Category Archives: Chilean Literature

Not to Write

Quote

Posted on by
Reply

‘Not to write. That’s the formula. Stand up right now, wash my hands of it and flee. Why do I say flee? Simply go away. I have to be simple. I should go away; then I won’t have to explain anything. I should put down a period and end here.’

‘I don’t want to write for myself. You say that, but deep down you’ve got a need to be read, to go beyond yourself; there is a desire for grandeur, for conquest.’

‘All that’s left is the tormented need to write something, and I don’t know what it is.’

‘Sometimes, the “self” who does what I don’t want to do is, in reality, the one whom I love because he releases me from that stubborn, hermitic no that I am bound to.’

From The Empty Book by Josefina Vicens (translated by David Lauer)

[What begins as an exercise of meta-fiction about a writer struggling to write anything worthwhile develops—this is provisional as I’ve yet to finish a first reading of the novel—into an enquiry into the nature of writing, fiction and why we read fiction (or why we read at all).]

Literary Yearnings

Posted on by
6

On shelves in various rooms of my home are over a thousand books I’ve yet to read. I want to read them all of course. I want also to read the catalogues from the art exhibitions I visit, and the programmes from my regular opera attendances. Then there’s the journals I can’t do without: The White Review, PN Review and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and my weekly TLS, which these days invariably comes late, three or four at the time. I skim the FT daily on my iPad, and the headlines from the Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Times and Washington Post.

In an average year I read around sixty-five books, so in the event of house arrest for unforgivable literary consumerism, I have sufficient reading material for at least fifteen years, slightly less perhaps if I can resist the allure of social media. On the other hand, I’ve decided to spend more time on developing my inept film literacy, so I could possibly stretch existing supplies out for up to twenty years, especially if I make time for those art catalogues and opera programmes.

Surrounded by unread books, unwatched films, with the treasures of London’s galleries within fifteen minutes of my office, why is it that the writers I most want to read are not those on my shelves, but those effectively unattainable because they are not translated into a language I can read?

One of this year’s most thrilling moments was the delivery of Roberto Bazlen’s Notes Without a Text. I’ve been translating fragments for at least a decade from the Biblioteca Adelphi edition. More recently I’ve been possessed by Maria Gabriela Llansol’s work since reading and rereading the Geography of Rebels trilogy. Translating from Portuguese is enjoyably difficult but glacially slow work.

This week I’ve been reading Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read. I am drawn to Zambra’s voice, particularly his essays, translated by Megan McDowell; he writes with precision and extreme generosity. This book gathers essays written for the culture section of a Chilean newspaper. He writes about writing, books he has read, and has fuelled a few more literary yearnings for the difficult to obtain novels of Josefina Vicens and the journals of Paul Léautaud and Raúl Ruiz.

Style of Necessity

Quote

Posted on by
Reply

‘I’m sure Ribeyro knew this phrase of Paul Léautaud’s: “What I most like is literature that is written like a letter.” Léautaud was pointing to a style, the style of necessity. When we read other people’s letters, we are looking for a zone of necessity that is often absent in fiction. No clamouring narrators, no startling characters. In short, it does us good every once in a while to pause happily for a while on the steps that lead up to literature.”

Alejandro Zambra, Not to Read (trans. Megan McDowell)

Missing: twelve years of weekly letters written to my father from school.

Alejandro Zambra: The Private Lives of Trees

Posted on by
4

What are we to make of a fiction in which the main subject fails to appear? “For now,” writes Alejandro Zambra, “Verónica is someone who hasn’t arrived, who still hasn’t returned from her drawing class.” In The Private Lives of Trees the drama is turned inside out, dismantling the expected protagonist-antagonist tension. When Zambra writes, “When [Veronica] returns, the novel will end,” we know that the protagonist, like Godot, will never appear.

If the self-deception inherent in fiction relies on the portrayal of a representative character we can emulate, or with whom we can sympathise, how stable is a story based on the absence of a central subject? Though Verónica is only tangible through anticipation, she is also strangely present – to recall Berger’s critique of oil paintings of the nude – as the spectator in front of the scene. Everything is addressed to Verónica, yet she is, by definition, a stranger.

Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere writes, “how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included”. By dismantling a traditional conception of character in fiction, Zambra asks how we equate characters with people, and how we come to believe in characters that are nothing more than verbal abstractions or constructs.

Alejandro Zambra: My Documents

Posted on by
8

“I abandon books easily. Before, especially when I wrote literary criticism, I had the urge to read books from cover to cover. If I was writing about them, I’d read them twice over. I didn’t enjoy that, in part due to the obligation to say something beyond the obvious. I don’t do that anymore; I became more impulsive—there are just too many books I want to read. Also, I stopped writing about literature, which is cool. I was bureaucratizing the space of reading.”

Alejandro Zambra explains that he became a chaotic reader, abandoning books with ease. Atypically I persisted with Fonseca’s book and with Zambra’s My Documents and was rewarded in both instances by a series of stories that got steadily stronger.

The final story in Zambra’s collection, Artist’s Rendition, is all the more chilling for being so calmly told. A narrator presents a short brutal story about abuse, involving a reader directly with the sort of restricted metafiction that often signals tired and facile writing, but Zambra treats his subject earnestly and succeeds in raising questions about the arbitrariness of meaning and truth.

There is a fair variety to the stories in My Documents, which develop in strength and intensity throughout this collection, echoing themes of memory retrieval, abnegation and envy. After the first two sections I felt mildly bored and wondered whether to abandon the book. I began National Institute, the first story of the third section and was immediately and magnificently absorbed. It was so satisfying that I swallowed the remainder of the stories without getting up from my chair.

My Documents (translated into English very ably by Megan McDowell) is the first book I’ve read by Alejandro Zambra. If you enjoy his work, please recommend something else of his to read.