In the year of the fire rooster

Now that (Chinese) new year is almost upon us – either a creative or a timely excuse for being late to the yearend/yearstart party – I will kickstart the year (of the Earth Dog) with a look back at my reading fare: in terms of quantity, the lowest in recent memory. The lowest count since the year of the ox (2009): the first year in blog-record. But I do not regret the few pages I browsed. This was amply compensated by day job work load, career overreaching (reviewing for and passing two state exams), moving to a new home (stress and fulfillment combined), and looking at the ceiling (procrastination) or watching a lot of movies and tv shows. Sometimes I'm tempted to branch out to other subject matter (food review, film review) for the blog. Just to produce content, the amateur reader (excuse me, Tom) might wear the hat of a journalist or short story writer or food critic or travel tour guide. But the thing is, as shown by the graph below, there is a high correlation between the number of books read and the number of posts published. It's a no-brainer but I'll take home the insight just to gloss over the fact that the multi-year trend is downward. If the year of the fire rooster is any indication, then the Earth dog is bound to be an all-time low in reading owing to another stressful, demanding, procrastinating year punctuated by extreme weather events and a disruptive eruption of a volcano, metaphorically speaking.






FICTION

Hotel Iris by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet, translated by Jordan Stump

Ang Makina ni Mang Turing [The Machine of Old Turing] by Ramon Guillermo

Ang mga Hangin ng Abril [The Winds of April] by N.V.M. Gonzalez, translated from English to Filipino by Edgardo B. Maranan

R.U.R. (Robot Unibersal ni Rossum): Isang Dramang Kolektibang may Komikong Prologo at Tatlong Yugto mula sa Tsekong Manunulat na si Karel Čapek [R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Collective Drama With a Comic Prologue and in Three Acts from the Czech Writer Karel Čapek] by Karel Čapek, translated to Filipino by Guelan Varela-Luarca, from the English version by Claudia Novack

Walang Kapatid: Kasaysayang Bisaya / Wala’y Igsoon: Sugilanon’g Binisaya [Without a Brother: Visayan Novel] by Juan Irles Villagonzalo, translated from Cebuano to Filipino by Roderick C. Villaflor

Ang Ikatlong Anti-Kristo [The Third Anti-Christ] by Eros S. Atalia

Rubdob ng Tag-init [The Summer Solstice] by Nick Joaquín, translated from English to Filipino by Michael M. Coroza

The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray

Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga, translated from Basque into Spanish by Asun Garikano and Bernardo Atxaga, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

The Book of Proper Names by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Shaun Whiteside

Fort by B. S. Medina Jr., translated from Filipino to English by the author

Leche by R. Zamora Linmark

Ang Matanda at ang Dagat [The Old Man and the Sea] by Ernest Hemingway, translated to Filipino by Jesus Manuel Santiago

Children of the Ash-Covered Loam by N.V.M. Gonzalez

NONFICTION

Palawan and Its Global Connections, edited by James F. Eder and Oscar L. Evangelista

Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation: Wartime mobilisation as a model for action? by Laurence L. Delina

Rationalizing the Local Planning System (RPS) by Ernesto M. Serote

GRAPHIC

Ito ang Diktadura: Koleksiyon ng Libros para mañana (Mga Aklat para sa Kinabukasan) – Aklat 2 [This Is Dictatorship: Collection of Libros para mañana (Books of the Future) – Book 2] by Equipo Plantel, illustrated by Mikel Casal, translated from Spanish to Filipino by Annie Yglopaz and Kata Garcia

Mga Uring Panlipunan: Koleksiyon ng Libros para mañana (Mga Aklat para sa Kinabukasan) – Aklat 1 [Social Classes: Collection of Libros para mañana (Books of the Future) – Book 1] by Equipo Plantel, illustrated by Joan Negrescolor, translated from Spanish to Filipino by Annie Yglopaz and Kata Garcia

Ella Arcangel: Tomo Una: Ito ay Panganib [Ella Arcangel: First Issue: Danger Is Here] by Julius Villanueva and Mervin Malonzo

Tabi Po: Isyu 3 [Excuse Me: Issue 3] by Mervin Malonzo

Duras's closed door

The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Barbara Bray (Perennial Library, 1986)


Among personal tragedies, what could be more apocalyptic than the breakup of a love affair, even more so if the raw feelings never really subsided despite the distance and the years?

Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. She said, It's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he's heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.

In the intervening years from the end of the affair the woman became a novelist. Her sensuous phrases and images must be derived in part from her tumultuous, controversial affair with an older man, in part from grief caused by the death of her brother in the war. The Lover by Marguerite Duras was built from sensory images and poetic touches. It did so through repetitions and impressions waylaid by periods and commas. Memory was nudged by portrait images. Visual forms were elucidated, ekphrastic-like.

So, I'm fifteen and a half.
It's on a ferry crossing the Mekong River.
The image lasts all the way across.
I'm fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just one season, hot, monotonous, we're in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.

Duras mobilized in her prose the power of these punitive punctuation marks to pause feelings, to pace her long drawn out grief, to startle. Within the photographic context the poetic flourishes worked; in isolation they lost their color. Her Saigon was a closed door that does not budge. 

In the books I’ve written about my childhood I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don’t know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depth of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It's the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

In form, the novel (or novella) was artistic enough. In substance, it was lacking from an apparent slightness of frame. Its strength was in the uncompromising voice. Since then, there had been "novels of voice" with more heft, spun to more apocalyptic effect. Toni Morrison's early novels—Sula, Beloved, Tar Baby, Jazz—came to mind. Or The Book of Proper Names by Amélie Nothomb, which was a hyperactive, less mannered (anti-)love story. They were closed doors that admitted at the slightest provocation. As for The Lover ... it's as if I've never read, though I thought I read.


Doom is upon us—the apocalypse trifecta edition.

Bernhard's demons

What would Thomas Bernhard's desert island reading be like? If his novels were any indication, his library must be heavy on philosophy and white male writers. But his memoirs would provide more definite titles and authors. The epigraphs of his five-part memoirs were selected quotations from Voltaire, Montaigne, Pascal, and Novalis. His grandfather's shelves contained: Works of Goethe (volume 4), Shakespeare's King Lear, the poems of Dauthendey, Christian Wagner, Hölderlin, Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena.

I had read Hamsun's Hunger, Dostoyevsky's Raw Youth, and Goethe's Elective Affinities, and I had made notes on what I had read, a practice my grandfather had observed throughout his life. I tried keeping a diary but immediately gave up. I could have had contacts with all kinds of people at the Vötterl, but I did not want any, being satisfied with the company of my books and with the long expeditions I made into the vast, undiscovered continents of the imagination. Hardly had I woken up and conscientiously taken my temperature in accordance with the rules, as I had done every morning for months, than I turned to my books, my closest and most intimate friends. It was in Grossgmain that I first discovered reading. This was a sudden discovery which proved decisive for my subsequent life. This discovery—that literature can at any moment provide the mathematical solution to life and one's own existence provided that it is put into gear and operated as though it were mathematics, so that in time it becomes a form of higher mathematics and ultimately the supreme mathematical art, which can be called reading only when we have mastered it completely—this discovery was one which I could not have made until my grandfather had died ... Through reading I was able to bridge the gulf which yawned beneath me even here and was thus able to rescue myself from moods which could have led only to destruction. [1]

Literature as mathematics, then as higher mathematics and supreme mathematical art, was reminiscent of Atzabacher's attributed belief in the "high art and the highest art" in Old Masters. Bernhard confessed to reading mainly European writers, mostly from the collection in his grandfather's shelves. The "principal works of Shakespeare and Stifter, of Lenau and Cervantes, though I cannot claim that I understood them in all their rich complexity". Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Montaigne, Pascal, Péguy, and Schopenhauer. (He read a lot of poetry and philosophy, in addition to having later on a life-long daily addiction to reading newspapers.) Verlaine: check. Trakl: check. Baudelaire: check. Dostoyevsky: check.

Dostoyevsky above all else. The young Bernhard was smitten by the Russian's voluptuous specter of self-destruction, particularly in The Demons. It was a watershed for him. And it was a book to emulate. A path-breaker. It was like a medicine to his sickly body.

Never in my whole life have I read a more engrossing and elemental work, and at the time I had never read such a long one. It had the effect of a powerful drug, and for a time I was totally absorbed by it. For some time after my return home I refused to read another book, fearing that I might be plunged headlong into the deepest disappointment. For weeks I refused to read anything at all. The monstrous quality of The Demons had made me strong; it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out. I had felt the impact of a work that was both wild and great, and I emerged from the experience like a hero. Seldom has literature produced such an overwhelming effect on me. ... What I needed I had found in The Demons. I searched the sanatorium library for other such elemental works, but there were none. It would be superfluous to enumerate the authors whose books I opened and immediately shut again, repelled by their cheapness and triviality. Apart from The Demons I had no time for literature, but I felt sure that there must be other books like it. But there was no point in looking for them in the sanatorium library, which was chock-full of tastelessness and banality, of Catholicism and National Socialism. How was I to get hold of other books like The Demons? My only chance was to leave Grafenhof as soon as possible and look for my demons in freedom.

Who could blame the young, tubercular writer if the anarchic-revolutionary tendencies of the Russian novelist offered him the way out? There were many chilling scenes in Bernhard's novels, but his memoirs were scene after scene of perversity and absurdity. He unpacked them all: "the war and its aftermath, my grandfather's sickness and death, my own illness, my mother's illness, my family's despair, the depressing conditions under which they lived, the hopelessness of their existence." Intermittently, he was confined in hospitals, death ward, and sanatorium, waging personal battle against his illness in such graphic and painful ways. I still could not forget the scene wherein a doctor performed a pneumothorax on him.

The patient has to lie on the bed in the doctor's surgery while air is introduced between the diaphragm and the diseased lung by means of a thin tube; in this way the tubercular lung cavity is collapsed so that it can re-seal. I had often witnessed this procedure. It is painful only initially, after which the patient becomes accustomed to it and thinks no more about it. It becomes a routine experience, and although the patient is always afraid beforehand, by the time it is over his fear is proved to have been unfounded. However, it is not invariably unfounded, as I was soon to discover.

"Absurdity", for him, "is the only way forward. it was a way I knew, the only one that led anywhere." His recollections were a conflation of all his lifelong frustrations, all the absurd situations he found himself in.

One day, while this highly respected doctor (he was in fact a professor) was injecting me with air, he went over to the telephone, leaving me on the bed with the tube in my chest, and rang up his cook to give her instructions about his lunch. After a good deal of to-and-fro about chives and butter and whether there should be potatoes or not, the professor brought the debate to an end and deigned to return to his patient on the bed. He injected a further volume of air and then told me to step behind the X-ray screen. This was the only way to discover how the air had been distributed. Hardly had I taken the required position than I was seized with a fit of coughing and passed out. I just heard the professor say, My God, I collapsed the other lung!

Borges postulated that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical [2]. Everything literary is non-fiction, including fiction. This is probably because the reverse is also true. In Bernhard, the reenactment of his younger self's troubled life was truthful only in the sense that it was only ever an approximation: "Truth is always wrong, even if it is one hundred percent truth. Every error is pure truth." This pure dose of contradiction was his literary framework, in novels and autobiography both.

Language is inadequate when it comes to communicating the truth, and the best the writer can offer is an approximation to the truth, a desperate and hence unreliable approximation. Language can only falsify and distort whatever is authentic.

W. G. Sebald borrowed heavily from this aesthetics of falsification. Bernhard's pragmatic and practical outlook in life prepared him to adopt the stance of the skeptic. Not for him Sebald's attempt to recapture the literary equivalent of restitution and atonement. War was not a romantic concept in which to set off one's destiny. He realized that even after the war ended, he never actually escaped from it. War was his state of nature. And so he would not be troubled by any notion of being a casualty of the war, or by the imaginary burden of surviving it. The shadow of war was the shadow lurking in his lung. He considered himself well-trained in skepticism and rebellion, but these were often manifested in complaints and extreme irony. He was prepared for the worst. Armed with memories and demons (books), he happily searched out for more demons: the elemental and monstrous kind. The supreme calculus in mathematical prose. The raging demons that built his personal canon.



Notes:

[1] Quoted passages were from "Breath: A Decision" (Der Atem, 1978) and "In the Cold" (Die Kälte, 1981), by Thomas Bernhard, in Gathering Evidence and My Prizes, translated by David McLintock and Carol Brown Janeway (Vintage International, 2011). Passages in bold are my emphases.

[2] From "A Profession of Literary Faith" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books, 2000).

Atxaga's colonial design

Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga, translated from Basque into Spanish by Asun Garikano and Bernardo Atxaga, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill Secker, 2011)


The humorless and no-nonsense Chrysostome Liège was the pivot around which Bernardo Atxaga's dark comedy about a short stop at turn-of-the-century Congo revolves. But it was not until the last few chapters, with the characters fully developed to breaking point and with the entry of the assuming journalist Lassalle to observe a duel to the death, that the pitch nature of the comedy was revealed: the novel was as black as the black mamba. For while the story was clothed in the reality of colonialism, Atxaga elected to tweak the story such that the central human rights violations appeared to be glossed over. He must be using negative capability (if that was the right phrase here) to the extreme. He had designed a seemingly ordinary tale of ordinary characters living in ordinary circumstances. Except that they weren't. Chrysostome's unbending will not to touch a woman was a throwback of sorts in a macho novel of obvious design: the desire for and conquest of women, the rape of women, as the obvious correlative of colonialism.

Was Atxaga making his obvious point all the more pointed? What was happening in the background, Africans tortured and murdered, losing their lives left and right, every little thing to do with the victim, was shunted out and were described as an aside, as "matter-of-fact".

One Sunday, when the palm wine had been flowing freely, the Lieutenant had the idea of organising a shooting match to decide who among the officers deserved the title of the William Tell of Yangambi. He would provide the cartridges, so no one need worry about that.
...
A few children were brought from a nearby mugini, and the competition began with more than a dozen participants prepared to shoot at the apples that were placed on each child's head. Not wanting to disappoint the Lieutenant, Lopes and the other officers did not try very hard, but Chrysostome was incapable of pretence and he played fairly and honestly, treating the second highest-ranking officer in Yangambi as if he were just another soldier. He split open five apples with five bullets, while the Lieutenant managed only two.

The unspeakable was never spoken, but the chilling effect was the same. In just a few words but with such tremendous implication, cruelty was as if normalized and made more palpable. That Schiller play was surely some kind of a marker in the story.

As it turned out in a flashback, Chrysostome's resolve was maybe another rationing of indirection on the part of the novelist. At the heart of hearts of this enigmatic central character, provincial and religious and fundamentalist attitudes resided. His uncompromising self might just be the key ingredient to start a war, any war, or an economy built on forced labor, or dabbling in all forms of perversity, in all colors of slavery. Chrysostome was equally guilty as every officer around him. When his girlfriend had died in the hands of Lieutenant Van Thiegel who tried to rape her, Chrysostome could only utter in religious terms: "The Lord's ways are strange indeed ... Who would have thought that he would seek the help of that filthy drunk [Van Thiegel] to save my purity?"

The novel's title referred to the vested interests of Lalande Biran, the highest ranking officer in Yangambi, in working in the Congo. In order to secure for his wife seven houses in France, Lalande Biran colluded with his bosom friend and fellow poetaster Duke Armand Saint-Foix ("Toisonet"), well-positioned in the retinue of King Léopold II. Friendship and exploitation went hand in hand as they embarked on the smuggling of ivory and mahogany from Congo. The opposite of Chrysostome, Lalande Biran would weekly satisfy his appetite for women and girls. Fearing syphilis, he would only take virgins as a rule. The classic conquistador. Virility as the most valued virtue of those in power.

When the second clean-up operation began in Yangambi, there was only a week to go before Christmas. A despatch from the AIA informed Lalande Biran that since the journalist Ferdinand Lassalle would be bringing the most up-to-date of cameras with him, it would be best if the older, uglier natives were removed from Yangambi and kept in an enclosure in the jungle until the visit was over.

Sure enough, the plan to hide the ugly and the old natives was executed, and the caged ones were almost forgotten in the jungle in the interim. No matter how much he lingered at the stage of those in power, what was hiding in the backstage was Atxaga's vision of humanity. There, with the stage hands and the prop men, he put up a mirror in which to examine the naked self. An intense, Western self-examination, that most Socratic of virtues, was unfolding.

By focusing on the daily lives and travails of the officers in the Congo, Atxaga had made Congo the true state of the world. Life in the Congo was also life outside it. People would behave in the same manner (corrupt, greedy, lecherous) wherever they are. Lalande Biran pursued his writing of poetry even in the Congo. His muse had not left him in dark times of the dark age. Who ever said that there's no poetry after the Holocaust?

The Roi du Congo was progressing so slowly that it was easy to forget that you were travelling down the River Congo. He [Lassalle] had to make a conscious effort to think this in order to remind himself where he was: in the heart of Africa, not in Europe. This, however, was a physical truth, not a spiritual one. His spirit was still in Europe, and his greatest joy was knowing that his stay in Africa was coming to an end.

What was a Basque writer doing in Congo? A writer's imagination was untethered, in free reign. This Basque novel was really a novel of Basque. At the same time it was a novel of Africa. And it was a Western novel. The geography mattered less than the spiritual component. By normalizing cruelty, he had only reinforced the blindness of the perpetrators to their crime. The Zola anecdote recounted by the journalist was on point.

When visiting a very deep mine, the writer asked the miners how they managed to get the Percheron horses they used for transportation out of the mine, given that the animals were so large and the entrance to the galleries so narrow. One of the miners told him: 'Oh, we don't take them out. They're brought down here when they're only a few months old and then they stay here for good.' According to him, there was no reason to pity the poor beasts. The horses knew nothing else and had adapted to the world they inhabited.

The tragic thing about the world we lived in was that we had become inured to injustices and inhumanities that they just became news stories and headlines for us. Just another one of those wars, another bombing, another refugee drowning. The only way for evil to prosper was for people to become adapted to their comfortable lifeways and to condone or falsely believe in the system. The novel had to end in a duel when everything else was a mockery.

There were no rebels or freedom fighters in this story. Resistance and revolt were mere whispers in the shadows. The only clear instance of rebellion was one slave planting black mambas into the officers' quarters. The focus on Western, colonial perspective and its pursuit of African exoticism at every opportunity was a form of deliberate "discrimination" of novelistic detail. Atxaga knowingly privileged the white man's burden (and voice). But this was a risky novel design to begin with. There's no more need to highlight the discrepancy between the obvious and the not-so, between right and wrong. The attack of the rebels was imminent, as one officer lamented at the novel's end. While infinitely waiting for the barbarians, the savages had already drunk themselves to death on the table.


A late submission to the Spanish Literature Month(s) co-organized by Winstonsdad's Blog and Caravana de recuerdos.

Snapshot

Preparing for a few days journey by ship. Books to bring.

A shipwreck! Anthony of Times Flow Stemmed made me reconsider my priority reading list drafted a lifetime ago (on the first year of this blog). What my desert reading looks like I leave to a combination of fortuitous circumstances.


Inter Ice Age 4 – Kobo Abé
The Writing on the Wall – Miklós Bánffy 
Frost – Thomas Bernhard
Selected Non-Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus – Sir Thomas Browne
Sakhalin Island – Anton Chekhov
Scenes from Provincial Life – J. M. Coetzee
The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
The Maias – Eça de Queirós
Visitation – Jenny Erpenbeck
The Siege of Krishnapur – J. G. Farrell
Mysteries – Knut Hamsun
Amerika – Franz Kafka
A Time for Everything – Karl O. Knausgaard
Satantango – László Krasznahorkai
Nada – Carmen Laforet
Women in Love – D. H. Lawrence
Payback – Gert Ledig
Joseph and His Brothers – Thomas Mann
Wittgenstein's Mistress – David Markson
Oleza – Gabriel Miró
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll – Álvaro Mutis
But for the Lovers – Wilfrido S. Nolledo
Hygiene and the Assassin – Amélie Nothomb
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O'Brien
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa 
The Gray Notebook – Josep Pla
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago  
Silent Catastrophes – W. G. Sebald
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
And Then – Natsume Sōseki
Indian Summer – Adalbert Stifter
Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories – Kōno Taeko
Petals of Blood – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Territory of Light – Yūko Tsushima
Poemas Humanos – César Vallejo
The Aesthetics of Resistance, vol. 1 – Peter Weiss
The Vivisector – Patrick White
The Waves – Virginia Woolf