Phoenix, 2005, 506 p, plus i p summary, i p about the author, ii p “For discussion”, x p “A walk in the footsteps of The Shadow in the Wind” including ii p maps. Translated by Lucia Graves from the Spanish La sombra del viento, Editorial Planeta, 2002.

Well, this all started out promisingly enough with ten year old Daniel Sempere being taken by his father to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books to pick one out for himself, to keep it alive. This conceit hinted that the novel would be one of those books about books and the importance of the word like The Name of the Rose, especially since Daniel is told, “Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens,” but the novel soon veers off into more conventional unravelling a mystery territory.

The book Daniel picks is titled The Shadow of the Wind by one Julián Carax. Daniel reads it and is enthralled, wishing to find out more about its author and any other books he may have written. But Carax is an elusive creature. Very few of his books (most of which sold in pitifully small numbers) survive. In addition a mysterious man going under the name Lain Coubert, a character in Carax’s Shadow of the Wind, is going around buying them up – in order to burn them. Already we are in a recursive situation, a loop which is in essence claustrophobic. Too many of the characters in the book are bound up either with Daniel, Carax or both.

Daniel’s first infatuation is with the blind Clara, quite a few years his senior. Their (necessarily) chaste relationship – and her entanglement with her piano teacher – is somewhat reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez but as if off-key, though paradoxically, given Marquez’s magic realism, none of this aspect of Zafón’s novel feels natural. It appears forced, occurring only at Zafón’s will. Other backstories read like information dumping and there are too many parallels between Carax’s life and Daniel’s; between his friend Tomás Aguilar and Carax’s, Jorge Aldaya, between his first lover Beatriz Aguilar and Carax’s, Penélope Aldaya.

As an example of an authorial misstep Zafón has Daniel tell Bea about Carax’s The Shadow of the Wind that, “This was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life,” inviting us to draw a parallel that had been obvious long before. Yes, Daniel’s friend, Fermín Romero de Torres, is a memorable character but the villain of the piece, Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero, tends to the cartoonish, his obsession with Carax insufficiently founded – at least to me. There are, too, frequent recapitulations of the story to other characters. The Aldaya mansion on the Avenida del Tibidabo, though, is a gothic enough creation, along with the statues in its grounds.

Attempts at background verisimilitude also fall down at times. An old quack’s “sole remaining wish was for Barcelona’s football team to win the league, once and for all, so that he could die in peace.” This is an odd observation for someone to make in 1954 as Barcelona had most recently won La Liga in season 1952-3 and also the one before. Again in 1954 a restaurant manager apologises for poor service by saying, “‘But s’afternoon, it being the European Cup semi-final, we’ve had a lot of customers. Great game.’” The first European Cup semi-finals did not take place till 1956. Similarly there is a mention of the League Cup – but the La Liga Cup did not start till 1984 (and only lasted four years.) Did Zafón perhaps have the Copa del Rey in mind?

Still, “‘Mysteries must be solved, one must find out what they hide,’” and I suppose this is what keeps us reading but while it may be true that, “People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t complicated enough,” I’m not sure I agree with the assertion, “‘When we stand in front of a coffin, we only see what is good, or what we want to see.’”

Set where and when it is The Shadow of the Wind could not avoid touching on the fallout of the Spanish Civil War but it does so only tangentially. It is eminently readable but in the end it doesn’t manage to achieve the stature that the author is clearly striving for. Quite simply in this book Zafón is trying too hard.

Pedant’s corner:- “a couple of nuns …. mumbling under their breath” (ought really to be breaths,) polanaises (polonaises; this correct form is used later in the book,) “froze the blood in my veins” (really? Especially when followed on the next page by “my blood froze,”) the Barcelós apartment (Barceló’s,) for goodness’ sake (goodness’s,) automatons (okay it’s acceptable in English – as well as automata, the plural from the Greek,) “none of the drawings were more than rough sketches” (none was more than a rough sketch,) faggotry (a USianism,) “‘It’s my fault,’ I said. I should have said something…’” (missing open quote mark after “I said.”) “An act of charity or friendship on behalf of an ailing lady” (‘on the part of’ is meant,) “which violated at least five of six recognized mortal sins,” (shouldn’t that be “five or six”? – and violated here seems to mean committed,) morgue (mortuary,) with sudden heartfelt hug (with a sudden,) catlike smile the smile of a mischievous child (a missing comma after the first smile,) garoted (garrotted,) Jacintaʻs vision (has a backward, and upside down, apostrophe,) “so that he can have a brain scan” (a brain scan? In 1954?) Barnarda (her name everywhere else in the novel is Bernarda,) passion (passion,) a benzine lighter (the term used in English is cigarette lighter,) “and whose specialty was Latin, trigonometry, and gymnastics, in that order,” (that’s three specialties.)
Plus points for “not all was lost”.

Twelve Stories, Penguin, 2013, 195 p + 7 p Prologue. Translated from the Spanish Doce Cuentos Peregrinos by Edith Grossman. First published by Mondadori España, S A, 1992.
Borrowed from a threatened library.

In the Prologue Why Twelve, Why Stories, Why Pilgrims? Márquez describes the genesis of this collection in a series of notes for 64 stories – some of which became newspaper articles or films – and their final conception as a thematic whole. After many false starts, vicissitudes and throwings-away it came to the point where, “Sometimes I felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.” Most of the twelve concern South Americans adrift in a continent inhabited by those strange people with their strange ways, Europeans.
The opening story, “Bon Voyage, Mr President”, features a deposed President in search of medical treatment in Geneva, where he is recognised by a countryman. They come to regard each other warmly. South America is said to be, “A continent conceived by the scum of the Earth without a moment of love: the children of abductions, rapes, violations, infamous dealings, deceptions, the union of enemies with enemies.”
In The Saint, a man spends twenty-two years in Rome trying to secure the canonisation of his daughter, who had died of an essential fever. When the cemetery back home was relocated to make way for a dam her exhumed body was found to be uncorrupted and weightless.
The narrator of Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane is waiting for his flight when he catches sight of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in the lobby of Charles de Gaulle airport. She turns out to be on the next seat to him on the plane but not a word is spoken between them.
I Sell My Dreams is the story of the strange intersections its narrator had with a Colombian exile in Vienna who had a talent for dreaming who uses this to make her way in life. Whether or not the talent was charlatanic is up to the reader to decide.
In “I Only Came to Use the Phone” a woman’s car breaks down. She is desperate to phone her husband to tell him she’ll be late. She finally gets a lift from a bus but unfortunately its destination is an asylum.
The Ghosts of August sees a family visit the castle in Tuscany built by Ludovico, who killed his lady in their bed then turned his dogs on himself. The bedchamber has been preserved, bloodstained bedsheets and all. Nevertheless they stay overnight.
Maria dos Prazeres is an old woman who has a dream she will die and spends the next three years preparing for it. Among other things she teaches her dog to weep.
In Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen, after her husband dies, Señora Prudencia Linero makes a journey to Rome to see the Pope. On landing in the country she does not like Italy nor the prospect of the seventeen Englishmen in the lobby of the hotel she is shown to. She dines elsewhere.
The Tramontana is a days-long wind which blows through Cadaqués, the effects of which (even the prospect of which) drives people to suicide.
Despite her surname, the Miss Forbes of Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness is a German governess hired to look after two boys spending summer in the Island of Pantelleria. She is strict and they resent it.
Arising from a chance remark about the poetry of household objects Light is Like Water (“You turn the tap and out it comes”) is a very magic realist tale of two boys transforming light into the ocean of their dreams.
The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow is a tragic tale of two young lovers, Billy Sánchez and Nena Daconte. At a reception on arriving in Spain on their honeymoon she pricks her hand on a bouquet of roses. At first this does not seem serious but the bleeding will not stop. When they eventually reach a hospital – in Paris! – he is not allowed to accompany her and told there is no visiting except on Tuesdays, six days away.
These are tales of misfits, delusion and misunderstandings mostly seen from aslant. Good stuff.

Pedant’s corner:- organdy (organdie,) detact (detect,) spit (spat,) carabineriere (carabiniere?)

Penguin, 2014, 186 p. Translated from the Spanish La Mala Hora by Gregory Rabassa. First published in Spain in 1968.

Borrowed from a threatened library.

In Evil Hour is a very South American tale set in a town where the inhabitants keep expecting the bad old days of summary execution to return. In amongst descriptions of various relationships in the town there are vignettes such as the local telegrapher spending his free time sending poems and novels to the lady telegrapher in another town. The church is plagued by mice and the town by the clandestine posting of scurrilous notes on its walls while it sleeps. These notes, which the text calls lampoons, contain only gossip everybody knows but have created tension which spills over when César Montero kills the local troubadour Pastor for an alleged affair with his wife. The mayor at first tries to keep things low-key but later, as the tensions rise, imposes martial law and street patrols. There is a hint at the end that despite arrests being made these measures have been ineffective. Apart from the constant threat of governmental violence/coercion the book seems to deal with the more mundane aspects of life and is not as invested with magic realism as others of Márquez’s works. It is very readable though; a testament both to Márquez and his translator, Gregory Rabassa.

Pedant’s corner:- Father Ángel is rendered once as Angel.

Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, 128 p + ix p introduction by Candia McWilliam.

Spark is another important Scots writer with whom the 2014 challenge has given me the impetus to catch up. My only familiarity with her work up to now has been a BBC TV adaptation of The Girls of Slender Means, plus the TV and film versions of this title, all from way back. Candia McWilliam’s introduction to this Penguin Modern Classics edition describes Spark as “the greatest living Scots writer of prose.”

I must say I found reading this to be an odd experience. There was just something about the writing style that didn’t sit well with me. Three times in the first few pages and intermittently thereafter we are told that Rose Stanley is famous for sex (or sex appeal), we are also frequently told that Monica Douglas is good at Mathematics. Yet we are never shown these traits, either via dialogue or in any other way, we simply have to take the narration’s word for it. Frequently, too, mention is made of things that will happen later than the immediate moment of the text as the narrative slips forwards from events in the 1930s to post war and backwards again.

Now; foreshadowing is fine, essential even, but this is not foreshadowing, it is relating. McWilliam sees this “proleptic¹ use of time” as a strength. I found it irritating. (In this respect The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has something in common with the first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.) It is as if the novel is a life recalled. Yet the narrative adopts multiple third person viewpoints, its events are not seen from one character’s perspective; or, rather, some events in it could not have been observed by a single narrator.

Miss Jean Brodie herself, teacher at Marcia Blaine School for Girls, is egregiously self-centred, demagogue rather than pedagogue, neglecting the wider needs of her pupils to indulge in reminiscences of her fallen fiancé, her tastes in art and her leanings towards the fascisti, brooking no contradiction: Leonardo is not the greatest Italian painter; that is Giotto, “he is my favourite.” Her contention, in a later conversation with Sandy Stranger, that she loved art teacher Teddy Lloyd, married to someone else, is not, however, borne out by her actions, which, some descriptions of her interactions with her pupils apart, are always given us at one remove. Her famous catch-phrases, “la crème de la crème,” “I am in my prime,” are there to be sure, but after the first third or so the book concerns itself more with her chosen girls (known as the Brodie Set,) particularly Sandy. At the end I felt, perhaps due to the shadows cast by the TV and film versions I have seen, Brodie was actually more of an absence than a presence. The nature of the final betrayal of Miss Brodie was also problematic for me. No doubt she was a dangerous woman (not least, dangerous to men) but there were plenty of people in Britain in 1938 – even in 1940! – who would not have held Miss Brodie’s political attractions against her.

Yes there are human truths here, Teddy’s inability to paint a portrait without it becoming a representation of Jean rings very true, young minds can be susceptible to influence, but the artifice of the writing made it very hard for me to suspend my disbelief. To judge whether or not Spark is “the greatest living Scots writer of prose” I’ll need to look out for The Girls of Slender Means or others of her novels as, on this evidence, I’d have to say not. (Or am I merely saying that Leonardo is not my favourite?)

¹I am not convinced Spark’s use of time in the book is anticipatory.

Due to Eastercon I also missed commemorating the passing of Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez.

I have read only two of his novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera but do not regret reading either of them and would happily sit down to other works of his were my tbr pile not so high already. Maybe when it’s shrunk a bit, then.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez: 6/3/1927 – 17/4/2014. So it goes.

Translated from the Spanish El amor en los tiempos del cólera by Edith Grossman.
Penguin, 2007, 348 p. First published by Editorial Oveja Nregra Ltda, Bogota, 1985.

The opening sentence, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love,” hits us immediately with two of the great triumvirate of literary preoccupations; love and death. (Bitter almonds is the smell of cyanide.) The only one remaining is sex. Sex does come later but not till well into the book.

By this gambit we are invited to believe that the story is to be that of Dr Juliano Urbino de la Calle, who has been called in to certify the death (by suicide) of his friend and chess opponent Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The main focus of the novel is, however, on Florentino Ariza, who conceived a passion for Dr Urbino’s wife, Fermana Daza, in both their youths, and has maintained it ever since. In some respects this aspect of the novel has echoes in Orhan Pamuk’s similarly obsessed protagonist in The Museum of Innocence.

The action of Love in the Time of Cholera mainly takes place in an unnamed city somewhere on the delta of the River Magdalena on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, though there is a late voyage up and down the river.

The narrative flows between the three main agonists, detailing aspects of their lives in the decades over which the story rummages back and forward. Marquez does nothing so crude as to devote sections to one character, he weaves in and out of the three’s concerns without a break. In the background are other colourful characters but the lives of these people are well-to-do, we see little, if any, of more impoverished inhabitants. Flashes of the history of the country, which has seen several civil wars which were really all one war, appear only in passing, which is, of course, how the well-to-do would have experienced them. Only by inference is the possibility of atrocities hinted at, for example, “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.”

Joseph Conrad (in his pre-novelist incarnation as Joseph T K Korzeniowski) gains a brief mention as being involved in some sort of arms deal.

Interspersed through the novel Marquez gives us some acute aperçus.
“The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men.”
“If he had told the truth not … anybody in this whole town would have loved him as much as they did.”
“… too young to know the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good,”
“… nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
“It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”
“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root.”

There was an instance of odd wording in the translation, “for he did compete not out of ambition for the prize, but” surely ought to be either, “for he competed not out of ambition, but…” or “for he did not compete out of ambition, but…”

Love in the Time of Cholera bears the stamp of a novelist who knows the inner workings of the human heart, its constancies (and inconstancies.)

Translated from the Spanish Cien años de soledad by Gregory Rabassa. Penguin, 1998, 432p

The first sentence of this book reads, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” I blogged about it here. While the Colonel is an important character, as this could be described as a family saga he is not the main one, the book is not his reminiscences. And we don’t get to the ice till page 18.

This is characteristic of Márquez’s approach. Chapter after chapter begins with a revelation of sorts that takes pages later in the narrative finally to be reached – a tic which can be annoying till you come in the end to expect it.

Not till p 402 do we encounter a rationale, “A century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would go on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle,” by which time we are winding down to the end.

Throughout this story of the town of Macondo and of the Buendía family who founded it there is an enormous amount told rather than shown, and not much in the way of dialogue. Given the propensity for children to be named after previous family members it can also be difficult to keep track of who exactly is who among the plethoras of Aurelianos, José Arcadios and Amarantas. Certainly all of human life is here, not to mention sex and death; but the characters don’t understand one other at all well. As a result the word solitude tolls regularly throughout.

Added to the mix is the magic realism. One character suddenly ascends to heaven and it’s not remarked as unusual, another comes surrounded by clouds of yellow butterflies, it rains non-stop for four years, a child is born and has a pig’s tail, several thousand people are killed by the army and their bodies carried off by rail to be thrown into the sea and barely anyone remembers. This episode may be one of induced mass amnesia, though. There is also a woman who, Miss Havisham-like, shuts herself away in her house for decades until she dies. Dickens as a magic realist; now there’s a thought.

For anyone who might find it a stumbling block I should mention that the translation was into American English.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude is not an easy, nor at times comforting, read. The struggle against governments of various stripe – and the powerful forces which back them up – is presented as unavailing even when they are apparently willing to compromise.

Márquez’s thesis is perhaps best illustrated on p 408, “…they must always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

I’m glad I’ve read this as I felt that my unfamiliarity with Márquez was an omission to be remedied but it all does seem rather a long winded way to say, “carpe diem.”

I’ve not posted much about the philosophy or mechanics of writing, only implied things in the course of my reviews of the books I have read in the past eleven months.

There have of course been the Linguistic Annoyances posts but these have been mainly about general misuses of English and not particularly writerly.

Now, though, I have read a first sentence which demands comment.

To begin: there is foreshadowing (essentially the dropping of clues) – a necessary element if you’re to be fair to the reader. Some writers eschew this subtlety in favour of more or less telling you what’s going to happen (not good in my opinion.) Then there is just cheating.

One of a book’s first paragraphs that I well remember is from Robert Silverberg’s Kingdoms of The Wall. I quote:-
“This is the book of Poilar Crookleg, who has been to the roof of the World at the top of the Wall, who has seen the strange and bewildering gods that dwell there, who has grappled with them and returned rich with the knowledge of the mysteries of life and death. These are the things I experienced, this is what I learned, this is what I must teach you for the sake of your souls. Listen and remember.”

This paragraph does several things. It lays out – in its first twenty five words! – the SF discontinuity from our world, it introduces a degree of jeopardy, it promises adventure and revelations, it offers redemption to its world’s putative readership and, by extension, to us. If you’re intrigued, get yourself a copy and read it. (Read any Silverberg from his mature period, you won’t be disappointed.)

However, the paragraph doesn’t foreshadow as such, it tells. It is close to, if not over, the border of cheating. Yet somehow we know the author is in full command of his story and we are in safe hands.

Now consider:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

An author must gain our attention, of course, but isn’t this a little extreme?

Yes, this might make you want to read on to find out why and how Colonel Buendía (presumably the main character) faced the firing squad, and the relevance of the ice. Yes, the author is definitely in full command and clearly knows what he is doing. But!

It’s cheating. The writer hasn’t yet earned the right for us to continue. He hasn’t engaged us with the character or his situation. It doesn’t matter even if the whole novel concerns the character’s reminiscences in the moments before the order to fire, the enticement is artificial, a shortcut to the involvement with the character that it is the writer’s job to engender over pages of close encounter. In a way we are being short changed here. As we also were with the Silverberg extract, since the narrator addresses us at one remove.

And there is another danger with this sort of thing. I quoted the second extract to the good lady and she remarked she wouldn’t bother with continuing to read a book that started in such a way. There would be little point, because the tension has gone.

Even if, which I suspect in this case, we are being deliberately misdirected (especially if we are being misdirected?) it is still a cheat.

The second quote is of course the opening to one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. One I am finally in the course of reading.

It has been said that ordinary writers may plagiarise, but great ones steal. Perhaps great ones cheat as well.