A Million Drops by Víctor del Árbol

Paperback, 672 pgs, Expected publication: May 15th 2018 by Other Press (NY), ISBN13: 9781590518458

America’s literary scene is so robust and successful that it tends to influence and eclipse exciting work appearing around the world. Other Press of New York has a terrific record of finding and translating for us the best of European fiction and this month we are treated to a historical thriller from Spain, first published in 2014 in Barcelona. The author Víctor del Árbol was a seminarian and historian before embarking on a successful literary career, so his thrillers have recognizable historical underpinnings and a rich and brutal context of war and conflict.

Árbol’s name has begun to show up in lists for literary prizes at home and in Europe. With this second novel to be translated into English, we experience the emotional and historical depths of a Spain struggling with its political past. The richness of the novel stems from Árbol’s contextual complexity and recognized divergence from old societal norms, e.g., the centrality of strong but flawed female characters, acknowledged homosexuality, police misconduct, and in a predominantly Christian country, an important Jewish character who suffered Stalin-era torture at the hands of leftists, leading to lifelong psychological affliction.

Russia and Spain have long been intertwined, and the twentieth century brought enthusiastic support for communist ideals in Spain. Students from all over Europe travelled to offer their services to a Russian government trying to consolidate power under Stalin, but they found “being a non-Soviet Communist is seen as suspicious even in the USSR.” When a purge of dissident elements was undertaken, the Spanish engineering student Elías along with his cohort of fellow Europeans were caught up in the melee and deported to the now-infamous Nazino Island.

Nazino Island was home to a little-known real-life atrocity perpetrated by the Head of the Secret Police Genrikh Yagoda and the Head of Labor Camps Matvei Berman and approved by Stalin in May 1933 in which 6,000 deportees made up of petty criminals and political prisoners were forcibly relocated to a small island in western Siberia. The group was meant to construct a camp designed to bring unproductive land under cultivation during a time of nationwide famine. Few provisions accompanied the prisoners and within thirteen weeks 4,000 had died of starvation, sickness, or at the hands of others. Árbol allows his imagination to construct the camp, describing the depraved behaviors the survivors are thought to have witnessed. Elías’s hope for escape from Nazino looks extremely unlikely, lending a thriller-like air to the telling.

Elías’s 20th-century story is interspersed with the 21st-century stories of his children and the children of people Elías knew from his time in Nazino. His daughter Laura is a journalist-turned-policewoman, and his son Gonzalo is a lawyer with leftist sympathies. In fact, the novel opens with a shockingly brutal incident that leaves us gasping for air, and we are propelled to explain that event by looking for clues in the past.

The structure of the novel is deceptively simple, jumping from one century to the next through chapter headings, but not always immediately addressing the questions we have formulated—another source of tension in the novel. References to important historical moments in Spanish history are intriguing in their own right, generating an enthusiasm in readers to investigate more straightforward accounts that would explain the larger forces at work.

If I had any criticism of the book, it would be that the novel seems indulgent in length. While the situations of Elías and his family are intrinsically interesting and filled with tension, that sense of urgency is difficult to sustain over 600+ pages. Sometimes less really is more, especially in a mystery/thriller. Were the novel shorter, the author wouldn’t need to explain so much, as the reader would be following step-by-step.

The character list takes a toll, and begins to put a strain on our ability to remember an unfamiliar history along with strikingly similar-sounding names, e.g., Gonzalo-Gonzalez, Luis-Luisa, Lola-Laura. And finally, after the complicated relationships carried throughout the novel, the Epilogue seemed too easy, once again usurping the reader’s role to imagine.

While I wouldn’t call this international crime fiction, it has some elements common to that genre. It is closer to historical literary fiction in the way that books about WWII bring that era back to life. This mentions WWII, particularly Stalingrad, but for the Jewish character Elías that horror show just brought back memories of worse. Perhaps not enough was made of Elías’s Jewishness, unless the author meant for that to layer lightly over other elements without being explicit about what it means. In my own country, I’d know what that means. In Spain, I’m not too sure.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel for me was Barcelona living and the mindset of current residents there. Descriptions of tourists blowing in for a week of sun rang as true as the description of a popular Spanish architect living in London coming to introduce his latest commission to the public. I am not entirely sure I got my fill of the authentic experience un-moderated by American TV scenarios (like Miami Vice, mentioned in the final pages) but I very much look forward to more.



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Blitz by David Trueba, translated by John Cullen

Somewhere in the middle of this book I experienced a moment of unrestrained joy. It came from the novelist’s art. He was able to twist me around, following the unexamined actions and attitudes of a confused 30-year-old struggling architect from Spain who had just been dumped by his girlfriend. Much of the joy came from the novelist showing me his chagrin at the heart and soul and underdeveloped mind of a young man under duress.

The young man travels to Germany with his girlfriend to defend his landscape architecture project for an international prize before a jury. The novel opens with his girlfriend dumping him by email, an email missent to him. He becomes disoriented, and a day later he is fumbling through the streets of Munich with his suitcase. It hits us viscerally. We’ve been there. But almost immediately the young man turns his anger and disappointment on his competitors in the landscape competition, which compromises our affection for him. He is taken home by a 63-year-old conference organizer, and proceeds to insist himself on her sexually.

The whole bedroom scene is etched in spell-binding detail, down to the uncomfortable moment he fingers the underpants of a woman not expecting a moment of intimacy. She fairly clearly (they are both drunk) resists his advances, but finally concludes that resistance is futile. The result is a conclusion each think of as a “pity fuck,” the young man chortling over the details to his friends later.

It is a gorgeously written, naked, painful, seeing moment. We watch as the callow young man stumbles into a job that suits him, and it is somewhere here that I experience the joy I spoke of. It comes when we realize the novel is not really about Beto, the young man. The meaning of the novel comes from Helga, the older woman, and her fears and understanding about the passing of time, and how life changes and fades one’s ambitions. The pity fuck was all on her side, and eventually the young man begins to see her, the German mütter, with her heavy breasts hanging to her waist and her dry cunt and her understanding and acceptance of all that life is.

Every review I have seen of this novel mentions David Trueba’s earlier novel, Four Friends (or Cuatro amigos) and compares this one unfavorably. I haven’t read Trueba’s earlier work, but just reading this novel makes me think he is something very special indeed. It isn’t just the young male viewpoint in this novel, but how Trueba brings us along to admiration and acceptance and real feeling for both characters. The idiocy and dignity of human beings capable of compassion are equally on display.

Trueba is a novelist as well as a well-respected actor, screenwriter, and film director in Spain. His brother Fernando won a Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1994 for the film Belle Epoque, and David's film, Living is Easy with Eyes Closed, was nominated in 2015 for Best Foreign Language Film. The movie, about John Lennon's roadtrip in Spain, swept the prestigious Goya Awards the year before. The synergy of David Trueba’s set of skills creates, in screenplays or in novels, quick, sharply-focussed images that we recognize from the pain and distress or joy in our own lives. A prop, a bottle of vodka with a blade of grass resting at the bottom, is the “gun” in this novel, the object that once brandished, means something consequential is about to take place.

The paperback copy of this novel has included several color plates that are so sudden and so unexpected that one actually experiences a kind of gratitude. One plate is a photograph of a postcard of an unnamed bay in Mallorca on a glorious, sunny day, the photo showing the rooftops of several gargantuan summer homes for vacationing Europeans and a few boats dotting an aqua inlet. The other plates are relevant to the story and imbue the work with a richness and glamour. There is also an excellent, absurd pen-and-ink drawing of Beto as he stands before the sum total of his life to that time.

This is a hilarious, painful, meaningful novel that has a sophisticated European feel, despite the ordinariness of the lives of the characters. I am delighted to be introduced to the work of David Trueba. I’ll be looking for his films, and of course the much-lauded Cuatro amigos. Many thanks to Other Press for finding this and sharing the wealth.



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Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, this novel comes after a long history of successful poetry, novels, and screenplays by Levy, so we are primed to find it praiseworthy. And it is, but she very nearly tips us into the deep, endlessly cycling the trauma of caring for someone apparently suffering a psychosomatic illness. To make it thrilling, Levy throws in parallels to Europe’s debt crisis and America’s pushy Big Pharma colonization. If you take the cover story as what Levy was trying to convey, you miss the beauty of her satire and the humor in her (wo)man-made disaster.

Sofia Irina is a half-British half-Greek anthropologist, trained to look for cultural memory which links the past to our present attitudes and actions. She quit working on her Ph.D. ostensibly to care for her mother, who is unable to walk. No explanation can be found for the mother’s malady so mother and daughter travel to Spain in hopes a specialist there may be able to elicit a cure.

The Doctor they have contracted with in Spain is a traditionalist who eschews Big Pharma, represented by a handsome gnat of a young man who seeks to discredit the Doctor’s carefully staged proofs that the illness Sophia’s mother suffers are in her head. The Doctor has a sexy Sunny vodka-swilling daughter who works with him and represents Spain’s youthful disdain for the old ways. It goes on like this, each character representing something larger than themselves, culminating in Levy's masterpiece: a luscious blond German autocrat attractive to both sexes who manages to import old fabrics from China and export them again at a markup after she adds her skillful embroidery.

An early scene which derailed a fine reviewer was the one where Sophia, delighted to find herself by the beach in sunny Spain, swims far out only to be stung by the swarms of medusa jelly-fish that have become a menace due to overfishing. (The birthplace of Medusa is Greece.) She runs back to shore to be treated for the painful stings, only to realize late that her bikini halter has broken and she is topless, jiggling insanely as she stomps about with the pain.

Besides the enormous fun we have with Levy’s impersonation of financial crises, there are other themes Levy raises about an adult daughter caring for her mother in illness. Again and again in the course of the novel, we are pointed to the notion that some people would never consider doing things that are not to their own advantage. This notion is first explicitly stated when Sophia visits her estranged and happily remarried father to ask for financial assistance or, at the very least, moral support for her efforts to care for his first wife. What some might consider his debt or obligation, he refuses to honor. His new young wife snorts with derision that he would consider doing anything not to his advantage.

Women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters—often do things not strictly in their best interests. They do it out of love, usually, or say they do. But when one is the head of one’s own household, one is responsible for oneself—to oneself—to manage, to persist, to succeed. How one succeeds is not always by putting oneself first. [I might point out that people who put themselves first in every instance are the most unbearable and uncivilized bores, to say nothing of the possibility of culpability in a large societal context.]

There is more in this novel: forbidden love and lustful sex, fabulous deep white cotton sheets from Berlin, blue embroidery thread that spells out a mistaken and potentially lethal message, a pregnant white cat and a chained dog who howls whether or not he is leashed. I don’t want to take all the fun out of this novel by speculating on possible meanings of these for readers. Keep your eyes and mind open for the delights this novel offers and try not to be frustrated with the air of post-adolescent confusion. The claustrophobia of a strictly line-by-line reading might lead one to underestimate what Levy was attempting. If the stage is set for a close (re)reading, I think you will find yourself instead enjoying Levy's facility with keeping many balls in the air at one time, once again earning our respect.

I was helped in understanding this novel by many reviewers at the online site Goodreads, including one in particular, whose great insights pushed me to examine my initial lackluster evaluation more closely.


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Isabella: The Warrior Queen by Kristin Downey

Paperback, 560 pages Published November 10th 2015 by Anchor (first published October 28th 2014)

Queen Isabella of Spain is remembered as being a brilliant logistician, so good at strategizing and outfitting her troops for war that she often emerged victorious. She fought a great deal—her family for the right to rule, Portugal for land and eminence, Muslims to retake occupied territory. She was a strong patron of the arts, curious in intellectual debate, and an ardent Catholic, an unusual combination of traits in any century. Any reader who appreciates history will appreciate Downey’s effort to place Isabella and her contemporaries in the context of world history.

One thing Downey doesn't address is whether the example of Isabella's rule began the recognition of the need for separation of church and state in Western governments. The Catholic Church during Isabella's rule became increasingly corrupt and separated from its teachings, and orders from Isabella on the need to bring Jews and Muslims residing in Spain (conversos) into the Catholic fold became the notoriously punitive Inquisition. Isabella may have been a pious and reasonable leader, but her directives were lost in execution. Downey does share the origin stories of people or events we may have heard bits of in our lives but never knew where to find the references:

Monty Python: The Monty Python skit of the soldier who first loses a leg, then an arm, then another arm…you know it…was based on the struggles of Portuguese soldier, Duarte de Almeida, to keep the Portuguese flag flying in the Battle of Toro against Ferdinand and Isabella, who were thought to be illegally seizing the throne in Castile.

"It was difficult to recount later exactly what happened because the Portuguese and Castilian accounts differed...the Castilians seized the battle flag, the royal standard of Portugal, despite the valiant efforts of a Portuguese soldier, Duart de Almeida, to retain it. Almeida had been holding the flag aloft in his right arm, which was slashed from his body, and so he transferred the pendant to his other arm and kept fighting. Then his other arm was cut off, and he held the flag in his teeth until he finally succumbed to death."

Count Dracula: Mehmed the Conquerer was determined to expand the Ottoman Empire and conquered Constantinople in 1453. Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul and swore to take Rome within two years. He didn’t, but he managed to take Athens and Corinth and Serbia. In 1462, as Mehmed was attempting to subdue the geographical region of Romania, then called Wallachia, Mehmed came up against his father’s former hostage, Vlad, who had been beaten and abused in the Turkish court and then sent back to Wallachia to rule. “Vlad fought Mehmed ferociously, earning himself the name of Vlad the Impaler, the prototype for the character that came to be known as Count Dracula. He is estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people, partly in efforts to repel the Turks. He was finally assassinated.”

The game of chess: "Chess was enormously popular in Spain during Isabella’s rule…and soon after the battle [of Almeria during the Reconquest], the Queen became the single most powerful piece on the chessboard, able to move great distances in all directions, her mission is to protect and defend the key piece on the board, the King. Some versions of chess had had a Queen figure before Isabella’s birth, but it was at this time that the fame, originally invented in India, underwent a complete metamorphosis and the queen became a dominant figure. The changes in the game were chronicled in a popular book on the new rules of chess, published in Salamanca about 1496, written by Ramirez de Lucena. He described the game now as “queen’s chess,” and her new powers allowed her to “advance as far as she liked, as long as her path was clear.” Queen Isabella had memorialized herself as a powerful player in the game of war."

1492 was the year that Americans have enshrined as the year Columbus discovered North America. But in Spain, it is the year that Isabella and Ferdinand finally took back Granada, after the fighting of many years, from the Muslim Nasrid dynasty. “The victory over Granada won acclaim for Isabella and Ferdinand throughout Europe, because it was the first significant triumph against Islam in hundreds of years, and to many Europeans, it was partial payback for the loss of Constantinople.” Cristóbal Colón “was at Granada when the city finally fell to the Christians [to petition the Queen]...but court scholars once again rejected Columbus’s proposal as unsound.” Shortly after meeting with the Queen in Granada, however, the Queen sent a messenger after Columbus, reaching him about ten miles outside of Granada. The trip was approved. Three well-known mariners, the Pinzon brothers, agreed to sign on in leadership positions. Juan de la Costa brought his own ship, Santa Maria. They left August 3, 1492, and sighted land in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492.

Cristóbal Colón: Christopher Columbus was a dreamer with a streak of madness. He wrote in cipher, signed his name in and “indecipherable combination of letters and images.” He heard “voices in the air,” and spent many hours writing feverishly in the margins of books, developing his theories. “…although Columbus showed himself to be an excellent mariner, he was also exposed as a terrible administrator and a man of poor judgement…he faced an almost constant sequences of mutinies among his crew…Columbus’s ferocity in dealing with the Indians was a direct contradiction of his orders from Queen Isabella about how to interact with them…Columbus was viewed with a measure of contempt…Columbus had become very unpopular…at court, and it was getting more difficult for others to stand up for him…He compounded his own problems by denying what was patently obvious. He had promised the sovereigns that he would find a path to the Orient, He had stumbled on something large and important, but it was not the Indies.”

Syphilis Downey makes a case for the notion that Columbus’s returning ship brought the disease to Europe in 1493.

The Inquisition initially began as an attempt to ferret out insincere Christians, and to correct them. Those deemed unrepentant were burned at the stake, the traditional penalty for heresy. The thing was, Spain was filled with Muslims and Jews as a result of previous conquests. Many declared themselves to be Christians to get along, but retained their old customs and methods of worship. “The governing principle of an Inquisition is that failing to conform to religious and political norms is treason. In Isabella’s age, church and state were one—religious authority and secular power were intermingled….Historians once believed that immense numbers of people were burned at the stake, but more recent scholarship has cast doubt on those assertions…There is no questions that during Isabella’s reign, hundreds of people were put to the flame, probably at least 1,000…” Isabella chose a religious zealot, Cisneros, as archbishop of Toledo, the most important and powerful cleric in Spain. With this, she “put her kingdom on a less tolerant and more religious path,” leading to excesses in the Inquisition.

Cesare Borgia: Isabella was a devout Catholic and was pleased when Rodrigo Borgia ascended to the papacy in August 1492, the second time a Spaniard managed to do so. However, Borgia, who had taken the name of the Greek conquerer Alexander IV, proved himself a corrupt and promiscuous pontiff, fathering a vast number of “beautiful and intelligent” children whom he squired to important ranks in society. Cesare, “the cynical man whom Machiavelli called a political genius,” was one of these.

Bonfire of the Vanities took place in Florence, Italy during Lent in 1497 and 1498 when an Italian preacher, determined to rid the Catholic church of corruption, convinced crowds to burn objects that represented human vices and unnecessary luxury. “Items thrown into the bonfire included rich clothing, mirrors, playing cards, and paintings of books, some of which represented pornography but others of which were great works that represented the celebration of sensuality at the heart of the Italian Renaissance.”

Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and returned to Portugal with Indian and Asian spices, just about the time Isabella’s daughter, Maria, married Manuel, King of Portugal. Queen Isabella was at the end of her reign, but now that her daughter was Queen of Portugal, “together they ruled over much of the world, and wealth poured into their countries.” Isabella had always been a patron of the arts, commissioning paintings to mark major victories or family events.

Catherine of Aragon was Isabella’s fourth daughter. She was wed to Britain’s Prince of Wales, Arthur, but it is uncertain whether or not the marriage was consummated before Arthur died of the plague in 1502. It was suggested that she marry Arthur’s brother Henry instead of returning to Spain, but in order to do so, Isabella needed a papal dispensation from the Pope she had begun to hate for his excesses, Pope Alexander IV (Rodrigo Borgia). King Ferdinand therefore drafted the request, and after two years the dispensation returned from Italy and was subsequently sent to England.

When Isabella died in 1504, “even her enemies in other countries recognized her [as] one of the wisest and most honourable persons in the world.” In the prosaic way we might recognize today, her son dumped her vast collection of jewels and worldly goods, selling them far below market value so that they were later resold piecemeal at far higher prices. Her priceless collection of paintings was salvaged in part by a daughter-in-law, Margaret, “who bought many of the paintings of Christ’s life,” which were kept as a set. “Today most of them remain in Madrid’s Royal Palace; the rest are part of the treasured collections of major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.”

I am not a historian, but historically-minded readers will find her popular history filled with possibilities for further investigation. The back and forth nature of writing history is probably the best way to record all the events in a certain time period, but sometimes, with the detail, I didn't always get a clear view of chronology, or a snapshot of a moment in time. I read the paper copy and listened to the audio version published by Random House and narrated by Kimberly Farr. Both Downey and Farr did a herculean job.


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The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Marías chooses a female character, Maria, to narrate this European-style psychological thriller with a slow reveal that turns on a dime in the final chapters. Maria works in a publishing company and every day on her break from work she sees an intriguing couple, married, having coffee together. They look so happy and in love that Maria finds herself looking forward to seeing them in the coffee shop. Sometimes she overhears scraps of conversation and pieces together a life for them without them taking notice of her.

On the very first page of this novel we learn a man is murdered. It is the man of the couple Maria is so interested in. Maria tells us the last time she saw the man was the last time his own wife saw him. It didn’t seem fair, she thinks, for them to share that intimacy for she didn’t even know his name until she saw the report of his death on television.

Marías, Maria: the names one suspects are intentionally close in sound and structure for it is very rare to find a character give up her thoughts so completely to an author. In this novel Marías resides inside the mind of Maria, and almost everything that she thinks over a period of weeks and months is recorded here for us to consider. The world from her view gives us a distance from the victim, his wife, his friend, and the perpetrator of the crime.

This novel addresses some themes: the closeness of love and envy; our closest friends could become our greatest enemies; love and distaste; the uncertainty that comes with intimacy. In the following brief video interview composed by his publisher, Penguin Random House, Marías talks about an oft-encountered theme in his work: betrayal.



Marías’ style--reflective, reflexive, recursive, chatty, digressive—would not work if it weren’t at the same time fiercely intelligent and deeply thoughtful. He is funny, too, as though he has caught onto a joke before we had and can explain it to us. The author is like translator himself, seeking for ways to express an idea, a word, a concept. Long, long sentences and paragraphs punctuated with ellipses and em-dashes show the ongoing thoughts of the narrator and her interpretation of what she finds out when she introduces herself to the wife of the murdered man.

After listening to this novel, my first foray into Marías’ work, I went looking for information about the author. His Goodreads site mentions Proust, William Faulkner, and the German writer Thomas Bernhard as influences, and it is not difficult to see these influences in the ebb and flow of internal dialogue that runs alongside the action in this novel.

I listened to the audio of this title produced by Penguin Random House, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and read by Justine Eyre. The translation is extremely impressive for stream-of-consciousness writing and reading, perfectly understandable and involving. A capacious mind and a brilliant translator will keep one occupied for days.




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The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti

This is not a book about cheese. It is a love story--a cheesy love story, perhaps. Cheese is mentioned, sure, but that story comes early and occupies perhaps 40 pages of the 360. Remember the film version of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief? It was called “Adaptation”: “A love-lorn script writer grows increasingly desperate in his quest to¹…with many self-referential events added²." The script writer had so much trouble making a movie of the story that he spent most of the time talking about how hard it was to put the story into film, therefore ineluctably inserting himself into the story.

Well, this book does that too. Paterniti spent most of his professional career writing magazine articles—short deadlines, lots of travel, and a mass of information to corral quickly or jettison. When his agent asked him if he wanted to pursue a larger story idea he’d encountered—a special cheese made in a small village in Spain—his life and his editors were in alignment that the time was right to take up the challenge. He was given an advance and a deadline.

All kinds of challenges came to meet him. For one, the man who had been making the cheese was no longer in business. Actually, he was bankrupt and contesting several lawsuits. That’s part of the reason why the cheese part of the story didn’t take that long to tell. But cheese was the least of it. This is a book about Catalan Spain, male friendship, disconnecting, and taking time for wine, children, and storytelling.

This book is Paterniti’s ‘telling room.’ By the time Paterniti did the barest minimum required of a journalist writing a story—seeking out both sides of the lost-cheese-factory story—I read it avidly, thirstily. It comes at the end, ironically, a decade or more after Paterniti began his researches, “aging” the story until it was crumbly, Herculean, tasting of flower and dirt and minerals. And pretty darn close to indigestible. The footnotes…

The writing changed direction and went around and around like a word tornado sucking up stray facts, interesting asides, musings, apologies, accusations, justifications along the way. The book editor of this work must have had moments of terrible doubt. By the time the story came into print, nearly twenty years after its conception, technology had changed so much sections of it felt positively dated. But again, this story evolved into the story of a way of life, or men’s lives, or the life of one man…it had been begun and worked on and agonized over and left for dead so many times over the years, it is a miracle it has seen print at all.

Paterniti is a good man, an interesting man. Just begin with an open heart and do.not.think.about.cheese.

¹imbd.com
²wikipedia.com


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