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Sunday, February first, 2009
I just finished Senselessness -- nothing prepared me for those last sentences. Probably need to reread the book without the preconceptions I had going in.
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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...wanting to tell everything once I'd been encouraged to start talking, down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets, until my interlocutor knew all he wanted to know, in an exhaustive confession after which I would suffer the worst possible backlash.
(Wow, has Castellanos Moya spent much time in the blogosphere?...) I want to refine my previous declaration about this work being a dark comedy, and say instead that it does not fit into a genre. I'm a little surprised because it's such a brief book, it seems like too little space for such a lot to be going on. But each chapter now is changing how I want to categorize the book; so I think the best approach is to call it sui generis.
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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It strikes me midway through that I have been reading Senselessness wrong, that I have been reading it as "foreign" when actually it's a comic piece similar to other works I'm familiar with. I was expecting it for some reason to be more on the order of Innocent Voices but it's not that at all. Reminiscent of wartime slapstick like the first portion of Gravity's Rainbow? Not as fully realized as that, I think, and the narrator's misogyny really strikes me as off, in a way. Like it's impossible to sympathize with it unless it were being made fun of, and I sort of can't read where the author is coming from here. But the powerful memory of that pearl of pus between my legs made me understand that this was an issue of first things coming first, that my strategy for repudiating Fátima could wait, and that first I had to stop the infection, so, swiftly, perhaps with the speed of one possessed, I made my way toward the enormous wooden door, crossed the filthy street teeming with beggars and street vendors, and entered the corner drugstore to find a pharmacist who could give me a prescription for the strongest possible penicillin to treat the disease I had caught. Got my first real laugh in the book here -- kind of black comedy I'm thinking as I review the passage -- and clicked Oh, I see, this is a funny book not (or not only) a grim one...
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
...Until she had gotten over what had happened with Humberto she wouldn't be capable of being with anyone else, she insisted, even though she liked me and she felt good with me, she just couldn't. And then all the listlessness in the world fell upon my shoulders -- I had gone to the wrong theater, which was showing a boring old movie I could follow with my eyes closed because I'd seen it a thousand times -- a listlessness so overwhelming and paralyzing that I didn't even have the wherewithal to stand up and get myself a taxi...
I'm kind of circling around the text in Senselessness, I find -- the imagery is vivid and the rhythm, as I said, pulls me in, and it seems like Castellanos Moya is encouraging me to identify with his narrator; but there's a feeling of being manipulated, that Castellanos Moya is setting up his narrator as obviously flawed and disordered, to make room for his redemption by the work he is doing. I'll be the first to admit this reading is facile and superficial; I'm having a hard time getting past the surface of the narration. I see a distinction between third-person narration of flawed characters (which I've seen recently with Saramago and with García Márquez), and this first-person narration -- with the former I had a much easier time putting myself into the story. Of course I may be projecting this reading, this difficulty, onto the text; I don't know if anybody else would have this reaction.
posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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Friday, January 30th, 2009
...and after relishing the delightful tickle of that first sip, I fnally recovered my equilibrium and relaxed, capable now of observing the flow of my thoughts while remaining separate from them, not identifying with them, as if they were somebody else's mental movie I was watching with a certain amount of indifference... The narrator's temper tantrum at the office and his brief sexual fantasy at the bar are to be taken as indications of his internal disorder which he associates with reading the papers he is editing -- here he is finally able to get back into his cool, detached head and feel in control again.
At this point in reading the novel, I am getting a sense that I know how the book will play out -- along the lines of, making his way through the papers he is editing will force the narrator to face internal demons probably including racism ("Didn't he realize I wasn't just another miserable Indian like he was used to dealing with?") and misogyny... If this is all that this book is, I will be a little disappointed -- this is pretty well-trodden conceptual territory. On the other hand the setting is something new, and the prose is fresh and engaging; so I would not be too disappointed. Also, I am still near the beginning of the novel, and there is absolutely room for me to be surprised.
posted evening of January 30th, 2009: Respond
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Today I started reading Senselessness -- you can read the first two chapters online at Words without Borders to get a taste of Castellanos Moya's writing style. I am drawn in quickly and easily to his narrator's world. Castellanos Moya uses a similar style to Saramago's Baroque sentences -- the rhythm and pacing are distinct from Saramago, but I'm not sure yet how to describe the difference beyond saying the author's voice is his own. Chapter II closes with a reference to Quevedo's poem "Prevención para la Vida y para la Muerte": Si no temo perder lo que poseo,
ni deseo tener lo que no gozo,
poco de la Fortuna en mà el destrozo
valdrá, cuando me elija actor o reo.
Ya su familia reformó el deseo;
no palidez al susto, o risa al gozo
le debe de mi edad el postrer trozo,
ni anhelar a la Parca su rodeo.
Sólo ya el no querer es lo que quiero;
prendas de la alma son las prendas mÃas;
cobre el puesto la muerte, y el dinero.
A las promesas miro como a espÃas;
morir al paso de la edad espero:
pues me trujeron, llévenme los dÃas.
posted evening of January 30th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, January 29th, 2009
In truth, we can only read the maps of cities we know. In my case, for example, and first and foremost, Buenos Aires. The problem is, under normal circumstances, a map plays a kind of trick on us, because if we know a city well, any detail it shows us will be either redundant or limited. Come to think of it, that describes the relationship I have with Buenos Aires: redundancy and insufficiency.-- Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds
This line really captures my imagination. I've always liked looking at maps -- I'm very familiar with the distinction between looking at a map of familiar territory and looking at a map of somewhere I've never been (and the gradations of experience in between), but I would never have thought of expressing it this way. I love the idea that home is necessarily redundant and insufficient.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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Sergio Chejfec turned out not to be the highlight of the evening. His work -- the portion of it that is excerpted in BOMB -- is lovely and introspective; but because it is introspective it did not lend itself to being read aloud. You want room for your mind to wander while you're reading it. My favorite thing I heard this evening was the poetry of Nicanor Parra, read by his translator Liz Werner from the recent book Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great. For instance, from the poem "Something Like That": THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we're right back to being enemies Also very nice to listen to was Lina Meruana's short story "Ay" -- she writes a flowing, engaging narrative that pulled me in. She only read the first half of the story but it was enough to make me want to read the rest of it on the train coming home. Raúl Zurita was also there, reading some oddly dream-like poems about the coup of 1973 and about Akira Kurosawa; he has one of the most pleasant reading voices I've ever heard -- it was almost hard to get past the immediate sensory delight of listening to him speak, to get at the content of the poems. Zurita also has a piece in this issue of BOMB about Nicanor Parra, sort of bringing me full circle.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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I'm looking forward to hearing Sergio Chejfec reading this evening, and hope to buy a copy of his book. And I just found out, he is blogging, and has been since 2006! His blog is Parábola Anterior -- mostly in Spanish, the top article AOTW is translated into English by Margaret Carson (who translated My Two Worlds and will be at the event tonight). At LanguageHat's site, I asked how his name is pronounced; Bill Walderman notes that the name is the Polish spelling of Heifetz.
posted afternoon of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I commented at The Great Whatsit today that I was not finding the second and third books of the His Dark Materials series quite as  overwhelmingly great as I found the first. But as of the reading I did with Sylvia tonight -- chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass -- I want to take that back, and just say the middle book is a lull between two masterpieces. The beauty of the narrative here is just enough to take my breath away. I am realizing that these books could be made into a truly fantastic series of movies if only the studios were not so attached to live action and CGI -- I think they are a perfect match for anime (or maybe I mean "for Studio Ghibli", which is about the sum total of my exposure to anime). Reading about Will talking to Balthamos and Baruch, especially the fight against Metatron, was bringing visions of Spirited Away flickering across my mind. Metatron is even a perfect name for an anime bad guy! I also noticed a couple of coincidences of imagery with Cien Años de Soledad, which I take as a very good sign -- I am absorbing enough of the book even without knowing the language well, for it to be on my mind when I'm not reading it. When the narrator noted that Will's knife could cut between worlds but could not "abolish distance within worlds," I immediately flashed on Melquíades' statement that "la ciencia ha eliminado las distancias"; and when Will's boots were sinking into the soft sand in the hot, humid new world, my mind jumped to "aquel paraíso de humedad y silencio,... donde las botas se hundían en pozos de aceite humeante..."
posted evening of January 28th, 2009: Respond
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