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Friday, September 16th, 2011
It's hard to know where to begin with The Secret History of Costaguana -- here are a few things I find myself wanting to call attention to, in no particular order. (Well in an order to be sure; but likely not the best one.) It is a book that wears its sources gladly on its sleeve, that does not make you puzzle over what references are to what; the author and narrator are most obliging in pointing out where to look for further reading, in helping you catch the wordplay and history-play and genre-play, of which there is plenty -- a surpassingly playful book. (There are also more subtle bits of play that you need to be looking for to catch -- I felt happy to get a Quixote reference that I could have missed ("...a certain Conradian novel whose name I do not care to remember..."), and which I thought also contained a reference on the translator's part to Grossman.) Borgesian is an adjective that could probably be applied without too much disregard for the truth. Suicide is a major presence in this book; so far, midway through, one major character has killed himself and two more have attempted it. (One of these attempts, Joseph Conrad's, was a piece of historical fact, and a very important piece of the book's fabric.) Joseph Conrad's role in the book is wonderful and puzzling. I still have not gotten to the point where the narrator meets him. The narrator is kind-of trying to draw parallels between his own life and Conrad's, indeed he spends a lot of time on this, but I'm not sure why he is doing it. He is not claiming to be an alter ego of Conrad, but he is pushing for there to be some kind of bond between their existences. Not clear yet. Speaking of Conrad, it seems like kind of a major liability for me in getting the most out of this book, that I have never read Nostromo. If I were ever going to reread this book, it will be after I have read the Conrad. One reference that I am surprised not to see anywhere is to Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez -- the book's historical subject overlaps a fair bit with that of 100 Years of Solitude, but Vásquez does not tip his hat to GarcÃa Márquez at all, that I can see. I guess there's not really any need to... The book is not at all similar to 100 Years outside of the subject matter, but I had a corny notion that a good title for a review of Costaguana would be "100 Years of Multitude". Well that's probably enough verbiage. Below the fold, for those who would care to indulge, two magnificent passages from Costaguana. Spoiler warnings apply as always.
 In Chapter Ⅲ ("Joseph Conrad Asks for Help"), the narrator relates the back story of Santiago Pérez Triana, the man who will introduce him to Conrad. Triana is an important figure in the politics of Colombia's civil wars; and the narrator feels obliged to give the reader "a very brief lesson in Colombian politics":
...The moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate The Iliad, was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches...
At the end of Chapter â…¥ ("In the Belly of the Elephant"), after interweaving Conrad's journey up the Congo to relieve the company's agent at the interior station with the unraveling of his own father's life and sanity in the wake of the failed Panama Canal project, the narrator describes his father wandering among the abandoned excavation equipment, in a scene that I think might very well be described as Conrad-esque:
He walked around the machine slowly, stopping beside each leg, pulling the leaves away with his hands and touching each of the buckets that his arms could reach: the old elephant was ill, and my father circled it in search of symptoms. He soon found the elephant's belly, a little shed that served as the monstrous tank of the excavator's engine room, and there he took shelter. He did not come out again. When, after a fruitless two-day search of Colón and the surrounding area, I managed to discover his whereabouts, I found him lying on the damp floor of the excavator. Fate decreed it would rain that day as well, so I lay down beside my dead father and closed my eyes to feel what he would have felt during his last moments: the murderous clatter of the rain on the hollow metal of the buckets, the smell of the hibiscus, the shirt soaked through with the cold of the wet rust, and the exhaustion, the pitiless exhaustion.
↻...done
posted evening of September 16th, 2011: 2 responses
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Maybe the first thing I noticed about The Secret History of Costaguana is the conversational tone its narrator, José Altamirano, adopts -- as he is telling his story, he is chatting with the reader about his narrative choices, editorializing, debating whether he should continue on one thread or backtrack... And it seems like this might be Vásquez' natural style, based on the Author's Note at the back of the volume. He may have gotten the idea for the book, he tells us, from his first reading of Conrad's Nostromo, in '98; or perhaps it was in 2003, when he was working on a biography of Conrad; or... This playful, second-guessing narrative style works very nicely for a historical novel that is constantly calling into question the history and the versions of history which form its fabric. The reader cannot trust the narrator -- the narrator tells the reader up front not to trust him -- and cannot trust the narrative of history.
posted evening of September 15th, 2011: Respond
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Some exquisite images of dinosaur feathers and proto-feathers in this Discovery article about a newly found trove of amber deposits from Grassy Lake, Alberta.
posted evening of September 15th, 2011: Respond
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Lots to say about Juan Gabriel Vásquez' new book -- I have no time to post right now but just want to say (midway through) that this is an absolutely captivating read and you should put it on your list.
posted morning of September 15th, 2011: 2 responses
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
 I just loved Juan Pablo Roncone's story "Geese" in the new issue of 60 Watts. I thought I would sit down and try to translate it... And wow! I am surprised at what a challenge it is to get the English to sound as simple, as elegant as Roncone's Spanish. It seemed like it would be a breeze -- the sentences are generally quite short, single declarative clauses, easily understood, I don't have the problem of forgetting midway through the long sentence what the subject was... But it turns out that mimicking the structure of the sentences in English comes out clunky and repetitive. Or at least it has so far. I think I am going to finish the rough translation, then tear it up and try again.
posted evening of September 14th, 2011: 1 response
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Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
A lovely passage from "The Return", the first story in Zupcic's Dragi Sol.
He walked down to the beach. He carried in his eyes the blue of his childhood seas. There would be no point in trying to compare it to this other blue, the blue of America: even if all the world's seas flowed into one sea and all the earth were a single mountain, the blue which was dampening his feet would never be the same as that of his eyes, as that whose gleam he had sought out from the bell tower of the cathedral in Rikeja, from the tall houses of Sibenik, forty years ago.
An interesting translation puzzle -- the narrator in this story (and throughout Dragi Sol) refers to Croatian boys as "niños cerulei", an Italian adjective modifying a Spanish noun. My impulse would be to translate this as "cerulean boys" but I don't think that's quite right, I've never heard "cerulean" used to mean "blue-eyed"...
posted evening of September 13th, 2011: Respond
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NPR's Robert Krulwich takes a look at the ordered art of Ursus Wehrli. More photos, and making-of videos, at Wehrli's home page. (Thanks for the link, Jeff!)
posted evening of September 13th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, September 12th, 2011
 In comments today at Making Light, fidelio links to a lovely poem by Paul Goodman, "The Weepers Tower in Amsterdam".
Oh many are the lovely northern rivers!
the Housatonic and Connecticut
and Charles and James and Thames and Roanoke
and the St. Lawrence and the Kennebec
and the Potomac and the sweet Delaware
and not of them the least the lordly Hudson;
and all of them have made the fortunes of
famous towns as arteries of trade,
but all of them flow down into the sea,
all of them flow down into the sea.
Today is the anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that bears his name; on September 12th, 1609, he sailed as far north as Albany (had there been an Albany) looking for a shorter passage to India.
 Oh and look at that -- Goodman would be 100 years old just a few days ago now, he was born September 9, 1911.
posted evening of September 12th, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, September 11th, 2011
Christine passes along a link to  Brooklyn Rider's web site -- a string quartet featuring a couple of the musicians who made More or Less I Am such a fantastic show. Take a look -- a fun site design and some marvelous music.
posted evening of September 11th, 2011: Respond
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Ellen is going out for dinner tonight with Lisa; Sylvia and I are going to cook a nice dinner for ourselves.
Rigatoni with sausage and spinach
Simplest dinner around. Saute some onions and garlic with fennel seeds, cook the sausage in the same pan, add some spinach leaves and wilt them. Toss with pasta, serve with some grated cheese. (We have some asiago on hand that will be very nice with this.) Sylvia and I are going over to the grocery store in a little while to pick up some spinach and some artichokes to serve on the side. (I asked if she wanted artichoke hearts and she said, "I want the outside part of the artichoke, the kind you scrape off with your teeth.")
Apple-blackberry gratin
(recipe based on one found in this week's NY Times Magazine)
- 3 sliced apples (unpeeled)
- Blackberries
- Sugar
- Cornstarch
- Butter
- ½ cup sour cream
- ¼ cup milk
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Honey
- Cinnamon
- Walnuts
Toss sliced apples and blackberries with 1 teaspoon each of sugar and cornstarch. Sauté in 1 Tablespoon of butter for 10 minutes. Spread in a 9-by-13-inch pan with some walnuts.
Whisk together sour cream, milk, vanilla extract and honey to taste, and 1 tsp cornstarch. Sprinkle over apples.
Broil 4 to 6 inches from the flame until lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes. Let sit for 5 minutes before serving.
posted afternoon of September 11th, 2011: 2 responses
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