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Saturday, January second, 2010
The old men lead their sins to pasture,
this is their only job.
They release them during the daytime, and pass the day forgetting,
and in the evening go out to rope them
to sleep with them, warming up.-- from "The Old Indians"
 For a few days I have been reading some poetry from the collection Poets of Nicaragua: a bilingual anthology 1918 - 1979; today I think I found a poet I really dig. Every poem I have read by JoaquÃn Pasos contains images that transfix me with their concreteness and clarity and originality -- "The old men lead their sins to pasture"! "Let us seek out a corner in the air,/ that we might lie down"! 14 of Pasos' poems are online at los-poetas.com, including his magnum opus, "Song of the war of things".
posted evening of January second, 2010: Respond
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Mary put out her hands to receive the earthenware bowl, which, through some extraordinary optical illusion, perhaps due to the light of the sky, was transformed into a vessel of the purest gold.
I started reading Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ last night, the book which precipitated his self-imposed exile from Portugal. Taken aback by the grandeur of the heresy he lays out and by the subtle beauty with which he commits it. His voice describing Galilee and its denizens, and Mary and Joseph, has a familiar ring to it -- this book is very clearly written by the author of Balthazar and Blimunda.By happy coincidence I was at the Brooklyn Museum today and got a chance to look at their collection of James Tissot's watercolors of The Life of Christ -- beautiful, meticulously researched and composed. Tissot is of course coming from a very different place than Saramago. But the commitment to a naturalistic rendering of Christ's life had me thinking of Saramago's work as I looked through this exhibition. A few reading notes: The opening of the novel is a detailed description of a painting of the Passion, it had me wondering whether Saramago is describing a particular existing painting or a fictitious composite work. In the third chapter, when Joseph tells his tale to the council of elders, they send a delegation composed of Zacchæus, Dothan, and Abiathar ("names recorded here to forestall any suspicion of historical inaccuracy in the minds of those who have acquired their version of the story from other sources" -- ha!) to question Mary about her vision; I wonder where Saramago is getting this bit from. The three names are Biblical but I'm not finding any connection to the story of Jesus' conception.
posted evening of January second, 2010: 1 response
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009
And, well: here are the books I want to read in 2010. Many of these are left over from 2009's list... The deal is the same as before, I'll be adding to this list as the year goes along; if you have any suggestions for me, please leave them in the comments. (Actually the list is now books I plan to be reading in 2011. For the books that were on this list that I read in 2010 and removed from the list, see A Year of Reading.) The List
Novels and stories
- The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
- City of God by Paolo Lins
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, in Güneli Gün's translation.
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
- The Promised Land by Karel Shoeman
- Die Blendung by Elias Canetti
- 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 Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes
- A Wild Ride Through the Night by Walter Moers
- The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
- Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
- Dusklands by J.M. Coetzee
- Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig
- Casi un Objeto by José Saramago
- Sobre heroes y tumbas by Ernesto Sábato
- Temple of the Iconoclasts by J.R. Wilcock
- El desierto by Carlos Franz
- Where Once Was Paradise by Carlos Franz
- The Art of Resurrection by Hernán Rivera Letelier
- Santa MarÃa de las flores negras by HRL
- How it is by Beckett
- The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale
Non-fiction
Poetry
- Paradise Lost by Milton (or, well, probably not actually.)
- Works and Days by Hesiod
- Theogony by Hesiod
- MartÃn Fierro by José Hernández
- Altazor by Vicente Huidobro
- Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
posted evening of December 31st, 2009: 8 responses
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Well: the theme this year has been the Spanish language, the literature of Iberia and of Latin America. I started out the year reading Borges oral and (the beginning of) Cien años de soledad, and translating the Spanish translation of Saramago's blog, and thinking it's kind of funny that my interest in Spanish should have ultimately been piqued by a Portuguese author. Over the year I've gotten much more comfortable with the language and am just finding it a whole lot of fun to be reading and understanding a language which is not English. Maybe it's connected that I've gotten a whole lot more interested in poetry this year than I ever have been in the past, principally in Spanish-language poetry; at the beginning of the year I was reading Pablo Neruda and GarcÃa Lorca, then I picked up Romantic Dogs, also I spent some time on Ferlinghetti; and just recently I've been spending time with some Spanish and South American poets whom I have not been writing about yet. Not quite sure what it is, but somehow the distance between me and the text imposed by the foreign language seems to make it easier to appreciate the sound of the poetry and to look for the imagery being communicated. This is also the year Sylvia lost interest in having me read her bedtime stories -- early in the year we read The Subtle Knife and The Hobbit (which led to me reading Lord of the Rings on my own and reliving my juvenile frustration with it); after that she was done with the bedtime story ritual. Growing up! My favorite books this year: Elizabeth Costello, Balthazar and Blimunda and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (which together gave me an entirely new picture of Saramago and which have me waiting on pins and needles for The Elephant's Journey), Museum of Innocence, and late entrant The Savage Detectives, which is making me want to read more Bolaño soon.
posted evening of December 31st, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
It's 1976 and the revolution has been defeated
but we've yet to find out.
We are 22, 23 years old.
Mario Santiago and I walk down a black and white street.
At the end of the street, in a neighborhood straight out of a fifties film, sits the house of DarÃo Galicia's parents.
It's the year 1976 and they've trepanned DarÃo Galicia's skull.
Another thing I spent a lot of mental energy on while reading The Savage Detectives, was on wondering how closely the events being narrated corresponded to actual events in the lives of Bolaño and his crowd. For example the poem "Visit to the Convalescent" from The Romantic Dogs narrates a visit Roberto and Mario Santiago make to the house of their friend, DarÃo Galicia, after he has surgery for an aneurysm. It reads like memoir, like something that really happened... In The Savage Detectives, Angélica Font tells the story of Ernesto San Epiphanio's convalescence and eventual death following his brain surgery at the end of 1977, by which time Arturo is in Barcelona and Ulises either in Europe or Israel, I'm not sure which, but in no position to visit Ernesto. So as I'm reading I'm wondering what changes have been made and what the reasoning is... Is Ernesto's character based on DarÃo? Or is Bolaño just using an event from DarÃo's life to tell a story that is much more about Angélica than about Ernesto, a relatively minor character? From poking around with Google it's clear that much of the broad framework of the story is true to life -- it would be interesting to learn where the story diverges from life.
posted afternoon of December 26th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, December 25th, 2009
...So instead of writing that futile piece this week, I spent my time absorbed in reading The Savage Detectives. Lots to say about it! One thing I was wondering about pretty constantly was, who is the documentarian who is compiling the narratives that make up the middle portion of the book? It can't really be Belano or Lima for various reasons. It would be nice if it were GarcÃa Madero, but that does not seem plausible either. (It is interesting to notice that GarcÃa Madero is almost entirely absent from this middle section -- the only time his name is mentioned is by the Mexican professor who's publishing a book about the Visceral Realists, to say that he does not recognize the name. But who is he talking to?) One way to look at this middle section which does not require the presence of an archivist, is as a collection of short stories -- many of the narratives stand up on their own as short stories, and the linking, interweaving threads shared between them serve to draw the reader through the collection.
posted evening of December 25th, 2009: Respond
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For a few months now I have had fixed in mind that I wanted to write a critical essay on Museum of Innocence with reference to Snow, examining (in a nutshell) Kemal's love for Füsun as a displacement of his desire to be authentically Turkish, a reaction to his feelings of alienation. But frankly I think writing this piece would take critical, sociological and psychological chops that I do not have -- every time I have started all I have come up with is a condemnation of Kemal for acting in bad faith -- which is not what I was aiming for. So, I'm going to move on from this, try and find something else to think about... It is worth noting -- I didn't blog the end of the novel partly out of wanting to avoid spoilers, partly out of wanting to save material for the essay I was going to write -- that the last 50 pages of the book were just fantastically good reading. All through the book I felt conflicted about not liking Kemal, wondered if it was even worth reading with such a jerk for a narrator; but the end of the book took away any doubts I had been feeling about whether this is a great novel.
posted evening of December 25th, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, December 20th, 2009
I'm wondering how many of the characters in The Savage Detectives are real people from Bolaño's cohort in D.F. in the mid-70's. According to infrarrealismo.com, Ulises Lima is based on Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro*; clearly Arturo Belano is Bolaño himself. I am assuming GarcÃa Madero is made-up, and that the Font family must be based at least loosely on real people. The rest of the Visceral Realists must be a mix of real poets and inventions...
 * Oops, and Papasquiaro is itself a pen name, just as Ulises Lima is; the poet's actual name is José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda -- that Wiki page also lists a number of other poets who are presumably represented in The Savage Detectives.
posted morning of December 20th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Scott McLemee has an interview with Marcela Valdes -- whose essay Alone Among the Ghosts prefaces the newly published volume of Bolaño's non-fiction -- at Inside Higher Ed today, on the subject of the new book and Bolaño's writing in general, and his current popularity. Asked about the "Bolaño myth", Valdes observes, "The fact that American publishers have used Bolaño's life story to sell his books? Is this really a mortal sin? The book industry is in such terrible shape these days that publishers are trying everything to sell books." -- this is a nice perspective, a good way to step back from the dire imprecations of Castellanos Moya... McLemee quotes a line from Bolaño's Playboy interview; when asked about his feelings on posthumous works, he responded, "Posthumous? It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage." -- I had not realized this: Bolaño had been battling the disease which would kill him since the early 90's, which means a great deal of his corpus, including The Savage Detectives, was written under the shadow of death. I wonder what led the interviewer to ask that question -- was Bolaño's health public knowledge? It seems almost indelicate... Earlier today I happened on his The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais at Words Without Borders -- it is one of the biographical sketches that make up Nazi Literature in the Americas. Its closing line comes across as extremely dark given the knowledge of its author's health: "Death found [Mirebelais] composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms." Based on this excerpt, Nazi Literature in the Americas looks like an extremely demanding read -- if anything moreso than The Savage Detectives; I think my understanding of the passage is really severely hampered by not being familiar with the poets he mentions (and of course by being familiar in only a limited, general way with Haiti's modern history).
posted evening of December 16th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, December 14th, 2009
I've noticed several times Bolaño's statement that he was "less embarrassed" by his poetry than by his novels -- don't remember where I first read that, but it was recently referenced at MobyLives -- it crossed my mind today when I remembered his poem about Lupe in The Romantic Dogs: She worked in la Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's,
and she was 17 and had lost a son.
The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, ... -- very similar material to what he will later write about Lupe in The Savage Detectives. And the funny thing is, that poem seemed to me like about the weakest one in The Romantic Dogs, whereas the writing about Lupe in the novel is strong and resonant. Not sure exactly what to make of that... Perhaps that Bolaño wrote his fiction best as prose, that his best work as a poet was not narrative; perhaps that this poem was a rough draft for a characterization in the novel?
 Update: ...or another possibility, that The Romantic Dogs does not contain Bolaño's strongest poetry work at all -- this is the assertion made by Chad Post in today's edition of Making the Translator Visible -- Post interviews Erica Mena, translator of (among other things) Bolaño's poem "Tales from the Autumn in Gerona," which will be published in the March issue of Words Without Borders [link] and which Mena and (tentatively) Post find to be much better than the poems in The Romantic Dogs. Something to look forward to, certainly.
posted evening of December 14th, 2009: Respond
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