Tag: Javier Cercas

Iberian October: The Two Javiers

There are two Spanish writers, both called Javier, whom I really enjoy reading, so no wonder that I decided to start with them for my self-imposed Spanish and Portuguese-language themed month of October.

Javier Cercas: Even the Darkest Night (Terra Alta 1), transl. Anne McLean, Maclehose Press, 2021.

I’ve appreciated Javier Cercas’ brand of ‘historically-tinged’ fiction since I first met him at Quais du Polar in Lyon and read him translated into French, and later a couple of his books translated into English. What do I mean by ‘historically-tinged’? He examines the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the many years of the Franco regime upon the present-day. He has done extensive research on that period, and his novels often blend fact and fiction, with perhaps the best-known one being Soldiers of Salamis.

So I was intrigued to hear that he had embarked upon a series of crime fiction novels set in Terra Alta, a sparsely-populated landlocked district in the south of the region of Catalonia in Spain. Even the Darkest Night is the first in a trilogy set in this region, featuring Melchor Marin, a young cop sent to this region from Barcelona to protect his identity after he foiled a terrorist attack. I suspected that there might be a historical component to the crime (and there is a bit), but it appears that Cercas is more concerned with showing us the less glamorous, more poverty-stricken regions of his country.

‘This is an inhospitable, very poor land. It always has been. A land people passed through and the only ones who stayed were the ones with no other choice, the ones with nowhere else to go. A land of losers. Nobody loves this region, that’s the truth, and the proof is that they only ever remember us in order to bomb us. What are we known for outside the region? For the Battle of the Ebro, the most ferocious battle that’s ever been waged in this country…’

Melchor has a troubled past and problems with anger management. The son of a Barcelona prostitute, he ended up in prison, where he was reformed after reading Les Miserables. He managed to get his slate wiped clean and join the police force upon his release from prison, and has been obsessed with finding his mother’s killer ever since. Over the past four years, he seems to have laid roots in Terra Alta, has married the local librarian and dotes on their daughter Cosette. When he gets called to investigate the grisly murder of the wealthy businessman Adell and his wife and maid in their country home, he feels that the investigation into their deaths is not quite adding up. Sure enough, it soon peters out for lack of proper evidence.

There is nothing new about cops with secrets and problematic pasts, but a crime writer would have drip-fed tiny bits of back story here and there, only as much as was necessary for driving the plot forwards and giving us an insight into the main character. You can tell that Cercas is not really a crime writer, however, as he seems to spend a considerable portion of the book in lengthy flashbacks, and the investigation becomes almost secondary. Nor are there any real clues for the reader about the true motives for the initial crimes, plus we encounter a rather unnecessary death which shocked me.

All in all, not the most satisfying book by this author whom I highly respect. I will probably read the next in the trilogy, though, if only to see if he has mastered the crime writing conventions a little better.

The book has already been given a more elegant but bland Penguin Modern Classics treatment.

Javier Marias: All Souls, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press, 1999.

This also feels like a less typical effort by this author – perhaps the least complicated and most accessible of his novels, a good entry point to his work.

It is an often very funny depiction of the pretentiousness and pettiness of Oxford collegiate life, seen through the eyes of a young Spanish lecturer on a two-year visiting fellowship. During his stay he becomes the lover of Clare Bayes, an attractive academic married to a far duller, more senior academic. He also becomes protégé of two enigmatic old scholars (and possibly spies), Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands, who later reappear in a more sinister capacity in the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.

I have always been fond of Marias’ astute observations of individuals and social groups, and this book seems to have even more wickedly funny passages (the description of dinner at the High Table is hilarious) than usual – and perhaps less of the deeply troubling issues that make an appearance in his other works.

For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.

In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money…Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself… The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one’s dispensation to not reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from here comes the tradition – true – and the myth – also true – of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying… Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples.

Nevertheless, it is almost certainly not the way the Daily Mail blurb on the cover describes it: ‘probably the wittiest novels set in British academia since David Lodge’s Changing Places’, because Marias has never been interested purely in satire or a love story. His books are always about the slippery nature of memory, about how people constantly rewrite themselves into their own lives and the lives of others, about that longing for something indefinable yet more than what we have. It is also about displacement, about never quite fitting in, which I think Marias himself experienced (too ‘British’ for the Spanish, too Spanish for the English-speaking world). Here is an example of that wistfulness, in what Toby Rylands tells the narrator at some point:

I’ve always kept on learning. But that ignorance is still so vast that even today, at seventy, leading this quiet life, I still cherish the hope of being able to embrace everything and experience everything, the unknown and the known, yes, even things I’ve known before. There’s as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can’t accept that certain things won’t repeat themselves.

It is rather poignant that the author himself died at the age of seventy, no doubt harbouring a very similar sentiment.

A very enjoyable entry in my Marias reading, and I’m almost tempted to sneak in another one by him before the end of October, although I only have thick ones left to read and don’t want to carry them with me to Romania next week.

Part 4 of #HayFestival: Translations

What could be more suitable for #TranslationThurs than a report on the panels on translated fiction which I attended at Hay Festival this past weekend? I had heard of the Bogota39 initiative and planned to attend one panel on it, but perhaps the Caetano Veloso CD I listened to on the way to the festival knew something that I didn’t, because I ended up attending three panels on Spanish-speaking literature, most of it Latin American (and yes, sadly, there were no Brazilians among them that I could practise my three phrases of Brazilian Portuguese on). As it happens, all the three panels I attended were moderated by Daniel Hahn, translator and cross-cultural promoter, whom I’d also met at the London Book Fair last year, and who must slowly be starting to wonder if I’m stalking him…

Bogota39 is a Hay Festival initiative to make the work of young writers from Latin America (under the age of 40) visible to the English-speaking world. The first edition back in 2005/6 was hugely successful, with many of the writers going on to become international stars. This current crop are just a small selection of the many, many talented and vibrant writers working in or stemming from Latin American countries today. There is a freedom to experiment with fiction that perhaps few writers elsewhere have – because the language feels younger and more adventurous than the more literary Spanish from Spain, but most of all because there are no Creative Writing courses that ‘teach’ people to write in a certain way, and there are no advances or royalties (not much money in publishing), so editors are not so focussed on commercial success and writers can write pretty much whatever they like.

Liliana Colanzi and Carlos Fonseca being kind enough to pose. Felipe Restrepo Pombo on the left is chatting to Daniel Hahn.

The first panel included Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia, short stories), Felipe Restrepo Pombo (Mexico, non-fiction) and Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica, novelist). The second featured Peruvian author Claudia Ulloa and two more Mexicans (yes, they do dominate a bit): Laia Jufresa and Emiliano Monge. Of these six, only three have been translated into English at present (just one book in most cases), so I hope events such as these will make publishers more keen to gamble on them. They certainly have the brains, wit and English to be very personable guests (which shouldn’t matter, but we all know it does).

The two panels had many common themes, so I’ll discuss them together. For instance, although the previous generation of writers might have felt that they were living in the shadow of the Boom generation of Latin American writers (Marquez, Cortazar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa – the giants of the 1960s and 70s – which coincided with the rise of Latin jazz), this generation does not feel intimidated by them. Nor do they think that they have been influenced by them as much as by other writers, many of them from abroad. As Emiliano Monge put it: ‘We have the same territory and the same guns as the Boom writers, but we are hunting different animals.’

Although they recognise the limitations of the Bogota39 initiative (somewhat arbitrary and subjective inclusion of authors, only a small fragment included which barely gives a flavour), they are also aware that it provides a calling card for UK and US publishers and that it extends the concept of Latin American literature beyond the same obvious names. Hopefully, it also extends the idea of the topics that Latin American literature can cover, beyond the obvious violence, memory, heritage.

The second panel: from left to right, Ignacio (? – translator, though not much needed), Emiliano Monge, Claudia Ulloa, Laia Jufresa and Daniel Hahn.

What surprised me most was the lack of a continent-wide distribution system despite most of the continent being monolingual. Each Latin American country has its own small publisher and they only bother to distribute to the other countries for the big successes. Sometimes Spain would step in as a mediator, but since the 2008 crash, Spanish publishers have been somewhat bankrupt. So this anthology also helps to introduce these writers to each other.

What, if anything, did this disparate band of brothers and sisters have in common, other than the fact that they didn’t consider themselves ‘Latin American’ until they went abroad and were put in that category? Well, they all love playing around with language, structure and stories; they have quite an ironic tone; most of them are no longer overtly political, but feel that choice of form is a political act in itself.

Another communality is that many of these writers are now living and working abroad. In most cases, it’s this actual physical distance from their home country which also gave them the necessary mental distance in order to be able to write about it. While Valeria Luiselli might be on the cusp of starting to write in English, all of the panellists felt that they wouldn’t write in anything else but Spanish. As Claudia Ulloa memorably put it: ‘I learnt to breathe in Spanish, and writing is like breathing, very physical.’

If you would like to explore any of these authors further, Laia Jufresa’s Umami, Carlos Fonseca’s Colonel Lagrimas and Liliana Colanzi’s short story collection Our Dead World have been translated (the latter two were published in the US only).

The flower arrangements were beautiful throughout.

The third panel I attended consisted of two current giants of Spanish-language literature – Juan Gabriel Vasquez from Colombia and Javier Cercas from Spain. They’ve had more of their novels translated into English and were presenting their latest hardbacks, The Shape of the Ruins and The Impostor respectively. I haven’t read those yet (they both sound extremely interesting, but are slightly expensive, so I’m waiting for the paperback), but I have read earlier books by them and even included him in the Crime Fiction Lover article on Latin American crime novels. At first glance, they seemed to agree on many things, not least that Don Quixote contains within it all the possibilities of the novel and proves that you don’t have to follow the rules.

Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vasquez – apologies for the blurry picture.

They talked about how their novels were based on certain true facts and their own personal reactions to those facts at the time. Cercas writes about the infamous case of a Spanish man who pretended to be a resistance fighter and Nazi camp survivor, while Vasquez met a doctor who had a vertebra and a piece of skull from the two most famous assassinations in Colombian history. Both of their novels feature a protagonist called the same name as the author, but which apparently is not the author. And both of them are sceptical about calling their novels ‘historical fiction’, because actually they are about how history impacts upon us in the present. Although the past seems remote and alien, it has repercussions and long echos in the present, for generations. What can we do with our bad inheritance (and this applies not just to Latin America or Spain, but to the British Empire and most other countries in fact)? Who gets to control the narrative of the past? And if it’s usually the victors, those in power, then the mission of the novel is to provide alternative possible versions of the story. The novel makes history more democratic, by giving voice to marginalised, forgotten people, by providing a side door to the edifice that is textbook history.

Perhaps the most uplifting moment came at the very end, when someone in the audience asked if the novel has a future. At which all three (including Daniel Hahn) pointed out that the very name ‘novel’ indicates that it is something constantly renewing itself, that it’s an omnivorous monster devouring other genres and influences, and that it constantly mutates and comes out on top.

Finally, a very personal observation: that although it is false to think of ‘Latin America’ as a monolith, I did instantly feel at home with the ‘thinking out loud’ both on the page and on the panels, the chatty replies, the warmth and humour, the serious yet also deeply ironic way of looking at things, which reminded me so much of my own culture. Another reminder that I need to read more of their literature.