El bautismo

El bautismo (Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1991)
by César Aira
Argentina, 1991

Who knows just what the frick don César Aira's prattling on about for most of this approximately 150-page doorstopper--the representation of reality? literary criticism? Mother Nature and mass extinction?  LOL!--but does it really matter much what the human Cheshire Cat is up to given that his entire career is essentially an extended homage to the unreliable narrator?  I thought not.  In any case, El bautismo [The Baptism, not yet available in English] is ostensibly concerned with depicting two landmark events in bourgeois parish priest turned film critic Máximo's life--the first having to do with the storm-tossed night when he refused to baptize a prematurely born baby because it was so hideous to the eyes and of an undetermined gender that it was worth denying the sacrament to and the second having to do with a night some twenty years later when the now elderly priest realizes that the handsome young man he's been keeping company with during a catastrophic flood is the very same person he'd refused to baptize years and years ago.  Mischievous baptism/flood parallels notwithstanding (the incessant rain of the second night is said to be the cause of "la muerte por inmersión de millones de animalitos" ["the death by immersion of millions of little animals"] with "little animals" naturally including humans such as you and yours truly [83]), non-theological gags constitute the primary sources of humor here as in the free indirect discourse swipe at an infamously uptight American master of the same ("Como Henry James, tendría que dar los más interminables rodeos para evitar hablar del sexo" ["Like Henry James, he'd have to beat around the bush ad nauseam to avoid speaking about sex"]) (64); the several pages dedicated to competing lettered and unlettered interpretations of Campo Argentino [Argentinean Countryside] magazine's comic book feuilleton of what would appear to be a cross-dressing and particularly violent sequel to the gaucho epic Martín Fierro; Máximo's provocative claim that regardless of the intrinsic good or bad value of a movie, "el producto final del cine son los buenos críticos" ["the end product of film is good critics"] (115); and a surrealist sight gag in which the edifice in which the priest and the young man have taken shelter is revealed to be a doll house.  OK, so maybe that bit about good critics being the true end product of film is more provocative than funny.  Still, it's at least somewhat amusing to see where Aira and the priest go with the joke: "La verdadera astucia de un productor de cine es trabajar con muertos, no con vivos" ["The true cleverness of a film producer lies in working with the dead and not the living"], Máximo argues.  "Hay que ponerse del lado de la fatalidad.  Los muertos en la realidad no se mueven ni configuran argumentos interesantes, pero el cine puede crear esa ilusión, y es la que mejor le sale...  Cualquier película, la más trivial, mejora con el sencillo expediente de considerarla una danza de cadáveres" ["Put yourself in Fate's shoes.  The dead in reality neither come up with nor fashion interesting plots, but film can create that illusion and that's how things turn out for the best...  Any movie, no matter how trivial, improves by the simple expedient of considering it as a dance of cadavers"] (115, ellipses added).  WTF?  Word, homey!

 César Aira

Other Aira Works Reviewed on Caravana de recuerdos

Ema, la cautiva (1981)

"Cecil Taylor" (1987)

Los Fantasmas (1990)

La prueba (1992)

Cómo me hice monja (1993)

Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000)

La Vida Nueva (2007)

Continuación de ideas diversas (2014)

Spanish Lit Month 2015: 7/12-7/18 Links

Thanks to all of you who helped make last week another productive one for Spanish Lit Month 2015!  As I'm a little backed up on my reading and reviewing these days, here's the most recent round of posts dedicated to the event sans the usual introductory chatter from me for a change.  If Spanish Lit Month founder Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and I seem to owe any of y'all a visit to your blog, apologies but please don't worry--you're not alone!  In the meantime, many SLM 2015-related discussions can be followed on Twitter by referencing  the #SpanishLitMonth hashtag.  Cheers!

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza

A Heart So White by Javier Marías

Emma, Book Around the Corner
Days of Combat by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Grant, 1streading's Blog
A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas
The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata by Adolfo Bioy Casares

JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal
Spanish Wines for #SpanishLitMonth: Albariño from Galicia

Maria Behar, MindSpirit Book Journeys
Spanish Lit Month, 2015

Miguel, St. Orberose
A Plan for Escape by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Obooki, Obooki's Obloquy
The Birds of Baden-Baden by Ignacio Aldecoa

Pat, South of Paris Books
The Stein Report by José Carlos Llop

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
La vida privada de los árboles by Alejandro Zambra

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Spanish teeth for sale quote for sunday

Tony, Tony's Reading List

Woman in Darkness by Luisgé Martín

La vida privada de los árboles

La vida privada de los árboles (Anagrama, 2007)
por Alejandro Zambra

Chile, 2007

Una linda pero muy linda historia.  Julián, un profesor de literatura en cuatro universidades de Santiago y un aspirante a novelista, es el marido de Verónica y el padrasto de Daniela.  "Daniela no es su hija, pero a él le cuesta no pensarla como una hija", el narrador nos dice (13).  Resulta que a veces el treintañero "distrae a la niña con 'La vida privada de los árboles', una serie de historias que ha inventado para hacerla dormir" (Ibid.).  Una noche cuando Verónica tarda en regresar de su clase de dibujo, Julián cuenta otra historia de los arbolitos a Dani mientras él imagina lo peor acerca de la ausencia de su mujer.  Verónica: "Si yo me muero no quiero que la niña viva con Fernando [su ex marido].  Prefiero que se quede contigo o con mi mamá" (65).  Mediante un estilo moderado y una prosa preciosa y sutil a la vez, Zambra ha escrito una meditación sobre el arte de narrar y la fragilidad del amor y de los recuerdos de infancia que es enormemente agradable y conmovedora.  Sobre Julián: "No quería, en verdad, escribir una novela; simplemente deseaba dar con una zona nebulosa y coherente donde amontonar los recuerdos.  Quería meter la memoria en una bolsa y cargar esa bolsa hasta que el peso le estropeara la espalda" (47).  Sobre la novela que Julián dedicó a Daniela y que ésta va a leerla como adulta: "Es una historia de amor, nada demasiado particular: dos personas construyen, con voluntad e inocencia, un mundo paralelo que, naturalmente, muy pronto se viene abajo.  Es la historia de un amor mediocre, juvenil, en la que reconoce a su clase: departamentos estrechos, verdades a medias, automáticas frases de amor, cobardías, fanatismos, ilusiones perdidas y luego recuperadas --los bruscos cambios de destino de quienes suben y bajan y no se van y no se quedan.  Palabras veloces, que anticipan una revelación que no llega" (103).  Excelente.  Me encantó.

Alejandro Zambra

P.S. to Spanish Lit Month 2015 Readers

Tony of Tony's Reading List has a review of The Private Lives of Trees here.  For those who can't read Zambra in Spanish, suffice it to say that I agree with Tony that "it's a tempting proposition" to read all of the Chilean writer's translated works.

Spanish Lit Month 2015: 7/5-7/11 Links

With the first week and a half of SLM 2015 now in the books, I'd like to thank everybody who's participated so far and everybody who's said that they'll be participating later in the month.  After a rather sluggish start of my own, I hope to increase the Spanish-language posting pace here over the next couple of weeks.  In the meantime, two of the more interesting factoids to emerge from last week's SLM reviews are that Rise and Tony exercised their rights to bend the Spanish language emphasis/focus/rules to add works originally composed in Valencian/Catalan and Galician to the mix and that the time range of books reviewed for the event now extends from 1490 to 2013 and presently includes writers from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru in addition to "New Spain" and Spain.  Nice going so far, ¡damas y caballeros!

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

plays as doughnuts - Lope de Vega's revolutionary Fuenteovejuna

A frenzy, an illusion,/A shadow, delirium, a fiction - Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza

Spanish Literature Month...Another Reason I Love to Blog in July

Grant, 1streading's Blog
Out in the Open by Jesús Carrasco

JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal
All Souls by Javier Marías

Melissa Beck, The Book Binder's Daughter
The One Before by Juan José Saer

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
Historia de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma by Catalina de Erauso

Rise, in lieu of a field guide
Tirante el Blanco by Joanot Martorell

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog
Uppsala Woods by Álvaro Colomer
Marks of Identity by Juan Goytisolo

Tony, Tony's Reading List
One Million Cows by Manuel Rivas

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).