Lost and Found: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra—which I read in Nick Caistor’s translation of a book known in Spanish as simply Salvatierra—is a wonderful sliver of a novel narrated by a man who returns to his hometown after his father’s death. He comes back to sort through his father’s art but the skeleton of the story, which is a mystery of sorts, is fairly (arche)typical—return to childhood places, family secrets, and so on—so it’s Mairal’s details, atmosphere, and vivid description that keep Salvatierra intresting.

Juan Salvatierra loses the ability speak as a child then becomes a postal worker and artist as a man, painting one huge mural a year to depict events in his life. After Salvatierra’s death, a European museum buys the rolls of canvas, which have been stored away in a shed and would measure a total of two miles, unrolled. Everything’s there but one roll, the missing year of the title: 1961, when the narrator was ten.

In Salvatierra, art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art, and art helps resurrect lost memories. Through his art, Salvatierra also shows his sons his life before they were born, including his own wedding, where veins—bloodlines—join and even flow into the river. The bloodlines also flow from the past into the present, and the river plays a key part in solving the mystery of the missing mural. It’s not just blood and the river that flow: the whole book flows, flows, flows, through memories and murals and old acquaintances.

Best of all, the flow of Salvatierra is a lot like the flow of Juan Salvatierra’s paintings. It feels silly to write much about Salvatierra when this one line sums up the book’s effect so concisely:

He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.

Bonus link: An interview with translator Nick Caistor, from World Literature Today.

 

Up Next: Joshua Max Feldman’s The Book of Jonah.

Cause & Effect: César Aira’s Varamo

César Aira’s Varamo is a wonderful Rube Goldbergesque novella, an elegant and humorous conglomeration of seemingly incongruous actions, consequences, and objects that combine to show the reader how a third-class clerk in Panama named Varamo receives his pay in counterfeit money and comes to write a “masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child” by the next dawn. I read Varamo in Chris Andrews’s translation.

Colón, Panama, in 1910. Varamo takes
place in 1923.

Aira’s story examines creativity and representation, following Varamo, a civil servant lacking special job skills, as he goes home after receiving the fake money: at home he works on a taxidermy project involving a fish and, eventually, uses his notes about the fish as a basis for his poem. (Original title: How to Embalm Small Animals.) At the end of the book, we find truth as the “raw material” for fantasy plus some peculiar observations on permanence. Varamo’s city, Colón, for example, remains as long as he does, and Varamo discovers that a die-shaped piece of candy he had stuck to a branch hours before remains stuck, despite having been pecked, daintily, by birds.

The fish has a stranger fate, and it’s interesting to see the poor thing as the object of two creative projects. The first is an attempt to make the fish appear, in death, as something more than it had been in life: a piano-playing fish. Then, if I understand this correctly, the chronicle of Varamo’s work on the fish becomes, through transformations involving random papers and a Rosetta Stone-like document that Varamo obtains through a chance meeting, the famous poem.

I found Varamo particularly fun because Aira suffuses his story with mentions of chance, accidents, improvisation, anarchists, literary genre, and cause and effect. Two examples:

The poem’s capacity to integrate all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that situates it historically.

and 

Like all adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the temporal constant between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime.

I enjoyed Varamo very, very much, perhaps most for the lovely absurdities of its portrayal of the (or maybe “a”?) so-called writing process, a term I fought when I attended workshops at writing conferences years ago. For me, writing—and now translating—has never felt like an explainable process, other than certain mechanical actions, like sitting in a chair and applying fingers to a keyboard. I don’t believe in ethereal muses, either, but I do believe in cause and effect in the form of a myriad of mental processes, most of which occur rather randomly and quickly, (only, alas, to be forgotten, making me wonder how I (I?!) came up with my final drafts) that lead me to choose words that come together to create seemingly reasonable English-language versions of Russian texts. I don’t know Chris Andrews’s stance on any of this but I thought his Varamo established a voice that meshed nicely with the novella’s content, a voice that I looked forward to reading.

Disclosures: I picked up a copy of Varamo from publisher New Directions at BookExpo America in 2011. Thank you! I always enjoy speaking with New Directions about literature in translation.

Up Next: Anna Funder’s All that I Am. (My time for English-language reading has been at a new low in recent months because I’m teaching a college course this semester… but spring break is on the way!)

Photo Credit: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia. 

Aira’s Literary Conference

A whirl of work, itinerant cold symptoms, and travel preparations slashed into my reading time over the last couple weeks… but I did manage to read and finish a novella, César Aira’s The Literary Conference, Katherine Silver’s translation of El congreso de literature. The Literary Conference is short and full of offbeat surprises -- plus I’m getting ready to go to a literary conference of sorts myself, the London Book Fair -- so I’ll keep this post brief, too.

The Literary Conference is a wonderfully metaphysical short novel told by a man, (not) coincidently named César, who is a translator and a scientist with a unique cloning method. He goes to a literary conference, which the reader barely sees, with the goal of cloning a Mexican writer. Of course the project goes haywire in a very dramatic and odd way.

The book’s plot is fun and unpredictable, blending genres, but I enjoyed César’s thought process, which often appears random, even more. The Literary Conference begins with César’s story of how he found pirate treasure. He says it wasn’t genius that enabled him to solve the long-time mystery of the treasure:

What happened (I shall try to explain it) is that every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is.

César goes on to relate this thought to the books we read, which made me happy because this is something I think about all too often. Indeed, who reads the same sets of books? And how do those odd combinations affect our thinking? Then there’s this, which César mentions while his clone incubates. This sums up my state of mind as I prepare to travel and finish up this post at Logan Airport:

For someone who travels as little as I do, for someone who leads a very routine life, a trip can make an enormous difference; it is the objective equivalent of cerebral hyperactivity.

I think the attraction of The Literary Conference comes more from the charm of César’s quirky voice, thoughts, and combination of experiences than a single brilliant idea or conclusion. Even if César’s mind sometimes feels a hair too hyperactive, this short book contains lots of enjoyable scenes and observations. The Literary Conference is on the shortlist for the Best Translated Book Awards; I don’t read Spanish but thought Silver’s translation read very nicely, capturing and creating a voice.

I’ll leave analysis of the book’s “translations” and narrative shifts to M.A.Orthofer of The Complete Review. I think he does a nice job summing up the book without revealing too much.

Up Next: I have no idea! Probably something I find in my travels…

Disclaimer. I received a review copy of The Literary Conference from New Directions, a publisher with whom I have discussed translations. Read the first pages of the book here.