Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade

I had four other books in progress when I finished Amulet (and when I started it for that matter), but I felt like I wanted to stick with the same mood somehow and I pulled out Horacio Castellanos Moya's Dance with Snakes without giving it much thought. I didn't even notice, for example, that Roberto Bolaño blurbed it, saying: 

The acid humor of Horacio Castellanos Moya, resembling that of a Buster Keaton movie or a time-bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles, who when they read him feel the irrepressible desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a real writer.

Quite a blurb. I'd read four previous novels by Castellanos Moya – two of them twice – and loved them all. Dance with Snakes is an earlier work than the others I've read. I certainly wasn't expecting literal snakes, which there are in the book. (Though perhaps literal isn't quite the way to put it.) I found the level of violence, which quickly veers into the absurd, a little hard to handle. The narrator commits atrocities in the book, and yet you find yourself pulling for him somehow. It's dark and ridiculous and uncomfortable, and I was relieved when it was over, which I guess doesn't sound like much of a recommendation. Maybe it's best if I borrow a 3-tiered rating system from an acquaintance of mine who, when he reviews books, lists them as either, "Recommended," "Recommended for the Enthusiast," or "Not Recommended." I would put Dance with Snakes in the middle category. If you, like me, hope to be a Horacio Castellanos Moya completist: For sure read it! It's fun (ish). For the general reader, get yourself a copy of Senselessness and read it and then read it again and then read it yet another time, why not?

After finishing Dance with Snakes, instead of going back to one of the books I had already started or starting my next book club book – which is long and which I really should start soon because I have lot going on between now and my next book club meeting – I decided to start Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures by Lizzie Wade. Lizzie is an online acquaintance of mine, which is what let me to pre-order Apocalypse and to read it at all. As anyone who follows my reading at all will know (I write as if I have a public... as if!), straight nonfiction is rare here. Memoir, sure. But nonfiction, with just a couple exceptions, is limited to books I've been compelled to read for one reason or another. 

I don't know what I was expecting because, again, this is so outside my usual consumption, but Apocalypse was absorbing and beautiful. I cried several times while reading it. A few chapters in, I found myself making an odd comparison: Apocalypse, I thought, reminded me of Kalpa Imperial – a successive account of civilizations that have reached some kind of peak, and then collapse. Each looks different and what comes after changes, but the inevitable end and renewal is always there. The thought passed as I read on, particularly as I got into the second section, but the idea remains compelling to me. 

Since we're doing recommendations in this post, apparently, I'll say that Apocalypse is Recommended. It's  approachable and rigorous, informative and captivating. I'm so glad chance internet communities led me to read it.

Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño. That was more than 15 years ago. I loved it, but I remember it only vaguely. Almost more as a mood than a text. I went on to read 2666 and then several of the earlier, shorter works – most recently The Spirit of Science Fiction. I had a similar feeling reading Amulet to what I felt reading The Spirit of Science Fiction. While Amulet is more polished, I had the feeling that it was practice for what would become The Savage Detectives. There were those same familiar names and places and events, which have somehow stayed with me over the years. Amulet even had the tiniest hint of 2666. It's just a passing moment, but the book refers to someplace looking like a graveyard, but not a graveyard of the present – a graveyard in the year 2666 (whatever that means).

The central event of Amulet is the occupation of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1968. The book's narrator is an undocumented Uruguayan woman who does occasional casual labor for faculty in the department of literature and philosophy. She hides out in a bathroom on campus and remains undetected through the army occupation. She is part of the older generation, but the book – and its narrator – are interested in the youth movements. There's a second character in Amulet who is without doubt a stand-in for Bolaño himself: Chilean, born in the same year (1953), and called in the book Arturo Belano. Like Bolaño is supposed to (but may not) have done, Belano made a trip to Chile in 1973* to participate in the revolution and returned to Mexico City a changed person. Perhaps Bolaño made this fictional version of himself as he wished he had been. 

 * I'll add that Bolaño is in good company if he missed out on being in Chile for the revolution and felt some shame about it. This is a theme in José Donoso's Curfew, whose central character left Chile well before 1973 (as did Donoso himself) but played the part of an exiled person though he never had any official dealings with the Pinochet regime. Of course Donoso is from a different generation: he was over 50 in 1973, when Bolaño was just 20.

By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing (Again)

By the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I had already read two other books by George Gissing: The Odd Women, which kicked off a year (2011) which I devoted almost entirely to reading nineteenth century British literature, and New Grub Street, which I read later that same year. I was led to By the Ionian Sea by a self-published study of Calabria, which I must have picked up when I was planning a trip to that part of Italy in 2018. I didn't end up getting By the Ionian Sea until after that trip – though it did influence a trip I took the following year to Puglia. I don't know that I would have made it to Taranto and the wonderful MArTA museum there if I hadn't read this book. I loved The Odd Women, but reading By the Ionian Sea, I developed such an affection for George Gissing – one I never would have had from reading his novels alone. Gissing is far more informed on ancient history than I am, and clearly stronger in languages, but I feel an affinity with him in his travels to these remote places more than 100 years ago. Of course, it's much easier to get to Calabria today, and the conditions there are much improved so I must give Gissing credit where credit is due. 

When I first wrote about this book, I said that Gissing's views about Southern Italy were paternalistic. I maintain that this is true – his accounts of the people are as bad as any British colonial descriptions of the developing world – but on this reading perhaps I had Carlo Levi more in mind than I did the first time around. (Which would be odd – given that I read Carlo Levi much closer to my first reading of By the Ionian Sea.) In any case, when I reflected on the fact that Gissing was visiting Calabria and Basilicata (and even the corner of Puglia) just under 40 years before Levi was exiled there and abject poverty and deeply unhygienic living conditions of people in that region, Gissing's complaints – about his accommodations, the food, the water, the wine – were probably reasonable. He contracted a severe illness during his travels, which may well have been malaria (which, I learned from Levi, was rampant in southern Italy at that time). Most of the water was probably not safe to drink, and the wine was often watered down for economic reasons. So maybe I need to give Gissing a little slack. I mention this because, despite it all, Gissing comes out of this journey joyful. On my first reading, I came away with a lingering feeling of the decrepitude of it all, while this time it's the delight that is staying with me. The worst of Gissing's time is spent at Cotrone, but even of Cotrone he says, 

My own chamber contained merely the barest necessities, and, as the gentleman of Cosenza would have said, "left something to be desired" in point of cleanliness. Conceive the places into which Cotrone's poorest have to crawl when they are stricken with disease. I admit, however, that the thought was worse to me in the moment than it is now. After all, the native of Cotrone has advantages over the native of a city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar in Shoreditch. 

What I relate to in Gissing is his joy in traveling alone and discovering things that have meaning only for him. While I felt this affection for him the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I'm not sure I could have articulated the reason. It's still a little hard to put into words, but I see myself in him in this book. 

 

P.S. When I started this post, I didn't know where it was going, and I thought I would get to something which now feels off topic. For those unfamiliar with The Odd Women, the title refers to the gender imbalance in Victorian England, where there were evidently more women than men due to war and colonialism I guess? In any case, I found myself thinking about this quite a bit while reading Testament of Youth – presumably there was an even greater gender imbalance in the postwar era. I think this fact of having Gissing in my mind is what led me to reread By the Ionion Sea. I can't imagine why else it would have been top of mind.