Open Door by Iosi Havilio

Though he was at the Festival a few years ago, I came across Iosi Havilio's novel (translated into English in 2011), Open Door, which is such an excellent read.

The book is set in Argentina and gives us a glimpse into an unnamed narrator who returns home after a jaunt out in a northern village to visit a sick horse (she's a veterinary assistant), meets up with her girlfriend who suddenly disappears. The women are clearly having problems but when Aída goes into a shop in La Boca to buy cigarettes and never comes back out, a mystery of sorts opens up. In the short time after Aída goes into the shop, a person (maybe a man, maybe a woman) is on a bridge high above, surrounded by police and others trying to talk him or her down. A crowd gathers to watch and goad and click their tongues and when it seems that the person is, in fact, being talked down, suddenly the individual jumps and falls to a presumable death in the water. The central question is: was this Aída or not?

To call this book a thriller would be wildly misleading and, in fact, the best part of the book is the muted emotional response of the protagonist who goes on with life with almost no emotional reaction. She loses her job, and then without any explanation, returns to the village up north where she'd been visiting the sick horse the week before. There she falls in with an older man named Jaime and she becomes obsessed with a local teenaged girl who lives in the village.

It's such an austere story in many ways, mainly due to the lack of any kind of emotional response from the protagonist: she never reflects back on her life, her past, we know little to nothing about her childhood, her parents. All she does is push through life with no particular impulse driving her except sex (and even that is relatively infrequent). Occasionally, a phone call will come in from Buenos Aires, asking her to return to identify a body that's washed up but our heroine constantly ends up shaking her head. Where is Aída?

Sometimes a writer will come to the Festival and though I try to read as many Festival books as I can (I did read this 2-3 years ago), I will read it quickly without really revelling in it. Mainly that kind of reading is "trying to get a sense" of the book so that I know how to use the author. But it's in the months or years after the Festival that I will have time to read for the story, to revel in the language, to enjoy it.

Interviews of note: Richard Ford, Danny Glover, Luisa Valenzuela and David Wellington

Danny Glover: a true Hollywood artist

• Who knew that Danny Glover was such an aficionado of art-house cinema? Really interesting interview with him here about the entire alternative career he's built up in interesting movie-making.
• One of my most favorite writers, Argentine Luisa Valenzuela, in interview with Paris Review. Every time I read one of these interviews, I learn something new, even about writers who I'm kind of obsessed with. Valenzuela has long been considered one of the most daring and innovative of Argentine writers. Writing since the 1960s, she's not been translated into English much and is much less known here as a result.
• This book looks like it could be interesting...another zombie affair but still...
• American writer Richard Ford (Blue Met 2014) sits down with Paris Review. I've met lots of writers in my work and Ford stands out, not only for his work, of course, but also for the fact that he was such a kind, engaging and generous man. What a gentleman.

Richard Ford: charmer

Alfonsina Storni: Words to my Mother

Words to my Mother

I don't ask you to tell me the great truths
Because you wouldn't tell me; I only ask
If, when you carried me in your belly, strolling through
Dark patios in bloom, the moon was a witness.

And if, when I slept listening
In your breast with its Latin passions,
A hoarse and singing sea lulled you to sleep nights
And if you watched in the gold dusk, the sea birds plunge.

For my soul is all fantasy, a voyager,
And it is wrapped in a cloud of dancing folly
When the new moon ascends the dark blue sky.

And, lulled by a clear song of sailors, it likes -
If the sea unlocks its strong perfume -
To watch the great birds that pass without destination.
       
                                -Alfonsina Storni (translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow)

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig

I was over at a friend's place the other day and she had a copy of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman on her coffee table. Since she (like me) is surrounded by books, I knew she wouldn't miss one so I asked if I could borrow it.

The next day, I read most of it in one sitting. It's a fascinating novel. The book starts out as a conversation between two unnamed characters and it's only as the story progresses that the details are fleshed out: the two are in prison and are sharing a cell. One is a political prisoner and we learn more and more about his tale as he opens up to his cell mate. The other is in prison for "unnatural" acts (basically for cross-dressing though there is some intimation that he slept with someone underage). Molina (the trans character) tells the plots of movies to the other to pass the time which raises all kinds of limitations to their viewpoints. Valentin (the revolutionary) is allergic to bourgeois morality and values (materialism, romantic love), something which the overly romantic Molina needs to survive. Notions of performing genders comes into play here, Molina adopts the guise of the woman that he feels he is by modeling his notions of gender, his values, his approach to love, etc., on movies and how he sees biological women perform their genders.

For Valentin, though, being together with Molina allows him to express his vulnerabilities in a way that he's never been able to, admitting his own fears, his own views of his weaknesses, the ways he doesn't conform to the blustery machismo he performs in his own right (even if he is also an intellectual and a leftist).

The edition I have has all these annotations which relate to Freudian theories of sexual development which are highly irritating (pages and pages of psychosexual longings that are spelled out in clinical and theoretical terms, etc.) that seem only tangentially related to the story (besides, I don't need someone pointing out all the Freudian references in the plot, thank you very much). I'm not sure if these insertions are part of Puig's original or if they were added in by the translator and/or editor of the American edition. At any rate, they make the work feel incredibly dated. Also the views of homosexuality seem dated as well: though the writer is compassionate, we've come a long way since the mid-70s on defining gay identity and trans-identities which all seem to get lumped together as part and parcel of homosexuality.

But besides the above, the novel itself is really interesting. Formally it's unusual but there are so many things worth thinking about here: gender, class, leftist politics, Argentine politics, power. I won't give away much more but suffice it to say that this book is a great summer read and I wish that Manuel Puig were better known.

The movie version of this came out when I was in my very early teens though I don't think I've ever seen it. Still, I might wait a few months and then rent the film though typically I try to see the movie before I read the book whenever possible. William Hurt won an Academic Award for his Molina and Raul Julia (an actor whose work I really liked) plays Valentin. Julia died young in 1994.

Richler and Valenzuela: two very different writers

First there's Nancy Richler, whose Giller-nominated novel, The Imposter Bride, from earlier this year I've been reading this week. It's an engaging story about surviving trauma and learning to forgive the past. When a young woman arrives in Montreal just after the war, it's clear to everyone around her that she has come out of something horrific. What struck me about these passages is how much the characters keep to themselves. I think today we have more impulse to share what we are feeling and thinking in order to help those around understand why we do (or don't do) the things we do.

But this mid-20th century family still guards their thoughts and feelings preciously and, as a result, the novel's plot moves forward. It veers towards the overly poetic at times (the sending of stones to Ruth every year on her birthday seems like a highly novelistic flourish) but it's a story which reminds us of the individual horrors that WWII brought to so many lives. Mothers who leave, secret traumas from the past, starting a new life and a new identity and the things we can't leave behind: all these themes are explored by the writer but in the end, we are left with a story that is hard to put down, hard to forget. Certain images have stayed with me for days and the shifting points of view created an important effect in that we never sense that feeling of claustrophobia we might have if we were only in Lily's head.

Though the book was nominated for the Giller, it didn't get as much buzz as it might have which is surprising since it's such a powerful story. She's a new writer to me but I am excited about having the chance to read her earlier work.

The other writer I've been thinking about is Argentine Luisa Valenzuela. She's getting on now in years but I find her work so unique and thoughtful. Though she might be called a "difficult" writer (see yesterday's post) her almost stream-of-consciousness narration is highly disciplined and very tightly woven into the fabric of history, particularly the recent history of Argentina.

She breathes in huge gulps of her city's air, the verb a lie at the time, because the air had become unbreathable. With vandal-like delight she is disemboweling her library. Some books will have to disappear - the word alone produces goosebumps - others are simply dismantled in order to preserve this story or that essay or those three chapters that she knows she'll need for her course, or that she wants to keep with her in spite of the weight limit on planes. Get rid of everything to be able to leave as lightly as possible. She knows that if she stays in her own country, she won't write anymore. She can't show her latest work to anyone. She's afraid of putting those readers in danger (from "Getting Ready to Jump," in the collection Dark Desires and the Others).

What strikes me about this passage is how openly she references the politics in one way but how cloaked her allusions are in another way. Valenzuela has said that she avoids writing about "the message" of politics and this to me seems like a fair way to approach this topic. (It also reminds me of a Slate article over the weekend on the work of Barbara Kingsolver. Is the writer - either Kingsolver herself or Michelle Dean the Slate writer - confusing the issue with the message?) Otherwise, writing (or any art) becomes dated very quickly.

Valenzuela's work is fascinating and a writer I'd love to see in person sometime.

A great interview with Luisa Valenzuela here from the Paris Review Writers Series.