True artists, and those who actually live their philosophy, politics or literature exist mostly within books, confined to pages, between lines. Very rarely do artists rise above the mundane and declare their true affiliations. Nowadays, writers are afraid to take sides in political and social quarrels, let alone show solidarity for real issues, for the causes of life, humanity, freedom or politics. There is one name, from the middle east, a novelist and activist, in whose death and murder, true artistic activity was able to flourish, albeit, briefly.
Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian novelist, writer of short stories and political activist was killed in a car bomb explosion along with his young niece in Beirut in 1972, the alleged responsibility later on accepted by the Israeli secret services supposedly, a death that was neither condemned by the Israeli left, its writers or in the west. Kanafani was a man of the left, and was one amongst the many intellectuals who were murdered by the Israelis, some of them as punishment for the terrorist outrage at Munich. The Palestinians lost a voice and Arab literature a new influence, and it is intriguing to think how his growing influence would shape Arab literature, considering that his published work is considered of much importance. He was only 36 when he was killed.
I recently read his novella called All that is left to you, and this book also includes a few short stories. Kanafani is usually identified with his Men in the sun novella and as a writer of short stories.In an excellent introduction to the latter mentioned novel, Hilary Kirkpatrick writes that Kanafani lived and died according to his ideals. Yet, unlike many committed writers, he refused to impose an ideological scheme on his fiction in any but the most general terms. Although his literature served the cause of Palestine, they have a universal appeal, thanks to his literary talents and his tenacity in preserving that freedom without which art is stifled.
In the novel All that is left to you, ( useful link) there are five characters, two of which are time and the desert. The novel thus has different voices which are initially difficult to relate to. But the type face for each voice is different, and we soon find how and when the desert and time speak. The story is that of a man, called Hamid who flees across the desert to Jordan, leaving his sister, Maryam behind, who has married Zakaria, who had gotten her pregnant outside wedlock but has eventually married to.Hamid cannot take the shame his sister has subjected him to and leaves her with the promise of writing to her when he gets there. He runs into an Israeli border guard and ambushes him, while his sister, who is faced with her husband ( previously married with five children) cannot take her new subjugation and sharing her husband with another woman any longer, and in a frenzy stabs him.
The other two narrators, namely time and the desert reveal what happens to these three characters from their point of view, adding perspectives that would be otherwise hard to see. As events escalate, the prose gets quick and pacy till we reach the final denouement. It seemed to me that there was no need to have different type faces for the narrators but that is just an observation. Perhaps, it should have been left to the readers to differentiate. I found it slightly tedious.
The style was supposed to be highly experimental for Arab fiction at that time and it clearly is a fore runner of similar experiments elsewhere. The prose is never sloppy nor excessively fable like( which is a problem with Arabic novels). The narrations merge with each other but we can separate them. The images are brilliantly constructed and the usual cliches of male dominance, honour and manhood are subtly woven into the situation of Palestine itself. Hamid tells his sister Maryam, a woman seething with repressed sexual desires that don't talk about marriage before our national cause has been decided. Maryam reflects on her first sexual experience with her going to be husband thus:
He pulled himself closer to me, and the heat of his breath set me on fire. I knew it was going to happen and I couldn't resist him. My nakedness was fluid beneath him. The darkness throbbed with excited hisses. I began relentlessly undulating, up and down, rhythmically, crushed beneath his shoulders, flung, pulled, crumpled, left quiet and then dragged, squeezed, kneaded and soaked in water in a terrifying melange of heat and cold....................This perhaps seems necessary to her and I felt it might reflect what is happening to her land too. Kanafani's two characters, brother and sister are thus on a journey, separately and in the end both take the plunge.
This novel is not the most poetic but deft and stylish. The terrors of the desert and the main protagonists are conveyed well. Kanafani conveys the miseries of his land quite well, a cause for which he died and at the same time, writing a highly innovative and charged document of Arabic fiction.
The moods of my eternal body, says the desert, love and hate and an unwillingness to forget. Time itself was rooted in my depths. Violence and anger. And before and above everything: submission. And says Maryam when thinking of her brother.........
He seemed to be like the last train that has left a deserted platform, listening to that silence which belongs to places of exile and loneliness.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
To My Love On New Year's Eve
This is a poem from the collection of love poems by Nizar Kabbani, the Syrian poet.
I love you
And I don't want
To link you
To the water or the wind,
To the ebb and flow of the sea,
To the hours of the solar eclipse
I don't care
About what the astronomers say
About what appears
In the lines of the coffee cups.
Your eyes are
The only prophecy.
I love you
And I don't want
To link you
To the water or the wind,
To the ebb and flow of the sea,
To the hours of the solar eclipse
I don't care
About what the astronomers say
About what appears
In the lines of the coffee cups.
Your eyes are
The only prophecy.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
This Bolano Love: Language and Rebellion
It is my feeling that a particular type of literature or a poem or for that matter a colour like black, even a certain kind of sadness can only appeal to a few people. It does not make those people privileged or necessarily more receptive, it only reflects a way of responding to words, colours, life, sadness. From time to time, we talk of melancholy, the pretensions of melancholy even and how well educated it can be as a mood, a pose. Yet, certain anarchic attitudes, rebellion, surrender when it is required, welcome loves, hideous heartbreaks are more than a pose, an affect, for they can reflect the underlying persona of an individual.
I want to talk about the literary style and language of Roberto Bolano, for my eagerness about this writer, my enthusiasm is less than the generosity of delight and sorrow or sadness that I have found in his books. It is my naive consideration or opinion that Bolano can only become the chosen writer of a select band of literary maniacs, for whom style and form is as important as meaning and context. Bolano's fiction, for want of a better word is the screaming heartache of a generation, a generation of men and women, whose voices are shushed by the loss of youth and the advancement of hopelessness.
It must be the prerogative of literature and writers to invent a new language and to culminate rebellion and angst ( a word I dislike) on paper, through poetry, through the promise of poetry. This needs a total reinvention, because the exigencies that prompt this heartache are the results of cultural dominance by unfriendly powers, by social norms continued through a kind of imperial insistence, a denial of the right to live and die, political uncertainty, loss of human rights, slavery, death, disease, destruction. Thus this new writing must turn the old away and find a new idiom, a new love.
Most of The Savage Detectives is a kind of an answer, against the old kind of poetry, basically a cry against the established order. Thus visceral realism as I understand it, is a youngish attempt to fight, to reinvent the left, to reinvigorate the ideals of revolution against the tyrannical powers of unmoralistic capitalism, fetishism and the boredom of philosophy and classical literature. However, the savagery of this literature is evident in the total chaos of this attempt, in the unmitigated disaster of this realism, for it only survives briefly and then dies, for it is not well thought through because it is the naive response of youth, destined to die.
Language does not only belong to philosophers or to those who read it, or those who read philosophy or the semantics of everything. Language is created after heartache and after reason, for the language without terrible pain is droll, dull and inconsequential. Bolano's language is the language of a defeated revolution, a slangy heartache. It is important to recognise it. I may not speak this language myself because I don't know how to. It is a field language born out of living such loves, such terrible flights. Thus it gives expression, a ready expression, for it now revivifies the pestilence of defeated ideals, the triumph of the establishment and the defeat of youth.
Bolano's language, especially in his novels ( barring By night in Chile perhaps) is a street smart, earthy, frantic elegy, an elegy born on the roads of various continents, tried during the day and perfected during the nights. It is not recognised as an impossible deity by its speakers for it metamorphoses their hidden naivety or their earnest desires. It is a great language because it is a tragic language. It is not pretentious, not wordy, never classical. Far from it, it is funny and vastly idiomatic and reflective of the weather and seasons of the speakers and their lives and where they live them. It has a universal accent because it is deeply poetic. It is magical and not elusive. It does not hide behind tame metaphysics nor does it allow or want psychoanalytic reduction, a reduction to plain sexual emptiness.
One of the greatest achievements of this language is that it mocks and laughs at the speakers because the speakers are not as naive as the reader might think. The success of Bolano's attempt is in his distancing from the grandiosity of the dreams of this generation because his superior knowledge, from hindsight perhaps knows that success cannot be achieved. Thus his use of B as an alter ego in his stories and simply Belano ( same professions, habits etc) in his novels shows his realisation of Belano's success perhaps and Bolano's defeat, for this is a literature of equal participation and he would have failed in reality had Arturo Belano succeeded in his books.
Politics and social rage are important components of his stories and find expression in his language. Unlike European literature, especially the tame Eastern European type, Bolano has method and politics in his novels and stories and his characters are ready to die and hunt for the missing poem, for Mexico, for Latin America as they say, for the Third World. Thus this language is not new but compared to the processed and genteel politics of European writers, seems savage and harsh. But it too is only a pose, a slang, a response as Bolano is clever to point out.
Nights are duller and days insipid without any more Bolano to read.
I want to talk about the literary style and language of Roberto Bolano, for my eagerness about this writer, my enthusiasm is less than the generosity of delight and sorrow or sadness that I have found in his books. It is my naive consideration or opinion that Bolano can only become the chosen writer of a select band of literary maniacs, for whom style and form is as important as meaning and context. Bolano's fiction, for want of a better word is the screaming heartache of a generation, a generation of men and women, whose voices are shushed by the loss of youth and the advancement of hopelessness.
It must be the prerogative of literature and writers to invent a new language and to culminate rebellion and angst ( a word I dislike) on paper, through poetry, through the promise of poetry. This needs a total reinvention, because the exigencies that prompt this heartache are the results of cultural dominance by unfriendly powers, by social norms continued through a kind of imperial insistence, a denial of the right to live and die, political uncertainty, loss of human rights, slavery, death, disease, destruction. Thus this new writing must turn the old away and find a new idiom, a new love.
Most of The Savage Detectives is a kind of an answer, against the old kind of poetry, basically a cry against the established order. Thus visceral realism as I understand it, is a youngish attempt to fight, to reinvent the left, to reinvigorate the ideals of revolution against the tyrannical powers of unmoralistic capitalism, fetishism and the boredom of philosophy and classical literature. However, the savagery of this literature is evident in the total chaos of this attempt, in the unmitigated disaster of this realism, for it only survives briefly and then dies, for it is not well thought through because it is the naive response of youth, destined to die.
Language does not only belong to philosophers or to those who read it, or those who read philosophy or the semantics of everything. Language is created after heartache and after reason, for the language without terrible pain is droll, dull and inconsequential. Bolano's language is the language of a defeated revolution, a slangy heartache. It is important to recognise it. I may not speak this language myself because I don't know how to. It is a field language born out of living such loves, such terrible flights. Thus it gives expression, a ready expression, for it now revivifies the pestilence of defeated ideals, the triumph of the establishment and the defeat of youth.
Bolano's language, especially in his novels ( barring By night in Chile perhaps) is a street smart, earthy, frantic elegy, an elegy born on the roads of various continents, tried during the day and perfected during the nights. It is not recognised as an impossible deity by its speakers for it metamorphoses their hidden naivety or their earnest desires. It is a great language because it is a tragic language. It is not pretentious, not wordy, never classical. Far from it, it is funny and vastly idiomatic and reflective of the weather and seasons of the speakers and their lives and where they live them. It has a universal accent because it is deeply poetic. It is magical and not elusive. It does not hide behind tame metaphysics nor does it allow or want psychoanalytic reduction, a reduction to plain sexual emptiness.
One of the greatest achievements of this language is that it mocks and laughs at the speakers because the speakers are not as naive as the reader might think. The success of Bolano's attempt is in his distancing from the grandiosity of the dreams of this generation because his superior knowledge, from hindsight perhaps knows that success cannot be achieved. Thus his use of B as an alter ego in his stories and simply Belano ( same professions, habits etc) in his novels shows his realisation of Belano's success perhaps and Bolano's defeat, for this is a literature of equal participation and he would have failed in reality had Arturo Belano succeeded in his books.
Politics and social rage are important components of his stories and find expression in his language. Unlike European literature, especially the tame Eastern European type, Bolano has method and politics in his novels and stories and his characters are ready to die and hunt for the missing poem, for Mexico, for Latin America as they say, for the Third World. Thus this language is not new but compared to the processed and genteel politics of European writers, seems savage and harsh. But it too is only a pose, a slang, a response as Bolano is clever to point out.
Nights are duller and days insipid without any more Bolano to read.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Threnody In The Desert
Threnody, our young 17 year old poet, Garcia Madero tells us, is an elegy that is not recited in the presence of the dead. And that is what The Savage Detectives is.........a threnody for unsung poets, lost, forgotten, dead and killed sometimes, sometimes in a desert.
This is my 3rd post about the The Savage Detectives, a novel for which I have now stopped using adjectives, as I have run out of them. The third and final section of this novel is called The Sonora desert, and brings us back to the narrator of the 1st section, Juan Garcia Madero, 17 years old, young, poetic, in love, fleeing, fleeing into the desert dust with Belano and Lima and Lupe, in search of the mythic poet Tinajero, followed at every step by Lupe' pimp, the murderous Alberto. The beginning of this section is one of the most delightful parts of the book, in which Madero, to kill time or to distract the others and to entertain them starts testing their knowledge about poetic forms and meters, asking them if they know what free verse is followed by terms like glyconic, hemiepes, paragogic, chiasmus, ictus and so on.
All the while, as they blaze into the desert, they are searching for Tinajero, of mythic and forgotten fame. Each step is dangerous as Alberto is always just a step behind. This section and the novel ends in eclipse and exile, a blaze of sunsets, heartbreaks and dust. And so at last, we reach the end of a novel, which to borrow from the inside jacket is..........mesmerizing, multi layered, tragicomic, an odyssey, a journey, a search for the meaning of literature in a world on the edge of collapse, a novel in a class entirely of its own.
One of the most important aspects of this novel is its structure, in spite of its length. There are multiple narrators, each with his or her own story, in each way revealing or talking about literature, broken dreams, love, sex, life, that kind of thing ( To borrow from Bolano.) Each story can exist on its own, as a sketch, a dream, a desire and nowhere do the stories seem superfluous or un neccessary. They are a part of this cosmic desire to search for meaning or an explanation for the reasons that we need to live, amongst so many to die. And these reasons are part of the same reasons to read and write, same life and the same death.
Bolano refused to accept that his was mostly a literature of exile. However, exile is an important part of his entire oeuvre, for it seems that without this or other tragic circumstances, literature and poetry will not reveal to the seeker or in this case the savage detective. And maybe, if we read his other stories and novels, one feels an interconnected, underlying current, from his glorious Last evenings on earth to the fascinating amulet and this novel too, perhaps the stories are the same, the same search, pain, loss, exile.
Bolano's stories, heart wrenching and cataclysmic as they are, end in defeat. All the loves too. And the constant refrain is that then we never met again, or we parted forever or this love was lost or he died or killed himself, that kind of thing. He gives their stories space, expression, words and poetry. Thus Bolano, in one story and other stories writes of defeat and loss, exile and suffocation. Not for a moment should we think that he is always on their side for there is a sharp, cruel and almost merciless sense of underlying sarcasm and humour behind the words, in perhaps the lesson of each narration. It is in laughing at these participants in this game of love and literature that Bolano lifts their stories and catapults them into the high territory of tragedy.
Amadeo, we will find Cesarea ( Tinajero) for you even if we have to look for every stone in the north. I said don't do it for my sake. It is no trouble, it is a pleasure. And I insisted don't do it for me. We are not doing it for you, we are doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for The Third world, for our girl friends because we feel like doing it.
This game is not really savage, this hunt, this escape. It is tragic and tender. But it is never ordinary. I think Bolano is a writer of elegies, of dirges, wails and epitaphs. Bolano has written a beautiful threnody or a succession of them, for all those who died when they were young, with poems in their hearts or for those who live still, in spite of having been in the heart of love and poetry but find themselves in deserts of one or the other sort, having lost all poetry. That kind of thing.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The Invention Of Morel: Adolfo Bioy Casares
Having kept off reading this novel till now, I finally read it, adding it the collection of fantastic fictions, part of a literary genre that was extolled by Borges. This short novella, written by Adolfo Bioy Casares has been long regarded as a literary classic, having influenced the so-called Latin American fiction "boom" of the sixties and many movies including the elusive Last Year In Marienbad.
Casares grew up in Argentina and became very close to Borges and it seems was under his shadow, literally. In fact, they collaborated together in their work called Fantastic Fictions and this novel is dedicated to Borges, who has also written a prologue for this novel. Borges was his friend and mentor and it will be out of place for me to say how close they really were and whether there was a literary rivalry between them, as some historians have suggested. However, it is quite clear that Borges was his mentor and helped to introduce Casares to Argentinian literati and to Casares' future wife too.
This novella, called The Invention Of Morel has a dream like quality about it. One gets the feeling that one is not actually sure of what is being read. The prose has a hypnotic cadence about it and since one wants surprises here and one is constantly on the lookout, there is a constant sense of dread, suspense and alarm that lurks in these pages.The sentences are short, sure without explanations, for the narrator is himself unsure of the nature of events that are happening around him.
Perhaps I must try to understand and enumerate what Borges and later Casares meant by fantastic fiction? From my previous encounters with Borgesian fiction, I think it generally means to question the real or apparent and actually see how similar it might be from dreams or fantasy. To try to understand natural causation and see how imagination, fantasy and fiction are closely impinging on the natural or scientific explanation of events. Octavio Paz describes this novel as more metaphysical than cosmic, with we traversing a realm of shadows, for we are shadows ourselves.
The story in brief, without revealing it all is that of a fugitive narrator, living on a deserted island who finds it peopled one day, suddenly. He in particular notices a woman, gypsy like, called Faustine with whom he falls in love. However, after many attempts to speak to her, the narrator realizes that he cannot be seen by her or others on the island. This naturally seems strange though our narrator gives explanations, from the possibility of his hallucinating to his having turned invisible to these people having come from another planet. The events soon lead all these people assembling together and the events explained to them by Morel, whose island it seems it is. All these people happen to be merely shadows, Morel's invention, for in essence they do not exist, these are merely images, sensations, shadows and photographs with the souls of these people having passed on to the photos and thus ending their lives.
This invention of Morel is basically a machine that he has invented, whereby images can be reproduced, that could later on have souls, of those very people, whose images these are. There is also mention of two suns and two moons, tides, for instance neap tides, reality and its ensuing hyper reality and so on. This is science fiction but not of a jarring nature for it induces one to question the nature of things around oneself.......the very nature of time, its linear or circular nature, migration of souls in to images, the possibility of immortality for memories if not physically and the migration of consciousness.
This novel was published in 1940 and hence was quite far ahead of its time. There are explanations towards the end for every event described including a fascinating metaphysical contemplation of love. I would not necessarily call this novel science fiction though it deals with fantastic ideas, ideas that most people generally have but are afraid to voice. Regarding the connection between this novel and Marienbad, for those who have read this novel and watched that movie, the effect is perhaps the same disconcerting chill, that feeling of having been through an illusion, of words and mirrors. The style is very much in keeping with the drama and mystery of the occurrences, and I think this novel is suitable for a dream session reading, wherein, afterwards, one asks..........Did I actually read anything? Like the narrator himself as he asks the reader..............
To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjointed presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety.
An interesting article in TLS about the relationship between Borges and Casares here, and a website dedicated to Casares fans.
Friday, October 12, 2007
And Then ( Y despues)
The labyrinths
that time creates
vanish.
( Only the desert
remains.)
The heart
fountain of desire
vanishes.
(Only the desert
remains.)
The illusion of dawn
and kisses
vanish.
Only the desert
remains.
Undulating
desert.
Federico Garcia Lorca
that time creates
vanish.
( Only the desert
remains.)
The heart
fountain of desire
vanishes.
(Only the desert
remains.)
The illusion of dawn
and kisses
vanish.
Only the desert
remains.
Undulating
desert.
Federico Garcia Lorca
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Autumn Pain
These autumn nights are merciless, they come so suddenly and then stay stuck, stuck to one's skin, soul, eyes. They seem limpid to begin with, at times serene, benign, easy to have, easy to live with, weightless. Then they spread their net, their long arms and start scratching, leaving livid marks on oneself, but they are all inside, these marks, these fears, these nights.
But what are these nights actually? Why should I even think to think about these things? Is it the melancholy of loneliness or the acid taste of darkness? Where do such heartaches come from? Why are just a few people prone to such disasters or do we misunderstand the geography and the climate of our inner hearts? Do innermost hearts have a different weather?
I believed once that loneliness and autumn are good for one's soul, they bring colour, albeit a different colour, like they do it to leaves, which are lying scattered everywhere in the courtyard outside my window. Such colour, such bleeding. The trees are slightly morose, the leaves are aching, some are crimson, the neighbour's wall is on fire. Other leaves are slightly more fortunate but they too will fall, turn hectic and die and then the bare colour of winter, which is transparent and white, sullen and heavy will invade everything.
But I digress. I was talking about nights, these slightly cold nights, when getting up in the morning is a disaster. I would just lie down, next to my fictitious cat, and would want to look at my pale hands as night lifts its cover and a new autumn day spreads its blue. It is the silence of these nights that halts poetry. Even music, of whatever colour pales and whimpers as these nights blur fantasy into reality and dissolve desire into memory.
I have always loved autumn, a particular autumn, in that garden, under a magnolia, my feet soaking in a struggling sun, a book, a poem and a dream in my arms. But then it brought nights of love, of colour and joy and sun and peace. Now it gives silence, shadows on walls and longing for poetry.
But what are these nights actually? Why should I even think to think about these things? Is it the melancholy of loneliness or the acid taste of darkness? Where do such heartaches come from? Why are just a few people prone to such disasters or do we misunderstand the geography and the climate of our inner hearts? Do innermost hearts have a different weather?
I believed once that loneliness and autumn are good for one's soul, they bring colour, albeit a different colour, like they do it to leaves, which are lying scattered everywhere in the courtyard outside my window. Such colour, such bleeding. The trees are slightly morose, the leaves are aching, some are crimson, the neighbour's wall is on fire. Other leaves are slightly more fortunate but they too will fall, turn hectic and die and then the bare colour of winter, which is transparent and white, sullen and heavy will invade everything.
But I digress. I was talking about nights, these slightly cold nights, when getting up in the morning is a disaster. I would just lie down, next to my fictitious cat, and would want to look at my pale hands as night lifts its cover and a new autumn day spreads its blue. It is the silence of these nights that halts poetry. Even music, of whatever colour pales and whimpers as these nights blur fantasy into reality and dissolve desire into memory.
I have always loved autumn, a particular autumn, in that garden, under a magnolia, my feet soaking in a struggling sun, a book, a poem and a dream in my arms. But then it brought nights of love, of colour and joy and sun and peace. Now it gives silence, shadows on walls and longing for poetry.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Jose Eduardo Agualusa
This is my first foray into Angolan fiction, or for that matter fiction from that part of Africa, having limited myself, sadly, to Achebe, North Africa and thereabouts. However, this rising star of African and Portuguese fiction, who has won numerous prizes, including the Grand prize for literature, Independent foreign fiction prize 2007 and others is being considered as a rising star in Portuguese literary circles. He is also the first Angolan writer to be translated into English and having come across this writer on the Internet and at Three percent, I took the chance to buy two of his novels Creole and The Book Of Chameleons.
One must perhaps ask whether this is Angolan or Portuguese fiction and whether both are actually the same? Is Salman Rushdie an Indian writer or an Indian writer writing in English, though his nationality is British. Indian readers of Rushdie's fiction are perhaps reading a different writer compared to his English readers. This question might be academic or perhaps political. Agualusa is white and Angolan but the novels are written in Portuguese which to me are not the same. However, that, maybe later.
I decided to read The Book Of Chameleons, published in the Portuguese as, "O vendedor de passados," which simply means The seller of pasts though the English title is different, there being not even one chameleon in it. This novel has been described as "Strange, elliptical, charming" and "humorous and with a fierce originality" with the Independent claiming that "not since Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis have we had a convincing non-human narrator". The narrator of this novel is a gecko, who in a previous life was a man. This gecko lives in the house of Felix Ventura and we are introduced into Ventura's world slowly. Ventura invents pasts for people if they are unhappy about it, with new lineage and new memories, photos and a completely new biography. Into this strange world, as the gecko lets us in, comes a man who wants a new past which he is easily given. but as it turns out, this new past turns out to be this man's , Buchmann he is called, as actually his real past, memories and all.
The gecko, who meditates and reflects on these events and lets us share his own past, his dreams and his memories, and his conversations with Ventura, clearly is amazed at this turn of events but not surprised. For the gecko is convinced of the frailty of human memory and the state of human desire. His conversations or his narrations have the flair of poetry sometimes and usually they are grim and sad thoughts of his own previous life, childhood and so on.
I am surprised as to why the narrator of this novel is a gecko and what is the purpose? Is this of a symbolic or allegorical importance? Even though Angola has gone through a traumatic civil war with millions displaced, there are flimsy references to these events though the invention of past for a Government minister serves some purpose at least. The style of this novel is impressive, it is not weighty, in fact I breezed through this novel. It is easy reading, compact and at times rises to attempt poetry but fails at the final moment when words usually overflow over the brim. Some passages are quite good, the evocation of Luandan smells and sights, its evenings is at times well done. However, nowhere does this novel rise above the level it takes to become really great. I find it still readable but I doubt whether I will read it again.
Ventura gives a few insights into his profession and at one point says...."name a profession - any profession - that doesn't sometimes have recourse to lying, a profession in which a man who only tells the truth would be welcomed." "I think what I do is really an advanced kind of literature,” he told me conspiratorially. “I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality.” Nowhere did I feel that our gecko reminded one of Samsa and I find this comparison unnecessary.
There are some very good reviews of this book here and here, the authors website ( I think he is quite good looking) To be honest, I am not really sure what I think of this novel. May be I didn't even understand it. I am hoping that creole will be better for it looks into slavery, Angolan history and related issues. I am quoting this passage, which I thought is the best in the entire book.
"Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. We watch the dawn light break over the acacia trees, the birds pecking at the morning, as though at a fruit. Further off we see the serenity of a river, and the trees embracing its banks. We see the cattle slowly grazing, holding hands, children dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun. We see the calm lakes where there are ducks swimming, rivers heavy with water where elephants quench their thirst. These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they are so far away we cannot touch them. some are so far, some very far away, and the moving train so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they did really happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them my memory is already failing me, we say and maybe it was just the darkening of the sky".
One must perhaps ask whether this is Angolan or Portuguese fiction and whether both are actually the same? Is Salman Rushdie an Indian writer or an Indian writer writing in English, though his nationality is British. Indian readers of Rushdie's fiction are perhaps reading a different writer compared to his English readers. This question might be academic or perhaps political. Agualusa is white and Angolan but the novels are written in Portuguese which to me are not the same. However, that, maybe later.
I decided to read The Book Of Chameleons, published in the Portuguese as, "O vendedor de passados," which simply means The seller of pasts though the English title is different, there being not even one chameleon in it. This novel has been described as "Strange, elliptical, charming" and "humorous and with a fierce originality" with the Independent claiming that "not since Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis have we had a convincing non-human narrator". The narrator of this novel is a gecko, who in a previous life was a man. This gecko lives in the house of Felix Ventura and we are introduced into Ventura's world slowly. Ventura invents pasts for people if they are unhappy about it, with new lineage and new memories, photos and a completely new biography. Into this strange world, as the gecko lets us in, comes a man who wants a new past which he is easily given. but as it turns out, this new past turns out to be this man's , Buchmann he is called, as actually his real past, memories and all.
The gecko, who meditates and reflects on these events and lets us share his own past, his dreams and his memories, and his conversations with Ventura, clearly is amazed at this turn of events but not surprised. For the gecko is convinced of the frailty of human memory and the state of human desire. His conversations or his narrations have the flair of poetry sometimes and usually they are grim and sad thoughts of his own previous life, childhood and so on.
I am surprised as to why the narrator of this novel is a gecko and what is the purpose? Is this of a symbolic or allegorical importance? Even though Angola has gone through a traumatic civil war with millions displaced, there are flimsy references to these events though the invention of past for a Government minister serves some purpose at least. The style of this novel is impressive, it is not weighty, in fact I breezed through this novel. It is easy reading, compact and at times rises to attempt poetry but fails at the final moment when words usually overflow over the brim. Some passages are quite good, the evocation of Luandan smells and sights, its evenings is at times well done. However, nowhere does this novel rise above the level it takes to become really great. I find it still readable but I doubt whether I will read it again.
Ventura gives a few insights into his profession and at one point says...."name a profession - any profession - that doesn't sometimes have recourse to lying, a profession in which a man who only tells the truth would be welcomed." "I think what I do is really an advanced kind of literature,” he told me conspiratorially. “I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality.” Nowhere did I feel that our gecko reminded one of Samsa and I find this comparison unnecessary.
There are some very good reviews of this book here and here, the authors website ( I think he is quite good looking) To be honest, I am not really sure what I think of this novel. May be I didn't even understand it. I am hoping that creole will be better for it looks into slavery, Angolan history and related issues. I am quoting this passage, which I thought is the best in the entire book.
"Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. We watch the dawn light break over the acacia trees, the birds pecking at the morning, as though at a fruit. Further off we see the serenity of a river, and the trees embracing its banks. We see the cattle slowly grazing, holding hands, children dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun. We see the calm lakes where there are ducks swimming, rivers heavy with water where elephants quench their thirst. These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they are so far away we cannot touch them. some are so far, some very far away, and the moving train so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they did really happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them my memory is already failing me, we say and maybe it was just the darkening of the sky".
Monday, October 08, 2007
The Bolano Effect
"The loves we have for cities", wrote Camus "are secret loves". And if we are to take this a bit further, the love that we have for writers or addiction to some is at times secret too. However, one must say that we find a particular rainbow haunting, a few sunsets too deeply sad, a few nights when restlessness rains loose a loose rain, and there we are, on our way, in the midst of this grip, this hold, this secret love.
Roberto Bolano, whom Sontag amongst others called a rare writer, has taken a hold over me, as the few readers of this blog might have noticed. I have become addicted to the unfixable loss that his writing leaves me with. Who cares about the outcome of this love like all other loves! The whirlwind sound of his words takes you on a journey that ends in poetry, in heartache and not just inside those words but afterwards as well. Have we not known all these characters before, that live in his pages or at least some of them, those who scribble poems in the margins of pages and read poems in the shower, leaving books and poems soggy and wet.
We know the climate of his novels, the raging sunsets of his cities and we know the beginning and outcome of such loves, for sometime surely some of us knew those who sang or loved when we too sang and loved and wrote names on trees.
Reading is not a recreational but a serious business and if reading is serious as writing is, as some would have us believe, then reading Bolano is to partake of that activity, to linger with him in the romance of writing, to simmer at the edge of those pages, and filter past those pages of love, rebellion and desire. Most of his characters exist before and after poetry, after life has failed them, as it always does, in the thundering heartache of night or in the mist of the early morning. There is no shame in saying that I find other literary fiction as rather tame after reading Bolano. Of course other literature and other writers exist and will come galore but the Bolano effect, as I have just called it, is different. With him is more tragedy, the awfulness of love, rebellion, poetry, music and heartache.
Bolano has written like no one else has before or perhaps I have not read anything like this. I try to accumulate these reading stones at this base of reading but I have given Bolano's stones different colours for they have given me new colours too, and yes, thunder, rain, poetry and literature.
I find myself getting a bit impatient waiting for his 2666, which is being rated better than The Savage Detectives!
(An interesting link)
Roberto Bolano, whom Sontag amongst others called a rare writer, has taken a hold over me, as the few readers of this blog might have noticed. I have become addicted to the unfixable loss that his writing leaves me with. Who cares about the outcome of this love like all other loves! The whirlwind sound of his words takes you on a journey that ends in poetry, in heartache and not just inside those words but afterwards as well. Have we not known all these characters before, that live in his pages or at least some of them, those who scribble poems in the margins of pages and read poems in the shower, leaving books and poems soggy and wet.
We know the climate of his novels, the raging sunsets of his cities and we know the beginning and outcome of such loves, for sometime surely some of us knew those who sang or loved when we too sang and loved and wrote names on trees.
Reading is not a recreational but a serious business and if reading is serious as writing is, as some would have us believe, then reading Bolano is to partake of that activity, to linger with him in the romance of writing, to simmer at the edge of those pages, and filter past those pages of love, rebellion and desire. Most of his characters exist before and after poetry, after life has failed them, as it always does, in the thundering heartache of night or in the mist of the early morning. There is no shame in saying that I find other literary fiction as rather tame after reading Bolano. Of course other literature and other writers exist and will come galore but the Bolano effect, as I have just called it, is different. With him is more tragedy, the awfulness of love, rebellion, poetry, music and heartache.
Bolano has written like no one else has before or perhaps I have not read anything like this. I try to accumulate these reading stones at this base of reading but I have given Bolano's stones different colours for they have given me new colours too, and yes, thunder, rain, poetry and literature.
I find myself getting a bit impatient waiting for his 2666, which is being rated better than The Savage Detectives!
(An interesting link)
Friday, October 05, 2007
Los Suicidas Mezcal
I have taken this license of naming my 2nd post on The Savage Detectives after this fabulously named drink, mezcal, that Amadeo Salvatierra offers to Belano and Lima, the savage detectives at the beginning of the 2nd section of this great novel."Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas Mezcal anymore," says Amadeo, "what a shame that times passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us." It seems there is only one bottle and the rest of the time must be spent only in drinking tequila. "The two of them standing and me sitting, drinking and savouring each drop of Los Suicidas and thinking who knows what". And later he says, "when the glass is full, shall we say glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat". This conversation sets the tone for this section, which is the best Bolano I have read so far. "Salud, then! I said. Salud, they said."
This section which runs over a few hundred pages, is narrated by more than thirty narrators, who alternate with each other in a cyclical, almost rhythmic manner. The seemingly outward purpose is to construct a history and the actions of the two detectives as they crisscross across continents, unknown and unseen generally, like shadows, like ghosts. Their outward actions, or conversations with a few people, their motives, their words, their poetry, sighs, sadness and happiness is thus constructed from these narratives, which relies on the memory and the opinion of those few people who actually know them and in some cases from those who have heard about them. During this narration, we also get to know in more detail the various narrators themselves, for they form the outer thread or circle of this very clandestine group of visceral realists. Amadeo possesses the only copy of Caborca, the magazine wherein lies the only published poem of Tinajero, which our two poets are after.
Once we are familiar with one narrator, we can expect a particular form of voice or style which is peculiar to each one of them. Thus, as Amadeo speaks, we see his lamentation for Mezcal flow within his general heartache for lost time as he narrates wistfully his history of Cesarea Tinajero, the poet who vanished. Amadeo is thus a senior statesman, and our two Young men seemingly have some regard for his sighs. From narration to narration we rock and flow, from heartache to heartache to pain, from adventure to poetry but this adventure is all poetry.
One of the most important things that happens in the 2nd section is that we never actually get to know these two detectives, because they seem to be absent from the page themselves, as if they were being talked about only, if they had never existed or only were known to exist, or if their existence was so tragic and melancholic and abrupt that we must contemplate their poetry, or their attempt to be in poetry, for they are addicted and devoted to poetry, for they are supposed to be in poetry. thus what we see is the shadow of Belano and the ghost of Lima, we hang on the shadow of their words and on the promise of their poetry, for we actually know that they do exist for we have known their flight into a white impala, into the Sonora desert with our young poet Madero from the first section. This deliberate hush accentuates the savagery of these two poets or the savagery of their poetry which we never get to read but get to trust.
This novel flows on the wings of poetry and I know this sentence sounds too cliched. But yes, this is all poetry. what we see is a construction of a way of living, a romantic upheaval into the heart of Mexico city days and nights, which we must not forget is central to the existence of this novel. these narrators are all lynched by poetry, they have tried to be in the heart of literature or at least near those who were literature themselves. This novel evokes the childhood fire of some people who like moths dance around the young flame of life, in certain cities during certain nights, when those high on Mezcal or drunk with love and words float and drift and sing a high song, at a low or audible pitch, when their lover or lovers are around, when their love is about, when they have been and touched love and when love has just left them, as love has to leave and flee, when poetry and life has deserted them, when death has come or is about to strike.
Since there are more than thirty narrators, we get to trust their voice after sometime. we have amongst these Quim Font, who is most poetic, his daughters, luscious skin, and Auxilio, whose 10 pages are breathtaking, and these pages are even better than the whole of Amulet, where she is the only narrator. Belano's ex lover, Jauregi tells us "that visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me. The thing was, I didn't love him any more. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement". The loves these poets feel for each other are strange and real................"our relationship was spectral. I don't want to talk about love, and I am reluctant to talk about desire. we only had a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them".
The constant feeling when one reads this novel is the sense of loss that pervades these narratives, as each potential poet packs in and fades, dies and disappears. This narration which does not appear to be but is a sad narration, a wistful narrative, a melancholic prose poem, a haunting history of the lives of these past lives, is a searing experience for it reminds us, some of us who might have had a faint ambition of being in poetry or in love, of our own failure, of our own savage ambition. this novel gives you , "moments, something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last for a second or two or your whole life, because there is something for everyone on this cruel earth."
There are fabulous passages in this section and this one one is one of the best............How late it was, that time when night sinks into night, though never all of a sudden, the white footed Mexico city night, a night that endlessly announces her arrival, I am coming, I am coming, as if she too, the devil, had stayed behind to watch the sunset, the incomparable sunsets of Mexico, the peacock sunsets.........
As Francisco Goldman observes, "Bolano shows how time punishes us for the rebellious dreams of youth, bringing disappointment, painfully modest accomplishments, broken loves, illness, even violent death and, simply, the end of youth. But for readers no longer young, the novel also conjures youth in all its hilariousness and overwrought drama, and reminds us of the purity of young people's faith—above all in poetry. It can also make a reader care deeply about the characters, almost like a parent, wanting happiness for them, fretting when it eludes them, and finally forced to accept that they will live out their destinies on their own."
I want you to make me see stars, I said to her one day. How long do you think stars last? she said. How long is a long time? she persisted. With this novel, we see various and different stars, before they fall down and disappear. Before they fall and leave a melancholy trace in the sky, before they fall down and leave some poetry and some pain, huge separation in our eyes. We see acts of poetry and acts of love which are perhaps the same. We notice also the disintegration of this fatal world, but at least we have seen a few stars.
I will write soon my third and final post on the last section, and complete this humble homage to a great literary masterpiece.
This section which runs over a few hundred pages, is narrated by more than thirty narrators, who alternate with each other in a cyclical, almost rhythmic manner. The seemingly outward purpose is to construct a history and the actions of the two detectives as they crisscross across continents, unknown and unseen generally, like shadows, like ghosts. Their outward actions, or conversations with a few people, their motives, their words, their poetry, sighs, sadness and happiness is thus constructed from these narratives, which relies on the memory and the opinion of those few people who actually know them and in some cases from those who have heard about them. During this narration, we also get to know in more detail the various narrators themselves, for they form the outer thread or circle of this very clandestine group of visceral realists. Amadeo possesses the only copy of Caborca, the magazine wherein lies the only published poem of Tinajero, which our two poets are after.
Once we are familiar with one narrator, we can expect a particular form of voice or style which is peculiar to each one of them. Thus, as Amadeo speaks, we see his lamentation for Mezcal flow within his general heartache for lost time as he narrates wistfully his history of Cesarea Tinajero, the poet who vanished. Amadeo is thus a senior statesman, and our two Young men seemingly have some regard for his sighs. From narration to narration we rock and flow, from heartache to heartache to pain, from adventure to poetry but this adventure is all poetry.
One of the most important things that happens in the 2nd section is that we never actually get to know these two detectives, because they seem to be absent from the page themselves, as if they were being talked about only, if they had never existed or only were known to exist, or if their existence was so tragic and melancholic and abrupt that we must contemplate their poetry, or their attempt to be in poetry, for they are addicted and devoted to poetry, for they are supposed to be in poetry. thus what we see is the shadow of Belano and the ghost of Lima, we hang on the shadow of their words and on the promise of their poetry, for we actually know that they do exist for we have known their flight into a white impala, into the Sonora desert with our young poet Madero from the first section. This deliberate hush accentuates the savagery of these two poets or the savagery of their poetry which we never get to read but get to trust.
This novel flows on the wings of poetry and I know this sentence sounds too cliched. But yes, this is all poetry. what we see is a construction of a way of living, a romantic upheaval into the heart of Mexico city days and nights, which we must not forget is central to the existence of this novel. these narrators are all lynched by poetry, they have tried to be in the heart of literature or at least near those who were literature themselves. This novel evokes the childhood fire of some people who like moths dance around the young flame of life, in certain cities during certain nights, when those high on Mezcal or drunk with love and words float and drift and sing a high song, at a low or audible pitch, when their lover or lovers are around, when their love is about, when they have been and touched love and when love has just left them, as love has to leave and flee, when poetry and life has deserted them, when death has come or is about to strike.
Since there are more than thirty narrators, we get to trust their voice after sometime. we have amongst these Quim Font, who is most poetic, his daughters, luscious skin, and Auxilio, whose 10 pages are breathtaking, and these pages are even better than the whole of Amulet, where she is the only narrator. Belano's ex lover, Jauregi tells us "that visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me. The thing was, I didn't love him any more. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement". The loves these poets feel for each other are strange and real................"our relationship was spectral. I don't want to talk about love, and I am reluctant to talk about desire. we only had a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them".
The constant feeling when one reads this novel is the sense of loss that pervades these narratives, as each potential poet packs in and fades, dies and disappears. This narration which does not appear to be but is a sad narration, a wistful narrative, a melancholic prose poem, a haunting history of the lives of these past lives, is a searing experience for it reminds us, some of us who might have had a faint ambition of being in poetry or in love, of our own failure, of our own savage ambition. this novel gives you , "moments, something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last for a second or two or your whole life, because there is something for everyone on this cruel earth."
There are fabulous passages in this section and this one one is one of the best............How late it was, that time when night sinks into night, though never all of a sudden, the white footed Mexico city night, a night that endlessly announces her arrival, I am coming, I am coming, as if she too, the devil, had stayed behind to watch the sunset, the incomparable sunsets of Mexico, the peacock sunsets.........
As Francisco Goldman observes, "Bolano shows how time punishes us for the rebellious dreams of youth, bringing disappointment, painfully modest accomplishments, broken loves, illness, even violent death and, simply, the end of youth. But for readers no longer young, the novel also conjures youth in all its hilariousness and overwrought drama, and reminds us of the purity of young people's faith—above all in poetry. It can also make a reader care deeply about the characters, almost like a parent, wanting happiness for them, fretting when it eludes them, and finally forced to accept that they will live out their destinies on their own."
I want you to make me see stars, I said to her one day. How long do you think stars last? she said. How long is a long time? she persisted. With this novel, we see various and different stars, before they fall down and disappear. Before they fall and leave a melancholy trace in the sky, before they fall down and leave some poetry and some pain, huge separation in our eyes. We see acts of poetry and acts of love which are perhaps the same. We notice also the disintegration of this fatal world, but at least we have seen a few stars.
I will write soon my third and final post on the last section, and complete this humble homage to a great literary masterpiece.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Bartleby & Co
This work of fiction is surely one of the most outstanding I have read this year and stands on its own, as a work of footnotes and not necessarily as a novel. I heard very recently about Enrique-Vila Matas, and decided to read this book, along with Montano's malady, which I haven't touched yet.
Vila-Matas has been hailed as the best writer in Spanish at present though I am not sure where this claim is coming from, outside or inside Spain ( that is a political question). That notwithstanding, Vila Matas has written an outstanding book, an exercise in collating or writing a footnote or an essay about those writers who decided that writing was a useless exercise and served no purpose. The central premise of this work is actually an anecdotal history of those writers and poets who having written one or two books then gave up, having either finished or having found nothing more to stimulate them. Most of the writers Matas mentions are those who did not write of their own volition, having decided about the further futility of doing so, not because the wells of inspiration had dried.
The title Bartleby, as Vila-Matas explains, is named after the story about Bartleby by Herman Melville, who never reads, never drinks, never goes anywhere, who is always alone, aloof, a mystery, never revealing who he is, preferring not to. This book aims to investigate the examples of Bartleby's syndrome in literature, which Vila-Matas thinks is endemic, about those writers who never write or stop altogether after having written, becoming paralysed for good.
Our narrator, who I think is middle aged, starts by saying this.........I never had luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my close relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. I have begun this diary which is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys. twenty five years ago, when I was very young, I published a short novel on the impossibility of love. Since then on account of a trauma I will go into later, I had not written again, I became a Bartleby, and that is why I have been interested in them for some time.
This work reads like a who is who of Bartlebys syndrome, giving an insight into certain interior aspects of the writers lives. I am not really sure how true each incident is for perhaps Vila-Matas might have actually invented a few himself. Most writers mentioned are well known, mostly from the Spanish speaking world, and there is wealth of reading material here, for one can actually catalogue all these writers, make a personal note and then begin to read these works of previous bartlebys.
The style of this book is not poetic nor is it meant to be. The prose is well written, measured, humorous, ironic, self aware, reservedly self sufficient and then quite morbidly reflective, honest and very candid. There are times when one laughs in earnest and at times when Marcelo, the narrator makes you wince for his hidden misfortune, his pain, his Bartlebys disease. For his is the world made up of these characters from literature, he lives with these writers and their characters in a world that negates the reality of the supposedly real world outside. Negation, Kafkaesque silence, a lack of desire, morbid melancholia, disquiet inside and outside are some internal themes that constantly well up inside Marcelo, and his clerkish quietish existence is very like Kafka himself, like Pessoa, like the heteronyms of Pessoa, somebody like the narrator of All the Names by Saramago.
However, our man is not ill or deluded for he is carrying out a research into a real phenomena, that of Barlebys disease and in doing so, builds up a profile of the writers, their personal experiences, perhaps their real reasons in giving up this heartache of fiction or poetry. Vila-Matas' narration thus is fundamentally an archive of melancholy and I could feel echoes of Sebald though the writing styles are quite different. Vila-Matas avoids melancholy and ends up in it which makes it more melancholic.
The writers that are mentioned are both great and famous. He starts with Walser, quoting him that writing that one cannot write is also writing. Walser's entire work is considered as a commentary on the vanity of life and writing. Going to Rulfo and his famous silence after Pedro Paramo, for thirty years, He calls Rulfo the writer of the No. After this there are stories about Rimbaud, Socrates who never wrote anything, and Robert Musil who mythologised the idea of an unproductive author in The man without qualities. Flaubert never completed Le Garcon, we are reminded.
From writers who fell into madness after one book to those who lived near each other and did not know each other, from opium as a substitute for not writing as in De Quincey's case to those who committed suicide, this book is filled with incidents and anecdotes. Mention is made of Felisberto Hernandez and his short story collection Incomplete narratives, Salinger, Pepin bello, Borges, Pessoa and him saying famously that the only metaphysics in the world were chocolates. Hofmannsthal, Keats and his negative capability, Mallarme, Tabucchi all get a mention. However, Melville and Hawthorne, who created Bartleby and Wakefield, two almost similar characters are considered in greater detail as the founders of the dark arts of the no.
Marcelo also writes about characters from his own past and the most poignant story is of a friend called Luis Felipe Pineda which is searing in sadness, a poet who only writes the first line of a poem and then forgets about them all together. There are so many other stories and writers mentioned in this book that it is not possible to mention everyone though I might post some extracts in the future. (A link to Sebald and Matas here, and here, another good link .)
I think this book is simply delightful, a treasure and a wonder, an enquiry into the subtle art of writing and the art of the No, for as even lesser writers know, writing something, even a small little poem is an affirmation, a record of the soul's fever chart, the answer to nights, fog, sunlight and mist. However, I have always believed what Hofmannsthal wrote in Lord chandos' crisis that words were a law unto themselves and could not explain life. Beckett would say that words abandon us and that is all there is to it. That is how Bartleby & Co ends and that is the fate of this post too.
Vila-Matas has been hailed as the best writer in Spanish at present though I am not sure where this claim is coming from, outside or inside Spain ( that is a political question). That notwithstanding, Vila Matas has written an outstanding book, an exercise in collating or writing a footnote or an essay about those writers who decided that writing was a useless exercise and served no purpose. The central premise of this work is actually an anecdotal history of those writers and poets who having written one or two books then gave up, having either finished or having found nothing more to stimulate them. Most of the writers Matas mentions are those who did not write of their own volition, having decided about the further futility of doing so, not because the wells of inspiration had dried.
The title Bartleby, as Vila-Matas explains, is named after the story about Bartleby by Herman Melville, who never reads, never drinks, never goes anywhere, who is always alone, aloof, a mystery, never revealing who he is, preferring not to. This book aims to investigate the examples of Bartleby's syndrome in literature, which Vila-Matas thinks is endemic, about those writers who never write or stop altogether after having written, becoming paralysed for good.
Our narrator, who I think is middle aged, starts by saying this.........I never had luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my close relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. I have begun this diary which is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys. twenty five years ago, when I was very young, I published a short novel on the impossibility of love. Since then on account of a trauma I will go into later, I had not written again, I became a Bartleby, and that is why I have been interested in them for some time.
This work reads like a who is who of Bartlebys syndrome, giving an insight into certain interior aspects of the writers lives. I am not really sure how true each incident is for perhaps Vila-Matas might have actually invented a few himself. Most writers mentioned are well known, mostly from the Spanish speaking world, and there is wealth of reading material here, for one can actually catalogue all these writers, make a personal note and then begin to read these works of previous bartlebys.
The style of this book is not poetic nor is it meant to be. The prose is well written, measured, humorous, ironic, self aware, reservedly self sufficient and then quite morbidly reflective, honest and very candid. There are times when one laughs in earnest and at times when Marcelo, the narrator makes you wince for his hidden misfortune, his pain, his Bartlebys disease. For his is the world made up of these characters from literature, he lives with these writers and their characters in a world that negates the reality of the supposedly real world outside. Negation, Kafkaesque silence, a lack of desire, morbid melancholia, disquiet inside and outside are some internal themes that constantly well up inside Marcelo, and his clerkish quietish existence is very like Kafka himself, like Pessoa, like the heteronyms of Pessoa, somebody like the narrator of All the Names by Saramago.
However, our man is not ill or deluded for he is carrying out a research into a real phenomena, that of Barlebys disease and in doing so, builds up a profile of the writers, their personal experiences, perhaps their real reasons in giving up this heartache of fiction or poetry. Vila-Matas' narration thus is fundamentally an archive of melancholy and I could feel echoes of Sebald though the writing styles are quite different. Vila-Matas avoids melancholy and ends up in it which makes it more melancholic.
The writers that are mentioned are both great and famous. He starts with Walser, quoting him that writing that one cannot write is also writing. Walser's entire work is considered as a commentary on the vanity of life and writing. Going to Rulfo and his famous silence after Pedro Paramo, for thirty years, He calls Rulfo the writer of the No. After this there are stories about Rimbaud, Socrates who never wrote anything, and Robert Musil who mythologised the idea of an unproductive author in The man without qualities. Flaubert never completed Le Garcon, we are reminded.
From writers who fell into madness after one book to those who lived near each other and did not know each other, from opium as a substitute for not writing as in De Quincey's case to those who committed suicide, this book is filled with incidents and anecdotes. Mention is made of Felisberto Hernandez and his short story collection Incomplete narratives, Salinger, Pepin bello, Borges, Pessoa and him saying famously that the only metaphysics in the world were chocolates. Hofmannsthal, Keats and his negative capability, Mallarme, Tabucchi all get a mention. However, Melville and Hawthorne, who created Bartleby and Wakefield, two almost similar characters are considered in greater detail as the founders of the dark arts of the no.
Marcelo also writes about characters from his own past and the most poignant story is of a friend called Luis Felipe Pineda which is searing in sadness, a poet who only writes the first line of a poem and then forgets about them all together. There are so many other stories and writers mentioned in this book that it is not possible to mention everyone though I might post some extracts in the future. (A link to Sebald and Matas here, and here, another good link .)
I think this book is simply delightful, a treasure and a wonder, an enquiry into the subtle art of writing and the art of the No, for as even lesser writers know, writing something, even a small little poem is an affirmation, a record of the soul's fever chart, the answer to nights, fog, sunlight and mist. However, I have always believed what Hofmannsthal wrote in Lord chandos' crisis that words were a law unto themselves and could not explain life. Beckett would say that words abandon us and that is all there is to it. That is how Bartleby & Co ends and that is the fate of this post too.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Bolano's Vagabonds
A very well written and understanding insight into Roberto Bolano's The savage detectives, by Daniel Zalewski in the New Yorker. This critique highlights the essential elements of this novel and the various exigencies that are central to Bolano's writing style and the raison de etre of his oeuvre. Besides offering biographical details, it shows Bolano's mistrust of magic realism and the reasons why and allows us to understand his restored relationship and respect for Borges and Hopscotch (For Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end.) Of course, some calculation lay behind his position. There was one living Latin-American novelist whose avid bookishness and formal cleverness made him the obvious heir to the modernist tradition: Roberto Bolaño.
Titled Vagabonds, this article is one of the best I have read about Bolano so far, as it traces his own life and its various key points and offers a parallel into the key areas of his fiction. Most of his short and long stories deal with Literature, which he he declared, “is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” When asked by the Mexican edition of Playboy to name his favorite things, he cited “the literature of Borges” and “making love.” He said that the Nobel Prize was typically won by “jerks.” Bolaño played up his hippie past, claiming to have lived for years on “a diet of rice.” Despite the diaspora evoked in “The Savage Detectives,” he rejected the idea that his work was a “literature of exile.” He wrote, “For a true writer, his only homeland is the bookstore.” He still considered himself primarily a poet: “I blush less when I reread my poems.”
This issue of the New Yorker has a short story by Bolano called The insufferable gaucho. There is an interesting comparison between Sebald and Bolano here, along with a few very interesting reviews and critiques about his work in English so far.
I will endeavour to write the second part of my own homage to the Savage detectives soon.
Titled Vagabonds, this article is one of the best I have read about Bolano so far, as it traces his own life and its various key points and offers a parallel into the key areas of his fiction. Most of his short and long stories deal with Literature, which he he declared, “is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” When asked by the Mexican edition of Playboy to name his favorite things, he cited “the literature of Borges” and “making love.” He said that the Nobel Prize was typically won by “jerks.” Bolaño played up his hippie past, claiming to have lived for years on “a diet of rice.” Despite the diaspora evoked in “The Savage Detectives,” he rejected the idea that his work was a “literature of exile.” He wrote, “For a true writer, his only homeland is the bookstore.” He still considered himself primarily a poet: “I blush less when I reread my poems.”
This issue of the New Yorker has a short story by Bolano called The insufferable gaucho. There is an interesting comparison between Sebald and Bolano here, along with a few very interesting reviews and critiques about his work in English so far.
I will endeavour to write the second part of my own homage to the Savage detectives soon.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
If I Had Asked
When we met last
near those familiar stone steps,
you apologetic somehow and me somewhat
embarrassed,
I did not turn back and look again
to see the sad poetry of that moment.
words seemed needless then, even though
the need was great.
And now, years later,
I think of that moment and wonder
why I must carry the solitude of those hours
till I can carry on.
I wish I had turned back and disturbed
the sad poetry of that moment,
and asked you, why?
near those familiar stone steps,
you apologetic somehow and me somewhat
embarrassed,
I did not turn back and look again
to see the sad poetry of that moment.
words seemed needless then, even though
the need was great.
And now, years later,
I think of that moment and wonder
why I must carry the solitude of those hours
till I can carry on.
I wish I had turned back and disturbed
the sad poetry of that moment,
and asked you, why?
Thursday, September 27, 2007
To Be Read In the Interrogative
A great poem by Julio Cortazar.
Have you seen
Have you truly seen
the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze
Have you touched
really have you touched
the plate the bread the face of that woman you love
so much
Have you lived
like a blow to the head
the flash the gasp the fall the flight
Have you known
known in every pore of your skin
how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart
must be thrown away
must be wept away
must be invented all over again
Have you seen
Have you truly seen
the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze
Have you touched
really have you touched
the plate the bread the face of that woman you love
so much
Have you lived
like a blow to the head
the flash the gasp the fall the flight
Have you known
known in every pore of your skin
how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart
must be thrown away
must be wept away
must be invented all over again
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Visceral Realism
Finally, having overcome my hesitant hesitation in writing about The Savage Detectives, I am writing this first of three posts about this great novel.
Published as Los detectives salvages in 1998 and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer and only available in 2007, this novel is what one must read before all world happens, after everything else has happened. For each page, each nuance and every turn in this long novel is a step towards poetry.
It is divided into three sections, the first one called Mexicans lost in Mexico. This is how it begins......
November 2
I have been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
November 3
I am not really sure what visceral realism is........................
Thus begins one great narration, delivered by a 17 year old aspiring poet called Juan Garcia Madero. It ends on the 31st of December, as Garcia Madero jumps into a car with the visceral realists, as they are being shot at, looking at shadows.
all the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, he tells us.
The diary is straight forward, revealing the extreme pain of being a gawky young poet, in Mexico city as our Madero jumps into visceral realism. At his poetic workshop, he gets bored till he runs into Ulises Lima and Belano ( bolano's alter ego), founders of this realism. He decides that leaving school is better, and joins the fraternity of unemployed, hopeful, hesitant, energetic poets who follow the moon rather than the sun. Madero falls in love many times, till he finally falls in love with maria, perhaps an ex visceral realist herself. This ends in failure, and Madero starts living with a bar maid till he leaves her for maria again, which ends in Madero fleeing with Lima and Belano into the Mexican desert.
But is that all? No. Let us see what visceral realism is.
Madero, whilst in a bar hears a singer and then tells us........the song sounded to me like a bolero, about a desperate love, a love that could never heal, although with the passage of the years it became more humiliating, more pathetic, more terrible. With these sensibilities, Madero reveals an undying love for sadness in beauty, which I think is the true definition of beauty. This beauty can only be found in poetry and writing, in associating with this underground movement, called visceral realism, for it is an alternative answer to the established voice of literature, which Madero calls pet it-bourgeoisie, as all visceral realists must be basically proletarians.
Madero spends all his time in poetry, for the world outside poetry is outside realism. He follows Lima and Belano, borrowing books from them, even at times stealing them. Madero feels a physical need to hear one of her poems from her own lips. Madero, who has left his family, drifts from place to place like a piece of flotsam. This drift is not a physical drift but a poetic drift. At a book shop, Madero hears the owner saying that realism is never visceral, visceral belongs to the oneiric world, which he finds disconcerting. the underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. the problem with literature, like life, goes he is that in the end people always turn into bastards.
Visceral realism is always in madero's mind, even after frenetic love making with his barmaid. In one sense, madero says, the name of the group is a joke. at the same time, it is completely in earnest. according to Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. the visceral realists walked backward. backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.
Madero never discusses visceral realism with Lima or Belano directly. There is a deliberate mystery about the group, which Madero finds intriguing. However, he does rebel occasionally at the concept of this realism but is loath to distance himself from Belano and Lima. In between marijuana and endless tequila's, Madero the lover is actually Madero the poet. His affiliation to the literary world is very solid, which makes him accept the friendly overtures of Lima and Belano, who until the first section ends, are like ghosts on the fringe, like some dictators who own or direct this group, in the drone and darkness of Mexico City nights, purging the group of faulty poets and then denying this purge altogether.
However, they seem like men of action, revelaed on the last page of section 1, as they help Maria's father, whose house is under siege by criminals, as both Lima and Belano jump into a white impala, along with Lupe, maria's friend ( who is escaping a fiendish pimp). Our young poet Madero, unafraid, jumps into this impala too. It seems that Lima and Belano's real mission is to track down Cesarea Tinajero, an obscure Mexican poet of the thirties who disappeared into the desert, taking with her the great unpublished gems of Mexican poetry. Thus, Lima and Belano, literary detectives, travel on this savage mission, themselves hunted, destined for violence, poetry and exile.
This is Bolano's persistent theme, especially passionately written in last evenings on earth and in amulet. Madero, who reads at a frenetic pace, throws writers and poets at you on each and every page. This section is like a catalogue of Latin American poetry and literature. The necessary theme, the real action in this section is expressed by Madero, a young poet who leaves his family and lives like a nomad in Mexico city, drifting, sighing, drinking, loving but always, always in poetry. His flight into the desert is his answer and his response against the night of his city.
Published as Los detectives salvages in 1998 and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer and only available in 2007, this novel is what one must read before all world happens, after everything else has happened. For each page, each nuance and every turn in this long novel is a step towards poetry.
It is divided into three sections, the first one called Mexicans lost in Mexico. This is how it begins......
November 2
I have been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
November 3
I am not really sure what visceral realism is........................
Thus begins one great narration, delivered by a 17 year old aspiring poet called Juan Garcia Madero. It ends on the 31st of December, as Garcia Madero jumps into a car with the visceral realists, as they are being shot at, looking at shadows.
all the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, he tells us.
The diary is straight forward, revealing the extreme pain of being a gawky young poet, in Mexico city as our Madero jumps into visceral realism. At his poetic workshop, he gets bored till he runs into Ulises Lima and Belano ( bolano's alter ego), founders of this realism. He decides that leaving school is better, and joins the fraternity of unemployed, hopeful, hesitant, energetic poets who follow the moon rather than the sun. Madero falls in love many times, till he finally falls in love with maria, perhaps an ex visceral realist herself. This ends in failure, and Madero starts living with a bar maid till he leaves her for maria again, which ends in Madero fleeing with Lima and Belano into the Mexican desert.
But is that all? No. Let us see what visceral realism is.
Madero, whilst in a bar hears a singer and then tells us........the song sounded to me like a bolero, about a desperate love, a love that could never heal, although with the passage of the years it became more humiliating, more pathetic, more terrible. With these sensibilities, Madero reveals an undying love for sadness in beauty, which I think is the true definition of beauty. This beauty can only be found in poetry and writing, in associating with this underground movement, called visceral realism, for it is an alternative answer to the established voice of literature, which Madero calls pet it-bourgeoisie, as all visceral realists must be basically proletarians.
Madero spends all his time in poetry, for the world outside poetry is outside realism. He follows Lima and Belano, borrowing books from them, even at times stealing them. Madero feels a physical need to hear one of her poems from her own lips. Madero, who has left his family, drifts from place to place like a piece of flotsam. This drift is not a physical drift but a poetic drift. At a book shop, Madero hears the owner saying that realism is never visceral, visceral belongs to the oneiric world, which he finds disconcerting. the underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. the problem with literature, like life, goes he is that in the end people always turn into bastards.
Visceral realism is always in madero's mind, even after frenetic love making with his barmaid. In one sense, madero says, the name of the group is a joke. at the same time, it is completely in earnest. according to Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. the visceral realists walked backward. backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.
Madero never discusses visceral realism with Lima or Belano directly. There is a deliberate mystery about the group, which Madero finds intriguing. However, he does rebel occasionally at the concept of this realism but is loath to distance himself from Belano and Lima. In between marijuana and endless tequila's, Madero the lover is actually Madero the poet. His affiliation to the literary world is very solid, which makes him accept the friendly overtures of Lima and Belano, who until the first section ends, are like ghosts on the fringe, like some dictators who own or direct this group, in the drone and darkness of Mexico City nights, purging the group of faulty poets and then denying this purge altogether.
However, they seem like men of action, revelaed on the last page of section 1, as they help Maria's father, whose house is under siege by criminals, as both Lima and Belano jump into a white impala, along with Lupe, maria's friend ( who is escaping a fiendish pimp). Our young poet Madero, unafraid, jumps into this impala too. It seems that Lima and Belano's real mission is to track down Cesarea Tinajero, an obscure Mexican poet of the thirties who disappeared into the desert, taking with her the great unpublished gems of Mexican poetry. Thus, Lima and Belano, literary detectives, travel on this savage mission, themselves hunted, destined for violence, poetry and exile.
This is Bolano's persistent theme, especially passionately written in last evenings on earth and in amulet. Madero, who reads at a frenetic pace, throws writers and poets at you on each and every page. This section is like a catalogue of Latin American poetry and literature. The necessary theme, the real action in this section is expressed by Madero, a young poet who leaves his family and lives like a nomad in Mexico city, drifting, sighing, drinking, loving but always, always in poetry. His flight into the desert is his answer and his response against the night of his city.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Rita And The Rifle
A beautiful poem by Mahmoud Darwish. A few poems of Darwish here, and interview with the poet here.
Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and plays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle
Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again
Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita
Between Rita and my eyes—
A rifle
Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and plays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle
Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again
Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita
Between Rita and my eyes—
A rifle
Sunday, September 23, 2007
An Extract From The Savage Detectives
Here follows this delightful extract from Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, narrated by one of the numerous narrators in this great novel. I will write about this savage novel soon.
****************************
All literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
Freaks were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-steps from ethics to aesthetics and back again.Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillen, Alexaindre and Alberti could be considered a sissy, butch, and a queer respectively. As a general love, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to Lopez Velarde or Efrain Huerta.
Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an underground battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, were faggot poets by birth, but who out of weakness or for comfort's sake lived within and accepted - most of the time- the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale , and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.
In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. take the case of poor Sanguinetti. Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the kingdom of letters. and the less said the better of the faggotry of the Russian revolution, which if we are to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.
Who?
Mayakovsky? No
Esenin? No
Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?
Hardly
There was only one but he was the real thing, a steppes-and -snow-faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.
And in Latin America how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martin Adan. period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernandez, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobrio, fairies like Alfonso Cortes, butches like Leon De Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo De Rokha, sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Gongora, and along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban revolution. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal.
Gorostiza's death without end, alongwith the poetry of Paz, is the Marseillase of highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Poetry. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Nuno, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; and back to Spain, back to the beginning, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences beween queers and faggots.............................
****************************
All literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
Freaks were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-steps from ethics to aesthetics and back again.Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillen, Alexaindre and Alberti could be considered a sissy, butch, and a queer respectively. As a general love, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to Lopez Velarde or Efrain Huerta.
Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an underground battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, were faggot poets by birth, but who out of weakness or for comfort's sake lived within and accepted - most of the time- the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale , and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.
In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. take the case of poor Sanguinetti. Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the kingdom of letters. and the less said the better of the faggotry of the Russian revolution, which if we are to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.
Who?
Mayakovsky? No
Esenin? No
Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?
Hardly
There was only one but he was the real thing, a steppes-and -snow-faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.
And in Latin America how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martin Adan. period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernandez, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobrio, fairies like Alfonso Cortes, butches like Leon De Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo De Rokha, sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Gongora, and along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban revolution. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal.
Gorostiza's death without end, alongwith the poetry of Paz, is the Marseillase of highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Poetry. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Nuno, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; and back to Spain, back to the beginning, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences beween queers and faggots.............................
Friday, September 21, 2007
Book Tags
In response to a tag from flowerville.......
Total number of books owned
Well....Never done this before. I am poor at deciding about hates and loves generally. But I am participating with some relish. I will only consider the last 2 years, since they have been kind in allowing some freedom to read much more than before. In the last 2 years, I have bought 270 plus books. These include novels, poems and essays, and some philosophy. I don't borrow from my local library as it is not worth the trouble. If I consider the books that I actually own, then the number is greater. Some books have been borrowed by friends over the years and not returned.
Last book bought
The day before.........The Obscene Bird Of Night, Donoso. I have not started reading it yet. I am attracted to the cover. I am a cover fetishist but not literally. I buy books in sprees. It is a kind of sad mania. Whenever I am in a bookshop, I lose concentration and get restless. I throw my love at books. My favourite bookshop is Borders, but I generally buy online.
Last book read
Amulet, by Roberto Bolano. I wrote a post about it yesterday. I don't generally write about any book I read until weeks or months later. I let it simmer and seethe inside. Amulet is an exception. I had to do something to do something about it. I do not know why I had ignored it till now. I don't know why things and books ignore us sometimes. I read it at the suggestion of atenea, whose blog I admire without knowing how to read it.
I have this strange habit of reading a few books at the same time. They exist in parallel worlds and do not generally meet. I am reading Landscapes of war by Juan Goytisolo, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, Querelle Of Brest by Jean Genet, Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua.......... I must pick up The obscene bird now.
Five books that mean a lot to you
Like Alok, I will not include the Russians or books read more than 2 years ago.
The book of disquiet by Fernando Pessoa: I have named my blog after this book. It needs no praises from myself. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully disconcerting experience to read it. It is the love of the morbid and a simultaneous running away from it. It is truly great. Everyone should read it more than once and then many times afterwards.
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar: I have read the first two pages many, many times. It reminds me of my own circle that is now scattered, seperated by the Atlantic. It also makes me jealous, considering the bohemian, love struck, star struck eyes and the sad sad jazz all over its pages. I think it is a sad novel despite the hyper, experimental text.
The savage detectives by Roberto Bolano: I have not written about this book here because I feel unable to. I completed it this July, after my own departure lounges had saturated my eyes. No body writes like Bolano, honestly. He grows upon you. It is LSD for the soul and the crash. All those who love writing and writers and books and the folklore of this love must read it. And the politics is the blade behind the words. I love Latin American fiction, not just the usual tame magic realism type.
the loser by Thomas Bernhard: This book is better than one thinks it is. It gave me the expression I thought I should have known before, namely deterioration process. I have actually not been fazed by my own deterioration process since reading it, as one East Anglian friend must know.
I saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti: I am a bit biased against the Arab novel sometimes for it lacks the formal structure of the novel in the western sense. I think the novel is a western European invention. That aside, this novel is pure elegy, calm one however. It tells you of the pain of not returning to what was once home. Barghouti is a great poet and this novel is a tribute to Palestinian pain and all freedom lovers generally. Insomniacs must avoid this book.
I must mention that I have not listed the Russians or Joyce, Melville or Jean Genet or Nabokov or Sebald. This summer I discovered Juan Goytisolo but the trilogy is partly unread. Goytisolo, is the writer's writer, the poets poet. I have also not mentioned poetry, for then I would talk about Federico Garcia Lorca or Borges or Darwish.
One book that I did not like that I read this year is war and war by Krasznahorkai.
Total number of books owned
Well....Never done this before. I am poor at deciding about hates and loves generally. But I am participating with some relish. I will only consider the last 2 years, since they have been kind in allowing some freedom to read much more than before. In the last 2 years, I have bought 270 plus books. These include novels, poems and essays, and some philosophy. I don't borrow from my local library as it is not worth the trouble. If I consider the books that I actually own, then the number is greater. Some books have been borrowed by friends over the years and not returned.
Last book bought
The day before.........The Obscene Bird Of Night, Donoso. I have not started reading it yet. I am attracted to the cover. I am a cover fetishist but not literally. I buy books in sprees. It is a kind of sad mania. Whenever I am in a bookshop, I lose concentration and get restless. I throw my love at books. My favourite bookshop is Borders, but I generally buy online.
Last book read
Amulet, by Roberto Bolano. I wrote a post about it yesterday. I don't generally write about any book I read until weeks or months later. I let it simmer and seethe inside. Amulet is an exception. I had to do something to do something about it. I do not know why I had ignored it till now. I don't know why things and books ignore us sometimes. I read it at the suggestion of atenea, whose blog I admire without knowing how to read it.
I have this strange habit of reading a few books at the same time. They exist in parallel worlds and do not generally meet. I am reading Landscapes of war by Juan Goytisolo, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, Querelle Of Brest by Jean Genet, Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua.......... I must pick up The obscene bird now.
Five books that mean a lot to you
Like Alok, I will not include the Russians or books read more than 2 years ago.
The book of disquiet by Fernando Pessoa: I have named my blog after this book. It needs no praises from myself. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully disconcerting experience to read it. It is the love of the morbid and a simultaneous running away from it. It is truly great. Everyone should read it more than once and then many times afterwards.
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar: I have read the first two pages many, many times. It reminds me of my own circle that is now scattered, seperated by the Atlantic. It also makes me jealous, considering the bohemian, love struck, star struck eyes and the sad sad jazz all over its pages. I think it is a sad novel despite the hyper, experimental text.
The savage detectives by Roberto Bolano: I have not written about this book here because I feel unable to. I completed it this July, after my own departure lounges had saturated my eyes. No body writes like Bolano, honestly. He grows upon you. It is LSD for the soul and the crash. All those who love writing and writers and books and the folklore of this love must read it. And the politics is the blade behind the words. I love Latin American fiction, not just the usual tame magic realism type.
the loser by Thomas Bernhard: This book is better than one thinks it is. It gave me the expression I thought I should have known before, namely deterioration process. I have actually not been fazed by my own deterioration process since reading it, as one East Anglian friend must know.
I saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti: I am a bit biased against the Arab novel sometimes for it lacks the formal structure of the novel in the western sense. I think the novel is a western European invention. That aside, this novel is pure elegy, calm one however. It tells you of the pain of not returning to what was once home. Barghouti is a great poet and this novel is a tribute to Palestinian pain and all freedom lovers generally. Insomniacs must avoid this book.
I must mention that I have not listed the Russians or Joyce, Melville or Jean Genet or Nabokov or Sebald. This summer I discovered Juan Goytisolo but the trilogy is partly unread. Goytisolo, is the writer's writer, the poets poet. I have also not mentioned poetry, for then I would talk about Federico Garcia Lorca or Borges or Darwish.
One book that I did not like that I read this year is war and war by Krasznahorkai.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Roberto Bolano's Amulet
If the beginning sentences of By night in chile are legion by now, this is how amulet begins............This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. I am a friend to all Mexicans. I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but I better not. I know all the poets and all poets know me. so I could say it. I could say one mother of a zephyr is blowing down the centuries, but I better not.
What are the ways or means with which one can say that this writer or novel is nearly enough? how can one measure the heartache of words, phantasms that words conjure, endless stealth in poetry, drama, emotion and the reality of life? One of the possible answers lies in reading Roberto Bolano. Such is the magic of his writing, stupendous poetry, reams of palpitations, dizzy heartaches. Bolano grows on you till other writers seem pale, even insignificant. I cannot make this outlandish claim that only some can like Bolano or that you must be in exile yourself or know what heartache is or that some sunsets have been witnessed and rehearsed now in memory alone.
No, I will not say that one should be a poet oneself or understand the music of words or be of a certain romantic temperament to get addicted to Bolano. I will not write here that Bolano must be read at midnight near the window, with a burning cigarette in ones hands. Obviously these things are desirable but not essential. To like Bolano one must have a love of all poets and writers, of displaced poets and forgotten writers, a soft corner for despair, a tender love for forgotten poems, a seething search for mildewed, thumbed memories.
I read Amulet recently at the suggestion of atenea, having not read this novel so far, strangely. I have felt deeply saddened and tranced, so to say, with the seething sadness of this novel. Calling herself the mother of Mexican poets, Auxilio hunts and seeks exiled poets, living with them, reading them, moving on, forgetting some, moving on in the mysteries of this night, this journey, having hidden in the bathroom of a Mexican university while students and teachers are being hounded and killed by the forces that launched the coup in Mexico in 1968. The refrain to this event is constant, for Auxilio reminds us again and again, of Latin America's violent and sad political events. Bolano gives us his alter ego again, called Belano, an autobiographical creation, who having returned from the terrors of Chile, has now changed.
Sometimes, not often, I found paid work; a professor would pay me out of his salary to be a kind of personal assistant, or the department heads or the faculty would put me on a contract for two weeks, a month, or sometimes month and a half, with vague, ambiguous and mostly non-existent duties, or the secretaries—who were so nice, I made friends with them all; they confided in me, told me about their heartaches and their hopes—made sure that their bosses kept finding me odd jobs so that I could earn a few pesos. That was during the day. At night I led what you might call a bohemian life with the poets of Mexico City, which I found deeply rewarding and convenient too, since money was scarce at the time and I didn’t always have enough to pay for lodgings. But most of the time I did. I shouldn’t exaggerate. I had enough money to get by and the poets educated me in Mexican literature by lending me books, their own books of poems for a start (you know what poets are like), the essentials and the classics, so my expenses were minimal…I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy.
That is how Auxilio describes her activities. The changes that happen when Auxilio manages to survive are then reflected from her numerous perceptions about Latin america, literature, poetry, war, peace and the events that led to such disasters in latin america.
something is happening as time passes says Auxilio, something that has happened before, although in a sense every time time is the first time so experience counts for nothing, which is better in the end, because experience is generally a hoax.
The time that Auxilio spends in hiding, more than two weeks in the bathroom, while students are being killed, reading poems, writing poems on toilet paper is the moving theme behind her monologue. In essence, Auxilio does not want even to exorcise the ghosts of that time. In effect, she feels guilty for having survived, having seen that violent historical convulsion. From time to time, she reminds the reader of this violent history. There, in the night of this sad revolution, Auxilio moves with young, unknown poets, amongst them Belano himself. There are countless references to poets and writers, in one particular hallucinatory passage, Auxilio predicts the fate of more famous writers. I quote
Metempsychosis. Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall manifest itself in a different form. Cesare Pavese shall become the patron saint of seers and lookers in the year 2034. Pier Paolo Pasolini shall become the patron saint of escapees in the year 2010. And so on.....
As in his other works, Bolano does not mince words. This book is a more open and direct example of what is achieved in other shorter works. I am not referring to his savage detectives, which must be discussed separately. I think that amulet is a far better book than by night in Chile, for it is more poetic, better written, more openly political and more mesmerisingly haunting. It is an example of perfection in form, and lucidity in content. This novel ( a good review here) is thus an example of Bolano's honesty as a writer and as a political activist.
I think I can only struggle in describing this book, for it is a fantastic novel, an addiction. Parts of Amulet can be read aloud, which is not achieved by many books. I quote this passage from the last page, for in the last few pages, this book soars and hits and ravages like a malignant monster, filled with pain and poetry. The passage below could be written for all those people who have died or are still dying unjustly under the eyes of a blind world.
So the ghost children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love. But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet.
A good review here, an an American perspective on Bolano here.
What are the ways or means with which one can say that this writer or novel is nearly enough? how can one measure the heartache of words, phantasms that words conjure, endless stealth in poetry, drama, emotion and the reality of life? One of the possible answers lies in reading Roberto Bolano. Such is the magic of his writing, stupendous poetry, reams of palpitations, dizzy heartaches. Bolano grows on you till other writers seem pale, even insignificant. I cannot make this outlandish claim that only some can like Bolano or that you must be in exile yourself or know what heartache is or that some sunsets have been witnessed and rehearsed now in memory alone.
No, I will not say that one should be a poet oneself or understand the music of words or be of a certain romantic temperament to get addicted to Bolano. I will not write here that Bolano must be read at midnight near the window, with a burning cigarette in ones hands. Obviously these things are desirable but not essential. To like Bolano one must have a love of all poets and writers, of displaced poets and forgotten writers, a soft corner for despair, a tender love for forgotten poems, a seething search for mildewed, thumbed memories.
I read Amulet recently at the suggestion of atenea, having not read this novel so far, strangely. I have felt deeply saddened and tranced, so to say, with the seething sadness of this novel. Calling herself the mother of Mexican poets, Auxilio hunts and seeks exiled poets, living with them, reading them, moving on, forgetting some, moving on in the mysteries of this night, this journey, having hidden in the bathroom of a Mexican university while students and teachers are being hounded and killed by the forces that launched the coup in Mexico in 1968. The refrain to this event is constant, for Auxilio reminds us again and again, of Latin America's violent and sad political events. Bolano gives us his alter ego again, called Belano, an autobiographical creation, who having returned from the terrors of Chile, has now changed.
Sometimes, not often, I found paid work; a professor would pay me out of his salary to be a kind of personal assistant, or the department heads or the faculty would put me on a contract for two weeks, a month, or sometimes month and a half, with vague, ambiguous and mostly non-existent duties, or the secretaries—who were so nice, I made friends with them all; they confided in me, told me about their heartaches and their hopes—made sure that their bosses kept finding me odd jobs so that I could earn a few pesos. That was during the day. At night I led what you might call a bohemian life with the poets of Mexico City, which I found deeply rewarding and convenient too, since money was scarce at the time and I didn’t always have enough to pay for lodgings. But most of the time I did. I shouldn’t exaggerate. I had enough money to get by and the poets educated me in Mexican literature by lending me books, their own books of poems for a start (you know what poets are like), the essentials and the classics, so my expenses were minimal…I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy.
That is how Auxilio describes her activities. The changes that happen when Auxilio manages to survive are then reflected from her numerous perceptions about Latin america, literature, poetry, war, peace and the events that led to such disasters in latin america.
something is happening as time passes says Auxilio, something that has happened before, although in a sense every time time is the first time so experience counts for nothing, which is better in the end, because experience is generally a hoax.
The time that Auxilio spends in hiding, more than two weeks in the bathroom, while students are being killed, reading poems, writing poems on toilet paper is the moving theme behind her monologue. In essence, Auxilio does not want even to exorcise the ghosts of that time. In effect, she feels guilty for having survived, having seen that violent historical convulsion. From time to time, she reminds the reader of this violent history. There, in the night of this sad revolution, Auxilio moves with young, unknown poets, amongst them Belano himself. There are countless references to poets and writers, in one particular hallucinatory passage, Auxilio predicts the fate of more famous writers. I quote
Metempsychosis. Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall manifest itself in a different form. Cesare Pavese shall become the patron saint of seers and lookers in the year 2034. Pier Paolo Pasolini shall become the patron saint of escapees in the year 2010. And so on.....
As in his other works, Bolano does not mince words. This book is a more open and direct example of what is achieved in other shorter works. I am not referring to his savage detectives, which must be discussed separately. I think that amulet is a far better book than by night in Chile, for it is more poetic, better written, more openly political and more mesmerisingly haunting. It is an example of perfection in form, and lucidity in content. This novel ( a good review here) is thus an example of Bolano's honesty as a writer and as a political activist.
I think I can only struggle in describing this book, for it is a fantastic novel, an addiction. Parts of Amulet can be read aloud, which is not achieved by many books. I quote this passage from the last page, for in the last few pages, this book soars and hits and ravages like a malignant monster, filled with pain and poetry. The passage below could be written for all those people who have died or are still dying unjustly under the eyes of a blind world.
So the ghost children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love. But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet.
A good review here, an an American perspective on Bolano here.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Ibn Arabi : Seal Of Mystics
The medieval Spanish Muslim mystic, Ibn Arabi is generally regarded as the shaikh- ul -Akbar or the greatest mystic in Sufi terms and in the Western world as Doctor Maximus. His influence, his vast teachings, erudition, writings, many of which have survived to the present day have exerted lasting influence on Sufi mystical thought in addition to re framing the way Sufism can be interpreted in present times for those who do not either understand it or find it too eclectic, too abstract and difficult to come to terms with.
Born in Murcia in Spain, and moving to Seville later, Ibn Arabi moved east wards towards the Arab world, where he achieved fame and some opposition before settling down in Syria, where he lies buried. Thus Ibn Arabi is a Spanish mystic, and his work should be seen in the context of Western Muslim mysticism.It is believed that he had epiphanies and near divine experiences as a young man. He travelled east wards towards the Arab world, visited many places, performed pilgrimages to the holy lands before settling in present day Syria, where he is buried. Ibn Arabi's thoughts and writings have been controversial, at least within conservative Muslim circles, where he has been denounced more than once as heretical and his philosophies and religious approach as outrageously beyond legal Muslim parlance. However, no one can ignore his metaphysics, his self absorbed and fresh attitude towards Sufi practices and his nuanced new eclecticism, which continues to surprise and interest the neutral observer.
One of his most original and daring philosophy is his concept of oneness of creation, also called Wahdat ul Wajud ( pantheism) in Arabic. My own understanding of this is that contrary to monotheistic teachings especially Islamic, Ibn Arabi invites the uninitiated to seek God within every created thing in the universe, allowing each person to re frame monotheism within the arc of created things. In other words, one can seek signs from the natural world, in stones, rivers or flowers and feel these to be peripheral or worldly emanations of the one being. This would allow the person to seek within the limits of his or her temporal experience, a sighting of the divine, the miraculous. This is in contrast to the bare monotheism of Islam, wherein any representation of the divine is heretical. This concept is akin to the one found in the Upanishads, that is of pantheism, but Ibn Arabi is generally considered to have originated this concept in the Muslim world. See here.
I have read with interest and some amazement about Ibn Arabi's life and the biography i refer to, called Quest for the Red sulphur is a well researched attempt to construct his life. written by Claude Addas, the writer allows the reader to glean from Ibn Arabi's experiences what nowadays would be considered impossible happenings. We understand all natural or other phenomena with scientific tools and rightly so and if we use psychological or other tools to understand mystical experiences, we findIbn Arabis life a vast enterprise in epiphany itself.
It is not possible to understand mystical experiences, in a world devoid of miracles and saints. It is beguiling to ask why sainthood has disappeared if at all and how outside canonical religion, one can make sense of this life, literature apart. It is all the more difficult to understand Ibn Arabi and his experiences, for most of these are in the realms of a unique mystic experience. However, another aspect of this experience is the flowering of it in Spain, the western fringe of Islam, a coming together in a non Arab climate of shattering, path breaking Sufi mysticism. Here Ibn Arabi is not alone, for Spain has produced great mystics, not just Muslim mystics, and Spain could be called the land of mystics. Ibn Arabi's work, partly conservative as all Sufi experiences must be, allows the sacred to be understood by the secular, the divine with the ephemeral, thoughts with words, such as had never happened before.
Ibn Arabi was a prolific writer and his greatest works are well preserved and now available in English. his seminal works, Revelations in Mecca, which Ibn Arabi is said to have been revealed to him in a vision and Bezels of Wisdom, difficult to read are cornerstones in Sufi thought. Almost all Sufis have expressed their gratitude and debt to Ibn Arabi, no matter what language they spoke. A profile of Ibn Arabi by William Chittick, famous scholar here. And a link to Ibn Arabi society here.
Born in Murcia in Spain, and moving to Seville later, Ibn Arabi moved east wards towards the Arab world, where he achieved fame and some opposition before settling down in Syria, where he lies buried. Thus Ibn Arabi is a Spanish mystic, and his work should be seen in the context of Western Muslim mysticism.It is believed that he had epiphanies and near divine experiences as a young man. He travelled east wards towards the Arab world, visited many places, performed pilgrimages to the holy lands before settling in present day Syria, where he is buried. Ibn Arabi's thoughts and writings have been controversial, at least within conservative Muslim circles, where he has been denounced more than once as heretical and his philosophies and religious approach as outrageously beyond legal Muslim parlance. However, no one can ignore his metaphysics, his self absorbed and fresh attitude towards Sufi practices and his nuanced new eclecticism, which continues to surprise and interest the neutral observer.
One of his most original and daring philosophy is his concept of oneness of creation, also called Wahdat ul Wajud ( pantheism) in Arabic. My own understanding of this is that contrary to monotheistic teachings especially Islamic, Ibn Arabi invites the uninitiated to seek God within every created thing in the universe, allowing each person to re frame monotheism within the arc of created things. In other words, one can seek signs from the natural world, in stones, rivers or flowers and feel these to be peripheral or worldly emanations of the one being. This would allow the person to seek within the limits of his or her temporal experience, a sighting of the divine, the miraculous. This is in contrast to the bare monotheism of Islam, wherein any representation of the divine is heretical. This concept is akin to the one found in the Upanishads, that is of pantheism, but Ibn Arabi is generally considered to have originated this concept in the Muslim world. See here.
I have read with interest and some amazement about Ibn Arabi's life and the biography i refer to, called Quest for the Red sulphur is a well researched attempt to construct his life. written by Claude Addas, the writer allows the reader to glean from Ibn Arabi's experiences what nowadays would be considered impossible happenings. We understand all natural or other phenomena with scientific tools and rightly so and if we use psychological or other tools to understand mystical experiences, we findIbn Arabis life a vast enterprise in epiphany itself.
It is not possible to understand mystical experiences, in a world devoid of miracles and saints. It is beguiling to ask why sainthood has disappeared if at all and how outside canonical religion, one can make sense of this life, literature apart. It is all the more difficult to understand Ibn Arabi and his experiences, for most of these are in the realms of a unique mystic experience. However, another aspect of this experience is the flowering of it in Spain, the western fringe of Islam, a coming together in a non Arab climate of shattering, path breaking Sufi mysticism. Here Ibn Arabi is not alone, for Spain has produced great mystics, not just Muslim mystics, and Spain could be called the land of mystics. Ibn Arabi's work, partly conservative as all Sufi experiences must be, allows the sacred to be understood by the secular, the divine with the ephemeral, thoughts with words, such as had never happened before.
Ibn Arabi was a prolific writer and his greatest works are well preserved and now available in English. his seminal works, Revelations in Mecca, which Ibn Arabi is said to have been revealed to him in a vision and Bezels of Wisdom, difficult to read are cornerstones in Sufi thought. Almost all Sufis have expressed their gratitude and debt to Ibn Arabi, no matter what language they spoke. A profile of Ibn Arabi by William Chittick, famous scholar here. And a link to Ibn Arabi society here.
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