Review: And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers

Gonzalo Celorio. Translated by Dick Gerdes. Austin:U Texas Press, 2009.

Michael Sedano

I am glad I am not a drinker. Money pours out to buy noxious chemicals that pickle a brain. The body gives out, the mind goes. Over time.Then there's la cruda, that enervating measure of accountability for a night's drinking.

But the bars! The booze! The ritual of the bar crawl and its rules: one beer and tequila chaser, then move along to the next spot. And if one delays and doubles the dose, ni modo. The feet know where to step next to reach the goal, another favorite spot out of many.

That hangover hit retiring professor Juan Manuel Barrientos hard. He's slowing down after twentyplus years as a university professor and one heck of a party the night before has pushed him to his limit and here he is the morning after, pushing his endurance once again. It's all downhill from here, literally.

Juan Manuel's life is out of control and he doesn't admit it. Instead, he hides behind professorial airs and alkie theories to justify drinking. Here is an extended sample to give you a flavor of the drinker's worldview and the style of this translation:

beer is simply a chaser for the tequila, because one of its ingredients, yeast, serves as a protective layer to the stomach lining. As a result, when you rigorously knock back a shot of tequila, an act sustained by the oldest ritual in Mexico, the liquor splashes on top of a foamy cbshion that protects our insides from irritation and acidity. And judging from the academic vocabulary that you usually use for explaining even the most mundane topics, your students would listen to you attentively-well, they would've listened to you had they been here today-similar to the way they took notes and listened to you lecture about Sor Juana's "First Dream" or baroque pilasters.
However, at the bar they served you three drinks-a mug of beer, a shot of tequila, and a sangrita chaser. You're alone, Juan Manuel, so you can knock back three or four drinks, one right after the other, which cures hangovers once and for all. And you can do it without having to talk to anyone around you. Bur you must restrain yourself and hold back as much as possible, because you still have several more stops to make. Right off the bat, you reject the sangrita and take a long sip of beer, which is tequila's best friend. Satisfying your thirst, the beer allows the tequila to concentrate on its own energy, strength, and nuances. Just imagine trying to quench your thirst with tequila. Well, you'd be dead by now, Juan Manuel, because your thirst is insatiable, boundless. You take a second swig of beer and ponder the tiny double ting of pearls that forms on the surface of the tequila. Judiciously, you sprinkle salt on a slice of Iime. Then you pick up the shot of tequila, raise it in a toast that the mirror behind the rows of vodka and gin bottles reflects back at you in a friendly way, and down it in one gulp, like yestetday at Casa Pedro, and like every day, as always, down the hatch, burning all the way down. Jesus! Tequila isn't to be savored. It's supposed to go straight down, no swishing it around in your mouth, because the good feeling it produces comes afterward, when you exhale, when its vapors resurface from below, from your stomach, in your breath. It's then, and not before, when the lime with a dash of salt blends sharply with the tequila, because in reality you're supposed to inhale tequila in the same way you inhale smoke from a cigarette. Tequila is a drink that you inhale. After quivering for a moment, you immediately feel a rush, a loss of body, and then everything returns to notmal. And there's nothing like tequila to cure a hangover. pg30

The lies and elaborate reasoning have become a lifestyle of the old professor. Today--how could he know?--will be his final hangover and the novel will track his final day bar by bar until the novel's ironic ending, in the same bar where it begins. Readers will be mystified how the irony arises. Was he that hungover he didn't see his student in the bar? Vice versa?

Gonzalo Celorio's novel takes its name from the Mexican National Anthem, as illustrated below in another of Juan Manual's drunken ravings. Celorio calls a reader's attention to the allusion early in the day. Readers want to make sense of the allusion, not just owing to the novel's declivitous story but beause the pun takes on added punch in the novel's last events.

“Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra,” meaning “And let the earth tremble at its centers." Here, it was as if the earth had several centers, that is, as if the center-the epicenter-equally distant from other centers, configuring the circumference, and giving the center precisely its condition of centeredness, according to its definition, was not just one but many centers. It wasn't a rhetorical figure, like the one that multiplies the essence of the nation or its destiny in order to make it sound more sonorous or emphatic-the destinies of the nation, the essences of the homeland. No. The idea of several centers was something else. Explaining the phenomenon to Jimena and Fernando in that unbearable professional tone, you say that to you the anthem's original version says "antros" instead of "centros," that is, caverns instead of centers. Haphazardly, the songwriter González Bocanegra must have transcribed some of the letters in such a way that they were interpreted differently, and since then, have become a part of the official record and the public domain. As a result, "And let the earth tremble at its centers" should have been "And let the earth tremble in its caverns," because back then "antros" didn't have the connotation that it has today, that is, dingy, disreputable bars or dives, like you would have wanted it to mean, but only the innermost recesses of centers, that is, caverns, caves, or grottos. "And let the earth tremble in its caverns" meant just that, its caves and grottos. So, why not say, "And let the earth tremble from within?" That doesn't sound so bad, does it? The verse would be longer and more fitting for the rhythm of a national anthem, you exclaim while gesticulating wildly. This is crazy! We've had to add syllables to every verse forever and ever in order to make them fit the music: [heaven] ha-has given you a soldier in every son. Do you see what I mean? Mexicans, at the cry of wa-war, / prepare the steel and the ste-eed / And may the earth shake at its co-ore / to the resounding roar of the-e cannon. Like any other anthem, ours is a fighting, warlike, violent hymn, bur we've had to stutter, adding syllables, to make it work.

Bolstered by the strange pleasure he got from the combination of tequila and philology-centers, caverns, and dingy bars-Juan Manuel Barrientos walked to the Tolsá Plaza, so secret yet so magnificent. 35

Readers will enjoy the translator's skill in creating fluid prose in English from Celorio's anything but straightforward prose and abrupt time and scene shifts. As with any translation, it would be fun to review the original with the English. I look forward to the day a publisher elects to bring readers facing page text to double the pleasure and help answer nagging questions. For example, the unusual style of the narrative, particularly Celorio's heavy reliance upon second person narrative addressing his character as "you" immediately raises the question, "tu" or "ud."?

Travelers to Mexico City will want to carry the novel along. It opens with Juan Manuel parking at Bellas Artes and preparing to give his students an architectural tour of the historic centro's unknown treasures. You'll get a fabulous, though sketchy, guided tour of the area around Garibaldi Plaza, Bellas Artes, el Zócalo. It would be fun to follow, up to a point, Juan Manuel's footsteps.

English majors and other critics may be tempted to see parallels in Juan Manuel's story to the title character in Nathanael West's Dream Life of Balso Snell. They share the plot of progressive degradation and oddball character, so some readers may wish to re-read West with an eye on Celorio's Mexican horizon. I intend to.

All in all, readers who enjoy Mexican novels, who love el Defie and have walked its streets and boulevards, will find this impressive work a lot of fun.


My gosh, that's the final Tuesday of October! A Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except you are here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga. With DDLM around the corner, not to mention treats or tricks, costumes and screamingly happy tykes, there's tons of fun happening between now and next Tuesday. Enjoy your share.

mvs

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Guest Columnist: Jesse Tijerina

Every once and awhile I get lucky enough and stumble across an author of whom I have never heard, but should have; it was a pleasant surprise to discover Mexico’s very own, Guillermo Arriaga early last week at a used bookstore in South Denver.

The novel, “The Night Buffalo,” is the first of three to be published in the United States. Arriaga’s knack to craft such a multifarious plot into fluid and poetic narrative will come as no revelation to the fans of his Academy Award nominated films, “21 Grams and Amores Perros.”

So begins the story of a previously shy and presently disheveled Gregorio Valdez who succumbs to madness by placing a .38 Brazilian revolver to his head. In the wake of the tragic discovery of his blood drenched corpse, the lives of those most intimate unravel into a state beyond repair. His at once dear friend Manuel finds himself behind bars after viciously unloading a pistol into the flesh of an innocent jaguar at the local zoo. Valdez’s sometimes novia Tania magically disappears and reappears only to find there is no escaping the madness of Gregorio’s spell.
Ultimately, those dear to Valdez realize there is no freedom from the grasp of the once withdrawn boy who has gone mad by earwigs and pesadillas of a heavy huffing buffalo. “The last message I got from Gregorio consisted of an envelope with three earwigs and a white, bloodspattered card with the phrase: The night buffalo dreams of us,” reveals Manuel. “I never found out who send it.” Manuel knew exactly who had penned such a mad letter with added ephemera; he simply was refusing to acknowledge nightmare for reality.

Having since read Arriaga’s other two novels, it is safe to say he is worth the read.

Then Night Buffalo by Guillermo Arriaga published by Simon & Schuster, 2007

Review: Yankee Invasion. Ignacio Solares.

Yankee Invasion

A Novel of Mexico City

By Ignacio Solares
Translated by Timothy G. Compton
Introduction by Carlos Fuentes

ISBN: 978-0-9798249-4-4

Michael Sedano

Imagine yourself a resident of Baghdad in March 2003. It is the eve of the United States invasion. You know your own military’s weakness is the perfect foil for the invader’s fabled power. Some of your men in uniform will fight fiercely, but they will surely die. You know your nation’s political leadership engenders little loyalty from a restive citizenry, so you hold no hope for massive resistance when the invaders raise their flag from the conquered rooftops. A feeling of dread begins to seep into your every waking thought. The first bombs drop, the first tanks turn the corner, and everything you feared turns out as you foresaw, only it’s worse because all these fears are real, and they’re happening to you.

Now put yourself into the same frame of mind, except the year is 1847 and you are living in Mexico City. The Yankees have already stolen Texas, the evil clown Santa Anna having held a state funeral for his dead leg, now has gone into hiding to avoid battle. Only poorly armed rasquachi soldiers stand in the way of General Scott’s invading giants. The Yankees have bombarded Veracruz. The Yankees have overwhelmed Puebla. The Yankees are in the Zócalo about to raise the stars and stripes above the Palacio Nacional.

Such parallels are inescapably part of the ambiente of Ignacio Solares’ Yankee Invasion, a Novel of Mexico City. Such is the bad P.R. the United States has earned from its many years of military adventures in foreign lands that the novel doesn’t need to make the parallels explicitly. Solares feeds the flames an anti-Yankeeism in this historical novel, so it is not a novel for “my country right or wrong my country” tipos. Solares doesn’t waste a lot of tears for Mexicanos, either. One of the key side characters, Father Jarauta, stands for fighting against the Yankees and the Mexicans who support them. Moreover, the story comes to us ten years after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has ceded half of Mexico into US control, and 1848 was a long time ago.

Solares uses the invasion as backdrop for the story of a courageous surgeon, a troubled writer, and an indictment of an inept government, then as now. We hear about war but see precious little. Much of the battle action takes place in hearsay narrative, in rumor, in newspaper reportage. And this is a good thing because readers who are Veterans of the U.S. military do not want to read about Mexicans—or anyone—killing GIs or Marines, whether from the halls of Montezuma or the banks of the Euphrates.

The medico is Dr. Urruchúa. He’s troubled that his patients die with regularity after childbirth and other procedures. He’s frustrated that a few tragos of rum are all he can offer a patient about to feel the doctor’s saw cut into an amputation. Urruchúa suspects that washing hands and instruments might alleviate virulent infection, and ruminates that hypnotism could be useful in surgery. The doctor is a genuine hero. During the battle for Mexico City, the doctor goes from hospital to hospital without food or rest tending to wounded. A grievously wounded Yankee gets as good as the doctor can give—just as Yankee medicos tend to wounded Mexicans.

Among the doctor’s closest friends is Abelardo, the frustrated writer. Dr. Urruchúa theorizes Mesmer’s treatments could reduce Abelardo’s chronic depression, not just an amputee’s. But the best the doctor can offer his friend is some pills and a sympathetic ear.

Abelardo experiences hallucinations borne of his depression. He sees colors and auras, contemplates suicide as his one sure cure, and perhaps the best way to escape the consequences of the Yankee invasion. But unlikeable Abelardo is a man of inaction, preferring to discuss politics with his other rich friends than take up arms in defense of la patria.

Abelardo’s story is at once comic and frustrating. Comedy grows from his relationship with Magdalena, his wife, and two women whom Abelardo refers to as the true loves of his life. Magdalena hectors the frustrated writer to stitch together the drawersful of newspaper clippings and scribblings, along with Dr. Urruchúa’s notes, Abelardo has collected over the years. She’s heard bits and snippets of the history throughout their married life and Magdalena’s fed up with the story’s sketchiness. She, too, wants details on the two women, daughter and mother.

This novel, in fact, is the result of Magdalena’s goading urgency. But, in the end, Magdalena refuses to accept Abelardo’s version of events. To the reader’s frustration, Abelardo acknowledges that Magdalena is probably correct, telling her that many details are pure fiction or wishful thinking. In Abelardo’s untrustworthy mind, there’s no difference. Still, history has a concrete referent for much that transpires. The U.S. did invade. Chapultepec was taken. Mexico City was occupied. The trains ran on time, as it were, from United States administrative reforms. And maybe--given its dismal leadership and powerless easily riled plebe--Mexico got what it deserved, the invasion and loss of half its former territory.

Readers will find Yankee Invasion, A Novel of Mexico City, a worthwhile endeavor because the twisted story of the two women is deliciously salacious without being dirty, because the patriotism of the troubled primera clase Abelardo is sincere and genuine, because the underlying satire of Solares’ costumbrismo takes big bites out of Mexican pride, because the narrative is fun as it swings like Abelardo’s moods between straightforward historical account to confessional first person elements when Abelardo steps out of the narrative to address his readers directly, because of its imaginative structure.

Imagine yourself in the assembled masses. The occupying authority summoned attendance to hear the victory proclamation. U.S. cavalry and infantry clean up their appearance as well as possible, a few hours removed from the bloody battle to occupy el Castillo de Chapultepc and fight their way to the seat of government. An officer reads an English language proclamation—pendejo, the people think, screw you and whatever you’re saying in your foreign language. One GI is honored to haul the U.S. flag up the pole. A shot sounds from a nearby rooftop. The sniper’s aim drops the Yankee in his tracks. The crowd explodes in frenzy, pulling invaders to the ground, beating them with brooms and hammers and stones, tearing their dirty uniforms from bleeding corpses. You’re running for your life away from the carnage when a dying Yankee grabs your ankles. In desperation you pull a knife and thrust it into the Yankee’s body again and again until you smell his last breath. It is your own personal moment of triumph. If it happened. Ni modo, there’s a novel in it.

That's the first Tuesday of August. August, my birthday month, my anniversary month! But it's a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.

mvs

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Review: A Tuesday Like Today

Michael Sedano

Cecilia Urbina. A Tuesday Like Today. Translated by Clare E. Sullivan. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2008.
ISBN: 0916727475 ISBN 13: 9780916727475

Someone rings the doorbell, rousing Márgara from a whiskey-induced nap. Is it David? Has the mysterious-stranger-become-lover tracked her down after so short a delay?

This is how Cecilia Urbina's novel ends, with an unanswered question, a drowsy Márgara, an unfinished novel on the floor beside her chair as she rises to go answer her door.

Of course it's David, isn't it? This is a romance, isn't it?

Urbina's and Sullivan's A Tuesday Like Today wends its way from the ruins of Cambodian temples, to Bali, to Mexico City, with a detour via a story-within-a-story to the cowboy and indian Old West. Exotic locales with a pair of exotic sisters and a story, that, once it takes hold, holds a reader's interest to see how Urbina develops the tantalizing clues and parallels she weaves into her story.

At first, the story seems oddly out of place. The rich by marriage Camila, protective older sister Márgara, traveling the world on Camila's husband's credit card while he works on some mysterious, possibly illegal, business in Europe.

The novel's story within a story fuzzes the boundaries between the history of Camila's namesake grandmother and the sisters' pursuit of the definitely out of place David Masters-Iturbe, a piano playing Mexican they stumble upon in the bar of the Grand Hotel, who knows the history and ins and outs of Angkor Wat and other enchanting places.

The sisters become captivated by the urbane David. Camila, the married sister with the man-killing stare, seems to have the upper hand, even disappearing into the night with David while Márgara retires to their room barely containing her big sister dudgeon, yet nurturing her bitterness at a failed relationship of her own. Camila always gets the man.

David is like a local. Puts his jeep at the women's disposal, along with his services as guide and raconteur. The first hint that something lurks beneath the surface comes when the women spin David a family legend of Camila's namesake in Victorian Mexico involving the Decameron, a forbidden flirtation, and a handsome but ultimately worthless husband. But the question hangs over them, who is David, why is he at home in this remote part of Southeast Asia, does he have a shady occupation as does Camila's husband? Is history repeating itself?

The family legend of grandmother Camila's flirtation then disastrous marriage to the bad poet cheating gambler Francisco is turned upside down when the sisters invite David to tell his story. Rather than take on his own history, David fabricates the unknown history of Francisco, between the flirtation and the grandparents' union some years later. David confesses he weaves a story of lusty gamblers and fearless women out of countless of movies he's seen, but to Camila and Márgara, David has masked elements of his life in the cloak of the fable.

Their escapist evening tales come to an ugly confrontation with their surroundings when the tourists meet dozens of children missing eyes, feet, legs; victims of land mines left behind by various invaders. It's a searing fact that later bears a direct connection to David's story, his search for a sister missing somewhere in the Cambodian jungles.

I was hoping for a bit of ribaldry, a la the Decameron, but Urbina underplays it with nothing lubricious. A bit of understated sex on the beach, the lovers' two-day tryst in Bali, very little urgency one might find in a U.S. novel. But then, this is a Mexican novel. Unlike numerous translations, A Tuesday Like Today has a smooth continuity that doesn't bump up against the original language and culture. In English, it's an involving story. In Spanish, it won the Premio Coatlicue 2008, as did Elena Poniatowska, putting Urbina in the finest literary company.

Wings Press is not some powerhouse advertising behemoth--Urbina's novel is not yet on the publisher's website, so for your fortunate reader friends who merit an excellent recommendation they're not going to find at some mega store, order and read your copy of A Tuesday Like Today and pass it along. Coming in at only 160 pages, the novel passes quickly through one's hands and into a friend's.


That's the antepenultimate Tuesday of the last month of 2008. Uau, wow, and Santa Claus around the corner desperation. Still time to mail order hard-to-find titles, or visit your local independent bookseller. See you next week.

mvs

A Savage Read Without Detectives

Michael Sedano

In keeping with Daniel Olivas' column on Monday, here is the opening paragraph from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, as translated by Natasha Wimmer:

"November 2. I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."

On December 23, the narrator, a 17-year old boy named Juan García Madero, contributes what to me would have been a more cogent opening line:

"Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it."

In a nutshell, there's the sum and tenor of 577 generally tedious pages of adventurous writing. I suspect a plurality of readers will find the opening segment involving, then will get bogged down, or lost, in the abrupt stylistic shift of the middle of the novel, and probably stop reading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Can't say as I blame them, although I stuck it out to the bitter end, having invested too many hours seeing if I could make sense of what was going on.

The opening segment takes place in 1975 with García Madero abandoning his university studies to join the oddball poets and barmaids of Mexico City. Bolaño creates a sentimental map of the city, the character wandering the various quarters of the city searching the cafés and bars for the twenty-something poets who have opened their clique to the youth. In the process he beds one of two sisters and gets tangled up in the girl's altruistic plan to liberate a whore from her pimp. The girl's father, however, complicates matters when the boy discovers the father has taken the whore as a Sancha, ensconced her in a cheap hotel, but has to flee to the family home when the pimp discovers the love nest. 1975 ends with the boy, the whore, Lima and Belano--two disreputable poet-tipos--fleeing Mexico City after an armed confrontation with the pimp and a corrupt cop.

Exciting and colorful material there. Then the narrative shifts from the diarist story teller to that of a documentary film interviewing a mixed cast of characters. Here the story wends its way back and forth in time, between 1976 to 1996, tracking the movement of the two poet-tipos as they travel about France, Spain, and Israel. Another thread--the detection element--tracks the search for Cesárea Tinajero, the mother, or perhaps chief muse, of this visceral realism literary movement. In subthreads we learn more about the personal lives of the the visceral realists introduced in the opening section, and various gente who come in contact with the mythic Lima and Belano, and Octavio Paz' secretary. Much of this actually has interest and delight as Bolaño uses it for sketches of a certain mode of literary life in Mexico City. But it's long and could easily benefit from a liberal paring, especially as a character remembers the name of a poet, then another, then another, another, another, another...

The novel wraps up reverting to 1976, with the fleeing quartet arriving in northern Mexico, pursued by the vengeful pimp and his cop enforcer. The detectives finally find the mother of visceral realism in a remote Sonoran village. In a fatal confrontation with the pimp, Cesárea Tinajero saves their lives but is shot dead in the process. One of the poet-tipos knifes the pimp, and the cop is gut-shot and will die a slow, painful death. As I note, I suspect many readers will abandon the novel and won't ever get to this climactic desert confrontation, so this is not a spoiler revelation.

I actually felt a bit sorry for the translator, saddled with what must have been a rich variety of colorfully abusive language that ends up in English as fuck this and fuck that. After numerous such linguistic devolutions, I was reminded of the scene in the film El Norte, when the Guatemalteco elder counsels the about-to-be emigrants that, in order to sound like a Mexican, they have to pepper their speech with liberal uses of "chingado" this and "chingada" that. Aside from a bit of French verse, little is untranslatable, except for a moment of fun at the end of the novel. The insufferable García Madero quizzes the falso poets about classical poetic schemes and tropes, none of which the street girl and the two tipos understand. To turn the tables, they quiz García Madero on a unique idiom they speak. Early, early in the novel, a character complains that Lima and Belano speak this language--it has a name though I cannot cite it--and finally on the 532 page, we're treated to a sample that runs two pages:

"All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?"
"A toke of weed," said Belano without turning around.
"And what is muy carranza?"
"Something very old," said Belano.
"And lurias?"
"Let me answer," I said, because all the questions were really for me.
"All right," said Belano.
"I don't know," I said after thinking for a while.

I was surprised to find Bolaño's novel so tedious. I glanced at the blurbs on the back cover and noted the breathless praise heaped upon it. "Powerful and sophisticated." "premier Latin American writer." "The great Mexican novel of its generation." Maybe it's just me, as despite my problems, I wasn't entirely bored with it. I suspect the difference is similar to the differences that stretch between, yet link, the music of Beethoven to Dvorak and Stravinsky, then on to Suk and Schoenberg and beyond into the 21st century. The new stuff is somewhat interesting, musically tolerable, and more so because it often is quite short. Bolaños sets that model on its head with 577 pages, some filled out with nearly interminable lists that, like December 23, either have nothing happening, or I didn't understand them.

mvs

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