A Night in Chile / Roberto Bolano

For me, “A Night in Chile” is extremely resonant with Azuela’s “The Underdogs” in its overt and complex statements about a particular historical situation and its participants, real and fictional (though certainly, Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” and Carpentier’s “The Chase” must be included).

In some sense a hero—any hero—is, by definition to his or her enemy, a villain, and vice versa. That individual (or group) may have particular characteristics, such as being more or less formidable for various reasons of, say, intellect or charisma, but they are essentially the “other” solely by contrast—whether that is defined by ideology, physiology, or which side of the street one lives on, and independent of whether those differences are perceived as real or known to be imagined.

“A Night in Chile” is especially compelling in the directness with which it addresses not so much (though neither so little) who is a hero or villain, but how the world goes so utterly and quickly astray. To pick only one small yet vital piece from the story, the section on Fr Antonio and falconry seems a perfect example. Problem solving, devoid of the time-consuming and difficult consideration of context (in its broadest, ever-changing, yet simplest implications), is inherently amoral, for it suggests an obscene equality among all possible responses and all possible situations. (An editorial in the N Y Times on Friday, 7 May 2010, about a young man who ran onto the field during a major-league baseball game and was stopped—instantly—by the police with a stun gun/Taser, asks the same questions about the relation of force and action.) The possible next step into immorality can be so transparent as to be invisible, and inevitable, and to appear, as the narrator at one point says of his own action, necessary—justifiable.

To kill all the pigeons and doves in the world if they threaten the physical well-being of the architectural structures of the Church (historic and aesthetic considerations included, as well as the recollection that “the Church” is, in its own definition, its adherents, not its buildings), is to vacate any understanding of the sacred aspect of life, and, if one so believes, in God’s creation. Fr Antonio’s doubt, fear, and pain at this expedient measure rings through the whole book, as does recognition of the value of the creation of art, of which the churches mentioned and the novel itself are exquisite examples.

The narrator has tried to avoid any real or meaningful probing of his own life and actions not so much by residing in a realm of culture apart, or because he too is a limited and flawed individual, but by being ever willing and ready to look no further than a solution to the next “problem.” He cannot even recognize that Mr Raef and Mr Etah are Fear and Hate in their most banal modern guise, at once backward and efficiently all business.

Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo

Notes on “Pedro Paramo”

On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.

All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.

For want of any other way to describe it, I would have to say that “Pedro Paramo” is a cultural shock. Certainly, Paramo and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. But this work feels essentially Latin/Hispanic in contrast to the others, where Latin and Hispanic issues seem to be largely, though not entirely, the material but not the pattern from which they are made. Obviously, this is an over-statement meant to highlight a point.

However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. In English there is only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately human.

Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo

Notes on “Pedro Paramo”

On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.

All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.

For example, Azuela’s “Underdogs” could equally well have been written to take place in late medieval or renaissance “Italy;” Borges’ stories are deep philosophical (and comical) ontological musings; Bioys is timeless and entirely modern simultaneously, taking place on an un-located deserted island within the invisible dominant culture of post-industrial Europe; and Bombal’s characters are burdened with culture like window-dressing: individual, cosmopolitan, and ultimately psychological, they could be bourgeois gentry in the south of France or the smaller German states, anywhere.

For want of any other way to describe it, I would have to say that “Pedro Paramo” is a cultural shock. Certainly, Paramo and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. But this work feels essentially Latin/Hispanic in contrast to the others, where Latin and Hispanic issues seem to be largely, though not entirely, the material but not the pattern from which they are made. Obviously, this is an over-statement meant to highlight a point.

However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. In English there is only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately huma

The Invention of Morel / Adolfo Bioy Casares

My initial response to “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares was a desire to defend it. As the work of a gifted 26-year old writer, “Morel” is extremely impressive, even powerful. I found it marvelously clever, at times deeply perceptive and very funny, and also prescient regarding technology and science, and contemporary societies’ obsession with these related features as carriers of the ideas of salvation and redemption, and the un-life-like aspects of life itself (such as the “consciousness” of chemical processes and certain machine functions). I was both tired of the tedious recursiveness and moved by the over-stuffed emptiness. I did not find it satisfying, but I do not believe Bioy intended that particular effect. It is haunting.

It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.

Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.

Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an “entire” invention of the narrator’s mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.

In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.

Borges, The Aleph / House of Asterion

At the risk of being so reductive as to be nearly meaningless, I offer a few comments about how these stories struck me. Every story seems to describe a point on a continuum that alludes, nonetheless, to all the rest: the abstract and particular in constant inescapable union through alternations that naturally entail the themes of reflections (including references), complements, and the inability of anything to fully describe its source. Everything becomes its opposite, one story proceeds from another, complicating a theme or redirecting it altogether, or falls back on itself just as it seemed to go off in an entirely new direction—which, of course, it does.

Though Borges accuses literature (and language) of being incompetent, in his hands it is anything but. A crashing and conflicted cosmos is ever at hand, pre- and post-Big Bang, simultaneously, as some physicists would agree. Emma Zunz is a marvelous contradiction/conflation of fact and point of view, both true and false at the same time, vengeful and redemptive. The Dead Man gets to live because he is already marked for death, therefore his actions do not matter (who is not marked, eventually, for death?) Flaminius Rufus realizes that he and the troglodyte (who will turn out, perhaps, to be Homer, more or less) have identical perceptions, but that they “live” in different universes: they coordinate and construct the same perceptions differently, in ways incomprehensible to each other.

I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.

Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.


Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world, and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction--a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.

Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?

The Forest

I love the forest—the smell of eucalyptus, the sound of bird wings rustling into silence like a deck of cards shuffled in one hand, and the scattered shimmer of light: long, bright blind fingers reading their way across the moss-covered floor. She is at my side, or I at hers—either way we are together.

Harder and harder, we pedal up the hill and turn to the right, but the bicycles veer off to the left, into the courtyard of a beautiful church, long abandoned.

We enter the open door. The floor is checkered in huge black and white tiles that slough fine, grey dust in long narrow mounds that look like rows of curving dunes on a sea-less shore. An elevated pulpit curls out from the sculptured wall like a pale orchid blooming on the side of a rock. I climb the winding stairs and step onto the little balconied stage whose floor is a jumble of broken slats.

In praise, jubilation, or mere readiness, my arms shoot up from my sides, pointing to the windows and choir that are not there.

“Look! Here I can be myself,” she calls out to me from the center of the darkness below.

Peeling off her clothes, she crawls onto a low wooden crate. Her whole body glows like a jellied candy held up to the sun. She brushes the back of her hand against the nape of her neck, lifting her dark hair in a long arc that spills back over her shoulders. Her arm descends, unfolding outward into another arc, finally pointing to a painting framed in gold—it is a landscape of the same forest just outside the church.

Her shadow rolls across the floor, up the wall, and settles into the shape of a dark doorway leading into the painting of the forest. Entering this doorway, I see the stairs straight ahead, running deep into the moist red soil, farther and farther from the last glimmering light that quickly disappears behind thick branches and masses of bruise-black leaves.

The darkness bristles with gunfire. I lift my rifle toward the enemy hiding behind the huge fallen oak. My aim is sure. One by one each of them startles upward and pirouettes to one side before tumbling forward over the dead tree, like a puppet whose strings have been suddenly cut by a sharp, swift breeze or the silver edge of an outstretched wing.

“You cannot win,” the last one calls out, already dead.

I lift my hand to check my cards. The ace of diamonds slowly turns from red to black.

How will I explain, and to whom, that it is still the ace of diamonds. I want to check the hearts to see if they too are black, or if the spades and clubs are covered in blood, but the alarm rings out: the castle’s on fire. It’s time to leave—run over the dark lawn, through the colorless shrubs. I must scream and yell—call for help as if I mean it.

Outside the beautiful gate, five men walk toward me, unarmed except for long coats with high velvet collars. Across the square in the building on the corner she is waiting, and something to eat is laid out on a table. From there it is a short walk back to the forest.

Recipes

The grandmother liked to sit at the foot of the long walnut table in the dining room at her daughter’s house, in the chair closest to the door. She liked to come and go as she pleased, constantly threatening to arrive or disappear in a rhythm all her own, punctuated by the jingling keys always in her hand. This freedom was a luxury she had come to know only late in life and, among the unexpected joys of widowhood, gave the most pleasure.

Perhaps she should have been a lion-tamer, a white-collar criminal, or a card-shark in an old frontier town. A small, comfortable life in southern California had allowed her only to be bossy, and invariably correct—if not also often wrong.

Among her family, conversation was almost entirely unknown. So unlike herself, her descendants resembled sea urchins or beautiful, pale underwater corals, crusted around the edge of the dark table. As if moved by an invisible current, they seemed to sway and interact in arbitrary and impersonal patterns that described the merely physical laws of cause and effect—attraction and repulsion—more common to plants than to people. They nibbled at life, like goldfish, or pigeons endlessly pecking at one dry spot or another on an empty sidewalk, too stupid or never hungry enough to move on.

If Julie was to become one of them, she too would have to learn to meander in the slow-motion selvage of purposelessness, whatever she might actually think. Paul’s grandmother was at the center of this universe, not so much because of the power of her attraction or force, but for the laziness of all the others, who circled in predictable orbits, like marbles around the rim of a big platter. It didn’t really matter if there was anything at the center, but for the sake of form, as an idea.

“We had a wonderful dinner last night at Café Verdi—linguini with lobster and saffron sauce.” Julie put her hand on Paul’s shoulder as she spoke to his grandmother. She was only trying to be polite. Of course, these people could be crowding around her little kitchen table whenever they want, if she marries Paul. The grandmother rustled her pearls, planning the attack she could neither admit nor resist.

“A million years ago, I used to cook lobsters. Finally, I couldn’t stand the noise.”

Not known for her prowess in the kitchen, the grandmother’s idea of cooking included mashing fresh strawberries and whipping heavy cream for pastries that came in a box from a bakery. Anything to which she applied heat experienced a transformation far more alchemical than culinary and produced relics rather than meals.

For Julie, cooking was also little more than a bothersome concept: she subsisted on steamed zucchini, dressing-less salad, and English Breakfast tea. She was better read, and much less daring than the grandmother, and believed that the lobsters must have made some terrible screech as they were plunged into the boiling water.

“Is it a high-pitched sound? It can’t go on for that long, can it?”

“No, dear… it’s the tapping.”

“Tapping?”

“Yes, you just can’t imagine.” The grandmother repositioned her eyeglasses, like a gunner setting her sights. “Everyone loves to eat lobsters, but no one thinks about the cook who first has to get them all into the oven and then must listen to their relentless tapping on the glass of the oven door, until they’re cooked. Silence is the only way to know they’re done.”

Was she simply lying? Was it possible that, from cruelty or kindness, no one had ever countered this woman and told her how lobsters are cooked? Paul must have heard this story a million times, but his face was as pure and blind as a crystal paperweight. He looked straight ahead at the ugly credenza loaded with china dogs, and his shoulder dipped slightly, away from her hand.

“What are your other favorite recipes?”

Paul’s mother finally spoke, “Who wants more iced tea?” The grandmother rattled her keys.