Month: March 2026

Categories
Luiselli

Book 11: Train Station Disorientation in “Faces in the Crowd”

“The subway, its multiple stops, its breakdowns, its sudden accelera-
tions, its dark zones, could function as the space-time scheme for
this other novel.” (58)

This book is a difficult, obscure read. Even after going through it a few times to write this post, I still struggled with distinguishing who wrote which section

Unlike some books, where at every chapter break or perspective shift the narrator character is clearly labelled, or indicated with a markedly different style of writing The story intentionally obfuscates who is speaking since everyone uses “I” as their pronoun. You can only guess from the context clues of what’s being mentioned in each part. And the story shifts very quickly, sometimes multiple times in a single page, so you’re . And it’s not just multiple fictional perspectives, but also blending the book being written, such as how the husband says he has been “banished from the novel”, going to Philadelphia like it is a farm upstate (85).

It is a horizontal book told vertically (69), or it’s a vertical novel told horizontally (122). Or it has 3D depth to it, going underground and then back aboveground. It reminds me of when I was in Japan last year, and found myself lost multiple times in the cavernous Shinjuku and Shibuya subway stations Even getting above-ground is a challenge, and many of the exits also lead to exits that are for bus pickups and other busy intersections that you can’t cross over, exits that aren’t for you. You return back to the labyrinth, and then it turns out the exit is only accessed after deliberately passing up another exit (one of the station platforms). It was so disorienting

In the lecture, Maria Pape mentions reading the book like the Manhattan subway, and I mainly agree, but I think even still the book more complex than that. In real life, stations on the map are theoretically connected based on the lines drawn, but you have no actual sense of how it’s actually connecting spatial or temporally, i.e. how long it is from point A to B. But for this book, I could not even ground myself into what the stations were named, or how many stations there are. There is no cross-section or legend to reference like It seems that the husband and the man in the book, and the historical names, and Philadelphia and Mexico City and New York City are all connected in a way. But the true nature of the connection is unclear, and also impossible to keep track of unless you write down notes, create your own map of a subway with no map.

In that, I think the title’s namesake shines. It’s not pared down into the barest of language like Ezra Pound’s original poem, but it has replicated a different labyrinthine feel of endless subway stations with names and actions lost to obscurity. Maybe you could say it’s that poem but multiplied manifold, that there are endless apparitions in the crowd, in endless stations. Just as how Philadelphia is a city, but also the title of the novel, the intricate subway system manifests as this book (58). And by the end, I don’t even know if I found my way out.

“Why do you think Papa’s going to Philadelphia?
But where is Philadelphia?” (54)

Where indeed is Philadelphia? Is it even on the station map?

Question: To you, what does it mean for a book to be “horizontal” or “vertical” or to be viewed from below. If not related to a subway metaphor, what else comes to mind? I thought about Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and how the Tralfalmadorians have their own four-dimension perception of time and narrative. Or maybe something like Flatland, where us two-dimensional readers are face-to-face with a three-dimensional narrative?

Categories
Uncategorized

Book 10: Writing Heroes in “The Soldiers of Salamis”

After finishing this book, I felt the same that I did when finishing If on a winter’s night a traveler, the satisfying end to a meta-story and a long journey. It even ends with its own wink to itself: kust as how that book ends with the reader beginning to read the titular book, this ends with the writer about to write the completed version of The Soldiers of Salamis, with the first line: “It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad” (208). Except where If on a winter’s night a traveler is concerned about the position of readers, The Soldiers of Salamis is about storytellers.

And that got me thinking that I could analyze them in a similar method: how do they look at those. If on a winter’s night a traveler is the simple pure affirmation of being a reader, that aspiring to read leads to a fulfilling life with a happy ending. But when I read this book, I came away thinking that the goal of the storyteller is for a more noble cause. In the interview with Miralles, while Cercas is only concerned about Miralles’s narrative role as the potential soldier who spared Sánchez Mazas, a minor character in history elevated to hero, he retorts that there are some who are even more forgotten by history, his fellow soldiers: “the Garcia Segués brothers (Joan and Lela), Miquel Cardos, Cagi Baldrich, Pipo Canal, el Gordo Odena, Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol” (198). And no furter stories will be told about them, as only Miralles remembers them, and once he dies, those stories will disappear. But Cercas remarks that as long as he tells this story of the “Soldiers of Salamis” and keeps talking about them, they would all still be alive (207). From the POV of Cercas, the storyteller’s role is just as important for history as the original heroes themselves, whether that storyteller is Miralles to Cercas, or Cercas to us.

But at the same time, the story is still aware that all stories and historical narratives are faulty with the truth, fiction in some way. There’s no confirmation that everything that Cercas discovers in his research is true, with all the people he interviews having different pieces of the story. And on the meta level, the whole story of the Soldiers of Salamis is made up, with all the interviews and the connections across time being impossible as written in the lecture. Miralles denies that he’s the soldier at the end of the interview, which should doom the whole story’s narrative – but it doesn’t, because ultimately while Cercas may not want to admit it it doesn’t matter what he had answered there. I think that is the story’s challenge towards writers and storytellers, that it is still comprised of a mix of fact and fiction but still “whole and real, [a] completed true tale” (208) Because those fictional parts, like Miralles and the hypothetical soldiers standing in for those literally “unsung heroes” on the margins of history, or the imagined connections between these historical figures and the new storyteller Cercas, are just as “true” for memory and narrative passed down as the “historical facts”.

 

Question of the week, which I have been forgetting to do: what do you think of the epigraph:

The gods desire to keep the stuff of life
Hidden from us.
– Hesiod, Works and Days

Last week’s quote from Brecht about robbing banks was pretty straightforward, this less so because it clearly had Greek mythological / philosophical context that differs from this story’s context. What are the “gods”, and what is the “stuff of life” in reference to this story?

I would think of the “gods” as grand narratives structuring history, and maybe “the stuff of life” as the little acts and people that are actually crucial and load-bearing, like the soldier sparing Sánchez Mazas, so we tell stories to reveal those little things.

 

 

Categories
Piglia

Book 9: The Queer True Crime of “Money to Burn”

*post contains F and T-slurs

I enjoyed this book a lot, it was a thrilling read from start to finish and I was always interested in what would happen next in the robbery and pursuit. I also enjoyed it as it being explicitly queer with the Kid and Dorda annd those elements caught my eye; I think of hard-boiled and noir crime genres as very stereotypically hypermasculine but also hyper-heterosexual with the femme fatale being an established figure. So seeing this very gay take was cool, especially the romance of the Kid’s death scene which everyone will deservedly quote because it’s the best scene in the book.

My impression, looking at previous blog posts and reception of the movie is the heavy emphasis on the homosexual relationship between the Kid and Dorda when talking about the queer elements. But not much seems to talk about Dorda’s possible gender identity as a trans character. (It’s possible the movie removed those parts of Dorda’s story). When Dorda and Kid are jailed in Batan, they’re with the unit with “faggots. Whores, trannies, queens” (57), so the book knows these identities exist. Dorda mentions that he always hears women’s voices in his head (54), and transness and plurality are statistically comorbid. Dorda also jokes about “getting pregnant” and getting “the op” (gender reassignment surgery) after having gay sex for the first time (57)… but it doesn’t have to only be a joke.

And it doesn’t seem like it’s all just in Dorda’s head, but also acknowledged by the Kid When Malito venomously asks if the Kid and Dorda are like “man and wife”, the Kid answers, “Of course, cretin[.]” (59) An easy response to a jab, but could also be hinting towards Dorda’s identity and Kid as the only one who truly loves and understands Dorda. Though it is interesting to me that the narration persistently refers to Dorda with male pronouns, which does weaken my argument substantially…

In any case, the story does play into the trope of mentally unstable sociopathic/psychopathic queer killers as a bombastic element to add to historical retelling, a reason for why these outsiders would commit crimes to this length and be found half-naked together. The trans elements I interpreted may just play into Dorda’s troubled identity crisis, it being an easy signifier for mental illness of “wrong identity in the body”. We see this problematic trope resurface in recent times with trans school shooters being the latest media boogeyman to drum up transphobic hatred. But at the same time I think it’s cool to see this queer relationship fighting against the world in a literal blaze of glory, stealing the money and then burning it in a nihilistic rejection of the world and its systems. In the end, despite all their crimes, I think following their escapades we find the main two a lot more sympathetic than Silva or the murderous crowd. To me, the core of noir is that feeling so complicated and mixed after reading.

Also, this is not related to the main topic of the post, but I found the book more interesting before the epilogue explaining that it was true crime fiction. (I didn’t read the lecture or book jacket before reading). I thought the rhetorical flourishes that had the event being retold by various people, like the journalist Emilio, or the police chief Silva, or Dr. Bunge, looking back on the events was very cool. While being a hard-boiled noir inspired work whose genre is, in my experience, heavily shaped by its characters’ point of view and their emotional states, it had a very detached and analytical, almost omniscient tone to the play-by-play of what was happening. Which is then explained by it being true crime fiction of past events. I guess I liked the illusion more that Piglia made it all up, and also not getting the odd feeling that it could be exploitative in how it was riffing off contemporary historical murders. Especially when it was brought up in the lecture that Piglia was sued over it Bianca and Dorda’s daughter. Truly problematic fiction in all elements.

 

Categories
Manea

Book 8: Names in “The Trenchcoat”

This short story left me very confused and disoriented, with not much to grasp onto and characters also losing it, like Ioana gesturing towards hidden conspiracies and death that had existed  So it was relieving to know that the confusion and paranoia and gradual descent into madness is a feature, not a bug, of the story, when listening to the conversation video and the lecture.

One thing that stood out to me (that I was most easily able to comprehend) was how names were used. In the story, everyone has a name, like the Stoains and the Beldeanus, and Felicia. Everyone except the Guileless One who I’ll come back to in a bit. The names in the story are character data. We identify and distinguish characters based on their names, Your name is all your personal information, and since the totalitarian government holds all their names and their data, it can control them by holding power over their names. Even if the system has lagged and has become what Ali describes as “apathetic”, and just sorting and filing everything away, “files, files and more files, hardly ever used” (239-240), that threat still looms. Everyone still has to fear the “means, the motivations, the machine” (240). It makes me think of the panopticon, the system where everyone thinks they’re being watched at all times, developing paranoia and forced to self-police.

 

And meanwhile, Manea deliberately leaves the government nameless. While he is writing about the Romanian authoritatian government,  they are just “the Institution” (239). The “trenchcoat” is emblematic of this – it must belong to a human, but that person is both everywhere and nowhere. It is likely an informant who “uses the apartment without permission of the tenants” (192), but no one knows. You can’t assign a name or data to it, it’s a ghost in the system that haunts the cast. To be nameless is to be exempt from that scrutiny, to not exist within the system, either by being the system itself or being outside it.

By the end of the story,  two people have disappeared. Or rather, their names and identity have.
“A focused, steady voice, and a happy laugh, incognito” (259). She begins as Dina, or Lady Di, but that all disappears after her mental break, and she is now just “the sick woman”. And so, too, is the one unnamed member of the two couples. He was Felicia’s husband, or the Guileless One, the Learned One, the Researcher, the Child, the Kid, the Simpleton; all these titles bestowed on him by others, including the author and his narrative that positions him as The Narrator. He already had one foot out the door, by not being being named in the story. But at the end, he has now fully discarded all those titles. They are now just “the two”, “the old friends from childhood” (258), and they do idyllic things like go for walks and chat. I think that’s why the two wear raincoats in the last scene (257), as a nod to what the “trenchcoat” is, the empty clothing. It is called “the time of absence” (259), and I see it as that feeling of liberation.

Though that does lead me to my question: just what exactly is the liberation that Dina and the man feel at the end, a “absolute, cosmic, intangible assurance” (258-259)? Of course nothing has changed politically in the world; is it just a mental shift, and rejection / escape from the world? Or is it some other metaphorical plane beyond the authoritarian system? Maybe it simply cannot be named.

 

Spam prevention powered by Akismet