Peter Damian Bellis

I'll start by saying that I think it's unfortunate that Javier Pedro Zabala never had a chance to see his work published. The Mad Patagonian (apparently his one and only work) is a massive and extraordinary 1210 pages of great literature that spans over centuries, continents and cultures yet seemingly effortlessly manages to link them all together seamlessly. It's one of the rare works of literature that has multiple philosophical, political and narrative and historical dimensions that are show more all powerfully and equally matched.

Stylistically Zabala's writing is a composite of multiple influences...whether reminding of specific writers or particular genres but always maintaining an utterly modern tone. From book to book (and there are 9 books of varying lengths that make up the text of the Mad Patagonian) these influences come out one right after another. For me it looked like this:

1. Roberto Bolano--which shouldn't surprise anyone who reads the 52 page introduction as Bolano and Zabala corresponded in writing often and met up on at least two occasions. Bolano's influence is particularly strong for the first several hundred pages.

2. Louis Ferdinand Céline kind of makes an appearance in book 4 with an Admiral Bragueton (Journey to the end of the night) like episode but...

3. Alvaro Mutis is the writer that book 4 reminds me most of.

4. Roberto Arlt--there are some almost eerie textual similarities in the noir-ish like 5th book to the author of The Seven Madmen/Flamethrowers. Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba I might add that

5. Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba would almost make the perfect companion piece though Kushner's book came out well after Zabala's death.

6. Alain Robbe-Grillet--the last 3 books all have a kind of a nouveau roman edge very reminiscent of that French writer.

Others----> 7. Don Delillo 8. Paul Auster 9. Albert Camus 10. Jorge Luis Borges.

A bit on characterization that I hope will be helpful for anyone who reads the book:

There are two genealogies of the Escoraz family that go back to 19th century Spain at the beginning of the text--one for the family tree of Andres and Ana and the other the family tree of Arturo and Verona. These are very useful to check back on from time to time. There are a lot of characters in the 9 books and two of the three main characters Escolastica Escoraz Vda de Miranda (otherwise known by her nickname Tika) and Isidora Escoraz Calzada (who IMO is the most central of all figures--appearing in all parts of the book) will be found in these family trees--one to each. The third central figure is of the on again off again college teacher Travis Lauterbach who is a main character in parts 1 and 3. It also helps to keep track of names if only because some of the more important ones help to link from one book to another. I made notes as I went along because when you're reading 1210 pages and there are a lot of different characters it is handy to be able to look back and say 'oh-okay--that's.....blah, blah, blah'. IMO unless you have a really prodigious memory--keeping notes will really enhance this work for you.

On the plotting--the book starts kind of in present (or not that long ago) time in Part 1--then in Part 2 goes back to 19th century Spain--moving into the 20th century and in Book 5 it's like late 50's very early 60's pre-Revolutionary Cuba and then 60's-70's-early 80--ish Florida. In Part 3 we're pretty much back to present time. Some characters cross over and some don't but the ones who do are the keys to how the parts intersect. To me in it's own way the Mad Patagonian reminds me a bit of Perec's 'Life: A User's manual' in how Zabala accomplishes all the intersecting that he does.

Which is to say that reading the Mad Patagonian was for me like capturing lightning in a bottle. It is a book that I'd want on whatever desert island I would be shipwrecked on and to my mind easily comparable in range, multi-dimensionality and execution to my two favorite epics of Latin American fiction---Bolano's 2666 and Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral. IMO it is a flat out masterpiece and I would encourage anyone at all interested in reading great literature to go out and get him/herself a copy. show less

If William Faulkner were alive today I'm thinking he would really dig this. Peter Damian Bellis proving the Southern Gothic novel is alive and kicking takes us on a leaky boat alligator hunt into some of the murkiest swamps of the deep south. Thaddeus Jacobs the ne'er do well adopted--then excommunicated son of a tent revivalist preacher living almost as a hermit on an abandoned island is the stuff of local legend. Many of those living in the nearest nearby locality look at him show more superstitiously as Lucifer in the flesh. He's spent his life surviving by thrift and guile. When Kilby and Jonas Lee--two trouble happy juvenile delinquents catch him napping with a basketful of live crabs they almost get away with them. Almost--but not quite. Broken up into narrative parts Bellis's Conjure Man (reminiscent of Faulkner's Sound and the Fury) tells its tale through the voices of the middle aged Thaddeus trying to find his peace with God and the world about him and a young Huck Finn-ish like Kilby who sees the world always with fresh and opportunistic eyes. Hoodoo and superstition--trumpet players and shape changing demons--wild alcoholic reveries and crazy faith healing orgies and at the end of the line is the biggest, meanest, nastiest alligator in creation looking to eat whatever comes within its range. The entire shebang is here pretty much of what you might expect from a Southern Gothic novel--the writing and plotting clever and witty. A very very entertaining read and one I would very much recommend. show less

I loved the magical realism that closed the book--highlighted by Jane's "ghost."

After all the debate between the Turk, the burly man, and Jane about "nihilism/stoicism/living for the moment" and a more spiritual conception of eternity and afterlife, Jane's Purgatory seemed to affirm her view (women are always right, after all!). Yet, in the conventional sense, die she did and left behind a little girl, whom Nkechi fostered.

The closing scene highlights my initial impression more:

"But now it show more was different. They were no longer waiting. The quiet stillness from before had been replaced by the mechanical hum of the plane."

Perhaps it is the fact that I just re-read Dante's Commedia and am re-reading Hamlet at present, but I found this final section to be an analogue of Dante's ascent: from the Inferno of guerrilla warfare and bloody revolutions in Africa; to the in-between (farmhouse) passage of the Purgatorio; to the peaceful heights of Paradiso (the plane). "They were no longer waiting" seems to me to parallel the passage from Purgatory to the heavenly sphere.

I also noted a blend of Borges's story, "The Aleph," where the characters become entranced by all of the universe concentrated in a single point, a portal to see all of Time at once, and Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return:

"It suddenly seemed to her that everything that had ever happened was happening again, all at once. It was as if here...time converged upon itself, a spider web of sparkling shadows and infinite contradictions, a perfect symmetry of purpose and creation, all of it becoming a single fixed point."

Overall, I appreciate how, illumined by the Turk/Jame debate, our characters are in a world of chaos and contradiction. They are limited to being kings and queens bounded within the nutshell of their own mind (to take a cue from Hamlet). Each must confer upon this paradox their own interpretation in order to cope--and even though the burly man is painted as indifferent, this is still but a stance from which to achieve a pseudo-Turk-like stoicism. show less

A flagship shelf-stopper from the stellar River Boat Books.

Is this book for you? At over half a million words, it's likely to keep you busy for a while. Luckily, the beginning is rhythmic and fast-paced. The layered complexities and dense historical detail comes later, once you get to know some key players, are acclimatized to the atmosphere, and once you revel with these frolicsome rogues for a while. In terms of difficulty, it is about as challenging as Cloud Atlas, but more than twice as show more long, with similarly strung together novellas, all differing in form and content and characters. It also brings to mind The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll for this reason, but The Mad Patagonian, in the end, is its own chimerical self.

As detailed in the fabulous introduction, there are many affinities between this book and Bolaño's work, and it is a safe bet that if you enjoyed 2666, you'll find joy in this expansive new offering. Due to the shifting perspective and kaleidoscopic contexts inherent in the novel, I would call the introduction required reading, if not part of the novel - a tenth layer hidden in plain sight - and it may benefit your reading experience to peruse the articles on the publisher's website after you have completed the last page, to better untangle the history of the book, its themes and integral motifs.

Rife with references to poetry, philosophy, theology, mysticism, pop culture, conspiracies, history, and much more, it does not often get bogged down by erudition or allusion. From the start, its capacity to engage the reader stems from its creative use of language and characters.

The novel explores, among a vast quantity of other themes, the pursuit of paradise, the possibility of salvation, redemption, and oblivion, and multigenerational connections, vendettas and familial gravitas and the inheritance of culture. Coherence and the malleability of history is one of its main preoccupations, leading to diverging interpretations and recursive speculation by the various narrators, protagonists and bit players.

Partaking of some elements of noir, it also experiments with barroom storytelling, police procedure, the epistolary form, diary entries, historical reportage, journalistic techniques, dream sequences, straight up surrealism and magical realism, hyperrealism (in terms of detail-oriented description), tropes of the bildungsroman, palimpsests and parallel perceptions of metaphysical reality, and a myriad of other belletristic incarnations.

Boiling it all down would never give you, the potential reader, an accurate portrait of this voluminous literary undertaking. But the key components, or driving forces of much of the chronicle are the following: impermanence, inner peace versus outer peace, the political nature of writing and the responsibility of the writer to embody the revolutionary spirit, the 'fragile mirror of our misplaced aspirations,' rebirth and renewal of the human spirit beneath the tyranny of history and cultural expectations, disappearance and the anonymity of the struggling artist, solitude versus the sacred ties of family, God's creation and man's relationship to Him, the question of whether He needs us or we need Him, a journey through the mythic realms of the past, existentialist crises and the idealist delusions of youth, the power of the imagination, the abyss of the self, the personal interpretations and quest for a satisfactory paradise, paranoia in government and relationships, the destructive and instinctual power of sexuality, religious atonement, dissolution and corruption, the transitory nature of art, the function of UFOs, inescapable uncertainty, despair and ephemeral beauty - but the more I seek to summarize, the more essential content falls by the wayside. A proper study of this book's inner recesses would necessitate a professional thesis.

Taking place primarily in Florida, Cuba and Spain, it also includes jaunts to other exotic locales, as the outreaching tentacles of war and suffering between disparate factions and progeny converge symbolically while they diversify in personification. We are confronted with unreliable narrators and criminals, along with a varied cast of outcasts, each with their own burden of hang-ups, fears, ambitions, and lusts.

The influences, according to the Introduction, of Salinger, Henry Miller, Borges (including a cameo), Cortázar, Bolaño, de Sade, Vila-Matas, Kafka, Breton, Dante, Foucault, and Nietzsche can be found in the pages to follow. But the tone - what about that? It is reminiscent of nostalgic Hollywood stills, moments in archival film, sepia-tone landscapes peopled primarily by Latin American men and women, wandering a lush, urban apocalypse of cardboard sunsets, dragging behind them like disembodied spirits their multitudinous coping mechanisms, the evidence of their own authenticity, the internal maps of escape to Devilish liaisons, always surrounded by Consumerist empires, haunted by the voices of crushed cultures, desire-laden ghosts, hypocritical tyrants, and festering with metropolitan numbness, they are the boiled beach bums and beached angelic dolphins, epitomizing shame, exasperation, and humiliation in the face of murder, depravity, disenchantment and a strangely symbolic omnipresent man with a metal detector, while their looming innocence and lost opportunities, the radiance of their souls within their bodies, their self-defeating investigations of wrongdoings, allow them to brave the seas of their own mortality, crossing an "ocean of trouble" to "paint their newborn self across the sky." Amid this crippling self-awareness and shattered faith is a tempest of doubt. Angels constantly dance on the point of a needle, and hallucinogenic, tilted reality reigns until the half-crazed rantings of our subconscious minds smack of prophecy and the ripples of our decisions are cast into the sullied sea of the future. The idea of cellular memory and reincarnation and the alternatives to the Catholic staples of belief are integrated into the legends of downtrodden representatives of the human race in this thorny masterpiece, effectively blurring the edges of its liminal space until the fictive corpus drifts into our cerebral firmament to subsume our simple complacency.

And yet. The chaos within us makes us human.

We must either accept the way the world is, or at least as it appears to be, and so we must buy into the propaganda that imprisons everyone else. Or we must embrace the world as we think it should be, what some would call paradise. But we must choose, and whatever we choose will be considered madness by those who would have made a different choice.

Life is a sort of post-traumatic stress induced by birth, and it only gets more harrowing as you age toward inescapable death. How we deal with this tragedy we call living is either our downfall or legacy.

Now,
I am wondering if I am coming down with some kind of strange Patagonian madness. show less