Cristina Peri Rossi

In fifteen short stories and a couple of linking essays, Peri Rossi dissects the stages of falling in love and out of it again, with "alone at last" serving as a key-phrase (in different senses) for both processes. Infatuation, cohabitation, the interference of children and rival lovers, and the frustrated quest for the full-stop at the end of a relationship are all illustrated from ironic and slightly offbeat perspectives. Witty and often perceptive in unexpected ways. I think my favourite show more was "Ulva lactuca" (Sea lettuce) — a story that turns out to be all about the journey of a spoonful of soup towards the firmly-closed mouth of a reluctant toddler. show less

If one were to look for an appropriate classification for this book, it would be easy to find a label. Postmodernist fiction? Yes, certainly! Latin American magical realism? Of course! Feminist literature? Without a doubt! Yet, the book is not just any one of these and more than all of these at the same time. So, let's leave the classification attempts aside.

The book starts with a set of disjointed stories, episodes, journeys of the main protagonist Ecks. These journeys are loosely held show more together by a symbolic interpretation of the Tapestry of Creation, an actual piece of 11th century religious art on display in the Cathedral of Girona. Some of the stories are more engaging than others but all of them are filled with literary, historical and cultural references as well as with interesting observations and original aphorisms:

“We have all been exiled from something or someone. I think this is a human condition”
“there are journeys from which one cannot return”
“our days are no different from the past, except in the number of tyrants, their systematic methods and the cold logic with which they lead the world to madness”
“We know nothing about those we love, except our need for their presence”
“the essence of some stories lies precisely in this: they do not change, but remain like citadels or lighthouses facing the irresistible assault of time”

Just like the unchanging stories of the last quote, the characters in the book are static. They do move along, meet and part with other people, but they resist the assault of time, their inner worlds are well formed and are protected from external influences. If you primarily look for a character development in a book, look elsewhere. The story-line does develop though. The disjointed parts slowly come together and culminate in the part of the tapestry devoted to Eve. The story about subjugation of a woman starting from the myth of creation continuing on to our days is where the novel packs its strongest punch, strikes its hardest blow.

The ending is somewhat of a letdown, an anticlimax. Did I mention the numerous sexual scenes or references in the book? I did not. Well, Peri Rossi decides to deliver her ending there in a description of an act performed on stage. The setting is such but the message delivered is an answer to an old riddle: "What is the greatest tribute and homage a man can give to a woman he loves?" You might have guessed the answer, or you might have heard it elsewhere. In any case, I find it a bit at odds with the rest of the book, where us fools are taken on a journey of life, sailing in our ships only to be then abandoned at sea. show less

I picked up this tiny book of poetry, intending to read a handful of poems before pausing to do some other things, but I could not put it down once I started.

State of Exile is about just that. Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay, yet due to the rise of a military dictatorship that banned her books, removed her from her professorship, and forbid her to publish, she eventually choose exile, fleeing to Spain, then Paris, then back to Spain again.

These poems were not written with the intent show more to publish, but to help her process her experience. As such these poems are personal, sometimes biographical, but also bringing in the experiences of other fellow exiles. It wasn't until, much later, after the dictatorships of South America ended, and a new wave of emigrants began arriving from North Africa, that Rossi decided to publish these poems, to give voice to those fleeing their homelands.

These are simple poems, and mostly short, but the rage, the nostalgia, the trauma, the mourning, crackles off of the page. The mundane experiences of poverty, the frustration of language barriers, the disorientation of navigating whole new countries, cities, languages, cultures. The impossibility of return even when the junta has gone away, when the dictator has died.

I love that these poems are presented both in the original Spanish and in English, on facing pages. There is also both a translator's note and a prologue from the author that I loved.

One of my favorite poems was XXIV. An excerpt:

I'm sure that love will be our revenge
to be able to love, still
to be able to love, in spite of everything
in spite of circumstances without where when how
but first, I swear to you —Véronique said to me —
I would like
I would really like
to send some of those sons of bitches to hell,
painlessly, of course,
because I am civilized
and I make love with a condom.

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CWs for SA, bestiality, torture (all as brief mentions) show less

The literature of exile that emerged in the wake of the repressive regimes of the 1960s and 70s allowed Latin American writers to address cosmopolitan themes while incorporating elements from a range of earlier regional forms, from Spanish baroque to Romantic modernismo then vangardismo, from social and political realism to Magic Realism and testimonio.

Cristina Peri Rossi (ex-Uruguayan, settled in Barcelona) lets the allegory of The Ship of Fools—a shipload of the mad and diseased show more abandoned at sea—stand in for the exiled, the battered, and the disappeared. Her fiction is experimental without being obscure, psychologically and emotionally rich without being maudlin. As the characters in The Ship of Fools attempt to come to grips with memory, loss, desire and dislocation, we get a perceptive meditation on language, books, and meaning.

The main character is called Equis (‘X’ or ‘ex-‘?). Having just set foot on the Great White Ship in the opening pages, X is questioned by the Beautiful Passenger: “Is this really your first voyage?” Not exactly, he replies, “I’ve already read about this journey.”

X is the exile, forever on the move, until leaving and arriving become a kind of routine. He has his rituals—the books which he buys as soon as he arrives and settles in a new place are almost always the same: The Bible, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Poe’s stories, Kafkas’s The Trial and Metamorphosis, the lyrics of Catullus and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. A more appropriate reading list for the wayfaring stranger would be hard to imagine. He is also fond of old atlases and drawings of mythical beasts.

Peri Rossi alternates episodes in the lives of her characters with descriptions of the Tapestry of Creation, hanging in the Cathedral of Gerona, “the product of a religious system, a world, that is perfectly concentric and ordered. But such harmony assumes the destruction of those aspects of reality which oppose it; thus it is almost always purely symbolic.”

(The tapestry—beautiful and awe-inspiring—is a kind of totem for the perverse logic woven by the military regimes that justified state terrorism by portraying themselves as the defenders of Christian civilization against ‘subversion.’)

In contrast to the concentric and ordered world of repressive symbols, life for the exile and the battered and the disappeared is one of uncertainty, fluidity, and disconcerting juxtapositions. With cruelty comes absurdity. A friend of X is disappeared, bundled in blankets then stuffed in the trunk of a car, all the while worried for the caged bird left in the apartment alone, perhaps to starve. Suffocating in the dark heat of the trunk, his chief regret is that he will miss opening night at the circus, and particularly the performance of the sweet-voiced blonde lady dwarf, who only the night before he saw respond to the taunts of a saloonkeeper with a burst of violent fury. The disappeared are held in an abandoned cement factory, where the soldiers and officers are predisposed not only to violence but to poetry, and the well-read captives are forced to produce exalted appreciations of their captors’ literary works.

On an island where he stays in a small apartment with a terrace overlooking the town center, X meets Graciela, who represents for him youthful freedom; he tells her she is like “an idea free of historical circumstances”—to which she responds that the young are free “because they can change ideas often, unlike the old, who may change, but not in those things which they consider important.” She proceeds to disarm him psychologically, dismantling his assumptions and questioning his motivations (does he not know himself?) in what reads like a reverse seduction disguised as a philosophical tête à tête. Before such an intellectually autonomous and emotionally assured female character, X suspects that all his own actions are merely deception.

The island of Pueblo de Dios and its little town is one of those places where the energy of the world is polarized, as demonstrated by the magnetism of its tides and the five revelations purported to have occurred there. But, alas, notes X, revelations are always unclear. The prophet speaks not so much to be understood but to be obeyed. In the beginning was the metaphor, then came abbreviations.

Morris, who arrived a long time ago on Pueblo de Dios, rarely leaves his house because other people are disdainful of the strange-sounding words he uses. He explains that his tendency toward extravagant rhetoric is due to the fact that he learned the natives’ language by reading writers and philosophers of the sixteenth century. Other residents of the island include an old English poet whose books are all out of print, a physicist who has developed a fear of electricity, a retired television comedienne, a famous rapist, and a former astronaut, homesick for the moon, in exile from the peacefulness of empty space.

A disquisition by Morris on the city of Albion reads like a 4 page Dadaist riff that takes consideration of the phrase ‘navel-gazing’ to its logical, preposterous conclusion. Morris hopes to publish his memoir, but during an amusing (for the reader) and disheartening (for the writer) exchange with an editor in a publisher’s office, he is unable to respond satisfactorily to her enquiries: “What predominates in your work? Action? Sex? Politics? Is it an optimistic or pessimistic book?” Eventually Morris decides to leave for Africa after falling in love with a precocious 9-year-old boy he meets in the city park.

Graciela quits a teaching job to join Morris, the boy, and his mother sailing away on the Great White Ship. X stays behind, and finds work with a ‘transport company’ driving poor women to the city to have abortions. After smuggling on to the bus a young woman (Lucía) unable to pay the fare, X has a recurring dream: a king in love with his daughter demands her suitors to answer an obscure question, which keeps the daughter only for her father’s hands and eyes. In his dreams, X hears the question repeated over and over: What is the greatest tribute and homage a man can give to the woman he loves? He goes in search of Lucía, finds temporary respite in the room of a battered prostitute, then discovers Lucía performing in a live sex show in the city.

In the end, on The Ship of Fools, the women are all survivors. X discovers the answer to the enigma. The king dies. Exile and loss, Peri Rossi assures us, are part of the human condition. But so is perseverance in the face of absurd cruelties. show less