Rise 2013

Hi, everyone. Here's to a year of new discoveries.

2013 reading statistics:

71 books read: 61% fiction; 18% nonfiction; 17% poetry; 4% drama
86% books by male writers, 14% by female writers
25% translations; 75% in original language (English or Filipino)

Books read (2013):

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
The Tragedy of Fidel Castro by João Cerqueira, trans. Karen Bennett and Chris Mingay
100 Poems: Old and New by Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney

The Antigone Poems by Marie Slaight, drawings by Terrence Tasker
Lipad ng Uwak (Crow's Flight) by Mark Angeles
Trese: Stories From the Diabolical, Volume 1 by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo
How I Became a Nun by César Aira, trans. Chris Andrews

Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Makbet by William Shakespeare, trans. Rolando S. Tinio
Work on the Mountain by N.V.M. Gonzalez
Skyworld: Volume Two by Mervin Ignacio and Ian Sta. Maria
Skyworld: Volume One by Mervin Ignacio and Ian Sta. Maria
Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke, trans. Krishna Winston
Looking Back 6: Prehistoric Philippines by Ambeth R. Ocampo
Margosatubig: The Story of Salagunting by Ramon L. Muzones, trans. Ma. Cecilia Locsin-Nava
Bones of Contention: The Andres Bonifacio Lectures by Ambeth R. Ocampo
The Opposing Thumb: Decoding Literature of the Marcos Regime by Leonard Casper
Gitarista by Reev Robledo

Looking Back 4: Chulalongkorn's Elephants by Ambeth R. Ocampo
Looking Back by Ambeth R. Ocampo
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby
Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry, eds. Khavn De La Cruz and Joel M. Toledo
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler
Electric Light by Seamus Heaney
One, Tilting Leaves by Edith L. Tiempo
Buwan, Buwang Bulawan (Moon, Gilded Moon) by Rio Alma, illus. Abi Goy
The Secret by Lin Acacio-Flores, illus. Dick Crame

State of Fear by Michael Crichton
The Tracks of Babylon and Other Poems by Edith L. Tiempo
Adventures of a Child of War by Lin Acacio-Flores
Evil and the Mask by Nakamura Fuminori, trans. Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Personal: Mga Sanaysay sa Lupalop ng Gunita (Personal: Essays in the Territory of Memory) by Rene O. Villanueva
After Nature by W. G. Sebald, trans. Michael Hamburger
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, trans. Michael Hulse
Caring for the Last Frontier by David A. Ponce de Leon
Manila Noir, ed. Jessica Hagedorn

BAKA NG INA MO!: O bakit hindi palaging mother knows best ... by Ronaldo Vivo Jr., Erwin Dayrit, Danell Arquero, Earl Palma, Ronnel Vivo, and Christian De Jesus
To the Evening Star by Simeon Dumdum Jr.
Marginal Annotations and Other Poems by Edith L. Tiempo
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, trans. David McLintock

Ikalabindalawang Gabi (Twelfth Night) by William Shakespeare, trans. Rolando S. Tinio
Halos Isang Buhay (Almost a Life) by Edgar Calabia Samar
Beacon Hill Boys by Ken Mochizuki
Baha-Bahagdang Karupukan (Layers of Weaknesses) by Jim Pascual Agustin

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, trans. James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís
100 Kislap (100 Flashes) by Abdon M. Balde Jr.
Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin
Himno ng Apoy sa Gubat ng Dilim (Music of Fire in the Forest of Darkness) by Arlan Camba, Pia Montalban, and MJ Rafal
Daluyong (Gathering Storm) by Lázaro Francisco

Ermita by F. Sionil José
Brightest by Johann de Venecia, Joanne Crisner, and Josephine Litonjua
The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart
Ang Hukuman ni Sinukuan (The Court of Sinukuan) by Virgilio S. Almario, illus. Mitzi Villavecer

The Builder by Edith L. Tiempo
The Kite of Stars and Other Stories by Dean Francis Alfar
Timawa (Wretched) by A.C. Fabian
A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgaard, trans. James Anderson
Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, trans. Glenn Anderson
From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturnnah: Desire and Fantasy by Soledad S. Reyes
Mass, F. Sionil José

Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar
The Mission Song by John le Carré
The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquín
Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (Eight Muses of the Fall) by Edgar Calabia Samar
The Pretenders by F. Sionil José

The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira, trans. Katherine Silver
Mga Agos sa Disyerto (Streams in the Desert, 4th ed.) by Efren R. Abueg, Dominador B. Mirasol, Rogelio L. Ordoñez, Edgardo M. Reyes, and Rogelio R. Sikat
Kikomachine Komix Blg. 5 by Manix Abrera
My Brother, My Executioner by F. Sionil José

My 2012 reading journal is here.

Some 2012 reading stats:

84 books read: 80% fiction; 20% poetry and nonfiction
83% books by male writers, 17% by female writers
52% translations (mostly from Japanese, Spanish, and German); 48% in original language (about half in English, half in Filipino/Tagalog)

Top reads (2012):

The Aesthetics of Resistance, volume 1, by Peter Weiss
The Box Man by Abé Kobo
The Gold in Makiling by Macario Pineda - translation of Ang Ginto sa Makiling
Laughing Wolf by Tsushima Yūko
Luha ng Buwaya (Tears of the Crocodile) by Amado V. Hernandez
Maganda pa ang Daigdig (The World Is Wondrous Still) by Lazaro Francisco
Mandarins, stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
Sa Aking Panahon (In My Time) by Edgardo M. Reyes
Style F. L. Lucas (3rd ed.)
Trilce by César Vallejo, trans. Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi

I read the following books in December:

Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Adriana Hunter

Amélie Nothomb was in my sights ever since I read Loving Sabotage, her autobiographical novel of childhood in China. Here's another true to life fiction concerning the adventures of a female employee named Amélie in a male-dominated Japanese company. Her work consisted of going through the fires and tribulations of each of the seven circles of hell. Full of fear and temblor, shock and shiver, but it sometimes managed to be funny as hell.

3 -
I love that book! I've read 17 of Nothomb's books and her self-semi-autobiographical books are simply the best. I remember that I couldn't stop laughing either.

Looking forward to seeing how your thread progresses into the new year!

Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon/Journeys, Junctions by Rio Alma, translated by Marne L. Kilates

This is the second poetry collection I've read of Rio Alma, perhaps the foremost Filipino poet in Tagalog language. Like the other one (Dust Devils), this collection is a bilingual edition and selected from the poet's previous books. The unifying subject is the poet's travels and peregrinations through the landscape of art, memory, and history. The poems are highly aware of injustices brought about by class distinctions and the human capacity for barbarity. I particularly liked the long poems like "First Ascent at the Great Wall" and "Spoliarium". Here's a short excerpt from the first poem.

VI

If these ramparts could speak:
They will point to the corpses of slaves,
Rice rations and whips, and the harsh
Memory of drought in the fields.
If stone and moss could speak:
They will reveal the soldier's loneliness
While being blinded by dust storms
While waiting for the barbarians.
Long ago, these walls have asked the breeze
Why there are towering walls like these,
Why the candle gutters in the cold,
And why books were ordered burned.

"Esquire Fiction 2012", ed. Luis Katigbak, in Esquire Philippines, November 2012 (The Fiction Issue)

Collected in the very first Fiction Issue of Esquire Philippines magazine were eighteen stories from 18 new and established Filipino writers. Actually, only five stories could be properly called short stories; the rest are flash fiction. Only one was written in Filipino language: "Dialektika: Mga Diyurnal ni H" (Dialectic: Journals of H) by the independent film director Lav Diaz. The story, about a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, was a surprising one. The man's mother-in-law was not happy with her daughter's chosen husband; she's the type who will do anything to destroy the couple's relationship. There's an undercurrent of horror to the story's ending.

The other four stories in English were all written by seasoned Filipino contemporary fiction writers: Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., Charlson Ong, Angelo R. Lacuesta, and Dean Francis Alfar. The best stories for me are "Aurora" (by Alfar), followed by "Moroy" (by Lacuesta). Alfar's style was sui generis. His piece was excerpted from his upcoming novel A Field Guide to the Streets of Manila. The streets in the story could talk. They were alive. And the prose was also alive with noirish mastery. I was left dissatisfied by the stories of Dalisay and Ong. The stories were told in pedestrian fashion and though could be considered "standalone", the plot also came from novels in progress. The self-contained quality of their stories was itself in question due to the blandness of the telling. In fact, this is my major problem with the magazine's fiction issue. Each of the five short stories are not "original" short stories. They were all excerpts from novels. Why were no space given to stories conceptualized and written as short stories and not salvaged as parts of novels? In the case of Diaz, Alfar, and Lacuesta, this is not really a problem since the excerpts chosen were strong and distinctive in terms of language and content.

- 4

lilisin, she's such a hip and funny writer. It's good to see there's already a long backlist of her translations.

Meaning and History: The Rizal Lectures by Ambeth R. Ocampo

The national hero of the Philippines is José Rizal and his most popular historian is Ambeth R. Ocampo. In these lectures, Ocampo uses the sense of history (kasaysayan in Tagalog) as salaysay (narrative) and saysay (meaning) to guide his readers and listeners through the important facets of Rizal as revolutionary, scientist, dreamer (of literal night dreams), and historian. His conclusion: Rizal is a reflection of the Filipinos' continuing search for a national identity. This is an imposed argument because it involves seeing Rizal through the framework of nationalism, itself an imagined concept.

For his part, Ocampo's theses are grounded on first rate scholarship using primary information. His interpretations are at least as full of provocations and wit as to be challenging and fun to read. The last lecture, on Rizal's attempt to write Philippine history, is for me a very fine piece of argumentation, differentiating as it did between "objective scholarship" and "committed scholarship" and laying down more fertile grounds for historical inquiry.

Ocampo (paraphrasing Robert Frost) also would have us think that history is what is lost in translation. A contention that he himself debunked with his strong sense of history and translation/interpretation. Translation itself is an opportunity to correct history.

Ocampo the historian explains his methods well--reading, digesting, stitching facts together, synthesizing, making a cogent argument--while shedding light onto the philosophical and literary enigmas of Rizal, the hero who set the standard for the great Philippine novel that every Filipino novelist after him grappled with.

History is never objective nor impartial, but it is the duty of historians to strive to be so. Ocampo was fair minded enough to see many sides to a history.

Thousand Cranes by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

Quintessential Kawabata. An all-too-civilized catfight between two mistresses in the middle of a tea ceremony. The man between them is the son of their former benefactor. The hushed atmosphere, meaningful evasions, and raging passions are manipulated by fiery coals over which the tea boils to perfection. Even the tea utensils have a role to play in the drama.

Po-on by F. Sionil José

Po-on (also published as Dusk) is the first chronological part of F. Sionil José's epic story consisting of five volumes and collectively known as the Rosales saga. It is a historical and political novel set in Luzon Island during the last days of Spanish rule in the Philippines in late 19th century up to the entry of American imperialists. It traces the southward journey of an extended family evicted from their homes by Spanish authorities. The Salvador family's journey is marked by indescribable hardship. It also depicts the enduring character of small peoples and their continuing struggle against colonial powers (Spanish and American) and greedy landowners.

The novel is written in very spare, very transparent, and direct prose, devoid of any flourishes yet lyrical nonetheless. F. Sionil José is always spoken of as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. That he hasn't won yet may be explained by the fact that he is not what one would usually consider a prose stylist and that his novels are sometimes weighed down by their political themes. Among Filipino novelists in the English language, the late Nick Joaquín and N. V. M. Gonzalez are arguably better writers than him. Even so, his engagement with questions of national identity and social justice makes him a novelist worth reading. His aesthetic can be summed up by the words of one of this novel's pivotal characters:

"Remember, Eustaquio, these are curtains to a window. And the words are themselves the window. First, the writing must be neat but not ornate for if I wanted beautiful letters, then I would have nothing but a page of the alphabet in ornate lettering. The Chinese consider calligraphy as an art form and it could be beautiful, but attention, as tradition demands, is drawn to the shape of the characters themselves. Great calligraphers are, therefore, great poets, too. But you are not Chinese. Words should not hinder the expression of thought unless one is expressing poetry. I am not writing poetry; I am writing to convince people of the validity of our struggle, its righteousness, and the utter fallacy and hypocrisy of the Americans in saying we are not capable of self-government."

Tree by F. Sionil José

The second part of the Rosales novels is a surprising departure in tone from the previous. In Tree, F. Sionil José allows the voice of a young first person narrator to do the telling. It is a narrative strategy that pays off with its intimate look at the early 20th century rural middle class life in the Philippines under American rule. The narrator, an heir to a powerful landowner, reminisces about his childhood and his relations with the characters (his family's servants, laborers, and farm workers, all below his class standing).

As the character portraits begin to accumulate, we come to know more and more not only about the narrator but about the life of his father as a broker for the landlord Don Vicente. The conflict between the landlord and the landless is set against the backdrop of colonial history and yet the the weight of history and politics is balanced by the moving personal stories of the working class characters. What I'm beginning to like about this series is the ethical dimension and the crisis of faith it assiduously portrays.

I continue, for instance, to hope that there is reward in virtue, that those who pursue it should do so because it pleases them. This then becomes a very personal form of ethics, or belief, premised on pleasure. It would require no high sounding motivation, no philosophical explanation for the self, and its desires are animal, basic—the desire for food, for fornication. If this be the case, then we could very well do away with the church, with all those institutions that pretend to hammer into the human being attributes that would make him inherit God's vestments if not His kingdom.

Tree is one of the two novels collected in Don Vicente.

Three Novellas by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott

Is Thomas Bernhard funny? This collection could hint at an answer. His subjects are as un-funny as can be: committing suicide, becoming mad, walking and thinking, thinking and walking. His characters can be pitiful and pathetic. His worldview can be tragic. His voice is vitriol. The commas, as well as the ellipses, are so damn plentiful. They usher in a collapse of thinking, of existence. "Every existence is a mitigating circumstance, dear sir. Before every court, before every self-judgment."

The three novellas are called "Amras", "Playing Watten", and "Walking". Each is a journey into the interior, into a mind of darkness. Each is an intricate mental adventure that can be maddening and infuriating. The prose style is at least infuriating. By the time I reached the third novella, I felt like a helpless victim in a Kafkaesque story.

I am walking into the bell jar of our sensations ... pointless attempt at a swift escape from hopelessness ... with my head schooled in darkness, welded to darkness, from one extreme to the other ... conflicts ... forever into the depth through depth, guided by the power of imagination ... In that thought I pursued my self for a while ... To avoid suffocation, I suddenly turned back in that thought ... as if for dear life I had run back into myself in that thought ... (from "Amras", ellipses and italics not mine)

This collection of novellas shows that there is a method to madness in Bernhard's constructions. His use of repetition must be a form of political resistance. His use of nested narrative attributions ("the landlord said to the traveler, the truck driver said") must be a form of fictional resistance.

The narratives hover between a broken record and a crazy monologue. It is freewheeling poetry, definitely not for the faint of prose. Bernhard must be so funny because otherwise he is so unremittingly bleak, so unrelentingly despairing, and deadly poisonous. In his fiction, the world is nothing more than an insane asylum. Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy?

PseudoAbsurdoKapritso Ulo by Ronaldo Vivo Jr., Danell Arquero, Erwin Dayrit, Ronnel Vivo, and Christian De Jesus

While on a drinking session (I'm imagining this), five friends decided that they are literary gods incarnate. They assembled their writings and came up with this journal, the last book I read in 2012. (I received a copy from the publisher through a friend.) PseudoAbsurdoKapritso Ulo (PAK U for short) is a collection of 17 shorts in the genre of transgressive fiction. It's the very first offering of independent publisher UNGAZPress and I heard a second issue is in the works.

Perhaps what made PAK U an exciting collection was its satirical bite and versatility. We have, for example, the commentaries of Manong Google (Big Brother Google) in Christian De Jesus' story "Hin-Dot Com" (a play on the word hindot, which is slang for sex). Big Brother Google was the ubiquitous author of the artificial happiness in the ICT age.

*Manong Google: Pilit na hinahanap ng mga tao ang mga alternatibo ng araw-araw na pamumuhay sa espasyong walang tiyak na lalim, lawak, agwat at taas, na kung tawagin nila ay cyber space at internet. Nakalikha na sila ng birtwal na mundo na sila rin ang mga diyus-diyosan. At ngayong nagtagumpay sila sa pag-gawa ng mga artipisyal na rekurso ay pinipilit naman nilang magmukhang totoo at tunay ang mga nasa loob nito (3D). Ang mga tao, pilit na itinakwil ang tunay na mundo at natural na mga gawi, gumawa ng kunwa-kunwarian at artipisyal na mundo at mga tao, ngunit pilit namang pagmumukhaing totoong mundo at tunay na mga tao ang mga ito. Ginagawang kumplikado ang lahat. Mga Ungas!

(*Big Brother Google: People search hard for substitutes to their daily lives in a space of indefinite depth, width, distance and height, in what they call cyberspace and internet. They have created a virtual world where they themselves are demigods. And now that they succeeded in creating an artificial recourse, they did their best to make real and true its interior walls (3D). The people, trying their best to shun the real world and their natural ways, crafted an earth and people of imitation and artificial make, but they also tried hard to fashion out of these a real world and a breathing people. They complicated everything. The dimwits!)

The story was about a boy who was addicted to the pleasures of the Internet. Here we have the cyberspace in the age of make-believe, the age of borrowed or second-hand reality. Cyberspace artificiality bred the addictive zombie state of attention deficit, the miniscule attention span of a mouse click. The story typified the collection's intended or unintended effect as balm and antithesis to all the garbage wrought by noise and talk all around the hyperspace. It was a science fiction world we live in, and the journal was a jolt to wake up readers from this beautiful nightmare. Poverty, drug addition, teen angst were here depicted in all their loud realities.

Very interesting posts -- I need more time to digest this batch. :-) PAK U sounds like a fun read, I would be interested to get a copy.

You seem to have gotten more out of Thousand Cranes than I did last year. I still can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something significant with the story. I also, felt that the characters were all a bit too passive with regards to their imagined fates. No one really seemed to have desire to get themselves out of their self imposed funk. Not sure i would try another Kawabata if this his typical style.

I first read Thousand Cranes back in high school and remember feeling like I was very much out of the loop. Till this day, Kawabata is still a bit of a mystery to me and I don't know many Japanese people who have read him and liked him.

- 14

deebee, the journal is available only in a handful of indie bookshops and, I think, domestic online order. National Book Store and similar outlets wouldn't usually run publications like this.

-15

stretch, I like your term "self imposed funk". It really captured the characters' self-absorption. He supposedly wrote novels that were departures from his usual haiku fare but I've only read the funky novels so far. I find he relied so much on mood and suppressed feelings so they were a bit opaque even if the words are expressive.

-16

lilisin, I'm not sure myself how he was viewed by Japanese readers. For outsiders I presume he still was known for employing natural scenery and cultural subjects like snow mountains, tea ceremonies, cloth weaving, paintings, flowers, and festivals.

No, I didn't think NBS and suchlike would have this type of publications. But I wonder, too, if this is good policy -- how else would they get wider readership (or look at another way, more sales), if not accessed through the ubiquitous stores?

THOMAS

hi

- 18

deebee, I'm told NBS does not carry publications not to their taste. Some indie writers and publishers in Manila (for printed works that may or may not have ISBNs) are increasingly using "meet-ups" and domestic sending to sell works.

Here's a longer post on Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, which I read for a thematic bloggers' group reading this month.

When Kikuji's father died it seemed he inherited not only his material properties--the house and the antique tea bowls. His father's mistresses seemed to claim their hold onto him too. At the beginning of the novel, his father's first mistress Chikako sought him out to participate in a tea ceremony. But it seemed there was more to her invitation than tea drinking. She was arranging for Kikuji to meet a young beautiful woman as a marriage prospect. Mrs. Ota, his father's second mistress, with whom his father had had a longer lasting affair, was also present in the tea ceremony, together with her daughter. Her presence turned out to be a prelude to sexual relations with her former benefactor's son, with Kikuji himself.

The novel was another slippery haiku performance from Kawabata. As with his earlier novel Snow Country, nature and culture functioned as more than backdrops to sexual encounters. They were the very settings on which human frailties and beauties were heated to bubble up to the surface like steam on a tea kettle.

Over fiery coals the tea boils to perfection. The smoke couldn't hide the hushed desires, meaningful evasions, and raging passions of the characters. The elaborate tea ceremony at the opening almost obscured the all-too-civilized catfight between two mistresses soliciting the attention of a young man.

Thousand Cranes was a work of high symbolism and lyricism. It could be seen as a novel of cultural inheritance, the transference of culture through the generations, like a valuable heirloom in a family.

Before Mrs. Ota's ashes it (Shino tea ware) had been a flower vase, and now it was back at its old work, a water jar in a tea ceremony.

A jar that had been Mrs. Ota's was now being used by Chikako. After Mrs. Ota's death, it had passed to her daughter, and from Fumiko it had come to Kikuji.

It had had a strange career. But perhaps the strangeness was natural to tea vessels.

In the three or four hundred years before it became the property of Mrs. Ota, it had passed through the hands of people with what strange careers?

"Beside the iron kettle, the Shino looks even more like a beautiful woman," Kikuji said to Fumiko. "But it's strong enough to hold its own against the iron."

The novel could also be seen as a description of "cultural niche" (cf. ecological niche), the unique functions and inherent values of products and artifacts like tea bowls, in which the essence of culture dwells since immemorial time. There was a kind of mutual agreement between tea bowls and tea drinkers: the drinkers maintain the beauty of the bowls; the drink rejuvenates its drinkers.

"It's a great waste not to use Shino (sixteenth century ware) for tea. You can't bring out the real beauty of a tea piece unless you set it off against its own kind."
...
In black enamel touched with green and an occasional spot of russet, thick leaves of grass encircled the waist of the bowl. Clean and healthy, the leaves were enough to dispel his morbid fancies.

The proportions of the bowl were strong and dignified.

One appraised the value of tea vessels in terms of their aesthetic qualities and utility. Beauty and function defined their place in the world. The tea bowls were a valuable inheritance and were acquired at a high price. One left one's soul in them, like the stain of a lipstick that couldn't be rubbed off a teacup's rim.

The Shino was reddish to begin with, but Mother used to say that she couldn't rub (her) lipstick from the rim, no matter how hard she tried. I sometimes look at it now that she is dead, and there does seem to be a sort of flush in one place.

There was coevolution between cultural artifacts and people. As with The Old Capital, Kawabata was concerned with how cultures and traditions are transferred like genetic traits, like birthmarks. The imprint of culture was consistent to the way a birthmark was imprinted on a person. In the novel, Chikako had a birthmark on her breast. This mark, one character had noted, could leave a lasting impression on a child suckling on it.

From the day it was born it would drink there; and from the day it began to see, it would see that ugly mark on its mother's breast. Its first impression of the world, its first impression of its mother, would be that ugly birthmark, and there the impression would be, through the child's whole life.

As for the figure of the "thousand cranes", it was the striking pattern on a young woman's kerchief. It had so affected Kikuji's perception of her (the Inamura girl, the marriage prospect) that she came to embody it, becoming for him the "girl of the thousand cranes". The pattern could symbolize the vitality of youth, or the exhilarating freedom in flying. In the flight of the thousand cranes, flapping wings bring bird blood into the bristles of every feather. She probably inherited this piece of cloth from someone.

What a wonderful, intriguing post. I'm fascinated by your ideas on cultural inheritance and coevolution between objects and the people who use them. Perhaps it comes of being Australian (we have a short history as a nation while our individual histories stretch back generations through many different cultures) but I tend to think of objects, antique objects handed down through families, as part of a patchwork in a way. Most of them come from a long established tradition and are then woven into a new one. When a teabowl emigrates, what happens to the cultural legacy it carries? Ashes, a flower vase, and back to a water jar. Love it.

Thanks, letterpress. I guess that's what makes antiques more valuable, as repositories of culture and tradition.

So glad you wrote and posted a long version of a review for Thousand Cranes. Terrific review. I'm just now catching your thread (Only one week behind...I've done worse on other favorite threads here...) Always great stuff here. Interested in Journeys, Junctions by Rio Alma, although I'm still afraid of translated poetry. I struggle with English poetry, translated poetry is usually opaque to me. Also, great quote from Po-on by F. Sionil José.

Thanks, dan. I also have to catch up myself on many threads here. I sometimes think of translated poetry as a rare opportunity so am not very much resistant to it.

I read J. M. G. Le Clézio's Desert (translated by C. Dickson) two months ago. Here's my review:

Displacement, exile, refugee crossing, ethnic cleansing. J. M. G. Le Clézio's themes are heavy. They are the stuff of enduring human conflicts, the bane of civilization. Yet the register of his writing makes bearable the human failings and violence it seeks to redress. His prose register is poetry, but it is poetry lightened by silence and simplicity.

"There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another", says J. M. Coetzee's eponymous novelist in Elizabeth Costello; "There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination." Le Clézio's sympathetic imagination in the novel Desert is bounded only by geography (Saharan desert, Morocco, France) and time (20th century). His treatment of the plight of the marginalized people and their culture crosses over from place to place, from one generation to the next. It crosses over from an individual to the collective. Hence, the gaze of a young boy is also the gaze of his tribe or clan: "His face was dark, sun-scorched, but his eyes shone and the light of his gaze was almost supernatural." The young boy is Nour, and his people is being persecuted out of the African desert. In the next paragraph, Le Clézio generalized the particular "light of his gaze":

They were the men and women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of cloudless sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thirst of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon; accompanying them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccessible horizon. More than anything, they bore the light of their gaze shining so brightly in the whites of their eyes. (my emphasis)

The poet Wislawa Szymborska expressed a similar journey across an inhospitable landscape. In her poem "Some People" (trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), the same perilous rhythm can be detected.

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something like all they’ve got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

A second narrative thread of Desert tells the story of Lalla, a descendant of Nour. Lalla's people no longer flee, but she chooses to escape her village. She runs away with a man when she was forced to marry another. The man she eloped with, "the Hartani", is a shepherd who lives like a hermit and doesn't communicate in the usual way.

He doesn't speak. That is to say, he doesn't speak the same language as humans. But Lalla hears his voice inside her ears, and in his language he says very beautiful things that stir her body inwardly, that make her shudder. Maybe he speaks with the faint sound of the wind that comes from the depths of space, or else with the silence between each gust of wind. Maybe he speaks with the words of light, words that explode in showers of sparks on the razor-edged rocks, with the words of sand, the words of pebbles that crumble into hard powder, and also the words of scorpions and snakes that leave tiny indistinct marks in the dust. He knows how to speak with all of those words, and his gaze leaps, swift as an animal, from one rock to another, shoots all the way out to the horizon in a single move, flies straight up into the sky, soaring higher than the birds. (The placement of the text of Lalla's sections in the novel are justified, as distinguished from Nour's, which are left-aligned.)

Le Clézio conveys the contradiction between silence and the power of words to express feelings and ideas. The Hartani seems to be representative of an old way of life, a simple life dependent on the natural elements, far from the priorities and demands of the city. The only way to speak with him is to look in his eyes.

She looks at him and reads the light in his black eyes, and he looks deep into her amber eyes; he doesn't only look at her face, but really deep down into her eyes, and it's as if he understands what she wants to say to him.

The novel idealizes communication beyond words, in a natural setting, as opposed to the sounds of modernity in a city. Lalla can derive from the gaze of the Hartani the "essence" of things, maybe even those beyond the capacity of words to express.

Now Lalla knows that words don't really count. It's only what you mean to say, deep down inside, like a secret, like a prayer: that's the only thing that counts. And the Hartani doesn't speak in any other way; he knows how to give and receive that kind of message. So many things are conveyed through silence. Lalla didn't know that either before meeting the Hartani. Other people expect only words, or acts, proof, but the Hartani, he looks at Lalla with his handsome metallic eyes, without saying anything, and it is through the light in his eyes that you hear what he's saying, what he's asking.

The descriptive function of words is not so much challenged as rejected. This passage, obviously of well chosen words, yet offers more than evocation of words. It is in the register of invocation ("like a secret, like a prayer") of a desert life, an elegy to a vanishing culture, to a threatened indigenous way of life.

The novel as a whole offers a way of seeing beyond the surface of things, beyond the superficiality of words. As a persecuted people flee the harsh distances of the desert ("bundles rocking on their backs, like strange insects after a storm", 181-182), their pitiful silence seems both prayer and protest. Their quiet dignity and martyrdom provide a contrast to the people of a European city (the city Lalla escaped to) who are at the mercy of "immobile giants". That city, Marseilles, is worded in void.

Lalla can feel the relentless dizziness of the void entering her, as if the wind blowing in the street was part of a long spiraling movement. Maybe the wind is going to tear the roofs off the sordid houses, smash in the doors and windows, knock down the rotten walls, heave all the cars into a pile of scrap metal. It's bound to happen, because there's too much hate, too much suffering… But the big building remains standing, stunting the men in its tall silhouette. They are the immobile giants, with bloody eyes, with cruel eyes, the giants who devour men and women. In their entrails, young women are thrown down on dirty old mattresses, and possessed in a few seconds by silent men with members as hot as pokers. Then they get dressed again and leave, and the cigarette – left burning on the edge of the table – hasn't had time to go out. Inside the devouring giants, old women lie under the weight of men who are crushing them, dirtying their yellow flesh. And so, in all of those women's wombs, the void is born, the intense and icy void that escapes from their bodies and blows like a wind along the streets and alleys, endlessly shooting out new spirals.

The image of monstrous buildings sexually leveling people under them – 180 degrees from the idylls of desert – reinforces the cruelty and devouring of small people by powerful men. In this dank city, Lalla's adventures are told in descriptive words, not sacrificing the things that ought to be said, the things that count. They are words of suffering and degradation. That is, until her transfiguration and acquisition of a new kind of power.

Desert is an imagistic novel. From one exile to another, it recounts the never-ending quest for the equality of races and the security of a home. Beyond words, beyond aesthetic values, compassion resides in its pages.

That's a beautiful review, Rise! Very evocative and informative. Interesting that you should quote Coetzee; your review made me think of Foe (don't know whether you've read it), in which Robinson Crusoe's companion on the island, Friday, is represented as a mute (I believe his tongue was cut out, but I'm not sure). A lot is made of verbal communication versus other kinds of expression, as well as ideas like the speaking for the voicless, and how this relates to the colonising mindset.

Thanks, dewald. I'd like to read Foe too but I think I have to read Defoe's book first to get the full effect. I find Coetzee to be a great South African writer dealing with colonialism. Now that you mentioned being mute as a metaphorical condition of a colonized people, I've also encountered other physical disabilities, like being a cripple, being used as a metaphor for the helplessness of a conquered people. In Desert the character who doesn't speak is also presented as a kind of feral person and discriminated against by his fellow villagers. It may be saying something about the view of others on certain cultures they could (or would) not understand.

A beautiful review and immediate thumbs up. Have you read L'africain? It is a stunning book but I don't know if an English translation has come out.

A gorgeous review of Desert, Rise. This book was my introduction to Le Clezio, who immediately became a favorite author. I also loved his short stories, The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, and have Wandering Star on my TBR pile. Others are on my wishlist, but unfortunately, his translated works are not always easy to find here. My desire to read some of his untranslated works actually had me once contemplating course work in French!

Wonderful review. I will have to read this author.

>30 lilisin: I just saw on Amazon that Le Clezio's The African will be out in an English translation in April.

Fabulous review of Desert, Rise. I loved that book as well. I have several novels by him that I haven't read yet, and I'll buy L'Africain once it's available in English translation here.

Great review Rise

- 30: Thanks, lilisin. And for the recommendation of The African. Great news of its impending publication.

-31: Thanks, Linda. This is also my first. I've noted of your positive review of The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts. It's fortunate that he has a long backlist. There appears to be more than a dozen books by him in English translation. Hopefully most will be made widely available.

-32: Thank you, SassyLassy.

-34: Thanks, Darryl. It's very tempting to start another by him.

-35: Thanks for reading, barry.

Wow, Rise. Let this be THE review on LT for this book. I've read and adored this, but could never have written the reivew you put together. Well done.

#33 The African goes on the wishlist....

Thanks, dan.

The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes (New Directions, 2000)

It was said that modern Mayans rolled their eyes at the suggestion of Armageddon on 12/21/12. But in László Krasznahorkai's novel, nobody is rolling his eyes as something wicked comes the way of a Hungarian village. The seriousness of the situation is evident from the ambiance of fear and foreboding as Mrs. Plauf travels by train to her home. She can't shake off the feeling that an infinitesimal change in the landscape brought something amiss to the relative peace of the village. That constricting feeling of impending apocalypse suffuses the novel's introductory chapter, titled "An Emergency".

After so much gossip, so much terrifying rumour-mongering, she could now see for herself that 'it was all going down the drain', for she understood that while her own particular immediate danger was over, in 'a world where such things happen' the collapse into anarchy would inevitable follow.

The anarchy comes later in the book, but it happens after much paranoid and apocalyptic proselytizing by its characters. Like the Argentinian novelist César Aira, Krasznahorkai is a proponent of spontaneous realism, where the narratives unfold in real time and almost any scene can be considered in medias res. The characters ride a literal "train of thought", not so much in streaming consciousness, but a branching out of consciousness. They think aloud and they follow no discernible script except what insights their "walking minds" alight on.

Quotations of stock phrases (as in the above passage: 'it was all going down the drain'; 'a world where such things happen') make this narrative of constant "scenario-building" somehow realistic, somehow not hackneyed. They anchor the narrative to certain familiar tropes and avoid being too precious despite the seriousness of "the threat of end of times". At times, they provoke a certain "war on idioms and clichés" in a world where every usable concept may already have been labeled and delimited as to be "set off" and "qualified". Yet again, the quotes can be literally literal, as for example, Mrs. Eszter in front of her ex-husband's dirty laundry ("... if Valuska was willing to keep it a secret, she would like to wash her husband's dirty laundry with 'her own two hands', explaining how, through all the preceding years, she had regarded the husband who had so coldly rejected her with such unconditional fidelity and respect that it saturated her entire being.") or "cherry picking" later in the novel with real cherries in front of her.

After Mrs. Plauf, the paranoid narration is passed on to another character in a manner of a relay race. But this is a relay where, due to the almost standstill pace of real time narration, the baton is almost grudgingly passed on. The snail-paced race is continued by Mrs. Eszter, the ambitious lady who plans on leading the town as a decorated political leader; by Valuska, the half-wit and son of Mrs. Plauf, whose naivety is a contrast to the other characters' worldly cares; by Mr. Eszter, the estranged husband of Mrs. Eszter, who seems to have renounced the world and retreats into his house a physically broken man; and in between by characters who launch into monologues. These major characters perform the race according to their own slow motion and spontaneous meandering. Murphy's law is at work but there is at least one certain thing in the story: apocalypse lies at the finish line of the track and field

There is barely a plot in the story. A traveling circus is in town to showcase a very large whale and other circus oddities. It, along with some strange local occurrences, seems to have elicited the general fear of the town's "backward" populace. There's an undeniable apocalyptic flavor to the goings on behind the circus tent.

Krasznahorkai's whale seems to be a projection of all the uncertainties, pent-up anxieties, and random menace the world (or modern life or existence) is capable of inflicting on the human race. The ominous whale of monstrous proportions offends the sensibility of the provincial villagers. At the same time, the "fifty-metre truck-load" seems to have generated a cult following from the other villages it visited. These doomy attitudes ("an infection of the imagination") of the people ("spellbound mob") are bound to manifest a doomsday of their own. That doomsday is anything but joyful, except that the existential funk and angst of the characters are all too darkly and comically explored within a stylish, dense prose. Kilometric sentences within blocks of text not set off by paragraphs, a profusion of commas and dependent clauses: the tics of a handful of excellent European writers.

He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then, in what was imposing itself as a general frame of mind, he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for in divorcing the heavy artillery of his intellect (so typical of him) as he was, metaphorically, edging forward, or, in his own words, divorcing the 'ostensible fire-power of a determined general' from 'the chain of practical action and reaction', he had achieved mastery not through the application of a logical experimental process but through constant, wholly involuntary adaptations to the moment-by-moment nature of necessity; a process that no doubt reflected his intellectual bent but took no cognition of it. To judge by appearances, he summarized, the clear lesson was that the serious issue underlying this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a persistent assault embodying a flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from 'missing the point' to 'hitting the nail on the head' so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation, to an ever new set of exploratory motions, or so he had thought as he set out on his tour of inspection of the house to check whether any loose boards needed more secure fixing; there was nothing to indicate that the body's command mechanism, that well-oiled part of the human organism focused on the reality principle (he entered the kitchen) had imposed itself between the legislating mind and the executive hand and remained so well hidden that it could only be discovered, as he put it, 'between, if such a thing were possible, the dazzling object of illusion and the eye that perceives that object, a position that entailed conscious recognition of the illusory nature of the object'. It seemed it was the very freedom of choice between the range of competing ideas that actually decided the angle, the height, and experimental path between the top of the arc and the point of the nail.

The character, Mr. Eszter, is here speaking literally of hammer and nails, as he learns again "to master the art of banging in nails". In the course of this intellectualizing of carpentry, he also shares some of the qualities of the narrative's spontaneous realism. This seamlessly bridging of "the legislating mind and the executive hand" is an appeal to the authenticity of fresh ideas being transcribed as they occur.

The effect seems to be an illusion that nothing is predetermined, that there is a higher intelligence at work governing the fate of plot and story. In the hands of a prose stylist, the extraordinary turns of phrase (and plot) can be pedantically funny and refreshing. It can lend playfulness to the anticipation and perception of events and a spontaneous beauty to seemingly random details "freely" selected from a "range of competing ideas".

The Melancholy of Resistance may be a philosophical novel outlining its own state of nature ("the present state of the area") but not offering a social contract.

He had been wrong, he decided a few steps from his house, wrong in assuming that steady decay was the essence of the situation, for that was in effect to say that some element of good persisted in it while there was no evidence of that whatsoever, and this walk had convinced him that there never could have been, not because it had been lost but because 'the present state of the area' never had the slightest shred of meaning in the first place. It was not meant to have a point; if it was meant for anything at all it was expressely (sic) for the purpose of having no point.

The speaker's stance is pessimistic and nihilistic and any resistance to this state of nature is predicted to fail. The failure is here dramatized as a thought experiment, with the novel's apocalyptic scenes leading to self-realization and epiphany of the characters yet nonetheless consuming them. The whale has been likened to Hobbes's Leviathan but Kafka's looming Castle may also be an appropriate template. It is more a symptom of one's inability to comprehend things at a glance. When the idiot Valuska sees the whale, he is at least aware that his perception of it will be hopelessly incomplete.

Seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight, since to comprehend the enormous tail fin, the dried, cracked, steel-grey carapace and, halfway down the strangely bloated hulk, the top fin, which alone measured several metres, appeared a singularly hopeless task. It was just too big and too long, Valuska simply couldn't see it all at once, and failed even to get a proper look at its dead eyes.... (I)t was simply impossible to see the enormous head as an integral whole.

Perhaps there is something there about the danger of populist/mass thinking, its innate lack of foresight, and its consequent savagery arising from the inability to see the forest for the trees, the whole for the parts. Our yearning for the end of the world is but our failure to exact meaning from existence: our own enactment of intellectual mass suicide.

It's not surprising that W. G. Sebald contributes a blurb to the book which states that the novel's universal vision "rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing". He and Krasznahorkai are priests of a sort of European "literature of doom". Thomas Bernhard also belongs to that company. The Hungarian novelist seems to share in the Austrian's laments: "the whole of human history is no more ... than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success".

That is a quite depressing worldview, but there may be comedy in the delivery. Plus, we can take comfort from the fact that the end is nigh.


I read the book for the first quarter theme (Central and Eastern Europe) of Reading Globally group.

A very interesting review of The Melancholy of Resistance, Rise, although the book sounds as if it is somewhat difficult and dense. Have you read any others by Krasznahorkai?

It's my first book by him, Linda. I found it difficult at first and had to discontinue reading. The lack of paragraph breaks made it quite daunting. But when I picked it up again, it flowed very well and was even gripping by the end.

Sounds like tough stuff. That 2nd excerpt took many tries for me to get through, but I can see how one might get used to it and get into the flow a bit.

Once you mentioned the whale, I started thinking of Moby Dick, and then the parallels between it and what you describe in the review cascaded. (which has me thinking of MD in a new light) This is certainly a book to keep in mind, but not one I will pick up lightly.

Dan, now that you mentioned Moby Dick, I might read that soon and will also look into possible connections.

The prose of this novel is tough but it can grow on you. It somehow 'trains' the reader how to gloss over the pile of clauses. It's just amazing how the quality of translation is sustained throughout.

Excellent reviews of your last two reads, Rise!

Thank you, deebee.

Interesting review of The Melancholy of Resistance, Rise. It seems the book bears relation to the type of magical realism that I know from other European authors, specifically from authors such as Simon Vestdijk and Klaus Siegel. Their novels also portray the gradual changes from "normal" reality to the "absurd" magical reality of the apocalypse, involving either carnivalesc or circus-like figures. I suppose Carnival and the circus somehow represent a very ambiguous, deviant form of reality.

This type of central-European magical realism is quite different from the South-American realism, which seems more to bear out absurdism.

There must be more of this type of novels; I would, therefore, certainly be interested to read The Melancholy of Resistance.

Appreciate your thoughts on the magical realism Central European style vs. South American, Edwin. I've only read a bit from the latter kind and so was glad to hear of new (to me) European writers. I didn't mention it in my review, but there's another sinister circus figure in the book called "The Prince", someone who played a significant part in it. The ambiguous and deviant form of reality you mentioned is indeed an interesting way to frame the circus at the center of this narrative.

The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions, 2012)

The Argentinian novelist César Aira is flooding the market with his books—at least the Spanish-reading market (the English translation market cannot catch up). His is a thorough and deliberate exercise in style: each novel a miraculous variation of each other. The words within a single work are often self-referential, both to the work and to Aira's entire oeuvre itself. Consider a passage in the middle of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira.

The first thing was to begin publishing his installments of the Miracle Cures. First of all, obviously, he had to write them ... But at the same time he didn't need to write them because throughout the last few years he had filled an unbelievable number of notebooks with elaborations on his ideas; he had written so much that to write any more, on the same subject, was utterly impossible, even if he'd wanted to. Or better said, it was possible, very possible; it was what he had been doing year after year, in the constant "changing of ideas" that were his ideas. Continuing to write or continuing to think, which were the same, was equivalent to continuing to transform his ideas. That had been happening to him from the beginning, ever since his first idea.

It will not be a stretch to equate Dr. Aira's "miracle cures" with the real César Aira's extra-large quantity of publications. The miracle worker is the novelist himself, but the novelist is not trying to be subtle about it. That both of them share a name only indicates that one of them, or either of them, may be trying to pass himself off as the other.

Every other statement in that passage is a contradiction of the previous one (he had to write them ... he didn't need to write them; to write any more, on the same subject, was utterly impossible ... it was possible, very possible). He attributed this self-contradiction to his perpetual changing or transformation of ideas ("perpetual flux", he later said). He said it "had been happening to him from the beginning", from the get-go. Let us then consider here the beginning, the first paragraph of the novella.

One day at dawn, Dr. Aira found himself walking down a treelined street in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. He suffered from a type of somnambulism, and it wasn’t all that unusual for him to wake up on unknown streets, which he actually knew quite well because all of them were the same. His life was that of a half-distracted, half-attentive walker (half absent, half present) who by means of such alternations created his own continuity, that is to say, his style, or in other words and to close the circle, his life; and so it would be until his life reached its end—when he died. As he was approaching fifty, that endpoint, coming sooner or later, could occur at any moment.

Almost every other phrase or clause (unknown streets ... he actually knew quite well) is either a send-up or a comic reinforcement of the preceding. At the level of the sentence, Dr. Aira constantly revises his ideas, inverting the sense where possible.

His miracle cures are much sought after because they are "real" cures for the sick. However, his mortal enemy, Dr. Actyn (the name is quite meaningful), wants to expose the good doctor's methods and so keeps taunting him by setting up a trap for him one after another. That is partly the reason why Dr. Aira is wary of patients propositioning him.

One of the doctor's escapes from this paranoid state of affairs is writing. He decides to publish his miracle cures in installments. Hence, the implied comparison of dispensing miracle cures to novella-writing is so obvious it is not even veiled.

This work, however, turns out to be not only an allegory for writing or the creative process but for the actual publishing process as well. The doctor worries too much about how to include diagrams and illustrations in his planned installments and what other materials to put in, say, an "autobiographical component". He seems to be more concerned about the additional "textual apparatus" and physicality of the text than the contents.

As opposed to other objects, texts withstand time only when they are associated with an author whose actions in life—of which their texts are the only tangible testimony—excite the curiosity of posterity. Such posthumous curiosity is created by a biography full of small, strange, inexplicable maneuvers, colored in with a flash of inventiveness that is always in action, always in a state of "happening".

In real life, the writer takes pains to bring out his installments in as many venues as possible, in as many small presses as possible, including one that bounds books in between cardboards. More than practicing the art of self-blurbing or self-advertising, more than trying to gain the world record for having the most number of ISBNs, Aira seems to be concerned with encapsulating the modes of production into his own books, dissolving the base into the superstructure, so to speak. Beyond than the commercial and literary considerations of the text-installments, the accretion of published texts is their concretion, a way to increase a writer's exposure and ubiquity, a way for the writer to actively participate in the merchandise of memory and posterity. Hence, the completed (published) novels, in addition to being novels, function as their own textual apparatus as well.

A front-seat preview to Dr. Aira's miraculous cures is given at the final section of the book. Partly revealed is the secret mechanism behind the doctor and the novelist's careful selection of bibliographic (biographical, fictional) details, the material forces that go into book production. The doctor's miraculous act is a scene to behold: "He looked like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies".

Enjoyed reading your brilliant review of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

Thank you, barry. The novella is entertaining. I heard there are more works by Aira in French translation than in English.

Complicated little book. Great review.

Thanks, Dan.

Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, translated by Glenn Anderson (One Peace Books, 2013)

Botchan (1906) is a comic novel whose enduring appeal continues to entertain generations of Japanese readers. It's main character is a newly graduated Tokyo-bred young man sent to teach mathematics at middle school in an out of the way locality. As a young boy, Botchan, as he was fondly called by the household help Kiyo, is destined to be the black sheep of the family. His relationship with his father and brother is civil at best. Kiyo is the only one who was patient with him and who believed he will amount to something great. But Botchan can be a bit foolish as he runs to all kinds of trouble.

Another time a distant relative sent me a western pocketknife. I was holding the blade up to the sun to show my friend how nicely it caught the light and he said, "Sure it looks nice, but I bet it can't cut."

"Yeah right," I said. "This knife'll cut through anything, I'll show you."

"Bet it won't cut through your finger."

Well I couldn't let him get away with that so I shouted You bet I will! and sliced through the back of my thumb. Fortunately for me the knife was small, and the bone was hard, so my thumb is still stuck to the side of my hand like it should be. But the scar will be there till I die.

The novel's comedy partly derives its laughs from the utter silliness of situations. Botchan himself is a strong character, surprisingly winsome despite (or may be due to) his sarcastic view of things and constant complaints about every little thing. He finds his match, however, with his co-teachers in the school. He finds himself right in the middle of petty politics and bureaucratic maneuverings of his colleagues. Even his students are party to making his life in the country a living hell. His students start to stalk him and to make fun of him by daily writing up, on the blackboard, what he ate the previous night. And when he erupts into anger, it only seems to embolden his students.

When you take a joke too far it's not funny anymore. If you burn your bread it's not good anymore, it's just charred—but that was probably too much thinking for these little rednecks. They thought they could keep pushing it. What did they know about the world, living in a Podunk town like this? Growing up on a patch of grass with no charm, no visitors, and no brains, they'd see a guy eat tempura and confuse it for a world war. Pathetic twerps. With an education like this, I could imagine the sort of warped people they'd grow into. If it was all innocent fun I'd laugh along with them. but it wasn't. They may have been kids but their pranks were pregnant with hatred.

Botchan becomes the sore subject of endless jokes in school. This inflames him more and more even as he becomes the target of intrigues among his teaching colleagues. A couple of teachers are painted as duplicitous and scheming individuals. "Not a shred of human decency to be found in the whole place!" he cries at one point. To his credit, Botchan (the name can also have derogatory meaning) holds fast to his principles of honesty and simplicity.

It's like they believe you can't succeed in society without letting yourself rot to the core. Then they see someone who's honest and pure, and they have to sneer at them and call them Botchan and naive and whatever else they can think of that helps them get to sleep at night. If that's how people are going to be about it then we should stop telling children not to lie. If that's how they're going to be we should give children classes on how to lie and get away with it and how to doubt people and how to take advantage of others and so on.... Red Shirt was laughing because he thought I was simple. Well if we live in a world that laughs at the simple and honest, then I guess I should learn to expect it—but what a world that would be!

Natsume Sōseki effectively uses comedy in this otherwise serious critique of the education system run by corrupt leadership. In effect, he seems to be also mocking the shallowness and backwardness of a society that produced, and was perpetuated by, such kind of education. There are also hints of the clash between the rural/traditional mindset of the educators in the community and Botchan's liberal views coming from the open city of Tokyo. The entertainment value of the sometimes slapstick comedy is foil to the societal conflicts in the novel.

Another significant aspect in the novel is in providing a glimpse not only to this dire "isolationist" mindset of a provincial school but also the display of nationalism of the local people. Near the end of the book, Botchan witnesses a street parade celebrating Japan's victory over Russia during the war of the previous year.

The song went on, the lazy beat drooping like spilled syrup from a tabletop. (The drummer) made abrupt pauses in the beats to help the spectators find the beat, and soon enough though I don't know how they did it, everyone was clapping along. The thirty men started to whip their glinting swords to the beat, faster and faster. It was fascinating and terrifying to watch. They were all crammed so close on the stage that if one of them missed a beat, he'd be sliced to pieces. If they'd just swung the swords up and down there'd be no real danger, but there were times (when) they turned left and right, spun in circles, dropped to their knees. I half expected noses and ears to go flying. They all had control over their swords, but were swiping and flipping them in a space of two feet—all while crouching, ducking, spinning, and twirling.

The fascinating parade scene may be offering a glimpse into Japanese militarism in the early years of the twentieth century. Indeed there's a large gap between the discipline exhibited by the students in this street dance and the pettiness they are prone to in school.

In the afterword, translator Glenn Anderson admits that certain passages in the novel are omitted or altered in the interest of "readability and accessibility". The translation decisions to domesticate the novel are explained in the afterword itself. The resulting text appears to be an idiomatic novel that retains the comedy while making it sound contemporary. This is evident in the nicknames Botchan gave to his co-teachers. The novel itself has been translated five times already. (Here's a review comparing the translations of the first passage quoted above.) The present translation is highly readable, spunky, and fun, though I'm a little bit bothered by some typographical errors.

I received a copy of the book from the publisher.

Always interesting, Rise. Fascinated by the last excerpt...it's chilling in a way.

Thanks, dan. The parade scene was indeed heart-stopping and very vividly described.

Excellent review Rise; I can relate to Botchan

Thanks, Barry. Me, too!

A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgaard, translated by James Anderson (Archipelago Books, 2009)



DETAIL FROM LAMENTATION (C. 1305) BY GIOTTO, SCROVEGNI CHAPEL


We were made into the likeness of God. Our ways and nature had been much investigated by thinkers and storytellers since the old days. Yet no one fully understood God, the divine. There were just too much assumptions and uncertainties involved in the contemplation. One of the ways the nature of the divine can be explored was through a study of an intermediate being, someone between man and God. The angels – less than God, more than men – could hold the key to an understanding of the nature of the divine. What angels are like was intermittently depicted in the Bible and in church murals. The fertile ground of literature was also used in dramatizing the acts of the angels.

A systematics of the angelic orders, based on the above premise, was what the Norwegian novelist Karl O. Knausgaard attempted in A Time for Everything (in UK: A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven). The literary imagination, along with its unlimited sympathy and generosity, was a robust stage in which to construct from available materials the conditions and assumptions on the angels as the direct link between the human and the divine. The manifold riches of a modern novel, unshackled by dogma, could approximate the variety of life experiences and their daily miracles. Its prose and form could hold up large vistas of physical and spiritual landscapes. The religious order of readers was constantly inducted into the novel's power to mesmerize, to quicken the senses and open up selves to radical ideas and identities.

Knausgaard did for the selected stories of the Bible – mainly from the Genesis – what José Saramago did to the gospels in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. The stories were familiar to us such that they had acquired the status of the "definitive, official version". Yet for Knausgaard, the Biblical stories must be calling for a creative adaptation.

The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of a new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil.

And so Knausgaard recreated some "lost" details in the Old Testament, retouching the obscured details like an art restorer working on a fresco that has faded from the accumulation of dirt and grime. He wanted to capture the "infinitely delicate nuances" (emphasized above) of the stories of the creation, of rival brothers Cain and Abel, of Noah and the great flood, of Christ on the cross, etc. This time the stories were not just centered on the fury of God but on human and angelic struggles.

The selected characters acquired subtlety and realism beyond (or against) their traditional portrayals. The fount of these stories was God, the Author, but he probably will not appreciate the telling.

It is clear the whole time that the human condition is not something he has experienced. If he knows anything about it, it isn't from within. Only someone who lacks insight into the human condition could despair over its evilness, as the Lord does time and time again throughout the Old Testament. Perhaps he knew mankind, but he couldn't have understood them – or he wouldn't have been so surprised that they ate from the tree of knowledge, despite his emphatic prohibition, or that they could kill their own brothers, or that they built a tower almost up to heaven.

God, the narrator of the novel was implying, was not a good novelist. Being an inquiry into the angelic orders, the framework chosen to approach the divine must necessarily imbue the composition with an anthropocentric (novelistic) concreteness, tangibility, portents and omens, and subversion.

The story was framed by the figure of Antinous Bellori, an eccentric sixteenth century theologian who wrote On the Nature of Angels (1584). Bellori was a melancholic figure in the mold of Sir Thomas Browne – presumably there are two lines in Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646 that referenced Bellori's book – and Robert Walser, with Bellori's specialized system of microscopic handwriting similar to Walser's "microscripts". The structure of Bellori's book was loosely that of the present novel.

On the Nature of Angels consists of three parts. The first contains a catalog of all 189 angelic manifestations in the Bible, and the second discusses what conclusions can be drawn about the angels from these. The third, which initially looks at angels' non-Biblical appearances, ends in a discussion about the question that is the work's main theme: Can the nature of the divine undergo change?

It was a plausible structure to ascertain the (changing) nature of the divine. The third part ultimately led to the exposition of Bellori's thesis on the mutability, and hence fallibility, of the divine, and it was closely tied to how the novelist fulfilled the requirements of the structure. How exactly the evidences to support Bellori's thesis was teased out by the narrator/commentator (a writer figure that conveniently distanced the novelist from the story) was a pleasure to behold. The conclusion was already provocative but the "proof" was a daring combination of logic, scientific deduction, art criticism, and literary speculation. It necessitated the evaluation of the concept of the divine through variegated narrative registers. Absolute categories were interrogated; official versions were glossed over; and the religious abstractions, viewed from a new prism of understanding.

Knausgaard's brand of prose, similar to that of his protagonist Antinous Bellori, was closely related to "his religious speculations": "While writing On the Nature of Angels, (Bellori) studied every conceivable and inconceivable text in which angels figured, and thus formalized his intuitive insight into angelic mutability". The product of this rigorous research was reflected in the book's hyperrealist prose: the descriptions were individually particularized in space and time, making every detail not only "a detail" but this detail:

Bellori contemplated everything he saw. Whether it was fish, waterfalls, trees, mountains, birds, insects, or flowers, he saw only the unique. If one reads his notes consecutively, from beginning to end, a feeling is gradually fostered of the infinity of the world. Not "trees" nor even "a tree" but this particular tree right here, now, as it is. Not "fish" nor even "a fish" but this unique fish right here, now, as it darts suddenly across the sandy bottom through the clear, sun-spangled water. Its tail's rapid movement from side to side, the stream of water through its gills, the flat shadow gliding over the bottom beneath it ...

The particularities of details were evident in the sumptuous landscapes and character sketches. Against the fleeting moment of time and the constrictions of space, those details seemed to float in the reimagined pastoral landscape of the Bible. The novel was a sobering call for curiosity and open-mindedness in an age of uprightness and morality. Skepticism could be a form of enlightenment if it did not compromise unconditional beliefs for something hardly understood. Lamech, Noah's father, contemplated a single piece of advice to give to another son of his. What he came up with was simple enough: Always ask yourself: what if it's the complete opposite?

A Time for Everything is an intelligent novel that dared to think the opposite of things and to rethink the dogmatic abstractions of the divine. With the passage of time, God had become an abstract God and the idea had become unassailable. The reverse, in fact, was always an option (emphasis added):

It is hard to imagine, as Bellori said, that God and his divine creatures would exist without any sort of link with the human, raised completely over matter, as Thomas Aquinas and like minds maintained. As far as they were concerned, God in all his forms was absolute – absolute purity, absolute enlightenment, absolute perfection – but just what that absolute really was, or how it really developed, apart from being like light, is unknown. But because God in this way is defined as everything man is not, and never can be, it's easy to accept it and believe that things really are that way, and that this abstract God is the true God, when really it's the opposite: the abstract God is the more human, precisely because it equates with mankind's concept of what the most beautiful, the most elevated, and the most perfect is.

Despite such grand pronouncements, the book's intellectual rigor was not solemnized but rather metafictionally weighed. The fascinating story and religious speculations of Bellori, the adapted Bible stories, and the narrator's psychology at the end were all welded together by traditional suspense and vaulting improvisation. Each narrative block was a stunning set piece and, collectively, they carried Bellori's theory on the fall of the angels. What was brilliant about the whole thing was how within the novel's broad structure (borrowed from Bellori's fictional book) which the narrator was loosely mapping, the biblical stories were intricately tracing out the basic thesis through their own internal structures. The story of Noah, for instance, demonstrated a suspension of the linear narrative through successive digressions. As each digression closed its loop, the characters were revealed as chastised by the momentous events in their lives or shaken to the core by their encounters with angels – divine proxy – in any of their mystical forms. Readers might yet surface into the world with a more nuanced perception of God. And Bellori's mantra of negation might as well see us through: We know nothing. Nor is there anything to know.

Fabulous review, Rise! I will be looking for this book.

Amazing review ...And so Knausgaard recreated some "lost" details in the Old Testament, retouching the obscured details like an art restorer working on a fresco that has faded from the accumulation of dirt and grime.... a wonderful image

Thanks, Sassy and Linda.

Sassy, the paintings of angels is one of the things that figure prominently in the book.

You may have sold me on this one. Wonderful review.

Thank you, dan. I think you're the perfect reader for this book.

Great review of A Time for Everything, Rise. I own this as well, and I look forward to reading it soon after your comments about it.

Thanks, Darryl. It's thick, about 500 pages, but can be absorbing.

Excellent review Rise. I read A Time For Everything a couple of years ago and it was one of my favorite books of the year. I've been considering reading his autobiography, at least Volume I which has been published, but have heard mixed things about it.

Thanks, Deborah. It surely is a strong contender for my year's favorites list. I also have A Death in the Family but decided to go with this earlier work. I've also read some extreme reactions both ways for the 1st volume.

My review of Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar at Southeast Asia 2nd quarter theme read of Reading Globally group.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/151541#4063993

The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart (Harvard University Press, 2003)

The Discovery of Global Warming takes a historical perspective in presenting the global warming theory. First proposed as a theoretical concept in 1896, the idea of a warming atmosphere gradually evolved from speculation to a generally accepted scientific possibility and lately to a controversial and significant international political issue. In between its tumultuous history are protracted discussions, consensus building efforts, and compromises among climate scientists.

The book teases out the emergence of global warming and climate change and the revolutionary shift in scientific thinking that these made to bear on scientists. Knowledge about the subject has been greatly extended by debates among competing hypotheses and evidences. The ingenuity of scientists was only matched by the technological advances and their greater cooperation. It is notable how one scientific issue became an avenue for the collaboration of scientists from such diverse specializations as geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, geochemistry, computer science, and biology.

Carbon dioxide from a variety of human and industrial sources is steadily accumulating in the atmosphere, trapping heat along with other greenhouse gases. In recent decades, the greenhouse effect is pulling up and up the global average temperature, with each decade breaking the previous one's hottest record. Who would have thought that some of the clues to understanding the climate process are hidden in the ice cores, in the drilled columns from deep ocean, and in coral reefs and tree rings?

The book presents a lively narrative of bickering scientists. It is full of momentous scientific incidents and discovery and wide historical analyses and perspectives. It sustains an enthusiasm in a subject that is gaining more and more import as new researches and global computer models give uncomfortable predictions about the future of humankind. Even as the book discusses complex concepts from seemingly disparate but actually well connected scientific disciplines, it successfully lays down the historical basis for climate change and makes convincing arguments for the present peoples to act on the issue at hand.

In the middle of the book, the author Spencer R. Weart of the American Institute of Physics made a good observation about the lack of significant imaginative works on the subject.

The world's image makers had failed to give the public a vivid picture of what climate change might truly mean. There was nothing like the response to the threat of nuclear war in earlier decades, when first-class novels and movies had commanded everyone's attention. Global warming featured in a bare handful of science fiction paperbacks and shoddy movies, where scientifically dubious monster storms or radical sea-level rise served as a background for hackneyed action plots. The general public was never offered convincing and humanized tales of travails that might realistically beset us: the squalid ruin of the world's mountain meadows and coral reefs, the mounting impoverishment due to crop failures, the invasions of tropical diseases, the press of millions of refugees from drowned coastal regions.

A specter is haunting the Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have risen to the challenge and are able to explain most of the uncertainties behind human-induced global warming and the prospects for the future. Yet it remains a challenge to producers of literary fiction and popular films to come up with serious works about the subject, works that will galvanize readers and give them hope.

Indeed, despite the increased awareness about the phenomenon of global warming and climate change, their scientific basis has failed to colonize the imagination of many writers of fiction. The disaster movies generated by Hollywood are populated by shallow characters who were so overwhelmed by noise and special effects around them that the disaster itself seemed to consume them, the whole film, and the hapless audience.

Decent fiction and films about global warming and climate change must be rare because the science behind them can be complex and technical. Too many natural variables are involved: wind, currents, ice sheets, clouds, aerosols, emissions, deforestation, sunspots, etc. And it is hard to imagine what really is happening as the warming process is taking place far above us, in a blanket of gases surrounding the earth.

A sure way to effectively dramatize the subject is to humanize it: to depict the adverse impacts of climate change to human society. But the drama, though loud in films, seems muted in fiction. The subject seems to naturally resist storytelling techniques. The subject matter simply upsets our conception of a perfect world order. Weart is spot on when he acknowledges that the theory on global warming subverts the deeply-ingrained cultural/religious worldview of many of us. Even early scientists, along with the skeptics of today, resist the idea that something seemingly benign and invisible can overhaul the balance of the natural world. The idea just runs counter to our sense of a self-regulating world.

In this view, the way cloudiness rose or fell to stabilize temperature, or the way the oceans maintained a fixed level of gases in the atmosphere, were examples of a universal principle: the Balance of Nature. Hardly anyone imagined that human actions, so puny among the vast natural powers, could upset the balance that governed the planet as a whole. This view of Nature—suprahuman, benevolent, and inherently stable—lay deep in most human cultures. It was traditionally tied up with a religious faith in the God-given order of the universe, a flawless and imperturbable harmony. Such was the public belief, and scientists are members of the public, sharing most of the assumptions of their culture. Once scientists found plausible arguments explaining that the atmosphere and climate would remain unchanged within a human timescale—just as everyone expected—they stopped looking for possible counter-arguments.

Focusing on adverse natural, social, economic, and political impacts of global warming seems to be a solution to the failure of literary imagination. Still, it would be hard to assign the roles of hero and villain in an increasingly hot world where highly industrialized nations are not ready to curb their parasitic dependence on energy. Plus, there's also the danger for the writer being labeled an alarmist, if not a doomsday prophet or madman. He will have to skirt the sentimental traps of the material.

I hope to see a reading list of novels on the subject. Inter Ice Age 4 (1959) by Abé Kobo, about the melting of polar ice caps, sounds like a good one. The novel Bundu by Chris Barnard, about threats of famine and drought in a South African society, has been shortlisted in this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It received mixed reviews from several blogs I follow. I would like to think that the judges recognized the importance of the book's topic.

A quick Google search yields many promising fiction titles on climate change (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). So, there are novels being written about the subject. But are these works good enough to give justice to the subject? Which ones are most likely lasting contributions to the emerging genre?

What I'd like to see in these books is how characters cope with and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Given the inherent uncertainties about what exact effects climate change have in store for us, I'd like to see how writers balance the unequivocal warming of the climate system with the speculative nature of the subject. I'd like to see how fiction will be used to explore the scientific ideas while at the same remaining sensitive to human struggles. In short, I'd like to see fiction itself not only as a platform for dealing with the issues of climate change but as an adaptation strategy in itself.

I read the first edition of the book. A revised, expanded edition is published in 2008.

Your review of The Discovery of Global Warming raises some interesting questions. I certainly had not realised that there was a relative dearth of fiction on the subject. There have been movies, but many of the blockbusters that have been produced seem to suffer from what I call "The Spielberg effect". You know the idea that everything will work out well in the end as long as we all believe in family values.

A very thought-provoking review of The Discovery of Global Warming, Rise. It has me thinking about the role and relevance of literature, and particularly fiction, as a force in today's society for motivating broad recognition and discussion of social issues.

Barry, there are actually a lot of hard sci-fi books on the subject but only relatively few of it in what are usually called "literary" novels. I may try to find copies and read some of both to see for myself. I get what you mean by the Spielberg effect. I've watched some of them and they're just ear-splitting.

Linda, thanks. It's an ideal and may be asking too much of novelists but why not. Books are effective devices for mainstreaming issues.

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-crea...

NPR covered this topic recently about a new genre - cli-fi: fiction about climate change. Anyone read any?

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I've added the titles mentioned to my wish list. The closest I've read, if they qualify, are Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

A pioneer in the genre is probably The End of All Men (1927) by C. F. Ramuz.

Thanks for letting me know your thread was here. You read a lot of books that I find very intriguing and there's so much to read here that I'll be going through your thread slowly.

Thanks for reading, rebecca.

My post on The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin at Reading Globally group http://www.librarything.com/topic/151541#4092785

I'm really late, Rise, but I loved your last three reivews and I found your review of The Discovery of Global Warming very thought provoking. I've been suprised and depressed by the lack of public response to global warming...and at such a critical time. With your reivew I'm instead thinking about what might generate attention. Not that I have great ideas, but it's a nicer thing to think about.

Thanks, Dan. Hopefully the larger society do get to respond proactively to the challenge of global warming, before it's too late. Some people are a bit skeptical or fed up with the notion, so I guess more creative means, in literary/artistic and popular media, are needed.

The following is a review of one short story by João Guimarães Rosa, "Augusto Matraga's Hour and Turn" in Sagarana, translated by Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1966)

Sagarana was João Guimarães Rosa's fist book, a nine-story cycle published in 1946, a decade before the appearance of his back-to-back masterpieces: the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (which came out in English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands and the seven novellas in the two-volume Corpo de Baile. The title, as noted by Franklin de Oliveira in the introduction to the translation, is an amalgam of "Saga, an Old Norse root, a verbal creation at the service of the epic, and the Tupi suffix rana (in the manner of)." In the manner of a saga, the stories explored the poignant, comic, and earthy territory of the backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The last story in the cycle—"Augusto Matraga's Hour and Turn"—was significant for anticipating the concerns of Grande Sertão: Veredas. After an almost fatal and life-changing experience, the titular character underwent a radical self-invention after making a pact with no less than God. This was an anti-Faustian tale, a fine complement to the novel that succeeded it.

But "Matraga is not Matraga, or anything", announced the first sentence of the story. "Matraga is Estêves. Augusto Estêves, the son of Colonel Afonsão Estêves, of Pindaíbas and Saco-da-Embira." In the rest of the story, the name "Matraga" was no longer mentioned, a conspicuous absence that says something about the validity of names as determinant of a person's identity.

Augusto Estêves was a rich, patrician, and cruel fazendeiro (landed man) about to fall on hard times due to his wanton lifestyle and mismanagement of assets. He was as evil as he was impulsive: he treated people like animals and was himself described like an animal—"hard, rough, and unbridled, like a huge beast of the forest"—so evil he was "worse than a poison snake, which whoever sees it is duty-bound to kill." We are squarely in the middle of Guimarães Rosa's territory, in the mêlée of maelstrom, the middle of the whirlwind. It is the territory of "permanent crisis" wherein the dichotomy of good and evil was ever shifting, playing out its many erratic manifestations.

When Augusto's wealth diminished, he was left by those close to him. It was but the beginning of his downfall: "with crushing debts, on the losing side politically, his credit gone, his lands neglected, his ranches mortgaged, and the outlook hopeless, all doors closed, like a blank wall". Dona Dionóra, his wife whom he had estranged with his unfaithfulness and plain badness, ran off with another man. His men, whom he had neglected, deserted him for better pay as henchmen of Major Consilva. The latter was the instrument to his destruction. He was left for dead by his own men at the behest of Major Consilva who later appropriated all his properties and consolidated the power he once enjoyed.

"Matraga" was also a close study of revenge, a feeling associated with savagery and inhumanity. Despite the biblical undertones and apparent seriousness, the story was told like a brooding musical, with characters suddenly breaking into singing solo or in chorus. The prose was epigrammatic and onomatopoeic—"In the distance a dog spelled out one single, meaningless name"—and with its self-questioning, pedantic tone parodied its own artifice: "This is a made-up story and not something that happened, no indeed"; "And everything happened just like this because it had to, inasmuch as it did."

Crushed and destroyed, Augusto was taken in by a black couple who revived him not only through traditional medicines and procedures but with unceasing prayers and religiosity. Consulting and confessing to a priest, the man was comforted by a single certainty that will dictate the rhythm of his revenge. The priest had given him a powerful code, what for him was a mantra or spell to be whispered in times of trials and temptations, akin to an amulet: words to deal with the blows of fate: "Everyone has his hour and his turn; and yours will come."

With the underlying themes of the use of religion to temper the inherent ugliness in man and the use of violence to enforce the idea of goodness and decency, "Matraga" was a classic case of human conversion and transformation, the spectacular metamorphosis of a sinner's worldview into that of someone "half mad and half saint". This renewal of life, the curbing of animal temper and invocation of goodness in daily life transactions, was sealed under ritual oath.

Nhô Augusto knelt in the middle of the road, opened his arms wide, and swore: "I am going to heaven, I really am, by fair means or foul. And my turn will come. To Heaven I am going, even if I have to use a club."

Nhô Augusto and his adoptive parents went away to live a new life, in a new place. He became true to his promise.

He lived trying to help others. He hoed for himself and for his neighbors out of the warmth of his heart, wishing to share, giving out of love what he possessed.

Even so, the animal instinct was branded in him. He was constantly gnawed by thoughts of consummating his vengeance, tempted every which way to go back to his old evil ways, to secure the power lost to him. Time passed and the charitable life and work he demonstrated did not give him peace of mind. What is the price of penance and penitence? What is the cost of atonement for sins if salvation and liberation call for an itching beyond human comprehension and control?

And it was only then that he realized how he was lashed to his penitence and understood that this business of signing up with religion and trying to snatch his soul from the mouth of the devil was the same as entering a swamp where going forward or backward or to the sides is always hard and always drags you deeper into the mire.

The idyll was broken when a band of jagunços (armed vigilantes) passed the village. Its leader exuded power and violence his old life knew too well.

And the leader—the strongest and tallest of all, with a blue handkerchief rolled around his leather hat, his white teeth filed to sharp points, of commanding gaze and a hoarse voice, but with a pretty, gentle face of a maiden—was the most famous man in the two backlands of the river ... the stump-puller, the earth-shaker, the fire-eater, the boast-stopper, the measure-taker, the question-settler, the no-obstacle-brooker: Mr. Joãozinho Bem-Bem.

The charisma of the jagunço chief certainly contained shades of gallantry that only exemplary individuals possessed. Joãozinho Bem-Bem was in fact so famous and mythical he was mentioned several times in the The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.

At first sight, the two men—the repentant convert Nhô Augusto and the famous chieftain Joãozinho Bem-Bem—showed instant liking for each other. For Augusto, Bem-Bem's friendship represented a resurrection of a life of constant violence that once pumped in his lungs with unadulterated oxygen blood. The arrival of the bandits "equipped with an extravagance of arms—carbines, almost new; muzzle-loading pistols of one or two barrels; revolvers of good make; knives, daggers, pigstickers with carved handle, clubs and machetes—and wearing an excess of scapularies around their necks" was enough for him to once again smell the intoxicating blood in the air. He did not hesitate to offer hospitality to the leader and his troop. Joãozinho Bem-Bem awakened the possibility of finally avenging the death sentence pronounced on him by Major Consilva, along with the betrayal of his men and the treachery of his wife.

Joãozinho Bem-Bem saw through Augusto's old instincts, detecting the stain of his past. He liked the hospitable and friendly man so much he even offered him a job in his group, to be part of a band of warriors who will bring order to the whole sertão. What more, he offered him a favor he could exploit to his advantage: "If you need anything, if you have an unpleasant message to send to somebody ... If you have some frisky enemy anywhere, just you give me his name and address."

Both proposals Augusto refused, going against a part of his nature that cried for full-bloodied vengeance. He refused because the time is not yet ripe. Augusto was always, always waiting for the right time, the apocalyptic moment of his hour and his turn.

"Matraga" had been twice adapted to the big screen, in 1965 and 2011. The more recent adaptation (trailer) directed by Vinicius Coimbra was awarded Best Film by both jury and audience in the Rio International Film Festival.

I enjoyed the story

Thanks, Barry. There's more to the story as I didn't spoil the surprise ending.

I know I'm late, but wonderful that is wonderful essay on this story. Enjoyed!