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| 1644452855
| 9781644452851
| 1644452855
| 3.93
| 4,476
| 2020
| May 07, 2024
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really liked it
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'He could swear the woods have closed up behind him.' This continues my theory that getting on a boat in literature usually leads to a bummer time. But 'He could swear the woods have closed up behind him.' This continues my theory that getting on a boat in literature usually leads to a bummer time. But yet a good read. A consistent cycle of tragedy and trauma churns towards the next generation in Selva Almada’s Not a River, a story that serves as an urgent rebuke against submitting to feelings of fatalism and a plea to confront the social forces that drive it. Almada invokes an eerie elegance in this rather laconic tale of reminiscence and retribution where death casts a long shadow over a present always perched on the precipice of horror. Caught in its shadow are two lifelong friends who have come to a rural island river to fish with the teenage son of their friend who perished in the very same river. Sun-soaked into surreality and a sense of otherness amidst a threatening natural world, hostile locals and two mysterious sisters who catch their eye, each page portends disaster as an impending violence can be felt boiling underneath. Annie McDermott harnesses Almada’s prose as it winds like a river between past and present for a gorgeous translation certainly deserving of its shortlisting for the 2024 International Booker. Not a River is a brief yet powerful novella that enacts a chilling social horror through a deep look at masculinity wrapped up in broader issues of poverty, sexuality and violence set against the indifference of nature and human fragility. ‘A summer like this one. Twenty years back, a summer like this one. The same island or the next one along or the one after that. In the memory it's all just the island, with no name or exact coordinates.’ Central to Not a River is, in fact, a river—well ‘not a river, this river’—that takes on new meaning as the story flows around each narrative turn, it’s current carrying the two sets of characters as well as the past and present together. For the locals of this rural Argentinian island, they were ‘baptized by the river,’ for the visitors it is the source of warm memories of youth now waterlogged in grief at the loss of the friend who drowned there. But it is not just the river but the whole of the island and nature that comes alive like a character, interacting with the people and issuing a sense of foreboding with each branch shaking in the breeze. ‘This man isn’t from these woods and the woods are well aware. But they leave him be. He can come in, he can stay for as long as it takes to gather kindling. Then the woods themselves will spit him out, his arms full of branches, back to the shore’ Selva Almada excels at capturing a sense of eerie and creeping dread that makes the reader wonder if reality is about to be shredded into bloody taters as the abstract horrors underneath claw their way out. The tone of each scene is awash in disoriented unease where orange skies seem to be glowering in the gloam and even a house in daylight feels plunged into the darkness of a haunting—‘its scary in the silent, empty house, even though the sun is still shining’ Violence seems to crouch in every dark corner waiting to spring, and when Almada shines the beam of her prose to reveal the lurking dangers we find it to be unrestrained masculinity made all the more feral on a cocktail of grief and frustration. ‘A night like this, just like this, only darker.’ Almada cites Not a River as the third in a triptych of books aimed at investigating the effects of masculinity and violence, though readers can approach this without having any knowledge of The Wind That Lays Waste or Brickmakers to enjoy this one. Though readers familiar with Almada’s work will once again celebrate her stunning prose and familiar themes still rendered fresh. There is a signature sparseness to her writing that still feels spacious as where a lot is implied just off the page as the story stretches out its arms between past and present, and the imagery and symbolism fill a space far larger than their descriptions. Annie McDermott, who has translated several Almada works already, has a knack for capturing this in English and retaining the unique specifics of her works. In the afterword (publishers, please give translators the space to speak I love this) she gives a few insights into her choices that show genuine care. I was particularly intrigued by her efforts at the use of language on the island: ‘I was seeking to piece together a language that was earthy and colloquial, as natural as breathing, and could plausibly feel like the way people might speak on this island in the Paraná Delta.’ Another aspect of dialog I found effective in its execution are the ways the dialog is unadorned by quotations (which I honestly find redundant when an author has a good sense of tone anyways) but also offset in separate lines from the speaker. It gives a sense that the characters are detached from their own words as they, like the reader, are more observers to their speech as the surreal menacing atmosphere rolls over them. Like the bartender with words jostling with the smoke from the cigarette that never leaves his mouth,’ language is ghostly, airy, a character of its own apart from the characters who speak it. ‘That feeling would never leave him. That grief. It still hits him from time to time. It hits right now as he's smoking by himself. In the middle of the river. In the middle of the night.’ What works so well here is the way past and present blend back and forth with backstories that tease revelations just teetering on the edge of understanding until it all topples into tragedy together. No spoilers but there are some big reveals that land with the force of a book that feels more like 800 pages than 80. ‘Sometimes dreams are echoes of the future,’ the men are told in their youth as we see how the future can also haunt the past and build a sense of helplessness as tragedies seem to roll out in predictable cycles. The men suffer at their own hands yet throw them up in the air as if unable to recognize their own roles for which they are unrepentant. Men that want sex and the company of women but not any responsibility. Men who plot revenge that goes from a frightening warning to a potential murder as they drain the bottles down. Men who can’t seem to let go of a culture of masculinity even when they are drowning in it. ‘In a small town a tragedy's everyone's business, we're all mixed up together around here’ There is also an excellent look at the divide between rural and city here, particularly the way the rural folks stick together and are wary of outsiders. The killing of a ray and the disposal of its body that sets off the events of the novel is not just a ray but an expression of the island and the attitudes of the city to dismiss and dispose of the rural population. ‘It wasn't a ray. It was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she'd have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. Flat on the riverbed or gliding in her tulle, magnolia from the water, searching for food, chasing transparent larvae, skeletal roots.The hooks buried in her sides, the tug-of-war all afternoon till she can't tight any more. The gunshots. Pulled from the river to be thrown back in later. Frustrations fester and lives crack. Aside from the men fishing there is another excellent and haunting narrative about the aging Siomara and her losing battle against her daughters aging into young women lusted after by men, ‘how little by little they were slipping away, how sooner or later they were going to leave her as well.’ In Siomara we also find a juxtaposition to the indifference of nature, however, as she has a habit of setting fires learned after a particular childhood trauma. If nature is indifferent to the life humans, fire is indifferent to the life of nature, though one might have to consider if here fire is a symbol of destruction or purification. ‘Sometimes she thinks the fire talks to her. Not like a person does, not with words. But there's something in the crackle, the soft sound of the flames, as if she could almost hear the air burning away, yes, something, right there, that speaks to her alone... Come on, you know you want to. It says.’ Surreal and succinct, Not a River is an impressive and powerful little novel. With prose that crackles like the fires set around the island at night, Almada illuminates the darkness to find the menacing figures of toxic masculinity and violence beleaguering society. As past and present flow together, this story lands some rather haunting twists that culminates to an ending that you’ll sense approaching like the inevitability of death, yet when it arrives it is no less fierce or shocking. Yet amidst it all we still find a drive for survival and to placate the horrors of life. But will the men of this story be able to rise above the rage and resentments, or will the burden once again fall upon the women caught in the blaze. 4.5/5 ‘As if just before dying he'd seen something so huge he couldn't take it it. But what was it? Something too huge, that was for sure. But also too terrible? Or too beautiful.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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not set
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May 20, 2024
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| 1916277896
| 9781916277892
| B08MZ57D2Q
| 3.83
| 592
| May 2015
| Apr 06, 2021
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really liked it
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‘We’ve got more gossips in this town than Christians.’ Ideas of obsession, community, and tending one’s garden come alive in A Perfect Cemetery, a coll ‘We’ve got more gossips in this town than Christians.’ Ideas of obsession, community, and tending one’s garden come alive in A Perfect Cemetery, a collection of short stories by Argentinian writer Federico Falco and brilliantly translated by . Set in and around the Córdoba mountains of Argentina, the five stories collected here are by turns humorous and ponderous as people find themselves suffocated by the societies around them and try to find ways of discovering their own. As Falco has said in interviews ‘as social beings, there is no way to live in solitude,’ and we find the lives of these characters chafing and bruising against the day-to-day of life. They often move in surprising ways, written in shades of Juan Rulfo and Juan Carlos Onetti though also fresh and distinctly his own. These stories unfold slowly but surely, almost more like a novel despite their short length, nestling you into the lives of these flawed but very human characters in ways that make this engaging and unforgettable. Following the collection is a wonderful essay from translator Jennifer Croft (the award-winning translator for Olga Tokarczuk’s past few releases) where she discusses the difficulties in capturing place in translation. ‘Translation isn’t a system,’ she writes, ‘translation is an encounter between two human beings that takes place in words that belong to different systems,’ and something crucial to this novel is getting the sense of place across to English-speaking readers. The setting is so central to the stories with the land functioning nearly like an unruly character itself, as well as the community-at-large being an omnipresent character engaging with plot from social judgment to political maneuvering. Croft brings these elements alive and each word is carefully chosen towards that effect (she spends a page defending her use of the word ‘swell’ in a key line, for instance, so you know she has Falco’s best interests at heart). Frequently we find characters at odds with the society around them, most notably in the opening story The Hares where a man described as King of the Hares has left his village and lover to live in the wilderness, returning occasionally to steal necessary supplies from his former neighbors. The interplay between society and wilderness is carefully embedded in the language here, such as when the King receives a visitor, Cristina, and upon his embarrassment of his living space he immediately reverts back to being named Oscar in the text. Only when she leaves does he become the King again, a clever tactic to show how social surroundings have an effect on the self. In the blissfully comedic Silvi and her Dark Night we witness teenage Silvi reject the religion that so permeates her life (her mother has Silvi accompany her when delivering last rites, for instance) and becomes an atheist, only to immediately pledge to conversion of Mormonism. The conversion crumbles upon examination as her impetus was solely to gain access to Steve, the young Mormon missionary who reminds her of a beautiful boy she once watched die. Though this story also highlights another major theme of the collection: obsession. Silvi monomania for the Mormon is amusing, with her buying his brand of deodorant to smell while in bed, and her actions are so alarming to her mother that she consults a Priest. It becomes a beautiful idea, however, of going through a dark period to return home again. Here is a passage between Silvi and her father about his model airplane flying off: ‘How will it get back? asked Silvi when the plane disappeared, fully devoured by the light and the distance. The interplay of parental trust and love and the dangers of living and staying all come alive in the beautiful landscapes of Argentina, and this story is worth the price of the book alone. Though obsession is also key to the title story—my personal favorite—about a man who designs cemeteries clashing with a city council and locals who don’t want one. The mayor has ordered it built to accommodate his dying father (who insists he A. won't die like that dude in Monty Python and B. doesn't want to be buried there) and to give the town a scenic spot as a testament to those who lived there instead of having their corpses sent to be buried in another town. The engineer finds politics hindering his artistic vision—a wonderful statement on its own about how politics and budgets are a deterrence to the aims of purity in art—embarrassed his peers will know he clashed with a blacksmith he suspects of sabotaging his gate before the interdiction against his crowning visual centerpiece: an expensive oak tree. What is art when one does not want it, the story asks. ‘I’d rather you get me a wheelchair,’ says the dying father, ‘so I could go and see about my garden or visit my chickens, not to see some cemetery.’ Gardening, in fact, is central to many of these stories and is, in general, often a symbol of community. In The River a woman must watch as her late husband's garden is trampled and urinated on by the drunks from the neighborhood bar (a great statement on community as stiffling again) though in Forest Life the greenhouses become a place of refuge. Forest Life finds a middle-aged woman and her father stripped of their home when property developers buy the land and begin chopping down the pine forest her father has planeted and cultivated. To survive she decides to marry someone who will care for her father but her lifetime of living in the hills has been deemed antisocial behavior and marked her as an Other. She finds a Japanese man will take her, someone else outcast from society (even she resents his being foreign) and upkeeping a garden in a community of Japanese immigrants. This story has a boiling tension beneath that never bursts, something true to life that Falco excels in capturing. These stories all examine grief in unique ways and while community is thought to be something to share grief, here we find those who need the comfort most pushed aside. This is a short collection but each story is so rich that it feels significantly larger than the sum of pages. Federico Falco is wonderful and I certainly hope Croft has more translations of his coming soon. 4/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 15, 2022
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Sep 15, 2022
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Sep 15, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1590177177
| 9781590177174
| 1590177177
| 3.99
| 3,307
| 1956
| Aug 26, 2016
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it was amazing
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Something more is always expected. ‘To the victim of expectations,’ begins Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama in its epigraph. The Argentine masterpiece, firs Something more is always expected. ‘To the victim of expectations,’ begins Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama in its epigraph. The Argentine masterpiece, first published in 1956 and, in 2016, made available in an exacting English translation by Esther Allen that retains the precise and often surrealistic prose, is a novel of surmounting frustration and failed expectations of a man caged by his social status and position. The theme of restlessly remaining static functions equally as an existential and socio-political examination, the struggle between freedom and a constrictive society--self-sabotage--exacerbating a feeling of hopelessness and the ‘horror of being trapped in absurdity.’ The reader is treated to a captains seat within the consciousness of Don Diego de Zama in his purgatorial Paraguayan post afar from family in which he can rise no higher. Through the detestable, boastful and pathetic mind of the narrator, the reader rides a tragic tale of male fragility and futility in a new world that shall consume Zama as Benedetto examines the ego as well as the confines and constructs of the outer world that astringe against it. ‘I hoped, rather, to be myself, at last, in the future, by dint of what I might become in the future.’ Zama opens with a stark image of a deceased monkey rocking in the waves along the city’s port. All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.Don Diego de Zama begins his tale with an immediate affinity with this stagnant corpse, seeing in it the horrors of his own existence. A few pages later he once again finds a perfect metaphor for his condition in the fate of a species of fish ‘must devote nearly all their energies to the conquest of remaining in place.’ Much like in Benedetto’s first book, a loosely connected series of stories aptly titledMundo Animal (Animal World, as collected in the new Nest in the Bones: Stories by Antonio Benedetto), animal metaphors and nature imagery is employed towards an accruing sense of dread and absurdity such as the narrator of Mundo Animal allowing birds to nest in his skull only to be picked apart from the inside or Zama noticing the fruitless efforts of beasts in the wild. The novel, told in three sections--the final and shortest segment being the most impressive and most brutal--covers a decade of Zama’s life as the 18th century draws to a close. ‘Ready to go and not going’ sets the tone of what is to follow as Zama schemes for a promotion that will bring him back to the city, back to his wife, back to the limelight of social glory. He has risen quickly and efficiently, holding a position just beneath the local Gobernador while still in the youth of his early thirties, but is held back due to his identity--Zama is a child of the Americas. 18th Century Spanish law decreed that positions of power were to be held only by the true Spanish blood, and even though both Zama’s parents were, his fate of having been born in the colonies marks him. Early on, Zama visits the home of sex workers with other dignitaries who laugh at his insistence on only sleeping with white women, calling him out on his attempt to seem ‘purely Spanish’. This existential dissatisfaction with an identity beyond his control is the root of all his actions and frustrations. Zama spends the novel blaming outside conditions, spiraling into wild fits of rage and paranoia as the world around him seems to plot against him. However, many of his shortcomings are self-inflicted. Zama has an important position that he neglects while stewing over his lusts, haphazardly ruling over murder cases or dismissively making knee-jerk decisions on matters that require much more attention. His inability to act is best personified in a scene where he watches a poisonous spider crawl over the sleeping body of a man he knows. Zama does nothing, just hoping the situation will play out for the best and is horrified to realize he felt no empathy for the man who might be killed but instead just a tepid fascination to see what happens. Much like his titular character, Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986) never achieved fame during his lifetime. Like his narrator, his self-imposed exile in the countryside of Argentina instead of the literary hub of Buenos Aires hindered his rise in status. He was imprisoned in 1976 under the military dictatorship of General Videla, after which he would talk about how cruel it was for never having been told why he was arrested (thank you to GR friend El Miguelón for the corrected biographical info!). Benedetto faced the firing squad only to be pardoned moments before, much like his literary hero--and major influence--Fyodor Dostoyevsky¹. I found Zama to most bring to mind Hunger by Knut Hamsun, which is interesting to note as Hamsun was inspired by Dostoevsky and in turn influenced Franz Kafka while Benedetto was most influenced by Dostoevsky and Kafka (the latter he had just read in the year proceeding publication of Zama and Kafka’s influence is easily recognizable as having been currently weighing on his mind during the creative process). It seems there is a common denominator functioning within the works of these novels and Zama is another stone to overturn in the discovery of this underlying literary cohesion. As one author often informs upon another, I came to Benedetto through Roberto Bolaño and his story Sensini (the opening tale in the collection Last Evenings on Earth), whose namesake character is based on Benedetto himself. Wiithin the story Bolaño provides a succinct review of the novel Zama--appearing in Sensini as Ugarte: Entitled Ugarte, it was about a series of moments in the life of Juan de Ugarte, a bureaucrat in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century. Some (mainly Spanish) critics had dismissed it as Kafka in the colonies…and later Bolaño continues, very astutely addressing the prose as ‘a cold book, written with neurosurgical precision.’ While ‘Kafka in the colonies’ is used dismissively, it isn’t altogether inaccurate. Within Sensini, we find the caricature of Benedetto as an aging author with a son, Gregorio, who has ‘disappeared’ during the Dirty Wars. The narrator suspects the name as being a nod to Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis. Bolaño was laying much of the groundwork of interpretation for Zama--pronounced in Spanish with a sibilant S like Sama--by playfully making the novel Zama like a literary child lost in the chaos of the mid twentieth century and pointing out that the title is a play of Kafka’s Samsa².Much like Gregor Samsa, Zama is trapped in the horrors of his situation. ‘I saw the past as a shapeless, visceral mass, yet still somehow perfectible.' There is a surmounting nightmarish quality to the second half of Zama as frustrations grow. Zama professes a desire for the ‘reality’ in his world but when they do not meet his expectations they become a living nightmare tinted in paranoia and surreal disappointments. After a particularly hellish scene in which he watches a young girl be trampled to death by a horse and then chases a woman who may or may not be posing as two women to, as he considers, toy with him, Zama wakes and dismisses it all as a fever dream. His refusal to accept the world around him, to accept his station in it, is launching him into a purgatory where freedom is stifled by the human condition and his rage against it is like crying out into a void. ‘How could I, how could anyone, voluntarily relinquish himself to horror?’ he asks himself. His inability to step through it becomes a trap of his own design. Benedetto positions the narrative within Zama’s stream of consciousness where we can observe the tides of his moods and hear his inner confessions. There is a wonderful, black humor to the novel that gives reprieve from its almost overwhelming grimey and grimness as Zama self-justifies all his actions in pathetically pompous manners. After assaulting a woman, he grieves not for the cheek he slapped but that he has ‘done violence to my own dignity.’ Zama is a detestable character, aggressive yet weak, lustful, prideful and totally unable to temper his own emotions. In effect, he feels very real and it is his ‘realness’ that he has the most difficulty grappling with along with the ‘realness’ of his surrounding world. The woman of the second section warns him through a metaphor of a lover’s claim on a woman: If he clings to the one who no longer is, and to her alone, then he loves a dangerous fantasy. It will lead to sickness and distress, perhaps horror.He must come to terms with reality as it is, not as he fantasizes it should be. Zama fails to heed the sagacious warning and continually slips into madness. This madness of his own doing stems from his own male fragility and the assumptions of what a man is and should be in his own culture. In this way, Benedetto manages to craft a novel that is almost a work of feminism. Zama wishes to be the great hero, and when he is on the up he is proud and boastful. ‘I feasted on the banquet of manliness,’ he cries, or, while drunk thinks ‘I marveled at the moon’s solitary lordliness, and in the ardor of alcohol felt myself prepared to match it were I put to the test.’ Along his purgatorial journey, Zama receives the aid of several women, whom he subjects to his debauched lusts. In the first segment, Zama spends much of his time pining for the wife of a wealthy landowner who spends much of his time out of town. She tells Zama that men often lust for her body, but she only desires friendship. Thinking he will best her by feigning friendship to gain frequent audience with her, which he does, Zama soon discovers that he has fallen into her plans, becoming just a confidant while he watches other men go to and from her bedroom at night. She pays him in kisses, which he thinks will lead to more and does not. He is a pillar of misogyny, lusting for her when she is kind to him, dismissing her as having ‘the face of a horse’ when she leaves him cold. By playing into his lusts, she gains the upper hand over him and uses it to guide his rulings in local politics. In the same section, Zama also lusts for a young girl in servitude to his home. After she is beaten and raped by her former lover, Zama vows to take revenge to prove his masculine dominance, which she gladly accepts because it is better for him to risk his life than for her own father. His masculinity stifled, Zama is enraged. In the second section, another woman offers to aid him in his promotion. Yet another woman felt authorized to furnish me with her protection. I was a fragile man, therefore, and visibly so.Having to accept the help of a woman he feels sexually diminished and later rapes her before begging her for money (Zama often lashes out at women by taking them by force, which is extremely problematic but builds to the effect of examining a fragile male ego. Much like modern day with groups such as Meninist wearing their despicable t-shirts to be intentionally offensive in place of actually having to face the reality of gender politics, Zama is most brash and distasteful when he feels socially, emotionally, or intellectually threatened). What seems to aggravate Zama’s fragile ego most is the ease of ability for these women to act--such as Piñares flicking away a poisonous spider and crushing it in bed not long after Zama’s own inability to do so--while his entire efforts fail to form any action. Even when Zama does act he feels his masculinity called into question. His singular act of bravado is to kill a wild dog in defence of a slave girl. He dubs himself “the dogslayer” in self debasing humour, recognizing his own shortcomings. We see Zama constantly reassessing himself, as if his act of storytelling to the reader is an effort to read himself through creating himself. The story takes a dramatic turn in the final segment when Zama is no longer reading himself but the world around him in order to find his place within it. The third section of the novel is an outright masterpiece. An aged Zama worn down from his stagnation attempts one more scheme to curry favour with the Spanish royalty by offering to lead a manhunt for a wanted man terrorizing the countryside, Vicuña Porto, whom had served Zama a decade ago. Here, out in the wild of the American pampas, everything comes to a head. Porto is revealed to be hiding out in the very group of soldiers looking for him and Zama is caught between duty and safety should he reveal Porto. ’Like the search for freedom,’ Zama muses, ‘which is not out there but within each one.’ The plains, once scorned and dismissed by him, are now a lush landscape of danger and mystery. We see the new world as one with it’s own stories, legends and people. We meet a wandering tribe, all blinded when a rival tribe put out their eyes years ago. They learn community as a method of survival and seem free and happy. Now their children, who have eyes, have begun to lead them and are leading them on gold hunting expeditions. Benedetto builds a vast and mystical world that begins to engulf Zama when he is stripped of his society, forcing him to recognize that the powersource of his status and masculinity was a societal battery, the very society he raged against for holding him back. Here, in the wild amongst death and thieves, Zama is weak and mostly just a casual observer. He is beaten several times and retains none of the sense of fearful respect from others we see in the previous sections. 'This could not be. This could not be for me.' Here Zama comes as close to an empathetic character as such a despicable person can be. He is to be pitted, weak and stripped of his stature as he begins to embrace existence and see it for its own reality and not the fantasy of desire. He also begins to bitterly embrace his existential condition, knowing the costs. In an act that is sure to bring doom upon him, he denies the existence of gold in the mountains to spare them. I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.Without spoiling the violent and shocking conclusion, let me simply say that the final dozen pages are some of the finest I have encountered and a satisfying fate for a man whose entire existence is centered on efforts of mobility. Though not for the easily off-put, Antonio Benedetto’s slim masterpiece Zama is a hauntingly satisfying read that will surely stick with you long after the final page has been turned. Rife with the existential horrors of Dostoevsky and the notable influence of Kafka, this literary descent into nightmarish futility is an overlooked classic that deserves the wider readership Esther Allen’s translation will hopefully forge for it. Zama is actually the first novel of a thematically linked trilogy, and the translation of the second book is currently in the works. Male fragility at it’s most despicable and society at its most constrictive, I have nothing but the highest admiration for the work which penetrates like the fear of death on a long lonely night. 4.5/5 'I mused that death was not a thing to enjoy, though going to one’s death could be, as a desired act, an act of will, of my will. To wait for it no longer. To hound it down, grow intimate with it.' ¹While imprisoned, Di Benedetto was allowed to correspond but not write fiction. In his letters to the outside world he would frequently describe a ‘dream’ he had and then proceed to write a short story in letters so small it required a magnifying glass to read. He was eventually released from prison at the urging of authors such as Heinrich Böll and Jorge Luis Borges. ²Another notable Benedetto/Bolaño connection is that of the young blonde boy who plagues Zama throughout each of the three sections of the novel and never seems to age. It is undoubtedly the inspiration for the ‘wizened youth’ who plagues the narrator of Bolaño’s By Night in Chile. [image] **Zana also had an excellent film adaptation: watch Zama trailer ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Aug 15, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0811220966
| 9780811220965
| 0811220966
| 4.29
| 425
| Jan 01, 1971
| Jul 10, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘O life, what have you done to this life of mine?’ Discovering Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry was like surfacing for air. It was a gust of crisp, clean ai ‘O life, what have you done to this life of mine?’ Discovering Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry was like surfacing for air. It was a gust of crisp, clean air that nearly stole my breath before filling me like phone of recharge. A Musical Hell, translated into english in this bilingual edition by Yvette Siegert and published as a pamphlet by New Direction (an endlessly cool publisher), is ‘a song—a tunnel to pass through;’ Pizarnik sends the reader's soul into a state of transcendence from their physical form to find solace and freedom existing in the realm of music and language where they float about with the purpose and power of the hook to a melody. ‘Before words can run out, something in the heart must die.’ Pizarnik is practically Argentina’s answer to Sylvia Plath (and not just said to connect that both we young suicides), though drastically different in style and tone, rummaging through the dark corners of the heart’s dresser drawers to find language and art as a shining lifeline. Waiting for nothing but music and allowing the pain—the pain that vibrates in forms too beautiful and treacherous—to reach down into the depths.Much of Pizarnik’s poetry, presented often as prose poems or chunky three-line poems that celebrates the harmony of speaking out with our voice, be in language or music, to find the common human traits in all of us. It is a cry for love, for understanding, but most of all a cry to say ‘despite it all, I am here.’¹ Even if not to others, but to oneself to remember that we live, we breath, we feel, and how wonderful it is how doing so manages to shine through the crust of our daily sadness and suffering. ‘I cannot speak with my voice, so I speak with my voices,’ she writes, using the voices of language and poetry to blot out fear and silence. ‘Maybe someday we’ll find refuge in true reality. In the meantime, can I just say how opposed I am to all of this?’ The title is a brilliant, all-encompassing snapshot of the connective threads of this volume. There is an ars poetica sense to her poetry that examines the why, or the void that must be filled, by the thirst for words. At the height of happiness, I have spoken of a music never heard before. So what? If only I could live in a continual state of ecstasy, shaping the body of the poem with my own, rescuing every phrase with my days and weeks, imbuing the poem with my breath while feeding the letters of its every word into the offering in this ceremony of living.Her words are simply exquisite, a fine wine to get gloriously drunk upon. ‘The light of language covers me like music,’ she prays like a sinner seeking the forgiveness of an Almighty, ‘like a picture ripped to shreds by the dogs of grief.’ Language is an escape route, but it is also a shield. While Pizarnik is empowered by words to punch through the grime of reality (‘I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat’), she also feels self-conscious and meek about it with language as the wool blanket a child hides beneath in fear of the formless monsters taking shape in the threatening blackness of bedtime. i’m going to hide behind languageSilence—’silence is fire’—and fear are major motifs that she builds ramparts from music and poetry to keep from overrunning her existence. ‘Just when I’d hoped to give up hoping, your fall takes place within me,’ she says of the light of language. The power to create can be a lifeblood that get’s us through our darkest hours. What a cause for celebration. Mortal Ties A single thought cast out words like lifelines at sea. Making love inside our embrace implied a black light: a darkness that started gleaming. A rediscovered light, twice extinguished already, yet up in the deadened hues of repressed desire; it’s light was the color of a mausoleum for infants. The rhythm of our bodies disguised the flight of the ravens. The rhythm of our bodies carved out a space of light inside that light. Pizarnik is a potent and perfect voice not just of Latin American poetry but for all of poetry. While this volume is brief, it’s beauty is vast. Also included is a letter to Pizarnik from her friend Julio Cortázar, who highly praised her work. ‘Your book hurts me,’ he writes to her, ‘it is so utterly your own; you’re so you in every line, so reticently clear.’ Alejandra Pizarnik offers a ladder to climb in and nestle comfortably within her headspace. It is one filled with demons lurking in the darkness, but also one where language builds a warm blanket fort to keep you safe. Reading Alejandra Pizarnik is like coming back to life. 5/5 ¹ This notion originates from Florencia's wonderful review of Árbol de Diana Fugue in Lilac You had to write without a for what, without a for whom. The body remembers love like the lighting of a lamp. If silence is temptation and promise. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 28, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1941920179
| 9781941920176
| B0140EEMSW
| 3.60
| 1,397
| 2010
| Oct 19, 2015
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really liked it
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The investigation always starts with a victim, he is the first trace, the dark light. An infectiously charming American man arrives in a small Argentin The investigation always starts with a victim, he is the first trace, the dark light. An infectiously charming American man arrives in a small Argentinian town with a suitcase full of money and the beautiful local twin sisters on his arm. Just as the town is engulfed in the dazzlement of such a provocative scene, the stranger Tony Durán is found dead in his hotel room, victim of an apparent and brutal murder. This all probably sounds like a fill-in-the-blank murder mystery, crooked cops and all, and it hardly needs mention that the sisters come from a wealthy and powerful family that is, as is to be expected of the genre, currently is a state of financial distress. Ricardo Piaglia, however, blows the dust off this presumably stiff genre tale and gives it a rich and vibrant life in Target in the Night. Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Novel prize¹, Target in the Night remains on the outside looking in, being less a plot-driven police investigation but a metaphysical investigation of truth in a complex conspiratorial web. The web seems to have attached itself to all manner of Argentinian politics, industry and sport, spinning and weaving a knot of power where 'there are no values left, only prices' Told in a very textured and layered style while dexterously toying with the intricacies of narrative time, Piglia threads through the narrative to pull Target together in its shocking and unexpected finale, creating an outstanding and reflective novel where the real mystery is the nature of mystery and clues themselves. What we write on the walls is the debris of memory. The murder in Target in the Night is the sensationalist outburst that draws attention to a much larger drama, the dusk-jacket blurb for an intricate novel. While the police investigation and bureaucratic drama makes up a large portion of the plot, Piglia invites us to step back and pay more attention to the hands directing the strings in this web of marionette violence. Emilio Renzi, a journalist who features in several of Piglia's novels and in this episode is sent to cover the murder case, makes an apt narrator for Target by approaching the events in a broad scale journalistic endeavor instead of an up-close, nothing-but-the-crime-scene-clues investigation. Presumably narrated a full decade after the events, Renzi moves back-and-forth about the timeline as if it were a chessboard he was arranging towards a checkmate, delivering his narration in the form of a reflective novel (the novel at hand is his novel, effectively) complete with footnotes to explore avenues that would dead-end in the plot. The method propels the story in an exciting withhold-and-reveal manner and all the exciting post-modern hallmarks employed by Piglia open plenty of free space to assess the information at various angles. While the style is exciting and alive in a playful post-modern fashion, all the looping never causes the novel to mistakenly bite at its own tail in digressive meta-fictional self-assessment as is common with the territory, the style being beneficial in grounding the story in an addressable time and space without having to itself be an aspect of the novel's themes². They're specialists of evil, the damned, their job is to make sure idiots sleep at night, they do the dirty work on behalf of the beautiful. The larger web at hand here involves many players, from the wealthy industrial Belladona family, suspicious police chiefs rushing to close cases, hired hitmen, fixed horse races and all the even larger hands controlling the political strings at the local level. The sort of men who don't hesitate to build a bridge of corpses to reach their goal or send a message, to 'use bodies as if they were words.' Bravely trying to navigate the web is Police Inspector Croce. Croce is a man with an obsessive passion for his work, who 'was always rebuilding a story that wasn't his,' a rightful heir to the throne of detectives like Sherlock Holmes who possessed genius blended with madness. It is this madness that allows Croce to see through the clutter, to examine a crime the way a surrealist examines life through abstraction. We have the dead body and we have a suspect...What we call motivation could be an unseen meaning, not because it's a mystery, but because the network of determination is too vast. We have to concentrate, synthesize, find the fixed point. We have to isolate an item of fact and create a closed field, otherwise we'll never be able to solve the enigma....I'm interested in showing that things that appear to be the same are really different.Croce, fraught by voices in his head, sees the abstract connections between events and has an open mind to interpretation, one that almost always finds the right perpetrator. His madness is not only the key to his success, but also a wide-open weakness for anyone to exploit if they need him out of the way. Also struggling in the web of deceit is the famous son of the Belladona family, the surviving brother (and possibly only half-brother) of a brilliant due of inventors. Their factory is facing takeover in a web of finance and corporate law —Piglia manages to guide the reader through in simple fashion while still retaining the mind-boggling madness and massive obfuscating tangle of it all— all initiated by a family betrayal. We used to attribute our misfortunes to the wrath of the gods, then to the fatality of destiny, but now we know that in reality the only things we have are conspiracies and secret maneuvers.Luca Belladona, like Croce, has the insight of abstract investigation, seeing the world as a parade of metaphors and symbols. 'Nothing is worth anything in and of itself,' he explains to Renzi, echoing Croce's sentiments, 'everything is worth something in relationship to other factors.' The approach to reality taken by Croce and Luca very much resembles that of an author. There is something to be read in the juxtaposition of events and clues, a thread to follow that may not have physical form. Luca remarks: We work with metaphors and analogies, with imagined worlds and with the concept of equal to, we look for equivalences in the absolute difference of the real.Suddenly, Target in the Night reveals itself to be an analogy of the world, an imagined story much like a parable that contains an urgent truth formed like a pearl when you compress the fiction of the story. Argentina's political history while events happen above like a flock of swallows migrating in winter. The truth that Piglia probes at is that of Argentinian history. His novel is the metaphor for the world he sought to fight against, feeling dwarfed by it's extraordinary reach and complex inter-workings. History, it seems, is yet another set of hands pulling the strings of those pulling strings. Through the political and historical backdrop Renzi illustrates in order to build reference to his local interest story we see a long lineage of power corruption, obdurate rule and self-serving political interest. The Pampas are run and ruled by private landowners with an invisible hand in every household. While the novel takes place just before the Dirty War as the junta came to political power for a dark period of violent authoritarian rule in which over 6,000 people were 'disappeared', Target demonstrates the sort of social and politically corrupt climate that made such future hostilities possible. In a land where bodies are used like words, only tragedy can grow. Target in the Night takes a simple plot cliche and stretches it to near-parable proportions. The plot is secondary yet effortlessly engrossing and the philosophic undertones fill the novel with bright brilliant light. You read too many detective novels, kid. If only you knew what things were really like. Order doesn't always get restored, the crime doesn't always get solved. There's never any logic to it. We struggle to establish the causes and deduce the effects, but we're never able to understand the entire network of the intrigue....for the most part we move blindly in the dark. The closer you are to the target, the more you get tangled in a web without end.Piglia provides much food for thought growing on a cultural and historical backdrop seething with social commentary. The writing is crisp and sharp and with the exception of an atrocious bit of dialogue from a newspaper editor character (the dialogue smacks with all the cliche elements of early 1900s ‘newspaper man' that you would expect to find in sketch comedy, though this may be either an intentional jab or a fumbled translation) the mostly conversation-based plotflow is powerful and exciting. Creating a work of ‘paranoid fiction,' a term explained by Renzi that would likely include many Pynchon novels under its umbrella, Piglia gives a large-scale political consciousness to a small scale local murder scandal and revitalizes the detective novel yet again. 4/5 There are two experiences that can protect those...from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the ‘ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds. ¹ The Rómulo Gallegos Novel prize has been awarded in the past to books such as The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías, as well as Enrique Vila-Matas, Carlos Fuentes and many other notable names/titles. Piglia was the 2015 recipient of the Formentor Prize, a lifetime acheivement prize previously awarded to Javier Marías and Enrique Vila-Matas. It seemed only natural with my love for all those authors mentioned that I should read Piglia. ² This is only partly true. As much of the novel deals with history and its effects on the present, Targets style may be asking the reader to question the effects of it's story on the narrator a decade down the line. While Renzi never goes into great detail about it, the events that transpire clearly leave their stain within him as he is later inclined to collect his thoughts about them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 02, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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