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Jul. 22nd, 2019 12:39 pm
La muerte de la Muerte de Artemio Cruz
Saturday morning, as the temperature was already hitting 30°C, I finished reading the Fuentes. Fittingly, it concluded with a rhapsodic description of the jungle, though it was set at night, which made me somewhat wish I'd pushed through and completed it Friday night.
Regardless, I feel like I deserve a medal. Tuesday I showed my copy to Uncle Betty and had him read about a page of descriptive narration. He's probably the best-read Spanish-speaker I know and even he had trouble with some of the vocabulary. Fortunately, the last couple sequences weren't as hairy as a lot of what had come before, though I often was a bit confused as to what exactly was happening to whom.
Now that I've read the whole thing, it's easier to appreciate the structure. The flashbacks seem random in time, but eventually you notice that Cruz is going both further back and further forward. The last two extended narratives are of a New Year's party where he's already geriatric and of the end of his childhood at about 15 or 16; the brief concluding passages are his birth and his death itself.
All in all, I think it holds up well despite being nearly 60 years old and having survived to see many of the techniques it pioneered adopted by other (often lesser) authors. I may even read it again someday, but first I'm looking forward to something a little easier. On a whim, I picked up Bolaño's collected short stories and promised I wouldn't read them until I was finished with Artemio Cruz. I read one Friday night and found it refreshingly comprehensible without resorting to a dictionary.
Coincidentally, I finished two other books at the same time: a collection of short stories by the Iraqi diaspora writer Hassan Blasim and a compilation of contemporary Vietnamese short stories by writers born since 1965. The latter wore out its welcome; despite the diversity of authors, it felt repetitive, lacking both stylistic and tonal range. Most of the stories were tragic and focused on protagonists (often first-person narrators) who wax nostalgic for the rural villages they were forced to abandon. After a while, they became hard to distinguish.
The Blasim went much quicker. I was worried I would find the casual brutality exhausting (there's a lot of rape in these stories, some of it presented with disturbing off-handedness) but there was enough humour and fantasy to prevent that. Sometimes I feel like he was going for shock value, sometimes I just didn't know what his purpose was. At least it felt like a good corrective to God in pink, the debut novel from a Canadian-Iraqi named Hasan Namir that I finished three weeks ago, which I found contrived and unconvincing.
Maybe now, with summer nearly over, I'll have the time to read the Tove Janssen I acquired back at the beginning of May. I've tried reading a few pages and it's made me feel dumb. Hopefully the vocabulary will come flooding back, but for now it's like, "Did I really used to be able to read Swedish?"
Regardless, I feel like I deserve a medal. Tuesday I showed my copy to Uncle Betty and had him read about a page of descriptive narration. He's probably the best-read Spanish-speaker I know and even he had trouble with some of the vocabulary. Fortunately, the last couple sequences weren't as hairy as a lot of what had come before, though I often was a bit confused as to what exactly was happening to whom.
Now that I've read the whole thing, it's easier to appreciate the structure. The flashbacks seem random in time, but eventually you notice that Cruz is going both further back and further forward. The last two extended narratives are of a New Year's party where he's already geriatric and of the end of his childhood at about 15 or 16; the brief concluding passages are his birth and his death itself.
All in all, I think it holds up well despite being nearly 60 years old and having survived to see many of the techniques it pioneered adopted by other (often lesser) authors. I may even read it again someday, but first I'm looking forward to something a little easier. On a whim, I picked up Bolaño's collected short stories and promised I wouldn't read them until I was finished with Artemio Cruz. I read one Friday night and found it refreshingly comprehensible without resorting to a dictionary.
Coincidentally, I finished two other books at the same time: a collection of short stories by the Iraqi diaspora writer Hassan Blasim and a compilation of contemporary Vietnamese short stories by writers born since 1965. The latter wore out its welcome; despite the diversity of authors, it felt repetitive, lacking both stylistic and tonal range. Most of the stories were tragic and focused on protagonists (often first-person narrators) who wax nostalgic for the rural villages they were forced to abandon. After a while, they became hard to distinguish.
The Blasim went much quicker. I was worried I would find the casual brutality exhausting (there's a lot of rape in these stories, some of it presented with disturbing off-handedness) but there was enough humour and fantasy to prevent that. Sometimes I feel like he was going for shock value, sometimes I just didn't know what his purpose was. At least it felt like a good corrective to God in pink, the debut novel from a Canadian-Iraqi named Hasan Namir that I finished three weeks ago, which I found contrived and unconvincing.
Maybe now, with summer nearly over, I'll have the time to read the Tove Janssen I acquired back at the beginning of May. I've tried reading a few pages and it's made me feel dumb. Hopefully the vocabulary will come flooding back, but for now it's like, "Did I really used to be able to read Swedish?"
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