Benito Pérez Galdós’ 1888 novel Miaow is forthcoming in English translation this summer by Margaret Jull Costa, via NYRB. Their blurb:
Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he’ll be able to find work and pull his family out of their financial straits, he spends his days visiting the administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil’s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law—whose feline appearances earn them the nickname “the Miaows”—are unimpressed by Villaamil’s failures, and the only joy left in Villaamil’s life is his young grandson Luis. When Luis’s disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso, reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even as he knows there is nothing pure about Víctor’s intentions and his return might spell their ruin.
Benito Pérez Galdós’s satire of middle-class life bears comparison with the novels of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, serving up a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption of nineteenth-century Spanish society and the dehumanizing rituals of work. Margaret Jull Costa’s new translation brings out the tragedy, the comedy, and the vitality of Pérez Galdós’s prose.
Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is probably my favorite book.
***
Years ago at an awful dinner party a man I didn’t know asked me What do you do?, by which he meant how I made money to live, or, maybe charitably, if I had a specific profession. When I told him it had something to do with literature and college students he followed up with a question no stranger should aim at another stranger-
-So what’s your favorite book then?
-Moby-Dick is my favorite book, I offered, this being my somewhat standard answer then.
-Oh no, I mean, what’s your real favorite book—not just the one you say to impress people?
–Okay Gravity’s Rainbow is my favorite book.
-I haven’t read that one yet but I like Tom Clancy too.
***
A dear friend at our house this weekend, under truly awful circumstances, circumstances that have no bearing on this riff, claimed to have counted “eighteen copies” of Moby-Dick around the house. As far as I could tell, there are only about thirteen, including a children’s pop up version and three comic book adaptations (I don’t know how he would’ve found the comic adaptations, as they are slim and I think in drawer or box). He asked for one; I offered him the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser, the one I’d used the last time I reread Moby-Dick. He opted instead for the most recent Norton Critical Edition, which a rep sent me a few years ago.
***
The last time I reread Moby-Dick I used the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser. This was in 2021. I ended up writing forty riffs on the novel, likely trying the patience of any regular readers of this blog.
The two preceding notes are my way of saying: Moby-Dick is probably my favorite novel; it’s fantastic and I’ve written about it in both short and long form, and I think anyone can read it and should–it’s funny, sad, thrilling, captivating, meditative, beguiling, baffling–a thing larger than its own frame, certainly larger than its author and his era. And so now–
***
I have another Moby-Dick. This one is designed and illustrated by Dmitry Samarov. It’s about 650 pages, and is a pleasing, squarish shape that rests easy in the hands (a contrast to the coffin-shaped Norton Critical Editions). The pages are not too bright (I hate bright white pages) nor too crisp; the spine is not so rigid that one seeks to break it before setting about the business of checking into the Spouter Inn. It is a very readable copy — relaxed, not too heavy and not too cramped, no precious footnotes. And there are Samarov’s sketches.
***
***
Rifling (or is it riffling? I can never remember) through this edition today, reading a few passages aloud even, just to feel myself go a little crazy and then get a small relief from that craze, the dominant sense I got from Samarov’s accompanying sketches is something like this: Someone riffing along to Ishmael’s ghost-voice, not competing with it nor trying to turn the mechanics of its verbs and nouns and adjectives into a mimetic representation of action or thought. I think the drawings, as a body, rather approximate something like an aesthetic ear tuned to Ishmael’s wail: scratchy ink lines tangle into and out of shapes in a discourse with the narrative. Others tuned to the voice might on any given page jot down a note or circle a phrase or even, dare, dream of a crowded footnote; Samarov offers a sketch. His love for the novel comes through.
***
If you haven’t read Moby-Dick, you should. Samarov’s edition is a worthy entry into the fold. Check it out.
Matt Bucher’s forthcoming novel The Summer Layoff is a semi-sequel to his debut, The Belan Deck. Blurb:
On Day 1, the narrator of The Summer Layoff is unceremoniously canned from his soul-sucking corporate job. But, he has a generous severance package that affords him the time off to do nothing, for once. Instead of attending virtual meetings and reviewing PowerPoint files relating to an amorphous Al project, he can now take long walks through his Texas suburb, write in his diary, scroll Wikipedia for hours at a time, and contemplate normal human anxieties. Part catalog, part self-help note-to-self, The Summer Layoff is a meditation on the modern metaphysics of work and stasis.
Let’s talk about the spirit and form of The Belan Deck. Bucher borrows the epigraphic, anecdotal, fractured, discontinuous style that David Markson practiced (perfected?) in his so-called Notecard Quartet (1996-2007: Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel). “An assemblage…nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like,” wrote Markson, to which Bucher’s narrator replies, “Bricolage. DIY culture. Amateurism. Fandom. Blackout poems.”
Bucher’s bricolage picks up Markson’s style and spirit, but also moves it forward. Although Markson’s late quartet is arguably (I would say, by definition) formally postmodernist, the object of the Notecard Novels’ obsession is essentially Modernism. Bucher’s book is necessarily post-postmodern, taking as its objects the detritus and tools of postmodern communication: PowerPoint, Google Street View, Wikipedia, social media, artificial intelligence.
Egon Hostovský’s The Arsonist is new in translation by Christopher Morris from Twisted Spoon. Their blurb:
Awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature in 1936, The Arsonist explores the world of youth against the backdrop of a small eastern Bohemian border town being menaced by an invisible firebug. Time and fire, their ability to reshape and destroy, are central. Encoded in echo, wind, and smoke — in the gesture and in the whisper — the true nature of events is too intangible and fleeting, too pregnant with the unknown, to provide any genuine certainty, and this is the real source of the townsfolk’s terror. Their misguided attempts to identify the elusive arsonist ultimately reveal the emptiness and inflexibility of their own lives. One of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century Czech letters, Hostovský’s mix of mysticism, irony, and wit, all leavened by the influence of Expressionism on his early work, results in a richly textured narrative amid an atmosphere of growing peril that serves as a harbinger of the catastrophe to come. This is the first English translation.
I’m excited about Zuzana Brabcová’s novel Ceilings, in English translation by Tereza Novická. Here’s publisher Twisted Spoon’s blurb:
Kin to the work of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn, Ceilings is a polyphonic novel that takes place in a mental hospital in Prague where the “narrator” is undergoing detox treatment for substance abuse. As the borders blur between inner experience and the outer world, between reality and dream, as the walls and ceilings hemming in the desire for freedom fantastically break open as if into the unknown and gender fluidly shifts between brother and sister, who are one and the same, Brabcová’s flights of imagination portray how difficult it is to “come out of oneself” and to engage with the other in a multifarious world that demands it of us, no matter how ambivalently.
I’m excited about this one — R.J. Dent’s translation of the Marquis de Sade’s short work from Contra Mundum. Their blurb:
Written in his Bastille cell in the years between 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, this is the first English translation of Marquis de Sade’s collection of short works, Stories, Tales, and Fables.
Essential reading for all Sade devotees, Stories, Tales, and Fables is an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the work of this controversial French literary innovator. The short works in this collection range from the dramatic novella, Dorci, to comic tales such as The Duped Judge. Whether he is writing bawdy, exuberant comedies, supernatural tales, or human tragedies, Sade is essentially a moralist, and his exploration of the darker side of human nature remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own.
Psychologically perceptive and defiantly unconventional, Stories, Tales, and Fables reveals the compelling force of Sade’s narrative powers. An accomplished and artful fiction writer, Sade, like all great writers, asks penetrating questions about society, life, and humanity. This collection also includes a selection of Sade’s non-fiction, ranging from his insightful survey of the novelist’s art, Some Thoughts on the Novel, to his Last Will and Testament, as well as several essays about Sade’s work by renowned authors including Apollinaire, Heine, Masson, Anatole France and Paul Ėluard.
Paul Griffiths’ Ophelia novels are collected in one volume from NYRB for a US release:
“So: now I come to speak.” With this line, Shakespeare’s Ophelia starts telling her story. In let me tell you, this newly revealed woman uses exactly the same words Shakespeare gave her in Hamlet, shifted as in a kaleidoscope to create a very different voice: her own. We hear her personal narrative from childhood to the moments before the start of the play, when she knows she has a fateful decision to make. Along the way, we discover whole new angles on her father, her brother, the prince, and other characters who come out from behind the curtain.
In let me go on, her decision made, she refashions herself. Emerging from her old world, she explores a new one, of magical variety yet coherent. As she goes in search of what she may still become, she meets a new cast of characters, some poignant, some hilarious. Paul Griffiths gives this remarkable protagonist—and us—a play-full of humor, poignancy, passion, adventure, and a great many surprises.
I’ve been lucky over the last decade or so that my little college’s spring break almost always coincides with my children’s spring break. We aimed again this year at Georgia, spending a few days in a cabin outside the unfortunately named Whitesburg. Spring had not yet really sprung there yet. There was very little green about, but the hikes along and around Snake Creek through 20th century ruins were pleasant enough, and the kids enjoyed ziplining and aerial obstacle courses. In one of their sessions, I sneaked away to Harvey’s House of Books.
Harvey’s is, as far as I can tell, a Friends of the Library venture run by volunteers. I didn’t expect much, but the fiction section was surprisingly well populated. For around five bucks I picked up Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, and two by Cristina Peri Rossi — The Ship of Fools and Dostoevsky’s Last Night.
I was happy and surprised to find Rossi’s The Ship of Fools (in translation by Psiche Hughes); I’ve had it on a mental list for a few months now. I started it that night and it’s really odd–reminds me a bit of Ann Quin’s stuff, very odd but fun. More thoughts to come.
The Ship of Fools proved a nice antidote to the books I’d brought with me, Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, (in translation by Charlotte Mandell) and a Dino Buzzati collection translated by Lawrence Venuti, called The Bewitched Bourgeois. I’ve enjoyed the Buzzati stories, but piled up there’s a sameness here that cries for interruption. I love Borgesian riffs on “Before the Law” as much as the next nerd, but too many in a row (six, in my case this week) feels, I dunno, like, I get it. But to be clear, I’ve really liked most of The Bewitched Bourgeois. I think it’s better parceled out though. Monsieur Teste on the other hand…look, I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood the book entirely, but I really kinda sorta hated it. Was I supposed to hate the central persona, Mister Teste, who aims for precision in language but comes off as a bore? At least it was short.
While I didn’t have the time in Atlanta to hit multiple bookstores (like in past trips), I made a point to hit up A Capella Books, a well stocked indie joint with a great used collection. I didn’t score anything there, although I was thrilled to see Anders Nilsen’s Tongues prominently featured in the graphic novel section. The book is great — I got a review copy right before we left. Some asshole named Edwin Turner landed a blurb on the back under his hero Charles Burns’s much shorter, pithier, better blurb:
Our spring break culminated Saturday night at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, where we saw the so-called indie supergroup The Hard Quartet play all of their songs. I really dig The Hard Quartet’s self-titled debut, and dragged my wife and son along. (My daughter declined but played taxi driver.) Some interesting looking children were exiting the theater (really more of a club, let’s be honest) as we were entering, assuring the concerned security guard that they’d be right back, they just needed to get some Gatorade at a corner store. These were Sharp Pins, or The Sharp Pins, or Thee Sharp Pins, a Chicago power pop trio fronted by a kid named Kai Slater. They played a tight thirty minute set (including a Byrds cover); young Slater knows how to tuck away middle eight. The band’s youth invigorated the crowd of indie oldheads, and if Sharp Pins were occasionally a little out of tune or a step behind on the count, what came through was a true joy for the pop song. My son went bananas from them, saying something like, I know that they aren’t as good at playing their instruments as the Hard Quartet guys, but I liked their songs more. He bought their album and their t-shirt.
I liked The Hard Quartet’s live show very much — these are some old, or let’s just say older guys — look, pretty much everyone at the show was old, older, etc., except the Sharp Pins, my son, and some other teens there with their folks — these guys, the HQ, are veterans of disorder, coming up in club shows and theaters and big stages and big big stages and so on. They seemed very comfortable in the quasi-theater club. It was a joy to watch and listen to them.
They are, as I mentioned before, a so-called “supergroup.” Stephen Malkmus was the sideman for David Berman in The Silver Jews; Matt Sweeney, a popular YouTube influencer, was a member of another infamous supergroup — David Pajo’s short-lived side project Zwan; Emmett Kelly is a former gang member and circus performer; Jim White is the best drummer I’ve ever seen live (I have no stupid joke here; he is amazing and I listened to Ocean Songs every night for two years in a row when I was 22 and that’s not an exaggeration.)
The Hard Quartet are clearly a “real” band and not anyone’s side project. Sonics live were richer, fuller, more expansive than on disc. Emmett Kelly sang his new song, which, as far as I can tell, is the only update to their setlist in the past year — basically the record played straight through — but they seemed to never remember who was playing bass on which song when. No one used a pick, ever, as far as I could tell. Sweeney broke a string and then claimed he’d never broken a string on stage, ever. (Dubious.) Malkmus said he was thinking about “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but, what if it was, like, “The Devil Went Down on George.” Sweeney jokingly referred to Charlie Daniels as Chuck Daniels and at least two Atlanta audience members hissed foolish rejoinders. (Could’ve been those big beers, bald boys!) Jim White is both a gentle percussionist and a rawk gawd drummer. Malkmus’s, Kelly’s, and Sweeney’s singing in unison were some of the finest moments of the night, as in “Rio’s Song” and “Heel Highway.” The band’s weathered implementation of silence and space was also delicious and judicious in numbers like “Six Deaf Rats,” “Action for the Military Boys,” and “Hey.” Skronk and noodling were measured but never mannered. (Or the manners were there but they weren’t bad, unless they were meant to be bad.) Matt Sweeney’s left foot was the boss of the band, the bandleader, the clapper clopping down the count in a leopard print.
The Hard Quartet finished before eleven, having played all their songs. I think we all had a good time.
“No? Because I thought—what I mean is the lady at my hotel’s tourist information desk—the Intercontinental over there—and also the one who sold me the ticket now, both told me—”
The man’s shaking his head, looks at him straight-faced. It’s up to you, his look says, if you’re going to give me anything for this tour. I won’t ask. I won’t embarrass you if you don’t give me a crown. But I’m not going to stand here all day waiting for it.
“Here, I want to give you something for all this.” He looks in his wallet. Smallest is a fifty note. Even if he got three-to-one on the black market, it’s still too much. He feels the change in his pocket. Only small coins. This guy’s done this routine with plenty of people, that’s for sure, and he’d really like not to give him anything.
Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, in translation by Sophie Hughes, is new from NYRB. Their blurb–
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital “creatives” exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they’ve turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, “the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same.”
Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner is forthcoming in translation by Michael Hofmann. Publisher NYRB’s blurb:
In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends— is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.
The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner’s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz’s high-strung shenanigans and the father’s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.
As in all of Werner’s work, the world looks grim (“I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow, I’m going to get a grip on myself”) but never less than comic—a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann’s vivid translation.
I finally broke down and bought a copy of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate via an online bookseller; I’d been trying to pick up a used copy of it or his novel Frog for a while now, after devouring 1988’s Garbage last year. I was able to get a signed first edition for less than the novel’s original price listing, which is maybe a little depressing? The novel has eight sections; I read the first last night, in something like a trance. Here is the novel’s first paragraph:
He’s in the car with the two kids, driving on the Interstate when a car pulls up on his side and stays even with his for a while and he looks at it and the guy next to the driver of what’s a minivan signals him to roll down his window. He raises his forehead in an expression “What’s up?” but the guy, through an open window, makes motions again to roll down his window and then sticks his hand out his window and points down at the back of Nat’s car, and he says “My wheel, something wrong with it?” and the guy shakes his head and cups his hands over his mouth as if he wants to say something to him. He lowers his window, slows down a little while he does it, van staying alongside him, kids are playing some kid card game in back though strapped in, and when the window’s rolled almost all the way down and the hand he used is back on the steering wheel, the guy in the car sticks a gun out the window and points it at his head. “What? What the hell you doing,” he says, “you crazy?” and the guy’s laughing but still pointing, so’s the driver laughing, and he says “What is this? What I do, what do you want?” and the guy puts his free hand behind his ear and says “What, what, what? Can’t hear ya,” with the driver laughing even harder now, and he says “I said what do you want from me?” and the guy says “Just to scare you, that’s all, you know, and you’re scared, right?—look at the sucker, scared shitless,” and he says “Yeah, okay, very, so put it away,” and the kids start screaming, probably just took their eyes off the card game and saw what was happening, or one did and the other followed, or they just heard him and looked or had been screaming all the time and he didn’t hear them, but he doesn’t look at them through the rearview, no time, just concentrates on the gun and guy holding it and thinking what to do and thinks “Lose them,” and floors the gas pedal and gets ahead of the van but it pulls even with him and when he keeps flooring it stays even with him and even gets a little ahead and comes back with the guy still pointing the gun out the window and now grinning at him, driver’s in hysterics and slapping the dashboard, things seem to be so funny, and he thinks “Should I roll the window up or keep it down, for rolling it up the guy might take it the wrong way and shoot, if he’s got bullets in there,” and he looks around, no other cars on their side of the Interstate except way in the distance front and behind, no police cars coming the other way or parked as far as he can see on the median strip, and he yells “Kids, get down, duck, stop screaming, do what Daddy says,” and sees them in the rearview staring at the van and screaming and he shouts “I said get down, now, now, unbuckle yourselves, and shut up, your screaming’s making me not think,” and slows down and rolls the window up and van slows down till it’s alongside him, the guy holding the gun out and one time slapping the driver’s free hand with his, and then the guy points the gun at the backseat with the kids ducked down in it and crying, maybe on the floor, maybe on the seat, for he can’t see them, and he swerves to the slow lane and the van gets beside him in the middle lane, and then he pulls onto the shoulder, stops, shifts quickly and drives in reverse on it bumping over some clumps, and the van goes on but much slower and from about a hundred and then two and three and four hundred feet away the guy steadies his gun arm with his other hand and aims at his car and he yells “Kids, stay down,” for both are now looking out the back, maybe because of the bumping and sudden going in reverse, and bullets go through the windshield. He screams in pain, glass in his head and a bullet through his hand, yells “Girls, you all right?” for there’s screaming from in back but only one of them, and his oldest daughter says “Daddy, Julie’s not moving, Daddy, she’s bleeding, Daddy, I don’t see her breathing, I think she’s dead.”
I couldn’t pass up this slim 1976 Black Sparrow Press edition of Jane Bowles’ sketches, letters, and photos — even if a lot of it is reproduced in the later collection My Sister’s Hand in Mine.
Here’s a short review of Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies: The book is amazing, a confounding, energetic picaresque suffused with sinister humor and dark delight. I read it knowing nothing about the plot on the recommendation of Ben Marcus, who described it as “so insane, so beautiful, and in some sense, unknowable to me. On the surface, it’s not really about much, but the arrangement of words does something chemical to me.” My recommendation is to dispense with the rest of my review and read Bowles’s novel.
I got a review copy of Lawrence Venuti’s selection of Dino Buzzati short stories he’s translated as The Bewitched Bourgeois a few days before we left for a family vacation at the end of last year in Mexico City. I’d meant to take it with me, thinking that the (often very short) short stories would make ideal plane, airport, and I’m-exhausted-but-want-a-quick-brain-snack reading. But I ended up throwing José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night into my ancient North Face Recon instead in a weird effort to get its last hundred and fifty pages “finished” before the so-called “next year.” I achieved that goal and am now rereading big chunks of The Obscene Bird of Night. I should have brought the Buzzati. I think it would have been ideal for my needs at the time, based on the handful of tales I’ve read so far.
Here’s NYRB’s blurb:
Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.
In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant publishes later this month from NYRB. And oof is she a big boy! NYRB’s blurb:
Mavis Gallant’s extraordinary mastery of the short story remains insufficiently recognized. She may be the best writer of stories since the early-1950s prime of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, and even in such august company, her work is sui generis. Gallant’s short fiction refines the art of the story even as it expands the boundaries of what a story can be. Above and beyond that, however, it constitutes a striking, almost avant-garde reduction. To read her is to discover something about the very nature of story: how for better or worse life is caught up in it, and how on the page that common predicament can come to life.
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes more than thirty stories never before gathered into one volume, including “The Accident” and “His Mother” and “An Autobiography” and “Dédé.” With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master’s fiction will be in print.
I’m excited about this one. I loved the previous Antonio Di Benedetto novels I read, Zama (1956) and The Silentiary (1964), both also translated by Esther Allen. (I reviewed Zama here and The Silentiary here.)
The Suicides will publish in February 2025 from NYRB. Their blurb:
A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds.
The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolaño and deemed “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the “Dirty War.”
So I finally made some time to dig into Augusto Monterroso’s lone novel, 1978’s The Rest Is Silence (trans. Aaron Kerner). It’s hardly a conventional novel (and seems very much of a piece with the other novel I’m reading right now, Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s 1967 novel Tres tristes tigres (in its 1971 translation as Three Trapped Tigers by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine). Both novels eschew traditional novelistic forms—no central narrator, no conventional plot, per se, polyglossia given rein over a controlling and unifying voice. I read the first fifty or so pages of The Rest Is Silence and look forward to digging in deeper.
From Dustin Illingworth’s introduction
Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence, a fictional Festschrife for a provincial Mexican Intellectual, teems with invented texts, imaginary writers, dubious footnotes, possible pseudonyms, and unreliable memories. The novel’s constituent parts reveal the social, culeural, and literary life of one Eduardo Torres, a writer and elder statesman of the fictional town of San Blas, Mexico, Its four sec-tions— grouped loosely into tributes, selected writings, aphorisms, and “impromptu collaborations” —make a case for compilation as a natural handmaiden to farce. The opening remarks from friends and family are largely hatchet jobs born of petty jealousy or long acquain-tance. The selections from Torres’s oeuvre—incredible misreadings, all-are bathetic, anodyne, lacking in sense, and almost invariably wrong. Yet the vivisection is marked by compassion as much as it is by savagery. Ferried by the risible figure of Torres, avatar of vanity and misjudgment, Monterroso smuggles a pocket autobiography within his deflation of Mexico’s literati. In the process, he forges one of the sublime fools of literature, a man whose commitment to delusion is itself a kind of glorious art.
Biblioklept 