2014: The Aftercast

Napoli

Widely scattered reading, sometimes heavy, with occasional posts diminishing towards the end of the year, threatening drought.

As Seraillon enters its fifth year of existence, I thank all of you who have visited the blog despite sometimes lengthy periods between posts. Even if I only reviewed a fraction of what I read, my reading in 2014 provided me with magnificent new discoveries, further explorations of some writers I knew, plus visits with a few old favorites. 
 

Italian literature dominated the year. Nearly a third of the books I read in 2014 were by Italian writers or set in Italy. This was not primarily due, as one might suppose, to three weeks in October I spent in Naples and in Sicily (where apparently I just missed Himadri of The Argumentative Old Git). Rather, I owe my Italian focus to four works read in relative succession that simply made me want to read more Italian literature: Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, perhaps my favorite book read in 2013; Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso, certainly my favorite book read in 2014; a reread of Dante’s Inferno in a startlingly original translation by Irish poet Ciarin Carson; and a reread of Manuel Mujica Láinez’s extraordinary Bomarzo, Italian even if not by an Italian writer. The bookends of travel, anticipation and aftermath, spurred further reading of Italian, and particularly Sicilian, writers.

I hope to post about more of these Italian works, so I’ll hold off on discussing them here except to single out a few as among my favorite books read in 2014.

Topping the entire list would be Orlando furioso. Ariosto’s 16^th century epic poem, depicting the defense of Christendom from Muslim invaders in the 9^th century and recasting, with generous charm and wit, the chivalric tales of Orlando (Roland) and his fellow knights, proved to be an tremendous breath of fresh air, unexpectedly modern and deeply humanistic, with an affable narrator, memorable heroic characters on all sides of the conflict, a strong feminist angle, and wildly entertaining fantastical elements, including around-the-world travel on a hippogryph and a voyage to the moon to rescue the frenzied Orlando’s lost wits. The nearly 40,000 lines of the poem, which Voltaire without exaggeration described as “the Iliad, the Odyssey and Don Quixote all rolled into one,” were not nearly enough; I did not want Orlando furioso to end.

A visit to the village of Aci Trezza on Sicily’s eastern shore provided incentive to read Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), a work I’d long awaited reading. Verga’s portrait of the poor Malavoglia family’s seemingly endless series of setbacks is biting, tragic and comical at once, and an unforgettable portrayal of the human struggle against adversity and poverty. I know of nothing quite like Verga’s brand of realism, the manner in which he depicts human dignity in the face of tragedy so movingly, yet with such droll, fine humor - and with such a deliberate attempt, in trying to represent reality, to strip away that all the rest that is literature.

I'd been awestruck in 2012 by Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt, but The Skin, Malaparte’s series of semi-fictionalized essays set mostly in American-occupied Naples in the waning years of World War II, has absolutely haunted me, especially while in Naples. The Skin depicts the absurdity and horror not only of the war, but of the victory as well. No one writes like Malaparte, one of World War II’s great witnesses; his fictional, surreal embellishments of grim, often horrific situations, instead of rendering them unbelievable, manages to make their reality even more tangible.

Having previously read only two works by Sicilian writer and activist Leonardo Sciascia, his crime novel The Day of the Owl and his strangely obsessive inquest into the suicide of Raymond Roussel, I was blown away by The Council of Egypt, a novel set in 18^th century Palermo involving forged books, the traitorousness of translation, the impact of history on the living, and providing, in a surprising turn at the end of the novel, a powerful indictment of torture.

Among the non-Italian highlights of the year (not strictly Italian anyway), I include three for which I’ve written posts: Bomarzo and two 19^th century Spanish novels, one fat and one thin, that fit well together: Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta and Benito Pérez Galdós’ Tristana. One about which I have not yet written is Richard Harris Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends. I was unfamiliar with this work, yet in the 19^th century Barham’s collection of legends, poems and songs, published under the pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby, was the most popular work of fiction in Great Britain, even surpassing works by publisher Robert Bentley’s other best-selling author, one Charles Dickens. Barham’s linguistically wide-ranging prose and brilliantly rhyming poetry, put to work whimsically and ferociously in darkly humorous, grotesquely gothic folkloric tales full of cruel chastisements and bad (very bad) ends, kept me entertained for weeks. The extensive annotations by Carol Hart in my Spring Street Books edition are nearly as entertaining as the work itself. And hey, there’s a whole second volume to go.

Among authors I happily revisited were E. M. Forster, Raymond Roussel, Willa Cather, Colette, Anita Loos, Roberto Bolaño (a 2666 group read sponsored by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos), MacDonald Harris, Conor McPherson, Kingsley Amis, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Ann Radcliffe, José Saramago, Boris Vian, Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s ever enthralling and elegant Wind, Sand and Stars, Joan Aiken’s superbly entertaining children’s book, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and cartoonist Roz Chast in her brilliantly funnynotfunny account of taking care of elderly parents, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Dora Bruder marked my return to Patrick Modiano after a number of years. This work, straddling fiction and non-fiction, makes for a compelling rejoinder to those who’ve scoffed at Modiano’s having been awarded the Nobel Prize. I’d include it on a short list of crucial works about the Holocaust. Modiano tugs on a loose thread, an old newspaper clipping, and unravels a devastating history all the more affecting for our knowledge that there were millions of such singular stories, such promising lives, each so individual, each so terribly alike in their end. 

As for authors new to me, I dusted off a few books long in the queue, including Helene Hanff’s charming, hilarious epistolary work, 84, Charing Cross Road. I tackled the first volume of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, but preferred the pseudonymous Harry Kressing’s almost undoubtedly Peake-inspired, comic novel of calculated nastiness, The Cook. Another pulled from the pile, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1872 novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, proved far more fascinating than its sometimes leaden sentences initially promised. Considered the first novel written by a Mexican-American woman, Who Would Have Thought It? explores complications of race, gender, power and politics in the American Civil War period by an unusual writer and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. One of the few other U.S. writers I discovered this year was playwright August Wilson. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and its predecessor, Gem of the Ocean, look at African-Americans in Pittsburgh at the beginning of the 20^th century, exploring the tensions between those unable to put the atrocity of slavery behind them and others all too eager to move on, oblivious to the past. These are riveting plays, rich in language and nuance. And though I’d probably first encountered Njal’s Saga in some form in grade school, a group read led by the Wuthering Expectations blog made it a new and bloody rewarding experience.

A collection of short stories, Things Look Different inthe Light, introduced me to late Spanish writer Medardo Fraile, whose sly tales take slices of daily life at an oblique angle. Thanks to Miguel of the St. Orberose blog, I got a tantalizing introduction to another Spanish writer, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. 2014 is also the year I discovered Rodrigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan protégé of Paul Bowles. Two of Rey Rosa’s short novels – Severina and The African Shore – whet my appetite to read more of this remarkable writer and his distinctively lucid, penetrating prose. Regrettably, I read few books from beyond Europe and the Americas, but two were real standouts: Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat’s La Chouette Aveugle (The Blind Owl), and Touareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s desert novel, Gold Dust, which pairs nicely with Rey Rosa’s The African Shore as excellent short novels with animals at the center of their stories. 

I might have missed Fog Island Mountains, by Michelle Bailat-Jones, but for her interest in and translation of Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz having alerted me to her own writing. Fog Island Mountains, Bailat-Jones’ first novel, takes an old Japanese folktale and spins on top of it a contemporary story of coming to terms with terminal illness. The mythological quality of the tale permits some liberties with coincidence and dramatic effect, resulting in a beautiful and moving book structured around stages of a typhoon that spans the compressed time frame of the story.

My favorite new discovery among contemporary writers is John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun  (for its American edition re-titled by some marketeer as the hum-drum By the Lake). Magahern’s deceptively simple subject – the return to a lakeside Irish village of a couple who’ve left behind their professional lives in London – is developed into an exquisite portrayal of small town life, the tensions between progress and tradition, the effort to make a good life in the face of mortality, the inexorability of time. Sparkling with witty Irish crack and peopled by a cast of characters one comes to know intimately, MaGahern’s novel subtly and richly weaves in politics, manners and culture such that I felt upon emerging from the novel that I might need no other guide to visit its setting and have a grip on the place.

Putting aside Ariosto, I read slightly less poetry than in past years, but what I read I liked very much: Louise Labé’s 16^th century love poems, a selection of Spain’s Siglo de Oro poets, Frank Kuppner’s idiosyncratic and irreverent collection of 500+ quatrains devoted to Chinese painting in A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, Chris Abani’s harrowing prison poems in Kalakuta Republic, and, among the Italians a sampling of Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Saba, and Danilo Dolci. In the final days of the year I discovered the irreverent sonneteer Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, whose work I’m continuing to read now, and about whom I expect to have more to say later.

I read slightly more detective/thriller/polar novels than usual, including several of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books, Ariel Winter’s adept and entertaining impersonations of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson in the trilogy of novels entitled The Twenty Year Death, and, uh, one or two others. Most mysteries slip through my memory like sand.

I don’t expect my exploration of Italian literature to slow down in 2015, especially as I’ve begun the year reading nothing but works by Italians. Plus, how fortuitous, the Wuthering Expectations blog has picked Italian literature as the focus for its annual reading challenge. I do have a few non-Italian works I plan to read, though, and as always, I remain open to whatever other glittering thing might flash before my wandering magpie eyes. Thank you again visiting Seraillon, and to you all I wish a year of abundant humor, happiness, love and peace – and rewarding reading, of course.  

Cabu

Drawing, by one of my godchildren in Paris, 

discovered today tucked inside the "Sociétié/Religion" section of Les Années '80, by Cabu. 

Restez en paix.

“The prickly problem of the free woman” - Pérez Galdós’ Tristana

Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, author of vast, sprawling novels such as Fortunata and Jacinta, can be accessed somewhat more expediently via his 1893 novella Tristana, recently published in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. The work’s relative compactness diminishes nothing; Tristana possesses a snow globe quality, an entire world in miniature, presented and circumscribed as though under glass.

The title suggests an unhappy tale, and Tristana indeed contains a panoply of circumscribed, unhappy circumstances and events: oppressed childhoods as dire as any in Dickens, sexual and spiritual exploitation, frustrated love and destroyed hopes, physical degradation and suffering connected to illness, age and enervation. But a deep psychological sensitivity; crisp, ironic tone; subtle but ample humor; complex, memorable characters; and exceptionally rich language help leaven these heavy aspects.

In its age-old situation of an older man’s relationship with a young woman, Tristana feels nearly iconic. Pérez Galdós sets the tone early, through a tableau vivant in which he first introduces, recounted at arm’s length by an unnamed narrator, his two central characters.

Don Juan López Garrido – “Don Lope” - is “an agreeable-looking gentleman…like a figure in a Velázquez painting of one of Spain’s regiments in Flanders.” His name, “with more than a whiff of the theater about it,” echoes that of dramatist Lope de Vega and links him to Spain’s vanished golden age. As though living in the wrong period, Don Lope also possesses a morality of “his own…an amalgamation in his mind of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like the invisible bacteria that inhabit the physical atmosphere.”

Sitting at table with him in this portrait is a young woman a third his age, Tristana, about whom the narrator initially keeps the reader, along with the rest of Madrid, guessing as to her precise relation to Don Lope: is she servant, niece, daughter - perhaps even wife? With dark eyes, skin of “pure alabaster,” red lips, and “small teeth …like pieces of concentrated crystal” - a subtly amusing description that might have been lifted from a Siglo de Oro poem - she too is linked to the past. Even her name derives from her mother’s obsession with the theater of the golden age, “which created an ideal society to serve as a model and example to our own crude, vulgar realities.” 

Whatever air of chivalry may wrap Don Lope in the novel’s first lines, however, abruptly dissipates when we learn that, having taken in the adolescent Tristana as his charge after the death of her father and madness of her mother, the manipulative old man has within mere months added her “to his very long list of victories over innocence” and kept Tristana “as if she were nothing more than a tobacco pouch.” From the beginning, then, Pérez Galdós pointedly rejects a literature that aims to present an ideal society, leaping instead directly into the world’s “crude, vulgar realities.”

The ensuing narrative delicately traces relations between Tristana and Don Lope, beginning with further background, then, coincident with Tristana’s awakening to the injustice of her situation, slowing to portray her growing self-awareness and desire to make something of herself. A clandestine attachment with a young painter, Horacio Diaz, occupies the bright center of the story, until the trajectory begins a descent marked by adverse irruptions of life - distance, illness, the impositions of an older generation – that imperil youth, love, hope and self-determination.

Tristana contains a thematic concern with the position of women articulated explicitly without ever becoming polemical. Pérez Galdós devotes considerable attention to Tristana’s awakening, “the doll’s stuffing…gradually changing into the blood and marrow of a woman.” But as Don Lope’s maid Saturna succinctly states the case, a young woman without independent means faces but three choices: marriage, the theater, or prostitution. The word “freedom,” observes Saturna, “isn’t one that sounds good in a woman’s mouth.” Tristana ponders whether there may be some other way: “Do I understand so little of the world that I’m thinking what’s possible is, in fact, impossible?” Pérez Galdós’ direct manner in raising these thematic concerns is evident in the young woman’s simple statement, upon arriving at a moment of illuminated self-awareness: “Here I am.”

This directness continues as Tristana questions other constraints on women’s lives - in education, sexuality, marriage and motherhood. Inspired by Horacio, who encourages her to “find the formula…to perhaps resolve the prickly problem of the free woman,” Tristana looks to art as a possible path, bemoaning women’s education in the arts as “insubstantial…intended to help girls bring a good son-in-law home.” She asserts her sexual independence in defying Don Lope’s threats in order to be with Horacio, declaring, “I am not an adulteress; the only person I am deceiving is someone who has no right to tyrannize me. My infidelity, therefore, is not infidelity at all.” Marriage she sees as an arrangement between willing individuals, not some unity of souls: “Living as one for the other! Two for one! What nonsense…” During a lengthy discussion with Horacio concerning the possibility of their having children, Tristana fiercely asserts her view of fatherhood as little more than a mechanical function; were she to become a mother, the child would be hers, not theirs.

But these important questions recede, and the novel takes an unexpected narrative turn, when Horacio’s decision to take care of an infirm aunt sends him indefinitely to the country. What has amounted largely to exposition is now supplanted by the letters Tristana and Horacio write to one another. Mixing flirtatiousness and playfulness, coy mockery, ironies and ecstasies, and a darker premonitory undercurrent, these letters form the energetic, exquisitely inventive centerpiece of Tristana, Pérez Galdós’ young lovers express themselves in feverish flights of prose, their hopes buoying them above the surrounding social muck, their love seeming to push language to new limits. They conjure lovers’ nicknames, subjugate words to their desires by twisting spelling and exaggerating phonetic components, pull in foreign terms and phrases, draw on literary references, and employ interjections, exclamations and nonce words where a proper word doesn’t suffice, as when Tristana writes to Horacio:

…I am positively stuffed with knowledge. Goodness, how much I knoo! In the space of eight days I have swallowed more pages than you could buy lentils for five thousand pesetas. If you could see my little brain from inside, you would be frightened. Ideas are positively fighting for space in there. I have far too many of them and I don’t know wheech ones to keep. I will as easily bite into a volume of History as into a treatise on Philosophy. I bet you don’t know what Señor Leibniz’s monads are. And no, I did not say nomads. And if I come across a book on Medicine, I don’t rear back from that either. No, I wade straight in. I want to know more and more and more. By the way…no, I won’t tell you now. Another day. It’s very late; I’ve stayed awake so as to write you; the pale torch of the moon is burning out, my love. I can hear the cock crowing, the harbinger of the new day, and already the sweet juice of henbane is flowing through my veins…Go on, my rustic love, admit that the bit about henbane made you laugh. Anyway, I am exhausted, and I am going to my almo lecho, my sacred couch, yes sir, and there’ll be no turning back: almo, almo.”

This epistolary section of Tristana also limits our knowledge of the action to what is being reported by the two young lovers, at last allowed to speak for themselves nearly free of the dispassionate narrator. In the spaces between these letters, though, one reads an entire invisible story, outlined by the difficulties of maintaining the relationship through nothing but writing.

Pérez Galdós complicates the resolution of the “prickly problem” first by this love affair, in which art loses out as Horacio turns to painting “flowers and dead animals” as a “cargo of sentimentalism” flies back and forth on the mail carriage, and then by injecting a dose of reality so abruptly factual – an illness and surgery, evoking Charles Bovary’s botched clubfoot operation in Madame Bovary - as to irreparably contaminate any “idealized” conception or promise of happiness. It’s an invention that relieves Pérez Galdós of fleshing out how Tristana might have fought for her independence (and according to the introduction came in for criticism), but it also stresses the unpredictable “cruel realities” life can impose in a moment and serves as a potent physical symbol of the cutting off of Tristana’s potential. 

The glow from the lovers’ letters fades as reality intervenes and as the softening of Don Lope’s hard edges brings him again closer to Tristana in scenes that render him all too wretchedly human. The years go by; age, infirmity and submersion in the facile comforts of religion take their toll. The narrative, again recounted matter-of-factly by the outside observer, regains its snow globe quality. The tossed-off question posed by this narrator at the novel’s end manages to be both affectingly poignant and, in its detachment and irony, sharply pointed, underscoring how lugubriously such a triste tale might have been told. In Tristana's overt rejection of past literary approaches, and its vivid, assured portrait of artistic aspiration and the multifold impediments to its realization, perhaps the telling of the story, the creation of art, is as much the subject of Pérez Galdós’ novel as is Tristana herself. As an artistic creation, balancing piercing social criticism with a tremendous sympathy and tenderness, this short, beautiful novel is anything but unrealized.

Tristana is published by New York Review Books. Dwight at A Common Reader has written on Tristana as well as other works by Pérez Galdós; I'm indebted to him for first making me aware of this writer, and hope to follow him in exploring Pérez Galdós' longer novels. 

Bloggus Interruptus

Seraillon is away and expects to return in November. 

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester: The King Amaz'd

Diego Velásquez, "El Venus del espejo," National Gallery, London

At about 150 pages, The King Amaz’d: A Chronicle (Crónica del rey pasmado,1989) - the only one of the late Spanish writer Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s novels currently in English translation - is something of an amuse-bouche given that the writer’s better known works stretch to several times that length. It certainly whet my appetite, however, for a good-hearted translator to come along to serve the main courses. Miguel of the St. Oberose blog has written about some of those, and I’m indebted to him for this welcome introduction to an author about whom I knew next to nothing.

In The King Amaz’d, Torrente Ballester offers up a kind of political fairy tale, employing an ironic tone and wry humor to give a cross-sectional glimpse of 17th century Spain and in particular the machinery of power. He dispenses with the sumptuous detail of many historical novels, instead choosing to push the furniture against the walls to let a few key events and ideas have plenty of room, and giving just enough specifics to pinpoint the story in Madrid during the early years of Philip IV’s reign. Neither the king’s name nor that of the capital is ever mentioned, however, and this detached distance lends the book its fairy tale atmosphere. Nevertheless, the narrator occasionally provides evocative period details, such as when a character riding in a coach complains, “I need to pee” and is told: “Just pick up that cushion where your bottom is. I’m sure you’ll find a hole underneath.”

The novel’s imaginative opening is written so assuredly that one can’t help but sit up and take notice: the capital has been plunged into a sudden chaos of supernatural events: witches seen flying across the night sky; a sulfurous crater opening in a street; rumored sightings of an immense serpent said to have wrapped itself around the palace. These prove a kind of mass hysteria (“everybody was talking about the events, but nobody had seen them”) that occurs coincidental with the novel’s main event: the 21-year-old king, following an initiatory experience with a well-known prostitute, has asked to see the queen naked, rather than (another amusing period detail) clothed on every part of her body but where necessary to ensure continuation of the royal line. This innocent request produces a disruption of state that sends clerics and bishops scurrying to heated conference talks that devolve hilariously into behind the scenes scheming, echoed by the network of hidden passageways and secret doors of the palace and capital. Popular opinion runs amok. Machinations are put into motion in the palace – where “decency doesn’t exact thrive in [the] corridors” - to optimize certain outcomes and careers. The novel uses this precipitating event to explore the relationship between sex and state and religion, rulers and ruled, and political power versus personal will. It shares with Leopoldo Alas’ 19^th century La Regenta a focus on the thorny zone where human sexuality and Spain’s Catholic clergy intersect, a dynamic apparently little changed in two hundred years.

Framed within this diverting story, the inner workings of government, the variety of political motives, and the many facets of power are on display. These include the division of society into one morality for rulers and another for subjects; the uses of superstition, gossip, propaganda and violence to prop up authority; the hidden politics that lie behind the political theater performed to a susceptible and apathetic public; and the questionable relationship between the personal peccadillos of rulers and the maintenance of state order. This last notion is pointedly satirized when a Duchess in the palace is told,

“For the fleet to reach Cadiz safely, and for us to win or lose in Flanders, it all depends on the King’s sins.”

The Duchess gave a great laugh: “I can never reason out why the country is so full of idiots who believe in such things.”

“It’s what the theologians think.”

“I’d say it again even if the Queen of the Fairies thinks the same.”

In another scene in which a minister describes to the King the rumors swirling around the city, the gullibility of the public as well as the manipulation of public opinion are laid bare:

“…what appears to have frightened [the people] is the presence of a huge serpent many claim to have seen. Some think it’s going to push the city walls down. Others think it’s going for the royal palace, but most think it’ll attack their own homes. They all know they’re sinners.”

           

“That’s the way it goes with public opinion, Your Excellency. There’s always someone who creates and manages it, but then each one starts thinking on his own account.”

Scenes like this clearly apply almost globally to contemporary politics (one only need think of the persecution of Bill Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky scandal as regards the first example or of how distant threats of terrorism or Ebola can evoke panic close to home as regards the second), and as a political parable The King Amaz’d has rather universal relevance. But The King Amaz’d belongs to that genre of novels that address themselves to a nation (the book sold 150,000 copies upon publication in Spain and has gone through multiple printings). It takes specific aim at certain proclivities and dynamics in Spanish culture, sardonically milking sacred Spanish cows such as national pride in the glories of the Siglo de Oro and the continuing prominent place of the Catholic church in Spanish society. The introduction by translator Colin Smith makes clear that some resonances might be lost on readers (present!) not well-versed in Spanish history and culture. Torrente Ballester inserts cleverly disguised appearances by Siglo de Oro poets Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo, and also uses period paintings – especially the Rokeby Venus (La Venus del espejo) by Diego Velázquez – as inspiration for some of his scenes. In this portrait of 17^th century Spain, Torrente Ballester also alludes obliquely to the country’s more recent history under Franco. The arbitrary exercise of power is seen in the ease with which the kingdom’s Chief Minister accedes to the sex-phobic, sadistic religious fervor of one friar, Father Villescusa, who dreams of a mass auto-da-fé which would simultaneously placate an angry God and conveniently rid the country of his political enemies. Just beneath the abundant humor of The King Amaz’d runs a frisson of abhorrence and contempt at the wanton abuse of political power that manifests itself in the malleability of the young King by those truly holding the reins, in politically expedient detentions and the threat of torture and execution capable of being dispensed at whim by authority, and through religious superstition that infects a credulous people and incites violence in the worst of those who rule them. Still, it’s the withering comedy of the barbs Torrente Ballester hurls at Spain’s self-image that have the most tenacity, as when one character demands of another, rhetorically,

“In what part of the world has it ever been the case that, for a husband to be with his wife in private, the protocols and even the clergy have to come into it?”

“In this part of the world where we are, such things and even greater miracles are ten-a-penny. Don’t lose your sense of reality.”