February Books I
Miguel de Cervantes, Kathryn Scanlan, Renee Gladman
Don Quixote, Part II (1615), by Miguel de Cervantes, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (2003)
The second part of Don Quixote was published ten years after the first and, while it picks up where it left off, it’s a very different book. Don Quixote is no less mad, but maybe less caustic, picking his fights more carefully. Sancho Panza is more eloquent by leaps and bounds, as if he crammed an entire rhetoric degree into the few weeks he spent back in his hometown while his master was under house arrest. But by far the biggest change is in the structure of the novel. It’s a much more focused work than the first part. Part I is littered with these interstitial chapters and stand-alone short stories that grind the narrative momentum to a halt. The second part does away with these, is less repetitive, and is brilliantly paced. Part II also transforms Don Quixote into an even more self-referential novel. The first part has been published in the world of the second, and everywhere they go Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves minor celebrities, ironically indulged and patronized by strangers who indulge their folie à deux and treat them as a traveling sideshow.
The meat of Part II finds our hero and his sidekick at the estate of a Duke and Duchess who, with the help of their servants, stage absurd adventures for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Amongst other trials, Sancho Panza must lash himself 3,000 times to break the curse that has transformed the Don Quixote’s beloved Dulcinea into an ugly peasant. Don Quixote is subjected to numerous practical jokes, culminating in him being mauled by an angry cat. They even go so far as creating a sort of bizzaro potemkin village for Sancho Panza to rule over as governor — a position he executes somewhat admirably but holds for only a few days before becoming mentally undone. Eventually Don Quixote and Sancho leave the estate of the Duke and Duchess and make their way to Barcelona, where the former is defeated in combat by a neighbor posing as the Knight of the White Moon. Per the terms of his defeat in combat, he returns home and renounces his knightly pursuits. Defeated once again, the scales finally fall from his eyes, he sours on his books of chivalry, and promptly dies.
Alongside the novel, I skimmed Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote, a 1983 publication of a series of talks he gave on the novel as a visiting professor at Harvard. For him, the appeal of the novel has to do with cruelty:
The author seems to plan it thus: Come with me, ungentle reader, who enjoys seeing a live dog inflated and kicked around like a soccer football; reader, who likes, of a Sunday morning, on his way to or from church, to poke his stick or direct his spittle at a poor rogue in the stocks; come, ungentle reader, with me and consider into what ingenious and cruel hands I shall place my ridiculously vulnerable hero. And I hope you will be amused by what I have to offer.
I find it hard to argue with this reading of the novel, and I copy it here as maybe the best advertisement for the novel that I have seen.
Aug 9 — Fog (2019), by Kathryn Scanlan
Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 — Fog, one of the books I learned of from Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night, is a found object. Scanlan’s parents were antique dealers and she would accompany them to auctions and estate sales while she was living with them after finishing college. She came into possession of a diary written by an older woman from a small town in Illinois, covering the years of her life between 1968 and 1972. The diary was essentially a piece of trash, mildewed, falling apart, and unreadable in parts. Scanlan was a practicing visual artist at the time and had designs for it as more of an art object, or incorporated into some other form of collage work. For whatever reason that never panned out. Instead, 100-so pages of sentences, images, and phrases were plucked out and formed this book.
The book is divided into seasons. In the winter, the diarist visits with friends, paints, and does puzzles:
In P.M. to Burg got my slips. Roads sloppy white rims on trees. That puzzle a humdinger
In the summer she listens to the birds and walks in the woods.
Towards the end of the book, her friends become ill and die:
Vern confused. Vern awful confused. Vern confused one of the girls with D. Vern bad nite. Vern bad.
She slowly loses steam. She is awaiting her own death:
Ever where glare of ice. We didn't sleep too good. My pep has left me.
It’s a lovely book and sad without being morose or depressing. Its final entry beautifully and succinctly sums up the arc of a human life and echoes the late great David Lynch’s weather reports:
Sun shining then rainy but clearing
Houses of Ravicka (2017), by Renee Gladman
In Renee Gladman’s Houses of Ravicka, a controller roams around a city, trying to map out two houses that are proving elusive. This is not an uncommon issue in Ravicka — a city that is constantly rotating, spinning, and shifting its topography, creating new superpositions of buildings and locations — but this particular house that the controller is looking for is proving to be uncommonly difficult to find.
The first half of the novel is bewildering. The reader accompanies this city employee as they walk around becoming increasingly desperate and anxious. They have an academic understanding of the physical and geographical nature of their reality, but it doesn’t seem to be serving them. As their confusion and anxiety grows, it becomes ours as readers. They become frantic:
I stopped walking because the idea of circling, or much worse, succumbing to a labyrinth was disarming. I was tired of regretting my decisions. I reasoned that as long as I didn't see the rotary I was not repeating myself. The detour had thrown me out of sync with these streets I've known most of my life. Well, you know the big streets, but sometimes forget the little ones. I got off Monstastrajen as soon as I could, but only to dead-end on Vibja. I checked the location of the sun; there was still time. I turned around. There was a fence there and on the other side a private road. I knew where that road led, a place I'd never go, even to save my life.
The perspective shifts in the last bit of the novel and is told from the point of view of someone living in the invisible house which the controller is searching for. Their more passive role assuages the feeling of anxiety present earlier in the book. Without trying to understand how everything works, this resident is more at peace, things wash over them. Yet I felt that they were better able to describe the world they were living in:
These were the categories I had to negotiate: there were the exclusively hard buildings that were migrating; there were the invisible buildings, which mostly stayed where they were (though obviously changing their architecture depending on which hard buildings were laid against them); and newly added was this mutant strand of building that wavered between visibility and invisibility. How did I know it wavered if I saw it when it was both visible and not? Again, because when it was visible the lines that determined its boundaries were not luminous.
Houses of Ravicka is part of a larger cycle of novels. Maybe I would have a better of idea of what was going on if I had read more of her work, but I doubt it. The point of this novel isn’t really to tell a traditional story with characters and plots and rising and falling action, but to impart an emotional experience. The novel ends with an afterword by Gladman that explains this:
I wanted to stay in the space of discovery, for Houses to be a record, a kind of organization of my movement across those folds of space. I wanted to be able to show the reader what I encountered as a subject writing inside another subject, to argue the novel as a study of experience, a study of time and tones and topographies that one conducts from positions of not knowing or of wonder. I wanted the story, its conclusion to be one I meet rather than one I previously knew.
This sense of not writing toward an ending is palpable when reading Houses. It’s not a novel that really goes anywhere but rather rotates in concentric, collapsing circles. A lot of novels try similar things or are attempts miniaturist studies of particular aspects of human experience (like time or tone or topography). A lot of them end up either boring or unmemorable. I think by situating the novel in another world entirely, one that is largely unrecognizable and alien to us, this sense of wonder preserved. She kept my interest as a reader and I am probably going to check out other novels in this series. I do want to spend more time in this world, even if I don’t end up understanding it any better than I do now.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in a few days with a second newsletter on some NYRB and New Directions book club books I’ve received since the start of the year.