A Writer's Edge

THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS, written in Portuguese, won a Foreign Fiction Prize awarded by The Independent in 2007. Daniel Hahn executed a beautiful English translation. He also translated Agualusa's novel CREOLE, which won the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and MY FATHER'S WIVES, published in English in the UK. Publishers translate such a small percentage of books into English, that it is a treat to have the opportunity to experience this literature.

 

The publisher touts this book as a "completely original murder mystery.” I would hesitate to categorize it as such, because it is so much more. The murder plays a trivial role. The story is really about identity and memories—what is real and true, and what is not. Who are we if we have no memory of a past? If we choose a different identity, we need new memories to accompany the falsified life. There Felix Ventura enters the scenes in Angola, a war-weary land where many seek to erase their pasts. For these sad souls, Felix builds new lives backwards from the present, complete with grand genealogies demanding remembrances of different pasts and constructed with hopes for better futures. He falsifies identities for a price.

 

Unfortunately, for Felix's client who becomes Jose Buchmann, the true past has a bent for breaking out, no matter who we pretend to be later on. This wealthy client professes a background eerily similar to that of Felix's new girlfriend. The lovely Angela Lucia, an itinerant photographer, becomes Felix's first romance. Her past and that of Felix's client collide one fateful night in the vendedor’s spacious home.

 

That house, set in a tropical climate, reminded me of a spacious Danish sea captain’s home I stayed in when I visited St. Thomas, a steamy island in the Caribbean. A gecko (not a chameleon) describes it in luxurious detail and, not incidentally, narrates most of the story, and some parts are dreams.

 

“Once night has fallen I wander from area to area—the living room opens out to the garden, a narrow, badly tended sort of thing, which is only delightful thanks to the two glorious Imperial palm trees, very tall, very haughty, that stand at either end, keeping watch over the house. The living room leads to the library. A wide doorway takes you from the library into the corridor, which is a deep tunnel, damp and dark…”

 

From his often birds-eye point of view, a complex, lyrical tale unfolds, one that haunts the reader after the last page is turned. The gecko is Felix’s confidante, a nearly voiceless reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges, for whom Agualusa wrote the book as a tribute. This story-within-a-story is meaningful maybe only to the author, who claims Latin American writers influence his style, writers like Borges, Marquez, and Amado.

 

When asked in an exclusive interview, “Did reincarnation play a part in the plot beyond being the vehicle for a tribute to Borges?” Agualusa responded, “Yes, it is an homage to Borges and also a narrative strategy. Curiously the use of the gecko as a narrator is something that startles Europeans a great deal but didn’t strike my African readers as the least bit strange. All oral literature in Africa is based around fables. Apart from this, animism continues to be a powerful force, even though it might not seem so”.

 

And I couldn’t resist inquiring if the author believes in reincarnation. He said, “No. I’m a very curious skeptic. I like going to places where Candomblé is practiced, and to talk to medicine-men and magicians. I enjoy anything Mysterious. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in my grandmother. I talk to her every day and I know that she is watching me and protecting me.”

 

THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS has been favorably compared to others of ‘magical realism’. I asked if Agualusa felt he wrote such a novel, and what the term means. He replied:

 

English-language critics have classified this book as standing close to so-called ‘magic realism’. But in Portugal, Brazil, Spain, and even in France, I’ve never been asked this question so persistently. It’s true that the Latin American writers were very important to my development. Cubans, Colombians, and some Brazilians, such as Jorge Amado, move in a universe that is very close to my own. They are Afro-Latin Creole universes where the real is hard to distinguish from the marvelous. In Luanda you will find that fishermen – and the population as a whole – believe in mermaids, and so communicate with them just as naturally as in the middle ages Europeans communicated with angels, or mermaids too. You just have to read the accounts from that time. In 1570 Antonio de Torqemada published in Salamanca The Garden of Curious Flowers, a collection of wonders that influenced Cervantes. Among the witches, fairies and geographical oddities there is room too for mermaids. He says: “People often speak of these mermaids, saying that the upper half of the body has the shape of a woman, and the lower half that of a fish; represented with a comb in one hand and a mirror in the other; it is said that they sing so sweetly that they put the sailors to sleep and then they can board the ships and kill everyone sleeping.” And later, “While this is so, and there are fish of this kind in the sea, I hold the sweetness of their singing and everything else said about them to be just a fable.” That is, very sensibly Torquemada doesn’t question the existence of mermaids, only the quality of their singing. So to respond to your question, I try merely to explore in a literary way the possibilities that reality offers me.

 

In places, the characters speak poetry or the text reads like a poem. At the beginning of the book, the narrating gecko quotes song lyrics that begin,

 

Nothing passes, nor expires,
The past is now
A river, sleeping— Memory tells
A thousand lies.

 

Later, after dreaming about him, Felix names the gecko Eulalio, “…because he’s so well spoken.” That suited the lizard well. Agualusa also writes poetry as well as short stories, essays and columns. It seemed reasonable to ask, “Does your poetry inform your novels?”

 

Agualusa: Yes, poetry has always been very important to me. I started off writing poetry, and to this day I’m a voracious reader of poetry. Poetry is everywhere, often where you least expect it. On a minefield. In a country which has been destroyed, in the mouth of a soldier or a murderer. I’ve always been fascinated in Angola with the possibility of people producing poetry without realising it, as they speak Portuguese with African languages interfering in it.

 

Before I let him go, I had to inquire, “What are you working on right now?” Nothing he said would have surprised me, although I would not have expected or suspected science fiction, or maybe it’s more magical realism.

 

He said: I’m working on a very ambitious project. A novel that takes place entirely in Luanda, in the near future. It’s the story of a love between a singer and a writer. A love that comes to an end, in a universe where past and future can’t be easily distinguished from each other.

"They've got your number." "Your number's up." These phrases might arise while riding Lee Eisenberg's whiplash spin through the maze of retirement planning. He manages to deluge readers with facts and references made palatable by his witty but nonstop prose. A conversation with Eisenberg must leave one breathless.

 

In this era of let it all hang out reality whatever, the Number remains the last bastion of modesty. No one, Eisenberg says, will reveal how much money he thinks is needed to retire comfortably. Worse, many don't know. Worse yet, many are mistaken.

 

Hold on while he sorts us all into categories. You'll find yourself in descriptions of the brainless Procrastinator, the scatterbrained Plucker, the left-brained Plotter, or the right-brained Prober, all victims of the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles that can blindside anyone's plans. While we're all getting smacked with changes and unpredictable life events that destroy our financial illusions, along comes a new breed of financial consultants billing themselves as "life planners." More like "Rest of Your Life Planners."

 

This is one of Eisenberg's major themes, that retirement isn't what it used to be. It's morphed into "The Rest of Your Life," and it stretches out farther than anyone ever imagined when the current generation of retirees began planning (if they did at all.) Throw in failing social support systems (pension plans, Social Security) with investing roller coasters and you bring strong men to their knees when forced to face the Number. New Age life coaches to the rescue!

 

Don't be surprised if one of these life planners or coaches asks you three particular questions. Those questions were the only surprising part of "The Number" for this Plotter. Question 1. How would you live if you had all the money you would ever need? Question 2. Same setup, but you know you'll die in 5-10 years. Question 3. Same setup, but now you have only one day left, so what would you miss not having done? Oddly, my response was the same for all, but Eisenberg cites the questions' source, George Kinder, as saying that the response to the third is usually something "qualitative" than the materialistic answers to the first two questions. "And it's here, Kinder says, in the answer to question three, that he zeroes in on what the Number is really for."

 

This seems to be Eisenberg's conclusion, that what counts isn't how big the Number is, but what you do with it. He does offer a simple calculation tool in an appendix. It's as good as any you'll find online or in money magazines and probably a lot easier to use. However, he admits it's an ex post facto tool that focuses only on figuring out how much income a certain Number can produce. It doesn't tell you how much you would need to regret having an answer to Question 3. If you can't wait and perform the calculation before reading the book, do yourself a favor and recalculate at the end. You might also want to recalibrate your life.

"Wheels within wheels" is a good description of this debut production. It's set in the author's childhood, a Catholic family in the conflict of northern Ireland during the turbulent 1960's and 1970's. Gabriel Harkin struggles to identify himself as an Irish Catholic boy. His extended family relishes competition and secretly flouts religious dicta while conforming to social superficialities, more recalling Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club than Annie Dillard's An American Childhood.

This typical coming-of-age novel has an engaging mystery entwined with a rich, many-layered set of opposing forces. The plot is simpler, yet meatier, than the recent similar debut novel A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice, a much younger writer. Who is Gabriel, and what will become of him? Little is resolved by the end, leeway for a sequel, yet Gabriel achieves satisfying development in all areas of his life. The book received nominations for three national awards in its first year and appeared in a trade paperback edition in June 2005.

On the surface, Ulster was the scene of some of the most vicious terrorism in the interfaith battle for control of northern Ireland. Society provided the prejudice of Protestants vs. Catholics instead of the racial hatred protagonists like Richard Wright in Black Boy and Alexs Pate's Edward in West of Rehoboth. The Harkin family experiences a midnight intrusion by troops searching for IRA members, although the incident appears to be a gratuitous peak in this story. Surrounded by so much violence, it isn't surprising that physical confrontations played a major role in the Irish boys' lives. The brutality, the ugliness, was acceptable to the adults of that era, and Gabriel suffered because of his aversion to violence of any sort. Cruel and unattractive males also violated his sexual innocence, initiating more interior conflict and confusion about what kind of a person he was becoming. His family provided additional mixed signals in their approach to religious requirements.

 

Throughout the novel, Gabriel doesn't stray far from his home in contrast to James Michner's David in The Fires of Spring or Henry Miller in Black Spring. Mired in the mud and muck of his family's rural life, he progresses to a high school and decides to leave Ireland for a university in England. That's where McNicholl leaves Gabriel, still unsure of himself in a world of conflict.

What a rare treat to see a great poet's working manuscript, even if it is a facsimile! None of the five collections of poetry on my shelves contains even one verse by Plath. They all skip from Plato to Poe. Dead white guys. No wonder it's probably been 40 years since I read selections from The Bell Jar. This new collection from HarperCollins begins with a Foreword by Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter. Then come the 40 poems exactly as arranged in Plath's original "Ariel and other poems" manuscript. Following the poems in standard print format is the facsimile with all the strike outs and markings by Plath. Interesting additions are a poem titled "The Swarm" with its facsimile, the script Plath wrote for a BBC broadcast, and a section called "Notes" by poet and editor David Semanki on punctuation and word choice differences among various editions of Plath's works. Not best of all, but wonderful--it's printed on acid-free paper.

The three "R's" of poetry--writing, reading, and reviewing--are personal processes. In this way, poems resemble paintings, their right-brain correlates. The best capture the poet's feelings and experiences. The reader filters a poem through the emotions and events already experienced. The response is more often "Yes, that's what it's like!" than "So, that's what it's like." Similarly, a reviewer or critic brings to bear only the sum total of his or her own life, more or less disguised as an impartial estimation of a book's worth.

Precious is the opportunity to view a word artist's prepublication presentation, the exact order and appearance the poet wanted for a collection of works, not mediated or moderated by an editor and the publishing processes. Given the chance to choose, what poet wouldn't want the work printed as created with spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact? The selection and arrangement of poems in a collection might also hold an intended meaning. These are treasures that the restored edition of Ariel with Sylvia Plath's manuscript offers. Not only are the poems printed as faithfully to Plath's final draft as possible; we get to see a facsimile of that manuscript, and more. Here we can view the creative process at work in revisions of the individual poem "Ariel", Plath's markings, if not her thoughts, on succeeding drafts of the work in progress.

A foreword by Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, offers not insight (she was a child when her mother committed suicide in 1963), but a guide to the differences between the way Plath presented her work and way it appeared in print subsequent to her death. She even points out the scathing diatribes against her father, Ted Hughes, that he chose to omit from the first editions of the book which appeared in the U.K. in 1965 and the U.S. in 1966.

When Plath wrote her last poems and lost her battle with the darkness of depression, I wouldn't have appreciated her efforts. Now, few women born after 1960 can comprehend their impact, but for opposite reasons. While Plath transmuted anguish into verse, I watched an inebriated visiting poet, Theodore Roethke, nearly stumble off the stage of a Northwestern University theater into my lap. Dr. Bergen Evans' advice to pursue writing couldn't counter the discouraging words from my creative writing professors. Prior to those incidents, my advisor in Speech insisted there was no place for women in broadcast production. In high school, a few years earlier, I was told "women can't be broadcast engineers". That's how it was, before "Women's Lib".

Thoroughly diverted, I gave up career notions, married, had a child, and kept poetry confined to a folder mostly. I avoided Plath's work, knowing she'd killed herself. It was depressing enough being a child of divorce, alcoholism, and finally fatherless at barely 17. Plath, whose father died when she was eight, almost called her book "Daddy", the term I used. I did my best to fulfill a middle-class Midwest society's vision of post-WWII womanhood, as my fierce German Lutheran upbringing dictated: kinder, kirche, und kuchen. All but barefoot and pregnant! When I first read "The Jailor" , I reeled from the reverberations. Plath been there first, trapped and tortured between expectation and expression. Would it have made a difference in my isolated life if I'd read this 40 or 30 years ago, I wondered:

I am myself. That is not enough.

The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely.

My own love sonnets eventually gave way to children's ditties, then bitter reprises on marriage and death. Plath had the courage to pour out her pain on paper for the world to behold, even as she lacked the courage to face life any longer. I hid my poetry and hadn't the courage to face death, choosing to kill a career and endure the pain. Now I have Plath's book, just as she would have wished it to appear. I can cradle it next to my heart and make her children my own.

"Oh, oh, another Da Vinci Code?" The murder mystery caused some wondering if separating fact from fiction would be as difficult as it is in Brown's book, but not to worry. Although set in the real locale of Boston with much attention to the authenticity of the 1800's era, and populated with real famous people (poets and publishers), Matthew Pearl's first fiction makes clear in a Historical Note at the end of the book what parts are reality and what are the result of his fecund imagination. Mostly, the plot is a fantasy. Pearl used the facts that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow formed a "Dante Club" with fellow authors and their publisher to assist in the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy from its original Italian. All the rest of the events of the book are circuitously interwoven nightmares.

 

One part gory horror, one part academic political intrigue, a heavy-handed dash of literati, spiced with excellent vintage descriptions of people, places, and daily events that depict life in post-bellum Boston. Only the women appear as paper-doll cut-outs, something that the wives of luminaries such as Lowell, Holmes, and Longfellow undoubtedly were not. Almost all the attention, and the tension, takes place between men: fathers and sons, employers and employees, comrades and competitors. It is unusual to find such polish and finesse in the writing of a young person's first book of fiction. Pearl's academic background and scholarly pursuits are evident in the storytelling. This book would appeal to intellectuals without prurient interests (unless they find the intimate details of the lives of maggots exciting).

Matthew Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American Literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School, where he wrote the first draft of The Dante Club. In 1998, he won the prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America for his scholarly work. He is also the editor of the new Modern Library edition of Dante’s Inferno, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Copyright © 2007-2009 Georganna Hancock