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
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
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?
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?
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