Carte blanche

Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. Jonathan Dunne (Harvill Secker, 2007)

'To recall with a memory that is not our own,' I heard him whisper in my ear, 'is a variant of the theme of the double, but it is also a perfect metaphor for literary expression.'

A narrator of Enrique Vila-Matas in the lecture novel Montano (in Spanish: El mal de Montano, 2002) was basically admitting that most of the things he (the narrator) was writing about was borrowed. He constantly alluded to his writing as parasitic, the way it depended on the ideas of other writers he read or conversed with. His conversation, for instance, with César Aira, whether it really happened or not (though why would the narrator invent something like it), found its way on the novel.

My memory is infiltrated by the recollection of something César Aira told me in the Café Tortoni, in Buenos Aires, one day when we fell into a bizarre conversation about the essence of literature. We had started discussing the review I had written of his last book and in a few seconds, with barely any transition from one theme to the other, we became engrossed, almost without realising, in the subject of the essence of literature. 'As a teenager, reading Borges,' Aira said to me, 'I saw where the essence of literature was. This was definitive, but later I also discovered that literature does not have one, but many historical and contingent essences. So it was easy to escape from Borges' orbit, as easy as going back, or as never having escaped.'

Aira was speaking in circles, contradicting himself as he was wont to do. It was a safe answer in any case. Designed as a discourse on 'literature sickness', Montano was a writer's attempt to arrive at the essence of literature, and it arrived not in one destination but in many of them ("many historical and contingent essences"), via the texts of many modernist writers and diarists, or more precisely, the insidious memory of those texts. 

Memory infiltration was the mechanism with which the lecture novel proceeded with its free association. Perhaps I should stop saying lecture novel when what I really meant was literary criticism. Montano was a compartment of many prose forms: diary/private journal, novel, dictionary, lecture, memoir, essay, criticism. And yet the veil of criticism was probably the most accommodating form of the novel since the recombination of many texts from various sources produced a new text and new bibliography of imagination, a new way of looking at literature from the perspective of a sick man, or a deceived man, as the narrator later considered himself to be.

As Montano progressed, the narrator was successively commenting on the preceding chapters of the novel, clarifying which parts of the work was fiction, which ones invented. Every page contained copious ideas from select writers. These bookish ideas were creatively incorporated into – or had infiltrated – the novelist's consciousness. Sometimes he would access "his real life" and insert it into the text, thereby breaking the monotony of his thoughts and finding another material for his text.

An hour ago, I rang the poet Pere Gimferrer to ask him which of Dalí's two diaries he likes more: 'Why do you want to know?' Gimferrer, who always wants to know everything, asked  me. 'I don't know if I want to know,' I told him, 'really I rang you so that you would appear in the diary I'm writing, which has turned into a novel and dictionary and looks less and less like a diary, especially since I started taking about things from the past, maybe that's why I rang you, perhaps to have something to relate that occurred today, that happened this Thursday in real life, I need a bit of present.'

And that was how the conversation with Gimferrer was integrated into the text. The narrator was free to escape from his philosophical musings and infuse reality, its immediacy, into his diary/text. The material of reality now invaded the novel, was now duly represented and made a part of that novel, the very novel enacted before the reader's eyes.

Thinking what Kafka would have thought about the 9/11 attacks in New York, the narrator felt the need to read the 11 September 1911 entry in Kafka's diaries, 90 years before the attack, discovering there the collision between a motor car and a tricycle. Later, the narrator would open the 11 September 1912 entry of the diary, reading about a particular dream by the Czech writer.

I kept talking about "the narrator" here as if there was only one protagonist when in fact there were probably at least five personae whom Vila-Matas created in this novel, one for every chapter. Every narrator subverted the form and contents of the previous one's writing, until the reader was no longer sure which person was written about and who was a character in whose text. The selection of quotes from many writers – Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Walser, Sebald, Musil, Josep Pla (in The Gray Notebook) – only served to stitch together Vila-Matas's meditations on literary creation and mortality, on the anxiety of influence and the labyrinthine ways in which novelistic ideas relate and coincide.

By the end of Montano, the narrator's comic and melancholic tone gave way to exhaustion. The narrator dissembled even as he pursued his never-ending text. More than once, the narrator/s referred to himself (themselves) as the very embodiment of literature and even if he was "literature-sick", there were indications that he had freely embraced his literary destiny.

I wonder how I can have been so stupid, believing for so long that I must eradicate my Montano's malady, when it is the only worthwhile and truly comfortable possession I have. I also wonder why I should apologise for being so literary if, in the final outcome, only literature could save the spirit in an age as deplorable as ours. My life should be, once and for all, purely and only literature.

The sickness had taken full possession of the narrator. The novelist had disappeared inside the novel, right there in the text, fulfilling Blanchot's question in the epigraph: "What will we do to disappear?"

* * *

"There is nothing sometimes further away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organised like that," the novelist in Montano said, before entertaining the converse, "but it could be otherwise". The autonomous world we lived in is not a tidy novel, and the ways we negotiate our lives do not resemble a well-argued literary essay. If anything, it fitted well with how the novelist in David Markson's final novel self-referentially described his final novel:

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

The collage novel was perfectly realized in Markson's novel called – again, self-referentially – The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). Quoting Walter Benjamin, Vila-Matas described the  ideal properties of a collage novel in Montano (a collage in its own way): "In our time the only work truly endowed with meaning – critical meaning, as well – would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works":

In its time, I incorporated into that collage relatively personal ideas and phrases, and slowly created for myself an autonomous world, paradoxically very closely linked to the echoes of other works. ...

And I came down, as tends to happen when one scales the peaks of tragedy. I came down and saw that I did not have to worry about my parasitical past, rather to convert it – to revert it – into my own artistic programme, to turn into a literary parasite on myself, to make the most of the reduced but autonomous part of my anxiety and of my work which I could consider to be mine. Then I read 'Second Hand' by [Alan] Pauls and relaxed even more when I saw, for example, that Borges had been a highly creative and astute case of literary parasitism.

Nothing so comforting as Pauls' idea that an important dimension of Borges' work revolved around the writer arriving always after, in second place, in a subordinate's role – with a minimal biography, but with a biography, which is already saying a lot – this writer always arrives later and does so to read or comment on or translate or introduce a work or writer that appears first, original. [emphases added]

The Last Novel was a novel of aphorisms, of successive short sentences or flash sentences, in the manner of flash fiction. Its narrator was called Novelist, with capital N. Like the narrator of Montano, Novelist in Markson's novel was mapping out his minimalist autobiography in the work. While the narrator of the second section of Montano – "Dictionary of Timid Love for Life" – promised to tell only true things about himself in his diary, Novelist decided "carte blanche to do anything [in the novel] he damned well pleases". Like Vila-Matas (and his narrators), Markson (and Novelist) was establishing a personal genre: "A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel."

I'm still in the middle of Markson's book. The form should be tiresome, but there were fascinating details and comic relief in every page. The self-contained aphorisms had an invisible engine propelling them forward, wee drops of wit accumulating, accumulating.

While waiting for the death of the novel, which is like waiting for the barbarians, we could welcome the arrival of new novel forms, in new formats. These anti-novels and autofictions, they follow their own artistic programmes. They depend on a trove of treasures and trivia about certain writers and artists, recalling memories not their own, creating a mosaic of passages from literature to produce new texts, new textures. They are "last novels" because they hardly look like proper novels. Certainly they terminate, or break, the monotony of this-happens-and-then-this-followed-by-this storytelling.

It is said that every moment in life must be lived as if it was the last. In the same way, every novel could be written as if it is the final one. Haunted by death, sustained by the last flickering breaths, final novels have unlimited freedom. To play around with texts, with wild artistic abandon. To do whatever with a blank page as with a signed blank check. Unrestricted, only the last novels have the spirit of carte blanche.



For the Spanish Lit Month, by Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and Richard of Caravana de recuerdos.

Titles read: January to July 2014

Works in English or English translation

Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. Jonathan Dunne [review]

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

Care of Light [poetry] by Gémino H. Abad

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F. H. Batacan [review]

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe by Chris Andrews [review]

XXth Century: 2 Plays [bilingual ed.] by Malou Jacob [review]

An Aquarium [poetry] by Jeffrey Yang

Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla, tr. Peter Bush and Anne McLean [review]

Gotita de Dragon and Other Stories by Nick Joaquín, illus. Beth Parrocha

In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa, tr. Helen Lane

Monstress by Lysley Tenorio

The Tenant and The Motive by Javier Cercas, tr. Anne McLean [review]

Sound Before Water [poetry] by Jim Pascual Agustin

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry

The Mango Bride by Marivi Soliven

Spooky Mo: Horror Stories by Marivi Soliven Blanco

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag [review]

Seven Mountains of the Imagination by Virgilio S. Almario, tr. Marne L. Kilates and Phillip Kimpo Jr. [review]

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [rev. ed.] by Benedict Anderson [related post]

Shockbox: Ang Butas na Kahon ni Kulas Talon: The Complete Posthumous Poetry [bilingual ed.] by Kulas Talon, tr. Mikael de Lara Co, Khavn De La Cruz, Ramil Digal Gulle, et al.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, tr. Samuel Beckett

The Voice From Sumisip & Four Short Stories by Antonio Enriquez

Eight Muses of the Fall by Edgar Calabia Samar, tr. Mikael de Lara Co and Sasha Martinez [review]

What Now, Ricky? by Rosario de Guzman Lingat, tr. Soledad S. Reyes [review]

The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker [post 1, post 2]

This I Believe—Gleanings From a Life in Literature by F. Sionil José

The Leprous Bishop by Gabriel Miró, tr. Marlon James Sales [review]

Our Father San Daniel by Gabriel Miró, tr. Marlon James Sales

Works in Filipino

Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala [Crónica del rey pasmado] by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, tr. Marlon James Sales [review]

Ang Alkemista [The Alchemist] by Paulo Coelho, tr. Edgardo B. Maranan [review]

Tabi Po: Isyu 1 by Mervin Malonzo

(Im)Personal: Gabay sa Panulat at Pagmamanunulat [(Im)Personal: Guide to Writing and the Writerly] by Rene O. Villanueva 

Si Janus Sílang at ang Tiyanak ng Tábon [Janus Sílang and the Child Monster of Tábon] by Edgar Calabia Samar

Para Kay B (o kung paano dinevastate ng pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa atin) [For B (or how 4 out of 5 of us were devastated by love)] by Ricky Lee [review]

Diaspora at Iba pang mga Kwento [Diaspora and Other Stories] by Genoveva Edroza Matute 

Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady [How I Became a Leading Lady] by Carlo Vergara and Elmer Cantada

Tatlong Gabi, Tatlong Araw [Three Nights, Three Days] by Eros Atalia [review]

Reading stats

38 books read: 23 (61%) fiction; 7 nonfiction; 4 poetry; 2 drama; 2 graphic
29 (76%) books by male writers; 9 (24%) by female writers
23 (61%) in original language; 15 (39%) in translation

Titles in blue are highly recommended.

Smaller and Smaller Circles

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F. H. Batacan (The University of the Philippines Press, 2002)



Perhaps I should preface this post with a trigger warning. The quote below describes in graphic detail the method to a cold-blooded crime.

"We know from the clean incision at the neck that he would slit the skin under the chin first, from ear to ear. I think he needed help to peel the skin back from the chin, so he would hook this under the skin and flesh, using it much like you would use a chisel, and start to pull the skin upward. But it couldn't have been easy. For something so thin, these things are pretty tough, made from surgical steel or chromium; the skin and flesh would tear in place. So he'd hook in again and again, and in the process of pulling the skin over the chin bone, he would leave these marks."

Perhaps the novel itself should come with a bit of a warning. Nothing could have prepared the reader for—pardon the comparison—a prose that cuts and slices cleanly. The violence in this detective novel was unflinching.

A series of killings was being committed in Payatas, in a garbage dump site in Metro Manila. All victims shared the same profile: all adolescent boys, all poor, and all with slight body frames. They were found dumped on a mountain of garbage, with facial skin peeled off and with vital organs missing.

The National Bureau of Investigation enlisted the help of Father Augusto Saenz, a Jesuit priest and renowned forensic anthropologist. He was easily becoming the go-to person in solving high profile cases in the city. Saenz was assisted in this case by Father Jerome Lucero, another priest, a clinical psychologist and his former student. During the course of their investigation, an unflattering portrait of urban poverty and ineptitude of law enforcers was drawn. The characters meanwhile were shown as full, rounded human beings worthy of our sympathy—the detective priests hard at work, the victims' relatives, and most disconcertingly, the killer himself.

F. H. Batacan's debut novel won the two prestigious literary awards in the country—the Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel and the Philippine National Book Award. It was a surprise hit, too. It had several print runs and must now be considered a cult novel.

Part of its appeal, I think, is its quick and efficient sketches of characters and situations. It effectively dramatized the professional work of the two detectives priests and rather menacingly tapped into the psyche of the serial killer. Hunter and then hunted, the killer was as creepy as the ubiquitous rats, large and numerous, running around the garbage heap. He was as much offender as offended quarry.

I can feel them. Scurrying in circles around me, smaller and smaller circles like rats around a crust of bread or piece of cheese. Waiting, waiting, waiting for the right moment. The moment when I slip up, when I make a mistake, when I get careless.

I can hear their feet. Some of them pass by the gate on the sidewalks; they think I can't see them. Some of them are brave enough to rattle the gate; they bring my mail, my bills, they ask for donations. Some of them get into the house while I'm sleeping, and I wake up and I hear their feet on the stairs, yes I do.

As the world of the killer gradually narrows down and collapses into a point, detectives Saenz and Lucero, and the reader with them, began to sense that the crime scene of a garbage dump was the very emblem of social and economic ills that drove human beings to despair and destruction. The quiet moments of anguish and reflection in the novel proved to be as devastating and desperate as the violent acts they seek to redress.

This turned out to be an old-fashioned detective story, using the conventional effects of the genre to create suspense. Despite the artifice, the paradox of deriving pleasure and excitement from reading crime novels was obvious.

Satisfied, Saenz steps carefully towards the body. He feels more than a bit ashamed of the way sorrow and horror and revulsion are warring with the excitement mounting within him; the shame feels like sand in his mouth, rough and gritty, and he wishes he could spit it out.

Saenz himself could not properly acknowledge the giddy feeling he felt as he found a critical evidence near one victim. This was the evidence that could help solve or explain the crimes. The gratuitousness of it all was at least fully acknowledged.

Two-thirds into the novel, the identity of the killer was already revealed. The remaining one-third was spent on the search for the root of evil, its motivation, its internal workings. In the end, the case was solved rather too neatly. The novel's strength lay not in the plot, but in the characterization and in the writing. The sentences were arresting and clinical in their precision and passionate intensity.

Blunt to the point of occasional abrasiveness, he has few friends.

A thin blade of fear, cold like surgical steel in the brain, slices through the priest's consciousness.

The hatred on his face [is] so intense and terrible that she feels it almost as a kind of heat on her own.

Fr. Saenz will later return in a short story by Batacan in Manila Noir. Hopefully his wits and expertise will be put to use in another novel of great human interest. I am almost ashamed to wish so.

Shadow Without a Name

Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla, trans. Peter Bush and Anne McLean (Picador, 2004)

An adept chess player, my father used to say whenever he explained a masterly move to me, recognizes immediately, even in the strangest of circumstances, those who are his peers. However, he embarks on a game only when he is sure he has measured his opponent's strengths, and never – absolutely never – will he wager on the outcome anything less than his own life. I don't know which of the two made the initial proposal, or at what ill-starred moment the board eventually made an appearance. I do know the game's parameters were soon starkly defined, through the haze which clouds the rest of the story. If my father won, the other man would take his place on the eastern front and hand over his job as pointsman in hut nine on the Munich-Salzburg line. If, on the other hand, my father lost, he would shoot himself before the train reached its destination.

The wager could not have been more rash. It was a calculated risk, as every momentous situation in this novel was. A man (or his opponent, it was not clear) decided to challenge the other to a fatal game of chess. This was all the novelist's doing, we might say. He made the two do it. The novelist's selection of details – seemingly random but actually momentous details – were the engine through which ordinary confrontations became extraordinary. Suspense hang in the air precisely because the initial conditions were set up to make it appear as if there is a higher intelligence at work whenever the strangest of circumstances end in something definitive. Something like death or defiance of death. That form of intelligence could just be a shorthand for destiny or fate or God. But we were in the realm of fiction, and even our reliance on the decadence of the fantastic or the surreal had to be contextualized in secular (literary) terms.

The game of chess, its decisive outcome, was perfect representation for the ways a novelist adopts a strategy, moves his pieces around according to his plan, and goes for the kill when the opportunity arises. At the back of the characters, with all their attendant complexities and motivations, we tended to assume it was the novelist who was doing the pushing. Behind the novelist, it was harder to see who was in control.

In the second part of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges called "Chess" (trans. Alastair Reid), the idea of God's enabler was raised.

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
Straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn—
Over the checkered black and white terrain
They seek out and begin their armed campaign.

They do not know it is the player’s hand
That dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
Controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(The words are Omar’s) on another ground
Where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the player, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

Ignacio Padilla's novel Shadow Without a Name (Spanish title: Amphitryon) was a game of chess. There were certain movements and exchanges of pawns but we were never really sure what comes next or which piece will be sacrificed. The commanding free will was as opaque as the face of a seasoned chess player.

In the opening game of chess at the start of the novel, one man wagered his life, the other his identity. In the second game, we learned that the man who lost his identity was himself an impersonator. And so on. There were multiple identities being exchanged and replaced, like a pawn who was finally promoted to another piece. The many chess games played in the novel and the deadly wagers behind them took place during the two world wars and the Nazi occupation, right up to the trials of infamous Nazi soldiers.

Tension was generated in the novel through the multiple shifts in time and place. In four chapters, four chess players narrated the exchanges of identities. Four narrators; many games of chance. The transfer of character identities was also the transfer of evil. The identity of evil was seemingly the puzzle being constructed, a puzzle whose solution was withheld because, in the first place, the objective of the puzzle was always to prevent it from being solved.

I meditated on the surprises the unchained beast of memory might hold in store. I thought of Efrussi, of the loneliness of boys isolated by their fathers' designs. I could almost hear him dragging his feet on the way to synagogue, as if the mere idea of flaunting his Jewishness through the streets of Vienna was an unbearable weight upon him. I also conjured up his innumerable precocious chess victories, always gained under the watchful eye of his father, who strove to turn those childhood victories into public demonstrations of the superiority of his people. More than a game for the jeweller, chess was the indisputable proof of a collective identity of genius, bred in his son across millennia of persecution, diasporas and fearful defence of a racial consciousness maintained through pain and blood. [emphasis added]

The twentieth century, like the previous ages – like the present – was the age of chess. It was the age of prejudice and racism. Black and white were forever opposed to one another. Intolerance was like a dominant genetic trait. The contentious spirit of the game, the violence embodied in its competitiveness, was constructed in dueling persons, in nations at war or in conflict. In one story by Borges, the indisputable solution to the puzzle was staring right in front of us.

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?”

I thought a moment and replied, “The word chess.”

The novel's fascinating structure of changing points of view produced a riddle whose solution was still a few more moves in advance to be discerned just yet. The puzzle – the nature of evil – we could hardly detect because there were just too many pieces and they obstructed the larger view of the board. In the end, one sensed the passage of evil in history or one took a whiff of its utter banality. Or perhaps another puzzle behind the puzzle begins to form, begins the round of dust and time and sleep and agonies.


July is Spanish Lit Month, brought to us by Stu and Richard. 

The Tenant and The Motive

The Tenant and The Motive by Javier Cercas, trans. Anne McLean (Bloomsbury, 2005)



After writing for 15 years since 1987, Javier Cercas finally arrived in the world literary stage with the publication of Soldados de Salamina, a multi-awarded novel in both its original Spanish and English translation. The novel was ranked at a lucky place (# 13) in the Semana magazine list of 100 best Spanish-language novels of the past 25 years. Soldiers of Salamis, the English version by Anne McLean, won back-to-back prestigious translation awards in 2004, receiving the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Premio Valle-Inclán. The novel revealed a writer concerned with the duplicitous workings of memory and the metafictional, intertextual tendencies of modern Q-narratives. It capitalized on a brilliant structure as it investigated a significant historical (wartime) memory. Like W. G. Sebald, Cercas explored the ethical dimensions of remembering and forgetting with a strong emotional force.

The two translated novellas in The Tenant and The Motive were only symptoms of Cercas's novelistic greatness, or perhaps manifestations of his potential aesthetic energy as a writer. Its retrospective appearance only set into relief his meteoric development as a writer. Between "The Tenant" and "The Motive", the second had the more self-reflexive creative design. It told of a writer beginning work on a novel closely patterned after his dealings with real people in his neighborhood. He stalked his neighbors and pursued relations with them in the service of his art:

Over the following days his work began to bear its first fruits. The novel was advancing steadily, though it diverged in parts from the outline arranged in the drafts and the previous plan. But Álvaro let it flow freely within that precarious and difficult balance between the instantaneous pull that certain situations and characters imposed and the necessary rigour of the general design that structures a work. As for the rest, if the presence of real models for his characters facilitated his task and provided a point of support where his imagination could rest or derive fresh impetus, at the same time it introduced new variables that would necessarily change the course of the tale. The two stylistic pillars upon which the work was being raised were nevertheless intact, and that was the essential thing for Álvaro. On the one hand, the descriptive passion, which offers the possibility of constructing a fictive duplicate of reality, by appropriating it; moreover, he considered that, while the enjoyment of sentiment is merely a plebeian emotion, the genuinely artistic enjoyment comes from the impersonal pleasure of description. On the other hand, it was necessary to narrate events in the same neutral tone that dominated the descriptive passages, like someone recounting incidents he hasn't entirely understood himself or as if the relationship between the narrator and his characters was of a similar order to that which the narrator maintained with his toiletries. Álvaro frequently congratulated himself on his immovable conviction of the validity of these principles.

The prose was leaden, ordinary. The tone was "neutral", parodying its own unremarkable style. It was a circular method. Later on, the protagonist Álvaro would acknowledge that "out of the material he'd written for the novel he would be able to construct its parody and refutation." It went back to the novel's signature and premise, attributed to Hegel, but echoing Borges's proclamation, after the American painter Whistler, that "art happens every time we read a poem":

Despite all the century's swipes, however, it was essential to keep believing in the novel. Some had already understood this. No instrument could grasp with more precision and wealth of nuance the long-winded complexity of reality. As for its death certificate, he considered it a dangerous Hegelian prejudice; art neither advances nor retreats: art happens. But it was only possible to combat the notion of the genre's death throes by returning to its moment of splendour, in the meantime taking careful note of the technical and other sorts of contributions the century had afforded, which it would be, at the very least, stupid to waste. It was essential to go back to the nineteenth century; it was essential to go back to Flaubert.

Flaubert in French untranslated was in fact found at the start of the novella, in its epigraph. Perhaps the only way to appreciate "The Motive" was to treat its rabid self-examination and its self-critical passages as irony and satire, which they were, although the delivery was rather solemn for its own good. And the cliches are too distracting to serve a satiric function.

"The Tenant", for its part, was an unsuccessful variation of "the double". Michael Rota, a lecturer in a university, was slowly being displaced by a newly hired professor who happened to be a tenant in the same apartment compound he lived in. He watched, seemingly helplessly, as his own tenured position and his girlfriend were usurped by the man. A Kafkan nightmare was being enacted at his expense. Something must have been out of sorts in the world, or a new dimension of reality must have opened up. "The Tenant" would have been an effective tale were it not for the obviousness of the literary devices used: the recurring images and metaphors, the surreal details doled out to connote and denote wrinkles in time: twilight zone-ish, déjà vu situations. As with the second novella, its reception would have to be adjusted to appreciate what the writer was trying to achieve using very transparent effects.

An apprentice work, The Tenant and The Motive was a merely amusing window into the full literary maturity found in the Sebaldian or memory-haunted false novel Soldiers of Salamis and its false sequel The Speed of Light. 


For the Spanish Lit Month by Stu and Richard.

Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala

Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, translated from the Spanish by Marlon James Sales (Cacho Publishing House, 2013)

Crónica del rey pasmado (1989) was a comic novel set in the midst of 17th century Spanish Inquisition. Its writer, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910-1999), was dead serious. Realism was one thing he would not let go of. Never mind if his story combined elements of the fantastical, the nonsensical, and the supernatural.
 

Saan ka naman makakakita ng lalaki na upang masarili ang kanyang esposa ay kailangan pang makialam ang mga protokolo at maging ang mga pari?

– Sa bahaging ito ng mundo kung saan ka naroroon, pangkaraniwan ito at ang iba pang kababalaghan. Huwag kang bibitiw sa realidad.

[Where have you seen a man who, in order to be with his wife alone, needs priests and protocols to interfere?

– In this part of the world where you find yourself, this as well as other sorcery is commonplace. Don't let go of reality.]

When it was learned the king slept the night before with a whore and later requested to see his own wife the queen naked, the news spread like wildfire in the kingdom of the religious. The die hard conservatives were scandalized and would have the king pay for his impure thoughts. Seeing his queen naked! Surely that was uncalled for.

In no time at all, the unforgivable offense became the agenda of an emergency meeting of the Holy Tribunal presided over by the Grand Inquisitor. The excellencies were hell bent to impose their doctrines. To add to the provocation, the country was raging a war against two territories and the king's indiscretion was seen as prelude to certain defeat. God would certainly punish the people for the sins of the king. And to add further to the devious turn of events, the Devil himself was seen roaming around in monstrous get up.

This period novel was a surprisingly sobering mirror of current times. Given the Church's penchant for intruding into secular affairs, the contemporary quality of its subject matter would not fade for a long time. Must leaders be put to a stricter set of moral standards than their subjects? Morality as a class issue, anyone?

Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala (The Tale of the Bewitched King) was translation into Filipino of Torrente Ballester's loud-funny novel of a sexually repressed young king and his kingdom under the clutches of clerical bigotry. The translator, Marlon James Sales, earlier produced his version of Gabriel Miró's Oleza novels, proving himself a proficient translator of satirical novels dealing with hypocrisy and religious conservatism. The two works were both concerned with what happens when dogmatism runs counter not so much against common sense (though it does that) but against human nature. As one character would have it: Magkaminsa'y maraming suliraning dulot ang matibay na pananampalataya sa kaayusan ng sambayanan. (There are times when resolute faith brings its fair share of problems to national peace and order.)

Miró's double novel had a more realistic bent. In terms of prose style it was a bit more dense, and the scope was broader. But the saucy topic and playful bent of Torrente Ballester compensated for its slim (186 pages in translation) and streamlined treatment of good and evil (or shall we say, sense and senselessness). Torrente Ballester's novel was faster paced, more spontaneous in giving a succession of hilarious set pieces. The awesome conversation between pragmatic Satan and a priest was one highlight of the novel, not to mention the long debate during the Holy Tribunal, the climactic picaresque scene involving the queen being spirited away to finally consort with the king, and cameo appearance by the poet Luis de Góngora. Did I mention it was funny and exciting? How it managed to be so in a novel where there are constant reminders of auto-da-fé was crazy. The erotic part was a bonus.
 
This Spanish novel also appeared earlier in English as The King Amaz'd: A Chronicle (1996, trans. Colin Smith) and was adapted into film. Readers in English and Filipino would have to content themselves with this lone translation of Torrente Ballester's fiction so far. The knowledge that more major works from the same novelist await translation was enough to give us hope. La saga/fuga de J.B. (The Epic/Escape of J.B., 1972), for instance, was said to be the master work, the 800-pager to loose oneself in. I wonder who would be the intrepid translator and publisher for the task.... Miguel of St. Orberose had the scoop on Torrente Ballester's must-translate texts. As it is, Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala was already a comic marvel in miniature.



For the Spanish Lit Month by Stu and Richard.

Correction (21 Sept. 2014): As obooki commented in a review in seraillon, Torrente Ballester has actually been previously translated into English with Don Juan, tr. Bernard Molloy (Iberia, 1986).