Category Archives: teaching

Bad Girls: Creatures in Travesti Heaven

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The girls whose lives are portrayed in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (2019) may be seen as “bad” by outsiders looking on, but this book is written from their perspective and although it admits that at times “We had no idea how to be good or bad” (145), overwhelmingly it shows that they have a code of ethics and empathy that puts the rest of society to shame.

The “girls” in question are travestis, which a preliminary “Author’s Note” seeks to differentiate from trans women, although that is the term that would be the closest equivalent in English. But in Latin America, the word travesti, originally a slur, conjures up an image of marginality and precarity, inflected through class as much as sexuality and gender, and often linked with street sex work. In some ways it shares some of the semantic territory as the British term, “rent boy,” but with the addition of an association with performative femininity. As the “Author’s Note” puts it:

Far below, where the secret rivers of the world flow, appeared a word that stank of death, shit, semen, prostitution, the night, the cold, bribery, blood and jail, of misery and neglect. A word sharp as a knife, grime-encrusted and wounding. A word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty, of the acts that made us legendary, of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities. We didn’t want to look like women, we didn’t want to hide our struggles in any way, we didn’t feel trapped in the wrong bodies, we didn’t know what we were doing. But in the street, they christened us with that old, buried word, highlighting our beauty, which was like a home. (x–xi)

The novel is dedicated to tracing that beauty–and kindness, and love–even in the abject conditions in which travestis find themselves, which to some extent they also embrace. Specifically, it focuses on a loose group that haunt and ply their trade in a park in the provincial Argentine city of Córdoba. They come to life at night, and give life to the place even at the expense of their own poverty and suffering: “Every night, the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about, to bring spring back to the world” (1). Early on in the book, this notion that the travestis can conjure and nurture new life from such unpropitious circumstances is literalized when one of them, Auntie Encarna, finds “a three-month-old boy abandoned in the Park” (4) and proceeds (informally and illicitly) to adopt him. One strand of the narrative then proceeds to follow the fate of this unlikely pair: the child and his new mother, whose breasts may be formed by backstreet injections of aircraft oil, whose “maternal instincts were theatrical but took control of her character so thoroughly that they felt authentic” (11). All the other travestis regard Encarna as their substitute mother, who welcomes them into her high-walled pink house, “the queerest boardinghouse in the world” (5). Why not also take in this baby who has known no other mother?

Not that Sosa Villada is prone to romanticization. This is not particularly the tale of whores with hearts of gold. They hardly have the space or time for sentimentality. As much as the travestis are in constant danger from their clients–any trick may go wrong at any point–from the police, or simply from the scorn of would-be “respectable” society, they also fight and squabble among themselves, sometimes viciously. Indeed, at times the worst violence is that inflicted on each other, or themselves, whether it be out of bouts of competitiveness or displaced anger that would be better directed at institutions that they feel unable to change.

In fact, it is striking that as much as the book stresses the humanity of these outcasts who are often treated as mere objects for quick and guilty sexual satisfaction (though they also make themselves “into an object, into valuable flesh, to live the only life that was available in that town” [105] and even “embrace[ their] role as slave, as an object” [111]), it is drawn too to their animality. They are described as a “pack,” “a small pack wandering the margins of the world” (54). They have “animal wisdom” (85) or sleep “sweating like animals” (96). More mysteriously still, one of them locks herself in her room once a month as she turns into a “she-wolf,” while another, originally Maria the Mute, starts to grow feathers on her chest, and by the end of the story has entirely transmuted into Maria the Bird, flying down into the narrator’s purse: “I let her settle in there” (191). As the adopted boy grows up, he takes to “whittling figures of all the animals we’d been: bird women, she-wolves, sad women, brave women, a whole mythology carved in figurines the boy created in his isolation” (181). We are all basically beasts, the novel seems to suggest, and women are one animal among others in a world in which the line between species is blurry and can be crossed, whether by accident, thanks to forces beyond our control, or through effort and determination. 

So perhaps the point is that the fellow feeling and support that the travestis (admittedly, intermittently) show each other comes from their recognition of our common status as creatures governed as much by instinct and desire, hunger and the most basic of needs for shelter and, ultimately, love. It is also notable that among the many pen portraits of clients and (less often) boyfriends, one of the most sympathetic is a zookeeper: “My zoo guard gave me tenderness, brought me hot coffee on cold winter nights, and several times dropped me off at home in his car, saying goodbye with a kiss on the mouth” (134). He takes her on midnight jaunts through the zoo, closed to the public, where they have sex among the cages, as she “rub[s] up against him like a horny dog.” “If it was up to me,” the guard tells her, “I’d open up the cages and let it all go to hell” (134). Everyone and everything deserves its freedom. The travestis perhaps lead the way in showing the life that can be lived on the wild side, beyond the cages that most of us do not even realize that we are inhabiting.

Power and its injustices, however, are all too obvious to a travesti. Hence their anger and resentment has a broad range, and is sometimes indiscriminate: “We were forever ready to burn the whole place down: our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines, the posh kids who all looked the same, the patrician cocksuckers who scorned us so” (97). But often they feel powerless to do anything–or to be precise, too exhausted; a travesti ages quickly, we are told, “at an accelerated rate, the way dogs [and] wolves [. . .] do: seven years for every human one” (82). Yet they are also aware that, for all their exclusion and marginality, they are also central to the political and social economy that excludes them. Their clients are students, workers, politicians, supposedly happily married husbands, who may deny their own desire but cannot resist it. “Such is the power of travestis, we attract the gazes of the world. No one can escape the allure of a man dressed as a woman, the faggots who go too far, the degenerates everyone stares at” (149).

Yet they are both confined and cling to the shadows, seeking out invisibility and “transparency” as much as they also revel in their power to “dazzle” (121). Their stories go untold, or told only as cautionary tales by homophobic parents who predict sad ends to their non-conforming children. But for Sosa Villada, they are “there to be written about. To be immortalized” (96). And though their stories may not end well–this is a book haunted by death, which comes to its characters in many different ways, from sickness to suicide to murder–Bad Girls perhaps provides a glimpse of the beauty of “travesti heaven,” where they can “finally be compensated for [their] broken heart[s]” (28).

Ru: Glimmering through Fragments

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Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) is a lyrical evocation of growing up amid displacement, exile, and migration. It proceeds via a series of very short sections or vignettes, many of which are no more than a dozen lines long, and few of which are more than a page. As each section starts a new page (and so there is abundant white space beneath many of them) and as, in this English translation at least, the text is only left-justified and so the lines are ragged on the right, at first glance upon opening the book it could seem to be a book of poetry.

Moreover, though it is presented as “a novel” on the front cover, it is as much as anything else memoir or meditation, even to some extent a collection of short stories–some humorous, some tragic–that collectively constitute the story of Vietnamese migration and adaptation to Canada.

The narrator’s name is Nguyen An Tinh. On my keyboard, I cannot reproduce the diacritics, which differ only by a single (under the i) from her mother’s name, Nguyen An Tinh. This already suggests how translation (and these are names twice translated: from Vietnamese to French, and now to English) flattens out difference and creates composite subjects. Similarly, there is also an uncertain difference and distance between narrator and author (whose name is, of course, Kim Thúy), whose stories overlap but presumably also differ in ways that can never be fully clear to the reader, least of all to a reader in English.

This is, moreover, a book that is continually in translation, in the various sense of that term. As well as the linguistic translation (usually implicit, but sometimes explicit, between Vietnamese and French; and characteristically invisible between French and English), there are the geographical translations between East Asia and North America, the cultural translations involved in that displacement (and its attendant memories), as well as the drastic change in status between a relatively privileged life in South Vietnam, the trauma of the refugee experience on a flimsy boat or in a Malaysian refugee camp, and the struggles of resettlement in Canada.

As such the book both questions and depends upon the notion that something survives translation. (And each page’s visual resemblance to poetry perhaps reminds us of the quip that it is poetry that is lost in translation.) At one point, the narrator directly addresses this issue:

Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thuang Bà dê dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Quebecois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thuong); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tình nghia). It’s impossible quite simply to love, to love without one’s head. (96)

It’s worth repeating that my keyboard cannot do the Vietnamese orthography justice. But this passage again also suggests that the problem here is not just with (verbal) language, but also with bodily gestures that may seem to be innate or even natural. A well-meaning pat on the head on a Canadian sports field turns a Vietnamese kid into a “raging tiger.” Even love requires translation, or is perhaps untranslatable. Perhaps the narrator’s Vietnamese love, the love withing and surrounding her Vietnamese family, does not translate, and instead has to be invented anew, for her Canadian family and relations.

There is much that is left out of the narrator’s story–surely there is much left out of anyone’s story, but here the structure of brief vignettes, stopping and starting, and the white space surrounding them, makes those narrative absences all the clearer, such that we are not even sure if we are really dealing with narrative at all. One figure, for instance, who is almost entirely omitted is the narrator’s “‘white’ husband” (79), with the quotation marks around “white” adding a further layer of uncertainty, though we can assume he is not Vietnamese. After all, the only other time he is mentioned, it is for a sartorial faux pas when he wears a “red T-shirt with a yellow star,” in other words mimicking the national flag of (Socialist, postwar) Vietnam “in the streets of Montreal.” What is presumably intended as a gesture of affiliation is (again) taken as an insult, such that the narrator’s “parents had him take it off and replaced it with an ill-fitting shirt of my father’s” (95). Taking off the national flag and replacing it with the Vietnamese father’s shirt, does the husband now become more Vietnamese or more (inconspicuously) white? This cross-cultural relationship, between husband and wife, husband and in-laws, remains unexplored, off limits.

As for the love between mothers and children, that also takes on new aspects via displacement. Whereas the narrator has been given a name that is virtually indistinguishable from that of her mother’s, such that she is her “extension,” her “sequel,” whose task is to “continue her story” (2), she has given her own children names that are resolutely French: Pascal and Henri, names of French philosophers and kings. Moreover, Henri, at least, is probably never going to continue his mother’s (the narrator’s) story:

He is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. [. . .] Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly [. . .]. He won’t know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it’s invincible. (7)

This is a book about the obstacles to expression and translation, whether they be the untranslatability of emotion or language, or autism, or the vengeance and re-education camps of the Communist victors in the aftermath of war. But it is also a book about the struggles against those obstacles, and about the “moment[s] of complicity, of communion” (132) that can emerge through the glimpse of a scar, at a family reunion, or in the ritual whereby Henri “curl[s] up in Pascal’s arms, hiding behind him in front of strangers” (50). We “recognize our old selves,” but presumably also others, “only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In this fragmented prose, it is perhaps the gaps between the vignettes as much as the stories they contain that allow such glimmers to shine through, sparks of joy amid suffering.

The Possession: the Madness of Meaning

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Annie Ernaux’s The Possession (2002) is the briefest of tales, at a mere sixty-two pages barely a novella, if a little more than a short story. It explores, and ultimately exorcises (temporarily at least) what Ernaux describes as possession “in both sense of the word”: property and madness.

The narrator is a woman who feels herself usurped. There is nothing particularly rational about this feeling, not least because it is she who ended the relationship that now so thoroughly disturbs her: “I was the one who had left W., several months earlier, after six years together.” Their parting had been, it seems, relatively amicable: “We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time” (8). Yet when he takes up with a new lover, moving in with her, the narrator is seized with a jealousy that practically drives her out of her mind.

One frustration is that W. (with whom she remains in touch) is reticent to give her too many details about the new woman. “He had not,” for instance, “wanted to tell me her name. / This absent name was a hole, a void around which I turned in circles” (21). The narrator therefore turns detective, picking up on such hints as the man does let slip–for instance, that she teaches history at such and such a university–to try to track him down, at times convincing herself that she has indeed identified her putative rival.

But her obsession leads her less to pin down or focus in on a particular spot (though there are now swathes of Paris that she avoids, fearing that she may run into the new woman with her old flame), than to project her fears on her entire environment. Almost any woman could be her: on the metro, on the street, in a seminar room. “This transubstantiation of the bodies of women I encountered into the body of the other woman was in continual operation: I saw her everywhere” (13). Everything becomes a sign, a symbol of the other’s presence, or of the narrator’s own absence, her ejection from her former partner’s life. 

She can no longer watch a movie or listen to a song without projecting herself into it: “Whatever the script, if the heroine was in pain, it was my pain that was being portrayed” (20). If the lover is now to be found everywhere the narrator looks, then the narrator also finds herself dispersed and fragmented, ubiquitous except where she actually wants to be.

None of this is exactly rational–“this is too fucked up” (57), the narrator admits. But it has its logic, and even this admittedly self-imposed pain has its appeal: she recognizes a desire “to hold on to its suffering which, after all, gave meaning to the world” (49). There is something creative, even productive, about the self-abasing and otherwise even paralyzing obsession that has taken over her.

As the narrator puts it, “One could find in this hunt and this frantic assembling of signs an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence. But I see its having a poetic function–the same one that is at work in literature, religion, and paranoia” (34). Finding significance in the smallest details, imbuing the world with meaning, literature, religion, and madness alike all provide purpose and motivation, if sometimes at the expense of self-flagellation and the risk of embarrassment at best, self-abnegation or even self-erasure at worst. There is something in the workings of jealousy that shines a light on representation itself: “Writing, that is, as a jealousy of the real” (34).

Writing, indeed, is the narrator’s way in, way through, and way out of her possession. At one stage she imagines writing as a weapon in her armoury aimed at the unknown (and unknowable) but real woman: told of the idea of “making dolls out of bread dough and pricking them with pins,” she thinks that “The act of writing, here, is perhaps not so different from that of sticking in needles” (29). It is a kind of witchcraft, pursued in the hope that art can be invoked to manage and even influence life: a wound to the imagined image of the other can translate into a real injury to the hated rival.

But writing can also be a kind of cure. After all, the narrator writes instead ofpricking dolls with pins (or worse). More to the point, perhaps, “the image of the Other–the desire that this Other had for him” is not only “equipped with a force great enough to sweep away the boredom and everything that had compelled me to break things off.” It also, no, “makes me write” (44). And writing, in turn, as the fictionalization of what is no doubt a real experience (at least someone’s real experience), allows the expression of jealousy without shame or embarrassment, giving it a form, a beginning as well, most crucially, as an end: “Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality–a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the street–but has become ‘the possession,’ a period of time, circumscribed and completed” (60–61).

It has also of course become The Possession, a novel or novella, similarly circumscribed and completed, and perhaps admirably (thankfully) brief: a short excursion into madness at the end of which we can turn the page, close the book, put it down, and return to a world in which not everything has meaning, and that is OK.

That Hair: Ornament and Caricature

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Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (2015) is hardly a conventional novel. It has no obvious plot, for instance, and consists instead of memories (presumably, mostly autobiographical; the narrator’s history seems on the whole to mirror Pereira de Almeida’s biography) and reflections braided around the persistent topic of the narrator’s hair. The hair itself is both the book’s subject and its excuse, its content and in many ways also its form in so far as the narrator’s thought processes curl and crimp, get matted and entangled, despite periodic efforts to brush them straight or give them more recognizable shape. 

Strangely, perhaps, the hair itself is not in fact described at great length. We are merely told that after it was first cut, when the narrator, Mila, was till basically a baby, only six months old, it grew back or was “reborn coiled and dry” (1). Presumably it is dark, curly and, well . . . stereotypically “African.” It is characterized as a “rebellious mane [. . .] a lion’s mane” (5), further reinforcing the notion that her hair is what ties the narrator to the land of her birth, Angola, as well perhaps as indicating a dash of the primitive and the exotic.

But Mila is not exactly what, in Africa at least, would be called Black. She is, rather, a “mulata das pedras, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that mulata conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot” (6). Her father was “a blond-haired, prematurely bald young man who in past lives had been the blondest kid in the neighborhood, the child-elect to play Baby Jesus for a Beira nativity scene” (60) and she grows up with her paternal grandparents, Grandma Lúcia and Grandpa Manuel, in Portugal, in a town very close to Lisbon, to which she has moved when she was still a young child. She is, in other words, at least as much Portuguese as she is Angolan. Not that it is always so easy to disentangle the two.

After all, her Portuguese relatives have a long-lasting relationship with southern Africa. Grandma Lúcia was born to a Portuguese travelling salesman and his wife in the Congo. Grandpa Manuel was an engineer who moved to Mozambique to help to construct dams for a hydroelectric company. Their family history is evidence of flows and fluxes across Europe (the narrator’s great-grandmother is described as an “unmistakeable Jew” [62] and some distant aunts as “Viennese girls lost in Mozambique” [63]) as well as between colonial center and far-flung periphery. Another great-great- grandmother had been “the spouse of a celebrated colonel in Macau” (64). They are all, in various ways, servants, handmaidens, or children of an Empire that lasted surprisingly

In Africa, the Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique, but also for instance Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, all first colonized in the sixteenth century) only gained their independence in the 1970s, after years of bloody guerilla warfare (of which, however, Pereira de Almeida makes very little mention). The Portuguese withdrew after a peaceful coup (the “Carnation Revolution”) that in 1974 overthrew the authoritarian regime originally established by António de Oliveira Salazar in the 1930s. It is as though Mila, and her hair, were a displaced remnant of that long colonial enterprise. Or as the narrator puts it: “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics” (2). 

Yet Pereira de Almeida’s narrator is unwilling to see her hair as simply a symbol or metaphor. It is too stubbornly material to be reduced to mere signifier. This is indeed a history of her hair–or rather “that hair,” which is not entirely part of her, and not entirely not. Over the course of the book “that hair” emerges almost as an entity in its own right, “its own persona, an alter ego there in the room” (38), not so much a part of the narrator as a prefigurement of what she herself might yet become, or could once have become. That hair has a life of its own, a life to which the narrator herself sometimes aspires.

At the start of the book, the narrator worries that this is too frivolous a topic; it seems such “a trivial matter” (51). And of course, we can easily live without our hair: it is surely more ornament than essence. “Are you still talking about your hair, Mila?” someone unknown person (perhaps, Mila herself) is imagined as asking (86). At times it is as though it is an unworthy subject, when so much is going on in the world. At times she “cut [her] hair to forget it even further,” and yet she discovers that “What I can’t do, I would later admit to myself, is forget this hair without also forgetting myself and plowing forward while leaving myself behind, like two people who lose sight of one another at a street market” (83). She has to come to terms with this quasi-alien excrescence, precariously attached to her, and to which she is only precariously attached.

There is a lot in this book about photography and photographs. The narrator leafs through her own, or her family’s, photo albums, real or imaginary, as well as an album given to her by a hairdresser: a catalogue of ideal types of haircuts, “featuring women who’d just had their hair done, their look of pride [. . .]. The album is the antithesis of my own disheveled albums, and, at the same time, it describes the arc of my hair’s drama, showing day one, the best day of each woman’s hair” (115). There is also a discussion of a photograph taken in 1957, amid the civil rights struggles in the USA, of a Black student attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by a baying mob of white protesters. The narrator sees herself in all the people pictured, Black and white: “little rock, the mulata das pedras. I see now that I am the persecuted and the persecutor, the disfigured, disfiguring myself” (97). Her hair, here, is a gateway to history, allowing (or perhaps forcing) her to take both sides in a visceral clash that is also, of course, based on an appearance mistaken to be essence.

There is something intolerable in the feeling of being split in this way, in being compelled to identify with such discordant positionings, but the narrator’s hair is also an entryway into language and writing, which similarly revolves around what she calls (in the context of a school party in which she “dress[es] up as an African”) “distancing and duplicating” herself. “This was perhaps the only mask that could reveal me, exposing the distance that separates me from what I am as an auspicious and not irretrievable idea” (112). It is by performing or recording (writing) the caricature that she can never quite become that she may also be able to come to terms with who she is. “The hair and the writing would one day need to come together like a couple after a long separation” (124). Yet this resolution never quite arrives in the novel: its last words are (still) “who then is Mila?” (148). 

After all, if this “whole hairy drama” (146) were ever fully unknotted, then it would no longer be her hair; it would no longer be her. The knots, the entanglement (expressed often in language that is equally convoluted), are what make “that hair” what it is, and similarly what make Mila who she is: someone whose identity can never quite be pinned down, caught between her “own particularity” and the “stock black woman” to whom she can only aspire, and who “today deserves [her] deference How to be worthy of her? I don’t know how to do my hair on paper without this story slipping from my grasp” (86). Just as her hair can never fully be “tamed” (95), except through an imaginary encounter with the Little Rock photo taken before she was born, so her story remains unruly, “leaving literature waiting at the door” (124). Hence That Hair never quite takes shape as a novel. How could it?

If reading this book is therefore often frustrating, then that is surely part of the point. As the narrative only comes in and out of focus, without ever settling in one place or time, does that not mirror what the narrator terms her hair’s “cycles” of growth and regrowth punctuated by new cuts and stylings (85)? So long as Mila has hair on her head, old stories are abandoned and cut short as new ones emerge without ever coming to any single conclusion.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance: Songs of Selves and Others

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The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”: 

I sing to the moon when it blossoms full, 
Round fang in the kindly night, 
[. . .]

I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance. (69)

But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.

The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.

But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.

Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.

Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).

This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.

If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.

Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.

It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints. 

We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime. 

There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.

Discontent: Calling Out Bullshit

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Marisa, the narrator and protagonist of Beatriz Serrano’s Discontent (2025) has what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 3). In her case, her pointless employment is as a mid-level manager in an advertising agency. In meetings, she comes up with clichés or finds ways to fend off deadlines and decisions–“Let me check a few things” (7)–while she daydreams, scans Twitter (now, of course, X) and doodles tiny penises in her notebook. Later, she will hand off any actual work she has been asked to do to the students she is teaching in a course in “a master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn” (10), passing off the task as an assignment for academic credit. 

Her students at least are still eager and enthusiasm. Marisa is long past jaded: “I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist” (8). She once wanted to be an artist or a curator–she studied Art History at university, and still likes to tour the Prado when she takes one of her many midday breaks, playing hooky while still on the agency’s clock. She originally took her job as a temporary thing, staying on in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis because “the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things” (17). After all, she has bills to pay. And it is nice to be able to take off at short notice for a week or two to the Canary Islands. Any residual anxiety can be dealt with by popping Lorezapam (Ativan) a few times a day.

Indeed, her life is hardly all dismal. She has enough money, few commitments (no children or partner, but a guy in her building is a regular “friend with benefits”), stable employment, and sufficient distance from the demands of her employment that she is happy to see it as a performance or a game: “Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. [. . .] I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six” (6). She may well be alienated, but she knows it (no illusions), and she is not exactly mining coal or being sent up chimneys. She does not really care whether her agency does well or otherwise, and she knows how to keep up the pretense that she is contributing willingly and productively to whatever success it may have.

The worst she has to endure is the vacuous small talk and naïve sloganeering of her colleagues (“teamwork makes the dream work” [25]). And she has at least one co-worker, Rita, who thinks much the same as herself, and they can entertain themselves by rolling eyes at each other during meetings. At the end of the day, rather than feeling downtrodden or oppressed, Marisa feels that she has “tricked capitalism for one more day” (27). After all, Capital has hardly appropriated much if any of her labor power. And what would she be doing otherwise? She spends most of her spare time (and much of her “work” time, too) watching YouTube videos.

She does recognize, however, that this is a game that is not without victims, even if she is not one herself. She indulges in a measure of hypocrisy that we might call post-post-feminist. She has, after all, (she tells us) read her way through the feminist canon: “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Virginie Despentes. None of that matters” (29). Not only does she still shave her legs and buy expensive face cream, she is called in to shield her company from accusations of sexism, such as when she helps come up with a “sorry not sorry” apology for an ill-advised tweet made by a freelancer on their social media team. She has “been branded the office feminist who needs to be consulted on all gender-equity issues. I’m a token; what I read outside of work and the fundamental beliefs I fight for when I’m not too tired are used by the company to improve their image” (29). “A part of me is disgusted,” she admits, “like I’m betraying my gender” (61).

But (bull)shit gets a bit more real when Rita, who is if anything even more “discontent” than Marisa, stops coming in to work and is found to have died, perhaps by suicide. No longer is Marisa simply “betraying” an abstract concept such as “gender.” Now perhaps a real, flesh and blood person–although hardly a “friend,” as she realizes how little she knows of Rita’s life outside of work–has literalized the daily “dehuman[ization]” (49) that Marisa otherwise keeps at bay through humor and irony. It is a struggle to admit to herself that perhaps humor is not enough, and that maybe she is not “trick[ing] capitalism.” It is almost unimaginable that she might admit this to anyone else, though she fantasizes about telling her mother: 

Mom, I don’t think I’m doing OK. I don’t think anyone is entirely OK, but I think I’m a little worse than the rest. I don’t think I’m as bad as a girl I knew, named Rita, who I never told you about, but who I think killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. Goes to show you how well I knew her. Mom, I want to escape, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live this life. (129–30)

Discontent could, then, be written as tragedy, but though it definitely makes some serious points and lets off some shrewd and cutting barbs, for the most part it is cast as comedy (it is indeed often very funny), and ultimately as farce. It culminates with a company retreat, which is of course the very epitome and culmination of corporate ridiculousness (as also in the magnificent recent TV show Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat). Here, much bitter fun is made of the fact that Marisa’s boss wants her to help him find a speaker who would be “maybe a woman who can empower other women, but also men.” She considers what to answer:

I think about talks on the wage gap, on why women leave their careers to take care of their children, or on the mental burden of housework. I think about talks on destroying gender, sex, the patriarchy. I think about talks on sexism in the workplace, on the need for better applied policies on equality or on companies’ lack of real commitment to equity. I know that’s not what Ramón is looking for. (61)

In the end, Marisa herself speaks at the retreat, but rather than making the broad social commentary that she briefly envisages for the occasion, instead (spoiler alert) she takes the occasion as an excuse to spike her colleagues’ drinks with MDMA (Molly, Ecstasy). This is all very funny (it briefly reminded me of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s classic satire, Lucky Jim), not least the brief coda to this event which consists of a series of emails around the ensuing “internal investigation team-building retreat” (155), all of which are interspersed with Marisa’s automatic out-of-office reply, as she herself has blithely jetted off to Fuerteventura. But it is not exactly a critique. After all, isn’t the point that her colleagues (and maybe also the people who buy the wares that they all hawk) are already basically drugged, pictured here as zombies enthusiastically embracing the banal rewards of consumer capitalism?

But I guess the idea is that sobriety–or the cynicism and even feminist-informed self-knowledge that Marisa, for instance, instantiates–is no alibi. Surely, most of us do already know that work is shit; Marisa is far less of an outlier than she seems to think she is. We can be knowingly complicit or unknowingly so. Either way, simply knowing (however much disillusion and discontent go with it) is not enough.

Little Eyes: Remote Control and Controlled

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At the very end of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018), there is a mention of a young boy “staring at his own reflection on [a] black screen” (239). The book’s resonance with the TV series, Black Mirror, could hardly be clearer. As with Charlie Brooker’s show, Schewblin’s novel takes technology, especially the screens with which we are in constant interaction, as a point of departure for examining our all too (post)human foibles and frailties.

Also like Black Mirror, the innovation at the center of this book is hardly very far removed from what we already have with us. No jet packs, flying cars, or hyperdrive here. A “kentuki” is a digital pet or toy, not so different from the Tamagotchi that were briefly all the rage just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps crossed with the Furbies that came out around the same time. They are semi-autonomous digital robots dressed up with the accoutrements of an animal (rabbit, owl, crow, dragon. . .), for which their owners feel a sense of responsibility, and with which they can establish rather primitive communication. They can scurry around on built-in wheels but have no limbs and cannot climb, and they make noises such as squeaks or purring sounds, but cannot speak. 

The difference is that with a kentuki, there is a real live human being at the other end, controlling the creature’s movements via an Internet connection. Moreover, via a camera built into the kentuki’s little eyes, they can see you, but you cannot see them. So if you buy a kentuki, you can choose either to purchase the object itself, of which you become a “keeper,” or to buy a code that establishes a connection with and the means to operate someone else’s object, of which you thereby become a “dweller.” 

There is one connection, and one connection only, between dweller and keeper, which is broken if the dweller chooses to break it, or if the keeper either lets the thing run out of battery or otherwise disables or destroys it. Moreover, nobody gets to choose whose dweller or keeper they become: the pairings are randomly established, and could well cross cultures and continents. The dweller has a built-in on-screen translation so that they can understand a keeper’s instructions, or eavesdrop on their conversations with others. It is much harder for a keeper to receive any kind of message from a dweller, and in the book we find characters resorting to various stratagems such as Ouija boards or Morse code to do so. But while keepers tend to want to speak to and hear from the “other side” inhabited by dwellers, a dweller cannot be compelled to respond, and may well take advantage of the fundamental opacity of their role to be simply a silent voyeur of a keeper’s life. One can already imagine some of the ways in which things can go wrong.

The novel interlaces the disconnected stories of a variety of different kentukis, sometimes from the point of view of the dweller, sometimes from that of the keeper. It thereby criss-crosses the globe, establishing parallels or direct connections between cities or city pairs that lend their names to chapter titles: Lima, Barcelona, Zagreb, Beijing, Lyon, Umbertide (Italy), Antigua (Guatemala), even Vancouver (Canada). Some cities are the setting merely for brief vignettes that either break off or do not go anywhere in particular. In other cities, longer narrations develop with a number of twists and turns as either keeper or dweller develops new perspectives on their experience, but suffice it to say that they rarely end well. 

Again as in Black Mirror, a gadget initially envisaged as improving people’s lives (by providing companionship to the lonely, for instance, or allowing people to travel the world from their bedrooms) ends up complicating and even ruining them in unforeseen (if not entirely unpredictable) ways. We soon run into issues of ethics (can a keeper be accused of “abusing” their dweller? What if anything does a dweller “owe” their keeper?) and also politics (should the kentukis be “liberated” from their keepers?). Questions of epistemology (what can we “know” of what is behind the screen) and perhaps above all affect also abound. People may after all know that these are mere toys, whichever side of the screen they find ourselves on, but they soon become subject to or provoke love, desire, jealousy, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and so on. Even though dwellers cannot “feel,” the kentukis’ tactility comes to the fore, both when keepers are drawn to pet (rub, scratch, caress) their creatures, and when, for instance, a dweller from the tropics sets his kentuki on a mission to touch and even plunge into Arctic snow.

Through these little machines, subjects and selves become fragmented and globally dispersed in technological proxies and prostheses, re-embodiments that feel as real (or realer) than the sites where what one character calls the “brutish hunk[s] of meat” (92) that are our biological bodies actually reside. But all this is hardly science fiction. As with Black Mirror, we quickly grasp that Little Eyes is a reflection of a current condition that has been with us for some time.

A Girl Returned: Mothers, Sisters, Strawberries

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Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (2017) reminded me of a host of similar novels, though it also has much that is original and striking of its own. Its opening scene, for instance, has echoes (deliberate or otherwise) with the way that Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada (1945), begins. In both, we see an adolescent girl struggling up steps with a loaded suitcase to an unfamiliar apartment where (for reasons that are not fully explained) she will spend the next year or so with relatives she has never previously met, who strike her, at first at least, as hostile and even monstrous. In both cases, the host family is impoverished, and there is much emphasis on food (or its lack). But there are also strange psychological tensions and a disturbing erotic undercurrent, especially around a strong-willed older male figure who never quite fits his environment and then dramatically dies–in Laforet’s novel, at the tale’s conclusion; in Di Pietrantonio’s, more like halfway through. The protagonist is only able to negotiate all these difficulties as she becomes friends with a female figure of about the same age, who teaches her lessons in resilience and resistance.

The twist in A Girl Returned is that the family to whose strange ways the unnamed narrator has to adapt is in fact her own birth family. (In Nada, the equivalent household is packed instead with uncles and aunts.) For it turns out that she has been living with, and formally or informally adopted by, an aunt or uncle. But when the story opens, she has been forced out of that arrangement (because, she believes, her adoptive mother is ill, perhaps terminally) and is returned to a set of biological parents and siblings that she has never known. Moreover, in a test of in the influence of nurture versus nature, her aunt and uncle had raised her in a life of relative privilege, of urban sophistication, ballet lessons, and beach clubs by the sea. Her “real” family, by contrast, live hand to mouth in a much smaller town, speak dialect rather than standard Italian, are crowded in a single bedroom with only a flimsy partition to separate the young from the adult, and the children drop out of school early as they are expected to help in the constant effort to put food on the table.

If Carmen Laforet is a possible forbear for Di Pietrantonio, it is also impossible to ignore the shadow of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (likewise translated by Ann Goldstein), whose female narrator similarly looks back on a youth marked by economic hardship, with scholastic success the apparent key to social mobility. But if Ferrante’s novels revolve around a “brilliant friend” (“amica genial”), here it is the narrator’s new-found younger sister, Adriana, who calls the narrator a “genius of verbs” (78) and is subsequently in turn described as “a genius, that Adriana” (133). (It must be admitted, however, that almost any novel is bound to suffer in a comparison with My Brilliant Friend. Di Pietrantonio’s is not a bad book, but it does not have the texture and finely-judged ambivalence sustained at such length by Ferrante’s magnum opus.)

A Girl Returned is perhaps most interesting for what it has to say about memory and forgetting. Like both Nada and My Brilliant Friend, its story is told by a narrator who is recounting her experience at a much later date. (We are teased with fleeting references to what must have happened in the meantime: her youngest brother is now in an institution, for instance; Adriana may soon be getting married.) As such, she reviews and reflects on the gap between what she realizes now and what she did not know then. Thinking back, for instance, she is kinder and less judgemental towards her biological parents than she was at the time. She is drawn to moments of light amidst what was often darkness and even violence: “Every so often I think again,” for example she tells us, “of the hand of the first [mother] that for a few moments rested on my shoulder, at school. I still wonder why she placed it there, a woman so sparing of caresses” (129). Ferrante’s narrator–if we have to make the comparison–is by contrast much less forgiving of her own mother, even if she can similarly see that the older woman’s defects are the result of a struggle against a harsh and inhospitable environment for women of her class and [lack of] social status.

Softened perhaps by memory and time passing, Di Pietrantonio’s narrator is even surprisingly generous towards an older brother who is a hair’s breadth (or less) from taking advantage of her sexually. She is saved only by his sudden accidental death. Yet at the very end of the book (on its penultimate page) there is a moment of solemn mourning, as the narrator and her sister “silently [. . .] remember [. . .] him” (179) at the very beach where he had first acted on his incestuous desire, kissing her open-mouthed (53). One would have thought this would be something the narrator would want to forget.

But her greatest fear is to be forgotten. Even as she is with her biological family, she continually hopes that she may be reunited with her former mother, and has to believe that she has not been forgotten by her. She clings on to the hope that, even if her adoptive mother is not in touch with her, this must be for some good reason–perhaps because she is in hospital; or even because she is dead. If she is alive, however, she must surely be thinking about her “lost” daughter, and at some point will come to take her back. But she is not always able to sustain this hope: “In certain melancholy moods, I felt forgotten. I’d fallen out of her thoughts. There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips” (115). And when the narrator learns the true reason why she was “returned” to her biological family–her adoptive mother, who previously thought herself infertile, gets pregnant–the worst thing she can imagine doing in revenge is to erase her erstwhile mother from her memory: “I immediately decided not to see her Again [. . .]. I truly lost her, and for a few hours I thought I could forget her” (128).

Of course, she cannot fully forget, and by the novel’s end, after a rather excruciating dinner, she can see her adoptive mother as herself a victim, constrained by rules to which she only unwillingly agrees. More generally, at last the narrator seems able to let go of motherhood entirely, and certainly the idealization of mothers. It seems significant that, so far as we can tell, the narrator has not had any children. Mothers cannot protect you–if anything, whatever their best intentions, they only make things worse. It is thanks to her “alliance” with her sister that the two of them are said, at the book’s conclusion, to have “survived” (170). And together, the two sisters care for their disadvantaged younger brother, visiting him regularly, bringing him strawberries: “Then he eats them, after holding them up to the light, one by one, gripping them by the stem. He observes the tiny variations in shape, in color. I suspect that he’s trying to count all those seeds on the surface” (113). These are the relationships, and these the observations of detail and minor difference, that ultimately matter. This, perhaps, is what is worth remembering for Di Pietrantonio.

Roads Not Taken

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I ended up teaching a course on long books this semester. Here is the original proposal:

Why are long books long? Beyond its length, what makes a long book different from a short book? How is the experience of reading a long book distinct from that of reading a short book? Should long books be shorter? Should short books be longer? What, if any, characteristics do long books share? Is there a politics of extension? This course sets out to answer these apparently simple questions. Along the way, we will also consider the phenomenology of reading, and ask how we read and why?

We will begin by reading a couple of long books (and, for the sake of comparison, also a couple of short books by the same authors) together. After that, students will choose a long book of their own for further study and investigation.

But I was quite tentative and unsure about this proposal, and in fact came up with (and suggested to the department) two other possibilities, one on “Twenty-First-Century Women Writers” across various Romance languages, and the other on “Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative.” I am putting the descriptions of those potential courses below. I suspect that at first sight they would have been more attractive to many students. Indeed, one of my worries about a course with the title “long books” was that nobody would want to take it, not least because it advertises from the start that it would involve a lot of reading…

To my surprise, in fact, more students signed up than I had anticipated. Specifically (in that this was always to be a combined graduate/undergraduate course), more undergraduates enrolled than I expected to do so. And these were undergraduate students, moreover, who were overwhelmingly engaged and outspoken from the start. I had worried that they would feel intimidated and silenced by the graduate students (as sometimes happens with these crosslisted courses), but on the contrary: if anything the undergraduates were more invested and wanted to make the most of the course and what it had to offer.

(Sidenote: This is something I noticed also in the other course I taught this semester, which I also worried about at first. I thought, especially after coming back from a year and a half without teaching–because of sabbatical and leave–AI would basically have taken over. But no: I think we have a rising generation of post-Covid and AI-resistant students who no longer want to be fobbed off by a sub-standard university.)

Anyhow, these other potential courses would no doubt have been interesting and productive in their way, I like to think. But I am very glad that I went with “Long Books,” a course I had in fact long been talking about and hoping to teach, even if at the last minute I almost got cold feet about it.

For one thing, it soon become clear that the initial question–“why are long books long?”–although it may seem trivial and even jokey at the outset (after all, the obvious answer is the banal one, “because they have more words”), is in fact a real question that opens up a whole series of topics and themes. Indeed, we have ended up discussing literature and politics, psychology, economics, aesthetics, sociology, even biology… and fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of representation.

For another, the course proved challenging but also rewarding pedagogically: I asked students to read one long book that I chose (Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives), but also invited them to pick a long book of their own, which they read in tandem or parallel with the set book. “Teaching” these books that I had not read (that in some cases I had never even heard of before the start of the semester), I have never felt more like an ignorant schoolmaster. And yet now, in the last week of the semester, I have a (fleeting?) feeling that all these texts are starting to resonate with each other, as they come to their various endings.

And finally, I have a new respect for and interest in long books. Adapting Tolstoy, I do think it is true that while short books are short for mostly the same reasons, long books tend to be long in their own ways. Which is not to fetishize length for its own sake (there are plenty of bad long books), but to think about what can be done across a bigger canvas, and how long books postpone conclusions or resolutions for good reasons.

But these are the roads not taken…

1. Twenty-First-Century Women Writers

This course is a survey of contemporary women writers whose work has been translated from Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, or who are writing within a Romance Language tradition. Their books cover many different topics and styles: from history to memoir, autofiction to thriller, fantasy to horror; migration and violence, politics and family, race, class, and sexuality as well as gender, and much else. Amid all this variety, we will ask what if anything these texts might have in common. Does it make sense to talk of “women’s writing” here? Does the fact that they write or are fluent in a Romance language make this a meaningful category?

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Spanish: Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), Jawbone (2018); Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Little Eyes (2018)
French: Delphine de Vigan (France), Based on a True Story (2015); Annie Erneaux (France), The Years (2008)
Italian: Elena Ferrante (Italy), My Brilliant Friend (2012); Valeria Parrella (Italy), Almarina (2019)
Portuguese: Adriana Lisboa (Brazil), Crow Blue (2010); Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Angola/Portugal, That Hair (2015)
Romanian: Ioana Pârvulescu (Romania), Life Begins on Friday (2009)
Catalan: Eva Baltasar (Catalonia), Permafrost (2018)
English: Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Valeria Luiselli (Mexico), Lost Children Archive (2019)
German: Herta Müller (Romania/Germany), The Hunger Angel (2009)

2. Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative

This course examines various forms of displacement and mobility in Latin American narrative, from the conquest to the present. It proposes that displacement and mobility are central figures in the region’s literary imagination, continually reprised and replayed in sometimes surprising variations. From the violence of conquest to the itinerancy of capital, from the desperation of exile to the utopia of migration, the disruption of revolution or the smooth flows of neoliberalism, displacement and mobility have continually reshaped Latin American society and politics, uprooting populations and enabling lines of flight or escape, for better and for worse.

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires
Juan José Saer, The Witness
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Tununa Mercado, In a State of Memory
Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
Rita Indiana, Papi
Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn
Emiliano Monge, Among the Lost
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

2666 VI: Between Parentheses, Naturaleza Muerta

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At one point in “The Part of Archimboldi,” the 325-page section with which 2666 concludes, we find ourselves something like four, five, or even six or more levels of narrative deep, as digressions and parentheses accumulate with no clear end. We might find ourselves in danger of losing sight of the whole, embedded as we are in so much detail within detail. 

Hans Reiter, the protagonist of this section, has yet (despite his name) to become the writer Benno von Archimboldi, who gives this part its title, which itself returns us to “The Part of the Critics,” in which the critics Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton travel to Santa Teresa in search of the elusive Archimboldi. Earlier I called this quest a “macguffin”: a gimmick that merely serves to get us to Santa Teresa, site of serial femicides and setting for this book’s central “Part of the Crimes.” But as such, the search for Archimboldi is also the novel’s frame narrative, and here we return to it. The critics may never track down their man (and indeed they are not once even mentioned in “The Part of Archimboldi”), but we do ultimately discover why the novelist may have made his way to Sonora and the US/Mexico borderlands: it turns out that Klaus Haas, imprisoned suspected author of at least some of the Sonoran crimes, is his nephew. As the book ends, Archimboldi is therefore en route to Mexico. 

But before Achimboldi, there is Reiter. And if the broad plot of the novel’s frame involves the search for Archimboldi, we could say that this section tells the story of how Reiter became Archimboldi, which is equally the story of how Reiter became a writer. This narrative therefore takes us from Reiter’s birth, in 1920, in rural Prussia, child of a one-eyed mother and a crippled father who had lost his leg in the First World War, to his nomadic existence as a successful novelist and concerned uncle.

But before he becomes a writer, Reiter is a reader. Bolaño (or whoever our narrator may be… a brief Afterword to the novel, by Ignacio Echevarría, tells us that a note discovered among Bolaño’s papers states that “The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano” [1125/898]) marks Reiter’s birth with a double literary reference, to Elias Canetti “and Borges, too, I think,” who both, supposedly, claimed that “the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited” (797/639). In this case, however, these esteemed authors are wrong: the young Reiter is a creature of the water rather than the forest, and particularly a creature of the watery depths of lakes, rivers, and seas in which he likes to dive, inspired and informed by a stolen book that becomes to him something like a Bible: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Indeed, we are told that his diving and his reading are one and the same activity: “The book [. . .] was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it” (799–800/641). Reiter learns to “read” the submarine world as he learns how to name things in this world through the pages of a book, which he later copies as he fills a notebook with drawings of seaweed and their Latin nomenclature: Chorda filum, Leathesia difformis, Ascophyllum nodosum . . . . This may be no book or stories (neither Bolaño nor Reiter seem particularly preoccupied by the usual structure of beginnings, middles, and ends), but it literally provides him with a language of description and reference that provides a sense of order to a chaotic and unfamiliar environment.

Reiter never completes his schooling–his headmaster declares that “the boy wasn’t fit for school” (“no estaba capacitado para estudiar”) in 1933, “the year Hitler seized power” (810/649). But he is sent to work at the local country house of an absentee baron, where he is tasked with dusting the books in the house’s immense library, and where he meets and strikes up a strange friendship with the baron’s nephew, who spends much of his time reading in the library. The nephew, Hugo Halder, introduces young Hans to the idea of genre, and the difference between history and literature. Why, asks Reiter, does Halder seem to focus on history books in his reading? “‘It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history,’” Halder replies, “‘and I need to brush up.’ / ‘What for?’ asked Hans Reiter. / ‘To fill a void.’ / ‘Voids can’t be filled,’ said Hans Reiter” (820/657). And indeed, as Reiter starts to expand his reading beyond his cherished Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, we see exactly how his reading opens up voids rather than filling them.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, sent as an infantryman to the Eastern Front, Reither finds himself in a village on the banks of the Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine, where in an abandoned farmhouse he finds a sheaf of papers or notebook hidden in the hearth. This turns out to be the work of the farm’s former inhabitant, a Jew named Boris Abramovich Ansky, and Reiter sits himself down in the hidden spot where he found it, “until well into the night, until his joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading” (884/708). He also takes the notebook with him as he goes out and about, and as he is sent to the Crimea even as the Russians steadily advance West: sheltering from their artillery and airforce, he “pass[es] the time reading Ansky’s notebook and sleeping and watching things grow or burn around him” (925/740). He reads it from the moment he wakes up, “opening it at random” (921/737). He “ceaselessly read[s] and reread[s] Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky” (928/742). He even dreams about the thing, with a vision in which now reading and diving no longer combine so neatly as in his youth, or perhaps they combine all too well as the notebook is imagined “reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of [it] stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves” (929/743). The book has become his obsession, and he envisages it dissolving into his fluid surroundings, but not without leaving a physical residue on his body. 

Reiter’s account of what he constitutes then a third narrative level, which continues off and on for fifty pages or so, when Reiter finally returns to the village and, before he then abandons its farmhouse for good, returns Anksy’s “notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought” (929/744). He passes the book on to future readers, just as the novel itself reproduces its content for us, who become thereby readers by proxy. Indeed, we read much more of what Reiter himself reads than we ever read of what he writes, in that even by the end of Bolaño’s novel we have very little sense of the content of Archimboldi’s own work. Any sense of what counts as literature (and literary value) comes either from Reiter/Archimboldi’s discussion of the topic, or from what we understand to have moved him first to write.

Ansky’s narrative in some ways mirrors Reiter’s own story: it is a tale of nomadism and displacement occasioned by the violence that sweeps across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The difference is that, where Reiter fights with the German Wehrmacht, Ansky signs up at a young age (in fact, long before World War Two) with the Russian Red Army.

It is not long, however, before Ansky’s story is interrupted (much, again, like it itself interrupts Reiter’s). After a tour of duty in Siberia and the Arctic, he travels to Moscow where he meets a writer named Efraim Ivanov, whose tale now briefly takes over before being told roughly in parallel with Ansky’s own. We are now therefore at a fourth embedded narrative level. Ivanov’s story concerns the fate of a writer in the nascent Soviet Union, but perhaps more generally the problematic relationship between writing and politics, even (or perhaps especially) a politics of the Utopian Left. For Ivanov had long been a true believer–a “party member,” we are told, “since 1902” (888/710), even before, one must assume, the 1903 split that led to the division between Menshevik and Bolshevik. Before the 1917 Revolution he was still no more than a “promising writer” (888/711), fruitlessly in search of new literary forms to match the political experiments that were on the horizon. After the Revolution, he turns to science fiction as a genre suitable to the Communist sense of futurity. 

At this point, then, we are given a fairly detailed account both of the short story with which Ivanov makes his name, and of a subsequent novel whose reception turns out to be much more mixed. With the extended description of both texts, then, we are now entrenched in a fifth nested narrative layer. Russian dolls indeed! Moreover, the short story, entitled “The Train through the Urals,” itself revolves around a similar nested structure. It tells the tale of a boy in 1940 (i.e. some twenty years in the future at the time that the story is written), who travels to meet his grandfather, a scientist and former Red Army soldier, whom he asks “tell stories about the revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention” (890/711). The grandfather’s stories, therefore, constitute a sixth and (for now at least) final narrative level: they are stories within a story (written by Ivanov) within a story (told by Ivanov) that is in a story (written by Ansky) within a story (Reiter’s) that itself is an element of the grand story that is Bolaño’s 2666. 

We might here add, however, that 2666 itself could be described as the proliferating elaboration of a hint provided in another of Bolaño’s novels, Amulet, which is the only place in his fiction where the date 2666 is otherwise mentioned (it never once crops up in 2666 itself). And Amulet in turn expands upon a chapter (chapter four) from Part II of The Savage Detectives, as one of a series of interviews that interrupt that progression of what is arguably that book’s main plot, which involves the search for forgotten visceral realist poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Or alternatively, the fourth chapter of The Savage Detectivesmight also be seen as a development of a story first found (at least in literary/written form) in a very short section of Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco.

In other words, the grandfather’s stories of the Russian Revolution are arguably nine or even ten levels deep–or, if you prefer, within nine or ten sets of parentheses–within an over-arching narrative that concerns either the search for a poetic ur-text in the mid 1970s or the repression of Mexico’s student movement (and by extension, of all Latin America’s radical youth movements) in the late 1960s. Which is apt in so far as these same stories, asked of a grandfather by his grandson, similarly involve a return to a mythic past (which is actually the then present projected into a future that is now past), as well as the recovery of how political radicalism may be seen in years to come.

All of which shows how 2666, and Bolaño’s work as a whole, concatenates and expands, not via a process of extension but through intensification. After all, the story that this massive novel tells from beginning to end lasts less than twenty years: from November 1980, the first date to be mentioned on its first page, to some time in or shortly after 2001 (a date that occurs on page 1111), which must be when Archimboldi decides to leave for Mexico. The book expands not by linearly adding to the end, or by going back to begin ever earlier, but from the middle, via digressions that follow and mirror (and complicate) its main themes, in a search for a secret (Santa Teresa and the killings that take place there as holding “the secret of the world” [439/348]) that we will later see has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Finally, it in Ansky’s notebook, and so in this digressive expansion in medias res, this opening up or escape through and beyond the middle of the work, that Reiter comes across Arcimboldi, who we are told was an Italian artist (and a real one at that), even though the first mention of his name immediately leads to a digression about Courbet, which then is followed by a joke as told to Ansky by Ivanov (and as told to Ivanov by Soviet anthropologists at a party) about a misencounter between (French) anthropologists and natives in Borneo. . . And Ansky (or perhaps Reiter’s summary of Ansky’s account) is surprisingly brief when he returns to Arcimboldi (or Arcimboldo, as he’s also here called, and is more generally known). We learn, however, that “When he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo.” Moreover, that “the Milanese painter’s technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. [El fin de las aparencias] [. . .] Everything in everything [Todo dentro de todo], writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance” (917–18/734). The joy or happiness that Arcimboldi provokes has something to do with what here is translated as a refusal or limit to appearance, and with a strange capaciousness (everything in or, perhaps better, within everything) that might remind us of Bolaño’s own technique, as described here hitherto. Everything is (already) in everything, so no need to seek it elsewhere (isn’t this Belano and Lima’s mistake in The Savage Detectives?); everything is immediately at hand, if you know how to look.

What Ansky (or Reiter, or Bolaño) doesn’t tell us is the substance or content of Arcimboldo’s paintings. They are in fact at first sight all about appearance, about its ephemerality or fleetingness. He is known for still lifes, what in Spanish are known as “naturaleza muerta”–that is, paintings of flowers, vegetables, meat, and the like–whose elements are (wholly unnaturally) arranged to produce the effect, from a distance at least, of portraiture. Alternatively we might say that he painted portraits whose elements turn out, on closer inspection, to be merely disconnected items that bear only a synecdochic relationship to the whole that they purport to represent. Thus his portrait of a librarian comprises what turns out to be a stack of books. His portrait “The Admiral” is composed of fish and other marine animals and shells. The same goes for his more abstract pictures, such as “Summer” or “The Sense of Smell,” which turn out, upon closer inspection, to be precarious conjunctions of (respectively) elements associated with the season, or items that are fragrant or pungent in one way or another.

Again, is this not all about appearance? Or does it rather take us to the limit (the endpoint) of appearance, by showing us the forced proximities upon which resemblance rests? Is not all resemblance or representation a form of trompe-l’œil, a trick played on the eye?

And it is of course Arcimboldo, plucked from Ansky’s journal, who gives Reiter his pen name, when he finally turns to writing. But it may be that Bolaño, too, has also learned the “single lesson, but one of vital importance” that Arcimboldo teaches, a lesson that has something to do with distance and scale. The closer we get to Bolaño’s text (perhaps any text?), the more its claims to depict a broader figure dissolve, but also the more other universes and worlds open up. From the illusion of the portrait we move to stranger, vegetal worlds of what is “still life,” but not necessarily life as we know it.