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Oct. 11111. Jorge Luis Borges, El otro, el mismo [1964] 104 pages [in Spanish]
A collection of poems written from the thirties to the sixties, uneven but some were quite good. It ranges from sonnets and other rhymed poetry to free verse, and deals with a diverse group of themes, including literature and history, especially of his own ancestors. Some of the poems about death were a bit too mystical for my taste.
112. Jorge Luis Borges, Para las seis cuerdas [1965] 26 pages [in Spanish]
A series of milongas, which are a kind of short ballad to be sung to a guitar. They were all about people fighting with knives; puñal and cuchillo seem to be almost as much his favorite words as espejo and laberinto.
Oct. 16 113. Jorge Luis Borges, Elogio de la sombra [1969] 44 pages [in Spanish]
Another very short book of poetry; uneven but some good poems.
Oct. 19114. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté [1949, rev. 1967] 624 pages [e-book, in French]
(I read it in French, the English translation is The Elementary Structure of Kinship.) I explained in my review of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life why I am currently reading some of the classic theoretical writings of anthropology or sociology. (Lévi-Strauss refers to his work with both terms, and I think correctly; the difference is less one of what they study than of an invidious distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" or "developed" cultures. I know as a (retired) cataloger that it is impossible to separate the two fields in the Dewey Decimal system, for example, because they deal with the same subjects. To his credit, given when he was writing, whenever Lévi-Strauss uses the term "primitif" or "primitives" for a culture or people, as opposed to a particular trait in the sense of original or prior in time, he almost always puts the word in quotation marks.) After reading a few books, principally by Durkheim and Malinowski, I set the project aside for a while to deal with other reading projects, and am coming back to it now.
Although Lévi-Strauss had already authored (or co-authored with his wife) a study and several articles based on their joint fieldwork, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté was his first major theoretical work and established his reputation among academic anthropologists (his reputation with the general public derived from his later and more popular Tristes tropiques). The book was written in 1948 and published the following year; the edition I read is the revised edition from 1967. The revision consists almost entirely in defending the original work against criticisms. I might add that it took me several hours to find a free (pirated?) copy on the Internet.
He presents the work as an inquiry into the nature and origins of the incest taboo. (Remember that it was written in the heydey of Freudianism.) He begins by saying that it seems in some form or other to be almost the only truly universal trait among all cultures that have been studied, and that in an extended sense it is fundamental to understanding the structures of cultures. (He even goes so far as to agree with Freud that it is the origin of culture.) In the first chapters, he argues against previous explanations, such as the views that it is instinctual or that it was based on biology (recessive genes, etc.) as well as the Freudian explanations He points out in the first place that it was not found among animals and that it could not be an instinct because it requires knowledge of the existence of the relationship. He also points out that inbreeding is not always disadvantageous, or is only a disadvantage for a small number of generations, depending on the frequency and type of recessive genes in the population, and in the long run could even have the opposite effect of removing undesirable recessive traits from the population. He then proposes a social explanation, that the taboo serves to prevent violence between neighboring families over mates and creates alliances between them.
After these preliminaries, he proposes to study the question in the extended form of what he calls "elementary structures of kinship." He defines these as marriage rules based solely on considerations of real or classificatory kinship, as opposed to "complex structures" based on other factors (status, wealth, romantic attraction and free choice, and so forth, as in our own society.) In particular, he poses the question of why, when to a modern Westerner, and in genetic terms, all first cousins are equally closely related, a large majority of "primitive" cultures forbid marriage between parallel cousins as "incest" and allow, prefer or even require marriage between cross cousins, and other cultures also prohibit marriage between patrilateral cross cousins but require it between matrilateral cross cousins and (less often) vice versa. Part One of the book is devoted to what he calls "Exchange restreint", where wives are exchanged between two groups, either directly between families or more formally between two or more classes or moieties (dualism). He considers this exchange as similar to, or in fact part of, a whole complex of gift-exchanges. He emphasizes what he calls "reciprocity" as the basic structure, and shifts between talking about reinforcing solidarity within or between groups and fairly allocating scarce resources (potential wives.) Actually, he seems to identify the two functions. He uses the example of "classic" Australian kinship patterns, and also considers some apparent exceptions such as the Murngin pattern -- this section becomes very technical and detailed, and also at times very polemical with regard to other anthropologists, and I couldn't always follow his arguments.
Perhaps this is the place to note that, to be frank, the book is not at all well-organized. He frequently interrupts his argument to go off on a tangent. At one point, he inserts an entire chapter discussing and rejecting the comparison which was popular at the time of "primitives" with children and neurotics of our own culture. I'm glad he did, because this was one of the most interesting chapters in the book (I recently watched a "TED talk" which presented exactly the same idea as he does here as a brand new thought) -- but it had virtually no connection with the argument it interrupted. Even more problematic is that in the revised edition his replies to criticisms, often quite lengthy, usually come before he reaches the arguments that were being criticized, so it is far from obvious what he is talking about. He also refers frequently to cultures by name, such as "the Murngin system" or "the Katchin system" before he actually discusses them; professional anthropologists -- the intended audience -- would of course have been familiar with them, since they were the subject of controversy at the time, but I again had no idea what he was talking about until he described them in a later chapter.
Part Two is devoted to what he calls "Exchange generalisé", where instead of two (or an even number of) exogamic groups there are three or more groups organized in such a way that men in group A marry women in group B, men in group B marry women in group C, and men in group C marry women in group A (and so on, for whatever number of groups there are) to form a circular exchange which returns to the original state after a certain number of generations. He illustrates this with a number of cultures in Asia and again there are exceptions and a lot of polemics. He then analyzes Chinese customs in a couple of chapters and suggests a widespread original substratum of generalized exchange. Then he moves on to India and connects these cultures with the theorized original culture, and gives a speculative explanation of the origins of the caste system in the effects of "hypergamy" or "anisogamy" (marriage between unequal groups in a hierarchy) followed by endogamy of the top groups. (of course I have insufficient background to even begin to evaluate any of this, but it was very interesting. In the course of these discussions, he touches on marriage between generations such as "avuncular" systems, the transition to modern "complex" structures and many other things. At some point he also introduces what seems like another tangent but is actually one of his fundamental ideas, the distinction between "harmonic" and "dysharmonic" cultures (cultures which are matrilineal and matrilocal or patrilineal and patrilocal are "harmonic", cultures which are matrilineal and patrilocal or patrilineal and matrilocal are "dysharmonic") and argues that "exchange restreint" occures in dysharmonic cultures and "exchange generalisé" in harmonic cultures.
In his "Conclusion" he sums up the developments and links them to the original problem of incest taboos. His theory is that incest taboos whether simple or in the more generalized form of exogamic groups is not a negative prohibition in essence but a positive prescription, not a question of "thou shalt not" but a question of what should happen -- marriage outside the family as a means of forming alliances and solidarity within and between groups, which, together with language, is the source of human culture. He gives an anecdote in which Margaret Mead questioned a native informant about why marriage was forbidden between brother and sister. He seemed at first not to even understand the question or even the possibility, but when she asked what he would say to someone who wanted to marry his own sister, he didn't talk about "immorality" or "taboo" or anything similar; he said, I'd ask him, don't you want brother-in-laws?
Overall, I would say that Lévi-Strauss uses the question of the incest taboo as a hook for what is essentially a theoretical study of elementary structures of kinship, as the title suggests. This is a book written for a particular academic/professional group; for the general reader, the basic ideas are eventually obvious enough but I would pass lightly (I can't bring myself to use the word "skim") over the details and especially the polemics.
===========================
de Heuschm Luc, Review Article: Les structures élémentaires de la parenté - The elementary structures of kinship (Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land- en Volkenkunde, 126, 1, 1970)
A review of the English translation and the second French edition. The author essentially agrees with Lévi-Strauss. His summary of the book doesn't differ much from mine in the above review, which encourages me to think I haven't totally misunderstood the book. He suggests some reservations about the identification of the kinship structures with semiotics, and also that the analysis of the role of hypergamy relative to relationships of economic inequality could be developed to provide a bridge between structuralism and Marxism.
Oct. 19115. Lord Dunsany, Plays of Gods and Men [1917] 88 pages
Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, 1878-1957) was one of the first major writers of adult fantasy, and perhaps the first to establish it as a separate literary genre; he was preceded mainly by William Morris, and influenced subsequently many of the later writers in the genre, most notably H.P. Lovecraft. (I decided to read or re-read some collections of Lovecraft's stories for my Halloween books this year, and naturally I am ending up reading Dunsany as well; perhaps I should have started with Morris, but I didn't want to turn it into a major project.) Before reading his short stories from the library, I decided to start with this collection of plays which I already had. There are four plays in the collection.
The Tents of the Arabs [1910] contrasts a camel-driver who prefers cities to the desert and wants to be a king, and the king of the city who would rather live in the desert. The Laughter of the Gods [1911] also deals with the contrast between a king who wants to live in a small rural city in the jungle and his courtiers (and particularly their wives) who prefer the "big city". A Night at an Inn [1912] is about a group of white thieves and the way they get their comeuppance from the natives they robbed. The Queen's Enemies [1913] is about a queen of ancient Egypt who doesn't want to have enemies, and invites them to a banquet. All four plays are comedies. They were probably intended as closet dramas, although A Night at an Inn at least has been performed.
Oct. 20-21116. Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegâna [1905] 60 pages
117. Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods [1905] 124 pages
118. Lord Dunsany, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories [1908] 90 pages
The first three collections of fantasy stories by Lord Dunsany, these stories constitute a mythology and legendary history of a group of imaginary countries located in the remote past or in a dreamworld, and thus together with William Morris' somewhat earlier writings set the precedent for all the subsequent fantasy worlds which are different from our own and yet not exactly science fiction, from H.P. Lovecraft through Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis' Narnia to Terry Pratchett's Discworld, as mutually distinct as all these are, and I recognized many of their ideas in embryo here (particularly the theme of Pratchett's Small Gods, the title of which is obviously derived from the "small gods" on Pegâna, the "Olympus" of these stories.) In calling William Morris and Lord Dunsany the founders of adult fantasy fiction, of course I mean the modern genre; there was certainly a long tradition of fantasy writing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (I'm also still working my way through the Thousand Nights and a Night, and some of the stories here -- I'm thinking especially of the various destroyed-city stories -- are very reminiscent of tales from that collection, which must have been an influence.)
The Gods of Pegâna [1905], his first fantasy book, is not really a collection of stories so much as a single connected pseudo-nonfiction work describing the "theology" of the Gods. The chapters are not completely consistent -- I think deliberately. He is clearly imitating the Biblical creation stories -- including even the archaic "King James" language -- from Genesis, which are of course hardly consistent either. There are two versions of "creation" here juxtaposed; in one, the original creator God Mana-Yood-Sushai, after creating the small gods and falling asleep, dreams the Worlds into existence, in the other the small gods create the Worlds while he sleeps. The two versions can perhaps be reconciled logically, but they differ entirely in spirit -- just as the first two chapters of Genesis in which humanity is created male and female by the simple word of God in chapter one, and then in a much more primitive version in chapter two Adam is modeled out clay and Eve is carved from his rib. Dunsany is also presenting in all these works the religious and legendary traditions of many different but related "cultures", which differ in the names of the Gods and many details.
The second book, Time and the Gods [1905 according to the title page of the PG edition, 1906 according to Wikipedia] is in my opinion better written, and contains myths and legends treated more as real stories. There are stories here which are skeptical of the existence of the Gods, or consider them in an unfavorable light or emphasize their eventual doom; and throughout the book there runs the thread of personification of Time as the great destroyer, both individually (old age) and of societies. (Again I had to think of the Thousand and One Nights with the frequent concluding formula "till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies", a bit more realistic than "and they lived happily ever after".)
The third book, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories [1908], is different, more diverse but equally well-written. Some of the stories are of the same type as in the first two collections, i.e. set in a fantasy world, but there are also traditional ghost stories and other fantasies set in our own world.
Oct. 22119. Lord Dunsany, A Dreamer's Tales [1910] 107 pages
120. Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder [1912] 62 pages
121. Lord Dunsany, Fifty-One Tales: The Food of Death [1915] 52 pages
Three more short books by Lord Dunsany. They are similar to the last two, that is a mixture of "capital letter fantasy" set in the dreamworlds and more standard "real world" fantasy stories; I'm having trouble saying anything different about them.
A Dreamer's Tales contains, together with other stories, a fairly long novella, Idle Days on the Yann, which is perhaps the most perfect example of Dunsany's original style; nothing much happens, but the world is fascinating.
The Book of Wonder is a collection of fourteen stories. Fifty-one Tales: the Food of Death is a collection of very short, one or two page stories mainly about death and time.
Oct. 23122. Lord Dunsany, Tales of Wonder [1916] 100 pages
The seventh collection of Lord Dunsany's fiction, unless I have missed some. Apparently a sequel to The Book of Wonder, this is a collection of about twenty stories. With each subsequent collection there seems to be a lower proportion of what Dunsany is most famous for, stories set in a fantasy world, and a higher proportion of tales set in the actual world, "the fields that we know", although still full of magic and "wonder." In this collection, only the seventh story and perhaps one other very short one is of the first type.
Oct. 24123. Lord Dunsany, Tales of Three Hemispheres [1919] 69 pages
The last story collection of Lord Dunsany I will be reading this month (I still have two novels and some plays), this contains fifteen tales, including Idle Days on the Yann from A Dreamer's Tales and two sequels to that.
Oct. 25124. Lord Dunsany, If: A Play in Four Acts [1921] 124 pages
125. Lord Dunsany, Plays of Near & Far [1922] 134 pages
Some more plays by Lord Dunsany. If is an enjoyable fantasy comedy about a man who tries to change one little thing about the past, and ends up changing more than he expects to. Plays of Near & Far is a collection of six short plays, also all comedies or satires: The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, The Flight of the Queen, Cheezo, A Good Bargain, If Shakespeare Lived Today, and Fame and the Poet.
Oct. 26 126. Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley [1922] 274 pages
Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley is a fantasy-romance of chivalry set in Spain "near the end of the Golden Age." The hero, Don Rodriguez, sets out after his father's death to "find the wars" and win a castle. He is sort of a Don Quixote in his romantic imagination, but unlike Don Quixote he isn't confused about facts, and his romanticism is respected and is shared by some of the other characters -- perhaps one could say he is what Don Quixote thought he was or in a world which corresponded to his imagination. He is accompanied by a servant, Morāno, who is clearly modelled on Sancho Panza. Although there is one chapter in which they meet with a magician from Saragossa and have an out-of-body adventure beyond the Earth, the fantasy element is mainly just the unreal, romance world he lives in, which of course never actually existed, in mediaeval Spain or anywhere else. The real interest in this book is the poetry and humor of the writing.
Oct. 27127. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter [1924] 242 pages
The King of Elfland's Daughter is Lord Dunsany's best-known and best book. It was a re-read for me, but I read it so long ago that it seemed like the first time; it is the last of Dunsany's books that I am reading this time around.
The novel begins with the Parliament of Erl coming before their lord and asking that they be ruled by a magic lord; he agrees and sends his son Alveric to Elfland to seek Lirazel, the daughter of the King of Elfland, as his wife. He wins her early in the book. The introduction by Lin Carter says that while fairy-tales end there with the wedding and tell us that they lived happily ever after, Dunsany realizes that the marriage between an elfin princess and a mortal will not work so easily; they are incompatible in too many ways, and she returns to Elfland, while Alveric seeks to find her again -- but Elfland has removed far from Erl and he cannot easily find it again. As he goes on quest to seek Elfland and Lirazel, their son Orion grows up and rules Erl. I think that this is to give Dunsany a little too much credit for originality -- there are many stories in the Thousand Nights and a Night which follow the same plot, where a mortal wins and marries the daughter of a djinn-king, who returns home and must be sought again through long and difficult adventures. Dunsany does it well, nevertheless.
The Elfland of this work is not a trivial fairy mound -- these are the sort of elves that we meet later in Tolkien, one of the many writers influenced by Dunsany. As in all his writings, he presents the opposition between imagination and philistinism; the closest thing to a villain is the Freer, who curses all imagination and fantasy; while Dunsany doesn't call him the Friar, or identify the golden symbol he wears around his neck as a cross, it is evident enough what he is talking about. The parliament eventually decides they have had more magic than they bargained for -- but too late.
Oct. 29128. H. P. Lovecraft, The Tomb and Other Stories (ed. by August Derleth) 190 pages
129. H. P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (Beagle) 182 pages
130. H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath (ed. by Lin Carter) 242 pages
131. H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories (ed. by Margaret Ronan) 255 pages
132. H. P. Lovecraft, The Doom That Came to Sarnath (ed. by Lin Carter) 208 pages
For my Halloween reading this year, after a detour through Lord Dunsany, I read, or in some cases re-read, these tales from the early master of modern horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). The five anthologies which I had in my garage contain most of his fantasy writings apart from the Cthullhu cycle for which he is best known (perhaps I will read those things next October). There was some duplication, but altogether there were about forty works, including the complete novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and several novellas, as well as short stories and a poem. I should note that The Lurking Fear and Other Stories is the anthology published by Beagle; apparently there is another collection by another publisher with the same title but a different selection. With apologies to his more enthusiastic fans, Lovecraft is not as great a writer as Edgar Allan Poe, or even in my opinion Lord Dunsany, the two most obvious influences, but he is definitely better than most horror-fantasy ("weird fiction") writers since. A statue of Lovecraft was given as the prize for the World Fantasy Awards until 2016, when he fell afoul of the wokies who attacked it as a symbol of "racism"; while Lovecraft's views of Blacks were not particularly liberal, it seems to me that they were less a question of racism than of an "Old Native Stock" snobbery which was equally dismissive of white "foreigners" such as Poles, Lithuanians and so on, including Southern "white trash" (his expression.)
What I learned from the introductions and notes, especially those by Lin Carter to the two Ballantine anthologies: Lovecraft's father died in an insane asylum when Howard was very young; he was raised by his grandfather and later by his mother and aunts. He was an invalid in childhood and later on a recluse. He began reading at four, and was especially influenced by the Thousand and One Nights; he adopted the pseudonym Abdul Alhazred at five (later the name of the author of the Necronomicon which plays such a role in his later fiction); he wrote his first story when he was six. The five earliest stories which he preserved and later published date from between his fifteenth and twentieth years; they are included in The Tomb and Other Stories. After a hiatus of seven years, he began writing again in 1917. His stories up until 1919 are all grotesque horror stories in the tradition of Poe; that year he discovered the writings of Lord Dunsany and began writing nostalgic dream fantasies in his manner, although less humorous and always a bit "darker" than Dunsany. Throughout the 1920's he alternates stories in the Dunsanian mode, such as "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" [1919], "The Cats of Ulthar" [1920] and "Celephais" [1920] with stories in the earlier mode such as "The Moon-Bog" [1921] and "The Outsider" [1921]. Toward the end of the decade he begins to combine the two strands in works like The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and ultimately the Cthullhu mythos.
While his stories are mostly based on original ideas and truly are "horror", too often he relies on building up an atmosphere with vague and meaningless adjectives, interchangeable when not actually misused, such as "obscene", "monstrous", "hideous", "inhuman". "blasphemous", "nameless", "unwholesome" and of course "evil".
Oct. 31133. Ander Izagirre, Potosi: Narrativa [2017] 204 pages [Kindle Unlimited, in Spanish]
Ander Izagirre is a Spanish journalist who writes in both Spanish and Euzkadi (Basque). Potosi: Narrativa is the book in Spanish which has been translated into English as The Mountain That Eats Men and which is this month's reading for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads. "The Mountain that Eats Men" is the nickname of the Cerro Rico just south of the city of Potosi in Bolivia, which since colonial times has been one of the richest silver mines in the world. The descriptions of the book on Amazon and elsewhere call the book a history of the Potosi mine or the story of a young minera (fourteen at the beginning of the book) whom Izagirre calls "Alicia Quispe" (as with many of those he interviews, he has changed the name for her own safety) -- but in fact it is much more. Essentially, it is a history of mining in Bolivia, or what amounts to the same thing, a history of Bolivia; probably no country in the world is a better example of the Marxist dictum that all history is the history of class struggle.
The first chapter, "En el pais de los tesoros", is set in the Potosi silver mines. It opens underground, where the author is interviewing an old miner (as he says, a rarity in Bolivia) he calls "Pedro Villca", and the first sentence is ""Las mujeres no pueden entrar a la mina" dice Pedro Villca." ("Women cannot enter the mines", said Pedro Villca.) There follows a description of the interior of the mountain and the current primitive methods of working the veins. The book then turns to a clearing high on the mountainside where Alicia lives with her widowed mother Doña Rosa and her little sister Evelyn. Throughout the book we come back to this family. Here we learn more about the horrible conditions of poverty and environmental contamination in which the mining families live in Potosi. There is also a bit of the early history of the region.
The second chapter, "El barón y la princesa" describes the author's second trip to Bolivia and is set mainly in Llallagua, about 230 km north of Potosi, the site of the "Siglo XX" tin mines. This chapter goes back to the turn of the century, when a ruined miner discovered a rich vein of tin and sold it to a speculator named Simon Patiño, who became the fifth richest man in the world. (I couldn't help thinking of the poor computer programmer who wrote DOS and sold it for a couple hundred dollars to his "friend" Bill Gates.) Patiño and the other tin barons did nothing to develop the country or diversify its economy; they controlled the government in the interests of their oligarchy and all eventually lived outside Bolivia. The author meditates a bit on the irony that the richest places in world in terms of natural resources are the poorest for the working classes. (This is not only true for mineral resources; the richest agricultural territory of the colonial empires was -- Haiti.)
The third chapter, "Todo a punto de estallar", continues the more recent history from the Revolution of 1951 under Victor Paz Estenssoro, which nationalized the mines and made a beginning of improving conditions for the miners, but ended up in bureaucratic corruption (I was reminded of the Egyptian Revolution of the same period under Gamal Abdul Nasser, and more generally of most revolutions from the Bolsheviks on) and eventually succumbed to the pressure of American imperialism which artificially depressed the world price of tin (as they later did with copper to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile). There followed a series of military governments, a brief period of democracy, and then the second administration of Paz Estenssoro, who was by then a complete tool of the IMF and the multinational corporations, and who immediately undid all that he had done before, privatizing the mines (the more profitable given to the multinationals, the less profitable as "cooperatives"). This chapter has some very interesting information about the role of working class women in overthrowing one of the military governments and highlights the role of Domatila Barrios. This section is partly based on interviews with a leftist Catholic priest who seems to be a precursor of "liberation theology".
The fourth chapter, "Los que sobran", comes back to the Potosi region and explains the nature and role of the "cooperatives." Originally actual cooperatives of miners, who worked the least profitable parts of the mines, they were taken over by the bureaucratic leaders who treat them as their private property and employ and exploit the greatest number of miners in the country, mostly not "members" of the cooperatives, who make minimum wage or below and have no benefits. The cooperatives up until recently were exempt from most taxes, labor and environmental laws (and ignored those that did apply) and used those exemptions to "front" for the multinationals. The cooperatives employ almost all the miners in the country, which is to say most of the industrial workers, and account for about 3% of the total production, while the multinational corporations who own the technologically advanced private mines employ only a few thousand miners and account for the other 97%. The book explains the attempts of the leftist government of Evo Morales to bring the cooperatives under the laws and how the cooperative directors fought against his administration. (Last November I read a book by Tariq Ali which was partially about Evo Morales, the only other thing I have read about Bolivia. He has since been deposed by the oligarchy.)
The last chapter, "El Diablo", is about the violence of the miners' culture and the attempts of women to organize and change it. The book then ends with the family of Alicia.
This is a very bleak and depressing book; it shows that there is essentially no hope for the workers of Bolivia as long as capitalism continues to exist on a world scale. I don't know enough about the history of Bolivia, obviously, to judge whether all his facts and interpretations are correct, but there is nothing which doesn't ring true in the light of what I know about the United States and other parts of the world.
Nov. 2134. Jorge Luis Borges, El Informe de Brodie [1970] 77 pages [in Spanish]
A collection of eleven stories, published 21 years after his previous collection El Aleph. Apart from the title story, which purports to be a missionary's description of a very primitive cannibal tribe he calls the "Yahoos" -- the allusion is to Swift, not the search engine -- and the most "Borgesian" story in the book, "Guayaquil", a dialogue about history, these are all what Borges himself calls "realistic" stories, mainly stories of violence similar to those in his poetry collection Para las seis cuerdas. While his earlier stories were influenced by writers like Joyce and Kafka, he tells us that in these he was trying for Rudyard Kipling. It's not that these are bad stories but they're not the sort of imaginative writing I was expecting from his earlier books.
135. Jorge Luis Borges, El oro de los tigres [1972] 47 pages [in Spanish]
Thirty one poems on a variety of his favorite themes: literature and history, time and knife fights.
Nov.3
136. Jorge Luis Borges, La rosa profunda [1975] 47 pages [in Spanish]
Thirty six poems, on the same themes as in El oro de los tigres, and a few on his blindness and old age (written in his early seventies.)
Nov. 5137. Nicholas Hern, Peter Handke: Theater and Anti-Theater [1971] 122 pages
This short work on Peter Handke is volume five in a series called Modern German Authors: Texts and Contexts. Peter Handke, the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been writing for over fifty years, since about 1966; I read many of his books last year, including all his early plays. This book, published in 1971, obviously only deals with those early works. It begins with a short overview of the author, his reputation as an enfant-terrible, his provocations and self-promotion, his general ideas and political opinions (at that point more or less left-wing and anarchist). The greater part of the book, however, consists in analysis of his first eight plays. There is a short appendix of translated excerpts from the works discussed, and a bibliography of critical articles that had appeared about him by that time.
I wish that I had found this book and read it when I was reading the plays; I might have gotten more out of them. The series title refers to contexts, and that was what I was missing. I did note generally in my review of the Theaterstücke that he was influenced by Brecht and Beckett, but this book demonstrates how much in the plays was based on specific allusions to certain plays of Beckett and to Ionesco, most of which I haven't read. I didn't really understand how intertextual his writing actually was. He was also apparently very influenced by the later writings of Wittgenstein; I've only read the early Wittgenstein (the Tractatus) so I missed that also. To be sure, I did appreciate his plays more than his fiction -- but now I wonder how much of that was also intertextual.
Perhaps after I have read more of Beckett, Ionesco and Wittgenstein, all of whom are on my TBR list for the next two or three years, I will come back to Handke's plays.
Nov. 6 138. Nawal El-Saadawi, Walking Through Fire: The Life of Nawal El-Saadawi [2001, tr. 2002] 251 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Walking Through Fire is the second volume of Nawal El-Saadawi's autobiography (the first volume, Daughter of Isis, was about her childhood; unfortunately it is not available from Open Library). It has a complex chronological structure and is written in a sophisticated literary style which is reminiscent of her fiction. It opens in 1993, in Durham, North Carolina, where she and her husband Sherif (the English translator of the book) are teaching at Duke University. This first chapter is entitled "The Threat", and it soon returns to Cairo to narrate the immediately previous period of her life, how she was put on a death-list and eventually decided she had to go into exile. The actual autobiography begins in the next two chapters, starting about 1950 in the last days of British rule when she was a medical student and political activist for independence. She falls in love with a fida'iyeen, Ahmed Helmi, a guerilla fighter against the British occupation, and they get married. He goes to the front, and returns defeated and broken in spirit, betrayed by the government. Then follows the Revolution of 1951 and the rise of Gamal Abd el-Nasser. Throughout the book, the political events play a major role, as one would expect from a political figure such as Saadawi.
The fourth chapter skips to 1957; she is recently divorced, with a baby daughter, Mona. After rejecting an offer of marriage from another doctor, as soon as she completes her internship she convinces the government, which is expanding medical services in rural areas, to send her to her natal village of Khafr Tahla as the local doctor, despite their reluctance to assign women. The chronicle of her experiences as a rural doctor are quite interesting. The following chapter is on the war which breaks out over the Suez Canal, and the invasion by England, France and Israel. She takes military training, but the orders never come for the local recruits to go to the front. She points out that even with the country being invaded, the government of Nasser (undoubtedly the most anti-imperialist leader in the Arab world, apart from the Palestinian resistance) never dared to arm the people, though he demagogically promised to. Despite its claims to be "socialist" and a fairly extensive land reform, Nasser's revolution was top-down and limited to essentially bourgeois tasks; he feared the rise of a real revolution among the peasantry and the working class. After the war, she tries unsuccessfully to save a young girl in a forced marriage who is being abused by her elderly husband; the girl is returned to her husband by the police and commits suicide. Saadawi is reported by her time-serving superior for "inciting women against the divine laws of Islam" -- which would be the accusation against her throughout her working life -- and is transferred to a hospital for tuberculosis patients in Cairo. The book then describes her life in Cairo and the death of her mother and father.
Halfway through the book, chapter eight opens with her sitting before a blank sheet of paper and suffering from "writer's block." We are then plunged immediately and without warning into a surrealist nightmare resembling some of her later novels. When she comes back to the world, we find that it is the first day of 2000, the present time of the book, which she is writing. Then there is a memory flashback to the end of her first marriage, which explains some of the nightmare. The next chapter again begins in 2000 and again passes immediately into a flashback, this time to 1960, and her second marriage. It seems as if she is going to resume the chronological story, but instead the narrative for the rest of the book moves back and forth to various episodes of her life from the forties to the present, according to a logic of image association rather than chronology, just as in her experimental novels. The book ends with her on the plane to return to Cairo from her seven years in exile.
This is a very interesting book about a brilliant and committed woman. She died in March, 2021, at the age of ninety.
Nov. 8139. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nightwith Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.2 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
This volume is divided into two parts. The first part, which is about three quarters of the book, contains the rest of the material from Payne's Tales from the Arabic (see my review of supplemental v1.) This includes the sixteen stories of the chiefs of police (mainly how they were gulled by clever criminals, mostly women), a few romantic adventure stories, and another version of the frame story. The second half, written by W.A. Clouston rather than Burton, is composed of source notes, analogues and variants of the tales in this and the previous volume, giving texts or summaries of other tales which are either possible sources, parallels, or in some cases derived from the Nights, including Indian stories (e.g. from Somadeva's The Ocean of Stories), Persian and Turkish stories, and some from late Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe, mainly Italian and "Old English" (i.e. Middle English).
Nov. 10140. Jorge Luis Borges, El libro de arena [1975] 88 pages [in Spanish]
A collection of thirteen short stories, this reminded me more of his earlier collections than the immediately previous El informe de Brodie. It is an extremely diverse selection. In contrast to the last book, only one story, "La noche de los dones", was about a cuchillero.
The first story, "El Otro", about a meeting with his doppelganger, and "Utopia de un hombre que está cansada" are in the tradition of his dream fantasies; "Ulrica" he calls his only love story, but the style is somewhat strange and mysterious; "El Congreso" is not exactly fantasy, but is about a strange political movement; "There Are More Things" is a horror story in homage to H.P. Lovecraft; "La Secta de los Treinta" is one of his imaginary heresy stories; "El espejo y la máscara" and "Undr" are fantasies about poetry; "El soborno" is a realistic story of academic politics which is very similar to "Guayaquil", one of the best stories in the previous book; "Avelino Arredondo" is a historical fiction; "El disco" is another fantasy; and the title story, "El libro de arena" was definitely in the same style as his most memorable stories in Ficciones and El Aleph.
Nov. 11141. Jorge Luis Borges, La moneda de hierro [1976] 40 pages [in Spanish]
142. Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de la noche [1977] 47 pages [in Spanish]
143. Jorge Luis Borges, La cifra [1981] 59 pages [in Spanish]
Three more short poetry collections by Borges, only one more to go. As with his other collections, I found these poems very uneven both in content and as poetry, but I thought they were definitely worth reading. There are many poems here which are what he calls "chaotic enumerations", that is lists of seemingly random items, in a style which he attributes to Walt Whitman. There are also a number of prose poems, especially in La cifra.
Nov. 22144. Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin: Texte de l'édition originale {1831] 416 pages [in French]
Although it comes near the end of the final version of the Comédie humaine, in the section entitled Études philosophiques, La Peau de Chagrin was one of the earliest of Balzac's novels written under his own name, two years after Les Chauans. Having over the past three or fours years worked my way through more than half the Comédie humaine, I was not expecting this to be what it was: a supernatural horror story, very different from his other works. This was Balzac's first commercial and critical success. As an early work -- and this was emphasized by the fact that the editor of the edition I read (Livre de Poche classique with an introduction by Pierre Barbéris) chose to reprint the original 1831 serialized version rather than the last revision for the Comédie humaine -- it is perhaps less well organized than most of his later novels.
The book begins with a young man, whom we later find out to be the marquis Raphael de Valentin, the son of a ruined nobleman, losing his last "napoléon" in a gambling house. This incident was originally a short story called "Le Dernier Napoléon", which Balzac unfortunately and rather inartistically turns into an anti-gambling tract (the original story was included as an appendix in the edition I read). Raphael then decides to commit suicide, but before throwing himself into the river he stops along the way at an antique shop. The scene at the antique shop is a masterpiece of horror writing. At the end, the Mephistophelean proprietor offers him the "Peau de chagrin". "Chagrin" here is a sort of play on words; it has of course the usual meaning, the same as in English, of embarrassment or remorse, but also the meaning of a wild ass or onager (the English "shagreen"), thus "Peau de chagrin" is both literally the "Skin of an onager" and also a "Skin of remorse". Inscribed with strange writing, Sanskrit or Arabic, the skin has the power to grant every wish of its possessor -- but for each wish it shrinks, and when it is gone the possessor dies. Raphael of course doesn't believe this, and facetiously wishes to be rich and at a banquet with lots of food, high society, and so forth. He leaves the shop to continue to the Seine, but is met by some friends who have been seeking him out to invite him to just such a banquet, and at the banquet he is met by a lawyer who tells him he has just inherited six million francs from an unknown uncle.
We then get a long flashback from his infancy to the time he was seeking to commit suicide; according to the editor's introduction this section was largely autobiographical, and it is written in Balzac's usual style of blending Romanticism with realistic traits. Then we pick up his story again a few years after he gets the skin. He is married to the wonderful Pauline, his former landlady's daughter who has also unexpectedly become rich -- possibly because Raphael wanted her to be. However, the skin has considerably shrunk. Here the horror story commences, as he tries everything possible to get rid of the skin or prevent its effects, but all in vain. I won't reveal the ending.
In addition to being a good story, the novel is an allegory of the theory that fulfilled desires come at the expense of life. It is also an opportunity as always for Balzac to satirize the bourgeois society of his time.
Nov. 22145. Navagatio Sancti Brendani [10th century] about 18 pages [Bibliotheca Augustana, html file, in Latin]
The Navagatio Sancti Brendani, or Navigation of Saint Brendan is an account, probably written around 900 AD, of a seven-year voyage of the fifth-century Irish Saint Brendan to find the Land of Promise to the Saints (terra repromissionis sanctorum). It is known from about 140 manuscripts, which all differ slightly in details; the version I read, downloaded from the Bibliotheca Augustana website, is a transcription of the Alençon MS from the eleventh century and titled in that manuscript Vita sanctissimi confessoris Christi Brendani. For those who haven't discovered it, the Bibliotheca Augustana is a great free site for classical, mediaeval and renaissance texts (and some later works in the common domain) in the original languages, but it consists of continuous html pages so it is difficult to get a real page count. The work is 18 pages of ordinary 8 1/2 x 11 paper, but would probably be somewhat longer if an actual printed book. The Latin is not particularly difficult, except for a handful of mediaeval words that I didn't know and were not in my Latin dictionary (based on the classical language.)
The story begins with Saint Brendan in his monastery, who is visited by his nephew, Barinthus. Barinthus tells him about his visit to his son (in Christ?) Mernocatus, who has established his own monastery on the Delicious Island; Barinthus and Mernocatus then travel in three days to the nearby Land of Promise. After Barinthus leaves for his own monastery, St. Brendan decides to find the island himself, together with fourteen volunteers from his monastery. They set sail, but it takes them seven years of sailing around in circles before they are allowed to reach the island they are seeking. Although some Irish (or Irish-American) chauvinists use this and similar stories to claim that the Irish discovered North America a half-millennium before Leif Ericson, the text is obviously not the account of a real voyage and they never reach any mainland, let alone the coast of America. What they find are miraculous islands peopled by angels in the form of talking birds and other fabulous places; they travel around in circles celebrating Christmas and Easter at the same places each year (including on the back of a giant whale.)
Now that I am retired I am planning to "fill in the gaps" of my reading in the classics, essentially in three simultaneous projects: one from the Odyssey to the ninth century, one from the tenth to the seventeenth century (beginning with this book), and one from the eighteenth century (starting with Blake) to the present. I'm not sure how far I will get on any of them.
Nov. 23146. Jorge Luis Borges, La memoria de Shakespeare [1983] 33 pages [in Spanish]
The last and by far the shortest of Borges' story collections, La memoria de Shakespeare contains only four stories. The first story, "Agosto 25, 1983" is like the first story of the previous collection a meeting of Borges with his older/younger double; the second story, "Tigres azules" is like the last story of that collection, about "disks" which are impossible to exist in the normal world; the third story, "La rosa de Paracelso" is about alchemy; and the title story is about a man who receives the memories of Shakespeare.
147. Jorge Luis Borges, Los conjurados [1985] 54 pages [in Spanish]The last poetry collection of Borges, and the last thing I will be reading by him this year. It contains 39 short poems, on a variety of themes. As always, I am not good at reviewing poetry; I liked some and not others.
Nov. 25148. Ana María Barrenechea, Borges the labyrinth maker [1965] 175 pages
A critical study of Borges' writings up to the time it was written (after El otro, el mismo but before Elogia de la sombra and El informe de Brodie), this is an expanded translation of La expresíon de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges.
It begins with a short biography which describes the various literary movements by which Borges was influenced and gives a brief summary of his writings. The rest of the book traces his exploration of irreality in terms of various repeated themes in his stories, poems and essays, such as infinity, chaos, pantheism, time and eternity, and idealist philosophy.
In addition to casting some light on passages which were somewhat obscure, the book also shows how all the stories and poems fit together as part of an extended discussion and what issues Borges was concerned with. It also discusses the literary techniques he uses in the stories. More worthwhile than most books of criticism.
Dec. 1149. Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus [1982] 454 pages [in Spanish]
Allende's first novel, La casa de los espíritus is the chronicle of four generations of the Del Valle and Trueba family from the beginning of the twentieth century to the military coup which overthrew the government of (the author's father's cousin) Salvador Allende (though neither he, Pinochet, or any other historical character is mentioned by name in the book). The novel is obviously very much influenced by Cien años de soledad, both in its overall structure and especially in the first third of the book (the most "magical realist" part) where many of the characters and episodes almost seem to be taken from the earlier novel (for instance, the supernaturally beautiful Rosa la Bella; the extravagant inventions and voyages of Tio Marcos; the servant Nana; and even the tree in the patio). The central role of Senator Trueba is in some respects similar to that of Colonel Bendija, although with very different politics; in both novels there is mention of a large and unknown number of illegitimate children who play a role in later events. About a third of the way in, the novel becomes more purely realist and the magical elements gradually disappear under the weight of the all-too-real political events. Running through both novels is the theme of political violence.
Allende's novel opens on the Thursday before Easter with the Del Valle family: the parents Severo (who has just decided to become involved in politics as a candidate of the Liberal Party) and Nivea (a suffragette), the servant Nana, and a number of children, of whom only two play a significant role in the book: the oldest (surviving) daughter Rosa, and the youngest, Clara. The central character Esteban Trueba is mentioned casually as Rosa's novio, who is working under miserable conditions in a mine in the north of the country to make enough money to marry her. (He comes from an originally wealthy landlord family which has been ruined by his father's alcoholism.) After a few pages of domestic events all crammed into that one day -- a scandalous comment by Clara at church which earns her the enmity of the fanatic Father Restrepo, who seems as though he will be a major character but actually disappears from the book after the first chapter, the arrival of the body of Tio Marcos, who is described later in memory flashbacks at several points in the novel, and of the strange giant dog Barrabás -- we arrive at the event which is at one level (the personal family level) the cause of all the tragic events in the novel: the death of Rosa, who is accidentally poisoned by a bottle of liquor meant to assassinate her father, in what is described as one of the first political assassinations in the country.
The next chapter is focused on Esteban Trueba. After years of hard and fruitless labor in the mine, he has finally discovered a vein of gold which will make him rich. The same day he learns that Rosa is dead. Angry and frustrated -- his character throughout the novel -- he turns the mine over to an overseer and ultimately decides to restore and live at his family's semi-feudal fundo in the countryside, Los Tres Marias. He succeeds in making this ruined ranch into a model, one of the richest in the region; he prides himself in having improved the material lives of his peasants, but treats them arrogantly as incapable children with no rights. From this point on, he functions as a symbol of the patriarchal feudal order, eventually becoming a Senator of the Conservative Party and a leader of the far right in the struggle against Allende and the socialists.
The third chapter turns to focus on Clara, an unusual girl with psychic powers. Ultimately, she marries her sister's former suitor, Esteban. To summarize the middle chapters of the novel briefly -- basically just listing the main characters: Trueba and Clara have a daughter, Blanca, and twin boys, Jaime and Nicolas. We meet the son of Trueba's overseer, Pedro Tercero Garcia, who from the beginning is closely associated with Blanca and who represents the political "left". We meet the strange French count Jean de Satigny. Blanca has a daughter Alba, who (as we learn in the Epilogue) is the "narrator" of the book. We meet Nicolas' girlfriend Amanda and her brother Miguel. Most of this part of the book deals with the domestic affairs of the family.
Finally, in the last few chapters the book becomes entirely political, with the victory of Allende, the struggles of left and right and ultimately the coup of the Military Junta led by General Pinochet, and how these events affect the destinies of all the characters. The ending is very powerful. This is one of the best political novels I have read in a long time.
To end on a more personal note, I remember that when I was quite young, a woman from Chile visited our church and gave a talk about the country, probably to raise money for missionaries. What I recall, apart from the delicious Chilean food that was served that evening, was that she kept repeating that Chile was the one country in South America with an unbroken tradition of democracy, which had never had a military regime or a dictatorship. This boast, a matter of great pride to Chileans at the time, is mentioned many times in the novel; none of the characters, whatever side they were on (apart from Miguel), believes beforehand that a coup could ever take place in Chile. Perhaps Chile for that reason was the one country in South America where people could believe that a "peaceful road to socialism" was possible. I remembered this visit later, when the coup against Allende occurred. At the time I was living in New York City, and I was part of a group called the Latin American Solidarity Committee, which mobilized to organize demonstrations against the Pinochet regime and for asylum for various victims escaping from the terror of that time, which is described in the last chapters of the novel. It's impossible to really know what effect a movement like that has, but I like to think we helped prevent some deaths.
Dec. 3150. Ernesto Sábato, El túnel [1948] 124 pages [in Spanish]
This year the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads is reading one book from each of the major countries of Hispanic America (I say "Hispanic America" rather than "Latin America" because Brazil is omitted). For Argentina, the group chose Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, obviously the "right" choice because Borges is probably the most influential contemporary author of the region (apart from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom he influenced.) The runner-up in the poll was this short novel (actually more of a novella) by Sábato. Since it is so short and I already had a copy in my garage-library, I decided to read it as well. (I will also be reading some more of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even though he was not the winner for Colombia.)
The book is formally a crime story, narrated in the first person by the murderer, Juan Pablo Castel, in prison after his conviction for killing Maria Iribarne (or rather, as we can guess from the last page, in an institution for the criminally insane). It is first and foremost a psychological study, a frightening confession of a lonely, obsessed man who stalks a young woman (with her own psychological problems, apparently) and ultimately kills her out of a jealousy which the reader sees immediately has no foundation in reality. (It is not however a psychological "thriller", in that the narrator admits in the first sentence that he murdered her.) Actually it is somewhat more than that.
There are books which are often called "timeless", in the sense that, apart from references to particular historical events or technologies, one could imagine them as having been written at any point in a fairly wide span of time. Ficciones is an example; if I were given one of the stories in that collection without knowing who wrote it or when, without the mentions of cars or telephones I would be hard put to locate it more precisely than "probably twentieth century". There are other books which (and I don't mean this in any derogatory sense) are so closely connected with the concerns, ideas and style of a particular period that they could easily be located within say a ten year span. El túnel belongs to this second type. As I read it I was constantly reminded of other (apparently dissimilar) novels I have read: L'étranger and La peste by Camus, Sartre's L'age de raison trilogy, Waugh's The Loved One and Beckett's Watt among others. When I looked at my reading notebook, all of them were written within five years of El túnel.
What El túnel has in common with the other books of the late forties and early fifties is that the aberrations of the characters are not considered as psychological illnesses so much as exaggerated examples of a metaphysical human condition of alienation. The metaphor of the tunnel in which the narrator feels himself to be confined is not considered as something abnormal, but as the condition of all of us, although most people are too superficial or intellectually dishonest to recognize it; the narrator's insanity is just that he does recognize it and tries to break out of it through his relationship with the young woman he murders, hence his obsession. The narrator's desperate but futile attempts to understand and communicate with other people, and especially Maria, through a kind of parody of logical reasoning is what reminded me of Watt.
The edition I read, in the Macmillan Modern Spanish American Literature Series, was designed for use in American second-year Spanish classes, with an introduction and notes in English by the editor, Louis Pérez, and a glossary. The introduction I think makes one common mistake about this literature of the forties and fifties -- he says that the author was trying to describe the alienation of "modern" life. While in fact the feelings of alienation and isolation he describes are typical of "modern" [read: capitalist] life of a certain class, and this was explicitly the theme of earlier and later novels, the literary tradition of this period (often called "existentialist") does not locate it within time or class but considers it as a universal atemporal metaphysical condition of human life. Paradoxically, it was that effort to be "timeless" that is so dated. Today, we would read this as a purely psychological novel and it is well worth reading from that perspective, if we realize that it was not the author's.
Dec. 7151. Isabel Allende, Eva Luna [1985] 286 pages [in Spanish]
Isabel Allende's third novel, Eva Luna is essentially a very good story or interrelated stories about interesting and unusual characters, centering on the adventures of an imaginative girl and later young woman named Eva Luna who likes to tell stories, perhaps much like Allende herself, and who is the first person narrator of the novel. In a sense, this is a book about imaginative fiction as well as an example of it. The publisher's blurb refers to her "aventuras picarescas" and the phrase also occurs once in the novel itself; I think it is a good description. Perhaps I was a bit disappointed simply because I read this right after reading her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, which was a powerful political novel, and this is a very different kind of book.
While the earlier novel was set in Allende's native country of Chile and culminated in the reign of terror under General Pinochet after the overthrow of her relative Salvador Allende (the novel never explicitly says it is Chile or names Allende or Pinochet, but there is no question what it is referring to) this book is set in an unnamed oil-rich country on the Caribbean coast, which I would guess is intended to be Venezuela (where Isabel Allende lived for several years after the coup in Chile). Although the later part of the book deals with a hopeless guerilla struggle, the politics in this book seemed much more abstract and generic than in the earlier one; until the very end the narrator (the girl/woman Eva Luna) and the other major characters are not politically involved or even interested or informed about political events, and although Allende mentions them it is not a major theme of the book until the last chapters. The earlier novel began as "magical realism", obviously influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and ended up as largely realistic. This book in contrast has few "magical" elements, all of which can be taken as belonging to Eva's imagination, and is in a more Romantic than realist style; the characters in the first book, although very interesting and individualized, were also "types" of the various social layers of the country, but in this book they are mostly all outside the norms of society.
When I say that this has few or any "magical" or fantasy elements, I mean supernatural or paranormal events outside physical reality; the book is full of fantasy in the sense of logically possible events which would never actually happen in any real world, and certainly not all to the same persons. The novel begins with the arrival of her mother, white and red-headed, barely old enough to crawl and not yet speaking, alone, filthy and naked on a riverboat in a small isolated and somewhat unreal mission town in the middle of a jungle. She is taken up by the missionaries and baptised as Consuela. When she reaches adolescence and after a strange afternoon cutting up birds which have gold in their stomachs she is sent to another convent in the capital city. Having no vocation for religion, she is sent out to work as a domestic servant for a strange doctor who has invented a secret method of embalming. Here in a scene possibly imitated from The World According to Garp she becomes pregnant by an apparently dying Indian gardener and gives birth to Eva Luna. How much of this is supposed to be "real" and how much the imagination of Eva we don't know, and that is true of much of the book; at the end she is writing a "telenovela" (i.e. television soap opera) based on her stories, which seem to be the same episodes as in the novel.
After the birth of Eva, the novel moves in the second chapter to Austria, where a young boy named Rolf Carlé is growing up in a dysfunctional family with an abusive father. From this chapter on, chapters about Eva and chapters about Rolf more or less alternate, until they finally meet near the end of the book. Eva's story then continues with a series of "picaresque" adventures; her mother dies and she is adopted by her godmother, only referred to as La Madrina; after the death of the doctor, they move out (with no possessions but an embalmed puma) and Eva goes to work for another eccentric patron, an elderly woman who has discovered the "Materia Ultima", a sort of plaster of Paris which hardens into a kind of plastic. Here she is more or less adopted by another servant, Elvira. Eva runs away and meets up with a street urchin named Huberto Naranjo, who plays an important part much later in the book. After a few days on the street, she returns to La Madrina who takes her back to the patron. Later on, she works for another patron, a government Minister with unpleasant habits, then runs away again and meets up with Huberto, who installs her in the house of La Señora, a woman who runs a number of sex-related enterprises. Here she meets Melecio.
After Eva has lived with La Señora for a while, the neighborhood is raided by the police. Eva escapes and searches again for Huberto, but is unable to find him in the turbulence of the resulting events. She is found by a storeowner named Riad Halabi, who takes her to the countryside, to a small village called Agua Santa, where she lives for several years with him and his wife Zulema. Riad is called "The Turk" because he has a (fake) Turkish passport, but there are suggestions that he is actually a Palestinian refugee. After a number of years, she ends up being accused of murder, and after being cleared she returns to the capital, now basically an adult. After a few weeks of searching for work, she runs into a beautiful woman named Mimi -- who turns out to be the same person she knew as Melecio. They share an apartment for most of the remainder of the book.
Mimi is one of the most interesting characters in recent fiction. She is what today would be called a "transgender woman", before "transgenderism" or "antibinarism" became a fad and a fashionable cause for ex-feminist liberals. Allende describes her very sensitively and sympathetically, making her seem like a real person and not a one-dimensional symbol as is so often the case with more recent literature about gender questions.
About this time Eva meets Huberto again, and the political theme is taken up, which occupies the last few chapters. She also meets Rolf Carlé, linking up the two formerly separate strands of the book. Despite the weakness of the political theme, this was definitely a good read.
Dec. 15152. Mircea Eliade, Chamanisme: et les techniques archaiques de l'extase [1951, rev. 1964] 404 pages [in French]
A classic in a way (euphemism for outdated?), this was the first comprehensive comparative study of shamanism and related phenomena across many different cultures. First written in 1951, it was somewhat revised and expanded in 1964 at the time of the English translation. It was written to be accessible to the general reader as well as specialists, but it is not an easy book. Eliade begins by defining shamanism as a form of religious experience involving professional practitioners who use "ecstasis" or trance behavior to communicate with the spirit world, primarily as a way of healing but also as "psychopomps" guiding the souls of the dead to the afterlife. Shamanistic religion in one form or another is very widespread among archaic (hunting and pastoral) cultures, and is probably one of the oldest forms of religion, but at least today it is almost never the sole religion in a community; as a vocation of an elite group it coexists with other forms of religion involving larger parts of the community, and both influences and is influenced by the overall mythology and beliefs of the various cultures. He considers that shamanism in the strict sense is a specific subset of a more general, even older and nearly universal layer of archaic beliefs involving the afterlife and souls. He distinguishes shamans from other religious professionals such as priests and sorcerers by their use of ecstatic techniques. (I'm using the English "shaman" to translate both "chaman" and "chamane"; among the Araucana of South America and some tribes in Indonesia and elsewhere, shamans are female, and in some cultures they can be of either sex, but in most of the cultures he describes they are predominantly (but not always exclusively) male. In a few cultures, they are "transgender" females, which suggests that they might have been originally women, although Eliade considers that unlikely.)
Shamanism was first identified and studied among the cultures of Central and Northern Asia, particularly Siberia, (the word "shaman" is from the Tongu language via Russian) and the book begins each section by describing the typical forms in that region before going on to discuss the parallels among the Eskimo, the North and South American Indians, Indonesia, Oceania and Australia. There are fewer references to Africa although there are similar phenomena there as well. One thing which would have very much improved the book for me would have been a map of Northern and Central Asia showing where the cultures he talks about most are located.
The book begins with the selection of the shaman (due often to an illness or some other involuntary experience in Siberia, more often voluntarily sought through a "quest" among the Eskimo and North American Indians. In some cultures the role of shaman is hereditary, but still requires an ecstatic experience to become valid.) He describes (on the basis of ethnographic reports, etc.) the visions or dreams which reveal the shaman's vocation and constitute the real "initiation", often involving the themes of death and resurrection and voyages to heaven and the underworld. He then describes the "official" rituals of initiation which constitute the recognition of the vocation by the other shamans and the public. Then he describes various techniques and mythological explanations, the "auxiliary spirits", the costumes and other accessories, certain important motifs such as the axis of the world, the world tree, and so forth, and the functions of the shaman in their cultural contexts. From this point on, the chapters are geographical, and there is a certain amount of repetitiousness. One chapter considers the North American "secret societies" and the Ghost Dance Religion as attempts to popularize shamanic techniques among a wider part of the populations, and how they relate to the actual professional shamans.
The book next considers shamanism among Indo-European peoples and in India, China and the Far East. Here we can only talk about possible survivals, since these cultures were agricultural and even urban, or at least in close contact with cultures which were, for centuries before our earliest evidence. In regards to Greece, he considers the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which involves descent to the underworld to find a soul and has close analogues in many shamanistic myths, some of the mythology of Apollo, and so forth. There is much less about Greece than I expected, since that is one of the reasons I was reading it. Not surprisingly there are more possible survivals in German and Scandinavian myths since they became agricultural later than the Greeks; he discusses in particular Odin as a shaman figure. He makes a point of not claiming too much, since the fact that some vestigial trait is part of the shamanistic complex does not necessarily mean that it was derived from shamanism as opposed to the older substrata that shamanism is a particular form of. He goes into this more in the next chapter, giving parallels to shamanistic ideas which are outside the shamanistic religion in the strict sense. I was interested in the point he made that smiths in the early days of metallurgy were thought to be shamans or have similar powers and attributes.
The book ends with a chapter entitled "Conclusions" but it was not a summary of the conclusions of the rest of the book but deals with a new theme: the actual origins and history. He admits that the Central Asian cultures which have been considered most "typical" of shamanism are heavily influenced by lamaist forms of Buddhism, but denies that shamanism is derived from Buddhism; he argues that these cultures are actually not the classic forms of the religion but hybrid religions representing the last stage of the religion. He suggests that shamanism in its specific sense may have originated as early as 25,000 years ago, and that the earlier beliefs it is based on may date from the beginnings of human culture, but does not claim that this is or could be proven. There is also a short epilogue suggesting that shamanist myths of supernatural quests may be among the first origins of literature. (And not just the origins; I noted many similarities to some of the stories in the Thousand and One Nights which I recently finished reading (e.g. the quests for the djinn wives who have returned to their own world) although they reinterpret the themes in accordance with Islam -- and then there's Gandalf.)
Eliade's introduction and a few footnotes indicate that he believes the phenomena of shamanism are genuine encounters with a real supernatural order; according to the biographical information on Wikipedia he himself believed that he had similar experiences beginning in childhood. In the text itself, however, he limits himself to describing the actual behaviors and beliefs, usually from earlier sources, and leaves the question of their "authenticity" for other books.
I should note that I am not an anthropologist, much less a "historian of religion", and have no qualifications to evaluate whether his historical interpretations are likely to be correct. He is definitely writing from a very idealistic viewpoint which I do not share. I did however find much of interest in the book. It was interesting to see the shamanistic myths which were later incorporated into other more developed religious mythologies and literatures.
Dec. 20153. Isabel Allende, Mi pais inventado: un paseo nostálgico por Chile [2003] 220 pages [in Spanish]
Subtitled "a nostalgic journey through Chile", this book is part memoir, part description of Chile and the Chileans. While I learned much about the geography, history and customs of the country, many of the social generalizations I would take with a grain of salt (and she admits that they are subjective, "nostalgic" recreations of her memory, hence the title "My invented country"); the real interest is in the book's insights into the life of the author and her family.
In particular, the history of her grandparents and her uncles and aunts was interesting because many of their traits and actions appear under other names in her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, which originated from a letter to her grandfather about the history of the family. It also confirms that the setting of Eva Luna is Venezuela, which I had assumed but isn't actually stated in the novel.
While Allende is a wonderful novelist, this nonfiction work tends to reveal more of her limitations, her naive political ideas which seemed more purely liberal than those of the socialist-leaning characters in the novel, although that may be because the book was written in the United States in the year following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, when many people who should have known better became super-patriots for a time. She doesn't go that far, and does of course include quite a bit of the history of the coup and the results of neoliberalism in Chile.
She points out the coincidence that Tuesday, September 11, was also the date of the coup in Chile 28 years earlier, which was a major turning point in her own life, beginning her exile in Venezuela and later the United States. I've learned to expect that authors who write good political novels aren't always consistent in their politics.
The book is worth reading if you are interested in the background of her fiction.
Dec. 26154. Isabel Allende, La suma de las dias [2007] 365 pages [in Spanish]
An autobiography, beginning with the death of her daughter, Paula, in 1993, and continuing to the date it was written in 2007. It is largely the story of her extended family, or "tribe" as she calls it. Their lives resemble a soap opera, with quarrels and divorces, love affairs, births and deaths, and ghostly spirits. In addition to her second husband Willie, there is her grown son Nico, his ex-wife Celia who left him for Willie's son Jason's fiancée Sally, his second wife Lori, and his three children Alejandro, Andrea and Nicole, Willie's daughter Jennifer and her orphaned daughter Sabrina who is adopted by a couple of lesbian Buddist nuns, a young Greek widow, Juliette (who offers to be a surrogate for Lori and Nico) and her two sons, Aristotle and Achilles, a friend Tabra who occasionally lives with them and her on-and-off Comanche boyfriend named Lagarto Emplumado (Feathered Lizard) who is trying to recover the crown of Montezuma and return it to the Aztecs, and various other colorful characters.
Along the way, she mentions the books she is writing. While all her novels I have or have checked out from the library are subsequent to this book, and I was planning to stop with them, I discovered here that Hija de la fortuna and Retrato en sepia were written as "prequels" to La casa de los espíritus, so I will want to read those eventually, and that El Zorro was not about a fox but about the television character which was one of my favorites when I was a child, so I may want to find that and add it to my ever-growing TBR list as well.
Dec. 30155. Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia [2020] 356 pages [Kindle]
Magdalena, the book chosen to represent Colombia for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, is not a literary work by a Colombian as I was hoping to read but a book about Colombia by a North American naturalist, Wade Davis. (The group did the same thing with Bolivia, reading a Spanish journalist about the country.) Having read his earlier book about the Amazon basin, One River, I knew what to expect: short anecdotes about history, anthropology, botany and zoology, literature, music, art and current events, tied together by the author's travels along the river. The book is a very subjective account; a main theme is ecology and the need for conservation and restoration of the river and the lands along its banks, which is very good, but when he gets into the other themes, as interesting as his narratives are, I am a bit more skeptical. In particular, he seems to have come to his political conclusions in advance and then looked for informants who would reinforce what he already believed -- a sort of semi-Christian spiritualist pacifism.
The author very powerfully presents the tragedy of the years of violence and its effects on both the population and the environment, but he just takes the simplistic position that "violence is bad", setting the drug lords, the right-wing paramilitaries and the various leftist guerilla groups all equal. He gives no idea of the politics of the various guerilla movements, which are all essentially lumped together with the FARC and attributed to quarrels over drug money, and doesn't address the question of how the peasants and workers could change things democratically in a country where the economy and government are completely dominated by a conservative oligarchy linked to the United States and the multinational corporations. If Allende couldn't do it peacefully in Chile, there was even less chance in Colombia. Basically, he just praises people who were apolitical and only concerned with their own lives and earning a living, and considers any sort of politics as naive or evil -- except of course for environmental activism.
He gives a cautiously optimistic account of the peace process in the text, but admits -- hidden in the acknowledgements and other "back matter" at the end, which most people never read -- that in fact there is still a high level of political violence by the right-wing paramilitaries and that the amnesty has been applied very unequally, with virtual immunity for the right wing but persecution of the former guerillas, which is pushing some factions back into armed activity. He also suggests in the text that there are improvements in conservation, while admitting in the back matter that things are actually getting worse.
There is much interesting information in this book, but I would hesitate to take it all as factual.
109. Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph [1949; augmented 1952] 126 pages [in Spanish]
Another re-read; see my review from 2018.
Oct. 7
110. Jorge Luis Borges, El Hacedor [1960] 121 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in Spanish]
El Hacedor is a miscellaneous collection of writings by Borges; the first half, roughly, is made up of very short stories, ranging from a paragraph to a page or a page and a half, the second half is poetry. The stories include "Del rigor en la ciencia", the story which was originally the last story in Historia universal de la infamia about the perfect map which was useless because it duplicated what it was a map of, and "Dreamtigers" (the title was in English; I assume, though I am not sure, that this is the book which was translated under that title.) I should note that none of these stories are in the incomplete Vintage Español Cuentos completos, which also lacks the story about al-Mu'tasim from La historia de la eternidad; the companion Poesia completa does include all the poems.