José Lezama Lima (1910–1976)

Paradiso defeated me. It is a novel that requires more than focused concentration - it also asks for your imagination and devotion. There are narrative blind alleys, excessive (and seemingly irrelevant) erudition, and an unclear sense of time. Ostensibly about Jose Cemi's coming of age, the narrative thread is extremely loose. In order to make any sense of it, I realized that I needed to focus on paragraphs rather than trying to follow a linear story. Each paragraph is like a tone poem, show more loaded with allusion and imagery, and are disconnected from what comes before or after. In a way, I guess Paradiso like many other modernist works, attempts to simulate human consciousness, but I think Virginia Woolf mastered this mode of writing with very few successful imitators. Novels like Paradiso tread the line between art and egotism - what good is telling a story if no one can understand it? Is it just meant to be an abstraction that settles into the subconscious? Or is it a cover for bad writing?

I actually think this is a masterpiece, but it is also so mysterious and overwhelming that I can't say more than that there are some moments of real beauty, some brain-burning imagery (the scarecrows playing chess at the end will stay with me), and just an aesthetic sense of the poet in love with language more than interested in telling a coherent story. show less

I've heard Paradiso being described as pure genius several times, but I just didn't see it. Apart from some beautiful turns of phrase, the prose is supremely turgid; apart from a few interesting situations, the thick shell of this tropical fruit hides a hollow core.

I wanted to like this book-- but it almost felt as if Lezama Lima had merely set himself the challenge of using the greatest possible number of words to tell a story-- and/or were consciously attempting to produce a Cuban version of Ulysses. Insanely flowery, and at times, incomprehensible.

Cortazar loved it, so maybe I'll venture in again someday. Not now. His world is too private, his style way too baroque for me to be enthusiastic about the journey.