|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0525620788
| 3.67
| 379,039
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 30, 2020
|
really liked it
|
‘Our bodies hide so many mysteries and they tell so many stories without a single word.’ There are novels about haunted houses and then there are novel ‘Our bodies hide so many mysteries and they tell so many stories without a single word.’ There are novels about haunted houses and then there are novels that feel like a haunted house themselves. Mexican Gothic from Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the latter, engulfing the reader in the dark, twisted corridors of plot amidst an almost choking atmosphere of dread and decay. It is a slow-burn of a narrative, not unlike the way one shuffles forward in trepidation through a haunted house, the burning glow of a candle our only light. But beyond that, Mexican Gothic is a horror of history, weaving a bloody legacy of colonialism and the repression of women through this ghastly tale of a house that might be consuming minds and bodies. Drawing on a long history of the gothic tradition but with a fresh and fierce twist, Moreno-Garcia creates a postcolonialist horror that delivers as many social criticisms as it does scares and shrieks. ‘ She wasn't one for believing in things that go bump in the night either, but right that second she firmly felt every spook and demon and evil thing might be crawling about the earth…’ Call me late to the party, but I finally understand all the hype. Having recently been impressed by Moreno-Garcia’s The Lover I was recommended this by emma griffioen! and her wonderful review and found this to be a dark delight. The story moves slowly, picking up dread all along the way and is just a feast of atmosphere and tone. It is also highly cinematic and I’m shocked this isn’t already a film. There are a lot of similarities between this and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, something Kingfisher acknowledges in the intro to that book, though they both stand apart quite well and make a very different use of their shared evil. ‘The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real.’ I enjoy the way Mexican Gothic superimposes a traditional English gothic narrative trope over a Mexican landscape which, thematically, already implies an aspect of colonialism in the narrative. This is a tale of how the Doyle family legacy is one of violence and power, where even their self-mythologizing about providing the town with jobs and money—at the expense of strapping the town forever in their debt and service—can’t erase the real bodies buried in their wake. Moreno-Garcia touches on the aspects of relying on the aid of indigenous peoples before massacring them to steal their resources and land. One should not be surprised history would return to haunt, though Moreno-Garcia offers an unexpected twist where it isn’t their sins returning to haunt them but instead the sins growing hungrier for more… ‘Loyalty to the family is rewarded, and impertinence is punished.’ The patriarchal legacy is also a source of evil casting a long shadow across the novel as well as a threat of immediate danger in the way it has found to perpetuate itself from generation to generation. It is one shown to rule through violence and repression (and some sci-fi help too), and Noemí—who is an excellent character both capable and feisty—is an excellent counterpoint to it all. ‘Noemí's father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once,’ we are told, and we see how she aims to be able to be the best of both worlds. Though her struggles for education and independence are always beset by the patriarchal forces and we see the clear double standards held against women. ‘She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.’ This all plays into a sense of gaslighting that occurs in the novel, with Catalina and Ruth being a sort of play on the “madwoman in the attic” trope of gothic fiction, or, most notably, the way it was addressed as a post-colonial work in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Though the yellow mold in Noemí room also seems to hint at another work of feminist fiction: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ‘In a sense all dreams foretell events, but some more clearly than others.’ This book was impossible to put down and offers a lot of legit chills and thrills. It does use dreams fairly heavily as narrative trope which I often don’t particularly enjoy, though it does integrate itself quite well into the story and horror elements and also functions as a vessel to see the way the past and present are haunted by each other. ‘The truth was she was afraid of going to bed, of what nightmares might uncoil in the dark. What did people do after witnessing the horrors they had seen? Was it possible to slip back into normality, to play pretend and go on? She wanted to think this was exactly the case, but she was afraid sleep would prove her wrong.’ This all moves towards a rather incredible ending and the slowburn of the narrative almost feels like foreshadowing for the rather amazing climatic scene. And, in the face of colonialism and violent patriarchy, who hasn’t wanted it all to burn? The novel does turn a bit from the gothic to a more modern style horror in the later sections, though it flows pretty smoothly and the twist is an excellent symbol of the ways patriarchal legacies are parasitical on the communities they repress. This was quite the ride. The homage to the history of the gothic but in a way that represents a reaction to colonialism and a path to the future—the progressive woman of color valuing education and independence rising over the legacy of a white patriarchy repressing the working class. Mexican Gothic is a haunted house of history where every page lures you deeper into its catacombs and it is a journey I would definitely recommend. 4.5/5 ‘The world might indeed be a cursed circle; the snake swallowed its tail and there could be no end, only an eternal ruination and endless devouring.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 03, 2024
|
Jan 03, 2024
|
Jan 03, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1555977243
| 9781555977245
| 1555977243
| 3.33
| 460
| 1994
| Nov 03, 2015
|
liked it
|
‘The curse is the sameness that now, because of love, is making us suffer.’ The late, great Roberto Bolaño once said of Daniel Sada ‘of my generation I ‘The curse is the sameness that now, because of love, is making us suffer.’ The late, great Roberto Bolaño once said of Daniel Sada ‘of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.’ Having a massive literary crush on Bolaño (I mean, I have a tattoo of this guy), I simply had to read a Sada novel and joyfully happened upon One Out of Two at Capitol Hill Books in DC this week. I’m glad I did as it made an excellent companion for my disaster of bumped flights, awkward layovers and maintenance delays yesterday, allowing me to finish the book in one day and bask in its humorously peaceful tone amid my turbulence ridden flights. One Out of Two explores the theme of identical twins switching places as the aging Gamal sisters add a bit of spice to their life away from their seamstress business and rotate dating the same man. Yet the reprieve of romantic bliss can only lead to trouble as life never stands still and their ‘long and difficult compromise’ to share everything will inevitably lead to trouble and jealousy. Written in gorgeous, rhythmic prose (wonderfully translated by Katherine Silver) and full of sharp imagery and symbolism, this is a slight and silly but overall charming little tale of sisterly mischief run amok. ‘Daniel Sada is undoubtedly writing some of the most ambitious works in the Spanish language,’ Bolaño also noted, and in here we see the prose prance in a rather rhythmic fashion, aided with a rather liberal use of colons that punctuates and directs the writing in a way you can practically hear aloud through the reading of it. It is a short novel at 100pgs, and even then a rather slim storyline that is enlarged on a grandiose scale through his exploration of details. At times it can seem a cloying level of minutia, though the efficacy of his imagery and the surprising lightness of the narrative makes the details come alive instead of bog it down, like those highly detailed still-life paintings that you’d swear are photography. There’s a charming folkiness to the story, with clever observations and killer lines like ‘destiny is nothing but a trickster demon’ that steers us with excitement and whimsy through what would be an altogether unsurprising story in lesser hands. Silver does an excellent job with the translation that captures the uniqueness of phrases that provide the lovely tone to the tale, such as when the sister—through luck of the draw—attends a wedding while the other works and says she ‘danced all night with a slender man of interesting age.’ Interesting phrasing indeed, and it all rolls off the page and through your mind quite tenderly. The story itself follows Gloria and Constitución Gamal, identical twins (save for an easily hidden birthmark on one shoulder) from their youth, suddenly orphaned when their parents are decapitated in a mass car wreck and buried in a mass grave—through their teenage years living with an aunt and her many children, to finally growing into old age running a bustling seamstress business. They pride themselves on their indistinguishable sameness, deciding everything will be shared between them. ‘individualism,’ Sada writes, ‘is nothing but amorphous vanity,’ so they continue this pact even when one begins to date a man, Oscar, ‘deceiving him, not out of treachery but rather sisterhood.’ It’s a silly scandalous story and that spends most of the prose examining the comic proportions of their sameness and status in the town due to their quirkiness. ‘They were like two excessively celebrated actresses whose eccentricities people find a way to forgive. What would be seen as a defect in anybody else was in them a mere peculiarity.’ To avoid the townsfolk sticking their noses in and ruining the game, they put up a sign that becomes stuff of local legend: We are busy professionals. Restrict your conversation to the business at hand. Please do not disturb us for no reason. Sincerely: The Gamal Sisters. Naturally, affections for a third party throw unity awry, and it all becomes a fun little romp, exploring ideas of multiple lives attempting complete congruence and how this affects issues of fairness, jealousy, and is otherwises tested by human emotions. Is their sameness a sense of freedom, and they once thought, or a curse, and is there a way to grow uniquely instead of similarly as they enter older age. ‘Because in the long run, love would cease to be what dreams dictate and turn instead into insipid bread, intrepid monotony, and in the end and forevermore: subjugated love.’ A low-stakes tale that comes alive as local gossip, One Out of Two is a pleasant enough novel that takes its time enjoying itself. It makes insightful symbolism out of sewing and bean sorting and the imagery really dazzles. The translation is lovely, and while it cannot ever retain the full meter and lyricism of the original, it still manages to deliver a bouncing and buoyant prose that dances in your mind. It never quite has enough grit to really grip you, but it successfully charms and doesn’t overstay its welcome. A nice little book, I’ll certainly want to be reading more Daniel Sada. 3.5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 06, 2023
|
Apr 06, 2023
|
Apr 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0811230953
| 9780811230957
| 0811230953
| 4.13
| 26,764
| Jul 12, 1981
| Jun 01, 2021
|
really liked it
|
‘When, I wondered, was the first time I became aware of desire?’ ‘Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe,’ wrote Guy de Maupassant, ‘it g ‘When, I wondered, was the first time I became aware of desire?’ ‘Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe,’ wrote Guy de Maupassant, ‘it gives back life to those who no longer exist.’ People vanish or die, homes change owners, buildings are torn down, cities mutate and lives are plunged perpetually forward but with literature we can pause and return to eras now out of reach. The right words can trigger an emotional response nearly placing us back in childhood, phantom smells can arise and, if you are Proust, you’ll start telling your entire life story. José Emilio Pacheco’s classic Bildungsroman of 1950’s Mexico, Battles in the Desert, is a haunting trip down memory lane for the narrator to a time and place where ‘there is no memory of the Mexico of those year’ left outside people’s private minds. For ‘who could feel nostalgia for that horror?’ Carlos reflects on a time of struggle in Mexico under Presidente Miguel Alemán, with wealthy elites sucking up all economic growth at the expense of the poor, of plagues, the threat of nuclear war, and more. Yet, in this tumultous time, Carlos has his first awakenings of love. The consequences of his desire spiral like his nation in this slim powerhouse of a novel told in expertly calibrated narration of memory and mood. This wonderful new English translation by Katherine Silver comes at a perfect moment. While any time would seem a good time to introduce a new audience to this tiny miracle of literature, it should only take a few pages to see why this book might hit extra close when everything seems to be a lot lately: ’It was the year of polio: schools full of children wearing orthopedic devices; of foot-and-mouth disease: all over the country tens of thousands of sick livestock were being shot; of floods: the city center had turned into a lake...the adults complained about inflation, changes, traffic, immorality, noise, crime, overpopulation, beggars, foreigners, corruption, the limitless wealth of the few and the abject misery of almost everyone else…’ Pacheco makes a strong impression on the unbearable state of things with a long litany of issues several times throughout the novella, the most horrific being the known corrupt acts of the government (stealing food intended for the homeless or milk for schools and selling it at a profit being one). ‘We’re all hypocrites, unable to see ourselves or judge ourselves as we see and judge others.’ The stark contrast between rich and poor pours out of every page, yet so does the humanity (or lack thereof) between classes. When Carlos visits his rich friend the parents call him racial slurs to his face, criticize him for not knowing the purpose of different fancy forks, etc. while he finds incredible hospitality and warmth in the house of his poorest friend. ‘My father pointed out to me it’s not their fault they’re poor, and before judging anyone else I should ask myself if he’s had the same opportunities as me,’ Carlos reflects, being a middle class family caught in the undertow of troubles yet still thriving compared to many others. Yet they are not without flaws, for his father has a secret second family and his brother reads Nazi propaganda, sexually assaults the maid and is said to grow up to be an ‘extreme right’ businessman (he is said to later attend the University of Chicago, where people studied Friedman economics, many of which were given positions in oppressive regimes such as under hard-Right dictator Pinochet in Chile’s neoliberal experiment). Pacheco deftly weaves historical context into the story, creating a fine-tuned impression of Mexico on the cusp of social change post-revolution. ‘Love is a disease in a world where only hatred’s natural.’ In this bleak portrait of affairs, Carlos is like an image of purity. Said to be short and that ‘he identifies with the victims, with animals and trees that can’t defend themselves,’ he embodies love in a world that doesn’t understand or have much use for it. Carlos falls in love with the mother of his friend, a young woman named Mariana who is said to be the mistress of a powerful man close to the President, one most known for government corruption. When it is found out he visits her, his whole life is upended as his family and local society is outraged and horrified by this taboo love. ’I wasn’t repentant and I didn’t feel guilty. Loving someone is not a sin, love is good, and the only demonic thing is hatred.’ This contrast between love and hate is central to the novel. Children are often yelled at for their actions in this novel, yet they are only mimicing and trying to understand those of the adults around them. They play war on the playground, they try to love beautiful women (Mariana is supposed to be based on Rita Hayworth) and are told it is disgusting. This becomes part of Pacheco’s criticisms of capitalism, for this sort of behavior is marketed for profit but if someone acts upon it, they are shunned. ‘Look at the magazines, the radio, movies; everything is being done to corrupt the innocent,’ Carlos’ mother says. A patriarchial culture coupled with toxic masculinity demands sex, and finds that sex is a quick and easy marketing plot, yet at the same time to have sex is to be imorral if you aren't the dominant male culture. This is paired with it also being a highly religious culture. When Carlos’ brother attempts to rape the staff they tend to be fired for having ‘tempted’ him and his actions are shrugged off as ‘its just boys being boys’. When Carlos has a love for an older woman, or when he sneaks a nude magazine, it is looked down upon for being outside the accepted norm. Yet 'my actions didn't fit the rules they were using to judge me by.' Told many years down the line, Pacheo has perfected an impression of memory rebuilding a lost era that one would like to forget if not for a sole moment of beauty in all the gloom: Mariana. While taboo, there is a tenderness to the reflections that lights a candle in all the darkness of the novel. It feels akin to Space Invaders by Nona Fernández for its succinct portrayal of bleak times, rebellious acts and events much larger than oneself all told in memory from a child’s point of view, and Pacheo’s prose is so outstanding this slim novella registers as much more epic in scale within the memory of the reader. We are lucky to have this new translation in English. 4.5/5 'So ancient, so remote, such an impossible story. But Mariana existed.' ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 12, 2021
|
Aug 12, 2021
|
Aug 12, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 6074111014
| 9786074111019
| 6074111014
| 3.54
| 127
| Aug 15, 2012
| Jan 01, 2013
|
really liked it
|
‘I heard the bridge of dreams breaking, somewhere.’ There is a mythical and marevelous quality to the stories collected in Pergentino José’s Red Ants t ‘I heard the bridge of dreams breaking, somewhere.’ There is a mythical and marevelous quality to the stories collected in Pergentino José’s Red Ants that get under your skin. Like a dream you can’t quite recall, these stories echo in your thoughts, teasing your mind to probe them further. This is quite an achievement, in part as Red Ants boasts being the first literary work translated into English from the indigenous Sierra Zapotec language of Oaxaca, Mexico. These stories, often surreal, bear a cultural weight that feels akin to the mythological as they subvert a colonial gaze and address identity, family and exploitive political and environmental issues. With a dream-like nature, Red Ants curls and sways like smoke, always visible but difficult to hold onto. The Sierra Zapotec is a tonal language that comes from an indigenous pre-Columbian civilization based in what is modern day Oaxaca. While these stories are modern, and occasionally make reference to modern technology like the internet, they still feel rather timeless as if they could be old stories passed down for generations. There is an element of magical realism infused in them as well as a shifting, dream-logic-esque unfolding of events that occasionally borders almost on horror. People change in front of your eyes, events suddenly shift with little explanation and the story seems to play out almost independently of themselves. They are short, most from 5 to 10 pages, but stick in the mind and benefit from repeat readings. There is a deep connection between land and people, with the culture inseparable with the hills, valleys and plant and animal life it exists around. ‘Where I come from, we hide our secrets in the roots of ferns,’ a mother tells her daughter in The Priestess on the Mountain, ‘they are the only plants that go on growing in the dark.’ The story of the land and animals is also the story of the people. We have bamboo being cut down to make way for coffee fields to enrich the imperialists, great beasts of the land being slaughtered but, when needed, protecting the people of the land. There is a duality where the natural world is both threatening or protecting, as are the people to the world such as in Heart of Birds where to protect the people a man harms the very birds he was destined to protect. Bulls, birds and especially ants appear in multiple stories, each time expanding their imagery and meaning in the kaleidoscopic narratives. Late in the collection we are told red ants ‘frees the spirits of any person buried underground,’ and, fittingly, many of these stories tend to take place in subterranean cells and rooms. We have stories of underground cells with flowing rivers or filling up with worms, dark rooms impossible to escape from, and door knobs that crumble in your hand. There is a strong prison imagery--both real and figurative--throughout the collection compounded with the frequent mention of police, Sentinels and soldiers that are terrorizing the people. Being written in an indigenous language, this immediately recalls the colonialism of the region and the traditional myth-like aspects of the stories give them a sense of mythological revolt against the oppressors (a menacing wall being built to the North is referenced, by the way). Missing persons, cloak-and-dagger meetings in dark alleys, guns weighing down pockets, all add to the general revolutionary sense to the stories that pair well to the natural world stories or the mythological ones through José’s dreamlike prose blending them all so effortlessly. Violence is never far away from mythology and violence is a ever present part of the natural order of things here. It is a land haunted by bloodshed, much in a way that resonates on similar wavelengths with authors like Juan Rulfo but still wholly original. As with all the themes here, violence is depicted both as evil but also as occasionally necessary. In Prayers we learn of a folkloric-like hero who sits and waits on a rock in a dark alley, his hammer dripping with the blood of the occupying soldiers. In The Snorting of Bulls, a young girl commits an act of violence to defend herself from the constant sexual assault of an older landowner, only to have bulls crush the mob intent on killing her for it. ‘The bridge of dreams broke,’ José writes, ‘but this world does not belong to you.’ This is a celebration of the indigenous spirit and culture, one that reminds imperialists that no matter what their guns and titles and power may say, the land is never truly theirs. This is a startlingly good collection with everything from bird gods massacring unfaithful priests to agoraphobic landscape painters. Short but blissfully succinct, Red Ants is a stunning collection of stories from a young author just overflowing with talent. 4/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 18, 2020
|
Jan 07, 2021
|
Dec 18, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1908276738
| 9781908276735
| B01H65WGE4
| 3.69
| 2,939
| Oct 01, 2013
| Jul 07, 2016
|
really liked it
|
‘These days we walk past a body on the street, and we have to stop pretending we can’t see it.’ A plague has overtaken an unnamed city when The Redeeme ‘These days we walk past a body on the street, and we have to stop pretending we can’t see it.’ A plague has overtaken an unnamed city when The Redeemer--a hero with a hardness to rival any hard-boiled noir protagonist coupled with a philosophical soft-spot for humanity--is called to broker the exchange of kidnapped children from rival crime families. The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a tight little noir with a lot of power and heart. It is as if Herrera read Raymond Chandler and asked is this all you’ve got? I’ll show you hard-boiled. This novel is a feast of tone that alone could sustain enjoyment through the brief 101 pages, however Herrera treats the reader to a well-nuanced and lived-in, gritty narrative that is sheer delight. Drawing on the violence of the drug wars and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Herrera plunges the reader into a dark ride alongside the Redeemer as he navigates a world fraught with meanness while still holding on to a belief that people can be good if you only find the right methods of persuasion. ‘The scene had the innocence of all unsettling things that take place in silence.’ The stage for Herrera’s hard-boiled noir is an unnamed city that manages to both be a microcosm of Mexico while still offering an eerie universality to remind the readers that this world lurks all around them no matter where they are. A deadly airborne plague has swept in and everyone is holed up in their homes creating a tense and horrific silence in the once-busy streets. ‘There was no one, nothing, not a single voice, not one sound on an avenue that by that time should have been rammed with cars.’ Those who go out are encouraged to wear masks lest they fall victim to the unknown pandemic. Reading this in the summer of 2020 while wearing my own mask due to our current pandemic, this book hits home right away, particularly the way Herrera shows compliance with masks as a character trait. Tough guys like the Neeyanderthal scoff at them and openly refuse to wear them, but the truest of tough guys like the Redeemer wear one because it makes others feel safe doing so. 'The Redeemer was embarrassed to be wearing a mask and considered taking it off for a minute, but opted to leave it on.' The virus itself works as a metaphor for the Drug Wars and the randomness of violence which is well paired with several passing scenes of police checkpoints demonstrating police brutality against random civilians such as a solitary punk kid who has his piercings torn from his face by the cops just to give them a laugh. The real horror isn’t the unseen pandemic, though it quietly casts a tense shadow over every scene, but the visible harm people will do to each other. Herrera is a masterful prose stylist that brings this world to life, and Lisa Dillman expertly renders this into English in a way that retains the quirks of his language. As in his incredible novel Signs Preceding the End of the World, Herrera has a very stylized prose that brings the language of the underworld and street life alive like poetry. Dillman captures this in ways such as writing ‘tho’ instead of ‘though’, or the repeated line ‘fuckit’ that is practically the mantra of the novel (if you are like me your mind rushes to this classic scene). While this doesn’t reach the fever pitch of apocalyptic terror found in Signs, there is still an epic and myth-like quality to the characters, each only being identified through their street names ie. the Unruly, the Dolphin, etc. which Herrera waxes poetic about in one particular passage that shines a cutting, critical eye on the toxic aspects of the underworld culture. There is a subtle poking of fun at the toxic masculinities that tend permeate a lot of noir fiction, with lines such as the gem 'two badasses emerged, with faces that confirmed they were indeed very big badasses' which reads like an tongue-in-cheek eyeroll towards 'tough guys'. The Redeemer exists to keep events ‘from escalating to a major shitstorm.’ He is a fixer. ‘That was what he knew, how to efface set-in-stone truths.’ There is a beautifully tone-setting scene right at the beginning when the currently unnamed protagonist has his day interrupted by a phone call asking who they are speaking to. ‘Who’s this? the man asked, like he didn’t know what number he’d just dialed. Who do you think, replied the Redeemer. It’s me.’ And end scene. Immediately the reader knows they are dealing with a badass; you can practically hear the theme song pumping into a movie theater as the title credits wash in and some teenage boy chokes on his popcorn in the front row while yelling “oooooooh shiiiiit!” As previously mentioned, Herrera takes hard-boiled noir, mixes it with some of the dark grit signature to Roberto Bolaño, and then cranks it all up to an unimaginably awesome level. The Redeemer, however, isn’t some cold-hearted action hero. He figures himself as someone who helps ‘the man who let[s] himself be helped.’ He believes people are good, but can be led astray by rage, grief, misplaced loyalty, booze, you know, all the classic bad decision makers. often, people were really just waiting for someone to talk them down, offer them a way out of the fight. That was why when he talked sweet he really worked his word. The word is ergonomic, he said. You just have to know how to shape it to each person. This hero with a heart for humanity is set loose into a pandemic because two crime families each have the other’s child, and, to make matters worse, both are now corpses. How did they get this way, and why is one body being stored in a mansion that mysteriously belongs to one family. Herrera leans into the Shakespeare reference to the Montagues and Capulets by having one child quite literally named Romeo while the other faction are the Castro family. Despite the dark and horrific tone of the novel, it shines a ray of hope. The deaths, it would seem, are accidental (one by plague) and other teenage children are less kidnappers and more those just trying to help but caught in a bad situation. This is a toxic climate imposed upon them by their fathers and the mythos of a blood feud they aren’t all that interested in actively engaging in beyond playful chiding. Sure, the Castro’s jibe Romeo but ‘There’s just some people you mess with, that’s just the way it is.’ Even the fearsome sister, the Unruly, calls out the patriarchal society for only referring to the rival family’s daughter as Baby Girl. ‘I have a name, that’s what she said the day I took her home with me, don’t call me Baby Girl. And she told me her name.’ As they say, the kids are alright. It is the parents placing them into violence holding a grudge, ‘fighting over ashes.’ ‘Unhappy people aren’t the problem. It’s people taking their unhappy out on you.’ This is a brief yet really compelling novella that manages to create a more intense and detailed underworld than most noir novels thrice it’s length. There is even a humorous side-plot threading through the novel of the Redeemer earnestly trying to buy condoms--and failing--so he can honorably make it with the girl he likes. Even the worst of characters, like the crass Neeyanderthal, are humanized and looked at as a product of their sadness. Everyone is judged by their ability to keep going despite the horrors of the world and, as the Redeemer finds, many are able to be decent people if given the right assistance. While this does not compare to the epic quality of his formerly translated novel, Herrera delivers a well-crafted and utterly engaging novella that certainly made my weekend blissful. There is a beautiful heart beating here beneath all the exciting grit. 3.5/5 ‘The truth is, the Redeemer said, maybe we’re damned from the start.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 26, 2020
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802151868
| 9780802151865
| 0802151868
| 3.68
| 40
| 1983
| Mar 29, 1994
|
liked it
|
In the novel Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, the young, upstart author-character buys an anthology of Mexican poetry compiled by Octavio Paz.
In the novel Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, the young, upstart author-character buys an anthology of Mexican poetry compiled by Octavio Paz. When she reads it—absent-mindlessly, mind you—she finds it 'boring' and goes on to add that she suspects Paz of selecting friends or reputation-influencing poets in nepotistic fashion to populate his anthology. I had recently finished Luiselli's lovely novel when I happened upon this volume of Mexican poetry selected by Paz at a used bookstore. It was only a few weeks on a new job as a delivery driver, a job that takes me across multiple states in bite-sized solitude in my delivery van, and I had been briefly exploring each destination to mentally organize my days by which restaurants, scenic vistas, and—most importantly—which used bookstores I could stop at to relax and keep sane. I'd like to believe that this is the same anthology Luiselli mentions, though I am dubious as this anthology covers several centuries of Mexican poets. Either way, I found this anthology to be, as Luiselli's character states, rather boring. Perhaps it is on no fault of the poets or their translator (I was also rather excited about reading translations by Samuel Beckett), but on my own unwitting desire to perpetuate the myth and bring the readings I held dear into fruition. This sort of thing would feel at home in a Luiselli or Vila-Matas novel, and that brings me some warmth I can smile upon. Finding this book was a much needed tingle of euphoria, the sort Alice would feel finding the hole leading to Wonderland; it's not the escape from her world into another but that a physical link between the two does exist. This is the sort of life preserver we sometimes need to be thrown in the sea of a long week. Paz does not include any of his own poems, and it was nice to be introduced to a large collection of poets previously unfamiliar to me (Alfonso Reyes was the only name I had recognized in the table of contents). I am, however, slightly disappointed that the back cover of my 1985 edition hypes the inclusion of a certain poet who is not actually printed in the book. What a tease. 3/5 There is a note before the title page worth considering. It mentions this anthology was a collaboration between the Mexican government and Unesco, and that Unesco asked Professor C.M. Bowra to introduce this book to the English-speaking public, and M. Paul Claudel to perform a similar service for French readers. Their essays should not be considered as prefaces or introductions in the usual sense. They are intended rather to emphasize the essential solidarity of creative artists in different nations, languages, centuries, and latitudes, and to point out the fundamental identity of emotions to which the genius of the poet can give a form at once lasting and beautiful....more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Dec 13, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3775728678
| 9783775728676
| 3775728678
| 4.12
| 8
| Jan 31, 2012
| Jan 31, 2012
|
liked it
|
He lived in a house filled with his own books. To Mario Bellatin, literature is a game. He sets the board, arranges the words, and invites you to play He lived in a house filled with his own books. To Mario Bellatin, literature is a game. He sets the board, arranges the words, and invites you to play with him. There are few things I respect more than this. In this brief pamphlet, The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin, the author sets up a premise—written in poetic form that is ultimately unnecessary but has a certain charm to it—of publishing 100 books and converting his home to hold 1,000 copies of each book at all time. The publishing house that supposedly backsThese books will not be free, they will 'be made available, not marketed / they are in a sort of gelatinous state of exchange.' Bellatin then proceeds to list the possible ideas of each book, the list not being necessarily of the Joycean type, but more like a poem by David Berman; the ideas spiral together towards an idea of the author and consist of those brief, mundane moments of life where eternal discourse is brewing right below the surface. These are the breathless moments of life that give us breath, the plain ordinary moments in passing that hold an eternity within. For example: 3. This garden belongs to everyone. Don't let your children ruin it. or 86. More and more undeveloped rolls of film in large plastic bags. or 97. Dogs that were left to be stuffed but were never picked up by their masters. These are the notions of poetic insight, the ideas the poets unlock to create worlds within worlds. While the pamphlet is not poetry per say, it is a poetic investigation into the possibilities of literature and an elucidation on the joys of literature as an intellectual game where both the author and the reader are winners for participating. Certainly not for everyone and recommended mostly to those already engrossed in the works of Bellatin, this pamphlet is a quick and fun glimpse through windows of a mind that appear more like an alternate reality where we all live in a world much more beautiful than our own. 3/5 6. Conclusion: Pain lasts only an instant; what persists is its representaion. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 17, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1939419026
| 9781939419026
| 1939419026
| 3.74
| 177
| 2001
| Sep 01, 2013
|
really liked it
|
At the end of his life he embraced the idea that, realistically, the size of his nose has determined his existence. Where does a person fit in society At the end of his life he embraced the idea that, realistically, the size of his nose has determined his existence. Where does a person fit in society that allows them the vantage point to hone their artistic craft; or, perhaps, is it how doesn’t an artist fit into society that shapes the tools for their artistic vision? Frustration, alienation and solitude are a fiery furnace where great beauty can be forged. Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction is a ‘biography’ written by Mario Bellatin on the life and works of Nagaoka, whose comically enormous nose made him a subject of ridicule and an outcast throughout his life. The fictional biography began as a playful, Nabokovian-like joke but progresses into insightful analysis of artistry and culture where the rejection and alienation or deformity chiseled out from the block of ‘normal’ society forms a flawless mold for the creation of beauty, The backstory of Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka helps elucidate the understanding of the brief biography. During a literary conference, Bellatin was asked to name his largest influences and invented the author Shiki Nagaoka for humors sake¹. During the question-and-answer portion, he invented details of the as-yet-untranslated Japanese author (one book of which is written in a language understood only to Nagaoka) with a preposterously large nose. The audience never realized this was a joke, even when Bellatin cited Juan Rulfo (author of the highly influential Pedro Páramo) as another Nagaoka-influenced writer. With only the best type of humor, Bellatin continued the joke and wrote this biography for those eager to learn more of an author that never existed (hilariously enough, reviews float about the internet where the reviewer still has not recognized the joke and begs for translations of the works). Even the translator plays along in his introduction and furthers the mythology, which is outstanding and brings a smile to my heart. While the impetus for the book was to further a joke, Bellatin uses this as a platform to discuss a wide variety of social and artistic topics from deformity and alienation to pushing the boundaries of literature through a union of mixed media. There is also a fantastic interplay in the idea that Bellatin has created a fictional character and given him reality in which the ‘real’ Nagaoka feared being thought of as a fictional character due to his features. This is the sort of literature and humor that makes it worth getting out of bed each day. The women discussed whether his nose was a punishment for having participated—the mother, like much of her society—in the excessive enthusiasm that accompanied the arrival of foreign ideas. Nagaoka’s destiny seems eternally knotted to his nose. For many, the nose represents the influence of foreign invaders, both physically and ideologically, in traditional society, When Shiki Nagaoka was born, the new, liberal politics of commerce, established by decree when military forces abandoned absolute power, were still fresh.Rejected by an obdurate, not-yet-ready society, he escapes into the monkhood and is further rejected by his family for taking up religious convictions. However, even in religious monastery is he subject to cruel ridicule and alienation due to his ‘abnormal’ features, where ironically even a sect devoted to the love of all mankind in servitude to God rejects those that are different. What better portrait of society exists than one where the religious and the society of the masses reject and fear anything that doesn’t fit their mold. Bellatin belongs to the group of the ‘abnormal’ as defined by his novella, lacking an arm and decorating it with extravagant prosthesis. He doesn’t hide himself, he puts it in everyone's face and celebrates his difference. As Mike points out in his wonderful review, most of Bellatin’s characters have a deformity or illness of sorts that forces them outside the gates of society. Yet, like the Artists of the Floating World in the biography, literally and metaphorically separate and above the society of the streets, being alienated is fertile soil for creation. Nagaoka spends his life writing stories, primarily featuring noses as focal characters, and eventually opens a photo development booth where he blends prose with pictures to press literature in a bold new direction. This style captures the appreciation of Juan Rulfo and José María Arguedas. To be able to see reality modified not only by the lens of the photographer but also by the written word that accompanies those images is a path that infinitely strengthens the narrative possibilities of actual reality.The biography itself accomplishes this goal, featuring nearly half it’s length in photographs with descriptions to tie them into Nagaoka’s life. Interestingly enough, the only photograph of Nagaoka is damaged by his sister to hide his nose, lest he not be thought of as a fictional character. Bellatin is a master of literary games, and the brief biography is merely a door to a deep cavern of examination and understanding. How often we reject what we do not understand, ridicule what is different, hurt beings not unlike ourselves because we only look at the outside and refuse to see the inside. Shiki Nagaoka is a plea to accept and respect all, who knows what nose is hiding the next great work of art inside. 3.5/5 ¹ This NY Times article provides more details on the joke and an excellent examination of the life and works of Bellatin. [image] The only known photograph of Shiki Nagaoka, intentionally damaged by his sister. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1908276428
| 9781908276421
| 1908276428
| 3.90
| 14,143
| 2009
| Mar 10, 2015
|
really liked it
|
*Reread Update after the review You are a door, not the one who walks through. The setting sun, ‘like a giant pool of drying blood’, casts lengthy human *Reread Update after the review You are a door, not the one who walks through. The setting sun, ‘like a giant pool of drying blood’, casts lengthy human shaped shadows along the mountainside that bridges the past to the future, the old to the new, the dying to the living. Behold the great transmigration of souls, the hopeful and damned stripped of all but necessity slouching towards a nightmare of turmoil. One can only hope the storm clouds part upon a fresh world built on the sturdy bricks of the past and the bones of ancestors to safely house the new souls in this always imperfect, yet striving, world. And then comes dawn and this new hope is but a cruel trick, a new land where outsiders are feared, scored, abused and oppressed. Yuri Herrera takes our hand to deliver us through this crossing in Signs Preceding the End of the World, a tale of border crossing to bring back family permeated by an ominous tone of apocalyptic dread. Herrera champions language as the battalions fighting the dying monarchy of borderlines through his crisp stylistic tale where a crossing means leaving more behind than just your home. Real adventures rough you up. While most of us have not undergone a crossing as dire and dear as that of our heroine seeking out her brother in America on a trail of brutality, fear and sinister opposition in a devil’s deal of the underworld activity, we all have experienced the sort of ‘crossing’ that beats the rhythm of life in Signs. Be it leaving behind your hometown for a new start (or being driven from your homeland), going away to college, starting a family, experiencing a crushing separation, etc, et al, we all must cross the test of a mountain to arrive at a new and uncertain future throughout our lives. This passing changes us, molds us like clay into the person we are becoming while we leave behind pieces of our souls with every footfall on the way. Sometimes we get to where we wished to go, sometimes we are lost in the fray. For every new beginning we must withstand the death throes of the past, which can haunt you in the night and and beset you with fear and regret, yet we must press forward. For the future and progress depends on the fearless who see through the apocalypse and begin anew. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.We are the conduits of change. We are the erasable and malleable, those that must shed our skin to see the dawn of a new era. Herrera paints a world of Mexicans crossing into America, shedding blood sweat and tears to earn a paycheck. Makina notices that in every restaurant there are Mexican cooks and laughs that ‘all food is Mexican food’. The cultures are commingling, borrowing from one another and forging something new. Even by borrowing or adopting the language of the other we create something fresh from the cohesion: ‘it’s not another way of saying things, these are new things.’ While the novel shows the way Mexican culture is becoming part of the culture in the US, there is also a predominant theme in the novel that the United States is far from a welcoming utopia. The journey across the border is difficult and once across it is a violent and oppressive landscape where people will murder you in the false name of “patriotism”, people will oppress, harm, and even attempt to elect leaders to alter laws to accomodate bigotry and fan the flames of racial fear white people have to any outsiders. Look at the current state of the United States with horrific anti-immigration attempts in Arizona, a rise in deportations, children separated from their families and placed in separate holding cells while they await an uncertain fate handed down by judges who only profit from their misery. Late in the novel a character is given a rigged choice that places him in military service. This speaks volumes. Here we have people from Mexico being oppressed into a violent, imperialist arm of the US government--the same arm that robbed Mexico of their land in the past and enforces a border through bloodshed. It shows people serving a nation that does not love them back and discards them like rags once their service is complete, allowing many veterans to go homeless without the proper support they need. This is a piercing portrait of the United States, and one we must not look away from but confront head on. It will only get worse if we do not move forward with empathy, love, and understanding. Herrera employs powerful stylistic choices that bring the novel to life and supply further commentary on his themes. Language. prose and poetry is what can save us, help us in dark times, etch our story into history, and be the piercing dagger into the hearts of our enemies. It is the sheer honesty of poetry that gets Makina through one of her toughest binds. This is a story brilliantly translated¹ and full of dialect and colloquialisms that bring the story to life in a fascinating immediacy. This is the language of life, not a stuffy academic reenactment though all the hallmarks of serious theory are present. There are unique line breaks that let the story flow like a river and make poetry out of the mundane. The José Saramago-like dialogue shucking off quotation marks and mashing multiple interlocutor's words into a single paragraph only offset by periods to denote a change of speaker, as well as the replete free indirect narration knitting Makina to the outside observer illuminates a world where borders, race, gender, heritage, native-tongue, etc. comingle into one unit called Humans. Yet we see that this is not the case, where in America there is staunch resistance to acceptance and--as we witness with the brother--the upper classes feast on the lower classes to retain their power. Their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying and what is not yet born. For the new world to start, the old must end. Herrera chronicles the ending of an era through dark, haunting apocalyptic imagery. Buildings become a void in the ground, ‘expelled from this world.’, bigots are demonic fiery bearded gatekeepers, and to press forward she must leave behind all she knows and has to the wasteland of the past. Makina passes through the gates from her world to the new where change is afoot, and all is frightening and fresh. Herrera employs defamiliarization to perfection in making common American traditions seem barbaric and unnatural. The description of a baseball game, something ‘anglos...play to celebrate who they are’, is accurate yet seemingly alien: One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world. to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract the enemies, and if he doesn’t get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.The passage is very telling of many aspects to the story, from the American military and colonialism, to the crossings people make to America and back, welcomed with open arms if they return. Everyone had to do something for themselves. Alas, the progress towards the future is hunted like a rabbit by wolves, ravenous teeth hellbent on self satisfaction at the blood-loss of others. Makina’s brother, and countless others who made the crossing to seek brighter horizons find themselves not only at the mercy of those who despise their kind simply for the nationality, but those who will wring blood from a stone for profit. Makina’s brother is skinned of his identity to take that of an American boy, symbolic of the way that the new world doesn’t want the melting pot they preach, but assimilation into their own bereft of the culture of old. ‘We are the barbarians,’ Makina writes. The ones who dream the American dream, work the hard hours in filthy jobs, the backbone of the society, are the same the ‘patriotic’. white upper class shuns and spits upon. Their assimilation reeks of the imperialism of old, of Missionaries sailing the seas with religious conversion as a cover for their thirst in gold and slavery. They live in fear of the lights going out, as if every day wasn’t already made of lightning and blackouts. They need us. They want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to work they need to change color and number. But it’s already happening.We must not cling to the world we know, as it is dying within our fingertips, but embrace the future, embrace the union of humanity that can evaporate cultural and political borderlines because only together can we cross the thresholds of a brighter future, not apart. Make the world anew Sings Preceding the End of the World moves swiftly and subtly with even the most brutal and emotionally charged moments fleeting the winds like a ghost in your peripheral vision. It is part of a soon-to-be past that is a necessity for a future and we cannot cling to anything if we want to get there. Even a bullet through the ribs must be forgotten and glossed over if our goal is to be achieved. Herrera’s novel is a stunning portrait of stylization and linguistic brilliance that serves as a battlecry for a more open minded world in which we do not judge one another by outward appearance or culture, but welcome one and all into the party of humanity. We all have our mountains and borders to cross, lets welcome those who make it with open arms. They are the true heros in this world they are fighting for. 4.55/5 We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. ¹ Signs Preceding the End of the World must have been no small task to translate. The style and language is so pertinent to the understanding of the story and Lisa Dillman pulls it off with flair, retaining the original intent of the prose after all the mashing and grinding of the cogworks of translation and bestowing Herrera’s gift unto English speaking readers in a way they can process accurately. Dillman claims she read the story several times over, each read paying specific attention to different key themes to best analyze the translation, and consulted the prose of similar works (both stylistically and thematically) to further understand the relationship between theme and prose. She states that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the most beneficial text she approached for translation purposes, which may mean something to some of you. The sparseness and lack of traditional punctuation or form that provides a unique fluidity to the novel seem akin in the two books—both addressing a new post-apocalypse world though in very different manners—and the pairing is quite interesting to contemplate. [image] REREAD UPDATE: I recently revisited this incredible novella and found it delivered a more formidable power than I remembered. Looking back at my review (below) from 2015, I see the same issues the novel addresses have only gotten worse and more disturbing. Family separations were happening in 2015 yet in 2020 it has only gotten worse and, despite being a national topic of conversation, nothing has been done to stop it. Children are dying in ICE custody and these agents are not facing consequences but instead are making profit. A border wall is being funded through tax payer dollars being diverted from more important needs while environmental protections are being dramatically slashed. Even here in Holland, Mi our own representative Bill Huizenga has worked to stoke fear of immigration while undercutting the Great Lakes. Photos of the Vice President Pence show him looking disinterested and mildly disgusted at refugees packed into overcrowded cages receiving little to no care while their children are in a different concentration camp being drugged into submission and wondering if they will ever see their families again. We are all complicit if we are silent on this. As mentioned in the review, we cannot look away and must press on through ‘the weariness we feel at the monuments of another history’. This book is extremely powerful and important. For a small book it packs an immense array of well-explored themes. There are things that I wish I would have phrased better in the original review but I’ve left it in its original state (I’d like to believe people can learn and grow). I strongly recommend this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 02, 2015
|
Aug 11, 2015
|
Aug 02, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802133908
| 9780802133908
| 0802133908
| 4.05
| 76,187
| Mar 19, 1955
| Mar 10, 1994
|
really liked it
|
It has been a few years since I first encountered Pedro Páramo from Juan Rulfo but my joy over the novel and its first sting of brilliance have never
It has been a few years since I first encountered Pedro Páramo from Juan Rulfo but my joy over the novel and its first sting of brilliance have never faded. It’s a novel I am frequently reminded of, not only due to it being alluded to in many other works I’ve read but also its ghostly vibes of rot and decay are the first to come to mind when encountering dark and decaying towns in any form of media. Not only is this retranslation an excellent update on the language, one Valeria Luiselli (who’s novel Faces in the Crowd—a favorite I highly recommend—leans heavily into homage to Rulfo’s work) refers to as ‘by far, the best of Rulfo in English,’ but also just a great excuse to reread the book. Rulfo himself once said in an interview that Pedro Páramo was intended to be read at least three times before it could be truly understood. Though another reason this is worth reading is for the introduction by the late, great Gabriel García Márquez. Marquez writes that reading Rulfo for the first time ‘will without doubt be an essential chapter in my memoirs,’ an experience on par with his first experience with Franz Kafka. It is a interesting little tale, where Marquez was handed a copy by friend Álvaro Mutis and told ‘read this and learn.’ He did, and fell in love with it. How could you not. ‘They number scarcely more than three hundred pages,’ he writes of these marvelous pages of literature, ‘but they are as great—and, I believe, as enduring—as those of Sophocles.’ Coming from Marquez, that’s about as great an endorsement as one can get, though for those still curious I’ve left my original review intact below. ‘The sun was tumbling over things, giving them form once again. The ruined, sterile earth lay before him.’ There are passages of Juan Rulfo’s exquisite ‘Pedro Páramo’ that I want to cut out and hang upon my walls like a valuable painting. Because that is what this novel is, a purely beautiful surrealistic painting of a hellish Mexico where words are the brushstrokes and the ghastly, ghostly tone is the color palate. Rulfo’s short tale is an utter masterpiece, and the forerunner of magical realism¹—a dark swirling fog of surrealism and horror that is both simple and weightless, yet weighs heavy like an unpardonable sin upon the readers heart and soul. Nights around here are filled with ghosts. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. As soon as it is dark they begin to come out. No one likes to see them. There’s so many of them and so few of us that we don’t even make the effort to pray for them anymore, to help them out of their purgatory. We don’t have enough prayers to go around…Then there are our sins on top of theirs. None of us still living is in God’s grace. We can’t lift up our eyes, because they’re filled with shame.When Juan Preciado visit’s his mother’s home of Comala to his father, the long deceased and ‘pure bile’ of a man, Pedro Páramo, he finds a town of rot and decay filled with ghosts, both figuratively and literally. This is a place of utter damnation, where the sins of a family are so strong that their bloodstained hands have tainted and tarnished the immortal souls of all they come in contact with, leaving in their wake a trail of withered, writhing spirits condemned to forever inhabit their hellish homes. There is nothing pleasant—aside from the intense, striking poetry of Rulfo’s words—to be found in the history of Comala, a town burdened by a list of sins so long and dark that even the preacher’s soul cannot escape from the vile vortex. Life is hard as it is. The only thing that keeps you going is the hope that when you die you’ll be lifted off this mortal coil; but when they close one door to you and the only one left open is the door to Hell, you’re better off not being born…This violent, vitriolic landscape forges an unforgettable portrait of Rulfo’s Mexico, eternally encapsulating his vision into the glorious dimensions of myth. The small novel reads like a bedtime story meant to instill good morality in children through fear, while still enchanting their mind’s eye with a disintegrating stage furnished by crumbling, cadaverous buildings and populated by doomed phantoms. His style is phenomenal, effortlessly swapping between past and present, character to character, all in order to build a montage of madness and damnation. Rulfo’s book is easily digested in a sitting or two, yet will nourish (or cling like a parasite to) your literary soul for an eternity. A dazzling surrealism coupled with a simple, yet potent prose make this an unforgettable classic, and one that has inspired many great authors since its first printing. A hellish portrait of society, brilliantly incorporating political events to help illustrate an abominable image of the dark side of Mexican history, Rulfo immortalizes himself and his homeland into myth and legend. A must read that will haunt you like the pale specters whose voices echo forever in the streets of Comala. 4.5/5 ‘This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years.’ ¹ Gabriel García Márquez, who once said of Rulfo’s novel ‘I could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards,’ (Rediscovering Pedro Páramo), credits the book as playing a major chord of inspiration in his brand of ‘magical realism’. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 15, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0330511831
| 9780330511834
| 0330511831
| 3.84
| 9,086
| 1999
| Sep 04, 2009
|
really liked it
|
History is like a horror story. The student youth of Mexico raised their fists in protest during the summer and fall of 1968, marching against the gove History is like a horror story. The student youth of Mexico raised their fists in protest during the summer and fall of 1968, marching against the government towards the violent climax of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2nd. ¹ Student demonstrations were organized in response to the killings of several students by the police called in to repress a fight between gang members of two rival schools—the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and National Politechnical Institute (IPN)—and were further aggravated by the upcoming summer Olympics taking place in Mexico City. The Olympic Committee, headed by an American, chose Mexico as the first third-world country to host an Olympic event, and protestors saw this as an attempt to portray Mexico as a country stabilized by American support and financial backing. Protestors took to the streets shouting ‘We Don't Want Olympic Games, We Want a Revolution!’ Roberto Bolaño’s slim, yet satisfying, Amulet has as its centerpiece the Mexican army occupation of UNAM, using the violent event as a nucleus around which narrator Auxilio Lacouture’s life events orbit. Finding herself trapped in the UNAM bathroom during the occupation, a subtle yet monumental act of resistance, Auxilio becomes unstuck in time, narrating events both past, present and future, yet always returning to the moonlight reflecting off the tiles of the lonely bathroom floor. Through pure poetic ecstasy, Bolaño uses Auxilio’s beautiful mind and perspective to brilliantly juxtapose seemingly disparate elements in order to paint a unified and emotionally charged portrait of the struggles, sorrows and strife of the Latin American people. [image] Student demonstration, August 27th, 1968 ‘I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, Auxilio says on the opening page, ‘but I better not. I know all the poets and all the poets know me.’ Drifting in extreme poverty through the streets of Mexico City like so many others, Auxilio is a glorious soul that finds odd jobs at the university to earn her keep while spending her nights in drunken sublimity with the young Mexican poets, such as the authors alter-ego, Arturo Belano, caring for them as a mother while being shamelessly enraptured by their poetry. Auxilio has a rare gift of seeing the events of the world, past and future, unfold before her eyes, unlocked during her isolation in the UNAM bathroom, but with this gift comes great costs. It would be easy to dismiss her as crazy, a woman missing teeth (‘I lost my teeth on the alter of human sacrifice’) and crying at the words of people half her age before leaving the bars without paying, yet that would be a grave misunderstanding and would deny oneself an illuminating look into her heart and soul. I never paid, or hardly ever. I was the one who could see into the past and those who can see into the past never pay. But I could also see into the future and vision of that kind comes at a high price: life, sometimes, or sanity. So I figured I was paying, night after forgotten night, though nobody realized it; I was paying for everyone’s round, the kids who would be poets and those who never would.I like to believe that one of the many gifts of literature is to cultivate a more open-minded view and to learn acceptance of others. Auxilio must face the horrors of history, of existence, in a way others cannot, and must travel to the vicious depths of her soul that most minds form a wall to protect themselves from having to journey into. Like a snake that unhinges its jaw to swallow a large meal, Auxilio must unhinge her mind—at least by the common socially accepted, or clinical, standards²in order to swallow such enormous thoughts and burdensome truths. She witnesses the pains and poverty of others, and is charged with the task of putting it all together to witness the birth of History and document it across the ages. The birth of History can’t wait, and if we arrive late you won’t see anything, only ruins and smoke, an empty landscape, and you’ll be alone again forever even if you go out and get drunk with your poet friends every night Bolaño possessed an incredible gift for organizing seemingly unrelated events into a unified message. Auxilio’s skipping across time bears witness to many different characters and subtly probes into their hearts, making Amulet almost feel like a collection of short stories, with them all orbiting around one narrator. Yet, somehow through the juxtaposition, Bolaño manages to make each story mesh, creating a space between each idea where the reader’s mind will occupy and abstractly connect each element, each theme, into one larger, all-encompassing image. These are stories of poverty, resilience, heartbreak, rebellion, bravery and even an investigation into the story of Erigone and Orestes. The conflict between students and government is also juxtaposed with the overthrowing of Allende in Chile, in which Belano plays a role. While no connection is never made overt, the themes of conflict and revolution are enough to give the reader a sense of the violence haunting Bolaño . What is most impressive and satisfying, however, is the way Bolaño orchestrates a world where literature is of the utmost importance, giving meaning and validation to the lives of those who give meaning through its application to the sights and sounds of the horror show of History playing out around them. Much in the ways Auxilio binds the lives of those around her into one common, driving force, Amulet serves to bind together the oeuvre of its author. As Distant Star is the elaboration of the final story in Nazi Literature in the Americas, Amulet expands on Auxilio’s small, but unforgettable account in The Savage Detectives. While Amulet may be a minor work, it plays a key role in the Bolaño universe, expanding on the themes that constitute the life-giving roots of his work. The idea that violence plagues Latin America through all eternity is glimpsed, even connecting itself to his magnum opus 2666 through a hallucinatory passage as Auxilio follows Belano towards a potentially deadly confrontation: Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.This intertextuality is one of the many reasons that it is hard to go long without returning to the poetic pages of a Bolaño book, creating a world that seems to come alive through repeat characters. Short, yet overflowing with passages of sheer beauty reminiscent of Bolaño’s prose poems that are sure to drain your pen dry underlining each gem, Amulet is a wonderful trip through horrific and melancholy events. Auxilio may only play a small role in the uprisings, yet her small role forever transfixes her into mythological magnitude in history, becoming a beacon of hope and a symbol of fortitude for the weak and weary to seek comfort and redemption. The final pages are the most haunting, culminating all the sorrows and struggles into a song of revolution that will live on regardless of the body count at the oppressive hands of both the army and history. Similarly, while Bolaño may have passed, his voice lives on. It is certainly a voice worth listening to. 4/5 ‘ I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.’ ¹The following history of the 1968 student revolution is paraphrased from the article October 2nd is Not Forgotten. ²As discussed in Machado De Assis’ The Alienist, we are all uniquely wired (or, perhaps, uniquely weird), and who is really to say what constitutes sanity. Understandably there must be clinical standards, I’m not here to disparage the psychological community in any way, however, Auxilio is a wonderful literary example of how we often write off others without truly attempting to understand them and see the world through their eyes. By dismissing her as crazy, you lose the opportunity to unlock the world and learn through her. Laziness is similar, and often dismissing someone as lazy is actually the lazy way out; even what appears as laziness is a highly complex set of emotions and actions that offer deeper insights into a person. Not that this is a universal law, but hopefully you get the point. I’m moralizing now, which makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable, so I’ll conclude by reiterating that literature, and characters like Auxilio, plead that we try harder to understand and accept one another instead of casting one another aside through negatively connotative dismissals. ‘I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 20, 2013
|
Aug 16, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0872864731
| 9780872864733
| 3.86
| 2,981
| 1994
| Jul 01, 2009
|
really liked it
|
‘The best thing was a quick death under the most comfortable circumstances’ Everyone suffers and everyone must eventually die, the rich and poor alike. ‘The best thing was a quick death under the most comfortable circumstances’ Everyone suffers and everyone must eventually die, the rich and poor alike. Yet, it is the poor, the discarded, those on the fringes of society—be it by choice or cast off for being deemed as an illness to society—that must suffer and die in pitiful conditions and solitude, often forgotten by those around them or ignored by the multitude of marching feet that pound the pavement just away beyond where they lie dying in a gutter. Beauty Salon, Mario Bellatín’s powerful book that at 63 pages hugs the border between being a succinct novella or short story, is a emotionally jarring account of a young man converting his beauty parlor into a shelter for men to spend their final days as their body is ravaged by an unnamed plague which is gutting the city. ‘It wasn’t death that got me,’ he says, ‘the only thing I wanted was to make sure these people, abandoned by state hospitals, didn’t die like dogs in the middle of the street.’ Heart wrenching and brutally honest, Bellatín illuminates his miniscule allegory through impressively layered symbols as he weaves the life story of a man who must become caretaker for the dying with the pains and plight of a his community as it is faced with bigotry and burdened by the AIDs epidemic. Beauty Salon is like an elaborate tango between life and destruction, elegantly dancing back and forth across the plotline as if it were a dance floor and flourishing each step with his mutli-layered symbolism. The story never really leaves the dance floor to progress into the untold futures of the night, but deftly swirls and steps across each inch of the narrator’s life to pull it all together as one moment of artistic beauty. Having been rejected by his mother 'for not turning out to be the straight son she had wanted,' he moves to the city a follows the advice of a former employer ‘that I should never forget that youth is fleeting and that I should take advantage of my young age as much as possible.’ He opens up a highly successful beauty salon and lives an exhausting nightlife chasing other young men at clubs and steambaths, until the plague begins to claim the lives of those close to him. Narrated by looping through past and present, his narration may be considered to be a symptom of the disease which leaves many of the young men to lie awake ranting aimlessly, yet the technique is a brilliant method for Bellatín to control that what he reveals is done at just the precise moment. This tiny novella is so carefully crafted and emits a poetic radiance through its swirling, short sentence structure. ‘Despite the circumstances, I feel a somewhat sad joy when I realize that for the first time ever I’ve imposed a certain kind of order on my life, even if the way I have achieved it does seem a bit gloomy.’ Bellatín constructs a poignant account of his community and the undeserved slighting it often receives. His nightlife is full of dangers from others, such as a gang that attacks men like him who dress as women and these victims that survive the sporadic violence are subjected to further suffering as they are subsequently shunned by the general population. The narrator is at home with the underbelly of society, with the dregs and the outcasts, and feels he must offer aid where nobody else will. Many of the first who come to die in The Terminal are rejected by society and denied medical assistance from religious organizations simply for being whom they are, and barred from hospitals for not meeting the proper economic status. Nothing is ever named, not the narrator, those awaiting the end in The Terminal, or even the plague, which only intensifies the essence of being an outcast, denied even a name in the eyes of the ideals of society. Although the plague is never named, there is a strong implication of being the AIDs epidemic. Central to the story are the fish raised by the narrator in the beauty salon, and one of their many purposes to the narrative is to exemplify the nature of the plague as in his depiction of the vicious axolotl fish. [T]hey were so ferocious and carnivorous that they wouldn’t put up with the presence of garbage fish, not even for a moment. I once put in a couple of garbage fish while the axolotls were sleeping I stayed for a few moments to watch their reaction. Nothing much happened during the first half hour. The garbage fish got to work, and with their big mouths stuck to the glass they started to eat the impurities in the fish tank….As soon as I left the tank, though, the axolotls attacked and devoured the garbage fish. I returned a few minutes later to discover the carnage.While the garbage fish try to keep the tank clean, similar to the white blood cells, the axototls destroy them and condemn the tank to a slow death. There is a sense of hopelessness that permeates Beauty Salon as the narrator recognizes that no amount of care can ever cure the infected and that all he can do is ease their suffering as their body deteriorates towards an inevitable death. He remains indifferent to them, careful not to get attached, painfully resigned to their expiration date. He allows no sense of hope, discourages encouragement when symptoms temporarily subside, and bans any religious prayer or icons. He belongs to a community outcast by religious institutions, and the totality of destruction wrought upon those touched by the plague could easily lead one to feel they are outcast by a creator. There is little light to cling to in the story, and the little there is dims with each turning page as the reader witnesses the narrators dive into sorrow and solitude, resigned to his own painful demise. Perhaps this is the feeling my mother had when, after years of being examined in hospitals, she was told that she had a malignant tumor…She sent me a letter I never answered. Now that I find myself in a similar situation, there’s no one I can write. There’s not even anyone out there who doesn’t want to write to me. The fish are rather pivotal to the story, reflecting all aspects of humanity in the novella. The narrator first keeps only guppies, a fish he is told are very resilient and require little care—resiliency being a desirable trait in the eyes of someone who leads a exhausting and dangerous life. As the salon begins to fill with the effluvium of the dying, the fish become his last grip on the old world, being an extension of his attempts to adorn himself in beauty and life. It is when the reader begins to view the fish as people themselves when the real dark beauty of the novella surfaces. We all float along at the whim of a world we cannot understand or control, like the fish subjected to the neglect of their weary owner. They suffer from poor living conditions and fungus claims the lives of many, much like the plague. When he puts the fish on the nightstand of a dying young man, they give him comfort, like the comfort the dying find being able to spend their last days in the company of their peers. However, eventually nobody even mentions the fish. They lurk behind cloudy green glass, forgotten by those who should care for them and watch over them. Tiny, yet filled with a melancholy power that echoes deep into the heart, Bellatín’s Beauty Salon is a poetic revealing of the hardships faced by those around us, especially those that must live with the faces many avert their eyes from. This is the sort of book that makes you want to run out and hug everyone you know and live your life as a better person, the sort of book that makes you thankfully cling to your health in the present and makes your heart ache for those less fortunate than you as you contemplate ways you could ease the ocean of suffering in the world, even if only by one tiny drop. Similar to Camus’ The Plague (well, substituting fascism for AIDs), yet as a tiny glass miniature that captures a tiny beam of poetic light and casts it upon the wall as a giant radiant rainbow. Gritty, emotionally impacting, and downright heartbreaking, this novella makes me hope that the English reading world will soon be treated to more translations of this author that has made quite a mark on the Mexican literary scene. 3.75/5 ‘Now the only thing I ask is that they respect the loneliness to come.’ [image] ‘To me literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders. But in my work the rules of the game are always obvious, the guts are exposed, and you can see what is being cooked up.’ – Mario Bellatín ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Apr 08, 2013
|
Paperback
|
Loading...
12 of 12 loaded
