"You have to keep going."

Stones in a Landslide
By Maria Barbal
Translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell
126 pages
Peirene Press
June 2010




She does what I am not capable of doing. I feel like a stone after a landslide. If someone or something stirs it, I'll come tumbling down after the others. If nothing comes near, I'll be here, still, for days and days. . .

Maria Barbal, author of eight novels, is widely acclaimed as the most influential living Catalan writer. First published in 1985, her seminal work Pedra de Tartera (Stones in a Landslide) has since gone through fifty editions and sold over 50,000 copies in Germany alone.

Stones in a Landslide covers the complete lifetime of Conxa (short for Concepció) among the isolated farming villages of Catalonia. The book opens at the beginning of the twentieth century, when 13-year-old Conxa was sent to live with her childless aunt and uncle. She eventually marries Jaume, a builder and carpenter whose work takes him away for long stretches of time. Although Conxa remains tied to farm and family, Jaume's travels expose him to new ideas regarding government and citizens' rights which will land him on the wrong side of the Spanish Civil War. But it is his widow who will live with the subsequent tragedy for decades afterward.

There are essentially two distinct narratives here: the chronicle of a traditional rural culture and an emerging story of revolution and modernity which will eventually overtake it. Both strands are personified in the characters of Conxa and Jaume, whose marriage, though happy, comes to represent the difficult union of past and rapidly-changing present. Of the political turmoil that will ultimately consume them, Conxa is uncomprehending.

When we talked about such matters the same thing always happened to me. A thick fog came over my brain and from there it passed to my heart. It left me frozen and in the dark. I was made to know what I saw, to speak about what I felt. I didn't know anything outside of Pallarès or Montsent or Ermita. I'd heard of Barcelona, of the sea, even of Madrid, of the King. It all seemed to me like one of those stories my father used to tell round the fire. I didn't believe all that really existed. I thought it was a trick, like Soledat Estevet having a claim to the throne of England. Perhaps that was why when I saw Jaume's eyes shining as he spoke of these strange things, the ground beneath me moved and I couldn't find true north. Instead of me guiding the animals, it felt like they were leading me. At moments like this, Jaume and I were as different as night and day, and that difference made me tremble more than when he left to go away for a whole week's work.

To Conxa, the female role is the very foundation of agricultural life, and her entire being is consequently bound to the timeless rhythms of planting, harvesting, livestock, and family. She is accustomed, above all, to perpetual labor broken only by the occasional festival. Barbal's prose is the clear and unadorned voice of a woman who may lack sophistication, but not insight and acuity. "No, I didn't say anything to the girls. They needed to move on," Conxa says later. "What happened was a huge blow to them but there was no point in thinking about it. You have to keep going." She had learned long ago that too much depends on her to be paralyzed by death and upheaval.

In the end, however, it is not the war but the inevitable march of progress that threatens to leave Conxa behind. Farming is no longer viable in a world that has come to value novelty, speed, technology, and the city. Although Conxa modestly denies being any real source of history, the story of her life nevertheless reflects the growth of Catalan society - indeed, of many societies - in the twentieth century. And that, I believe, is the main reason Stones in a Landslide enjoys such strong international resonance. There is a universality to Conxa that is beautifully highlighted by Maria Barbal's vivid writing and I can see Stones in a Landslide appealing to a wide variety of readers. Recommended.

Also check out: Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring, a Catalan novel set in an otherworldly village with grotesque customs, which may be seen as an allegory for Spain under Franco.

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A special thanks to Meike Ziervogel for this review copy.

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I ♥ Art

Gasoline
By Quim Monzó
Translated by Mary Ann Newman
141 Pages
Open Letter Press
June 8, 2010





Humbert cannot fathom how some critics can demand - in the name of some sacrosant consistency - that he amputate part of his imagination. Even if he worked constantly, without a moment's interruption for years and years, he would not have enough time to work on all the things building in his head, because each idea is a magician's hat from which new ideas pop up in the form of magicians' hats from which new ideas pop up. . . (He adds the bit about hats to the list.) What about the idea he had been toying with for days now? Making movies. Not video, no: conventional cinema. He has so many stories to tell. . .

After going missing last Friday and remaining unfound all weekend and assumed to have been left at work, Quim Monzó's Gasoline was finally located Monday morning in the back seat of my car. How it came to be there is a mystery. I am the only one who uses that car and no one has sat back there in weeks. I put all my stuff on the front seat. But anyway, I found it, finished it, and now I am reviewing it.

Quim Monzó was born in Barcelona in 1952 and is one of the most prominent contemporary Catalan writers, having won numerous prestigious awards both at home and abroad. In the 1970s he worked as an international reporter for the Barcelona paper Tele/eXprés and since then has become known for the irony and pop cultural awareness exhibited in his novels and short stories. Monzó is also a translator whose work includes Capote, Salinger, and Hemingway.

Gasoline, first published in 1983, is about art, artists, and the New York art scene. Heribert Juliá was a breakout sensation only months ago. With a second major show looming, he suddenly finds himself unable to paint and feeling increasingly apathetic and aimless in his daily life. He spends his time roaming Manhattan, indulging in meaningless affairs, and drinking. The haze of alcohol and lethargy, unfortunately, has obscured the ominous signs behind his wife's own infidelity. Her paramour is none other than Humbert Herrera, a buzzworthy upstart who can't stop creating and has a grand vision of uniting all art movements of the past several decades in a grand exhibit that will mark the end stage of everything twentieth century art has been striving towards. As Heribert decreases, Humbert increases, until he has literally supplanted his predecessor and stolen his career, his wife, and his creativity.

I can see what Monzó was trying to do: both Humbert and Heribert, though they occupy two opposing extremes, are men consumed by their art. One, because it has left him; the other, because it overwhelms him. They are surrounded by a world of galleries, cocktail parties, and restaurants that, despite its pretensions to some greater cultural legitimacy, closely mirrors the mainstream obsession with trends, fashion, and celebrity. Monzó sets these two creative individuals within this milieu and explores how its dual populism-elitism informs their perceptions of themselves and their art. Heribert, in particular, despite his critical acclaim, seems unable to develop an original idea. His glorious vision is basically a slapdash hodgepodge of every self-consciously avant-garde innovation that came before him. It would seem, then, that art is two-faced and intent on devouring itself.

Interesting idea, but I think I'm missing something. It was kind of like Andrei Moscovit's The Judgment Day Archives, which I read a couple months ago. It purported to be a roundabout, over-the-top satire but ended up falling flat. I get the same impression here with Gasoline. I mean, I'm just left going, huh? What was the point of all that? Um, this guy wanders around and then this other guy goes all manic and on and on about all the stuff he wants to paint/draw/photograph/photocopy/film/write about, and . . . ?

Gasoline has apparently been well-received but I'm not getting it. There are a couple of moments of hilarity but the story ultimately did nothing for me. Sorry, folks. Maybe this book should've stayed missing for awhile longer? <ouch>

And why is it called Gasoline?

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Review Copy

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The Angel's Game (A Review - or Rather, an Essay)

"All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case [of religion], the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially while we're awake."

I've reviewed so many excellent translated books for this blog. Yet with a few exceptions (i.e. Hesse, Murakami), they remain largely unknown in the United States. Considering that just about every contemporary work of international literature I've read makes at least one reference to America or American culture, that lack of awareness in this country (which I'm trying to overcome in my own little corner of the Interwebs) really gives one pause. So needless to say, it's been great to see that everyone seems to be reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game (El Juego del Ángel), a Spanish novel translated by Lucia Graves. Ruiz Zafón's previous book, The Shadow of the Wind, to which The Angel's Game is a prequel, was also a major international bestseller that originally introduced the Sempere & Sons bookshop and mythical Cemetery of Lost Books. Both are back for The Angel's Game, which takes us on a tour through the winding streets of Barcelona in the late 1920s, a place where the ancient and modern collided in an uneasy juxtaposition of dazzling technology and decaying grandeur.

The story centers on a young writer named David Martín, the survivor of a lonely and difficult childhood as the son of a damaged war veteran. Following his father's death, a wealthy benefactor named Pedro Vidal lands him a position at a local paper, where David eventually gains a bit of fame as the author of a thrilling crime serial. He then moves on to write City of the Damned, a lurid Gothic series, under the name Ignatius Samson for a pair of shady publishers. When he discovers he is dying of a brain tumor, however, he agrees to accept a vague but highly lucrative offer from the mysterious Andreas Corelli to compose a fictional work with the power to literally inspire humanity and change the world (for better or worse). His tumor magically removed, David soon learns that he has, in fact, been hired to invent a new religion for purposes unknown. Meanwhile, during a visit to the Cemetery of Lost Books, David acquires an obscure volume called Lux Aterna, a veritable "book of the dead" whose hypnotic prose is clearly the work of a madman - one who used to live in the dilapidated mansion David now inhabits. Events soon escalate. As people around him start dropping dead, David finds himself in a struggle with the demonic Corelli for nothing less than his very soul.

If the shadowy atmosphere of pre-Civil War Barcelona seems layered on too thickly, that was probably Ruiz Zafón's intention. The Angel's Game is a work of quasi-metafiction in which the external world mirrors the sensational tales David spins early in his career. "The clock is ticking," a suspicious character says to David, "and instead of telling me what you did with Cristina Sagnier, you persist in trying to convince me with a story that sounds like something from City of the Damned." The Angel's Game contains so many elements typical of the Gothic thriller - such as haunted and ruined mansions, black magic, brooding Byronic hero, ghosts, insanity, family saga (i.e. the "ancestral curse"), melodrama, and an overall sense of corruption and corrosion - that it borders on ridiculousness and satire. Again, however, I think that what seems at first like a multitude of technical flaws is really something Ruiz Zafón did on purpose. Gothic fiction has a long history of self-parody, exhibited most famously in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. But what's great about The Angel's Game is that this self-conscious play of genre enables the book to function on two levels. On one, it is a lavish and enjoyable mystery/adventure with broad popular appeal. At the same time, it is also a real intellectual treat.

(And much as a I love European Gothic metal, that is admittedly one music genre also thoroughly ripe for parody.)

The Angel's Game seems to differ, however, in its treatment of the modern (relative to the novel's setting) world. Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, which takes place and was written in roughly the same time period as The Angel's Game, has more in common with its inspiration, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), than it does with most contemporaneous literature (i.e. Woolf, Hemingway). The romantic suspense of Rebecca and Jane Eyre is timeless. The Angel's Game, on the other hand, takes place in a recognizable twentieth century, with the progressive spirit of the Modernist era vividly contrasting with the powerful sense of Past revealed through crumbling architecture, the trauma of old tragedies, and murky, hidden spaces like the Cemetery of Lost Books. It is very reminiscent of a recent non-fiction work, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris, which explores how advances in science, technology, and even the arts both inspired crime and helped combat it pre-WWI France. One innovation the Hooblers discuss is the then-novel idea of a getaway car (and the subsequent car chase), first utilized in a robbery outside Paris in 1911. Speeding through Barcelona is rather frequent occurrence in The Angel's Game; plus, there's that grand car chase near the end.

Also mentioned several times is the International Exhibition, while the avant-garde Modernist style of a lawyer's office (its stark coldness set against that ever-present sense of past) reminded me that many Modernist artists were initially believed to be clinically insane - one critic even called the Armory Show "pathology on display." Again, madness is a pivotal aspect of both The Angel's Game and Gothic literature in general. Victor Serge, a major presence in The Crimes of Paris, wrote a novel in the late '40s called Unforgiving Years, in which he asserts that civilization itself "is a form of schizophrenia," referring to the recent horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, as well as Stalin's current reign of terror in the Soviet Union. While fascism and communism are both secular ideologies, the murderous passion they inspire in their masses of Bacchante (a Euripedes reference) is not unlike the zeal of religion. Says Corelli:

"Nothing makes us believe more than fear, the certainty of being threatened. When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motifies us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we're acting in self-defense. Evil, menace - those are always the preserve of the other. The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match."

He goes on:

"It's much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be an individual character. It can be a nation, a race, a group . . . anything."

Later, at the close of the book, David is standing on a beach somewhere in 1945, looking back on his life following the events of The Angel's Game. Although he never completed the holy book Corelli had commissioned him to write, he recalls "reading those chronicles about the war in Spain, and then in Europe and the rest of the world," observing that "I've seen how the inferno promised in the pages I wrote for the boss has taken on a life of its own." Serge, in Unforgiving Years, similarly denounces the blind hate and fervor which spawned that age of global calamity.

If all religion is a form of universal fiction, preserved and carried down through society's collective consciousness, then so too can the act of storytelling be the catalyst for friendship and harmony. Despite the darkness closing in, this is seen time and again throughout The Angel's Game, as David forms close bonds with fellow writers and bookworms such as Vidal, Isabella, and the Semperes. Religion is always concerned with the soul; here, Ruiz Zafón argues that fiction is the soul of humanity. It is the creative spirit, the polar opposite of the destructive impulse rising from fiction gone wrong. Ultimately, we all face this choice between the two. David's own internal struggle is precisely that psychological dilemma faced by the lone individual watching the Nazis march into town: collaborate or hide my Jewish neighbors? Should David write a book for Corelli that may well set the world aflame, in exchange for health and money, or should he stand up and defend those around him?

The ending got a little convoluted for my tastes and the character Cristina was annoying pathetic, but really, other than that, this is an awesome book.



Since the idea of the "universal myth" plays such a huge role in The Angel's Game, I thought I'd share this totally awesome "supertrailer" I found on YouTube, which showcases the common elements found in the modern sagas of Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Lord of the Rings. Note that they all deal with a war between good v. evil, a prophesized Messiah, and epic battle scenes. Now compare these to the various major religions, past and present, and you get a pretty good picture of the legends that have driven humanity for time immemorial. LOL, if only this was a real movie!

Death in Spring (A Review)

Death in Spring
By Mercè Rodoreda
Translated by Martha Tennent
Open Letter Press
150 pages
May 26, 2009





He would say, in order to survive, you have to live as if you are dead.

Widely considered the most important Catalan author of the post-war period, Mercè Rodoreda (1909-1983) wrote her most important works in exile during Francisco Franco's reign as dictator of Spain and heavy-handed censor of culture. Married at age 20 to an uncle seventeen years her senior, Rodoreda began her career as a novelist in the early 1930s with the publication of Sóc una dona honrada? (Am I a Decent Woman?), which precipitated her transformation into a fashionable and daring woman who went on to pen political articles for Catalan newspapers. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, however, forced Rodoreda to flee to France and later Switzerland. She would later state that "Writing in Catalan in a foreign country is like wanting flowers to bloom at the North Pole." Still, despite the difficulties of writing abroad in a small regional language, Rodoreda's seminal work La mort i la primavera (Death in Spring) probably could not have come together without its author's experiences living in foreign lands.

It has been said that Rodoreda's novels and short stories often contain "an extraordinary assortment of exiles, soldiers, and unprotected people who find expression in a no-man's-land." It is a sort of bittersweet freedom that is at its most contradictory in Death in Spring, first published posthumously in 1986 and only just now appearing in English. On the one hand, its vague, otherworldly setting is a remote village reminiscent of the isolated dystopia depicted in Lois Lowry's The Giver, while the grotesque behavior of its people recalls Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." At the same time, however, the social outsiders Death in Spring centers on possess an autonomy and insight denied to the conformists surrounding them. Although the publisher's summary describes the narrator as a fourteen-year-old boy, he actually ages at least four years throughout the story, and this progression in age is accompanied by a deeper, more profound psychological maturity.

The first quarter of Death in Spring is far more frightening than most conventional horror novels. It is surreal and so deeply disturbing that reading it became uncomfortable despite Rodoreda's lyrical prose. There is talk of men without faces because they were thrown into the underground river and ominous references to "the prisoner." The narrator witnesses his neighbors pour cement down his father's throat and then wall him into a hollowed-out tree. The reader soon learns that these are merely typical community rituals and everyone expects their life to end in this same manner. Both the novella's unspecified setting and the villagers' outlandish behavior lend an aura of timelessness to the story, and it is this sense of Time as an undying circle, forever flowing like the town's river, that becomes one Rodoreda's central themes.

She told me she knew many things: far away the river was flowing; the dead were asleep; trees that held a dead person likewise died a bit; cement inside a dead person took a long time to dry. She said we knew many things about the light, about everything that transpires as it goes round, returning to us – neither too fast nor too slowly, like our shadows on the sundial hours. The same, always the same, no beginning, no ending, never tiring.

I was actually reminded of my favorite poem, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the primary speaker's voice comes from beyond the grave yet still echoes through the post-war detritus as he "pass[es] the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool." Rodoreda's unnamed narrator, however, is oddly detached, even as he describes events of great emotional significance. In short, I had long suspected what was going to happen in the end, even before a desire to break the proverbial cycle slowly became apparent.

As the protagonist plays with his wild teenaged stepmother and converses with the prisoner, he becomes increasingly aware of the constraints he lives under, as well as the subliminal methods of control exercised by the society in which he lives. Along with his four-year-old daughter (the stepmother later became the wife), he also becomes acquainted with the son of the blacksmith. The latter is a man with considerable authority who nevertheless starved and imprisoned his child so that he would be too weak to be thrown into the river. (Similarly, in "The Lottery," Tessie has always accepted the lottery and never objected to it until her name was chosen.) Although his father's ritual murder is what initially sparked the narrator's disillusionment, he does not begin to articulate his feelings until later, as events reveal that history has begun to repeat itself. If the world is too entrenched for us to bear, if the people around us are trapped lock-step in meaningless and dysfunctional customs, there still remains one thing in life we can choose for ourselves. "Man is made of water, lives with earth and air," says the prisoner. "He lives imprisoned. All men." So what is one of the few methods of protest left to the powerless?

Death is Spring is certainly a haunting and thought-provoking book, but it is not without its flaws. Told in the first person, it is strongly psychological and full of rambling stream-of-conscious internal monologues. Unfortunately, these frequently slow the story down in the second half of the novella and it often feels like Rodoreda is babbling on about nothing. I really wonder if an editor could have helped her cut some of it down, especially since Death in Spring is also one of those stories where everything is a symbol for something else and the reader never knows when, to borrow the words of Freud, "a cigar is only a cigar." You're either overanalyzing it or not looking deeply enough and it's hard to tell which. Reading can subsequently feel like a chore. The jacket copy also praises Rodoreda's "stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions," which I thought was overblown. Her writing is indeed quite impressive: smoothly flowing, occasionally musical, and highly effective at creating mood. Still, I felt a bit let-down – I don't think she was quite that good, though we must also keep in mind that this is a translation.

Despite these criticisms, I still feel that Death in Spring is a book worth reading, but not for pleasure under an umbrella at the beach. At 150 pages, it is very short, but definitely not quick. Its meandering passages demand serious thought and concentration. In fact, I believe that this is one of those books which must be read twice. Readers seeking something challenging should find Death in Spring satisfying, particularly for its unique portrayal of an oppressive society (I think North Korea is perhaps its closest real-life counterpart), as well as its status as a modern European classic. But The Giver and "The Lottery" are far more readable and share many of the same themes.

Now I know, now that my life has come full circle, like a glass ball on the verge of shattering.

The Same Sea as Every Summer (A Review)

Esther Tusquets first came to light in the heady post-Franco years. As Spain finally emerged from out of the shadow of its late dictator, the floodgates were opened and a spirit of cultural glasnost prevailed. El mismo mar de todos los veranos, first published in 1978, was emblematic of this new era, as its poetic exploration of lesbian sexuality pushed the envelope far beyond anything that would have been remotely permitted under Franco's regime.

Though powerfully sensual, The Same Sea as Every Summer is not merely a piece of erotic fiction. Nor does it wear its message on its sleeve; it is not simply one of those How I Became a Liberated Woman narratives, like Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune, that seek to drive home their theme of EMPOWERMENT. In terms of style, Tusquets's book is a more akin to Virginia Woolf's The Waves, an extended stream-of-conscious meditation on both the life of the individual and the human world at large that frequently ascends to pure abstract poetry. An unhappy middle-aged professor has returned to her childhood home, fleeing a distant daughter, philandering husband, and veritable ice queen of a mother. She pours forth her story in pleasantly rambling fashion; like the layers of an onion, the reader must peel away multiple coats - fantasy sequences of mermaids and princesses, soliloquies on the faded glory of old houses, reflections on the failure of the bourgeoisie artist, vivid childhood reminisces - to uncover the true, underlying story. The narrator, whom we come to know intimately but whose name remains a mystery, ultimately fears betrayal, and it is that theme that the novel is built upon. It is a subliminal dread that reveals itself primarily through allusions to music, literature, and popular culture, i.e. "The Little Mermaid," Faust, The Twilight of the Gods, Swan Lake. Not surprisingly then, the tale closes in an empty hotel room, as the young lover rides away in a taxi. (Of course, both women had cheated on one another with men.) There is nevertheless a hopeful note at the very end: "And Wendy grew up." It may be over, but the narrator has finally known authentic experience and a genuine self.

I really wish an American publisher would reprint and publicize this (and do something about that cheap, dated cover design). It is such a wonderful book that has the perfect balance of intellect and avant-garde beauty and would be of great interest to both the LGBT community and anyone who enjoys international literature, due to its history as a daring groundbreaker. In short, The Same Sea as Every Summer comes highly recommended.