Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7 

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

 
Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

Reading: Imajine by Claudel Casseus

In Port au Prince, before the earthquake, living on the brink of disaster was the status quo for countless Haitians. Now, almost fifteen months after the disaster, life among the ruins is the new normal. The media tells us that half of the 1.5 million people made homeless have now returned to their former homes, or have found new ones, but wherever we drove in the capital last month it seemed that every vacant lot and public space was still crammed with tent cities. No major roads remained blocked with rubble, but I saw many buildings in a state of near-collapse, tilted and slanted, their poorly engineered concrete slabs jutting into the sky at all angles. They look, these former buildings, as if the earthquake had only happened last week.

Not so the tent cities, which are developing a sense of permanence. The once grand, open expanse of the Champ de Mars, directly in front of the as-yet still undemolished, collapsed and impotent national palace, is full of tents, some now with reinforced walls of plywood and metal. It looks as if every last rusted tin corrugation, ersatz television antenna, tattered blue polytarp and urine-stained alleyway of a Rio de Janeiro favela had been teleported here and dropped in front of the equivalent of the White House. This is no longer a refugee camp, it is a community, complete with restaurants, bars in which to gather and watch television, hair salons, hookers, fried plantain salesmen, midwives, neighbors and hoodlums. It is all too easy to imagine that unless presented with a pleasant alternative, nobody is going nowhere no time soon. At the moment neither options pleasant nor unpleasant seem to be presenting themselves, despite the hundreds (thousands?) of NGOs that have flooded the city with housing schemes, feasibility studies, risk assessments and white SUVs.

It is an unfulfilled cliché of development and aid work that the population being aided should, for best results, be consulted, involved in the process and invited to help shape its own destiny. But a recent literary project showcases, for me, just how rare it is for a Haitian perspective on the earthquake to take center stage. Imajine, by Claudel Casseus, is not a prescription for relief or reconstruction, it is a personal narrative of how one Haitian man experienced the earthquake and its aftermath. Reading it makes one realize that our comprehension of what the quake was like is based on images, and on a few quotes from traumatized citizens collected and selected by foreign reporters in the days immediately following the catastrophe. It showcases, by extension, the limitations of the very narrow lens through which we view most international events, despite the potential of the internet to bring us direct reports from those affected.

Imajine is essentially a work-for-hire, produced, enabled and published by conceptual artist and musician Bill Drummond. But the words in it are those of Claudel Casseus, perhaps a typical underemployed, eager, brilliant and sometimes desperate Haitian young man. There are many like him in Port au Prince, people with vast unrealized potential, their creative possibilities and dreams squelched by racism, borders, corruption, politics and poverty. Nobody else, however, could have written Imajine.

As a participant in the December 2009 Ghetto Biennale, Bill Drummond painted the provocative and uncomfortably prescient slogan "imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared" on a wall in the Grand Rue of Port-au-Prince. Claudel Casseus steadied the ladder for him. In the days after the earthquake, less than a month after the triumphant finale of the biennale, participating artists, now back at their homes all over the globe, set up a master list and an email network to exchange news and reports of how their newly made Haitian friends and collaborators had fared in the earthquake. Nobody knew anything of Casseus' whereabouts, nor what might have happened to him.

"Imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared."

Some two weeks later Bill Drummond's cellphone rang. Through the electronic fog he recognized Casseus' voice, but the connection was too bad and the language barrier too great for him to understand much more than the simple fact that his former ladder-holder was alive. He wondered how he could help, for surely that transatlantic telephone call represented a request for assistance. Drummond's answer to this question continues to elude many of the NGOs working in Port-au-Prince, despite its simplicity: if you want to help a Haitian in this nightmarish time, give him or her a job. Drummond proposed a work-for-hire, commissioning Casseus to write a five-thousand word account of how he had experienced the earthquake. Imajine is the result of Casseus seizing this opportunity by the horns; he spent countless hours in an internet café pouring out his memories in emails to Drummond. Ultimately, his account ran to some sixty pages.

The Grand Rue on runoff election day, March 20th.

Casseus' descriptions of the psychological effects of the earthquake demonstrate the shortcomings of journalistic accounts, so often written by observers arriving on the scene after a catastrophe has already occurred. I remember reading in various stories that Haitians were traumatized and that many "refused to set foot in any building," and that this was complicating efforts to get people to return to their homes, but I didn't really understand the emotional depth of their sentiment until I read Casseus: "It was impossible to walk by a collapsed building without having the illusion that there might be someone under the rubble screaming for help. Sometimes it might be true and sometimes it might be just a vision that got stuck in your head. If you walked by a building, you can't help but think it is about to fall down on you or that you could have been dead under there if it wasn't for the grace of God and the Spirits."

The power of Imajine lies in the raw, unpolished delivery of Casseus' memories. Typing directly into a terminal in an internet café, the author had neither the means nor the technology to review and edit his own work. He simply let the words flow onto the screen and then pressed SEND, making this book the Zapruder film of earthquake memoirs. It is full of elliptical meanderings, digressions and repetitions, none of which manage to diminish the visceral quality of the writing. Profound truths and painful observations await the reader with each turn of the page. This gives Imajine a unique mode of narrative tension; you continue to read because at almost any moment you may stumble across a surprising thought or illuminating sentence. "This tragedy made me come to the understanding that we human beings are nothing," Casseus writes early on, "and that we should make good use of our time because we do not know when we are going to die."

The deservedly proud author, Claudel Casseus, in the Grand Rue two weeks ago.

I got my copy of Imajine the best way one can acquire a book: I bought it directly from the author, who autographed it for me. It is available directly from Penkiln Burn, and also from Amazon.co.uk, but there are very few copies for sale in Haiti. I'm hoping on my next visit it will be available in every gift boutique in the airport. Ask for it, when you are there buying your duty-free rum.

Reading: Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson

One positive legacy to emerge out of several decades of over-infatuation with post-modern critical theory is the ongoing debate over the blurry line between fact and fiction. The subject came up during the recent conference on Alexander von Humboldt and travel writing at the British Academy in London, in which I took part.

A kind of memoir, travelogue as a genre floats in the subjective space somewhere between journalism and literary fiction; it isn't always clear the extent to which the employment of novelistic techniques or the shortcomings of the working method divert the reader, and the writer, from a factually accurate presentation of events. During the Cuban travels that became Walking to Guantánamo, for instance, I never pulled out a notebook and started jotting down my interactions with Cubans right in the very moment of speaking with them, as a reporter might; instead I did my best to remember the substance of conversations that evening, or the next day over breakfast, jotting down the turns of phrase and perspectives I thought most intriguing. Much later, those skeletal notes of distant conversations were fleshed out into scenes. It wasn't that I was trying to conceal my intentions from the people I met, it simply seemed intrusive.

Certainly my intention was always to be as true to my experience of events as I could manage, but there can be no doubt that this kind of working method operates in a murky and subjective realm, where the influence of my preconceptions and even state of mind on a given day can neither be known, nor discounted.

The boggy rainforests of the Pacific northwest make a good metaphor for this squooshy literary territory, which may be one reason Bruce Benderson set his novel, Pacific Agony, in the region. By pure coincidence, I was in the midst of reading it when I came to London. The front cover announces "a novel," but the text is pure travelogue. Whether invented or not, Pacific Agony recounts an author's commissioned journey through Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. Think of it as a fiction that employs travelogian techniques.

As a narrator, the jaded and overeducated Reginald Fortiphton has more than his parodic north-eastern liberal-elitist name to overcome, should he hope to weasel his way into the reader's sympathies. He is a dissolute, substance-abusing, convicted pedophile, wallowing in the sordid dregs of an unpurposed life. However brilliant and acidic and witty, his unremittingly bitter and cynical pose has grown stale. Our antihero is near bottom, but somehow he has bluffed his way, perhaps with a few well-crafted sentences, into a contract to write an outsider's meditation on the renegade heritage and splendor of the moist and dripping northwest.

Ooh, he is a noxious and tortured fellow, this pill-popping squalor-seeker. So what does it mean that I secretly agree with his every criticism of our tragic, misguided society? I, too, am seduced by the earth-firsters; I downloaded and read the Unabomber's manifesto with fascination and interest, and was sympathetic to the cause, despite thinking Ted's terrorist tactics repugnant. I am as overwhelmed as Fortiphton by the cancerous creep of the strip-mall and the mind-deadening homogeneity of our franchised culture, and at least as ambivalent about the illusory benefits of choice. I hate cars but, oops, still ride in them. "Nowadays," writes Benderson-Fortiphton, "the term 'increased mobility' had become a ruse. It was about the movement of the next generation from one curtailed space into another, eating at a Denny's or a mammalian Hooters that is exactly the same but in another location, producing a new family unit in another town bound by the same suspicion, resentment, and fear."

Fortiphton dismissively deconstructs the pillars of Oregonian and Washingtonian identity, making snide remarks about supposed regional characteristics like spunkiness, frontier grit, expansiveness of spirit and a firm sense of independence. These platitudinous qualities are defended by a reader, one Narcissa Whitman Applegate, who footnotes and attacks the passages in Fortiphton's manuscript that most offend her sensibilities. The conceit, essentially, is that we are reading her annotated copy, sent by the publisher for her comments and fact-checkery. Benderson's inclusion of the Applegate notes is a crafty device, but Applegate is so shrill, pinched and literal-minded that for most of the book she operates as a sort of self-satisfied caricature of the prim librarian rather than as a fully-realized foil for the decrepit and indecent Fortiphton.

Somewhere along the guided tour Fortiphton discovers, or thinks he discovers, a kind of eco-terrorist conspiracy and game-changing revolutionary spirit personified by his elusive love-interest, an unwashed crusty youth named Judas. "How much I wanted to be a part of their imagined doomsday scenario," he muses about Judas' crew of "ragged marginals, fueled by deep resentment," intent on the overthrow of a "seamless, corporatized hegemenony." Fortiphton spirals into paranoid delusion, and begins to believe that the sponsors of his journey are persecuting and manipulating him. He flees his itinerary, and his per diem, taking shelter in the anonymity of a Vancouver encampment of homeless. At last Applegate shows her usefulness. As she doggedly fact-checks Fortiphton's more and more obscure meanderings her antagonism intensifies, but a seed of doubt begins to germinate in the mind of the reader. "Bizarre that F's references actually are in accordance with known Pacific coast Native American rituals," says footnote #87, "or would be if this were happening more than eighty years ago...."

When her contempt for Fortiphton confronts his recounting of the sorts of trivial historical fact that she perhaps believes only herself qualified to know, she becomes the narrator's unwitting collaborator in the battle between fact and fiction. Despite all his paranoid rantings he is writing a travelogue, and he wants you to subscribe to his version. When Applegate wonders how it is that this derelict could possibly know so much about Quileute folklore we have no choice but understand that he speaks the truth, and sign up.

The best reason never to have a sex scene in your novel

Repeating a favorite pun in this year's coverage of my favorite literary prize, the Guardian informs that the "Bad Sex Award shortlist pits Philip Roth against Stiff Competition." I've never read anything by Mr. Competition, but, like Paul Theroux, he's a two-time offender. (November 2006's headline reads: "Stiff Competition on Bad Sex shortlist"). There are some heavy hitters in the running this year. The list is HERE.

This dubious achievement award goes to the author of the most "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant sex scene in an otherwise sound literary novel," and past winners include Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. Perhaps unsurprisingly there aren't a tremendous selection of excerpts from past nominations to be found on the web, but this collection from 2003 is representative. It reeks so strongly of clammy, clichéd comminglings that one imagines the judges holding their noses while forced to choose only one of these pathetic passages to reward as the very most stinkingist. Almost nothing is funnier, or as awful, as a serious writer trying to write something more than porn.

I like to think it runs in the family dept.

Watch my erudite father discussing his new book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, on C-Span.

From A Brooklynite on the Ice

Reading: An Episode in the life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

When the great scientific-minded explorer, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, set out across the globe hoping to discover and understand every last plant, insect and mountain range, his arduous journeys were broken by interludes of genteel luxury. His title and erudition preceded him, and he moved bearing letters of commendation and introduction to the cream of new world society, bedding down in the mansions of the aristocracy of colonialism, rich planters and ranchers pleased to host eminent thinkers from the old world. And eager to hear their news. The combination of adventure and hospitality must have made the early nineteenth century an amazing time to travel. Von Humboldt displayed a fearless and multidisciplinary optimism, examining everything from the geology, botany, topography and astronomy of the places he visited to the agriculture, social structure and psychological characteristics of their inhabitants.

An important part of this immense chronicling, in the age before photography, was visually to represent these distant landscapes and cultures, and von Humboldt traveled to the New World accompanied by a variety of contract painters mandated to capture scenes of nature and life in as faithful a manner as possible. His travels inspired other artists.

One friend and acolyte of von Humboldt's was the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas, who seems to have spent a melancholic and almost loveless life moving steadily through latin America, painting abundantly. When he wasn't, he was pacing, impotent, in Europe, wishing only to cross the Atlantic once more and rejoin his subject matter. My meager research has revealed no biography of Rugendas, but when I discovered a novel based on his travels, blurbed and introduced by Roberto Bolaño and written by an Argentine writer, César Aira, I ordered a copy immediately.

I was shocked when Aira's novella, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, arrived in the mail from Amazon; the paperback was little more than a flimsy pamphlet. Picture the instruction booklet that comes with an electric coffee grinder, or a hair dryer. Reading it took me less than two hours from start to finish. I found it profoundly weird and not only literally thought it lightweight.

Now, some few weeks later, I'm trying to understand why Aira's imagery is so persistent, even in translation. It won't leave my head. I am almost obsessed with the gigantic two wheeled carts, "contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge." The shafts by which these could be hitched to a full ten teams of oxen were so long that they "seemed to disappear among the clouds." Their cargo "sometimes comprised all the goods and chattel of a magnate," and they moved at a glacial pace: 200 meters per day. Rugendas, Aira writes, felt that following them "would be like traveling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras...." Philosophically, Rugendas is fixated on the intense flatnesses of the pampas; he seems to think that reaching the flattest place on earth, something like the umbilical of the planet, will help him to reveal great pictorial truths. In retrospect this seems a bizarre metaphorical anticipation of the concerns of modernist painting, the fixation on the flatness of the canvas itself. Are these things and notions Aira's invention, like his recreation of Rugendas' emotional state? This was precisely my problem with the novel; it is such an infuriating, surreal and seamless blend of fact, fancy and imagination that I never once found myself standing on solid ground. The whole tiny book is one quaking, boggy, postmodern uncertainty.

And yet I can't rid myself of vivid visions of Rugendas, trapped in a hellish lightning storm in the pan-flat wastes of the Argentine plains, dragged face down by one stirrup behind his own horse on a black night full of thunder. I can't forget his disfigured retreat back to the comfortable hospitality of Mendoza, and his earnest friend and disciple Krause, who can barely look him in his ruined face. The Indian cattle-rustlers he painted, charging out of the southern mountains, persist in charging through my daydreams. César Aira is a master conjurer, and like a stubborn teenager at a magic show, I won't rest until I have worked out the tricks.

Reading: Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien by Brian Winter

For some time now the idea has been swirling around in my brain that Argentina is a country poorly served by the travel literature. There are of course the usual plethora of Lonely Planet guides influencing the movements of gringo visitors through the country. That's not what I'm referring to. Such books have become tired caricatures of themselves, and lately I have more than once caught myself using them for guidance on precisely where not to go, in hopes of avoiding the backpacker hordes. No, what I mean is that I've been searching in vain for a travelogue that lays bare the soul of the vast Argentine nation. After all, Chile, a much smaller and narrower strip of land to the west of the Andes, has one in Sarah Wheeler's excellent Travels in a Thin Country. Tales of Argentina do fill most of In Patagonia, indubitably one of the towering skyscrapers of the genre, but Bruce Chatwin's account rarely ranges farther afield than the boggy wastelands of the remote deep south. It is no more a book about Argentina than an account of frontier life in Alaska could encapsulate life in the United States. What's more, as I've already pointed out, there are scarcely any Argentines to be found between its covers.

I'm still looking, even if Brian Winter makes a gaucho's stab in the right direction with his Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien. This account of learning to dance the tango in the wee hours of the morning is resolutely focused on Buenos Aires, a city that resembles New York in the sense that, as Winter says, it ought really to be a completely separate country from the rest of Argentina. Nonetheless, both the tango and gaucho culture are right up there with Malbec on the list of things most foreigners would identify as essentially Argentine, and Long After Midnight does a decent job with each. The book is less convincing at forging a link between the two. When he asks where the dance comes from, Winter stirs up an ancient, troublesome debate amongst the group of cronies he frequents in the milongas, as tango halls are known. He apparently sides with "El Dandy," who attributes the origins of the tango to the gauchos, but I say apparently only because the opposing theories are never outlined with comparable clarity. (Winter's posse, always happy to be stood a round by the young Reuters Argentina financial correspondent, are referred to throughout by nicknames like El Tigre, El Chino and El Griego, and for me none of them really emerged from behind these masks of anonymity to become individual characters.)

Mi Buenos Aires, Querido

Winter makes a lot of jokes early in the book about learning to tango in order to meet women and relieve his lonely life in a distant city. He then falls in love with his tango teacher, something he cops to as a major cliché, but it is a savagely unrequited love affair that goes nowhere, and it ultimately feels a bit contrived, a convenient bit of plot paste to glue his milonga adventures together. There are lovely moments of self-deprecation here, however, as when Brian believes his foxy instructress has given him a unique whispered invitation to meet up after class for some serious partnering. Arriving at the dance he discovers only a table full of clumsy dweebs from every corner of the planet, a sort of kaffeeklatsch made up from the lovely Mariela's client list. It's my belief that making fun of oneself is the most effective route to humor in travel writing, and Winter comes up with some zingers. I particularly liked the opening to his epilogue: After I left Buenos Aires, I spent a year living in Mexico City, where I was the most grotesque creature imaginable--a Texan with an Argentine accent. I wore too many sweaters, I couldn't hold my tequila, I insisted on saying ciao instead of adios, and I had a strong urge to kiss everyone I met on the cheek, including men.

Winter dips into Argentine history, giving us Perón and populism, but he glances over the dictadura's more recent decades of horror, which he argues were less fertile ground for the tango. This is unfortunately akin to ignoring the holocaust in a consideration of the two Germanies, circa 1960. He argues that "the parallels between the fortunes of the tango and Argentine politics throughout history are truly striking," and goes on to say that the dark and melancholic tango "rose to prominence amid a time of prosperity almost unprecedented in the world; and then it nearly disappeared during the country's darkest hour." It is an elegant thought, but one which Winter promptly contradicts on the very next page, when he notes that between 2000 and 2004, "the worst years of the Argentine crisis...the number of milongas in Buenos Aires doubled."

A poster in front of the Casa Rosada demands justice

It is cruel but irresistible to point out that Winter, the Reuters financial correspondent covering one of the largest economic meltdowns of all time (at least prior to the United States of the last two years), demonstrates his perfect qualifications for a subsequent job as deputy foreign editor at USA Today when he opts to abandon the "astonishing sight" of thousands of demonstrators banging on pots and pans at 4 o'clock in the morning in the grand plaza in front of Argentina's Casa Rosada, the pink white house. Caught up in history, he succumbs to peer pressure and rushes off with his milongüero cohorts to visit a whorehouse.

Demonstration? There's a football game on...

Reading: Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

About a decade ago my father predicted, in an entirely non-judgmental way, that by the year 2025 the USA would become a bilingual country, and that soon those unable to speak both English and Spanish will find themselves at a severe disadvantage. This demographic transformation began decades ago and shows no signs of slowing. In cities like Los Angeles and Miami bilingualism has been a functional reality for a long while already; the most enormous shift of the last decade has been the spread of the Hispanic immigrant presence from big city enclaves and the labor-intensive segments of the agricultural sector into every corner of the United States, from villages in Oregon to cities in Maine and horse farms in Kentucky. I view this vast hidden and spreading underclass of Mayan and Incan and Olmec descendants as just the latest of the many waves of immigrants to arrive, struggle, be exploited and dismissed, then ultimately integrate and finally be recognized for helping "to make this nation great." However, the reactionary forces today aligned against them suggest that the Ellis Island paradigm has been definitively abandoned. The country is too full, argue our governors and congressional leaders, some only one or two generations removed from Napolitan gardeners, Polish masons and Irish canal-diggers. The Mexicans, Salvadorans and Ecuadorians are not like our parents were, they say, they don't want to learn English, they don't want to integrate.


Current policy amounts to little more than a war on immigration, particularly the illegal kind. What we have now is an expensive disincentive program based on the notion that if we make it sufficiently difficult to cross the border, live, and work here, by building real as well as administrative fences, people will stop coming. At its most extreme this means that as a nation we now seem to be comfortable provoking aspirant immigrants to more and more dangerous crossings, in the asphyxiating bowels of automobiles, locked in shipping containers, or on foot across the most parched and forbidding corners of the desert, where many routinely die of thirst and exposure. But, like the war on drugs, this war on immigration is doomed to fail, and for some of the same reasons. Like cocaine users, we create the demand. Our comfortable cost of living is subsidized at every level by illegal immigrant labor, kept conveniently inexpensive by its very illegality. The undocumented underpaid have little recourse to collective bargaining and impose less of the costs of taxation and compliance with labor law on employers. Any urge to agitate for better pay or an improved situation is overshadowed by the threat of discovery and deportation. In order for our tomatoes and our remodeling projects and our lawn-mowing to cost us so little (so much less than they do in Europe, for instance) requires both the presence of the illegal immigrant and his lack of status. Furthermore, it is in our interest that wages stay low in the home countries, so that the tee-shirts, bananas, and auto-parts we import from down south will remain almost risibly affordable. It may be a Marxist platitude, but NAFTA removed barriers to the free flow of capital at the same time we were clamping down harder and harder on the free flow of labor. Given institutionalized inequalities like those that see garment manufacturers in Central American free trade zones paying their assembly workers as little as twenty cents an hour, labor will continue to take matters into its own hands, or feet.


We need them desperately. Without this army of Tyson chicken parts packers, Le Cirque pot-scrubbers, country club fairway manicurists and warehouse pallet-loaders, many of America's last remnant industries would grind to a halt. But many of us seem to feel we don't want any more of them, and we don't want to legalize the ones who are already here, and our culture is being eroded, and the other day I went into a grocery store and, goddammit, the whole place, from customers to clerks, was full of latinos gabbling away at one another in Spanish. Let's send them all back.

The raging national debate over immigration, and the public policy to match it, is as self-contradictory and bi-polar as that last paragraph.


In Just Like Us, Helen Thorpe has written a deft and compelling investigation of the current, messy, state of affairs. Her account of the trajectories of four inseparable Latina high-school students, two legal and two illegal, quickly leads us into a zone completely alien to that of the typical complacent Anglo citizen. It is a world in which every time a person gets into a car they need to worry what might happen if they should be stopped; one where inter-state travel is forbidding and dangerous, and international travel out of the question; one in which talented students, the country's future engineers, doctors and inventors--the exact same people who are meant to be innovating us right out of our current crisis and into a sustainable green economy--are stopped dead in their educational tracks for want of a social security card. Imagine a life in which any of the countless situations in which we are asked to show identification, from entering large office buildings, to renting apartments and buying used cars, is freighted with anxiety. No wonder the Spanish-speaking immigrant community turns inward and looks to its own for goods, services, and culture. Since I've never met a Latino laborer, legal or illegal, who didn't intuitively grasp that learning to speak better English would immediately translate into higher wages and better opportunities, it seems clear that right-wing complaints about the failure to integrate ignore the perpetual fear and justifiable paranoia that go along with being undocumented in post 9/11 America. I was reminded more than once of my own harrowing bus journeys in third-world countries, of arbitrary roadblocks where a request for papers might easily degrade into unpleasantness. I had thought such things only happened in countries I visited, not the one where I live. Just Like Us exposes a parallel United States many of us willfully ignore.

The clash between the embracing support system of insular immigrant life and a yearning for access to the opportunities outside it is central to the identity crisis faced by Yadira and Marisela, the undocumented duo who are the heroines of the book. Illegal most of their young lives, they are desperate to assimilate and to integrate, if those ideas include having the same possibilities as the fellow college students from whom they must hide their status. Both of them are strivers who ultimately succeed in attending college in their hometown of Denver, albeit as "international students" (an irony indeed) able to pay out-of-state rates only thanks to scholarship support from various sympathizers. They are, in other words, the elite of their particular underclass, fluent in English and willing to explore every avenue and lead that might help them advance. We realize that these are not representative illegal migrants. The fate of those many others in the same situation who might find the obstacles overwhelming is left implicit. While Yadira and Marisela ultimately graduate, this does nothing to change their situation; they consider going on to law school, but Thorpe suggests that, particularly for Yadira, this is simply a way of putting off the unpleasantness of facing the job market without any documents.


Thorpe spent countless hours hanging out with the girls, their associates and their families over five years, a dedicated, long-term journalistic commitment all the more remarkable because she had to sneak out of the side door of the Mayor of Denver's residence every time she wanted to visit the barrio. That may be an exaggeration, but even after writing this book Thorpe remains married to John Hickenlooper, Denver's popular liberal mayor. Despite his popularity he is far from immune to the political mudslinging that spatters the topic of immigration. He may even be particularly vulnerable to it, given that before going into politics he was a restauranteur. His restaurant company, now in a blind trust, apparently owns most of the eateries and venues in which illegal Denverites (once) wash(ed) dishes and legal ones pass their free time. Thorpe struggles to keep her home life of charity galas and formal receptions separate from her inner-city journalistic endeavors, until mid-way through the project. When an off-duty police officer moonlighting as a bouncer at a Latino disco is murdered by an illegal alien once employed in one of the mayor's restaurants, her worlds collide. I cringed to imagine the pillow talk that must have ensued in the mayoral mansion, although Thorpe swears in her acknowledgments that her husband never wavered in his support for her work, striking out only one word in the finished manuscript. If true it would have been as unsporting of her not to comply as it is rude of me to wonder what the word was.

In the context of blogging, the notion of offering "full disclosure" has a ring of pretension to it, but even though we haven't spent much time in the same social circles in the last fifteen years I will nonetheless mention that Ms. Thorpe is a very old friend of mine. When I knew her well there was no doubt as to her liberal political persuasion; nothing in this book suggests that she has altered course. But Helen is the farthest thing imaginable from a knee-jerker, and in search of journalistic balance she spends far more time than I would have hanging out with the sorts of people who want to build a razor-wire fence between Brownsville and San Diego. There are moments when she almost seems to warm to Congressman Tom Tancredo as he drives her around his old neighborhood, cracking mafioso jokes and telling fuzzy stories about North Denver's version of the San Gennaro festival. Meanwhile, he was plotting the closest thing our most recent elections saw to a single-issue presidential campaign. If it did nothing else, Tancredo's short-lived bid for the Republican nomination forced most of the rest of the candidates further to the right on the immigration issue. And even while the Democrats wrinkled up their noses in disgust they were sticking them in the air to gauge which way the wind was blowing.


With official national joblessness hovering somewhere around the ten percent mark you don't have to be an unemployed rocket scientist to figure out that anti-immigrant populism has a bright future. This is one of the grim lessons of Just Like Us, a book that ought to have a happy ending but instead concludes with its protagonists in much the same place they were at its beginning; after five years of senatorial hand-wringing and congressional pussy-footing, Yadira and Marisela haven't come any closer to being welcomed as productive, legal members of our society, despite their hard-won college degrees. The only really good news I have is to tell you what a pleasure it was to read their stories. Like a well-crafted Hollywood blockbuster, this book anticipates, nay, demands a part dos, and I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel, which I hope will be written in Spanish. Or at least available in a bilingual edition.

Reading: Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

It's 2005, and Havana's greatest detective, Lieutenant Mario Conde, has long ago left the police force, having resigned in protest when his incorruptible mentor, Major Antonio Rangel, was made a target by the Department of Internal Affairs. In the Cuban context this means that the fictional Conde (the Count) has joined the great swirling, crowded whirlpool of the internal brain drain. The premature retirement of innumerable professors, teachers, doctors and professionals to become tour guides, translators, taxi drivers and waiters has been devastating to the Cuban state and the revolution. The abandonment of public service, and, often, the life of the mind, for the service industry and a chance to access the all-important tourist dollar has, fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and world Communism, sapped the revolutionary potential of an entire generation of Cubans. That Conde's creator, the Havana writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, has seen fit to send his ace detective into "retirement" and out into the wilds of the dollar economy has weighty metaphorical significance.

Mario's disaffection for the police force and his perennially postponed aspirations to become a writer of "squalid and moving" tales leads him inexorably into a new career as a used book dealer. It is a brilliant choice of destiny on the part of Padura Fuentes, whose detective novels always transcend their genre. For the used book-seller in Cuba is not the enthusiastic recycler of ideas and the noble guardian of our literary heritage that we sometimes imagine him to be here. (Yes, we are also familiar with the drooling ambulance chaser, picking through the estate like a crow nibbling at fresh roadkill). In Cuba, to be a used book dealer means that one is an active participant in the exportation of the country's culture, history, and patrimony. A looter, a defiler. No Cuban wanders the bookstalls of the Plaza de Armas in Havana with the wads of dollars needed to take home a musty, leather-bound tome. The client, everyone knows, is an extranjero, a visitor who will put that priceless volume in a suitcase and spirit it away, out of the country, forever.

Padura Fuentes, whose work I've written about before, is only getting better at stacking multiple layers of meaning within the basic structure of the noir crime novel. Havana Fever, as the UK-based Bitter Lemon Press regrettably insists on calling their translation of La Neblina de Ayer (the mists of yesterday), presents, like all of its precedents, at least one robust mystery to be solved, but the novel manages all at the same time to be a look back at the evolution and devolution of the revolution; an ode to books both as objects imbued with aura and repositories of wisdom, history, and inspiration; a chronicle of a ruined family and its satellite members; and a revelation of contemporary Cuban life.


It is tempting, although perhaps excessive, to see in the vicissitudes of Mario Conde's progress a metaphor for the revolution itself. He is getting old, and is not as indestructible as he once was. The hangovers once cured with a shower and some thick, cheap home-brewed coffee now linger long into the grim day. He has grown skinny from scarcity and may be willing to do things he shouldn't, and once wouldn't have, to ensure his own survival. In Havana Fever even his trust in his own atheism has grown shaky:

Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.

In this novel he is battered, beaten to a pulp and left almost for dead, but he refuses to throw in the towel. Once, he was the most incorruptible of police officers, and then the most honest and plain-talking of book dealers, but the end of this thriller will find him stashing away a cache of Cuba's most prized publications on his modest personal shelf. And weeping.

I'm going to leave many of Padura Fuentes' plot threads unpicked, in the hopes that you will seize the moment and read Havana Fever for yourself. I'll reveal nothing of the elusive bolero-singing seductress who disappeared from the nightclub stage just as the revolution was dawning, nor of the wealthy, handsome Batista-hating Meyer Lansky crony who flew off to Miami, leaving behind a spectacular library but no forwarding address. Once one really starts to appreciate what Padura Fuentes is up to, the lurid details of the actual plot are merely a fine veneer on the surface of dense layers of allegory.

Let's concentrate on the library, and the books. The logical extension of Mario's career is that he quests after libraries; his livelihood depends on those same skills with which he once solved crimes, except that now he concentrates on locating fresh supplies of ancient texts. It is a difficult task. When I was in Cuba in 2001, walking through the island, I had the impression that already every last stick of antique furniture, every jeweled brooch, every Tiffany lamp and every mahogany mantelpiece had already been removed from the country. The woman at whose bed and breakfast I lodged in Havana had a regular client from Italy who specialized in buying diamonds passed down through the generations, stepping in whenever necessity overwhelmed nostalgia. He did not visit while I was there, but nonetheless a neighbor came around once, in the hopes that someone, anyone, might purchase her mother's wedding ring. It was a squalid and moving moment. Padura Fuentes conveys the dismal dynamics of this Havana used trade with pathos and economy: Conde, standing before a grand but tattered mansion he somehow has never noticed before, imagines that "someone must have already beaten him to it, because that style of edifice was usually profitable; past grandeurs might include a library of leather-bound volumes; present penury would include hunger and despair, and that formula tended to be a winner for a buyer of second hand goods."


The brother and sister who inhabit this house, in which Mario Conde discovers the ultimate library, have already sold off “the noble bone china dinner services, repoussé silver, chandeliers...,” and it is only because of a solemn, fifty-year old pledge that the books still exist. But there they are, untouched except for their ritual biannual dusting.

The reverence with which Padura Fuentes has Mario Conde enter that chapel of reading and savor the spines of those all-but mythical volumes rivals the bibliomaniacal inventions of Jorge Luis Borges. Not since the Argentine master has a library been this breathtaking, important, and charged. Naturally, it is in this place that the clues to two murders await revelation. But here also is inscribed the entirety of Cuba and, perhaps, much of the author’s personal cosmogeny. Mario immediately spots the Alphabetic Index of Demises in the Cuban Liberation Army “from its rare 1901 single printing in Havana,” and The Coffee Plantation, which “Conde’s fingers caressed even more lingeringly.” These are apparently real, rare, books, but their titles alone illuminate the march of Cuban literature and history, from sugar and coffee to slavery and rebellion. Here, too, is a first edition of “El Negrero,” (The Slave Trader), by Lino Novas Calvo, which I bought a couple of months ago in a painfully crumbly acidic paperback edition from an online bookseller in Venezuela, because Padura Fuentes recommended it in a 2004 "ten best" novels list. This is not the only cross-reference to the Cuban writer's other work: The previous Mario Conde novel, Havana Black, opens with two quotes. The first, from J. D. Salinger, reveals the forgotten (by me, at least) template for Conde's now five-novel predilection for all that is "esqualido y conmovedora." "I'm extremely interested in squalor," Esme tells Salinger's narrator. Now, in Havana Fever, the battered Conde, during a semi-conscious reverie as close as Padura Fuentes has yet veered towards the postmodern, encounters Salinger in an orange jumpsuit, and castigates him for no longer writing. The second quote is from José María Heredia and relates to that feeling of grim but almost sexual anticipation for the onslaught of an impending hurricane, a theme Padura Fuentes has repeatedly made his own, but which also constitutes a pivotal moment in Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, suggesting that the tense and frantic waiting for a deadly but purifying cyclone constitutes an essential aspect of the Cuban character. On the last page of Fever, it is a thin but priceless volume of Heredia's poetry that Conde gives to his beloved. As usual, it's all about the reading.

It's been out for almost three weeks...

If you haven't read my father's new book yet, GET WITH IT!



I know, you thought he was a medievalist, but John V. Fleming steadfastly refuses to be pigeon-holed, and in about the time it takes me to put together a decent blog entry he wrote a fascinating analysis of four books very much of and about their time: those grisly years of intrigue between the wars and after, when our necessary alliance with the Soviet Union morphed into the cold war. You might call it a literary procedural; he follows the evolution of four writers who, although initially captivated by Communism, turned away from Stalin and survived to tell the tale. Ultimately each wrote a book condemning the Soviet incarnation of their once-beloved ideology, and these books are the heroes in my father's account; the authors range from the shady and frustrated one-hit wonder "Jan Valtin" to the tortured genius Arthur Koestler. That their motivations and aspirations are often unclear makes this an all the more fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

Reading: Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

When you've worked at making a revolution, it's difficult to go back to what you did before. --Explosion in a Cathedral


The people of Cartagena de Indias, perhaps the most spectacular ancient city in the Americas, proudly describe themselves as Caribbean. In contrast, those from the interior, from the chilly, moist highlands of Bogotá, are called cachacos, a term that carries a pale tinge of disparagement. The cachacos are forever outsiders on this coast, where one often has the sense that to be Caribbean is appreciated as more vital than any notion of national pride. Particularly with the Colombian football team in a long, profound slump. Outside of Colombia, few would place Cartagena on a list of the top ten or even twenty-five Caribbean destinations, but Cartageneros are steeped in their own history; the sixteenth century fortifications, the city wall, and the massive castillo dominate the landscape and the psychology of the town, whose people seem not to have forgotten an era when Havana, Port au Prince, New Orleans and Veracruz were connected to it via a constant web of commerce and shipping.

It is a fitting place to read Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier's epic novel, set in some of the farthest corners of the Caribbean basin, in once glorious and gloriously rich cities like Point-a-Pitre, Cayenne, and Paramaribo, places most people today will be hard-pressed to put a country to. Carpentier is one of Cuba's greatest novelists, but I fear I would have been unlikely to read this dense chronicle about the Caribbean aftermath of the French Revolution if it hadn't been for the recommendation of another, Leonardo Padura Fuentes. I've written about Padura Fuentes before; he is a writer whose work and opinions I respect immensely. Googling revealed a 2004 "ten best" list of Cuban novels he created for the Guardian. Explosion in a Cathedral came in at number one. "(T)he theme," Padura Fuentes wrote, "is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions: the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful ideals." This is a loaded observation coming from a Havana writer whose work is characterized by a volatile blend of love for his city with disdain for the entrenchment of petty bureaucracy and the more ridiculous castigations of contemporary life there. Given that he also called the book "the perfect fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in narrative prose," I promptly ordered a battered ex-library copy.


The novel tells the story of Victor Hugues, a little-known Jacobin who maneuvered first to bring the French revolution to the Antillean colonies and then struggled to maintain his power in the face of shifting allegiances back in Paris. Born a baker, he traded in his rolling pin for a guillotine and became a butcher. When we meet him, however, he is a merchant, with interests in Port au Prince and Havana. He has just burst into the young and naive household of three bereaved relatives, a brother and sister, Carlos and Sophia, and their cousin Esteban. He easily insinuates himself into their lives, and ultimately his starry-eyed discourse and brash charisma will seduce two of them. Esteban succumbs philosophically, Sophia more traditionally.

Carpentier conjures up a compelling image of the stasis of life in Havana in the pre-information colonial age. It is a place where the veneer of civility is warped by slavery, ripe for the exportation of the equalizing fire of the French Revolution: "because people here seemed to be asleep, inert, living in a timeless marginal world, suspended between tobacco and sugar." His initial description of the city serves as the metaphorical template for Hugue's descent from infectious idealism into violent pragmatism: "Strangers praised the town's color and gaiety after spending three days visiting its dance halls, saloons, taverns and gambling dens, where innumerable orchestras incited sailors to spend their money, and set the women's hips swaying. But those who had to put up with the place the whole year round knew about the mud and the dust, and how the saltpetre turned the door-knockers green, ate away the iron-work, made silver sweat, brought mildew out on old engravings, and permanently blurred and misted the glass on drawings and etchings, already curling up with damp." Carpentier makes great use of this formal device throughout the novel, foreshadowing the action with ominous sentences ostensibly unrelated to the trajectories of the characters. On the imminent threat of a hurricane, to which Hugue's response will elevate him as a kind of savior of the household: "Those who lived on the island accepted the cyclone as a dreadful meteorological reality, which ultimately none of them would escape."

When the Spanish colonial authorities set out to purge Cuba of revolutionary thought, the strange family foursome is broken apart. Carlos tends to business in Havana, and Esteban and Sophia accompany Hugues as he flees to the south coast and Santiago de Cuba with his fellow progressive, the mulatto vodou doctor Ogé. The Caribbean is in an uproar. Rumor has it that Haiti's slaves are rising up; the fearsome black revolt has begun. Sophia remains in Santiago for safety; Hugues, Ogé and Esteban sail across the channel to find Port-au-Prince in flames. There is no going back to Cuba, and no staying in Haiti; suddenly Esteban, who is really the tortured hero of this book, finds himself in Paris, swept up in events much larger than himself.

Soon, he is diminished. Just one of the innumerable minor satellites orbiting Hugues' rising star as the conquering revolutionary exports the new France back to Guadeloupe, he will bear witness to the all corrupting influence of power as it rots away at his former mentor's ideals. Before long, the guillotine blade is dropping onto the necks of Hugues' enemies with disturbing frequency. Esteban follows Hugues to the next killing fields, the malarial Guyane, not because he wants to, but because he has become a virtual prisoner. When finally he manages to escape and return to Havana Carpentier introduces his grandest and most daring metaphor. Sophia, recently made a young widower and still in thrall to Hugues, years after a fleeting seduction in Santiago, abandons the reunited family to go and join him. Most writers would end their novel with the happy family reunion, but for Carpentier history is bound to repeat itself, and now it is Sophia, as mistress to the iron-fisted ruler, who will suffer disillusionment and witness the latter stages of Hugue's downward spiral into tyranny. In this novel there is no escaping the virulent fever of power and influence.

Padura Fuentes is by no means suggesting that guillotines are falling in Cuba today, but merely by suggesting that we read this novel now he continues his measured, thoughtful, and literary critique of the Cuba he sees out the windows of his home in Havana, fifty years on from another revolution. Here, too, there seems to be some Caribbean common ground.