Indra
In the heart of Berlin, close to the glass dome of the Reichstag, lies memorabilia for human's capacity for evil. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe invites its visitor to walk around the seemingly unordered black concrete slabs. As one walks from one edge to another, the pieces increase in size, engulfing its visitors. The outside world gradually loses its hold. Everything is mute. One could not help but wonder at the cruelty that the monument commemorates; the scale, the scope, and the industrious quality of it. As one emerges, regaining sunlight and the outer world, one question usually bursts at that moment: are we a creature of light or darkness?
Voluminous tomes of literature try to answer that question. One most prominent example is The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The classic inquiry of the nature of evil has entered the collective consciousness to such an extent that every subsequent quest examining power relations in closed society would garner comparison with it. Here comes A Luminous Republic, a story involving a group of children transgressing towards violence in an imaginary small city in South America. From the onset, the shadow of Lord of the Flies looms over this novel. However, putting this book so close to Golding's doesn't do Andres Barba justice.
For once, the striking originality. The plot of this novel is as unpredictable as the flow of the River Ere, the primordial river where the imaginary city of San Cristobal is set. It begins with the narrator in the present day recounting the day he moved to San Cristobal twenty years ago. Another aspect of Barba's deftness is the decision to frame the book in flashbacks and flash-forwards. The framework enables a pseudo-documentary style. The crux of the story, the fate of the thirty-two “feral children,” gains a layer of analysis. The reader can witness how time distance and survivorship reshape history and meaning. Despite the movement between different time frames, the chapters flow with an immediacy. One can read this slim book in one sitting, with bated breath at the end.
There is an element frequently occurred in Barba's works: the cruelty and mysteriousness of children. The book's central assertion falls along the line, that to expect children to be creatures of innocence is naïve and is a projection from adults trying to assert that their beginning is purity. Another theme in this book is the contrast between order and chaos, hierarchy and anarchy, and between society and individual freedom. A novel of ideas, disguised as a documentary, disguised as a conflict between an anarchic group of children and orderly society, this book will stay inside the readers' head long after they read it.
In A Luminous Republic, Andres Barba writes a slim, compulsively readable novel that would leave the reader thinking for twice as long as the time they took to read it.
I love The Shadow of The Wind and the city of Barcelona, so this is a biased review. What I like: the evocative sentences that bring you the atmosphere, the smell, and the idea of Barcelona and its surrounding, the cast of characters first recounted in The Shadow of the Wind, and the bibliophilia that permeates this book.
However, I find that the new cast of characters is not as distinctive as those of The Shadow of The Wind. The officer Hendaya, for example, is might as well Fumero in a new uniform. Alicia Gris and Victoria Urbach seem to come from the same mold, the classic femme fatale stereotype. Even Victor Mataix and his books serve as mere ornaments and are not as central as Julian Carax and his writings in The Shadow of The Wind.
What makes me put four stars instead of three stars is that the book entered into my dream the night after I finished it. I only remember fragments of the dream: the nooks and alleys of Barcelona, the tram in Tibidabo, the brown effigy that is the Montjuic Castle, and the sense of nostalgia the moving images evoke. It speaks volumes to the power of Zafon's writing. It's as if he is a spatiotemporal magician that brings with him all the time the city of Barcelona that he can conjure any time by a flick of the pen. The world will miss Carlos Ruiz Zafon, but the city he loves, the characters he wrote will stay in our memory and imagination. They might materialize in our castles of dream tonight.
In the rainy season, there is a certain kind of wind bringing the promise of rain. It is often accompanied by a musty smell, wet and prickling; Hurricane Season ushers in the same sensation. The book, aptly named, unleashed the same heat, charge, and effluvia that one experiences the moment before the storm.
The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse. It was the body of The Witch, a central figure of this novel, who is also an enigmatic and ingenious creation. Readers know The Witch through tell-tales and the village gossip. Nearly everything about her is fabulous and inexplicable: her mysterious conception and childhood, how she wanders around always clad in black clothes and veil, her role as the village's witch doctor, her rumored hidden treasures, and ultimately the story of her death. The novel continues Rashomon-like from different perspectives, but the crux of the tale is The Witch. She is a symbol of a time and a place: the narco period in a small village of La Matosa in Mexico.
As a novel that begins with death, it is no surprise that violence takes center stage in this book. The village of La Matosa was always a backwater place where inequalities and patriarchy persist. However, development in the forms of the new highway and oil fields exacerbates the situation by bringing with it narcotics and prostitution, problems that money attracts. Violence explored in this book comes in many forms: femicide, homophobia, abuse, and casual violence engendered by machismo and toxic masculinity.
Despite the despair and the grisly details of violence that fill the book, it is still a beautiful work. Fernanda Melchor writes with bold virtuosity and with a peculiar musicality. Chapters in this book take the form of a single unbroken paragraph. Run-on sentences weaved together creates a striking soundscape that is sensuous and evocative. Each consecutive chapters give voice to local characters that make them corporeal and distinct. However, the most remarkable quality of this book is the visceral description of life in La Matosa. There, poverty and provincial backwardness are exposed in sensuous detail. Everything there smells: rotten fish, unwashed bodies, brackish water, and cigarette smokes. Profanities are as much an element in this book as are eggs in pancakes. Fernanda Melchor does not want to merely show La Matosa; she barrages our senses to present a small village in Mexico where violence is the daily menu.
In Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor writes a realist work that is so vivid and evocative that no other word could describe how she does it but magic.
Imagine the Earth suddenly having two moons, but with no immediate discernable impact upon gravity, sea waves, or animals. There would be speculations, conspiracy theories, panic buying, and governments trying to appease their citizens without having any idea what to do. Despite not knowing what to do or think, life would go on.
The kind of life that would go on in the above scenario is the center of Weather, a new book by Jenny Offill. Lizzie, the protagonist, is a librarian whose side job is answering emails for a doomsday podcast. The world she lives in is the world of climate calamity and Donald Trump. People are anxious yet don't know what to do about the former, and react strongly to the latter. Both are extraordinary events. Life could not be the same again afterward.
Weather does not speculate nor predicts how future society would be. The book, instead, provides a glimpse of the collective consciousness trying to process these extraordinary events. It circumnavigates the paralysis, confusion, and vehement desire for normalcy that people feel when facing something new and dreadful. The narrative thread of the book is simple. So does the short, fragmentary paragraphs that comprise the book. However, this simplicity is deceptive. It is a device that Jenny Offill cunningly uses to demonstrate time under suspension, to exhibit the feeling of dread and hopelessness despite the knowledge we amassed.
The book is a timely read during this pandemic. The similarity between how people react to it and how people behave and think in this book is uncanny. Consequently, one could argue that this novel is more about how humanity reacts towards adversity than it is about the disaster or circumstances that prompts the reaction. The term “weather” here relates more to the verb than to the noun. Reading this book, one could understand why March 2020 feels like a year, yet April 2020 passes by in an instant.
Weather is a smart book, full of tender humor that deftly displays humanity's strengths and failings.
When Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I immediately remembered another laureate who won a decade ago. The connection was more of an intuition than a logical conclusion. Both were women authors who are also literature icons both in their country of origin and in Germany. But what I feel connect them the most is the longing to escape the entrapment of boundaries set up by ideologies and state power that is apparent in their works.
Herta Muller writes mostly about Romania under Ceausescu. Her early work, Nadirs, is a short story collection that reflects the hardships and paranoia of living under a totalitarian regime. It is only available in Romania after redaction by the state. A few years later, she emigrated to Germany and wrote masterpieces such as The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel. This book is an early work, but it foretells her powerful prose, evocative depictions, and her frequent motifs: nails, hair, sack, gunshot, and suicide.
The Fox was Ever the Hunter chronicles the lives of Adina, Clara, and Paul during the last months of the Ceausescu regime. They are subject to state surveillance due to their friend's subversive activities. The secret police, the Securitate, made their presence known by breaking into Adina's apartment, and gradually mutilate the limbs of the titular fox fur. One day the tail, the next one foot, and so on. If war makes monsters of men, then throughout the novel, we learn that state surveillance makes a prison of a nation and the people, wardens.
Such is the craft of Herta Muller that the paranoia and claustrophobia are palpable. The book is leaden with the weight of betrayals, with the knowledge that actions and words are recorded, archived for future use. In a totalitarian society, inanimate objects hold power, denounce their objectiveness, and swear their allegiance towards the supreme leader. A passage at the beginning of this book illustrates the corrosive fear that such a familiar and ubiquitous object instigates:
“The newspaper feels rough to the touch, but the dictator's forelock stands out smooth and glossy, slick and shiny with pomade. The big flattened curl pushes all the smaller curl to the back of the head, where they get swallowed by the paper. On the rough newsprint are the words: the beloved son of the people.
Everything that shines also sees.
The forelock shines. It peers into the country every day, and it sees.”
To complete the picture of life under Ceausescu, Herta Muller also chronicles members of the society such as the tinsmith, fishers, factory director, school teachers, and even a member of the Securitate. As the story goes, however, readers will not be able to distinguish who are the victims and who are the collaborators. The system of corruption and oppression has been so ingrained such that when the dictatorship topples, life does not improve that much. “Because the tanks are still scattered throughout the town, and the bread line in front of the store it still long.”
The Fox was Ever the Hunter is an authoritative account of life under totalitarianism. An early masterpiece that nonetheless showcases how Herta Muller “with the frankness of proses and the concentration of poetry, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”
In the heart of Ubud, I was sipping a cup of Balinese coffee when the music from the cafe's speakers transuded into my consciousness. The rhythm felt hypnotic, synths smooth as honey. The vocalist's pitch filtered my mind with memories not yet created of nostalgia and abandonment. It was a melancholic song, the kind that fits into the playlist I curated under the name ‘Smoky Pub Jukebox' along with the works of Tame Impala and Cigarettes After Sex. Not a good song to listen to in a public space.
It was ‘Always Forever' by the once-couple duo Cults. If you scour Youtube, you will find several videos juxtaposing the music with clips from similarly melancholic movies. One poster combines the music with Buffalo ‘66, another with a now-forgotten Heath Ledger movie, Candy (look it up, both the film and the combined clip). I imagine that once the movie adaptation comes out, some people, heartbroken and downtrodden, would set this music to Normal People.
Oh, this book. This book. Normal People by Sally Rooney. Firstly, the cover: two people hugging each other inside a partially opened tin box. Secondly, the epigraph, taken from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda:
It's one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.
I got an A1, he says. What did you get in German?
An A1, she says. Are you bragging?
You're going to get six hundred, are you?
She shrugs. You probably will, she says.
Well, you're smarter than me.
Don't feel bad. I'm smarter than everyone.
Sprawling, thought-provoking, mildly frustrating, but more importantly: original. A modern contrivance that mass-produces interpretations. Reading this reminds me of the first time I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Recommended for people who consider plot or characters are not necessary for a novel.
The Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century is under review for fomenting Colonialism, Racism, Fascism, and the multitude of bad-isms that followed. The promised utopia ruled by reason and devoid of superstition grew out to be a world that occasionally forgets its humanity, leading to, among others, the horrors of the two great wars. Now, we are verging on another age of reason. Advancement in the fields of AI and genetics hints at another utopia that is not without its horrors. It seems that human endeavors towards transcendence will inevitably birth monsters and monstrosities.
Horror, monsters, and monstrosities are the ubiquitous elements of this blisteringly bizarre novel. However, the abominations roaming this book differ remarkably from those that inhabit our pop culture. In a remote Argentinian sanatorium in 1907, a group of doctors intends to examine the nine-second window during which a severed head finally loses consciousness. They lured patients seeking cancer treatment and devised a specialized guillotine for the experiment. Needless to say that the doctors did not wait for the subjects to expire by natural causes. They recorded what the decapitated head said (or did not say) during the nine-second window and glean what lies across the limit of consciousness. “Si,” “welcome,” and “children last” are some of the answers. It is at this point that readers witness a testament to Larraquy's craftsmanship with which he could fashion a malleable alloy of horror and humor that is intact and cohesive.
Larraquy also possesses an admirable self-assurance that enables him to terminate one part of the narrative thread so suddenly and propels the readers to modern day Buenos Aires, a hundred years apart. Here the path through transcendence was through art. An avant-garde artist encroaches the limits of art through pain and the transformation of the human body. In this section, surrealism, absurdity, and horror are up a notch. In the hand of Roque Larraquy, the overall effect is startling, original, and impressive.
Let's end this review with an explanation of the eponymous plant. Farmers cultivate comemadre as a measure against pests. Its sap produces microscopic ravenous animal larvae which would soon consume from the inside rodents that eat the plant. In the first section, the doctors used it to dispose of patients after the horrific experiment. The artist in the second part of the novel employed it to arrange a delayed amputation. Transcendence and horror. Comemadre.
I have always been partial to the history of World War I. This feeling owes itself partially to the memory of travels through the ignition point of the Great War. Another reason is that the present socio-political climate feels like it is just a continuation of World War I.
The book presents the dying days of the Austrian Empire vis a vis the Habsburg Monarchy. Joseph Roth's exposition is sumptuous and luminous, glittered with sensory details. The inner landscape is tended well too, painting characters that are vivid and multilayered.
What I didn't expect was that a part of this book exhibits tendencies and sensibilities of a Victorian novel. I feel that such quality clashes with the modern-ish subject of this novel, namely the end of an era and a way of life. However, I still think this is a recommended read if you are curious about that particular period of history.
A common theme runs through the three novellas: disappearance, secrets, and life's and identity's vicissitudes. In Afterimage, the protagonist obsesses about the life of a reclusive photographer, tracing his last act of disappearance. Suspended Sentences, my favorite, unfolds the childhood of two brothers surrounded by a strange cast of characters whose sudden abandonment left them devastated. In Flowers of Ruin, narrative threads and figures appear and disappear, crisscrossing the narrator's adolescence and memory.
In the Netflix series The Crown, a later episode in the first season tells of Winston Churchill who returns over and over again to paint his goldfish pond at his residence. In an emotional scene, Churchill realizes that the goldfish pond reminds him of his daughter Marigold who died an infant. In the same vein, Patrick Modiano's stories recur to Paris at the time of the Occupation. His father (of Jewish background) was detained but narrowly missed deportation due to intervention from a friend. The friend, it later turned out, involved himself and Modiano's father in black market dealings during the war years. Not only that, the group he dealt with in the black market collaborated with the Gestapo.
In his works, Modiano tries to explain how a person could disappear without a trace. But it seems that the erasure of moral boundaries almost always precedes that of identity. A critic compares Modiano, whose trademark involves subtlety and restraint, to a pianist. Reading that, I immediately remember Phillip Glass, whose compositions trace and retrace itself like figure skaters. Their works feel like magic: minimum key changes, subtle progression, but haunting and devastating nonetheless. Maybe they are; disappearances are magician's work, after all.
The end of the year always fills me with melancholy. Well, probably that word does not adequately describe the feeling. Fortunately, the magical coasts of Wales provide an apt, devastatingly beautiful term: hiraeth — acute longing for a home-place or time to which you cannot return and without which you are incomplete. I suppose that the universal milestone for the passage of time reminds you of times lost, chances foregone, and opportunities closed.
It was in this state of mind that I read In the Café of Lost Youth by the Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano. Immediately, I know that this writer understands the taste of hiraeth. There is an ephemeral quality of his prose, his descriptions, and characters. He depicts Paris in the 1950s in a vivid but escaping details, like a blurred black-and-white photograph that bears no resemblance to today's reality. Imagine the paintings of Edward Hopper. There, the loneliness, the sense that what we see could fade at any moment.
The book is about the people of the Condé, a cafe frequented by drifters, shady characters, people who escaped their past. The focus falls upon the character “Louki,” a woman who inspires curiosity and compassion from the Condé's patrons. Modiano presents the character beautifully in a haunting first sentence of this novella: “There were two entrances to the café, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows.”
In a structure similar to Rashomon, the reader experiences the story through the eyes of four narrators, including Louki herself. However, Louki, the story, the Condé manage to escape. This is the center of Modiano's art: the refusal that a person, a place, a period could disappear without a trace, while simultaneously knowing that they would eventually. We try to preserve time or home-place with the futility of holding or retaining the shape of moving water. Patrick Modiano's prose is a gentle perfume. A whiff of fig, the memory of summer from long ago.
With subtlety, and with his characteristic emotional palette, Patrick Modiano hints at Paris in the 1950s: the city and the story of its lost youths.
Michaelangelo fears the retribution from the Pope because he accepted a commission from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
An Ottoman craftsman refuses to forge a sword because its design resembles an infidel cross.
What is the point of progress if writing about the past is in effect conveying the present, or predicting the future?
Such was the state of the East-West/Self-Other relationship in our time.
In a voice that at the same time candid, quirky, yet budding with uncommon wisdom, Sayaka Murata illustrates the absurdity of submitting into society's demand.
Travel shows often illustrate Japanese exoticism through the country's unique yet mouthwatering delicacies. In one of the shows, one can imagine a scene in which a newcomer to Japan confronts and tries to eat a raw octopus. The reader of this novella would experience the same thing as that newcomer. At first, curiosity, and then discombobulation, but just before the last swallow: a sense of wonder and a craving for more of this unmistakably Japanese treat.
Dasa Drndić writes with unflinching honesty. Her digression ranges from Soviet chess players, Latvian Nazi sympathizers, the appropriation of Jewish property, mortality and sanity. There is no focus in this excursive novel. Like life itself, it should be taken as a whole. But there is a voice that will guide you through the madness of life and history. That of Andreas Ban (which is the voice of Dasa herself): authoritative, erudite, yet filled with disguised tenderness.
A week after the official start of the Indonesian presidential campaign, news broke that supporters of the incumbent allegedly assaulted one of the opposition's spokesperson. While the public was still questioning the verity of this allegation, the opposition side held an unexpected public conference. Led by the candidate himself, the campaign team affirmed the accusation and vehemently criticized the government for allowing the assault. They even published the photographs of the bruised spokesperson. The news pulled the nation's attention. Controversies ablaze, verdicts issued, and conspiracy theories were thrown around.
Strangely, the voice of reason that took credence came not from the realm of law or politic. It was from the field of cosmetic surgery that the truth unfolded. A cosmetic doctor analyzed the pictures, allegedly the evidence of the assault, and concluded that the injuries and swellings were not from a physical attack, but rather from cosmetic surgery. He cited the symmetry of the bruises and their similarities with the typical effects of a facelift or similar operations. A further investigation supported this theory. The police did not find any evidence that the spokesperson was admitted to a hospital in the area, contrary to the spokesperson's account. Pictures of the spokesperson being treated in a place resembling a beauty clinic emerged. Confusion reigned. But increasingly, the “the spokesperson was lying” side gained more followers. Ultimately, both parties demanded the truth and pressed the spokesperson to hold her silence no more.
The rest, as they say, is history. The spokesperson's name is Ratna Sarumpaet, a former human rights activist in the 90s. In a dramatic confession, she ultimately refuted the assault allegation. She confessed to having cosmetic surgery, the aftermath of which she disguised as the result from an attack. Maybe because of shame, possibly to avert disapproval, who knows, she hid the surgery from her family's knowledge, thus sparking the rumor and, probably the most prominent political drama of that year. For almost two weeks, she had deceived the nation of 250 million people — a great impostor.
It is probably a divine providence that in the period this incident happened I was also reading this excellent book. The novel is about another, even greater impostor, Enric Marco, who fooled people from Spain and abroad to believe that he was involved in an anti-Franco and anti-Nazi resistance, as well as a victim of the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen.
Throughout the novel, Cercas examines the life of Enric Marco. He charts Marco's life from birth to the present. Exposing the parts that are blatant lies, providing theories and pieces of evidence that might explain the truth. One of the qualities of this book is that the extraordinary life journey Marco claims for himself and the more likely version both explain Spain's history and how its people confront the bleak history of the nation and the continent.
In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, which cost dearly for both sides, the Spanish population more or less accepted the authority of Franco. People from the losing side buried their identities, and only rarely they form a resistance. At that time a great war was engulfing Europe, claiming most of the nation's attention. Franco managed to navigate a delicate balance during the war, not committing much to either side and led Spain relatively unscathed after World War II. During his reign, Spain also saw significant economic growth and stability.
However, Franco Spain is still a dictatorship. There were killings and kidnappings. Oppression on the free press. The dictatorship used civil and military apparatuses to maintain authority. Some people were behind this oppression because there was no other choice. Some willingly joined. After 40 years, the dictatorship died with Franco's death. Miraculously, Spain transitioned peacefully into democracy shortly afterward. Some historians believed that the peaceful transition is possible because of restraint from both sides. The pro-Franco faction restrained from seizing power (which would have faced a massive opposition) and the anti-Franco restrained from heavily persecuting people who enabled the dictatorship.
For the Spanish population, the period after Franco was the time for reinvention. People involved in the dictatorship started to tailor another history for themselves, distancing themselves from Franco. This is the moment that Enric Marco used to slip his self-mythology. Cercas posits that at that point a majority of the population felt ashamed of themselves for complicity and more likely to revere a hero figure that maintained clandestine resistance.
Moreover, the novel explains, that Marco's deception was facilitated further by the authority (underline “author”) of the victim and witness. People (arguably as it should) do not dare to question the victim. We are also less likely to undermine accounts of which we know little. This double blackmail Marco used effectively to his advantage.
Another quality that I like about this book is the philosophical ramifications of fiction, retelling, and authorship that the book explores engagingly. The book, for example, poses the question: if we understand Marco, would that entail that we identify with him, however temporarily, and through identification, does it mean that we, even for the minutest moment, lower our resistance towards evil? This novel provides convincing arguments for both sides, even if Cercas chooses one side over the other.
While the book is heavy (literally and figuratively), the chapters fly by without significant obstacle. Even the essayistic parts of the novel are digestible and engaging. It is a magnificent feat that Cercas could unmask Enric Marco in fiction without a lie.
Ratna Sarumpaet and Enric Marco are both an impostor at certain points in their lives. As to what enables their fiction, readers could glean from this masterful novel. Reading this book is like diagnosing ourselves on why we are easily susceptible to hoaxes and fake news. A timely read in this election year.
With the mastery of a true storyteller, Javier Cercas unmasks the fiction of Enric Marco and deliberates the nature of self-mythology, authorship, retelling, and the role of art in this post-truth world.
What can we tell about our brothers, our sisters, parents? If I were to write about my family, the pages resulted from that endeavor would not amount to a decent size book or even novella. And if I were to compose only the truth about them, then nothing but blank pages. This is not about the power of one's perception; it is that with family, people tend to put the best version of themselves. Even if that version is mainly fictitious, dredged out from long-buried ideals.
A few lines from this novel provides motivation for people's behavior around their family:
“One often lies to and deceives the person one loves most in order to preserve their love, or to protect them... The protecting lie is the one you admit to when there's no longer any need to protect, and the lie intended to preserve love is the one you never reveal.”
Immediately after I read these sentences, arrives in my mind unannounced, episodes that, looking back from the privilege of the present, exemplify the very essence of those lines. One lives family in the present but can only understand it retrospectively.
One needs memory to facilitate that time travel to the past. However, memory is an extraordinarily poor instrument. It is often biased and incomplete, tampered with present sentiments or censured with denials. Moreover, it is a more limited resource than we would like to admit. We do not know when the person to which the memory attach would pass away, nor when the mind in which it resides would cease to function.
Such are the obstacles the narrator confronts when he tries to make sense of his life and family. At the age of nine, when he was fast asleep, two policemen came and arrested his father. The event commenced the slow unraveling of family secrets that would upend his world. The facade of normalcy crumbled, and he learned that his father was a swindler and a compulsive liar. His father had been absent for several years prior, living a frivolous life that gradually descended into disarray. A “fly-by-night” father whose egotism dictates that his worse nature triumphs over the more benevolent potentials. The arrest, however, was only a prelude to a larger mystery: why his mother put up with her husband's behavior for so long.
The mother's character might explain part of the enigma. Contrary to the father, she is stoic, aloof, mostly rational, and she possesses a nearly limitless emotional capacity that helps her through the marriage, loneliness, and, as we learn later, so much more. In fact, it is fair to say that the book is an attempt by the narrator to understand her. To peer into her world and glimpse the truth. A mission that is increasingly critical as she descends into dementia.
Diving into the past is as if swimming through murky water. Marcos Giralt Torrente, through the narrator, warns the reader at the beginning of the novel that there is no complete construct of memory.
“Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events. What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences. We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once. You might be able to give some sense of the intensity of those feelings, but not the whole diverse chain of connections of which they were composed. With the passing of time, feelings grow more impersonal, and their very impersonality renders them impenetrable.”
Such a masterful description of the limitations of remembering, and an excellent set piece for the tonality of the rest of the novel. The narrator tells, reminisces, and analyzes the past seamlessly. Reading this book is like entering a smoky bar, suffused with cigarette smoke, brimming with conversations which you hear as murmurs, details lost in the dim light.
To write about Spanish literature, set in Madrid, and the theme of memory and family is to evoke the giant whose shadow looms hugely over this novel: Javier Marias. There are definitely a lot of similarities in style. Moreover, the fact that Margaret Jull Costa, the English voice of many of Marias' novels, acts as the translator of this particular novel does not help to dissociate the connection. Despite that, I find that Torrente's characters are more sympathetic, more grounded in reality, and less prone to pondering the philosophical aspects of truth and culpability. Additionally, there is a display of restraint which is rarely found in a debut work but dearly needed in Marias' following outputs.
In this remarkable book, Marcos Giralt Torrente crafts a masterful narrative about family and memory that is simultaneously cerebral and heartrending.
What the book excels at the individual chapters (each is eerily distinctive and holds a treasure trove of philosophical discourses and insights), it equally lacks in coherence and unity. It is as if a peculiar curator decides to exhibit the Mona Lisa, Girl in a Pearl Earring, Guernica, and one of Monet's water lilies in a single room. One might marvel at each painting displayed, but can only speculate at the meaning of this all.
You are in the dusk of life. You have lived your life somewhat successfully, without much regret. You have seen many places, exotic and cultured alike, and you have found that people are not that different from each other. Nothing seems to surprise you anymore. You look back at the defining moments of your life, enumerating each of the forks and turns that ultimately bring you to this place of remembering. Apparently, love is there on the list, the foremost, even. Chronologically, it is not the first one you encounter, but in terms of consequence, the after effects, it is printed in bold, in red the color of passion. “Everyone has their love story... Everyone does. It's the only story.”
You read this book, the latest offering from Julian Barnes, a familiar name, and looking at the description of the book, you intuit that you are visiting a familiar ground. The interior landscape of life and love, as well as the texture of memory, is something that he masterfully elucidated in his previous prizewinning novel, The Sense of an Ending. Therefore you let the story unfolds with a reassurance that you are in a safe and capable hand.
The story of Paul Roberts is the story of his first love at the age of 19 with a married woman more than double his age. Immediately you expect all the familiar elements of a story as frequently recast as this is. But you are with Julian Barnes, the master cartographer of the human heart. You pore over the scintillating description of youth, its naivety, its reckless confidence, and the ache of love. At once you are reminded of the paintings by Edward Hopper: all the illuminating details of life's paraphernalia that do not entirely conceal tragedy and loneliness.
When Paul met the vivacious Susan McLeod through a fortuitous tennis match, you root for them but wary of future tragedy. You smile inwardly when Paul decides to continue the romance precisely because his parents will object and his friends will admire his rebelliousness. You notice the use of the first person, present tense in the descriptions of love between them. And you will agree that, yes, in love, there are no other persons and there is no regard for the future and retrospect.
You open the second part of the novel with dread because you notice immediately that this part deals with pain. Paul and Susan now live in London. He is estranged from his parents while she from her husband. Her children are old enough to be out from her former house altogether. You detect slow alienation and a plunge towards discord. You admire Paul's effort to preserve their love by blunt stubbornness and willful deceptions, especially towards each other and towards himself. You wonder if that what love is, and you try to come up with alternative definitions of love and fail because it seems that there are as many definitions of love as there are lovers. Maybe it is lovers' instinct to set themselves aside from the general population and obstinately insist that this time it's different, that they are different. As Susan descents into alcoholism, madness, and oblivion, you wonder, as Paul also wonders, if love is enough to save a life, how come it seems that there is a massive rift between love and happiness.
This book introduces you to all the scars and wounds a heart can have. Not in a way that will inoculate you against future pains, but in a humanistic recognition that these things exist. The next time you meet a new person in your life, you will wonder at their story; their love story, of course, because it is the only story.
I still like The Bridge on the Drina more.
It contains all the elements that make The Bridge on the Drina a great read. With some additions: the Western perspective of the Orient and the historical relationship of the Great Powers at the time. However, I don't think it's good to read the two books back-to-back, drawing comparisons is inevitable.
To be fair, the book shines a light on its own, but if you only have time for one book by Ivo Andrić, I would recommend the other one.
In the movie Lady Bird, there is a scene in which the eponymous girl is discussing her essay for an Ivy League college in a city “where the culture is,” to escape her native Sacramento, which she feels as drab, uninteresting, and inward looking. However, her counselor says that it is clear from her essay that she loves Sacramento, to which she replies that she merely pays attention. Her counselor then puts the matter wisely, “don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
It is clear that Ivo Andrić loves his native Bosnia. He returns again and again towards the region in many of his writings. His Bosnian Trilogy — this book, Bosnian Chronicle, and The Woman from Sarajevo — was the significant work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature. But here in The Bridge on The Drina, is where his compassion towards his native country and its people is most resonant.
One need only to peruse the first chapter:
“Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark, steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches. From this bridge spreads fanlike the whole rolling valley with the little oriental town of Viśegrad and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures, and plum-orchards, and crisscrossed with walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens. Looked at from a distance through the broad arches of the white bridge it seems as if one can see not only the green Drina but all that fertile and cultivated countryside and the southern sky above.”
Let me start with these set pieces. An Algerian woman did not receive French citizenship for refusing to shake hand with a government official. On Twitter, this story created a storm of outrage and opportunities for humor. One such instance was when a user commented on a picture of crown-shyness, a phenomenon in which the crown of the trees refuses to touch each other, creating fissures of light illuminating the understory. The user quipped, ”all denied French citizenship.”
Besides the roar of laughter, this story also elicits the realization of an instance in which trees behave like a human. More importantly, trees communicate with each other, between species and inter-species. Once we know that, we marvel at the things we don't know about them and what they can tell us.
The Overstory is grounded in the discovery of trees talking. It focuses our attention towards these towering gentle giants, whose slow language escapes our short attention span altogether. Time works differently for these patient creatures. The same Beringin tree might witness the Dutch occupation, its retreat to give way to the Japanese, the formation of the Ngayogyakarta Sultanate, and people listening to their smartphones beneath its shade in the same lifetime. Such is the timescale of this intricate novel, from the Civil War toward the current time. Its ambition shades over the length of the USA, through nine separate characters connected through the world of trees.
The novel is replete with the history and depictions of the trees of North America, as well as odes and sadly, eulogies for them. Despite the image that the USA is one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, a lot of pristine woodlands give way to real estate development and timber industry. The book laments our treatment of them and revolves around the characters that fell in love with these trees and fighting for them through art, science, environmental activism, and disobedience.
It is time for us to change our view of trees and the way they shape human history. It is time to read this book made for our ignorant times.
Digested: Cloud Atlas meets The Hidden Life of Trees
Recommended for: everyone
An arresting debut by Lisa Halliday about the relationship between art and life, the powerful and the powerless, the flight of imagination and the crumbling weight of reality.
This novel is composed of two novellas and a coda. The first novella, “Folly” chronicles the uneasy relationship between a twenty-something fledgling writer who works as a junior editor and a much older celebrated writer of a national treasure caliber. ”Madness,” the second novella, starkly departs from the seemingly tame (in comparison) subject and setting into a more dangerous and political territory of the prolonged conflict in the middle east.
In and of itself, each of the two novellas is compulsively readable and moves through the plot with artful grace. Nonetheless, the coda falls short of its design to bind the two novellas together and to enlighten the reader of the essence of the novel's architecture. While an avid reader might notice that the celebrated writer in the first novella is a thinly veiled Philip Roth, it is nearly impossible that a reader from a distant country would know that Lisa Halliday herself had a romantic relationship with Philip Roth, giving a new level of appreciation to the novel.
Without the full context, a person going through the book would feel like as if they are reading three marvelous pieces of writing, but not a single comprehensive novel. I would give three and a half stars but decided on four instead, for the sheer audacity.
Digested: Possessions meets The Prestige
Recommended for: well-read New Yorkers (oh how I miss McNally Jackson)