I have read only a very few graphic novels, but the ones I have read all seem to tread the same emotional ground. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World and now I Never Liked You by Chester Brown. Their stories center on a sort of teenage emptiness that inspires a combination of pity and fascination in me. Visually, however, the three are quite distinct with Brown’s artwork being far more spare than the other two. Brown’s jagged panels placed asymmetrically on the page are surrounded by black, drawing the eye to his simple lines. (Unfortunately, later editions of the book have replaced the black pages with white.) His panels are devoid of details and instead focusing of the setting, the reader dwells on the characters, primarily young Chester himself. Brown’s picture of himself is both funny and sad, and while the book touches on his mother’s death, the focus is on his interaction with girls. He tells his friend Sky that he loves her but doesn’t know what to do next. His neighbor Carrie has a crush on him and they engage in this strange wrestling ritual as a stand in for actual communication. Girls are drawn to the odd, artistic boy but they are also repulsed by him. In the end, the book is about Brown’s inability to engage emotionally – with these girls, with his mother, with the rest of his family. It’s a poignant and quick read (it took me about an hour), but Brown’s dreamy artwork will stay with you.
I Never Liked You by Chester Brown: A Review
The Existentialist Swimmer: Daniel Galera’s ‘Blood-Drenched Beard’
Most level-headed readers know not to judge a book by its cover. However, the adage that springs to mind when confronted with Daniel Galera’s debut novel is not to judge a book by its title. Presumably the original Portuguese title Barba Ensopada de Sangue carries more gravitas or conveys more menace than its English equivalent. Sadly, Blood-Drenched Beard sounds like a 400-page slab of cheap, cheesy melodrama. It might have worked if Galera’s game-plan was artful Tarantino-esque pastiche or full-on surrealist comedy. Instead he plays it straight, producing a candid, trick-free portrait of a young man starting afresh while seeking answers to a decades-old family tragedy in a small Brazilian beach town. Ignore the title and its false promise of heady sensationalism and dive right in.
‘Dive’ being the operative word, for this is a novel the events of which play in and around water and the protagonist of which is a swimming instructor. He remains nameless throughout the book and becomes something of a recluse, but Galera makes a point of recording his every thought and deed to paint a fascinating warts-and-all portrait that renders his character complex and mysterious but also knowable and sympathetic.
The novel opens with him paying a visit to his father and being promptly dealt two body-blows. The first is the story of his grandfather’s death -- or, specifically, murder -- in the town of Garopaba in the late '60s. Viewed by the long-suffering residents as a surly, antagonistic old gaucho, he riles them one last time at a dance at the community hall: the lights go out and when they come on again his bloody body lies on the dancefloor with multiple stab-wounds. The crime went investigated, no one was punished for it and the body disappeared.
Barely allowing him time to recover from the shock, father goes on to hit son with his second bombshell: ‘I’m going to kill myself tomorrow.’
The reader snared, Galera jump-cuts to Garopaba in the present. His young man is house-hunting, keen to distance himself from family and friends, several of whom call him and leave messages of condolence. He wanders around with his father’s ailing dog -- one he refused to have put down, despite his parent’s last request. It isn’t long before he has settled into an easy rhythm in his new downscaled life by the sea. He makes a friend in Bonobo, a Buddhist able to play ‘geriatric-diaper poker’ for hours on end. He gets a job as a swimming coach in a gym run by a pair called Saucepan and Spatula, starts a running club, and enters into a couple of relationships.
Throughout all this, slyly and incrementally, Galera reveals more about his hero’s situation: his girlfriend left him for his brother in São Paulo; he has been growing a beard since his father’s funeral; and, most intriguing of all, he suffers from prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder that prevents him from recognizing faces. ‘I don’t recognize my own face in the mirror,’ he tells one disbeliever. Instead he is forced to concentrate on attitudes, gestures, and voices. This medical condition is an interesting conceit that prompts awkward laughs (people think he is rude, forgetful, or just plain weird) but also inspires pity, particularly when we watch him up against enemies he is unable to identify.
Those enemies come out of the woodwork when he starts asking around about his grandfather’s mysterious death. It doesn’t help that he is the spitting image of him -- his beard not a mask but a recognition tag, transforming him in the eyes of the locals into a younger version of a man they hoped was safely dead and buried. Some profess remembering him but, conveniently, no one remembers his death. ‘If no one remembers,’ a policeman tells our hero, ‘then it didn’t happen.’
Blood-Drenched Beard feels like two novels in one. The first half of the book is chiefly devoted to Galera’s character going about his day to day activities of work and play. In the second he remembers why he moved to the beach resort in the first place and intensifies his sleuthing to make sense of this ‘nobody-knows, nobody-saw-it kind of crime.’ Here Galera ups the pace and the tension. His character learns that his grandfather has become a myth: he is a bogeyman, still alive and haunting the town. Rumor has it he is holed up in a cave in the hills. With newly inherited dog in tow, his grandson sets out to track him down. His treacherous, rain-lashed journey is a heart-of-darkness descent into madness, obsession, and painful self-discovery. Galera keeps the reader riveted, guessing all the way as to whether his bowed and near-beaten truth-seeker has bitten off more than he can chew.
Galera has published four novels in Brazil to great acclaim, and, in 2013, Granta named him one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists. In addition, he has translated the work of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, John Cheever, and David Foster Wallace into Portuguese. None of their shadows loom over Blood-Drenched Beard. Indeed, with the exception of several pages containing digressional Wallace-esque footnotes, Galera’s novel feels largely and refreshingly devoid of any Anglo-American creative influence.
Instead, Albert Camus rears his head when we are told that ‘the feeling of emptiness he yearns for is dormant inside him’, or when our ‘existentialist-materialist swimmer’ weighs up free will versus determinism (proving into the bargain he is no 'thick athlete'). There are also hints of Georges Simenon’s romans durs, his ‘hard’ non-Maigret psychological novels that fuse together raw emotions, moral conundrums, and bleak depictions of humanity. And, closer to home, every now and again Roberto Bolaño’s presence is felt, most noticeably in the scenes that radiate a queasy disquiet: an interview with a retired police chief in a Mafia-run nightclub; the discovery of a murdered, mutilated 16-year-old girl; the desolation of a sleepy seaside town in winter.
Galera excels at turning his purported coastal paradise -- ‘the perfect place to be happy’ -- into tawdry backwater. Out of season, dead penguins litter the sand: ‘No one touches them, not even the vultures.’ Incessant rain leads to flooding. ‘The light from the lampposts gives an oily yellow hue to the carpet of water moss that covers almost the entire surface of the polluted lagoon. A cloud of mosquitoes hovers over a small rotting warehouse. Huge dogs start to emerge from the vegetation on an empty lot, and he hooks his finger under Beta’s collar as a precaution.’
Holding his dog back from bigger ones is a shrewd move. Less rational and downright menacing is when he reaches out to the attractive Dália and ‘plunges his fingers into her hair, at the nape of her neck, forcefully working them into her taut hair, feeling the roughness of her roots and the resistance of her scalp. He holds her head by her hair in front of his.’ A grim foreboding permeates the novel that, towards the end, is worked into a palpable threat of violence. We approach Galera’s denouement -- more a showdown -- and wait for the moment his character’s long, unruly beard finally becomes blood-drenched.
Apart from that silly title, Galera also falters with occasional hackneyed phrasing (‘Tears snake down her cheeks again like rain on a window’). And what should be subtle foreshadowing is, once or twice, clumsy signposting. We are frequently reminded of his character’s previous ironman challenges and his expertise and endurance both through the water and under it, and so it comes as no surprise to witness him flung into danger and even less of a surprise to see him utilizing his physical capabilities to extricate himself from it.
Fortunately, these blemishes are few and are easily offset by the novel’s many strengths. Galera’s slow-burning first half fleshes out character and quest and comes larded with long drawn-out set-pieces that on the surface seem to go nowhere but on close analysis are freighted with compacted drama: an encounter at the village fair with a man who had a run-in with the character’s grandfather; a whale-watching excursion on which he becomes captivated by fellow loner Jasmim. That second part wrenches us away from sun, maté on the beach, and gently swaying pitanga trees and throws up its harsh, grainy flipside. Galera’s character comes to realize that ‘There are two possible places for a person. Family is one. The other is the whole world. Sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out which one we are in.’
Despite its omnipresence, Galera doesn’t go in for lavish descriptions of the sea. At one point ‘the ocean flaunts its infinitude,’ which smacks of Herman Melville in miniature -- say, ‘the new dusky moors of ocean’ in Benito Cereno. Elsewhere, though, Galera’s non-littoral imagery can be striking. His young man’s father has a bulbous nose, ‘shiny and pockmarked like tangerine peel.’ During a car ride, ‘Figures such as cows or cyclists come to life in a flash and go back to being specters in almost the same instant.’ Cold nights, we are told, ‘torture the summer with a slow death’.
Blood-Drenched Beard has at its center a fascinatingly headstrong character, one who swims perfectly but flounders on land, who strives for connection with his grandfather while cutting himself off from family -- and one we root for despite not knowing his name. If Galera’s other three novels are this potent and absorbing, and if his able-bodied translator Alison Entrekin can be persuaded to return to the helm, then readers are in for a treat.
●
●
Fractured World: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men
There is even a mock-beheading, all the more mocking and blackly comic because one of the executioners loses his dishdasha and has to improvise by wearing a Little Mermaid beach towel round his waist.
●
●
●
Transylvanians Gone Wild: On Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy
1.
The first volume of Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy opens as the protagonist, Count Balint Abady, is carried “peacefully and gently” in his carriage to a sumptuous ball. Having recently returned from diplomatic service to his native Transylvania and luxuriating in the memories evoked by the landscape, Balint is not concerned with making good time:
Soon Balint’s old fiacre, moving slowly, was overtaken by all sorts of other vehicles, some driving so fast that he could only occasionally recognize a face or two before they too were swallowed up in the dust.
Our first portrait of our hero is of him being passed by, slightly out of sync with and nostalgic for a world speeding toward oblivion. One could also read Balint’s glacial pace as a self-reflexive statement, a reminder for us to settle in for the extended pleasures of the three-part epic about to unfurl.
The trilogy, published last year in two volumes by Everyman’s Library and translated by Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, is a political novel, a melodrama, and a masterful social comedy. Written by the aristocrat, painter, and statesman Miklós Bánffy, the volumes were originally published between 1934 and 1940, just before Hungary was about to be torn apart by yet another world war.
Then lying in the southeastern portion of Hungary (and now a part of Romania), Transylvania had for centuries been “a highway whose path was trodden by countless nomads who came that way and then passed on.” Its rulers maintained a fierce independent streak whether as a semi-autonomous vassal state under the Ottomans or as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which explains Abady’s sensitivity to the perception that Transylvania is “just one of a string of otherwise insignificant provinces.” (One Budapest woman asks him, “Lots of bears where you come from, aren’t there?”) It is worth noting that another great chronicle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s implosion, Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, concerns a family with origins in a similarly peripheral territory -- Slovenia.
The central love story concerns Count Abady and the “strange, independent” Adrienne Miloth, a striking beauty married to a chillingly refined monster, Pal Uzdy. (Uzdy -- insane, sadistic, and a crack shot -- wouldn’t be my first choice of a man to cuckold, but then certain Transylvanian counts are known to have eccentric tastes.) Brutalized as she is by her domineering husband, it takes the entire first volume for Adrienne to respond to Abady’s cautious advances with anything less than revulsion. The further two volumes track the lovers’ frustrated efforts to wed and give Abady a much-desired heir.
The secondary protagonist, Laszlo Gyeroffy, Abady’s cousin, is an orphaned musician (he and Abady are conspicuously fatherless). As Abady muddles his way through Hungarian politics and peasant intrigues, Laszlo first becomes an elotancos, or “leading dancer and organizer” of all the balls in Budapest, a combination of bandleader, socialite, and perfect wedding guest. Letting his musical talent go to waste, he becomes known for his reckless gambling and drinking, two habits which set him on a debauched decline even as a succession of smitten and rich women attempt to save him.
Bánffy portrays the nobility with Dickensian verve. One family is marked by their “aggressive belligerent noses, noses like sharp beaks; eagle beaks like Crookface, falcon beaks like Ambrus; all the birds of prey were represented, from buzzards and peregrines down to shrikes.” He likens Aunt Lizinka, an octogenarian regular on the Transylvanian party circuit with a limitless desire to spread poisonous gossip, to a “dirt volcano whose daily eruptions splattered all within reach.” And Ernest Szent-Gyorgi (Neszti), the “beau ideal of the fin de siècle man,” expresses himself almost solely through his “extra organ of communication,” a monocle:
He wore the rimless eye-glass attached to an almost invisible silken thread, and when he put it up to his eye he could express an infinite variety of opinion merely by varying the gesture: comic surprise, irony, increased interest or incipient boredom, appreciation of a woman’s beauty or reprimand for a man’s presumption…His timing was inimitable and it was widely recognized that Neszti’s monocle was as much the symbol of his sway as was the scepter of kings.
These and other perfectly drawn caricatures, including an Austrian lothario nicknamed Nitwit, a rich Croatian known as the Black Cockatoo, and a lisping chauvinist who resembles an “enraged hamster” when dueling with sabers, are predictably present at social gatherings to liven things up.
2.
The trilogy’s love affairs, dances, and shooting parties unfold during the years leading up to WWI, when, as Hugh Thomas writes in his introduction, “European civilization committed suicide.” (The volumes, They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided, get their portentous titles from the Old Testament episode in which a feasting King Belshazzar receives some dire messages written on his wall.)
When the novel begins in 1904, the domestic political situation is in turmoil, as indeed it will be until the outbreak of war. A coalition of doggedly nationalist opposition groups has essentially shut down the government. Enter Abady, elected as an independent candidate to the Hungarian Parliament and hailing from one of the region’s oldest aristocratic families. His diffidence and deeply felt sense of noblesse oblige causes his fellow aristocrats to feel a “latent hostility” towards him. Abady resists “the idea of being tied to a party line and obliged to follow a party whip,” which allows him to float among the various factions, gaining confidences or creating distrust along the way, all the while staying true to the European political novel tradition of the protagonist being the least interesting and most naïve character. (Abady doesn’t realize that his reelection to Parliament resulted from the bribes of his mother’s crooked estate manager, who wants nothing more than to see the young lord spend more time in Budapest so as to leave him in larcenous peace.)
Abady strives towards the sublime but finds himself mired in the ridiculous: dysfunctional legislative scenes, buffoonish pranks, the collapse of his well-intentioned efforts to establish a co-operative on his mountain holdings, officious wrangling over duels that are themselves absurdly anticlimactic. He is disgusted by the crass political maneuverings he encounters in Budapest and the corrupt practices in his home province, which he sees as his duty as a nobleman to correct. His political speeches go largely ignored, and the wary Romanians in his mountainous forest district listen politely but resolve to wait the “strange lord” out until he returns to his Denestornya estate or Budapest.
There’s an extraordinary episode in which Abady tries to intervene on behalf of a group of Romanian peasants under the thumb of an unscrupulous moneylender. Like most of his attempts to intervene, he fails, and the peasants take it upon themselves to breach the offender’s citadel and mete out an older, and brutal, form of justice. Abady reads about the attack from the serene Italian village of Portofino, where “it was hard to believe in the bitter winter up in the mountains, the all-enveloping snow, silent men striding forth in a blizzard, in cruel murder and mysterious comings and goings in the all-embracing darkness.”
Despite Abady’s sporadic headlong rushes into local and national politics, he generally lacks the sustaining energy to be more than a spectator. And spectate he does. If it’s impolite to stare, then he and his countrymen are the rudest people on earth. One Hungarian woman compares Transylvanians to “birds of prey, hawks, always gazing into the far distance, to the horizon, and never noticing what lies at their feet, what is close at hand.” Abady constantly proves her right, prone as he is to “staring into the face of destiny, the inexorable destiny that would in time overwhelm his beloved country.” The trilogy ends as Abady, traveling to a front line regimen at the outbreak of the First World War, looks back on his beloved land from up high:
All his life lay before him, his whole past, everything...a deep bitterness came over him as he stood there alone, high above the world he had known and which was now doomed to perish...The whole world beyond the horizon seemed to be in flames.”
What he has been dreading has finally come into view.
3.
This might not be the thing one wants to hear before embarking on a 1,500 page quest, but the trilogy is marked by a narrative desultoriness that applies to both its human and political dramas. The novels are in a some ways about widespread distraction and inaction in the face of an impending catastrophe. The second installment, for example, concludes with the following recapitulation: “And so ended an era in which nothing whatever had been achieved.”
Comedy plays a large part in this narrative chronicle of distraction; indeed, the trilogy is a work of social comedy about the perils of the comic. Bánffy has a conflicting relationship with comedy. He clearly admires the “true Transylvanian sense of the absurd” most memorably displayed during a scene in which a crusading Frenchman visits Kolozsvar (Cluj-Napoca) to establish a Transylvanian Branch of his Anti-Dueling League. One of the hosts, an ex-officer known for his love of dueling, has no idea what their honorary guest is promoting and promptly becomes enraged upon hearing his favorite pastime derided as “pure barbarism.” The absurdity continues when a dispute breaks out that can only be settled with, yes, a duel, which is carried out in the same hall at which the anti-dueling event took place. One of the combatants, nose broken and head bandaged, gamely appears at the train station to see off the Frenchman, who is told that the poor man fell down the stairs. “What bad luck, Highness, what bad luck!”
These and other sketches of Transylvanians gone wild demonstrate a benign ridiculousness, but Bánffy also sees the corrosive effects of comedy. (Tellingly, one of the novel’s villains, Pal Uzdy, occasionally bursts out in strange, meaningless laughter.) When a newly-appointed Prefect is pelted with eggs in Parliament, Abady laughs along with the others before becoming overcome with sadness: “He thought only of the fact that an innocent man had been humiliated, and that it was callous and distasteful that everyone should think the whole affair a tremendous joke and nothing more.”
His Hungarian colleagues think most everything is a tremendous joke, a quality directly related to their failure to take the gathering international storm seriously:
The sad truth was that all of them found anything that did not concern their own country fit only for mockery and laughter. To them such matters were as remote from reality as if they had been happening on Mars; and therefore fit only for schoolboy puns and witty riposte.
Abady mistrusts his countrymen’s love of the comic as a form of irresponsibility. Late in the novel, he enjoys himself when his friends stage a drunken mock-trial of a bottle of brandy for the liquor’s numerous crimes, but senses that such silliness is indicative of a larger political folly and dangerous myopia. And thus, towards the end of the novel, Bánffy delivers a terse judgment as unequivocal as the one written on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast: “Everyone was guilty, all the upper strata of Hungarian society.”
●
●
●
South American Gothic: A Review of Alvaro Mutis’ The Mansion
Longtime readers of this blog will know that The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll is one of my favorite books. While I think it stands as a very good book by nearly any standard, it has several qualities that appeal particularly to me. To boil these down, my affinity for the book is tied to the vast geography it covers, including many exotic locales and a few mundane. I also like the book as an example of Latin American magical realism that is stylistically different from Borges or Garcia Marquez, but to me just as satisfying.Mutis is still relatively unknown, and were it not for the NYRB's impressive packaging of Maqroll, really a collection of seven novellas, and Edith Grossman's typically readable translation, it's likely that Mutis would have almost no presence among English-language readers at all. Prior to the NYRB edition of Maqroll, a pair of earlier collections had been put out, one containing three of the novellas and another containing four (those editions were also translated by Grossman). Aside from that, Mutis had published some short stories and quite a lot of poetry, much of it featuring "Maqroll the Gaviero," who would star in Mutis' novels.As best as I've been able to tell, none of Mutis' poetry has been published in English-language editions, but in 2004, a small Canadian publisher Ekstasis Editions, put out a thin collection of some of Mutis' short fiction. Maqroll does not appear, but the book, The Mansion offers what felt to this reader, a batch of stories in which Mutis tries out the various writerly tools that he will wield to great effect in Maqroll.The first portion of The Mansion is a novella, The Mansion of Araucaima, which supposedly was Mutis' answer to the director Luis Bunuel who claimed that it wasn't possible to write a gothic story set in the tropics. The idea being, I suppose, that the lushness of the region is at odds with the castles and dark mood that is emblematic of the genre. (It should be noted that the Bunuel story may be apocryphal. I read about it a few years ago, but more recent Googling hasn't turned much up about it.)Regardless, Mutis' effort is fairly successful, and appropriately moody and dark. As he does in Maqroll, Mutis experiments with structure in The Mansion of Araucaima. He divides the story up into brief chapters, focusing on the different characters and on their dreams (the dreams presumably being a key gothic element) before, after much stage setting, he offers a chapter called "The Events," during which the novella's narrative commences.The remaining stories also play with structure. Frame stories abound (Maqroll, of course, is a frame story which contains other frame stories). The stories in The Mansion start with sentences like "The pages you are about to read belong to a bundle of manuscripts sold at a book auction in London a few years before the end of the Second World War." and "A few facts surrounding the death of Alar the Illyrian... came to the attention of the Church at the Council of Nicaea when it discussed the canonization of a group of a group of Christians who had been martyred at the hands of the Turks."While Mutis takes the reader, in this handful of stories, to many arcane places and dreams up snippets of immersive histories and mythologies, they also feel like explorations and fragments (one story is in fact subtitled "A Fragment"), as opposed to fully formed pieces. As such, it is impossible to recommend the book ahead of Maqroll, which makes, out of the threads that Mutis plays with in The Mansion, a deep and layered tapestry. Maqroll perhaps also benefits from Grossman's translation, which seems to disappear into the narrative, whereas Beatriz Hausner's translation of The Mansion is more workmanlike. For those who have already read Maqroll and have an interest in Mutis, The Mansion will be an instructive and brief diversion. In terms of pure reading pleasure, however, rereading Maqroll might be a better bet.
●
●
●
Lineage of Restless Women: On Kristen Radtke’s ‘Imagine Wanting Only This’
Family is how many people understand the world, and that’s okay, but for many women, art is the key to unlocking the mysteries of life.
●
●
The Elusive Qualities of Dreams: On Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Strange Library’
Everything that comes to pass in 'The Strange Library,' like in so much of Murakami’s fiction, questions the differences between what is real and what is not, and whether such a distinction even matters.
●
●
●
●
●
●