Gradual revelations define the style of Patrick Modiano

Full title: The Night Watch

Author: Patrick Modiano, translated by Patricia Wolf, revised by Frank Wynne

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 130 pages, paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury (2015)

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

The hero of The Night Watch is a young man who has to deal with a fundamental dilemma: to work for the French Gestapo or for the Resistance? He is in a dilemma because he has been offered both options and he’s taken both, each for its separate advantages: on the one hand the pecuniary gains of a life among criminals, on the other hand the chance to become a hero. So he spends a lot of time tossing the options in search for the right answer, and although the right answer doesn’t quite arrive, at least his evolution means something. It means a kind of awakening.

But Modiano doesn’t make things easy. In order to arrive at the conclusion one needs to follow the winding path of the narrator’s own tosses and turns. Modiano’s trademark technique is a slow revealing of essential details. We start off with a narrator in a moral slum. We find no difficulty in not liking him. He’s a textbook petty criminal turned traitor. He’s well aware of his condition but doesn’t seem to be bothered by the nature of his various lucrative, if despicable, jobs. At this stage in the novel he doesn’t even seem resigned. He simply notes down self-observations as if they were notes in a log book:

“Night was drawing in, but my job as informant and blackmailer has accustomed me to darkness.”

Nicknamed ‘The Swing Troubadour’ (after Charles Trenet?) the young man is employed as part of a hoard of former convicts to act as the underground wing of the French Gestapo. It is much later that we find out his motivation: coming from a poor family, he’s been lured by the easy money he could make in the criminal branch. As a result, his morality is simple and aimed exclusively at personal gain.

“It was in the pawnshop on the Rue Pierre Charron (my mother would often go there, but they always refused to take her paste jewellery) that I decide once and for all that poverty was pain in the arse. You might think I have no principles. I started out a poor and innocent soul. But innocence gets lost along the way.”

Here one can already perceive the seeds of self-awareness. But as he grows accustomed to the voice of testimony, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ also gets to the point where he can declare with laudable sincerity the true psychological mechanism behind his actions:

“There is only one emotion of which I have firsthand knowledge, one powerful enough to make me move mountains: FEAR.”

Slowly, slowly, the young man becomes conscious at least of the dubious nature of his profession. Even if he rejects it for a length of time, and even if he cannot find the will to leave the band of bastards who are providing him with the luxury otherwise forever unavailable to him, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ is uncomfortable as a criminal.

Patrick Modiano. Source: The Telegraph

But, as already mentioned above, to reach this stage one needs to read the novel in its peculiar manipulation of chronology. The narrative voice moves back and forth within a relatively tight chronotope, but one generous enough to permit chronological arabesques. Not only does the narrator relate events that didn’t occur in a straight line, he also includes real characters and situations from times that don’t coincide with the narrative’s zero time. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century personages and their deeds (mostly criminal) are mixed with contemporary episodes, in an urban landscape that seems to level all differences and make these cross-chronological encounters possible. All this might sound like an exercise in the universalisation of criminality, maybe in the fashion of Borges’s History of Infamy, although the parallel must not be stretched too far.

Modiano’s narrative oddity appears to be facilitated by the general setting of the novel: Paris. A city with multiple layers of history and mentality, it distributes past and present in ways that make them seem to coincide. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century criminals and WW2 serial killers are brought together, sad apparitions in a tableau of sad colours, described in a future that is outside of the novel’s present-tense narration.

“There are ghosts here, but only those of Monsieur Philibert, the Khedive, and their acolytes. Stepping out of Claridge, arm in arm, come Joanovici and the Count de Cagliostro. They are wearing white suits and platinum signet rings. The shy young man crossing the Rue Lord-Byron is Eugene Weidemann. Standing frozen in front of Pam-Pam is Thérèse de Païva, the most beautiful whore of the Second Empire. From the corner of the Rue Marbeuf, Dr Petiot smiles at me. On the terrace of Le Colisée: a group of black marketeers are cracking open the champagne.”

This passage indicates yet another aspect of the novel: the rapid move between locations. There are numerous moments when the narrator limits the story to a listing of places. As the protagonist moves, the locations too reveal themselves, as if what one is reading were not a novel but the representation of a map of Paris. The progression of the story is thus made to imitate the progression of an urban traveller, a flâneur or picaro who, like Moll Flanders in the eighteenth century, are led forward by the trajectories of their criminal pursuits.

Surrounded by depravity and petty interests, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ has to find his own way through the labyrinth that leads to decency. It takes a different kind of awakening to bring him to the realization that he might have a better role to play in life. And that is the moment when he is employed to infiltrate a Resistance cell. It is now that a profound transformation takes place. As he starts spying on the cell, the protagonist learns to admire their heroic determination, their rectitude, and their friendship. The transformation is substantial. He is given a new name (the curiously feminine ‘Princess of Lamballe’), welcomed, trusted, asked to spy back on the Gestapo. And that’s when the young man seems to crack under the weight of the dilemma.

“Two groups of lunatics were pressuring me to do contradictory things, they would run me down until I dropped dead from exhaustion. I was a scapegoat for these madmen. I was the runt of the litter. I didn’t stand a chance.”

This dilemma keeps him on edge for the rest of the novel. But the end doesn’t bring concrete relief to him. Only reassurance to the reader that the right shape of things is about to be brought to light. The Resistance cell is gunned down and Lamballe’s double game discovered. Then everything ends in a hot pursuit, the young man driving a car towards the Swiss border, with enough cash to start a new life, but weighed down by an apocalyptic tiredness. We never know if he’s made it. Modiano stops his game of slow revelations and leaves everything on a cliff-hanger. To make things more interesting but also, perhaps, to relativise the trope of the converted criminal.

Have you heard of Milan Kundera?

Full title: The Festival of Insignificance

Author: Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 115 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Harper (2015)

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

Milan Kundera is 86 years old this year. Before publishing The Festival of Insignificance he hadn’t published a single book in 13 years. The communist realities he used to write about have turned into memories so distant you can’t even scare kids with them anymore.

One may or may not ignore these facts. If one doesn’t, one is likely to go on reading this novel so as to enjoy it. If one does, though, one will certainly make the mistake of expecting to find in it the Kundera of a few years back, when he was writing book after book with ease, and most importantly, when what he was writing about mattered to the world.

The first and most important impression I had from reading The Festival of Insignificance was that Kundera wrote it being aware that all of the above were problematic things. And he wrote so as to lay some traps. But traps that have gone, with the occasional exception, largely unnoticed.

The novel is about four friends who get together at a party thrown by a fifth man, who doesn’t quite sit well in their company but who offers them the right pretext for their meeting. In counterbalance, the novel also follows an episode involving Stalin, Khrushchev, and Kalinin. Present and past, France and the Soviet Union, friendship and comradeship, freedom and tyranny – these are trademark things in Kundera literature.

But it’s the question of insignificance that makes the book what it is, from title onward. Stalin lost in the usual (for Kundera) game of memory and forgetting, the queens of France immortalized as statues barely acknowledged in the Luxembourg Gardens; references to Hegel and Kant that lead nowhere; a party that doesn’t acquire anything of note. All these episodes and images form a collection of insignificant things. But this is not the insignificance of daily life, where a lot gets lost in a sea of small significances. On the contrary, we’re in the territory of historical insignificance, where things, when put in perspective, are likely to mean little. That’s why, perhaps, the most important episode of the novel is the party thrown by a man who pretends he’s about to die of cancer. His lie is in itself a question of individual significance. His party, a question of social insignificance. That party is placed against another one, in which Stalin tells an anecdote about some partridges he shot when he was young. This one is even closer to the essential questions regarding significance: when the world was a mess, with the Stalinist regime at a peak, what his acolytes find important is the truthfulness of his anecdote; not reality (the history before their eyes) but fiction (a reality from an uncertain, highly insignificant past). Stalin tells his acolytes how one day in his youth, when out hunting, he saw twenty four partridges perched on a tree. He aimed to shoot but realized he had only twelve bullets. So when he shot, only half of the partridges fell to the ground. He rode back home and came back a few hours later with twelve more rounds, and shot the rest of the birds. His attendants listen to the story and, in the spirit of the Stalinist cult, fake admiration. But when they’re alone, in the toilets built especially for them in the Kremlin, they express their outrage. They are enraged by the story. They find it ridiculous as well as cruel. But all things considered, nobody sees the joke in Stalin’s anecdote. And as Kundera suggests through his novel, one requires historical perspective to be able to see the obvious. It’s only years later, in Paris, when the four friends discuss the Stalin episode, that the essence surfaces:

“After a pause, Caliban says: ‘The one thing I find unbelievable in that whole story is that nobody understood that Stalin was joking.'

‘Of course not,’ said Charles, and he laid the book back on the table. ‘Because nobody around him any longer knew what a joke is. And in my view, that’s the beginning of a whole new period in history.’”

The period Charles is talking about is later described as “the twilight of joking,” or better still, “the post-joke age.”

One needs to read this time-after-the-joke knowing Kundera, because with this book he makes statements about himself. These statements are hidden. They need to be found if one wants to read the book adequately.

The insistence throughout the novel on the fact that the new generations don’t know who Stalin was, that they’ve never heard of Kant or Hegel – all this is self-referential. Behind these suggestions lies the actual question: have you heard of Milan Kundera? It’s like a little piece of bait thrown to the critics. Is it not?

“Time moves on. Because of time, first we’re alive – which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witness now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes.”

I’m not sure that the critics have seen this. When I first read the passage, as though it were about Stalin, I thought: okay, this must be Kundera being nostalgic (at the end of the day he started his career as an enthusiastic supporter of the communist cause). But reading it again I changed my mind. This is not about Stalin. This is about Kundera himself. Read it again through this filter and you’ll see.

Milan Kundera. Source: RTE

Some reviewers have expressed their discontent. They didn’t like the style of the novel, they didn’t like its lack of newness. But at the same time they didn’t see the joke: Kundera putting himself into the book, one character among the others (not only among the French friends in contemporary Paris, but also as a participant at the Soviet meetings, back in the Stalinist era). As the center of a joke, he becomes the center of the very age when the right allusion (the essence of a punch line) is no longer at hand; when the joke itself needs to be dug out of history, dusted, polished, and told again.

There are other clues in the novel that point in the same direction. One of them is the metanarrative element: the intervention of the narrative voice at random points in the story, and also the characters’ awareness that they are mere characters, that there is a “master” (they use that word a couple of times!) who handles them as if they were marionettes (see above). All this is about Kundera himself, can’t you see it? Arrows pointing back at him, as if in saying I’m here, it’s me you’re reading about. Precisely because he’s used these techniques so many times before it becomes, once more, important to see that The Festival of Insignificance is mostly about something characteristic to his work, something about him.

I don’t know why the reviewers avoid discussing these things. The narrative elements, the games played under the surface of the actual story, the references to things that are not there. Is that because they’re stuck in the insignificance of Kundera’s old age, the insignificance (in 2015) of his past, the insignificance, of course, of his present? Of the fact that this is, perhaps, his last book? And of the other, more significant thing: that maybe he wrote it knowing that this might be his last book? If such is the case then let’s read The Festival of Insignificance again. Let’s read it as if it were a book of ill laughter and of un-forgetting.

The curious complications of Manuel Gonzales

Full title: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Author: Manuel Gonzales

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 304 pages, paperback
Publisher: Riverhead (2013)

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

It’s pretty hard to find a word able to satisfactorily define the kind of prose Manuel Gonzales writes. One might be tempted to say fantasy, because there’s a lot of out-of-this-world stuff in the volume (zombies, werewolves, swamp monsters, unicorns etc.), but the term wouldn’t do justice to anything in its proximity. Fantasy is about Lala-lands (I’m sure there are better words than these to name them, but what the heck), with no connections to the one we’re in. Well, that definition wouldn’t even scratch the surface, because most of Gonzales’s style relies precisely in the realistic effect they deliver, in spite of all the crazy things he makes up. Then how about magical realism? That would explain pretty well the mix of reality and less-than-reality that scream at you from every single story. But wait. Magical realism goes about doing things so as to avoid drawing anybody’s attention to the artificial nature of the ‘magic’ involved. A magical realist who writes short stories (let’s say in the tradition of Julio Cortázar and/or Gabriel García Márquez) would have butterflies filling a room just like that, or an inundation in an apartment overflowing into the street – and there would be no wink addressed to the reader. But with the stories in Gonzales’s collection the reader is constantly given that friendly nudge in the ribcage: the got-it? kind of jolt that indicates that hey, don’t forget, this is a work of fiction.

Here’s how a story by Manuel Gonzales takes place. We’ve got a situation. A crazy situation. I mean a crazy-crazy situation. Like a music composer speaking through his ears. That’s just to bring a simple example to the table. Then, once the reader has rolled his/her eyes, the party starts. Everything that follows is a series of reinforcements to the framework of this outlandish situation. In most cases, the situation is so out of touch with reality (I was going to say so schizophrenic) that the reader’s attention is almost guaranteed. And once you’re in, Gonzales can work on further complications. They are pretty good pieces of narrative work, these complications. And they manage to build a universe of Gozalesque atmosphere, where everything is possible and everything is likely to turn really bad.

Ok, now. My favorite. We’re talking about a story only six pages in length, but an excellent example of a narrative complication that would look great in a film. “Cash to a Killing” is about these two guys, professional hitmen by the sound of it, who are observed while burying their latest victim. That’s the gist. One can see it with ease. But things get complicated. And more complicated. And more complicated. So everything evolves from bad to worse to disastrous, only to finish in a comic twist so sad that it’s actually tragic. Summarizing the story would be cruel and an unpardonable spoiler to boot. So I guess I can only recommend it. Anybody interested, remember: “Cash to a Killing.” Luckily, it’s been published in 2007 in the Esquire, so available online.

Manuel Gonzales. Source: The Daily Beast

Now, to speak of the title story, let’s say it’s a modern version of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput. As the title indicates, though, the little men have been replaced by the narrator’s wife, who’s turned small because the narrator himself, a mad scientist of sorts, has done it to her. Complications appear here too. The wife doesn’t like being belittled so. Literal diminution wouldn’t sit well with anybody, male or female, would it? So she sets up traps for the husband, he isolates her in a miniature house, she cheats on him with a colleague who’s miniaturized himself to do the job, he wants to kill her, she wants to kill him, and the story goes on and on. It doesn’t even reach a clear conclusion, if that helps. But that’s exactly what makes it interesting: the whole infrastructure of events and incidents that seem absolutely okay once we have accepted the idea that there’s a character turned into a mini-person.

What’s also noticeable in the volume is the series of so-called “Meritorious Lives.” Five of them. They are short pieces that outline the life of fictional characters but in ways that mimic the tone of biographies. Hence their titles, of course. Take this one for an example: “Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life.” Could the character mentioned in the title be the author? No it cannot be. Not only because of the extra Juan in the appellation but also because the character is said to have lived a couple of centuries ago (1804-1848). An innkeeper and a forger of letters, this Juan Manuel Gonzales participates in a comedy of situations that, in the spirit of the collection’s many twists, turns out to be a hard-to-distinguish conundrum between humor and tragedy. Once again, complications upon complications, in a story whose central event is an epistolary exchange between two young lovers whose love is interdicted by the boy’s tyrannical father. Juan Manuel Gonzales is not the protagonist of the story. And yet, he gets caught up in the tangle and becomes important; although his importance is somehow put under a question mark by the surprise in the end. With a story line that emulates the classic narrative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century romances, this piece brings about mistakes and misunderstandings to levels similar to say, some of Borges’s twists. And all in no more than three pages.

With all this, in nine cases out of ten, it looks as thought the author had a helluva lot of fun writing. You get this feeling that he enjoyed adding layers and incidents to a text so much that he just couldn’t stop. That’s why stories rarely end where the reader expects. There’s often one more thing to say, one more detail to add. And so, as it sits, the collection might very well be unfinished. At the end of the day, there’s so much more a story can contain.

Narrative appetizers by Sheila Heti

Full title: The Middle Stories

Author: Sheila Heti

Genre: Short stories
Attributes: 160 pages, paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's (2012)

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

You know you’re in for a feast of fiction when you open a book to titles such as “The Princess and the Plumber,” “Mermaid in a Jar,” “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” or “The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates.” Thirty such titles are lined up at the start line in Sheila Heti’s second edition of The Middle Stories. The volume, boasting nine additions to the cast of characters of the first take (2001), is a collection of minuets in prose with roots in the tradition of fairy tales and with branches in various offshoots of postmodernity.

By employing an identical tone and a unitary spatial and chronological progression, Heti managed to solve one of the most threatening aspects of short-story collections: unity. All her texts sound the same. I don’t mean this in a bad sense but on the contrary, as a tribute to the positive qualities of her prose.

There is a rhythm proper to fairy tales, in which sentences rise and fall so as to accommodate the reader/listener to the tempo of the telling. That rhythm, repetitive and ritualistic, has its proper utility: it is meant to reassure the reader/listener that they are in familiar territory, that what’s going to happen won’t do them any harm. That’s precisely what one finds in The Middle Stories too. Random example, the near-iambic scansion in the following opening paragraph, with special emphasis on the first sentence (“The Favorite Monkey”):

“They lay under the tree in the morning June air and breathed in each other’s whispers. That’s how romantic it was under the tree – under any tree! And nobody made them leave or come out of it or shake it off.”

This is what makes the stories familiar. This, as well as the easy embracing of the fantastic, in ways that keep no secret of their affiliation to fairy tales. At least these two elements make the collection a ride worth taking. And speaking of rides, I assume the brevity of the pieces collected in the volume is likely in tune with what we like to call ‘the modern life.’ Taken in isolation, these texts are tiny morsels of storytelling for the use of the hurried commuter, who has only this long to finish one text, and who needs to reach resolutions before reaching destinations. The Middle Stories delivers this sense of quick fixes lined up in a continuum of little episodes to be consumed like appetizers between this stop and the next. Mostly two to three pages in length, the stories manage narrative timing with a specialist’s exactitude. One wouldn’t find it hard to spot the austere style, the dialogues that don’t have much time to dwell on deep psychologies, the generous time lapses, the preference for outlines rather than full portraitures. All this is good and feels good when read, because it rings that familiar bell of fairy tales which, short and specific, take no prisoners in the battle for efficiency of expression.

Sheila Heti. Source: The Times-Picayune

Also from the fairy-tale molds emerges this noticeable tendency towards titles that grab (see above), followed by introductory sentences that pursue the lead announced by said titles. To illustrate, here’s the story called “The Giant,” and more specifically the way it starts:

“There was a giant in their town. His name was Sal. Everybody laughed as he walked by and said things like, ‘Hey, giant!’ and waved and grinned and elbowed their dates and stuff like that, which the giant tolerated only because he was a giant. It was part of his lot to be way bigger than everybody and teased mercilessly for being so.”

And so, following the above, there’s no doubt as to what the stories are about. The title makes it clear; the opening paragraph makes it clearer. Once again, a busy commuter must appreciate the slight of hand, although they have a wee bit of work to do for themselves before they can say the stories have been well comprehended.

Heti rarely describes characters through references to their physical features. When those are present, they’re often limited to very elusive hints. It’s often more important that “Eleanor was fond of ice cream” (“Eleanor”) or that “there was sweat under her arms” (“A Few Adventures of the Young Fornicator”) or that “Marcus was getting a headache” (“Janis and Marcus”). Or, when further narration is involved, it’s more important for things to go like this: “One boy was taller, and the three went slowly down the street, and it was cold” (“The Girl Who Planted Flowers”). Or like this: “A little old woman who never stopped smiling walked into the kitchen from her garden” (“The Raspberry Bush”). The pleasure the author takes in playing the good cards of brevity is noticeable throughout.

On another hand, connections between elements are often short-circuited in the manner just illustrated through the last two sample sentences. As a result, whatever stands in the place of description is puzzling, dazzling, nonplussing. But that’s exactly what gives the stories the flavor they have: this sense of rapid fires after rapid fires, this economy of means, this austerity.

Heti prefers to make her characters perform little sketches in front of their readers, because she wants to use narration as a means of description. Some stories are entirely conceived as such, although these portrayals are well disguised behind plot lines. How does one know, thought, that they’re only disguises? Because a lot of these stories don’t have conclusions. They make full use of the cliff-hanger trick to remain suspended in the reader’s mind and to create tiny tornadoes in their consciousness. They don’t distribute well-chewed closures, and when there is anything resembling moralitas at all, one can be sure that it is done in order to enforce sarcasm.

And so the general musicality of the thirty pieces in the collection is mostly jocular. In spite of the fact that many situations depicted in them are on the sad side of things (read again the opening to “The Giant”), the telling doesn’t feel depressed. This rhythmic parade lifts the texts to that innocent skipping-rope realism that characterizes fairy tales, in which even the most outrageous fantasy is understood to be real. Because that’s what the story dictates.

Valeria Luiselli’s narrative hide-and-seek

Full title: Faces in the Crowd

Author: Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 150 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Granta (2014)

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

“If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.”

(Faces in the Crowd)

Things get complicated in Faces in the Crowd every time it comes to spatial and chronological transgressions. The female narrator meets (or thinks she’s met) the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen on the New York subway. Owen himself meets (or thinks he’s met) Ezra Pound, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Joshua Zvorsky. The latter, a made-up character, is an impersonation of Louis Zukovsky (it takes only a few clues to figure it out). Valeria Luiselli plays expertly the game of who’s who in a style that smacks of Borges. This is a style that doesn’t bring any light to the puzzle represented by the text but, on the contrary, complicates every instance of uncertainty. It all goes crazy, until the reader gives up diagramming connections and accepts to play the game only for the pleasure of it. Of course, tracing the relations between characters is not an impossible task. The aha moments, when you recognize Chekhov’s gun before it gets fired, are everywhere. Hence the pleasure that comes with this novel. But the crux of the matter is this: time and space are relative, fictional chronotops allow intermixing of characters and interweaving of narratives.

Identities and settings are, therefore, crucial, as they provide the foundation of the entire story. Not only is the text split in two, with two narrative voices at two different moments in time going their mildly separate ways (one: a female writer/translator in Mexico City somewhere in the late 2000s; two: Gilberto Owen, decades earlier, strolling the streets of Harlem); it also features a nosy reader who keeps upsetting the progression of the narrative – up to a certain point, when he upsets no more. This intruder is the writer/translator’s husband, who has been peering over her shoulder while she’s been writing this novel that we’re reading. The husband comments every time he finds the occasion, picking on details of the story that involve himself or his wife’s amorous adventures. The role of this intruder is to shift the focus of narration and to highlight the artificial aspect of the fiction. He disagrees with certain episodes, questions others, and appears to be influenced in his actions by what he’s reading in his wife’s novel. Because of this character, a further complication of the narrative occurs. There is the level of the actual novel on the one hand, and the time-zero of narration on the other hand. The latter is still a fiction to us, the actual readers, but it acts as a real-life situation to the fictional reader who intervenes in the story.

Valeria Luiselli. Source: Translatable

You see how things get difficult to follow. Or should I say difficult to explain in a few lines? Faces in the Crowd (with a title taken, at least in its English rendition, from Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro” – so here’s another complication) needs to be followed closely to be truly enjoyed. It’s not the kind of book you hear about and decide you don’t have to read because you’ve got the plot, so why bother. Its intricate intertextuality and the network of relationships and trajectories make it a game worth playing, an exercise in readerly attention.

It’s quite something to follow the way Luiselli twists events like a well-trained puppeteer, giving them a different connotation or a chance to be seen from a new perspective. I’m all for the following example, a fragment where she imagines Ezra Pound at the very moment when he is struck by the image that will produce “In a Station of the Metro.” Note, this is Gilberto Owen (1904-1952) speaking.

“The first thing I do remember is the face of Ezra Pound in the crowd waiting on the platform for the train. Of course it wasn’t really him. The doors opened and there he was on the platform, leaning against a pillar. We looked each other straight in the eye, as if in recognition, although he couldn’t possibly have heard anything about me, a young Irish-Mexican, neither red haired nor good looking, more bastard than poet. I was transfixed – instead of getting off the train, I let the passengers leave and be replaced by others, identically ugly, overheated and ordinary. Pound didn’t board the train. He was lost among the crowd of faces on the platform, faces like the wet petals of his poem.”

For those who don’t remember Pound’s poem, here it is in its entirety:

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The fragment by Luiselli describes a look from the opposite side of a train platform, seeing Pound as he sees the incoming trains. It calls for some good courage only to go there.

What else. Well, this: unreliable narrator. A trick that can look cheap when handled by certain realist authors, is given a major part to play, and to remarkable effects. The female narrator (I hate the fact that she doesn’t have a name, so I have to keep calling here this) makes no secret of the fact that she’s a liar. She’s faked translations of poems by Owen, pretending they’d been done by Zvorsky (a fictional character himself, so another case of lying); she’s also lied to her husband about her sexual encounters; she’s lying through her teeth every time she has the opportunity. And yet she is the one whose story has to be believed. Everything hinges on the issue of truth: of how hard it is to acquire it, of how complicated the most straightforward form of truth could sometimes be. And guess what? The reader does believe her. We believe the story precisely because we know it’s based on lies, illusions, hallucinatory ideation. We believe the story because we know it’s fiction. That’s the greatest achievement of this little debut novel, the reason it has been so excitedly received by critics. That, of course, plus the author’s talent, her proficient handling of literary references, the intricacies of her architectonics, the tricks she plays on us, readers, when she pulls a stint of citation of which we might not be aware.

It’s sometimes nothing but a game, a game of guessing, a game of reading enjoyments. Best described in a passage like the following, where the female narrator, the metanarrative guarantor of the story, insinuates her condition in the form of a childish game:

“We play at hide-and-seek in this enormous house. It’s a different version of the game. I hide and the others have to find me. Sometimes hours go by. I shut myself up in the closet and write long, long paragraphs about another life, a life which is mine but not mine. Until someone remembers that I’m hiding and they find me.”

It’s this constant search for the characters, for their connections and their functions, that gives the novel that special air of a labyrinth (o, Borges, you again!), of an experiment well played. The others in the fragment just quoted – who could they be. Us, of course, the readers. The story is all about us, like it was in Last Year in Marienbad, a film Luiselli quotes, I think (now I can’t be sure but what the hell), so as to throw yet another allusion at us.

Allusion taken.

Hats, decapitations, and hippopotamuses

Full title: Down the Rabbit Hole

Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey

Genre: Novella
Attributes: 74 pages, paperback
Publisher: And Other Stories (2011)

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

Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole exhibits the essential attributes of Narcoliteratura. It has at the centre of the narrative a Mexican gang doing its deeds, armed to their teeth, killing, bribing, intimidating, making a lot of money and focusing almost exclusively on the protection of the immediate family. It is against this background that a young boy by the name of Tochtli (with very few exceptions, the characters have Nahuatl names that signify animal species; Tochtli = rabbit) leads his secluded life. The narrative is told exclusively from his perspective. The proximity of a person so young to violence of that magnitude is likely to upset some readers. Too bad for them, because Villalobos does a great job at giving the narrator a voice that’s innocent in spite of all that lies behind his life. And that voice makes everything interesting and worth reading. Not to mention the complexity of the text itself, a short but incredibly dense novella that exploits the experimental nature of the topic to incredible extents.

Like all young boys, Tochtli goes about getting wise about the world. For that purpose, his father, Yolcaut (= rattlesnake), the head of the gang, also known to the media as The King, has hired a private tutor. So Tochtli learns things. But he doesn’t do so the official way, not like other kids his age who attend proper schools with proper teachers teaching proper disciplines with proper learning outcomes. Mazatzin (=deer), the tutor, turns out to be an infiltrated journalist, but one who’s had the chance to put some seeds into the boy’s mind. His influence, however, is minimal, since the dominant figure is the father, who always speaks to the boy in the language of gangs and who teaches Tocthli almost everything he knows.

Juan Pablo Villalobos. Source: And Other Stories

The two of them play macabre games in which dead bodies and killing techniques are made to sound as innocent and child-like as a game of What’s the Time, Mister Wolf?

“One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.‘One bullet in the heart.’‘Corpse.’‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’‘Alive.’‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’‘Too early to tell.’”

Speaking of things that might upset some readers, this is father and son having quality time together. Tochtli spends his childhood thus, mostly bored by the seclusion that’s the only thing he’s ever known. From his father, he learns how to count and how to account. He learns that the essence of things stands in numbers, whether the number of bullets that can kill a person or the number of killings shown on tv, or the amount of money that can buy someone’s silence, or simply the taking into account of the family’s possessions:

“[O]ur palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcault’s business room and five more empty rooms we don’t use.”

From his father, Tocthi also learns a nationalist sense of pride and a macho way of assessing self-worth.

“What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m said Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:‘Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.’”

The entire novella has this tone of accountancy under the sign of maturity about it, the narrative voice recording life as if it were a ledger, with its various tables and categories and classes, their use, their worth, their applicability. Tochtli lists his desires the way he lists the rooms in the palace in which he lives. Whatever it is that he wants, he registers no apparent change in emotional intensity. He wants hats, he wants a samurai sword, he wants a Liberian pigmy hippopotamus, and all his wishes are granted. In what counts as his normality there’s a very short distance between desire and fulfilment. And because of that desire itself doesn’t stand out as anything special. It’s just a thing that exists out there, a list of wants, another list.

In spite of all this, though, Tochtli doesn’t sound like a spoiled child. He catalogues the world this way because this is how the world is to him. He doesn’t throw tantrums, he doesn’t stomp his feet while requesting things, he doesn’t ask for the impossible. What’s more, he’s intelligent and sympathetic. He’s capable of humour and of reason. When he acquires the hippopotamuses he’s been dreaming of (yes, there’s not just one but two, a pair), he calls them Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria. Black humour, as it turns out to be, but humour nonetheless. And for all these things Tochthli sounds likeable, clever, congenial. Clever as the author who wrote him up, and who made this truly brilliant parallel between decapitations, of which the book is full.

Yuri Herrera from narcosphere to immigrations

Full title: Signs Preceding the End of the World

Author: Yuri Herrera

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 128 pages, hard cover
Publisher: And Other Stories (2015)

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

I watched this documentary the other night, called Narco Cultura. It's about this Mexican popular epidemic of cultural products grown around drug cartels and the lives of drug traffickers south of the American border. This taste for outlaws and their adventures has birthed a literary offspring of its own. It's called Narcoliteratura or, even better to an English-tuned ear that’s familiar to the notion of the Latin American Boom, Tragic Realism. It deals with the same topics as the larger Narco Cultura phenomenon: violence, criminal acts, small-town glories based on fear and territorial claims, all forming what might be called a narcosphere, where everything revolves around the handling and using of drugs, plus the implications of such undertakings.

Yuri Herrera's novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, takes the genre and goes with it to a certain extent. The novel starts in a poor Mexican village where everything seems to be regulated by small cliques debating their turf. In the village there's this young woman, Makina, who has a problem to solve: she needs to cross the border to find her brother. It soon becomes apparent that the operation is easier said than done. She wouldn't stand the slimmest chance of succeeding by herself, so she has to go the 'natural' way, i.e. the way of the criminal factions that run the businesses of her home place. They're up for the task, since they have a whole network in place: men to facilitate the crossing, men to provide accommodation, men to protect her and men to introduce her to other men, who can also introduce her to other men, who can etc. etc.

The network works perfectly but there's one grand obstacle: the lure of the place Makina is going to. Her brother, as it turns out, has settled north of the border. We don’t know exactly where, because none of the places in the novel is called anything recognizable. The search for a brother who doesn’t want to return gives the young woman a bigger problem to deal with and a bunch of thoughts to mess up her mind.

To Yuri Herrera, this novella offers the opportunity to do many things. For instance, to practice the dynamics of a typical narrative scheme: protagonist, antagonist, dispatcher, helpers, destination, denouement. All these plus many other elements of Proppian morphology are identifiable at a mere glance. Textbook Formalism, to put it otherwise. Herrera hasn't made it a hard task for his readers to find these elements and enjoy their familiar feel.

Yuri Herrera. Source: Malinche

Then, at a conceptual level, he's got the chance to explore North-American mestizaje, and especially its tex-mex variety. He does so in a poetic manner that reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa. Like her, Herrera contracted a passionate leading character who's given this unique opportunity to put her in-betweenness to the test. There's a scene (recognizable, I'm sure, to people in the US-Mexico border area) in which a frustrated cop, the usual patriot-cum-chauvinist who uses authority to express his scorn for 'illegal aliens.' The scene is powerful. It forms what's likely to have been intended as the climax of the novel. The cop has forced a group of Mexicans to kneel in front of him and he mocks one of them who was carrying a volume of poetry. The cop rips a page out of the book and demands that the would-be poet write down something in English. The man is lost for words, humiliated, embarrassed, mortified. And here's where Makina, who speaks well the "Anglo tongue," intervenes and recites a chant of the humiliated immigrant.

“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 our jobs, who dream of wiping our 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 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.”

The words of the barbarian put the cop to silence. A battle is won. A symbolic one, of course, but one all the more important as it is on foreign territory.

Then there's another passage where Herrera gets even more Anzalduesque, exploring the picture of the border people, the Chicanos, speakers of two tongues, makers of two cultures, people of complexity and simplicity all in one bundle. It's the protagonist speaking again:

“More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongues is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugate latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there.”

All this is said and done against the background of narcoliteratura's own turf. The criminal life of the Mexican as well as American undergrounds loom over all these episodes with the weight of a cloud about to burst and crash everything underneath. But nothing bad really ever happens. The text is peppered with traffickers and pushers and all manner of mischief-makers, but the essence isn't there. Crime is not the major purpose. The novella deals with criminality as a liminal space: a sort of in-between that allows passage of people and destinies, highlighting only as much as it's needed to understand the passage of other things: of cultures and cultural allegiances, of politics and political dirty works; but most importantly, of stories and storytelling.

Sydney Padua and the computer that almost existed

Full title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Author: Sydney Padua

Genre: Graphic novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Pantheon (2015)

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

The book’s a jaunt through Victorian pretty-much-everything. To be more specific (…ish…): 1. Fashion (a lot of it, to keep the reader well immersed in the ‘spirit of the era’; btw, you’ve got to see the drawings to understand); 2. Technology (the book’s concerned primarily with this, since it’s set out to contemplate a possible alternative reality centered on a technological near-miss: the invention of the computer); 3. Historical facts (tons of them, every page explaining details about the era through copious references to primary sources, citations, encyclopedic blowing up of minute biographical details, etc. etc. etc.); 4. Mores and thereabouts (from literary salons to scientific soirées, a lot is being covered and presented with gusto).

Of course, as they say in Germany, Victorian times call for Victorian measures. Meaning: being so steeped in these times of ours when we take delight in all manner of reenactments, we might as well take pleasure in contemplating some Steampunk vogue (itself a conglomerate of fashion, mores, and all things Victorian). Which makes the Babbage case (see below for clarifications), with the addition of characters such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his crazy plans for the employment of the steam engine, pretty spot-on, since they’re prime material for the exploration of all of the above.

So Charles Babbage. A man who went down in history as the first who had an inkling of what a computer (called by him a “difference engine,” for a better-made philosophical case) might have looked like. Also, on the less fortunate side of his destiny, as one who proposed measures for the replacement of human workers by automated operations and/or machines. It’s said in the book:

“As I outlined in Machinery and Manufactures (6s. bound in cloth), true savings in labor costs arise from de-skilling complex tasks, so they may be done by any easily replaceable ignorant menial!”

In which by the menial is meant (symbolically first, actually later) an apparatus devoid of soul; in other words, a machine.

Good material for the Luddites to exercise their counter-arguments in their revolts. There are pages in the book that capture the protests of the masses, and they must be taken into consideration as well. At least for historical color.

Ada Lovelace, the other name in the title, has a story of her own too. Daughter of Byron (yes, the Byron), she was trained in sciences rather than the poetic reverberations of her father, who seems to have advised her strongly against his own profession. Or that’s what some letter fragments say. So she became a quite astute mathematician, met Babbage, worked with him for a while (some saying she was behind his calculations, as a do-all high priestess of the Difference Engine), but then their relationship broke, Lovelace died at the age of 36 (the same as her father’s! damn destiny!), while Babbage lived on to die a poor, bitter man, with none of his dreams fulfilled.

Sydney Padua. Source: Forbidden Planet

These are the facts. But Sydney Padua builds a parallel story. Of course, her art permits such escapades. And so we see Lovelace and Babbage succeeding in building that proto-computer that never got built in reality. And once they see it working they put it to use. More precisely, they sort out a financial crisis, get to work on manuscript corrections, go nuts about mathematical possibilities, and more, and more. As it’s easy to see, a lot of fictional stuff. Yet isn’t fiction, as they say in Magna Germania, the meat and bone of progress?

But to get back to Lovelace. Padua suggests she was powerless against the Byronic legacy (and she may not be the only one to suggest so); powerless in the sense of unable to avoid the fictional aspect of mathematics, the storytelling inherent in numbers, the narrative lure of formulae and theorems. Ada soliloquizes at some point:

“Nonsense! The most advanced mathematicians accept unquantified symbols in their realm! In any event, I am a historical figure, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Humanities!”

We appreciate the joke, but that’s exactly the point, madam la comtesse. Being made into a comic character, you’ve been moved away from the fact factory of overly-exact historicism and dropped into the melting pot of fiction.

Sydney Padua, it has to be said, does a very good job at balancing the two.

The book as a whole is a series of complexities. On the one hand, it reads like a straight-up comic book: panels following panels, the narrative organized in a mostly linear way (in the serialized fashion to boot), the drawings telling the story when the words aren’t that capable.
But wait, there’s more. Almost every page has footnotes, containing mostly true facts. In addition, these footnotes have their own notes, at the end of each chapter/installment, which bring about more information, more story, more insight. And just to complete the picture, the book ends with a thick section (almost sixty pages) containing two appendices: one made up of cutouts from primary documents (mostly mid-19^th century newspaper articles and “trivial yet amusing snippets”) and the other one offering a comic’s explanation (with illustrations, of course) of the Difference Engine, its operations, its logics, its many-many cogs and wheels. The first representation, it seems, in a long, long, long, long, long time.

But wait, there’s even more.

A page from the book, outlining the early-childhood destiny of Ada Lovelace.
Source: www.sydneypadua.com

There are special appearances by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and other Victorian celebrities I’m likely to have forgotten, depicted in their attire and typical gestures; and also some more cameos by Karl Marx and a bunch of Russian-looking revolutionaries (not sure if I spotted Lenin there or if it was just an illusion), who witness the crushing of ideology under the weight of progress. Chronological mismatches don’t matter, of course, because this is a multiverse, where time and space often coincide in the best ways possible, so as to generate an outcome equal to the input of fair judgment plus conceptual match-making.

There’s a meeting between Ada Lovelace and George Eliot I am tempted to draw attention to (and I will), when something I’d like to call “poetics of data” is brought up. The way Lovelace explains to a desperate Eliot that the words she’d thought destroyed by the machine are safe and well confers upon the topic an elegant lure, if tinged here and there with well-intended pretentiousnesses (yes, my plural is well intended too, if slightly odd):

“Despair not! Your words are not destroyed! On the contrary, they are shedding their earthly form! They have become transcendent! They have become… Data! Liberated from the static shell of the material, transliterated to the purely symbological, sublimated into a state entirely new! It can be filed, indexed, converted, replicated, searched, shared, shuffled, linked, remixed, recombined, archived, analyticated… resurrected!”

And to complete the picture in the same avant-la-lettre fashion, here’s what might sound even more familiar to a contemporary (i.e. of 21^st-century descent) reader:

“Imagine… with the eventual integration of Wheatstone’s telegraph, the difference engine will convey, transcribe, analyze, and store forever the deepest thoughts, the most profound conversations of our greatest philosophers!”

Sounds familiar? That’s because Lovelace is endowed by Padua (her favorite of the two characters, you can tell) with this special foresight that enables her to see the computer materialized when it was nothing but a technological dream, and even that a failing one.

So here’s to a multimodal book, where the weighing of historical accuracy takes place not in terms of a contradiction between True and False, but as an exchange of energies between truth and fiction. May the game (not a contest!) be won by both sides!