina de Erauso
New Spain, 1626

"History, his story or her story?" are just three of the gender-bending, cross-dressing angles to keep in mind whilst reading this alleged autobiography from 1626 [literally History of the Ensign Nun, Catalina de Erauso, as Written by Herself but Englishized under the much snappier title of Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World], but critic Enrique Anderson Imbert offers up another intriguing one by suggesting that even if Catalina de Erauso's wild autobio were found to be authentic, "que no lo creemos" ["which we don't believe to be the case"], "habría que adelantar dos siglos el nacimiento de la novela en Hispanoamérica" ["one would still have to backdate the birth of the novel in Spanish America to a full two centuries earlier"] due to its fanciful blurring of the lines between fact and fiction as fellow critic Ángel Esteban explains it (12).  For our purposes, thankfully it's enough to limit ourselves to the general contours of a picaresque-like hi(s)tory in which the Basque hero/heroine runs away from her convent in Spain, chops off her hair and begins disguising herself as a man, finds his/her way over to the New World where he/she battles both the indigenous resistance and the Dutch navy in support of the King of Spain's dominions all while engaging in one murderous duel after another and narrowly escaping the double trouble of the gallows and almost being wed to multiple women as a reward for services rendered--all while maintaining his/her virginity intact!  To those troubled by my emphasis on gender dichotomies thus far, I confess that it's been difficult to man up to a situation in which the subjectivity of the early modern authorial "I" is so confused that the hero/heroine refers to himself/herself as masculine or feminine almost randomly throughout the text and even as both masculine and feminine on the very same page at one point (121); to those, on the other hand, really only interested in finding a recommendation for their next good story, it's perhaps worth noting that even after becoming a transatlantic celebrity, meeting the Pope and receiving permission to continuing dressing like a man, the easy to anger colors of our temperamental hero/heroine are revealed in a too good to be true finale in which two damsels meet "Señora Catalina" on the road from Rome to Naples and while laughing at him/her are rebuffed with threats of violence and an unmistakably choice "mannish" expletive: "Señoras p..." ["Whores!"] (175).  In other words, a winning introduction to a person Spaniard Ángel Esteban considers to be "una de las figuras más controvertidas y excepcionales de nuestro Siglo de Oro" ["one of the most controversial and exceptional figures of our Siglo de Oro"] (11).

Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650)

in a portrait attributed to Juan van der Hamen

Spanish Lit Month 2015: 7/1-7/4 Links

With apologies to everybody accustomed to seeing these Spanish Lit Month link round-ups on Sundays in the past, your humble slacker is pleased to announce the belated first batch of SLM 2015 reviews from the half week of July 1-4.  I'll collate current and future posts from the various participants on Sundays throughout the duration of the event, but in the meantime I'm happy to note that this week has seen a massive Boom (Lat Am literature pun intended!) in works being read and written about for your SLM pleasure.  Thanks to everybody who's reading along with us, and don't hesitate to let me or my co-host Stu know if you've blogged about a book that you'd like us to know about.  Until then, I hope to make the rounds of several of your blogs over the next day or two.  Happy reading to you all!

Emma, Book Around the Corner

Transcontinental love

(on Tarzan's Tonsillitis by Alfredo Bryce Echenique)

Nicole, bibliographing

"An order was implicit in the phenomenal revelation of the world..."

 (on An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira)

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

"Plata y plomo" by Jesús Blancornelas

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Good Offices by Evelio Rosero

Tony, Tony's Reading List

The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol

Plata y plomo

"Plata y plomo"
by Jesús Blancornelas
Mexico, 2004

Welcoming Spanish Lit Month 2015 readers to the party with a dirty tumbler full of Mexican narcojournalism may seem a strange way to kick off the festivities out here in Caravanalandia, but it's not like I've ever been accused of having my finger on the pulse of the book blogging world so what the hell, let's rock and roll.  "Plata y plomo" ["Silver and Lead," slang for money and a bullet] is an intense 17-pager written in a terse, violent style not all that far removed from the Bolaño of 2666's "The Part About the Crimes" or the Ellroy of My Dark Places, but why take my word about the ass-kicking nature of the prose when you can see it for yourself in the essay's high adrenaline opening lines?  "Le achicharraron el pene con un puro.  Cicatrices en muslos, pecho y brazos no eran de cigarillo.  Lo encueraron...  Enalambrados tobillos y muñecas.  Apretados tanto hasta sangrar.  El primero y último tiros fueron en la boca" ["They burned his penis with a cigar.  Scars on the thighs, chest and arms weren't from cigarette burns.  They stripped him naked... Wrists and ankles bound in wire.  Tight to the point it provoked bleeding.  The first and last shots were to the mouth"] (47, ellipses added).  I'll spare you all the other grisly forensic details for now, but suffice it to say that they're fitting enough insofar as "Plata y plomo" deals with all the narco killings Blancornelas (1936-2006, above) covered or witnessed since giving up being a ring reporter in the 1950s.  So how does the Proustian madeleine of Mexican narco violence function as a journalistic device in this piece?  As Blancornelas tells it on page 49,

contar cadáveres desde 1985 no es como "nocauts" cuando era cronista deportivo 30 años atrás.  Vi muchos.  Fili Nava.  José Medel.  Toluco López.  Mauro Vázquez.  Ratón Macías.  El Pajarito Moreno.  El Negro Urbina.  Baby Vázquez.  Ultiminio Ramos.  Halimi.  Ike Williams.  Acumulaban "KO's" como cuentas de rosario.  Pero en Baja California los ajusticimiamientos en los últimos quince años, pasan de 300 y a veces llegan a 400 por año.  Enumeración parecida a la de Sinaloa.  Aproximada a la Ciudad Juárez.  Seguramente cercana al terror neolaredense.

[tallying up the dead bodies since 1985 isn't the same thing as tallying up knockouts was when I was a sports reporter 30 years ago.  I saw a lot of the latter.  Fili Nava.  José Medel.  Toluco López.  Mauro Vázquez.  Ratón Macías.  El Pajarito Moreno.  El Negro Urbina.  Baby Vázquez.  Ultiminio Ramos.  Halimi.  Ike Williams.  They accumulated KO's like rosary beads.  But in Baja California, the executions in the last fifteen years surpass 300 and occasionally reach up to 400 per year.  A number similar to that of Sinaloa.  Roughly that of Ciudad Juárez.  Certainly close to Nuevo Laredo's terror.]

Despite the body counts and the graphic descriptions of corpses dissolved in lime, discovered shot en masse Mexican Revolution-style or found hanging from bridges and the like, our reporter--himself the target of an assassination attempt in 1997 owing to his writings on cartel violence in Tijuana--insists that "Oler a muerte.  Sentirla de cerca.  Así como que te acaricia la mano" ["Smelling death.  Feeling it up close. As if it were caressing your hand"] is something one never gets used to.  "El estómago se revuelve" ["Your stomach churns"], for one thing.  For another, "Cada vez que veo a un ejecutado o la foto, siento como si tuviera a mi lado la muerte" ["Each time that I see somebody who's been executed or the photo of somebody who's been executed, I feel as if I had Death at my side"] (51).  "Algunos asesinatos son atribudos a ajustes de cuentas entre la delincuencia organizada" ["Some killings are attributed to settling of scores among organized crime"], he explains (56).  "Pero otros son calificados como mensajes ocultos de la mafia hacia el gobierno" ["But others are considered to be secret messages from the mafia to the government"] to warn the official power structure not to interfere with the unofficial one.  Whatever, Blancornelas writes as if he means it and his reflections on the worldwide narco trade's "remedo de los tiempos alcaponescos y hollywoodianos" ["imitation of Hollywoodian and Al Caponesque times"] (61) as it relates to wholesale murder in the streets eventually doubles back to one of his first lessons learned as a Mexican crime reporter: no investigation will take place.  "Recuerda bien, reporterito" ["Remember it well, little reporter"], a public prosecutor warns him, "que en boca cerrada no entran moscas" ["flies can't enter your mouth if your lips are sealed"].  Savage but truly top shelf nonfiction.

Source

Blancornelas, Jesús.  "Plata y plomo."  In Viento rojo.  Diez historias del narco en México (Mexico City: Random House Mondadori, 2004, 45-63).

Spanish Lit Month 2015

Whilst Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and I were kind of criminally late getting around to deciding on it this year, "it's all good" because we've decided to throw another Spanish Lit Month shindig next month in honor of the kindred spirits who as we speak are probably practically frothing at the mouth at the idea of stealing books off my Bolaño & Borges shelf!  Naturally, absolutely everybody is invited to "participate" in SLM 2015 whether you actually covet my beloved books or not. All you have to do to attend the party is to read and write about one or more pieces of Spanish language literature or Catalan language literature (read in the original or in translation) in the month of July and then let Stu or me know about it so we can collect the links for others to check out.  Not sure what you'd like to read?  No problem!  Consider joining us for a group read of Adolfo Bioy Casares' La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel] near the end of the month.  More details forthcoming--but until then, here are the books people read for Spanish Lit Month 2014 as the event continued on into stoppage time in August:

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/1-7/5 Links

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/6-7/12 Links

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/13-7/19 Links

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/20-7/26 Links

Spanish Lit Month(s) 2014: 7/27-8/2 Links

Spanish Lit Month(s) 2014: 8/3-8/16 Links

Spanish Lit Month 2015 Lineup
Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog
Amanda, Simpler Pastimes
Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza 
Caroline, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat
Chelsea, The Globally Curious
Emma, Book Around the Corner 
Frances, Nonsuch Book
Grant, 1streading's Blog
JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal
James B. Chester, James Reads Books
Jody
lizzysiddal, Lizzy's Literary Life
Maria Behar, MindSpirit Book Journeys
Mee, Bookie Mee
Melissa Beck, The Book Binder's Daughter
Miguel, St. Orberose
Nicole, bibliographing 
Obooki, Obooki's Obloquy
Pat, South of Paris Books 
Rise, in lieu of a field guide
Scott, seraillon
Séamus, Vapour Trails 
Tony, Tony's Reading List

Contempt

Contempt [Il disprezzo] (NYRB Classics, 1999)
by Alberto Moravia [translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson]
Italy, 1954

For a no nonsense, stripped down character study about an imploding marriage with virtually no show offy writing other than the occasional extravagant simile and, OK, some masterful psychoanalytic meta engagements with the Odysseus/Ulysses of Homer, Dante, Joyce and Freud, one of the things I most liked about immersing myself in the sea of Contempt's flat prose and suffocating interiority was watching the author heedlessly row himself out as far from shore as possible and then seeing if he could return without crashing onto the rocks of novelistic banality.  Heroic?  Not exactly.  However, it's probably a measure of Moravia's success in the realm of the "boudoir drama" (142) that even Madame fucking Bovary has a more uplifting ending as concerns the "conjugal repugnance" (141) theme!  Whatever, while I suspect that this quick reading but somewhat humorless novel is all too successful a neorealist-like downer for me to ever consider rereading without Technicolor happy pills in hand, two things that make me hedge my bets on that front are Moravia's ironic mean streak in selecting a writer as the poster boy for a self-absorbed intellectual emotionally impotent in the face of his true feelings for another human being (Riccardo Molteni on his wife Emilia: "And so, between us, there was a silence that was only broken from time to time by some quite unimportant remark: 'Will you have some wine?  Will you have some bread?  Some more meat?'...It was, then, a silence that was intolerable because perfectly negative, a silence caused by the suppression of all the things I wanted to say and felt incapable of saying" [116-117, ellipses added]) and a couple of profoundly moving hallucination scenes near the end which touch on the rational and the irrational at the heart of loving somebody while conjuring up the fabled wine dark sea of Homer in primal opposition to modern man's more prosaic and less poetic realities.  Powerful and perceptive but maybe not the perfect book to read if you're currently sleeping alone or have ever lost the girl (or guy) of your dreams to those capricious goddesses known as "Fate."

Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)

More Contempt
Frances, Nonsuch Book
Ally, SNOW FEATHERS Part I & Part II
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Grant, 1streading's Blog
Scott, seraillon 
Scott G.F. Bailey, six words for a hat 

Indios, ejército y frontera

Indios, ejército y frontera (Siglo XXI Editores, 1982)
por David Viñas
México, 1982

A veces aburrido y a veces divertido, Indios, ejército y frontera aún así se trata de un ensayo histórico valioso sobre los orígenes y los ejes del poder en la Argentina visto desde el punto de vista de "la cuestión india".  Quizá "aburrido" y "divertido" no sean las palabras adecuadas para evaluar la obra provocadora de Viñas porque el autor, un argentino que tuvo que escribir su libro en el exilio a causa de la dictadura militar de los setenta y ochenta también responsable de "desaparecer" a dos hijos suyos, aumenta las apuestas políticas y polémicas al principio de su obra por preguntar si "el discurso de silencio" en cuanto a los indígenas en la historia argentina no se debe al hecho de que los indios "fueron los desaparecidos de 1879" (12).  En todo caso, no es que falten anécdotas o perspectivas interesantes dentro del libro: citando a un tal Amadeo Jacques, por ejemplo, Viñas escribe de un cacique del Chaco que "había comido corazón de tigre y corazón de víbora para hacerse invulnerable a las balas" de una de las numerosas "expediciones blancas" a la región (120); en otra parte, el historiador ofrece una crítica tajante del cambio de énfasis hacia los indios en menos de una generación desde la publicación de Facundo de Sarmiento hasta la llamada Conquista del Desierto fomentada por el Ministro de Guerra Julio Argentino Roca: "Lo de civilización y barbarie aparece initialmente unido por una 'y' copulativa, hacia el momento de Roca el sentido se desplaza hacia una 'o' disyuntiva.  La síntesis se hace dilema".  ¿Lo importante de esto según Viñas?  "La integración que corre por cuenta del 'civilizador' se desplaza hacia el 'bárbaro' que debe convertirse o desaparecer; adscribirse a los valores del conquistador, en identificatoria sumisión, o perecer" (73).  Una lectura fuerte e inquietante en cuanto a su análisis del "indofobia" (27) y del "asesinato racial en la Argentina" (44) del siglo XIX, y además, una obra igualmente fuerte e inquietante en cuanto a su visión de la Argentina del siglo XX: "Si se analiza la historia argentina desde una amplia perspectiva, resulta evidente que sus mayores dirigentes siempre fueron militares o latifundistas.  Lo excepcional ha sido lo contrario...  Y por cierto que esa secuencia podría prolongarse hacia la actualidad enhebrando tanto a Yrigoyen como a Perón (para asumir la vertiente populista) o a Uriburu, Aramburu, Onganía o Videla si aludimos a la franja autoritaria" (197).  Acertado.

David Viñas (1927-2011)

I Have Nothing but Contempt for You

I'll say it one more time--"out loud" as it were: I HAVE NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT FOR YOU, YOU FUCKING BLOGGERS!!!  No new reviews.  No histrionic wringing of hands about the lackluster translation rates of foreign language lit making it into English.  Not even one of those alliterative memes that some of y'all super earnest types are so dang fond of.  Instead, all I have--all and nothing but, in fact--is contempt (a/k/a Contempt) in the form of a group read of the 1954 Alberto Moravia novel  [original title: Il disprezzo] being held over Memorial Day weekend, May 23rd thru May 25th, in conjunction with the lovely Frances of the legendary Nonsuch Book and the growing number of other non-contemptible types listed below.  Ignore that horrible NYRB Classics cover if you can (presumably generic clip art lifted from some high school yearbook editor's forgotten bottom desk drawer) and concentrate instead on the potential antisocial pleasures to be had in reading a slim 250-page novel of which no less an unassailable authority than the blurb-writer for the back cover of the NYRB edition has enthusiastically opined: "Molteni is one of the great appalling characters of twentieth century fiction."  So are you an innie or an outie?

In

Frances, Nonsuch Book
Ally, SNOW FEATHERS

Amy, New Century Reading

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Grant, 1streading's Blog

Scott, seraillon

Scott G.F. Bailey, six words for a hat

Out

Everybody Else