Roberto Bolano- By Night in Chile

Bolano's prose in By Night in Chile is beautiful. I don't think I've ever read such a poetic narrative. Of all the writers we've studied, Bolano seems to come the closest to stream-of-consciousness. He begins telling a story and softly wanders in and out of the primary narrative with other stories and observations but I think the reader is always aware that we are being told a story about the narrator's life- we are inside of his head. The first thing that struck me about the novel was the lack of chapters of even paragraphs. It's so unusual and really adds to the experience of reading the novel as the narrator is sort of thinking it. It was a little difficult for me to get my bearings at first, but once I did, I didn't want to put it down. It is so dense with literary and cultural references and with imagery that I'm not sure where to begin analyzing it. In this sense, Bolano does strike me as quite a bit Borgesian. And like with Borges, I underline far too many sentences just because they struck me as so beautiful- especially from the story about the shoemaker. I think it is interesting that, as far as I know, Bolano's other novels are written in a more traditional style.

Arjskdfh. I read the wrong story. Chronicles of a Death Foretold coming as soon as I grab it

Mario Vargas Llosa- The Cubs

The Cubs is written in a very abstract, stream-of-consciousness style. It immediately reminded me of Kerouac or Ginsberg but I had a lot of trouble following it at first. Once I got used to it I could appreciate the interesting feel it gave the story. I think the way it is written almost imitates the way we think when we're really young... never quite finishing a sentence or jumping from thought to thought. It makes the story feel very urgent.

Vargas Llosa's language is very beautiful but never flowery. I think he is able to convey very specific feelings of adolescents just through the actions of his characters and fairly succinct descriptions. He sets the scene of 60s very well, or I get that feeling from the story.

The Cubs is about a group of boys growing up from grade school to adulthood- and particularly about Cuellar, the friend that has turned into a rock n roll James Dean type while the others have gone on to studies and girlfriends. They find their adult lives easily and end up middle aged and soft around the middle with wives and children while Cuellar dies at a young age in a car wreck, I believe. The point of view is third person but it feels, somehow, that we're hearing from everyone but Cuellar.

I wasn't absolutely in love with this story, but it does such an incredible job of spanning 15 years or so in very few pages and depict the moving from childhood through adolescences with a group of friends so well. But I'm always attracted to those types of stories

Aura- Carlos Fuentes

Phffeww... this story is enchanting but totally creepy. Aura begins with a history teacher replying to a help wanted ad in the newspaper and ends with the same teacher in bed with a 109 year old woman who has somehow conjured and now controls a younger version of herself that he is in love with. He also realizes that he is, somehow, her dead husband.

Aura reads like a very beautiful and strange ghost story. The first thing I think anyone would notice is Fuentes' use of first person present tense narrative which gives the story a suspenseful and isolated feel. It feels very unnatural and eerie. I'm not sure exactly why, but some passages just stuck out to me so strongly as very unnatural and jarring even though they seem to be still following the first person present tense. For example:

"And Senora Consuelo is waiting for you, as Aura said. She's waiting for you after supper..."(par. 5, p.400)

Perhaps you need to read it in context to understand why it sounds so unusual.

Apparently Senora Consuelo has entered into some sort of Catholic witchery that involves devotion to Christ objects and also the growing of very powerful magic herbs. Or maybe she is a saint. The things Fuentes does with religious imagery and sex are mind-boggling. After Aura undresses Felipe and then gives him what seems to be a communion from her thighs he falls onto her body which is stretched out like Christ on the crucifix. "Aura opens up like an altar."
There is a religious undertone to everything in this narrative. One place is seems really obvious and almost out of place is when Felipe first confronts Aura about the Senora keeping her locked away...
"She's trying to bury you alive. You've got to be reborn, Aura."

"You have to die before you can be reborn... No, you don't understand. Forget it, Felipe. Just have faith in me."

The Senora makes comments about religious sacrifice to the affect that she is a sort of saint or martyr. I think you could easily write a hundred pages on just the religious parallels and references in this story.

Time is liquid in Aura and we're not sure if Felipe is existing in the house of Aura's youth or the present-day house(if there really is a "present day"). Once Felipe discovers that he looks just like the Senora's husband and his belief system is shattering, he declares that he no longer has use for his watch or the kind of time that a watch can measure. He can't hold "that bodiless dust" within his hands.

The use of light and darkness as symbols of age(or reality) and youth, respectively, is striking. From the very beginning Felipe feels his way through the dark moisture of the house. Maybe there is something in that as well... the house as a sort of womb. And then in the very final sentences, he feels Aura's body in the darkness but sees the Senora in the light, old and wrinkled.

Fuentes' sentence structures alone are at times almost unbelievably unusual and effective. I just kept thinking that it was incredible that words alone could create these feelings of uneasiness and suspense or fear followed just sentences later by dreamy airiness. I don't know why that understanding of language hasn't struck me so aggressively until now. I wish I could read Aura in Spanish.

Cortazar- The Pursuer

This narrative style immediately reminded me of Joyce and also, for some reason, of Dostoyevsky(specifically Notes From the Underground- maybe the narrative style and the self-deprecation)... Cortazar changes tenses abruptly in the very first paragraph and then continues to swing between past and present throughout the narrative.

One thing that struck me as different from our other readings is that you would never have to know that the author is Latin American. Everything about the pursuer is so European, and I think, before Latin American even American or just cosmopolitan with the jazz and blues references. In most of the other novels, there was this relationship to nature and the land that is so typical of the earlier works we read and is completely lacking here. The Pursuer is more in line with the Sur writers work, I think. Johnny's ideas about time are very sort of sloppy Borgesian. Or at least, this obsession with time and space and the metaphysical is something we've seen before in Borges, Bombal, Bioy.

The Pursuer was so dense that is seemed to wind around and back into itself. It's structure is basically a meditation interspliced with dialogue. It's as if we are just listening to Bruno think, and yet there are sections where he seems to be very aware that he has an audience.

Bruno, swings back and forth between loving Johnny and despising him and in the end I think I hated them both. However, I think Cortazar does an incredible job of depicting the relationship between the two of them without using any sort of 'outside' narrator. And I almost forgot that Bruno was not Cortazar himself and that Johnny Carter was just a character( I did find an American Jazz musician- a saxophone player- named John Carter born in 1929... but this is probably just a coincidence). I think this novel offers a really interesting look at jazz in the 50s and it's great that it starts in Paris and ends with almost everyone in new york. And I love the Dylan Thomas reference at the beginning and then at the very end as Johnny's last words- "O make me a mask."

I think this was a beautiful piece even though it was, at times, kind of ridiculous and obscure.

Also, I wonder if the dedication Ch. P, is Charlie Parker?

Arguedas

Warma Kuyay is a love story written from the eyes of a 14 year old boy. For some reason it reminds me so much of McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses- in the description of the gorge and the ranch and the sky. Also in the point of view of the young boy and the way he relates to the land and the animals. Arguedas does a spot on job of translating that feeling of loving someone so much and knowing that you can't be with them- the feeling that tears are not enough and your heart is ready to burst. When Ernesto is finally overtaken by remorse for the calf he watched Kutu viciously beat we see almost a coming of age and also an embodiment of his love for Justinita. He stands up to Kutu and is, in the end, left in his comfortable loneliness at the hacienda.

There are some very interesting social and racial questions brought up by this story. Ernesto loves Justinita who is an Indian but he is very aware that Kutu is an Indian as well and does not understand why Justinita would choose Kutu as her lover over him. He has been raised by the Indians on the hacienda just like a child would be raised by servants and nannies in some places and yet he isn't an Indian. He seems stuck in the middle and does not identify wholly with either the Indians or Don Froylan or the other white ranch owners. And he hates Don Froylan for abusing his power and raping Justinita. We can see the strange power dynamic especially between Kutu and Ernesto. They are clearly friends and care about each other and yet Kutu treats Ernesto in a very subservient way. He offers him Justinita and leaves the ranch when Ernesto tells him to.

The Pongo's Dream has a very different style. It reads almost like a parable. It's easy to see how Arguedas would have been involved in the peasant movements. It's interesting in regard to both stories that Arguedas learned Quechua from the servants when he was young and must have been very close with them.

Pedro Paramo

The first few pages of this novel had me captivated. I think we can immediately identify with the romanticizing of a place we have never been but only heard stories about. After his mother's death, Juan goes to fulfill his promise to her by traveling to Comala- the town of her childhood which he believes to be a beautiful place, to find his estranged father. But once he sees it over the horizon, he realizes that it is not the beautiful enchanted town his mother described but literally a ghost town in the desert haunted by its former inhabitants. Awesome. From the very beginning when the man who leads Juan to Comala replies to Juan's comment that it looks like a ghost town with, casually, yeah, everyone here is long dead... there is a feeling of eerieness.

The first two things I noticed about this novel were it's obvious element of unreality existing beside reality. In the first few pages we meet both the innkeeper who explains to Juan casually that his mother had told her that he would be arriving, and the man who directed him to her house. The innkeeper insists that the burro is dead but seems unphased by Juan's conversation with him. We are led to wonder if the innkeeper herself may be dead and just not realize it. We also get our first story about Juan's mother and Comala

Rulfo's narrative style in Pedro Paramo is very interesting and at times confusing. Juan begins the narration, but soon we hear a sort of omniscient narrator tell us about Pedro Paramo's life. There also seems to be some sort of narrative dialogue going on between Juan and some other entity. This narrative style compliments the overall sparse and fragmentary structure of the whole novel. But even as sparse as his writing style seems, we still get a very rich picture of the town of Comala and of Juan's mother and Pedro Paramo's lives. Rulfo's writing has this great gothic feel within a modernist style or structure. It reminded me of New Islands in that sense. Also in that as I read it, I was not sure what was real or what was fantasy or perception. But in Pedro Paramo, the characters are, indeed, ghosts.

Bombal- New Islands

The first story in New Islands- The Final Mist was really incredible and a great introduction to Bombal, I think. In it she exposes a lot of the themes central to her writing- our relationship to nature, sexuality, alienation from our sexuality and from nature, patriarchal social norms like marriage(even to your cousin). Her writing style is so interesting. Even when she is not writing in first person, which is rare, she appears to be. She changes tenses and perspectives and stops to meditate often and in strange places. She speaks through her punctuation and it affects her tone incredibly. Her writing has a very stream-of-consciousness feel to it even though she maintains a story. It isn't character driven in a typical way, though we are always inside the protagonists head. It is about what events mean.

Her writing is so erotic... I imagine it was fairly shocking for the time and a definite signature of feminism and sexual empowerment. It was interesting to me though that while she clearly considers herself a feminist writer, her female characters seem, in the end, to need saved by a man. Or at least to be in such pain because they lack the love of a man. Also, out of curiosity I looked up a picture of her and was surprised to find that she had a very mod haircut and a total lack of "braids." She must have chosen not be tethered to the earth like she believes all females must be.


I thought it was interesting that even though The Final Mist and The Tree were so similar in subject matter, nature did not signify the same thing. In The Final Mist, the woman seems to be at war with nature- the fog, the lake(though she feels at home there, it also kills the gardener and keeps her from knowing the truth about the stranger), the storms. She finds solace in the warm bedrooms of the stranger's home and Daniel's where the outside is shrouded in fog and silence. In The Tree Brigida feels comforted by the tapping of the rubber tree. Though I guess, in the end, it was blocking the too-bright light from her dressing room and actually protecting her from the outside as well.

The Final Mist reminded me of a noir film or novel... Bombal is so dark. It's definitely a beautiful dark, but incredibly pessimistic. Just the final paragraph of The Final Mist was so sad.

"Following him toward an infinity of insignificant tasks; toward a thousand trifling amusements; following him to live correctly- to cry from habit and smile
out of duty; following him to die, one day, correctly.

Around us the fog settles over everything like a shroud."

There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe

Borges- The Aleph

This section was incredible. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm guessing that The Aleph was put out as a collection of short stories far before it was compiled into this bigger collection. It seems as though these short stories must certainly have been written within a few years of each other or at least in the same decade or period for Borges. The obvious or underlying theme of each one has something to do with infinity, circular time, duality(of all sorts), mazes, mirrors, perception, the universe, the land, dreams, religion, the meaning of God. Some stories have even more specific ties- tigers are important symbols in both The Zahir and The Writing of the God. While in The Zahir, the tiger is said to have been the zahir and one point and caused men to "forget the universe." In The Writing of God, the mystery of the universe, of God, is written in the tiger's spots. The tiger can both torment a man's soul and lead him to God. He ends The Zahir, "perhaps behind the coin (the zahir) is God."

I also noticed that the number 14 was mentioned in at least two of the stories, and when it was, was synonymous with infinity. I tried to research this but came up empty-handed. It seems that this is another one of Borges constructions.

Other themes or points

• the transformation of man... the idea that there is one exact moment in a man's life that tells him who he is.

• everything is everything else and one in the same, and nothing at all:

"There are an infinite number of things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other." (240)

"The house is as big as the world- or rather, it is the world."(221)

"I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."(191)

• Aristotle vs. Plato

• memory and forgetting

• Qu'ran's two faces(duality)

• tigers are also part of Deutsches Requiem and Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth

• labyrinths

• blurred lines between life and death and dreams and the relationship of each to the other

• identity

• what God can and cannot do

• destiny, reincarnation, existence

Borges- Ficciones

The Garden of Forking Paths...
I love the way the first few stories in this section are constructed almost in the way Vonnegut constructs his novels- by creating made-up religions and different conditions of reality or unreality. The idea that without thinking about it we expect even fictional stories to adhere to or be based on our excepted and understood truths or environment is something I'd never really thought about. Borges explains his method best in the forward:

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius reminds me so much of House of Leaves( a novel written around a novel that does not exist but is quoted from and references a great number of other books that do not exist) or Tolkien. It's interesting that the story ends with Borges commenting that the ideas and even objects of Tlon are becoming so accepted and integrated into the world of his story that eventually people will not know what history is truth and what history has been made up. Which I think could possibly refer to our acceptance of things like religious histories and ideologies as truth.

The extent to which Borges constructs a language and culture for the people of Tlon complete with epistemological and metaphysical theories is ridiculous and almost unbelievable. The solid paragraphs of made-up information and facts would be overwhelming if they weren't perfectly balanced by and suspended among these dazzling weightless descriptions or observations. His ability to write a sentence that embeds itself in my head so beautifully or resonates so incredibly with me reminds me of Marquez or Camus- it is incredibly dense but feels so personal.

*I'm sorry if this isn't the most coherent. I'm nursing a mean cold and my brain is fuzzy. I'll try to add to it, but I wanted to get something down before class.

The Underdogs

My first impression of this novel was that the way in which he translator wrote the dialog was kind of funny and awkward. For some reason, I don't picture rural Mexican accent translating exactly into a backwoods southern accent. The dialogue, translated this way, gave the whole novel a very Cormac McCarthy feel. I had to keep reminding myself that it was taking place in Mexico, not Texas. And it felt out of place and very Americanized for a novel about the land, culture, and revolution of Mexico. I just wonder how different the atmosphere of the dialog would be if I had read it in Spanish.

I found it interesting that while the Underdogs could definitely fall under the canopy of naturalist literature, Azuelas still used a lot of very modern devices. For example, he changes tenses often when he steps outside the narrative to almost describe the character's motives and explain what is going on or give backstory. The way he did this once or twice in every chapter gave the novel an interesting flow. The perspectives shifted around quite a bit from Demetrio to Luis to the Federal officer and a few other characters. Hearing these different perspectives seems very important to studying and understanding any political uprising or war. I think the change of perspectives also helps us remember that in a war not only are all sides guilty of horrors but each person also has a story and a family and some innocence.

Loss of idealism and innocence is also a big themes in Underdogs. There is a very clear shift from part one to part two. By part two, Demetrio and his men have already started to lose the meaning of the revolution. Demetrio is seduced by power and success and his men have started looting and destroying the villages they pass through. At the beginning they saw the civilians as their own people but now they kill them for sport and rape their daughters. They have become all that they hated before in the Federales. Luis seems to be the only one who objects to their new habits, but only because it will give them a bad reputation, not because it goes against what they used to believe in- the revolution for the very people they have begun to terrorize.

By part three, Demetrio's inner circle is made up mostly of ex-Federales. He has turned into a war machine and the revolution has burned everything in its wake. The village people look at the soldiers with disdain and every man has been made to choose a side- there are no peaceful men left, Demetrio says, only Federales, revolutionaries, and deserters. And though the men have plenty of bills and gold in their pockets, the land is torn apart and there is no food for them to buy with all their money. They began to fight to save their land and their peaceful way of life but they have, in the end, destroyed it.

In the last few pages Demetrio is reunited with his wife and his son (who no longer recognizes him). When she asks him why he is still fighting, he tosses a rock over the side of the canyon and says "Look at the rock, how nothin' can stop it now..."

Other points:

• I thought it was interesting how both Demetrio's group and the Federales at least once, referred to the other as "dogs down below"

• Also, the way Azuelas describes the setting in this novel is so beautiful and rich. Every time they are in the Sierra, everything is described as blue, and as soon as they move to meet the rest of the revolutionary groups and invade the first town full of Federales everything is gray or white and smokey. In the last few pages Demetrio notices the sapphire mountain tops, but the second to last paragraph they are covered in white. "The Sierra is dressed in gala. Above its inaccessible peaks, a pure white fog descends like a snowy veil on a bride's head."

• Captain Solis is sort of the sage of the revolutionary army. He sees what the war is doing to the country and the people, but he is dismissed by Luis and the others as an idiot

• I noticed the ciccadas at the very beginning of the novel and again at the very end. Maybe they are a symbol for how the people of Mexico feel in the midst of the war and the pulling apart of their land- like helpless buzzing insects. They could also be a symbol of nature and consistency in the Sierra even after all the fighting.