Gonzalo Barr

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn again to Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.

Spanish journalist, María Luis Blanco, asked the writer about his relationship with his parents. Lobo Antunes answered [translation from the French mine]* –

Mon père m’a demandé quelles études je voulais faire, ce que je voulais faire dans la vie. Je lui ai répondu que je voulais être écrivain et qu’il fallait donc m’inscrire à la faculté de Lettres. Il m’a dit: “Très bien, d’accord.” Et le lendemain il m’a faire savoir que j’étais inscrit en médecine.

* * *

My father asked me what I wanted to study, what I wanted to be. I told him that I wanted to be a writer and that I should therefore register in the Literature faculty. He told me, “Very well. OK.” And the next day he let me know that I was registered in medical school.

Blanco also interviewed the writers’ parents –

[Le père] Il y a des gens quis disent qu’António est plus intelligent que João. Mais João est plus brilliant et plus ambitieux, alors qu’António n’a pas beaucoup d’ambition.

[La mère] João est très intelligent, et il s’intéresse à beaucoup de choses. Alors qu’António est très centré sur la littérature.

[Le père] Je n’arrive pas à lire les livres d’António, je n’en ai pas la patience. … La vie est trop courte pour lire António. Je ne suis plus assez patient.

[La mère] Je lis ses livres, mais je ne les apprécie pas parce que tout y est très triste … Ces personnages n’appartiennent pas à notre milieu.

* * *

[The father] There are people who say that António is more intelligent than [his brother] João. But João is more brilliant and more ambitious, since António doesn’t have much ambition.

[The mother] João is very intelligent. And he is interested in many things. While António is too centered on literature.

[The father] I have not gotten to read António’s books. It don’t have the patience. … Life is too short to read António. I am not that patient anymore.

[The mother] I read his books, but I don’t like them because everything is very sad. The characters are not or our [social] circle.

Lobo Antunes on his parents –

Mon père est un homme profondémont égoïste. Je ne me souviens pas d’avoir reçu la moindre marque d’affection de sa part. Pas plus que de la part de ma mère.

* * *

My father is a profoundly selfish man. I do not remember ever having received the smallest sign of affection on his part, no more than on my mother’s part.

*A note on the translations: I assume but I do not know whether the interviews with Lobo Antunes were conducted in his native Portuguese or in Blanco’s native Spanish. Her book, when it was first published in Spain seven years ago, came out in Spanish. Unfortunately for me, by the time I wanted to buy it, I could not find it in Spanish and had to buy the recently-published French translation. In essence, what we have here is an interview that most likely took place in Portuguese and was translated into Spanish for publication in one country, then re-translated from Spanish into French for publication in another. What I did was take the French translation of the Spanish translation of the Portuguese interview and translated that into English for publication in this blog. Simple, non?

Photo: António Lobo Antunes, El país; Source: María Luis Blanco, Conversations avec António Lobo Antunes (2004)

Apparently not, if you believe Darío Arizmendi, who spoke with The Guardian (and was rewarded for his effort with a gravely-accented “i” implanted in his first name, instead of the acute version used in Spanish).  Arizmendi said that he spent last weekend with García Márquez and assured the paper that the writer was putting the finishing touches on a new novel –

“I had the fortune to spend last weekend in Mexico with the writer and I can assure you that he is putting the final touches to his new novel.” As yet the 250-page work lacked a title, but [García] Márquez was leaving that until the end. “He wrote a first draft which he didn’t like, then another, then another; then, with the fifth draft, it was ready,” said Arizmendi.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores, published in 2004, was supposed to be his last.  Shortly after, he announced that he was retiring.  That novel was about a 90-year-old man who wants to celebrate his birthday by taking a teenage girl’s virginity.  Let’s hope that the new novel is better. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote, “The resulting memories are not melancholy, not even sad, but merely pitiful and disappointing,” which was still a generous a comment to make about that book.

Source: The Guardian (May 8, 2008)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of addressing students at Belén Jesuit Preparatory School, where I graduated in 1976. I presented my collection of short stories, The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa, and answered questions about writing and my current work on the novel. This week, the school continues to celebrate the annual book fair, which seems to me like an excellent thing to do in an environment that exists to foster reading and thinking.

It is was great experience. My thanks to Marta Cosculluela, Alexis Zequeira, and Carlos Maza, and to the students, of course.

Photo: Gonzalo Barr, Alexis Zequeira

The sense of place is fundamental in literature. It is fundamental in the literature that lasts inside us.  Think about all those books that you can remember vividly years after you read them and I would bet that place was strongly developed. 

Place is not something that can be established simply, in a single sentence. It comes through colors, smells, the way the ground feels, or the streets and the people. In Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, the country was brown. There were soft hills with tall pines. Who can forget the feel of the pine needles against your skin when lying on the ground? That’s not just from the last scene, the one where the injured Robert Jordan stays behind, waiting for the enemy. The place, the characteristics that make it unique, are repeated throughout the novel. It’s curious to me that when novels are discussed in school the subject of place is rarely one that is examined in its own right. 

Some writers claim a location as their own until it is hard to imagine it belonging to anyone else. London is that way for me. As far as I’m concerned, contemporary London belongs to Martin Amis. I couldn’t help thinking about Amis when I was there over Christmas. It wasn’t that I was reading any of his books. (I was actually reading a lot of Roth back then — different country, different time.) But I couldn’t get away from the thought that the London I walked each day had a twin sister in his words. I suspect that the same thing would happen to me if I went to Istanbul. I would look for the narrow, angled streets that Orhan Pamuk walked as a young man. The atmosphere of incompleteness, hollow yearning, which is what I remember best from The Black Book would come back, even if it’s been ten years since I read it.

Some cities no longer exist. To find the Dublin of James Joyce you have only one place to look. Dublin itself has become another place entirely. Joyce and even Bloomsday are still celebrated there, but the city is firmly part of the new century. The same is partly true of the Buenos Aires created by Jorge Luis Borges. It is gone. To recover it, you have to page through his stories, try to recreate the light, the fervor of Buenos Aires in the 1930s. Unlike Dublin, the city itself has succumbed to decades of inebriated politics that made one of the seven richest countries in the world into an economic basket case and the subject for opera buffa.

There are pictures too. An exhibit currently showing in Madrid gathers the photographs of Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola (1906 — ), who was a friend of Borges and who took walks through the city. Each claimed 1930s Buenos Aires for himself. What survives of that city, that time, is thanks to them and to the music. You can’t help but listen to any tango sung by Gardel and not experience it even if you have never been there.

The Portuguese language blog, O que cae dos dias has a lyrical post on the place of writers and cities that I wish I could translate in full here. I can’t do that, but I will give you a paragraph –

Numa noite chuvosa de 1936, o fotógrafo Horacio Coppola e o escritor Jorge Luis Borges faziam um de seus habituais passeios pelas ruas de Buenos Aires. Coppola parou diante de uma poça. Ajustou a câmera e disparou. No espelho de água, estava refletida a silhueta de uma casa do bairro de Palermo. Quando viu revelada a foto do amigo, Borges exclamou: «Isso é Buenos Aires». A mesma cidade que encontro agora reflectida na exposição do fotógrafo argentino, em Madrid. Uma metrópole fervilhante. Gente elegante cruzando amplas avenidas da moda, descendo e subindo de eléctricos ou parada à porta dos teatros ou apenas entrevista através das vitrinas dos cafés. E, ainda, subúrbios desertos, esquinas silenciosas, barcos ancorados na Boca.

* * *

On a rainy night in 1936, photographer Horacio Coppola and writer Jorge Luis Borges went out on one of their regular walks through the streets of Buenos Aires. Coppola stopped at a puddle, focussed, and shot. The water reflected a house in the neighborhood of Palermo. When Borges saw the picture after it was developed, he exclaimed, “That’s Buenos Aires.” It is the same city that I find mirrored in the exhibit in Madrid of the Argentine photographer [Coppola] – a city with fervor, with elegant people walking across the broad and fashionable avenues, climbing onto or descending off trams, waiting at the theater entrance, seen through cafe windows, of deserted suburbs, silent corners, and ships anchored at Boca.
João Ventura, “Buenos Aires pelos passos de Borges,” O que cae dos dias (May 5, 2008)[translation to English mine]

Selected pictures of the Coppola exhibit in Madrid are here. (Click on the word, “Fotografías,” then click on the word,”Siguiente,” to see the next picture.) You can also look here for pictures from another exhibit of Coppola’s work, this time from a museum in Buenos Aires.

Robert Wright, a travel photographer in Buenos Aires and author of the blog, Line of Sight, has a post comparing Buenos Aires in the 1930s and now. Here is Coppola’s 1936 picture of the obelisk –

Here is Wright’s more contemporary view –

It is the same location, but it is not the same place.  And yes, if you do the math, you will figure out that Coppola is 102 this year.

Photos: Horacio Coppola and Robert Wright, line of sight blog; Source: João Ventura, “Buenos Aires pelos passos de Borges,” O que cae dos dias (May 5, 2008)

More reflections on May 1968 and what it may or may not have represented. Christopher Hitchens writes –

We thought that our own struggle to change the campus rules was a part of the revolutionary agenda. And—unlike the pseudo-radical students of today—we wanted to be allowed to be grown-up rather than to claim another extended tranche of parental protection. Ask the dean’s office for protection against hurt feelings? No: we demanded the right to hurt the feelings and ruffle the susceptibilities of others.

The rest of the essay is here.

My post on an essay by Paul Auster about the 1968 Columbia protests is here.

Photo:  May 1968 Paris Student Protests, Bruno Barbey, massimilianolosini.it/blog/; Source: city-journal.org

The New York Times interviewed Dmitri Nabokov about his decision to publish his father’s last work thirty years after his death. The work is reportedly outlined on 138 index cards. In a previous post, the number reported was 50 index cards. Dmitri Nabokov is quoted as saying –

…if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?

When asked if he would consider publishing a facsimile of the index cards, he answered, “Yes.”

The rest of the interview is here.

Source: The New York Times

About good writing, he said –

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.

In a previous post, more than a month ago, I mentioned that I had read two very interesting essays in the Times Literary Supplement issue of March 14, 2008. I shared with you the first essay — Julian Barnes on Flaubert — and promised to discuss the second essay that weekend or the following Monday, at the latest. Well, it’s been a month, a busy month, but a month nonetheless, so here is the post I promised.

The other essay, written by Paul Theroux, was about a curious rivalry between Georges Simenon and Albert Camus.  Perhaps rivarly is too strong a word.  It was more the case of Simenon comparing himself favorably with Camus and believing that he, not Camus, should have been awarded the Nobel.

Camus seems to have taken no notice of Simenon (no mention at all in any Camus biography), though we know that Simenon was watchful of, and somewhat competitive with, the decade-younger Camus, whose complete works (he must surely have noted) can be accommodated between the covers of one modest-sized volume. The indefatigable Simenon, confident of winning the Nobel Prize, predicted in 1937 that he would win it in within ten years. It went to others – Pearl S. Buck, F. E. Sillanpää, Winston S. Churchill. Then in 1957, hearing that Camus had won it, Simenon (so his wife reported) became enraged. “Can you believe that asshole got it and not me?”

You can read the essay here.

Photos: Georges Simenon on the cover of La libre Match, trussel.com; Source: Times Literary Supplement (March 14, 2008)

Francisco Goya, Fusilamientos del 2 de mayo 1808

The most superficial guide to this painting will remark upon the composition, the almost spiritual glow of light from the cube off the center to the right, the machine-like anonymity of the soldiers pointing their bayoneted rifles at the unarmed civilians on the left.  The civilians are comprised of several figures but represented by one.  He is dressed in a white shirt and bright yellow pants.   His face is darker than it should be, given the light.  His arms look as if they had been captured by a camera the instant he flung them upwards.  He is the true protagonist of this work. 

You can let years pass without seeing this painting and he is the figure you will remember.  He is a man, a person. He has a face, something that is mostly denied to the others. He is an individual, especially when contrasted with the mass of soldiers leaning forward into what they are about to do.

Jay McInerney, in his 1992 novel, Brightness Falls, has one of his characters say –

Begin with an individual and you’ll find that you’ve got nothing but ambiguity and compassion; if you intend violence, stick with the type.

Here we see both — the type in the soldiers, the individual in the man who is about to be executed. Which is why we can close our hearts to the executioners, but the man’s fate, to paraphrase Donne, still diminishes us. 

Image:  Francisco Goya, Fusilamientos del 2 de mayo, pbs.org; Sources: Jay McInerney, Brightness Falls (1992), John Donne, from “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - “Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die.”

The ocean and the beach especially have always drawn me. I love cities by the ocean. That’s no surprise: I was born in one, grew up here, and after many years — studying and wasting time elsewhere in equal measures — I returned to make my life.

When I spent a few days in March, first on one beach then on another, I couldn’t help but remember what it is about the beach that makes it as precious to me as a first love. Though one must be careful. A romance with the ocean must always remain platonic. To have her is to commit to her and that is a whole other life.

Here is one of the most memorable passages I know about the beach and the ocean.  There is no rationale behind my selection.  I stood in my study and pulled some books off the shelves.  

A book can remind you of where you were when you first read it and that, in turn, opens another door, to another memory. To reread is to relive.  In a sense, your life is written in the books that you keep. 

Al tercer día de lluvia habían matado tantos cangrejos dentro de la casa, que Pelayo tuvo que atravesar su patio anegado para tirarlos en el mar, pues el niño recién nacido había pasado la noche con calenturas y se pensaba que era a causa de petilencia. El mundo estaba triste desde el martes. El cielo y el mar eran una misma cosa de ceniza, y las arenas de la playa, que en marzo fulguraban como polvo de lumbre, se habían convertido en un caldo de lodo y mariscos podridos.

* * *

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ashgray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.

– Gabriel García Márquez, “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (1968)(translation by Gregory Rabassa)

I was thirteen. It was afternoon at the Santo Domingo airport. There was nothing to do. My grandmother had the driver drop me off way too early, at nine in the morning, for a flight that was scheduled to leave at two in the afternoon.  But the flight was delayed until who-knows-when.

I had almost forgetten how to speak Spanish, my first language. It wasn’t that I had a weird accent, like an americano, who can’t help but turn a simple, pure vowel into a dipthong spilling all over the place. Not that. It was that I had to think before I spoke. I had to construct my sentences in my mind, test them out, before launching them. The language no longer belonged to me.  

The airfield was bleached by the sunlight.  Beyond it was the Caribbean Sea, temperamental, ringed by sharp dark rocks.  On the second floor of the airport, there was a small shop where I bought a carton of very sweet orange-flavored drink and a small paperback from a display rack that sqeaked each time I turned it. Don’t let anyone fool you into believing that covers do not matter. I picked this book because of its cover – Cartoonish sea shells or jellyfish and starfish in different sizes. Many years later, I read somewhere that its author believes sea shells bring good luck, contrary to the superstition in Latin America that collecting them does the opposite.  The cover made me pluck the book from the display rack, but it was the title made me buy it.  La increible y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada was too seductive a title to put the book back, even if the paperback was a sad little thing with its cheap cardboard cover and pages of newsprint that fell out during the first reading on the flight back to Miami.

I still have that book because it represents for me the time I discovered and unlocked the hidden door to a garden known as “El Boom,” because it marks the beginning of that time when I recovered my first language from the dark well of forgetting. 

Photos: South Beach in November and paperback, Gonzalo Barr; Source: Gabriel García Márquez, “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (1968) in La increible y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972)