The Obscene Bird of Night, José Donoso

I was about a hundred pages in -- maybe even at the end of the first section of The Obscene Bird of Night -- when I read the blurb on the back cover and said (possibly aloud), "wait, that's what this is about?" The blurb reads:

The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions.

And, indeed, around the 180-page mark, this narrative does emerge from the confusing text as a suddenly clear story. Before long, this story is left behind, though it reappears a couple more times. This happened again and again in the book: I'd be lost for pages, or whole chapters, uncertain about who was telling the story, who was speaking, when and where the events were taking place, whether they were fiction within the fiction, and then there would be sudden, beautiful clarity.

The book cover also proclaims that it was Luis Buñuel's favorite novel. If that's true, it makes perfect sense. There were multiple ragged party scenes that could have been straight from "Viridiana." (Though, who knows if I would have thought of "Viridiana" if I hadn't seen Buñuel's name on the cover.)

Finishing this book felt like a huge weight off. As I mentioned in my post about The Kingdom of this World, it's decidedly not beach reading. It didn't even take me all that long to read (two and a half weeks, if you subtract the the week I set it aside.) The book was dense and easy to get lost in and when I did come upon one of those moments of clarity, I felt like I could breathe again, but I was always a little awestruck at the same time. I read roughly the last 100 pages in one go and felt so drained, but also pretty great, at the end of it all.

Breathing Room

I've had asthma my entire life. Since 1999, it has been well-controlled by daily use of an inhaled steroid, which has been supplemented with another daily medicine since 2005, when I started living with cats. I also have an albuterol inhaler, which is a fast-acting asthma treatment for use only when I am experiencing asthma symptoms. These last 17 years, I've needed it rarely. Even before 1999, I took medicine daily going back as far as I can remember. I probably tried every asthma treatment available in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, I used my albuterol inhaler frequently. I often used it up before I was eligible for a refill. I wheezed all winter; I ran out of breath from even mild physical activity; I woke up in the night needing to be rushed to the emergency room. None of these problems persisted after I started taking inhaled steroids and I hardly think about my asthma anymore. (Taking daily medicine is so routine for me, I don't give it a second thought; I have taken medicine literally every day for more than 35 years.)

It's easy to overlook, all these years later, how having asthma affected some of my major life events, particularly the effect it had on my professional life. It's true that having health insurance - particularly in the pre-Obamacare era - was a privilege, but not having health insurance was a privilege of its own sort; one I could never afford. I require daily medicine that would cost hundreds of dollars per month, if I had to pay out-of-pocket. If I were to forgo the medicine, I would likely need coverage for emergency room visits every few months. As long as I've been an adult, having health insurance has been very near the top of my priorities. When I left school with no degree to show for it, I headed straight for the temp agency affiliated with Harvard seeking any kind of job I could get, as long as it included health insurance. Sixteen years later, I realize this decision - spurred in the moment by a combination of practicality and fear - was the start of the career path I'm still on today. Now and then, I've wanted to take career risks, but asthma (or, more accurately, my need for asthma medication) has always given me pause. (I have had a handful of short stints without insurance in my adult life, which I've gotten through via a combination of medicine-hoarding and doctors' free samples.) Overall, I like my work and I'm not actually sure I would have done anything differently if, say, I lived in a country that provided healthcare. It would have been nice to feel I had the option.

Yuppies

The other night on the subway, two young women were talking derisively about yuppies. Then one of them asked what yuppie even stands for and they tried out possibilities. They knew the Y was for young, but beyond that, they were lost. Young Unemployed Privileged People, one guessed? They seemed pretty sure the U was for unemployed, which struck me because yuppies were decidedly not unemployed. I don't want to extrapolate too much from this, but I do think it's interesting. When the term was coined, the object of derision was people who worked -- probably long hours -- in high-paying jobs. Now it's people who are so privileged that they don't have to work who are despised.

The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier

I was a good chunk of the way in -- but still far from finishing -- José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night when a scheduled vacation in Guadeloupe was drawing close. I had started it optimistically thinking I could finish it before leaving, but I was only about a third of the way through. This was decidedly not what I wanted to be reading on vacation in the Caribbean. Luckily, I came to a break between parts and so I set it aside to be resumed when I returned from vacation. Of course, I was then faced with the dilemma of what to read on my trip. I picked Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World in part because it was about the Caribbean (pre and post revolutionary Haiti, to be precise) and in part because Carpentier is who got me interested in Guadeloupe (via his Explosion in a Cathedral) and in part because the edition I had was well worn and the book is slim and it seemed manageable for my short trip. As it happened, I didn't pick up the book once while in Guadeloupe, but between a bit of reading the day before my departure and on my flights to and from Pointe-a-Pitre, I finished it, so I think I made a good choice. (We'll ignore the fact that I brought a second book with me in case I finished the Carpentier while I was away - hahahahaaaa...)

I was kind of disappointed in this book. I think mostly because of its brevity, which is, of course, why I picked it up when I did, so it seems kind of dumb to complain about it, but here we are. I was very excited to read Carpentier's treatment of the Haitian Revolution, and it just seemed light. While reading it, I felt like I knew either too much or too little about the Haitian Revolution going in. If I had known less about it, I might not have been so occupied with what was going on when; as it was, I kept wanting to refer back to The Black Jacobins, which I now intend to reread. My disappointment aside, the prose and the imagery in The Kingdom of This World were lovely. The book is told largely from the perspective of the slave Ti Noel and covers a long span of his life, with big gaps. This may sound a little odd without context, but I found the end of the book, when Ti Noel gives up on humanity and takes on non-human forms, only to discover the challenges of them, to be especially beautiful.

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco

I read Ilustrado because of Jesse Eisenberg. Right around the time I was putting together my list of countries and books, there was an interview with him in the Times Book Review where he mentioned having left it on a plane the day before. I wasn't familiar with the book, so I looked it up and when I learned the author was Filipino, I added it to my list. A few months later I found a copy and last week I decided to pick it up. As has been the case with several of the countries I've read books from for this "project," Ilustrado brought to my attention how little I know about the history of the Philippines.*

There are a lot of pieces to this book -- and sometimes I wasn't at all clear how they fit in with the larger story -- but at the center is the narrator, a Filipino writer living in New York, who is writing a biography of an older Filipino writer who had also settled in New York and whose death seems unresolved. I love a literary detective story, but the thing I really liked about this book was how the narrator turns out to be a mystery himself. As you learn more and more about him over the course of the book, you're forced to go back and reassess who he is and why he's telling this story. It never quite resolves, but the story has a lovely way of unfolding.

*Also embarrassing: It took me 3 tries to spell Philippines correctly.