SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Note: Author Kyung-sook Shin is the first female WINNER of the Man Asian Literary Prize (2012).  She is also WINNER of the French Prix de l’Inapercu and ten major awards in Korea.

“Looking back on your twenties, what would you most want to say to those of us who are going through our twenties now,” a student asks the professor.

“I hope you all have someone who always makes you want to say, Let’s remember this day forever…[and] I hope you will never hesitate to say, I’ll be right there,” the professor responds.

Although lovers of international fiction can find a number of novels in translation from Japan, China, and other Asian countries available in English, the number of novels from Korea is comparatively small.  Though I actively look for novels from as many countries as possible, I have, in fact, reviewed only one other Korean novel on this website to date – Three Generations, by Yom Sang-Soep, a classic written in 1931.  Kyung-sook Shin’s new novel, I’ll Be Right There, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, has therefore introduced me to a new, contemporary literary world, and I hope that other readers interested in unusual and rewarding fiction from an author who is almost unknown in the US will feel as enriched by her work as I do.  I’ll Be Right There takes place during the turbulent 1980s, a time in which Korean students demonstrated against the military dictatorship which had seized their country in a coup in 1979.  It was partly because of these demonstrations, leading to the well-publicized torture death of a student, that the country’s leadership finally announced in 1987 that the direct election of a President would finally take place.

The novel’s Prologue opens in the present with main character Jung Yoon receiving a phone call from someone to whom she had obviously once been close, but with whom she has had no contact at all for eight years.  Her caller reveals that Prof. Yoon (no relation to Jung Yoon), the literature professor whom she and her friends had all revered, lies dying in the hospital.  Quickly involving the reader, who wants to know more about Jung Yoon and her life, the author provides details about the professor’s influence on Jung Yoon and hints at the mysterious relationship Jung Yoon has had with Myungsuh Yi, the man who has phoned her. When Miyungsuh asks if he can come over to her place, however, Yoon cruelly rebuffs him. “It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast,” she remarks to the reader, as she realizes that she has just used the same words to rebuff him that he once used with her.

The college students frequently meet at the bench beneath the Zelkova tree. It is this tree type which is so frequently used for bonsai plants. Photo by Bonsai Anna

As Jung Yoon’s life in the 1980s unfolds, many American readers will be startled by the cultural differences – and similarities – between her life and theirs.  When Yoon’s mother becomes terminally, ill, for example, she sends Yoon away to live with a female cousin for the entire four years she is in high school:  “Everybody has to say goodbye eventually, [my mother] told me, so you may as well start practicing.”  Jung Yoon never says that her mother was wrong, just that “we saw things differently.”  It is not until her mother’s death that she takes a leave of absence from college and finally returns home to the countryside to reconnect with her father and her childhood friend Dahn.  Dahn’s eventual decision to drop out of college to join the army introduces an ominous new element which echoes throughout the plot of the novel when he is assigned, ironically, to riot duty at the college.

From inside her apartment, Yoon looked out at the apartment buildings clustered at the base of Naksan Mountain

When she returns to college and Prof. Yoon’s class, Jung Yoon becomes friendly with two other students there, Myungsuh Yi, a male student, and his female friend Miru.  The professor, fond of speaking in aphorisms, also recites poems from western authors and tells stories with moral lessons.  A repeating story, which becomes symbolic, is that of Saint Christopher who was a “boatman with no boat,” who used his body to carry people across the river.  One night as he is carrying a child, the child becomes almost impossibly heavy, just as the river starts rising precipitously.  When Christopher barely makes it to the other side, Jesus appears, telling him that “When you crossed that river, you were carrying the world on your shoulders.”  The professor notes for the students that “Each of you is both Christopher and the child he carries on his back…Only the student who truly savors this paradox will make it safely across.  Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for.”  Among the many authors whose writings are quoted here are Romain Rolland, Emily Dickinson, Roland Barthes, and Rainer Maria Rilke.  The sad story of Kitty Genovese in New York is also recalled here.

Namsan Tower, with all its colors, is visible from Yoon's apartment and from many other points menioned in the novel.

Italicized notes from the Brown Notebook kept by Myungsuh Yi expand the narrative and point of view as the story progresses, including the beginnings of a love story, as Jung Yoon, Myungsuh, Miru, and Miru’s sister Mirae become almost constant companions.  The students continue to make (sometimes ponderous) observations about their lives. Miru remarks that “to hold someone’s hand, you must first know when to let go.”  Myungsuh quotes the professor as saying that “everyone has his or her own means of defining value,” and Myungsuh himself wishes that “someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless.  I wish there were promises worth believing in.”  Some characters, anticipating that they could disappear at any moment, begin recording their thoughts; others fail to “become St. Christopher” and do not respond quickly enough to cries for help (as happened with Kitty Genovese in New York).  Still others cannot see the urgency of others’ needs through the pressures of their own.  The novel concludes in the present, more than twenty years later, and resolves all the story lines.

Yoon spent many afternoons visiting the Gyeongbokgun Palace museum. The famed Gwanghwamun Gate is in the lower left.

Though the novel is somewhat awkward at the beginning, with too many grand metaphysical statements, the complexities of the characters and their interactions soon take over, leading to a wonderfully rich and dramatic conclusion which explains some of the unusual decisions the characters make, especially regarding love.  Ultimately, Jung Yoon herself “finally realized that I was not alone.  Everything I saw and everything I felt belonged to [my departed friends], too…I was living their unfinished time with them,” an epiphany which gives some resolution to her own imperfect life.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de

Yoon and her friends often gathered at the bench under the zelkova tree.  This type of tree is one of the most popular trees for bonsai.  Photo here by Bonsai Anna, taken, ironically in Visby, Gotland, Sweden. 

The "spider glyph," from the Nazca culture of Peru, 100 BC - 800 AD, was seen from the air by Yoon in her later years and inspired the epiphany of her life.

Naksan Mountain, which Yoon could see from her window, is found on http://seoulmateskorea.com/

The Namsan Tower, visible in the distance from Yoon’s apartment, and from several scenes in the novel, appears on http://namsan.wordpress.com

The Gyeongbokgun Palace museum, which Yoon often visited, is shown here, with the Gwanghwanmun entrance gate in the lower left:  http://seoulmateskorea.com/

Seeing the “spider glyph” of the Nazca culture (100 B.C. to 800 A.D.)  was a major moment for Yoon when she flew over this area in Peru many years after the time of the main action here. Those who read the book will understand this reference and the importance of the image.  http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/

ARC: Other Press

Note: This novel was WINNER of the 2014 IMPAC Dublin Award, WINNER of the Alfaguara Novel Prize in Spain, and WINNER of an English PEN Award.

“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life…tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates…and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke [or] fate.”

A novel so rich it is difficult to describe in anything less than superlatives, Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling mesmerizes with its ideas and captivating literary style, while also keeping a reader on the edge of the chair with its unusual plot, fully developed characters, dark themes, and repeating images.  Set in Colombia, the novel opens in Bogota in 2009, with Antonio Yamarra, a law professor, reading a newspaper story about a male hippopotamus which had escaped from the untended zoo belonging to former drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was shot and killed in 1993.  The hippo, one of several living free and breeding on the huge Escobar property in the sixteen years since Escobar’s death, had eventually wreaked havoc in the surrounding countryside until it was shot and killed by a marksman.  The fate of the hippo’s mate and baby, which had escaped with him, were then unknown.  The newspaper’s image of the slaughtered hippo brings back traumatic memories for Yamarra – real memories involving a former acquaintance, Ricardo Laverde, whom he had known for a few months in 1996, until Laverde’s death later that year, and more subtle images of a family destroyed and some possible connections to Colombia’s on-going war against drugs.

Flashing back to 1996, Yamarra shows the almost total control that the Escobar cartel had over many aspects of Colombian life for more than a dozen years from the early 1980s to early 1990s.  “I’m not talking about the violence of cheap stabbing and stray bullets, the settling of accounts between low-grade dealers, but the kind that transcends the small resentments and small revenges of little people, the violence whose actors are collectives…the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front.”  On one day which Yamarra remembers from 1996, another shooting occurred, this time the death of the son of a former President, who was himself a candidate for President.  At the time, Yamarra is playing billiards, where all the players, inured to such news bulletins on the TV, listen for a minute, then go back to their game, except for one person, Ricardo Laverde, a man in his forties, who remains riveted to the screen as the TV news switches to a new picture story about the abandoned Hacienda Napoles, Escobar’s 3000-hectare estate in the Magdalena Valley.  The TV news story shows Escobar’s former estate empty of life and falling into disrepair, Escobar’s prized car collection (including the one in which Al Capone was killed) turning to rust, the bullring filled with weeds, and the Colombian government, which has appropriated the property, unable to figure out what to do with it.

Hacienda Napoles, Pablo Escobar's estate. The single-engine plane over the entrance was the one Escobar used to start his business.

Over the billiard table during next few weeks, Yammara begins to learn a little more about Ricardo Laverde, who had been in jail for twenty years and has only recently been released, implying some reasons for his unusual curiosity about the current state of the Escobar property.  Laverde offers no information, and Yammara does not press him.   He does hear gossip, however, including the fact that “This man [Laverde] was not always this man.  This man used to be another man.”  He was also a pilot, information which fascinates Yammara, whose father and grandfather were also interesting in flying.  After Laverde leaves for a trip that summer, Antonio Yammara’s own life begins to unfold for the reader.  Living with one of his students, who is pregnant with his child, Yammara and Aura, his love, have their ultrasound on the day on which American Airlines Flight 965, flying from Miami to Cali, crashes into a mountain outside of Cali, introducing more airplane-related imagery which also affects Yammara – and, in a direct way, Laverde.

The remains of American Airlines Flight 965, which crashed into a mountain outside of Cali on December 29, 1995, killing someone close to Laverde and 158 other people.

Antonio Yammara’s relationship with Laverde is not altogether benign.  When Laverde is eventually killed, something the reader discovers in the early pages, Yammara is inadvertently involved, and he suffers physically and emotionally for several years in the aftermath.  His suffering involves every aspect of his existence, including his relationship with Aura and his young daughter Leticia.  Eventually, Yammara meets Laverde’s daughter Maya and learns more about the parallel story of Laverde, his wife Elaine, and their own daughter.  The time then flashes back to the 1970s, giving breadth to the themes and the philosophical ideas which the author illustrates throughout.

Eventually, Yammara goes to the Magdalena Valley to visit one of Laverde's family members and to find out more information about his life.

Throughout the thirty-year time span of the novel, author Vasquez keeps the novel moving forward.   Virtually every image in the novel connects with similar images in other times, and as time passes, the reader comes to accept that “The great thing about Colombia [is] that nobody’s ever alone with their fate.”  At the same time, few readers will be able to avoid feeling the isolation of the main characters as they deal with their issues alone in the face of overwhelming odds over which they have no control.  No reader will “blame” Yammara for his choices, however bad the results are, since Vasquez excels at preparing the reader for those choices based on Yammara’s past history.   And no reader will be able to avoid thinking of Laverde and his family as they deal with the long history of Colombia and its problems dealing with the country’s most lucrative export.

Yammara says the Magdalena Valley reminds him of a painting by Gonzalo Ariza, with its green plains, misty atmosphere, and gray mountains in the distance.

Exciting as a story and its development are, the novel also gives Vasquez ample opportunity to develop his themes. Yammara comments that “It’s always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are;  it’s always disconcerting to discover, when it’s another person who brings us the revelation, the slight or complete lack of control we have over our own experience.”  And when “the saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find that their memories are lies,” and that the best conclusion that one can draw about the motivation of someone close to us is simply, “He must have done something,” then the whole point of Vasquez’s novel is as clear, as “an object falling from the sky.”

Note: Translator Anne McLean maintains the honest and unpretentious language which the novel requires while also recreating vibrant images and well-wrought symbols.  Her use of colloquial language allows the reader to feel involved with the speaker, despite the novel’s complex themes of life and death and fate.

Photos, in order: The authors photo appears on http://www.cancilleria.gov.co/

Hacienda Napoles, the enormous estate of Pablo Escobar in the Magdalena Valley, was left empty by the government which seized it, its zoo animals being left to fend for themselves.  The hippos, which numbered four when Escobar purchased them, now number between sixty and seventy, living in the wild.  Story here: http://www.bbc.com/ Photo of entrance, here:  http://www.eluniversal.com.co/

The wreckage of the 1995 crash of American Airlines, Flight 967, outside of Cali, devastated Laverde. http://lessonslearned.faa.gov/

The Magdalena Valley, where Escobar’s estate was located, was also where a member of Laverde’s family lived.  http://www.pbase.com/

Gustavo Ariza, who painted images of the Magdalena Valley, is an artist admired by Yammara.  This painting is “Nuves de Lluvia.” http://blogs.elespectador.com

Note: This novel was WINNER of the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger Award for 1977.  In 2013, the author was WINNER of both the Saltire Society Fletcher of Saltoun Award for his “outstanding contribution to Scotland’s life and culture,” and WINNER of the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Writing.

“[Laidlaw] felt his nature anew as a wrack of paradox.  He was potentially a violent man who hated violence, a believer in fidelity who was unfaithful, an active man who longed for understanding.  He was tempted to unlock the drawer in his desk where he kept Kierkegaard, Camus, and Unamuno, like caches of alcohol. Instead, he…tidied the papers on his desk.  He knew nothing to do but inhabit the paradoxes.”

In this classic novel from 1977, Scottish author/poet William McIlvanney pulls out all the literary stops, creating a novel so filled with ideas, unique descriptions, and unusual characters that labeling it as one of the great crime novels does it a disservice.  It is also a literary novel of stunning originality, so unusual for its time that it is now labeled as the first of the “Tartan noir” novels, with McIlvanney himself described as the “Scottish Camus.”* Two sequels – The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983), a Silver Dagger Award winner, and Strange Loyalties (1991), a winner of the Scottish Art Council Award – complete the story of Laidlaw.  Despite his success and his prizes, however, McIlvanney’s “Tartan noir” career ended after these three novels, with the author concentrating instead on his poetry, literary fiction, screenplays, journalism, and essays – and winning prizes for his work in all of these genres. Inexplicably, considering the author’s successes and his prizes, all three of the Laidlaw novels have been long out of print – until this year – when Europa Editions in the US and Canongate Books in the UK decided to republish Laidlaw.  They are also planning the release of the two remaining books in the Laidlaw Trilogy for the fall of 2014.

Author photo by Ivon Bartholomew

The Prologue establishes the unique nature of this novel, with an unnamed young man running, running, totally in tune with his senses – “the lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs.  Your arms came up unevenly in front of you, reaching from nowhere….It was like the hands of a lot of people drowning.”  Most remarkably, however, the young man cannot understand what it is that he has done or why.  He just knows that he has to run.  “Half-an-hour before it, you had laughed.  Then your hands were an ambush.  They betrayed you…Your hands, that lifted cups and held coins and waved, were suddenly a riot, a brief raging.  The consequence was forever.”  He realizes now that his body is “a strange place,” and he wonders, “Out of what burrows in you had the creatures come that used you?  They came from nowhere that you knew about.”  He must be a monster, he concludes, believing that “nowhere in all the city could there be anyone to understand what you had done, to share it with you.  No one, no one.”

Glasgow police uniform, 1977, from the Glasgow Police Museum

As the novel itself begins, Detective Inspector Laidlaw of the Glasgow Crime Squad sits at his desk, and he is thinking some of the same things that the running man has been thinking.  Even as a child, “He [experienced] nights when the terror of darkness had driven him to his parents’ room.  He must have run for miles on that bed.  It wouldn’t have surprised him if his mother had had to get the sheets re-soled.  Then, it had been bats and bears…Now the monsters were simultaneously less exotic and less avoidable.”  Laidlaw will be the detective who is most attuned to finding Tommy Bryson, the young “running man” who has killed a young woman, and these two opening scenes set up the reader for a dramatic and unusual novel of pursuit in which two men, one a killer and one a policeman, reveal themselves to be not so different from each other after all.  Laidlaw is an outsider among the police, partly because he is regarded as a softie regarding criminals.  One hard-headed police officer tells Laidlaw’s new partner, Det. Constable Brian Harkness, that “you’ll have to wear wellies when you work with [Laidlaw].  To wade through the tears.  He thinks criminals are underprivileged.  He’s not a detective.  He’s a shop steward for neds.”

Kelvingrove Park, where the body of Jennifer Lawson is found.

Soon the reader learns more about the killer’s background and the name of at least one friend who is willing to do whatever is necessary to save him, and as the search for the killer develops, the city of Glasgow is revealed in all its unsavory layers, from petty crooks to bookmakers to mob leaders.  The reader meets them all, while simultaneously learning their loyalties and animosities.  The police, too, have their hierarchy, and their own unsavory histories, and everyone’s motivation for finding Tommy differs.  One person loves Tommy Bryson, while another has a murderous rage at him.  One person wants to kill him in order to gain money from a mob leader, another plays two sides against each other as each side wants Tommy dead. One policeman wants to catch him in order to advance his career, and another wants to embarrass Laidlaw.  The variations are limitless.

Ol Tolbooth, “a kind of midget tower with a small balustrade at the top and above that the figure of a unicorn and motto, “Nemo me lacessit.”

While none of these motivations are new, McIlvanney’s descriptive powers make the narrative feel new, filled with unique observations.  One man is described as “a mobile quarrel with the world…His face looked like an argument you couldn’t win,” another as “Mary Poppins with hair on her chest.”  Still another (years before Donald Trump) had “parted his hair just slightly above his armpits and trained the strands to climb like clematis.” Even something as commonplace as an early summer day becomes unique in McIlvanney’s hands.  The Glasgow sun is “dully luminous, an eye with cataract.”  People in the park are “pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer.”

As the novel works its way to the inevitable confrontation and climax, the reader (this one, anyway) continues to be enthralled by the author’s style and obvious literary skill, confident that the ending will be as perceptive and sensitive as the opening.  Though we never really get to know Laidlaw as much as we might want, it helps to know that there are two more Laidlaw books coming out this fall.  This one is a true classic for anyone who wonders just how good a crime novel can be, as Laidlaw holds to his own truths and refuses to succumb to the easy black and white view of the world so common to this genre.

*Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/

ALSO by William McIlvanney: THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH and     STRANGE LOYALTIES

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Ivon Bartholomew appears on http://www.bbc.co.uk

The uniform of the Glasgow police in 1977 is from http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Kelvingrove Park, where Jennifer Lawson’s body was found, is seen on http://www.visitscotland.com/

The Ol Tolbooth, shown on a website for which Liz Smith is webmaster, has the motto “Nemo me impune lacessit, meaning “No one assails me with impunity,” which Laidlaw interprets as “‘Visitors are advised not to be cheeky.”  He likes the “civic honesty” of that.  http://www.mycityglasgow.co.uk/

ARC: Europa Editions

“He wasn’t able to meet her eyes – he’d been gazing at her waistband when he’d inadvertently proposed [marriage] in a shame-faced way.  It wasn’t that he had intended to get down on one knee – he hadn’t intended anything at all.  What he had meant, if only he could have said it, was, ‘How do you get out of your dress?’ ”

Already optioned for a miniseries by the producers of Downton Abbey, this novel has everything that will make this projected series a huge, popular success – a young, ingratiating main character who bumbles along as he tries to sort out his life; a woman to whom he becomes inadvertently engaged and who turns out to be a character worthy of great empathy; another woman who has still not recovered from her loss during World War I; and a Welsh setting in 1924 in Narberth, a small, rural town in Pembrokeshire in which everyone knows everyone else’s business.  World War I is over, and the many young men from Narberth who were killed in the war have left behind broken hearts, ruined lives, and devastated families.  Young men like Wilfred Price, who have not served in battle, have escaped many of the emotional horrors of the war, insulated from this reality because their professions have been considered essential to their communities.

This photo accompanies a video interview of the author. Click the photo for that video.

Wilfred, age twenty-seven, is a particularly conscientious funeral director who also makes the caskets and does all the work involved in a funeral and burial, and he is anxious to expand his business, perhaps by selling wallpaper in a front room of his establishment.  His da is the local gravedigger.  Wilfred is not looking for love when he sees Grace Reece, the daughter of the local physician at an afternoon picnic, but he is suddenly mesmerized by her dress (which, by the way, bears no resemblance to the gauzy picture on the book’s cover, except for its color).  In 1924, the age of flappers, Grace’s dress is “the colour of lemon curd…[and made of] pleated silk, sleeveless, with a low waistband and a square neck that was slightly too low.”  For Wilfred, “it was not only how she got into the dress that Wilfred wondered about.  He wondered, too, how Grace got out of it.”  Overcome with his fantasies, as Grace serves him a dessert, Wilfred hears himself asking her to marry him, a dramatic development which he recognizes instantly as a mistake, even as Grace is saying, “I would be delighted.”  Escaping from this unexpected engagement proves to be far more difficult than he’s ever imagined. He ignores the problem, then tries to avoid it – and Grace – even as the community is speculating about their future, and as Wilfred finds himself attracted to someone else.

Dinner at Grace’s house is served on Blue Willow china. See photo credits for the story of the star-crossed lovers being pursued across the bridge on the plate, bottom left, above the fence.

As the action (or inaction by Wilfred) develops over the next few months, the novel becomes ironic and almost farcical in its complications, but though Wilfred sometimes seems far too innocent to be completely believable, his predicaments inspire empathy, not laughter.  As he tries to avoid hurting anyone – Grace, her family, his new love, his da – he comes to realize, belatedly, that the responsibilities of adulthood come with obligations; what he needs to figure out is how to fulfill these obligations without causing pain to others.  It never occurs to him that some of these people, recognizing that he is kindly and sensitive, can manipulate him to fulfill obligations which may not really be his own.  As this comedy of manners of the “simple” life becomes ever more complicated, the characters are revealed as humans, not stereotypes, people living in the particular time and place which have shaped them.  The reader comes to care for them all, even when their innocence severely challenges our twenty-first century cynicism.

Wilfred meets his new love at a cottage overlooking Pendine Sands on the south coast of Wales.

As Wilfred, Grace, and Wilfred’s new love, try to work out their complicated lives while always being sensitive to the feelings of those around them, author Wendy Jones ultimately makes us admire, and sometimes wish for, the simplicity of life a hundred years ago.  We care about the characters, and we wish for their happiness, perhaps because they remind us of our own dreams when we were their ages.  However charming and sweet (I can think of no other word) this story may be, it is never saccharine or sentimental, and as Wilfred experiences a belated coming-of-age, the reader cheers his growth and imagines his future.  Readers who yearn for an old-fashioned tale in which time seems to have stopped will cheer this novel which features fully developed characters who yearn for happiness and do what they can to achieve it within the limits of their society, a welcome respite from twenty-first century realities – and a story which will lend itself beautifully to a British mini-series centered on the life of a common man, instead of an aristocrat.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo accompanies her video interview here:  http://www.youtube.com

The Blue Willow pattern includes a story of two lovers who are pursued by her murderous father.  See the three tiny characters crossing the bridge in the bottom left of the plate, above the fence.  The doves at the top are “their spirits, flying to the realms of eternal happiness.”  http://www.replacements.com/

Pendine Sands, where Wilfred’s new love has a cottage, is where they meet occasionally as Wilfred tries to end his relationship with Grace.  http://www.static-caravan.co.uk/davies_pendine.htm

ARC:  Europa Editions

Note: In 2004, Rodrigo Rey Rosa was WINNER of Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize.

“One of my uncles…believed that books…are animated by a kind of collective spirit…He talked about how books struggle for domination in certain regions of the planet, a phenomenon whose trends and flows could be tracked…There are wars between different kinds or genres of books, he said.  And, as in real wars, the best don’t always win; but for us, in the end, there are no losers, although they all fade away…” –Otto Blanco, grandfather of Ana, the book thief.

In this consummate homage to books, Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa introduces the unnamed owner of a bookstore in Guatemala – a commercial rarity, he points out – before moving on to describe the bookseller’s life, the books he enjoys, his book-loving friends, and, ultimately the book thief who haunts his store and with whom he has fallen in love.  Writing in clear language without fanciful flourishes, Rey Rosa tells a classic story of love and loss and life and death, and those looking for a simple love story with unusual characters in an exotic setting will be amply rewarded as they meet and follow Severina, the novel’s beautiful and unusual “heroine.”

The novel is far deeper than that, however.  It is also a complex meditation on books and why people read them; on the value of libraries, both public and private; and on how books contribute to the very essence of life for cultures, societies, and individuals.

Author photo by RCN Radio.

Author Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s personal world extends far beyond Guatemala, literally and figuratively.  He worked for years in Morocco with author Paul Bowles while translating Bowles’s novels into Spanish, a professional agreement which worked both ways, with Bowles also translating Rey Rosa’s novels into English. A voracious reader with serious interests in history, philosophy, metaphysics, and novels of all genres, from classical epics and adventure stories to fantasies and satires, Rey Rosa is clearly having fun as he writes this intriguing and unusual love story, while also providing insights into the entire literary canon.  His tastes, as we see them here, are eclectic, ranging from Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1704 – 1715), to books on Russian travel, William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, Jorge Reichmann’s Conversations Between Alchemists, Thomas Raucat’s The Honorable Picnic, various Japanese writings, philosophical treatises, and eventually, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.  A single major presence reigns over the whole novel, however – that of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, whose ideas and works permeate every aspect of the action.

Contemporary artist Erik Desmazieres (b. 1948) has created a series of etchings of Borges's Library of Babel. Click once on picture to go to site, and when there, click once again to see an enlargement. Amazing!

The narrator of Severina, a writer and part owner of a shop called La Entretenida (meaning “entertaining”), first sees Ana when she attends a reading at his shop, and he knows instinctively that he will see her again.  When she attends a second reading, however, he sees her slip two small books of Japanese literature into her bag.  (“The speed of it was impressive.”)  He says nothing.  When she returns a couple of weeks later, looking for a book for a “boyfriend,” he suggests some new books in the Japanese literature section.  “It’s over there.  As you know.”  When she leaves, he discovers that she has now taken a volume of Galland’s The Thousand and One Nights, from 1704.  Weeks later, when he finally confronts her with a list of everything she’s stolen, she produces the items she has hidden in her clothing that day but suggests that they just “forget” the ones she has stolen previously.  He prefers to regard her theft as an “outstanding debt, a personal loan from me to you.”  He is smitten, and he begins to pursue her, “embarking on a purely sentimental adventure…for the first time in my life.”  Eventually, he discovers the pension where she lives with a mysterious, elderly man, alternately referred to as her father, her husband, and her grandfather.

Tecun Uman, the Guatemalan national hero, did not really exist.

Exotic references, some of them historical and some literary, continue as the bookseller becomes more and more obsessed with Ana and as she continues to help herself to his books.  The narrator knows nothing about where Ana comes from, being unable to place her accent.  When she runs off, at one point, the narrator follows her, only to discover that she is going to the airport, where he sees her with a rival bookseller, Ahmed al Fahsi, a Moroccan from whom she has also stolen many books.  Ironically, the narrator is standing near the statue of Tecun Uman,  “the hero of our national history in spite of the fact that he didn’t [really] exist.”  In that respect Tecun Uman might well resemble Ana, whose family name, “Blanco,” means white, or blank.  While she is away, he makes lists of all the books she has taken, hoping “this would help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic to me.”  He likes to believe that her mania for books, “those quivering, murmuring creatures,” is associated with “an uncompromising approach to life: absolute freedom, a radical realization of the ideal of living by and for books.”

"Daphnis and Chloe," by Baron Francois Gerard

Reality and fantasy begin to overlap for the narrator upon the return of Ana and her grandfather from Latin America, as his dreams/nightmares begin to confuse him.  Even the sirens of ambulances begin to suggest deeper meanings:  “For a moment the sound of the siren – which was all I could hear – reminded me of the original sirens, who had the bodies of birds, not fish, and whose song led men to their ruin.  The incoherent images that tumbled through my mind left me thinking that the idea of love that comes down to us from the Romantics, who associated it with death and sometimes with the devil, was too gloomy to be credible.”  Thinking of the story of Daphnis and Chloe, the romance described by second century Greek novelist Longus, the narrator hopes for a happy ending to his own “romance.”  At the same time, Ana is telling him about getting inside Borges’s library for three weeks in 1999, though she swears that she did not take anything.  “I did not dare.”  Soon Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh is inspiring the narrator to think about making some big changes in his life.

The conclusion solves the requirements of the plot with great flair, once again with the “help” of Borges and the imagery associated with him.  Irony takes on new meanings, leaving the reader with a smirk, if not a smile.  Clever and thoughtful (though self-conscious and sometimes precious), Rey Rosa proves that it is possible to create a BIG novel in remarkably few words and do it on many levels at once, satisfying the reader on all levels.    Life and death, love, and books.  Who could ask for more?

Also by Rey Rosa:  THE AFRICAN SHORE

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from RCN Radio: http://caravanaderecuerdos.blogspot.com

The amazing etching by Erik Desmazieres (contemporary, born 1948), to illustrate Borges’s “The Library of Babel” may be seen in more detail here.  http://benedante.blogspot.com Or click on the photo once, then when the page opens, click on the photo there once again.

Tecun Uman, a mythical warrior, is the national “hero” of Guatemala, though he never existed.   http://ljhsjblike.pbworks.com

The painting of Daphnis and Chloe, consummately romantic, is by French painter Baron Francois Gerard, and symbolizes for the narrator’s growing feelings for Ana.  http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/

Momostenango rugs, typical of the traditional, hand-made rugs of the Mayans in Guatemala for thousands of years.  http://www.coloresdelpueblo.org These rugs by indigenous people decorated the rooms at the pension where Ana lived.

ARC: Yale University Press