Notebooks: 1936-1947 (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

I thought of a Mexican Proust. Would one be possible? At first glance totally impossible. Proust describes a world that’s like an overheated greenhouse; here we’re in the open in the tropics, the earth burns and trembles. Proust analyzes beings who are refined and complex in the fashion of a certain Paris, for whom the adventure of living is social, sentimental, psychological, and conventional, filled with the charm of fine dining, petits fours pleasantly offered in a salon, loves as learnedly futile as the chatter . . . Here instincts prevail over psychology, of whose existence only professors are aware. The arid mountain is close to the city, the knife is hidden beneath the hand, anger beneath laughter. Here elemental passion kills without complication, faith causes delirium and ensures forgiveness, envy is a flame, love is a violence that relieves, and death isn’t bourgeois: it is near and dark with the laughing teeth of the calaveras, it revives the memory of Dürer’s danse macabre, and not that of a luxurious catafalque with plumed horses taking a beautiful coffin to Père Lachaise . . . Everything is torrid, brutal, vehement, simple—but simple like the life of carnal flesh, swollen with blood, which are nothing but meat and mystery: nothing is cerebral.