Mi Top 13 de 2015

1) Petersburg, de Andrei Bely (Rusia, 1916)

Petersburg

Petersburg: Antipoetry and Panic

2) Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë (Inglaterra, 1847)

3) Meursault, contre-enquête, de Kamel Daoud (Argelia, 2013)

4) Les chercheurs d'os, de Tahar Djaout (Argelia, 1984)

5) Le sermon sur la chute de Rome, de Jérôme Ferrari (Francia, 2012)

6) A Brief History of Seven Killings, de Marlon James (Estados Unidos, 2014)

7) La petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais, de Lola Lafon (Francia, 2014)

8) Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, de Lucio V. Mansilla (Argentina, 1870)

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles: Captivity Narratives I

 

9) Últimas tardes con Teresa, de Juan Marsé (España, 1966)

10) Le village de l'Allemand ou Le journal des frères Schiller, de Boualem Sansal (Argelia, 2008)

11) Fuera de campo.  Literatura y arte argentinos después de Duchamp, de Graciela Speranza (Argentina, 2006)

12) La vida privada de los árboles, de Alejandro Zambra (Chile, 2007)

13) Fogwill, una memoria coral, de Patricio Zunini (Argentina, 2014)

*en orden alfabético por autor [in alphabetical order by author]*

Blog, Interrupted

Dear Readers,

Having had a heart attack this past weekend, I've decided to take some time off from the blog until life returns to "normal."  In the meantime, I wanted to wish you all a happy holiday season and a Happy 2016 in advance.  Hope to be back in touch before too long.

Cheers!

Richard

*

Estimados lectores:

Después de haber tenido un ataque cardíaco este fin de semana, he decidido tomar un descanso del blog hasta que la vida vuelve a la normalidad.  Mientras tanto, yo quería desearles felices fiestas y un feliz año nuevo por adelantado.  Espero que sigamos en contacto.

¡Saludos!

Richard

La raza de los nerviosos

La raza de los nerviosos (Seix Barral, 2006)
por Vlady Kociancich
La Argentina, 2006

"Pertenecemos a la raza de los nerviosos, que da delincuentes o artistas" (7).  Citando al chiste de Marcel Proust en su prólogo, Vlady Kociancich, vieja amiga de Bioy Casares y Borges y una distinguida autora por derecho propio, empieza con el pie derecho en este sumamente interesante libro de 23 ensayos dedicados a algunos de sus escritores favoritos (por ejemplo, Conrad, Lampedusa, Poe y Sciascia, entre otros).  De muchos comentarios memorables, me gustaría compartir tres sobre Dostoyevski ("En la literatura, como en las religiones, no es el Paraíso sino el Infierno el que tiene los mejores cronistas" [de Dostoyevski y sus demonios, 37]), Italo Svevo ("¿Hay algo más repetido en la historia de la literatura que la indiferencia de los contemporáneos?" [de La historia del buen viejo y la hermosa muchacha, de Svevo, 77]), y el género del ensayo ("En la obra de un narrador, el ensayo es como un cuarto en la intimidad de su casa, ahí donde sólo entran los amigos" [del pasaje Robert Louis Stevenson, ensayista de Sobre el ensayo, 100]) para dar un ejemplo del sabor del libro.  Sin lugar a dudas, hay una variedad de anécdotas memorables también.  Ésta, sobre una charla entre Kociancich y Borges, es un buen ejemplo del cariño que tiene la ensayista por uno de sus escritores argentinos favoritos:  "Cuando Borges decía que prefería ser reconocido como un buen lector antes que como un buen escritor, estaba definiendo su personalidad de escritor, no haciendo gala de modestia.  Un día me preguntó si recordaba la primera novela que yo había leído, porque él había empezado leyendo cuentos.  'La novela entró tarde en mi vida', dijo borgeanamente".  La respuesta a la pregunta de Borges, sigue Kociancich, era Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, de Mark Twain.  "--Pero no --dijo Borges suspirando--.  Usted leyó Huckleberry Finn.  Tom Sawyer es muy floja".  Un momento más tarde, "compadeciéndome por haber leído la novela equivocada", Borges añade "--Qué pena....  Huckleberry Finn es mucho mejor" (de La lectura, 162).  En resumen, una lectura encantadora.

Vlady Kociancich

The 2015 Argentinean (& Algerian) Literature(s) of Doom: November Links

JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal

The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

Frances, Nonsuch Book

side by side

(on The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud)

Pat, South of Paris Books

The Angels Die by Yasmina Khadra

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud

Les chercheurs d'os by Tahar Djaout
 *

Thanks to Amateur Reader (Tom), Frances, JacquiWine, Miguel, Pat, and Scott for keeping me company during the first two months of the 2015 Argentinean (& Algerian) Literature(s) of Doom.  Hope y'all enjoy this second round of links for the event.  For a preview of December's Doom finale, here's a "typical" quote from one of my current reads, the nonfiction Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) penned by Algerian Mouloud Feraoun:

At Béni-Douala on the slope where the market is held behind tangles of twisted barbed wire, soldiers, in shorts blackened by dust and sun, busy themselves around jeeps, trucks, and tanks.  It seems that the cannons and machine guns pointed at the sky are there to convince you that you are not lost, that you are with fine people who know how to live and proclaim the benefits of a motorized and armored civilization.

This quote, translated by Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade and found on page 16, comes from Feraoun's November 13, 1955 journal entry.  In a particularly cruel twist of fate, Feraoun was murdered by a right-wing death squad just three days before the cease fire that ended the war.

Old Masters

Old Masters [Alte Meister] (The University of Chicago Press, 1992)
by Thomas Bernhard [translated from the German by Ewald Osers]
Austria, 1985

For whatever reason--poor timing, a bad attitude, a fatal case of been there, done that ism mayhaps, who knows?--the insult machine known as Old Masters really wasn't doing it for me until about a third of the way into the indignities.  After that, I kind of wondered WTF I possibly could have been disappointed about early on.  The concluding salvo in Bernhard's bilious, ranting arts trilogy, Old Masters slyly links an art criticism-laced conversation about Tintoretto's The White-Bearded Man held by two old friends at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum with a series of Karl Kraus-like mudballs lobbed at Vienna's true Kultur: e.g. "Viennese lavatories are altogether a scandal, even in the lower Balkans you will not find a lavatory which is quite so neglected" (80).  While the final pages of the work take an unexpectedly-warm-for-Bernhard detour to touch on the importance of love and friendship in this, "our age of chaos and kitsch" (154), insult meister need not be deterred from reading this uplifting Austrian Jonathan Livingston Seagull because the abuse heaped on targets as diverse as the vagaries of the Austrian justice system ("not just arbitrariness but a perfidious machine for grinding human beings" [109]), sculptors ("those brutal common proletarian men of violence with their chisels" [110]), and the common Austrian himself  ("a common Nazi or a stupid Catholic" [122]) proves that Bernhard's defamation ammo is of the same high caliber as usual.  Consumed, with the child-like delight one usually associates with the consumption of the humble ice cream cone, in honor of the German Literature Month V festivities perpetrated by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)

Les chercheurs d'os

Les chercheurs d'os (Éditions du Seuil, 1984)
by Tahar Djaout
Algeria, 1984

Tahar Djaout was only 30 at the time of the publication of Les chercheurs d'os [The Bone Collectors, unavailable in English] and all of 39 the year he was assassinated by Islamist extremists.  While this depressing biographical note certainly colored my reading of the novel, it'd be a mistake to attribute the novel's emotional power to any sentimentality on Djaout's part: Les chercheurs d'os is a wrenching affair but also a low-key one that's understatedly told.  To help explain the significance of the title, I should probably begin by mentioning that the narrator of the work is a young teenage boy who sets out with a distant relative, Rabah Ouali, in search of the remains of the older brother who had perished three years earlier fighting "l'armée d'occupation" ["the army of occupation"] (140) during Algeria's war of independence against the French.  The ensuing travelogue gives the boy a chance to comment on all of the new sights he's taking in upon leaving his Kabylie village for the first time and gives Djaout a chance to rue the continuing famine and poverty and other aftereffects of the war during the boy's quest for the "os martyrs" ["martyred bones"] of his older brother (44).  Highlights.  As might be expected from a "simple" but convincing first person narration, Djaout is a master of voice and nuance.  At the very least, the older brother's explanation to his younger brother concerning his reasons for joining the resistance--"Le sang est parfois nécessaire" ["(The shedding of) blood is sometimes necessary"] (106)--rings particularly true within the confines of a fictive space which also muses on French military abuses in an evenhanded and non-partisan way.  In one of the more memorable scenes from the novel, for example, Rabah Ouali tells the young narrator about his discovery of a dropped or discarded letter from a father in mainland France which had been sent to the army commander occupying the main characters' village.  The gist of the letter?  The father warns the son not to bring shame upon his "famille très respectable" ["very respectable family"] by perpetrating cruelties on the very people whose country he was occupying so "arbitrairement" ["arbitrarily"]--a perspective which surprises  Rabah Ouali because he never knew "des étrangers" ["outsiders"] existed who shared this view of their land (41).  Great anecdote.  While not a highlight per se, I was also very taken by Djaout's restraint and subtlety.  In a novel ostensibly devoted to the search for and repatriation of the "cadavres héroïques" ["heroic cadavers"] (70) of the fallen and in a novel in which man and boy earnestly discuss whether death arrives and whispers "Je suis la mort" ["I am Death"] to its victims (153), I was hardly expecting to be so won over by non-flashy prose that instead trades in the currency of an almost picaresque-like immediacy (sans the jokes, of course).  Djaout was supposedly murdered, by the way, for having "wielded a fearsome pen that could have an effect on Islamic sectors," a cowardly act to be sure but a cowardly act that proves that even cowardly murderers might know a thing or two about literary criticism from time to time.

Tahar Djaout (1954-1993)

L'homme à l'envers

L'homme à l'envers (J'ai Lu, 2015)
by Fred Vargas
France, 1999

Stupid ending and previsible villain aside, Fred Vargas' L'homme à l'envers [literally Inside-Out Man but Englishized as Seeking Whom He May Devour] was still an otherwise intelligent and entertaining enough page-turner that I wouldn't hesitate to read another of her Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries or to give a try to her so-called Three Evangelists series or even both.  Intelligent and entertaining?  The proof is in the pudding, dude.  For most of the whodunit/"roade-mouvie" (182), Vargas is sufficiently understated and amusing to get away with spinning an audaciously farfetched story in which characters actually debate whether an enormous wolf or an actual werewolf is at all responsible for a series of barbaric wolf attack-like slayings across France.  No mean feat!  Pros: Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is appealingly enigmatic as the intuition- rather than logic-based crime-solving star of the show, and both the Parisian Commissaire and his love interest and even the minor characters are all way more subtly drawn/believable than the narrator Dino in Alberto Moravia's Boredom or the overwrought mother-in-law Fay in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter (two supposedly "good" books I totally hated and now no longer need to review, thank you very much).  Cons: Although I jotted down a fair amount of new to me French vocab to look up during my time with the novel, I didn't take note of any cool lines to share with you here and my emphasis on characterization above probably should be construed as damning with faint praise.  Bottom line: OK, serviceable prose, not as dumb as most thrillers.  Wait, did I just say a fucking werewolf?!?

Fred Vargas