Tag: Spanish

In the end, only the laughter remains: Austral by Carlos Fonseca

“Only someone who knows he is condemned can clearly see the path to salvation.”

Carlos Fonseca is a writer who delights in spinning complex webs that blend history, fiction and a distinct fondness for archival elements to create a framework within which important ideas and themes can be explored. As with his earlier works, Colonel Lagrimas and Natural History, his new novel Austral reaches across time and space to craft a unique literary environment complete with eccentric characters and grand schemes that gradually reveal the secret of their connections. But this time, the key to the puzzle the narrator is seeking to understand lies closer to home than he suspects when he is first drawn into this most unusual mystery.

Julio Gamboa’s world is unravelling when an unexpected summons arrives from his past. His distant past. The letter, postmarked in Argentina, bears an unfamiliar name, but the contents inform him that his friend Alicia—or Aliza as he had known her—Abravanel has died following a long illness that had, ultimately, left her almost entirely mute. However, as the letter writer, Olivia, assures him, she remained perfectly lucid to the very end. And, in passing, she entrusted a most important task to Julio, even though it had been more than thirty years since they last spoke or saw one another. An invitation to visit Aliza’s home in Humahuaca accompanies this curious missive and, with winter taking hold of Cincinnati and the future of his recently fractured marriage uncertain, Julio imagines not only a welcome reprieve, but a potential return.

Julio had met Aliza as a teenager in his native Costa Rica. To him she was exotic—a British girl bursting with poetry and stories of punk music who had run away from home at seventeen in pursuit of freedom and adventure. By contrast, he was cautious and uncertain, reluctantly committed to trying to meet his parents’ expectations that he pursue an academic future. Knowing that a scholarship awaited him, Julio and Aliza headed off on a last road trip up through Central America, finally ending in Guatemala during the volatile years of the early 1980s. That is where they parted ways, Julio leaving an angry and disappointed Aliza behind. Over the decades that followed, he moved to the US where he studied, got married and eventually settled into life as a professor of literature. Aliza, on the other hand, stayed in Latin America, changed the spelling of her name and began to write and publish novels in Spanish. When a stroke left her with a progressive form of aphasia, she moved to a commune in northern Argentina to try to complete the last installment of an ecologically themed tetralogy. But that goal had perhaps been too ambitious so her focus changed and she turned her attention to a new project. When she died, she left that manuscript with the explicit instruction that Julio was the only person who could edit it.

Upon his arrival in Humahuacha, he is given Aliza’s text—memoir or fiction, he is left to decide—and he begins to read a most remarkable account of Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld, an anthropologist who travelled to Paraguay in the 1960s seeking the ruins of New Germany, the failed utopia founded in 1886 by Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich, and her eugenicist husband Bernhard Förster. But Karl-Heinz’s intended research takes a different turn when he meets Juvenal Suárez, the last surviving member of an indigenous tribe and only living speaker of the Nataibo language. Over several subsequent visits, the anthropologist’s efforts to record and preserve this soon-to-be-lost language increases while his sanity deteriorates. Aliza’s father comes into the picture a number of years later when he is invited to meet with the anthropologist in the Swiss sanitarium where he lives. He is inspired to carry the torch he believes the older man is attempting to pass him—a destructive path that left him ever changed but may have kindled his daughter’s attraction to Latin America.

As Julio makes his way into Aliza’s manuscript, titled A Private Language, he is impressed by the richness of the writing given the author’s declining ability to communicate while haunted by the notion that he is dealing with a work somehow composed in a “private key”—a text that “all could read but only one person could understand.” As her chosen reader, he feels that Aliza is offering him precious insight into the girl he once knew, but wonders what deeper message she might be sending him after all these years. Then, at a party, he learns of a companion piece she was working on, a dictionary of sorts. It is suggested that an indigenous man who visited the commune daily might know more. The following day, as Julio sets off by bus for Salinas Grande in search of this man, Raúl Sarapura, he is beset with his own linguistic anxieties:

Though he wouldn’t say so, he was bothered by that sense of foreignness that fell over him every time he came back to Latin America. That feeling of never really returning. An anxiety over belonging that occasionally even translated into grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes, making him feel that little by little he was losing his language, and the last traces of his past along with it.

He returns bearing Dictionary of Loss, a notebook filled with almost child-like collages featuring images and entries with meanings, etymologies and commentaries for various words. If the key to understanding one text, and Aliza herself, lay in the other, and it was now Julio’s task to find the key to unlock the secret buried within this dual project.

Such a journey, of course, will lead Julio into a labyrinth lined with historical, philosophical and literary references, all somehow inextricable from his memories of his time with Aliza. But from his sofa back home in snowy Cincinnati, the logic connecting it all eludes him. Until he realizes that the roads he seems to be wandering down all lead to Guatemala, to the site of a village destroyed during the genocide, where a man he read about in the Dictionary, has constructed a memory theatre containing images, objects and recorded recollections—a space where fellow survivors of the war can honour their lost community and, through sharing memories, heal their trauma. Julio is certain that this is where he will find the answers he needs to complete the posthumous request his friend has made.

Austral is, clearly, a book about language, about the relationship of language—on an individual and societal level—to memory and legacy. It offers much to contemplate, but at the centre is the question of what can be done, in the face of the loss of language, to preserve the memory of a person or a people. Language does not exist in a vacuum, it needs to be spoken or read or committed to memory. Language is a link between the past and the future. A key image, repeated twice in the text, drawing on the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913) depicts a sketch of two rivers, one representing thought and the other representing language. The caption reads: “The trick, then, would be to learn to pass from one bank to the other without ceasing to speak.” For Saussure, language was a social phenomenon, in Austral the isolation of one speaker from a social network that has completely disappeared is mirrored by the potential loss of the ability of another speaker to navigate an existing system because the tools make that language possible have become inaccessible to her. But where an attempt to record a dictionary to preserve a dying language without a community fails, a dying speaker losing language is able to employ a community to reach an audience of one.

Fonseca, like his protagonist, is also from Costa Rica although he spent much of his adolescence in Puerto Rico, and Austral marks his first return to Central America in his writing. He notes in an interview that it meant a lot to finally feel comfortable “narrating from a region that I recognise as home but which I left long ago.” It may have taken three novels to get back there, but, having read and loved both of his previous works, I would suggest that this

is perhaps his strongest, most focused and most rewarding to date. Sometimes you can go home again.

Austral: A Novel by Carlos Fonseca is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Searching for the ever elusive “I”: The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills

Lately, when I imagine, I remember. Then I shift into a peaceful kind of forgetfulness. And I start to imagine again, remembering. Like a circle that’s no longer vicious because it erases its own trail, little by little, always resketching its outline for the first time.

How much of identity is memory? It would seem that the experience of being in the world is dependent on memory because each moment, as it passes, becomes part of an ever accumulating past—a past that gives coherency to the existential “I.” Yet, can what we think we know about ourselves help us live with our choices, idiosyncrasies, strengths and faults? In her inventive and intelligent collection of personal essays, The Book of Explanations, Mexican poet and writer Tedi López Mills begins with a look at a most basic question of identity, her “improper” (read: “unconventional”) name, followed by playfully distinctive explorations and dissections of the nature of memory. These opening pieces set the groundwork for a journey that will carry us through many of the experiences, influences, values and ideals that make her who she is and, by extension, any one of us who we are—or might be—because, after all, what can anyone ever really know for certain?

I don’t know the history of the fourteen essays—cleverly numbered from 0 through 13— that comprise The Book of Explanations. That is, I cannot tell if the original 2012 collection was assembled from previously published pieces or intended as a cohesive work from the outset, but it definitely succeeds as a whole. López Mills’ style is eclectic and fresh; her essays open up in unexpected directions, adopting different forms and approaches from piece to piece. She is always very much present, drawing on memories and personal experience, but even her more memoirish essays swing toward broader social, psychological and philosophical questions.

After her early forays into the nature of remembering, López Mills turns her attention to that strange period of often dark introspection otherwise known as adolescence and to reflections on the peculiarities of family dynamics. As a teenager, the author, or  her possible alter ego/alternate “I,” falls into to some classically heavy reading—Hesse, Nietzsche—in search of formulative role models. On her family’s frequently uprooted home front, her father, an eccentric, frustrated architect of dreams and schemes, is an unpredictable but memorable character while her mother is the stabilizing presence. She explores the lasting impact of her childhood in the essay “Father, Mother, Children,” where she posits: “Maybe there are no happy families, just happy days. I remember them because they’re always flanked by unhappy ones.” Her father, she says, was “erratic, original every day,” her mother “homogenous, predictable.” She is tempted to imagine who her mother might have been without children, although that necessarily imagines the imaginer out of existence. This leads into a fascinating observation about childlessness—her own situation which she insists is neither right or wrong—and its implications:

You belong to yourself, and in the end you may realize that your persona dims if you don’t put it at risk; you start melting away into a nervous, perfectionist mind. The influence of childlessness may even be more shocking, a deprivation so intense that it triggers hallucinations of a crowd as you rummage around, hearing no one’s noise. A fictitious identity, if forced and constant. While there’s no room for regret—you can’t undo what was never done—there’s an extravagant kind of nostalgia. You miss the future, not the past.

Either option, parenting or childlessness, simply puts you on one side of anguish or the other. And as a parent, I would add that you can experience an extravagant kind of nostalgia as well. In fact, I suspect that we all have some aspects of our lives in which it is the future we miss, not the past.

From one essay to the next, López Mills, examines those notions that intrigue or trouble her, or both. Her affection for cats, the pervasive and evasive nature of guilt (a regular evening visitor), what makes some people prone to jealousy (something she does not experience) and what makes others “good” (something she would like to be). She defends pessimism in what is essentially an essay about Cioran, makes some astute observations of the way we show or fail to show compassion for those in need and, finally, engages in a spirited Wittgensteinian-like investigation of wisdom by way of by Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and the Bhagavad Gita with plenty of introspective musing unfolding over 54 short reflections.

Not only is López Mills an engaging companion with a philosopher’s tendency to question and a poet’s sensitive attention to language, she puts herself—as the typically uncertain “I”—into all of the subjects she explores in a way that is always thoughtful and recognizable. This is a book filled with so many intriguing thoughts and ideas, but it is never intimidating or alienating. At a time when “genre-bending” essays have become quite popular, I sensed something here that I have not found in other similarly described collections. I suspect it may have to do with age. Although I grew up in a different environment and my soul searching may have had some differing triggers along the way, I had a sense from early in this collection that the author had to be close to my own age. There were no particular pop culture references to cling to but rather a shared atmosphere of being a teenager in the seventies, and a certain accumulated, well, wisdom. I finally looked her bio up online and discovered that she was born in 1959 and is just one year older than I am. Even though this book, first published in Spanish in 2012, was probably compiled when she was in her early fifties, I felt I was reading a contemporary.

It’s so easy to believe we know it all when young, but the older you get the more you realize how naïve your younger self was and the more you appreciate how little you ever really understand about who you are. At fifty or sixty, you may care less what others think in explicit terms, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to figure out what it all means at the end of the day. As with one of my heroes, Michel Leris, who differs greatly from López Mills in style but not in intent, there is this unending desire to catch oneself in the act of being and examine a subject—the elusive “I”—which can really only be observed in passing. Both writers know we can look back at what we remember, but in the moment we are fluid beings and what we remember is always being reimagined. There will always be more questions than answers.

And that’s okay.

The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Deep Vellum.

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.

Love is blind too: Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

The claustrophobic atmosphere of Lina Meruane’s compelling novel, Seeing Red, envelopes you from the first lines. The narrator, Lucina, is distraught. Sentences end mid-thought. Unfinished. A party is in full swing, only a room away, but she is suddenly alone, isolated.

I had to give myself an injection at twelve o’clock sharp but now I wouldn’t make it, because the pile of precariously balanced coats let my purse slide to the floor, because instead of stopping conscientiously, as I should have, I bent over and reached to pick it up . And a firecracker went off in my head. But it was no fire I was seeing, it was blood spilling out inside my eye. The most shockingly beautiful blood I have ever seen. The most outrageous. The most terrifying.

A diabetic diagnosed with a serious condition affecting her eyes, Lucina had been warned against leaning over and now one thoughtless movement has left her eyesight, her work and her normal connections to the external world threatened by a curtain of blood. What follows is a deeply internalized monologue that builds in neurotic intensity, narrated by a woman struggling against her worst fears with a rapidly diminishing reserve of dignity and grace.

Inspired by her own real-life episode of blindness, Seeing Red is not exactly an autobiographical novel. In an interview, the Chilean author and essayist explains that she began writing what she thought would be a memoir, but as the relationship with truth began to interest her less, it quickly became a piece of fiction. She was, however, keenly interested in capturing the experience of blindness as “seen” from the perspective of the unseeing person—something raw that would be in contrast to the tendency in Latin American literature to present blind characters from view of the outsider.

Set in the early 2000s, Lucina, the protagonist of Seeing Red is, like her creator, a writer (writing under the name “Lina” Meruane) who lives in New York City with her boyfriend Ignacio, an academic. Their relationship is only about six months old and they are just about to move to a new apartment when her sight starts to rapidly disappear. She faces an uncertain prognosis, and a delay before the doctor will be able to consider operating, but they are bound to one another by the intense emotion of a new romance. That’s a good thing, because Lucina will test it, especially when she flies home to Chile to visit her parents—both of whom are doctors—while Ignacio attends a conference in Argentina. He soon joins her as they to try to salvage a vacation they’d planned, one that is now restricted to Chile, primarily to her family’s Santiago home, because of her fragile condition. Relying on her memory, she guides her partner through a city he has never visited, trying at the same time to blindly negotiate an emotional minefield of complicated family dynamics and past relationships.

The narrative style cleverly enhances the increasingly unreliable nature of Lucina’s connection to the world around her. Through a series of unbroken single-paragraph sections, each two or three pages long, we are held hostage to her unseeing perspective. Thoughts unspoken race through her mind, as she imagines how those around her are reacting, picturing their expressions and adding to their words her own visualized commentary. She second guesses herself. She second guesses everyone and everything. One can only imagine how her patient partner or her aloof mother really feel as everything is channelled through Lucina’s  personal filter. Her reconstructions. Her cynical digressions. Her abruptly aborted sentences.  As readers we have to trust her descriptions which are themselves coloured by her anxieties and growing agitation.

Aren’t you dying of cold? Ignacio insisted, rubbing his hands together as if lighting a fire. I was trained to resist the damp air that was seeping into his bones. His teeth chattered. He got up from the chair and bent his legs to wake them up. He rummaged quickly in a packet of cigarettes, the match scratched my ears, and I heard him suck on the cigarette in spite of his imaginary flu. I could envision him forming fragile smoke rings that his forced cough then tore apart, his dry cough and the beaten voice of a bellyaching Galician. Winter in my Santiago made him remember winter in his own, in Compostela, and he told me again how as a boy he’d slept beside a wall that let water filter in from outside, how he’d spent his whole childhood sick, covered in rashes, his ears hardened by chilblains. He exaggerated his hardships, or invented them, all so as not to talk about our own.

The question of her relationship with Ignacio, and whether it will stand the strain, haunts Lucina. She wants to give him the freedom to decide if he would be willing to stay, even if the unthinkable happens and her sight never returns, and yet they are each terrified of being alone, lost and overwhelmed by the enormous implications that hang over them both. Conversations begin but are quickly aborted. Strange sexual urges obsess her. Once back in New York, with surgery ahead, the narrative only becomes more charged and visceral and surreal. In Megan McDowell’s excellent translation, none of the energy or intensity is lost. Lucina is a complex, difficult, thoroughly compelling character. Her story vividly demonstrates the fear of losing control, the limitations of relying on the mind’s eye and the extreme pressures a person in crisis can put on those close to them.

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane is translated by Megan McDowell and published by Deep Vellum.

Night / falls / slowly: Dream Pattering Soles by Miguelángel Meza

I was long asleep within me.
Emerge to keep vigil,
move.
Yes I was asleep within me.
I am truly alone.

(from “Appear”)

It may be small, but this trilingual chapbook contains an entire world in the span of ten poems. Here Guaraní poet Miguelángel Meza calls on the traditional mythology and cosmology of his Indigenous Paraguayan culture to speak to contemporary issues. This project, named in full Ita ha’eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra Formerly and Again Known as Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles has its origin in a dual language Spanish translation by Meza along with Carlos Villagra and Jacobo Rauskin first published in 1985. The original Guaraní was revisited and edited by the poet for this double bilingual edition which includes both the Spanish version and an English translation by Elisa Taber (each running alongside the original from the opposite end of the book). As a writer, translator and anthropologist born in Paraguay, Taber is especially well suited to take on this project. She was able to access the original poems directly and via the Spanish, check with the poet as needed, and edit the final version, allowing a uniquely interwoven translation to emerge.

The English title Dream Pattering Soles is a literal translation of the original title Pyambu, that, as the translator indicates in her Note, evokes an auditory image of “menacing presences, deities turned human.” The Spanish title that translates as The Stone is No Longer Alone calls to mind comforting presences, the “humanity of the nonhuman.” Together, the titles selected for the two translations embrace two essential elements of the grounding mythic narratives and the poet’s approach to rendering them. As Taber says:

Meza’s central figures of speech are metaphors and metonymies used in conjunction. Something substitutes another which is part of a whole. The attribute of a particular god is identifiable in a human and that of any human is identifiable in an animal or a thing.

As such, the journey of the poet, and by extension his community and the reader, is one of moving from being with to becoming in the other.

In the opening poem, Meza, takes on, as “I”, the voice of the fundamental essence—the first  ñe’ë, or world-soul, that arises with the beginning of the world. Nature is, as one would expect, an abiding presence in this sequence, and even without a detailed knowledge of Guaraní mythology, the mournful beauty speaks across a wide geographical and cultural expanse.

I suffer, moon.
Wrung firefly falls.
Earth will turn to dust, they say.
End. Then,
who will you, daughter, orbit?
I suffer:
The sky wrecks the rivers.
Sadness’ dust falls.
Ashes cover the fields and
the vast forest.
And you seem to spin back
into the sky’s depths.

(from “Moon”)

In this conception of the world, we see ancient wisdom meet modern concerns. The delicate, haunting images seem speak to our changing planet in the uncanny way traditional mythology so often does. In these uncertain times—the slogan of the 2020s it seems—this unique volume is a timely invitation to listen.

Dream Pattering Soles by Miguelángel Meza is translated by Elis Taber and published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Tragedy or farce: Natural History by Carlos Fonseca

“Hell is an incomprehensible sarcasm.”

There is, at the centre of the longest section of Carlos Fonseca’s ambitious and wildly inventive new novel, Natural History, an improbable tower inhabited by poor families, vagrants, addicts and an assortment of individuals who crave the seclusion afforded by a structure barely accessible by ordinary means. It is a strange and fantastic community bound by its own logic, something like the larger fictional work that supports its existence—a daring and intelligent spectacle peopled by a wide and vividly drawn cast, both historical and imagined.

Fonseca is a writer who loves to play with ideas, to set his eccentric characters up, rather like a set of dominoes, and allow them to follow leads, passages and pathways to the most unexpected and impossible conclusions. The tendencies that drive Natural History—a fascination with archival novels, science, and art—can be seen in his debut, Colonel Lágrimas, but here they are observed on a much grander scale. And yet there is a cramped, claustrophobic atmosphere that haunts the protagonists who get swept up in this multi-layered adventure.

The novel opens with the neurotic confession of the unnamed Puerto Rican American narrator who works as a curator at a natural history museum in New Jersey. He admits that he tries to avoid facing beginnings by imagining his life is a continual act of imitation, an ongoing repetition of what has already happened. So, when he receives a package containing several envelopes filled with photographs, essays and newspaper clippings, he is not surprised. They are from Giovanna Luxembourg, a recently deceased fashion designer. His inheritance, so to speak. Seven years earlier she had summoned him out of the blue and arranged for a meeting at her unusual New York City apartment. Her interest in him had been sparked by papers he had once published on tropical butterflies and the quincunx, a geometric pattern consisting of five points with the fifth in the centre like, for example, the five on a dice.

They begin to meet. Periodically she calls for him and they talk well into the night about patterns occurring in nature. Afterwards, the narrator typically makes his way through the Bowery and stops into a Lebanese restaurant where he has become oddly obsessed with an older woman who sits with a table full of newspapers. Strange? Yes, well everything is strange. The uncertain attraction between two troubled insomniacs, Giovanna’s strained elusiveness, the narrator’s peculiar behaviours, and his annoyance when the designer suddenly becomes obsessed with masks. However, when Giovanna’s package arrives after her death, the narrator finds clues that will allow him to begin to unravel the truth of her identity, and the unconventional family that she sought to hide from.

Natural History is not a mystery or a detective novel so much as an elaborate construction of facts and fictions that, if it seems loose and slippery around the edges, works as a whole. It depends on having a wide enough sweep to see patterns form, connect and repeat. As multiple, richly realized story lines unfold and individual characters labour after their own obsessions, Fonseca is slowly gathering threads and themes together. As his quest for answers begins, the narrator visits an abandoned mining town where underground fires burn, home to a reclusive Israeli photographer who had once enjoyed a glamourous existence in the New York City of the sixties and seventies. Bits and pieces of the story begin to take shape there. He tells meeting and marrying a dynamic young beauty, their shared fame and their unfortunate decision to head south with their young daughter, the child who would one day become known as Giovanna.

A year later, in 2008, our protagonist learns of the arrest, in Puerto Rico, of a former model and actress, missing for decades, found in the odd, rundown high rise where she’d been living in seclusion. Now in her seventies but still striking, she is charged with intentionally, yet anonymously, planting fake news items which have impacted the stock market. She argues that she was engaged in a time honoured act of performative art. A nervous young lawyer is hired, and a lengthy trial ensues, observed close at hand by the narrator’s colourful friend Tancredo who has been sent to report on the event. Before long, he gets swept up in the entire strange atmosphere, telling the narrator that he’s spent nights thinking of:

all those who… had fallen prey to Virginia McCallister’s madness. He spoke of a great conspiracy that originated not in a human mind, but in a cosmic figure that grew steadily. I recalled my first months with Giovanna, months of exhaustion and delirium, and understood why my friend was starting to rave. Too much rum, too much heat, too many theories.

In this part, the longest and most complex section of the book, a wealth of ideas are woven into the narrative, against a rich tapestry of unlikely and colourful characters. The fourth part carries us back to the mid-seventies to revisit, this time in third person, the journey of the small family—photographer father, actress-model mother and sickly child—into the Central American jungle following a man known as the apostle. A formative and destructive pilgrimage. The final section is another missive from a ghost.

The core story line is filled in slowly, but the overall tale is never slow. The human connections (and disconnections) are real and affecting. The settings, urban and natural alike, are vividly drawn. And there is so much going on. On so many levels. Primary themes—masks, camouflage, the desire to disappear, the nature of art, the quincunx, utopian colonies, ruins, burning—all cross over and multiply in the reader’s imagination long after the book is finished. As well, the  steady parade of historical personalities that pass in and out: Comandante Marcos of the Zapatistas; Argentinian artists Jacoby, Costa and Escari who planned and promoted a Happening that did not occur; B. Traven, the popular Mexican-based author whose actual identity remains a mystery; Antonin Artaud; Karl Wallenda; General William Sherman and many more offer a wealth of opportunities for extratextual reading. Of course, to be able to carry all these interwoven elements with ease, a novel must be strong, strange and smart enough. And this one is.

Natural History by Carlos Fonseca is translated by Megan McDowell and published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Of insects and island men: Napoleon’s Beekeeper by José Luis De Juan

Bees are disciplined and predictable, but the outcome of their labour is uncertain, the same as happens with the deeds of men…

The setting is Elba, the year, 1814. Napoleon having abdicated in Fontainbleu, has been exiled to the Italian island where Andrea Pasolini, a beekeeper with a secret passion for philosophy, awaits anxiously for an expected encounter with the Emperor. It seems that, along with an innate island sensibility, the two men share a fascination with and passion for bees. This is the simple premise of Napoleon’s Beekeeper, a fanciful novella by Spanish writer José Luis De Juan. Combining details from history with a contemporary understanding of apiculture, he constructs, through a series of short, crisscrossing chapters, a vivid portrait of two very different men whose lives seemed destined to intersect at what could be a critical moment in history.

Elba’s honey had, at the time, gained a far reaching reputation for its quality and curative powers. Passolini inherited his official vocation from his father, but his true love, nurtured under the tutelage of a free thinking priest, Father Anselmo, who had been, like Napoleon, exiled on the island for a number of years, lies elsewhere. Through him, the farmer’s son had been introduced to philosophical thinking far beyond the accepted scope of the Church. Reading became his greatest love, one he took great pains to keep hidden, first from the townsfolk and later from his own wife and family. But when he can find time he retreats to a room hidden in his cellar where he reads and fills notebooks with his thoughts and experiences. This most unusual beekeeper exercises a careful pattern of behaviour to reveal his private pursuits to no one, even more so now that Bonaparte is on Elba.

It so happens that Passolini has dedicated himself to studying the Corsican’s career for decades, inspired by an anonymous account of an odd behaviour observed during the Marengo battle which caused him to suspect that the Emperor’s adoption of the bee as a symbol and his apparent appreciation of varieties of honey signified a deeper obsession.

From that day forward, after he learned of the connection between Bonaparte and bees, Passolini’s routine as a beekeeper found a new release. He started foraging in the backrooms of booksellers located in Pisa, Luca and Florence, getting hold of the tiniest booklets with some special tidbit about the First Consul, the most intimate detail, the most secret.

Over time, the beekeeper begins to see, in the behaviour of the colony and the structure of the hive, a key to understanding, even predicting, the outcome of military actions. He comes to view Napoleon through the hexagonal lens of the honeycomb. However, this knowledge also has him caught as a pawn in a larger political scheme he no longer wants to be part of. Now that the object of his attention is close at hand and interested in meeting and touring the island’s hives with him, his anxiety and paranoia grows steadily.

Meanwhile, the Emperor spends his early months in exile keeping his leadership muscles as toned as they can be under the circumstances. Down but not defeated. However, the days begin to drag and soon Napoleon finds himself alternately frustrated by circumstances and troubled by doubts and insecurity. He passes his days with a measure of regimented boredom as he rules over his diminished domain. The glory he once tasted begins to feel more distant, less possible:

I confess I’m an impostor. I was never the youngest general of France. I never conquered the north of Italy or reached as far as Naples to cleanse the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of its bandits. My great Alexander dream was just a boozy night in a tavern. I no longer make the foolish claim of having kept the Revolution from turning against itself, of having tackled the Terror, promoted civil justice, set the lazy clock of the centuries racing.

Of course, relieved, at least temporarily, from the full demands of his former existence, Mr. Bonaparte has time to indulge his interest in apiculture and from his arrival on his present island realm, that is one of his goals. He was already aware of Passolini, having received an unexpected missive from the modest beekeeper many years earlier and imagines the humble farmer to be a suitable guide to the island’s apiaries. Arrangements are made.

As the narrative inches toward their planned meeting, moving not chronologically but rather slipping in and out of the past to sketch out and fill in the characters of the Emperor and his would-be beekeeper, dropping into their dreams and nightmares along the way, a lyrical, slightly magical story unfolds. This is historical fiction at its most spare and whimsical, but grounded in possibility, that ultimately becomes a double stranded portrait of two sad figures longing to escape their circumstances.

Napoleon’s Beekeeper by José Luis De Juan is translated by Elizabeth Bryer and published by Giramondo.

A second-hand melancholy: Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos

At the beginning of Argentinian writer Mariana Dimópulos’ unsettling novel Imminence, it is immediately evident that there is something oddly off-balance here—a softly-hued disconnect that instantly sets the tone for one of the most finely realized representations of what it feels like to be oddly out of step with the world around you. The narrator, alone for the first time with her infant son awkwardly reaches out to touch him. She strokes a foot and waits for something to stir inside her chest as she had been assured it would. Nothing. Her partner Ivan comes into the room and, for the moment, rescues her from any further responsibility. Relief.

She was, we soon learn, hospitalized for a month with a serious infection following the baby’s birth, so young Isaac has been attended to by Ivan, her sister, and the nurses up until this point when she is deemed well enough to venture home. She does not even know her child has been named until that first night in the apartment.  His Russian father has chosen his own grandfather’s name, an appellation sadly devoid of Spanish musicality. But that’s okay.

The story that unfolds—or to be more precise, unwinds—belongs to that first evening home from the hospital, and to another evening with strong and increasingly ominous echoes—the last with her pervious lover, Pedro. Woven in and out of her careful accounts of those two evenings, are a flow of memories tied to her past and a number of key people in her life. There is Celeste, the relative she comes to stay with when she moves into Buenos Aires from the smaller rural community of Los Flores in her teens, and her friends, Mara the actress, and Ludmilla who was tragically killed young. These are the women she tries to measure her own insecure sense of womanhood against. And then there are the men: Ivan and Pedro, of course, and the Cousin, a mysterious distant relative with whom she has an occasional sexual relationship—a manipulative, distasteful character with an uncanny sense of timing.

Her account is not chronological, she foreshadows and repeats herself as if slowly filling in a fluid, watery tapestry. There is a dreamlike quality to her stories that bounce off one another, gradually taking on greater shape and form. Her observations are strange, often almost mechanical as if existing in the world is not something that comes naturally. She tries to take her cues from others. Mara and Ludmilla are especially important as early role models:

They were masters of subtlety, and both possessed a scathing wit. And as the stars of the night I would feel a great admiration for the two of them, and I would swear alongside them the sacred oaths of their master plan: I would never get married; I would never cry a single tear over a man who didn’t deserve it; I would never have children, nor would I attend to any other such calls of nature, if indeed nature were ever to call.

As her story is gradually fleshed out, her differences become more explicit, and more intriguing. Socially she struggles. She is, it appears, truly unable to interact with reality, if there is such a thing, with the same ease others seem to demonstrate. Aware of this shortcoming, she has learned, as she puts it, to disappear “inside the parenthesis”. She cannot even recall when it first happened—as a child or as an adult in response to loss perhaps—but either way she has found a refuge, first in the comfort of numbers and if that fails, in a private ritual:

In order to pull off the trick, all I had to do was imagine a beautiful derivative. If that didn’t work, I would make a little ball out of a stocking or a scarf and place it where I imagined my stomach to be, then spin around on the floor or the bed and wait for a few seconds, and soon enough it would start working, and any feeling remotely like an emotion was swiftly eliminated.

This ability to push emotion aside, one that could well be deeply embedded in the narrator’s personality, is a double-edged sword. If it eased the trauma of Ludmilla’s death, or Celeste’s difficult final years; it impairs her resistance to the Cousin’s inappropriate attentions, and undoes her relationship with Pedro, an academic who had visions of a future she could not share. In close proximity to others, her capacity to “perform herself” tends to fall apart and she becomes the architect and the audience of her own misfortune, watching from the impassive default position she continues to fall back into.

But when Ivan unexpectedly comes into her life, the ground suddenly shits beneath her feet. She feels. Unprepared, she is secretly pleased at this thing stirring inside. However, he is a doctor, called back to Minsk at least temporarily, and she has to act fast on this rising tide:

I was triumphant: I made promises, I sent signals, I invested all my energy into calculating what Ivan was really trying to tell me, rummaging for the hidden meaning beneath every sentence, in a feverish kind of hermeneutics, trying to enthrall him, letting myself become enthralled.

Ivan does return, their relationship blossoms, and ultimately they are sitting over soup on this first night together as a family while their child sleeps in his cot. She and Pedro likewise had had soup for dinner on the night their relationship ended. Is the stage set for another repetition, like the many coincidental duplications our number-obsessed narrator has previously noted? As the trajectories of the two accounts at the core of this tale threaten to converge, the tone becomes increasingly measured, disturbed. Tensions rise.

Imminence is an exceptionally well crafted novel. The narrative winds forward and back in time, but never loses its focus. The compelling voice of the narrator is the key, the magic that pulls this work together. Translator Alice Whitmore allows the full beauty and the strangeness of her reminisces and reflections to come through. Lyrical, but odd, the narrative strikies a tone somewhere between that of  Fleur Jaeggy’s SS Prolterka and Max Frisch’s Homo Faber. Some may find her detachment difficult to forgive, but she herself is aware of a lack, a disconnect—a something that sets her apart from other people, especially women. She will frequently assert that she is not a woman, but this is not an indication of an inherent gender insecurity, so much as a failure to play by the normal rules of human engagement which, because she is female, she assumes are those of a woman. Yet, with less of a record to set straight than Jaeggy or Frisch’s protagonists, her story is one with many more undefined edges. This is not just a confession, but a sombre self-examination, a mess of complicated emotions muted, repressed and viewed through a haze of time and physical fatigue. And it is a narrative that holds you in its spell until the very end.

Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos is translated from the Spanish by Alice Whitmore, is published by Giramondo.

Civil war up close: Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez

“Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.”
.                                                                  MARX

 So begins Blood of the Dawn, the devastating debut novel by Peruvian author Claudia Salazar Jiménez. This slender volume that captures, at gut level, the horror of the “Time of Fear”, the years when the Shining Path insurgency was at its most intense is tightly bound to the intimate feminine experience. It is an exercise with little narrative distance—one that takes three women from very different backgrounds, closes in on their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and motivations, and weaves back and forth between their stories. When their disparate trajectories intersect, their individual fates, at least in that time and place, become shockingly similar.

In 1980, a  fringe group of Maoist terrorists stole ballot boxes and burned them in the public square of the town of Chuschi, setting off a time of fear and violence that would, over the next twenty years, leave 70,000 dead. Set primarily during the first decade of this “People’s War,” Salazar Jiménez’s novel is a bold attempt to give voice to those not often heard. On both sides of the conflict.

There is Marcela, a disillusioned, yet idealistic teacher who is seduced by the message of the Shining Path and its charismatic leaders. Abandoning her husband and young daughter, she joins the battle. Her first person account is reported from prison, where she looks back at her childhood, early adulthood and her time with the guerilla group. In the face of regular interrogation she is still defiant, still holding on to a loyalty that cannot quite be dissolved despite the atrocities she has observed, participated in and experienced. Hers is a complicated narrative that takes the reader right into the conflicted reasoning, force of conviction, and group dynamics that shape a terrorist.

The women advance, marching along the gray patio. The first of them holds a banner with the image of Comrade Leader. Honor and glory to the proletariat and the people of Peru. Hair trained under green caps. Red blouses. Aquamarine skirts to the knee. Marching in formation. Educated in the shining trenches of combat. Jail others call it; prison. All at the same pace. Give one’s life for the party and the revolution. Banners of red flags with a yellow star. Torches in hand. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Drum one. Drum two. Drum three. The feminine ferment rising. We travel a shining path. We struggle without truce to the end.

The second character is Melanie, a young photojournalist in love with a female artist who has moved to Paris. She imagines that the conflict in the mountains holds the story she is meant to record. A city dweller, she is quite unprepared for the harsh realities she finds. Her story is told in a first person present that highlights both her passions and her naivete. She will discover that her camera is neither welcomed by the villagers she meets, nor does it provide a shield against the sights, sounds and smells that will come to permeate her very being.

The next hamlet is a cloud of smoke. It’s hard to make out anything clearly. My camera feels heavier than usual. That’s fine; its weight anchors me to reality in this spectral place. What’s left when everything is done? Nothing. Where should I go look now? What should my lens focus on?

Finally, the truly innocent victim in the situation is the Indigenous peasant woman Modesta, who will lose everything as insurgents and soldiers repeatedly cross through her village, leaving a trail of rape, torture and murder. Her account is reported in the second person—a startling powerful perspective—until, toward the end when she finds her own voice and picks up her own thread. By then we see her slowly finding a resilience and strength that is fragile and determined at once, caught in war that makes no sense to her.

Every day at exactly four in the afternoon, new words parade into your ears just like the terrorists parade every morning. That if the class, they say, that if the proletariat, they say; that if the revolution, they say, that if the people’s war, they say, are saying, say. You only nod in agreement, already tuning out. They speak of people you don’t know, a certain Marx, a certain Lenin, a certain Mao, and a certain President Leader who is boss of them all. We’re all going to be equal, they say.

The atmosphere is claustrophobic. Wound through the plaited threads of the women’s stories are episodes of unattributed stream of consciousness and short quotes from political and philosophical sources. Repetition is employed to reinforce the relentlessness of the savage violence, and the point at which the narratives of the three protagonists blur in identical experiences of excruciating violation. The anonymity of the moment is in sharp contrast to the differing paths that lead each woman to that point, and the diverging courses their lives follow afterward. In an interesting Translator’s Note, Elizabeth Bryer brings to light some of the challenges of reflecting, in English, the different voices through use of rhythm, ideological focus and cultural references as appropriate to each woman.

In the end, Blood of the Dawn comes very close to risking losing its impact with the bludgeoning effect of the brutal tableau that unfolds. Fortunately this a spare, tightly controlled work and, to its credit, one that raises more questions than it answers, even leaving its own characters uncertain. A brave debut, indeed.

Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez is translated by Elizabeth Bryer and published by Deep Vellum.

 

Voices from the margins: Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón

There seems to be considerable debate these days about where the line should be drawn between the literary license to imagine and the appropriation of  voices of those of different genders, sexualities, cultures, ethnicities and racial identities. What was once considered acceptable is now questioned. And, although race is often considered a boundary to be respected or only be crossed with exceptional care, in a highly stratified cultures, class or caste or ethnic heritage may also come in to play. The concern is that the dominant voice will not only be given more attention, but that others risk being reduced to stereotypes and caricatures.

I recently abandoned a book that, despite some very witty and engaging writing, seemed to be freely exploiting mental illness, poverty and family dysfunction as justification for a smart-assed narrator with all the warmth of a sociopath. Anyone who has been suicidal or lost a loved one to suicide will know it is no laughing matter. The charm quickly fizzled and turned to distaste for me. Apparently the poor and mentally ill are still fair game for slapstick humour and humiliation.

However, it is entirely different when the humour, social commentary or complex stories are owned from within a community, told by its members. That is, I would argue, the importance of supporting and encouraging contributions to literature, theatre, film and the arts from marginal voices.

Cue Mundo Cruel, a series of short, sharp stories that take you into the heart of a small community peopled with eccentric, mostly queer characters—a world that Puerto Rican writer Luis Negrón knows well. It is his own:

Santurce, Puerto Rico, once known as Cangrejos, meaning Crabs, but no longer. Santurce. Blocks and blocks full of doctor’s offices and temples—Catholic, Evangelical, Mormon, Rosicrucian, Espiritista, Jewish, and yoga-ist, if that’s what you call it. The stench of sewers 24/7. Unbearable heat. Reggaeton, old school salsa, boleros, bachatas, jukeboxes, pool halls, slot machines. Topless bars, Dominican bars, gay bars. Catholic schools, beauty schools, vocational schools, and schools where you can get a professional degree in just one year and without much homework.
.                       —from the “The Vampire of Moca”

A striking array of voices and personalities pass through the stories in this slender collection, and their lives are often disturbing, filled with misfortune, dark humour and an uncanny resilience. Most of the pieces are first person narratives, often presented as monologues or one-sided conversations, and, in one instance, as a series of increasingly desperate notes  without a reply. The opening piece “The Chosen One” will challenge a few readers with its precocious young narrator, gleefully recounting his very early initiation into sexual activity with boys and men, experiences bound, as he sees it, to his “special” role within the church. Crude, unnerving, and funny this is in its way a backhanded satire on the degree of sexual abuse that can and does occur. But our young narrator refuses to see himself as the victim. His story sets the stage for the hustlers and the heartache that re-emerges in later stories, but it is not typical. Truth be told there is no “typical” here at all.

What is remarkable about this collection is the variety—each story is different in style and tone. Negrón channels a wide range of characters with compassion and affection, even those who espouse homophobic and xenophobic views, allowing each to demonstrate his or her own narrowness or generosity. The one-side conversations and observed dialogues are particularly effective in this regard, allowing us to eavesdrop, without further comment. The infectious, campy energy of “La Edwin” offers a perfect example:

Ahá! . . . Listen, changing the subject, did La Edwin call you? . . . Yes, Edwin. The one who thinks she’s a man. Honey, the one from the support group . . . That’s weird because that little queen is calling everybody . . . Yeah, her, that’s the one . . . Oh I didn’t know they called her that. You’re bad, girl, bad, bad . . . Well she called me last night, drr-unk out of her mind . . . Saying that he felt all alone, that for him it was difficult to deal with all this shit, meaning gayness . . . I let her go on . . . So she could get it out of her system. Wait a second, I’m getting another call . . . Aló, aló. Aló, aló. How weird, they hung up . . . The thing is, a man left her . . . Yeah, girl, she got involved with one of those lefty fupistas who plant bombs and want the ROTC out of the university . . . Yeah, girl, since they can’t liberate the motherland, they’re going to liberate themselves sexually.

It’s a fun little romp, but the story it tells about queer identity and sexual insecurity is serious.

Most of the stories in Mundo Cruel are quite short, or rather, as long as they need to be. None feel like they are dragged out too far, preferring to offer snapshots of life in this marginalized community. As is typical, some are stronger than others. Likely each reader will have their own favourites. For me it is the sad, but beautiful, story, “The Garden”. Set in the late 1980s, it is the account of a love affair between a young man and his older lover who is dying of AIDS. Nestito’s boyfriend, Willie, shares a house with his sister Sharon who has a longstanding, secret love affair of her own. Together the three of them make an odd, but happy family. As Willie nears the end of his life they plan a party. Another indication of Negrón’s versatility, this is by far the tenderest, most heart-wrenching piece in the collection:

I lay down next to Willie. He had recently taken a bath. He had changed with me ever since he became bedridden. For months he ignored me as at the party where we had met. I wasn’t me, I was part of a duo with Sharon. “You two this, you guys that.” I looked closely at his body and passed my hand over his chest. His armpits were tender ground for little flowers. I hugged him gently. His bones felt fragile. Body, host. Orchard fed with alien nutrients. I sought his face, kissed the dry sores, brushed away an eyelash that rested on his cheek. I looked into his eyes and found, finally, after eight months and sixteen days, desire.

Only 91 pages long, Mundo Cruel offers a wonderful introduction to a skilled, sensitive storyteller and the strange, sometimes dark little corner of the world he knows and clearly loves.

Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and published by Seven Stories, I read this book as part of the Spanish/Portuguese Literature  Month (and, to be fair, the tail end of Pride as well).