Two Short Stories by Spanish Authors in Best European Fiction 2013

If you want a sense of what is going on in the short story in Europe you would be hard pressed to find a better source than the Best of European Fiction series published annually  since 2011. I recently posted on a very interesting story by a Spanish author from the forthcoming in October Best European Fiction 2015.  Today I want to talk briefly about the two stories by authors from Spain in Best European Fiction 2013 (all volumes published by Dalkey Archives).

"Pirpo and Chamberlain, Murderers" by Bernardo Atxaya starts in the Basque region of Spain around 1935.  Pirpo and Chamberlain were killers for hire, having, as they repeat numerous times, "carte Blanche" to do what ever they want in the largely lawless Pyrenees Mountain Region of Spain.  They also smuggle people out of Spain into France, or kind of do.  What they often did, collecting the money up front, was to walk people up into the mountains and the tell them they were in France even though they were not.  Big trouble for them comes when a maid tips of Pirpo, depicted as a great ladies' man while Chamberlain spends his earnings in brothels, that a rich couple wants to smuggle them into France and that they will be carrying a fortune in gems.  I won't spoil the ending.  The story was a lot of fun to read and I did feel transported back in time to Basque Spain in the 1930s.

Bernardo Atxaga 

Bernardo Atxaga (Joseba Irazu Garmendia, Asteasu, Guipúzcoa, 1951) belongs to the group of young Basque writers that began publishing in his mother language, Euskera, in the Seventies. Graduated in Economics for the Bilbao University, he later studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.  You can learn much more about him on his webpage.

http://www.atxaga.org/

"The Mercury of the Thermometers" by Eloy Tizon is an interesting story about a younger family members making a duty visit to an elderly widowed aunt who lives alone above a pharmacy.  She only goes out to shop and attend mass.  The story revolves around the differences concerning how the young people perceive their aunt's life to have been and what it really was.  The perceptions are interesting and the story is psychologically perceptive.

 

"True Milk" by Aiya de la Cruz (from Best European Fiction 2015, forthcoming October 2014)

I am happy to be able to participate in Spanish Literature Month - 2014 hosted by Richard of Caravana De Recuerdos and Stu of Winstondad's Blog.  There are lots of great reading ideas on the event page.

I have chosen as my participation in the event to post on an excellant very creative story "True Milk" by Aiya de la Cruz.  The story will appear in the to be published in October Best European Fiction - 2015.  (I was kindly given an advance review copy by the publisher and it might be the best so far of this marvelous series of collections.)

"True Milk" is a vampire story with several interesting twists.  The narrator knows a vampire story is gone to be seen by Literati as pure pandering to teens and young adult readers and tries to rise above this.  There are really two intertwining narrative threads, one is a scholarly academic type account of the role Lord Byron had in shaping the notion of how a vampire should appear (I found this very interesting and well done.  The first vampire story, "The Vampyre"  was written by John Polidori in 1819.  He based the dress and style of the vampire on Lord Byron and that is why vampires are portrayed as suave overly stylish gentlemen.  (My post on Polidor's story http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2011/09/vampyre-by-john-polidori.html contains background on this).

The narrator gives birth while she is doing her research on vampires. The story is told from her post birth hospital bed. The research part of the story is in italics and is really good, maybe the best part of the story.   Now the story takes a turn some would protest and babies are seen as kind of vampires.  The close of the story is very clever and I will leave it untold.  

Aixa de la Cruz was born in Bilbao, Spain, in 1988. She used the time afforded by an Antonio Gala Foundation grant to write Cuando fuimos los mejores (When We Were the Greatest) in 2007, which was a finalist in the Premio Euskadia de Literatura in 2008. With the help of a scholarship from the Caixa Galicia, she wrote De música ligera (On Light Music) in 2009. Her stage play I don’t like Mondays is being shown in Mexico this year as part of the Muestra Nacional de Teatro de Monterrey.

You can read this story here.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/true-milk-by-aixa-de-la-cruz

I liked this story a lot.  

I hope to post on the second short story originally in Spanish from Best European Fiction 2015 before the month ends.

Mel u

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila Matas

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila Matas (2012, translated by Ann Mclean and Rosalind Harvey, 320 pages)

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila Matas  (Barcelona, Spain, 1948) is about a sixty year old retired owner of a publishing house, a two years sober alcoholic, married with no children and still very much the child of his 85 year old parents.   He is very upset over what he sees as the end of the Gutenberg Era which he thinks the increasing popularity of e books is bringing about.   This is very much a book about a very cultured man who has lived a life centered on books.   He was also an alcoholic for much of his adult life.  He speaks or reads no English but he is very into Irish literature, especially Beckett and Joyce but he talks about John Banville and Colum McCann also.

He always wanted to publish a great masterwork but he never did.  He decided he will go to Dublin and much of the book is devoted to him thinking and talking about this trip.

There are a number of very good book blog posts on this work which a book blog search will find. Everyone declares it a great work.    I wanted to really like this book but I found I was at best OK with it.  Here are my reasons, which are to a good extent exterior to the merit of the book.  I do not especially like novels, short stories, movies or TV shows about alcoholics or drug users.   This is a personal prejudice and I acknowledge it as such but I was bored listening to the narrator talk and think about how much he wished he could have a drink.  Also I think, and it is an often expressed view, that saying the growth of E-Readers is somehow a terrible thing that will lead to the ending of reading or is the start of a new dark age is one of the dumbest phoniest silliest debates around and the narrator seems to think it is going to happen because of e-books.  This made me see him as a self serving person with no real love for literature.

I enjoyed parts of this book but I do not endorse purchasing of it.  I know there are those who will think I am totally off in my remarks or cannot see pass my prejudices about drinkers and drug users and that it OK. I felt like telling the narrator, OK let me buy you a shot of Jameson at Temple Bar and then you can go look in some of the book stores on Grofton Street and then you can look at the hundreds and hundreds of ways E-readers and tablets are enriching the reading world when you sober up in the morning, and Oh yes your wife called and wants to be sure you are not drinking again.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605 and 1615, 940 pages, translated by Edith Grossman, 2002)



Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547 to 1616) is the most influential novel ever written.   Harold Bloom in his introduction says it is the greatest novel ever written.  I have never read a book I enjoyed more than this or one that moved me more deeply.    On the covers of the paperback edition there are quotes from great writers of the modern era like Mann and Nabokov suggesting all novels since DQ was published are its descendants.

When I started The Reading Life in July 2009 I planned to make it mainly about literary works that focus on the lives of people who lead reading, in part at least, centered lives.  I had a list of fifty books in mind.  I got distracted and the rest is history but  with Don Quixote I am happy to return to my origins.   There is no better novel about the reading life than this one and there just might not be a better one period.

The "big question" is what does the quest of  Don Quixote mean?    Everyone will have their own answer but it is a question that cannot be avoided by anyone with a real interest in world culture or the history of the novel.      It is one of the cornerstones of world culture, not just the Spanish speaking world.  

I am having a hard time articulating why I love this book so much.     To be interested in the novel and not reading Don Quixote is pretty much like being interested in English drama and never having read Shakespeare.   (He and Cervantes both died on the same day.)

To me there is something profoundly amazing about reading a book started in prison more than four centuries ago and seeing it relate directly to your own life.   When I told my wife I was reading a famous book about a man driven crazy by reading too much it was all she could do not to say, "Oh, just like you".

To my readers, I would say read DQ as young as you can so you can read it over and over as you age and advance in your reading.  

There is magic in this book, powerful old magic and magic as new as it comes.  

I will restrain from saying the first modern novel, is the best one ever written but it is for sure the most influential one.   It is also just great fun to read.    Some people do not like the numerous stories within a story Cervantes uses, Clifton Fadiman, who listed the book in his A Lifetime Reading Plan, says to skip these stories.  OK some are a bit longish but do not skip them.  

I do not know if Grossman's translation is a good one, the experts say it is a great, but I know the prose in this work is marvelous.   I also like her footnotes, they are at the bottom on the page and give us just the information you need.  DQ is also a great account of Spain in the early 1600s.    I read a bit of another new translation (in the edition by John Rutherford from Penguin Books) and it felt musty and that is one of the very last words I would use to describe the book.   I disliked that translation so much (somehow I ended up with two different translations on my book shelves for the last several years) that I left it in a public place with a note saying "free book".  I will keep the Grossman translation forever.  

I will say I prefer as a general rule reading on my IPAD to reading books but in the case of Don Quixote I am glad to have read it in book format and I like seeing it on the shelves.  I hope to read it again a year from now.  

Do not let any notions of not letting "the canon" being crammed down your reading throat keep you   from experiencing this book.    I could see it being read 1000 years from now in other galaxies as the best of the human race's literature.This is not a staid, boring literature majors only book.  It is not a "hard book".  

Ok enough ranting.  I love this book and I hope you will try it.      One of many the wonderful things about  DQ is how the conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho change them.  

Please share your experience with Don Quixote with us.  If you do not want to read it, tell us why.  

Mel u