May Books
Alejandro Zambra, Mario Levrero, Maylis de Kerangal
No leer (2018), by Alejandro Zambra
A couple of years ago, I mentioned in one my newsletters that I had started reading this book by Alejandro Zambra, and that I liked it so far. Well I never got around to finishing it, so I picked it back up in May.
No leer, or, as it’s been translated by Megan McDowell for Fitzcarraldo Editions, Not to Read, is a collection of literary reviews and essays about the experience of reading written and published by Alejandro Zambra throughout his career as a critic for the Las últimas noticias, among other publications.
Following the news that the National Endowment for the Arts would be cutting funding for a number of small presses that put out translations, I felt a sense of literary claustrophobia, an urgent need to expand my horizons, and brush off my very dusty Spanish. No leer served this purpose very well, and also felt like a warm blanket, a comfort read. Not only did it send me on my way with a list of books and writers to look up, but it also indulged in nostalgia in a way that felt productive and instructive. Zambra writes about reading with a warmth and simplicity that may occasionally smell of cheese, but protects against pretension.
Zambra is better the more he inserts himself into his pieces. Most of the essays in No leer are extremely short, maybe a page and a half to three pages, but there are a few longer ones in which he has room to stretch his legs and occupy a bit more space. His obituary for Nicanor Parra, who lived to such a ripe old age that some maybe doubted his mortality, is subtly moving, not for any grand intuitions about death or poetry, but just for the generosity and intimacy of sharing his memories and emotions about the poet.
When people are older than one hundred years old it is highly likely that they’ll die at any moment, but, as many friends have said, we’d gotten used to Nicanor’s apparent immortality. There were three whole years in which I could have visited him a ton of times. I didn’t, I’m not even there with him now, at his wake, at his funeral. I have no choice but to say bye to him like this, writing, speaking softly to nobody. (Translation mine)
This is how most of the collection reads. Zambra’s writing is plain, and his prose never purple. You never really get the sense that he is showing off or trying to impress. This felt honest and admirable to me as a reader, as if Zambra respected not just my intelligence but my attention span. I’m not sure there will be a ton here for readers who aren’t deeply interested in the literature of the Southern Cone, but you could treat this as a resource, as yellow pages through which to find new writers and books, and you would be doing yourself a great favor.
The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (1970), by Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter
The stories within The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine occupy some place on the spectrum between science fiction and surrealism, or maybe fantasy and surrealism, although McDermott’s afterword makes clear that Levrero balked at the term surrealism and considered himself a staunch realist. While there isn’t a single through line and the stories do not pile themselves up into anything resembling a novel, the characters and even the plots are all secondary to a sense of place. The first, titular story serves as a sort of prologue and clue as to the world that we are about to visit:
Before going to bed I made my daily rounds of the house, to check everything was in order; the window was open in the small bathroom at the back, so the polyester shirt I was going to wear the next day could dry overnight; I shut the door (to prevent draughts); in the kitchen, the tap was dripping and I tightened it; the window was open and I left it that way — though I did close the blind — and the rubbish had been taken out; the three knobs on the stove were all at zero; the dial on the fridge was at three (light refrigeration) and the half-drunk bottle of mineral water was sealed with its plastic cap; in the dining room, the big clock wouldn’t need winding for several more days and the table had been cleared; in the library I had to turn off the amp, which someone had left on, but the turntable had switched itself off automatically; the ashtray on the armchair had been emptied, the thinking-about-Gladys machine was plugged in and purring away softly as usual, and the high little window that looks on the air shaft was open, with the smoke from the day’s cigarettes slowly drifting through it [….]
In the early hours I woke up feeling anxious; an unusual noise had made me jump; I curled up in the bed with all the pillows on top of me and clutched the back of my neck and waited tensely for the end: the house was falling down.
The first few stories are funhouses, they take place in funhouses. They are disorienting, maybe a little menacing, but ultimately harmless. In “The Basement“, a small boy spends his life exploring a family estate that resembles an Alice in Wonderland world in search of a key to access a secret basement, and in his hunt he must contend with gnome-like creatures in imaginary prisons and a monster who lives at the bottom of a well and eats iron. We are firmly in the land of fantasy and there is a levity here, a sense of play.
In these first stories, we feel reasonably confident as readers that no mortal harm will come to Levrero’s characters, even if we don’t exactly envy their station in life. But then these funhouses become haunted houses and hellscapes. In “The Green Liquid”, we follow a homeless man in search of shelter and companionship as he traverses a city that is slowly being taken over by a miasma that kills on contact. And Levrero bookends the collection with a reprise, “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Negative)”, in which the narrator is decidedly not okay. Here are the melodramatic final words of the collection:
[…] the high little window that looks onto the air shaft is open, and through it you can hear the roar of the sea and the shouts of night fisherman; the living room is full of people, men and women, lined up side by side, facing the wall with their arms above their heads; I go into the bedroom and find the woman in my bed, naked; she promises to wake me tomorrow at the usual time; I take hundreds of packets of condoms from the nightstand drawer, stuff my pyjama pockets with them, go into the wardrobe and lock the door from the inside.
In the early hours, I wake up shivering. Someone has opened the little window in the wardobe and I have a fever, I’m drenched in sweat and my left eye hurts. I shout for a doctor or an ambulance, but I’m in the middle of a desolate field and no one can hear my cries.
The true terror experienced by the characters of Levrero’s stories seems to come from some volatile imbalance in the division of public and private space. The shelter and comfort of homes and private space is always fleeting and these spaces have something of the uncanny about them. They are unstable. On the other hand, the public spaces are chaotic and devoid of any sense of solidarity. They are simply places made to hold too many individuals. These are themes you see pop up again and again in the horror genre, across all different mediums, but Levrero does it very, very well.
Canoes (2021), by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (2024)
Canoes make a cameo in almost all the straight-faced realist stories of this collection. They don’t play starring roles, but pop up as objects in discrete scenes, images in metaphors and similes. You could spend some time trying to tease out the meaning of this. The canoe is an analog watercraft, typically non-motorized. I think many would associate it with indigenous people, at least in the United States, but maybe around the world. For many, its an object of leisure and summer, a fixture of lakeside summer camps.
The best (and longest) story in Canoes is “Mustang”. It concerns a French woman who moves to Golden, Colorado with her son following a miscarriage so that her partner can enroll in the Colorado School of Mines and she can attempt to find peace via a change of scenery. She immediately finds herself adrift, roaming around the semi-urban sprawl of greater Denver, truly alone in a land that is ambiently hostile:
The night landing had begun by stealing all landscape, the Denver airport deserted and out of proportion; the police officer at customs had a head shaped like an alembic still, pinkish skin, and empty eyes. He spoke to me in a language in which I had no foothold, in which I could find no protuberance to grasp onto, a language that seemed to have dissolved, melted in on itself. I stammered some inappropriate responses, the officer grew impatient, Kid ended up vomiting the entire contents of a pack of blue Haribo Smurfs gummies, and these had not dissolved, which earned me hostile looks from people shifting from foot to foot behind me in line, and probably insults as well which I couldn’t understand either.
De Kerangal’s writing often has this quality of a bad dream, and the slightly bizarre combination of historical, antiquated words and images (alembic stills) with items from contemporary pop culture (Haribo gummies) lends itself well to this story. Miles of strip malls and trailer parks are dotted with tourist traps that allude to the mythos of the Wild West. Indigenous land, a land of dinosaur bones and precious stones, has been taken over. The cultural and capitalist sprawl of the U.S. has distilled history and memory into fetish objects to be sold at a markup in a downtown historic district. It is not a place that can offer any kind of escape or peace to anyone.
It is in “Mustangs” that the theme of the canoe seems to be working, you can see the gears moving. The other stories are all more or less good, but for me, somewhat forgettable. In the others, the canoe is a rickety vessel, a schtick or a tic of which the writer has asked too much.