The Paper Gatherer

An unexpectedly long and unavoidable absence from posting is now colliding with the start of an expected absence. I plan to return to posting in early July. In the meantime, I’ll sign off with this small item, which caught my attention after I’d read a scene in Victor Segalen’s novel René Leys in which a gentleman in the streets of early 20^th century Peking extracts a piece of paper from a pile of horse dung:

From Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1984, p. 66:

Plate 52. “The Paper Gatherer.” The Wenhuashe, or “Society of the Splendors of Literature,” hired this man to collect any refuse paper with writing on it. It was considered a crime for any paper with writing on it to be tossed away. This attitude reflected a deep cultural respect for literature and learning. The paper gatherer picked up scraps from the streets and sidewalks, and stopped at deposit boxes located throughout Chinatown. He would bring the paper to special incinerators, and the ashes would be sent on boats to be tossed into the ocean outside the Golden Gate… The practice ended shortly after the earthquake. 

Back in two or three weeks – best wishes to all.

Panaït Istrati's Kyra Kyralina

 “…a born poet madly in love with simple things like adventure, friendship, rebellion, flesh and blood.” – Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

A few years ago I’d visited the French literature section of the library to track down a novel by Joseph Kessel (so few of whose works, alas, are available in English). I located it, but simultaneously my eyes spotted a brightly decorated spine the next shelf over. Stretching to pull it down, I barely avoided having it bean me on the head. On the cover a folkloric floral design accompanied the curious name “Panaït Istrati.” Intrigued, I turned to the preface, written by…Joseph Kessel. This fascinating piece of writing served as my entrée to one of the more unusual literary figures of the 20^th century.

Kessel’s preface was followed by another by Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland, recounting the extraordinary circumstances under which Rolland had discovered Istrati. A young vagabond had slit his own throat in a park in Nice and was hospitalized there. Inside the man’s jacket, his rescuers had found a letter addressed to Rolland and had forwarded it to him. “I read it and was seized by the tumult of genius, like a wind burning on the plain. It was the confession of a new Gorki from the Balkans. They managed to save him. I wanted to get to know him. We began corresponding. We became friends.”

The man, of course, was Panaït Istrati, a young Romanian of Slavic and Greek descent who had led a most extraordinary life, one that had taken him around the Mediterranean, across eastern Europe and the Levant, and into and out of all kinds of jobs: “cabaret waiter, pastry chef, locksmith, tinker, mechanic, manual laborer, stevedore, house boy, sandwich man, sign painter, house painter, journalist and photographer.” Along the way, Istrati had picked up stories as varied and entrancing as those of The Arabian Nights. Rolland took Istrati under his wing, recognizing in him a born storyteller (in his preface Rolland notes that Istrati’s storytelling prowess proved so irrepressible he’d interrupted the narrative of his own suicide note to weave in a few choice tales).

Though I’d avoided being knocked out physically by the volume that had nearly cracked me on the head (Volume 1 of four volumes of Istrati’s fiction put out by Gallimard in Paris), I could not escape being metaphorically knocked out by its the first selection, Kyra Kyralina. I was smitten by the novel, enough to hunt down my own copy of the Gallimard edition, a book towards which I have developed a particularly fond personal attachment. Kyra Kyralina marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Adrien Zograffi cycle. This series of tales set in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire had, by the time of Istrati’s death in 1935, amassed into more than a dozen novels, and had earned Istrati accolades as one of the pioneers of modernism. The Zograffi books had even been compared to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. But as Kessel points out in his preface, Istrati’s death, the dissolution of his publishing house, and the war all conspired together to send his work into oblivion for a third of a century until the Gallimard edition appeared in 1968.

Thus I was immensely pleased recently to discover an American edition of Kyra Kyralina and for the chance to revisit the novel, this time in English (translated by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno and including the original Rolland preface). This new English translation is especially welcome given that Istrati’s vernacular French (he’d only begun to learn the language seven years before writing Kyra Kyralina) contains some grammatical oddities that create occasional challenges for those of us whose French is inexpert.

But even were Kyra Kyralina scratched into dirt with a stick, one would be hard pressed not to recognize in it storytelling of the highest order. One reads Kyra Kyralina in large gulps. Its narratives “nest” within a framing device such as one finds in story cycles such as The Arabian Nights or the Decameron, beginning guilelessly and timorously with the young Adrien’s first leave-taking from home, then plunging one into tales of high drama and exoticism combined with a gripping realism. Adrien serves as the conduit for these tales, gathering them from the singular characters he encounters. In Kyra Kyralina, the story idles along until it meets one of these figures, Stavro, whom Adrien and a companion have joined on a trip to a nearby country fair where they’ll try to profit by selling watered down citric acid as lemonade. Stavro, confronted by the two boys after displaying some amorous intentions in a hayloft one night, offers as explanation the story of his life, a history riveting in its brutality, joy, independence of spirit, and instinct for survival. Stories in Kyra Kyralina possess this kind of power: a capacity for bewitching and transforming the moment; in this instance the boys’ sense of insult regarding Stavro’s advances is quickly dissipated by the spell his tale creates.

An honest, fundamental curiosity, refusing to censor any aspect of life, gives Istrati’s writing both a mythic quality and puts Istrati ahead of his time, with a particularly enlightened sensibility concerning gender and sexuality. Predictably, while the novel was popular upon its publication in France, it met with suspicion and distrust in the U.S., where, as Sawyer-Lauçanno points out, attitudes were quite a bit less liberal sexually than in the Ottoman culture from which Istrati emerged.

Istrati’s principal characters are, like those of Albert Cossery a few decades later, vibrant common people who refuse to accept anything less than their full human dignity, and who, through the sheer ferocity of their zeal for life, expose the niceties of bourgeois morality as sham. Unforgettable in their courage, persistence and vitality, they find themselves able to survive even in the most wretched of circumstances through a conviction, sometimes beaten by the world into a fragile thinness, that events will turn, that their oppression will not last forever, and that “suffering a thousand setbacks does not give one the right to dismiss all of humanity.” In this way these wanderers at fortune’s mercy become teachers of others in the school of hard knocks, their lessons often rising to heroic heights. When Stavro’s mother suffers a ferocious beating by her brute husband, she flees with Stavro and his older sister Kyra, then, once at a safe distance, leaves them with a powerful speech:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow. I’m going to leave you. …And Kyra, listen to what I have to say to you. If you Kyra, as I believe, do not feel the need to live a life of virtue, then don’t. Don’t be virtuous if it means you are constrained and shriveled inside. Don’t mock God. Strive to be the best in how He made you. Seek pleasure, even debauchery, but don’t let debauchery harden your heart…and you, Drogomir, if you cannot be a virtuous man, be like your sister and your mother, be a thief even, but a thief who has a heart, for a man without a heart, my children, is a corpse that keeps the living from living their lives.

Adrien plays a peripheral role in these tales, that of listener and transducer. The few places in Kyra Kyralina where he appears, he’s a traveler, “following his own destiny” and “[piling] up plenty of adventures,” the perfect vehicle for recounting the stories he hears, as learning them is “what interested him most in life: the need to look ceaselessly in to the deepest part of the human soul. The multitude of nameless beings he encountered rarely possessed souls worth exploring, but Adrien knew how to find them, and by chance he occasionally came upon them.”

It’s a glowing, vibrant, grand world of adventure, violence, tenderness, good humor, great friendship, and a prevailing love bound by blood. Above all, it is a distinctly human world in which God, important only in an abstract sense, proves fairly useless. When Stavro laments that God may have erred in preserving a few of his subjects after the Flood, he adds forgivingly that it wasn’t entirely God’s fault since, “God (like me at sixteen) didn’t know the world all that well and didn’t know what people were capable of doing.”

For its simultaneously larger-than-life and down-to-earth characters, warmly engaging narrator, and vivid realism combined with the exoticism of tales from another age, Kyra Kyralina is a work I relished re-reading. Istrati, like many supporters of communism, traveled to the newly formed USSR. Ever peripatetic, he traveled far beyond Moscow, confirming with his own eyes the rumors that others had incredulously dismissed. Among the first of several authors (later to include George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge and Istrati’s close friend Nikos Kazantzakis) to warn of the horrors unfolding under Stalin, Istrati paid dearly for these truths. Accused of betraying the revolution, he was denounced ferociously by many who had been his ardent supporters. Rejected by both left and right, broken and disheartened, sick with tuberculosis, Istrati returned to Romania, where he died in the sanitarium in Bucharest.

In Translation: Carlos Drummond de Andrade

A recent obituary for Antonio Tabucchi noted that, in addition to being a writer of fiction, a political activist, and an academic with a strong focus on modern literature in Portuguese, especially Fernando Pessoa, Tabucchi also specialized in the poetry of Brazil’s most renowned 20^th century poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I’m half ashamed that I’d never heard of him.

I say “half ashamed” as the fault lies not simply in the inadequate scope of my curiosity, but also in the scarcity of English translations of Drummond’s work. Drummond is a grand figure in Brazilian literature. His poems are widely recognized, anthologized and recited; one even appears on a bill of the nation’s currency. Yet a mere handful of short collections have appeared in English, all now out of print. This makes for a rather astonishing state of affairs for a poet of Drummond’s stature: imagine not being able to read Pablo Neruda in English, or reading only Spanish and being unable to find Walt Whitman in translation.

Prompted by the Tabucchi obituary, I dug into one of these books - In the Middle of the Road, translated by John Nist – with an exponentially growing excitement and an almost proprietary sense of discovering a writer who appealed to me so directly as to merit inclusion in the selective personal pantheon of writers for whom I feel the greatest enthusiasm. Here was the kind of poet who – in his resonant, concrete clarity, deep humor, and profound appreciation of life’s knife-edge proximity to death – threw into sharp relief the inadequacies of so much other poetry. I followed Nist’s book with The Minus Sign (translator Virginia de Araujo) and Traveling in the Family (various translators). These three volumes together offer a terrific introduction to Drummond, as well as – given their overlapping selections – the opportunity to examine, side-by-side, different approaches to translating him. But the difficulty of finding these books and the limited number of poems they contain – altogether about 100 accounting for overlap, compared to over 200 in a single French pocket edition I found - underscore the dire need for an expanded collection of this tremendous poet’s work to be published for English readers. I’m talking to you, publishers!

The three volumes exhibit remarkably complementary strengths and weaknesses. Only In the Middle of the Road provides the original Portuguese, with translations on facing pages. Drummond’s clear simplicity of expression makes turning to the originals - if for no other reason than to get a sense of the sound and rhythm of his work - rewarding to anyone with even a wisp of a background in a Romance language. De Araujo notes that Nist’s translations are often overly literal, and while in certain instances I preferred them to others, they displayed occasionally wince-inducing missteps (most notably in the translation of a proper name, “Raimundo,” used to rhyme with “mundo” [world], for which Nist’s baffling, expedient solution is "Twirled"). The organizing principle behind Nist’s selections is also unclear and frustrating in its lack of dates for the poems. Traveling in the Family remedies this problem with a chronologically-arranged selection of about 45 poems, translated by Thomas Colchie, Mark Strand, Gregory Rabassa and Elizabeth Bishop - the last widely credited with bringing Drummond to the attention of admiring Anglophone poets (with whom Anglophone familiarity with Drummond has largely, alas, appeared to settle).  Finally, Virginia de Araujo’s solo translation effort, The Minus Sign, offers some 55 poems organized thematically: The Individual, Land and Family, and Being-In-The-World. De Araujo also offers a majestic introductory bio-sketch of Drummond’s remarkable life (plus, as an added bonus, a defense of her translation method that could stand alone as an unusually conscientious argument for the serious responsibilities of the translator). This beautifully written introduction outlines Drummond’s aristocratic origins in the hilly mining and agricultural country of Minas Gerais and the way in which the close friendships of his youth – with many who would later become influential Brazilian politicians – trumped to a large extent any ill feeling regarding his rejection of privilege in favor of a strongly left-leaning, humanistic political activism. Thus, despite an embrace of communism, Drummond remained a respected civil servant in Rio de Janeiro, holding for most of his life a position in charge of preservation of the country’s historical monuments.

One poem included in all three books - “In the Middle of the Road” - is arguably Drummond’s most famous – and uncharacteristic. Here is de Araujo’s translation:

In the Middle of the Road

In the middle of the road there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

there was a stone

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

I will never forget the occasion

never as long as my tired eyes stay open,

I will never forget that in the middle of the road

there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

This short, curious poem encapsulates many of Drummond's signature elements: humor and liveliness; complexity in simplicity; universality; the abrupt sense of the immediacy of events; the grounding (literal in this case) of his subject in the concrete and tangible; the notion of the inevitability of obstacles in life; the harmonious melding of form with function (in this case, experimentation with form as a means of approaching and evading obstacles).

For skeptical readers, I’ll quickly note that the poem is perhaps the most obscure in these collections. By contrast, most of Drummond’s work, though no less intriguing,  is eminently accessible: intimately personable, warmly conversational and clear. He writes about subjects immediately familiar (at a slant), exploring unexpected niches of life one nonetheless recognizes as having been in front of one’s face all along:  the essential weirdness of family photographs; the losses that occur with maturity; the mixture of joy and regret in discovering love in middle age; the curiously potent nostalgia in seeing a grand hotel being demolished; the everyman qualities of Charlie Chaplin; even a poem about the complicated psychological concern for one’s appearance that dental work can produce. His range is formidable, from brief poems that indulge in almost childlike, whimsical word-play, to lush, erotic love poems, to poems with a deep resonance on sober subjects, for example a mother fretting over a disappeared daughter (“Forget politics for a moment/set aside materialistic concerns/and devote some time to searching,/making inquiries, nosing around./You won’t regret it. There’s no/satisfaction greater than the smile/of a joyous mother”), or a man heading to his death in a plane crash - a stunning poem told as though time has been twisted to simultaneously show both the man's awareness and unawareness of what’s to come (“I eat a fish in a sauce/of gold and cream./It is my last fish on my last/fork.”). 

Mortality and its companions, time and aging, appear throughout Drummond’s work. Particularly striking for a modern poet, Drummond appears to assume the inevitability of human extinction, though with a fierce defense of the importance of reveling in life despite our species’ poor odds. What appears to be an implicit pessimism may actually be (to use a phrase from Sartre) “the sternness of our optimism,” as these are hardly what one would think of as apocalyptic, grim or morose poems. They exalt and extol life, rage against the dying of the light, sometimes on a global scale, embracing the “the sun of the short day in which we fight.” There’s a tender ferocity in Drummond, a deep appreciation of the limited time we have on earth fused with a pointed sense of justice and a deliberately humanistic, generalisable quality. When he writes of love, it is both particular and partaking of a wider, agape-like love of humanity. Also, in defiantly setting himself against death, Drummond can be funny and moving in equal measure.

One example of this is the poem “The Table,” an extended fantasy on a family holiday feast at which Drummond’s deceased father – and the family’s other ghosts – are present along with the living. It’s a clever idea brimming with humor (“you’d feel replete, pleased/to have such sons…Man!/What crooks! But [you’d say]/they did turn out better/than they looked”), but also flickering with deeply felt grief and love. At one point in the poem, Drummond invites his father to look at a girl we assume to be Drummond’s daughter:

take a close look at this

little girl: chin, eyes, hands,

and into her private conscience,

and into her young grace,

and say, after that look,

if she isn’t – in my tide of error –

an island of surprise.

She is my explication,

my best, my most quiet stanza,

my all, who fills the vacuum.

“My most quiet stanza” echoes a philosophical underpinning of Drummond’s poetry – that poetry is both essential and inadequate to life, a kind of meager scratching to get at truth. Poetry itself is a frequent, reflexive subject of Drummond’s poems, which plead both in form and content for conscientiousness in writing and humility in recognizing poetry as a tool for the grand task of living.  Seldom does one find a poet who breathes so much life into words, makes of them such living entities, offers such buoyant support for why poetry and literature matter to us.

Come close and consider the words.

With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces

and with no interest in your response,

whether weak or strong,

each word asks:

Did you bring the key?

Take note:

Words hide in the night

in caves of music and image.

Still humid and pregnant with sleep

they turn in a winding river and by neglect are transformed.

Amid poets who believe so strongly in the power of the written word, it’s immensely refreshing to find one who so humbly recognizes that poetry can only get us closer to life, that (in the poem from which de Araujo’s book takes its title) “the best poetry is/a minus sign.” In the pantheon of great modern poets, however, what Drummond deserves is addition, particularly for those readers of English like me who until now have been unfamiliar with his marvelous work. Discovering him in the middle of my own road has been an occasion I will never forget. 

Antonio Tabucchi on The Book of Disquiet

If one can say that a life can be transformed by reading a writer’s work, the contemporary Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi (who died this March) provides a notable example. As a student in Paris, Tabucchi read Fernando Pessoa’s poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” which set him on a lifelong trajectory influenced to an unusual degree by the Portuguese writer. Tabucchi  wrote and taught of Pessoa, translated nearly all of the writer’s works into Italian, and, in his own novels and short stories, fed ravenously on Pessoa’s influence.

Before I leave off discussion of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I thought I’d attempt to summarize Tabucchi’s brief treatment of this work in La nostalgie du possible: sur Pessoa (The Nostalgia of the Possible: On Pessoa), one of Tabucchi’s two books of essays on the writer. There may be more insightful works on Pessoa, but I’ve singled out this one due to my appreciation of Tabucchi and because the book is both unavailable in English and difficult to track down in French.  La nostalgie du possible consists of four lectures Tabucchi presented in Paris in 1994 along with a handy guide to Pessoa’s principal heteronyms, those alter egos he created as authors of his poetry and prose. The first lecture addresses philosophical concepts in the entirety of Pessoa’s work. Another compares Pessoa to Leopardi. In a third (for me the highlight of the collection, though not the subject of this post) Tabucchi literally unpacks – like Harpo Marx emptying his pockets – the diverse and surprising belongings of the Pessoan heteronym Alvaro de Campos, commencing with a list of all the physical objects mentioned in de Campos’ poems, and incorporating a wonderful bit about the automobile in modernist literature that begins with Proust’s “Ruskinian adventures” in visiting France’s cathedrals using a car’s headlights to illuminate their facades and ends with discussion of a wayward tire floating in the middle of the de Campos poem, “Maritime Ode.”

The short lecture Tabucchi devotes to The Book of Disquiet is entitled, “L’infinie dysphorique du Bernardo Soares” (“The Dysphoric Infinity of Bernado Soares”). Tabucchi views Soares as a being whose primary mode of interacting with the world is a “disquiet” feeling of nostalgia, not for the past, or even the present, but for those things that might have been. Soares’ life is unusually marked by insignificance and troubled by the day-to-day. Out of the vast and dense universe of the quotidian described in these 450 pages of meditations by Soares, Tabucchi pulls out a particularly interesting episode: the fright Soares experiences when a group photo is taken at a holiday party at his office (fragment 56 in the Richard Zenith translation), a photo that causes Soares to suffer “the truth on seeing myself there” and that prompts him to wonder who he is, exactly, among this “lifeless tide of faces.” In effect, it’s a scene that clearly identifies Soares as depressive and dysphoric. And while as Tabucchi points out, the origins of this depression beg for a psychoanalytic interpretation he’s unqualified to provide, one must also point out that Soares is a fictional character, his book a “phenomenological” one (with a kinship to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Soares’ depression is not just the “black mood” of the ancients, but a dysphoric rupture with reality, a frustration with not being able to find in the exterior world a correlation for the grandeur of his emotions and sensations, those great and small alike. His interior world is simply too expansive to fit the crude limitations of his commonplace reality. A commonplace person, he turns of necessity to “his little daily universe, his pocket universe,” (I love this phrase – “pocket universe”), the ordinariness of the world, constructing of it a new kind of infinity, a new kind of metaphysics through which the mysteries of the universe are revealed via the quotidian and banal. One result of this attempt to invest the outside, commonplace world with the tumultuous interior world of Soares’ emotions is the richness with which, in his daily journal, Soares is able to imbue the most insignificant of things and magnify the world through them (through descriptions Tabucchi compares to the “word-paintings” of Ruskin).  As Tabucchi concludes, Soares’ writing – his pinning down the impressions of a day and etching his reflections on his tenuous existence – is the dysphoric stroke of a pendulum that finds a correlating euphoric expression in Pessoa’s other poet heteronyms, together representing an almost compulsory attempt to fill the void by trying to write “all possible books…incessantly multiplying oneself as though the world were made of writing.”  

“…as though the world were made of writing.”

I look forward to tracking down Tabucchi’s other book of essays on Pessoa.

Song of My Selves: Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

To open Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is get a glimpse of still, twilit infinity. This surprisingly rich, dense, lyrical work defies classification, interpretation and conclusions. At once novel, journal, poem (or “poeticized prose,” as translator Richard Zenith calls it), meditation, confession, psychological case study (from the patient’s point of view), philosophical essay, and description of the abyss, The Book of Disquiet may well be one of the world’s most accurately titled works of art.

It also may well be one of the world’s most amorphous documents, a book only in the loosest sense. Its history reads like the contrived conceit of some contemporary metafictional novel: found at Pessoa’s death in 1935 as a collection of bound and loose pages in a trunk, The Book of Disquiet, from its indeterminate plan as to how its parts were to fit together, and as to what should and shouldn’t be included, retains an indefinite, shifting shape.

The indistinct outlines of its form provide us this: close to five hundred entries in a kind of log in which the impressions of Bernando Soares, an accounting clerk in an import/export office in the Rua Douradores in Lisbon (the city that gave birth to the sublime) are recorded with a repetitive layering, the day by day accounts of a solitary, depressive yet poetic functionary who goes each day to his office, performs his duty, dines at the same restaurant each evening, and walks home through Lisbon’s streets to his spare, humble apartment where he puts down his observations and reflections. If a more communicative Bartleby or a less bitter and incapacitated Willy Loman had kept a journal, it might read a little like this; a devotional exercise in capturing tedium, routine, and the mechanical, paralyzed life of an office worker.

Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations hosted something of a solo read-along of The Book of Disquiet a couple of weeks ago, pulling the weight himself. In joining this late, I can add little to the insights provided by his posts and in the accompanying comments, but among the latter one reader called The Book of Disquiet “frightening,” while another called it “comfort reading.”  I can’t know what’s behind those readers’ disparate poles of reaction, but since I’ve experienced both of them myself, I’ll argue in favor of discarding an understandable reluctance to begin this admittedly frightening prospect - a 450 page book in which melancholy, insomnia, and passive crises of identity repeat across the entirety of its surface – and even finding solace in it.

I’d flirted with picking up a copy of The Book of Disquiet for many years, repeatedly passing it over out of anxiety that it would prove a dreary, melancholic cult novel attractive primarily to dreary, melancholic, cultish intellectuals. The first pages of The Book of Disquiet, however, made me sit up straight. Its immediate, prescient articulation of modern anxieties and sentiments felt intimately, eerily, abruptly familiar, yet for all that seemed fresh and illuminating. Pessoa’s language surprised me even more; in describing a world of the banal and ordinary, of office work and simple rooms, of passivity and resignation, Bernardo Soares’ gaze is also charged with an intense, ravishing lyricism and a Whitmanian, biblical cadence. Some passages in the The Book of Disquiet are simply breathtaking, lending a subversive irony and an intensity of observed life to the narrator’s meditations on futility.

Soares is a quintessential modern man, yoked to a workday that repeats itself with no promise of respite “until the coach from the abyss pulls up” (Zenith, fragment 1). In some ways he’s the flip side of a Kafka character; both are at the mercy of bureaucratic, impersonal forces larger than themselves, but Soares, rather than being reduced to the iconic singularity of a dry and dusty beetle, a badger in a burrow or a hunger artist in a cage, finds, if not escape exactly, then perhaps a kind of allowance for continuing to live, gained through the unexpected fruits of his concentrated attempts to melt into his surroundings, to extinguish himself to the point of refusing an identity, to seek refuge in nothingness. Like Whitman (whose influence pervades The Book of Disquiet) Soares, in his naked confrontation with the world and panoramic, encompassing, personified identification with all that his attention touches, contains multitudes. Unlike Whitman, whatever celebration of himself he makes is sober and interior, whatever singing of it but a wistful fado. Pessoa has taken the ebullient, expansive infinity of Whitman and seated it in 9-to-5 office job. In place of a desire to merge atomically with the world in a joyous fusion, there’s an almost pathological compulsion in Soares to obliterate himself in the world. In large measure he succeeds, sensing himself only as a concentrated awareness, a disembodied eye that observes, an existence reduced to a presence that dreams, with an effacing, disconsolate kind of freedom snatched from trying to avoid being seen. Dreams trump reality in The Book of Disquiet, providing a kind of parallel shadow life for Soares to inhabit, one multiplied by dreams’ capacity - like that of fiction, one might add - to allow one to lead, in the world of the mind, a multiplicity of lives other than one’s own (tellingly, Soares dreams of a romanticized Samarkand of the past, an exotic and impossible destination that might as well be the back of the moon).  Even dreams, though, as Soares recognizes, have “detestable” limitations, since the mind recognizes that they are but dreams. Yet neither is action possible, in that action “offends… sensibility” and threatens to disrupt – as though sicklied over with the pale cast of thought - the still gaze that provides Soares the poetic response that sustains him. And so Soares remains something of a fixed quantity, a gaze that thinks, slotted somewhere between dreaming and action, between emotion and intellect, flickering but not really moving, a figure in a zoetrope.

What could be comforting in this? Routine can provide comfort. Inaction can provide a kind of tranquility. But a serious person would hardly think of these as more than illusory. What may be comforting, however, in a philosophical sense, is Soares’ acceptance of the price of routine and inaction, one articulated here as disquiet, or in the original Portuguese, desassossego (a word deconstructed by Antonio Tabucchi in a brief essay on the book[i], as being, like its sister word saudade, nearly untranslatable in its complexity of associations). Soares provides the kind of comfort one obtains from having one’s sense of reality affirmed, from accepting intranquility as a condition of modern life. In other words, Soares provides the solace of understanding that he does not understand.

One might also find comfort in the aphoristic quality of Soares’ journal. Much of The Book of Disquiet consists of meditations, aphorisms that, even in their disquieting assertions, provide a lulling affirmation of one’s existence. Despite Soares’ determined conviction that action is futile, that the refuge of dreams is temporary, that thought is of questionable use, there remains a palpable heroism not only in the poeticism of his response to the world, but in the very fact that he has one. Perhaps most striking about The Book of Disquiet is the manner in which Pessoa merges these meditations on routine existence with a rapturous poeticism that lifts Soares far above his ordinary, day to day life; it’s no coincidence that so many of Soares’ descriptions involve the sky above Lisbon. Pessoa/Soares provides us, as Tabucchi points out in his essay, a metaphysics of the banal. It’s the closest thing we may have to a religious text for the faithless and dispossessed.

The one activity in which Soares engages that may be construed as action (apart those minimal functional tasks required to dress and eat and hold a job) is writing. In this dense, amorphous collection of what at times appears to be little other than entries one might shuffle like a deck of cards (one kind of infinity), perhaps the beginning of The Book of Disquiet is really the end. Here one finds a short framing device through which Fernando Pessoa first introduces us to Bernando Soares, a man (like himself) who dines each night (like himself) at the same restaurant and who (like himself) retires each night to a simple room to write:  a semblable, an intimate if not exactly a friend. At the end of this preface, Pessoa notes Soares’ contentment in finding someone with whom to leave his book, a gift Pessoa accepts with an appreciation “from a psychological point of view” and because he recognizes the writer’s need to have a reader. For those of us now privileged to be readers of The Book of Disquiet, we may recognize our own semblable in Pessoa’s book, which speaks so intimately to the many attributes of our own modern psychology, and which, by being a work of fiction and not simply a psychological case study, immortalizes, in an almost infinitely intriguing work of art (I have scarcely begun to sound its depths), the heroic/anti-heroic fragility of our dreaming, shifting, insubstantial search for meaning, solidity and identity in a mechanized and spiritually tenuous world.

One final note on reading The Book of Disquiet to help mitigate the fright of anyone approaching it for the first time, particularly those who, like me, expected a novel. While the book has novelistic aspects, its dense accumulation of observations and reflections can weigh heavily in one’s reading, and it has little if anything in the way of plot (unless one might approach Pessoa’s coyly expressed “psychological point of view” with a psychologist’s interest in tracing Soares’ pathology). In a comment, Amateur Reader notes translator Alfred MacAdams’ suggestion to approach the book by reading it through once in the already somewhat arbitrary order in which it has been assembled, then turning to its entries randomly for the rest of one’s life. This seems infinitely sound advice.

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[i] Antonio Tabucchi, “L’infinie dysphorique de Bernardo Soares,” in La Nostalgie du Possible: Sur Pessoa, Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 1998

Well Read By Moonlight

Over the past few days, a few literary bloggers (you know who you are) have been discussing what constitutes a “classic” and how the “canon” is formed: in other words, how literature comes to be valued collectively. Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations generously (and humorously) offers that “a classic is whatever other people say it is, and also whatever you say it is.” It’s that second category of valuation that interests me here: each reader’s “personal” canon, those works he or she might carry along to a desert island. When the “classics/canon” discussion arose, I’d just been musing about that topic in a tangential context.

On a less than 24-hour passage through London recently, I spent one of those rare travel days when everything clicked, the whole day an enchaînement of enchantments. I spent some time in second-hand bookshops, emerging both relieved (no more books to cram into my bags) and disappointed (no more books to cram into my bags). The shops seemed ransacked; I found nothing I was seeking, nor anything I wasn’t. But heading back to my hotel in the remains of the day, I noticed a bookshop I’d missed earlier, like the others not clean, not well-lighted, bereft of all but the most forlorn books. But suddenly I spied a pristine Folio Society edition of William Stanley Moss’ Ill Met By Moonlight, a work I’d wanted to read since learning of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s role in the tale it recounts. For the few British coins remaining in my pocket, it was mine.

Some books seem to leave one reluctant to the risk tarnishing the singular power of their storytelling by something so superfluous, mingy and indecorous as critical commentary (a few that come to mind: Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Ill Met By Moonlight, Moss’ log of his and Fermor’s daring 1943 kidnapping, with the help of local partisans, of the Nazi general overseeing the occupation of Crete, fits this mold. It’s a supremely absorbing adventure tale. I read it in a single sitting, finishing in the jet-lagged wee hours of the morning. I wish to add or subtract nothing from its mesmerizing story, but one marginal, bookish element snagged my attention.

I’d found this notable elsewhere, even in Fermor’s own travel books: the supreme importance, on a personal level, given to literature, to the point of hauling it around as a travel accessory (necessity, more like). Reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, an account of his travels in the 1930’s through Persia and Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but notice the number of books Byron brought along. Byron’s library for his punishing travels – not exactly beach reading - included Proust, Boswell, Thucydides and some detective novels, as though he were toting along a whole civilization, like a talisman to prevent him from losing himself in foreign lands. In a less cumbrous example of literature as travel necessity, Antonio Tabucchi, writing about Miguel de Unamuno, notes that when exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, Unamuno insisted on taking along the New Testament, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi. Certainly there are hundreds of other such lists.

But finding this same phenomenon in Ill Met By Moonlight raised an eyebrow. Unlike Byron, off on a self-initiated grand cultural adventure, and unlike Unanmuno, fleeing into indeterminate exile, Moss and Fermor were on a clandestine, highly dangerous war-time mission, involving night travel on precarious goat paths, hiding in caves and ditches, evading German patrols and myriad other perils. Nonetheless, writing in a canyon after a long night’s rugged march several days after his secret disembarkation on Crete, Moss reveals:

I have with me the books which Paddy and I selected in Cairo to take with us, and among them there is something to suit every mood. My literary companions are Cellini, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Tolstoi, and Marco Polo, while in lighter vein there are Les Fleurs du Mal, Les Yeux d’Elsa, and Alice in Wonderland. Then there are The Oxford Book of Verse and the collected Shakespeare which Billy MacLean gave us on our last night in Tara…smiling shyly and giving us these two volumes, one to Paddy, one to me, saying that they had been with him in Albania and would surely bring us luck.

What a commitment to literature! What an almost superstitious faith in its power! This attitude is underscored by the role that literature and poetry play in the mission itself, as when the young Fermor completes in Latin some lines from Horace that the kidnapped German general has begun to mutter, or in the numerous poems and songs recited by the Cretans and Brits alike to provide solace, courage and sustenance.

But it’s not as though hauling around a load of literature is restricted to those on grand explorations, perilous missions or trips into exile. After all, on my fortuitous London evening, Ill Met By Moonlight joined 18 other books I’d already picked up during two weeks of travel. I wonder, though, which books I’d bring along on a voyage if I knew there was a more than significant chance I wouldn’t come back. The canon formed by what other people think is a classic is certainly not something I dismiss; I suspect, though, that it wouldn’t be the first place I’d turn to make my choices for this journey.

Natural Born Killers: J. A. Baker's The Peregrine

I knew right away that The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s slim 1967 book about peregrine hawks, would be unlike any naturalist’s book I’d encountered before. Baker follows two opening paragraphs of detailed description of landscape by suddenly swooping down mercilessly on his own narrative: “Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious.” I learned of The Peregrine from Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes, who listed it among his end-of-year favorites and in his review - which highlights some of the book's best passages - likened it to Moby Dick. This rather hyperbolic claim is one with which I now concur. To drag an old canard out into the open, saying that The Peregrine is a book about birds is like saying that Moby Dick is a book about…well, I don’t need to complete that. But The Peregrine does carry a similar weight and quality of obsession and the sense that its subjects range into territory well beyond the guileless promise of its simple title.

I love books like this, that appear to be one thing and turn out to be something quite else. Readers expecting a history of falconry or granular details of peregrine biology should look elsewhere. Without doubt, The Peregrine presents a fascinating naturalist’s appreciation of peregrine hawks, detailing their habits and behaviors and physical characteristics. And yes, as a naturalist’s book it fits a pattern, effectively and affectingly, of bemoaning man’s senseless destruction of nature and the tragic decline of a species. Baker also makes it impossible for one not to notice birds – any bird – and that is reason enough to value The Peregrine. But this is also a wildly personal, idiosyncratic, poetically daring book, not one of tender feelings or detached, scientific analysis. Baker is no Farley Mowat, lugging along a wealth of scientific background to go and live peaceably among the animals then returning to civilization to report on what they’re up to. Rather, Baker’s fixation with peregrines borders on madness, a kind of intimate, obsessive/compulsive ordering of the world in which he allies himself with his avian subjects, leaving those of us of his own species opposite some bitter demarcation zone. With an approach far more Grizzly Man than “Wild Kingdom,” Baker’s nearly daily rounds to observe peregrines see him gradually and furtively slipping into their world, beginning to identify with some of their characteristics and appetites (lucky for him, peregrines are not grizzly bears).

Baker’s distinctive style employs unusual verbs and adjectives in descriptions that create an untamed, sharp-edged narrative nonetheless arresting in its ability to capture certain scenes or experiences with stunning lyrical beauty. I repeatedly had to stop and relish a descriptive line or phrase. A lot of writers exhibit a magician’s dexterity with adjectives; few, though, come close to Baker’s exploitation of the descriptive potential of the verb. Skies “brim” with cloud; birds are “threshed up” from field and furrow, then “shoulder,” “jink,” and “claw” the air.

Early on, Baker warns us that he’ll “try to make plain the bloodiness of killing.” That he does, and how. Nature is red in beak and claw in The Peregrine, as on page after page Baker describes the brutal, explosively swift attacks of the peregrines and the ravaged bodies, crushed skulls and torn flesh of their victims. There are dozens of such descriptions:

He is overtaken, cut down. He drops with a squelching thud. The hawk lands on the softening bird, grips its neck in his bill. I hear the bone snap, like barbed wire cut by pliers. He nudges the dead bird over. Its wings wave, then it lites on its back. I hear the tearing of feathers, the tug of flesh, the crack and snap of gristle. I can see the black blood dripping from the gleam of the hawk’s bill.

Filing each day’s observations, Baker amasses a compendium of such murders that has a cumulative impact on the reader (in one of those accidents of juxtaposition, having read Roberto Bolaño just prior to picking up The Peregrine, I could not help but think of the similar concussive effect of the terrible catalog of murders in Bolaño’s 2666). More often than once, Baker’s morbid accounts drift into a nearly manic fascination with violence and death:

A day of blood; of sun, snow, and blood. Blood-red! What a useless adjective that is. Nothing is as beautifully, richly red as flowing blood on snow. It is strange that the eye can love what mind and body hate.

Compared to his interest in the birds’ plumage or their agile aerial acrobatics, Baker’s focus on the audacity of the attacks and the grisly details of their aftermath takes on a special, almost pathological flavor. It’s enough to make one wonder: What does this person do when he’s not out observing birds? How is his apparently solitary life (he mentions no friend, companion or even acquaintance) organized such that he can spend whole days observing his subjects, heedless of inclement weather, without apparent obligations on his time? Unlike those convocations of Sunday birdwatchers, together compiling lists of the birds they’ve sighted, Baker is pronounced in his solitariness, and his spectacularly voluptuous descriptions of death don’t fit any sort of scientific approach. This lends his narrative an eerily steady, practically creepy tone, a frisson of madness that makes his innocent birdwatching come across as akin to the stalker-ish obsessions of John Fowles’ Frederick Clegg in The Collector or those of the homicidal photographer in Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom.

It’s little surprise, then, to find these characteristics amplified in a book that seems to give the aberrant elements of Baker’s psychology a wicked push: mystery writer William Bayer’s Peregrine, in which Baker’s obsessive pathology and the effective killing machines that are his beloved tiercels and falcons come together in a grimly tongue-in-cheek crime novel in which peregrines are used as murder weapons. Bayer culls the cream (and the blood) from a modus operandi like Baker’s and makes them…well…blood-curdling (sorry). Bayer’s peregrines stoop from the sky at ferocious speeds to kill their human prey, just as they do their non-human victims in Baker’s book.

I intend by this comparison no denigration of Baker or of his beautiful book; it’s simply that the force of his fascination with death and violence broaches psychological areas on which such more sinister tales of obsession and violence are constructed. Baker’s stated intention at the beginning of The Peregrine is to sap the power of the word “predator” as applied to peregrines, since nearly all birds exhibit carnivorous traits and – more to the point – the peregrines’ rapaciousness has nothing on that of man. Baker’s success at describing the gruesomeness of death is perhaps only exceeded by his ability to describe - with devastating economy - the dismaying impact of pollutants, poisons and other manmade agents of destruction. Few books convey so strongly the wanton predations of human beings and our malign unconsciousness of the natural world around us. In one passage, Baker observes a man on a sea wall completely oblivious to a cloud of savage avian activity occurring directly above his head. With a nearly theological power, this scene limns the lamentable ridiculousness of our human ignorance of the unseen, unnoticed universe we inhabit. The creatures above the man’s head might as well be angels. And if one will never look at a bird the same way again after reading The Peregrine, it’s even more likely that one will emerge with a lasting awareness of the wild battles of life and death going on in those ostensibly tranquil marshes, forests and skies, and of the toxic bumblings of humanity that threaten not only the natural world, but also something wild and vital in ourselves. 

Lives of the Poets: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

I’ve been cordially invited to join The Savage Detectives reading challenge.  I accepted of course, albeit with slight reluctance, and not just due to time constraints (I’m late, I’m sorry). I’ve been both fascinated and vaguely irritated by the previous works of Roberto Bolaño that I’ve read - in order: Distant Star, By Night in Chile, 2666, Nazi Literature in the Americas, Antwerp – good heavens, is it that many already? There’s something about him that’s prickled on a purely personal (visceral?) level, and I’ve been unable to put my finger on it, despite there being many candidates: he challenges his readers and makes us feel uneasy; he can be showy and self-conscious in his intellectualism; his world is so concentrated on the minutiae of writers and writing that one can feel left outside of some private club (or private joke); he can indulge in literary games with a fervor bordering on adolescent excess; he can even come across as tinged by a homophobic and slightly patriarchal streak.  To make matters worse and better at the same time, he can appear to do and be the opposite of all of these things as well. Anyway, none or all of this seemed to explain my light irritation. Maybe too it was that I’d been raised on a diet consisting of an excess of Beat literature, provoking something akin to an allergy, and Bolaño had clearly dined on a lot of the same. I don’t know. But I went into The Savage Detectives with a sense almost of duty, expecting to bear, throughout my reading of it, this same mild prickliness. Alas, The Savage Detectives smashed my petty, hypochondriacal presumptions to bits.

Where does one begin to get a grip on this work, or to avoid sticking to it, like a desert burr, wherever one tries to grab hold? How not to be reductionist, when there’s so much going on here that focusing on one aspect makes the others go out of focus, like trying to pin down a floater in one’s retina, or tugging at one thread and feeling the whole ensemble quiver with the possibility of destruction?

Perhaps it would be helpful (I really don’t know) to briefly summarize the arc of the novel’s three-part structure, which begins in Mexico City with a series of diary entries by 17-year old aspiring poet Juan Garcia Madero that stretch from Dia de los Muertos to New Year’s Eve, 1975; gets interrupted by 350 pages of testimonials (recordings?) made over a period of 20 years by some 50-odd narrators, all piecing together the travels and travails of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, leaders of the Visceral Realist poetry movement Garcia Madero has been invited to join; then finally returns to Garcia Madero’s diary from New Year’s Day through February 15, 1976, detailing a journey that began at the end of part one with Garcia Madero, Belano, Lima, and Lupe, a young prostitute, together in a borrowed Impala, heading to the Sonora desert both in flight from Lupe’s violent pimp and in search of the elusive, mysterious, lost poet of the original Visceral Realists of a previous generation, Cesárea Tinajero. That’s a rather long sentence; this is a rather long book.

The broad sweep of it encompasses generations of poets. Real and imagined, appearing and disappearing, they zing about like electrons in a vast chamber, from Garcia Madero to his heroes Belano and Lima to the target of their own rebellion, Octavio Paz, and to their lost hero Cesárea Tinajero, from the most famous to the most obscure, to all of Mexico’s poets and, radiating outward in straight lines, waves, and jagged zigzags to those of South America and the rest of the world. Like Frederic Prokosch’s The Asiatics, The Savage Detectives scurries around the globe with an astonishing ability to delve into the particulars of place. And if The Asiatics represented a new sort of “internationalist” novel, then The Savage Detectives maybe represents a new sort of “Google-ist” novel in its astounding array of details. It’s also an experimental work. Aside from the consecutive dates on Garcia Madero’s diary entries, time too follows myriad crooked directions, flashing backward and forward. Multiple stories intertwine and overlap. In addition to the scores of narrators, multitudes of literary forms are used to tell these multitudes of stories (which, for all of Bolaño ’s experimentalism, reveal a terrific storytelling ability and a sometimes surpassing tenderness).

So what’s it all about? Good lord. Literature. Biography and autobiography, youthful exuberance, literary aspiration and literary longevity. Literary pretension and literary humility. High and low culture. Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism and violence. Exile and exile’s return. Reliable friends and unreliable narrators. Rebellion and acquiescence. Interrogation and detective work. Writers who seek fame, writers who muddle through, writers who disappear, writers who are disappeared. Mexican painter Dr. Atl figures into the novel, though his most famous creation doesn’t, perhaps to encourage us to think of it ourselves: like his astonishing curtain in Mexico City’s Bellas Artes theater, The Savage Detectives glints and sparkles and reflects like two tons of glass forming an image from a million different pieces (would that an image of this stunning object had been used for the book’s cover).

Bolaño  has discovered a form for his book that admits of almost anything. It’s as though he’s simply reached around the back of the novel – while everyone looked on in horror and trepidation (hey, you can’t do that!) - and found the hidden spring that explodes the locks, opening the form to its capacity to encompass and absorb anything, a kind of gravitational energy like a black hole, but one in which everything swallowed remains visible - and visceral. This is not simple “metafiction,” which, in comparison to what Bolaño  is doing, seems to be just playing around the edges. Rather, for Bolaño , the key to the treasure is the treasure. By going directly to literature itself, into questions of what literature is and does, its possibilities and limitations, who writes and why, does any of it matter and why does it seem to matter so much, he turns the entirety of literary enterprise inside out to reveal its motivations, literary influences, schools and movements and attitudes, events in the poets’ lives and those of the poets’ associates, hero worship and jealousies and internecine fighting among writers (sometimes literalized, as in a duel fought on the beach between writer and critic, or in a physical altercation between Belano and his girlfriend, or more humorously, the orbital conjunctions of Ulises Lima and Octavio Paz as they perambulate in a park). In other words, perhaps, to reveal the visceral reality of literary enterprise?

Literature often (if not usually) involves a writer’s effort to erase traces of him or herself. In The Savage Detectives, this process is taken apart literally. As readers we’re detectives piecing together the lives of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (not to mention the sense and sensibility of the whole work), while we’re also reading about characters trying to piece together, like detectives, the life of a vanished poet, whose sole surviving poem is a work without words, itself quite literally a mere trace, one that pushes the limits of poetry to where it borders on  - “poof” - just disappearing, as does another such wordless poem-object, with magically strange, majestic humor and poignancy at the end of the novel. And finally, we’re also reading about the pursuit of these detective poets by “savage detectives” of another order, Lupe’s pimp and the potential for violence that he brings with him. For as a counterbalance to all this literary effort, to this “gang” of Visceral Realists, there’s a dead weight of destructive violence inhabiting the space around the desire to create, where in the end (in yet another of Bolaño ’s comic/serious manifestations of the literal) it’s poets vs. thugs.

The Savage Detectives references literally hundreds (if not thousands) of poets, poetic terms and forms, movements and incidents in the history of poetry, from the ephemeral to the established to the imaginary. Some of this avalanche of particulars seems like name-dropping, but one of the astonishing things about Bolaño is the extent to which he seems to have absorbed, like someone with a photographic soul, everything he ever read or heard about literature, and is able to recapitulate it with its original sense intact, as well as with his reinvention of it, as well as with all the resonances it might have for a reader. In the novel’s lengthy laundry lists of poetic terms and forms, of types of experimental writing, and above all, of writers themselves, you sometimes come to doubt that Bolaño knows what he’s talking about; then you shudder at the possibility, then probability, then near certainty that he does (whatever else The Savage Detectives may be, it’s an astonishing phenomenon of intellect). Bolaño even anticipates your doubts. When Amadeo Salvatierra reads out of Manuel Maples Arce’s “Directory of the Avant-Garde,” an epic catalog of hundreds of names, he interrupts his reading of the list occasionally to interject things like, “Look…all we’re getting is last names now, “ or “Here I think Manuel was just pulling names out of a hat.” Naturally one wonders if Bolaño is doing the same thing.

Not that it would matter terribly if he was; Bolaño  knows where his knowledge matters and where it doesn’t. Everything in The Savage Detectives works to raise questions and play with those questions, constantly engaging the reader in puzzles and games. Some of them are light-hearted and gossamer thin, while others are magisterial re-workings of literary histories into his own imagination, as in the scene of the duel on the beach which flashes for a moment like a perfectly-tuned recreation of the tone and setting of Meursault’s fatal encounter on the beach in Camus’ The Stranger - before it takes off in a completely unexpected direction. While The Savage Detectives certainly rewards readers for the knowledge they bring to it (and makes what we don’t know seem a desert we could travel without end), there’s a refreshing lack of elitism and condescension in his gaming, which is also shot through with humor, from visual puns that would amuse a child to laugh-out loud funny intellectual conceits. One of the funniest of these involves one of Arturo Belano’s former lovers, female body builder Maria Teresa Solsona Ribot, the flabbiness of whose literary taste is in inverse proportion to the tightness of her muscles. While discussing Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” in particular the novel that the writer played by Jack Nicholson writes as he sinks into madness, Belano reminds Ribot that it consists of a single line – “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” – 500 pages of it written every possible way. He casually notes to her that “It might have been a good novel.” At Ribot’s incredulity that such a creation could be “a good novel,” he replies, “That shows a lack of respect for the reader.”  It’s a suggestion to Bolaño ’s own readers that he respects our abilities - and an instruction that we should have fun as well.

But Bolaño ’s games are more than just idle; they’re also rooted in something serious, as when a character notes that South American poets have a reason to be serious, given that most have spent time in prison for political reasons, and as further underscored by Bolaño ’s engagement with real world violence, such as the Tlatelolco massacre (or the heinous Juarez serial killings in 2666). As though to remind us that one can play literary games in fiction, but not to the extent that they simply become fiction’s sole, self-reflexive object, Bolaño culls something both playful and meaningful out of literature’s weighty accretion of texts and movements and history. Of the many writers who weave in and out of Bolaño ’s narratives, perhaps the most notable is Rimbaud, who haunts (should I have said “infects”?) The Savage Detectives. Using that Arthur Rimbaud/Roberto Bolaño  hybrid, Arturo Belano, Bolaño  interlaces the actual horror of the civil war in Liberia with a fictionalized version of the disappearance of the poet into Africa, just as Rimbaud appeared to give up poetry and vanish there, trailed through literary history by rumors and suppositions.

Of course the disappearance of a poet, trailed through literary history by rumors and suppositions, is also at the heart of the central plot of The Savage Detectives. Why does Cesárea Tinajero disappear? As in some lost chapter out of Silences, Tillie Olsen’s great book about literary disappearing acts, we learn that Cesárea’s disappearance is rooted in her defense of another young female poet, Encarnación Guzman, who has been ridiculed by male members of the earlier movement of Visceral Realists. Angered by their patronizing behavior, Tinajero refuses to come to their meetings again. She and Encarnación instead become even faster friends. And then after Encarnación vanishes into marriage, Cesárea herself vanishes, becoming magnified and distorted in legend, seen here, maybe seen there, thin in one recollection, fat in the next, imagined by Amadeo Salvatierra as “a spot moving along an endless ribbon.” Or perhaps a square along that ribbon.  Or a sailboat. We’re again in one of Bolaño’s games.

For those willing to play along, The Savage Detectives will likely have generous readers for a long time to come. While the traces of his alter egos may lead off into the world’s cities, into the Mexican desert, into the violence of Africa’s wars, and even right out the window, Bolaño’s own traces are in little danger of disappearing thanks to this glittering, sprawling, howling, ingenious, generous book, one powerful enough to bring even Cesárea Tinajero back from oblivion.

Many thanks to Richard and to Rise for organizing The Savage Detectives reading challenge.