Notes

As a counter-weight to Lezama Lima's impossibly dense and confusing Paradiso, I'm also reading Jorge Volpi's novel El fin de la locura (Seix Barral, 2004). The book opens in the streets of Paris during the events of May 1968, with often hilarious evocations of the protagonist's confusion as he ends up among students at the barricades.

Volpi talked about this novel in an interview last year with the BBC. El fin de la locura is meant to be the second installment in a trilogy on the XX century that begins with En busca de Klingsor (Seix Barral, 1999). The third novel, which he's currently writing, will be centered on the years following the disappearance of the Berlin wall.

In the anthology of essays Palabra de América (Seix Barral, 2004), Volpi wrote about the misconceptions certain critics and readers have about Latin American writers:

"No contentos con denunciar la <<colonización literaria>> perpetrada por las potencias europeas, atribuyen a los escritores de estas regiones su misma ambivalencia. Obsesionados con lavar sus pecados, no se cansan de alabar el <<valor diferencial>> que encuentran en las literaturas de Asia, África y la propia América Latina con el mismo entusiasmo con el que un turista se maravilla ante la danza folclórica que observa en el lobby de un hotel de lujo. Por desgracia, muchos de estos críticos y lectores olvidan que, al menos desde el siglo XVI, los escritores de América Latina siempre han creído pertenecer por propio derecho a eso que llamamos Occidente. Tal vez se trata de un Occidente excéntrico, como señaló Octavio Paz—un Occidente matizado, en el que conviven muchas otras influencias—, pero ello no elimina la convicción de estos creadores de responder con sus obras, de manera absolutamente natural, a la misma tradición de sus críticos."
("El fin de la narrativa latinoamericana")

*

Sunday was spent wonderfully on a beach in Buzzards Bay, with friends, swimming in the ocean for the first time since last summer. I always exist in at least two worlds, at times defined by the English and Spanish languages. They hardly ever seem to meet and I don't feel completely comfortable in either one, though reading pulls them toward each other.

Swimming underwater, looking at rocks and pebbles on the shore and lying in the sun can all be forms of relating to Lezama Lima's seemingly-impossible novel, his evident pleasure with language. Write these notes as exercise, just as later today I'll go running to clear my mind.