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Imagine yourself a resident of Baghdad in March 2003. It is the eve of the United States invasion. You know your own military’s weakness is the perfect foil for the invader’s fabled power. Some of your men in uniform will fight fiercely, but they will surely die. You know your nation’s political leadership engenders little loyalty from a restive citizenry, so you hold no hope for massive resistance when the invaders raise their flag from the conquered rooftops. A feeling of dread begins to seep into your every waking thought. The first bombs drop, the first tanks turn the corner, and everything you feared turns out as you foresaw, only it’s worse because all these fears are real, and they’re happening to you.

Now put yourself into the same frame of mind, except the year is 1847 and you are living in Mexico City. The Yankees have already stolen Texas, the evil clown Santa Anna having held a state funeral for his dead leg, now has gone into hiding to avoid battle. Only poorly armed rasquachi soldiers stand in the way of General Scott’s invading giants. The Yankees have bombarded Veracruz. The Yankees have overwhelmed Puebla. The Yankees are in the Zócalo about to raise the stars and stripes above the Palacio Nacional.

Such parallels are inescapably part of the ambiente of Ignacio Solares’ Yankee Invasion, a Novel of Mexico City. Such is the bad P.R. the United States has earned from its many years of military adventures in foreign lands that the novel doesn’t need to make the parallels explicitly. Solares feeds the flames an anti-Yankeeism in this historical novel, so it is not a novel for “my country right or wrong my country” tipos. Solares doesn’t waste a lot of tears for Mexicanos, either. One of the key side characters, Father Jarauta, stands for fighting against the Yankees and the Mexicans who support them. Moreover, the story comes to us ten years after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has ceded half of Mexico into US control, and 1848 was a long time ago.

Solares uses the invasion as backdrop for the story of a courageous surgeon, a troubled writer, and an indictment of an inept government, then as now. We hear about war but see precious little. Much of the battle action takes place in hearsay narrative, in rumor, in newspaper reportage. And this is a good thing because readers who are Veterans of the U.S. military do not want to read about Mexicans—or anyone—killing GIs or Marines, whether from the halls of Montezuma or the banks of the Euphrates.

The medico is Dr. Urruchúa. He’s troubled that his patients die with regularity after childbirth and other procedures. He’s frustrated that a few tragos of rum are all he can offer a patient about to feel the doctor’s saw cut into an amputation. Urruchúa suspects that washing hands and instruments might alleviate virulent infection, and ruminates that hypnotism could be useful in surgery. The doctor is a genuine hero. During the battle for Mexico City, the doctor goes from hospital to hospital without food or rest tending to wounded. A grievously wounded Yankee gets as good as the doctor can give—just as Yankee medicos tend to wounded Mexicans.

Among the doctor’s closest friends is Abelardo, the frustrated writer. Dr. Urruchúa theorizes Mesmer’s treatments could reduce Abelardo’s chronic depression, not just an amputee’s. But the best the doctor can offer his friend is some pills and a sympathetic ear.

Abelardo experiences hallucinations borne of his depression. He sees colors and auras, contemplates suicide as his one sure cure, and perhaps the best way to escape the consequences of the Yankee invasion. But unlikeable Abelardo is a man of inaction, preferring to discuss politics with his other rich friends than take up arms in defense of la patria.

Abelardo’s story is at once comic and frustrating. Comedy grows from his relationship with Magdalena, his wife, and two women whom Abelardo refers to as the true loves of his life. Magdalena hectors the frustrated writer to stitch together the drawersful of newspaper clippings and scribblings, along with Dr. Urruchúa’s notes, Abelardo has collected over the years. She’s heard bits and snippets of the history throughout their married life and Magdalena’s fed up with the story’s sketchiness. She, too, wants details on the two women, daughter and mother.

This novel, in fact, is the result of Magdalena’s goading urgency. But, in the end, Magdalena refuses to accept Abelardo’s version of events. To the reader’s frustration, Abelardo acknowledges that Magdalena is probably correct, telling her that many details are pure fiction or wishful thinking. In Abelardo’s untrustworthy mind, there’s no difference. Still, history has a concrete referent for much that transpires. The U.S. did invade. Chapultepec was taken. Mexico City was occupied. The trains ran on time, as it were, from United States administrative reforms. And maybe--given its dismal leadership and powerless easily riled plebe--Mexico got what it deserved, the invasion and loss of half its former territory.

Readers will find Yankee Invasion, A Novel of Mexico City, a worthwhile endeavor because the twisted story of the two women is deliciously salacious without being dirty, because the patriotism of the troubled primera clase Abelardo is sincere and genuine, because the underlying satire of Solares’ costumbrismo takes big bites out of Mexican pride, because the narrative is fun as it swings like Abelardo’s moods between straightforward historical account to confessional first person elements when Abelardo steps out of the narrative to address his readers directly, because of its imaginative structure.

Imagine yourself in the assembled masses. The occupying authority summoned attendance to hear the victory proclamation. U.S. cavalry and infantry clean up their appearance as well as possible, a few hours removed from the bloody battle to occupy el Castillo de Chapultepc and fight their way to the seat of government. An officer reads an English language proclamation—pendejo, the people think, screw you and whatever you’re saying in your foreign language. One GI is honored to haul the U.S. flag up the pole. A shot sounds from a nearby rooftop. The sniper’s aim drops the Yankee in his tracks. The crowd explodes in frenzy, pulling invaders to the ground, beating them with brooms and hammers and stones, tearing their dirty uniforms from bleeding corpses. You’re running for your life away from the carnage when a dying Yankee grabs your ankles. In desperation you pull a knife and thrust it into the Yankee’s body again and again until you smell his last breath. It is your own personal moment of triumph. If it happened. Ni modo, there’s a novel in it.

That's the first Tuesday of August. August, my birthday month, my anniversary month! But it's a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.

mvs

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Michael Sedano

In keeping with Daniel Olivas' column on Monday, here is the opening paragraph from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, as translated by Natasha Wimmer:

"November 2. I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."

On December 23, the narrator, a 17-year old boy named Juan García Madero, contributes what to me would have been a more cogent opening line:

"Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it."

In a nutshell, there's the sum and tenor of 577 generally tedious pages of adventurous writing. I suspect a plurality of readers will find the opening segment involving, then will get bogged down, or lost, in the abrupt stylistic shift of the middle of the novel, and probably stop reading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Can't say as I blame them, although I stuck it out to the bitter end, having invested too many hours seeing if I could make sense of what was going on.

The opening segment takes place in 1975 with García Madero abandoning his university studies to join the oddball poets and barmaids of Mexico City. Bolaño creates a sentimental map of the city, the character wandering the various quarters of the city searching the cafés and bars for the twenty-something poets who have opened their clique to the youth. In the process he beds one of two sisters and gets tangled up in the girl's altruistic plan to liberate a whore from her pimp. The girl's father, however, complicates matters when the boy discovers the father has taken the whore as a Sancha, ensconced her in a cheap hotel, but has to flee to the family home when the pimp discovers the love nest. 1975 ends with the boy, the whore, Lima and Belano--two disreputable poet-tipos--fleeing Mexico City after an armed confrontation with the pimp and a corrupt cop.

Exciting and colorful material there. Then the narrative shifts from the diarist story teller to that of a documentary film interviewing a mixed cast of characters. Here the story wends its way back and forth in time, between 1976 to 1996, tracking the movement of the two poet-tipos as they travel about France, Spain, and Israel. Another thread--the detection element--tracks the search for Cesárea Tinajero, the mother, or perhaps chief muse, of this visceral realism literary movement. In subthreads we learn more about the personal lives of the the visceral realists introduced in the opening section, and various gente who come in contact with the mythic Lima and Belano, and Octavio Paz' secretary. Much of this actually has interest and delight as Bolaño uses it for sketches of a certain mode of literary life in Mexico City. But it's long and could easily benefit from a liberal paring, especially as a character remembers the name of a poet, then another, then another, another, another, another...

The novel wraps up reverting to 1976, with the fleeing quartet arriving in northern Mexico, pursued by the vengeful pimp and his cop enforcer. The detectives finally find the mother of visceral realism in a remote Sonoran village. In a fatal confrontation with the pimp, Cesárea Tinajero saves their lives but is shot dead in the process. One of the poet-tipos knifes the pimp, and the cop is gut-shot and will die a slow, painful death. As I note, I suspect many readers will abandon the novel and won't ever get to this climactic desert confrontation, so this is not a spoiler revelation.

I actually felt a bit sorry for the translator, saddled with what must have been a rich variety of colorfully abusive language that ends up in English as fuck this and fuck that. After numerous such linguistic devolutions, I was reminded of the scene in the film El Norte, when the Guatemalteco elder counsels the about-to-be emigrants that, in order to sound like a Mexican, they have to pepper their speech with liberal uses of "chingado" this and "chingada" that. Aside from a bit of French verse, little is untranslatable, except for a moment of fun at the end of the novel. The insufferable García Madero quizzes the falso poets about classical poetic schemes and tropes, none of which the street girl and the two tipos understand. To turn the tables, they quiz García Madero on a unique idiom they speak. Early, early in the novel, a character complains that Lima and Belano speak this language--it has a name though I cannot cite it--and finally on the 532 page, we're treated to a sample that runs two pages:

"All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?"
"A toke of weed," said Belano without turning around.
"And what is muy carranza?"
"Something very old," said Belano.
"And lurias?"
"Let me answer," I said, because all the questions were really for me.
"All right," said Belano.
"I don't know," I said after thinking for a while.

I was surprised to find Bolaño's novel so tedious. I glanced at the blurbs on the back cover and noted the breathless praise heaped upon it. "Powerful and sophisticated." "premier Latin American writer." "The great Mexican novel of its generation." Maybe it's just me, as despite my problems, I wasn't entirely bored with it. I suspect the difference is similar to the differences that stretch between, yet link, the music of Beethoven to Dvorak and Stravinsky, then on to Suk and Schoenberg and beyond into the 21st century. The new stuff is somewhat interesting, musically tolerable, and more so because it often is quite short. Bolaños sets that model on its head with 577 pages, some filled out with nearly interminable lists that, like December 23, either have nothing happening, or I didn't understand them.

mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments here, particularly if you have a more solid footing to go on for The Savage Detectives. I'd dearly love to learn your appreciation of Bolaño's effort. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you'd enjoy becoming our guest, click here, or when you've got a mind to share, drop us a comment on the day's post.

I was listening to NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday, and it was about people who work as telecommuters, freelancers, consultants, etc., and the various perks and challenges of that. One guest described the careers of many freelancers as investment portfolios. They do various kinds of work to fit various needs. They do certain work to bring in income, but that allows them to do the work that's their real artistic effort. 

I always appreciate a good metaphor for my crazy, stitched-together, must make income but really want to write poetry" career. So here's my question: If you didn't have to make any income, what parts of your career would you give up? Your day job, if you have one? Your promotional efforts for your published writing? School visits? Work for hire writing?

If I had no need to make money, I'd keep my poetry and fiction writing, and I'd probably try my hand at more trade nonfiction. I'd keep a little bit of my freelance web editing work through Children's Literature Network and Winding Oak, because I love the people in the children's literature world that I get to meet through that job.

But I wouldn't stress out about having a certain number of hours of web work. And I'd drop work for hire writing, including books, assessment, the whole nine yards. And I'd probably stop hemming and hawing over school visits and just not do them. And I guess I wouldn't worry about teaching, either. I actually enjoy that part of my career, teaching writing workshops or speaking at writing conferences. But if I didn't need to make any money, I guess I'd actually rather be writing than teaching about writing.

What parts of your work do you truly enjoy, and what parts would you be happy to kick to the curb?