Llamadas telefónicas por Roberto Bolaño

This is my second expedition into the world of Bolaño. After Los detectivos salvajes I knew some of what might lie in store when I began reading. The first thing to note is the diminutive size of this novel. Compared to The Detectives, it's a light-weight and not nearly as far reaching. It is still utterly engrossing though, sucking you right in to the life of which ever of its many individuals you are reading about.

The book works in a similar vein being split into a number of short stories, set out like this:

1. Llamadas telefónicas
i. Sensini Follows the friendship, through a shared interest in writing competitions, of the protagonist and an older and more accomplished author.
ii. Henri Simon Leprince Centres on a writer of poetry and stories battling against French critics around the time of the first world war and describes his philosophy of helping writers through the resistance. The story is very tongue in cheek.  In his heart, Leprince finally accepted his condition as a bad writer but also understood and accepted that good writers need bad writers as alone, they would be but readers or squires. He also knew that by saving (or helping) a few good writers, he had earned the right to blot paper and make mistakes. Also, he knew that he had earned the right to to be published in two or maybe three magazines.
iii. Enrique Martín Here, Arturo Bolano describes a successful poet living in Barcelona who begins to write Science Fiction opens a bookshop and becomes apparently quite paranoid.
iv. Una aventura literaria is a fantastic story about writer, named simply 'B', who is not famous, has no money, and whose poems are published in marginal magazines. 'B' writes a book in which one of the chapters pokes fun at a writer, named simply 'A'. 'A' is the same age as 'B' but is famous, has money, and is well read. This book is well received and 'A' appears in interviews, waxing lyrical about the book. The story follows 'B' and his (or her) thoughts about whether 'A' in fact knows that the book is poking fun.
v. Llamadas telefónicas is again about a character named 'B' and his break up with 'X'. 'X' is subsequently murdered and investigated by the police. 

2 Detectives
El Gusano tells the story from a young boy who plays truant, and spends his days buying or stealing books and going to the cinema to watch erotic Mexican films. The boy befriends 'el Gusano' and their relationship is explored.
La nieve is an account by the protagonist, of the story told to him by Rogelio Estrada, whose 'smile seemed permanently stuck between astonishment and mischief', of his life in Moscow working for a rather dodgy Russian businessman, who has a love of Dostoevsky and Chekhov. This plot becomes quite dark, and involves love, death and books.
Otro cuento ruso again takes place during the second world war, this time on the Russian front line and is just exquisite in content and form. I'm not going to describe anything of the plot but have instead translated the short story as it isn't available in English.
William Burns is an odd story about a time in William Burns' life when he had a relationship with two women, one older, one younger and the events surrounding a holiday house in the mountains.
Detectives is a dialogue between two police detectives, driving and reminiscing. The conversation, of course, is very odd.

The third part of the book La vida de Anne Moore, has four more short stories, each centering on a group of people and their lives. One woman goes mad and tries to kill one or more of her friends, while another story focuses in an actress in adult movies. The stories vary in scope and style and seem not to be linked in any way. Friends, family come and go, they seem not to be tied particularly to any one place or time. Many of them seem to enjoy talking into the night, smoking cigarettes and have some connection to writing, though not all. What I'm beginning to recognise as a Bolaño style. This style also accounts for the fact that they all seem to live and breath and seem as flawed and lost as anyone really is.

Translation into English of 'Another Russian story' taken from Llamadas telefónicas by Roberto Bolaño

For Anselmo Sanjuan
At some point in time, after discussing with a friend about the wandering identity of art, Amalfitano told a story that he had heard in Barcelona. The story dealt with a soldier of the Spanish Blue Division who fought in the second world war, on the Russian front, more specifically as part of the Army Group North, in a zone near Novgorod.

The Soldier was a a small man from Seville, stick thin with blue eyes that, life as is (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo nor Thomas Salvador and when he had to salute the Roman salute, neither was he a real fascist or falangist), he went to stop Russia. There, without knowing who started, someone told him soldier go over there or soldier do that or the other, and the word soldier was left in his head, but in the dark part of the head, and in this place, large and desolate with the passing of time and with the daily shocks, the word transformed into a precentor. I don't know how this happened, let's suppose that an infantile mechanism activated it, some happy memory that had been waiting for the opportunity to return.

This meant that the Andalusian thought about himself in the terms and duties of a precentor, although he didn't consciously have any real understanding of the significance of this word which is given to the head of the choir in certain cathedrals. But somehow, and this is remarkable, through the power of thinking of himself as precentor, he was converted into a precentor. During the terrible winter of '41, he put himself in charge of a choir that sang carols while the Russians crushed 250 Regiment. In their memory these days were full of sound (dry, constant sounds) and of a subterranean happiness, a little out of focus. They sang, but it was as if their voices arrived afterwards or even before and the lips, the throats, the eyes of the singers slid over a fracture of silence, in a brief journey, equally foreign.

Anyway, the man from Seville behaved courageously, with resignation, even if his mood soured as time passed.

He didn't have to wait to taste his share of blood. One evening, in a lapse of concentration, he was injured and for two weeks he was interned at the Military Hospital at Riga, in the care of robust, smiling nurses of the Reich, skeptical of the colour of his eyes, and of a few ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters or sisters in law or distant cousins of Jose Antonio.

When orders arrived, something happened that would not have grave consequences for the man from Seville: instead of receiving a ticket with the correct destination, he was sent one that took him to the quarters of an SS batallion, posted some three hundred kilometres from his own regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians and Swedish, all much taller and stronger than him, he tried to rectify the mistake using rudimentary German, but the SS put him off and while clearing up the matter, gave him a broom to scrub the barracks and a mop and a bucket of water to mop the enormous, oblong wooden building where they held, interrogated and tortured every kind of prisoner.

Without giving up on everything, but still complying with his new task conscientiously, the man from Seville saw time pass from his new barracks, eating better than before and without exposing himself to new dangers, being as the SS batallion was stationed in the rearguard, fighting those termed 'bandits'. Then, in the dark part of his head, the word soldier returned to be readable. I am a soldier, he told himself, a raw recruit, and I must accept my destiny. The word precentor disappeared little by little, although some evenings, under an unending sky that took him back to nostalgic memories of Seville, the word still echoed, lost who knows where. Once he heard some German soldiers singing and was reminded of it, another time he heard a child singing behind some bushes and remembered once again the word, this time more precisely, but when he looked behind the bushes, the child had gone.

One day, what had to happen, happened. The SS barracks were attacked and taken, according to some, by the Russian Cavalry, according to others, a group of partisans. The fight was brief and went against the Germans. After an hour the Russians found the man from Seville hidden in the oblong building, dressed in the uniform of an SS and surrounded by not long since committed disgraces. As they say, caught red handed. He was quickly tied to one of the chairs that the SS had used during interrogations, one of those chairs with belts on the legs and arms, and everything the Russians asked, he answered in Spanish that he didn't understand and that he was only a dogsbody. He also tried to say it in German, but he hardly knew four words in the language and the Russians didn't know any. After a session of slaps and kicks, they went to find one who knew German and got to work interrogating prisoners in another of the cells in the oblong building. Before they returned, the man from Seville heard shots, he knew they were killing some of the SS and lost the hope of walking free that he had still held; however, when the shots stopped he went on clutching onto life with everything he had. The one who knew German asked him what he did there, what was his rank and his role. The man from Seville tried to explain in German, but in vain. The Russians then opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers that the Germans used for other parts of the anatomy, started to pull and squeeze his tongue. The pain that he felt made his eyes water and he said, or  shouted the word 'coño'. With the pliers in his mouth, the Spanish outburst tranformed and came out in a shriek as the word kunst.

The Russian who knew German looked at him quizzically. The man from Seville shouted kunst, kunst, and cried with pain. The word kunst in German means art and the bilingual soldier understood it as such and said that the bastard was an artist or something. Those torturing the man from Seville pulled out the pliers with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. The word art. It tamed them. And so tamed, the Russians took a breather and waited for some sort of signal while the solder bled from his mouth and swallowed and choked on his blood mixed with large doses of saliva. The word 'coño', metamorphosed into the word art had saved his life. When he left the oblong building the sun was hidden but hurt his eyes as if it was the middle of the day. 


They took him with the other remaining prisoners and a little after another Russian who understood Spanish was able to listen to his story and the man from Seville was stopped up at a prison camp in Siberia while his accidental comrades in wickedness were shot. He remained in Siberia well into the next decade. In 1957 he moved to Barcelona. Sometimes he would open his mouth and happily recount war stories. Other times he would open his mouth and show whoever was willing to see, the piece of tongue that was missing. It was hardly visible. When people said this to him, the man from Seville explained that his tongue, with the years had grown. Amalfitano didn't meet him personally, but when he told the story, the man from Seville still lived in a hostel in Barcelona.

Almayer's Folly - Joseph Conrad

I found Conrad, as I think a few of my generation must have done, through the film Appocolypse Now, which based on the novel Heart of Darkness. The film is really moving and quite disturbing and the book opened a new world to me. Not only do I find Conrad's ability to reach vivid realist descriptions and to firmly imprint images on ones mind just astounding but in doing so he somehow maintains the momentum and pace in the writing and keeps ones interest in the prose.

 

JOSEPH CONRAD

 

Published in 1895, Almayer's Folly is set on the Malayan island of Borneo during the 19th century with the backdrop of Dutch colonialism and pioneering explorers setting out to make money from the rich resources of these tropical lands. It's a great setting and the book is written at a time when few people lived in this part of the world and few Europeans had any idea about what it might be like. One can assume that Conrad wrote his book with the knowledge that those reading would almost certainly not not have sampled first hand the tropics or moreover the Malay archipelago. Perhaps this is one driving factor behind the rich imagery that he builds up; he wants people to be able to experience what he has so obviously seen, heard, smelled first hand and he achieves this wonderfully.

Being here in Indonesia, a nation that today shares the island of Borneo and therefore vistas as well as aspects of culture, allows me to read the book with knowledge of the places and and having met people like those described in the novella. Reading the book when you have this knowledge of the people here, of the landscapes, of the villages you realise just how exact the descriptions in the book are.

Every time you pick up the book it involves you and moves you to such a depth. You watch the story unfold before your eyes, unconscious of everything else and when you awake it is as if from a dream. While it isn't a page turner in the traditional sense, Conrad does keep you hungry for more. Style aside. The story itself: tragedy in human endeavor and the plight of the dreamer unable to realise one single ambition. The main protagonist finds himself thrust into a world to which he is not suited and manages to undo everything that has been done for him. Driven by intense motivation but contrantly thwarted by the obstacle of his own lack of a clue as to how to put it into action, the story describes him as he loses every single thing he has.

Tomorrow in the Battle think on me. Javier Marias

This was handed to me by Gary Crabb when I had run out of good books recently. It is written by Javier Marias who is a well-known Spanish author and translator. The book follows a short period of time in the life of a man who has the misfortune of being on a date with a woman who suddenly and unexpectedly dies in his arms. The title conjures up images of war or struggle and references the man's inner struggle with having to deal with the consequences of having an affair with a woman who dies the first time they meet up for a date, a woman who he barely met.

We find out very early on that the woman is both a wife and mother and that the narrator, although invited round, is in fact almost a stranger in the house and an imposter in his place at her death bed. As the death occurs within the first few pages, the bulk of the book deals with the the way that this woman's death plays on the narrator's mind and his obsession with her and with his desire to learn more about this woman, her family. The reader follows the twists and turns of his mind and somehow Marias manages to create sensations of utter excitement but also of horror, suspense; I suppose what we are reading is the narrator's own sense of guilt and the process as he moves through this. There are dark undertones throughout the book which at times I took to be a thickening sub-plot of another side to the main character; something that certain events in the book perhaps allude to but which I think, upon finishing the book, one realises perhaps simply reflect the human mind and dark places that we all have.

In the battle certainly ranks very highly in the list of books I have read. It is simply unlike any other book I have read. Rivas' ability to write in a manner which is so like human thought, at times it is scary. We move through his thoughts and feelings and find ourselves judging him for decisions and errors he makes. The book stayed with me for some time after finishing it.

Albert Camus - The Outsider

The Outsider written by Albert Camus was published in 1942, his first novel, it is a mind-blowing piece of literature; it really allows you to look at life from a slightly different angle and is a major work of philosophy, dealing primarily with absurdism.

 

The book is used by Camus to explore the theory of the Absurd: a paradox which deals with the idea that although, as humans, we cherish life and value existence highly we are all destined to die and are conscious of our own mortality. Everything we do is futile in the face of this mortality. How can anyone enjoy life knowing that they are sentenced to death? Something like unhappiness is easy to deal with as we know that happiness will follow: we've been unhappy before but we have also been happy and we know that the two follow one another (Parmenides), but any enjoyment of life is impossible due to the meaningless of it. To illustrate this, Camus sentences his main protagonist Meursault, to death and the book follows the life of this character before and after the sentencing. 

The Outsider is set in the author's own birth place of Algeria and chronicles a short period of the life of the main protagonist's life leading up to his untimely death. The book is split into two sections. Part one details the funeral of the protagonist's very recently deceased mother and Meursault's murder of a local man while the second part follows the same character's court trial for murder. In this way, Meursault confronts death in three distinct ways including facing up to his own end. The book leaves the reader uncertain about the nature of Meursault; although it is written in the first person he gives nothing about the his own interpretation of events and has a complete emotional detachment from what is happening around him:

 "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday." pg.3

The reasons for this detachment depend on the reading of the book one adopts. It is maintained throughout witnessing his own mother's death, the murder and his own road death trial. One interpretation for example, is that the character suffers from asbergers or autism to some degree; unaided and misunderstood as he stumbles through his own life and causing the reader to feel wonder, empathy, frustration as they read:

"And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realised then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage." Part 2, Chapter 2, pg. 79

If the book has a bizarre feel to it it overall, this can be explained in part by the fact that it is used by Camus to explore the theory of the Absurd. I find the theory of the Absurd and the way it is expressed through this book fantastic. Reading the book as an exploration of the theory: Meursault's emotional detachment is explained in an instant. This paradox deals with the idea that humans cherish life and value their own existence highly; they seek happiness, comfort and perhaps knowledge and more. Despite all this thirst for living, when all is said and done, we are all destined to die and everything we do becomes futile in the face of or own mortality. How can life have any meaning for you if you are aware that you will die. Coping with unhappiness is possible: we know happiness is sure to follow, but the meaningless of life means any enjoyment of it is impossible.

Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

I just finished Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. I first came across the author through an article that my Dad gave me about him a couple of years. It was this book, translated in 2008, that brought his name to the attention of the English speaking world. He died in 2003 and was only truly recognised internationally, after his death.

The book focuses on  two Mexican poets, Arturo Bolano (a ficticious alter-ego of the author) and Ulises Lima and documents their search, over twenty years, for Cisarea Tinajero, a mysterious dissappeared writer and founder of the real vicerismo movement. It is told in three parts. The first and last are diary entries by a young student who, through his involvement in Bolano and Lima's gang of real viceralistas, ends up leaving Mexico  DF with the two. The main, central part of the book consists of a series of various freinds' and acquaintances' accounts of meetings with and reflections on Bolano and Lima, and their lives between 1976 to 1996.

 The central part of the book is an audacious undertaking, in terms both of the scale of what it chronicles -twenty years of searching through Mexico, Spain, France, Israel and even Africa- and in the narative technique used to tell this. Some of the writers give numerous accounts, others appearing just once; some are a couple of paragraphs while others are over twenty pages long. What impressed me most was Bolano's ability to adopt the persona of these fictitious characters, and use them todescribe a certain period of one or the other of Lima or Bolano's lives. One character simply retells tales that Bolano told him. Fantastic tales and short stories in their own right. Another character is asked by Bolano to assist him in a duel with a critic who Belano feels has misrepresented him.  Later in the book, there's a passage from a woman whose spare room Belano rents. She's a body builder who falls in love with Bolano, but with whom Bolano has little, if anything, in common. Sometimes I found myself stunned by the brilliance of these first person naratives. The content is so rich, giving you an awful lot to dwell on.

The book is realist in its descriptions and has an incredible richness in terms of the language. I  have to admit that when I first picked up the book, I was overwhealmed. It had been a long while since I'd done much reaing in Spanish and it did seem a little daunting. It is certainly a book that you can return to, and understand more and more with time. It is the first book that I have read that is so closely tied to poetry and was an awakening, with regard to how beaurtiful writing can be. I'm now completely sold on LAm literiture. With Javier Marias and Jose Saramago, every book I pick up at the moment feels like it's the best book I've ever read.