(48)

*Calvino. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 1979. 263 pp.

I finally got through this in the original. My reading of Bolaño and Coolidge kept me from it for a while. It seems very much of its time, with reader-response criticism sweeping through American universities at around the same time.

If you haven't read it I suggest you do. (In whatever language you want.) It is really the compleat treatise on the act of reading in relation to every kind of social institution that impacts on it. Publication, translation, scholarship, literary theory, censorship, politics.

On this reading I enjoyed the 10 first chapters of novels more than the in-between chapter that Calvino uses to get from one to the next. That interstitial material seemed too cute in some ways.

(47)

*Bolaño. La pista de hielo. 1993. 198 pp.

This novel takes place in a campground in the Costa Brava. Gaspar is a nightwatchman, Remo the owner. Enric is an obese local political figure who embezzles public money so he can build an ice rink (in an abandoned mansion) for Nuria, a figure skater that is in love with. The three men take turns narrating in two to four page chapters. A dead body shows up in the ice rink...

Not a great novel, but if we're being completist about Bolaño, this had to be included.

So far, the best have been two novels about Chile, Estrella distante and Nocturno chileno, and Los detectives salvajes. I'm looking forward to reading La literatura nazi en América and 2666.

(46)

Los detectives salvajes. 1998. 609 pp.

I'm sure I'm the last person to read this (maybe literally, since I finished it a minute ago!), but I finally have finished the tale of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, related through multiple narrators. We never have any narration focalized through either of the two main characters, instead we get others' reactions to them. There are great moments of humor and passion, and also quite a few duller patches, told in the voices of dull people and in a flat, barely serviceable style. Somehow Bolaño gets away with it. I loved García Madero, the 17-year old narrator of the first and last sections.

I have few more books to read by Bolaño.

(45)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. Besanji. 1994. 137 pp.

A lighthouse keeper and his dgo, Besanji, named after an Egyptian god. The unnamed narrator, the lighthouse keeper, seems to go gradually insane as he anticipates his own death. This was Menchu's first novel. I've read all of them now except for one that our library doesn't have.

(44)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. La tabla de las mareas. 1998. 96 pp.

This is a strange tale of several nameless characters, male and female and of varying ages, and their relation to two demons, one male and the other female. There are two churches, one black and one white, on either side of a river. I took a couple hours after dinner to read it this evening. I'm not sure of the whole demon thing, but, once again, very nice writing.

(43)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. Viaje de estudios. 1995. 112 pp.

Here's another, very similar but completely different novel by MG. The narrator is an orphan going on a university "field trip" by train to various monasteries. The activity of the trip seems to be investigating various parareal "agujeros" (holes). One of the other orphans, X, (all the students on the trip are orphans) gets sucked into one of these holes at the end. There are frequent flashbacks about the various orphanages where the narrator has lived. The narrator has strange visions.

All these novels are about the same length and have very short chapters. All relate eery spiritual quests in an unreal environment. All are very well written, with a nice eye for visual detail. I checked out another one, La tabla de las mareas at the library today, and recalled another from the annex as well. That will be five in total. There's a sixth our library doesn't have.

(42)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. Disección de una tormeta. 2005. 114 pp.

Another strange and beautiful short novel: a woman is interned in a kind of institution/retreat where the therapy consists of a series of rituals having to do with human hair. Everyone's hair is shaved off; the paint brushes, the strings of the musical instruments, are all made of hair. Books in the library are all about hair too, of course.

(41)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. La mujer ensimismada. 2001. 90 pp.

A woman visits twelve nearly identical houses on one street and describes their contents. In each house, a woman is engaged in some artistic endeavor, whether of the fine arts or the practical arts. Music, cooking, gardening, sewing, painting, etc... The weather outside in the plaza changes every time she emerges from one of the houses. The descriptions are lovely, and the writing exquisite throughout. Despite its excellence, there is something unsatisfying here. Not just that nothing happens, which is to be expected in a "poet's novel" as this one is, but that there is an absence of negative emotion: everything is too prettified, somehow. Nothing is really at stake.

(40)

*Bolaño. Monseiur Pain. 1999. 171 pp.

Bolaño wrote this in the early 80s, but it wasn't published till much later. M. Pierre Pain is a mesmerist who is called in to try to help the dying César Vallejo in Paris, 1938. He becomes convinced that someone is trying to assassinate Vallejo, after a few Spaniards, presumably agents of Franco?, bribe him to get off the case.

The novel is only partially successful. Vallejo himself doesn't figure much, and the detective story doesn't really get off the ground.

(39)

*Bolaño. Amberes. 2002. 119 pp.

Bolaño wrote this in 1980, during a more experimental phase. It's an extremely fragmented and discontinuous novel--with 56 very short chapters. Chapter 20 is a brief and helpful "synopsis":

"Synopsis. The little hunchback in the woods next to the campground and the tennis court and stables. In Barcelona a South American is dying in a stinking bedroom. Police dragnets. Cops fucking nameless girls. The English writer talks with the little hunchback in the woods. Agony and a rotten South American traveling. Five or six waiters return to the hotel on a solitary beach. The first days of autumn. The wind stirs up the sand and covers them."

Amberes is the name of a city. Has this one been translated to English? I don't think so.

(38)

*Bolaño. El gaucho insufrible. 2003. 177 pp.

This is a posthumous book of short stories (and two strange lecture), published in the year of RB's death. The best story here is "El policía de las ratas," narrated by a rat-policeman, with Kafkaesque implications. (The police-rat's aunt is named Josephine, as in Kafka's story of Josephine, the rodent singer.) As Pepe, the police-rat, investigates a series of cases, he begins to suspect that the killer is another rat--which means that rats can kill other rats. This is a disturbing conclusion, since the idea is that only other animals kill them (humans, cats, weasels, snakes...). What does this mean for the future of the species?

The title story is also good: a prosperous Buenos Aires lawyer decides to go live on his property in the Argentine pampa, and little by little becomes an "insufferable gaucho." The intertext here is Borges's story "El sur." This is Argentine mythology turned to farce. The pampa is inhabited by rabbits rather than horses and cattle. The only way to live is by trapping rabbits, eating them and selling their skins.

(37)

*Bolaño. Estrella distante. 1996. 157 pp.

This and Nocturno de Chile are the best RB novels I've read. He wanted to call Nocturno de Chile Tormenta de mierda (shit storm), but his publisher convinced him otherwise.

Carlos Wieder is a poet... or is he? His poems don't seem written by him; there is a strange disconnect. After Pinochet's golpe Wieder murders several women of his acquaintance (in an official capacity) and reappears sky-writing poems. The first is simply the first words of Genesis in Latin, which the nameless narrator of the novel sees from the courtyard of a prison. His career as an airforce pilot comes to an end when he mounts a private exhibition of photos of the women he's killed.

(36)

*Bolaño. Llamadas telefónicas. 1997. 204 pp.

Not a novel, but a collection of short stories, some written in a flat, monotonous style. At times, you are waiting for some kind of epiphany, some kind of point to the story, that may or may not come. There's nothing brilliant here in the writing itself--much exorcism of demons, a few memorable images.

In my effort to become an instant Bolaño expert, I've learned that he admired the poetry of my friends Miguel Casado and Olvido García Valdés. He knew who Frank O'Hara was, and Carson McCullers. He looked down on Isabel Allende (who doesn't?) and Antonio Skármeta. He considered himself more a poet than a novelist.

(35)

*Calvino. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. 1947. 195 pp.

This is Calvino's first novel, set in WWIII. A boy, Pin, has a sister who is a prostitute. A German sailor, a client of the sister, has a pistol. The local men at the bar tell Pin to steal it, but when he does, they don't seem that interested any more. He hides it in the place where spiders build their nests (hence the title of the novel.) The German's arrest him and beat him; he escapes from jail along with a resistance leader, Lupo Rosso (the red wolf) and makes his way to an encampment of partisans in the mountains, along with "Cugino" (the cousin). He is basically a "bambino" in the world of "grandi." He doesn't really understand the adult world, but has no childhood to speak of. I couldn't really get a fix on his exact age, but took him to be 12 or so.

There's also an interesting preface written by Calvino in 1967, 20 years after the initial publication of the novel.

(34)

*Bolaño. Nocturno de Chile. 2000. 150 pp.

I'm a little embarrassed about not having read much Bolaño, since he is all the rage now. I read 3/4 of this in the public library today. I don't like joining bandwagons but this is the one Latin American writer who has hit it big with the English speaking audience in the last little while, so it's kind of bad if people ask me about him and I am completely ignorant.

Anyway, the narrator is a priest who is a member of the Opus Dei, a literary critic, and a kind of idiot, ultimately. The kind of idiot that is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Toward the beginning, he meets Neruda. (Bolaño likes the trick of placing real characters in a fictional context.) He goes to Europe to discover techniques for preserving old churches against pigeon dung: it turns out the priests there use falcons to hunt the pigeons! There is another long digression about a shoemaker in the Austrio-Hungarian empire who wants to build a monument to heroes of said empire. Bolaño has a gift of invention, for sure. Quasi-probable episodes involving real historical figures are his speciality here. The book is written in one long continuous paragraph, and structured around a series of discrete episodes--some of which seem digressive.

It hasn't been explained yet how the priest can be in the Opus yet also be the most liberal possible member of the Opus, how he can be learned and yet so idiotic, etc...


After Pinochet's coup takes place, our narrator is enlisted (by the same mysterious import / export guys that sent him to Europe to study the dove-shit problem), to give a mini-course to Pinochet and the other generals of the junta on Marxism. He dutifully prepares and give his course, going through all the major texts of Marx and ending with Castro and Mao. At the end, he asks Pinochet whether he's done a good job and the general reassures him. When the library closed, Pinochet was explaining to the narrative that Allende was not really an intellectual, just a guy who read magazines and had other people tell him what to think.

I've given up on the Calvino novel about real-estate development. I just don't care what happens with this particular building project. I have another one by Calvino about the resistance that looks a bit more promising.

[Update: a chilling scene provides the conclusion to Bolaño's novel. At a literary soirée a drunken guest gets lost in huge house and finds, behind a door in a basement, a man chained to a bed and gagged. Returning to the party, he says nothing. It turns out that the husband of the hostess, "Jimmy," is CIA and uses the house as a place to interrogate and torture. The narrator/priest seems somewhat shocked--but this is the same guy who obsequiously taught Marxism to Pinochet with no qualms. Who does he think ordered the torture?]

(33)

*Harry Mathews. Cigarettes. 1987

This is an intricately plotted novel that I have read many times. One of the pleasures of rereading it is in having forgotten many details large and small. Each chapter is based on a dyad of two characters. The focus shifts from one set of characters to another, but the last chapters bring you back to the starting point once again. The novel is written on Oulipean principles, but these are invisible. You feel there is a hidden, inexorable structure, but you cannot reconstruct it from the novel itself.

One of my favorite novels. I've always preferred the Sorrentino / Mathews branch of novelistic posmodernism to the Gaddis/Pynchon branch.

(32)

Italo Calvino. La speculazione edilizia.. 1963. 138 pp.

I'm almost halfway through this. The title means "real-estate speculation," I guess. Quinto, an inhabitant of the Italian Riviera, is deciding whether to sell part of the family estate to an untrustworthy developer, Caisotti. He goes around talking to people who tell him Caisotti is not to be trusted. There's some dreary social commentary along the way. Eventually, Quinto (the fifth man?) devises a plan to sell to Caisotti but also develop part of his own land himself. Quinto is a communist or ex-communist, with some intellectual friends who want to start a Marxist journal--a poet and a philosopher. Some dreary banter about Marx and Freud ensues.

There is no hint here of the author of Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Castle of the Forked Destinies. (This must be another novelist named "Italo Calvino." ) I sure hope this gets interesting before too long, because so far it's on the duller side. The central conflict of the novel seems to be that developing between Quinto and Caisotti: who will get the best end of the dreary real-estate deal? Maybe a few corpses showing up, Sciascia-style, will enliven the book a bit. I did learn some new words: "battuta" means a joke or witticism.

(31)

Leonardo Sciascia. Todo modo. 1974. 124 pp.

The title is in Spanish though the novel is in Italian. The narrator, a famous painter, turns up at an inn/hermitage by accident right before some "spiritual excercises" are going to take place, led by the cynical and erudite priest don Gaetano. The attendees are prominent politicians, churchmen, and industrialists--and a few of their mistresses! The title refers to a quote by Ignacio de Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and author of a famous book of spiritual exercises. There is a lot of erudite banter between the nameless narrator and don Gaetano. Then a series of murders of the prominent "ospiti." There are some desultory attempts to solve them, but then the lead investigator simply gives up and lets everyone go home, on the theory that if he lets them stay until he finds the murderer, more murders will take place! There are some obligatory references to Agatha Christie: apparently all of them have motives to off all the rest of them.

It's a novel of ideas rather than of plot--hence the concluding fizzle. The only memorable character is don Gaetano himself, and he is memorable more for his ideas than for his personality or actions. The erudition would be interesting except that it is simply the erudition of the author, placed in the character's mouth. I could have a fictional fisherman quote Mallarmé too, but it would still be me who knows the Mallarmé, not the cardboard fisherman.

The church is the "raft of Medusa." The church can do any evil it wants, since it exists in an evil world, apparently. That's the nihilist priest's philosphy of life.

Not a very good novel, though interesting from the point of view of Italian clericalism/anticlericalism.

I've got to read some better novels. At least this was short and so relatively painless.

My goal is to be able to read Italian poetry. I need to slog through enough novels so I have a decent vocabulary.

(30)

Antonio Tabucchi. Notturno indiano 1984. 109 pp.

A man goes to India to search for his missing friend, Xavier. He follows various clues, going to different places and having a variety of conversations with people. Not much happens, really. I think I'll give up on Tabucchi for a while. Sostiene Peirera was good, but the last two I read were kind of inconsequential. In fact, this one reproduces the structure of the "edge of the horizon." A pointless search that comes to nothing.

(29)

Unamuno. Niebla.

This is the famous novel where Augusto Pérez meets his creator and they have a dialogue about whether a character in a novel can commit suicide or not. I taught it to my undergraduates this semester.