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.