Paris

by Marcos Giralt Torrente, Margaret Jull Costa (Translation)

Paris depicts a man’s journey through the labyrinth of his memories, a search for his origins that will uncover an old family secret and turn his world upside down. A mesmerizing and haunting story by award-winning author Marcos Giralt Torrente, a master craftsman calibrating nuance and impact with a true gift.

Genres: Fiction, Spanish Literature

348 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 1999

About the author

Marcos Giralt Torrente es licenciado en Filosofía por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, ciudad donde reside. Inició su carrera literaria con el libro de cuentos Entiéndame (Anagrama, 1995). Es autor, también, de la novela corta Nada sucede solo (Ediciones del Bronce, 1999; Premio Modest Furest i Roca) y de las novelas París (Premio Herralde de Novela, Anagrama, 1999) y Los seres felices (Anagrama, 2005). Colabora habitualmente como crítico literario en Babelia, de El País, y fue autor residente de la Academia Española en Roma, del Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf y de la University de Aberdeen y participó en el Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme de 2002-2003. Su tercera novela Tiempo de vida (Anagrama, 2010), tuvo una gran acogida por parte de la crítica y fue galardonada con el Premio Nacional de Narrativa. Con su libro de relatos El final del amor (Páginas de espuma, 2011), ha sido el ganador de la 2ª edición del Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marcos Giralt Torrente's debut novel - originally written in 1999 but only just translated into English - comes heavily trailed by illustrious comparisons.

We're told the book won the major Spanish Herralde Prize, awarded by a jury chaired by Roberto Bolano, who had himself won the same award previous year, with 2nd place given to the debut novel by Andres Neumann. And that El Pais hailed him as an heir to Javier Marias and Enrique Vila-Matis. From the English language, Ishiguro is another obvious reference point.

And the ultimate seal of approval - a who's who of translators into English have worked on his books. Paris is translated by the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa (Javier Marias's main translator), and we also have a memoir done by Natasha Wimmer (of Bolano's 2666 fame) and a short-story collection with Katherine Silver (Cesar Aira's English voice).

Amongst all these names, the novels of Marias are the most obvious parallel. Indeed the narrative voice, in English, is so similar at times, I would wonder if this was a artefice of having a translator in common, were it not for Jull Costa having proven herself more than capable of adopting very different voices for authors as diverse as Marias, Saramago, Atxaga, Antunes, and de Queiroz.

But is Giralt simply Marias-by-numbers, in the same way that so many Latin American authors tried to emulate Garcia Marquez but without capturing his magic (cough...Isabelle Allende...cough)? Fortunately, I'm pleased to say that Torrente is a distinctive, and important voice in his own right.

Paris tells the story of a middle-aged narrator, and his detailed reflections on his relationship with his parents, and their relationship with each other, mostly focused on events in his childhood and adolesence. His mother is by now suffering from dementia, and so unable to answer the many questions he has, which he instead turns over, obsessively and in great detail, in his mind.

His father was a rogue, and not even a particularly loveable one, a "fly-by-night" (his son's own description), a con-man not adverse to stealing from his own wife's purse. And he was frequently absent from home, including a 2 year spell in prison.

His mother, in contrasts, presents to him a calm facade and does her best to shelter him from his father's unpredictability, while almost never opening up to him, and certainly not to anyone else, about her true feelings.

While his father was in prison she offers her son "lame" answers for his absence, involving a illness needing hospitalisation followed by a job overseas, which he "unquestioningly accepted". Looking back now he reflects that "when all of this was going on, she told me nothing, her life was a pretense, a permanent charade intended to allow me to carry on as normal, to sleep, eat, laugh, wake up, go to school, and even cry, without worrying about things I had no reason to worry about or that she didn't want me to worry about. My mother was a rock, and if there was a chisel chipping away at her, if it caused dust or flakes of stone to fall onto the floor of her spirit or allowed time to erode her, revealing gaps and flaws and fractured veins, all of that happened while she was alone, without me as a witness, or, of course as a confidant...we never touched on feelings, she never told me what went on inside her or what pain she felt, if indeed she felt any pain."

His mother only really opens up to him - and then primarily to reveal important truths rather than her own feelings - twice in his life, each time imploring him to "pay attention and listen".

The first is on the way to pick up his father on his release date, when she reveals that his father has been in prison. He isn't angry with his mother for hiding this truth, concluding that "Her previous lie became justifiable as soon as she decided to tell me that such a lie had existed. It would not have been justifiable, on the other hand, if, over the course of time, I'd found out the truth by myself."

The second time occurs later, both in time and in the pages of the novel, when she reveals, albeit in a very roundabout fashion, a key family secret which shakes the foundation of the intra-family relationships, and indeed the reader's appreciation of the story.

His mother prefaces this second confession, and justifies her previous silence on this topic, with the words "one often lies to and deceives the person one loves most in order to preserve their love, or to protect them". And the narrator goes on to reflect:

"While my mother maintains a smoke-filled silence I think about those words which...it would seem she said quite deliberately. The two reasons she gives are quite different, and she didn't make that distinction by chance...The protecting lie is the one you admit to when there's no longer any need to protect and the lie intended to preserve love is the one you never reveal. I think this reluctantly and wonder how much my mother will keep silent about until the end of her days, and how much she is holding back until the time comes for it to be told."

And this pursuit of what else his mother may be holding back for the right time or keeping silent about forever, remains his obsession, even more so now his mother, while alive, is no longer mentally capable of revealing any further secrets.

Specifically, the narrator remains fixated on trying to learn the truth behind a different episode. When, a few years after his release, his mother and father separate permanently, his mother moves from their Madrid home to Paris for an extended stay, leaving him in the care of his Aunt. His mother returns, unexpectedly from Paris, and he and she resume their life together, without his father, but he becomes convinced that something fundamental happened in Paris, perhaps his mother went there in search for or even to live with his father, or something else significant. It's this pursuit of the truth behind the Paris period of his mother's life that leads to the revelation of the, seemingly much more fundamental, family secret, but even then, and until the present, he remains fixated on Paris, as if his one missing piece of the puzzle could unlock his relationship with his mother:

"I'm always drawn back to the thought of something that may never even have happened and only exists in my imagination as a way of neutralising the different emotions the image arouses in me. I will never know more than I know now, and perhaps it is the impossibility of getting beyond mere conjecture that continues to endow with significance an event which, if it did happen, would have to be considered less important in comparison with other I know to have happened, and which she very bravely told me about when few people in her situation would have dared to so much as mention them."

This comment opens the novel, while the previous incident of his mother "bravely" revealing the secret, to which the truth about Paris is "less important in comparison", close it, giving the novel a circular quality, which deliberately reflects the narrator's thought processes.

Indeed Giralt's style, as expressed by the narrator, is highly elliptical. The narrator spends much more time anticipating what happened (is about to have happened) and retrospectively analysing his feelings while it was about to happen - he coins the wonderful phrase "retrospective pre-sentiment" - than he ever does telling us about the incident or conversation itself. Giralt himself has been quoted (not in the novel) "The language [the narrators of his books] use to express themselves has to reflect the undulations of their thoughts and their mimesis of details and exactitude."

Giralt also has his narrator explicitly rejected any omniscience on his behalf. At the outset of his account he tells us "I must make do with what I myself saw and heard. I must try to speak only of the things of which I have direct experience, even if that depends in large measure on what I don't know but can only intuit. Since it's not my intention to convert doubt into certainty but simply to make sense of what happened as a consequence of my suspicions, there will be nothing contradictory about my course of action as long as everything I say is told from my point of view at the time. Any gaps other than those in my own memory will have to continue to exist, because even if it were in my power to do so, what purpose would there be in trying to investigate them further? Indeed, their fate might be precisely that, to remain unassailable in order to illuminate other gaps that do actually exist in my memory."

It Is fascinating to read Giralt back-to-back, as I have, with Knausgaard's Boyhood Island, as the theme of memory is key to both novels. Giralt's narrator observes that "memory is a great temptation, and what could be easier than to highlight some memories at the expenses of others and retrospectively draw up a synthesis adapted to what has endured rather than what actually happened?"

And key to Giralt's novel is the inability for anyone to ever really truly know another person: "however close we feel to those around us, can we ever be sure that what we know about them is true, if what they tell us is the whole truth, and does knowing or not knowing change anything in our life?"

Compared to Marias, his themes are less universal, or at least have less explicit attempts to draw universal truths, but not necessarily worse for it as it leaves reader to draw wider conclusions.

If there is a possible weakness in the novel, it is that the meta-narrative can feel contrived to achieve the desired literary effect, for example the narrator seems remarkably uncurious about incidents such as the two year absence of his father in jail, adding to the effect when he suddenly discovers the truth, and seems unusually unwilling to simply ask his mother direct questions. Although this itself could be explained as the narrator's artifice rather than the author's - indeed comparisons to Ishiguro are inevitable at the point with his blithly unaware and possibly unreliable narrators. As the narrator himself says "When we think about the past, it's hard to resist both dividing it up into blocks in accordance with the pattern of events that have made the most impression on us and attributing powers to it that it does not have, allowing ourselves to believe that the arrival of a particular date had the ability to work some radical transformation on us."

Overall, a stunning and important work which made a deep impression on me, as evidenced by the length of the review and my extensive quotations.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

by unanimous jury decision (which included roberto bolaño), marcos giralt torrente's paris was awarded the 1999 herralde prize (andrés neuman's as yet untranslated bariloche was the runner-up). the spaniard's debut novel is a remarkable work of remembrance, reconciliation of memory, and the tenacious effects of formative moments. giralt torrente's narrator, a man reflecting back on a number of unanswered questions from his youth (most notably, the time his mother spent living in the french capital city without him - and the relationship they both had to his oft-absent father), spends nearly the entirety of the novel reflecting, recalling, re-imagining, and re-processing the events of childhood. with stunning prose and impressive psychology insight, paris is a meditation on the nature of memory and the ways it binds our present to the past. giralt torrente's debut novel is a masterful feat.

when we think about the past, it's hard to resist both dividing it up into blocks in accordance with the pattern of events that have made most impression on us and attributing powers to it that it does not have, allowing ourselves to believe that the arrival of a particular date had the ability to work some radical transformation on us. until the death of my father, we say, i was like this or like that, when we should really say that on such and such a date, something that already existed inside us began to make itself manifest or visible. such nonsense is merely the reflection of a still greater error of thinking, the belief that we change suddenly rather than gradually, as if we could not possibly be influenced by opposing but simultaneous impulses.

*translated from the spanish by margaret jull costa (saramago, marías, pessoa, eça de queirós, et al.)

[Cris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lo he dejado y retomado varias veces, creía que no lo acababa. Es complicado de leer, más que avanzar en línea recta sientes que estás girando en círculos repetitivos. Aún así, aprecio la forma en que está escrito, con una historia muy sencilla es capaz de armar un libro muy denso, manteniendo la tensión en todo momento, aunque a mi me ha resultado agotador.

[Oon · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can we tell about our brothers, our sisters, parents? If I were to write about my family, the pages resulted from that endeavor would not amount to a decent size book or even novella. And if I were to compose only the truth about them, then nothing but blank pages. This is not about the power of one's perception; it is that with family, people tend to put the best version of themselves. Even if that version is mainly fictitious, dredged out from long-buried ideals.

A few lines from this novel provides motivation for people's behavior around their family:

"One often lies to and deceives the person one loves most in order to preserve their love, or to protect them... The protecting lie is the one you admit to when there's no longer any need to protect, and the lie intended to preserve love is the one you never reveal."

Immediately after I read these sentences, arrives in my mind unannounced, episodes that, looking back from the privilege of the present, exemplify the very essence of those lines. One lives family in the present but can only understand it retrospectively.

One needs memory to facilitate that time travel to the past. However, memory is an extraordinarily poor instrument. It is often biased and incomplete, tampered with present sentiments or censured with denials. Moreover, it is a more limited resource than we would like to admit. We do not know when the person to which the memory attach would pass away, nor when the mind in which it resides would cease to function.

Such are the obstacles the narrator confronts when he tries to make sense of his life and family. At the age of nine, when he was fast asleep, two policemen came and arrested his father. The event commenced the slow unraveling of family secrets that would upend his world. The facade of normalcy crumbled, and he learned that his father was a swindler and a compulsive liar. His father had been absent for several years prior, living a frivolous life that gradually descended into disarray. A “fly-by-night” father whose egotism dictates that his worse nature triumphs over the more benevolent potentials. The arrest, however, was only a prelude to a larger mystery: why his mother put up with her husband's behavior for so long.

The mother’s character might explain part of the enigma. Contrary to the father, she is stoic, aloof, mostly rational, and she possesses a nearly limitless emotional capacity that helps her through the marriage, loneliness, and, as we learn later, so much more. In fact, it is fair to say that the book is an attempt by the narrator to understand her. To peer into her world and glimpse the truth. A mission that is increasingly critical as she descends into dementia.

Diving into the past is as if swimming through murky water. Marcos Giralt Torrente, through the narrator, warns the reader at the beginning of the novel that there is no complete construct of memory.

"Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events. What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences. We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once. You might be able to give some sense of the intensity of those feelings, but not the whole diverse chain of connections of which they were composed. With the passing of time, feelings grow more impersonal, and their very impersonality renders them impenetrable."

Such a masterful description of the limitations of remembering, and an excellent set piece for the tonality of the rest of the novel. The narrator tells, reminisces, and analyzes the past seamlessly. Reading this book is like entering a smoky bar, suffused with cigarette smoke, brimming with conversations which you hear as murmurs, details lost in the dim light.

To write about Spanish literature, set in Madrid, and the theme of memory and family is to evoke the giant whose shadow looms hugely over this novel: Javier Marias. There are definitely a lot of similarities in style. Moreover, the fact that Margaret Jull Costa, the English voice of many of Marias’ novels, acts as the translator of this particular novel does not help to dissociate the connection. Despite that, I find that Torrente’s characters are more sympathetic, more grounded in reality, and less prone to pondering the philosophical aspects of truth and culpability. Additionally, there is a display of restraint which is rarely found in a debut work but dearly needed in Marias’ following outputs.

In this remarkable book, Marcos Giralt Torrente crafts a masterful narrative about family and memory that is simultaneously cerebral and heartrending.

[Rosa Margarita · Rating 3 out of 5]

París no es un libro fácil de leer, me llevó bastante tiempo porque lo tienes que agarrar cuando estás en ese estado de ánimo.

Es una historia bastante sencilla explicada hasta el fondo de los detalles lo cual lleva a abordar temas por páginas y páginas sin realmente avanzar en la historia. Sin embargo esta característica no es para nada rechazable ya que el escritor explica pequeñas reacciones, pensamientos y sentimientos que todo ser humano en algún momento llega a experimentar. Es un libro escrito de una manera muy personal por parte del escritor que es imposible relacionar que muchos de esos pequeños detalles están ahí de manera autobiográfica, sin embargo me queda claro que no es un libro para todos, la mayoría lo dejaría antes de la mitad del libro.

[Dado Canales · Rating 5 out of 5]

"París" de Marcos Giralt Torrente. Premio Herralde de Novela 1999.Con la única ayuda de su memoria, el narrador de esta novela, busca comprender lo q realmente sucedió en su niñez q NO pudo comprender. Vivía en Madrid con sus padres. Todo parecía ser temporal y en constante movimiento. No había certezas ni una vida estable. Tratando de comprender la verdad, desde el adulto actual, el narrador va reconstruyendo su infancia: era hijo de un estafador, de un hombre cínico e irresponsable q "decía trabajar como editor", pero q estafaba aquienes querían publicar su novela. El narrador, nos detalla a su madre: una mujer codependiente y llena de secretos q aunque le reclamaba a su marido la angustia en la q vivían, jamás lo pudo dejar, aunque esto implicara tener q salir huyendo para NO ser capturados por la policía o por los deudores. El padre se desaparecía por meses, para después volver cómo si no hubiera sucedido nada. Así q a lo largo de su niñez, este niño y adolescente, va mudando de ciudad hasta q un buen día, su madre le informa q lo llevará a la Coruña, a casa de su tía materna, ya q ella tiene q irse a París a trabajar, pues su padre ya se ha gastado todos los ahorros q tenían. Dejan su departamento de Madrid otra vez. Lo q sería una estancia corta, se convirtieron en 9 meses en los q él escuchaba tras la puerta a su tía hablar con su madre, siempre susurrando y con preocupación en la voz. Así q París, se convierte en una gran interrogante. ¿Qué hace su madre allá? ¿Por qué no puede decirle con exactitud cuando volverá por él en las cortas llamadas q tiene con ella? ¿Por qué su madre habla a escondidas con su tía? ¿Qué oscuro secreto hay atrás de "la vida en París"?Cuando finalmente su madre va por él y regresan a Madrid, le informa q su padre los ha dejado, q se ha ido y q jamás volverá a hablar de él. Este joven, ya sabía de la existencia de los documentos falsos de su padre y q la policía lo buscaba. Su madre, le dice q no sabe nada de su paradero.Un día al salir del colegio, se equivoca de autobús y se baja en una parada lejana. Observa como su madre, con prisa, entra a un bar. Se acerca para descubrir asus dos padres tomados de la mano...

[Scott]

“I no longer talk to my mother, it’s impossible. I think about her, but I hardly see her. What’s to be done when we still have questions to ask, when we have not had run out of questions, and when the person of whom we’d like to ask those questions, with whom we’d like to continue talking, isn’t there to answer us, can’t speak, and has no idea that we’re counting on her? My mother is there, but she doesn’t say anything—or nothing that makes any sense—she doesn’t answer, she isn’t her. Her body is there, you can touch her, she hasn’t really changed, apart from getting a little thinner, but she’s a body without voice or memory, a body that doesn’t recognize anyone and has neither past nor future. Something that neither she nor I foresaw has swooped down on her body and torn it apart forever, even though it still exists and can go on existing. Sometimes, like now, I think that since she clearly isn’t her anymore, nothing binds me to that empty body, which moves and speaks but doesn’t feel, or whose feelings are distorted, and other times I resist losing her; on those occasions, I take her hand and try to make her recognize me, to rediscover some trace of the person she was. Sometimes when I visit, I spent hours looking at her, then I leave and don’t come back for weeks, because I can’t bear seeing her like that. I prefer my memory of her to a present in which he has no voice, I prefer to let her grow inside my memory rather than accept this alien, jarring present.”

[Carolina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vamos começar com este livro, que recebi num agradável encontro BookCrossiano. :)

Fica o mistério do porquê do título deste livro, porque a cidade em causa apenas é mencionada muito vagamente. Conta a história familiar de um rapaz cujo o pai é um aldrabão. Aldrabou o rapaz, a mãe dele e muitos outros e este, na sua inocência, vai descobrindo as aldrabices umas por cima das outras e tentando descortinar a realidade sobre o seu pai e sobre a sua família.

Depois uma coisa muito chocante é revelada, mas ficamos um pouco sem saber se era realmente necessário esse dado para o desenvolvimento da história e das personagens ou se foi algo ali metido a martelo para que chocasse o leitor.

A leitura é fácil e ritmada e acabamos por nos envolver com esta pessoa horrível que é o pai do rapaz, sempre à espera de saber qual foi a marosca em que se meteu. Mas fora isso, não impressiona.

[Damian Vallejos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tuve que abandonarlo. Lo lei hasta la mitad del libro pero no pude interesarme por los personajes ni por la historia. Tenia la constante sensación que la trama no avanzaba, como si los capitulos llevaran al lector a un callejon sin salida. No se si volvere a darle otra oportunidad. Una pena ya que es un premio herralde y generalmente son buenas obras

[Tuli Márquez · Rating 2 out of 5]

muy bien y tal pero cuando la conversación final con la madre, que bajón. Le sobran cincuenta páginas y tal.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lento
Largo
Reiterativo

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gostei.

[Loli Deen · Rating 1 out of 5]

No es lo mio, esperaba otra cosa

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

despite the seemingly dense prose as advertised in various reviews/blurbs, I found Paris a fast and gripping psychological read with a three quarters predictable main twist - given the setup and after reading many books in its vein, most of the main twist was expected, one half kind of clear after a while (see above cover too) and one half being being one of a few possibilities so the "3/4" - and a book that took over my reading from the first page so I couldn't put down until finished

the prose (at least in the English translation which read very smooth) does indeed remind one of Javier Marias so for example if you read the 700 page Night of Time, this 250 odd page novel will seem a breeze

everything "happens" in the mind of the narrator when now as a mid thirties adult recollects the crucial events of his childhood starting with the first arrest of his father at age 9 - arrest concealed artfully by his mother and soon forgotten despite the boy actually witnessing it, up to the final disappearance of his father from his life and a shocking meeting he witnesses a few years later which leads to his mother's second main "confession" (first being the arrest one some time after but before this fulcrum of the novel)

as expected not all is explained and we are left wondering about the main repeating theme of the novel:

“One often lies to and deceives the person one loves most in order to preserve their love, or to protect them.

......

The protecting lie is the one you admit to when there’s no longer any need to protect, and the lie intended to preserve love is the one you never reveal.”

on the minor niggles side, there are some repetitions that I think were intended to reinforce the main theme above, but which seemed forced on occasion, while the "purely psychological" nature gives the book "a disconnected from reality" flavor where the "rawness" of life takes a second place to one's imagination; still the prose was magic and absorbed me completely

highly recommended

[Didier Vanoverbeke · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting premise is systematically undermined by writery gum-flapping. There seems to be a tendency with some of the people whose recommendations I have blindly taken to heart to revel in the contemporary crop of MemoryLit (Murnane and Chejfec being two other prominent members of this clique). I'm feeling thoroughly dissatisfied, perhaps most of all because Paris is the poorest example I've read so far. It's like Days of Abandonment was doused in boredom.

[Fernando Soto silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendo descubrimiento (gracias hermanito) y pasa cada tanto, te toca una buena mano y aparece el libro que necesita tu alma.

"Todos llevamos en nuestro interior el proyecto de lo que somos así como el de lo que pudimos haber sido, y que acabemos siendo de un modo o de otro no depende de la aparición o desaparición de nuevos rasgos, sino, más bien, de la forma en que unos rasgos ya existentes terminan imponiéndose sobre los otros"

"Ya nada importa nada"

[Félix · Rating 5 out of 5]

El descubrimiento de Giralt Torrente es algo de lo que no te olvidas tan fácilmente.
La prosa me atrae, quizás porque si fuese a escribir un libro me gustaría que tuviese su ritmo, sus palabras o la forma que tiene de expresarse.
Si vuelvo a ver a Giralt Torrente en alguna estantería, no me quedaría más remedio que leerlo. Supongo que eso describe el poso que me dejó su libro.

[Eva · Rating 1 out of 5]

No lo recomiendo.

[Augusto Pellegrinetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

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