Battalions of ants trying to line up into meaning

Stamped on a poster next to the book is the face of a handsome man, too handsome, maybe: tousled hair, a weather-scarred complexion, melancholy eyes, a cigarette tucked between his fingers.

I don't like to admit it, but faces like this one remind me abstractly of a face I once loved, a face of a man I was maybe not loved by in return, but with whom I at least had a beautiful daughter before he disappeared. This face perhaps also reminds me of future men whom I could love and might be loved by but won't have enough lives to try. Past men are the same as possible future men, in any case. Men whose rooms are spartan, whose T-shirts are self-consciously threadbare around the neck, whose handwritten notes are full of small, crooked letters, like battalions of ants trying to line up into meaning, because they never learned good penmanship. Men whose conversation is not always intelligent but is alive. Men who arrive like a natural disaster, then leave. Men who produce a vacuum toward which I somehow tend to gravitate.

— from Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli.

Men who don't open their mail. Men who have nothing but an empty carton of milk and a bloody bottle of ketchup in the fridge. Men who don't have a sofa, "Come sit beside me on the bed." Men who live in the dark. No, not those men. I want to be reminded of someone I don't know yet.

All merged into one enormous rock

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying desperately to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don't judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other, because they have chosen to not understand each other anymore. There should be a man who knows how to untangle his woman's hair but who decides not to one morning, perhaps because now other women's hair has become interesting, perhaps because he has simply grown tired. There should be a woman who leaves, withdrawing either slowly or in a single sad and elegant coup de dés. A novel about a woman who leaves before she loses something, like the woman in Nathalie Léger's novel I'm reading, or like Sontag in her twenties. A woman who begins to fall in love with strangers, possibly only because they are strangers. There is a couple who loses the ability to laugh together. A man and a woman who sometimes hate each other, and will, if they are not stopped short by a better part of themselves, block out the last ray of innocence left in the other. A novel with a couple whose only engaging conversations are about revisiting past misunderstandings, layers and layers of them, all merged into one enormous rock. Dear bookseller, do you know the myth of Sisyphus? Do you have any version of it? An antidote? A piece of advice? A spare bed?

— from Lost Children Archives, by Valeria Luiselli.

Like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives

I thought about writing stuff down in a notebook for you to read one day, but you are a bad reader still. level A or B, still read everything backward or in a mess, and I have no idea when you'll finally learn to read properly, or if you ever will. So I decided to record sound instead. Also, writing is slower and reading is slower, but at the same time listening is slower than looking, which is a contradiction that cannot be explained. Anyway, I decided to record, which was faster, although I don't mind slow things. People usually like fast things. I don't know what kind of person you will be in the future, a person who likes slow things or one who likes fast things. I kind of hope you are the type of person who likes slow things, but I can't rely on that. So I made this recording and took all those pictures.

I wonder if more books shouldn't come with instructions.

Or something like artist statements. It's a common practice at art galleries, for example, to post alongside any given piece not just the title of the work and its materials, but a note about its composition — its inspiration, intention, or context. However, I dislike the layout of many of our local galleries for positioning this supplementary material such that many people gravitate to it before they see the art. I prefer to come to art cold, try to figure how I feel about it and then check the signs, to validate my interpretation, fill in the blanks, and hopefully expand my understanding.

It's rare to have this kind of reference point for works of literature. An "exhibition catalogue" of novels might be curated by an academic expert, but to know the artists' intentions, one typically must search out several secondary sources.

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, includes notes on the works cited. She wants to make sure we're not reading this as idiots who think she's merely name-dropping or that the allusions are decorative — they "function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past." She goes on to explain the echoes in the novel's structure and the threads that hold it together. She's not interested in intertextuality as a performative gesture but as a method of composition.

I was readily drawn into Lost Children Archive, and this supplementary material helps me admire the skill and craft that brought this book together. But thank goodness the notes come at the end, else I would've gone into this book believing she was an annoyingly pretentious know-it-all bent on setting herself above writers who write mere stories.

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

The references, for the record, are many and varied, and not so obscure that I didn't recognize some, and introduced me to The Gates of Paradise, a novel about the Children's Crusade of 1212 consisting of two sentences (the second one being five words long, the first comprising the rest of the story), a copy of which I am now struggling to track down, by Jerzy Andrzejewski, whose name I've quite coincidentally encountered a couple of times this week in the context of him being a highly popular Polish post-WWII novelist who is sadly not so well recognized outside of his native country, despite having written Ashes and Diamonds, which Andrzej Wajda masterfully adapted for film.

Lost Children Archive starts with so many moments recollected to explain this beautiful thing of a family they've built, and the rest of the book is a roadtrip of a novel across its dissolution.

I had no trouble slipping into the car beside them, the tragedy of it all quite palpable.

It's about a sound documentarian (Pa) setting out for the Southwest on an Apache project, hunting for echoes, with family in tow. Ma is a more journalistic documentarist who is pursuing an migration crisis story in general while looking for a Mexican woman's two daughters in particular — young girls who were sent across the border to reunite with family. In the back of the car are the ten-year-old boy (his) and the five-year-old girl (hers), who are also witnessing their family fall apart while being part of it.

The children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They're like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it has had, for me, the mysterious power to evoke echoes of my being, reminding me of the kind of person I once was, wanted to be, could be still. It reminded me of what it was like to be a new mother and be head over heels in love with my child, of trying to see the world through her eyes, and falling in love with the world all over again, in a grown-up way. It reminded me of Lisbon Story, which would have been my first exposure to acoustemology (my brother and I experimented with sending audio letters around the time that movie was released, but how? did we really mail each other mini cassette tapes?).

Acoustemology is a sonic way of knowing and being in the world.

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid about it.

This book is a composition of multiple texts, scraps, transcriptions, with photographs and lists. No sound, but a written record of echoes of sound. (I am reminded, at times, of Clarice Lispector's incantatory attempt in Agua Viva to write the way music is composed.) So the book itself is a kind of artefact while functioning as an archive, boxing the family members' experiences.

I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you've finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.

Halfway, the book switches from Ma's perspective to the boy's. I did not at first warm to the boy's voice, but gradually it becomes fairytale-like as the children set out on their own, without breadcrumbs, avoiding danger and performing trials on an almost mythological quest.

They had walked, and swam, and hidden, and run. They had boarded trains and spent nights sleepless atop gondolas, looking up at the barren, godless sky. The trains, like beasts, drilled and scratched their way across jungles, across cities, across places difficult to name. Then, aboard this last train, they had come to this desert, where the incandescent light bent the sky into a full arch, and time had also bent back on itself. Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.

Review
The New Yorker: Writing about writing about the border crisis

Microchemical raptures

"The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal."

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don't remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures — little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue — that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

— from Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli.

I resisted reading this book. I hadn't liked The Story of My Teeth, despite its accolades; I assumed this Archive would be similarly overrated. But thus far (about a quarter in), I am loving it. It's touching me in all the right ways, caressing my brain and poking my heart. I want to know more about acoustemology and private languages. It makes me want to read Susan Sontag.

Those raptures for me, these days: Clarice Lispector, Olga Tokarczuk. This book too seems to be full of raptures.

In praise of short novels

I recently convinced several people to read Valera Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, not by describing the main character or his story or explaining the concept behind the book, but by praising how short it was. As if its brevity was its greatest virtue. Perhaps it was.

Of course you can read it over the weekend! It's so short! Only 134 pages, according to my e-version. And all those blank pages at the front. The table of contents is longer than expected. An epigraph or two. Decorative leaves between chapters. Then there are photo plates at the end, and the translator's chronology, which can't be said to be part of the book proper, though it was my favourite part. The author's afterword, also not really part of the book, although arguably it's what gives the book meaning. Still, it doesn't count as story. And more blank pages. Bringing us down to maybe a 100 pages of novel. Who can't manage that?

In this way I "sold" a book I didn't really like (I admire and respect it — I just didn't connect with it) because I had nothing better to say about it. It's really short! And an impromptu book club came into being.

I've read a lot of short books this year. It's all that my time and attention can hold.

Short novels means less commitment, cuz I just don't have it in me these days. Short novels sustain my interest, in ways most 400-page novels just can't. I can slip from one genre to another. More variety. I'm sampling more authors. And I have a sense of accomplishment. I can still read and finish books! And I can convince other people to read them too. Short novels are so digestible.

Surpassing the truth

After all, as Quintilian says, a hyperbolic is simply "a fissure in the relationship between style and reality."

I'd heard quite a bit about The Story of My Teeth, and I'd followed with interest its performance in this year's Tournament of Books, and spurred by the upcoming appearance of author Valeria Luiselli at this year's Blue Met festival, I read it.

It's a strange little book, which has it's own strange little story, but frankly, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

I've actually encouraged a handful of people to read this. We'll make a night out of it. Hear what the author has to say. Adjourn for cocktails.

Its selling points: 1. It's really short. It clocks in at 134 pages, but there's front matter and back matter and decorative plates and really wide margins. 2. There are clowns. Well, that may scare some people, but I think it's a plus. 3. There are funny bits, where I smiled and chuckled (but no guffaws) — but hard to say if it's at all funny apart from occasionally being clever and pretentious or almost constantly parodic and hyperbolic.

On the whole, however, I didn't like it. Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez, is not very likeable. Not that I have to like a character to like a book. But the book did not connect with me at all, not the character, the story, the tone. There were glimmers of hope, in the humour, in the oddness, in the clowns, but it wasn't sustained. But it is a weird book, in a way that merits discussion.

The story, such as it is: Highway left his wife and son to pursue his calling. He's an auctioneer, who once bought at auction and had surgically implanted Marilyn Monroe's teeth. He returns to Mexico with a fine collection of... of objects, of collectibles, and in the course of auctioning of his collection of teeth, crosses paths with his grown son.

The thing about auctioneering — he creates value, by telling stories.

When Highway first began to recount his stories to me, I thought he was a compulsive liar. But then, living with him, I realized that it had less to do with lying than surpassing the truth.

There are some marvelous insights gleaned from several of Highway's esteemed relations...

Baudrillard:

I completely disagree with my second-uncle Juan Sánchez Baudrillard when he says that "Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."

Dostoevsky:

I suppose my uncle Fredo Sánchez Dostoyevsky was right when he said that insult, after all, is a purification of the soul.

Foucault:

In other words, as my uncle Miguel Sánchez Foucault said in relation to something else, these men and women are "singular lives transformed into strange poems through who knows what twists of fate."

And my favourite cousin, Sartre:

I was certain that I had gone to hell. During the long family meals I had to endure in my childhood, my cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre, who used to wear white plastic flip-flops and couldn't hold his drink, would inevitably tell us — around the time when the dessert was being served — that we were hell.

One of the more mysterious elements of the book is "The Chronologic," contributed by translator Christina MacSweeney. It is in fact my favourite part of the book, for the great puzzle it presents. For example, why include an entry to mark the date that Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. It presents an interesting framework for thinking about the story, a real-world level of narrative.

The Story of My Teeth stems from a commission to catalog an actual art collection, and was created in large part by collaboration. It was meant to be read aloud and in instalments. Audience feedback was integrated into subsequent drafts. The author's and translator's collaboration mean the resulting book is a further version of the original, not a strict translation.

The Afterword is more of an Artist's Statement, and for clarity's sake, I wish it were labelled as such. This book is like that odd installation at a gallery that you can't make heads of tails of, but you finally find the little placard an you read and you think it makes sense, but you read it again to make sure, but you're not sure, and you look at the art again and something clicks, but just for a second; it's somehow been made more acceptable even if it's not any less opaque.

The problem is: I'm not convinced art should work that way; it should stand on its own, not propped up by justifications. And for some reason, if that art should be literary — it's already full of words — I think it has less right to go outside of itself in order to communicate about itself.

In that sense, The Story of My Teeth "works" as a piece of art, an artefact, an experiment, but not as a real novel, in my opinion. But I do look forward to hearing the author, discussing the book with others, and having my ignorance dispelled.