RMST 495/520: Long Books

My long book is Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Firstly, I would like to shoutout Amanda, who has done such a good summary of this first section of the book that I’m going to refer you all to that blog post instead of repeating the same thing here.

Otherwise, the TLDR of it all is: Daniel (age 10, in 1940s Barcelona) is sad because his mom died so his father wakes him up before dawn to meet some guy at a bookstore that he’ll one day inherit. He chooses a book (/the book chooses him) and becomes obsessed with it and its author.

I enjoyed the first section of this novel. It’s rather fast-paced and the tone is to-the-point, but the prose is nice to read and there’s a good mix of dialogue and introspection so far.

One of the first questions that came up for me while reading is the connection between the concept of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (the name of the bookstore) and the relationship between Daniel, his deceased mother, and his father. It was mentioned early on that Daniel woke up one night crying, saying he couldn’t remember his mother’s face. When his father comforts him by saying he’ll remember twice as hard for the both of them, Daniel thinks to himself that his father won’t be around forever. I think we’re meant to connect here cemeteries (final resting places) of forgotten books, forgotten stories, forgotten people.

People make stories, and so I think Daniel forgetting these parts of his mother will come back around to mean something. If each shopkeeper of the Cemetery is called to a specific book to safekeep and remember for the duration of their life, there’s bound to be some metaphor growing here about people and life and death, especially with the book’s war themes. I’ll wait until I’m further into the book, until I have a more comprehensive perspective, before trying to outline this better.

Another idea I thought was worth noting from this first part (I misplaced the page number, but will comment below when I find it) was how it is characteristic of childhood to not understand something but still feel it deeply.  As the novel introduces war in a coming-of-age sort of trajectory, I wanted to highlight this sentiment, of feeling the repercussions of things you don’t yet understand and slowly losing your childhood innocence through the acquisition of knowledge.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the Inkheart series, a set of three children’s/middle-grade books fro the early 2000s, but this novel is giving off a similar vibe (energy) so far (albeit with more advanced/mature themes).

In Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, a grieving father and son set off on a long drive to the home of their wife and mother’s family. Except it’s a lot more complicated than that: the father, Juan, is a medium with a serious heart condition; the son, Gaspar, is beginning to be able to see the dead; and the recently-deceased Rosario’s family is part of the Order, a cult that has made use of Juan’s power for most of his life. The Order hopes to discover whether Gaspar shares his father’s abilities, which they could then exploit after Juan’s (possibly imminent) death. On top of all this, Juan has been unable to “contact” Rosario, and he is beginning to suspect that she was murdered and sent somewhere unreachable.

The first part of the book mainly gives us Juan’s perspective. Juan is a fascinating mess of contradictions: he is very powerful and very sick; he can be extremely gentle and patient with six-year-old Gaspar, and he can be manipulative and physically abusive; he is shattered by Rosario’s death, and he is able to enjoy a sort of romantic involvement with her half-sister, Tali; he is determined to ensure that Gaspar will be protected from the Order after he is gone, and at the same time, he does not want to die — and he knows that he could use Gaspar’s body to keep his own consciousness alive.

On another note, I’m curious about how this English translation compares to the Spanish version. Although I am enjoying the writing over all, there are moments that feel a little clumsy to me, stylistically, and it’s hard to tell how much of that comes from Enriquez herself and how much comes from the translator, Megan McDowell. Perhaps our little Enriquez book club can discuss.

One last thing: I feel sort of silly writing this now, but I expected to find a stronger sense of hope behind all the horror of this story. And maybe there is hopefulness to come in the later sections. Or maybe it’s already there, and I’m just having trouble perceiving it. Have you ever picked up a book that you hoped/imagined/wanted to believe would be “the answer”? That it would be the exact thing you needed or wanted at that particular point in time? Have you ever been right? I realize that’s a lot to ask of a book.

I will begin with a short summary of what has happened so far in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The story begins in an interesting way, saying that the narrator’s father brought him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (in Barcelona, where they live) and already I am wondering what this is. Is it a literal cemetery? The first line spoken by one of the characters is the father, telling the narrator, Daniel, that he “musn’t tell anyone what [he’s] about to see today” (Ruiz Zafón 3). We find out that Daniel is only 10-years-old and this “cemetery” is actually a bookstore. Daniel is allowed to choose, or “adopt”, one book, but Daniel says that he feels the book has actually adopted him. That book is called The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. As the story begins in the summer of 1945, we know that the Spanish civil war is over (1936-1939) and they have entered the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Daniel wants to read more of Carax’s books but finds out through his father’s friend, Barceló, and Barceló’s daughter, Clara, that Daniel holds the last of any of Carax’s books because all the rest have been burned. Daniel ends up falling in love with Clara, who is almost 10 years older than him, so he puts aside many of his interests for a few years and spends most of his time with her. Around the same time that he realizes Clara will never love him, he is visited by the man who has been burning Carax’s books because he wants the final copy to burn. This brings Daniel back into the mystery of Carax. All he (and we) know so far is that Carax was also from Barcelona, fled to Spain during the war, but apparently died in Barcelona. I stopped at page 77, right as Daniel finds out that Isaac’s (book keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books) daughter had a love affair with Carax. 

It was extremely difficult for me to put the book down after that. I felt hooked from the very beginning and just as I was getting into more of this mystery I had to put it down. I am already looking forward to picking it back up, though I have to admit that even though Savage Detectives didn’t pull me in in the same way, I am curious to know what’s going to happen next (and if it will pull me in more!)

As they mentioned in the book, it was quite common for Spaniards to flee the country during that time and try to create a new life for themselves in France. I believe more people left during the dictatorship (though I would have to research whether that was true or not) and I found it curious that it was mentioned that Carax knew what was coming: he knew Spain would be worse after the war than it already was and so he got a headstart, trying to create a better life for himself. So why did he go back to Spain? It seems his stay in France was quite short-lived. 

I was reminded of my own family, reading about the war and the escape into France, however they did not take this headstart, like Carax had. They fled Spain (by walking hundreds of kilometers) to find a better life in France (and eventually Canada), after they witnessed how Franco was ruling the country. 

It isn’t just the historical part that feels most interesting to me, it’s also Ruiz Zafón’s style of writing that I enjoy. It seems that he is also using a lot of foreshadowing, such as, “I felt sure that The Shadow of the Wind had been waiting for me there for years, probably since before I was born, (Ruiz Zafón 7). That tells us that there is going to be some reason why this book chose to “adopt” Daniel. There must be something that the book wants Daniel to learn, or perhaps grow into, in his life. 

I feel I can go on and on, sharing all my thoughts and things I loved about these first several chapters, but I will end with a paragraph that I really loved: “I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later – no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget – we will return, (Ruiz Zafón 8). I absolutely loved this and believe that it’s true. Even if we do not re-read books that we once loved, there is something about those books that have left imprints on our lives, and I think we return back to the themes of those books, because they speak to our souls.

PS I also found the Spanish edition of The Shadow of the Wind as I was wandering through Indigo the other day so I also took this as a sign of being adopted by it and will continue the rest of the semester reading the Spanish edition, as a nice challenge for me.

Introduction:

Sandro Veronesi is a novelist, essayist and journalist from Florence, in the beautiful and endless rolling hills of Tuscan region of Italy, who has written many celebrated works, such as Quiet Chaos, The Hummingbird and Black September. Veronesi’s writing often explores both the softer and the deeper themes of fragility between what is love and what is loss after an emotionally inexplicable tragedy. His 2005 novel Quiet Chaos (Caos Calmo) is no short of this.

In Quiet Chaos, it centers on recent 43 year old widower named Pietro Paladini and it walks the readers through the stages of grief after a tragic loss of his late wife. The beginning of the story, however, took place at a beach where he and his brother was spending time together during their families’ summer vacation. Both men noticed that two women were drowning in the sea and soon after, both rushed into the waters to save them and swim them to shore. The novel spent lengths of describing this particular scene. It was very suspenseful because it appeared that Pietro almost drowned with the woman.

Eventually, they saved the women and drove back to their summer home with news to tell their wives and children. However, Pietro returned home, only to find out that his wife fell off the second floor of the house and died from the accident. And here, the grief begins… Weeks later, we, the readers, starts being introduced to Pietro’s psychological breakdown. He no longer shows up to work. He no longer has a desire to eat. He no longer has a desire to meet with others. Rather, he only desires one thing: he sits on a park bench nearby his daughter’s (Claudia’s) school, facing the window of her classroom. Pietro spends countless hours sitting, starting from the drop off of Claudia to school to the pick up of her at end of her school.

Impressions:

With three to four chapters in, I really have been enjoying Veronesi’s novel. The narrative captures the brutal contrast between survival and loss without overexplanining and it frames Pietro’s grief through the stillness rather than melodrama. That is, his grief becomes stillness: abandoning work and routine, he spends his days silently watching his daughter from a park bench. As if this could excuse him from his guilt – his oversight – for not being able to save his wife from the accident but rather a random woman who was drowning. In particular, the focus on silence and routine makes the emotional weight of this story feels earned, unsettling and quietlty powerful. Pietro never verbalize his regret and grief, especially not infront of Clauda. Instead, readers would need to piece together his actions and thoughts, stringing them into an endless thread of silence, grief and guilt – eating him away slowly and quietly.

Discussion Question

« Absence can be more powerful than prescene. » When central relationship disappears and grief takes over (e.g., Pietro and his late wife), does one’s identity dismantle itself, or does it reorganize itself around the absence? Therefore, how might such absence manifest itself through writing – in the behaviours, in the stillness, in the withdrawal or in the obsessions of oneself? Feel free to explore this question with any of the books you’ve read.

In terms of Quiet Chaos, I find that Pietro’s identity reorganize itself around what is missing. His wife’s passing becomes the silent center of his life, reshaping his actions through negation rather than expression. In Veronesi’s writing, this absence manifests as stillness, withdrawal, and obsessive routines: Pietro stops working, stops eating, and sits for hours outside his daughter’s school. His behaviours are not empty but emotionally charged, suggesting that fried creates a temporary identity governed by different rules: one in which meaning is found not in action, but in waiting, watching and refusing to move forward. Through this lens, absence transformas the ordinary into a heightened moral and emotional terrain, enabling every small gestures, glance, and pause signficant in revealing the psychological impact of loss. Utimately, Veronesi shows that absence reshapes one’s identity, turning grief and guilt into a quiet, obsessive presence that redefines life as much through what is no longer there as through what still remains.

– David Chen

This writing is also exploratory. I have no idea what am I going to be talking about in the next few hundred words expect for the fact that I’ll be talking about Mariana Enriquez’s “Nuestra parte de noche”.

The plot, it it’s most bare down version, is simple. A father makes a road trip with his son. That is all that we know form the start. I’m on the fence about talking about plot points for this book, though it is interesting it is the least interesting thing Enriquez has to offer. Mother dies in car crash. Father goes in road trip with child. We discover that the father is a medium for a occult cult and has been controlled by the organization. Father fucks. Child starts manifesting powers and is revealed a medium, father is scared for his child’s future, father confirms child is a medium by summoning a demon. The go to Iguazu, etc, etc. Basically the plot is a convoluted cast of characters that are involved in the occult, while Juan, our protagonist and point of view for the first part of the book, tries to find his now dead wife and save his child form the grasp of the cult he is the most important figure for.

Did that make any sense?

I want to cheat and read more. Contrary to Bolaño Enriquez’s story interests me; no, not her story, her language. Enriquez’s language is captivating. Is hauntingly beautiful. Her mastery over ambiance and her gorey, raw descriptions of violence make this book full of horrific beauty. It makes me think of Mónica Ojeda and her Andean Gothic that is part of this new Latin American Gothic written by women in the fast few decades.

Another thought, which I might explore more thoroughly for my final essay, is the sheer queerness of this book. Enriquez, like Bolaño, doesn’t shy away from graphic sexual descriptions, but here they feel different. I don’t know why yet, but my suspicion has to do with the way the characters are portrayed and the feeling that this sex serves the story, has a role to play, whereas with Garcia Madero’s narration just felt like a weird, gross, bragging.

Back to the queer aspect. Apart from the graphical descriptions of queer sex the themes in the novel play with a lot of themes that appear in queer literature. Specifically in the genre of the book, for example, trans authors have made a name for themselves by their mastery of body-horror. Transformation, monstrosity, marginalization, being “different” and being “accepted” despite this difference, are all things that are recurring in the book.

This were all loose thoughts about the novel. I really want to keep reading it and I’m dreading the fact that there is around another 170 pages of Bolaño between me and the continuation of Juan’s story.

Felipe Pinglo Alva was mentioned in the book so here is a famous song of his performed by Jesús Vasquéz. I hope you enjoy listening to it as you read my blog!

Before I share my reflections on my first reading of Conversation in the Cathedral, I thought to share the epigraph at the beginning of the book as it did an amazing job drawing me in:

Il faut avoir fouillé toute la vie sociale pour être un vrai romancier, vu que le roman est l’histoire privée des nations  -Balzac

I translated it (using google translate) to double check that I understood correctly. It says: one must have explored all of social life in order to be a true novelist, since the novel is the private history of nations. That is such a phenomenal way to describe novels and from what I have read so far, this is doing just that.

Part I, chapter 1 poses a question to the reader: “at what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up” and I believe that Mario Vargas Llosa is attempting to provide us with an answer as we go along. You can already tell from that question alone that the book is highly political. I should say that it has lived up to my expectations so far, though I find it very challenging. There are many characters, some with their own nicknames; however, this information isn’t given to the reader so I had to piece it together as I read, figuring out who is who. I must say it was a very slow, dull start. At first, I felt a bit lost and thought I was skipping pages by mistake. It wasn’t until later that I realized the story shifts back and forth through time. It took about 40-50 pages for me to fully get into the story and start understanding what was happening. One thing that I’ve enjoyed about the novel so far is how there are many names of places and streets mentioned. I found myself searching them up to see what the streets looked like and where these places were.

Ultimately, the story seems to be a conversation in the “Catedral” between Ambrosio and Santiago. The novel seems to do exactly what the epigraph describes… Vargas Llosa is telling Peru’s history through the voice of its people. What were the social realities? Their struggles, the rhetoric, the political climate, perhaps their mistakes, regrets, and realizations? The story appears to be narrated against Odría who took office through a military coup, overthrowing Bustamante in 1948. The protagonist, Santiago, seems to struggle with who he is and how just like Peru he searches for the precise moment that he fucked up. People around him especially his father are Odría supporters and he deeply detests this. As people ask him why he is so against Odría, he says “Odría came to power by force, Odría put a lot of people in jail (p. 27). Those in support of Odría’s military takeover express their satisfaction with him as he is “clearing up the streets,” wiping the streets of communists and Apristas. Santiago later on says, “Odría was the worst tyrant in the history of Peru… give him time and you will see” (p. 68). This novel makes me think… How can a nation fail to see what is happening in plain sight? How can one not point out the symptoms of a dictatorship, or be in support of its practices, repressing dissent, censorship, extrajudicial killings, and other acts of state violence? How can some characters think it’s a heroic act that Odría overthrew an elected government, and be optimistic that the conditions will get better?

There are many themes that have been discussed so far in the book, though confusing, I find it stimulating to read and very thought provoking.

Another section from the book that was interesting to me was how Santiago says that he doesn’t know much about Marxism, he would like to know more but doesn’t know where, and how. Then, one of his friends when asked whether he is a communist or not says “I’m a sympathizer… besides, in order to be a communist you’ve got to do a lot of studying” (p. 72). I’ll leave this to you to interpret as you see fit. Also, I think Vargas Llosa does an amazing job of representing the social hierarchies during the period as well as the racism present, for instance some individuals are referred to as a “half-breed” in a degrading way; even Odría is described as one by Santiago.

I look forward to reading the rest of this novel and I wonder if the story timeline extends beyond the Ochenio including the aftermath of the dictatorship.

A question I have for you is whether you think we should factor in who the writer is and what their political views are while reading such novel? Or should it be more about the experience of reading the novel? Though this book is fiction, it is deeply historical and political which is why I personally think it serves far greater than a book and as Balzac described it, it is the untold “private history of a nation,” so the biases are important and should be taken into account, perhaps.

I AM A SELF-PROCLAIMED BAD POETRY READER. But through experience, I have come to learn all skills can be sharped with discipline. Henceforth, I propose for all my blogs to start with a poem. Apropos Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, it is a novel about poets, poetry and lost poets. I suspect I will only be adding Latin American poets (or perhaps, from Romance World), as I hope to get a sense of Latin American poetry. So here is this week’s poem: a collective poetic voice(s) penned by Argentine poet & translator, Suzana Thénon (1935-1991)

why is that woman screaming? 

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY Rebekah Smith 

why is that woman screaming?
why is she screaming?
why is that woman screaming?
don’t even try to understand 

that woman, why is she screaming?
don’t even try to understand
look at what beautiful flowers
why is she screaming?
hyacinth       asters
why?
why what?
why is that woman screaming? 

and that woman?
and that woman?
just try and understand
she must be crazy that woman
look         look at the little mirrors
could it be because of her steed?
just try to understand 

and where did you hear
the word steed?
it’s a secret             that woman
why is she screaming?
look at the asters
the woman
little mirrors
little birds
that don’t sing
why is she screaming?
that don’t fly
why is she screaming?
that don’t intrude 

the woman
and that woman
and was she crazy that woman? 

she’s not screaming any more 

(do you remember that woman?)  

Reflection: a harsh poetic voice. I encountered it reading Selva Almada’s non-fiction novel about femicides, Dead Girls (2014). It serves as the novel’s epigraph.

I read until part 1 of The Savage Detectives. I picked up a Spanish paperback from UBC’s Koerner library last spring equinox. For one reason or another, I put it down after 30 pages and eventually returned it back. Someone had placed a recall. Now that I have read until part 1, I feel…. I don’t have an exact word for how I feel.  A kaleidoscope of nostalgia, for one Arturo Belano ( Bolaño’s fictive self) is back. Readers have encountered him in other stories, mainly those taken from Llamadas telefónicas (1997) and Putas asesinas (2001), with the stories mix-and-matched in its their English translation counterparts, Last Evenings on Earth (1997) and The Return (2010). Alongside nostalgia, I felt fear. I fear for how Lupe and Alberto’s story will unfold…. will she eventually become the victim of a femicide? What is that I am witnessing? I devoured the first part as I tried to find out. Moreover, I underlined my responses to Garcia Madero’s narration on text. It goes something like this (“Prick” as a reaction to his view on women; “Too much sex” in response to all the sexual scenes;  “Giggled” in response to the usage of cannabis… as they laugh “te heee heee…”….. this part this stood out to me here. In Latin America, cannabis is illegal. But something I notice in this hemisphere of the world, cannabis shops are like cactus on a desert. Everywhere. I wonder then, how a story like this could unfold in a contemporary Vancouver. Lost poets in Vancouver? Anyone? What would that entail………. writing poems of snow-covered North Shore mountains?). Additionally, my reactions to the scenes of literary industry references were positive. I love me a good metafictional story. Still, I love me a good diary entry story! Lastly, I will say I have read “Amulet” before (I apologize if I am getting ahead of myself) and am really excited for a re-read. To be fair, I have only wanted to read TDS so as to understand how Auxilio Lacouture’s story fits in. I really enjoyed her maladaptive daydreams manifesting in conversations with Remedios Varos, and besides references to Lilian Serpas…. I suspect one of her poems might be an epigraph for a future blogs.

Question: Sex is an act that drives human expectancy. For some, sexual drive is higher and is classified as promiscuous. Sex then is a main theme in Savage Detectives as it depicts a collective network of promiscuity. In his essay, Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature Brad Kessler shows cases the importance of food depiction in realist literature, emphasizing food as a spiritual act of existence wherein the act of eating entails many experiences. How it is gathered, when it eating, the absence of food, etc. Savage Detectives depicts a similar conceptual approach, but towards the act that leads to creature creation. Though Bolaño chooses to defile the act itself and explores an act repurposed for pleasure rather than procreation. There is no middle ground (so far). What then is the importance of intimate acts in contemporary literature and where do you see literature’s depictions of these moments as our current societies see integration of Artificial & Metallic Entities  (pre-programmed machines with capability of holding human interaction but lack consciousness) .

They say not to judge a book by its cover – and in this case, that’s pretty easy: the cover doesn’t give away much! I do like the black on white and the disrupting lines, very arresting…anyway, on to the reading!

I was interested in how the story started in a university setting – a poetry class, taught by (no one’s favourite) Álamo. As narrator Juan (as he is rarely called) slowly stops going to his classes, I felt a first sense of kinship: here was a character living out an alternative life to mine where he doesn’t go to class and prioritises life outside of the classroom. Later on, I found how Juan described an event as “…after an ordeal that was too long and nerve-wracking to describe in detail (plus I hate details)…” evoked our discussion from last class. And, as we established, since this is certainly a long novel, this line is a touch ironic. For further literary discussion, I was amused at the evaluation of the sexual orientation of short stories, novels, and poetry on page 80 – though listing which type of homosexual different authors were for over three pages, I found to be too much detail. I like how the book started in the classroom, and used the ideas and people in the classroom as a springboard for the rest of the novel, while continually making references to literature.

As he recounts this story, Juan as a character began to remind me of someone I couldn’t place my finger on…aha! Holden Caulfield, the narrator of Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger! The falling in love with different women, sardonic first-person narration, coming of age of a prickly teen, feelings of alienation and despair, and, running away from a home-like place. Does anyone else agree? Or had to write a high school essay on this book?

Something else that stood out to me was the obvious inclusion of sex. I always feel a bit ambivalent when books, especially those by male authors, make prolific use of sex and sexual abuse against women. We see this (pretty darn plainly) with the character of Lupe and the stories she tells of Alberto, as well as with characters María, Rosario and Brígida. On the one hand, it adds drama and a kind of realism, in that the world is not safe for women. But also it can lend into a sort of fantasy from the author – what kind of waitress takes a 17 year old unprompted out back for an illicit meeting and then falls in love with him? How does this kid have women falling over him? Some of the sexual nature of the story and representations of women felt a little bit silly, unrealistic, and exaggerated ; it is in this territory that I find it verges on a fantasy more than a sense of gritty realism.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the first 139 pages of The Savage Detectives. As evidenced by this late post, I read those pages pretty recently and in quick succession, but it wasn’t hard to do! It was an easy and exciting story to follow.

P.S. the featured image isn’t the edition I have, but it was my favourite edition I found online!