Vargas Llosa’s two trilogies at one stroke

Full title: The Discreet Hero

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 326 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The novels of Mario Vargas Llosa should come with instruction manuals. Not because he indulges in obscure matters, but because his constant play with references is so intricate and so personalized that a new text, like The Discreet Hero, risks passing as a mere exercise in simplistic storytelling flavors with an exhibitive soap-opera character. Knowing the author’s penchant for narrative experimentations, a lot of this is likely to have been done on purpose. But confusion does look like a real possibility when it comes to readers.

The review in The Guardian, for instance, all but ignores the cross-referential nature of the novel, which brings together allusions to earlier novels by Vargas Llosa. Francisco Goldman’s account, in The New York Times, is much better informed and better situated critically in its balanced view of the Peruvian author’s literary and political views (paying attention to matters of plot significance, as well as following his ascending career, from the socialist devotee of the early works and convictions to the aristocratic conservative known, since 2011, under the hereditary title of 1^st Marquis of Vargas Llosa).

The Discreet Hero is an interesting case of double closure, a really curious and highly original hybrid. It stands as the third volume in two different trilogies: the one taking place in Lima and featuring Don Rigoberto and his immediate family (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and In Praise of the Stepmother) and the other one set in Piura and featuring Sergeant Lituma (The Green House and Death in the Andes).

This hybrid is not at all surprising if one considers Vargas Llosa's distinctive attention to narrative interweaving and plotting, based precisely on shooting references across pages and across texts.

His favourite technique shows, at a local level, throughout The Discreet Hero: alternative chaptering. As in so many of his previous books, Vargas Llosa refuses, almost programmatically, to stick to a one-plot narrative. And for that reason his cast of characters is, as always, impressive. Every chapter has its own plot, with their respective subplots and parallel developments, each following the performance of specific characters. The most important of them are, of course, Don Rigoberto and Sergeant Lituma. They don’t know each other, and when they do meet (very late in the novel) there is no outstanding exchange between them. Only the reader is satisfied to see the convergence of the two lines of plot and to admire, perhaps, the author’s art of bringing them together. Otherwise, Rigoberto is the same aristocrat disgusted by the mundane flavor of life, who featured, with his strange rituals of ablution and sexual oddities, in The Notebooks and in The Stepmother. Lituma too remains true to his narrative destiny drawn in the previous novels: poor but honest, victim of coincidences and misunderstandings, the only policeman in town who has never taken a bribe and who, for precisely that reason, is, in his own words, “the only one that's still a poor beggar and will be a cop forever.” Both Lituma and Rigoberto, must be noted, are secondary characters in this novel. The chapters in which they feature are dedicated to Felícito Yanaqué and Don Ismael Carrera, respectively, business owners of different calibers but of similar providence, who find themselves the victims of their relatives’ rapacity.

But we know that Lituma and Rigoberto are the men to look for, because they are the ones who help finishing the trilogies.

Mario Vargas Llosa. Source: The New York Times

The chapters woven into each other play the obvious role of keeping the reader’s attention in check. With the spirit borrowed, doubtlessly, from the popular telenovelas of South America and also, perhaps, from the Greek and Roman Menippean satire, this technique relies on the good old effect of well managed cliffhangers: tension builds up, a climax becomes possible, then very likely, then unavoidable, and suddenly the curtain falls and we move to the next chapter. Where the action starts anew and builds up towards the same resolution. And so on and so forth.

One wonders if this technique, now anything but new in Vargas Llosa's work, is a narrative strength of his or just a sign of weakness. I believe both options have equal chances to be the winner. I would not completely dismiss the view that this spectacular intermingling of narratives turns almost all of his novels into collections of short stories. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nobody said novels must be monological. On the contrary. And in fact the novels of Maria Vargas Llosa always find subtle, surprising ways of connecting those stories and sub-plots in ways that give them a true novel feel. But still, that demon of doubt...

In The Discreet Hero, it's not only stories that are sewn together but also genres. From drama to tragicomedy and from 19^th-century melodrama to 20^th and 21^st-century telenovelas, a broad spectrum of possibilities is activated every step of the way. At times the novel feels like the work of a debutant who is trying his hand at as much narrative material as possible.

A tad too much soap opera? Maybe. Albeit the message is clear: here’s life imitating art and art imitating life.

“My God, what stories ordinary life devised; not masterpieces to be sure, they were doubtless closer to Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexical soap operas that to Cervantes and Tolstoy. But again not too far from Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, or Benito Pérez Galdós.”

Until the moment of the reunion of the two narrative threads, though, almost everything has that cheap allure of unexpected encounters, events whose levels of likelihood would, under normal circumstances, be very low, situations and accidents that seem, well – too accidental to be taken seriously. Kind of like eighteenth-century novels. Something à la Tom Jones, if you like, or the pseudo-romances of Samuel Richardson, where characters run into trouble in the most artificial of ways, all in the name of a transparent spectacle.

But it’s clear that Vargas Llosa has planned, with this his latest novel, a take on genres as much as a take on his eternal concern with Peruvian life. And since we’re in the eternity department, let’s finish with another quote concerning telenovelas:

“The soap opera isn’t over, it goes on and on and gets harder to understand every day.”

That’s Don Rigoberto for you, the aristocrat who ends the novel in a plane, flying his family to Europe, where he has planned to disappear amidst bourgeois intellectual pursuits like a man who has been planning his withdrawal from a book.

The ingenious prose of Nic Low

Full title: Arms Race

Author: Nic Low

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 250 pages, paperback
Publisher: Text Publishing (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Being a character in Nic Low’s first collection of short stories would be nothing short of a great vacation. You’d be taken places you never imagined or never thought of visiting during your lifetime. India. Laos. Mongolia. The Australian desert. A New Zealand coast town. San Francisco. London. Melbourne. New Zealand again. And some more. Wouldn’t your character life look like a traveler’s map if you took the journeys advertised by the volume?
Pick and choose – Master Low will take you there in a few pages and give you the ride of your life.

Not only do the stories in Arms Race grow beautifully in such geographic amplitudes, you’d also be given the chance to travel multidimensionally. Like, for instance, getting to a London of a future where all you can consume to stay alive is megabytes. This is the case of “Data Furnace,” a story where Low shows the traces of a true master storyteller.

What is a master storyteller? Someone who leaves the reader wondering how the hell he’d come up with that or with that or with that.
Going into details would ruin the pleasure of reading, I know, I know. But unfortunately you can only talk about Nic Low’s stories if you commit, repeatedly, the crime of giving the show away. That’s how good you feel after having read, one after the other, the twelve stories in the volume, asking, at the last page, if there were any more of them on the way.
So beware: the following may contain spoilers.

To take “Data Furnace” as a model and give it a brief summary, what have we got? We’ve got the city of London caught up in an apocalyptic winter. First stop, take a look at how he describes the city:

“I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned spires of the City: they’re all so deformed by frost they look like they were designed by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.”

Good, isn’t it? Atmospheric to the point where you feel your bones penetrated by cold.

And this is just to give a taste of what all the texts in the volume read like: with aplomb, with wit, with clarity, with a baroque tendency of exaggerating the contours, but only lightly, with a candid touch not to make the landscapes too foreign. There is, indeed, a sense that, no matter where you are in these stories, no matter what the location or the situation or the purpose, you’re never in need of a compass: you can do it on your own; you can journey through these places like a pro.
If there’s one element that stands out in Nic Low’s stories, it’s got to be his associations. In descriptions, you’re always driven away from the ‘natural’ course. The “gutted apartments” – who would have thought of using that adjective to describe an empty habitation? It’s the adjectives that do the job, of course. Adjectives, those no-no’s of creative writing classes, are Low’s best allies. He knows how to deploy them and deploys them to get the best effect. Like in an arms race for the conquest of readership.

Source: Te Karaka

But to return to the story. Temperatures have gone so low and for such a long time that people have been leaving the streets, the houses, the whole urban space. All but a few; to be more precise: the narrator, his beautiful colleague Umi, and the opportunistic homeless figure known under the name of Old Man Canary. The first two work as IT specialists in a company that has just shut down its last server room. They refuse to leave the city when everyone else is running for the airports like crazy. They stay and they come up with a brilliant idea. Since there’s nothing else to burn to keep themselves warm (every single tree in London has been cut to pieces and consumed in domestic fires), they will use data. They will get the servers to heat up.

This is one of those situations where the reader goes, Oh, I see. Because we all know that computers do give off heat (that’s why they’re equipped with coolers!). But in order to generate enough heat in the servers, the two of them need traffic. They need to get the servers working like never before. Solution: shoot a YouTube video and wait for it to go viral. Easy to say, not so easy to do, since online audiences are best known for their volatility and unpredictability. But a new brilliant idea pops out of Umi’s head. She connects a terrarium to the servers. In the terrarium there’s a tropical frog. The frog needs warmth just like the humans. But there’s a trick to it. As we are told a little earlier (by way of a story that sounds like an urban myth), if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it in cold water and heat that water gradually, it will stay there, allowing itself to be cooked to death. This is where the ingenious idea resides. With a few videos and some hacking that brings traffic to a decent level, the terrarium starts getting warmer and warmer. The heat from the server is transferred to it. It grows hotter and hotter as the viewers turn the event into a share frenzy of epic proportions. Everything’s broadcast live and soon bets are placed on whether the frog will jump out or not. It’s this betting that gets the traffic flowing. The world is taken with the madness of this new form of entertainment. And behind all this – the logic of data flooding:

“We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.”

I have to stop here, though. “Data Furnace” still has an ending that needs to be read, not overheard. But after all this effort to summarize, I think there's one thing that can be said about Nic Low with some degree of certainty: his stories are imaginative like you haven’t seen for a long time. The pleasure with which he tells these stories, the succulent texts full of images and metaphors that make your mouth froth as you read along, the pace of the narration – all these things make the collection impossible to ignore. As also impossible to ignore must be Nic Low’s current project, set to be launched in 2016.

The last novel of Philip Roth

Full title: Nemesis

Author: Philip Roth

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 304 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When Philip Roth declared, in 2012, that he had given up writing, Nemesis had been the last novel published under his name (2010). So far, he has kept his promise, and by the looks of it he’s just as determined to shut his creativity shop as he was, in the past, determined to write like there was no tomorrow. So now, knowing that this is his last novel, Nemesis has the aura of a closure. But truth being said, there is nothing in it that suggests some end-of-the-road proclamation. So I believe we need to get back to where it all started, i.e. back to the novel itself, and read it as it should be: as a novel with only itself to stand by.

Nemesis is a book of hostilities. Set in 1944, when Europe and the Pacific were being blown to small pieces by WW2, it follows closely the brief career of Bucky Cantor, a teacher and playground director in a Newark Jewish community. What’s singular about Bucky Cantor is that he has the ill luck of being contemporary with an epidemic of polio. Roth follows at a painstakingly slow pace the evolution of the illness, which makes the account all the more appalling. Kids disfigured, reduced to having to breathe through machines, with their limbs twisted and paralyzed, the children under Bucky Cantor’s care enter the stage and leave it as if they had never existed, casualties in a war without weapons. We get a quick glimpse of them and then they’re no more.

Several characters in the novel make the obvious connection between the Jewish origins of this community and the historical destiny of the Jews at large, especially at the time of the then-unfolding WW2, when the concentration camps in Europe were still running. As Dr. Steinberg, one of the prominent figures in the community, declares, the destiny of those children killed by polio was equal to the greater destiny of the Jews in the world, and that in its turn was equal to the destiny of humanity in general:

”I’m against the frightening of Jewish kids. I’m against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.”

Bucky is conscious of the weight of this destiny and the power of this fear. He sees, around him, parents growing paranoid, impatient, and unfair. Some get as far as screaming out, with the power of a slogan: “Disinfect everything!” Others, confronted with this implacable destiny that seems to be unwilling to take any prisoners, find consolation in the pathetic illusion that salvation can come from signs:

“Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn’t there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn’t there a quarantine sign protecting my children?”

The panic grows continuously, and Bucky Cantor is a hopeless witness of the growing devastation. Caught in the centre of the epidemic, he finds it his duty to stay and fight the right fight to the end. But there’s a fiancé as well; she is in a holiday camp away from the polio catastrophe, and she insists that he join her. Bucky gives in and he leaves the city at a time when the epidemic had already reached biblical proportions. But once in the safe haven of the Pocono Mountains, where everything is bucolic and out of harm’s way, he starts having second thoughts. He is in a constant strife with himself: a man overcome by his own morality, a teacher with the constitution of a hero but the fortune of an apostate. He comes out of all this scarred for life, a victim with a story to tell.

Philip Roth. Source: The Reader's Room

Bucky’s tragedy is that everything for him works the other way round. He is not like the others. He is an orphan whose mother died giving birth to him. His father, a thief, disappeared from his life when he was too young to even notice him. He is athletic by nature, fully prepared to face the world, but because of his poor eyesight he is not accepted in the army, and so, fails to enlist in America’s wars against Germany and Japan. While others his age are fighting in a real war, he is caught up in this fake, humiliating, war against polio, which is far crueller, more unfair, and less glorious than any other war he can imagine. And while those who have fought the honourable fights come home, he finds himself on a hospital bed, ridden with polio, more wounded in his soul and more maimed in his body than those who had seen Normandy or Pearl Harbor.

Bucky’s tragedy is the tragedy of someone who’s never been given the chance to become a hero.

He is engaged in very many battles, but each of them seem to be the wrong one. He battles polio when everyone else is battling the Germans or the Japanese. He battles god when everyone else is battling destiny. He battles his own demons when everyone else has an external cause to fight for. Bucky is always misplaced, always at the mercy of an incoherent fate:

“Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.”

Because God, indeed, is an uncomfortable notion for Bucky: the entity he blames for the entire disaster, for the polio as well as for for everything else. God, a fixation that hurts, an obsession that insists on meaning nothing reasonable:

“His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two – a sick fuck and an evil genius.”

This gives the novel an air of revenge. If anything, Philip Roth's last novel is a book about the unfairness of the world, about heroism that just doesn't happen, and also about the failure of an ideology based on patriotism and duty. America at its most vulnerable: this is the working topic of Nemesis.

"The ping and the pong of America"

Full title: The Making of Zombie Wars. A Novel

Author: Aleksandar Hemon

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When you see the title you know straight away that there’s fun to be had from reading this novel. And the fun begins alright, yet slowly, gradually – because nothing can proceed unless we have some good introductory chapters first. So here it goes: Joshua Levin, a young would-be writer based in Chicago, is facing the mother of all creative impasses. He’s tried his hand at various genres, but after a while decided that film scripts are the go-to enterprise. So he proceeds to writing them. No success. Projects die one after another. He’s joined a group of other would-be’s, with whom he shares this destiny of being in an eternal bottleneck. They get together to discuss writing that never takes place and end up, almost invariably, with their minds assaulted by sexual ideation or drowned in cheap oxidized wine.

Case in point, the following dialogue:

“’American movies always have happy ending,’ Bega said. ‘Life is tragedy: you’re born, you live, you die.’
‘This could be like a European art-house movie. Which would be good because you could show tits,’ Graham said, pausing to picture the tits.”

Of course, what Hemon wants to point out here is the cultural break that divides these two cultures he’s concerned with: the Easter-European one (a culture of immigrants who have too many stories to tell and no chance to do it properly) and the American one (where things make sense only if they’re showy, over-the-top, kitsch). In fact, Bega, the Bosnian, doesn’t lose a single opportunity to highlight, in his accent-ridden voice, this division. He does so with the typical air of contempt that behooves respectable immigrants:

“’I was thinking, Josh,’ Bega said. ‘Why America now must have superheroes? Why can’t you just have normal heroes? John Wayne was not good enough, now you must have Batman?’”

And a couple of pages further down, again, because nothing is sweeter than the taste of cultural revenge:

“’Tell me why is that,’ Bega said, ‘last eight presidents have simple names: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, two with Bush. You used to have Washington, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, and then something happened. You can’t elect your president with complicated name anymore. Idiot voters have to be able to spell fucking name.’”

Mocked, Joshua flexes his artistic muscle even harder, trying to achieve the impossible. He keeps a record of all the ideas that cross his mind at various points in time. There are many of them. He has them numbered, neatly catalogued in the memory of his personal computer. He brings them out every now and then as personal reminders that work needs to be done if artistic immortality is desired. But there’s no joy in the exercise, because he never gets to the point of materialization. His writing sucks, to put it bluntly; and he knows it. Nothing has come out yet from under his unconvincing finger tips. Nothing, that is, except this script idea for a film called Zombie Wars.

Aleksandar Hemon. Source: KCET

Steeped in American dullness, Joshua has a life best described as minor. His food is bland, his family is concerned with inconsequential Jewish problems, his whole life’s a sub-product better imagined as part of a low-budget B-series movie. He can’t even enjoy the prospect of dreams.

“Joshua hated sleeping, but waking up was worse. Nightmares were not the problem: he never really had any. Nobody ever bothered to chase him in his dreams; he never plunged from a tall building to wake up just before exploding like a pomegranate, nor did he ever experience even the vaguest presence of death. There was little violence, only occasional vanilla sex, his dreams damp rather than wet, his subconscious a Wilmette where he was forever sleepily immortal.”

Trapped in this dreamless Americanness, it’s a miracle Joshua doesn’t turn into a Norman Bates or some solo-act of Bonnie and Clyde.

Truth is he doesn’t have a chance to become wild, simply because he doesn’t have the guts. He flees conflict, avoids his mad landlord, avoids his family, avoids the happiness that seems likely to catch roots in the company of his near-perfect Japanese girlfriend, avoids – ultimately – writing the script of his own life. Hence the general feeling of his being completely and utterly (excuse the word) fucked: a looser in the most specific sense of the word, eligible to feature in the world’s best galleries of all-time losers.

After a while, though, things get moving and everything that was dull in the beginning turns into a fast-paced Hollywood-like production. There’s drama (Joshua’s father discovering that he has prostate cancer), romance (a lot of it, but of the problematic kind, with the Japanese girlfriend gone from perfect match to utter hater, aided by a Bosnian contender impossible to resist), adventure (featuring the colourful landlord by the name of Stagger, who brandishes a samurai sword and gets his butt kicked big time, and not just once), and even bits of thriller (with a bunch of other Bosnians in close-up, just to make sure we don’t forget who Aleksandar Hemon is).

With action cropping up at superhighway speeds, The Making of Zombie Wars turns hilarious and sad at the same time. A sympathetic reader will surely feel for the protagonist’s sorry ass, but will LOL at the encounter with Stagger, the novel’s best, if not only, truly comic character (“If ever a man was entitled to a cape and light saber, it was Stagger.”)

Then one must admire Hemon’s talent for destroying every cliché that ever comes his way. There are moments when one is reminded of those comedies in which a seemingly melodramatic plot ends with a turntable scratch that makes the audience aware that this ain’t nothing but a joke. Take this, for instance, for a ruined bucolic:

“All across the wide world, spring was landing on its fairy feet. Everywhere, trees were budding and coming into leaves, ground thawing and earthworms stirring, dog shit defrosting and releasing the pungent stink that brought back memories of springs past.”

As per example, Hemon knows irony well, and proves to be a good adept of the new American wave of novelists, who take the Mickey out of everything but do so with intelligence, elegance, and sophistication. (See Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz etc. etc.) Some of Hemon’s metaphors, let’s admit it, rock. Take “clouds floated like meringue zeppelins” for an example. But metaphors aren’t everything that stands out. Hemon also engages perfectly with the critical vein of the American club, seeing where America is weak and hitting precisely there, for maximum effect:

“Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive. On the other hand, it was cheap and everywhere. Hope and war: the ping and the pong of America.”

There would be numberless other occasions to quote Aleksadar Hemon, now at his sixth book, already a victor of American letters. Part of his talent is that he knows how to scatter quotable bits throughout the text. The novel expertly apes the prose of religious sermons, it mimics Spinoza, it offers brilliant philosophical gems, it mixes script excerpts into the novelistic fabric. It does all sorts of novel-writing prestidigitation, and a lot of it comes out well. A multi-voice enterprise, The Making of Zombie Wars is a novel worth keeping in one’s personal library for some time.

Michael Ondaatje: “Images only from memory”

Full title: The Cat's Table

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 293 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (2011)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel (four years old at this point in time) is a book of passages. It tells the story of three boys travelling between Sri Lanka and England on the transoceanic Oronsay, during the summer of 1954. It tells the story of what went on, during that three-week journey that’s been never forgotten. It tells the story of how the people on board passed from one small island at the end of the Indian subcontinent to a bigger island at the end of Europe.

A sense of a spectacle full of surprises mixed with water and patches of moon permeates through the narrative suppleness and the poetic subtleties of Ondaatje’s prose. The ship itself is a big floating stage, where the passengers play their roles in a space where there is, really, nothing else to do. Once the boys are boarded and the Oronsay starts floating on, they find themselves in a different world, one of freedom but also one of apprehension, where they are “no longer free of the realities of the earth.”

Because of this encounter with the unprecedented (born in Colombo, not far from the sea, they still remember their homes as grounded certainties: territories of earth, not of water), the passengers gather together to construct a universe whose meaning is limited to the time and space of the ship. The narrative gives sufficient hints to inform the reader that nothing of what they are witnessing is the characters’ normal way about things.

The voyage is a game; a game for the boys, who see through events as if they did not matter beyond their immediate happening; a game for the other passengers too, who put on various masks in order to enjoy a short-term life of differences and quasi-anomalies.

The passage, the narrator insists in this story told years later, was not what one might call splendid. Not in its original unfolding. Like all formative events, the formativeness of this passage becomes significant only in hindsight:

“It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.”

It is important that we keep this in mind while reading The Cat’s Table, because this way the question of childhood (inexperience, naivety, and everything else that comes with it) can be brought up again and again. Now, at maturity (the novel’s ‘time zero of narration’), the events are recounted to minds as young as those of the protagonists, participating in the unlikely formation of this generation that grew after the events.

What we’re made to understand from this series of stories remembered as if they were coming from a different world, is that everything – everything – is the product of memory. Impractical, restorative, unreliable memory.

“For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the Oronsay exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory.”

This state beyond documentation lays the ground for fiction. It is, in fact, the perfect incubator for fantasy and for imagination. Without facts, the universe is open to speculations: forms of creative remembering.

Michael Ondaatje. Source: University of North Texas

Autobiographic by default, every writing gesture questions the relevance of memory and its ability to go back to a beginning that is forever fragile. “Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence,” the narrator says at some point. The impermanence of events is the one true theme of The Cat’s Table. Impermanence aided by the fact that this voyage towards an unknown place is recounted as an event in itself: a series of incidents with their own internal logic, held together not by linear biography but by a floating device. That’s why the novel ends at the arrival. In three pages, the episode of Michael’s meeting his mother (who has been waiting for him in London all this time) is done with; without emotional charge, without a mother-son love collision.

That’s because what really matters is not the reunion but the breaking of the party: the fact that the journey ended and, with it, the magic of the show broke up as well. At the arrival, certainty takes front stage again. No more room for fantasy and artifice, no more imagining about. All of that was the ship’s magic, a thing of the past. Now, giving the sea its due, the land puts everybody’s feet to the ground; literally, ordinarily, most prosaically.

But let’s return to the voyage. Given the lack of means to record the events, the narrator’s recollections will have to be regarded as the only accounts of the journey, the only reliable (to an extent) sources of information about a three-week period that was never memorised otherwise.

And so, the boys seem to be under the constant pressure of a duty to witness. Throughout the voyage, they watch and listen. They stand hidden in the darkness of a life boat, covered by the tarpaulin, furtively seeing and listening to events as they unfolded. This sense of witnessing becomes apparent everywhere in the novel. Sometimes, it suggests confusion – like the confusion in the minds of the young protagonists:

“We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility.”

At other times, the sense of testimony appears as a necessary training for a future when the events are meant to gain significance:

“Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

This is the core of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table: the facts of fiction adding memory to existence.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, together (again)

Full title: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Mexican Modern Art
Author: Helga Prignitz-Poda

Genre: Exhibition catalogue
Attributes: 144 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Skira Rizzoli (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As we speak, the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is hosting (February 26 – May 31, 2015) this almost obligatory exhibition of Mexican Modern Art, at the centre of which stand the works of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Full title: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection & 20^th Century Mexican Art from the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Collection. The book I’m looking at here is the catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Helga Prignitz-Poda, a Kahlo expert and curator specialized in Mexican art. The book is an object as well as an event. It makes apparent the exhibition’s coherence and its spirit, surveying works by the sonorous representatives of Mexican muralism, José Clemente Orózco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, or by many of the Surrealists who, like Rufino Tamayo or Francisco Toledo, have given modern Mexican art its distinctive flavors, twists and fantasies, as well as its solid Zapotec roots.

But the centre of this vortex is, obviously, the two-headed hybrid Kahlo-Rivera. The book starts with them and somehow, in the readers’ subconscious, ends with them.

Classed, almost against their wish, as Surrealists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are doubtless the most famous of Mexican artists of all times. They differed a lot, and the book wastes no opportunity to point this out. The couple, who somehow came down in history as near-archetypes of love, are described here from the point of view of separation. Artistic separation, to be sure, because this is what the catalogue is really interested in; the rest of their story having already become legend.

“When Kahlo painted surrealistically she took the iconography of everyday life and created estrangements in order to describe the surreal quality of her own reality. When Rivera painted in a surrealistic manner, he took found objects in the landscape, contemplated them, and exaggerated their peculiar forms of appearance.”

To illustrate this statement, the author mentions Landscape with cacti (a Rivera of 1931), and also Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939), their most iconic canvases. But there are plenty other examples to confirm the story of their divergence.

Yes, the differences between the two are their most apparent artistic feature, but also a feature that appeared just as relevant in life. Rivera, masculine, grand, dominant, worked on a scale that transgressed the human dimension. His choice, later in his career, of mural painting (which is, perhaps, the turn that’s made him really famous) is indicative of this domineering outlook. Big, but also capable of sentiments – of big sentiments, that is –, his work impresses by scale but also by quantity.

“Rivera’s catalog of works comprises several thousand oil paintings and more than forty-three thousand square feet of murals.”

This was, no doubt, a man who painted beyond necessity; a man who painted like there was no tomorrow.

Kahlo, on the other hand, worked diminutively. One finds out from the catalog that only 140 of her works are extant now, and most of them are paintings on a small scale. There’s an explanation for this:

“Kahlo’s oeuvre remained small because the act of painting was physically difficult for her, despite almost thirty operations undertaken to counteract her gradually worsening state of health.”

Because of this, perhaps, Kahlo represented herself more than anything else. Her self-portraits, where she appears and disappears in waves of realism and surrealism, are indicative of an obsession with the self that’s narcissistic, but of a strange kind of narcissism, which is not precisely self-glorifying but rather self-exploring. One can see that in the decorativeness of her poses, in the static (doll-like) qualities of her face, in the flamboyance of her colour schemes.

Source: BBC

With Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the centre of everything, the Mexican art of the twentieth century has always found its recognition. And, as the catalogue seems to point out, it will be long before the place of honour is taken by someone else.

The girl in evening gloves

Full title: The Adventuress

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Genre: Graphic Novel
Attributes: 144 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (2006)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

A girl wearing only a skirt and a pair of elbow-long gloves: this is the protagonist, the Adventuress. She lives on aquatint plates, courtesy of Audrey Niffenegger (best known for The Time Traveler’s Wife, and  the film, of course), and that’s why she’s such a beautifully monochromatic creature. The whiteness of her skin provides all the contrast needed; she rises on every page not unlike the light of the moon on a dark sky.

In a little blurb at the end of the book, Niffenegger confesses that she started everything in the 1980s, in the form of a scrap book. The plates made then were loosely connected; the protagonist was, then, a creature without a coherent story. Some of that has been preserved in the book version too. The Adventuress (let’s call her that, via the title – otherwise her author doesn’t give us a single clue: she’s “she,” “her,” nothing nominal, pure anonymity) traverses the book – i.e. her own story – as a victim. To start with, she’s not begotten but manufactured. Her father, an alchemist, makes her the way he must have made a philosophical stone or two. Governed, as it seems, by that masculine ambition of creators who create without a single care about the creature’s destiny, the father, contented as only an alchemist can be, clasps his hands in admiration when the girl emerges on the page, as well as in his life. Emergence – would that be a good word to describe the act of coming-to-life that isn’t birth but something else? Why not?

She learns, of course, things of alchemy. There are caterpillars and butterflies that circle her in tight loops. Caterpillars and butterflies which, of course, are creatures of metamorphoses, creature that challenge the logic of coming-to-life.

The father watches while she learns. He’s content once more.

This is the first man in the Adventuress’ life. Soon, though, the second man appears: the powerful Baron von K., a man dipped in shadows and surrounded by servants who do everything for him, while he’s enjoying the necessary invisibility of his authority. The Adventuress fares badly in the castle of this mysterious baron. Like female subjects the world over, she too is surrounded by eyes. Her being is the target of many a gaze.

There’s nothing she can do about those pupils watching her moves. But there’s something else she can do. She can burn the castle down; which is exactly what she does, leaving the Baron to burn inside. When the castle is in flames, the Adventuress fleas, but she’s quickly apprehended, brought back, tried, convicted, imprisoned, shamed, subjected by the patriarchal authority once more.

Given the prison and the promise of an eternity spent there, the alchemist’s daughter finds escape in fantasy. In the barren cell to which she’s been consigned, she fashions a cocoon. A former companion of caterpillars, what’s it to her to turn herself into a chrysalis, just like that? She weaves the cocoon from threads she’d unraveled from her skirt (which makes her, obviously, naked). She spends the winter in the cocoon and then, when spring comes, evades through the rails of her cell – metamorphosed into a moth.

The subsequent episodes see her encountering none other than Napoleon Bonaparte; yet a different Napoleon, who doesn’t go to wage a war but to accomplish another manly feat of infidelity. Meantime, the Adventuress gives birth to Maurice. Maurice – a black cat! Extracted from her uterus like a white rabbit from a magician’s hat. Betrayed, the Adventuress finds consolation only in the presence of Maurice. Maurice, who sees her to the very last moment – to the moment of death. Maurice, who, once the Adventuress is dead, brings her back to Napoleon for an improbable resurrection.

Audrey Niffenegger. Source: Creative Tourist

This is all there is to the book. The story is simple – very simple. Like a montage with abrupt cuts, the episodes are distinctively separated and there seems to be no attempt at hiding the seams.

The same can be said, of course, about language. What stands out is a forthright lack of metaphors. Somewhat, somewhere, the impression has been formed that graphic novels with any modicum of metaphysical background must have layers of meaning, evidenced in a language that requires deciphering (if you don’t put your mind to it, you miss the point). But Niffenegger doesn’t do intricacies. She speaks so plainly, there’s almost nothing quotable in her book. Only the end, perhaps, stands out:

“Her spirit flew out into the night
And the sky reached down
And drew her up,
And she was filled with light…
 And she is happy.”

But even this cannot be quoted unless there’s room for the story to be transported somewhere else. The change in tense indicates that there must be another dimension, an outside where the character keeps leading a life in which she’s finally happy. And that’s, perhaps, where the story must be looked for now.