The Ambit of Books: Rodrigo Rey Rosa's Severina

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short novella, Severina, is almost ready-made to please admirers of contemporary literary fiction. For one thing, its principal characters are a book thief and a bookseller, and a love of books - or perhaps more accurately, a “bookish impulse” that carries the narrator “beyond the bounds of reason” - facilitates and mediates a love affair between these two strangers. For another, it’s brimming with references to literature, including several lists of books (stolen, shared, given away, accumulated) to send the literarily curious on a hunt for new potential treasures (Émile Laoust’s volume of Berber folktales, anyone?) as well as clues to possible resonances of these works within Rey Rosa’s own. Severina also references more easily traceable influences on Rey Rosa’s work, including his time in Morocco and tutelage under Paul Bowles, since works by both Bowles and his wife Jane show up on the lists, and Moroccan Arabic as well as an actual Moroccan also make appearances. Perhaps most conspicuous, though, is the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, who, off stage, even helps along the plot (or at least his personal library does – is your interest piqued now?)

The narrator, unnamed co-owner of a bookshop started by “eccentrics” “tired of paying through the nose for books chosen by and for others,” strikes a tone perhaps all too recognizable to those obsessed by literature:

Those were eventful days, or rather I heard that they’d been eventful (there was a rash of lynchings in the inland villages and a coup in a neighboring country, cocaine became the world’s number one illicit substance, stagnant water was discovered on Mars, and Pluto definitively lost its status as a planet), my life having shrunk once more to the ambit of books; I had become another specimen of that sad type, the bookseller with literary aspirations.

Into this “sad” life, a bit of color appears in the form of a book thief with exquisite taste in literature, an attractive woman (I should have said “colors” earlier in this sentence, since she always sports a different one) who quietly slips into the bookstore, filches books, and mysteriously manages to walk out without setting off the alarm, returning several times. The narrator’s curiosity about her – and her book choices, which “might help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic” – trumps any indignation he feels about her transgressions. He allows her petty larcenies to continue long enough for him to let her know that he knows what she’s doing, and for him to fall in love with her.

But from the beginning Ana Severina Bruguera (sharp readers may recognize that last name as the same of one of Borges’ publishers) is an enigma difficult to pin down and as chameleon-like as the colors she wears. An unidentifiable accent marks her as perhaps Italian, Honduran, Columbian or from elsewhere. She lives or doesn’t live with an older man who may be her father, husband, lover or grandfather (aptly named Señor Blanco, as though he’s a blank page). She has several false passports on which she appears to travel about, lifting books wherever she goes. Despite the novel’s Guatemalan setting, it possesses a tangible internationalist quality, one made especially appealing here by a suggestion that Severina and her companion seem almost fictions themselves, emissaries from a world of books rather than from a specific, identifiable country. The narrator’s sketchy knowledge about her arrives from multiple sources; hearsay and rumor, the clerk of the pension where Severina stays, Severina’s own cryptic and perhaps mendacious revelations, and even the narrator’s own fantasies, dreams and doubts.  Very little is clear in Rey Rosa’s narrative, other than his extraordinarily crisp and lucid writing.

Severina could simply be an indulgent exercise in literary self-reflexivity were it not for elements that enrich and buoy it above that. Among them is the subtlety with which Rey Rosa incorporates his literary themes. For example, there’s a good deal in Severina concerning the mechanisms of exchange and consumption of literature, an implicit questioning of the role of writers and books in forging one’s identity, and even a hidden noir novel here, with a murder, clandestine disposal of a body, closed borders, and secret deals to buy silence and freedom. Also, the novel engenders a sense of ambiguity and open-endedness, especially regarding the slipperiness of identity, that is both disturbing and liberating, venturing well beyond its literary games. After all, this is also the story of a love affair and of the sins of commission and omission that permit that love to happen, as underscored by the book’s anchoring epigraph from William Carlos Williams: “What power has love but forgiveness?”

It’s unsurprising that Roberto Bolaño thought of Rey Rosa as “the best of [their] generation.” Both writers display an explicit fixation on books and writers to the extent that they become material for their own works, and both incorporate assertions about literature and books that raise questions but remain deliberately inconclusive, the centerpiece at Rey Rosa’s book banquet being a monologue by Señor Blanco (reminiscent of the “bookish pharmacists” passage in Bolaño’s 2666) concerning “the tides and currents of books,” their “migrations, invasions, outbreaks, extinctions.” One might be forgiven for loving this.  

I’m pleased that Severina, after The African Shore, was the second of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels I read this year. I can’t say I was surprised by Severina’s more circumscribed world of writers and books, a focus with similarities to Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and almost sure to please fans of that book. But the wider divergence from this focus that is on display in The African Shore – and its meticulous, crystalline-clear writing, captivating storytelling,  complexity of themes, unusual atmosphere combining a calm spaciousness with restive, colliding social tensions, and its unforgettable, almost instantly classic contribution to the genre of works in which an animal serves as a nexus for human interactions – reveal manifold different capacities of this writer.  I greatly look forward to discovering his other works.

I read Severina (2011, English translation by Chris Andrews 2014, Yale University Press) for Spanish Literature Month, hosted by Richard and Stu. The African Shore, 1999, is translated by Jeffrey Gray and also published by Yale University Press (2013). 

Boris Vian: L’écume des jours

Something akin to those science experiments that employ vast amounts of energy to achieve a momentary glimpse of a transitory but paradigm-shifting state, Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’écume des jours [i] - a delirious, nutty, affecting and tragic love story (ranked #10 on Le Monde’s 1999 list of the best 100 books of the 20^th century) - radiates life and captures, for a brilliantly glowing instant, the effervescent transports of youth, love and friendship.

It’s disappointing that Vian seems to be best known, at least in the United States, for I Spit on Your Graves (J’irai cracher sur vos tombes), his raging novel of racial and sexual violence in the American South, as L’écume des jours, while hardly free of the darkness that shadows that later attempt at noir, reveals Vian working a far richer, more resplendent and dazzling vein. As though anticipating the Beat Generation (and taking most of its better aspects, leaving the larder spare), Vian’s novel mixes his beloved jazz music with poetic conceits and inventive language into a work in which music and movement seem generated by every gesture, to punctuate each event, creating an animated, spirited atmosphere of transient vivacity and bright promise. In a prefatory note to the book, Vian captures the vital concentration of this elixir, writing, “There are only two things: love, in all its aspects, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or of Duke Ellington. The rest should disappear, because the rest is ugly, and these few pages of demonstration that follow take all of their force from the fact that the story is true, just as I have imagined it from one end to the other.”

The reader knows right away that he or she is in for an imaginative “true story.” L’écume des jours verges on fable, creating a world in which the emotions of its characters find correspondence in exterior manifestations, often of an absurdist, even hilarious nature. The novel opens with the well-off, 21-year-old Colin emerging exhilarated from his bath and walking down the hallway to the kitchen, where mustachioed mice - one serves as a mute but expressive witness throughout the novel - dance delightedly in the rays of sun reflecting off the shiny faucets of the sink. Colin’s private chef, Nicholas, has ingeniously trapped an eel that has been sticking its head out of the lavatory basin, and is preparing an extragant recipe supplied to us in full (more recipes follow, all at least as over-the-top as any in James Hamilton Patterson’s comical Cooking with Fernet Branca, but plausible, since…well, try looking into an antiquarian French cookbook sometime). When Colin’s closest friend Chick arrives, the jazz-obsessed Colin demonstrates for him his pianocktail, a piano that mixes cocktails in accordance with particular melodies played on the keyboard, just one of many conceits and inventions in L’écume des jours wild enough to rival those of Raymond Roussel.[ii] 

Colin, aching to fall in love with someone, like Chick has with Nicolas’ niece Alise, encounters at the ice skating rink one day the 18-year-old Chloe, from whom he flees after committing a faux pas. Vian captures beautifully the abject fear mingled with all-encompassing hope that marks the earliest moments of love between young people. What follows is a madcap, whirling, deeply poignant love story in which the brightest and most ethereal moments of young love run up against the trials and cruelties of a world seemingly determined to snuff them out.

Though fantastical for a “true” story, L’écume des jours cleaves closely to realities thinly veiled and often tremendously funny, as in a contrepèterie transformation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (friends and champions of Vian) into Jean-Sol Partre, the great philosopher of the moment, and his colleague the Duchesse de Bovouard. Chick, obsessed with purchasing all of Partre’s books in the finest editions (including one bound in nothingness), becomes nearly giddy when a bookseller offers him a pair of the philosopher’s worn pants. His girlfriend Alise shares his fanaticism, at least for a time. Partre himself, nearing completion of his magnum opus, a 20-volume encyclopedia of nausea, arrives at a conference riding upon the back of an elephant, accompanied by sharpshooters; following the philosopher’s talk to fans no less enthusiastic than those of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, sample vials of varieties preserved vomit are offered for sale.

Vian’s rich language provides one of the greatest pleasures of L’écume des jours. For example, in the original French, the above vials are described as “enchantillons de vomi empaillé,” the last word nearly untranslatable in context, given its connotations of taxidermy. Vian frequently employs neologisms, surprising juxtapositions of adjectives, and unusual turns of phrase, many of which slip as effortlessly as a grace note into the linguistic current, as in his invention (replete with description) of a dance he terms the “biglemoi.”

Much of the fanciful content of L’écume des jours derives from its many cartoonish exaggerations, like those one imagines might have blossomed had Salvador Dalí continued his brief collaboration with Walt Disney. In one scene, Colin draws grooves on the top of a cake, then spins the cake on his index finger while, with the sharp point of a holly leaf serving as a stylus, elicits Duke Ellington’s “Chloe.” In another scene, as a piece by Ellington is played on the phonograph, a rectangular room stretches to become round, resuming its original shape when the music stops. When Chloe undergoes an operation to remove a water lily growing in her lung, the surgical scar forms a comically perfect circle. Nicolas’ culinary concoctions reach an alarming state of absurdity when he prepares a hangover cure consisting of “white wine, a spoonful of vinegar, five egg yolks, two oysters, and a hundred grams of ground beef with crème fraîche and a pinch of hyposulfite of soda.”[iii]

Often, though, such elaborations represent material correspondences of the sharp emotions of youth. Some of these take on a violent quality of the sort present in I Spit on Your Graves, a just-under-the-surface fury at life’s injustices, a fierce protest against all that stands in the way of love, vitality and hope. When a skating rink attendant moves with lethargic indifference after Colin learns that Chloe is in the hospital, Colin, with cartoon violence, dispatches him by throwing an ice skate and decapitating him. Alise’s eventual dismay at Chick’s having become a slave to collecting all things Partre results in a furiously disproportionate explosion of violence that contains echoes of the Nazis’ destructive purges.

If not an explicit response to the horrors of the just-concluded war, L’écume des jours, written as Vian traveled about the United States in 1946, nonetheless carries within it a scream of indignation against a world that could allow the wanton destruction of so many young people, so much beauty. Coming from the pen of a writer who would go on to compose one of the most forceful and defiant refusals to participate in the killing of his fellow human beings – the acidly caustic song “Le Deserteur” - it’s small wonder that this marvel-filled and moving work of imagination and exuberance could simultaneously contain such a grimly melancholic vision bordering on fatalism, an acknowledgement that the world’s ugliness may prove too much even for the best of youth. Having witnessed the terrible things of which the world was capable, even Mickey Mouse might willingly have placed his head in the open maw of an ever-obliging cat.

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[i] The difficulties of translation are evident in the history of attempts to translate the title of Vian’s novel. “L’écume” translates literally as “froth,” “foam,” or “sea spray” (Wikipedia’s entry on Vian goes for the more vulgar “scum”). At least three English translations of L’écume des jours have been published and three film versions have come out, all of which demonstrate this translation problem. The film titles include Spray of the Days and two titles that leapfrog the issue, Chloe and, sharing the same title as the second English edition to be published, the recent Mood Indigo. The first English edition appeared in 1967, entitled Froth on the Daydream. The latest, 2003’s Foam of the Daze, leans in the direction of fetishizing the kookier elements of the book at the expense of its genuine innocence and tenderness, and to me misses the poignancy of the original French. This may largely be a matter of taste; I am not a translator, but an option that appeals to me is The Evanescence of Days.

[ii] Literature’s marvelous ability to imagine what others may go on to realize is born out , as an Internet search on the word reveals, by the existence of several working pianocktails created by Vian’s fans.

[iii] Perhaps best known today as the principal ingredient in those chemical “instant heat” hand warmers and thermal pads.

Medardo Fraile: Things Look Different in the Light

Things Look Different in the Light is the first selection of work by the late Spanish writer Medardo Fraile to be translated into English, permitting Anglophone readers access to these unusually delightful, lucid, short, intimate stories, contemporary yet as resonant as old folktales. Though the book is but 220 pages long, it contains nearly 30 stories, some as brief as three pages. Despite their brevity, Fraile’s stories contain worlds, and are marked by a distinctive, singular style, a lightness of touch, and a sense of wonder at the marvelous strangeness of what’s around us. Fraile finds his subject matter in the quotidian, in the micro rather than macro (or so it might seem, anyway), in the delicate, nuanced interactions between people, whether intimates or strangers. Even the titles of his stories suggest this closeness to the everyday: “The Shirt,” “The Chair,” “The Car,” “The Lemon Drop,” “Restless Eyes,” “What’s Going On in That Head of Yours?” One feels in his stories the magnitude of the minutest event, how it can alter perceptions, directions, even whole lives.

One could describe Fraile’s stories as quirky, but their subject matter rests squarely within reality – or, on the occasions when they knock at reality’s borders, within the real, idiosyncratic musings of his characters. Had Gogol chosen to forego his absurdist elements and allow the day-to-day to work its own magic, he might have written stories like these. A telling passage in “The Last Shout,” a grandmother speaking with her grandson, seems to underscore this faith in the sufficiency of reality:

The thing is that miracles happen so often, they seem normal to us, the morning comes then the night, the sun and the moon rise and set, the earth gives us harvest after harvest, and we say, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ and tomorrow we’re still alive to do it. My dear, you’re right: reality is a miracle.

Without trumpeting any deliberately meta-fictional intention, Fraile nonetheless manages to make many of his stories about the fragility of language and texts, of all kinds of communications. In “Full Stop,” a teacher, having forgotten his dictation assignment, decides to have his students take dictation from a personal letter the teacher is trying to write. He then pauses at the end of the class when they want to erase from the blackboard those

words that only a moment before had been unknown to them and even distant and worthy of respect…They want to erase them, to erase me, to discard the tender, unctuous, white splendour of those words, to reduce them to dust, to cast them to the winds like so many dead cells hampering their growth...

In “That Novel,” a worker changing jobs bemoans leaving behind a friendship with a co-worker who, regardless of the topic, always mentions the single novel he once read, one that contained “everything important, or unimportant – in richer, livelier, more memorable form.” The departing co-worker finally decides to ask his friend the question he’s always wanted to ask, the title of the novel, only to be told that his friend can’t remember. In “The Bookstall,” a character is mysteriously drawn to the physical decay of books in a poor bookseller’s rain-soaked stall, and lives “in hope that one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands.”

Fraile’s range is surprisingly broad, from stories of marital relations that called to mind James Thurber to fleeting encounters between strangers that underscore one’s fundamental solitude. There’s even a kind of oriental fable, and an exquisite evocation, in “The Sea,” of the phenomenological experience of being by the ocean. “An Episode from National History” brings a sudden intrusion of the “macro” world, with its piercing evocation of the Spanish Civil War, when “the offended parties on both left and right decided to improve Spain by destroying it.” One of my favorites in the collection is the first story, “Berta’s Presence” (“presence” is an operative concept in many of these tales), in which a young man, Jacobo, makes the obligatory visit to see his friends’ baby on the occasion of her first birthday and is brought up short by the child’s demands on life. He can see that Lupita, with her whole life before her, expects him to say exactly the right thing, and he remains silent while inwardly seeking the perfectly crafted words that will meet the child’s rigid expectations:

Lupita was momentarily ignored and she remembered that, before Berta had arrived, someone else had been about to speak to her. And she turned her head, looking at everyone there, one by one, until she found him: Jacobo. Eyes wide, gaze fixed on him, she urged him to say his sentence.

It’s a story that offers tremendous deference and respect to children – and to the importance of communication.

One emerges from Fraile’s small stories with an amplified awareness of the impact of one’s smallest actions, of the myriad ways a word or gesture, a glance, an accidental sighting of something or someone, can transform a moment, often without our knowing exactly what the consequences may be. These are deceptively simple, slyly penetrating stories, full of charm, full of traps. You too may find yourself changed.

Things Look Different in the Light, by Medardo Fraile, is translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by Pushkin Press, 2014.

Poems from Spain's Golden Age

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Edith Grossman’s The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, a sampling from poets of Spain’s glorious literary period from the late 15^th through mid 17^th centuries. The book contains several poems each by eight of the Golden Age’s greatest poets: Jorge Manrique, Garcilaso de la Vega, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongóra, Francisco de Quevedo, and, as her books were first published in Spain, Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Even if the limited number of selections (Lope de Vega, author of some 3,000 sonnets and 2,000 plays, gets three short poems) can only provide a quick glimpse of the work of these poets, Grossman gives a terrific introduction to this period, providing each poet with a brief biography accompanied by an engraved portrait, and the Spanish originals on facing pages (the hardcover book itself, printed on deckle-edged rag paper, is lovely; my spouse, reading her own book one night, kept stealing glances at mine and finally asked, “What is that beautiful book you’re reading?”). The biographies touch on formalistic and stylistic elements of the poems, historical innovations such as Garcilaso’s tremendous impact in introducing Italian, Petrarchan forms to Spanish poetry, and memorable biographical details. One concerns Gongóra’s nickname, “The Prince of Darkness,” due to a culturanista or euphuistic style mocked by Lope de Vega and Quevedo. Another is Fray de León’s Jewish converso background and insistence on honoring the Hebrew origins of biblical stories. Returning to teaching after four years in prison, he is said to have begun his first class, “As I was saying the other day…” Sor Juana, towards the end of her life, gave away her entire library of 4,000 volumes, the largest in Mexico at the time, and died serving the poor.

A striking number of the poems in The Golden Age take as their subject the brevity and evanescence of life. Of these, Quevedo is the clear master of such deeply melancholy expressions of our short tenure on earth and of approaching death, pining in one poem, “I am a weary was, will be, and is” and in another, “Sonnet XVIII,” offering a palpably acute sense of death’s parentheses around life:

The too-brief year of this our mortal life

sweeps everything away, mocking the courage

of valiant steel and marble gleaming cold

that dare to challenge time with their hard strength.

Before my foot knows how to walk it moves

along the path to death, where I do send

my obscure life, a poor and  turbulent river

swallowed by great waves in a pitch-dark sea.

Each brief moment a long and thrusting step

I take against my will, for on this journey

e’en when still, or sleeping, I spur ahead.

A brief lament, a final, bitter sigh

is death, the fate that is our legacy:

if law, not penalty, why do I grieve?

Courtly apostrophes to women idolized from a distance also figure frequently in the selection, filled with snowy bosoms “so pure and white,” “inviting scarlet lips,” “Aurora upon your cheek/Phoebus in your eyes.” Lope de Vega, in his “Folk Song VII,” attempts to surmount such clichés: “”Your beautiful eyes, Lucinda/are not really stars in the sky” while admitting that “their brightness, their sweet light/not having something divine -/that cannot be.” As poet Billy Collins notes in his introduction to the book, such lofty sentiments are offset, somewhat ironically, by the patently carnal religious poems of San Juan de la Cruz. A disciple of St. Teresa of Avila, San Juan mimicked the transparently sexual ecstasy of his muse’s religious transports in expressions that would have been scandalous if addressed to a flesh and blood woman, but remained safe when couched in a higher, more spiritual context:

O flame of living love

that wounds with such tenderness

the deep, the deepest center of my soul,

now that you have come to me

conclude, if you so wish,

and rend the fabric of this sweet encounter.

 - (from"Song III: Flame of Living Love")

One of the most charming poems in the book is notable for its unusual self-reflexivity. In “Instant Sonnet,” Lope de Vega spends a sonnet’s entire 14 lines describing the writing of the poem itself.

Violante orders me to write a sonnet,

I’ve never been so pressed in my life before.

Fourteen verses, they say, are in a sonnet;

I haven’t even tried and I have four…

Perhaps my favorite of all the works in the book is a lengthier poem by Garcilaso de la Vega, “Eclogue 1,” modeled on the bucolic eclogues of Virgil. In the first dedicatory stanzas, Garcilaso notes that before singing the praises of his patron he’ll entertain him with a story of two shepherds, Salicio and Nemeroso, both grieving the loss of their lady loves (Salicio’s has run off with another man; Nemeroso’s has died). The poem is like an exquisitely painted miniature. Garcilaso first presents the two shepherds as though zooming into the pastoral landscape with a camera to capture the beginning of their lamentations - “their sheep paid heed to their sweet songs, forgetting/to graze, listening to their plaints of love” - following this with several pages of deeply felt melancholy and grief, the shepherds alternating their woeful tales. At the poem’s end, Garcilaso zooms back out to reveal again the tranquil scene of the two shepherds at the end of their work day:

Never would the shepherds have put an end

to their laments, or their sweet, mournful songs,

heard only by mountains untamed and desolate,

have ceased, if, looking at crimson-hued clouds

embroidered in gold by the setting sun,

they had not seen the close of day upon them.

The shadows came descending,

moving apace, hastening down the overgrown slope

of the loftiest mountain, and the two,

as if waking from a dream, and in

the scant light of the sun

in flight, and then gone, brought together their sheep,

and slowly, step by step, the shepherds left.

Garcilaso manages to invest the surface of a typical pastoral scene – two shepherds tending their flocks – with intense interiority, a kind of lesson in the depth of human emotion lurking beneath placid surfaces. In the context of placing his shepherd’s tale as a sort of preface to the delayed praise of the patron for whom he writes the poem, perhaps (I am speculating here) Garcilaso also creates a subtle means of orienting his patron to interior reflection and to a sympathetic understanding of suffering.

Grossman’s selections do exactly what such selections should do: arouse the reader’s interest in reading more. The strength of her selection, at least for me, is that my interest has been aroused not just for a few of these poets, but for all of them. And if my reading of additional selections from Garcilaso de la Vega is any indication, many treasures await.

Sincere thanks to Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos for suggesting The Golden Age.