Jose Manuel Prieto

Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia tells the story of Cuban immigrant Thelonious Monk (not his real name) living in post-Soviet Russia. Monk loves women, many of them, particularly beautiful women. In St Petersburg he meets a young woman named Linda Evangelista (also not her real name) and after brief affair and some correspondence the two strangers become an inseparable pair. He takes her to Yalta where he starts work on a new novel about her, his notes for this novel comprise of this Encyclopaedia.

This is a really tricky novel to talk about, let alone try to understand but I will try to do my best. The novel explores these two misfits as they try to explore through a world that is changing. They are caught between old traditions and modern consumerism. I suspect that Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia is semi-autobiographical as José Manuel Prieto spent twenty years in Russian. Not knowing much of José’s life only leaves me to speculate, but I have to wonder if he is Thelonious, then who is Linda (real name Anastasia Stárseva according to an entry in the ‘L’). She comes across as a really interesting and mysterious character, a modernist who in a past like was an unorthodox poet and bourgeois muse.

The novel is a fusion of history, philosophy, social-critique and in my opinion autobiographical fiction. Though, like many other postmodern novels, there is a degree of difficulty in reading it; the rewards are great but I can’t help wondering just what I’m actually reading here. It’s a satirical, philosophical, meta-fictional encyclopaedia which is evocative of the era in which it was compiled in. This makes it incredibly complex and that would require more knowledge to understand it better. There are references that range from Bach to Dostoyevsky but also consumerism. I found a lot of nods to Russian literature and a better knowledge of this (especially Checkov) would be a huge asset to this novel.

The characters think of themselves as avatars of consumer culture, navigating the border between art and commerce during the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. This means we get this interesting perpective of a changing Russia. Mixed in are conversations about advertisement copy and art criticism. This is invoking a blending (and changing) from the old traditional high art to a more commercial culture.

I love the way that the novel is broken into mock Encyclopaedia entries; it was an interesting narrative type but surprisingly informative. The book did force me to flip between entries, I often found myself going back and forth but this ended up creating an ever-deepening picture of the world they are living in. Reading Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia runs the risk of looking like an idiot while trying to understand this overly complex novel but the reward is far greater and in the end well worth the effort.

I did take me a while to get through this book and even longer to put together my thoughts from the notes I made (yes, I’m trying to write notes now, does it reflect in my reviews?) but I’m so glad I read this novel. The novel is packed with wit, irony, philosophical thought and the written in a poetic voice. This is a translated book from Spanish and I can’t help but be angry that something can sound so beautiful after being translated out of its original language. If you are not afraid of post modernist novels and are willing to put the time and effort into this book, then reading Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia will be highly rewarding experience.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/02/20/encyclopedia-of-a-life-in-russia-by-j...… (mais)

After enjoying the insane brilliance of [b:Rex: A Novel|6134954|Rex A Novel|José Manuel Prieto|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328823947s/6134954.jpg|6313517], I got this earlier novel from the library. (It's his second book, but the first to be translated. Rex is his third, but translated into English second; [b:Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia|15811126|Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia|José Manuel Prieto|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1359423121s/15811126.jpg|21536301] is his first, translated third. I think?) Prieto is a Cuban writer, now living in New York City, but these three novels (Esther Allen, who translated the other two, refers to them as a trilogy) stem from the decade-plus he spent in Russia. So take your Russian heavyweights, mix with Latin American aesthetics (more Borges than García Márquez), and add in some cosmopolitan postmodernism (Nabokov above all).... it seems unlikely, but it works.

Nocturnal Butterflies doesn't work as well as Rex, though. It's an epistolary novel, nominally consisting of the drafts of seven letters from J., a Cuban smuggling Russian goods to the West, to V., a woman he has met in Istanbul, where he was meeting a Swede to arrange an expedition to the Caucasus to find a rare butterfly. J. is in Livadia, on the Black Sea, and expected V. to join him there, but she only sends letters instead. We read only J.'s drafts (or maybe they're not his drafts—they're narratives, structured according to the intervals between incoming letters, but they're not really addressed to anyone). J. reads not only V.'s letters but piles and piles of books of great letters from history—Russian authors, Abelard and Héloïse, Paul's epistles, you name it. And that's where the book disappoints, because while J.'s character unpeels itself from a noble and scholarly butterfly-hunter to a wannabe lover/smuggler/adventurer—and that's reflected in the prose, which gets more entertaining as the book goes on—what I also wanted, after reading Rex, was for that prose to be so suffused in J.'s epistolary models that the reader couldn't be quite sure of even reading J.'s story any more, rather than some other letter-writer whose consciousness had leaked in.

It does that a bit, but not enough. Perhaps the translators aren't quite as skilled as Esther Allen? Nocturnal Butterflies starts off slowly and the pomo pyrotechnics don't really get going until halfway through. And even then they seem muted, subtle—and I don't think subtle is Prieto's thing.

If you liked Rex, you'll like this book—but don't expect to like it as much.… (mais)

This novel by Cuban-born, Russian-educated José Manuel Prieto is narrated by a tutor (who asks to be called Psellus) and directed to his pupil, eleven-year-old Petya, the son of two Russian émigrés living in luxury on Spain’s Costa del Sol. Petya’s parents, Vasily and Nelly, are hiding from two Russian mafiosos they swindled out of millions in a scheme involving fake diamonds. But, in Rex, appearances are highly questionable, and the purported swindle could be merely a tool used by Vasily and Nelly to persuade Psellus to do their bidding, including transforming Vasily into the long-lost czar of Russia. Whatever the truth, plot is secondary in Prieto’s unique literary creation that is Rex.

Psellus derives his lessons to the young Petya, and indirectly to the reader, exclusively from the Book, Psellus’s name for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:
“If you receive nothing more from me than some knowledge of the details of the Book, if in all your adult life you don’t manage to retain any more than a few passages, a few scattered phrases of the Book, that would be enough to give you a distinct advantage as you go out into the world. Only through the Book can you learn to judge men sensibly, plumb their depths, detect and comprehend their obscurest motives, sound the abyss of their souls.”
Psellus’s other influences include the supremely worthy Writer, who is really an amalgamation of numerous writers, including Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky, and the despicable Commentator, quite likely intended as a stand-in for Jorge Luis Borges, and perhaps even, at times, for Prieto himself.

Prieto’s prose defies description. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read recently (or maybe ever). It’s a highly referential banter of thoughts, images, dialog, and questions to the reader. Often lacking in subjects or verbs or other generally indispensable parts of sentences, Prieto’s sentences are obscure and difficult, but also loaded with charm and humor. Esther Allen’s flexible, lively translation is its own work of art. As demonstrated by this scene where Psellus steals a dance with the beautiful but unattainable Nelly, Allen captures the musicality and exuberance of Prieto’s language:
“In which the two of us danced, Nelly’s face and mine, our faces consumed by fire, the blue tongues of my passion, the impulse that led me to inhale the aroma of her hair, bewitched by the arc of her brows, revolving at the center of a slow song that astonished me when I heard its first chords because I said to myself: jazz, but without being able to tell you [Petya], you up in your room at that moment, to interject a rapid commentary, overlooking for the moment the commentaristic (or belated? Or belated) nature of jazz. A song that now, each time I hear it, of course.”

Rex is a thoroughly enjoyable literary puzzle for those who embrace originality and can accept some amount of confusion for a little over 300 pages (if the quote above brings fear to your heart, you should probably skip this one). This book begs a second reading, which I suspect would be even more pleasurable than the first

This review also appears on my blog Literary License.… (mais)