Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

It is hard to be original in literature. Good, up-and-coming authors have to put up with being compared to literary giants from the past, both distant and recent. Writing styles have become defined along such demanding lines that only by putting them all in a big cauldron, mixing them and stirring them up can one attempt to come up with a new breed. Sometimes I think that writers are defter at chemistry than at their craft. Wizards of letters could be a new job description to appear in the ad pages of the London Review of Books.

This is the reason why I can’t think highly enough of Dirty Havana Trilogy, a novel written by the Cuban author Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. I read it last summer and it left me with a nasty, and yet at the same time pleasant taste in my mouth. Whilst conforming to some of the stereotypes people have of Cubans (even those who have never paid a visit to the island), the book escapes classification. The nasty/pleasant taste in my mouth had nothing to do with the sex scenes, mind you, unbridled and “in your face” as they were. It was not the heavy dose of realism that permeated each and every single sentence of the book. It was something else and I would like to use this column and the next three-hundred or four-hundred words to explore it.

Because it is so hard to be an original author nowadays, many of those who choose writing as their profession resort to clichés, either in form or content. Pedro manages to manoeuvre himself out of these literary booby-traps.

Dirty Havana Trilogy is a novel in three parts about a man’s (called Pedro Juan as well) observations and experiences of the Havana of the 90s. Having lived through those years myself (’90 – ’97, when I relocated to London) I looked forward to reading what this fellow habanero had to write about one of the more significant periods in the history of our nation. I was left with mixed feelings but with a sense that for Pedro it was mission accomplished.

Havana is presented as a city of sex, drugs and... more sex and drugs. No surprise about that. I recognised some of the characters because I used to hang out with many of them. The sex scenes (plentiful, sorry about the spoiler) were also familiar to me. The language was shocking. It was not just the foul language in the mouths of the characters but in the narrator’s mind.

A cliché is not just a stereotyped expression but also the loss of original thinking. In Dirty Havana Trilogy Gutiérrez avoids this by enhancing the sense of smell. It seems as if he were saying “This is the reek of my city. It won’t feature in the brochures you pick up on the high street of your western country, but it’s the stench I wake up to and have to put up with every day”. No wonder the book was banned in Cuba after publication. It's not the economy, stupid; it’s the stink!  The novel very adroitly describes the hopelessness that swept through Cuba in the terrible 90s in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the “special period” (not very special for those at the top). Occupying a lead role in the volume is the rafters’ crisis in ’94, probably the closest the Cuban system came to collapsing.

Some books find themselves in the unenviable position of being one or two words away from the edge of the abyss of platitudes. Use the wrong phrase and down you go; you lose your reader. This is particularly characteristic of what I call books with “risky” subject matter.The trick, As I see it, is in feeling the writing as it comes along, as it leaves your head and it’s passed onto the blank paper. Let the reader make up his or her mind.

Dirty? Yes. Smelly? Yes. But cliché-free

Pedro skips around the pitfalls that come with writing a “socio-political” novel. His book is at times cynical like when he praises a mulatto woman who has the typical swagger many of my fellow countrywomen display. Twenty years from now, his description goes, she will still be desired and that is one of the reasons why he would stay on the island until the end of his days. His internal speech is impassioned and full of candour for his subject but it is given a reality-check at the end. This woman, like many others, is looking for a “yuma” (“foreigner” in Cuban slang) who will take her out of the country. The novel has moments of real humanity and I remember those vividly. Not everyone is out to get you. Not everyone is out to rob you. Not everyone is out to con you. Yes, the 90s were terrible, to the point where for the sake of a dollar someone could put a knife on your throat. However, underneath this social decay there were still some decent human beings, fewer but present.

In the same way that Ginsberg’s best minds of his generation were “destroyed by madness”, Pedro’s characters are crushed by the dyad of, on the one hand the self-inflicted Cuban embargo and on the other hand, the five-decades-old US one. That he carves such a fine, cliché-free piece of work out of this situation is a testament to good, original literature and we should enjoy it while we can.

© 2014

Next Post: “Sunday Morning: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 28^th September at 10am (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

There’s a passage in Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men which has stayed with me since I first read the book five or six years ago. In it the protagonist, nine-year-old Suleiman, goes to visit a relative of his and sits on a couch in the lounge. On sitting down he makes a funny noise which sounds more like a fart than anything else. He immediately rearranges himself on the sofa in a way that causes him to make the same noise again, thus stopping his relative from thinking that he’s let one drop.

The scene is very short, just a couple of lines long. It is completely irrelevant to the novel’s plot and yet, in its mundaneness I found magic.

When I read fiction, I seek entertainment but also affinity. I take the place of the main character or characters and buy into their life story. I immerse myself in their surroundings and partake of their conflicts. Along the way I enjoy the author’s prose, his or her use of metaphors and similes and the occasional or regular dollop of experimentation. But from time to time, I do also get carried away by a phenomenon I’ve come to label the “wonderful moments of real-life quotidianness”. These are sentences or phrases that strike me for their prosaicness and make me look up from the page. In the example quoted above, when I read the book, I remember thinking at the time that I’d done the same thing Suleiman had done on a few occasions before. In fact, my son did it a couple of weeks ago when we were watching a movie. He came into the lounge, sat down and made a funny noise. Straight away he shot up and said: “That wasn’t what you think it was, it was the sofa.” As if to convince us he sat back down and made the same noise and we all laughed about it.

I, too, laughed when I read the passage with nine-year-old Suleiman. In a novel about the Qaddafi regime and the brutality of it, you need these light-hearted moments. I don’t think Hisham Matar included that scene with a specific purpose in mind. That scene just happened. In the same way characters breathe, but we don’t notice their inhalation/exhalation processes until one of them “sighs with disappointment”. These mundane moments don’t exist for a particular reason. I even doubt they’re thought through properly. And yet, I notice them for their clarity, ubiquity and, above all, for a reality that mirrors mine. We’re so used to well-crafted and nuanced sentences and paragraphs. We can only hazard a guess at the lengths the writer has gone to in order to produce a fine specimen for us readers to devour. However, a novel or short story is also full of unguarded, non-transcendental moments.

For example, in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, the main character, Alex-Li Tandem travels to New York from London looking for the autograph of erstwhile film star Kitty Alexander. In one passage in the novel Alex is about to cross a busy road in the Big Apple when he is pulled back before stepping off the kerb. The problem? He has looked right instead of looking left. Again, this moment has no significance within the book’s grand narratives: both the search for a father-like figure to fill up the gap left behind by Alex’s dad’s death and the nature of celebrity. Nevertheless, I remember this scene because the same (although the other way around) happened to me when I moved to the Big Smoke from Havana. Even if no one pulled me off the road at the last minute, I do recall feeling confused as to which way to look when crossing a street.

Well-written books trigger off chemical reactions in us through a mix of tropes and reality. Whilst he former continues to be the reason why I read fiction, it is the latter that occasionally gives me a satisfaction that no metaphor, no matter how well-placed, can beat. Even if this “wonderful moment of real-life quotidianness” arrives wrapped up in the sound of what could be (but isn’t) a fart.

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 17^th February at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World (1st Mov Vivace/ 2nd Mov Grave)

French arrived in my life in the autumn of 1994. I know that the title of this column deals only with the Spanish-English daily goings-on of my existence as an immigrant in the UK but please bear with me on this one. French and German have been two faithful companions for many years and although lately they have fallen by the wayside on account of me living in Blighty now, the truth is that when I recently picked up a novel in the Gallic language the rapport was immediate and it felt as if that lexicon had still been with me all these years.

Pierre et Jean had been given to me as a gift aeons ago by a Frenchman I had to translate for when he visited the Havana University Folkloric Ensemble in 1994. By then I had already done four months of an intensive course on French and my teacher had turned out to be so good that already I could hold a conversation in that difficult European language. For some reason or other the book lay unopened for a long time until I came to live in Britain. And all these years I was completely oblivious to this little gem that was tucked away in my bookshelf.

This is a novel that could very well fall into the psychological genre. Two brothers, Pierre and Jean live with their parents in L'Havre, Normandy. One day they receive a piece of news that will alter their lives forever and put a chain of events in motion that will test their loyalty towards one another. One of his father's friends has died leaving Jean, the younger sibling, as the sole heir to his fortune. Pierre, on hearing this news, is taken aback, for he was also acquainted with the late fellow and cannot understand why he has been left out. Little by little the plot unveils surprises for the reader that Maupassant, very expertly, distributes evenly throughout the book.

When I was still at the French Alliance in Havana I got into the habit of reading in French. It could be magazines like Cahiers du Cinema or books like 'L'Etranger' by Albert Camus. The truth is that I developed a taste for reading in this language that is so close to my native Spanish.

And therein lies the fun: the language. Take this example. Pierre has just paid a visit to a young woman who works in a cafe and who is very keen on him. On learning that Jean has inherited such a vast fortune whilst Pierre has been ignored, she, very innocently, mentions en passant that that could be the reason why the two brothers do not look alike, Pierre is dark-skinned whilst Jean is blond. Pierre's reaction is to confront the woman trying to find out what she means but her explanation does not yield a deeper response. Here is what Pierre thinks as he leaves the cafe (apologies for the lack of French accents. My keyboard cannot produce them).

'Qu'avait-elle pense? Qu'avait-elle sous-entendu dans ces mots! Certes il y avait la une malice, une mechancete, une infamie. Oui, cette fille avait du croire que Jean etait le fils de Marechal(his father's late friend).

L'emotion qu'il ressentit a l'idee de ce soupcon jete sur sa mere fut si violent qu'il s'arreta et qu'il chercha de l'oeil un endroit pour s'asseoir.'

Thus begins a mental process that torments Pierre for the next two quarters of the book. As the tension rises, the language acquires a colourful and mournful tone. Here is another example after he sets off for the harbour and watches the people coming and going:

'Mais tout a coup, comme s'il s'eveillait, il les apercut distinctement; et une haine surgit en lui contre eux, car ils semblaient heureux et contents'.

The very confession Pierre makes to himself about feeling hateful towards people he runs into in the harbour acts as a preamble for the last scene where he confronts his own brother with what now looks like the truth. His mother slept with Marechal behind his father's back and begot a son by him. His fury and despondency send him off on a cruise to The United States of America

Linguistically, Pierre et Jean is a long collage of adjectives and metaphores that describe the Normandy of mid-19th century in great detail. Possibly influenced by the impressionist movement that was already making waves in these years, the novel is a long brushstroke with undefined contours. Each character is nuanced and the language serves to reinforce this.

All in all, my experience of going back to French was like bumping into an old friend. After the initial euphoria, the long-lasting embrace and the warm words, you realise that their essence is the same, and the core is the same core that attracted you to them all those many years ago. And then you smile.

Copyright 2008

The Good Terrorist (1st Mov 'Allegro') (2nd Mov 'Andante') (3rd Mov 'Grave') (Contains spoilers)

Is terrorism ever a viable option to achieve a fairer society? Can acts of terrorism leave the perpertrators emotionally unscathed? Can a terrorist separate, right down the middle, the emotions that spur them to fight against the status quo and the emotions that make them human? Can socialist ideas flourish, or even survive in a consumerist society? At what point does the individual become more important than the collective? At what point does it happen in reverse? How much are we willing to give up to achieve the ultimate goal of an equitable society? And what happens when we realise that it's too much? Is it too late, too?

Alice's call to the Samaritans in the final pages of The Good Terrorist, by Doris Lessing, is the catharsis of one of the most poignant fiction books I've ever read on the subject of leftwing European politics. Its ending reminded of the movie 'The Last King of Scotland' which came out earlier this year in the UK when Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker, tells Nicholas Garrigan, played by James McAvoy, 'So you thought this was a game, uh?'. Politics is not a game. It's never been. It never will be. And acts of sabotage do not just harm state property, but people, human, beings, individuals with flaws and virtues, vices and merits. And that is the main theme in 'The Good Terrorist'.

Through Alice's eyes and her middle-class bourgeois upbringing Lessing details a left-wing movement desillusioned with the incumbent Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the state of the former Soviet Union and the lackadaisical attitude of many of their peers. The layers of their frustration, once peeled, reveal a strong desire to do. What? Anything. And it's that anything that proves fatal. Unfortunately for innocent bystanders, too.

Lessing manages to capture the spirit of a squat, its quibbles and quips, its flights of fancy and disappointments. Central to the novel is Alice as the character who holds it all together, and I mean that literally. She rescues the squat from the hands of the local council. She offers her shoulder to one of the occupiers when she needs it. She does the chores around the house and gets the money to get by (stealing it on one occasion even). She's the heroine, but more than that, she's the living proof that an individual's power should never be underestimated and thus, unwittingly she points at the failure of the state all the squatters are in awe of, namely, The Soviet Union.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is that there are not supporting roles, and I mean in the traditional sense that once one of the leading characters disappears, nothing is ever heard about them again. Whether by name or image, all original squatters appear all the way through the book until almost the very end.

Pivotal to the novel is the question of whether in a country like the UK, where there exists the rule of law, accountability, a judiciary and a free press (OK, don't smirk at the back, please), if there are enough conditions for a Cuban- or Soviet-style revolution to take place, or even to triumph. In my humble opinion the answer is a rotund no. Despite this, sometimes Alice's conversations with her mother, with whom she has a love/hate relationship, made me remember the slogans heard (and still seen and heard) in my childhood and youth in Cuba. Ultimately it's Alice's mother who serves as a powerful reminder that you can take the girl out of the 'class', but you can't the 'class' out of the girl. And by 'class', I mean social and economic status. When Alice sees the flat her Mum is living in after she vacates the house she shared with her father for so many years, she breaks into to tears. It's this kind of moment that Lessing is so good at depicting, the innermost feelings of a person for whom class is the source of all evil in the country she was born and brought up in.

The Good Terrorist is a good fiction read for anyone interested in the internal turmoils of the British Left. I gather that nothing much has changed since the mid 80s, although you, my dear fellow poster/reader/blogger would beg to differ.

Copyright 2007