Tag Archives: characters

Week 12: My Tender Matador

I remember being told last week that we had made it to the end of the “linguistically difficult” texts. After reading this, I’m not sure about that. I’m certainly not complaining, though: my favourite part of this book was the way it was written, however hard it may be to follow along with the dialogue at times. There were several points at which I wished I could check the Spanish original for comparison, since even in translation the language is complex and full of subtle details. In the conversation video, Juan Poblete refers to the style as “popular baroque” in how it integrates “high” and “low” language, but this is hardly a binary opposition of two discrete modes; rather, it’s written on a strange continuum of poetic, conversational, romantic, political, confessional, comedic, and pornographic, each of which is coloured with heavy irony. As any literary critic would point out, it really brings out the artificiality of all language and social performance while simultaneously revealing the absence of any essential core hiding beneath these performances.

Though attention isn’t drawn to it in the same way as in Lispector or Menchú, I found the voice of the narrator played an interesting role throughout this book. Due to the lack of quotation marks or line breaks during dialogue, it can be hard to tell where the characters’ voices end and the narrator’s begins, but there were points where the narrator seemed to take a partisan position in the story’s conflicts. For instance, the topic everyone seems to stumble over when discussing this book: the Queen on the Corner’s gender identity. Going by her description throughout the majority of the story, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but a transgender woman, however anachronistic the term may be. The way she is portrayed, both through her own voice and the narrator’s, is so overwhelmingly feminine that it can be extremely jarring when other characters address her as “mister” or with “he/him” pronouns (which she always takes in stride, showing far less discomfort than I felt). Yet, there is an interesting exception near the beginning, where she is briefly referred to with masculine pronouns in the narrator’s voice for what I believe is the only time in the book (“All he needs is his Prince Charming, whispered the old ladies standing on the sidewalk across the street, watching him through an open window as he flitted about like a hummingbird”). If it weren’t for this one slip, it would be far easier to interpret the narrator as objective, but here it is revealed that the narrator is as susceptible to social perceptions (such as those of the old ladies) as any other character. As such, the Queen’s femininity becomes not a hidden yet inherent aspect of her identity confirmed by the objective voice of the narrator but an interested, asserted, even revolutionary position, understanding of which is reserved to an exclusive in-group including her, her loca friends, the narrator (for most of the book), and, towards the end, Carlos (there’s an interesting parallel here: as the Queen builds revolutionary consciousness through her association with Carlos, he too is introduced into her own world of revolutionary sexual politics). And, for a brief moment, this revolutionary assertion is successful, as Pinochet is “fooled” into perceiving her as a woman, again paralleling the momentary revolutionary assertion by the Patriotic Front that later takes place on the very same road.

Did others notice points at which the narrator intervened in the story in an active, interested way?

Week 9: The Hour of the Star

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I’ve always been fascinated by the country of Brazil. It’s the largest country in Latin America in terms of both area and population and is in some ways the South American equivalent to the United States: similar size, multiculturalism, and political/economic/racial divides. Yet, despite its huge population and international influence in the domains of music and sports, Brazil seems to have a surprisingly small international literary presence. There really aren’t any Brazilian writers with the same level of global success and canonization as Márquez, Borges, or Neruda (maybe with the exception of Paulo Coehlo, who could hardly be considered capital L “Literature”). Plus, it stands out to me that Lispector, both the only Brazilian representation in this class and one of the few Brazilian authors I had previously heard of (alongside Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado), wasn’t even Brazilian by birth but a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated at a young age – which I suppose further supports the parallel between Brazil and the United States, another country defined by immigrants.

Now, onto the actual text: I could tell from the opening sentence I was going to love this book. There were so many themes throughout that appealed to me immensely: the blending of the cosmic and the mundane, the ambiguous relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist, the existential tension between affirmation and nihilism, the ironic narrative style where nothing can be taken at face value, social commentary that doesn’t explicitly make its position clear, and so many seemingly throwaway lines with massive implications. Despite its short length, the sheer complexity of it all has honestly made me feel like I’m not qualified to give any general interpretation after only one reading, so the most I can offer are initial impressions that barely even touch on some of the themes that I found most intriguing.

The portrayal of capitalism in this book was very different from what I had expected. In contrast to One Hundred Years of Solitude and next week’s I, Rigoberta Menchu, both of which show capitalist exploitation from the perspective of production, Lispector instead focuses on the psychological effects of capitalist consumption. Perhaps Macabea is exploited in her work as a typist, yet the real sense of exploitation comes instead as her role as a mindless consumer whose personality and ideals are shaped by market propaganda. Yet she herself hardly seems distressed by this situation, so lacking in self-awareness that “she didn’t even know she was unhappy” – so who are we to make that judgement for her?

Adding further complexity to Macabea’s ambiguous position is the odd figure of the narrator, Rodrigo S.M. If Macabea is completely lacking in self-awareness, Rodrigo is self-aware to a fault, so self-aware that he can barely write without losing track of his narrative in questions about himself in relation to it. At many points where his narration came to the forefront, he reminded me of the similarly neurotic narrator from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground who also seems to stumble over himself in an attempt to justify the act of writing at all. Yet, Rodrigo is clearly not Lispector, as is ironically alluded to in his dismissal of female writers near the beginning (the story of a woman told through the voice of a man written by a woman!). His biases call the entire character of Macabea into question: she is only ever portrayed through his mediation and it can be hard to tell whether any aspect of her description can be taken as more than Rodrigo’s own reflection or counterpart.

I’m already well over the word limit so I’ll have to cut my thoughts short here. As for a question: do you think there is any theme, statement, or message in this book that can be taken at face value as the voice of Lispector, or is everything called into question by its ironic, ambiguous style?

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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I read One Hundred Years of Solitude during the winter break two months ago – spoiler warning for those who haven’t finished since it’s hard to separate the first half from the second in retrospect. Some of the details of the plot have faded from my mind, yet the overall effect remains: this is a beautiful book. This didn’t fully hit me until the last chapter; though I enjoyed it immensely the full way through, the final scene was like waking up from a dream and discovering that I had practically been in a trance for the past few weeks. As cliché as it is, there really is no better word to describe it than “magical.” The whole thing is infused with this sense of playful wonder and it has quickly cemented itself among my favourite books ever.

A defining characteristic of many of my favourite books is the elevation of the mundane to incredible through literary elaboration; Ulysses is my favourite book of all time yet almost nothing actually happens in it. Márquez does the opposite and achieves a similar effect. So much takes place throughout the century this book covers, yet it can feel like nothing happens at all. Even the most marvelous events are portrayed in the same deadpan historical tone and no character is given much inner development; at times, it barely feels like a work of fiction at all. Despite this, it is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. There really is something childlike about it all; it’s like seeing the world without all those preconceptions that we’ve picked up, freed from expectations of reality, morality, modernity and narrative for a smooth plane in which everything is equally possible and nothing is elevated above anything else.

While reading, I kept trying to figure out who the real protagonist of the story was. Early on I figured out that José Arcadio Buendía and Colonel Aureliano Buendía were decoys; as important as they are in certain sections, both are absent for too much of the narrative to fulfill this role in the bigger picture. I then convinced myself that Úrsula was the real hero for how long she persisted and kept order while others came and went. This theory was also disappointed when she too died well before the ending. My next option was Pilar Ternera, who, though seemingly marginal, lives longer than anyone else, first appearing in chapter 2 and not dying until the last chapter. Or was it Melquiades, the mysterious traveller from the opening chapter who survives two deaths to reappear as a spirit and ultimately predict the demise of Macondo in the final scene? None of these possibilities was really satisfying. Ultimately, a book as decentered as this one has no need for a protagonist; if anything, Macondo itself is the protagonist. Or, if we can permit a bit of pretension, maybe that titular spirit of Solitude who comes to visit everyone sooner or later is the real central figure. Maybe a stretch for any other book, but for one such as this where anything is possible, why not?

Who or what do others think could best be characterized as the “protagonist” of this book?