The word 'revolution' gets bandied about a lot, often without context and usually with positive intonations, as though the act of revolt itself were s...moreThe word 'revolution' gets bandied about a lot, often without context and usually with positive intonations, as though the act of revolt itself were somehow desirable. In an age that makes a pop-star of Che Guevara, Javier Cercas writes, soberingly, of a right-wing and unheroic revolutionary, the largely-forgotten Spanish Falangist writer Raphael Sanchez Mazas, and in doing so exposes the senseless bloodlust that motivated this facist's revolt. Sanchez Mazas's cause, the 'moral and aesthetic definition of the Falangists', was, according to Cercas, 'made up of deliberate ideological confusion, mystical exaltation of violence and militarism, and essentialist vulgarities proclaiming the eternal character of the fatherland and the Catholic religion'. He goes on:
However, during the time the war was incubating, the watchwords Sanchez Mazas disseminated still possessed a gleaming suggestion of modernity, that young patriots from good families and the violent ideals they cherished contributed to strengthening. At that time [Falangist leader] Jose Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler's; that at the eleventh hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilisation. At that time the young Falangists felt they were that squad of soldiers. They knew (or believed they knew) that their families slept an innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude, not knowing that a wave of impunity and egalitarian barbarism was going to wake them suddenly with a tremendous clamour of catastrophe. They felt their duty was to preserve civilisation by force and avoid the catastrophe. They knew (or believed they knew) that they were few, but this mere statistical circumstance did not daunt them. They felt they were heroes. Although he was no longer young and lacked the physical strength, courage and even the essential conviction to be one - but not a family whose innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude he wished to preserve - Sanchez Mazas also felt it, and thus abandoned literature to give himself over to the cause with priestly devotion. That didn't keep him from frequenting the most exclusive salons of the capital...
Terrifying, ironic, sublime and never merely vitriolic, Cercas's prose sings with indignation - it's mesmerising. Sentences extend with surprising clauses until at last, stunned and breathless, you shake your head and read them over, savouring them even in your outrage. What makes this especially exciting is that Cercas himself seems to proceed largely from instinct, never quite knowing where his investigations or his thought or his sentences might lead him. Frequently he stumbles, and with self-effacing humour brushes himself off and gets back up again, so that the writing of the story itself (supposedly by an alternate, unmarried Javier Cercas whose father has just died and who has 'given up literature') is as much a focus as its historical subject. Hilariously, Cercas creates for his alter-ego a bleached-blonde, spike-heeled philistine of a girlfriend who works as a fortune-teller on television and fetishises his former middling success as a novelist while criticising his current direction for lacking leftist chic:
'How can you want to write about a fascist with the number of really good lefty writers there must be around! Garcia Lorca, for example. He was a red, wasn't he?' she said not waiting for a reply, reaching under the table... 'God, my pussy's so itchy!'
But Cercas has seen a kind of mirror-reflection of Lorca's execution in the story of Sanchez Mazas, who escaped into the woods as the Republican firing squad began shooting and whose life - so legend has it - was saved by an unnamed soldier who found him hiding and let him go free, not to mention by the locals (including ex-members of the Republican army) who fed and sheltered him while he waited for Franco's troops to arrive. Of one of these 'forest friends' Cercas writes:
Over the following years, Maria would write to Sanchez Mazas many times and he would always answer in his own handwriting. Sanchez Mazas' letters no longer exist, because Maria, on the advice of her mother, who for some reason feared they might compromise her, eventually destroyed them. As for her own letters,... in them she asked for relatives, friends or acquaintances to be released from prison, which they almost invariably were; so over the years she was endowed with a saint's halo, or made into a fairy godmother for the desperate people of the region, whose families came in search of protection for the indiscriminate victims of a post-war period that in those days no-one could have imagined would last so long. Other than her family, no-one knew that the source of those favours wasn't a secret lover of Maria's, or a supernatural power she'd always had but hadn't thought appropriate to use until now, but rather a fugitive beggar she'd offered a little hot food one day at dawn and whom, after that mid-morning in February when he disappeared down the dirt track..., she never saw again in her entire life.
As to Sanchez Mazas's own life after the war:
Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything, and least of all, in what he'd defended or preached. He practised politics, but deep down always scorned them. He exalted time-honoured values - loyalty, courage - but practised treachery and cowardice, and contributed more than most to the brutalisation the Falange's rhetoric inflicted on these values; he also exalted old institutions - the monarchy, the family, religion, the fatherland - but didn't lift a finger to bring a king to Spain, ignored his family, often living apart from them, would have exchanged all of Catholicism for a single canto of The Divine Comedy and as for the fatherland, well, no-one knows what the fatherland is, or maybe it's simply an excuse for venality or sloth... 'I have but only in the most mediocre way measured up to the hope placed in me and help given me,' he confessed around this time...
As an examination of what makes someone sell his soul for an illusion (for something he very likely knows is an illusion), I think this is unsurpassed, at least in my reading. But more than that, by the novel's end we encounter a true picture of heroism, and though this last section seems clunky at times - the machinery just a little too transparent, the last pages slightly too sentimental - it is very moving. It's 'about those inconceivable moments when all of civilisation depends on a single man, and about that man and about how civilisation repays that man.' Why did the Republican soldier let Sanchez Mazas go? Maybe because that's what made him different to Sanchez Mazas - because no-one deserves to die for an idea, no matter how ill-informed or cynical or dishonest. And that Sanchez Mazas lived on as an ineffectual, neutered puppet to the regime he had helped engender is fitting punishment; that he did his best to help his forest friends goes at least some way towards redeeming him and proving the lone soldier's actions right.
I loved this book, even though at times I was slightly suspicious of it. So much repetition, so much re-examining of the same events, yet he gets away with it. And so indebted to Bolano, yet because he's upfront about that debt he transforms it; in a way (and on a small scale), he superscedes Bolano.
In the 1980s, J.G. Ballard said the balance between reality and fiction had shifted:
Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-emption of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
Cercas has invented the reality of his part-factual novel with skill and artistry. His book is unique and illuminating and touching. Funny, too. And it proves again, from a rare perspective, the words of Simon Bolivar:
All who have served the revolution have ploughed the sea.
Strangely, for a book recommended to me by a man who claims not to like short stories, this is not a novel (as its cover-blurb claims) but a collectio...moreStrangely, for a book recommended to me by a man who claims not to like short stories, this is not a novel (as its cover-blurb claims) but a collection of short stories. Linked they may be, but cohesive enough to be a novel they are not. Nor (while I'm on the subject of the cover-blurb) do they 'anticipate works like Pale Fire and One Hundred Years of Solitude'. The metafictional element - the 'whimsy of a loss of authorial control' as Mary McCarthy writes in the afterword - is no great innovation, and while it is entertaining and, in at least one story ('A Character', in which a fictional character falls in love with a 'real' woman), moving, it rarely occupies centre-stage. As McCarthy says: 'If any aspect of the book has aged, it is this whimsicality.' Maybe that's exaggeration, or maybe I don't care that it has aged; for my part, I liked the whimsy, but felt it was unevenly spread across the stories. As to One Hundred Years of Solitude, huh?! In the book's one true magical moment ('The Necrophil', about a woman who dies for months at a time and is resuscitated) Alfau channels Poe, and the resultant fairly traditional gothic tale resembles Marquez not at all. That said, I'm not complaining. For the first half of this book I had a merry old time. Old-fashioned storytelling with a touch of Pirandello and a bunch of belly-laughs - it was great! But around about 'The Chinelato' I fancied it slackened off in intensity, and by the last two stories, 'The Necrophil' and 'A Romance of Dogs', I felt sure Alfau was serving up earlier work with familiar character's names inserted to superficially maintain cohesion - though I'll admit I'm no fan of quizzes or crosswords either, so I no doubt missed some (tacked-on, I maintain) minor revelations. Whether there's any real 'depth' here I can't say, but when Alfau's at his best I don't care, because he's so entertaining. Nor does the idea of his having been a supporter of Franco (from the sidelines in the U.S., not while shedding blood in Spain) bother me in the slightest. This is about as apolitical as fiction gets, and (apart from the last story) close to pure invention. I think it's great, in places, and some kind of 'lost classic'. But to call it a great innovation is a bit of a stretch.
(Oh God, and spare me the Hopscotch comparisons! So you can read the stories in any order - so what? You can read Winesburg, Ohio in any order as well, but no-one calls it experimental - nor do they call it a novel, for that matter. And don't even get me started about how pathetic the structural ruse of Hopscotch is in the first place!... Forgive me the rant: I just get so sick of people praising these books for what seem to me the wrong reasons. Locos is fun, period. Read it for that reason and I doubt you'll be disappointed.)(less)
Stark, dialogue-based, rarely descriptive and lacking plot, the three pieces in this collection (a novel, a novella, a short story) are nonetheless co...moreStark, dialogue-based, rarely descriptive and lacking plot, the three pieces in this collection (a novel, a novella, a short story) are nonetheless compelling in their stark, heartfelt urgency. A rector at the University of Salamanca in Spain at the turn of the 20th century, many times relieved of his post and given it back again, also deported to the Canary Islands for ‘attacks on the Monarchy’, Unamuno was a man made well aware of the dangers of truth-telling.
What has happened? Simply that five people have already approached me to ask what I meant by writing the piece of fiction I have just published, what I intended to say, and what bearing did it have. Idiots, idiots, and thrice idiots! They’re worse than children who break dolls to find out what’s inside... They believe no-one could write except to prove something, or defend or attack some proposition, or from an ulterior motive... (‘The Madness of Doctor Montarco’.)
Like the good doctor, I also have an aversion to such analysis. I don’t much care what the ‘themes’ of a piece of fiction are. Montarco’s psychiatrist puts it so:
I have been reading his work since he has been here and I realise that one of their mistakes was to take him for a man of ideas, a writer of ideas, when fundamentally he is no such thing. His ideas were a point of departure, mere raw material, and had as much importance in his writing as earth used by Velasquez in making the pigments had to do with his painting, or as the type of stone Michelangelo used had to do with his Moses... At best, ideas are no more than raw material, as I’ve already said, for works of art, or for philosophy, or for polemics.
So, the themes – the types of stone – in this case are: a retelling of Cain and Abel with the focus on Cain (why it’s called ‘Abel Sanchez’ I don’t know); a portrait of a modern so-called saint and his struggle with his unbelief in a small village; a portrait of a lucid writer/doctor unable to reconcile the two strands of his public persona and committed to an asylum. But what makes the stories is their usage of these themes as springboards to whatever it is that occurs to Unamo as he muses on these beginnings. In tone they remind of mid-career Hesse – Demian especially – though starker and rarely lyrical. And it’s not hard to see how people might have reacted to them as Doctor Montarco’s readers reacted to his writings, because the focus on debating voices gives them a tone something like a work of philosophy, in which the thrust of the argument is all important. To me, again, this is immaterial. To me, it was the magical suggestion of something – lives, a world – beyond the dialogue that kept me reading. And the determination to be true to this world, to the conception. And the fact that the argument had two sides, and evolved.
Despite an occasional sense of the monochrome or (in terms of the descriptive fleshing-out of a world) the one-dimensional, these are good works, intent on a truth beyond politics or sociology. As translator Anthony Kerrigan says: ‘As regards a terrible and troubled honesty, their like is seldom seen.’
Apologies to all but this didn't do it for me. Marias can write, and he wants you to know it, but to me this was just a cute idea with a lot of run-on...moreApologies to all but this didn't do it for me. Marias can write, and he wants you to know it, but to me this was just a cute idea with a lot of run-on sentences to give it the appearance of depth.
And I dig the pick in, one and two and three times, it makes a kind of squelch, kill him, I kill him, I am killing him, how can it be true, it is happening and it is irreversible and I see him...
I mean, is this stream-of-consciousness thing really the best way to denote passion, intensity, meaning? To me it seems an excuse for padding out a short story to the size of a novella. Nor do I find the long reflective opening passages very illuminating. In between there's some stuff - a single scene, basically, with some scene-setting leading up to it - that's amusing and charming and well-executed, along with a good point about translation that could have been the topic of an effective short story.
It doesn't help that there's (what appears to be) a historical error in the first few pages: I doubt Colonel Tom Parker could ever have traveled to Mexico since he didn't have a passport (this accounts for the fact that Elvis never toured outside of the U.S.), and since his appearance is entirely unnecessary to the plot this didn't give me much confidence re Marias's research or knowledge of the period he's describing. Granted, the whole story's fictional, but isn't the point of this kind of thing to make it as real as possible? Besides which, why Elvis? Yeah, it's funny. It's cute. It sounds good in synopsis. But is that all?
Aside from this I've only read All Souls, and while I enjoyed it in parts I have to think Marias and I will probably never really get along.
POSTSCRIPT:
Lest I've rained on the constant parade that is Marias's reception here on Goodreads, a qualification. Marias, like Billy Crystal's idealised conception of a writer in Throw Momma From the Train, strikes me as a writer who 'writes, always', and maybe that's just not my ideal conception of a writer. I like those who burn brightly and briefly, who cook and cook away at their stuff until it's sticky and pungent and potent, who rarely luxuriate, for whom a passage - any passage - of prose is never just another day at the office. Marias, while certainly possessed of a style, too often seems to be going through the motions. Impressive motions they may be, but just not weighted enough, not important-seeming, to him or to me, because there's always the sense he'll be back tomorrow to go through them again, and again. For what it's worth.(less)
I wasn't convinced by this as a novel, though as a collection of essays it was interesting. Nor did the 'footnotes to an invisible text' ruse work for...moreI wasn't convinced by this as a novel, though as a collection of essays it was interesting. Nor did the 'footnotes to an invisible text' ruse work for me - surely you could make that claim for any handful of half-connected non-fiction commentaries. I liked the concept of 'a Bartleby', and I will be reading the Melville story, and I liked the 'Literature of the No' concept too. I also appreciate anyone who starts out their book with a commentary on Robert Walser. 'Robert Walser knew that writing that one cannot write is also writing' - that's gold. But overall I didn't learn a whole lot from this, nor find Vila Matis's thought very penetrating. At times, yes, but too often I found myself wanting it to end. A book probably best approached by filling it with post-it notes and dipping into it from time to time. (less)
I enjoyed this. I think Marias is in his element here. It's frequently funny and sometimes moving, and what's more it's straight to the point. For exa...moreI enjoyed this. I think Marias is in his element here. It's frequently funny and sometimes moving, and what's more it's straight to the point. For example, from the end of the Oscar Wilde piece:
He lies in the Paris cemetery of Pere Lachais, and on his grave, presided over by a sphinx, there is never any shortage of the flowers due to all martyrs.
Now that's beautiful. That's a homage. It's graceful, not flashy, not indulgent, and it gets the point across. I don't even like Wilde much and it choked me up. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, take the piece on Joseph Conrad – it's downright hilarious:
Conrad was so irritable that whenever he dropped his pen, instead of picking it up at once and carrying on writing, he would spend several minutes exasperatedly drumming his fingers on the desk as if bemoaning what had occurred.
Ha! I can just see it. So too when Henry James is pontificating so long and intently to two friends while out walking his dog that he doesn't notice the dog has circled the three men several times with its long leash and trapped them. Or the 'black mass' in the piece on Laurence Sterne, during which a baboon 'leapt onto the shoulders of the celebrant, Lord Sandwich, and was assumed to be the Devil himself'. Rilke's obsession with noblewomen, Joyce's terror of storms, Mann's meticulous recording of bowel movements in his journal – the details Marias focuses on here are almost all telling, like little keys to hidden parts of biographies too often told in 500-page tomes as indulgent as Thomas Mann's diaries. (God, it's hilarious when some young American praises Death in Venice to the skies and Mann, trying to be modest, says, 'After all, relatively speaking, I was still a beginner. A beginner of genius but still a beginner.')
In many ways, this resembles Borges – his brief essays on writers, or the biographical portraits from A Universal History of Infamy. But whereas Borges – in those pieces – is too often epigrammatic, Marias never taunts us with riddles or too much brevity. The telling detail is his speciality. His 7 pages on Lampedusa, for instance, give a balanced and touching portrait of that introspective man, based mostly around his daily routine of reading, browsing the local bookshop and sitting for hours outside a certain cafe, his habit of carrying several books with him in a rucksack with cakes and tobacco wherever he went, and his kind, meticulous education of a younger friend (who went on to become a respected critic) in English literature via a series of essays which he sweated over (he described his piece on Byron as 'an utter abomination') and never seems to have considered publishing. With lightness and deftness Marias makes this look easy, something which I have rarely seen done before (Antonio Tabucchi's piece on Antero de Quental is similar, but even Tabucchi pulled off this feat only once), and which I therefore must presume is anything but easy.
This is fun. It's a breeze. It's thought-provoking and educational. Only one thing troubles me: if he can write like this why doesn't he do it more often? After recently having finished All Souls, I looked at The Dark Back of Time and it appeared like quicksand, a glut of words saying (at least judging by the first chapter) far less than a few well-placed phrases in this little gem of a book, and sucking me quickly into a kind of infuriated questing 'Tell me more! Quickly!' attitude of reading which I did not relish. Contrast that with his epitaph on Kipling:
He was admired and read, but perhaps not very loved, although no-one ever said a word against him as a person.
Or with his piece on Joyce, in which after detailing at length one of Joyce's many interrogations of his wife Nora concerning her sexual practices ('I have been trying to picture you frigging... How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up... Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit?') – in which after all of this and more Marias writes:
No-one can deny that Joyce was a scrupulous man with a love of detail.
Senior Marias, as an Anglophile you'd know the saying: brevity is the soul of wit. And judging by Written Lives, when you're not trying to break the record for the most subordinate clauses in a sentence, you're a witty man. Bravo, sir. Now, show us again how it's done?(less)
Strangely, I'm not exactly sure what I thought of this one. I mean, I liked it. I didn't love it though, except in places: the opening (the ancient po...moreStrangely, I'm not exactly sure what I thought of this one. I mean, I liked it. I didn't love it though, except in places: the opening (the ancient porter who, memory ravaged, imagines himself in a different decade every morning); the hilarious 'High Table' dinner scene (in which I could almost imagine a half a boiled egg shooting from the throats of one of the Dons and lodging itself in the prominent cleavage of Claire Bayes (which I couldn't help reading as Claire Danes)); even, perhaps, the ending (kind of satisfying, kind of magical, kind of circular, feeding back into the body of the book and casting much of it in a new light). And Marias's use of language is, at times, flat out brilliant. But at times, and despite that he didn't come across (like so many 'virtuosic' writers) as a megalomaniac, I got the feeling he was skating on thin ice – a little too close to the precipice of self-caricature or just plain lack of inspiration, playing for time too transparently as he tried to conjure the next of his clause- and parenthesis-glutted sentences. An example:
I saw the child Eric, Claire's son, only once and that was when the days of his unexpected stay in Oxford were coming to an end and my emotional instability was at its height (for if you have already been deprived of something for some time or – its real duration being of little importance – have experienced it as having gone on for a long time, as perhaps being endless, the fact that an end to it is now in sight pales into insignificance beside the continuing fact of your deprivation; I mean that the mere juxtaposition of these two things is not in itself enough for you to perceive as being at an end something which, though about to end, is still not over, and what prevails is the fear that by some ill luck – by some misfortune, the opposite of what you have foreseen – that long-accumulated, patient present might yet go on forever: you experience not relief but anxiety and feel only distrust for the future.)
Now I don't know about you, but I feel as if I'd pretty much grasped what he was saying by halfway through that sentence, and that everything after 'I mean that the mere juxtaposition...' was just flash and fizzle, more about maintaining the elaborate rhythm than transmitting any meaning or illumination. To me that sentence sums up the best and worst of Javier Marias. Perhaps because I haven't read a bunch of other sentences like it recently, looking at it now I have to admit it frustrates me less than when I originally read it (and I let the book sit before writing this review for just that reason, to see if it would settle and become more satisfying, less frustrating, in retrospect). And of course there's the chance that Margaret Jull Costa's otherwise excellent translation has struggled here: that phrase 'the juxtaposition of these two things is not in itself enough for you to perceive as being at an end' is almost like some tongue-twister out of a scientific journal or owner's manual, and may well have been hell to transpose. But still, by halfway through All Souls I did start to wonder how much of this was just playing for time. By comparison, fellow Spaniard Javier Cercas uses a similar prose style in The Soldiers of Salamis, but his serpentine sentences, though at times seeming less proficiently rendered than Marias's, often left me with with a feeling I'd been kicked or struck with a whip – or bitten, to continue the serpent analogy. I winced. I gasped. He seemed to really be saying something. Now maybe it's just that my and Marias's temperaments don't knit so well, or maybe it's that I need to read more of him to put into a broader context this thin slice of his ouvre, but for now the jury's out. I can't in all conscience say I love him like Cercas or Bolano, even though Marias may well have pioneered the style that the other two use so successfully. To be fair, I've had this sense that Marias might not be 'my people' from the first time I noticed him back in the nineties – when A Heart So White propelled him to fame. Why not? Try this:
'I have my cock in her mouth,' I thought at a certain point... 'I have my cock in her mouth or rather she has her mouth round my cock, since it is her mouth that sought it out. I have my cock in her mouth,' I thought, 'and it isn't like other times, all those other times in recent months. As I noticed the first time I kissed her, Muriel's mouth is absorbent but not as spacious or liquid as Claire's mouth. It lacks saliva and space. She has nice lips but they're a bit thin and immobile or, rather, not immobile exactly (for they're not, I'm aware of them moving) but lacking in flexibility, rigid... While I have my cock in her mouth I can see her breasts, they are large and white with very dark nipples... her breasts are soft, like new Plasticine... I used to play with Plasticine a lot... It's incomprehensible to me that I should have my cock in her mouth...'
And so on and so forth. It's a one-night stand he's describing, granted. Probably it was never going to be scintillating. But why linger on it for so long? To me, it's just more playing for time. Add that to the long essayistic paragraph which accompanies it – 'When, over a period of time, one has become used to one mouth, other mouths seem incongruous, and present one with all kinds of difficulties,' etc, etc – and I guess I have to wonder if Marias is just some kind of a boffin. Zero punk rock in that passage, that's for damn sure, which I'm aware must sound like a pretty unintelligent criticism. But maybe it goes some way to explaining why he and I may never quite gel. A high three. (less)
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