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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
I have never given any thought to why Brazil is historically a Portuguese colony, when (almost) all the other states of South America are historically Spanish colonies. But perhaps it is because of the Treaty of Tordesilla, which specifies that lands west of the meridian halfway between the (Portuguese) Cape Verde islands and the West Indies shall be the territory of Spain, and lands east of this meridian shall be Portuguese. Brazil is the easternmost country of South America and much of it lies east of this meridian. (In The Stone Raft, the Iberian "peninsula" comes to rest "on the line that in those glorious days had divided the world into two parts, one for me, one for you, one for me." -- That's how I came to be finding out about it.) Also here, we have a couple more direct textual references, to "Padre António Vieira's History of the Future and The Prophesies of Bandarra, as well as Pessoa's Mensagem, but that goes without saying." ...And, Roque Lozano has rejoined the story! Can Maria Dolores be far off? Your questions are false if you already know the answer.
posted evening of December 23rd, 2008: 4 responses
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Saturday, December 20th, 2008
Do you believe in any of what you're saying, It's not a question of believing or not believing, everything we go on saying is added to what is, to what exists,... when I get to the end of what I'm saying, I have to believe in my having said it, that's often all that's needed, just as water, flour, and yeast make bread.
I read a lot more of The Stone Raft today and am pretty well cured of my fear (sort of silly on its face) that Saramago was going to turn the story into a conventional unconventional romance. I still feel concerned about the way the two female characters were brought into the story each to hook up immediately with one of the men -- it seems to diminish their roles as independent characters, when the male characters had a hundred or so pages to develop themselves solo, not as part of a couple. (Also I'm still wondering about Maria Dolores -- why was she brought into the story and given an identity if she was not going to play any role going forward?)But maybe the romantic pairing is necessary -- it gives me as a reader a familiar element in this very alien story. I like the characters and I'm ok with them getting together. Joaquim is still immature and petulant -- he has not been cured of that by his liaison with Maria Guaivera. And yet I respect him, since he is the one who set this whole pilgrimage in motion. Something I'm wondering about: When Pedro tells of the stone ship he found at the coast, it reminds Maria of an old story that "saints landed on this coast in ships made of stone, coming from deserts on the other side of the world." Is this a real story? I'm going to try and find out more about it -- Maria references St. James as one of the sailors in question. ...Yes, a real story. celticcountries.com says, Further details about Saint James' late whereabouts were given in the Historia Compostellana [sic] commissioned by Archbishop Diego Gelmirez of Galicia in the 12th century. According to the Historia, after St. James was martyred in the Holy Land his disciples carried his body to Galicia in a ship made of stone. Like St. James, many other Celtic saints such as St. Matthieu or St. Malo in Brittany navigated also across the Atlantic in stone vessels.
(later, the travellers "are following the old route of Santiago," who is St. James, as they move slowly through the villages south of Lugo.)
posted evening of December 20th, 2008: Respond
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"Let's work hard and cheerfully and we'll continue to be happy," the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add. Adam Gopnik has a good article in the current New Yorker about de Brunhoff's Babar books -- "Freeing the Elephants" addresses complaints about the colonialist worldview in Babar by calling the books "a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination." I'm not totally convinced that this describes the spirit in which the books were written -- Gopnik doesn't really make an argument, just an assertion -- but it does seem like an excellent spirit in which to read the books.Next week we're going to see the exhibit at the Morgan Library. The library's website features a digital reproduction of de Brunhoff's first, hand-printed copy of Histoire de Babar.
posted morning of December 20th, 2008: Respond
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 I found out about this Mexican band by a circuitous route -- reading Alejandro Rossi's essay about Octavio Paz' Labyrinth of Solitude made me interested in finding out more about the book; and I came to learn that Botellita de Jerez had written a song with the same title.
The lyric (as far as I can understand it) refers to Paz' essay "Los Hijos de la Malinche", which I think is about Hernando Cortes' mistress, her role in turning Mexico into a Spanish colony, her place in the Mexican imagination. Here is another fantastic song from Botellita de Jerez, "Niña de mis ojos":
posted morning of December 20th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, December 18th, 2008
 Ellen tells me she has gotten me two books for Hanukkah, both featured on this year's reading list: What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? by António Lobo Antunes, and The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. Thanks El!
posted morning of December 18th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
The Wooster Collective features some art from Peter Fuss of Poland, including this billboard, which reminds me a bit (as so much else is doing these days) of The Stone Raft:
 (Seen in context at Fuss's site the message is a bit different.)
posted morning of December 17th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
The only real thing that exists at this moment on earth is our being here together...
I'm lingering around the middle of The Stone Raft a bit. I was a bit surprised at Joana's revelation, and it prompted me to think of the book as pretty strongly feminist in tone; but now, following close on that, she has paired off with José; Maria has been introduced and has paired off with Joaquim, and with that any feminism in the book seems (for now) much more muted, I mean to say it seems like a romance in a more familiar model. Joachim is self-centered and needy; if the book's aim is to show him growing into a full human being by accepting love from a woman, well, it will still be a very good book but I will be disappointed. (I speculate about how I will feel about the book when I'm done reading it -- obviously I can't know.) A romance can be a very satisfactory read of course. But the first half of this book made it seem like it was going to be much more than that; hopefully Saramago is not headed where I am assuming he is.
posted evening of December 16th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, December 15th, 2008
Three percent has nominated 25 books for the title of "Best translated [into English] book of 2008" -- they are running posts about each of them over the next month, until January 27 when they'll pick ten finalists. Lots of good stuff in the list! (A couple of titles from there are going on my reading list.) Thanks to Scott for the link.
posted afternoon of December 15th, 2008: Respond
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OK, for 2009 I am doing something I've never really done before (that I can recall), which is to make a list of books I'm interested in reading this year. The list is not ordered; I'm just going to be adding titles to it as they occur to me, and without commentary. When I comment on a book that's on the list, I will update with a link to the diary for that book. I'm going to link this post in my sidebar, so it will be at hand for reference. Just a few books for now, I'll build the list over the next few days. Note that I'm expecting 2009 to be mostly a year of reading Iberian and Latin American lit for me, not sure exactly how this will pan out though. The List
Novels and stories
- City of God by Paolo Lins
- Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
- Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
- What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? by António Lobo Antunes
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, in Güneli Gün's translation.
- The Double by José Saramago
- The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago
- All the Names by José Saramago
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
- The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
- Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
- Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
- The Promised Land by Karel Shoeman
- Die Blendung by Elias Canetti
- Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
- Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Counterlife by Philip Roth (Started this, totally turned off.)
- My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec
- The Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes
- The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
- A Wild Ride Through the Night by Walter Moers
- The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Non-fiction
- Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
- Borges in/and/on Film by J.L. Borges
- The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
- Cuadernos de Lanzarote by José Saramago
- The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
- The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport
Poetry
 If you have any suggestions for me, any books you think would do me good, please put them in comments!
posted morning of December 15th, 2008: 6 responses
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Sunday, December 14th, 2008
(Yikes! four posts about The Stone Raft this morning -- it's taken over my consciousness pretty completely.) Interesting: With the addition of Joana to group of travelers, there will be no more conversations that everybody understands. Pedro speaks only Spanish, Joana speaks only Portuguese -- José and Joachim are bilingual. I guess I had been vaguely assuming that most people in Portugal were competent in Spanish, not really sure why I would think such a thing though. When Pedro did not understand what was happening between Joachim and the border guard, it surprised me to realize that Joachim and José had not been speaking their native language with him. I think it's easy to fall into a trap of viewing the two languages as more similar than they actually are, if most of your exposure to them is reading. It seems like if you just do some letter substitutions, written Portuguese looks pretty similar to written Spanish. I was surprised watching City of God last night, that I had mostly no clue what the characters were saying -- when I watch a Spanish film with subtitles, I can generally map the meanings in the subtitles to the sounds of what people are saying -- but here it was very much the exception for me even to recognize a word of the spoken dialog. I don't know how different the spoken Portuguese of Brazil is from that of Europe. (By the way, Paolo Lins' City of God is now on my list of books to read in 2009 -- the movie made me really want to find out more about the characters, and I think I'll be able to understand them better in book form.)
posted afternoon of December 14th, 2008: Respond
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