Gonzalo Barr

No sooner do I launch the category, “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, that Le figaro in France and El país in Spain publish articles on Michel Houellebecq’s mother, Lucie Ceccaldi. In her memoirs, L’innocente, which are set to be released on May 7, the 83-year-old Ceccaldi attemps to even the score with her famous son. Recall that the way Houellebecq has told the story, and which Ceccaldi now confirms, she was a pre-1960s hippie-type who abandoned him at the age of five so she could hike through Africa. Michel Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, but later adopted his grandmother’s surname. The character of the mother, also named Ceccaldi in Houellebecq’s second novel, Les Particules elementaires (1998)(translated into English as The Elementary Particles) similarly abandons the two characters, Michel and Bruno.

The real Ceccaldi is quoted as complaining that Houellebecq is a parasite who has caused nothing but pain to those who surround him. She will not speak to him again until he begs her forgiveness. In the meantime, she warns him not to enmesh her in any more scandal or she will take a bat and smash it across his mouth until she has broken all his teeth.

It is no secret to anyone who has read Houellebecq or read about him that he has attracted controversy for years. He disdains the soixante-huitards and believes that the Sixties produced a culture of egotism and self-centeredness. (The subject is being discussed again, given the fortieth anniversary of May 1968.)  He has been accused of being a misogynist. And he was sued in French court for making what the plaintiffs believed were anti-Islamic remarks. He prevailed and went into exile, first to Ireland and more recently to Spain.

I find Houellebecq’s work intruiging and previously posted about him here.

How much of this is an act and how much of it is real? I’ve always been suspicious of writers’ antics. Houellebecq once grabbed the breasts of a woman who was interviewing him. He regularly shows up drunk to interviews. Antics like those are despicable and generate controversy. They feed into the middlebrow notion of the writer as bad boy and tortured soul — as destructive as a rock star, except with his hair cut short and dressed in a tweed jacket, chinos, and loafers — whereas the opposite is true. To paraphrase the famous line from Flaubert (Houellebecq’s compatriot and predecessor), a writer should live the ordered life of a bourgeois so he can be wild in his work, in other words, on paper.  But it doesn’t take a public relations genius to figure out that controversy pumps up the sale of books.

The writer of the Figaro article observes that even if Ceccaldi’s memoirs have no literary merit, they do shed light on the cold and unloved infancy of one of France’s most famous writers. In short, but for Houellebecq’s fame and notoriety, the memoirs most likely would not have been published.

Ceccaldi says –

Je n’ai pas cette fibre-là de dire, mon fils, c’est le plus beau du monde. Non, mon fils, c’est un petit con.

* * *
I don’t have it in me to say, My son is the most lovely in the world. No, my son is a little shit.

Source: Dominique Guiou, “Michel Houellebecq attaqué par sa mère,” Le figaro (Apr. 30, 2008), “A mi hijo, que le den, pero que no me meta en chismes,” El país (Apr. 30, 2008), and houellebecq.info website

Through most of Mario Vargas Llosa’s childhood, he was told that his father was dead.  Then one day, he was taken to Lima and introduced to a man who turned out to be his father. The event later surfaced in his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (translated into English as The Time of the Hero and made into a film entitled, The City and The Dogs).  The starting point of all his books, Vargas Llosa said in an interview with Brazil’s Globo TV, are his memories.  They are the raw material of fiction.  (The interview was conducted by Edney Silvestre in Rio de Janeiro for Globo TV. Silvestre asked his questions in Portuguese and Vargas Llosa answered them in Spanish.  The translations to English are mine.  This post first appeared with the video embedded below.  The video has been removed.)

Vargas Llosa’s father shipped him off to a military academy in order to “cure” him of his goal to become a writer –

My father distrusted literature a lot.  He thought that literature was a recipe for bohemianism, economic failure, and that it was not very virile.

Instead, Vargas Llosa took his experience at the Leoncio Prado military academy and turned it into his first novel.  While living at the military academy, he read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, all of Alexander Dumas, and others.

For me [reading] was a kind of resistance against a system that I rejected viscerally. … I didn’t know it [then] but literature was a way of living that was completely in contradiction to that authoritarianism, [against] that control. Literature was liberty.

Literature is the last front of the liberties we have. That’s why in authoritarian, totalitarian countries, literature is so important as a form of resistance for those who write and those who read.

Vargas Llosa’a first novel was published in Spain after being rejected by other publishers and was very well received thanks, in part, to the Peruvian military, who held a great bonfire in the same academy where the novel takes place –

That inquisitorial act [the burning of the book by the Peruvian authorities] resulted in great publicity for the book.  I have always asked myself whether the success of the book was due to its merits or to that inquisitorial act.

On a more personal note (not far from the theme of rebellion, this time against family), Vargas Llosa also spoke about his first marriage, at 18, to the sister of the wife of his uncle. (I know there is a more concise way of describing the relationship, but I wanted to underline the fact that they were not related by blood, something he points out too.) Why marry so young? Silvestre asked.

Love. Love has no age. And besides it was a love that my family rejected. So then love became mixed with rebelliousness.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot — Vargas Llosa studied law in Peru before he left for Madrid to complete his doctoral studies in literature, publish his first book, and become a full-time writer.

Photo:  Mario Vargas Llosa at the Miami International Book Fair, 1985, Miami-Dade College Archives, Wikipedia; Source: Edney Silvestre entrevista o jornalista, escritor, crítico literário e dramaturgo peruano Mario Vargas Llosa.  Ele fala sobre verdade e mentira, política e América Latina, Globo TV (removed from the Internet)

You never know where you are going to find something interesting. This interview of Salman Rushdie is from the latest issue of Departures –

Departures: You seem to have a great interest in the notion of defeat. And maybe failure, in some way?

Rushdie: One of the first times I ever met Günter Grass — I think it was in Germany when Midnight’s Children came out in translation — and he talked very interestingly about defeat. He said he felt that Germans had learned more from their defeat than Americans had learned from their victory.

Departures: How do you see that?

Rushdie: …When you lose, you have to question everything. So losing is a much more profound act. In my own life I’ve found that losses teach you more than gains. One of the great losses for me was when my parents sold our house in Bombay, which I felt was the place where I was rooted. I was 16 or something, and I’ve never been so angry at my parents. But now if I look at the kind of life I’ve had, it grows out of that loss. Had I had that permanent home, I would just have gone back there to live after Cambridge and stayed forever. God knows if I’d ever have written anything worth a damn.

Source: Departures (May/June 2008)

Brazil has a population of 190,010,647. It is by far the most populous lusophone country in the world. I have no idea the number of Brazilians in the US, but there must be many because they are everywhere. They are certainly everywhere in Miami.  And I don’t mean as laborers, I mean businessmen, bankers, and developers. We have gotten more than an earful of Brazilian music since the heyday of bossa nova and samba. One song, “The Girl from Ipanema,” is so well known that an otherwise educated American can be forgiven if he believes it was written by an American. (Your correspondent was sitting at a table in a café bar on the corner of Rua Vinícius de Moraes and Rua Prudente de Moraes in Ipanema when a colleague from a Boston firm insisted to half a dozen patient and tolerant Brazilian lawyers who were our hosts that the song had in fact been written by an American. He did it with the degree of certitude that anyone else would use to affirm that, well, yes, of course the earth is round. Fortunately, Brazilians are among the nicest people on the planet and, in any case, the embarrassment was washed away with another round of caipirinhas, even if the story made its way around the legal community in Rio.)

We know their music, we know the tanga and Havaianas. In Miami, you can have a feijoada or rodizio at any number of restaurants.

So where are the Brazilian writers? Where is their literature? We get some Jorge Amado and too much Paulo Coelho, but what about the others? What about Rubem Fonseca, Patrícia Melo, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Drummond, Paulo Lins, Moacyr Scliar, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, to name a few? Most of these writers are still alive and writing.

Let’s start with Rubem Fonseca, who has enjoyed a long career as the successful author of many bestsellers and who, as I post this, is on the eve of turning 83 years old this May.  A few of his books have been translated to English, they just haven’t gotten much mention. First, some background.

Fonseca was born the state of Minas Gerais in 1925, but moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was eight years old and still lives there. He studied and graduated with a law degree (so he qualifies as the second entry in the newly-minted “Law School and Writers” category).  In 1953, he began a career in the police, reaching the position of police commissioner until he resigned five years later in 1958.  He continued to work, then dedicated himself to writing full-time.  (Unfortunately, the wikipedia entry in Portuguese only says that he worked “na Light,” in a company or division called “Light,” but no more.)

He published his first three books, plus an anthology, between 1963 and 1973. They were collections of short stories entitled, Os prisioneiros (The Prisoners, 1963), A coleira do cão (The Rage of the Dog, 1965), and Lúcia McCartney (Lucia McCartney, 1967). His first novel, O caso Morel (The Morel Case) appeared in 1973.  Since then, I count twelve novels and numerous collections of short stories.  Four of his short stories appeared in the excellent anthology edited by Italo Moriconi, Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (2000), one of the first books I bought in Brazil, there at Saraiva on Rua do Ouvidor in downtown Rio. The anthology pretends to gather the 100 best Brazilian short stories of the twentieth century. If you have never read any Brazilian literature and if you can make your way through the Portuguese, it is a good introduction to the letters of a rich and unique country. (For one thing, Brazil was the only colony I know of that became the imperial capital for a while. When Bonapartist troops threatened Portugal, the emperor packed up and moved his entire court to Rio.  When Brazil became independent, it was a monarchy before it became a republic.)

I don’t understand why we don’t have more lusophone writers translated into English, especially when you take into account the long and close political relationship that England and Portugal have had.   The only English translations of Fonseca’s works that I have been able to find are, The Lost Manuscript (translated by Clifford Landers), which doesn’t help me identify the original Portuguese title as none of his books are called anything like that, Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts (translated by Clifford Landers), and High Art. According to the wikipedia article in English on Fonseca, two other works of his have been translated, Bufo & Spallanzani and most recently, The Taker and Other Stories (translated by Clifford Landers).

Of Fonseca’s work, I have read the novels, Agosto and Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos, the latter of which is available in English, the former in Spanish, French, and German. Both are murder mysteries. Usually, I do not read murder mysteries but, I confess, if it takes place in Rio, I will read it. Regardless of my bias, the books are well-written and the plots tight. I also read the short story collection, Pequenas criaturas (Little Creatures), which was entertaining. From what I read, Fonseca is nowhere near as audacious as, say, Loyola de Brandão, about whom I posted earlier, but who has even fewer of his books translated into English.

Fonseca is also an accomplished scriptwriter and filmmaker. I have not addressed this facet of his work because it would have made this post even longer.

Every year we are publishing more books in the US. Yet books written in a language other than English remain rare, which is puzzling. Just when you think that the economic and political reality, if not the Internet, would force us to shed some of our provincialism, we seem to be comfortably ignorant of the rest of the literary world.

Update August 9, 2008:  Clifford Landers, who has translated numerous works from Portuguese into English, including works by Fonseca and Melo from Brazil and Lobo Antunes from Portugal, kindly clarified a few titles in his comment below, but I will repeat what he wrote here as well.  The Lost Manuscript was the title given to Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts in the UK.  He also wrote, “The translation of Bufo and Spallazani was published by Dutton and is out of print but can be found by searching on the Internet.”  His transtion of The Taker and Other Stories will be out November 2008. Many thanks for the clarification.

Sources: articles on Rubem Fonseca, Wikipedia, biography and bibliography from the author’s website

This weekend, I started reading William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness (1951). This was his first novel, published when he was 25 years old. It is also the first novel of his that I read, which is why I was surprised to find long and starchy sentences that reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez. Here is the beginning of the novel –

Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond.

Compare that with the opening lines of The Autumn of the Patriarch (translated by Gregory Rabassa) –

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light.

Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1925. He died in 2006 at the age of 81 in Massachusetts. Besides Lie Down in Darkness, he wrote The Long March (1957), Set This House on Fire (1960), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Sophie’s Choice (1979).

Sources: William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), Gabriel García Márquez, El otoño del patriarca (1975), translated by Gregory Rabassa as The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976), information about William Styron from pbs.org website

The post yesterday made me take out my own copy of María Luisa Blanco’s book, which I bought in 2004 in the French translation because I could not find the original Spanish. On the back cover there is wonderful quote, which I will copy from the French translation (which is itself a translation from the Spanish and which I suspect was originally spoken in Portuguese) and (further) translate it into English.* Did you get all that?

Écrire, c’est comme une drogue. On commence juste pour le plaisir, et on finit par organiser sa vie autour de son vice, comme les drogués. Telle est la vie que je mène. Même mes souffrances, je les vis comme un dédoublement: l’homme souffre, et l’écrivain se demande comment utiliser cette souffrance dans son travail.

***

Writing is like a drug. You begin [to do it] just for the fun and you end up organizing your life around your vice, like the addicts. That’s the life I lead. It is the same with my own pain. I look at it like a schizoid: there’s the man who suffers and the writer who asks himself how he can use that suffering in his work.
–António Lobo Antunes

*I’ve always wanted to experiment:  take the translation of a story and retranslate it back to the original language without looking at the original.  I’ve wondered how close the re-translation would be to the original.

Source:  María Luisa Blanco, Conversations avec António Lobo Antunes (2004)

Gregório Dantas, the blogger at O mal de montano, reminds us of an excellent book by El país correspondent, María Luisa Blanco, Conversaciones con Antonio Lobo Antunes. The book first appeared in Spanish in 2001. The quote that appears below is from the Portuguese translation by Carlos Aboim de Brito, which was published by Dom Quixote the following year. [My translation into English follows].On young writers, Lobo Antunes said –

É que há um problema de atitude nos jovens escritores que creio que é grave. A mim enviam-me muitos manuscritos para que dê a minha opinião, e fico surpreendido porque estes jovens querem ser lidos na segunda-feira, ser publicados na terça, ter um êxito extraordinário na quarta e ser traduzidos em todo o mundo na quinta. Não são escritores porque têm um apetite de êxito imediato e essa atitude impede-os de crescer literariamente. Se desejam tanto o êxito, devem dedicar-se a outra coisa.

* * *

It’s that there is an attitude problem among young writers, one that I think is grave. They send me many manuscripts so that I can give my opinion. And I am surprised because these youths want to be read on Monday, published on Tuesday, have an extraordinary success on Wednesday and be translated all over the world on Thursday. They are not writers because they are hungry for immediate success and that attitude impedes them from developing as writers. If they really want success so badly, they should so something else.

– António Lobo Antunes

Source: O mal de montano blog

Hemingway on writing and writers’ groups –

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her that makes the rest unimportant.

From Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Photo: Ernest Hemingway on safari, Serengeti Plain, 1934, John F. Kennedy Library; Source: Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (1935)

What is it about Martin Amis that inspires people to write nasty things about him? I should confess my bias straight out — I love his novels.  He has created his own London.  Yet even if you are not a fan of his work, you have to feel a sense of injustice, anger even, at the pure venom some people write about him.  Curiously, all of it seems to be coming from his own countrymen. Martin Amis has been the victim of quite a few hatchet jobs since — oh, when did they start?  – since I started reading about him in the mid-nineties. There was the thing about his teeth.  He spent a lot of money having work done on them.  Then there was the thing about his dropping his former agent for his present agent so he could get substantially bigger advances. There were even snide remarks about his second wife, a lovely young woman. Obviously, a trophy, the press huffed. Except that she turned out to be smart and accomplished in her own right, which kind of blew up that argument into a million tiny pieces, not that anyone took any of it back in print.  And not that they have stopped either.

They are still at it.

Take a look at this piece that appeared in The Telegraph recently. There’s all the old stuff. And there’s new stuff. Amis is being paid GBP 80,000 a year to be Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. As that is not an outlandish amount of money, the writer of the article divided it by the number of hours that Amis was contracted to teach. The result — Martin Amis gets £3,000 an hour as a lecturer – reads the headline. And while you’re mulling over that, why not mull over the writer’s innuendo that the the University had to fire a number of staff in order to pay Amis.

First, the article writer fails to demonstrate how one event — hiring Amis– had anything to do with the other — reducing the number of staff.

Second, let’s look closely at the amount of Amis’s salary. What the Telegraph writer did was take the salary and divide it by the number of hours he is required to teach.  This assumes no preparation time and no office hours.  It also assumes that Amis’s contract calls for him to teach and teach alone — no speeches, no writing while on campus, nothing.  Also, let’s face it — GBP 80,000 is not that much money. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic says a word about the truly outlandish salaries paid to athletes, figures that are in another league altogether. Lastly, and most divorced from reality, the article writer assumes that Amis brings to the classroom his experience and his abilities as a lecturer, nothing more.

You know what?  I could take anyone’s salary, even the author of the article, and detail the number of vaccines it could buy for children in sub-Saharan Africa or how many gallons of water you can purify and deliver to people who do not have potable water?  That’s a pretty cheap trick, don’t you think?

I do.

Amis was hired by Manchester for many reasons, including the fact that he is a big enough name that his inclusion in the roster of lecturers will help enrollment. In an unattributed something-or-other (because it’s not a quote) in this loosely reasoned article, we read –

The university insisted on Friday that it was getting good value for money because Amis’s appointment had seen applications to the Centre for New Writing rise from 100 last year to 150 next year.

There you have it — the University itself is on the record insisting that it got its money’s worth.

Look, seriously, this is how it works:  If you are Martin Amis, a successful and popular author who has consistently produced great fiction and well-respected essays, and as a result of your hiring you increase the number of students enrolled in the program where you teach by fifty percent, you get the big bucks.  If you aren’t, you don’t.

End of story.

Sources: Nigel Reynolds, “Martin Amis gets GBP £3,000 and hour as lecturer,” The Telegraph (January 28, 2008), The University of Manchester Centre for New Writing, Martin Amis web page

I just came back from dropping off the children at school. In the school parking lot, one woman stood behind her vehicle, a great white hulk with lots of gold detailing, and next to her daughter. The girl pulled her backpack out of the vehicle; the woman was preoccupied thumb-punching a message on a Blackberry. On the way back home, in eight vehicles out of ten, the drivers chatted on their cell phones as they barrelled through residential streets in their hormone-fed SUVs. One woman drove through a busy intersection with her head down, her hands busy on the phone. I know because I saw her holding the phone against the steering wheel. A housekeeper sat on a bus bench. It was a beautiful cool morning and waiting for a bus is a good time to think, but no, she was on the phone, too.

Most every morning, once the traffic dies down, say around ten, I walk five to six miles. Sometimes I try to think my way through a problem in the novel, though I have learned that it is best to let my mind wander. I don’t think about the problem at all. My unconscious will do it for me. By the time I am ready to work again, I usually have a solution.

Most of the people I see on my walk wear earphones. The earphones are connected to iPods or they are connected to radios.  Or they are on the phone.

So my question is this: What happens when you fill every minute of your conscious life with the radio or music or the sound of a television set? In some cases, it’s evident what happens:  you end up with no thoughts of your own.  You parrot whatever half-baked opinion you heard that day on cable news or read in the Op/Ed section of the newspaper.

When I was a child, I often turned down a ride to school. Accepting the ride meant having to shout over the car radio. I was grateful to my school friend for offering, but I preferred the quiet of my long walks, even if I had to leave the house earlier.

So my next question is this:  Is so much connectivity the end of creative thinking?  And if so, consider Norman Stone’s statement that –

A first-rate intelligentsia, like stray dogs, is perhaps a sign of under-development.

Source:  Norman Stone, “The Pope’s divisions,” Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 27, 1996)