I´m game...Mostly Latin American/Peninsular fiction for me in 2010

Hello all, my name is Matt and I'm a 25 year old living in the Midwest. I joined this librarything to try and keep better track of the books I read and what I think about them. I´m interested to see how many books I read in a year. I know I have some long novels coming up in my rotation, so I don´t know if I can keep a 75 book a year pace. Regardless, I´ll try and post reviews of all the books I read.

I studied Spanish as an undergrad and developed a passion (obsession) for reading in Spanish. Probably about 75 percent of the books on my list will be from Latin America and Spain. My next big project is Paradiso, by Jose Lezama Lima. I´m pretty excited about it. Last year I taught myself to read in French, and I´ve told myself that I´m going to try and read one book a month in French. Up next are La Chute, by Camus, and Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo. Besides that, I´ll read the books my girlfriend recommends in English.

I look forward to any discussions about books that I might have with any of you. I think another reason that I joined this was to make reading a less solitary pursuit, at least until I can get my act together and get into graduate school to study what I love. Buena suerte a todos en 2010!

1. El Villano en su Rincón--Lope de Vega

I love reading Siglo de Oro plays, and I was thrilled to find three Cátedra editions of plays at the foreign bookstore the other day for two bucks apiece. I remember that when I was riding the train a lot, plays were great, because if I had a two hour commute, I could almost read a whole play, usually about an act each way. It´s nice to read something knowing about how long it´s going to take to finish it, and it seems like most plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth century were fairly uniform in length, somewhere around 3,000 lines. I started with El Villano en su Rincón, by Lope de Vega, and will soon read plays by Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca. El Villano en su Rincón is the story of Juan Labrador, a country person of considerable wealth who is content to live his life in his corner of the world without ever setting eyes on the king. The king often hunts nearby, and while Juan Labrador is chilling at home, the king finds the tombstone that Juan has prepared for himself, and reads about this man who is so proud of his happy, secluded country life, and has the audacity to profess that he has no desire to set eyes on the king. The king sets himself to meet Juan, show him the error of his ways, and convince him that life in the court by the side of the king is the best of all possible lives. He accomplishes this, and Juan and his children end up in Paris with the king. The main love story that takes place involves one of the king´s nobles, Otón, and the daughter of Juan, Lisarda. Their love is able to overcome the difference in their social class, and in the end they are set to be married with the king and his sister as witnesses.

I greatly enjoy the language of these old plays. I was reading about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the baroque style, and realized that much of the complexity of the language was intentional, written as a sort of challenge to the reader to unravel. I have a hard time with poetry by people like Sor Juana and Góngora, that is so complex and full of twists and turns and juxtapositions in sentence structure; but within the narrative storyline of a play, I feel like it all begins to make sense, and I feel a part of the conversations between the characters from way back in the Spanish day. This play was pretty light, and from reading the eighty pages of commentary that preceded it, I knew what el Fénix was trying to do thematically and what was going on in the story from scene to scene. It was a fun read, and I especially liked the conversations between the king and Juan Labrador. I also felt that the praise of the simple, rural life resonated with me. I spent a year and a half living in the Mongolian countryside as a Peace Corps volunteer, and now I live in Chicago. While on the one hand I miss the simplicity and happiness I felt in the rural setting, I also love being surrounded by so much culture and humanity. It´s interesting how Lope´s basic point that life separated from the king cannot be justified because the king is God on earth, and the sun around which the entire nation revolves, can be applied to the 21st century. Can people who cut themselves off from society and seek separation from the culture that rules over us all, as the king did over France in the time of the play, truly be happy? Is ignorance bliss, essentially? Lope says no, that a man ignorant of his king cannot be considered wise and happy. I´d say that culture, as relayed to us by the media and society, is our king, and I´m not sure that a man separated from the world he lives in can be happy either. I´m sure that plenty of people would say that I´m wrong, though, and I´ll come back to this play throughout my life and see what I think as I change.

2. Nazarín--Benito Pérez Galdós

Nazarín was the first book that I read by Benito Pérez Galdós, and was a good introduction to the author. I like reading new authors beginning with lesser works rather than their biggest successes, as a way of introducing myself to the author before tackling the books that they are best known for. I thought Nazarín was beautifully written, and there were passages that really moved me, especially the moments shared between Padre Nazario (also known as Nazarín) and the two women who accompany him in his peregrinations, Beatriz and Ándara. I read this book because I wanted to read a more traditional narrative after the conversational stream-of-consciousness style of Tres Tristes Tigres. As I was reading this book, I thought about Don Quijote, and compared the Nazarín to him as I read the wanderings of the catholic father that make up the plot of this book. Apparently a better person to have in mind would have been Jesus, based on what I read about Nazarín on the internet after I finished. I think I need to read the Bible so that I can make the connections between religion and literature, especially when they are as obvious as they are here. Nonetheless, it´s interesting to think how much Don Quijote himself must be based on Jesus.

I thought Nazarín was an excellent introduction to 19th Century Spanish narrative, and I want to read more books by Pérez Galdós. I think he might be comparable to Dickens in his mastery of storytelling. I remember thinking that David Copperfield was really boring when I read it in high school, but when I read other books from the same era, such as Nazarín, I think that maybe I just wasn´t ready for literature of this sort. I´d recommend this book, and I´ll probably read it again if I can will myself to read the story of Jesus in the Bible in the next year, so that I can see Padre Nazario´s wanderings through a different, biblical perspective (as opposed to the quixotic perspective that I used during this reading).

3. La Última Niebla/El Árbol--María Luisa Bombal

I ordered the book La Ultima Niebla/El Árbol, by María Luisa Bombal, for Christmas, and read the two title stories while at home for the holidays. I was impressed by the perspective that she had as a woman in the early part of the 20th Century. Her stories presented a lot of the themes that I associate with modern feminism, and I can´t say that I entirely expected them to be exhibited in a work from the 1930´s, written by a Chilean. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn´t be surprised, because many of my female Chilean friends that I met while studying in Santiago seemed more feminist than their North American counterparts, so maybe such an early show of feminism from the Southern Cone isn´t so surprising. Furthermore, I´m not exactly an expert on feminist literature, so really what I´m going on here is my reading The Bell Jar in high school and hanging out with women who are liberal and could perhaps be considered feminists. Anyway, the two stories that I read use symbols such as fog and a large, beautiful tree to represent the struggles that women trapped in the boredom of conventional marriage faced. The language is very straightforward and simple, and all the more powerful for being so. The stories are blunt and insistent in showing the frustrations of female life in a world that does not confer them the rights that they know they deserve. In reading the introduction, I learned that María Luisa Bombal spent a lot of her life in Paris and was a pretty cosmopolitan figure. These stories, I believe, were published in Sur, and she had a lot of famous friends. Hell, she dedicated “La Última Niebla” to Oliverio Girondo and Norah Lange. I really enjoyed these stories. I´d been reading novels and needed something that I could read in one sitting, a story with a beginning and an end that were within my grasp over a shorter space of time. And I´m trying to read more female authors, because I feel it´s ridiculous that such a large percentage of my books come from, essentially, half of the population on earth. They´re good stories, they seem revolutionary to me, and they make me think about my friends in Chile. I would recommend them to anyone.

Welcome! This is an area of the world I haven't read much from, so your reviews will be most appreciated.

Wow, it's not often I come across a male reader who enjoys reading feministic literature. I have to admit that I tend to avoid them, not at all feministic. Gender history was never my favourite while studying either. So...my respect to you! I see you are very ambitious in your reading too, good luck with that an I am looking forward to read your reviews throughout the year. Welcome to the group btw:)

Oh, I think I'm going to enjoy this thread. I loved your first review; I'll read the others a bit later. Welcome, and thanks for sharing!

welcome, matt. i look forward to your reads and reviews, and learning about authors i've never heard of before. i started reading Doña Perfecta by Perez Galdós last year as an introduction to his works as i have in my sights his Fortunata and Jacinta. Nazarín seems to be interesting -- if it's available in English, i will look for it (my Spanish needs a good deal of brushing up).

Welcome to the group, Matt! Sounds like you are doing some great reading this year.

Welcome! I'm going to enjoy your thread very much, if what you've read and reviewed so far is a taste of what is to come. Unfortunately, any books you recommend I'll have to read in English, unless by some miracle my college Spanish is retrievable.

Honduras, El Salvador, and Panama...? Areas of blankness in my literary map.

French authors, I would suggest reading Le Clezio in his native French because, I am reliably informed, it's impossible to translate with precision the musicality of Le Clezio's prose. I stress that I report only! I'd go for Christophe Bataille in the original, were I you.

PS, Hi Matt, and glad to see you here!

Hallo - again, I'm another one who's read next to no South American fiction! I'll be keeping track...

French authors, how about Alexandre Dumas, Françoise Sagan or Amélie Nothomb? Or Les Enfants Terrible by Jean Cocteau?

4. Los Rios Profundos (Deep Rivers)--José María Argüedas

Los Rios Profundos (Deep Rivers in English) by José María Argüedas, is a great book, the first really good book that I´ve read this year. As soon as I finished the last page, I found myself turning back to the initial chapters, wanting to know more about what had happened over the course of the story and how the beginning set the stage for later chapters in the book. If I finish a book and don´t want to put it down, it means a lot to me. I imagined this book as a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Peruvian-Mestizo-Quechua Man. It´s true that I haven´t read James Joyce´s book since I was in high school, but the first person style, the intensity of character and emotion of the young protagonist, and the questions of religious, social, and racial identity that he grapples with, all made me think of Joyce. I find it interesting how the influence of famous authors such as Joyce and Faulkner has trickled through the different national literatures of Latin America: which elements have been adapted by authors across such a large cultural space to fit their unique thematic and sociopolitical realities. I imagine the author reading Joyce´s book and seeing himself in its pages, adapting in his mind the coming of age story of Stephen Dedalus to fit the issues faced by his people and his country, and crafting something as beautiful as this book.

Los Rios Profundos is the story of Ernesto, a young boy whose mother has died, and who travels from town to town with his father, a poor lawyer who is continually searching for a place where he can live and earn enough money off of his law practice to survive. He eventually leaves his son at the Catholic school in the town of Abancay, and continues on his journey from town to town. The bulk of the story deals with Ernesto´s life in the school, the challenging and often brutal relationships that exist between the children of different social and racial backgrounds at school and in town, and the moral progression of Ernesto as he views the interactions between indigenous and non-indigenous groups in the town and the surrounding haciendas, where the Quechua population is subjugated under the power of the hacendados, the military and the church, forced to live in poverty and ignorance. Ernesto feels a strong affinity for the indigenous people of the haciendas, perhaps connecting them with his dead mother, and yearns to understand them and connect with them in alliance against the oppression that he sees in the acts of those around them. The events that fuel Ernesto´s moral development include a conflict between the chola women of Abancay and the government over the distribution of salt, and an outbreak of typhus that sets in motion a series of events that lead to the imminent departure of Ernesto from Abancay at the end of the novel.

Over the past year I´ve read a handful of indigenist books from different parts of Latin America, and I think this is my favorite. It seems very sincere and, while I´ve read that Argüedas´s descriptions of the Quechua people have been criticized for being overly simple (the Indian being naïve and childlike), I don´t really feel that here. If anything, I see the author´s approach as a result of his understanding that he cannot understand everything that the Quechua people feel and experience, that he is half-connected with them yet different in so many ways. The protagonist, while not wholly a member of the Quechua ethnicity, is deeply connected to its traditions. His admiration for the culture shines through in the pages of this story, often in his love for and description of Quechua music, in the form of huayllas presented to the reader in both Quechua and Spanish. The conflict between his desire to connect with his Quechua heritage and his status as a member of the educated Mestizo class contributes to his moral struggles, because he understands that he is stuck in the middle and will not truly connect with either the indigenous or the non-indigenous classes of his country.

I highly recommend this book, and hope that others enjoy it as much as I did. I´ll seek out other works by Argüedas and try to read and reflect on them later this year.

That sounds interesting - I shall have to see if I can find a copy in English.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! I´ll try and read your posts and see what you all are reading this year.

Appoline: It´s not that I´m interested in feminist literature per se, just that I want to read more woman authors this year, feminist or otherwise. I grew up reading a lot of books by African-American authors and lately I´ve been reading a lot of books from the indigenist movement across Latin America. It interests me to read about the struggles for legitimacy of different groups, and how they fought for a place in society and a voice in the world, no matter what the group. And as somebody who loves to read, it´s interesting how women fought for and found a place in world literature.

deebee1: Cool, I just bought a used copy of Tristana, so that´ll be my next Pérez Galdós book. I think I´ll start with his shorter works and build up to Fortunata y Jacinta. Miau also looks interesting.

arubabookwoman: I´ll start putting the English translation of the titles of the books I read. I find a lot of cheap English translations at www.abebooks.com, which frustrates me when I´m looking for Spanish copies, and there´s 50 copies in English of the book I want for $5 but nothing cheap in Spanish. I think a lot of great authors were published in translation but then somewhat forgotten, so their works are available in English for bargain prices.

richardderus, flissp: Thanks for the recommendations, I´ll keep them in mind and try and find some cheap copies online.

I'm adding Los Rios Profundos to my list. I've just read the first volume of Eduardo Galeano's Faces and Masks trilogy, Genesis, which consists of a series of short chapters/vignettes relating to events in the history of the colonization of South and Central America from Pre-Colombian times to 1700. It has spurred my interest in issues such as those raised in Los Rios Profundos, and I definitely want to read more along those lines.

5. Cuando Entonces--Juan Carlos Onetti

I´m a huge fan of Onetti, and I was thrilled to find a first edition of this short, 100 page novella at one of my local used bookstores the other day. To tell the truth, it is the first “first edition” I´ve ever owned, and I´m glad it´s by Onetti: as I read more of his books, I become more and more convinced that he will become one of my favorite authors. I like brutal, pessimistic, realistic fiction, and I like his style and his choice of protagonists that are stuck in lives that are incomprehensible and hardly worth living, drowning themselves in alcohol and despair. This book is the story of one woman, Magdalena (Magda) from the perspective of three men who met and fell in love with her in very different manners. It alternates between Buenos Aires and the fictional town of Santa María, the Macondo of Onetti (but far different than Gabriel García Márquez´s creation), and the interactions between the characters take place mostly in bars. It is a story very small in scope, limited essentially to three moments, three dialogues between different people, and a short epilogue. It is a great compliment to his other works, and I was happy to sit down and read this book in its entirety yesterday.

I was introduced to Juan Carlos Onetti in an odd, backward way. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia, I used to give my mom lists of authors that I was interested in, so that she could order some used books online and send them on to me (the Peace Corps library, while extensive, was pretty much monolingual, and I love to read in Spanish). I got a book called Cuando ya no Importe (Past Caring), which turns out to be the last book that Onetti wrote, a sort of literary epilogue that, without any background knowledge on what I was reading, was a very strange book. It showed me enough to search out more of his work when I came back to the States, and in the past year I´ve tracked down and read a few more of his books. Many of his books take place in Santa María, a made up town on the banks of the Paraná (probably) where a series of washed up protagonists and recurring locals interact with each other in ways that lay bare their anguish and lack of hope for the future. Often they have vague aspirations that are already destined to fail, even in their own eyes, and the plot consists of their struggle to continue on with projects that they know will eventually fall apart and crumble at their feet. I´ve heard him described as South America´s first and greatest existentialist, and based on how much I´ve been loving his books, as well as those of Albert Camus, I think it´s time that I investigate existentialism more fully, so that I can better understand what that means and why I´ve been liking these books so much.

I highly recommend Onetti, and I think at least two of his books, Bodysnatchers and The Shipyard, can be had cheaply on www.abebooks.com. They´re both excellent. He´s an author that I recommend to my friends because he introduces you to a different Latin American reality, a world of washed up men and women, drunks, prostitutes and smugglers, on the banks of one of South America´s biggest and most culturally important rivers. I think that his cycle of books set in Santa María will mean as much to me as an adult as the Macondo cycle of Gabriel García Márquez meant to me as a teenager, and they excite me in the same way: each book shows me a new facet of his world and fleshes out more of the questions that remain in my mind.

Next stop, La Nausee. Good review, Matt, thanks for briniging Onetti onto my radar.

Hi, Matt!
I have a daughter who reads quite a bit in Spanish. I was wondering where do you get your books? I was trying to get a Petra Delicado book (Ritos Muerte) in Spanish for her, and it was $15 in English and $60 in Spanish. So I got it in English. The major booksellers only have a few books in Spanish. I am looking forward to all of your book recommendations! :)
--BJ

richardderus--Thanks for the recommendation, the next time I order used books off the internet I´ll pick up a copy of La Nausee...I´d been wondering where to begin with Sartre.

billiejean--I mostly use www.abebooks.com to find books. I checked on the book you were looking for, and it ran about $17 including shipping, in Spanish. If there´s books I´m especially looking for, I check back regularly and eventually find some great bargains. Other than that, I stop in every used bookstore I see and ask about their foreign language section.

Thanks so much for the info. Obviously, I have got to give abebooks a second chance. That is quite a price difference!
--BJ

6. La Chute (The Fall)—Albert Camus

La Chute (The Fall) is the third book I’ve read by Camus in the past two years, and the first book I’ve read in French this year. I was quite blown away by The Stranger, and read The Plague while riding the train to and from work over the course of a few weeks last year and liked it a lot too. I thought it was interesting how strangely uplifting I found both books, considering my preconceptions about Camus being a brutal and pessimistic author. La Chute, however, was quite a downer. It is told from an interesting perspective, that of a narrator talking directly to the reader, as if he were conversing with you, telling his life story in the form of a confession. The narrator states in the beginning of the book that his occupation is that of “judge-penitent,” and the story follows his trajectory from successful Parisian lawyer to down-and-out in Amsterdam, drinking in bars frequented by sailors and living in a pension in the Jewish quarter of town. He has an awakening of sorts, becomes aware of the greater questions that trouble man, and struggles mightily to find answers that satisfy him. His story, which is told over the course of five days of dialogue with a traveler that he meets at the bar, forms the entirety of the short novel.

I didn’t like this book as much as the other two novels I’ve read of Camus, but it was nonetheless a worthwhile read, and helped me better understand the author and his conception of the world. I am impressed by the ability of Camus to make his characters resonate personally with the reader. In each of the books I’ve read, I have identified to a great degree with the protagonist, and this has made their tales, especially in the case of Meursalt in The Stranger and Clamence in this book, all the more agonizing to read. The fact that I see so much of myself in them makes it hard to come to grips with their moral struggles, because I can imagine myself going through similar struggles. I suppose that must be one of Camus’ goals in his writing, and the fact that he is so successful in my case makes me admire him a great deal as an author. His characters search for the answers to questions that many people answer through religion and their relationship with God. Not believing in God makes those questions more difficult to answer, especially if one loses faith in the goodness of humanity and the people around them. Camus' characters seek to make sense of life without God, and I can understand why some of them fail to do so, and why many people are disgusted by the portraits of humanity they encounter in his books.

If somebody told me they hadn’t read any Camus, I’d definitely recommend either The Stranger or The Plague. But I think anybody who enjoys either book would like The Fall. It helped me better understand the Camus’ ideas on human existence, and gave me a better conception of his motivations as a writer.

Wonderful review, Matt.

The Fall was the first Camus I read, when a bitter, angry 19-yr-old new father. It was *exactly* the right book for me at the time. I felt...understood, valued, helped by this bleak look at a life gone wrong, without any glaringly obvious reason for it to have done so.

It remains my favorite Camus, I suppose for that reason.

edited/touchstone issue

I have not yet read The Fall by Camus, although I have read both The Plague (and am planning on doing the group read this year, too) and The Stranger. I will have to look for the other. Thanks for the recommendation, Matt!

Good work to get a Hot Review so soon, Matt! Three thumbs-ups so far for your review of La Chute!

Excellent review, Matt! I'll probably read The Fall next month.

Wonderful thread, Matt! I'll be following your reading with interest, too. Thank you for the background information on Maria Luisa Bombal. I have House of Mist lined up for the near future. After reading your comments above, I'm quite keen to get to it! You may want to check out www.belletrista.com for more fabulous books by women from around the world, including Latin America ;

7. El Lugar sin Límites (The Place without Limits)--José Donoso

El Lugar Sin Límites is the second book by José Donoso that I´ve read, and I have liked them both, despite some negative feelings that I have toward the author. There are parts of his life story that lower my esteem for him: not so much his self-imposed exile from Chile during some of the most important years of Chilean history, but that he tied his exile to the regime of Pinochet and used it to protest the military dictatorship. It seems that if a person left Chile in 1967, before Allende and before Pinochet, then there had to be non-political reasons for leaving. To me, it seems opportunistic for an author to be living in Spain in the 70´s and claim to be exiled from Chile when in fact he left of his own free will, when so many people were persecuted, tortured, and forced to leave the country that they were born in and where they fought against what they considered an unjust and unlawful regime. I can´t help feeling that Donoso is a bit of a phony for claiming connection to the events that took place in Chile in the early 70´s, and I don´t think he has a right to do so because he wasn´t there when they took place. Maybe my negative feelings aren´t entirely justifiable, because I still find myself reading his books from time to time, and enjoying them. I often wonder where I should draw the line between an artist and their creations, and how much I should detach the author as a person from his or her creations.

The book is the story of a town dying a slow death in the middle of Chile, passed over in the construction of a highway that would have perhaps brought it growth and prosperity and consigned to wither away and be converted into an extension of the vineyards of Don Alejo, the wealthy landowner, senator and controller of the town and its inhabitants. The story illustrates the complex relationships between the different members of the community, and centers on the town brothel, owned by the father and daughter duo of La Manuela, a homosexual transvestite, and la Japonesita, his daughter conceived in a strange bet between her mother, la Japonesa, and Don Alejo. The other character that drives the book is Pancho, a man desperately trying to break away from the control that Don Alejo exerts over all of the people in town. I see this book as a Chilean riff on Pedro Páramo, examining the relationships of power between the wealthy landowner and the people that fall within his sphere of influence. All of the characters are subjugated to Don Alejo, their lives and futures in the town are controlled by his decisions, and they know it and rebel against it in their own ways.

I found the character of Manuela to be fascinating, and liked how the author slowly uncovered her sexuality as the book unfolded: in the beginning I believed that she was a woman, and only as the story unfolds did her true status become apparent. The ways that she is shamed, mistreated and brutalized in her role as an odd sideshow act in the whorehouse relate to the ways that the town itself is treated by its patron, and the portrayal of marginal homosexuality in rural Chile was a very compelling reason to keep reading this book. Homosexuality is such a complex issue in Latin America, and I really enjoyed reading a book from the 60´s where the main character is openly gay. It was very sad, and I thought the author used Manuela effectively and channeled the plights of all the characters through her own personal struggles to survive in a world that treats her so terribly. Their treatment of her in a way mirrors the treatment that they´ve all received, as they exercise their sexual and social power over her while at the same time they are controlled economically by the powerful Don Alejo.

This was a good book, and I´m happy to say that I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. While my prejudices against Donoso may hold me back from fully embracing him as an author, I think I´ll try another one of his books in a year or so.

I often wonder where I should draw the line between an artist and their creations, and how much I should detach the author as a person from his or her creations.

A worthwhile question. Louis-Ferdinand Celine was a revolting, anti-Semitic, collaborator. Death on the Installment Plan is still a brilliant book, despite its author's character failings. It is his one brilliant book, but then that's enough by all but the greediest standards to elevate him into the lower reaches of brilliance, no?

Atlas Shrugged is tedious twaddle written by a terrible person. I'd never, for any reason, read a book of hers again (that one was assigned). Her prose and her persona match: Labored, lumpish and lame.

So. Donoso's treatment of Manuela, as I understand it, went a long way to redeeming this book as a read for you. Does it have an effect on your idea of Donoso?

At least, this is how my internal conversation about authors-v-books-v-society runs. YMMV, of course.

richardderus: It does, because it adds a lot of depth to my conception of him as a person. As I understand it, after his death it was revealed that Donoso was a closeted homosexual. I imagine that he channeled a lot of his personal experiences into that character, and I think it shows how much he must have struggled as a young man in Latin America. Maybe some of the anguish and personal demons that Manuela struggles with in the book reflect what Donoso himself felt as he was writing the book. I feel like I have a better understanding of who he was, and I´m more interested in investigating his work now.

I´ve heard El Obsceno Pájaro de la Noche is a great book, and that´ll probably be the next book of his I´ll read. I´ll see how I feel about him after that. I think he´s a really good writer, and he´s managing to overcome my initial negative feelings through the strength of his writing.

after his death it was revealed that Donoso was a closeted homosexual So that 1967 departure makes a lot less sense. Why wait until you're past 40 to stage your escape? He becomes more interesting to me.

Doesn't look like a proper biography has been done of him, at least not in English and the Wikipedia page's list seems pretty thorough in both languages. That's odd...queer theorists ought to be all OVER this guy.

Mystery deepens.

richardderus: I´m not sure how much Donoso´s final departure had to do with his sexuality: it wasn´t the first time he´d left the country. He graduated from Princeton in 1951, so I´m assuming he came from a fairly affluent background, and had the means to live outside of the country. He is an interesting character, and I would be interested in learning more about his background.

For my next read, I thought that it would be fitting to move from a man who left Chile six years before the military coup to a man who may have fabricated his own participation in the events of 1973. I read an article last year in the New York Times about how Roberto Bolaño´s friends in Mexico, where he lived in the 70´s, had cast doubt on his story that he was present in Chile on September 11, 1973, spent more than a week in custody of the police near the town of Concepción, and was only released after two of his high school classmates, now detectives, recognized him and came to his aid. I figured that since I was questioning my feelings about José Donoso and how I relate authors as people to their creative works of fiction, it would be interesting to read an author that I esteem so highly while considering his own cloudy past.

8. Estrella Distante (Distant Star)--Roberto Bolaño
9. Tres--Roberto Bolaño

Estrella Distante is a short novel by Roberto Bolaño. This was the second time I read it, and after reading four out of the five books of 2666, I´m happy to step back and read this novel, which in many ways prefaces his later work. It is the story of a poet and his search for an old acquaintance, Alberto Ruiz Tagle, who becomes Carlos Weider, a pilot for the Armed Forces of Pinochet who writes poetry in the sky, commits horrible crimes under the auspices of the regime, exhibits a macabre photography gallery in Santiago, and disappears from public existence while leaving a winding trail of publications across South America and Europe in bizarre and little-read genre publications. The search for the mysterious writer, a theme that many of Bolaño´s books share, relates back to the poetry workshops in Concepción where the narrator met Carlos Weider, and traces the stories of the founders and participants of the workshops after Pinochet´s military coup in 1973. Through their stories, the narrator gives a panorama of Chilean poetry in the middle half of the 20th century and shows the effects that such a horrible and dramatic series of events such as the coup and the subsequent repression of the opposition could have on different individuals. It also examines the myths that people construct around people that pass through their lives mysteriously, and the realities that may lie beneath.

It is difficult to explain why I love the books of Roberto Bolaño so much. I think that, like the elusive writers and poets that the characters of many of his books search for, he invites the reader to search for his or her own conception of the author and his work. I know that I feel a great affinity for his characters’ relentless quest for knowledge and understanding of subjects small and large, from forgotten, ghost-like authors to the wave of murders in Ciudad Juárez. After I finish his books, I think about the authors that must have influenced him and how his work relates to people like Jorge Luis Borges and Nicanor Parra, people that both he and I have read with great pleasure during our lives. Like Borges, his stories exhibit the joy that he finds in writing and the passion that intellectual pursuits inspire in him. Like Parra, he looks around him and sees a ridiculous world filled with ridiculous people, and he seems to seek and inhabit a similar role of literary renegade as Parra. Finally, and most importantly, I think that he, as much as any author I´ve read, shows me the modern world in the ways that I want to see it, thrilling and often horrendous. I went to a museum and saw an art exhibition related to the femicide in Juárez, and I felt after reading La Parte de los crímenes from 2666 that I had a connection to the events that I couldn´t have gotten from reading newspaper articles on the internet: he had created Juárez for me, and had imagined the lives of the people investigating the crimes and living amongst the criminals and victims. No matter what the topic is that he writes about, short stories or novels, I don´t think that I´ve ever read anything by him that didn´t leave me satisfied and inspired to seek out more of his writing. I am excited to have a lifetime ahead of me to read his books and watch my feelings and understanding of his writing change as I change as a person.

After Estrella Distante, I decided to read a book of poetry by Bolaño entitled Tres. Because the novel had so much to do with Chilean poetry and the poets that lived in the turbulent years of the 70´s, I wanted to step back and experience Bolaño the poet. The first poem seems to be autobiographical in nature, depicting the return to Gerona of the poet at the beginning of autumn, where he is in life, and what he is feeling during that moment. I read it while I was sitting waiting to take a test to work for the census, and it helped pass the time nicely. The second poem I´d read a few times before, and was about a group of young Chilean musicians on a road trip to Southern Peru, the concerts they play and the people they meet, and their leader, who is a handful of years older than the rest of them. I see it as a reflection on growing old and the melancholy feelings that one has when he sees younger people having fun that he can no longer entirely share in. I read it before a road trip once, and it was entirely appropriate and helped me enjoy myself, even if enjoying myself meant feeling myself growing older at the same time. The third poem is a series of statements about Latin American authors and their influence, in life and in dreams, on the author. I liked it, because I always like reading what authors think about other authors. Sometimes they share in my feelings, and sometimes I disagree with them. All three of these poems were enjoyable, and considering that Chilean poetry is the poetry that I am most familiar with, it was interesting to see how the chain of style and influence continued in Bolaño (Huidobro-Mistral-Neruda-Parra-Bolaño?).

Oh my. We disagree completely on Bolano. I can't identify the writer I read in your panegyric at all.

Ain't lit'racher grand, to hold such divergent ideas about one source text.

Matt, sorry I'm slow to check in here. I am thrilled to be reading reviews of books by Latin American authors. I dug around my library for Panorama de las Literaturas Hispanoamericana y Panamena for some leads for you. This book is basically an overview of the regional literary traditions tied into historical periods and points to some specific literati from Panama (poets, authors, essayists, dramatists, etc.). Unfortunately, I discovered that the edition that I have on my shelf is missing 25 key pages in the middle. Anyway, working around that, here is a list of names to look for:

Folklore (tema vernaculo):
Ignacio de J. Valdes
Jose E. Huerta
Jose Maria Nunez
Lucas Barcenas
Jose Maria Sanchez
Carlos Chang Marin
Mario Augusto Rodriguez
Cesar A. Candanedo

Urban:
Rogelio SinanRoque Javier Laurenza
Manuel Ferrer Valdes
Pedro ZRivera
Alvaro Menendez Franco
Ernesto Endara

Literary stories:
Gil Blas Tejeira

(I'm following the headers in the book here, I think all of the above could fall into the short story category)

Novels:
Julio B. Sosa
Jose A. Cajar Escala
Octavio Mendez Pereira
Joaquin Beleno
Ramon H. Jurado
Rogelio Sinan
Alfredo Canton
Tristan Solarte
Agracia Sarasqueta de Smith
Gloria Guardia Zeledon
Renato Ozores

I hope this helps. If you want more details on any of them, let me know.

justchris: Thanks for the information! I´ll use your lists to try and find an appropriate starting point into the literature of Panama.

10. El Buscón--Francisco de Quevedo

I recently upgraded my copy of Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón, going from an edition written and annotated for college students of Spanish here in America to a Cátedra critical edition. This means that instead of a rudimentary introduction explaining the customs of Spain in the early 16th century, I got a thorough explanation of El Buscón´s place in the Spanish picaresque genre, and a summary of hundreds of years of critical attempts to extract meaning and moral lessons from the text. The opinion of the editor, Domingo Ynduraín, is that El Buscón should be read as an exercise in literary ingenuity, where Quevedo used the picaresque template to string together a series of intricate and humorous situations that revolve around Pablos, the unfortunate protagonist of the story. There are repeated errors in continuity, which the editor cites to justify his idea that the book was written by Quevedo more or less from the seat of his pants. There is no self-reflection by the protagonist on his life´s journey, and little to no moral advice intermingled with the entertaining stories of Pablos, as opposed to the other great picaresque novel of the era, Guzmán de Alfarache. The book is meant first and foremost to entertain the reader through the author´s genius with language and storytelling. Comparing picaresque novels to TV shows, I´d say that Guzmán de Alfarache is like The Wire, with serious issues and ruminations on morality and survival on the lowest and most desperate levels of society intermingled with entertaining and often humorous representations of urban life. El Buscón is more like a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where the arch of the story is the vehicle for Larry David to develop his particularly hilarious brand of situational humor.

El Buscón is the story of Pablos, a young man born to less than noble parents in early 16th century Spain. Due to his desire to become a gentleman, he flees his home in Segovia and passes through the university in Alcalá, the court in Valladolid, and the cities of Madrid and Sevilla. He falls in with bad and criminal crowds wherever he goes, meeting a series of ridiculous and devious characters that scrape out a living preying on the moneyed class in whatever way they can. Many of the characters in this book, such as the poor nobleman who lives at the court through smoke and mirrors, his clothing a patchwork of fabrics tied together to appear dignified, are Quevedo´s interpretations of archetypes of Spanish literature of the time, seen anywhere from Don Quijote to the plays of Lope de Vega and others. There´s nothing revolutionary going on in terms of story or characters, but Quevedo puts the Spanish language to work like few others. I was glad for the extensive footnotes (sometimes it seemed like there were more footnotes than actual text), because they keyed me in to all the multiple meanings and plays on words that are present on every page. I remember being amazed the first time I read El Buscón at the intricacy of each of the chain of situations that make up the book, and it was nice to get a second glance at them with the depth of analysis and research that accompany the Cátedra edition. I don´t think I necessarily like Quevedo as a person, based on his stiff, elitist and often downright bigoted views on society as expressed here and in his Sueños, but El Buscón is a book filled with great storytelling, and a worthwhile read.

I don´t know how well picaresque novels would fare in translation, due to the central role that intricate language and wordplay take in them. I know that there is an edition that contains Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón, entitled Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, that can be had for a dollar or two on amazon.com or half.com. I think it´s interesting to see the beginnings of a genre that is so universal and far-reaching. There are so many works that can be classified as picaresque, from books by Dickens, Twain and Günter Grass amongst many others, to movies like City of God and Slumdog Millionaire. Quevedo´s book helped set the stage for so much great fiction that it will always be a great read, and I enjoyed reading it over the past few days.

11. La casa inundada y otros cuentos (The inundated house and other stories)--Felisberto Hernández

I had been searching online for an affordable edition of short stories by Felisberto Hernández for months, and finally found this book a few weeks ago. He is a Uruguayan writer who has been cited as a major influence in the work of a number of famous 20th century writers, such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Italo Calvino. This book contains seven of his stories, two of which, the title story and “El Balcón” (The Balcony), I found absolutely marvelous. The rest alternated between very good and very strange, although I hope as I revisit them and get a better sense of the world as seen through the eyes of the author, they will rise in my esteem. All seven of the stories were written in the first person, and the narrator retains certain similarities throughout the book, similarities that may also be shared with the writer himself: he is often a piano player and a writer, and his personality is measured and somewhat aloof. “La Casa Inundada” and “El Balcón” revolve around lonely, melancholy women isolated in their houses, either unable to forget a past love or fearful of venturing beyond the security of the familiar world that surrounds them. The narrator enters into their lives and is able to connect with them, sharing in their loneliness and allowing them to explain themselves to a sympathetic listener. I thought these were the stories where the author was best able to convey himself, his own feelings, and his interactions with the people and world around him to the reader. As I think about it, though, they may simply be the most accessible of his stories and the easiest to connect with, because I felt that all of the stories were very personal in that they made me feel like I was getting to know Felisberto Hernández and seeing the world through his eyes.

Objects, from houses, balconies and statues to plants and trees, are heavily personified, given emotions, desires and the power to influence the lives of the people in the stories. They are often important “characters” in the stories, such as the Venice-like house that Margarita inhabits in “La Casa Inundada,” or the series of strange and unfamiliar objects in a dark tunnel that the boyhood friend of the narrator ritualistically passes his hands over every weekend in “Menos Julia.” Hernández and the characters in the stories of this book seem to share a deep and personal connection as much with the things that inhabit their world as with the people, and often the stories involve investigation or questioning of the nature of these mysterious connections. More often than not, the explanation is enigmatic or only partially resolves the mystery. I suppose, though, that it´s much more difficult to explain why a person might love the company of dolls, action figures, hordes of housecats, or any other thing that people grow attached to, than to explain peoples´ attachments to each other, and I think these enigmatic relationships are successfully represented in this book. Partly because Hernández´s characters interact with objects as well as people, with great intensity and emotion, these stories could be loosely called “fantastic,” or “surreal,” but they are so unique and personal that I would hesitate to classify them with other authors of similar style.

In the end, that is the reason that I enjoyed this book as much as I did: the stories made me feel that I was entering into the world of the author, and they evoked a piece of Uruguay and Argentina, and the life of a person living modestly and tenuously in that part of the world, as a small-town pianist, as a traveling salesman, or working odd jobs. They inhabit a blurry line between observation and imagination, yet take place in a clearly illustrated part of the world and suggest a specific, personal reality. They are strange, and it´s been difficult to organize my thoughts about them, but they are also wonderful in their uniqueness. There´s a new English translation of his work called Lands of Memory, and I´m glad to see that his work is standing the test of time across generations and national and linguistic borders.

12. The Metamorphoses--Ovid

As I was choosing my next book, my girlfriend said that she would pick one out for me. She chose a favorite of hers: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I didn’t really know much about this book, and was happy to learn that it is essentially a compendium of Greco-Roman mythology, written by Ovid as an extended prose poem that flows from one story to the next, moving in a somewhat chronological order through the canon of myths, leading up to a brief discourse on the reign of Caesar at the very end of the book. I grew up on Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and it was cool to read so many stories in a different style and from a different perspective. There were two aspects of the book that I especially enjoyed: the explanation of life as a constant metamorphosis, where nothing remains the same and gods, people, places and nature are constantly changing; and the Arabian Nights-esque flow of the stories, where the end of one story would lead to the beginning of another, stories would naturally surge from within other stories, and all of the pieces of the book, short and long, fit into each other and supported the theme of metamorphosis in life and legend.

The introduction by the translator, Horace Gregory, gave me some much-appreciated background on Ovid’s life and the Roman world that he inhabited. It also put the book in historical perspective and highlighted the ups and downs of its influence. Shakespeare certainly read Ovid, for Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream and other plays show shades of Ovid’s stories in The Metamorphoses; conversely, this book was unpopular during the Victorian age due to its treatment of sexuality and human passions and desires. The introduction also suggests that Ovid was writing largely to a female audience, due to the increased power and influence of women in Rome during his life. The stories in The Metamorphoses are often about relationships between women and men: Echo and Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Jason and Medea, and so on. His treatment of human sexuality may have led to his banishment from Rome by Augustus, in a reactionary measure against such open treatment of sex. All of the information that I gained from the short introduction really helped me understand the book. I remember when I was younger I used to always skip over forwards and introductions to begin reading the book itself. Now, though, I find them and important part of any book I read: I like knowing why the book is important, how it was received by its initial audience, and what the important aspects of the book are.

At first I had trouble keeping up with the constant changes in narrator and story, but as I read on, I began to like the flow of the book. Larger stories, such as the tales of Perseus, Jason, the Trojan War, and Hercules, are given their just due, and are mixed in with the great love stories, such as Orpheus and Eurydice, and tales of human folly in going against the gods and giving in to wicked temptations. I liked the last book, where Ovid expounds on the theme of metamorphoses in his work and why it relates to life as a whole. I never realized how many Greek myths ended with characters changing from human to animal form, or becoming statues, or undergoing other metamorphoses. It was a great thematic vehicle to relate the catalog of Greco-Roman mythology, and change as a constant in life is an enduring and compelling idea today, two thousand years later.

I don’t often read old books, but I love Greek myths and I liked this book a lot. I would recommend it over Edith Hamilton’s mythology, because I liked the overarching themes that connected all the stories: they made it seem like more of a whole rather than a collection of parts. I think I’ll seek out other classics such as this later this year: maybe The Aeneid should come next?

Delightful review of Metamorphoses, Matt! Smart girlfriend, too, since the power dynamics of Ovid's work are always fluid and negotiable. Men should pay attention to that, in general; don't know you so I can't say she's sending a message, but it's one subtext Ovid's putting across.

Aeneid is a radically different book from Metamorphoses. Try some Catullus.

13. Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía/Calcomanías (Twenty poems to be read on the tramway/Calcomanias)—Oliverio Girondo

I picked this book back up after reading La casa inundada y otros cuentos, by Felisberto Hernández, because Hernández´s short stories reminded me of Girondo´s poetry. Both authors use a style of personification in which objects think, move and act as if they were people. This book of poetry is described on the back cover as: “a spectacle where things act as protagonists. They advance toward the reader with an overflowing impetuosity, in the midst of a vast stage where everything gesticulates, becomes human, and performs.” I think that this description fits as well for Hernández´s book of stories as for Girondo´s book of poetry, and I really enjoyed reading the two authors consecutively. There is, though, one very large difference between the two men: Hernández focuses his techniques of personification inward on a very specific, personal world, the Uruguay and Argentina that the author inhabits; Girondo, on the other hand, is a traveler and an observer of foreign cities and people. The poems that make up this book were written as the author traveled to Brazil, Spain, Tunisia; up and down Argentina, France, Italy, and other exotic locales. He is describing the world seen by a traveler, a world filled with a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I thought that his travels were an excellent vehicle to impose his style and to employ objects in the way that he does, to give them life, and explain them in a way that is at once relatable and fascinating to anyone who dreams of visiting foreign lands. As he travels, he sees:

“Caravans of mountains camping out in the outskirts” (Rio de Janeiro)
“Taverns that sing with the voice of an orangutan” (Douarnenez, France)
“In the depth of the street, a building breathes in the stench of the city” (Buenos Aires)
“Clinging to the lonely street, as if it were a moor, the houses balance themselves so as not to fall into the sea” (Gibraltar)

As these images pile one on top of another over the course of a poem, they combine to give a fascinating image of the place that is being described. I enjoyed reading the book sitting at home, but I would also like to take it along if I have the opportunity to travel in the future. I think I would have enjoyed it greatly while riding the bus, dreaming about foreign places as I watched the city pass by; I also would have liked to have it along during past travels to foreign countries, so that I could look at the new and foreign things that passed by and use Girondo´s thoughts and images as a way to build my own perceptions of the worlds that I was passing through. Some of his poems made me think of places that I had been, and others made me think of places that I´d like to go. While this would have been amazing poetry to read while traveling, it was just as amazing to read while sitting in a (somewhat) warm house in the snow-covered midwest, because it helped me remember and imagine the beautiful and fascinating places that are out there.

One other thing that I found interesting about this book: I find it fascinating to read chronicles of Argentines traveling in Spain during the 1920´s and 1930´s (I´m also a big fan of Roberto Arlt´s newspaper columns written in Spain). I think it´s hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that Argentina was a very wealthy nation at the turn of the 20th century, and to imagine that wealthy Argentines such as Girondo went to Spain and saw it as rustic and undeveloped. I can remember meeting a lot of Spaniards in Buenos Aires who had come to Argentina to shop and take advantage of the power of the Euro in post-crash Argentina. It was interesting to read about a time when the tables were, in a way, turned.

I don´t own a lot of poetry, but I am glad that I own this particular book. At this point in my life, I appreciate having a small handful of books of poetry that I am slowly becoming more and more familiar with. I also think this is a great collection of poems from a fascinating and inspiring moment in 20th century literature. Buenos Aires in the 1920´s, to me, was the place where some of the greatest writing of the past century took place: there was so much inspiration coming from both Europe and Latin America, and so many distinct and inspiring ways that authors interpreted events in the past (Güiraldes´s depiction of the gaucho and the pampas in Don Segundo Sombra), the present (the poetry of Girondo and Borges), and the future (the maniacal plans of the Astrologist in Roberto Arlt´s Los Siete Locos).

Matt, have you read La Estancia and Bomarzo, both by Mujica Lainez? I loved his stuff when I read it in the 80s. (Estancia touchstone is wrong, apparently no one has this book on LT!)

Worth searching up, IMHO.

14. Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)—Victor Hugo

I was very impressed by Notre-Dame de Paris, and Victor Hugo managed to win me over even in the area where I doubted him the most: his emphasis on the importance of medieval architecture and its preservation, and his use of long chapters of the book to both describe Paris and develop his argument that what had been done to the city in the centuries after the events of his book was a travesty and a damn shame. I was afraid that I would get bogged down in the language (I’m relatively new to French) and that I’d get bored, wanting to get back to the story. In truth, I thought his eventual thesis, “Ceci tuera cela,” this will kill that, or, the printing press will kill architecture, was remarkable. I never thought about works of architecture as works of art in the same way as, say, a poem or a painting. Hugo says that the great architectural landmarks of antiquity all the way up to the invention of the printing press were, at heart, poems, written in the most durable language that mankind had at its disposal, with stones being the building blocks of expression instead of words. With the printing press and mass production of books, though, the written word took on a more immortal aspect in the minds of men, and because artists could now imagine the lasting presence of their works in the world, suddenly a book was able to make as lasting and far-reaching of a statement as a building or monument.

Hugo’s argument obviously goes far beyond what I can express in a paragraph of explanations, but I liked it both as a different way to look at art and architecture and as a justification for his book, one that made me understand both why he wrote it and why I was reading it nearly 200 years later. His choice of the cathedral of Notre Dame as the protagonist in an expansive novel such as Notre-Dame de Paris, considering that the cathedral was crumbling and in disrepair as he wrote this book, seems to be his attempt to preserve the beauty and inspiration he found in an architectural work of art by immortalizing it in a written work. I wonder whether he imagined that his book would lead to the renovation of the church and to works of historical preservation throughout Paris, or whether he was trying to leave a record of the grandeur of an edifice that he believed to be on the verge of disappearing from the city. I can’t imagine he would think that, in 2010, the church that we see when we visit Paris is in better shape than the one he is so fervently converting into literature. I think that his book is a good companion to the church, and if I am ever fortunate enough to go to Paris again, I’ll look at Notre Dame in a new and more familiar light.

As far as the story, it surprised me. I’ve never seen the Disney movie, but I think I was imagining the book to be something like I imagine the movie. In truth, no single character plays nearly as large of a role in the book as the church and the city of Paris. I think this is a good thing, because I was afraid I would get bored of Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Pierre Gringoire, Claude Frollo and all the rest, but I never did. I don’t think that any single character is particularly well-developed, and Esmeralda especially stood out as a character with no real substance, just a body for things to happen to over the course of the story. But, due to the fact that the focus was constantly shifting from person to person, without ever really settling on one character, I was entertained and encouraged to keep reading. A character (Pierre Gringoire, for example) would have a chapter or two devoted to him, and then float out of the book for the next 150 pages. By the time he came back, I was happy enough to see him, even though I didn’t really care that much about him in the first place. I wouldn’t have expected the author to shift away from the rising action at the cathedral to devote a 40-page chapter to the king of France, right at the climax of the book, but it worked in the context of the book. I think that the sequencing of the book was excellent, and was one of the reasons I found it so readable and enjoyable.

I also really enjoyed the ending of the book. It was not what I was expecting, and I thought it was a great way to finish the story. Notre-Dame de Paris was one of my first “big” reads of the year, and I’m happy to have completed it. I wonder if I would like it as much in English. Part of what I enjoyed was the new vocabulary and the new language, and the satisfaction of reading and completing a classic in its original language. I didn’t think the story was amazing, although I appreciated the author’s motivation for writing it. I think I would recommend it to friends who really enjoy reading, but for someone who reads just a few dozen books a year it might be too long and not really worth all the effort.

richardderus: I'll keep my eye out for books by Mujica Láinez as I make my rounds at the used bookstores; I got a copy of La Nausée and will be reading it in March...Thanks for the recommendations!

15. Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)—Gabriel García Márquez

I read this book over the course of two sittings, about two weeks apart. Gabriel García Márquez´s books inspire strong emotions in me, and this was no exception. At first I hated it. Then, as I was reading, I started looking for reasons not to hate it. I convinced myself that it was pretty well-written, and that I could actually enjoy it. It was so short that this was no problem, because I couldn´t feel that I was wasting my time knowing that I´d be done so quickly. I don´t know if it makes sense to say that I enjoyed reading this book but didn´t like it, but that´s what I concluded. I thought that it was over-the-top and way too sensational in tone, and there were many aspects of the story that annoyed me. I thought, would it kill Mr. García Márquez to give someone a normal name? Divina Flor, María Alejandrina Cervantes, Dionisio Iguarán, Purísimo del Carmén…Sometimes it felt that half the words in the book were people´s names, and they were all ridiculous. Most of all, I think I have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that my favorite author when I was 15 years old is decidedly not my favorite author now that I´m 25. This is the first time I´ve read a book by García Márquez not entitled One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera since I was a teenager, and I was saddened to find how different my feelings for it were. I´m conflicted, though, because I also feel like maybe I´m letting my own prejudices influence my appreciation for the book. In many ways, I did think it was a good book, and maybe ten years from now I´ll read it again and see it much differently.

The story is, Santiago Nasar gets murdered by the brothers Vicario because he supposedly slept with their sister, who then married the fabulously wealthy and mysterious Bayardo San Román, who found out she wasn´t a virgin and returned her to her family the night of the wedding. Everybody knows that Santiago Nasar is going to die, but nobody does anything to stop it, for a variety of reasons. The narrator is a journalist who is a native of the small town where the events took place, and the book is his reconstruction some 20 years later of the fateful day, compiled through interviews with all of the people involved in the events of the wedding and the murder. The reader knows from page one that Santiago Nasar is murdered, and the story slowly analyzes the events preceding his death, investigating the different characters in the story and their motivations for doing what they did on the morning that he died. The book gives the reader an image of the town and its inhabitants, and the events of one explosive and extravagant wedding and its aftermath.

After I finished reading Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada, I pulled out my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and found this quote from an interview with García Márquez:

--You always speak of critics with a great deal of irony. Why do they disgust you so much?
--Because, in general, with an investiture of pontifical importance, and without realizing that a novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude is completely lacking in seriousness and is full of gestures to my closest friends, gestures that only they can understand, the critics assume the responsibility of deciphering all of the riddles contained in the book at the risk of drawing extremely stupid conclusions.

I am happy that García Márquez feels this way about his great book, and I really enjoyed reading it the past few times that I´ve taken it off the shelf with these words of his in mind. I feel a little ridiculous myself, feeling so negative at times about him, considering that he himself wasn´t the one who built himself into such a towering figure in Latin American literature. I feel that so many people base their conception of the region´s literature based on his writing, and especially on just one or two books of his. They´re good books, but I feel like people think that all Latin American literature is “Magical Realism,” and that García Márquez´s work is the fantastic culmination of a regional literary movement. I also feel like his success has engendered a lot of crappy books written in a derivative style, but enjoying in popularity nonetheless. That´s not his fault and I think that maybe I hold that against him unfairly. Maybe he won´t ever be my favorite author again, but I like reading his books because of the roller coaster of emotions that they take me through, drawing on my past as a reader and my continuing passion for the fiction of Latin America.

very insightful reviews of the last two books, msjohsn, both of which i've read and liked. i enjoyed his chapters on the architecture of Notre Dame and the layout of Paris as you did, and was also struck with his thesis about buildings and monuments. on looking up about Hugo, i found out that he was actually an artist, before becoming a novelist -- he was into design and illustration, and did quite remarkable paintings throughout his life, but that he made a point of "suppressing" this talent of his at least from the wider public as he wanted to be better known for his written works. in short, Hugo knew architecture intimately, and indeed it showed remarkably in this book. i found the story quite trite and juvenile, but those chapters and digressions on architecture really stood out.

as to your last read -- i like GGM, but not all of his works. i love One Hundred Years, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and i think they are his best ones. i liked Chronicle because it is tightly written. i thought he did a great job of building the tension around a single event, it was like witnessing a kind of death dance but done backwards. as i enjoy narratives from various points of view, and non-linear storytelling, the book worked for me. i find his writing uneven, however, and his short stories lousy and amateurish, which is a surprise because most authors pull off with the short story form than with the novel.

I very much enjoyed your review of Hunchback of Notre Dame... it's another one of those books that I've always intended to read but never got around to. If I don't get to it this year (the Count of Monte Cristo may be enough of a 'big' read for me this year!) I hope to get to it next year. I feel that my reading is lacking for not having read it before... I'm not sure why I feel that way, but your review has certainly validated that feeling. Thank you for your thoughtful review!

I confess that the only Gabriel García Márquez I have read is Cien Años de Soledad. I picked it up and read it while I was in Peace Corps in Panama. It took me ten months to complete, with a few breaks for things like Thucydides. I liked this monumental work, but my dictionary was rather limited, so I never quite figured out some of the language. I wanted to pursue more of his works but never got around to it.

The only French literature I've read (in translation) is The Three Musketeers by Dumas. Once again, I enjoyed it but never got around to following up with other works.

So it's great to be following your reviews. They are inspiring. I'm afraid that I'm committed to Spanish literature at this time, though: Don Quijote--another classic that I've managed to neglect until my middle age. We're doing a group read of that.

16. The Golem—Gustav Meyrink

A friend of mine loaned me this book, which is about a man named Athanasius Pernath and his life in the Jewish ghetto of Prague. The golem of the title is based on a Jewish legend, where a rabbi creates a figure out of clay that is animated through the inscription of the word ‘emet’ (truth, or reality) on its forehead. The golem carries out the bidding of its creator, protecting the Jewish ghetto, committing crimes, spreading fear, and sometimes turning against its creator, depending on different forms of the story. It can be deactivated by rubbing out the first letter of the inscription on its forehead, creating the word ‘met’ (dead). The golem is a sort of Jewish Frankenstein’s monster, a fear-inspiring creation of man who has had a prolific life in all kinds of literature and cinema in the 20th century. Apparently the golem is a character in games like Dungeons and Dragons, has been included in books and movies by Michael Chabon and Quentin Tarantino, and has been written about by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. The story of its creation and animation also reminds me of Pinocchio for some reason. Of course, the name’ golem’ immediately made me think of the Lord of the Rings books, and the golem described in Meyrink’s book shares many physical similarities with Tolkein’s character. Over the past few years I’ve been reading books like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because I enjoy encountering famous monsters of popular culture in their original or most enduring iterations. That is one of the reasons that I wanted to read this book (I’d been bothering my friend to let me borrow it for a while): so that from this point forward, I’ll be able to understand references to golems that may pop up in books, TV shows and movies new and old.

In Meyrink’s book, Athanasius Pernath may himself be the golem, and his narration of his life and interaction with his friends, enemies and neighbors includes many episodes where he experiences changes in consciousness that perhaps are the result of his shifting between a normal state of being and a separate state where he is the golem. However, he could also just be insane, and many of the things that he says in this book may just be the ramblings of madman I think that a lot of the story is interpretable in a variety of ways. The author was heavily involved in all sorts of mysticism and studies of the occult, and Pernath has many spiritual experiences. However, while he does have revelations of sorts, they never add up to anything definite and, once again, it’s never really clear whether he’s in his right mind. He was an interesting character, very different from the monsters of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelly, and compelling in his own way. My struggles to understand what was going on seemed to parallel the Pernath’s own struggles, and I enjoyed being in the head of a monster (or a madman) such as the golem.

The place (the Jewish ghetto of Prague) and the people (a variety of junk dealers, puppeteers, deaf-mutes, consumptive students, young girls awaiting miracles, and saintly archivists) are vividly and gloomily described. The tone, the people and the story reminded me a lot of two of my favorite books: Los Siete Locos (The Seven Madmen) and Los Lanzallamas (the Flamethrowers) by Roberto Arlt. I’m confident that Arlt read The Golem and that his Buenos Aires was in some way inspired by Meyrink’s Prague. The people in both books are often greedy and horrible. The way that they treat each other reflects the ways that man can be truly awful to his fellow man. They show the despair of living in poverty and the ways that people grasp for meaning through religion and spiritualism, and how many times, everything never really makes sense. Both authors populate their stories with characters who are not necessarily sane (in fact, they’re probably crazy), have diabolical and grandiose schemes to either get revenge, get rich, or conquer the world, and in the end are often more than a few pieces short of putting it all together and realizing their strange and twisted ambitions. I was glad to feel such a strong connection between what I was reading and the books of Roberto Arlt, one of my favorite authors. Both authors are masterful in their description of the strangest and scariest corners of the worlds they inhabit, and given me an intriguing conception of urban life in the beginning of the 20th century.

When I finished this book, I wasn’t really sure what had happened. However, I think that it was better that way, and that some stories are better off not being truly resolved, or adding up. All of the Jewish cabbala talk and other weird visions that Pernath and the other characters have in this story is so strange that a final resolution, where everything adds up in the end, would have been out of place. I liked this book because it gave no clear answers, and because it described an interesting monster.

17. El cantor de tango (The Tango Singer)--Tomás Eloy Martínez

I chose this book because I was curious about the work of Tomás Eloy Martínez, who passed away in January. My public library had two of his books, and I chose this one because it looked more interesting. It is the story of a New York University graduate student who uses a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Buenos Aires, where he plans to work on his dissertation on Borges´ writings on the origins of the tango. Shortly before leaving, he hears about an elusive tango singer with an unforgettable voice, supposedly better than Gardel himself. The student, Bruno Cadogan, spends his time in Buenos Aires searching for the tango singer, Julián Martel, yearning to hear him sing at least a few tangos and hoping that if he succeeds and hears the tango singer, he will understand what he is doing in Buenos Aires and how he should proceed with his scholarly work. He also spends some time trying to lure a man named Bonarino out of the basement of the pension that he´s staying at, so that a character named el Tucumano can lead tourists to the 19th step of the stairs down to the basement, where Jorge Luis Borges´ Aleph can supposedly be seen. As the plot moves forward, the author describes moments and places in Buenos Aires history, such as the Palacio de Aguas Corrientes and the labyrinthic neighborhood of Parque Chas, where the streets don´t follow the normal grid pattern followed in the rest of the city. The final chapter of the book takes place in December, 2001, when the Argentine economy collapsed and days of panic and anger ensued amongst the people of Buenos Aires.

I believe that this book, both its plot and its depiction of the city of Buenos Aires, would be appealing to many people. I, however, did not find it very compelling. I thought that Bruno Cadogan was boring, naïve and at times downright stupid. He spent his time in Buenos Aires on a quest to find magical things, whether a tango singer or a fictional point in the world where all knowledge is contained. He does so with absolute seriousness, and while he often wonders whether what he´s doing will ever add up, he never stops to consider that what he´s doing might be ridiculous or absurd. I don´t doubt that Buenos Aires is a magical place for many people, but I still think that any 21st century quest for mythical figures in foreign countries should at least be tinged with a small amount of irony. Cadogan was a serious fellow, to the point that I could not take him seriously.

I also found the descriptions of Buenos Aires to be lacking somewhat in depth. There were moments when I found the stories about the city´s past and present compelling, such as the tale of a member of the Montoneros and his double-kidnapping of ex-President Aramburu, and a taxi ride taken by a Scandinavian woman in search for the old library of Buenos Aires, where she is to meet up with the rest of her tour group on a tour of sites related to the life of Borges. However, I often felt that the author relied on superficial and clichéd elements of the city´s past and present, without showing me anything that I didn´t already know about the city, or that I couldn´t find in a Lonely Planet Buenos Aires tourist guide to the city. I believe that the author wanted the descriptions to align with the perspective of a foreigner seeing and experiencing the city for the first time, and with that in mind maybe I shouldn´t be too disappointed. I suppose that my disappointment, though, has more to do with my expectations for the book. I hoped to read about the Buenos Aires that I didn´t know, and what I got instead was an overview of the main and noteworthy sites of the city.

I did, however, enjoy reading a story written by an Argentine about an American student´s trip to Buenos Aires. When I was in college I was lucky to spend a year in Argentina, so my perspective was tied to the protagonist´s through our shared experience as students in the city. I think, in the end, that what held me back was that I didn´t like the protagonist and his silly, romantic quest for “authenticity,” which I did not find compelling. I don’t think that I would recommend this book to my friends, because there´s quite a few other literary portraits of Buenos Aires that I would rather show them.

#50/51: Thanks for the reviews and recommendations of those, Matt. I will look for them.

#50 - I'm planning to read The Golem this year as I'm also intrigued by the golems I come across in books. I've lined up a few books about Prague and golems and hope to get to them mid-year. Love your comments on the book - I've favourited your post so I can come back once I finish the book.

I'll be visiting Buenos Aires again in a few weeks but don't think I have time to read much beforehand. I hope to finish The ministry of special cases and Buenos Aires: a cultural and literary history before the trip. I've had The Tango Singer home from the library a couple of times but never got to it, looks like it's not worth seeking out in a hurry. I'll stick to my BA Rough Guide.

18. Niebla (Mist)--Miguel de Unamuno

Continuing on my quest to learn more about 19th and early 20th century Spanish literature, I decided to give Niebla another try, after failing to get farther than half way through it the last time I attempted to read it. This time I did manage to finish it, and I am glad that I did, for I found the last three chapters to be my favorites. In Chapter 31, the protagonist, Don Augusto Pérez, travels to Salamanca to visit the author, Miguel de Unamuno, in order to discuss whether or not he, the fictional creation of Unamuno, possesses the free will to commit suicide. Author and character discuss their relationship with each other, and Don Augusto presents some interesting ideas: that it is actually he who is real, while Unamuno only exists as a pretext for bringing Augusto Pérez into the world; that he, Don Augusto, will surely outlive Unamuno, because he will be constantly reborn in the minds of readers and inhabit a larger and larger place in the world and the minds of men than his author, such as the case with Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, who exist and live on while their author, Miguel de Cervantes, died hundreds of years ago; and that fictional persons, once they are created by their authors, come to possess and manipulate their own sort of free will within the pages of the fictional world that they inhabit. In the end, Unamuno asserts his ultimate control over Don Augusto, and in Chapter 32, his vision of Augusto´s future does indeed come to pass. Chapter 33, the epilogue, is told from the perspective of the dog, Orfeo, which Don Augusto found in Chapter 5. It presents one further level of interaction between master and subject, and further examines the ways that both entities exert their free will and inhabit their roles relative to each other. Niebla is a complex book that brings into question the traditional relationships between author, character and reader within a fictional text. I enjoyed its scope and its aspiration to transcend the traditional novelistic form by breaking down some of the barriers between the different entities that exist in literature, nowhere more so than in the final chapters, when Don Augusto confronts his creator and challenges his dominion over him.

Unfortunately, I found Don Augusto hard to like, and the middle bloc of chapters where his story and experiences in the world of male-female relationships were difficult to get through. I think he´s supposed to be a tragic character, unable to understand love and the female mind and impotent in his relationships with women, destined to be screwed over by his two love interests, Efigenia and Rosario. Don Augusto is a rich momma´s boy who suddenly finds his mother dead and needs a new female presence in his life, some sort of wife-mother who will fulfill his need for human companionship and love. His quest to interact with, fall in love with, and understand women leads him to converse with a variety of friends, who give him their opinions and share their experience with females in love and in marriage. He is torn between the needs of his head, his heart and his stomach, and conducts investigations on how different women will help fulfill these needs. He falls in love, courts Efigenia, sends mixed messages to Rosario, ponders how his blossoming love for one woman has opened up a world of inter-gender love to him, and despairs at his struggles to find whatever it is he´s looking for. In the beginning, I felt sorry for Don Augusto, but as he investigates and interacts with women, I had a harder time finding compassion for his character. I concluded that Unamuno, through his creation Don Augusto, seems to be backward and machista in his gender conceptions , and his ideas on the female race in general showed more fear of them than respect for them.

So I liked the philosophical investigations, but didn´t like the gender investigations. Maybe I should see Don Augusto not as a real person (machista and unlikeable) but as a parody of Spanish society and of Spanish literature, specifically of two famous works: Don Qujote de la Mancha and La Celestina (I read about the connections between Niebla and these books in the introductory study to my edition). I enjoyed the similarities to Don Qujote, both in Don Augusto´s recognition of himself as a fictional character and his resulting questions concerning his existence and free will, and through the Curioso Impertinente-esque stories of his friends that are inserted into his amorous wanderings. I didn´t see the Celestina connections as clearly (Don Augusto is supposedly a parody of Calixto), but maybe I´m just not as familiar with La Celestina as I am with El Quijote. Maybe Don Augusto, as an early 20th century Spaniard, couldn´t be other than machista, and maybe I shouldn´t have been so put off by his strange conceptions of womenfolk. I know that Niebla is an important work in the Spanish literature, and I liked how it examined boundaries between creator and creation, and transcended traditional forms of literature. I´m glad I read it because I hope it will help me develop a greater understanding of what was going on in Spanish literature in Unamuno´s time. I have another book by Benito Pérez Galdós that I want to read soon, because I´m thinking that perhaps Unamuno ´s challenges to the novel are a reaction to writers such as Galdós. I don´t think that Niebla is a book that I would recommend to any friends of mine, because I don´t think they´d like it. I think it would be most interesting to students of philosophy or students of Spanish literature.

Re Niebla...well, I can't speak for Don Miguel, but all the readers of the book that I've ever known see Augusto as a parodic figure. His views are the conventional views of his class and time, and the women are presented as props, as cardboard cut-outs, to drive home the nature of vision...what you expect to see, you see, and you control only that which is not divinely ordained by your creator.

But it's been 22 years since my friend Cris and I had this discussion. I'll have to poke her and ask if we're due for a re-read.

richardderus: Thanks for the insight: I shoot from the hip on these commentaries (finish book, write about it, move on to the next one) and I certainly run the risk of misinterpreting things, or sometimes saying downright stupid things, as I feel that I've done here. You've given me reason to want to come back to this book after reading some other novels of the era, so that I can understand and better follow the parodic nature of Don Augusto.

I like posting here, because there's a lot of well-read and thoughtful people who know a lot more about literature than I do, and can help me look at books in different ways and point me in the right direction from time to time. 'Preciate it!

Good heavens, Matt! You said nothing stupid, and I can't see any misinterpretation in your post; your take is a valid one, supported by the text, and you've no need to justify it. I'd point to one specific thing, though, to consider in reviewing a text: What's the title? "Mist" is pretty suggestive of de Unamuno's purposes, given the actual book he wrote, don't you think?

Reading more works by an author or written in the general vein of the author always gives an interesting perspective. Not always a better one, I hasten to add...look at all the apologists for "Lord of the Rings"! *shudder* And what bad myth-mashing THAT is, up there with the Bible.

LT provides many pleasures, and the chance to really discuss a book is one of them. I'm active in the social parts of the site, too, but always excited by the chance to delve into something I've read. Helps to have good company in so doing.

Fair enough...I think, though, that I could have been a lot more forgiving of the depiction of women in Niebla keeping in mind the author and his purposes. I went into the book aware of the connection between Don Quijote (Unamuno's favorite book, I believe) and Niebla. I expected that, as Don Quijote parodies the chivalric texts of Cervantes' time, Niebla would be a similar take on the 19th century Spanish novel and its tendencies. And I think that I lost touch with that as I read, and ended up perhaps not liking some aspects of the book for the very reason that I should have liked them.

So I'll read it again someday in the not-too-distant future, and see if my thoughts on the book change. I'm by no means done with Unamuno, and am about to see if I can find a copy of his Vida de Don Qujote y Sancho.

see if I can find a copy of his Vida de Don Qujote y Sancho

THAT will be a treat! Fair hunting!

Matt, just wanted to drop in. First, sorry about not replying to you on my thread. I've been a little distracted and have fallen behind on posting and am now trying to catch up. I have managed to keep up with you're reading and I have to say you have some really great choices and always have something interesting to say.

I also have read and been impressed by Onetti and Felisberto, and though different in some ways, they both strike me as very subtle writers.

I have to admit, I'm not quite as effusive on Bolaño, but I count him as a favorite because I think his best stuff more than makes up for the stuff I'm not as enthused by. (And, it may just be my capacity as a reader.)

I have to admit I really liked Crónica de una muerte anunciada, which was only the second work I've read. It seems like an intentionally frustrating novel, a murder mystery where it seems the detective doesn't know any more (of importance) by the end of his investigation than he did in the beginning. I was a little less enthused with Del amor y otros demonios, though I still enjoyed it.

Incidentally, have you ever read Bolaño's essay "Los mitos de Cthulhu"? (I'm still trying to wrap my head around that title.) He's pretty savage on Latin American authors who are derivative of García Márquez.

That's a very interesting connection between Meyrink and Arlt. The only Meyrink I've read is a Spanish-language translation of Fledermäuse, which I found intriguing, but those are all short stories, none of which features such an intriguing cast of characters. One book I'd recommend with respect to golems is The Secret Life of Puppets, which explores (among other things) simulacra and automatons in art and literature.

With regards to female authors, I'd recommend Silvina Ocampo. I think she's unfortunately overshadowed by Bioy Casares and Borges, since she often worked with similar themes as both. I have to admit I approached her works, but she's got her own unique style and merits a look.

I have to admit I enjoyed El cantor de tango when I read it last year, but that may have to do with the fact that I was planning a visit to Buenos Aires after a nine-year absence and so the "love letter to BsAs" quality moved me. (Nostalgia can be a powerful thing.) I think your criticisms are valid. My main complaint was that the literary homage was laid on a little thick, especially with the Aleph subplot. When you compare this book with the way Borges' influence shows up in Bolaño it just looks even clumsier. (I'm not against homage, but at a certain level it can be distracting. Every time the narrator referred to Lopez Rega as Isabelita's astrologo, it seemed like a ploy to sneak in an Arlt reference.)

Been really enjoying following your reads, and I'll be getting caught up on my thread soon.

CarlosMcRey: Thanks for the response! I'll try and track down that essay by Bolaño, because I think I would find it interesting. I was reading a book of poetry by Sor Juana de la Cruz, and in the introduction it said that the work of the greatest Spanish baroque poets (like Góngora and her), led to a lot of really crappy baroque poetry by people who were not worthy of the complexity of the baroque style and form. I think the same thing about García Márquez: that he inspired some pretty bad fiction by people who applied "Magical Realism" with decidedly less mastery. I know that Bolaño was not afraid to speak his mind with regard to other writers, and I´d like to read his two cents.

I did have the chance to read a book of stories by Silvina Ocampo last year, and I enjoyed them. You´re right, very similar stylistically to Borges and Bioy Cásares, but they stand out in their own way. I imagine there was plenty of discussion and collaboration between all three of them. I like the way that they developed their own personal voices within the genre of short fiction, and I like jumping back and forth between them.

And, with regard to El cantor de tango, don´t forget that Julián Martel sings at a bookstore called "El Rufián Melancólico," another reference to Los siete locos.

19. A Wrinkle in Time--Madeline L'Engle

This book was a departure of sorts for me, a step back to young adult fiction. My girlfriend found it on a bookshelf at my house, and I said I’d liked it when I was a kid, and that I’d read it after she did. I think I read it along with its sequels when I was in 4th grade, and I was curious to see if I remembered anything, if I would be hit by any feelings of déjà vu as I read a book that I last read when I was about ten years old. I didn’t remember anything: it felt like I was reading this book for the first time. I think that I have memories of some books that I read when I was in elementary school, such as The Lord of the Flies, which I read and enjoyed in 5th grade. But many books have just faded away, making it interesting to look at a bookshelf of books from my past and occasionally pick one up and read it. A Wrinkle in Time was about some kids, Meg, her brother Charles, and her new friend Calvin, who tesseract (teleport) through space in search of their (Meg and Charles’) father. They go to a series of foreign planets, meeting different creatures both like and unlike humans, and fight against a mysterious force of darkness that is spreading through the universe. I thought it was alright, it disappointed me in some ways, and in some ways I thought it was a good book for young kids. It was a little too religious for me, with references to God and how we need to have faith in the powers of good. It wasn't too overt, but I wonder how it might have made me feel as a young, non-religious kid, because even the aliens seemed to be pretty certain that there was a greater being at work in the universe. On the positive side, it had some good vocabulary for a children’s book, and I was sometimes surprised to think that I knew a lot of the words in the book when I was that young. I also liked that a few of the characters spoke with lots of proverbs in foreign languages (La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia; As paredes tem ouvidos) that related to the story and were translated for the reader to English as well.

Since I didn’t really remember reading this book, I started to think about what books I do remember reading when I was in 4th grade. I remember sitting at my desk at school and reading John Grisham and Michael Crichton books. It’s funny to me that those were pretty much my favorite authors back then. I was really excited when Sphere and Congo got made into movies, and I still remember those movies pretty well (The hieroglyphs say: we are watching you!). I think that the books kids choose to read are interesting. Hollywood had a big influence on me, because I liked reading books and seeing the movies too. I remember A Time to Kill was an exciting movie event for me, although I liked the book better. I was also very excited when The Island of Dr. Moreau was made into a movie, because I’d just read the book and done a book report on it. Maybe the next time I decide to take a step down literary memory lane, I should choose one of those books that were made into movies, because I think they’ve stuck in my mind more firmly than something like A Wrinkle in Time. The problem is, though, that I don’t really think I’d enjoy reading John Grisham these days, and those books are a lot longer than A Wrinkle in Time.

62: I too read A Wrinkle in Time as a child, though I have not yet reread it as an adult. I don't think I would remember any of it by this time. I must say that my childhood reads were vastly different from yours, which means my age is showing. I don't remember seeing many movies as a child, and most had no connections to books that I knew. I am sure I mostly watched Disney, but Star Wars came out when I was just starting school. For me, John Grisham and Michael Crichton are authors of my adulthood whose books did not exist when I was young. I grew up reading a mixture of science fiction/fantasy (The Hobbit, Narnia, Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, and so on) and children's or animal-centered stories (Where the Red Fern Grows, A Wind in the Willows, Jim Kjelgaard's works, Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, The Call of the Wild, etc.).

justchris: Actually, not too much different...my Grisham/Crichton phase was a somewhat brief but intense one. I read and loved a lot of the books you mentioned, especially Watership Down (which I reread recently, enjoying it as much as an adult as I did as a kid), the Hobbit and the Chronicles of Narnia. It seems like there's always new "classics" in young adult literature (Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials trilogy are both really good) but the good books also seem to endure from generation to generation.

I also really enjoyed adventure stories a la Swiss Family Robinson or The Lord of the Flies.

It's interesting to try and remember books I read as a kid, and sometimes surprising to me which ones stand out in my mind. I believe that the books that were made into movies stuck in my memory more because I got them in two different forms on two different occasions; not necessarily because they were good or because they were my favorites.

Wow. I feel old. Grisham and Crichton came out of obscurity *after* my kid started reading on her own. A Wrinkle in Time wasn't a favorite of mine, IIRC, because I was out and on to Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke by that time.

I remember complaining about the Aslan/Jesus stuff in the Narnia books, which the religious one of my older sisters thought would slip by my militant anti-Christianity. Ha.

Professor Diggins' Dragons was a third-grade favorite of mine. I should look into it now. It's around here someplace, I think.

@64: I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, though I was somewhat disappointed at the end by all of the missed, undeveloped potential. I've heard mixed things about His Dark Materials.

@65: I wasn't clued in enough to figure out the Christian symbolism in the Narnia books. I was shocked when my humanities teacher in my senior year of high school mentioned it--that's not what ** remembered from the books at all! Then when I did reread them, it was so obvious. Never heard of Professor Diggins' Dragons, but the title alone makes it sound good.

20. Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell)--Arthur Rimbaud

One of the most satisfying aspects of learning French has been the chance it has given me to experience authors who had a profound influence on Latin American literature. There are French names that I have come across many times as I read and try and understand the progression of styles and themes that are found in the literature of Latin America, and now, as I read their works, I can reflect on how I feel they relate to the authors that they inspired across the Atlantic (or in Europe, since so many Latin American artists spent time in Europe). I had read Arthur Rimbaud´s name many times in various introductions and essays, and I found a copy of his collected poetry at the used bookstore the other day. I was immediately surprised: this French poet, whose works carry such fame and influence, was a wild teenager who gave up poetry not long after his 20th birthday, and the pages that were so widely read were written when he hadn´t even turned eighteen years old. I think that precocity in pretty much any field (literature, sports, mathematics, and so on) is fascinating, and I immediately chose one of the books of poetry included in this collection in order to get to know a little more about Rimbaud.

I read Une saison en enfer, which is one of Rimbaud´s later creations. He published it himself, with his own funds, and it chronicles his own coming-of-age struggles and questions about what one is to do in this world. It was an interesting introduction to him, and I´m actually glad that I read it first, because I think it will be interesting to step back and read some of his earliest poems after experiencing his work here, which seems to represent a sort of dawning of adulthood, where he is both looking inward at who he is and where he comes from, and looking outward to try and find direction in life. It begins with an introduction and a description of the author´s Gallic ancestry. He then drinks some poison, and the next bloc of poems (although they´re more prose than poetry) chronicles his journey through hell and the visions that he has. In the final poems, he finishes his account of hell and looks forward toward the rest of his life. The language and vocabulary are fairly simple and forceful. It is, however, not straightforward in the narrative or descriptive sense. It´s sometimes hard to figure out what he is saying, and I think that he was doing a lot of drugs while writing this, and in some way trying to create hallucinations of the personal hell that he may be imagining here. It’s an interesting chronicle of a strange process of maturation.

I thought about an old high school friend of mine as I was reading this who did a lot of drugs and was kind of crazy (I remember that he introduced me to the music of Donny Hathaway when I was 16 or so, for which I´m grateful). Rimbaud reminds me of him, and I wonder if he read any of his poetry when I knew him. If not, I think he would have enjoyed it greatly. I think it´s the kind of book that a lot of parents might not want their teenage children to read (because it might inspire them to do “wild stuff” like use drugs) but I think for certain teenagers it would be fascinating and inspiring. I myself, with the “maturity” of my 25 years, enjoyed reading Rimbaud´s chronicle of his youth. His search for meaning reminds me of what I went through, and what everyone goes through, as we change from adolescents to adults. As for the influence that his work had on Latin American poets, I´m going to have to think about that as I read and re-read more poetry. I feel like he reminds me of César Vallejo a lot, and that there´s a sort of psychological connection between the two and their views on life. Beyond that, I´m not sure, but I´m glad that the next time I read the words “heavily influenced by Rimbaud,” I´ll have a better idea of what that means. I think in a bit I´m going to read his earlier Poésies, to see the contrast between his beginnings as a writer and Une saison en enfer.

Hard to read that book, for me, and ultimately I felt like I did after reading Kerouac's On the Road...yeah, so?

But, like you, I am very glad to have Rimbaud as part of my mental furniture.

And now onto Paul Verlaine, as well...the adult half of Rimbaud's coming-of-age crisis. A bilingual edition of his selected poetry should really be enough of a commitment.

Richard: yeah, I understand where you're coming from. I think the difference for me between On the Road and Une saison en enfer is the age of the authors. I find a rebellious and wild teenager a lot more interesting than a rebellious and wild adult. I remember reading On the Road in high school and finding the protagonist pretty distasteful, like I wished he'd grow up already. Maybe I should read it now and see how my opinions (and I myself) have changed.

The other book that Une saison en enfer made me think of is The Catcher in the Rye, because I felt a certain similarity between Rimbaud and Holden Caulfield in their search for authenticity, or desire to become worldly, or something like that. I wonder if Salinger was very familiar with the poetry of Rimbaud...

Salinger did indeed know the Rimbaud, and Holden is a a spiritual descendent of young Arthur's. Well, it's a noble lineage.

Amazing what questions arise in the well-furnished mind. I love cross-cultural fertilization's results.

21. La Nausée (The Nausea)--Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve been working more lately and as such have had less time daily to read, and had a rather disjointed reading of this book, spread out in short segments over ten days or so. It’s too bad, because I feel that the more pages I read in a sitting, the more that I enjoyed what I was reading. It was hard to feel that I was constantly being distracted, or putting the book down to go do something else, and that these distractions detracted from the experience of reading La Nausée. I was struck by the connection that I felt with the narrator, Antoine Roquentin, an unemployed former traveler living a boring existence in a town in northern coastal France, and his search for meaning in the things around him, his daily acts, and interactions with other people. I thought that this book was very realistic in its depictions of everyday, solitary life, and I found myself thinking back to times in my own life where I didn´t have a whole lot of social stimulation. When Roquentin is walking down the streets of Bouville, or sitting in a café passively eavesdropping on the people around him, or even when he´s eating a meal with the autodidact, his thoughts and perceptions of the world around him are very relatable. I think I´ve felt similar feelings as him, looking around and not really feeling a connection with the people I see, sometimes wishing I was like them and sometimes not wanting to be like them at all, and reading his journal gave me a lot to reflect on in relation to my own self and what I look for in the things and people that surround me.

I will remember moments from this book that stood out to me: his trip to the museum to look at portraits, his lunch with the autodidact, a man who spends his days reading books at the library in alphabetical order, and his final trip to the library, where he sees a strange thing occur involving the autodidact and some other patrons. These moments were elaborated beautifully and I felt that I was being swept into the world of Roquentin as I read his journal. I will remember the narrator´s connection to the town of Bouville, where he is working on a historical biography and feels detached from the world around him. I think it´s a very accurate depiction of what it´s like to live in a place where you don´t really belong, that isn´t your home, and how strange it is to look at the people who have a whole existence built around the streets, buildings and businesses that hold a much more transitory place in your life. His time in Bouville made me think back on my time in places that I lived as a less than permanent resident, and how I would go places, make passing acquaintances with shopkeepers and cashiers at cafés and bars, but not really find a place in a world of people with friends, family, and established relationships. I think I would like to read this book again in a while, so that I can find more things to remember and more ways that I can look back on my own life and relate it to that of Roquentin.

I would recommend this book and I think there´s a lot more to it than I was able to take from my disjointed reading of it. The next time I read it, I´m going to make sure that I have more time on my hands when I do sit down to read, and probably read some background information on Sartre and this work specifically. I read through the Wikipedia article on this book (a rather thorough one) and it helped me understand its historical significance and some of the most notable interpretations of Sartre´s work and his philosophical ideas. It is a rather grim book and lacks in humor, but humor (outside of dry wit) in the character of Antoine Roquentin would seem out of place. He would probably be considered depressed and given some medicine if he saw a modern doctor. I thought at times that he should just lighten up and find some humor in the situations and encounters that he recounts in his journal, but I think that´s a really hard thing for people like him to do.

I enjoyed your commentary on Nausea; I'll probably read it later this year.

22. Tristana--Benito Pérez Galdós

With a title like Tristana, it´s not surprising that this book was sad. It is the story of the title character, a young lady who lives in a strange state of concubinage with her protector, Don Lope, after the death of her parents. She is a thoughtful and passionate young woman, and has faith that she will find success and fame in the world due to her talent and aptitude for learning new things, such as foreign languages, painting and music. Her ideas, most notably her resolute stance against marriage as an institution that imprisons both parties in an unhappy relationship, are quite progressive, and her strength of character contrasts with her imprisonment under the roof of her benefactor. She eventually falls in love with an artist from her neighborhood, engages in an extended written correspondence with him, and has a really unfortunate event befall her that changes her relationships with the people close to her and alters her view on life. The story was an interesting illustration of 19th century Madrid and the life of a woman who is exceptional and aspires to be more than society will allow her to be. The introduction to my edition of this book says that Tristana often gets overlooked in studies of Pérez Galdós, perhaps due to the fact that it is a relatively simple character study and because it lacks greater and overarching thematic statements. I liked its simplicity and straightforward nature, and am glad to have experienced a minor, but excellent, work of an author that I find very readable and likeable.

I enjoyed the style of narration, which was intellectual and sophisticated but at the same time quite colloquial. It made me feel that the narrator was enjoying his chronicle of Tristana, and its lightness complemented the underlying sadness of her life well. Her story is a sad one, but in a strange way, it´s told happily. This contrast was very compelling. Another aspect of the narration that I enjoyed was the alternation between third person narration and direct communication between Tristana and her lover in the form of the series of letters that they send each other when they are separated. I thought it broke up the narration at the right time, ceding the perspective from that of the narrator to the actual voices of the characters as they write back and forth from Madrid to the countryside. It fit the emotions and the love that the characters were experiencing, and flowed in and out fluidly with the narrator´s chronicle of Tristana´s life. I doubt that a straight third-person narrative of the events in this story would have worked nearly as well, because I think the middle section that deals with the two lovers´ correspondence was such an interesting break.

I have one more Pérez Galdós book, Doña Perfecta, that I plan to read soon. I´ve really enjoyed my first two experiences with him, this book and Nazarín. They were both straightforward character studies, and the author´s style and ability to transmit human emotions through writing have made me into a fan. I often try to compare new authors to old favorites, and the author that came to mind with Pérez Galdós is one of my childhood heroes, Kurt Vonnegut (I´m from Indiana, after all). I realize it´s a strange comparison to make, and I´m not quite sure why the one made me think of the other. I think it´s the style of narration: both authors speak to the reader in very familiar and friendly tones, and foster a sort of friendship between narrator, protagonist and reader. Obviously they´re different men of very different times and places, but I also think that, based on what I´ve read so far, I see a similarity between the two. The narrator really made me like and root for Tristana, the same as I ´ve felt about Vonnegut´s protagonists. I feel that with both authors, I have a pretty good chance of enjoying whatever book of theirs I pick up, and while the reading often feels light, it is also intelligent and thought-provoking. I doubt that Vonnegut read or was inspired by Pérez Galdós, but they seem to be cut from a similar literary cloth, and a fun one at that.

Finally, I´m a big fan of short, well-chosen final sentences, and I enjoyed the last sentence of this book as a synthesis of what had happened over the course of the previous 200-plus pages.

>71 msjohns615: So so glad you liked La Nausee as much as you did, given the kind of interrupted reading of it that Life made inevitable. I think it's his single best work. It's very relatable for anyone who has ever seen things from the outside, which I think is pretty much everyone!

I'd be amazed if the book didn't haul you back in at some future date. It's that kind of book...sentient, almost.

>73 msjohns615: I've never even HEARD of Tristana before! "Thanks" AWFULLY for leading me to it. *mutters sulphrously off to wishlist*

Richard: yeah, I´ll be back to La Nausée, for sure. I sometimes think that as I grow older, the number of books that I´m re-reading will slowly eclipse the books that I´m reading for the first time.

As for Tristana, I wonder whether it´s been translated. It´s considered a minor work of Pérez Galdós, and I bought it because it was the cheapest of three books of his that I found at the bookstore. I do enjoy minor works of major authors, and I´m glad that Alianza Editorial has done me the favor of disseminating his complete works to the extent that I can come across books like Tristana from time to time.

Well, I'll hope for a translation, or slug through a Spanish-language book for the first time in half my life. Could be good for my soul, ya never know.

23. El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames)--Juan Rulfo

I had read a few books by Latin American authors before going to college and studying Spanish. I remember a friend of mine read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was in middle school and passed it on to me, and I ended up checking out most of García Márquez´s books from the public library and reading them. I also remember checking out and reading Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar, a book which I continue to reread as I grow older and move around from place to place (Buenos Aires, rural Mongolia, Florida) and which I appreciate more and more as the years pass. The other author that I read in high school is Juan Rulfo, and I was introduced to his work on a family vacation on St. George´s Island in Florida. My parents had rented a house on the beach for a few days, and it had a horrible library filled with popular paperbacks by authors that I knew I wouldn´t like. Amongst the trash, though, I found Pedro Páramo, and read it both on the beach and on the car ride home (I don´t feel very bad about stealing it, or rather rescuing it, from that rental property). I´ve always enjoyed Mr. Rulfo´s work since then, and decided it was time to reread El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames) over the past few days.

In many of the stories in this book I saw elements of Mexico that are further examined in Pedro Páramo. The story Luvina is about a barren town filled with ghostlike people, and is told from the perspective of a man who once lived there speaking to another man on his way to live there. He speaks of how the man who led him to Luvina immediately turns around and leaves, saying that his tired animals will only lose strength by staying there. This scene is repeated with the arrival of Juan Preciado to Comala in Pedro Páramo. In La Cuesta de las Comadres, people slowly trickle away from a town terrorized by the Torrico family, much as people escape the oppressive figure of Pedro Páramo by leaving Comala (or dying). Anacleto Morones, the final story in this book and one of my favorites, depicts a man again very similar to Pedro Páramo in his corruption and abuse of power, told through the eyes of a group of nuns coming to speak to a man named Lucas Lucatero, who have been systematically wooed and abused by Anacleto. It´s interesting to think of these stories as preliminary sketches for Pedro Páramo, although saying that makes them sound less complete, when in fact I prefer these sketches to the novel. They’re blunt, straightforward, and extremely realistic in their depiction of rural desperation. I think I might just read Pedro Páramo next, because I really do feel that the two books go well together, and I think it´s cool that one can read the complete works of one of Latin America´s greatest authors in just a few days.

There are corruption and violence in nearly all of these stories and their depiction of the Mexican central plain against the backdrop of the Cristero revolution is powerful and haunting. Rulfo does an incredible job of presenting Mexico through the eyes and voices of a diverse lot of people. His stories are told by men and women, fugitives and the men pursuing them, friends and enemies of criminals and men condemned to die. One story, Macario, is told from the perspective of an orphaned mentally handicapped child, although I´ve always thought it could actually be a dog (I think a professor of mine analyzed the story from that perspective, and for the most part, it works). Whatever he is, he´s haunted by thoughts of going to hell for the bad things that he can´t stop himself from doing, and his constant and tormenting hunger reflects his handicapped (or dog-like) state, and is also a natural companion to the hunger experienced by the people in the other stories of the book. I feel like everyone has different favorite stories from this book, and I´m usually struck by different ones each time I read it. Together they form a book that I will continue to come back to, and have given me a lot of pleasure over the past few days.

Finally, I find it strange that this book isn´t widely available translated in English. Why not? Rulfo is considered by his peers and by many people to be the greatest Latin American writer of the 20th century, but why is it that I can´t find this book, or Pedro Páramo, at my local major bookseller? I found it on www.amazon.com, but it seems like there should be a mass-market version available. I wonder how the translation is, considering the dialectical difficulties of replicating rural Mexican speech in another language. I think this book would be a tantalizing challenge for a translator, and it would not surprise me if a new translation were released in the future. It seems that in English these stories would be very similar to those of William Faulkner, and I know that Faulkner was Rulfo´s main stylistic inspiration, so I think it could work.

Addressing your last question, I say only that translations are not by-and-large popular reading for most Americans. It's slowly changing, with the aforementioned Garcia Marquez as well as Eco and the Scandinavian thriller writers, but it's not at high tide, even, still less the flood it should be.

Still, by the time you're my age, I'll bet storytelling will be very much more internationalized than it is now, and it's more internationalized than it was in my mother's youth. I keep hoping that the other cultural tide, the monoglotism of Murrikin kulcher, will turn and the country will be filled with readers who can, and do, read Spanish-language books in the original.

*snort* I am an old Utopian, eh what?

24. Pedro Páramo--Juan Rulfo

I went ahead and finished the complete fictions of Juan Rulfo by reading Pedro Páramo. This was the first time that I had read both books consecutively, and it was interesting to see how the characters and ideas expressed in his short stories are also present in his novel. This novel, however, is far, far different from the short stories: where the stories are firmly rooted in a specific and harsh reality, the characters of Pedro Páramo are alive and also dead and the town of Comala where Juan Preciado arrives to find his father, Pedro Páramo, can be seen as a representation of purgatory, where souls in the town who did not receive the Catholic death rites remain after dying. The story is told from a succession of perspectives, with double paragraph breaks between each section. Sometimes multiple people are speaking at once, with the reader often required to figure out for himself who is speaking and what is going on. Over the course of 160 pages the stories of the inhabitants of Comala are told as Juan Preciado hears them, as a series of plaintive whispers and moans by the dead inhabitants of Comala, stuck in limbo because they were not able to buy eternal salvation or because the priest was not present or able to administer the necessary procedures. In this purgatory Pedro Páramo, the hacendado who rules over Comala, is the central figure, and his evil presence is felt from the first page of the story. Here´s how the story begins:

I came to Comala because I was told that my father, Pedro Páramo, lived here. My mother told me. And I promised her that I would come to see him when she died. I squeezed her hands to signal that I would come; she was about to die and I was ready to promise her anything. “Don´t fail to visit him,” she reminded me. “He goes by this name and by this other one. I’m sure that he will be happy to meet you.” So I couldn´t do anything but tell her that I would visit him, and from so much saying it I could hardly stop saying it even after I had to pry my hands from her dead hands.

I was struck by the line “he goes by this name and by this other one.” From the first page, Pedro Páramo is presented not only as a man, but as a representation of evil or perhaps the devil, and he plays an instrumental role in the lives and deaths of the other characters. Juan Preciado´s visit to Comala becomes a search not for a real person, his father, but for the thing whose presence dominates all the people in the town. I think the representation of the rich and violent landowner as the devil in poor central Mexico is very effective, and his actions and relationships are very interesting considering his dual characterization. I especially enjoyed his interactions with the town priest, Rentería, who is tormented by his reliance on Pedro Páramo´s wealth and fears that he is failing both his constituents and the church by accepting money in exchange for salvation.

This is one of my favorite books, and I always recommend it to friends. It is hard to read at times because it requires so much work on the reader´s part to sort out what is going on and who is speaking as the perspective shifts from soul to soul. I also again wonder how it would be in translation, because just like in his other book, the language represents the way people speak in a specific place and social class, and it might be hard to represent that in a foreign language. Rulfo was famous for two short books, and didn´t publish further works of fiction after Pedro Páramo. I saw his name brought up the other day in a newspaper comparing him to J.D. Salinger, in that both are authors whose complete works of (published) fiction can be read in a relatively short amount of time. It would be hard for Rulfo to outdo his first two books, and maybe rather than try to do so, he picked different artistic pursuits, like writing movie scripts and photography.

Fabulous reviews of the Rulfo books, Matthew! I read Pedro Paramo several years ago, and found it a tough read, as you mentioned. I think I'll give it another go in the near future, and refer back to your review of it.

26. Mateo Alemán--Guzmán Álvarez

I picked up this biography on Mateo Alemán, author of Guzmán de Alfarache, for about a buck at the used bookstore. I was hoping that it would be an entertaining account of Alemán´s life, which I knew involved lots of shady business dealings and a couple of stints in jail. I concluded that I would have been better off just sticking with my well-annotated version of Guzmanillo, because the introductory study and footnotes provide most of the information that was provided in this book (a Wikipedia article also might have sufficed). It was somewhat of a speculative biography, because while the author did have access to lots of documents regarding Alemán´s weird business dealings, he often simply quoted the author´s most famous work and used the author´s words to speculate on his life and to what extent Aleman´s writings reflect his personal experiences. It was not very interesting, and the fascinating anecdotes about the author that I was hoping to find were absent. Nonetheless, I´m a big fan of the saying “there is no book, as bad that it may be, that doesn´t contain something good. I was disappointed that this book wasn´t better, but I thought there were a few reasons to be glad that I read it.

Guzmán de Alfarache is one of my favorite books, and I´ve been thinking of it for a while and how its first and second part might have inspired Cervantes in their form as he wrote and published the two parts of Don Quijote just a few years later. Both books are similar in length, and in both cases, the author´s first part was followed by a spurious second part written by another author. Alemán and Cervantes then defended themselves against the usurpers of their fictional creations in the second parts of their books. I find it hard to believe that Cervantes wouldn´t have read Guzmanillo as he was creating Don Quijote, considering the widespread acclaim that it received after its publication. This book did a good job of documenting the publication of the first part of Guzmán de Alfarache and also analyzed Alemán´s literary vengeance against the usurper of his creation, a certain Juan José Martí. I thought his breakdown of Alemán´s ingenious means of addressing and defeating his plagiarist was the best part of the book, because I didn´t fully realize what was going on as I read the book. I´ll keep thinking about it as I slowly re-read Don Quijote this year and see whether I think that Cervantes was inspired by Alemán´s means of literary vengeance. The author of this biography only briefly touched on the connection between Alemán and Cervantes, stating that it was possible the two were incarcerated at the same time in Sevilla, and also alluding to the fact that they were supposedly enemies.

The other part of this book I enjoyed was a section where the author documented Alemán´s perplexing and shady business dealings, concluding that a whole series of byzantine property transfers probably only left him with debts, and perhaps a brief period of good living. He went on to say that that´s commonly the case with shady businessmen: they live well while they´re accumulating debts from a series of deals that eventually leave them bankrupt (and jailed back in the day). I chuckled thinking of a few of my friends who follow similar paths as Alemán, and how this idea could be applied to them.

But, as a whole, I found this book rather boring, and I wish it had provided me with more insights into the author´s life. I did find it ironic that a man named Guzmán wrote a biography of Mateo Alemán, whose most famous literary creation was named Guzmán too. I´m moving on to a biography of the mathematician Kurt Gödel, which forty pages in is much, much better than this book.

I chuckled thinking of a few of my friends who follow similar paths as Alemán, and how this idea could be applied to them.

Tell me...was your dad also known as "Tom Ripley"?

Richard: yeah, I guess that sounded mean-spirited...I think that if the folks I'm thinking of had ever really gotten in over their heads, I wouldn't be laughing, but their patterns of living irresponsibly well for a time then having to chill out and work hard to pay off credit card debts, etcetera, fall more under the category of youthful exuberance at this point...although there is certainly room to worry about where they're heading, I believe that they've got good heads on their shoulders...and I often admire their brashness and ability to dream big and live recklessly, as conservative as I am with my cash flow.

27. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel--Rebecca Goldstein

I completed my mini-vacation from fiction with this biography of Kurt Gödel, who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic. I´ve had Gödel and his incompleteness theorems stuck in my head since my senior year of high school, when I was really into math and read Douglas Hofstadter´s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. It´s a really cool book that examines music, art, math, paradoxes, computers, and a bunch of other stuff that I don´t remember very well. It introduced me to Gödel and his monumental proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic and of any other formal system of a sufficient level of complexity. After reading it, I recalled bits and pieces of Gödel´s incompleteness theorems from time to time, boiling them down in my mind to the idea that there is no system sufficiently complex as to be able to represent itself using its own language. I found this book fortuitously at the library, while I was watching my girlfriend´s stuff as she went to get a drink of water. I saw a book on the shelf and pulled it randomly, and when I saw it was about Gödel, I got very excited and checked it out. I was inspired by what I read, and have spent the past few days sharing tidbits of Gödel´s work and its implications to my friends.

This book is very different than Hofstadter´s in its examination of Gödel´s proof. Gödel created as system of numbering where mathematical units and processes were represented by numbers, so that the statements that he uses to prove the incompleteness of complex systems are both mathematical statements in and of themselves, and also representative of other arithmetical statements. In this way, he is able to use math to talk about math. Hofstadter introduces the reader to Gödel numbering and uses it to show what Gödel proved: I can remember creating a cheat sheet of Gödel numbers that I used while reading GEB. Goldstein, on the other hand, uses a very basic representation of Gödel numbering so that the reader can get the gist of what Gödel is doing. Her section on the incompleteness proofs is not as in-depth as Hofstadter´s, but she provides much more anecdotal and background information. She looks at the environment that Gödel was a part of in interwar Vienna and the different currents of philosophical and metamathematical thinking that were prevalent at the time, so that the reader can better understand just how significant Gödel´s incompleteness proof was, and how fundamentally it altered the foundations of logic and mathematics. After taking the reader through the basic steps that Gödel followed in the first and second parts of his proof, Goldstein examines the implications of his work in fields like logic, computing, artificial intelligence, and even psychopathology. She bookends all of this with anecdotes about Gödel´s time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, drawing the reader in with stories of Gödel´s friendship with Albert Einstein, who once said that he came to Princeton for the privilege of being able to take a daily walk with Kurt Gödel. After reading this book, it´s easy to see how even a man as brilliant as Einstein would be inspired and amazed by the mind of Gödel, and I think the author did a great job of conveying just how amazing he was.

I really enjoyed this book, and appreciated being able to refresh and deepen my knowledge about Kurt Gödel. It was sad, because it showed how intellectually lonely he felt: like Einstein, he thought that his proofs were manipulated and used to defend viewpoints on math and knowledge that were very much the opposite of his own. He found very few people in his life who understood him how he wished to be understood, and was intellectually lonely, even in a building full of geniuses of their fields at the Institute for Advanced Study. I like biographies of mathematicians because they give the reader a window into minds that are very different than normal human minds. Gödel certainly had trouble relating with other people, and I like thinking that he would have appreciated this book and its attempt to convey what he truly thought and believed in a way that he himself couldn´t express during his life.

#84: I read that one a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I had never heard of Kurt Godel previous to reading that book and my knowledge of mathematics is not wonderful, but Goldstein managed to make the book very accessible for me.

Fabulous reviews, Matt. I'll have to think about adding Incompleteness and Pedro Páramo to my list. I recall seeing Gödel, Escher, Bach on shelves years ago, but unlike you, I never got around to trying it.

Thanks, Chris! And I haven´t forgotten about the Don Quijote thread, just haven´t had time lately, it´s kind of a secondary project for me this year, so I´ll slowly go along, three chapters at a time, and add thoughts as I go.

28. Rhinocéros--Eugène Ionesco

I have seen a copy of this play on my dad´s bookshelf for most of my life, and I always wondered what it was about, and why it was called Rhinoceros. I saw a copy in French at the bookstore and decided that it was high time that I buy and read it. I find myself not really wanting to give away too much so that anyone who reads this and wants to read the play (my girlfriend, mainly) can experience it in the same way that I did, without knowing too much beforehand about what´s going to happen in the small French town where it takes place. So I will ignore the proverbial rhinoceros in the room, and just say that this is a really neat play about the way that people react to societal pressure and conform or don´t conform to what people around them are doing and believing. I understand that this play was written in a Europe threatened by the USSR, and that he is examining the implications of communism and/or fascism on individual liberty and free will, but I think that the story is universal and representative of the pressures that individuals feel in any society. In Rhinocéros, the characters slowly succumb to the pressures of fitting in and conforming to a fad, and I think that the reasons that they use to justify their decision to conform to societal pressure are extremely accurate, as well as ingeniously represented in the pages of this play. My favorite scene involves the protagonist, Bérenger, and his friend, Jean, who has decided to follow the fad that is sweeping through their town. It is hilarious and reminds me of when I was a kid, and people would do a lot of silly things because other people were doing them. Jean´s justification of his decision to follow and the change in his character as he accepts the new fad are really fun to read in dialogue. The whole play is very humorous and treats a very serious theme (conformity versus individuality) in a funny and absurd way.

I found myself thinking that this would be a great book for a classroom of high schoolers to read. I can imagine some really passionate and interesting discussions, and I think it would be a lot of fun to guide students through some of the dilemmas that the characters, and especially the central character, Bérenger, face as a peculiar and strangely magnetic fad sweeps through their town. I remember when I was in high school, I used to try so hard to not worry about what others thought of me, and it was often really hard if that meant not conforming, or not being cool enough (in my mind) to even think about conforming. I think I would have related really well to Bérenger, and I would have immediately recognized the connections between what he is seeing and what people see when they walk into high school.

I really liked this play. I did a little research on Wikipedia and Ionesco seems like a cool guy. The absurdity of a play like Rhinocéros made me think of existentialist books (Camus, Sartre) that I´ve read this year. He seems similar to Camus in his depiction of the absurdity of human existence, but I understand that he was not connected with the existentialists in his philosophical perspecitve. He seems more like a bit of a loner on the fringes, not really a part of any “movement,” and I feel strongly drawn to such writers.

Fabulous review! I'll definitely pick this up soon.

88: Yup, I'll second that it's a great review. How well do you think the dialogue might translate into English? It sounds like a fun play. The only connection I have to Ionesco plays is a very funny podcast of The Moth titled "Lost in Translation" and featuring Michael Rips, in which he recounts his experience in high school passing off a translation of an Ionesco play as his original work.

Interesting because we actually read Rhinoceros in my high school French class and, if memory serves me right, we went to a production of it. It might have been a different play, though: all I remember is a lot of chairs on the stage that kept getting moved around (this was 1971 in New York, so it was probably highly experimental). I've forgotten the play (and could probably no longer read it in French), but your review makes me want to look at it again.

Chris: I think it would be fine in translation. It's very straightforward, and I think that a translation would retain the most important elements of the play.

Rebecca: I can only imagine what an actual production of this play might be like (especially an "experimental" one). There would be some obvious difficulties, and I guess the show you saw used chairs to address the main difficulty. Anyway, I think that it's a fun play to read and imagine without actually seeing it on stage.

@92: Good to know. One of these days I'll try reading more plays. And attending more plays. My experience is quite limited. Also, I forgot to mention earlier--I look forward to reading your comments on Don Quijote when you have the chance. I totally understand it being something of a back-burner project when you have the spare time. In the meantime, I'll just dominate the thread with my many questions and so on. It's quite fun encountering for the first time a classic that so many people are already familiar with, so when I burble on they usually know what I'm talking about.

29. L'Avare (The Miser)--Molière

I realized that I´ve been stockpiling plays for some time now, and I thought that I´d read a bunch of them in a row, because I do love dialogue, and reading plays in Spanish and French from centuries past is a fun way to travel literarily to different eras when people spoke in different and interesting ways. Molière´s L´Avare is a comedy in five acts, where two children try and successfully maneuver their romantic desires around their father´s will, which runs contrary to their own. I really liked the intrigue between the characters in L´Avare, with all of the characters orbiting around the tyrannical and avaricious figure of Harapagon, the father. In the first and second acts, the conflicts are clearly presented: Cléante, Harapagon´s son, is secretly in love with Mariane and wants to marry her. He is just about to tell his father, who shocks him by declaring that he has decided to remarry (he´s a widower), and has chosen Mariane as his future wife. His daughter, Elise, wants to marry Valère and is also on the verge of declaring her intentions when her father tells her that he´s found her a sufficiently wealthy husband, an old man named Anselme whom Elise definitely does not want to marry. Beyond the marriage problems, Harapagon´s extremely thrifty ways put him in conflict with his children and his household servants. In the following acts the children, the servants, and a procuress named Frosine all try to get Harapagon to see things their way and get what they want out of him. The conflicts provide ample opportunity for comedy, and Molière delivers, with lots of cleverly devised arguments and funny moments. There´s often a tinge of tragedy in the way that Harapagon and his children interact, because they really do feel wronged by his miserly way of living, and I think that this helps make the comedy all the more effective, because it does tread that line while staying consistently funny.

I got into reading plays when I had a long commute to work on the train, and I enjoyed reading books that were more or less predictable in the amount of time they´d take to finish. Plays are constrained by the patience of the audience, and thus usually don´t take more than a few hours to read. I liked that, and ended up reading a fair amount of plays from Spain´s Siglo de Oro era. This play was written in the mid 1600´s, and I enjoyed a few aspects of L´Avare that reminded me of Spanish plays. The servants fall into a few archetypical categories common in both plays and novels of the era, such as the noble fallen on hard times who is working as a servant while wooing the woman he loves and hiding his true identity, or the greedy servant blinded by his desire for his master´s riches. Maître Jacques, Harpagon´s cook and coachman, is a great comic character, whose truthfulness with his master earns him Harpagon´s ire and a couple of beatings. Finally, the character of the procuress was quite familiar to me after reading Spanish plays, with the figure of the Celestina looming in my mind as I read her lines in L´Avare. I´m assuming that the audience of Molière´s time would place her immediately in context with other pieces that they had seen and enjoyed, because she is a minor character in this play who fits in perfectly as one more person who wants some of Harpagon´s tucked away riches. He wants her help in procuring marriage to Mariane, but obviously loathes having to deal with her. I enjoyed the similarities, and it was interesting to read a play from 17th century France and see how it related to the plays of 16th and 17th century Spain.

Molière´s play, on the other hand, was much more colloquial than a lot of my favorite Spanish plays, without the heady wordplay and complex manipulations of language that I enjoy in writers like Quevedo and Calderón. It was very accessible in its language and the plays on words and confusions between the characters were easy to follow while at the same time intelligent and well-crafted. There was one scene where two characters have an extended discourse where one is clearly referring to money while the other is clearly referring to a woman, and I really enjoyed the way that Molière was able to draw out the conversation to great length before either one realizes the confusion. There was one further difference between L´Avare and most Siglo de Oro plays: this play was written in prose, rather than in poetic form, which took me a while to notice, but seemed strange considering how much emphasis was put on form in those days. I´m often ignorant of what´s going on with meter and rhyme in plays, so maybe this wasn´t too out of the ordinary, but I certainly noticed it. I feel like La Celestina was in prose as well, but I think that most of the major Spanish playwrights wrote in poetic form.

One further thing I enjoyed about this play was my edition, which had text on one side of the page and photographs from a dramatic representation of the play on the other side. It was extremely helpful to see the characters and the clothes that they were wearing, because clothing was mentioned a lot in reference to the miserly or free-spending ways of the characters, and it´s always hard for me to fully understand what the array of strange 17th century tights, belts, ruffles and jackets actually would look like on a real person. Seeing Harpagon and the other characters on stage was really cool, and made me wish that some other books that I have read followed the same sort of format.

30. La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)--Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Segismundo´s father, Basilio, is the king of Poland and a big fan of astrology, studying the stars in order to understand the future. When his son is born, he reads that he is destined to become a cruel ruler, and so he imprisons him in an isolated mountainside fortress, telling his people that his son died in childbirth. Segismundo grows up under the tutelage of Clotaldo, who educates him in his isolated prison. When he is grown, Basilio decides that he wants to perform an experiment, testing whether or not free will can triumph over destiny as read in the stars. He gives Segismundo a drug that puts him to sleep and transports him to the palace, placing him on the throne as king. In this way, he can see whether his son can transcend the predictions of the stars and rule justly. He instructs Clotaldo to explain to Segismundo what has happened, and also to warn him that his new position as king may only be a dream, and that he may well wake up back in his prison. Segismundo as king must confront the unjust nature of his prison, and decide how to treat his subjects and his father, who imprisoned him and isolated him from the world. He also must enter into courtly society after living his life as a caged beast. Calderón´s play follows the action as Segismundo tries to understand the cruel existence that he has been forced into and examines whether or not he can be a just ruler despite his star-crossed birth and isolated, savage upbringing.

As I looked at my bookshelf trying to decide which of the handful of recently-purchased plays I wanted to read next, I decided instead to reread La vida es sueño, thinking that of all of my choices, I would enjoy it the most. Before I began reading, I was paging through the critical commentaries on the play that follow the text in my edition. There was a letter from the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev expressing his enjoyment of Calderón´s work, and he compares Segismundo with Shakespeare´s Hamlet. It´s a rather obvious choice, and as I read the play I thought about how similar the two princes are (although I haven´t read Hamlet since high school and only faintly remember it). Segismundo is made to question the world that surrounds him and ponder whether he is dreaming or awake: Hamlet´s most famous line, “To be or not to be,” in Segismundo´s world, becomes more a question of “Am I awake, or is this a dream?” Segismundo has a monologue that reminds me of Hamlet´s soliloquy on existence, and is one of my favorite passages in classic Spanish literature:

Yo sueño que estoy aquí
destas prisiones cargado,
y soñé que en otro estado
más lisonjero me vi.
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.

These words come at the heels of a day in which Segismundo has awoken in the bed of a king, confronted the reasons behind his lifelong imprisonment, and all the while been constantly reminded that what he is experiencing may only be a dream, and that he may wake up to the shackles and isolation of his prison. His contemplation of the world and whether or not our lives are anything more than dreams was remarkable to me the first time that I read it, because of its direct challenge to reality. I assume that Calderón was familiar with Don Quijote and perhaps Segismundo´s dilemma was inspired by his adventure in the Cave of Montesinos. It´s interesting to see another scenario where a Spaniard is writing about dreams and reality in the first part of the 16th century, because it´s a topic that seems to pertain much more to literature in modern times.

La vida es sueño is written in the baroque style, which means that the language is complicated and there are many different and sometimes confusing techniques that Calderón uses to construct arguments. My edition was thoroughly annotated, and helped bring my attention to some of the aspects of the baroque style that I would have ignored otherwise. Another element that I enjoyed was the somewhat atypical comic foil Clarín, who is unique in that he shows limited allegiance to his initial master, Rosaura, and floats around from master to master. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was the one living in a dream, and his commentaries often hint at his own confusion at the fate that befalls him. There were some parts of the play that didn´t seem as strong, such as the ending, where the different plot strands are conveniently tied up in the most straightforward way possible. In the end, though, Calderon´s depiction of Segismundo´s struggle to understand his life and the world that surrounds him, makes him one of my favorite characters in Siglo de Oro theater and a worthy holder of the title “Spanish Hamlet.”

31. Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps)--Alejo Carpentier

I had a lot of thoughts going through my head as I re-read this book, so I think I’ll begin by trying to describe it and see where I end up. It´s been about three years since I read it for the first time, and I liked it every bit as much as I did then. It is about a man who lives in a city (unnamed, but purportedly New York), and is a musician but has sold out to a normal 9-to-5 job doing scores for promotional ads so that he can support his wife, a theater actress who he never sees because their schedules only coincide on Sunday mornings, when they habitually meet in bed, less out of passion than out of habit. He is cheating on her with an astrologist who has a bunch of new-agey friends. One day he runs into an old colleague from the university where he did research on primitive instruments and music theory. His colleague gives him the opportunity to go to the depths of the jungle in search of instruments that will help prove his long-set-aside yet revolutionary theory on the origins of music. He decides to go, and takes his mistress with him. As he journeys deeper into the jungle, he becomes entranced with the people and the life that surround him, and feels a greater and greater desire to leave behind his frustrating and unfulfilling existence back in the city.

The story of an escape from civilization is not remarkable or unique, but it is written in a fantastically musical and flowing manner that I find hypnotic. In one of my favorite chapters, the protagonist hears Beethoven on the radio in a town on the edge of the jungle, and his thoughts flow in and out of the music, taking him to his childhood, the stories of his parents, his experiences in World War II, and his disillusionment with the clash between his father’s Europe (idealistic, intellectual) and the world of fascism and Nazism that he saw during the war. His thoughts in this chapter, as in the rest of the book, parallel the action and help situate the character in two worlds: the one that he yearns to leave behind and the one that he wishes to become a part of, the world of the jungle. The language that Carpentier uses is cultured and his vocabulary is large and at first intimidating. To tell the truth, the first time I began this book I thought it was going to be a really hard read (paragraphs are also often pages long). I find, however, that this isn’t the case, because he employs an almost universal sort of Spanish that for the most part avoids the colloquialisms and local vocabulary that make earlier regionalist novels hard for me at times. It is remarkably readable, which is a testament to the way Carpentier wields words, thoughts and ideas, joining them into his narrative and composing them almost as if they were parts of a symphony.

It is also remarkable stylistically as an antecedent to Gabriel García Márquez´s Magical Realism. As I understand Carpentier´s idea of Marvelous Realism (realismo maravilloso), it is a way of expressing that there are so many places, people, and occurrences across Latin America that are marvelous, awesome, at times hard to believe, yet real. This book is a journey into the marvelous, but it is firmly grounded in reality. Things happen, but they happen for reasons. For example, after a character dies in a town on the edge of the jungle, the next day, during the wake, a swarm of butterflies flood the sky, blocking the sun and creating an eclipse-like state. Carpentier explains the phenomenon as a migration not altogether uncommon in the jungle, and even comes back to the event later in the book, when the protagonist sees hoards of young butterflies and realizes that these are the creatures that will grow to someday flood the sky in some corner of the jungle. I believe that there is a nearly identical flood of butterflies, or something similar, falling from the sky after a death in 100 Years of Solitude, but in Márquez´s case, no explanation is given or really necessary in the world of Macondo. From Carpentier to Márquez, the world of Latin America has changed from a marvelous land to a magical one, and explanations for the fantastic and unbelievable events that happen are prescindable. I feel that Márquez is heavily indebted to Carpentier, both stylistically and thematically, and I enjoy reading Carpentier and experiencing a voice that is still connected to reality as it depicts the wonders of Latin America.

I really, really like this book, for the reasons I´ve mentioned above and because I feel a personal connection with this book and the story it narrates, having spent time in a rural, foreign setting as a Peace Corps volunteer and having related the story of the protagonist´s escape from civilization to my own trip from America to the Mongolian steppe (I had to replace the jungle, full of life, with the steppe, barren and bleak; besides that, I saw a lot of similarities). I read it for the first time during my summer training, and I often imagined my later trips from Ulaanbaatar to the provincial capital to my countryside home in comparison to what I read in this book. It is at the same time a paean to life away from civilization and a stark reminder of the chasm that separates the world of cities, universities and high culture from the isolated communities of Latin America and other parts of the world. I, like I´m sure many volunteers do, daydreamed of what it would be like to just stay in my community, and not go back to America. This book examines just how hard it is for an individual to do just that, and how much a person has to leave behind in order to stay. The narrator seems at times ugly and absurd the farther he journeys into the jungle, and his desires to embrace the simple life (and a native woman) were distasteful to me then, and a reminder of how different I was as an American in a very foreign place. I am glad that Carpentier´s protagonist is more of an antihero than a swashbuckling adventurer, because his flaws and presumptions helped me examine my own existence away from my native civilization. If anyone I know decides to join the Peace Corps, I think that I will send them a translation of this book, because it does an excellent job of illustrating the magical pull of rural life, while at the same time illustrating the barriers that separate us as urban, cultured individuals from the “simple life” to which we often year to return.

32. La vida breve (A Brief Life)--Juan Carlos Onetti

I had been trying to obtain a copy of this book for a long time, and was thrilled when I found it online for less than two bucks, with free shipping to boot (even if I had to re-glue the spine and tape it together in order to get it into readable condition). I have worked my way backward with Onetti, beginning with his last book, Cuando ya no importe (Past Caring) and continuing on to books like El Astillero (The Shipyard), Dejemos hablar al viento (Let the Wind Speak) and Juntacadáveres (Bodysnatchers). This has, admittedly, been a very strange way to proceed. These books have all taken place in and around the fictitious town of Santa María, situated on the banks of a river and with a nearby settlement known as la colonia Suiza (The Swiss colony). Santa María is invented in La vida breve by the protagonist, Juan María Brausen, who dreams it up as a way to make some money off of a movie script and maneuvers the characters in his preliminary sketches of Santa María in ways that parallel his own life. The chapters in La vida breve alternate between three worlds: Brausen´s life and his interactions with his wife, Gertrudis (who is in the process of leaving him) and his friend Stein; the world of Santa María where the doctor Díaz Gray meets Elena Sala, who comes to him for prescriptions for morphine and ends up taking him along with her in a search for a missing Englishman; and the apartment next door, where Brausen has introduced himself under a pseudonym, Arce, to his new neighbor la Queca, a prostitute with whom he enters into a strange and abusive relationship. There are similarities between Brausen and his fictional and half-fictional selves, and as the book continues, the lines blur even more as he exerts his will over Díaz Gray in Santa María, while completing a journey as Arce that is similar Díaz Gray´s trip with Elena Sala.

La vida breve is fascinating because it shifts the responsibility for the creation of Santa María from Onetti to one of his own fictional creations, and documents the way that this world came to be. I wonder how much Brausen is a reflection of Onetti´s own self, making this book a documentation of his own motivations in writing and his desires to liberate himself from everyday life through the creation of characters and situations that reflect his own world and the things that he both wants to do and has done. It´s interesting because Brausen creates alter egos that do and want to do things that he himself is not necessarily capable of doing (he fantasizes about murdering la Queca, for example), and his life as Arce as well as his writing about Díaz Gray allow him to explore his dark fantasies. I wonder how much Onetti, in the characters he creates, is doing the same thing, examining his fears and the dark corners of his world and creating portraits of men that are like him in many ways. While reading a book where three different stories are connected and interwoven, I also enjoyed thinking about how all three were in turn connected with the author himself. It is an interesting web, with Onetti sitting in Montevideo imagining Brausen sitting in Buenos Aires, who in turn is imagining Santa María into being.

The world of Santa María is blurry, the characters are hardly ever sober, and they are somewhere between depression, despair, and the point where life doesn´t matter to them any more as they look back on what they have and haven´t accomplished. His books present a sufficiently pessimistic and somber view of individual achievement and motivation for my tastes. They are also detailed in a way that makes it tantalizingly possible to locate Santa María geographically (somewhere along the Río de la Plata, somewhere in central to northern Uruguay, somewhere not too far from Buenos Aires but close to a day´s trip) and imagine it in relation to places that I have been, even though it´s not a real place and its streets and plazas can´t be defined by looking at a map. Finally, I like that the stories of Díaz Gray, Larsen, Brausen, and the other characters that make up (and in the case of Brausen, create) Santa María, are interesting and compelling portraits of individuals and paint a specific and difficult reality, without aspirations to make overarching statements about Uruguay or Latin America, or propel greater thematic designs. I found an interesting article about Onetti, and it contained a quote by a critic in a review of the English translation of El Astillero (The Shipyard), calling it “a graphic, ominous symbol of Uruguayan decay.” Onetti´s reaction was that he had not written a novel of airy symbolism but instead about the failures of one particular man. I enjoy stories about the failures of particular men and women, and have enjoyed reading a few of Onetti´s books side by side with books by Camus and Sartre this year, because of the similarities in their examinations of individuals and existence. It makes sense that Onetti would be considered a Latin American existentialist, because his work seems to be as relatable to the existentialists as to his Latin American peers.

Oh, and here´s the article about Juan Carlos Onetti:
http://blogs.monografias.com/sistema-limbico-neurociencias/2010/04/18/meet-juan-...

33. Le Horla--Guy de Maupassant

One of the first books that I read in French was a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, and I recently found a copy of Le Horla at the used bookstore, and decided to revisit them about a year later. I remember that the first time, I recounted the plots of a few of them to my girlfriend because I thought they were rather humorous and ingenious in their depiction of situations and moments in French life. Reading them for a second time, I was once again taken by these short and straightforward stories: the detachment of troops who find an abandoned house filled with provisions and throw a feast, and the surprising manner in which the local priest fulfills their request for female accompaniment; the woman overtaken by curiosity as she looks out of her balcony window and sees another woman signaling her services to passers-by on the street; a confrontation between fishermen and their wives over a prime fishing spot; and an interrogation by a local authority of two elderly people caught in the midst of an improper act in the middle of the forest. I enjoy Maupassant´s development of unique yet everyday situations, and the stories that make up the bulk of my edition of Le Horla were a lot of fun to read again, because I was familiar with them and began each story with the recognition of having read it before, but without fully remembering the details or even some of the major twists in each one.

I read in the introduction to my edition that Maupassant was influenced by Poe, and his examination of madness in two of the stories, L'Auberge and the title story, was where I thought this influence was most apparent (although it´s been many years since I read Poe´s stories). L´Auberge was neat because its story, that of two men wintering in a resort hotel in the mountains, trapped by snow and isolated from the rest of the world, has been depicted (albeit in a different fashion) in the movie The Shining. It was easy to compare the younger man´s descent into madness with that of Jack Nicholson in the movie, and I enjoyed thinking how the scenario presented in Maupassant´s movie passed through the generations and was reintroduced in cinematic form so many years later. Le Horla is also a story of madness and one man´s quest to discover a being that haunts him, drinking his water at night and making him feel possessed and ill at ease in his own home. There are two versions, and the earlier, shorter one was included in the appendix of my book. The earlier version is the narration of the man´s account of his madness (or perception of an alien being come to earth to supplant mankind) to a group of psychiatrists. The second version is in diary form, and expands his story to more fully examine his journey from sanity to madness. The narrator views a hypnotism and relates his experiences with the invisible being that haunts him to the hypnosis of his cousin, which I thought added an interesting parallel to his story. Apparently hypnotism was en vogue in Paris around the time that Maupassant wrote Le Horla, and it´s interesting to think about the effect that its inclusion in the story would have on his contemporaries as they read it.

I´m glad to have read this book for a second time, and I´m thinking about passing it along to a friend of mine who studied French as a kid. His stories remind me of those of Chekhov in their realism and depiction of 19th century life, and I´m glad to have learned about French life from him as I learned about Russian life from Chekhov. I also am glad to be familiar with his work as I continue to read Latin American short fiction, because I have read of his influence on the early generations of short story writers in Latin America. I’m also curious to read more of his work, and to see how his novels compare to his short fiction.

I really like Chekhov's short stories and your comment about how de Maupassant's stories remind you of Chekhov's makes me want to see them out, although I will have to read him in translation.

I've got de Maupassant's novel Bel Ami on deck to read in the next couple of months--I like his short stories too.

99: they both seem, to me, to be from a similar era and have similar aims in the portrayal of interesting events in a particular place. Chekhov is darker, and Maupassant is a little less grounded in reality. It's been a while since I read Chekhov, though, so I'm not sure how similar they really are.

100: I've been wanting to read one of his novels, so I'll have to see what you think!

34. Bestiario (Bestiary)--Julio Cortázar

I´m happy that I have finally read this book, because Julio Cortázar´s Rayuela (Hopscotch) is one of my favorite books and I have read three other books of his short stories, all of which have satisfied me greatly. It took me a while to find a sufficiently low-priced version of Bestiario, and I was also slightly put off by the fact that the first story, Casa Tomada, is more or less a staple in middle-level Spanish literature classes, and I´ve read it multiple times without ever really enjoying it, in part because I didn´t yet understand the importance of Cortázar when I took my first classes in Spanish lit, and later because I didn´t particularly admire it compared to so many other stories (and one novel) of his that I love. I think it´s chosen for college students because it´s relatively short and is an acceptable example of Cortázar´s species of fantastic literature. A house is inhabited by a brother and sister, who live boring, isolated lives devoted to their hobbies (reading for him, sewing for her). Slowly, parts of their home are taken until they find themselves locking the front door and leaving. No explanation is given for why the house is being taken, or who is slowly advancing from room to room, forcing them out. It is told matter-of-factly, with certainty, and with the conviction that there is no going back to the taken rooms. Actually, as I think about it, it isn't a bad story, and I enjoyed it more today than in the past. The description of the siblings´ detachment from the world and the small satisfactions that they find in the division of chores and the pursuit of their hobbies, are related in a manner that is touching and human, while also hinting at the feelings of melancholy and sadness that they may feel as they pass their days alone. It is a fantastic story, but it is also a human one, and it shows how good Cortázar is at conveying simple and moving human emotions as his stories completely unhinge from reality.

In the stories that follow Casa Tomada, a lot of strange things happen. A man births baby bunnies through his mouth every month or so, and despairs when he moves to the city to take care of a friend´s apartment and the pace of his bunny regurgitations quickens, making it hard for him to keep his secret and maintain the cleanliness of the apartment. The story of Circe is retold in the relationship between a young man and a woman whose two previous fiancés died strange deaths. A child is sent to spend the summer at a house in the country where a tiger lives amongst the human inhabitants, and must be avoided. A woman feels that she must travel to a bridge in Hungary, where she will meet another woman who she knows is suffering. A man takes his grieving friend out dancing in Palermo (the Buenos Aires Palermo) where they see his recently deceased wife. Each story contains something strange and unexplainable, and what makes this detachment from reality work so well for Cortázar here, and in later books, is that his human beings are so grounded in reality that certain elements of their world can be altered fundamentally, while they still retain their humanity. His stories, when sad, are very sad. When his young men meet and court young women, their desperation to find love and their melancholy acceptance of failure resonated with me when I was 19 and still do. I almost feel as if Cortázar is something of the yang to Borges´ ying, both exploring opposite ends of the fantastic in their short fiction. Borges´ stories explore the intellectual side of the fantastic, while Cortázar delves into the emotional side, vividly depicting human emotions as he alters reality.

One other aspect of Cortázar´s short fiction that I like is his use of children and the child´s perspective. In the story Bestiario, the story focuses on a child, who is spent to live in a house where a tiger also lives. This fantastic scenario, when seen through the eyes of a child, becomes less fantastic and more matter-of-fact. It’s harder for the child to understand the adults that surround her in the country house than it is for her to understand the presence of the tiger. I think that using children here (and in a few stories in Final del Juego) is an interesting way to contrast things that are unbelievable with things that are normal. The world of adults is often a strange, difficult to understand place for children, and I like how Cortázar depicts children struggling to understand the emotions that they feel in the adults that surround them, and how this is often a greater challenge for the kids than understanding, for example, how one must keep their eye out for a tiger and make sure everyone knows what rooms can´t be used at a certain time because the tiger is in there.

I think Bestiario is a good introduction to Cortázar, and I´d recommend it to my friends. It´s pretty short and I got into it, reading it in one sitting. His later stories are more developed, more political, and more in touch with the real world and real people (I´m thinking of El Perseguidor, a story about a jazz musician, perhaps based on Charlie Parker, and his story about the Cuban revolution), and delve into the strange and fantastic less regularly. They´re all good, and whether read chronologically or otherwise, I appreciate the short fiction of Julio Cortázar and always try to get my friends to read him when I have the chance.

35. The Moviegoer--Walker Percy

The Moviegoer is a book that I read when I was about fourteen years old, and for some reason, out of all of the books that I read in my early teenage years, it´s always stood out in my mind. I believe that this is because the story of Binx Bolling came to represent to me what it was going to be like to be an adult. He works in an unremarkable suburb of New Orleans selling stocks, content with going to the movies at night and having a series of affairs with his secretaries. He has devised a vague “search” for meaning in his day-to-day life, identifying noteworthy occurrences in his world that elevate existence above the mundanity of the everyday. He sees a movie star walking down the street and watches a young couple notice him, and thinks about the effect that the foreign and famous presence has on the otherwise unremarkable scene. He seeks repetitions in movies and life that elevate normal moments in nondescript theaters to a special status, and he drives a red MG convertible because it is a car that is immune to malaise, a car that one can drive in with a woman without being overwhelmed by how plain and meaningless their life is. He uses this invented search to find, if not pleasure, then at least low-level motivation to keep going in a job and a life that to most of his family seems uninspired and disappointing. Looking back, I think that at 14 I was aware that life would at some point become more repetitive, with less options sprawling out ahead of me and more routine and boredom from day to day. I related to his creation of a language with terms that defined situations by his own individual, aesthetic and arbitrary standards, but that nonetheless made the mundane less unbearable. At 26, I worried that this book would depress me, but it didn´t. As an adult I relate to Binx and his life, and I think that it is an accurate representation of adulthood.

Binx Bolling reminds me a lot of Camus´ Meursault in L´Etranger in the way that he is detached from a lot of the desires and motivations of the people in his world. He lives in Gentilly and doesn´t associate with the New Orleans society that he is a part of. His lack of faith contrasts with the religion of some members of his family, and his search for meaning circumvents the normal places that people look to for meaning (he doesn´t want God, and he doesn´t want to become a research scientist and make important discoveries). He appears content in a life that is hard for most of his family to understand, dating unremarkable secretaries and selling mutual funds to unremarkable people, without showing desire or ambition for more. I imagine that The Moviegoer is considered an existential novel, and a quick read of Walker Percy´s biography told me that he was a doctor, and that his own search for meaning drew him to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky and eventually to the Catholic religion due to a growing apprehension of science´s ability to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. I imagine that Binx is at least somewhat autobiographical and that his search at least partly parallels Percy´s own search for meaning in his life. With that in mind, I wonder if this search undertaken in his twenties would lead him, as in the author´s case, to religion later in life.

Besides providing me a possible blueprint for adulthood, The Moviegoer also gave me a mental image of New Orleans that I carried in my mind during the few times that I visited the city. It presents Southern aristocracy in a straightforward manner, it shows the racism still present in 1950´s Louisiana (black people are negroes in this book, they sit in the back of the bus, and so on), and it illustrates the customs and social conventions associated with Mardi Gras and the different parade krewes. My teenage conception of New Orleans, I realize, was pretty much half-Moviegoer, half-Confederacy of Dunces, and when I visited the city for the first time, I saw it through my recollection of these two novels, satisfied with the way that what I saw reflected what I remembered and expected to see based on these books.

#103: I like Walker Percy's books. Have you read any of others of his?

104: No, I haven't. I briefly had a copy of The Last Gentleman but passed it on to a friend before I could read it. Do you have any recommendations?

#105: I really liked his The Last Gentleman, so you might try that one for starters.

#102 - I'm a big fan of Cortázar's short fiction, especially the early fantastic stuff. The first story of his I ever read was "Axolotl," which I confess I picked for the exotic title. It was like nothing I'd ever read before. Also, good insight on the Borges/Cortázar comparison.

36. Il Principe (The Prince)--Niccolò Machiavelli

I’m excited to have read this book and have spent a lot of time thinking about how important it is in the context of life and human interaction, considering that the prince-subject relationship illustrated here by Machiavelli can be (and probably has been) applied to such a wide variety of situations and relationships in life. It’s an examination of a particular situation: the ascension to power of a new prince, the possibilities that result from his ascension and how he will handle the situations that arise, and the personal qualities that he will need to have in order to retain his position as ruler. A lot of the advice seems somewhat obvious: it is easier to rule a territory if you yourself move there and live amongst the people; armies of the state, created by the prince, are easier to control and more faithful to their ruler than mercenary armies hired to fight for the prince; and power gained by a stroke of fortune is more precarious than power gained hereditarily or honorably. It’s easy to forget how many princes (or rulers, since extending the term prince to autocratic dictators seems reasonable) have come and gone since Machiavelli’s time, and how some of his advice must have seemed fresher in the beginning of the 16th century than in the beginning of the 21st. Even now, though, I think that this book is remarkable, and his guide to ruling opens up a new perspective for me to consider life, current events (I can analyze President Obama’s presidency in comparison to Machiavelli; Bush’s as well) and my relationships with other people. I also better understand the meaning behind the saying “the ends justify the means.”

I’m not sure if this is good, but I find aspects of Machiavelli’s perspective to be refreshing, because he is not optimistic about the nature of man, or the provenance of fortune, but at the same time believes that a person has free will and the ability to influence his destiny through his acts. As I understand what I read, he believes that man is a being of nature and is governed by natural laws, that there is a cyclical rhythm to history and that events repeat themselves over time, and that fortune is a part of this cycle, rising and falling and sweeping men along on its cycle. He compares fortune to a river that crosses a plain: it is beneficial to humans and provides the engine for growth and prosperity in the plain, but in moments of bad fortune, when the river floods the surrounding land, crops and homes can be destroyed and people displaced. It’s therefore necessary to build levees and take other precautions during good times, so that when these bad times come, you are prepared and minimize the damage. I like the idea that good times and bad ones can both come at the drop of a hat, but that the prudent person will prepare for the bad and position him or herself to triumph over the circumstances, whatever they may be. He cites a lot of rulers, past and present, to illustrate both sides of the equation: times when prudent princes triumphed over adversity, and times when imprudent ones destroyed their state through their errors.

His analysis of the character of the prince seems to be the most controversial part of the book. Saying that the ends justify the means, and that wrongful acts committed to conserve one’s kingdom are justifiable and indeed necessary, is contentious. I think, however, that most people can understand how it might be more important for a leader to be feared than loved by the citizenry, because without fear of punitive repercussions, people often take liberties. Machiavelli’s idea that a prince should strive to be perceived virtuous, but be prepared to do what’s necessary to keep his state afloat, even when that means committing violent and evil acts, probably doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, but it represents the reality of his situation, and a lot of other ones in life. I feel like elementary and secondary teachers should be required to study this book, just because the teacher-class relationship is so easily comparable to the prince-people relationship. I don’t think that I want to start living my life by the code of Il Principe, but I think I can include his ends-justify-the-means approach into my way of looking at life and relationships. Maybe not being religious makes this easier for me, because it seems like living life by the example of someone like Jesus Christ would make it a lot harder (or impossible) to accept some of the negative actions that Machiavelli is declaring so confidently here as being necessary to a prince in certain situations.

One other thing I liked about my edition of Il Principe was the introductory study, written by a man named Raymond Aron. He compares and contrasts Marx’s Capital to Machiavelli’s Principe. He says that both men’s treatises have received similar treatment, being interpreted, misinterpreted and borrowed by a great deal of people over the years. He says that Marx’s dialectic presents a way of thinking that shows how things are getting better, or progressing, over the course of human history, while Machiavelli’s perspective of history is more horizontally cyclical. The two men also differ in their field, with Marx looking at economics while Machiavelli looks squarely at politics. He also points out the irony in the fact that the chief communist revolution of the 20th century, in Russia, brought to power a political party that was in many ways similar to the Machiavellian prince in its governance of the Russian people (although, he points out, the Russian revolution was hardly Marxist as Marx originally conceived the revolution of the proletariat). I thought the comparison was an interesting one, and I better understood Machiavelli’s ideas when they were contrasted with Marx’s.

37. El secreto del mal (The Secret of Evil)--Roberto Bolaño

My public library made the commendable choice to buy some books by Roberto Bolaño for their Spanish language section, and I was happy to take a couple off of their hands for a few weeks. El secreto del mal is a collection of short pieces that were culled from the author’s portfolio after his death. They are a series of situations that the author began and often left unfinished, or rather perhaps finished, perhaps not, and they give an idea of how he built up to his novels and short stories. At first, I questioned how much I would appreciate such a collection, because the preface to the edition, written by the editor, lays plain for the reader the incomplete nature of a lot of the stories included here. I found, though, that I did enjoy it, and many of the stories and narratives in this book were really compelling. The perspectives shift from Chilean to Mexican to Argentine to Spanish, and seem to incorporate a lot of the author’s experience as an expatriate in these places. Many seem autobiographical, or fictionalizations of the author and his experiences. Others are not, such as one story that recounts the plot of a zombie movie that the protagonist watched on TV the night before (I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie gets made someday, it wasn’t a bad idea). There’s also an analysis of Argentine literature included here that I really enjoyed reading. All in all, it is a hodgepodge, but it’s a fascinating one for someone who has read other and more complete books and stories by Bolaño.

There´s a story here called Playa (Beach) which begins, “I dropped heroin and returned to my hometown and started methodone treatments…” that has caused controversy over whether Bolaño was a heroin addict, or whether he made the story up. I read an article in the New York Times that mentioned this and other potential “artistic liberties,” or even rather serious lies, told by Bolaño, such as saying he was in Chile during the coup of 1973 when perhaps he wasn´t. I´m glad to have gotten to read the story about heroin, and I´m really not concerned with whether it´s autobiographical or fictitious. It was a good story and seemed to capture what it might feel like to stop using heroin, so maybe it was true, but who knows? Other stories that I found more fascinating seemed to represent preliminary stages of his larger novels: in one, Laberinto, a photograph and the people in it are analyzed and their day-to-day lives and dreams are expounded upon in a way that reminded me a whole lot of the first book of 2666; in another, the characters of Los Detectives Salvajes are present. I remember when I was in high school I got a kick out of reading Gabriel García Márquez´s early novels and seeing how he developed the world of Macondo in books like La hojarasca and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, along with the characters and themes that would be included in Cien años de soledad. I got a similar feeling here, that what I was reading was essentially practice for something else, and that some of these beginnings would eventually be completed in a different and expanded form.

So it was a good read for a Bolaño fan, and it reminded me how much I like him, and how much I have in common with him as a reader of Latin American fiction and a fan of Latin America in general. His article on Argentine literature was really neat, and showed his passion for books and their authors (he doesn´t exactly condemn anyone for being a bad writer, he actually seems to admire everyone he mentions, and the trick is that he pigeonholes them within the national tradition they are a part of without sounding mean), and his opinions, which I enjoyed. I don´t think I´d give this to someone as their first book by him, but it was definitely worth my time and I´m happy that my library is working to make their Spanish language collection more respectable.

38. Parliamo Italiano--Suzanne Branciforte and Anna Grassi

I used this book to learn Italian grammar, making flash cards out of all the example sentences and studying the vocabulary in each chapter, with the goal of being able to read books in Italian (with the help of a dictionary) when I was done. I just finished reading my first book, Il principe, so it served its purpose. My main concern was that it be complete, i.e., that it contain all the verb tenses and that by the end of the book it present all of the necessary structures needed to understand Italian. I think it did this, so in that sense, it was a good buy. Italian is a lot like Spanish, so I´m not sure if I was just able to intuitively make sense out of what others might have struggled with, but it seemed fairly comprehensive and intelligible in most instances. It is a book obviously made for communicative language learning, and ideally one would have a teacher to learn pronunciation. There are no pronunciation exercises, and no explanations of pronunciation of certain letters. I kind of enjoyed having to search around the internet and in a little Italian phrasebook that I have in order to figure out how certain consonants are pronounced, but others might not. It did bother me that, in the glossary at the end of the book, they had these little dots under certain letters to show which syllable was stressed, but they never explained the dots, so I had to figure it out by myself. I thought they should have included these dots in the vocabulary sections of the book, in order to make the pronunciation of new words clearer, but in a classroom situation, this probably isn´t a big deal.

All in all, this was a fine tool for an individual language learner like me, whose focus is reading comprehension, and I´m sure it would be even better in a communicative language classroom. It was a real bargain, costing less than $5 with shipping for an old edition. The focus on “modern technology” as it was in 2002 was fun for me, because I enjoy outdated language textbooks in general, and enjoy seeing their representation of the recent past. I´ve got a long way to go with Italian, but this book provided an excellent foundation.

#110: I think it is terrific that you are teaching yourself another language, Matt!

I'm still loving the reviews, Matt. You are quite comprehensive and personal. It helps us not just understand each particular book but also place them in the larger literary context. I can empathize with your reaction to Los Pasos Perdidos (#96). I think I went through similar feelings when I was in Peace Corps as well. Congratulations on the progress with Italian. When I was still living in Panama, I once met an Italian couple on vacation, and we were certainly able to understand each other speaking Spanish and Italian,respectively. I haven't forgotten Don Quijote (I'm on chapter 30 now), but I lost my internet connection for a few weeks and life has been amazingly busy lately...

Hi! Drop in only.

112: Thanks for the feedback! I'm still going with Don Quijote as well, I'm probably at about the same point as you, I just finished la Novela del Curioso Impertinente, and I want to post my thoughts again when I can find the time...

39. Cuando fui mortal (When I was Mortal)--Javier Marías

The name Javier Marías seemed familiar and for some reason significant to me as I browsed my library’s Spanish-language books, and I decided to try this collection of short stories as part of my attempt to branch out to some new and contemporary authors. It is a collection of commissioned stories, as he explains in the preface, with most of the stories containing some required element or another, per the desires of the journal/newspaper/literary entity that requested his contribution. I thought that it was interesting that he pointed this out, voicing his disagreement with the notion that fiction must written spontaneously and without restrictions placed on the creative flow of the writer and his pen (computer). The stories are mostly shorter in length, twenty to thirty pages at most, with one longer story that’s about seventy pages. There are a few stories about or from the perspective of ghosts, there are a few stories that involve mysteries and a protagonist searching for answers, and many of the stories involve crimes of passion or revenge; the central characters in most of the stories seem loosely based on the author himself (I supposed as I read them), sharing a somewhat melancholy and detached view on the world and the interpersonal relationships that make up life in Spain.

My mood as I read them rose and fell as I progressed through the book: I was not particularly interested by the initial stories, which I found uninspiring and a bit boring. There were two really good stories in the middle of the book, though: one, the title story, was about a ghost and the torment of life after death, arising in part from the fact that the dead have the power to learn about and comprehend the situations that surrounded their existence but remained hidden during life, including the motivations, unseen actions unheard words of friends, family, and all the people that surround us in the world. There wasn’t any real explanation as to why the dead are suddenly privy to this information, but it was a pretty disturbing idea and the story was well developed. The next story, Todo mal vuelve, was about a disjointed and occasional friendship between two men, the protagonist (presumably relatable to the author himself), and a tormented and mentally ill writer/doctor. The protagonist gives a summary of the author’s odd life and personality, and a portrait of his unstoppable artistic desires, which contribute in the end to his death. I enjoyed the somber mood and the difficulty that the protagonist had in understanding his acquaintance, a person who at the same time fascinated and haunted him. By the time I finished these two stories, my opinion of the book had turned, and while I didn’t like the following stories as much (Though one of them had a soccer theme, which was nice to read in the days leading up to the World Cup), I still have a positive impression of Marías.

I have the idea in my mind that I would enjoy Marías’ novels more than his short stories. The shorter stories in this collection didn’t really move me, and I enjoyed his writing more as he developed his ideas more fully, such as in the longest story of this book, whose title I can’t quite remember (I returned the book to the library yesterday). I was pleased, though, to find a contemporary Spanish author that I enjoy reading, and I will do a little research and try and find a good novel of his to read in a few months.

40. El Pozo/Para una tumba sin nombre (The Pit/For an Unmarked Grave)--Juan Carlos Onetti

I couldn’t help but continue my Onetti binge with this copy of two of his novellas, one of which, El Pozo, represents his initial explosion (a quiet, nearly unheard, yet important explosion) onto the Uruguayan and later Latin American literary scene. I’d been looking for a copy of this story for quite a while, so even though I thought maybe I should wait a little bit, since I just read one of his books a month or so ago, in the end I couldn’t help myself. I really enjoyed El Pozo. I was happy to get an idea of how Onetti’s literary world began, with Eladio Linacero sitting in a room writing his life story, alone, as the streets are full of people celebrating a holiday. It’s only about forty pages, and it reads almost like something that Remo Erdosain would have written in an odd moment of reflection sometime before his story as told by Roberto Arlt begins. Linacero agonizes over a world where “all of life is shit, and we are all blind men in the night, attentive and not understanding.” He has decided to write an autobiography on his fortieth birthday, which leads him to record his remembrance of a strange dream that takes place in a log cabin where an adolescent girl is exposed to him, a dream that encapsulates some strong feelings that he has twice tried to communicate to other people in his life, both times failing miserably in his quest to find understanding in others. As a result of his failed soul-barings, he feels very alone in a world that is dark and dirty and where no one really understands anyone else. Over forty pages he presents his frustrations and his pessimism with regard to the world, his roommate’s political fervor, and every human being that surrounds him. I liked this short, initial portrait of the type of man who slowly expands in Onetti’s work: from Linacero, who writes his life story, comes Brausen, who writes Díaz Gray’s story and creates Santa Maria, and from Brausen comes Larsen, who creates a whorehouse in Santa Maria and builds his own little world within a created world. Linacero’s story is the most straightforward, and it was very helpful to me in understanding how one thing led to another in the author’s work. It’s also a powerful voice of discontent and unhappiness with how little sense life might have had to an insignificant person in a rapidly expanding city of the Rio de la Plata region, surrounded by immigrants and growth and not really feeling a part of it.

I think that the inclusion of Para una tumba sin nombre in this edition along with El Pozo (I guess it doesn’t make a lot of sense to print a forty page book) was an excellent decision. It was written twenty years later and is firmly established in Santa María, so it doesn´t have any inherent connection to El Pozo. It´s a good story, though, about Doctor Díaz Gray and a story about a woman named Rita that was told to him by a young man in Santa María. Jorge Malabia, the storyteller, and Díaz Gray, the listener, both create the woman, Rita, who is buried in an unmarked grave at the beginning of the story. I liked the way that the central story, that of Jorge and his relationship with Rita, is bent and twisted through Díaz Gray´s influence, how he guides Jorge through the story and gets him to say the things that he might have otherwise kept hidden. It’s as if Jorge is creating the story as he tells it, fitting it to the needs and desires of his listener, even though it is supposed to be a true story. Then, at the end, Jorge and the other young man, Tito, turn the whole story of Rita on its head, although even in doing so they aren’t able to fully overcome Díaz Gray’s influence. It’s a hard story to summarize, but I thought it was a really neat expansion of a simple enough story of a woman begging for money outside Constitución, in Buenos Aires, with a goat included in her ploy of tricking people into giving her “cab fare” to go to her relatives’ house in Villa Ortúzar. She´s discovered by a young man who recognizes her as a former servant of his family in Santa María, and he wants to meet her again and consummate his adolescent longings for her. One thing leads to another, and eventually she’s back in Santa María, although maybe not, and he’s burying her in disgrace. Over eighty pages, though, this short story is expanded and twisted in a lot strange ways, and I really enjoyed it.

There’s also a study of Onetti at the end of this edition that delves into some of the themes he introduces in El Pozo, and talks about his education as a writer. I enjoyed the highlighted, underlined copy of this book that I bought, because the previous owner was probably studying it as a part of some class, and gave me some added insights and connections to other works of Onetti in her barely-legible handwriting. Sometimes highlighting and stuff like that can be a drag, but I enjoy it when it adds an extra window to the reading experience, as was the case here.

As I think about it, I'm actually pretty happy to have read a string of books by Juan Carlos Onetti. Sometimes I like to take breaks and dabble around within the realm of my personal interests, but it's nice to investigate an author that I like. For a while, I didn't really have access to a lot of books, so I couldn't really buy or check out from the library all the books by an author that really appealed to me. I think the last time I went on a similar streak of books by one author was when I was a freshman or sophomore in college and I systematically checked out all of Haruki Murakami's books from the university library over the course of a month in the dorms. I don't think that Murakami and Onetti are entirely dissimilar. My girlfriend recently finished The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which was the one book of Murakami's that I couldn't get through, and she has been bugging me to read it. I've resisted, because it's really long and I don't know if I want to take it on at the moment, but on the other hand, I know it has something to do with Mongolian World War II history, which is a topic of special interest to me, and as I think about certain similarities between Murakami and Onetti, and to what extent these similarities may exist, maybe I will read it. For now, I feel that both authors do a good job of examining and portraying the isolation of individuals in the very different worlds (Japan, Uruguay/Argentina) that surround them. Maybe that's what's strongly attracted me to both authors.

I enjoyed The Wind Up Bird Chronicle when I read it, Matt. I hope you give it another shot.

I think a full read of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would be very pleasant for you at this point, Matt, and I'd encourage it. The Onetti-reading you've done is excellent prep for another bash at this book.

117: Thanks, Stasia...I certainly will, sooner or later...

@118: Thanks for the encouragement, Richard. I don't think that I put it down out of distaste, more likely just got busier and I slowly got bogged down because I didn't have enough time to devote to it. It'll go back on my bookshelf in a place where I can't help but see it when I'm looking for what to read next.

41. Caligula/Le malentendu (Caligula/The Misunderstanding)--Albert Camus

Caligula is a historical play about the eponymous ex-Roman emperor, who descends into a series of cruel and depraved acts after the death of his sister and lover Drusilla. His realization that men die unhappy leads him to attempt to exercise autonomy and personal freedom to the greatest and purest extremes. Caligula repeatedly asks one of his subjects, Hélicon, to “bring him the moon,” believing that if the absolute were attained on at least one occasion, he would be satisfied and perhaps alter his actions. As the moon cannot be brought to him, he basically does the vilest, cruelest things he can imagine, convinced that all men are wicked and the sooner they die, the better really. His rebellion against mankind and his exercises of free will over the people that surround him isolate him further and further, although his basic idea that people can’t ever really understand each other anyways makes him not really care. This violent application of free will and his pursuit of absolutes are destined to never truly satisfy him, and he spirals onward with a mix of despair and disdain until the violent end of the play.

This play was most interesting to me in relation to Camus’ novels, especially L’Étranger, because of the seismic shift from an emperor in ancient Rome (Caligula) to an everyman in modern times (Meursault). While Camus in both books looks at the absurdity of life, Meursault and Caligula have different relationships with this absurdity, and vastly different possibilities with regard to their actions and interactions. Caligula attacks human life, which he has come to see as meaningless, and basically does whatever the hell he wants with the idea that if an unhappy death is our lot, the things that come before are meaningless. I liked seeing a different story of a person who finds life to be rather meaningless, and I liked just how different the time period, situation and driving force of Caligula were. If Camus was trying to develop a certain view on existence, I think it was a really cool choice to look at its possible individual ramifications by applying it to an emperor in Ancient Rome and then later doing so with a modern everyman.

Le Malentendu was fun to read because it gave me an immediate and persistent sense of déjà vu. I knew I had experienced the story before, but I couldn’t remember where, even though it was very clear in my mind. I explained it to my girlfriend and she felt the same way, and it kept bugging me, so rather than let it (eventually, hopefully) come to me, I looked it up and found out that, indeed, Le Malentendu is an expansion of the newspaper story that Meursault reads while in prison in L’Étranger. It’s about the homecoming of a man, Jan, who left his mother and sister behind many years ago, and who wants to reintroduce himself in their lives and use his good fortune in life toward their happiness. He doesn’t want to reveal himself to them immediately, or he doesn’t know how, and so he interacts with them as a stranger and decides to spend a night in their inn. His sister is the tragic center of the story, and her dreams of leaving the bleak countryside where she has spent her whole life fall in line with her anonymous brother’s means and desire to fulfill them, although the resolution of it all is not a happy one. It’s a short play, and the sister, Martha, is also convinced of the absurdity of life. I saw a lot in common between her, Caligula and Meursault, and her final interaction with Jan’s wife Maria reminded me a lot of Meursault’s final talk with the priest in L’Étranger. I enjoyed this short play, and like how Camus has fleshed out something only briefly mentioned in another one of his books, creating added connections in his fictional world. I know that a lot of authors make gestures to other works and build fictional connections between one book and another, and I feel like it’s a nice reward to the reader, who takes the time to read more and more books by the same person.

I think I’ll take a look at some basic summaries of Camus’ background and philosophical propositions now that I’ve gotten a few of his representations of individuals and the implications of feelings of meaninglessness and absurdity in life.

42. Phèdre (Phaedra)--Jean Racine

The price ($1.98) was right for this short play as I was trying to find a combination of books that would satisfy me and not exceed the $10.00 budget I gave myself at the used bookstore. It’s a piece with five acts that takes place in ancient Greece, with Phaedra being the wife of Theseus and stepmother of Hippolitus. Hippolitus is Theseus’ son by Antiope, the queen of the Amazons. Phaedra is in the grips of an impossible and shameful love for her stepson, and is suicidal because she really doesn’t see a way out: her feelings are too strong to suppress, and she knows that the object of her love is forbidden to her. Hippolitus also holds a forbidden love for Aricia, heir to Athens and persona non grata in Theseus’ eyes. He also doesn’t see how he can confess his love to his father, considering that Aricia is a blood representative of Theseus’ enemies. In the early stages of the play, stepmother and stepsons’ situations run parallel, with both of them interacting with their servants and confidantes. Both characters reluctantly admit their forbidden loves to their servants, and are advised on how best to proceed. Then, rumors of Theseus’ death throw an interesting twist in the situation and cause both characters to reconsider their situations and their impossibly strong feelings of love. Secrets are confessed, lies are told, and, this being a tragedy, the ending is not a happy one.

I enjoyed reading the alexandrine verse that Racine employs here. I have a very one-sided relationship with French, with most of my contact with the language coming through books. It was therefore fun to read the rhymed lines to myself, and I thought the rhythm of the characters’ verses made the play flow nicely, and was very enjoyable. I also liked the story and the strong presence of the Greek gods in the lives of the characters. It was interesting to see these specific moments in the lives of characters that are either famous and immediately recognizable in my mind (Theseus), or related to other gods and men of note (Phaedra is the daughter of Minos and one of her grandparents is the sun, Helios). The play illustrates a dark episode in Theseus’ life, and considering that I have a hard time remembering just what Theseus did besides slay the Minotaur, it was nice to be exposed to another part of his life. The mythology, the interplay between gods and men, and the faint familiarity of the characters were all appealing to me, and the play was beautifully written as well. I was absorbed in the story, happily reading the entire play in one sitting this morning.

I’m excited by this, one of my initial forays into 17th century French theatre. I’ll continue to seek out plays from this era, because I find that they compliment the Siglo de Oro plays from Spain that I greatly enjoy.

43. Don Quijote de la Mancha (Primera parte)--Miguel de Cervantes

A group read of Don Quijote was proposed in this 75 Books Challenge group, which motivated me to pick up one of my favorite books for another go-round. I read Don Quijote for the first time during my last year in college; I thought that it would be too difficult for me in Spanish, but I was surprised by how readable and accessible it was. I’ve read it three or four times since then, and it was my favorite book to read while in the Peace Corps, because I thought that life in a rural, third world setting was quite relatable to the wanderings of el Caballero de la Triste Figura. People always asked me why I had come to Mongolia, and they struggled to understand when I told them that I had chosen to do so, and that I was more or less happy in my community. Everyone pretty much saw America (or the western world, or even Korea) as the land of opportunity, and most people said that they would love to have the chance to visit my country, or move there to live and earn money for their families. Coming to the steppe of Mongolia by choice seemed incongruous to them, and when I thought about it, their experiences with me were relatable to peoples’ experiences with Don Quijote. He lives in Spain, but his world is so different from that of the people around him: he sees a world of knights, adventures, castles and chivalry, whereas everyone else sees nobles and peasants, everyday life, inns, and the rather rigid social structures of 16th century Spain. I used to like to read Don Quijote and think about my interactions with Mongolians in terms of what I was reading. So much of what I did seemed so strange to my friends and neighbors, and people were always popping in to my ger just to see how I was living in the countryside, and to talk to me about America. This is the first time I’ve read Don Quijote since I came back to the United States. It’s been fun thus far, as always. It's been a secondary read for me, as I've been picking it up when I have extra time or when I feel especially motivated to return to the stories that I’ve become familiar with over the past five years or so.

I'd previously used a fairly basic edition of the book, but this time I bought an annotated Cátedra edition. Also, unlike in Mongolia, I have the internet at my disposal and can research the history behind the story and some of the connections between Don Quijote and other books from its time period. These two changes in my circumstances, along with my recording of reflections and things that I found interesting as I read the first part, contributed to a much deeper reading of the book this time around. The footnotes to my edition constantly related Don Quijote’s speeches and actions to their literary antecedents, with Amadís de Gaula and Orlando Furioso standing out as the most commonly referenced texts. Their influence on the book has piqued my interest, and I’ve been tracking down both books so that I can read them before I read Don Quijote again. I also enjoyed the occasional footnotes where the editor is simply pointing out something particularly remarkable or inspired, as if to say, “look at this, isn’t Cervantes something?” I love the book, and it’s been fun to read it with the added commentary of a scholar who has spent his life studying it. I’m satisfied with my new edition, and I think that I would recommend an annotated edition of this book for anyone who is interested in reading it. The story is a lot of fun and remarkable in itself, but I enjoyed having the extra help in understanding how Don Quijote stands as a sort of synthesis of many different trends and genres in Spanish and European literature.

Now that I’m done with the first part, I’m going to read the first half of Miguel de Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. Since I’ve been writing down my thoughts about the book as I read and posting them in the group read thread, I think it’ll be really interesting to read Unamuno’s take on the book. I’ll read the first part, and if I feel like it’s the sort of information that I would enjoy having before reading on, I’ll read the second part before I start the second book of Don Quijote. I think it’s odd that Don Quijote is always thought of as a single book, when it’s really two books, one published ten years after the other. The two parts are really very different, with the success of the first playing heavily on the genesis of the second. I’m excited about reading the second part again, because I’ve enjoyed reading Don Quijote with greater depth and reflection. I tell a lot of people that they should read Don Quijote, because it’s very universal and has had a unique influence on literature. I’ve been reading it this time focusing on the past and the stories and genres that contributed to its creation; but, just the same, it can be read looking forward in time, with an eye to the characters and books that have been created in the centuries since Cervantes’ book. Without Don Quijote, there might not have been books like The Idiot, The Tin Drum or A Confederacy of Dunces (which contain a few of my favorite reincarnations of Don Quijote). Besides, it’s the funniest book I’ve ever read, especially this first part, where slapstick comedy and situational humor come together sublimely with the absurdity of Don Quijote’s character and his bizarre interactions with a wide variety of Spaniards rich and poor.

44. Poesía--Luis de Góngora

I’ve been reading this collection of poetry by Góngora before bed and when I have a few spare minutes here and there. It’s structured more or less chronologically, with the early, more straightforward poetry of Góngora giving way to the intricate hyperbaton (I definitely had to look that word up) that makes his later works so difficult to unravel. I really liked the early, more straightforward romances and letrillas, and I can also handle his confusing and jumbled phrases of when they come together in a sonnet. It’s like an intricate little puzzle, where you really have to work to unravel the words and place them in their conventional order, in the end getting a nice image of a beautiful girl, a rose or the city of Madrid. The surprising thing is that the language makes so much sense, when at times it seems so nonsensically jumbled. On the other hand, I really struggle and get bored when reading his longer poems, like the Soledades and Fábula de Prometeo y Galatea. I finally gave up on Prometeo y Galatea, in part because the editor of my edition decided not to include prose explanations of the poem in the footnotes (arguing that the reader by this point would be familiar enough with Góngora to be able to unravel the poem on their own). I read a bit, and was able to sort out the opening stanzas, but it was just too much work; if I ever find myself with a lot of time on my hands and nothing but a book of Góngora’s poetry at my disposal, I’ll definitely try to read it in its entirety, probably writing it out in my own words for reference.

The introductory study to this edition was informative, and explained how, despite earlier academic divisions between early Góngora (Prince of Light) and late Góngora (Prince of Darkness), there are a lot of doubts as to the actual chronology that suggest that he was perhaps writing intricate, hyperbaton-filled poems earlier in his career than previously thought. One of the appendices also has a bit of the poetic back-and-forth between Góngora and Quevedo, which I enjoyed as well. I wish there were more of Quevedo’s attacks on Góngora, because it’s clear that Góngora’s style was ripe for parody, and I would be amused to read more of the poems of his greatest enemy in the arts. Maybe that would be out of place in this book, though, considering it is an anthology of Góngora, not of Quevedo.

And, in the end, I am pleased by his career arc as presented here. I like artists whose work gets more and more difficult to comprehend as their careers go on (as long as they have the talent to make it work), and I admire his relentless pursuit of complexity in poetry. My favorite genre of music is rap, and I like to compare poets to rappers. Góngora provides an interesting case, and it’s been difficult to find an adequate rap comparison as I read Góngora’s poetry. I think that De la Soul’s first three albums illustrate a similar trajectory, from a more basic and straightforward language with creative yet fairly conventional images, to their lyrically dense and difficult-to-understand third album, Buhloone Mindstate. They kind of backed off, though, into a more straightforward and accessible strain of well-produced New York hip-hop. If they’d kept going, they might have produced some lyrics to rival Góngora’s Soledades. Wu-Tang, through their incorporation of such a wide panorama of film, musical and criminal slang influences into a re-imagination of their Staten Island home as Shaolin, are similarly difficult to unravel at times. It’s a little different, though, because the complexity is more in language and less in form. There are Ghostface Killah songs that are incredibly inventive in their language, but he’s not playing around with the form nearly as much as Góngora with his hyperbaton. However, I think that Ghostface, Raekwon, GZA and some of the other more intellectually-minded members of the Wu have the potential to go that way in the future. Considering their success at appealing to certain sectors of rap fans, which allows them to continue to sell out shows at small venues around the country, perhaps they could be inspired to experiment more and more with complex forms. And maybe somebody like Lil’ Wayne will decide to head way out in left field to avoid the plight of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes-type rappers, whose lameness increases proportionally with their age as they continue to prop up the same tired gangster/rich businessman personas year after year.

I think that I remember reading that Góngora inspired a lot of bad poetry written in imitation of his style. I also see how so many people have disliked what he has done with the language. I enjoy reading his poetry, and I like spending a little time on one of his sonnets figuring out how he’s managed to construct a 14-line poem that actually makes sense despite its strange order. I always say that I want to read more poetry (although maybe I should give myself more credit for a life immersed in rap music), and maybe I’ll find reasons to dislike this sort of exercise as I become more of an expert on the different ways that poems have been written.

45. La liebre (The Hare)--César Aira

I’ve found that as I browse my library’s Spanish language collection, I encounter more and more books that arouse my interest. At first I thought that their collection was entirely mediocre (I still do), but I’ve come to realize that it’s also quite valuable to a reader like me. It has a great deal of contemporary novels that I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to, and it gives me a chance to read books by new authors without having to spend a lot of money on new books. I’ve read a lot about César Aira, and as I read La liebre (The Hare), I kept on trying to remember an essay on Argentine literature by Roberto Bolaño that I recently read. I think that he claimed that Aira represented a stream of “heavy” literature that he traces back to Roberto Arlt. This stream was locked in a struggle with two other trends in post-Borgesian Argentine literature, represented by Osvaldo Soriano and Osvaldo Lamborghini. As I recall, he concluded that the throne would eventually belong to Soriano, not because he was the best of the bunch (in fact, in some ways Bolaño found him to be the lesser of the three writers), but because the other two writers and the literary paths that they represented were destined to destroy themselves as a result of their own seriousness. I thought it was an interesting essay, although I’m not sure how faithfully I’ve represented Bolaño’s words here. It made me want to read some César Aira (some Lamborghini as well, but I’m struggling to find anything by him at a price that I can afford), and I was pretty pumped to find La liebre at the library a few weeks ago.

I wonder if this book is representative of the Aira to whom Bolaño refers in his essay. It looks like it’s one of his earlier novels, so I’m thinking that it perhaps introduces some of his preferred themes and motivations. The indigenous people who interact with the protagonist, the Englishman Clarke, speak a lot about a “continuum” of reality, or, as Clarke finally concludes, of happiness. Life is relatable to the continuum, and reality is not easily understandable. Clarke is a naturalist who has come to Argentina to search for a hare (la liebre legiberiana). The first 25 pages of the book recount Clarke’s meeting with Juan Manuel de Rosas (the 19th century dictator), who gifts him a horse named Repetido and gives him permission to explore the pampas in search of whatever he’s looking for. He then sets off with a guide and a young orphan painter who wants to accompany him on his journey, and spends the rest of the book wandering around Mapuche and Voroga territory, where he becomes a part of a complicated situation involving the chieftan Cafulcurá and a variety of other leaders who want to take his place when he mysteriously vanishes. Clarke takes a greater and greater role in the events that are slowly unfolding across the Mapuche territory, and his search for the hare recedes into the background.

I really enjoyed Aira’s depiction of the indigenous people of Argentina. The interactions between Clarke and the men and women he meets show an interesting sort of mutual respect and frustration at each other’s strange and sometimes difficult-to-understand ways. The book is certainly not grounded in reality, and I think he does a great job of creating a world that is the Argentine pampas, but is also inhabited by mysterious creatures and tribes, where things aren’t what they seem and even the most normal situations are hard to understand. Clarke’s wanderings through indigenous Argentine society as an English outsider rang true with me and made me reminisce of my time as an American observer in rural Mongolia. I think I would have gotten a kick out of this book if I’d read it while I was there.

As to whether Aira is a latter-day incarnation of Arlt, I don’t think one book has given me enough information to understand Bolaño’s essay. Based on biographic information I found on Aira on the internet, it seems that he employs a wide variety of genres and styles in his books. What I saw in La liebre more than anything was an Argentine Tom Robbins novel. True, I’ve only read two of Robbins’ books, and I didn’t like them, but he’s the author that I thought of over and over again as I read this book. I wonder if Aira is familiar with Tom Robbins, and whether he was inspired by his books at all as he wrote this story. When I finished this book I got to thinking: why did I dislike Tom Robbins’ books so much? Would I hate this book if I were Argentine? Would I like Tom Robbins if I were Argentine, since I, the American, liked this Argentine book which reminded me so much of Tom Robbins, whom I haven’t enjoyed at all in the past? And, when will my library get another César Aira book so that I can check it out and read it? This was a fun book, and my first impression of Aira is a positive one. I’m interested in reading more of his books.

46. Los de abajo (The Underdogs)--Mariano Azuela

I can’t remember if I first read Los de abajo (The Underdogs) in high school or in college, but I definitely read it in English. I saw a cheap Cátedra edition online the other day, and decided it was time to read it again. I work with quite a few Mexicans, and when I told them I liked to read in Spanish, they told me I should read Los de abajo, because it’s one of the most famous Mexican novels. I imagine that it’s a much better read in Spanish, because the use of “Mexicanisms” is prevalent throughout and serves to define the characters’ backgrounds and social status. The book could be grouped in with a lot of other regional classics like Don Segundo Sombra, Doña Bárbara, and La vorágine, because it is a novel that is inseparable from the specific places in Mexico that it describes. More importantly, it’s inseparable from the Mexican revolution and the historical events that it depicts from the perspective of Demetrio Macías and his men. That’s what I find most fascinating about the book: it’s famous, millions of Mexican people have read it, and it has become so completely and intimately linked to the history of Mexico that its characters are almost more real than the actual people who fought the war. It was interesting to hear my coworkers talk about their ancestors’ roles in the war: one of them said that his grandfather fought for both sides, federales and revolucionarios, and that he went with the side that allowed him to take the best advantage of the situation for his personal benefit. As he was telling me about his grandfather, I wondered how much of what he was saying was about the actual man, and how much was about the characters in the book that he read as a kid, and which perhaps occupies a place in his memory alongside the stories of his grandfather.

I like the wide variety of characters that Azuela introduces in a relatively short book. Demetrio Macías, a rural citizen who takes up arms against the federal forces, serves as the central axis around whom the rest of the men and women orbit. I also like the trajectory of the story, from the men’s initial enthusiasm and pride in their role in the revolution (supported by their positive interactions with the poor, rural people who give them food and shelter) to their later greed, brutality and lack of consideration for human life, as right and wrong become less clear and the different factions wonder whom and what they are actually fighting for. I especially enjoyed an absolutely hellish twenty or thirty page section in the beginning of the second part of the story, where the men indulge in the spoils of victory and drunkenly revel in their impunity as they sack the rich estates they have forcibly occupied. They don’t pause to consider the ugliness of their actions (Demetrio shows ambivalence at times, but seems in a way to understand that the war and the reasons for what is happening are beyond his control), and Azuela narrates the scenes as they occur, without delving into the moral repercussions of the men’s acts. There’s no “voice of reason” saying what a shame it all is, and I like that. As a chronicle of a revolution and what happens when there’s no clear end result or goal that the revolutionaries are fighting for, I think the story and the men and women in it are as ugly as they should be.

Although I don't comment as often as I should, I do enjoy reading your reviews, and especially enjoyed reading your thoughts about The Underdogs (which I have, somewhere...). When I thumbed your review, I noticed that you also posted the review in Spanish. Thanks for that, as I need to read more written Spanish, in order to become more fluent in this beautiful language.

126: Thanks for the comment and yeah, It doesn't seem to be possible to post two separate reviews of the same book, even if they are in different languages, so I lumped them together...I want to try and write some of my thoughts about the "classics" of Latin American literature that I'm reading or re-reading in Spanish as well, so I'll do that when the motivation strikes me.

47. El fiord (The Fjord)--Osvaldo Lamborghini

This novella was very disturbing. Honestly, it was probably the most messed-up thing that I’ve ever read. It was about some people in a room torturing and mutilating each other. It was really shocking, and whatever I was expecting, I don’t think this was it. I do think, though, that I can respect Mr. Lamborghini for writing this, and I understand why it is an important book in the canon of Argentine literature. The writing is very creative, the language is very Argentine and was very familiar to me (there’s even a little bit of vesre, which is always fun), and the story that he tells, however horrible it may be, is told very well. I would like to revisit it after reading up on the radical, left-wing political movements of 1960s and 70s Argentina, because the characters in the story are young radicals and the story, one assumes, is allegorical. As I think about it, representing the living situation and interactions of a group of young, politically active “radicals” as Lamborghini does here makes sense: when people get together and talk about politics and revolution, there is quite a bit of self-inflicted and mutual mutilation regarding ideas and views. Perhaps he’s just taken that situation, of a bunch of people sitting around trying to prove how smart and right they are, and decided to replace their words with gruesome and despicable acts. It was hard for me to read this without being able to fully understand the context it was written in: it was kind of like walking into a theater showing one of the Saw movies a half hour into the movie, and just watching people get tortured for an hour without quite understanding why (but this Saw movie was directed by a director you’d heard a lot about, and you wanted to understand what he was trying to do, and you thought that even if it was torture, it seemed very well done).

Anyway, I’ll probably recommend this story to about two or three people who I think would appreciate it, and not mention it to anyone else. It was intense and graphic, but I do respect it for a few different reasons. It’s an introduction to an era of Argentine literature that I’m not extremely familiar with, and I think that as I read more Argentine books from the past fifty years, I will be glad to be familiar with this one. I like it when authors take chances and cross boundaries, and since I don’t exactly have a weak stomach, while I was disturbed, I kept reading. Also, I enjoyed the language, and it made me feel like I was back in Buenos Aires. Finally, the novella was powerful and jarring and was able to affect me more than most books I read, and that, even considering the circumstances, made it worthwhile. I can’t really even think of other books to compare it to. I’ve seen some movies that are somewhat similar: Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy and Takashi Miike’s Audition come to mind. Maybe that’s the best reference point: Asian horror. Anyway, if you want to read El Fiord, I found it here, with an introduction by César Aira:

http://www.taringa.net/posts/arte/4160747/El-fiord:-Osvaldo-Lamborghini.html

48. Lettres à un jeune poète (Letters to a Young Poet)--Rainer Maria Rilke

This is a series of letters originally written in German (I have a French translation) by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young man named Franz Xavier Kappus. The two had never met, and Kappus solicited the advice of Rilke with regard to his poetry and life in general. Rilke was 27 at the time, which isn’t really that old either; Kappus and he also both attended military academies, and in his first letter he sends his regards to a teacher that they both studied under. I thought that this small connection was intriguing, because I imagined that Rilke the poet must have seen a lot of himself in Kappus the young poet, and this common reference may have further strengthened the tie that he felt to his recipient. It was a bit like he was giving nostalgic advice to his 18-year old self, and as he addressed the difficulties that Kappus was facing and advised him not to despair but to instead find value in his solitude, I imagined that he was looking back on himself at the same age. Since it wasn’t that long ago for him, I thought that the loneliness and solitude that Rilke felt as a teenager in the military academy were still fresh enough in his mind that he was able to commiserate with the young man, yet distant enough that he was able to see their importance in his development as a person. I’m 26 years old, so I felt a connection with Rilke based on age, and reading his letters to the teenage Kappus made me reflect back on who I was at that age. I liked the things that Rilke was saying, and thought that his outlook on teenage emotions and their connection to childhood, creativity, love and maturation were basically on point.

It was a little strange seeing only one side of the correspondence, meaning that information about Kappus must be inferred from Rilke’s responses to his letters. As I think about it, though, not seeing the other side of the correspondence between the poets young and not-so-young gives the reader a greater opportunity to construct their own recipient, a combination between the young man that Rilke was writing to a century ago and the individual who is reading the letters now. When Rilke talks about love as it is experienced in immature and mature people, or when he talks about the importance of Kapuss’ feelings of solitude and disconnectedness in his development as a person and as a poet, I thought about myself and my own youth more than I imagined the foreign and distant recipient of the letters. Rilke advises the young man to turn inward and reflect on his past when he is unable to find inspiration in the people and places that surround him; I like that his letters allow readers, outsiders looking in on the dialogue between the two Austrian men living in the beginning of the 20th century, to do the same thing.

A few of the footnotes in my edition recognized similarities between Rilke and Proust in their treatment of childhood and times past, so I think that next month I’m going to begin reading Un amour de Swann, and hope that Rilke’s letters are a good introduction to Proust’s inquisitions into memories and the past.

#129: I have been meaning to read that book for a number of years now. Thanks for the reminder, Matt.

49. Horace--Corneille

I found a small collection of old French plays at a used bookstore in town, and have now read one play by each of the “big three” of 17th century French theater (Racine, Molière and Corneille) in the past few months. Horace is the story of two families, the Horace family of Rome and the Curiace family of Albe. The oldest sons of each family are married to the daughters of the other family, with Horace married to Curiace’s sister Sabine, and Curiace engaged to Horace’s sister Camille. The ties between the families are strained by Rome’s ongoing war with Albe, although Curiace is still somehow able to hang around the house of Horace during the first few acts of the play despite the fact that his city is at war with Rome. The proximity of the two sides makes an all-out battle undesirable, because many Albans are married to Romans or have relatives living in Rome, and vice versa. Therefore, they decide to nominate one family from each side to fight to the death and decide the war for everyone else. Because Horace and his brothers are strong and virtuous, they are chosen to represent Rome. Curiace and his brothers are also of exemplary Alban stock, so they are chosen to represent Albe. Before the battle, the different affected parties (Horace, Sabine, Curiace, Camille and Horace’s father, old Horace) ruminate at great length about civic obligation and love, whether or not the men should fight, and how excited they should be about the showdown between families linked by intermarriage. They fight, one side wins, and then the victorious brother comes home and commits a surprising murder in defense of his city. The fifth and final act consists of the king’s judgment of his acts. Some think he should be executed on the very day that he won the war for his city, while others think he should be pardoned and that his act of murder was, if not desirable, at least justifiable in defense of his city.

This, like the other French plays I’ve read this year, is an old, yellowed “Nouveaux Classiques Larousse” edition. My used bookstore has a little stash of them, and I will continue to buy them for two or three bucks apiece because I enjoy the plays and I enjoy the supplemental information that these editions provide. The introduction to Horace helped me understand why the play was so damn patriotic: after receiving certain criticisms by the ruling establishment of his previous play, Le Cid, Corneille wanted to win back the favor of the French leadership. He dedicated the play to Cardinal Richelieu, who was apparently a powerful figure in French politics in 1640, and crafted a classically-oriented play that respected the unity of time and of space, although less so of action, with strong civic themes that illustrate the importance of loving one’s country. The play was pretty well-received, so I guess his strategy worked. I didn’t particularly enjoy the subject matter focusing on loyalty to one’s homeland, but I think part of that is that I live in a very different time than Corneille: the world is more complex, and many people (myself included) see civic duty and loyalty to one’s nation as a more complex issue. He did illustrate a range of reactions to the impending battle royale, with some characters blindly embracing their civic duty, while others thought about and struggled with the horrible task of fighting one’s in-laws to the death. I especially enjoyed one character’s reaction to the outcome, heaping scorn on her hometown due to the death of her lover, and pointing out that the power of her homeland has been won through the deaths of so many people, and created many enemies. I also liked the murderous hero’s final speech, as he tried to balance his heroic triumph with the burden of the horrible criminal act that he committed in its aftermath.

I also enjoyed a critique of the play by the author himself that was included with this edition. He was candid and was quick to point out what he felt prevented the play from being truly great: iffy unity of action, a drawn-out progression of climactic moments, and a rather flat fifth act consisting of judgments on heroism and civic duty, among other things. I too thought the play was good but not great, although reading it with all of the extra information provided in my edition made it an interesting and worthwhile read.

50. Martín Fierro--José Hernández

Martín Fierro is an epic poem divided into two parts, the first published in 1872 and the second in 1879. I decided to reread this book because I wanted to go back to the basics of Argentine literature and revisit some of the 19th century classics that I once read in a university Spanish class, superficially analyzing them in the way that foreigners analyze literature of places that they want to learn about, in languages that they are not entirely familiar with. I was happy to find how much more I found to inspire me in Hernández’s book, now that I’ve become more familiar with the Spanish language and Argentine literature. I absolutely loved the first part of the book in its depiction of the marginalized and exploited gaucho; the famous scenes, such as Martín Fierro’s confrontation with the authorities (when Cruz comes to his aid), as well has his two knife fights, were extremely entertaining. And while I was a bit disappointed by the second part, I still like the way that Hernández brings back picaresque characters and themes from centuries past and injects them into gaucho Argentina. The first part of the story belongs to Martín Fierro (with a brief interlude documenting the life of the heroic Cruz), while the second part tells the stories of his two sons and the gaucho Picardía, and then concludes with a guitar battle between Martín Fierro and the son of a man he once killed, along with some final advice from the protagonist to his sons. It´s all in verse and the language is Hernández’s written interpretation of gaucho speech. The whole story is told by a guitar player, and the characters who tell their story do it all in musical form, to the accompaniment of a guitar (they all recognize their condition as musicians and humbly ask their audience to forgive their shortcomings at the beginning of their stories).

I just read Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo and was struck by how much the fictional characters had become real as time passed and the book stood as a document of the Mexican revolution. I felt the same thing here: Martín Fierro is probably more connected to the people’s image of the gaucho in Argentina than any real historical figures, and I think that when people think of gauchos in Argentina, his character eclipses most other representations. It’s an interesting image: he’s been uprooted from his home and family (much like Demetrio Macías in Los de abajo) to serve on the frontier and fight the Indians who menace the Argentine Wild West. His labor is exploited, he doesn’t get paid for his work, and he’s basically been lied to and betrayed by his country. When he is able to escape and go home, his homestead and family are gone. In his marginalized state, he wanders from place to place, afraid of facing the authorities due to his status as a deserter; when he finds solace in alcohol and rural gatherings, violence is the result on a few separate occasions, and he becomes even more isolated and separated from civilization. By the end of the first part of the poem, he has forsaken society and is prepared to seek acceptance amongst the Indians that populate the Argentine plains. His individualism and unwillingness to obey the unfair treatment that he receives from society as a gaucho cause him to turn his back on the civilized world. As a national hero and a representative of a bygone class of people, I think that Martín Fierro is an admirable and worthy creation. His convictions and unwillingness to be controlled by an unlawful government are admirable.

I was trying to think if the United States has a comparable book to Martín Fierro: a book, preferably an epic poem, which presents an image of the American, the Cowboy perhaps, defining that idolized, romanticized class of people who figure so prominently in our country’s history. The closest things I can think of, although very different from Martín Fierro, are Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Walden. It seems to me that an American is presented there that is somewhat relatable to the gaucho Martín Fierro. It’s not a poem, though, so I’m still a bit dissatisfied. Maybe I should read Leaves of Grass? That’s about the best example of a canonical American poem that I can think of. I think about the United States and Argentina as being very similar in their 19th and early 20th century histories: similar waves of westward expansion and genocide of native peoples, similar patterns of European immigration and growth, and similar struggles for national definition. Having read a lot of Argentine literature, and especially now that I’m stepping back into the fundamental stages of the national literature of Argentina, I now wonder what books I should read or reread that provide similar representations of the United States at those important moments in its literary history. There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine dates a guy who is a “bizarro Jerry,” and he has a whole cast of friends who are just like George, Kramer and Newmann, except completely different and “bizarro.” I’ve always thought about Argentina as being a bit like a “bizarro United States,” and I would like to get to know early American literature now that I’ve become somewhat familiar with Argentine literature.

#132 - Since before I was born, my dad owned a copy of Martin Fierro bound in cow hide--the kind with the hair still on it--yet I never read it growing up. For some reason, I was under the impression that it was difficult and sort of dull. It finally took the combined influence of Borges and Inodoro Pereyra to convince me to give it a shot, and I realized how wrong I had been in my former impression. The copy I read was thankfully annotated, which helped with much of the gaucho slang. Otherwise, it wasn't that difficult and certainly not dull.

The second half is a little weaker. I remember feeling a little annoyed when Picardia was introduced, as if Hernandez was just introducing extra characters to stretch out his narrative. On the other hand, I quite liked the payada at the end.

Have you/are you planning to read Facundo? That's an interesting counterpoint, though Sarmiento's Eurocentrism is a bit much at times.

That's a very dead-on observation about the weird parallels. After reading Fierro, I wondered whether there were gaucho movies like the cowboy movies of this country. I doubt the gaucho, certainly the subject of quite a bit of hagiography after the 1920s, was ever sanitized to the extent of say, Hopalong Casssidy. (On the other hand, trying to imagine John Wayne with a bushy beard, chiripa round his nether regions, facon in one hand, dropping d's... well, it really hammers home the "bizarro"-style differences.)

@133: Hi Carlos, my 19th century Argentina collection is limited to Martín Fierro, Facundo and El Matadero/La Cautiva, so I'll definitely be reading Facundo soon. That was the one that I struggled the most with in my college class, so I'll be happy to revisit it and see how Sarmiento's Civilización y Barbarie fit into to my conception of Argentina and its history and literature.

I remember when I read Martín Fierro for the first time, I was really interested by the similarities between the gaucho contrapunteo and contemporary rap battles. I think the character portrayed by many rappers is very similar in a lot of ways to the gaucho as portrayed by Hernández: in rap, you have gangsters, drug dealers and outlaws who are often forced by the circumstances that surround them to lead the lives that they lead. Also, the facón and the microphone as weapons in a "battle" have certain similarities (some might be quick to point out their phallic nature).

51. Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust--Nathaniel West

After I read The Moviegoer a few months ago, I started to think about other books that I remember from my teenage years. I’m not sure when I read The Day of the Locust; the only memories that I retained of it were that it was set in Hollywood, it was pretty dark, and one of the characters was named Homer Simpson. I went to check it out at the library and ended up with an edition that included the short novel Miss Lonelyhearts as well. And, as was the case with The Moviegoer, I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. West’s writing as an adult, perhaps more than I did as a kid. Miss Lonelyhearts was a great reintroduction to the author, and I liked reading the two books consecutively, in that order. Miss Lonelyhearts is really intense and The Day of the Locust starts a bit slower. I wondered whether it would ever attain the frantic energy of the first story, but all of a sudden Tod is out at the nightclub with Faye and poor Homer, then they’re back in Homer’s garage with Faye’s friends Earle and Miguel, and the midget is going wild over a cockfight, and the whole thing is just crazy.

Miss Lonelyhearts is about a man who writes an advice column in a New York newspaper under the aforementioned alias (his readers know he’s a man despite the column’s name). He’s experiencing an existential crisis, as he can no longer take the brutal portraits of human beings suffering that come to him every day through his readers’ letters. His erratic behavior and religious babbling are exacerbated by his heavy consumption of alcohol, and he spends a lot of time at the speakeasy and drinking with friends, and a few different women. His boss at the newspaper, Shrike, is a bombastic man whose overly-dramatic overtures also tend toward the religious, especially when he’s referring to Miss Lonelyhearts’ tortured soul. Miss Lonelyhearts has a girlfriend, but also pursues other women, including Shrike’s wife. Miss Lonelyhearts also meets a few of the people with whom he has corresponded via his column, and his relationship with them is rather messed-up. Everyone is morally corrupt, Miss Lonelyhearts is unable to find a way to deal with the letters he receives, and his despair spirals deeper and deeper.

I thought Mr. West did a great job of setting a tone that matches Miss Lonelyhearts’ struggles and sticking with it throughout the short novel. There is a lot of humor, but it is very, very dark. Shrike is great, and I enjoyed his alcohol-fueled dramatizations of Miss Lonelyhearts’ spiritual crisis. The letters themselves are brutal in their depiction of peoples’ everyday struggles, and help the reader understand why Miss Lonelyhearts is so down on the world. All of the drinking and partying complement and intensify to the existential struggles of the title character, and were fascinating to me in their depiction of a different era of American drinking culture.

The Day of The Locust is the story of Tod, a painter from the east coast (an Ivy League graduate no less) who comes to Los Angeles to work on art in the movies. He is fascinated by the masses of ordinary people who fill the city, and who stand in stark contrast to the cultural and economic elites and the movies that they are making in the city. The whole city kind of feels like a movie set to him, with houses from all different styles of cheap architecture. He’s in love with his neighbor, Faye, and then he meets Homer Simpson, who’s also recently met her and fallen in love with her. He’s attracted to Homer as a representation of the ordinary masses that he’s been observing and painting. Homer came to Los Angeles recently, and is more or less devoid of intellectual and cultural experience. He was an accountant at a hotel in the Midwest for 20 years, and moved to California on the advice of his doctor. He also has some strange tics and other issues with his hands, and hasn’t been with a woman in his whole life (except for one time that he almost did something with one of the hotel guests). His relationship with Faye, who is a big flirt, is a very troubling one right from the start, because while there are many reasons for her to have no interest in him, his obsession for her is unhealthy and reflects his lifelong sexual repression. This relationship is exacerbated when her father dies and she moves in to his house as a boarder in a “business relationship.” Things spiral out of control, and Tod hangs on for the ride. In the end, he has the emotional baggage and understanding of the Hollywood masses that he needs in order to paint his masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.”

I liked the way that the story presented Homer Simpson through the eyes of Tod. It’s as if Tod is a fictional representation of the author, who himself wants to understand the minds of the ordinary people that surround him. He writes about Tod, who meets and is fascinated by Homer because he’s so different. He tries to help him and become friends with him, curious to see what lies beneath the surface of a person who is superficially so different. He can’t ever really reach the same level as Homer, and in the end can only watch helplessly as Homer’s life spirals out of control. He sees how hard it is to relate to other people, whose different backgrounds are complemented by the difficulty of life in a city where everyone is a transplant who came to find happiness, fame, fortune, or paradise and good health.

This book, and the movies L.A. Confidential and Chinatown, are the main contributors to my mental image of Depression-era Los Angeles (though I guess L.A. Confidential was set a little later). I wonder if there’s not a bit of Homer Simpson in Russell Crowe’s character in L.A. Confidential. Actually, I bet the writer, Mr. Crowe, or both, read this book before making the movie. I also wonder what the relationship is between Homer Simpson and the show The Simpsons. The Day of the Locust seems like a pretty “cool” book, the type that creative people enjoy reading, and it seems altogether possible that Matt Groening or somebody close to him read this book as they were creating The Simpsons. Obviously, the two Homer Simpsons serve far different roles; but, perhaps the cartoon man reflects some of the physical aspects of the literary figure (big, solid, a bit oafish); and, maybe Groening had West’s Homer Simpson in his mind when he created his own American everyman.

#135: I have had that book in the BlackHole for a while now. Thanks for the reminder that I still need to read it, Matt.

#134 - I had a similar thought re: gauchos & rappers while reading Martin Fierro. Somewhere near the end of the first book, I round myself thinking of "Paul Revere"-era Beastie Boys ("It's not a tough decision as you can see; I can blow you away or you can ride with me" ... "Well, I'll ride with you if you can get me to the border..."). One can't help but ponder some post-ironic Argentine rapper picking the moniker MC Fierro.

On a more serious note, I found myself drawing parallels this morning between Fierro and the protagonists of Arlt's El Jorobadito, as figures who reject civilization to go seeking out less settled lands (metaphorically in Arlt's case).

@134: Yeah, one would assume that Arlt was quite familiar with Martín Fierro. As an Argentine, it would be hard not to be at that time. Also, Hernández's incorporation of stock picaresque situations and characters is widespread, especially in the second part. Arlt also loved Spanish picaresque literature, I mean, El juguete rabioso is a 20th century picaresque novel, some of the characters in Los siete locos (el buscador de oro comes to mind) follow in the picaresque tradition, and I remember him mentioning Guzmán de Alfarache in an Aguafuerte. So the two writers wear this similar influence on their sleeves, so to speak.

52. Los cachorros y otros relatos (The Cubs and other stories)--Mario Vargas Llosa

Los cachorros was one of the first stories that I read in Spanish, and I was glad to find a cheap copy of it the other day. It’s a short novella about a group of late-elementary school kids and their new friend Cuéllar. He gets mauled by the school´s dog in the groin and, as the kids grow older and begin to pass through adolescence and notice girls, his plight becomes sadder and sadder. For me, the highlight is middle section of the story, when the boys begin one by one to make their move on different young women and Cuéllar´s lack of interest or desire to engage the opposite sex becomes more and more apparent. He reacts very, very strongly to each one of his friends’ entry into romantic (and sexual) life, he lashes out at them, and they struggle to deal with his outbursts while he tries to prove his masculinity through alcohol, fast cars and athletic feats. It’s all very sad, and it’s interesting not only to see his life without his manhood, but to see his friends and their girlfriends struggle to put up with him and understand what he’s going through. They always try to forgive him and want to be his friend even as his behavior becomes wilder and stranger; I think in part because they were friends before the dog attacked him, they continue to see themselves in him, and don’t want to acknowledge what has happened. It’s an interesting story, and it remains one of my favorites by Vargas Llosa.

He does a really good job of illustrating the time when friends start having girlfriends, and even without the mauling, it would have been an interesting story. I mean, Cuéllar finally finds a girl that he’s really in to, and even if he were just really shy, the story wouldn’t have changed much. It still would have been excruciating to watch him, as all his friends and their girlfriends are encouraging him and pushing him to ask her out, still unable to work up the nerve to make his move. But the fact that he’s been neutered by a big dog makes the whole thing grotesque and sickening. Vargas Llosa does a good job of telling a story that could have been told in a very similar way if it were presented normally, but he adds an extra element that makes it all very shocking and disturbing. I always remembered this story for the mauling and the subsequent struggles of the victim, and that exceptional event is all the more jarring in what is essentially a very typical coming-of-age story about a group of upper-class Peruvians who grow up, meet women and get married.

I understand that it was one of his first books, and he employs an interesting experimental technique throughout: he alternates back and forth between the third person plural and the first person plural, as in the first paragraph of the story: “Todavía llevaban pantalón corto ese año, aún no fumábamos, entre todos los deportes preferían el fútbol y estábamos aprendiendo a correr olas, a zambullirnos desde el segundo trampolín del “Terrazas,” eran traviesos, lampiños, curiosos, muy ágiles, voraces. I wonder how I was able to twist my mind around this when I was just beginning to learn and read in Spanish. I didn’t recall this peculiarity from my previous reading of this book, but I imagine that I really struggled for the first few pages before I caught on. It’s actually a very nice technique in my opinion, it fits the length of the story (in a longer novel it might not be so great) and widens the perspective of the story to make it feel as though you were both looking from the outside in, and also in the middle of this group of kids, all at the same time.

I’ve been a somewhat ambivalent fan of Vargas Llosa the novelist (I am intrigued by Vargas Llosa the literary critic, and have been thinking about buying Viaje a la ficción for quite a while as an introduction to that side of his work). While I can’t think of any reason not to like him, and while I have thoroughly enjoyed the books of his that I’ve read, I don’t consider him to be one of my favorites. I don’t know why, though. He’s a really great storyteller and I’ve liked all of his books that I’ve read. He reminds me a bit of Dostoyevsky. He’s able to work a short novella just as well as an epic, dark novel, and he is both readable and thought-provoking. I remember being surprised by how quickly the pages passed by when I read Crime and Punishment in high school, because I thought reading it would be such hard work. Dostoyevsky really immersed me in the characters and their interactions, and it was a really engrossing story. I’ve had similar experiences with Vargas Llosa in books like Conversación en la catedral and La casa verde: what I had thought would be hard, arduous reads turned out to be real page-turners. I think maybe what bothered me about Vargas Llosa was I thought about him as a wealthy man who wrote brilliant novels while sitting in a nice, air conditioned room or something like that. He didn’t seem tortured or gritty enough for me. But that’s not really fair, and I’m ready to try some more of his books and have a more open mind about an author who has always thoroughly impressed me with his storytelling skills.

I have not yet read Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral (although I recently bought it), but I have enjoyed the others of his I have read especially War of the End of the World, which I absolutely loved. I do hope you will give that one a try in future, Matt.

The only Vargas Llosa I've read was La fiesta del Chivo, about the last days of Trujillo. I thought it was quite powerful, overall, though not without it's flaws, the biggest one of which was the framing story.

I enjoyed The Feast of the Goat but didn't think it was nearly as strong as War of the End of the World (my favorite V-L) or Conversation in the Cathedral.

@140-142: The first Vargas Llosa novel that I read was La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat). Since then I've read Conversación en la catedral and La casa verde (The Green House). Of these, La casa verde was my favorite. I remember that the other two were very similar, with webs of characters and stories and constant shifts around from one to the other (La casa verde was like that too, but I remember the other two being a bit more complex). They were all really good, I think that what I liked about La casa verde was that it was so firmly entrenched in a more rural Perú that I found fascinating. I would like to read more of Vargas Llosa's Peruvian novels before I venture back out into his historical fiction set in other parts of Latin America. I just found a copy of La ciudad y los perros for less than $5 with shipping, so that may be next...

Speaking of Peru, I have just started Death in the Andes, which I've had for more than 15 years but never read. And yes, Conversation in the Cathedral definitely is the way you describe. I hadn't heard of La ciudad y los perros, but according to LT its English title is Time of the Hero -- go figure!

@144: Rebecca, that book sounds cool. The protagonist, Lituma, was also in La casa verde. I think intertextuality is pretty cool, if you enjoy Death in the Andes it might be interesting to go back and read La casa verde (The Green House, a more literal title translation than La ciudad y los perros/Time of the Hero) to get the back story on him.

msjohn, I will definitely look for The Green House. I am first working my way (happily) through the Vargas LLosas I already own, but it is hard to resist getting a new one . . .

53. Altazor; Temblor del Cielo--Vicente Huidobro

When I was a student I studied for a semester in Santiago, Chile, and I took a course on poetry, from which I took the idea that the four most significant Chilean poets were Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra. Of these, I was attracted the most to Parra, who reminded me very much of Kurt Vonnegut. Neruda's politics bothered me (he had all these fancy residences in Chile, but he was a communist, and a Stalinist at that), and his odes weren't really my thing either; nonetheless, I've returned to his poetry from time to time and I´ve enjoyed it. I always admired Mistral's life story and thought she was a very honorable and inspiring person. And, for some reason, I decided there was something about Huidobro that I didn't like and I kind discarded him, put him aside and never really even gave Altazor a chance. But, my love of searching the internet for cheap Cátedra editions led me to a critical edition of Altazor at a price I couldn´t resist, and I decided to give it a try. I don't really know why I was put off of Huidobro, because there was a lot about this, his most famous work, that I really liked.

Altazor is a poem constructed over a period of many years, from around 1919 to 1931. It has seven cantos, and is written from the perspective of Altazor, a person who is descending through the sky on a parachute. The language as the poem goes on changes, with later cantos containing combinations of real words, made up words, and finally just a bunch of vowels at the very end. In the introduction it talks about how the poem is a sort of synthesis of all of the artistic movements (-isms) that were being developed during Huidobro's time. In general, the poem represents a questioning or refutation of the possiblity of defining art and the role of the artist, or to find one, or even many different ways of looking at life, art, or anything really. I don't think I can wrap my head around all of this in one initial reading. I thought the language was very beautiful, and I enjoyed the way that it was manipulated in different and fascinating ways. For me, reading this poem was like walking through the modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago (I miss that museum, I don't live in the Chi any more) and looking at art from the same interwar time period: there were a bunch of images that I really liked and thought were very beautiful, but I did not feel that I understood them very much at all, nor the context in which they were created. There were portions of the poem that I was especially intrigued by and that I wanted to know more about, just like there are artists from that time that I feel especially drawn to. It was just so sprawling, I feel a bit lost when I try to explain the poem as a whole.

One thing that was mentioned in the introduction that I found interesting was a line from the poem, "Se debe escribir en una lengua que no sea materna," which is exactly what Huidobro did in this poem, alternating between French and Spanish in the synthesis of Altazor. One of my favorite parts of this edition was that the editor compared some portions of the poem between the two languages, showing the interplay between the original French and the Spanish equivalents that Huidobro chose. As a language learner, I am intrigued by the possibilities of expression in languages that are not one's first language. In the case of French and Spanish, I think the closeness between the two languages makes for some fascinating possibiliities for a person who is bilingual and not only knows both languages, but seeks to understand the connection between the two. I liked learning about the bilingual creative process Huidobro followed in Altazor, and the introductory study helped me appreciate the poem more by shedding light on its French-language genesis.

Finally, Altazor made me think of an old favorite of mine, The Little Prince. I feel that Saint-Exupery must have been familiar with Altazor, and been inspired by it. The rose that Altazor speaks of regularly, his travels through the sky, and the way he yearns to understand the things that he sees, they all remind me of the Little Prince and his trip trough space, as well as his time on earth. It's more of a feeling I have than anything concrete, but from the beginning, I felt a connection between the two characters.

54. El romancero viejo
El romancero viejo is a collection of Spanish romances from the 13th to 16th centuries (maybe some fall outside of this time period, but they are not modern). These poems were originally transmitted orally and accompanied by music, but written records of them have been collected, studied and published in various forms and editions throughout the years. I enjoyed them because they provided a different perspective on an era of Spanish literature that I love. They seemed like a much more direct representation of the language and stories of the epoch than most of the plays that I've read, which often seem very refined and polished (except perhaps La Celestina). My edition provided background information on each romance, including the historical and literary sources, and also later works that were inspired by the romance. Reading these was like receiving another series of pieces in the giant puzzle of Spanish literature.

I enjoyed the sequence that my edition follows in dividing the romances: rather than chronologically, the romances are grouped thematically. First, there are romances set on the frontiers of Spain's conflict with the Moors and epic romances about actual kings, queens and heroes of a historical nature. The characters in these romances have been traced to actual people in Spain's past, and again, in each case the real people who are referenced are explained in footnotes. I thought these were cool because they provide a very interesting documentary perspective on specific moments in history. Most of the romances are no more than a page or two in length, corresponding to roughly ten to one hundred lines. In fifteen minutes, I could read seven or eight specific tellings of heroic acts, betrayals, victories, sieges and defeats. The romances really brought the past to life, and they were a lot of fun to read.

Next came romances about el Cid, Bernardo del Carpio and other heroes whose real-life exploits have been represented in literature to the point where they are almos mythological figures. Again, I liked the emphasis on specific moments: Rodrigo at the siege of Zamora, his conflicts with the King, and other moments that I hazily recalled from reading el Cid last year, but which were brought back into focus in these poems. Again, I enjoyed seeing another perspective on the events in the lives of famous heroes that I'd previously read about in a more extended form.

Next were a series of romances about the knights of the round table. These are also very cool. Lots of famous characters, such as Lanzarote, Reinaldo de Montalbán and Don Gaiferos, along with repeated motives and stories that interweave with the books that I love, such as the case in the romance that begins:

Nunca fuera caballero--de damas tan bien servido
como fuera Lanzarote--cuando de Bretaña vino,

Lines which are cited in Don Quijote when he first arrives to the venta after leaving his home. Finally, the book ends with a series of novelistic romances that tell stories of romantic conflicts and other more everyday tales of human interaction.

I really enjoyed the language, the episodic nature, and the constant rhymed, octosyllabic structure of the romances. Also, in many cases the stories were much more graphic than I might have expected. In one romance, a king´s mistress is wrongfully slain, so he brings the murderer to the grave of the mistress, digs her up, puts the knife in her hand and has her kill her murderer. Then he marries her dead body so that her kids are taken care of and receive part of the wealth of the crown. That's pretty raw.

It'll be nice to have the Romancero Viejo around as a resource as I read other old Spanish books, and I think I'll pull it back out from time to time when I'm reminded of the historical figures and characters whose stories are told in its pages. The amount of research and documentation that went in to the preservation of these romances is also very interesting, and I appreciate the fact that they have been preserved and printed in collections such as this one.

Nice review of The Cubs and Other Stories, Matt. I bought that a couple of years ago, but haven't read it yet.

I'll revisit this thread later today or tomorrow, to add my thoughts about MVL once my brain gets out of second gear.

Thanks for the mention of The War of the End of the World, Rebecca. I was trying to figure out what book to take with me on my long flight next week, and this will be perfect; I own two secondhand copies, so I'll give it to Rachael (if I see her) or drop it off at the nearest Oxfam bookshop once I'm done with it.

55. Obra Poética I--Jorge Luis Borges

This first volume of the complete poetic works of Jorge Luis Borges contains his first three books of poetry: Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929). Borges spent his early childhood in Buenos Aires, moved to Switzerland when he was fifteen, and moved back to Buenos Aires when he was twenty two (at least so says Wikipedia). These poems, then, are an exaltation of a city, a country and a culture that he is looking at both in terms of his childhood memories and his present observations as a young man who has returned to his home city after a significant amount of time away. As he puts it,

This city that I believed to be my past
is my future, my present;
the years that I have lived in Europe are illusory,
I was always (and always will be) in Buenos Aires.

This dual perspective on Argentina and Buenos Aires was especially compelling to me because I moved back to my hometown this year after seven or eight years away. I was 18 when I left and I'm 26 now. Sometimes I see faces and wonder if I once knew them many years ago, or I visit places that I faintly remember from my childhood. Borges's perspective as a returning native of a city, and his observations filtered through childhood memories, were very relatable to my situation, and I enjoyed feeling this connection with the author.

I also liked reading the poems of young Borges, and seeing the beginnings of the themes and ponderings that would continue in his later and more famous short fiction and essays. The poems are very much centered on traditional Argentine images and subjects: gauchos, arrabales, zaguanes, patios, and his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, who faught on the frontier in the Buenos Aires army. Naturally enough, there is also a poem on Juan Manuel de Rosas. While the poetry does not stray far topically from the Argentine canon, there are hints at Borges's later examinations of things like infinity and immortality. He ends his poem on Rosas by stating that:

God will have already forgotten him
and it is less injurious than piteous
to delay his infinite disolution
with alms of hate.

I really enjoyed this idea of Rosas being charitably kept alive through the hatred of the descendants of Unitarios decades after his death. Moments like these are what makes these volumes of poetry so interesting to me: Borges, in representing his own childhood city and country as he sees it after returning, also sets the wheels spinning on many of the obsessions and ponderings that he will continue to develop over his literary life. I also enjoyed the author's commentary to each of his three volumes, with a blind, elderly Borges briefly looking back on the poetry of his youth, identifying the flaws and pointing out the moments that he was the most proud of when looking back on his work.

56. Winesburg, Ohio--Sherwood Anderson

Since the online edition of Clarín changed their format and did away with a lot of their literary commentary (or hid it somewhere that I haven't yet found), I've switched over to Página 12's weekly literary supplement for my news on Argentine literature. A few weeks ago, they had a profile on a new Spanish translation of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-3932-2010-08-01.html). The article's emphasis on its importance in the development of American literature, and how it inspired Faulkner (who inspired Rulfo) caused me to reserve a copy at the library and give it a read. I have also been wanting to expand (or in this case recede) my horizons back from Latin American and European literature and read some classics of United States literature. I thought that I would have a lot of reasons to like this book, and in the end I really did.

The book consists of a series of profiles of different inhabitants of the town of Winesburg, Ohio at specific moments in their lives, and through telling their stories, the author creates a portrait of a town and of early 20th century America. In his preface, Anderson expresses the idea that most people spend their lives searching for a truth or series of truths, a code of sorts that will allow them to live their lives purposefully. This truth is beautiful as it is floating about, but when they find it and latch on to it, it becomes ugly and they become a "grotesque." The portraits, then, are of the grotesques that inhabit Winesburg, Ohio. Many of stories in the book focus on the moments when the characters try to explain themselves to their friends, lovers and family members, in the hopes that these people will understand what they are saying. In one of the last chapters, Anderson describes young men entering adulthood in the following way:

With all of his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

I suppose that is what I will remember this book as most of all: a chronicle of a bunch of people trying to explain themselves and find understanding in others. This occurs from time to time, but often it does not. A man seeking to express his feelings for a woman will instead get angry and say the opposite of what he meant to say to her; another will open up to someone else, confide the secret motivation that he has been hiding, but then back off and re-isolate himself. In his repeated illustration of this moment, Anderson creates a rather sad yet hopeful world. The people keep on chasing after their dreams, and also keep on searching for understanding regardless of past successes or failures. I though it was interesting to read these stories set in early 20th-century Ohio. The growth and progress of the nation, and the way that it influenced the lives of the different townspeople, provided an interesting setting for their stories. One of my favorite books of all time, James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, is also set in turn-of-the-century Ohio, and it was nice to flesh out my conception of this time and place in history.

I bought a nice copy of Winesburg, Ohio about a year ago and I never read it. I will have to rectify that. Thanks for the reminder, Matt.

57. Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily)--Elio Vittorini

I read Conversation in Sicily when I was a sophomore in college and really enjoyed it. That's getting long enough ago that I can't always remember exactly why I enjoyed certain books, but I'm starting to realize that if the book still stands out in my mind, it's probably because I really liked it. I remembered was that it was the story of a man who goes back to his childhood home in Sicily and talks to a series of people, and I thought since it had a lot of conversation, it would be a good book for me to read as I learn Italian. So, this time I read Conversazione in Sicilia, in italiano! It was a joy to read in its original language.

Vittorini writes of a man, Salvatore, who returns to his Sicilian home after 15 years in the north to visit his mother, who has recently been abandoned by his Shakespeare-loving father. He talks to some people on the train, including a poor farm laborer who mistakes him for an American. He also sees two police officers, referred to in the text as "Coi baffi" and "Senza baffi" (With and Without moustaches), who are derided by the other passengers. When he arrives to his mother's town, he finds her and eats a herring with her. They talk about the past, with his romantic memories of childhood contrasting with her recollection of poverty and hunger in railroad houses of southern Italy. She takes him along with her on her rounds as she goes from house to house giving injections to sick people. They visit a series of poor families with very little to eat and then visit the homes of two wealthier women, who joke with Salvatore and his mother and pretend to be afraid of letting Salvatore see them receive their shots. He then grows restless and decides to walk off, meeting a series of men whom he befriends, repetitively talking about "il mondo offeso" with each new interlocutor. The group ends up getting quite drunk on wine at the bar and Salvatore stumbles away, having a strange encounter with a ghost-like man who lurks in the shadows of the graveyard before waking up the next morning back at his mother's house. He walks through town crying, then comes back home once more before leaving Sicily.

One of the things that I admired most about this book was its vivid depiction of Sicily as a tremendously beautiful place, but also as a place full of poverty and suffering. On the one hand, the mountainous rural landscape, the sounds of music and ringing bells floating through the air, and the natural beauty of the women contribute to a rather wonderful and romantic image of southern Italy. This beauty is contrasted with the struggles of the Sicilians with whom Salvatore converses. There is a lot of talk of hunger, and the people that Salvatore meets often eat scavenged food such as snails and herbs from the countryside, if they have food to eat at all. The man he meets on the train talks about how nobody has money to buy his oranges, which is why he has nothing to eat except these same oranges that he can't sell. Salvatore, as an outsider in his homeland, struggles to make sense of the suffering that he sees, and wonders, along with his partners in conversation, why the world is the way it is. I thought the balance between the two extremes of beauty and suffering was excellent. Many depictions of the third world (because this Sicily of the 1930s certainly felt like the third world) seem to either emphasize either the romance and exotic beauty of foreign lands or dwell on the horrible suffering and oppression of the lower classes. This account of Sicily felt very, very realistic because it included both sides of the coin. Salvatore, in his return to his homeland, is especially attuned to the beauty of the land because it is intertwined with childhood memories. He is also especially attuned to the suffering because, as a man who has moved to a different and more prosperous place, he is now seeing the struggles that he was perhaps not fully aware of as a child.

More than half a century removed from the events of World War II in Italy and in Europe as a whole, the political message of the text floated somewhat above my head until the later stages of the book, when Silvestro leaves his mother and meets the individuals who represent different political archetypes of the period. I enjoyed this part of the book, where the interlocutors revolved around statements about the world and how "è grande ed è bello, ma è molto offeso." I enjoyed how each of the characters that Salvatore meets represent different views (the revolutionary Calogero, the consolatory Ezechiele, the Catholic Porfirio and the intellectual Colombo), but their conversation is made up of repeated and agreed-upon statements on the ways of the world. Their differences were not in how they saw the world, but in how they felt about it, and where they thought redemption or change might be found.

Finally, I might mention that this book was entirely appropriate for an Italian language learner. The language was simple and forceful, with a great deal of repetition of both names, descriptions and statements. The words that I learned through reading this book, I learned well, because they kept on reappearing throughout the text. So as a learning tool, it was excellent, and I would recommend it to anyone who is learning Italian.

58. L'élégance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)--Muriel Barbery

I don't read a lot of contemporary, popular fiction, but this book appealed to me because it was in French and the premise seemed reasonably interesting. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but I did not like the second half very much at all. The last time I had a similar reading experience was when I read The Kite Runner a couple of years ago on vacation. It´s fun to read about foreign places, and I liked Ms. Barbery's upper-class Paris apartment building, as I had previously liked Mr. Hosseini's Kabul. I liked the characters well enough too, perhaps moreso in the case of this book. Renée and Paloma, whose stories alternate back and forth in different formats and typefaces, are both pretty cool people with whom I share a lot in common. However, when the plot takes over and start twisting and turning, with romance and action and a series of relatively simple explanations provided to tie up loose ends (oh, so that's why Renée distrusts rich people, because of this one traumatizing event in her childhood), I realized that in this case, as with The Kite Runner, while I enjoyed the people and the places, I did not find the stories remarkable at all.

I really did relate to Renée and Paloma and the way that they hide portions of their thoughts and passions from the world around them. I spend a lot of time reading books that I don't really share with anyone else, although I don't feel as isolated in my intellectual pursuits as Renée, nor as segregated from the world that surrounds me as she does in her job as a concierge surrounded by rich people. I was especially happy when I read about her love of Anna Karenina. She specifically mentions the part in the book where Levin goes back to the countryside and works in the fields, and talks about his feelings of exaltation as he works the land. When I was in high school, my English teacher used to assign us one big book a semester to go along with our other readings. Anna Karenina was one of my favorites, and that was my favorite part too, a part that really resonated with my fifteen-year-old self. Her reference to this moment made me feel a nice connection to her. There were actually a lot of moments like this, where I felt a very strong and satisfying connection to Renée. In the case of Paloma, I thought her observations on life as a misunderstood child in a vapid, "socially progressive" rich family were very entertaining. I enjoy reading stories from the perspective of astutely observant children, and I liked the way that her observations and thoughts were interspersed in diary form with the story of Renée the intellectual concierge.

Maybe I expect too much, and should be content to read a reasonably entertaining page-turner with cool and well-developed characters. I kept on hoping for something interesting or remarkable to happen in the story, and I ended up feeling like I'd read the equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie that appeals to a sufficiently broad audience as to make a good amount of money at the box office (and maybe get nominated for a few Academy Awards). I want more out of a contemporary novel than likeable characters and a story that would translate well to a big-screen adaptation. I'm not surprised to see that a movie was already made out of this book, and I can't help feeling that the author must have had this profitable eventuality in mind when she wrote it. I guess I was just disappointed that, since this book purportedly appeals to people who love to read, that it wasn't more original in its story. It really did seem like a 400 page movie, and while there was a lot to like, it left me a bit unsatisfied.

As I look back and read what I wrote, I feel like I'm being a bit unfair. I don't think this is a bad book, and I think the problem lies more with me. I have trouble enjoying contemporary literature, and very rarely do I find a book written in the past few decades that really inspires me. I sometimes like author-auteurs who have very unique and individual styles, like Kurt Vonnegut or Haruki Murakami. Every once in a while a book really surprises me: a couple of examples that come to mind are Orhan Pamuk's Snow and Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai. I thought those books were rather unique in their storytelling and emotionally powerful. Maybe The Last Samurai is a good blueprint of what I hoped this book would be like. Anyway, I guess I should read new fiction with a grain of salt and make more of an attempt to enjoy it for what it is, rather than what I would like it to be.

I loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Matt, so I am sorry you did not enjoy it more. I hope your next read is a better one for you!

@155: I did enjoy it, I loved reading a contemporary French novel and learned a lot of new words...it was a lot of fun to read French as it is spoken today, and I especially enjoyed Paloma's diary entries for the language that she employed. It was very readable yet challenged me to expand my vocabulary. You seem to be a very avid reader, and I appreciate your input! I've been wishing I had a bit more time to read lately, but I guess it's good to be busy too.

59. La tregua (The Truce)--Mario Benedetti

The other day I was killing a bit of time at the end of the day searching for used books on the internet. There's a really great Spanish-language publisher called Cátedra that prints "scholarly" editions of modern and classic Spanish and Latin American literature, with introductory studies and generous footnotes included in each book. I really appreciate the introductions, because they help me understand the context and the meaning of the books I read. Their books are also very durable: Not only are they the perfect size to fit in one's front pocket, but they are able to withstand the wear and tear that results from being carried around in one's pocket during multiple readings. I pretty much buy the Cátedra version of any book that I like if it costs less than $5 with shipping included, so I recently upgraded to a Cátedra edition of Mario Benedetti's La tregua. I had been meaning to re-read this book after the author's death last year anyway, so it was a very satisfying purchase and read.

Martín Santomé works in an office in Montevideo and is about to stop working at the ripe old age of 50, the age at which people in Uruguay in the late 1950s used to retire. He's decided to keep a diary of his last year before retirement, because he considers himself a decent writer and he wants to write while he still has things worth documenting. When he retires and stops commuting to the office every day, he feels that his day-to-day experiences will be greatly reduced and he will find little motivation to keep journaling. He's got three children, Esteban, Jaime and Blanca. His wife died shortly after the birth of Jaime, and his experience with women during the quarter century after her death has been limited to brief and fleeting sexual encounters that he once describes as "hygienic." He writes about his job and the Montevideo that he sees around him, he writes about his few friends and his interactions with them, and he writes about his up-and-down relationship with his children. Most of all, though, he writes about his relationship with a younger woman named Laura Avellaneda who starts working in his office early in the year. He has a growing admiration for her, and is able to create a casual encounter where he expresses his desire to be with her, along with his concerns about impinging upon her liberty due to her youth and his old age. To his relief, she's into him too, and they have a nice relationship. His last journal entry is written just before he retires from the office, about a year after he started writing.

I really enjoyed reading this book for the second time. Knowing what happens as the story progresses made it a sadder book, and added a lot of importance to words, thoughts and journal entries that I might not have thought so much about the first time without knowing how the story ends. Santomé's struggle to find meaning in the mediocrity of his middle-aged office and home life was very compelling, and I found him to be an astute and humble observer of both the world that surrounds him and the people who inhabit it. I was happy to be taken back to a very real and tangible Uruguay, and I loved encountering a Spanish vocabulary that I once had contact with on an everyday basis when I lived and studied in Buenos Aires. I found some points of relation between this book and the books I had just read (like Conversazione in Sicilia, La tregua was grounded in the reality of everyday life in a very specific place and time, with Montevideo and the small country of Uruguay in the late 1950s replacing 1930s Sicily; like L'élégance du hérisson, a person whose partner had died many years ago finds unexpectedly finds new love) , and also between La tregua and a steadily-growing number of existential novels I have read in the past two years. Santomé is constantly interrogating himself about the meaning of life and the existence of God in the world of insignificant aging men who work insignificant jobs in offices, and the truce that gives title to book refers to a fleeting resolution to some of these issues that he finds during the year preceding his retirement from the working world.

I thought that the secondary focus on the state of the Uruguayan nation at a time of stagnation and civic and political unfulfillment was really fascinating as well, especially in relation to the United States that I live in today. I related to the characters' feelings about a nation that wasn't moving forward and their frustration with a society where systemic corruption has reached the extent where bribes have become necessary in public life for both illicit and, increasingly, licit ends. The characters' sentiments in the book sounded a lot like those that I read in the newspaper every morning in the local and national news stories and opinion pages. Perhaps the collapse of the Uruguayan system that occurred in the years following this book's publication does not bode well for the future of America, considering how much of our contemporary political culture I saw in their feelings about their small country and the direction in which it was heading.

The additional material in the Cátedra edition, as usual, was nice to have. I didn't really like the editor's personal touch (I thought he was kind of anti-United States and sometimes I didn't quite agree with his more subjective commentaries), but he did provide a lot of biographical details about Benedetti, as well as some footnotes that brought my attention to a number of special words and phrases of the Argentine-Uruguayan lexicon that I thought were worth highlighting. Another five dollars well-spent!

#157: Another five dollars well-spent!

It sounds like it!

Great review of the Benedetti novel, Matt; unfortunately its English translation doesn't seem to be available for purchase.

159: That's odd...I guess it's not sexy enough, not magically real enough for the United States book market.

60. Illuminations--Arthur Rimbaud

After reading Une saison en enfer earlier this year, I decided to move on to Rimbaud's prose-poem Illuminations rather than step back to his earlier poetry. I think that I may have been better served by going back to his earliest poems before proceeding to these later works. I found a lot to like in his Illuminations, but the nature of this collection of surreal prose poems is such that I wish I had a better idea of the poet's identity before reading this series. I enjoyed the narrative arc of Une saison en enfer, and felt that I had to wander through these poems a bit confusedly without that common story or thread connecting them. I woke up early on Sunday morning and read them all while lying in bed; I've since been opening the book up to random pages and re-reading them a couple at a time. I enjoy the poems, and they are a bit easier to wrap my mind around when I attack them individually. They often paint pictures through a series of striking and evocative images, and it is easier for me to appreciate them a few at a time instead of all at once. I wanted to get to know the poetry of Rimbaud due to his reputation as a visionary, a modernist before modernism, and I am certainly struck by just how unique he was, to have written in this style and from this perspective in the ealy 1870s.

The poems are about cities, about princes and genies, about flight and escape, and about the society and the world that surround the poet. I felt the same way as I read these poems as I did when I used to walk through the modern galleries of the Art Insitute of Chicago: "wow, this is marvelous, this is beautiful, I wish I understood more of what I´m seeing in painting after fascinating painting." Perhaps, though, without narrative or story, the beauty of of the image itself is what's important, and so maybe the fact that I like these poems is an important element of "understanding" them. I'm going to keep this book on my nightstand for a few more weeks so that I can continue re-reading the poems of Illuminations, because I realize that as I sit here trying to figure out what to write about them, I have little to say. I enjoy reading them, and they make me want to know more.

I think that what I really need to do is find a good biography of Arthur Rimbaud. I've spent years reading about his influence on Latin American poets of the early 20th century, and after reading some of his work, I can imagine their excitement and appreciation of his perspective, which must have been quite fresh back in those days. I haven't spent a tremendous amount of time reading books from the 19th century, but I can certainly see how different Rimbaud is from many of his contemporaries. It's hard to believe that his career as a poet began and ended during his teenage years. When I was a freshman in college, I was a math major and I read a few biographies of famous math "geniuses." They were fascinating to me because they seemed to think on a different plane than normal human beings (and I was thoroughly convinced that I was not like them, and I changed my major). I remember one book called The Man who Knew Infinity, about an Indian mathematician named Ramanujan. He produced notebooks of highly visionary mathematical statements, and seemed to be able to see mathematics differently than his contemporaries. As he struggled to find a job in India, he was eventually encouraged to send his work to British mathematicians. He was rejected by some, but eventually G.H. Hardy recognized his unique genius and brought him to England to continue his work and collaborate with mathematicians at Cambridge. The story of Rimbaud's "discovery" by Paul Verlaine, who sent him a ticket to come to Paris, parallels Hardy's summons of Ramanujan to come and work at Cambridge. And, like Ramanujan, Rimbaud looked at his subject in a different way than his peers, producing poetry that now seems prophetic in the way that it anticipated the artistic output of future generations. In my conception of what it might mean to be a "poetic genius," Rimbaud seems like an ideal example: his teenage poetry exhibits a similar genius to Ramanujan's mathematical notebooks. I'd like to learn more about his life and the context in which he wrote his poems, because I realize that at this point I'm as intrigued by Rimbaud himself as I am by his poetic work.

I have read about Ramanujan. I have also read Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, so I am at least passing familiar with both of them. I am not at all familiar with Rimbaud though. I will have to correct that.

61. Amirbar--Álvaro Mutis

I was very excited to stumble upon a new (to me) and relatively contemporary author with an impressive pedigree (Premio Cervantes, works translated by Edith Grossman, "One of the greatest writers of our time," according to Gabriel García Márquez), whose works were available at an extremely accessible price online. For a total of about ten bucks I was able to procure an Alfaguara anthology of his seven novellas about Maqroll el Gaviero, a wandering seaman who has traveled the world and had a great deal of adventures; as well as a first edition of this book, Amirbar, which is included in the Alfaguara anthology but is a bit of an anomaly, as it concerns the time that Maqroll left the open seas to try his hand at gold mining in the foothills of the Andes. Colombia is a country whose literature I'm not particularly familiar with, and it was exciting to have a new author with a plethora of works to choose from. I was hoping that this first book would open the door to a new author that I could enjoy in the future, and while I am not willing to discard the author based solely on this initial reading, my enthusiasm was a bit tempered by Amirbar. I think that Álvaro Mutis is without a doubt an exceptional writer, but his subject matter may not be my cup of tea.

In this book Maqroll tells his mining story to his chronicler in California as he recovers from a bout of malaria that has to taken him out of seafaring action. He arrives in South America seeking to mine some gold and meets a variety of interesting people along the way. He stays in an inland town for a while as he gets the lay of the land, and befriends one of the workers at the cafe named Dora Estela. She introduces him to her brother, who becomes his mining partner and helps him explore two mines, the second of which proves fruitful; unfortunately, he is then abducted by military patrollers concerned about guerilla activity in the region. Since Maqroll needs someone else to help him work the mine, Dora Estela sends him a woman who is mysterious and has a special method of contraception that prevents her from having children, which is one of her greatest fears in life. The mining story ends with Maqroll feeling older and wearier than when it began. There is an epilogue in which the chronicler recounts a later correspondence with Maqroll in which he explains how he found some information relatable to his experience in the mines in an old Mallorcan book that he read. I enjoyed the way that the initial and final sections of the book contrasted with the body of Maqroll´s tale, with ostensibly modern-day California and Europe helping situate his story, which in some ways could have just as easily happened a century ago as today, in our own times.

I would call this book well-written, but I certainly did not find it inspiring. Perhaps it was not the best introduction to the author: it appears to be an addendum of sorts to the life story of Maqroll, and it also wanders from the nautical nature of his other adventures. I didn´t find myself extremely attracted to the premise of an incessant and sage wanderer who has been everywhere in the world and has boatloads of experience with the various men and women who inhabit this earth. In reading the limited biographical information on Álvaro Mutis available online, it appears that he too has done a fair amount of wandering, and it stands to reason that his Maqroll character is a combination of his own experiences in the world and his fantasies about what it would be like to travel the high seas seeking adventure, winning women and experiencing the various trials and tribulations of the rough life of an anchorless soul. I´m just not a big fan of adult adventure stories, although I understand that many people are. The scope of el Gaviero's travels and experiences gave the author an expansive palette of people, places and vocabulary from which to choose, and Mr. Mutis undoubtedly has incredible control over the Spanish language. I would definitely recommend this book to those who enjoy adventure stories starring grown-ups; I just don't particularly enjoy them myself. I am glad that this book got me thinking about mines and mining, because I remembered that I wanted to re-read the book Subterra, by Baldomero Lillo, which documents the hardships of Chilean miners in the early 20th century. I was thinking about it when I first read about the miners in Chile who have been stuck far underground for quite some time, and I'm planning to start reading it during my afternoon break.

62. Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author)--Luigi Pirandello

I am happy to report that I have found an Italian author that I very much like: Luigi Pirandello. I just read his play Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, and while I am still not entirely comfortable reading books in Italian, and I struggled at times to fully understand the nuances of the language in his play, I still found more than enough in its pages to pique my interest and inspire me to seek out more of his texts. The introductory study to my edition of this play provided me with some background on both his life and the themes that he developed as a novelist and as a playwright. It was not short on laudatory statements, signaling him as one of the forefathers of modern theater and stating that he was responsible for introducing many questions concerning man's ability to communicate with and understand one another that have permeated twentieth century creative thought. Albert Einstein, after seeing one of his plays, introduced himself to the author and said that he felt they were "kindred spirits." In the play that I have just read, I can see why he might say this: human understanding of one another is relative to different individuals' vantage points, with each one of us seeing each other (and ourselves) in a different way. I imagine that Einstein would have been tickled to see ideas concerning an entirely different sort of relativity, psychological instead of scientific, expresed on stage.

In the play, a theater troupe is getting ready to start a rehearsal for their nightly performance when a group of six characters enter the theater and join them on stage. These characters (the father, the mother, the stepdaughter, the son, and two young children of the mother by her recently-deceased second husband, a boy and a girl) explain that they are looking for an author to write their story so that it may be performed on stage. The members of the troupe scoff at them, and ask them who the hell they think they are. As they begin to tell their story, the director and actors become more and more interested, and it is eventually decided that the family's story should be adapted for theater, with the actors playing the roles of the six characters. A script is hastily written, and the actors begin to act out a particularly shocking scene in the family's history in which the father meets the stepdaughter (fathered by the mother's second partner) in a prearranged sexual encounter at the shop where the stepdaughter works. The characters, however, find themselves unrecognizable in the actors. Even when they are saying the exact same things as the characters said in real life, the difference is so vast that the characters laugh in surprise, angering the actors and director who are trying to recreate real scenes from life on stage. Here, theater is unable to recreate real life, and actors are unable to "be" real people, no matter how much they strive for accuracy and authenticity.

The family's issues are to a large extent related to their inability to understand one another. The father sent the son away from the family and later instructed his wife to marry another man whom he believed she loved more. He wants the people on stage to understand his intentions, but he's not able to convey the reasons for his actions in a way that is satisfactory to him, and doesn't really seem to believe that comprehension between human beings is really possible. The son is obstinant in his refusal to take part in the drama that is unfolding, and repeatedly states that he really has nothing to do with it all. He seems embarrased to be associated with the other characters, and exhibits a rebel-without-a-cause sort of attitude. The stepdaughter works in the shop of Madame Pace, a seamstress-procuress, and exhibits disgust at the acts of the father, and a desire to fly away from the life she has been forced into. They argue about who holds responsibility for different aspects of their situation, and they want the actors to depict their story, perhaps so that they can see themselves objectively and see things how they really happened. This doesn't prove to be possible, because they cannot recognize their real selves in the actors, although these actors are professionally trained to portray real people on stage.

I look forward to reading many more works by Luigi Pirandello. This play was a good introduction to his investigations on human understanding and the limitations of art in representing human life. I've really been enjoying the Italian language and have found it quite accessible as a longtime student of Spanish. Reading a play was great, because there was a lot of dialogue and also a great deal of stage directions and descriptions of the characters and the set as imagined by the author. I learned a lot of new words, and got a better idea of how Italian is spoken in real life.

#164: I read that one last year, the only Pirandello I have read to date, but I did not read it in Italian. I enjoyed it too, so 'thanks' for the reminder that I need to look for more of his work.

63. Fausto--Estanislao del Campo

If I were to make a list of my favorite fictional premises that I have come across through the years, Estanislao del Campo's Fausto would rank very, very high. In the time of the War of the Triple Alliance, two gauchos, Anastasio "El Pollo" and Laguna, meet on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. They sit down and roll some cigarettes, one of them goes and grabs a bottle of gin, and Anastasio tells the incredible story of how he saw the devil at Teatro Colón. El Pollo, ignorant of the nuances of city life and civilized culture, watched a performance of Faust at the newly-constructed theater believing that the events that transpired on stage were actually happening. He recounts the performace to an incredulous Laguna as they drink and smoke.

I had been wanting to read this poem for a long time, and I was quite entertained by it. I was a bit surprised by how lighthearted and straightforward it was, as I was expecting a bit darker and more extensive poem than what I got. The premise presents the perfect vehicle for the development of the 19th century Argentine dichotomy of civilization versus barbary: the ignorant gaucho, making his way through the crowds at the theater in the cultural capital of civilized Argentina, cranes to see a high-class theatrical production of an educated, Western European man's fantasy, which he interprets as reality. I imagined Fausto as a work of poesía gauchezca that would more or less serve as a poetic companion to Martín Fierro, or to Domingo Sarmiento´s Facundo. In truth, this poem appears to be written to entertain, not to moralize. El Pollo tells his story in a matter-of-fact way, and Laguna sits there, listening and having a good time, occasionally interjecting brief commentary about how he can't believe that El Pollo was able to keep his cool as the devil himself was up there prancing around on stage. The description of the two friends' horses at the beginning of the poem is rather light-hearted, and the tone of the two friends' conversation is jovial throughout, with repeated references to the beauty of the pastoral, gaucho lifestyle interspersed with El Pollo's recount of his bizarre experience with the cityfolk at Teatro Colón. In the introduction to this book there was a short run-down of various prominent Argentines' feelings regarding "El Fausto Criollo." While some of them derided it or looked down on it, Jorge Luis Borges praised it for having two things in spades: beauty and happiness. For me, these two qualities are enough to make any book well worth reading, and Fausto certainly does possess them both.

This poem was written during the War of the Triple Alliance, fought by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay (the triple alliance) against Paraguay. The proceeds generated by the sales of the poem were donated to the victims of the war. Anastacio and Laguna make reference to the war and how difficult it has made things for them, because money is tight in the city and they have nowhere to sell their goods. I'm extremely interested in the War of the Triple Alliance, and I enjoyed reading a book that was so closely related to the war effort in its genesis and setting. It's not a war that many people know too much about, and I'm going to make a note to myself that the next time I'm at the library looking for books, I should try to find a good history of this bloody war that decimated Paraguay's population.

I was able to obtain and read this book because I just joined a new library with an extensive collection of books in Spanish. I was like a kid in a candy store as I browsed their collections, grabbing all the books I'd been wanting to read but was unable to find. I really enjoy how academic libraries organize their Spanish literature by country (at least I think this is usually the case). I'm thinking that in future visits, I'll plan on picking up a couple of books, then just look at what else is in that country's section. The edition that I grabbed from the four or five choices that the library presented me with was illustrated by a man named Oski. While I greatly enjoyed the cartoon illustrations of the characters, it was a bit incongruous for the 19th century poem to be illustrated in a 20th century comic style. It reminded me of when I started to watch the movie The Informant!, starring Matt Damon, which is set in the 1990s but with a soundtrack of significantly older music. It's strange to have that separation between the story and the images or music that accompany it. However, I do love older Argentine comic strips, and I may have to track down some of Oski's work now that I'm familiar with his name and his style.

Congratulations on finding a library that will support your reading habits, Matt!

168: Thanks, it's pretty cool. I'm going to be reading a lot of books in the next couple of months that I've spent months, and sometimes years, searching for.

64. Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (A Man Kicked to Death)--Pablo Palacio

At the beginning of this year I read an article on an Ecuadorean author named Pablo Palacio, describing him as one of the "great rarities" of world literature (the article is available here: http://edant.revistaenie.clarin.com/n...). The article painted a very curious portrait of a man whose stories focused on the sick, the deformed and the abnormal; it also described him as being three times marginalized: for the inquieting nature of his texts, for his location on the periphery of the cultural centers of Latin America, and for his situation as a prose writer in a Latin American vanguard populated by poets such as César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro and Oliverio Girondo. I was intrigued, but it was very hard to find any of his books. I was recently able to check out copies of two of his books from my new library of choice. I got a book of short stories, Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (A man kicked to death), as well as the "subjective novel" Vida del ahorcado (Life of the hanged man). I began with Un hombre muerto a puntapiés, which in turn begins with a brief note from the author:

Wearing operating gloves, I make a small clump of suburban mud. I set it rolling through these streets: those who cover their noses will have found it to be flesh of their flesh.

It is a strange note, and the stories were indeed odd. The title story is about a man who's intrigued by a note he read in the newspaper about a man found kicked to death; he conducts his own investigation of the homicide and develops a theory involving a failed homosexual advance made on the street by the dead man. Another one of the stories is about an imprisoned cannibal who was unable to resist the urges he felt to sample human flesh. The longest story in this edition is about a siamese twin (I say twin because the narrator, who refers to herself as yo-primera, considers herself and her other part, yo-segunda, to be a single entity and even takes the time to analyze the grammatical difficulties that she has in writing about herself). Another story is about a man who is unable to tolerate a certain peculiarity of his wife's language, eventually rushing to the arms of a neighborhood woman of the street, who gives him a disease that causes him to go crazy (strangely enough, life apparently imitated art in this case, as Palacio spent the last several years of his life in an institution due to the effects of syphilis contracted through his relationship with a prostitute). The style of the stories is direct and conversational, which helps compound the strangeness of the reading experience. It was a bit like reading the writing of a mentally imbalanced individual.

I like art that pushes these sorts of boundaries. In searching for points of comparison between him and his contemporaries, I see a bit of Roberto Arlt in his marginal perspective and forceful, disquieting topics. Arlt comments that: "we will create our own literature, not through continual conversations about literature, but rather by writing in proud solitude books that contain the violence of a "cross" to the mandible. Yes, one book after another, and 'let the eunuchs grumble'." That seems to be an apt comment to apply to the work of Palacio, and I certainly see an affinity between both men. I also like to compare writers to rappers, and in this case, the comparison was an easy one. It is almost as if Mr. Palacio were reincarneted some seventy or eighty years later in the person of Keith Thornton, also known as Kool Keith. Insanity, physical deformity, strange, complelling and unique fictional personages, cannibalism, and disquieting language and topic matter: these are all aspects of much of Kool Keith's discography. Maybe the next time I read this book I'll pop on my headphones and listen to his Dr. Octagon album. I wish that Pablo Palacio's work were available in English (and I think they'd be fun to translate), because I can think of more than a few friends of mine who would get a kick out of these stories, especially if I described the author as a 1920s Ecuadorean Kool Keith.

65. Subterra--Baldomero Lillo

I read Baldomero Lillo's Subterra as crews were completing the final stages of the drilling effort to reach the 33 miners trapped underground in Chile. When I read about the incident that trapped the miners underground, I thought of this book, because I remembered that it painted a very vivid picture of the difficult conditions in the mines of Chile a century ago. It does, and it's interesting to wonder about how different the recently freed miners' lives are from the men and children whose stories are told in these stories. At its best, this collection of short stories gives me similar feelings of uneasiness in my stomach to those I remember experiencing in high school when I read the scenes in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle documenting the conditions in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. The mine here is depicted as a monstrous entity that chews up strong, young men and spits them out as old, worn out remnants of their former robust selves. Death via accidents and explosions down in the mine is a constant possibility, and the foreign bosses of the mine treat their workers as expendable animals.

Lillo does a good job of creating (mostly) plausible scenarios that lay bare the suffering that the miners of the late 19th-and early-20th endured. I felt indignant as I read about how the workers were only allowed to purchase food and other goods at the mine's commissary, at prices that ate away at their wages to the point where on payday they were often left owing the mine money, even after pawning off their possessions in order to buy just enough food to get by until the next paycheck. Their treatment at the hands of the mine foremen was despicable, and the stories that are set in the mines do a good job of conveying the unfairness of their treatment, and the despair that the workers felt at being trapped in an inhumane situation. It seems obvious that the author is writing in the hopes of inspiring changes in the mines of Chile, and after reading this book, I wonder what effect his stories might have had on the working conditions in Chile's mining industry.

I was a bit disappointed when the stories began to wander away from the mines and into the surrounding communities and Chilean countryside. I think that Lillo is at his best when he is depicting life underground, and I really enjoyed reading the stories and thinking about how the story of the miners trapped in the mine in 2010 was stranger and more unbelievable than the mining stories written by Lillo a century ago. I also couldn't help but imagine how the story would have gone if Lillo would have written it back then: the group of 33 miners, trapped in a chamber in the bowels of the mine, would probably have been left to die a slow and horrific death, forgotten nearly immediately by a foreign administration that viewed them as eminently expendable. The scenario would have fit well with the other stories in this book, and it's interesting to think about how different the world is now (maybe) than it was a century ago. I was given this book as a going away present when I left Santiago, Chile more than six years ago, and I am always absorbed by stories in the news involving Chile. It's a beautiful, wonderful country, and it was interesting to step back in its history through this book.

Matt, I'm glad to see you enjoyed Fausto, which I read earlier this year. It was interesting to read a gaucho tale where the humor was front and center, since so often the gaucho can be such a somber or fearsome character. (Though I think Martin Fierro did have a few funny moments.)

I'd never heard of Pablo Palacio before, but his work sounds very interesting. I'll have to seek him out, and I'm very curious to hear more about Vida del ahorcado and what qualifies it as a "subjective novel."

Also, love the Arlt quote!

@171: Thanks for the comments! I'm reading Vida del ahorcado now, and so far, it's weird, and I don't exactly know why he's called it a "subjective" novel. I like his intensity, though, and hopefully will be satisfied by the time the book's over.

Now that I've read Fausto, I would like to read Juan Moreira, by Eduardo Gutiérrez. Have you read it?

66. El viaje a la ficción (The voyage into fiction)--Mario Vargas Llosa

This is another from my list of books that I had been wanting to read for a long time but couldn't find at a reasonable price. I hadn't remembered it when I went to the library, but as I was looking through the section of Uruguayan literature, it caught my eye (probably because it was a shiny, new edition) and I grabbed it. The book begins with an essay about fiction as an escape from the difficulties of primitive man's everyday life, and traces modern society's literary flights of fancy back to early shamans and other storytellers who helped their people find a collective, imaginative escape from everyday life through stories. Fiction's power as a means of escape from everyday life into a world of fantasy holds special interest in the case of Juan Carlos Onetti, who documents one man's creation of a fictional world and his escape into it in La vida breve. The world created by Juan María Brausen, Santa María, serves as the backdrop for many of his books, which continue to pursue themes related to man´s desire to escape from reality and live in an imagined world of their own creation. After his introduction, Vargas Llosa documents Onetti's work chronologically, with chapters devoted to his major books and short stories interspersed with analysis of the author's major themes and influences.

I enjoyed reading a thorough, chronological account of the work of an author that I admire. It was nice to be able to relate my thoughts and feelings about Onetti's work to Vargas Llosa's analysis. I though his interpretations were on-point, and enjoyed reading about how the influences of Roberto Arlt, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea and Louis-Ferdinand Céline all helped shape and guide Onetti in his (and his characters') journey into the world of fiction. As I've read books like El pozo and La vida breve this past year, after reading some of Onetti's later books in previous years, I've been intrigued and impressed by the initial progression from one book to the next: Eladio in El pozo sits down to write his biography, which chronicles his fantasy yet is firmly entrenched in the real world; then Brausen in La vida breve sits down to create his own fictional world in which to document his fantasy. In future books like El Astillero and Juntacadáveres, the characters exist in the fictional world, viewing their creator, Brausen, as a god-like figure, building statues of him and speaking of Brausen's control over their destinies. I appreciated having a straightforward documentation of the works of Onetti, and am really happy to have had them presented to me in this fashion. Vargas Llosa also highlights Onetti's talent as a short story writer, and drew special attention to a number of his shorter works that he considers to be amongst the best of the 20th century. Throughout, it's obvious that Vargas Llosa was every bit as amazed by Onetti's work as I have been: he goes so far as to say that at the time of its publication (1950), La vida breve was the most important novel ever written in Latin America.

One section that I found especially interesting involved the possible interpretation of Onetti's books, and specifically El astillero, as representative of Uruguayan society and the stagnation and decay of its economy after years of relative prosperity (it used to be seen as "the Switzerland of the Americas" ). Onetti refuted this interpretation of his work, saying that the story was of one man's individual disgrace, and that the story of Larssen's return to Santa María was not supposed to reflect the issues Uruguay, or Latin America, was facing at the time. Vargas Llosa argues that, even if the author did not intend to have his work reflect the social millieu that he found himself in, his writing could not be entirely disconnected from his environment. I really enjoyed his analysis of the connection between Uruguay and Santa María, and agreed with the idea that the crumbling shipyard, which is maintained by the shared illusions of Larssen, Petrus and the other workers, can be compared to crumbling, decaying Uruguay. As in Mario Benedetti's La tregua, I was once again a bit disturbed by how similar comments about the situation in 1960s Uruguay sounded to those I read in the morning newspaper in the United States of 2010. For example, among other characteristics of Onetti's Uruguay in decay, Vargas Llosa cites:

...the state of frustration, resentment, hate, impotence and desperation caused by these conditions, not only among the victims, but also, growingly, among the most lucid and sensible political and intellectual sectors, which makes for a growing propensity to opt for the apocalyptic, messianic, utopian solution--revolutionary radicalism (The Tea Party?!?)--which has been, along with the egoism, greed and lack of culture of the ruling classes, a great obstacle to the establishment in Latin America of modern liberal democracy with liberty, legal society, justice and prosperity.

"Frustration, resentment, hate, impotence, desperation..." That could certainly describe the United States electorate of 2010! And the "propensity to opt for revolutionary radicalism? Us as well. I'm not proposing to use Uruguay's past as a model for the United States' future, but as we start to look at what it might mean to be in a prolonged state of economic decay, I find it interesting to look at Onetti's depiction of a world where few people think that the future will be better than the past from my perspective as a 26-year old United States citizen. I'm glad that Vargas Llosa found these things in Onetti's writing, even if Onetti himself would have protested--and he did protest--against this type of interpretation of his work.

Really, my only issues with this book had to do with the moments when Mario Vargas Llosa himself shines through. For one, he engages in a bit of unnecessary name-dropping, telling stories about famous people that he met in really cool places. He does relate these stories to his study of Onetti but I thought they were completely prescindible. Perhaps he wished to add color to his academic documentation, but I found myself wondering why he needed to mention, for example, the comment that Julio Cortázar and his wife made to him in their Paris apartment about the prose of Eduardo Mallea; it just felt like he wanted to mention that he'd been in Paris with Cortázar, and since he could find a way to tie it in to this book, he did so. One gets the feeling that Vargas Llosa, unlike Onetti, is quite concerned about literary popularity contests, and about the perception that others have of him. It's a bit off-putting, and while I was wishing for information about the personal connection he felt with the books of Onetti (I had in mind Borges' Evaristo Carriego), it seemed like Vargas Llosa was trying to remind me of how cool he is. He also makes a strangely critical comment about the prose and story construction of Roberto Arlt, which didn't seem necessary nor well-justified: why would he need to take the time to say that he doesn't understand other people's fascination with Arlt, even as he's recognizing his fundamental importance in Onetti's work, as well as affirming his importance in the greater canon of Latin American literature?

Oh well. I thought the literary criticism was excellent, and I'd recommend this book to all those who would like to learn more about the life and work of Juan Carlos Onetti.

67. Bérénice--Jean Racine

When I was reading Muriel Barbery's L'élégance du hérisson, Renée the concierge made a few references to Racine and the elegant heights to which he elevated the French language. After one such reference, I added the copy of Bérénice that I bought a few months ago to the stack of books that I planned on reading in the near future. Very little happens in this play. Titus's father has recently died, and he suddenly realizes that his civic duty as emperor prohibits him from marrying Bérénice, queen of Palestine. Back in those days, the Romans did not take kindly to their emperors marrying foreign kings and queens, and the word on the street (and in the senate) is that she will not be greeted with open arms by Titus's people. Unfortunately, he loves her and has strung her on for about five years, promising that he'll marry her despite what they both know about Rome and its attitude toward foreign royalty. The third wheel in their romance is Antiochus, king of Comagère. He fought bravely under Titus in the Middle East, and is also madly in love with Bérénice. All three of them live in contiguous quarters, which makes his situation rather difficult because he has to see Titus and Bérénice, madly in love, basically everywhere he turns (however, this makes it easy for Racine to maintain continuity of space in his play). Before parting, he confesses his love to Bérénice, who is a bit concerned that Titus is avoiding her after he has completed the period of mourning he is required to observe after his father's death. Titus wants Antiochus to accompany Bérénice back to her homeland, and since he doesn't have the guts to relate his decision to her, he wants Antiochus to do that as well. She, however, does not want to hear what Antiochus is telling her, and decides that Titus's change of heart is due to the fact that he's jealous of Antiochus. It's tough, because there's a lot of love between them all. I think all three threaten to kill themselves at one point or another (though maybe not Antiochus). It is a sad play, and ends sadly.

Racine mentions in his introduction to this play that the grandeur of art consists of being able to "faire quelque chose à partir de rien" (make something out of nothing), which contributed to his decision to write a play relatively lacking in action. He was also motivated by the fact that his rival Corneille was preparing his own work of theater about the relationship between Titus and Bérénice. A lot of the critical judgements at the end of the play comment on the lack of action, and the fact that the whole play consists of people suffering in love. Many, though, found Bérénice to be a poignant and tragic figure, and it was apparently quite the tearjerker. I too shared their empathy for her, and thought that from our 21st century standards, Titus was really naive, at best, for stringing her along for so long if he wasn't going to have the guts to marry her against the will of his people. Because I was reading the play and not watching it on stage, the lack of characters and the relatively limited scope didn't really bother me. I wanted to read it because of the grandeur of Racine's command of the French language, and I thought it was grand indeed. It's remarkable that he could take a situation with limited action and a small cast, working under the strict constraints imposed on him by the norms of 17th century French theater, and create something so beautiful and enjoyable to read. Because, even though I might seem to be scoffing at the high-emotion/extremely low-action aspect of the work, I did find it really enjoyable.

This play also helped me understand the concepts of continuity of space, time and action in plays. In a few of the other 17th century French works I've read this year, I've read some criticisms about how the playwrights did not obey these continuities. I kind of understood what they meant, but now I feel like I have a solid prototype to refer to. It's remarkable how many rules Racine had to play by, with syllabic, rhyming and continuity constraints limiting his options. One almost wonders how he was able to give characters such lyrical and cohesive voices when working with all these restrictions.

@172 - I have not yet read Juan Moreira but am planning to start it shortly, probably in the next couple of weeks. (Que casualidad!) I also own Hormiga Negra, which I haven't read either, but I figured I'd start with Gutierrez' better known work.

The Vargas Llosa book sounds interesting, though something I would look into once I had read more Onetti. Some of your criticisms remind me a bit of Stephen King, whose nonfiction can be interesting (if a little superficial) but which sometimes gives the sense of the author's own ego getting in the way.

Have you ever read Respiración Artificial? There's an interesting commentary which one of the characters (Emilio Renzi, who is a stand-in for Piglia) discusses how fundamental Arlt's style--which breaks so many rules of what is considered proper style--is to the themes of his work.

@172: The Stephen King comparison is funny. I'm imagining Mario Vargas Llosa being run down and ran over by a deranged hater driving a minivan on the cobbled streets of his idyllic, picturesque Peruvian country home.

68. Vida del ahorcado (Life of the Hanged Man)--Pablo Palacio

I checked this book out along with a book of Pablo Palacio's short stories entitled Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (A man kicked to death), based on an article I read about the author that intrigued me. On the title page, the subtitle reads "Novela Subjetiva," or "Subjective Novel." There is some information at the end of the novel that could lead to multiple (subjective) interpretations of the text. The reader also has to choose how he or she wishes to interpret the text as they progress through the novel, because the voice and perspective of the narrator give rise to questions about his sanity and whether what he is relating to the reader is to be interpreted literally as being representative of reality, or as the babblings of a crazy person. I enjoyed the choices in interpretation given to me, and I once again enjoyed the author's style and ability to construct and develop a character whose mental faculties are questionable. He has a gift for writing from this perspective, and this book was interesting as a bit more extended study of a mentally-abnormal character.

The life of Andrés (the hung man) is presented in a series of vignette-like chapters. He's got a woman, Ana, and he at some point fathers a son as well. He eventually commits an atrocious crime, and is tried in a circus-like courtroom atmosphere. He talks a lot about the cube that people live in, and the beginning feels like something between a clandestine political meeting and a carnival sideshow. The story of his relationship with Ana is told disjointedly, and I especially enjoyed some of the segments describing Andrés's awkward social interactions with Ana and her gaggle of friends. There are some odd moments interspersed, like a couple of pages describing a strange autopsy; there are a couple of dream sequences as well. In truth, there's a dreamy (sometimes nightmarish) quality to most of his ramblings, especially when he takes his young son in his arms and starts talking to him about the world he lives in and what it's all about. The twist at the end is pretty neat, and I think, since this was a really short and quick read, that I will go back and read through it again before returning it to the library.

I wonder if Palacio was a big fan of Franz Kafka. I am, regrettably, not very well-versed in Kafka's work, but I once saw Orson Welles' movie version of The Trial. The judgment of Andrés reminds me of that movie, which I admittedly saw many years ago, and don't really remember at all. His trial has a surreal quality to it, and it descends into an absurd shouting match between judges, lawyers, representatives of student militancies, and other sectors of society who wish to vocalize their outrage at Andrés's crime and its meaning in the greater societal sphere of which they all form a part. It reminded me a bit of L'Étranger as well, because in both cases, the individual is being tried for his socially atypical actions. Ecuadorean society is even less happy with Andrés than Algerian society was with Meursault, and the trial, with the various interruptions and diatribes by different sectors of society, has an even more surreal and disorienting quality than that of Meursault.

I was surprised to find that you can buy a copy of an electronic version of this book on Amazon. I'm certainly not going to spend $10 for the electronic rights to this book (or any other book), but I was surprised and pleased that somebody is out there making books like this available in electronic form.

69. Leopoldo Lugones--Jorge Luis Borges

I had a small window of time the other day to run to the library, and since I hadn't planned on going, I forgot to bring my list of call numbers of books I wanted to check out. I figured that, since their Spanish language collection is grouped by country, I would be able to find what I was looking for without the call numbers. Unfortunately, I was unable to make sense of the order that the countries were in (it seemed like Central America was together, but I didn't find Bolivia where I expected it to be, after Argentina), and I ended up with an increasing sense of desperation as the minutes ticked away and I'd only found one of the books I'd come for. I ended up staring at a couple of shelves of books by Leopoldo Lugones, knowing that I was already in danger of running late but unable to make a choice. I've had reservations about Lugones due to the totalitarian stance he adopted later in life, but I also knew that he was an extremely important early figure in Argentine literature, and now that I had my choice of any of the many books he published, I couldn't decide where to begin. I then saw a thin little edition whose cover read LEOPOLDO LUGONES, and below that, BORGES. I generally avoid biographies of authors I haven't read, preferring to familiarize myself with their work before delving into their past lives. However, in this case I thought, who better than Jorge Luis Borges to introduce me to Lugones and help me figure out where to begin, as well as why I should read and appreciate Lugones's work.

This was a good choice: I was reminded of how much I enjoy Borges when he writes about Argentine topics that are close to his heart. The book has a friendly, inviting tone, highlighting the brilliance of Lugones's language and the importance of his works while offering an apology for his shortcomings. Borges begins by summarizing the poetic currents of the second half of the 20th century in order to show how Lugones fit into the modernizing movement of European and Latin American poetry. Many of Lugones's books show his connection to French and Latin American poets who came before him, and Borges points out that, while these influences are apparent and relatively clear, the originality of Lugones is indisputable and his intense poetry prefigured future Argentine literary production. This manner of creating original work based on clear influences makes me think of one of his contemporaries: Horacio Quiroga. It's easy to think of Quiroga as an Argentine Edgar Allen Poe, but that does not make him unoriginal. He uses Poe's short stories as a blueprint for depicting the terrible power that nature has over man in the wilderness of northeastern Argentina, writing stories of death and madness and of man's often losing struggle against the natural elements that work to overcome him in isolated parts of the world. I hope that Lugones is similar to Quiroga, in that his employment of foreign influences helped him create poetry that is original and important in its own right.

Borges especially admires Lugones's literary criticism of Martín Fierro, entitled El payador, as well as his short stories, which are early examples of Latin American fantastic short fiction (a genre that Borges himself wrote in to great acclaim). He sees Lugones as a patriotic man who loved Argentina and worked tirelessly to delve into its past and interpret the importance of the great figures of the 19th century. To that end, he also wrote an extensive biography of Sarmiento. When I go back to the library, I´ll try to grab El payador and the Cátedra edition of his short works I saw on the shelf, because not only do they carry Borges´s recommendation, but they also align with my interests. I'm intrigued to see how his fantastic short stories from the early 20th century relate to the Argentine authors who came after him, and I'm hoping to see glimpses of Borges, Cortázar, Bioy Cásares and company in his short works. I hope that El Payador gives me a better idea of Martín Fierro's importance, and that Lugones's Argentine passion and technical ability make it an entertaining and informative read.

Lugones is painted as a tireless writer who always came off as a bit cold and unrelatable to his readers. In books like this one, Borges is able to not only tell me about Lugones's creations and his importance in the canon of Argentine literature; he is also able to make me feel like he is my friend. There is a warmth and familiarity to his writing that I really appreciate, and he seems to be saying here that Lugones lacked these qualities. His eventual suicide is imagined in the closing of the book as, in part, an admission of his failure to connect with others:

"Perhaps he is worthy of deeper investigation. Perhaps it is worth reading behind the lines, guessing, or simply imagining the story; the story of a man who, without knowing, refuted passion and laboriously erected tall and illustrious verbal edifices until he was overcome by coldness and solitude. Then, that man, master of all words and of all of their splendor, felt in his heart that reality is not verbal and can be incommunicable and appalling, and he went, silently and solitarily, as the sun set over an island, to seek death."

70. Xaimaca--Ricardo Güiraldes

I once read a statement about the work of Ricardo Güiraldes by an Argentine author who said that he admired the book Xaimaca even more than Don Segundo Sombra. While I can't remember the context or the source of this statement, I did make a note to myself that I should read Xaimaca some day, because I really like Don Segundo Sombra. I finally found a copy and read it. I would have enjoyed it, too, if not for a rather ominous dark cloud that hung over the sometimes-inspired travel writing of Mr. Güiraldes. Marcos, a young Argentine, sets out to travel up the Pacific coast, meets a brother and sister named Peñalba and Clara, falls in love with Clara, and decides to continue on with them on a boat to Jamaica instead of parting ways in Peru. He documents his travels in diary form, with their ship passing through the Panama Canal and continuing on to the island of Jamaica. Clara, and his increasingly passionate feelings for her, eclipse his observations of the seas that surround their traveling vessel, and the journal becomes more romantic than documentary in nature as their romance blossoms, hidden from their third companion, Peñalba.

Things pick up when they get to Jamaica: Marcos and Clara's feelings for each other are in full bloom, and the description of their lush island surroundings, told from the perspective of a young man in the throes of a budding romance, are spectacular. The entire island is alive, and the world of mountains, ocean, clouds, trees, rivers, streams and forests revolves around Marcos as if it were an animate being. I enjoyed this section of the book, where his sensations are hightened by his emotional state, and he channels his romantic feelings into his observations of the new world around him. His writing, and the human characteristics and actions that he assigns to the natural world around him, remind me of Oliverio Girondo. The two were contemporaries, and they were both avid travelers, so perhaps they influenced each other's writing. For Güiraldes, a bungalow in Jamaica "opens its empty arms to us as we leave the hotel's dining room, with the secret illusion of concentrating the silence of the equinox," "sugar refineries exhale a sticky odor of molasses," and "my window, full of wonder, opened its square mouth to the night." Statements like this, rolled off one after another, reminded me of Girondo's “Taverns that sing with the voice of an orangutan” or “Caravans of mountains camping out in the outskirts." I enjoy this method of personification, and was glad to encounter it again in the writing of Güiraldes. It works well with travel writing, complementing the wonder and novelty of the sights and sounds of foreign places.

Alas, the dark cloud hovering over this book is a racist dark cloud. Marcos makes many horrible, indefensible comments regarding the indigenous and black people that he sees during his trip. It's an angry, beligerant racism, and it appalled me. The indigenous women who come on their boat in Peru to sell their wares are representative of an earlier, less-developed humanity whose vestigal existence in the Marcos's "civilized" world is unfortunate and lamentable. Black people are dirty, untrustworthy, simian, fear-inspiring and, basically, a scourge upon his otherwise hygienically-sound journey through Panama and the Caribbean. I imagine his character greeting Nazi Germany's racial policy with great enthusiasm, and one gets the feeling that he would whole-heartedly support the extermination of races that he considers to be less-civilized than his own. I was greatly disappointed to read these comments. The book does appear to be a somewhat-autobiographical account of a journey that Güiraldes himself made with his young wife, and I have a hard time imagining that Marcos's views don't mirror Güiraldes's own. I had previously held the author in high regard, based on his Don Segundo Sombra and also on his influential role in Argentine literature. I certainly can't respect a man with these views, and I think that I will try to investigate a bit more into his life and see if I can find more information about him. I know that he dabbled in Hinduism and other spiritual stuff later in life, so it's possible that he at some point renounced any racist feelings he previously held. However, it's still shocking to see statements like the ones made by the narrator of this book, written by a writer who was so celebrated and respected by the Buenos Aires literary circles of his time. It makes me wonder: how many Argentine writers read this book and didn't bat an eye, or even worse, nodded their heads in agreement?

#179: Even if I could read that one, I am not sure that I would given your statements regarding the racism it contains.

I wonder if it is any coincidence that so many of the Nazis who escaped after WWII went to Argentina.

Interesting review of Xaimaca and comments about Güiraldes, Matt. That reminds me; I must read this month's issue of Words Without Borders, as this month's issue focuses on contemporary Argentinian literature.

180: Yeah, the Nazi presence in South America is a bit disconcerting, to say the least. I remember passing through towns in southern Chile with lots of blond, blue eyed residents, and I couldn't help but wonder about the circumstances that brought them there. Roberto Bolaño wrote a lot about Nazi types. I've been wanting to read his La literatura nazi en America, which is a series of fictional profiles of South American writers with Nazi connections. Estrella distante also focused on a disturbed, right wing type.

@181: I saw that, and have been meaning to look into some of those authors. I'm not too up on contemporary literature in general, and I'm always looking for more recent books that inspire me.

71. De donde son los cantantes (From Where the Singers are From)--Severo Sarduy

I was coming off a string of books from Argentina, and I decided that I needed a change of scenery, so I spent a bit of time browsing the Cuban literature section of the library. I got an early Alejo Carpentier novel I hadn't read, a collection of José Lezama Lima's short fictions, a novel by Zoé Valdés, and two books by Severo Sarduy. I decided to start with the Cátedra edition of the latter's De donde son los cantantes, hoping that the 75-page introduction would help me get to know the author and prepare me for this book and Cobra, the other novel of his that I grabbed. I was thankful for the biographical information, written by a friend of the author's who has done extensive scholarly investigations on Sarduy and his work. He seems like an admirable, undeniably creative person, and the portrait of him made me excited not only to read this book but also to track down some of his writing for Tel Quel Magazine in Paris, for which he wrote a great deal of literary criticism. The introductory study was long but justifiable considering the tangled web of influences and ideas that went into the creation of De donde son los cantantes. It speaks of the cultural and stylistic influences of Carpentier and Lezama Lima and how they helped shape Sarduy's writing; the historic east-to-west migration of ideas, including those related to music and politics, across Cuba; the tripartite (African, Chinese, Spanish) cultural heritage of the country and the influence of the various parts on Cuban music and national culture; and a brief explanation and classification of the various figures of Cuban religious practices and how they are woven into Sarduy's novel. All of this serves to prepare the reader for a strange, experimental work that is divided into three parts, with each part related to one of the three parts of Cuban heritage as defined here (Chinese, African and Spanish).

In the first part, a General is pursuing a performer from a Havana Chinatown cabaret named Flor de Loto, following her through a chain of shady locales with eastern-influenced performances and clouds of illicit smoke. At one point, there is a performance on stage where Auxilio and Socorro, two transvestites who figure in the telling of all three of the stories, undergo a series of metamorphoses on stage. The general is not able to catch up with Flor de Loto, who is protected by Auxilio and Socorro, who parry his advances and end up convincing him to give them a bunch of stuff in exchange for access to the woman (who actually isn't a woman but another transvestite). The author himself occasionally interjects into the conversations between Auxilio and Socorro, and there are scattered references to Chinese texts, Spanish baroque literature, and a hodgepodge of other sources. I was glad for the footnotes, because it would have been even more difficult to understand what was going on without them.

The second part is a gloss of a ten-line epitath written on the gravestone of Dolores Rondón, a Camagüeyan woman who meets and wins the affection of the politician Mortal Pérez and ascends with him as he gains increasing political power and moves on up to Havana, where she lives in the lap of luxury with a small squad of servants and handlers, drinking rum and getting her hair done in a series of colors. The good times eventually come to an end and she comes home to Camagüey defeated and humbled.

The third part, the longest of the three, tells the story of Auxilio and Socorro's procession across Spain and Cuba, first in pursuit of Mortal, and later accompanying a decaying wooden carving of Jesus, whose journey across Cuba from East to West mirrors the procession that Fidel Castro and his victorious revolutionary troops made after the Batista left Cuba. The procession ends in a strange, futuristically-distorted Havana, where the Jesus figure in the final stages of decomposition is met by a blanketing of white snow and helicopters patrolling the skies, ominously monitoring the procession.

The three parts of the story are interrelated but don't particularly rely on one another. It's an experimental book, and I struggled a bit to get through it. I have a friend who often utilizes a particular vocabulary and series of references to past shared experiences and interests when he talks to his friends, making it difficult for other people, who did not share these interests or experiences, to understand what he's talking about. It makes for constantly exclusive conversations, and while these can be a lot of fun, they often frustrate those people in the group who haven't gotten to know him well enough to build up the shared experiences needed to penetrate into his web of references to Montreal Expos baseball history, Argentine politics, pick-up basketball at the park, and other odds and ends. His commentary is often cryptic, obscene, sensationalistic, hilarious and infuriating. People have strong feelings about their experiences with him, although as they become more and more initiated into his unique conversational methods and their charms, he tends to grow on them. Reading Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes was a lot like talking to my friend. When Sarduy blends things that I'm interested in and know about, like Cuban music and Spanish baroque literature, it can be a lot of fun. When the references stray from my knowledge base, it can be very, very difficult to follow along with an already unorthodox and fragmented story. I enjoyed reading this book and was happy to have the critical edition with introductory study and footnotes to help supplant my relative ignorance of a lot of the reference material. As I read more by him and come to better understand his perspective, he might grow on me. I can also imagine a lot of people I know putting this book down nearly imediately. It's an intriguing direction to take as a writer, away from a universal language that can be understood by all readers and toward a more particular, individual representation of one's heritage and country.

72. Enrico IV--Luigi Pirandello

A man in early 20th century Italy enjoys the dramatic arts and plunges whole-heartedly into a planned medieval reenactment, learning the role of Enrico IV. He really gets into the character of the former monarch, who had a longstanding power struggle with Pope Gregorio VII in the 11th century. In the reenactment, the man and his friends participate in a costumed cavalcade, during which his rival for the love of Matilda, Balcredi, causes him to fall from his horse. He hits his head and when he comes to, he believes that he is truly Enrico IV. His nephew, the wealthy di Nolli, decides to recreate the world of Enrico IV in the small Italian community where the accident occurred, allowing his uncle to live on in his madness as the royal figure that he believes himself to be. He hires actors to accompany Enrico IV, and when the man's friends and relatives visit him, they dress in costumes of the epoch, and talk about things pertinent to the life of the former king. Now, twenty years later, the whole group of them (di Nolli, now-married Balcredi and Matilda, along with their daughter Frida, and the doctor they've hired to examine their friend and relative) have come to town to try and bring him out of his delusion once and for all by recreating the fateful scene of the cavalcade, only with Frida (the spitting image of her mother) playing the man's beloved Matilda from twenty years ago. They hope to stun him out of his delusion and bring him back to reality.

What they don't know is that their friend, while he was indeed crazy and convinced he was Enrico IV for a good twelve years, has since come around to reality, while choosing to keep on living in the delusion. He's noticed that we all play roles in life, and that we all wear one mask or another our relationships with the people around us. Once these roles fully come together in adulthood, we're just about as stuck in them as he has been in Enrico IV. His potential role in the real world, as a formerly-mentally-ill man who lost his lover to his rival at the same time that he lost his sanity, and who lived the past 12 years as an 11th century monarch, is too much for him to bear, and he has decided to keep on playing his role and living in the world that has been created around him. The visit of his friends and relatives brings him face to face with the reality that he has walled himself away from, and causes him to confront them about their supposed act of good will and the hypocrisy of forcedly unmasking him, when they themselves are playing their own ridiculous roles in life.

I read this play over a couple of weeks, during my morning and afternoon breaks at work. I sometimes wished I had more continuity, but in general I like sitting at my desk and looking up new words on the internet as I slowly read in Italian. I thought this play was wonderful. This is the second play by Luigi Pirandello that I've read, and like the first one, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, it tells a story and makes some serious observations on the human condition as well. I read somewhere that, despite obvious and striking similarities, Pirandello is generally not considered to have been a major influence on the famous existentialist writers of the middle half of the 20th century. This is remarkable to me. I suppose that in the European climate of the early 20th century, it makes sense that different people in different places would pursue similar currents of thinking at the same time; nonetheless, I can't help but think that the literary, creative classes of other Western European capitals would have read and discussed his plays and novels, and that his influence must have helped mold the thinking of future generations. His examination of the human experience and his investigations on the difficulty of interpersonal communication and understanding, and also his characters who despair at the roles they've been locked into and are forced to continue playing year after year, are all intimately related with our existence as humans. I'd like to find more information about the influence his work had on 20th century European thought, so that I could better understand how his plays and novels influenced other existentialist writers. Of special interest to me would be any possible connection with Argentine literature. Argentina experienced a massive influx of Italians during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, and I wonder if Pirandello's works were brought to Argentina with any of the waves of immigrants, as well as how they might have been received by Argentine writers.

There was one moment in the play that I found particularly moving: after Enrico IV has come out to the actors who have been taking part in the extended reenactment, they're amazed that he's kept up with the act even after recovering his sanity. They suddenly realize that the old man who serves as Enrico IV's scribe and writed down the items of the day every night on medieval parchment is about to arrive. They laugh about how funny it is that this old man, perhaps slowly losing his touch with reality as he ages, comes every night to reenact the work of a scribe from he eleventh century. Enrico IV chastises them for laughing, saying that this man's devotion to him in his madness is far from funny, and that the seriousness with which he carries out his nightly work is sad and tragic if it is anything. They, who are play-acting in their jobs as paid actors in the indulgent fantasy of a wealthy man who wants to let his relative live on in a dream, think that they are able to escape their roles when they are off the clock, and laugh at the old man's seriousness. However, in Enrico IV's world, where everyone is locked into their own role (often, as in his case, a tragic one), they are no different from the old man who is the butt of their laughter. The old man then comes in and humbly complys with his nightly duty, as the actors look on.

I also enjoyed the fact that Enrico IV was never mentioned by his real name. The rigor of his separation from his actual, real existence reminded me a lot of Don Quijote's separation from Alonso Quijano.

Hey, I just found your thread. Fascinating list, and great reviews.

As you're interested in Latin America, I highly recommend One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. Argueta is an El Salvadorean writer. The book was written in 1980 and is about village life at the time of the Death Squads. Beautifully written and powerful.

You might also be interested in The Informers by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez, which deals with issues of guilt and responsibility while telling of life in WWII-era Colombia.

Comments on a couple of your books for this year:

I read (and loved) Meyrink's The Golem a few years back, immediately after a visit to Prague. Being Jewish myself, the subject of the history and mythology of the Prague Jewish ghetto is a fascinating one to me. I agree with your assessment that the surreal handling of the subject matter works extremely well.

I also found The Moviegoer to be a memorable book. I read it in the 80s while I was living not only in New Orleans, but in Gentilly, the neighborhood in which the story takes place. If you're looking for more Percy to read, I highly recommend The Second Coming.

Matt, I just spent ages reading your thread, absolutely enthralled by your amazing reviews. They are so well written. Will keep checking in to see what you read next.

@185: Thanks for the suggestions, Jerry! I just added Argueta's Un día en la vida to my list of books to pick up from the library. I've been a bit distracted from my goal of reading at least one book from each Spanish-speaking country, and this will be my first El Salvadorean novel.

You're a fan of jazz? Are you familiar with Julio Cortázar? He's my favorite "jazz" writer (and one of my favorites in general). Las armas secretas has an extended short story inspired by the tumultuous life of Charlie Parker, and there are tons of conversations about jazz in Rayuela. I love jazz music. As I've been looking back on some books that I enjoyed in high school (The Moviegoer, The Day of the Locust), I've also been revisiting some of my favorite jazz records from those days. I used to play the trumpet in high school, so I've got a lot of Blue Note Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard records from the 60s on my mp3 player at the moment. It's really cool to me to play an album I haven't heard for years: my memories are so vague of that time, but a lot of the heads seem so very familiar...Those albums are so perfect, and the musicians' genius is something I can appreciate without fully (or even partially) comprehending.

186: Thanks, I'm very flattered! I've enjoyed writing my thoughts about the books I read, I think it helps me appreciate them more and better understand why I like them.

Hi Matt, Glad to give a suggestion that interests you. Argueta's life story is quite interesting, as well. He had to go into exile in Costa Rica during the Death Squad days, but is now a cultural minister for the El Salvadorean government.

Yes, I am a jazz enthusiast. I spent several years as a jazz journalist and spent most of the 1980s as a jazz radio producer in New Orleans. Now I have a weekly jazz show that you can hear live online at www.kzyx.org every Monday from 2 to 4 PM Pacific time.

Going back to albums that were meaningful to you many years ago is always a wonderful experience. It's amazing how the music, musicians and memories come alive so vividly in an instant.

73. Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling (In the days of Clemente Colling)--Felisberto Hernández

I've come a long way in the past year in terms of my ability to access books by Felisberto Hernández, from not being able to find anything by him in the library or for purchase at a reasonable price, to being able to go to the library and have my choice of any of his published works. I read a book of his short stories earlier this year and was impressed, so I decided to check out a couple of his novellas, Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling and El caballo perdido. I started with the former, in which the narrator recounts a series of childhood events related to his memory of his blind piano instructor, Clemente Colling. He explains at the beginning that many of his memories aren't necessarily related to his direct contact with Colling, and indeed, Colling doesn't make his first appearance until about the thirtieth page (of an 82-page novella). He writes about taking the streetcar across Montevideo and seeing how formerly large estates have been divided up into lesser and dissatisfyingly run-down properties; the three elderly women whom his family visits at their home, and how their shared solitude and idiosyncracies appear to him through the lens of passed time; and his distant aunt Petrona, who used to live with them and had a very acute aesthetic sensibility, which she employed to find humor in peoples' unique expressions when they observe performance art. At this point, I'd begun to follow the flow of the narrator's memories, and the whole section about people's mannerisms at concerts and other productions was mesmerizing. One night, when I'd just gotten back from a Halloween party and I was a little drunk, I read a couple of pages about the narrator's young self expectantly arriving at a concert hall to see the blind virtuoso Clemente Colling give a performance. He describes the auditorium as it slowly fills with people, anxiously surveying his surroundings then shifting his thinking toward his own adolescent self, in a heavily-semicoloned reflection that was one of my favorite parts of the book:

"Later, as I leaned against the railing below the stage, I started to feel that sleepy silence that occurs before concerts, long before they commence; a silence made much more profound by the first whispers and the dry creaking of the first seats; when one is anxious to listen, yet in waiting finds more to see than to hear; when one's spirit, without knowing, waits laboriously; when it labors almost as if in a dream, letting things arrive, waiting for them and observing them with an infantile and profound distraction; when it occurs to one to make an effort to anticipate the coming concert and look at the program for the hundredth time; when, in evaluating one's life, illusions are ventured; when one feels the anguish of not being securely attached to any part of this world and swears to find his place; when one dreams of attracting the attention of others some day and has certain feelings of sadness and rancor because at this moment he does not; when one becomes hysterical and imagines a future that puts his skin to sleep and leaves his scalp tingling; a future that will never be shared with anyone because he imagines himself too highly, and because it comes to be the most closely held secret of a person with a certain degree of modesty; because it may form the most profound aspect of one's aesthetic sense of life; because when one doesn't know what he is capable of, he cannot know if his dreams represent vanity or pride."

With Colling, the narrator studies harmonics. Colling is a Frenchman who claims to have been brought to South America by a concert promoter who hired him and then screwed him over when he got there, leaving him unable to return to his (supposedly) noble French existence. He lives in poverty in Uruguay, and his social status combined with his blindness have caused his personal hygiene to decline from what the narrator assumes was a clean life in France. When he visits Colling's home later in the book, he observes that there are bedbugs crawling around his instructor's bed, and reflects that, while this would be cause for alarm and shame amongst his family, he can understand how Colling's disability (and alcoholism) help him coexist with these pests in his tenement home. The narrator's admiration for his teacher, with his combination of technical skill and remarkable memory (he is able to mimic any famous composer, and claims to have transcribed from memory a 45-minute piece that he had heard twice), are tempered by the poor hygiene and a series of crass comments, including a nasty, despective statement about his (Colling's) mother. He observes the effects that years of decline and underappreciation have had on Colling's pride, and is troubled by the ugliness and bitterness that peeks through on occasion in his instructor's behavior.

I've noticed that Hernández's characters may be based rather loosely (or not so loosely) on himself. There are a great deal of introverted, provincial pianists in his stories, and both the narrator and Clemente Colling are pianists. As I read, I thought: is the narrator a reflection of Felisberto Hernández, an adult looking back on a series of childhood memories? Or is Clemente Colling, the downtrodden pianist who gives lessons to the young narrator, Hernández's alter ego and a reflection of the author's successes and failures as a musician? Or both? As I read, I thought it was probably both, at least to some extent. With that in mind, the relationship between childhood memories and adult life that Hernández traces in this story was especially interesting, imagining that both characters may embody aspects of his own memories and experiences. I imagined that the adult narrator, in looking back on his childhood interactions with an adult who was in some ways similar to the person that he himself turned out to be, would find his recollections to be an especially fertile ground for self-reflection. Colling certainly may have sensed similarities between himself and the narrator as he gave him piano lessons, and the narrator may have begun to imagine a not-so-rosy future in which he himself, despite his talent and his desire, might end up like Colling some day. As he looks back on his time with Colling, as an adult, it becomes a complex game of memories. I liked thinking about all this as I read the book, and I though the possiblities became even more complex when searching for similarities between myself, past and present, and the two characters.

After reading, I did a little research on Centro Virtual Cervantes, which has a great page devoted to Felisberto Hernández at http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/fhern... I found that Clemente Colling was an actual person: Felisberto Hernández's piano instructor during his teenage years. As in the story, Colling did come to live with Hernández's family for a time, and he apparently behaved poorly in their home, seemingly unwilling to follow the conventional protocols of cohabitation. Hernández's mother ended up giving him the boot. I was maybe a bit off the mark in seeing the author in Colling, but I still think that my idea is valid: the way we recall the people in our lives is influenced to a large degree by who we are, and by who we were when we knew them. No matter what, this book proved to be quite thought-provoking, despite its short length. It was very pleasant and enjoyable, and I'm happy to see that it's included in a translated anthology of Hernández's work called Lands of Memory.

Matt, have you read any of Ricardo Piglia's books yet? Just curious. I am reading his The Absent City at the moment and finding it very interesting.

@190: I haven't, and thanks for the reminder, because I've been meaning to...I'll pick up a couple on my next trip to the library. He's one of those "autores cultos" whose books seem to be more accessible (i.e. cheaper) in English translation than the original Spanish here in the States. He sounds like my kind of guy, so hopefully it'll be worth the wait.

#191: I think a knowledge of Argentinian politics, of which I know nothing, would probably be helpful in reading The Absent City, but I am enjoying the read nonetheless.

Edited to correct TS

74. Monsieur Pain--Roberto Bolaño

In my most recent borrowing spree from the library, I couldn't help picking up this early novel by Roberto Bolaño, and as I was trying to decide which book to read next, I couldn't help but pull the Bolaño novel from my shelf. I used to do the same thing with Kurt Vonnegut books: I'd check out a bunch of books from the library, and I'd be excited about reading all of them, but I'd invariably choose the Vonnegut one first or second. I usually enjoyed Vonnegut's books, just as I usually enjoy Bolaño's, which is probably why they never stay on my shelf for very long. Also, based on their writing, I like them as people (for the most part; Bolaño seems a little shady), which may make me more motivated to read their books. Also, they've got a lot of shorter novels and short story collections, and sometimes I'm in the mood for a quick, relatively easy read.

Monsieur Pain is the story of Pierre Pain, a war veteran living in Paris in the 1930s, living off a veteran's pension and practicing a form of alternative medicine involving magnetic forces known as mesmerism (also known as "animal magnetism"). He's contacted by a lady whose husband died despite Pain's attempt to work his magic (science?) on the sick man. She now has a friend whose husband is in the hospital with, among other unidentifiable problems, the hiccups. The man is Peruvian, and his name is Vallejo, which perhaps means more to the reader than it does to Pain. He's shyly enamored with the woman, Madame Reynaud, and also figures that she's asking for his help to give him a chance to redeem himself for her husband's death (which she doesn't feel was really his fault anyways). Vallejo is stationed in a bizarrely-constructed hospital whose hallway spirals around and around, with the whole building rising floor by floor in this spiral pattern. Pain is also being followed by some Spaniards, who eventually bribe him to stay away from Vallejo. He later decides he still wants to see his potential patient, but is not allowed to. Madame Reynaud has also disappeared, and he begins a strange journey around Paris, falling into some strange and horrifying situations and meeting an array of colorful characters, both strangers and old acquaintences from his past.

This book reminded me of a David Lynch movie: many ominous and often scary situations, lots of strange, mysterious characters, and a limited amount of resolution at the end. There was less sex than in David Lynch movies, though, as Pain is a really timid guy who wistfully wishes he were involved with Madame Reynaud but has never made any indication to her that he would like to be with her during their extended friendship that follows her husband's death. The plot follows somewhat of a movie-style arc, with our hero, Pierre Pain, introduced in the beginning. We meet some characters who will interact with him, learn a bit about his past and current life, and find out that his basic goal is to access and try to treat Vallejo. His journey to meet his patient ends up taking a great deal of twists and turns, and he meets a lot of secondary characters with interesting side stories (like the brothers who create high-quality underwater dioramas of transportation accidents, whom he meets at an odd, jungle-themed bar). He faces more and more obstacles, and he ends up in some scary situations that threaten the possible resolution of his quest to treat Vallejo's hiccups, if not his life. Then, there's an ending that provides some closure, although not a whole lot. Reinforcing the movie-like structure of this book, Bolaño also includes an epilogue providing information about what happens to each of the characters in the years after the story ends. I liked this book, and was entertained by Pain's often-cryptic journey across 1930s Paris. A lot of the secondary characters were really interesting, and I would like to see this movie made. I'll bet that somewhere in Latin America, Europe or the United States, there'll be a Monsieur Pain in theatres; I'd even go so far to say it'll probably happen within the next ten years, based on how much people seem to like Bolaño. I also imagine that a lot of people wouldn't like this book (or the movie), because a lot of people want neater stories with more closure. A lot of people don't like David Lynch movies for the same reason, I think.

I also enjoyed the brief prologue from Bolaño, which explains that he wrote this story in 1983, submitted it to some literary competitions in Spain, and won a couple of these competitions. He had a story in another book of his about his career as a competitive writer trying to piece together a living by submitting entries to every literary competition he could find. In the story, he has a long correspondence with a fellow competitor, and they come to be penpals, discussing each others' situations in the obscure world of Spanish literary contests. He says that this book, Monsieur Pain, is one of the works that he talks about in that story. I'd like to re-read that story, and will try to track it down. I liked this book in a similar way to how I used to like the books of Kurt Vonnegut that I rushed to read after checking them out from the library: I related to the main character, I enjoyed the story, and I was satisfied to get a little bit better idea of the author and his perspective on the world. I liked Estrella Distante better, and I've greatly enjoyed the four first books of 2666, but I'd recommend this along with those books to anyone who would like to get into Bolaño's novels.

#193: I may have to wait a while on that one, as I just finished 2666 at the end of October, but I am definitely interested. Thanks for the review and recommendation, Matt.

Good review, Bolano has certainly been talked about a bit on LT recently.

Matt, way behind here, read your comments on Leopoldo Lugones and meant to respond ages ago. I've read some of Lugones' short stories. Las fuerzas extrañas is in translation, which is how I first read it. (King County library had it in translation.) It's a pretty unique collection. Some of the fiction is sort of straightforward supernatural stuff, like a toad that comes back from the grave and murders the person who killed it. A lot of the stories are science fiction, where one character describes the pseudo-science behind his new invention for most of the story, and sometimes there's a horrifying or funny twist near the end. Luckily, most of the stories are short, but it does get a little repetitious.

Cuentos fatales was sort of peculiar, starting of in the science fiction/fantasy vein of Fuerzas extrañas before going off into a weird philosophical fixation fatalism as a sort of force. (The title seems particularly ominous given Lugones' suicide.) I thought La guerra gaucha was pretty interesting. Lugones writes about the battles fought between montoneros and colonial forces in the Salta/Jujuy region of Argentina. I was a little disappointed that it didn't really give a sense of how each individual battle/encounter contributed to the war or altered its outcome, but is an interesting portrayal of the place and the battles.

If you're not familiar with it (Borges may not have touched on it), I recommend this Clárin article which goes into the life of Lugones' son and granddaughter, which is quite interesting.

Also, just thought I'd mention I'm reading Juan Moreira now. It's interesting, though it feels a bit hagiographic. The portrayal of Moreira feels like it owes a lot to Rousseau's "noble savage," especially compared with Martin Fierro, who is a more ambiguous character.

196: That's a crazy article. I studied in Santiago, Chile for a semester, and one time at the bar, two of my friends were talking about how one of their grandfathers had tortured people as a member of Pinochet's military regime, and the other's father had been tortured by that same regime. Listening to my friends talk, they all had stories about the coup of 1973 and how their families were involved, on one side or another. Living in the United States, with its 300 million people and multiple major cities, it was hard for me to imagine how much those military dictatorships affected every family, in countries with one major city and a fraction of the United States' population. Lugones' granddaughter being tortured to death using methods brought to Argentina by her father is a bit more understandable to me.

I've got a Cátedra edition of Las fuerzas extrañas on my shelf of books to read. I hope that, in the best case, they'll be comparable to Quiroga's best short stories in their Argentine Edgar Allen Poe-esque glory. They're intriguing to me as early precursors of the stellar Argentine fantastic short fiction of the middle of the 20th century. My hopes aren't too high, so I hope the stories meet them at least. I'm also looking forward to Juan Moreira, which is on my shelf next to Las fuerzas extrañas.

As always, glad to have someone so interested in Argentine literature to discuss books with!

@194: I've been dragging my feet with La parte de Archimboldi, but I really liked the first four parts of 2666. I really need to finish that book!

196: I very much enjoy Bolaño, presumably for a lot of the same reasons that many other people do, but also because, like me, he loves Latin American literature. He often wears his influences and admirations on his sleeve, and is not afraid to say how much he dislikes certain authors and everything they represent.

75. Let Your Mind Alone--James Thurber

I recently moved to a new apartment, and as I was unpacking my books, I noticed that I had three books by James Thurber, only one of which I had read. This is odd because that one book, My Life and Hard Times, is one of my all-time favorites. I think I took it from my grandfather's house when I was in second or third grade, and I remember lying in bed reading it, giggling over nighttime incidents, familial misunderstandings and amusing anecdotes from turn-of-the-century Ohio. I'd go so far as to say it was my favorite book when I was nine or ten. I loved the stories, and I also loved the funny pictures and captions, many of which still stick out in my mind today. I can still imagine the pictures and stories that accompanied phrases like "Some nights she threw them all," "He fell victim to the same disease that was plaguing the elms," and "Balencicwcz was trying to think." It occurs to me that James Thurber is probably not the most common favorite author of young children, and part of my enduring appreciation of his book stems from the fact that it's just so strange to me that I could have been so enthralled by it when I was so young. I have read it multiple times as an adult, and it continues to be hilarious to me. I gave it to my girlfriend as well, and she laughed her way through it. I think I've kept on coming back to My Life and Hard Times, rather than reading the other books of his I own, because I want to remember those stories that I loved as a kid and reencounter them at different points in my life. However, as I was unpacking I decided it was time to move on and give Let Your Mind Alone a try. It consists of a series of columns poking fun at self-help authors of the 1930s, followed by 28 other columns written by Thurber in the mid-30s, dealing with a variety of topics.

Self-help authors were a pretty easy target for Mr. Thurber. In general, it's pretty easy to poke holes in the theories of people who have "figured out" how to be successful and happy in life. He shows how ridiculous their advice is when applied to specific situations where it could not be followed successfully, and he often identifies it as just plain stupid. For example, one lady advises that a man who is concerned with how to successfully maneuver his date to their table at a restaurant should practice the scenario with his sister. Mr. Thurber first wonders why one should even be worried about this, then presents two siblings who are constantly bickering and making each other miserable in the way that siblings sometimes do. He imagines if, in the middle of their arguing and making fun of each other, the brother asked the sister if she could please help him imagine their house as a restaurant so that he could figure out how he will navigate his date to their table at the restaurant that night. Obviously, she would just laugh in his face and make fun of him some more for making such a dumb request. The whole section is filled with anecdotes like this. My favorite column involves a refutation of one author's assertion that one must "live firmly grounded in reality." Thurber recounts a time that he tried to get in free to a dog show in order to write a column about it, and how he was turned away by a bullying show organizer. He spent the rest of the day wandering around town, imagining all the witty things he could have responded to the bully, and how, in his reimagination of the situation, he could have triumphed over the man spectacularly, shaming him and winning admiration from onlookers. He points out that this daylong daydream provided him far, far more pleasure than he would have experienced if he kept himself grounded in reality.

The remaining columns are a hodgepodge of situational humor, satire of writers such as Proust and Faulkner, anecdotes of daily life in New York, and other odds and ends. They were fun to read, and I wondered whether they would have pleased me as much as My Life and Hard Times did so many years ago. Obviously, the satire would have gone over my head, but many of the stories are similar in nature. He's a funny, neurotic man, and I imagine him to be a bit like Woody Allen. I've only really seen one Woody Allen movie, so I don't have a lot to go on, but they do seem to be similarly self-effacing and willing to highlight their own idiosyncracies for the sake of humor. At his best, Thurber makes me laugh out loud. This volume wasn't as consistently funny as My Life and Hard Times, but it certainly had its moments. I especially enjoyed the final column, which recounted some of his adventures in the world without the aid of his glasses. He describes the fuzzy world of the man who must venture out of his home without his broken lenses as being a bit like Oz, and a bit like Wonderland. I thought his descriptions of things he's (mistakenly) seen and done with limited eyesight were hysterical.

On the negative side, he often seems sexist. I've tried to think of a justification for his perspective on women, because by contemporary standards, his words are not exactly progressive. He has an entire article about why he hates women, and many other articles are rather mean-spirited with respect to the opposite sex. On the other hand, he also has a lot of articles about men who act foolishly and essentially dig their own graves with their spouses, and I think you could safely say that many of his articles are just as degrading toward males as females. There's a strong element of competition between men and women in his conception of intersexual relationships, and he seems to want very badly to win this competition at times, while understanding that he (and other men) are often losing it. He seems a bit scared or intimidated by women, but he also seems to respect them in his own 1930s way. I did a little internet research and couldn't find too much information about James Thurber's sexism, so maybe for now I'll just avoid the stories that seem distasteful to me and stick to the ones that I find funny. I don't think I fully understand the nuances of 1930s New Yorker humor, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge someone based on my own, late 20th century upbringing. I also remember reading Thurber recognized the fundamental importance of his mother in the development of his comedic talents. I would like to think that he does respect women, even though he's afraid of throwing a javelin because he fears he wouldn't be able to throw it as far as Babe Didrickson, which would prove that a woman is capable of throwing an object farther than he can (a scary thought indeed for Mr. Thurber).

Congrats!

Congratulations on reaching 75! Just your comments on not getting 1930's New York humour, it is a different era for sure and with completely different ways of thinking. I found The Great Gatsby was a good read for me to understand a bit more about the era at least. It makes me wonder if the 1920-30's humour was influenced by the prohibition at the time?

Congratulations, Matt!

@200-203: Thanks! I've enjoyed keeping closer track of the books I read, and I think having a goal of reading 75 books in a year helped me read more...and I love to read, so I'm very happy about that.

202: Funny you mention it...I'm about to read Gatsby again. I was thinking about that book the other day as I was watching Boardwalk Empire, which also paints a pretty compelling picture of prohibition-era America.

76. El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville)--Attributed to Tirso de Molina

Don Juan is a pretty famous guy, and I had been meaning to read this play for quite some time so that I could see him in his original manifestation. I'd read José Zorilla's 19th century interpretation of the story, so I had an idea of what was going to happen, but I was still surprised by the dastardly ways of the 17th century Don Juan. He admits, straight up, that what he enjoys most in life is tricking a woman out of her honor, and that's basically what he does for the entire play. He runs through four women, deceiving them, pretending to be their fiancé, promising to marry them, and doing whatever is necessary to obtain their physical favors. He laughs off the warnings of his servant, Catalinón, as well as his father, both of whom warn him that he'll pay for his sins, if not in this life, then in the next one. He jumps from place to place, from Italy to the shores of Spain to Sevilla and on, leaving a wake of dishonored women behind, never doubting that he'll be able to get away with it all in the end because his father works for the king. Eventually, he makes a joke about how only a dead man would be able to do him in, and soon afterward, an animate statue of the man he recently killed during his escape from the home of Ana de Ulloa knocks at his door, accepting Don Juan's invitation to join him at his table then inviting the trickster to the church in order to return the favor. They have a final showdown there, because Don Juan, sure to the end that his smarts and trickery will allow him to escape from any situation, gladly accepts the statue's ominous invitation to dine at the church.

I really enjoyed this play, and was surprised by the title character's complete lack of remorse for his acts. It was surprising to see a nobleman depicted in such a negative light, because his priveleged upbringing got him off the hook for most of the play; even the king was content to turn a blind eye to a certain extent and seek a solution that would make the Don Juan problem disappear, rather than punishing him for his lies and deceit. My idea of Don Juan was more that of a good-natured lover of the ladies, and this guy was certainly not good-natured. In fact, he took a great deal of pleasure in leaving women without their honor, which in those times was a pretty awful and shameful thing. Although it was not particularly graphic, at lease not as much as I remember La Celestina being, I was still surprised by the play's treatment of the upper classes and its depiction of an out-of-control child of privilege. Don Juan was indeed recognizable to me, just not quite as the guy I thought he was going to be. I've known some young people who did bad things and thought they could get away with them due to their parents' social status, and it was interesting to think that they are the contemporary incarnations of the legendary Don Juan.

I also enjoyed comparing this play with some of the French plays by Racine and Corneille that I've read recently. Whereas they strove to maintain the unity of space, action and time, this play tears all three of these continuities asunder. They jump from Italy to Spain, at a moment's notice, and actions that take place in one place are immediately followed by other that take place hundreds of miles away. The play spans months in time, with Don Juan traveling from Naples to the shores of Spain within a single act. This is all fine with me: while I enjoyed seeing how one might construct a play while respecting the theatrical unities of space, action and time, It certainly doesn't seem entirely necessary. Whereas Racine, in a play like Bérénice, was able to construct a compelling play that could take place in a single setting on a single day, the author of this play took all the liberties he wanted, and I was entertained just the same.

I was a bit wary of the 120-page introduction to this edition, but in light of the complex issues surrounding this play, the scholar Alfredo Rodrígues López-Vázquez is probably justified in providing the reader such a long-winded study. He begins by discussing the genesis of what is today know as El burlador de Sevilla, but which may originally have been known by a different name, Tan largo me lo fiáis, which is the recurring refrain of Don Juan Tenorio when people tell him off for taking the honor of another woman and warn him that he'll get his some day; it means, approximately, "Wow, you're going to be waiting for quite a long time for that to happen!" López-Vázquez cites various reasons for believing that Tan Largo predates El Burlador, which is itself a recreation of the original text by theater groups who had performed it during the years following its creation. In looking at the differences between the two texts, many of the segments that are missing from El Burlador correspond to lines spoken by minor characters, which corroborates the idea that a theater group, when recreating the text, would have been able to piece together the major characters' roles as played by the various members of the group, but would struggle more with the bit parts and their placement in the larger text. Contemporary editions of the play have relied on both versions in order to piece together the play as it was meant to be performed. There has been, understandably, a fair amount of disagreement regarding differences in interpretation of various lines in the play, and the play itself contains footnotes which explain the history of some of the more contentious portions of the text.

The bulk of the introduction, though, is devoted to questions of authorship. Tirso de Molina has been thought to be the author, but López-Vázquez has devoted years of research to the issue, and presents the reader with many, many reasons why we should consider this original representation of Don Juan to be the work of Andrés de Claramonte. Claramonte was a contemporary of Tirso de Molina whose work was largely overlooked for centuries, but has lately been reexamined and revalued by scholars such as López-Vázquez. He has evaluated the work from many different angles, comparing Tan largo me lo fiáis and El burlador de Sevilla to the bodies of work of both Villamonte and Tirso, and showing why, stylistically, the play is better-attributed to Villamonte, due to the presence in it of specific motifs, metaphors and mythological references that Villamonte consistently employs in his dramatic works. It is also worth noting that he wrote another play, Deste agua no beberé, which shares many similarities with the original text of Tan largo me lo fiáis. I eventually grew fatigued from the sheer bulk of evidence that he provides to show why he believes this play should be attributed to Claramonte, and ended up skipping the final section, which was written to accompany this seventh Cátedra edition. Up to that point he´d made a strong case, and based on all the evidence he presented, I didn't see any reason besides simple inertia to continue attributing this play to Tirso de Molina. I enjoyed reading López-Vázquez's long-winded efforts to prove Villamonte's authorship, and a future edition carrying the words "Atribuida a Andrés de Villamonte" instead of "Atribuida a Tirso de Molina" would certainly bring a smile to my face.

Great review, Don Juan sounds very intriguing and it's interesting to see that so many people have retold this story. I will be adding this to my TBR list.

Just have to say, I agree about Boardwalk Empire being a very good insight into prohibition America. Also, Steve Buscemi is such a great actor and he does a good job in the lead role.

77. Raza de bronce (Race of Bronze)--Alcides Argüedas

I decided it was time to continue my tour of Latin America by way of the classics of early-20th century regionalist fiction, this time dropping in on a place that I once had the great pleasure of visiting: Lago Titicaca and the surround Bolivian highlands. Alcides Argüedas's story takes place on its shores, where Pedro Pantoja owns the land inhabited by an Aymara community and brutally exploits his indigenous serfs, just like his father did before him. In the beginning of the story, Agiali, a strong-willed and relatively affluent member of the community, takes the ring of Wata-Wara, a beautiful young woman whom he intends to marry. This symbolic theft (along with her willingness to part with the ring) represents his formal engagement to her, and he's happy as he prepares to set off the next day to buy seed for the community to plant in the spring. Wata-Wara mentions that she has been called to work at the patrón's house, and Agiali, knowing what that means, asks her not to, although he's pretty much resigned to the fact that it's out of his control, and that his love for Wata-Wara will have to withstand his feelings of jealousy based on what he assumes the patrón will ask her to do in his service while he's gone. This short beginning sets the stage for the story that will unfold in the pages to come, with the Pantoja-Wata-Wara relationship providing the basis for a violent ending to the relationship between the indigenous community members and their mestizo ruler. In between, the beautiful landscapes and the hardships of indigenous life are illustrated in great detail, with changing seasons giving the author a chance to document not only the plant and animal life of the lake, but also the agricultural cycle and the major holidays celebrated by the Aymara descendents of the Inca empire.

The entire first part of the book, which documented Agiali's journey with three other community members across the orchards and fertile fields of las Yungas, was my favorite because it helped me remember the specific late-summer moment when I was in Bolivia, and many of the fruits and local crops were recognizable to me because I had tasted them while I was there. Their trip, which nearly destroyed their animals and cost two of the four men their lives, introduced the climate of suffering and forced labor imposed on the Aymara community by the landowner. They were made to trek across hostile terrain, during a time of year when the creeks were swollen to the point that they could only be forded with great peril, all so that they could buy grain at a cheaper price than the patrón would have paid closer to home. The middle of the book dragged a little bit, and as the seasons changed it seemed like the author was too focused on the landscape and the different major events of the community's calendar year, with the narrative falling by the wayside. Different events seemed to pop up only so that the author could document weddings, funerals and other community events, and while I enjoyed it for the most part, I found myself wishing that the story would shift back to the inevitable series of events leading up to the confrontation between oppressors and oppressed. Eventually, Pantoja brought some of his friends to his home in order to show them a good time and go hunting, and things got interesting again. One of his buddies, Suárez, was a young poet who had a very progressive (if naïve) view on the indigenous peoples' lot in Bolivian society. He had some passionate arguments with the two landowners and the fourth member of their party, another thoughtful young man whose head was a bit less in the clouds than the young poet, and who straddled both sides of the argument. I enjoyed reading the landowners' justification for their barbaric treatment of the community members, especially in contrast with the arguments of the progressive poet. As they argued, the events began their slow climb toward the final showdown, and I happily enjoyed the last fifty pages of the book.

I am willing to mostly forgive this book its shortcomings because of how well brought the lake and the Bolivian countryside to life. This is how I generally feel about the major regionalist novels: They are worthwile to me as snapshots of Latin America at a time when artists across the region were beginning to discover the marvelous potential of the worlds that surrounded them, painting the landscapes and peoples of their countries into compelling narratives in order to open the eyes of the rest of the world as to the beauty of Latin America. I believe that time is on the side of the 21st-century reader of these texts, because I assume for every Doña Bárbara or Don Segundo Sombra, hundreds of mediocre texts have fallen by the wayside. I understand why people look at the regionalist texts of the early twentieth century as not much more than stepping stones in the development of the region's literature, building a foundation of regional representations that paved the way for the major works of "universal" literature that were produced in Latin America during the middle half of the 20th century. And it's true, I often do find more satisfaction in the books that, while they are clearly set in a place in Latin America, whether it be a city, a rural community or the jungle, don't bash you over the head with the names of all the local species of flora and fauna, and descriptions of all the unique characteristics of the people and their customs. However, sometimes I like to take a little vacation back in time to a specific place in Latin America, learn all about it, and read a reasonably-entertaining story at the same time. In this exercise in literary travel, I'm glad to have a compelling representation of the Bolivian highlands that I can return to when I want to be taken back to a place that I very much enjoyed visiting.

I also enjoyed the author's documentation of indigenous Bolivians' situation at that time, from the perspective of both the oppressors and the oppressed. The arguments between the mestizo landowners, as well as the voiced complaints of the community members suffering enormous abuses at the hands of the man who "owns" their ancestral land, all helped me better understand the different currents of indigenist thought as they stood in the early 20th century, which in turn helps me understand the ideological debates in present-day Bolivia a bit better as well. The author's personal viewpoint seems to be somewhat negative with respect to indigenous customs and practices, and I often thought that his depiction of the Aymara community suffered as a result of this. There was one moment that I found particularly distasteful, when, during a funeral in which the community members drank a large amount of alcohol, he described the drunken family members rather brutally and didn't seem to be able to understand their actions; he depicts them almost as savages. In general, I didn't get the felling that he was trying to understand the indigenous community he was depicting, and the book was written from more of an educated outsider's perspective. I wondered if men like him were the ones who later introduced policies of "mestizaje" and "cholification" into Bolivian political society, and I thought that Mr. Argüedas and I probably wouldn't see eye to eye on a lot of diversity-related issues. He does seem to be earnestly concerned about the ethnic issues troubling Bolivia, but his viewpoint lacks a certain degree of understanding and respect for different cultures. However, regardless of his viewpoint, his story clearly placed indigenous communities, such as the Aymara community depicted here, on the moral high ground of the struggle with European/mestizo landowners.

Raza de bronce wasn't my favorite regionalist book (I prefer Doña Bárbara, Don Segundo Sombra and Huasipungo, out of the few examples that I've read), nor was it my favorite indigenist book (I far prefer José María Argüedas's Los rios profundos). Nonetheless, it was a solid and enjoyable example of both. My next stop on my regionalist travels will be Cuba, because I have a copy of Alejo Carpentier's Ecue-Yambe-O, Novela afro-cubana. I'm interested to read an example of the genre written by a man whose later, more "universal" work I enjoy and admire.

Thank you for bringing Alguedas to my attention, Matt. I will look for some of his translated works.

@208: Good luck! I'm not sure if he's been translated, at least I can't find anything in translation at my library. I did pick up two books by Piglia the other day, and I'll try to read Ciudad ausente in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for the recommendation!

#208: The only one I could find translated that is available to me is Deep Rivers. The translator actually won an award for her translation, the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University.

I hope you enjoy the Piglia books, Matt!

@209: That's a different Argüedas, the Peruvian José María Argüedas. I read Deep Rivers earlier this year (#4 on my list), and thought it was great. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year!

#211: Well, rats. I should have paid more attention. Well, at least I will be trying a new-to-me author whatever his name is :)

Glad to know you enjoyed it so much, Matt!

78. Life of Pi--Yann Martel

When I added this book to my library, I was surprised to find that it is the 26th most-catalogued book on this web site, which makes it immensely more popular than most of the books I read. I'd seen it in bookstores, on friends' bookselves, and so on, and was encouraged by my girlfriend to pick it up and give it a try. It's the story of Pi Patel, an Indian young adult whose father runs a zoo in Pondicherry, a territory that was formerly ruled by the French (I didn't realize that French India existed). I enjoyed the descriptions of wild animals' existence in captivities, and the book made me look at zoos in a somewhat different and more positive light. Young Pi is rather open-minded with respect to religion, and ends up becoming a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu, all at once. This provokes some consternation from his family, although they end up letting him do what he wants, because his responses to their concerns are well-thought-out and show respect for all religions. HIs father decides that their nation isn't heading in the right direction and decides to move the family to Canada. He engages in some complex business negotiations in order to sell the zoo's animals to other sanctuaries around the world, and the family ends up traveling by boat to Canada with a bunch of zoo animals in the cargo hold. The boat sinks, and Pi ends up on a life raft with some animals. The book documents his adventure on the high seas.

This book didn't change my life, as the statement on the cover said it had the power to do, but I did find it enjoyable, and was able to easily read fifty to one hundred pages at a time without getting bored. It was a pretty well-done adventure book, and I thought that I would have really liked it a lot when I was younger, maybe thirteen or fourteen. I would probably give/recommend it to older children moreso than to adults, because I think they would enjoy the adventure and the story of a young person whose resourcefulness is put to the test in the most extreme of situations (on a life raft with a tiger!). There is a significant twist at the end of the story, and maybe that would be difficult for some younger readers to understand, but I think that a high schooler would be able to figure it out and appreciate it. The religious beliefs of Pi might trouble some parents, but I wouldn't have any problem with letting a kid read a story where the main character is really into religion and has decided to practice three major religions simultaneously; then again, I myself am not a religious person.

After I finished this book, I decided to see when the movie was coming out. There was no doubt in my mind that a book as hugely popular as this one would have a film in the works, and sure enough, it is in pre-production, and audiences can look forward to Life of Pi in 2011 or 2012, directed by Ang Lee (possibly even in 3-D! OMG). I was amused to find out sometime around 2002, M. Night Shyalaman became attached to a project whereby he would write a script and direct the movie version of the Life of Pi (according to Wikipedia). He decided against it because of its twist ending, which I guess he felt would be less compelling if he were to be at the helm, seeing as how a twist ending at the end of an M. Night Shyalalman movie is pretty much par for the course. I can't say I remember any of the movies that he's done lately, and I feel like his star has lost a bit of its shine in the past few years. I wonder if he looks back on this and regrets not making this movie while he was Hollywood's go-to guy for stories with surprising endings.

79. La ciudad ausente (Absent City)--Ricardo Piglia

A newspaper reporter named Junior is given a lead on a story and goes to visit a man named Fuyita. When he locates the apartment where he is supposed to find Fuyita, he finds a badly-bruised woman who begs him to go and buy her some gin as she takes swigs from a bottle of eau de cologne (a reference to La Queca from Onetti's La vida breve?). She also tells him to head on down to the Museum, where there is a Machine that spits out a string of stories related to other stories that have already been told. The first link in the string of altered stories is Poe's William Wilson, which becomes Steven Stevenson after the Machine has processed it. For a while, the reader wanders around some of the altered stories, which are derived from Argentine classics (I don't have the book with me, but I remember a reference to Remo Erdosain on the train at the end of Los lanzallamas). Junior's investigation also takes him in search of a foreign-born scientist, who aided in the creation of this machine, and who also worked on a strange mechanical bird. The Machine in the Museum reminded me a bit of Morel's invention in Adolfo Bioy Cásares's novel, in the way that it takes a reality, a story in this case and the lives of a group of people in Cásares's book, and perpetuates it, allowing it to live on in a simulation of its former self. There's also a portion of the book that takes place on an island where the spoken language shifts every so often, without rhyme or reason, and Finnegans Wake is a celebrated work. The persecution of clandestine political dissidents is a constant focus as well, with many of the characters (including Junior himself, as well as a woman who points him toward a foreign-born scientist) being monitored and often hassled by the police. The police also want to shut down or marginalize the machine, stopping the flow of stories that it emits.

In a book filled with references to literature, my limited familiarity with the work of Macedonio Fernández held me back. He is often cited as a major influence on Jorge Luis Borges and a number of other Argentine and Latin American authors, and there's an interesting entry on his Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonio_Fernandez) concerning his relationship with Borges. He wrote a book called Museo de la novela de la eterna (The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)), which, as I understand it, investigates possibilities of literary creation, and how people and characters exist in life and literature. The Machine in the Museum of Piglia's book, which is a device that perpetuates stories that were once given life by their creators, is Macedonio's invention, and Junior's investigations introduce him to people who worked with Macedonio in building it. Macedonio, as I understand, was completely devastated by the death of his wife Elena. He wrote a poem (a favorite of mine) entitled Elena Bellamuerte, which is a dialogue with his late wife and expresses the grief that he felt at her loss. Piglia's Machine is named Elena, and I would like to know more about her story, and the way that Macedonio works from her death in his own book about a museum; unfotunately, while I checked out Museo de la novela de la eterna a few weeks before I checked out La ciudad ausente, I chose to read Piglia's book first. I felt pretty lost. I was able to grasp at some of the connections that I felt most strongly (especially those moments in Piglia's book that reminded me of Elena Bellamuerte), but I wished I knew a lot more about Macedonio Fernández.

I found a link that gives a taste of Macedonio's writing, with a few exerpts from his Museum, which helped me a bit in understanding Piglia's book: http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4629/prmID/1502.

This book was similar to another book I recently read, Severo Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes. Both books bring together a web of influences in creating works that are new, yet reference bits and pieces of the literary traditions that the authors are part of. The more the reader knows about certain subjects (in this case Argentine literature, police/detective novels, the history of political repression in Argentina, and Finnegans Wake, among others), the more accessible the story is to him or her. I have enjoyed these books, which require a great deal of personal, intellectual connection between author and reader. In the areas of shared interest between the authors and myself, I thought they were a lot of fun. In the case of Sarduy's book, I was fortunate enough to have an annotated edition with an introduction that explained a lot of the bits and pieces that came together in his book; here, I felt a bit more lost, and might have appreciated some help. I don't really know much about police/detective novels, and I don't know too much about the history of political repression in Argentina. I do read a lot of books from Argentina, and I was most drawn to the aspects of this book that relate to various classics of Argentine literature. Perhaps most importantly, this book inspired me to investigate the writings of Macedonio Fernández, a man whose work I have overlooked for far too long.

#213: The Life of Pi did not change my life either, but I enjoyed it.

#214: I lamented my lack of knowledge about Argentine history when I read The Absent City too, Matt, but I enjoyed it on its merits as literary noir, which I really enjoy.

Matt, I haven't read La ciudad ausente, but Piglia is one of my favorite authors. I'd recommend Nombre Falso/Assumed Name, which is a collection of short stories, the title story being a pretty interesting homage to Roberto Arlt.

I also recommend Piglia's literary criticism, such as Formas Breves.

Also, I finished Juan Moreira. I'd say it's not as literary a work as Martin Fierro or Don Segundo Sombra, but I still found it quite fascinating. They way Gutierrez paints him, it's almost hard to believe Moreira was a real person, but the story won me over enough that I feel like I can give Gutierrez the benefit of the doubt. (If not in terms of its historical veracity, at least in terms of the value of the tale.)

The character of Moreira is a little off-putting at first, since whatever his virtues it seems like he is at least partially at fault in the situations he tends to get into often to the death of somebody else. I came to see him as sort of the Argentine equivalent of a Japanese ronin (or at least the romanticized version thereof), a man of high character but fearsome abilities who is cast out of society. He clings to those values that define him, even when he comes to realize that the best he can hope for is a good death. There's something admirable about that, which is why I ended up considering Moreira as a pretty compelling character.

It's odd that the novel seems to be so obscure now, considering it was apparently a huge hit when it first came out and has been adapted for stage and screen various times.

There's an interesting essay by Borges, "Our Poor Individualism", which came back to me while reading Moreira. I have to admit, I'd previously been skeptical of this view of the Argentine character. I grew up mostly in the US among a fairly liberal crowd, and Argentine views of race and gender have struck me as conservative and at times narrow-minded. On the other hand, perhaps it's no accident that Argentina was the first Latin American country to legalize gay marriage or that the supreme court struck down criminal penalties for marijuana possession (for personal use.)

Another couple of books I've read:

Aqui vivieron by Manuel Mujica Lainez. It's a collection of short stories, linked by being about the same place, a home in the neighborhood of San Isidro. It starts in the 16th century, when the home is just a little hut and the area wasn't called San Isidro, and then hops forward to tell little vignettes of the people and events around the home until the turn of the 20th century. MML isn't quite on par with Borges or Arlt, but I found this pretty enjoyable and with a nice Gothic sensibility.

Tinieblas by Elias Castelnuovo. Castelnuovo was a Uruguayan writer who was part of the Grupo Boedo, a Buenos Aires literary circle of the '20s and '30s, and of which Castelnuovo is apparently pretty representative. His work parallels Arlt's somewhat, since he writes of people on the lower rungs of Argentine (and Uruguayan) society and their struggles. His stories sometimes take on a sort of surreal, nightmarish tone. They aren't quite as good as Arlt's, lacking something of his sensibility, although in a way which I'm not sure how to pin down.

217: I've still got Juan Moreira on the shelf...I started reading Les misérables last week and placed a moratorium on reading other non-poetry books until I finish Tome I of the 3-part edition I have. I'd been meaning to read it for a while, and I had to ignore all the wonderful Argentine distractions that I was finding at the library (except for a book of poetry by Almafuerte).

I've been meaning to get down to investigating the Grupo de Florida/Grupo de Boedo rivalry, and I'm glad to see you mention Castelnuovo. I find the Boedo perspective pretty compelling; even though I know they probably won't reach the heights of Arlt, I'm looking forward to reading the work of some of his contemporaries.

80. Prosa y poesía (Prose and Poetry)--Almafuerter

Almafuerte is the pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios, an Argentine poet born in 1854 in the provincial outskirts of Buenos Aires. His name comes up from time to time in my meandering study of Argentine poetry and literature, and I grabbed this slim volume from the library so that I might know a bit about the man and his work. This collection of his prose and poetry was compiled by Jorge Luis Borges, who also wrote a short introduction. In it he recounts his initial exposure to the poetry of Almafuerte:

"Up until that night, human language had not been anything but a means of communication, an everyday mechanism made up of signs; the verses of Almafuerte that Evaristo Carriego recited to us revealed to me that it could be a music, a passion and a dream. Housman wrote that poetry is something that we feel physically, with our flesh and blood; I owe my first experience of that curious, magical fever to Almafuerte."

I enjoy retracing the influences of Borges, and it was nice to gain a cursory understanding of what Almafuerte's verses meant to him in his formation as a person and as a writer. To him, Almafuerte was a sincere man with a very intense, consolidated view on mankind. The flaws in his work are overcome by the strength and unity of his vision.

And what is his vision? I had expected pastoral poems celebrating the rural Argentine lifestyle; what I got was a very particular, very negative view on the poet himself and on all of mankind. His first poem, an extended meditation on "la patria," contains the following lines:

Those are the truth, God of justice
he who has painted this world falsely
and armed the wolf with potent claws,
who has made the path of pleasure a wide one
which leads to death or to nostalgia
who has left the gazelle indefenseless
and armed the wolf with potent claws,
who has divided the world of men
into the many, who suffer and work
and the few, who laugh and fulfill
the mission of guiding the progress of man
and their greatness grows with their lies
and their nobility grows with their murders!

Borges ruminates on other possible outcomes if Almafuerte were born in a different moment in a different place: He mentions Nietzche, and he also hypothesizes that he could have been a religious figure of sorts, a mystic leading groups of men with his dire predications of a world full of suffering, where man lives in a state of anguish and happiness is undesirable. The poems are bleak with respect to man, God and the poet himself. The longest poem, El Misionero, is about a man of the cloth who lays in anguish, exposed to the elements, voicing his suffering to a flock of dogs who sit by him as he speaks. One of my favorites is a song sung to a girl, wherein the poet explains his particular state of being and his negative view of himself, concluding with the following verse:

Given that you already know
the filiation, the prontuary
of the poetic visionary
who bears anguishes as he goes;
and because your soul, perhaps,
being the soul of a lady,
must insist on loving
that which I myself do not;
back from the edge of the abyss
I bid that you retreat.

This wasn't quite the "poesía gauchezca," that I expected, but as I thought about it, it seemed to me to be more authentic and more representative of a state of mind that is more "gaucho" than most of the literature I've read depicting the Argentine cowboy lifestyle. Martín Fierro is a book about a gaucho; the poetry of Almafuerte feels like poetry written by a gaucho. In truth, this is not entirely so: based on the limited biographical information I've found on Almafuerte, he was of rather humble origins, but focused on the arts from a young age. He gave up painting as a teenager when he did not receive a grant to travel to Europe to continue his studies. He then taught in a school in Chacabuco, but was dismissed for not holding a teaching license. He also worked as a journalist in La Plata for a while. In fact, his biography is not entirely disimilar to that of José Hernández, and these poems complement Martín Fierro well. I imagine the gaucho sitting on the open pampa and thinking these things to himself, dwelling on mental images of the rotten humanity found in the city, behind the walls of the fortín or at the counter of the boliche, and knowing that he himself is a member of that mass of suffering, sadness and shame. As I read and re-read the poems in this short compilation, I like them more and more, and am happy I finally took the time to introduce myself to the poetry of Almafuerte.

81. Les misérables--Victor Hugo

A few years ago a friend told me about a professor at his university who learned French so that he could read Les misérables in the original language. When I started learning French at the beginning of last year, I thought that it would be nice to read Les misérables a year or so down the road, when I had studied enough vocabulary to be able to appreciate it. I started looking for an unabridged, affordable copy of the book around the middle of last year. I eventually decided that even though I hadn't found my book at a price I was willing to pay, I was ready for Hugo, and I read Notre-Dame de Paris instead, enjoying it greatly. Then, one day, I went to a bookstore called "Academic and Scholarly Books." The owner does most of his business online, but maintans a small storefront where he places books that he hasn't been able to unload on the internet, selling them on the cheap to walk-in customers. Paperbacks are two bucks. After Christmas, he had a sale where everything was half off. I walked out that day with my complete, unabridged Les misérables, in a three-volume Livres de Poche paperback edition, for a grand total of three bucks. I then spent the rest of this year procrastinating, finally deciding in the beginning December that it was time to get down to it.

The first tome begins with the story of Monseigneur Bienvenu, the Bishop of Digne. He's a really cool guy, obstinately charitable and resolute in his refusal to reap any of the benefits available to church higher-ups. The only luxury he allows himself is a set of silver tableware and a pair of silver candleholders, which contrast with the spartan food and furnishings of his home. He is respected by all because he is so virtuous, and he travels all around his rural parish, even when the roads are bad or other difficulties exist. In one such case, he's warned not to go on a certain trip because a band of marauders is on the loose. He shrugs off the warnings profferred by those close to him and ends up returning to town with a bunch of treasure that the criminals gave to him out of respect for his person. He donates it all to charity, which is what he does with most of his salary as well. After we've gotten to know Bishop Bienvenu, we're introduced to an ex-convict who is looking for a place to stay in Digne. He's turned away from all the boarding houses in town, and is about to spend the night outside when someone suggest he knock on a door, which is of course that of the Bishop. Bienvenu gives him a good, square meal and a bed to sleep in. The man had spent nineteen years in prison, initially for stealing food. He kept trying to escape, with each failed attempt tacking additional years onto his sentence. When released, this good human being had turned bad, accustomed to years of penal mistreatment and bitter due to a punishment that far exceeded his crime. Even after receiving shockingly-good treatment at the hands of Bienvenu, he wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to steal the silverware. He escapes, but is captured and brought back to the Bishop. To the shock of both criminal and captors, Bienvenu explains that he had given the man the silverware out of charity, and orders him to be freed immediately. He then gives the man a brief lecture, "reminding" him about how he is going to use these silver objects to begin turning his life around, becoming a good and honest man. The man's name is Jean Valjean.

Then we meet a gaggle of carefree young Parisians, one of whom is named Fantine. Her boyfriend Tholomyès is the alpha male of a group of four young men who all take their girlfriends out on a date one beautiful afternoon. They have arranged for a surprise for their young lady friends, but it's not quite what the ladies expected. Fantine ends up leaving Paris with her daughter Cosette, making the painful decision to abandon her daughter in the arms of an innkeeper and his wife, Les Thenardier, in Montfermeil so that she can pursue employment in her hometown of Montreuil-sur-Mer. When she arrives, she finds that employment is easy to come by in a town booming under the industrious hand of Monsieur Madeliene, whose factory employs the townsfolk and who applies his financial gains toward the benefit of the community, enriching the lives of all its members as he himself grows wealthy. He's such a good citizen that he's eventually named mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Monsieur Madeliene, however, has a shadowy past, and as tends to happen in such cases, it eventually comes to light. He's exposed for the man he was, and the town loses its patron mayor. Fantine is also exposed as a single mother, and she's kicked out of her job, sending her life spiraling downward. As both Madeliene and Fantine reach rock-bottom, the story shifts and we learn all about the Battle of Waterloo. Then we return to Jean Valjean, who is on the run again, this time with young Cosette in tow (he extracted her from her miserable existence as the young child-servant of Mr. and Mrs. Thenardier). They are chased through Paris by Inspector Javert, who has recently moved to a new position in the city.

This is a long, long book! I'm only a third of the way done, and I'm blown away by the scope of it all. I've enjoyed how the characters' lives are interspersed with descriptions of rural and urban Paris. When a new setting is introduced, Hugo goes to great lengths to document it in its most intimate details. Digne, Paris, Montfermeil, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Waterloo and a bit more of the Parisian outskirts have all been thoroughly introduced to me, and I've been busy studying hundreds of new vocabulary words related to the terrain and architecture of 19th century France. I even enjoyed the explanation of the Battle of Waterloo from the perspective of a proud Frenchman looking back on it a few decades later. At the time I was a bit disappointed to be removed from the story, because the chapters right before the Waterloo interlude were pretty dramatic; however, I thought it was a nice change of pace and I've come to expect historical digressions in Victor Hugo books after my experience with Notre-Dame de Paris and its "Paris au vol d'oiseau" and "Ceci tuera cela" sections. I actually like the way that his books shift from character to character, and place to place, and the fact that the focus never remains on any one place for too long makes it easier to read such a long-winded text. The necessity of compiling and studying vocabulary as I read was tiring, but I'm going to try to take a week or so off then dig right back in to the second volume. I'm hoping that the presence on my shelf of some new books that I really, really want to read will help motivate me to power through the rest of Les misérables.

What is reading Les Mis like? The most comparable experience I've had is the time when I was in the Peace Corps, got the complete 5-season DVD set of The Wire, and watched it all in nightly installments. Like Les Mis, The Wire is epic in scope and examines many different lives and locations, with Maryland taking the place of France and Baltimore replacing Paris. Characters like Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, who build their fortunes in the drug game but are always looking for ways to start transferring their wealth and power to more legitimate ends, remind me a lot of Jean Valjean. When Stringer is wearing a hard hat and examining the progress of his new luxury condominiums on the Baltimore waterfront, talking with the contractors like he's a legitimate businessman, he's not unlike Monsieur Madeline in Montreuil-sur-Mer, cloaking his past in an aura of respectability and progress (although his ascendance to respectability is nowhere near as "pure" or "virtuous" as Monsieur le Maire). I remember getting fatigued by the fifty-plus hours of episodes (I don't binge on TV very often, so it was just a long chain of single-and double-episode evenings), which, when the going got a bit slower, required a similar degree of committment as reading Les Mis. Both, the book from the 1860s and the contemporary TV show examine a wide swath of characters, focusing on issues of morality in situations where justice in society is not necessarily served. Hugo introduces his book by saying that as long as there is suffering and injustice in the world, books like his cannot help but have value in society (loosely paraphrased). I imagine that the creator of The Wire, David Simon, had similar thoughts about his show. Both Hugo and Simon are extremely good at depicting the struggles of the lower classes. One of the most powerful sections of Les Mis was the story of Fantine's fall from grace, from stable employment to shame and prostitution, driven lower and lower by unpayable debts, her once-young body wrecked by poverty. It was almost sickening to read, and the physical effects of debt and poverty on Fantine reminded me of those that drugs and poverty had on characters like Bubbles and his sidekick (whose name I can't recall) in The Wire.

I get to thinking: Hugo had this idea in Notre-Dame de Paris that the advent of the printing press would significantly alter the importance of architecture in its role as a physical record of man's achievements, through which past generations left a lasting representation of their art and grandeur through structures erected in stone. With the printing press, recorded knowledge, art and history could be easily and widely transmitted in a way that would allow its endurance through the centuries. One no longer needed to construct a building out of stone in order for future centuries to remember him; he could write a book and publish it, with greater freedom due to the technological advances in printing, and disseminate it in a way that would allow his creation to endure. I remember thinking this was a very interesting argument, especially a century and a half later. I wondered what Hugo would have thought of skyscrapers, for instance, and other examples of monumental 20th century architecture. Would he have seen anything in the architecture of the past century that might have washed away his distaste for shoddy early-19th century constructions and his corresponding thesis on the decline of architecture's importance in the wake of the printing press?

As I read Les Mis, I thought about the ways that film and recorded media have affected printed media's role in our lives, and whether or not it is another case where "Ceci ait tué cela," with TV and movies in this case "killing" books. When I watch shows like The Wire and other classy HBO soap operas (Big Love, Boardwalk Empire...) I think that they have a lot in common with some of the more voluminous 19th century novels that I've read. When I read these behemoths, I try to take myself back to a time when TV didn't exist, and reading was pretty much the best show in town in terms of at-home entertainment. It seems appropriate to read a 900-page book when you've got long evening hours to kill and limited entertainment options. But now, with HD cable, the internet and all the other entertainment options we have at our fingertips, is it possible to read Anna Karenina, Middlemarch or Les misérables in the same way as a 19th century person would have? Has TV killed the effect of a good, long book, or altered it into something completely different than it was before? Is it at all fair to compare these classics that have stood the test of time to TV shows with somewhat similar aims, and can we consider something like The Wire as a representation of the world in our own time that approaches what Hugo has done in Les Mis?

I'm enjoying Les Mis, and I enjoyed The Wire. I like thinking about how the Wires of our day have replaced the big books of Hugo's time. I do wonder how TV shows, even the very best ones, will stand up through time. What value will The Wire have a century and a half from now? How will future generations access it? As was the case with architecture remaining alive as a form of artistic expression even after the printing press came along, I'm sure that books will stay alive as well. I'm hoping that E-books don't catch on to too great of an extent, because I think that the durability of the actual, physical book is a great advantage in its competition with electronic and visual media for the lesiure time of 21st century man. I mean, I put my CDs from the 90s in a CD player and most of them skip, whereas I have books that were printed a half a century ago yet are still perfectly readable. The durability of the book has certainly aided in its survival, and I hope to be able to continue browsing bookstores and the internet for bargains such as my three dollar Les misérables.

Matt, the 2011 group is up and running. I do hope you will be joining us again!

http://www.librarything.com/groups/75booksin20111

I'm very impressed by your multilingual reading of literature - I counted 4 languages you've been reading in - what's the breakdown of your reading between them?

222: Thanks, Elkie! I love reading and I love learning new languages, so reading in foreign languages is a good way to combine my interests. I learned Spanish in college and have been reading books in Spanish ever since as a way to maintain contact with the language. I think most of the books I read last year were in Spanish. I've tried to read at least a book a month in French for the past year and a half, and started studying Italian this year, trying to read a book a month in that language for the past six months or so.

I also avidly (obsessively) collect books in Spanish that I find on the internet. It's like an adult carryover of my childhood love of collecting baseball and basketball cards.