There were also the legendary but altogether real nocturnal attacks by large packs of wild dogs - some rewarding César Aira completism

Why have I been reading the 1995 Rizzoli coffee table book Argentina: The Great Estancias?  “Estancias” are estates, enormous cattle and sheep ranches, many of which have central houses – mansions – palaces – of great architectural and historic interest, given any interest in Argentinean ranches.

Edited by Juan Pablo Queiroz and Tomás de Elia, photos by the latter, text by César Aira.  There we go!  Aira was at this point a know writer in Argentina, unknown elsewhere, author of a mere twenty books.  This book is a professional gig, and I now think also a favor for friends.  This bit that I am writing is perhaps of narrow interest, to Airaists and fans of, I guess, Argentinean ranch architecture, but it is also a tribute to the pleasures of completism.

Aira is a conceptual artist and a surrealist.  His best quality, as far as I am concerned, is his inventiveness, his screwy surprises.  In The Great Estancias he is on his best behavior, which is unfortunate, but once in a while there is a reward:

There were also the legendary but altogether real nocturnal attacks by large packs of wild dogs.  (185)

Or:

In one of the old buildings, known as la casa de los huesos (the house of bones) Natalie Goodall maintains a collection of skeletons of dolphins, porpoises, and seals.  (200)

Those sound like Aira sentences.

Aira is also suspiciously attentive to visiting writers and to libraries:

That’s at the San Miguel estancia in the Córdoba province. 

Even with the ladder, those highest shelves, how?

This book was quite helpful in filling in the background of Aira’s subset of historical pampas novels, Ema the Captive (1981), The Hare (1991), and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000).  The protagonist of the latter, the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, is discussed on p. 50 – not that this is five years before the novel is written – and the book includes a Rugendas drawing that will be specifically parodied in Aira’s novel.

So I learned a lot about Argentinean ranch houses, which are frankly pretty interesting, and I learned some things about Aira and his art, which is why I sought out the book.

Aira recommends a book himself:

Lucas Bridges recounted the story of his father, Harberton [the estancia], and Viamonte in The Uttermost Part of the Earth, a beautiful book published in 1948 and reprinted many times.  (198)

This is Harberton, with the whale tooth arch, on Tierra del Fuego.  I of course immediately requested the book from the library.

The joys of completism.  I recommend the book to all amateur Airaists.  I was inspired to finally pin down Argentina: The Great Estancias because of the recent Mookse podcast on Aira.  I have not heard the show but I will eagerly read the transcript as soon as it is available.  For some reason Mookse omits this book, and one other, from a list of Aira books available in English.

The pampas Utopia -there was always something more to unfold - via César Aira and the current Booker Prize - And pinot noir to boot

Argentinean Doom begins when Argentinean literature begins, with The Gaucho Martín Fierro, “the 1872 epic gaucho poem by José Hernández,” “the root of Argentine literature.”  I’m quoting myself, why not.  The title cowboy takes a beating from the world until, finally, he “Martín takes a drink, smashes his guitar, steals some horses, and disappears across the frontier.”  Quoting myself again.

One of the current Booker Prize nominees, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron (2017), spins its title character out of Martín Fierro.  China Iron is Fierro’s wife, barely mentioned, a commodity with a name that demands its own story.  Cabezón Cámara describes the germ of the book:

I was in Berkeley, California, loving the sun, the clear skies, the trees, having the ocean and the sierras close by. And pinot noir to boot…  And I started writing with an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

That sounds, I won’t kid myself, great.  Not necessarily the resulting novel, which I have not read, but the model for living.  Ain’t much doom there.  The novel sounds like it is, if anything, a direct counter to her literature’s Doom.  The author is going to rescue her character from Doom.

Claire at Word by Word calls the story “a heroine’s journey from dystopia to utopia,” moving from the pampas to a fort (the frontier), and ending among the Argentinean Indians “where even the air feels easier to breathe.” I am turning back to the interview with the author:

I wanted to write an elegy to the flora and fauna of Argentina, or whatever is left of it, an elegy to what used to be here before it all got transformed into one big grim factory poisoned with pesticides. I wanted to write a novel infused with light.

The weird thing, reading Claire’s review, was that I felt I had just read this book, except it was César Aira’s Ema, the Captive (1981, tr. Chris Andrews), his second novel, in which the prisoner Ema emerges from a brutal journey across the pampas (to a fort) to eventually be captured by or escape to the Indians who live in a utopia based on raising pheasants and printing fiat currency (that Arlt novel also has a money-printing theme, a deep concern for Argentineans).  Here is how western Argentina looks on a map:

Beautiful miniatures stood in for absent inscriptions: the capital with its palaces and bridges, villages in remote clearings, and even the fort in Pringles and the settlement, where Ema was able to recognize the hut in which she had lived.

One of the maps, her favorite, was devoted to the pheasants.  Meticulous drawings represented each of the breeds.  (164)

The novel is full of animals, many of them like the pheasants dubiously Argentinean, but what do I know:

Above all, there were the grotesque dragonflies with their bulging eyes, which could be popped out with a little squeeze to lie in the palm of the hand like two tiny red balls.  They also saw a curious insect, a kind of mantis, which the gauchos called a tata-dios.  It was as big as a dove, and had so many joints that its definitive form remained elusive: there was always something more to unfold. (35)

Ema is early Aira, from when, as he writes in his fiftieth-birthday essay (Birthday, 2001, tr. ditto), “I used to write with the sole aim of producing work of high quality: good novels, better than others, etc.” (57).  Its plot and characters have a kind of novelistic coherence that he would later abandon, but the Argentina represented, as history and landscape, becomes more fantastic as the novel progresses until it has wandered into a true Utopia, Nowhere.  I assume, given the date, that Aira is engaged in a parody of so-called magical realism, perhaps pushing it back to its origins in Surrealism as detailed in Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Lost Steps (1953).  He pushes pretty far.  Early in the book, a French officer imagines writing a novel on anti-Airan principles:

… a novel could be written about those changes of color in the sky and the transformations of the clouds between say, six and eight, so long as the author confined himself to the most rigorous realism.  The resulting novel, a report on atmospheric colors, shifts, and flows, would be the apotheosis of life’s futility.  Why not?  (17-8)

Ema, the Captive is not that book.  Nor, by the sound of it, is The Adventures of China Iron.  Are there more of these books in Argentinean literature?  They are so strangely close, like “jolly historical pampas travesty” is an established genre.  I hope it is.

Translation as amateurism - Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers - a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror

Caravana de Recuerdos is for some reason encouraging people to read some literature from Argentina this year – a “full year of “’the strain of doom’” that characterizes so much Argentinean literature from its beginnings.  What, now, who needs it, you might say, loudly.

Regardless, I took a run at doomy Roberto Arlt’s The Flamethrowers (1931), not really a novel on its own but rather part two of the perfectly titled Seven Madmen (1929).  A bunch of anarchists, nihilists, and lunatic gangsters jitterbug around Buenos Aires as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government by means of poison gas, funded by and manufactured at a chain of brothels.  This plan somehow does not work, and the first part of the novel jerks to a halt with the shattering of the conspiracy.  Someone is murdered, maybe?  I find crazy stories hard to remember.

Seven Madmen is available in two good, professional translations, but for some reason no one published The Flamethrowers until 2017, when the tiny, deconstructionist River Boat Books released it.  The translator is either Larry Riley, who learned Spanish solely in order to read and then translate this book, or is possibly the oddball novelist Rick Harsch under a complexly-maintained pseudonym.  Please see Steve Holt on Twitter for the plausible evidence.  “Riley’s” translation is amateurish in both the better and worse ways.

The Astrologer’s hands remained in the pockets of his shirt.  He listened to Hipólita contemptuously scrutinizing her with a grimace that left his eyelids half closed, so as to filter through his eyes the possible intentions of his visitor. (22, the second page if you want to check the Spanish)

Some of the prose, especially in its more functional mode, has this kind of strain in the English, an awkwardness that a professional translator would relax.  Where exactly do the adverbs go in the sentence; “shirt pockets,” or just “pockets”; drop “so as”; do something with “filter through his eyes,” something.  The tone ought to be more informal.

Having said that, the entire novel, in conception, characters, incidents, meaning, and of course prose, is completely insane, written by the eighth madman.  The novel had better have some awkwardness, some pieces that just ain’t right, where there is no way to know who is to blame, the translator, the author, or the metaphysics.

Sometimes “Riley” gets the voice right, especially in sections that are more interior or extreme, like “The Death Agony of the Melancholy Ruffian” or “The Curtain of Anguish,” a piece of tormented late-night mad scientist existentialism:

The voice shrank and retracted.  Erdosain felt that it was searching for a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror.  It filled up his belly as if it wanted to make him explode.  And Erdosain’s body vibrated as if it had been placed upon a chassis supporting a supercharged motor.  (75)

Elegance and efficiency are beside the point in scenes like this.  And these are the best parts of the novel, easily, the important parts.

The good side of amateurism is that the translation is an act of love, and I am glad to have it.  I finally know how the dang story ends (in a bloodbath, as I could have guessed).  And parts of the translation are pretty good.  Someday someone will do a better one, but now I have this one.

I once thought that blogs and the like would lead to a lot more amateur translation.  On this very website there is a short piece by César Aira that as far as I know has still not been translated anywhere else.  My Spanish is a lot worse than “Larry Riley’s.”  Let’s get it all out there, then fix it up.

Whether he had meant it as a joke - Aira's "Cecil Taylor" - She is not a story.

I doubt I was the only one who did this.  Roberto Bolaño had called César Aira’s “Cecil Taylor” (1987, I think) “one of the five best stories I can remember,” so even though it was not available in English I had to see for myself even if I could not exactly read it.  What I wanted to know was if the story was actually about Cecil Taylor, the thorny jazz pianist, one of the inventors of free jazz – he broke free from chords – and one of the few surviving giants of the 1950s.  One of two, I am afraid, along with Sonny Rollins.

Yes, the story is in fact about Cecil Taylor and his struggles early in his career not to be understood but just to be heard.  César Aira has now published something like ninety little books, sometimes producing three or four a year, but in 1988, well, I suspect there is some strong identification of the author with his subject.

His experience at Cooper Union was even less gratifying.  They used a blackout as a pretext to stop him halfway through; there was vigorous booing, and from what he heard later, his performance left the audience wondering about the limits of music, and whether he had meant it as a joke.  (349)

“Cecil Taylor,” now available in English via Chris Andrews in The Musical Brain and right here, was at that time only accessible in a 1992 collection called Buenos Aires: una antología de nueva ficción argentina (which someone should translate in its entirety).  Each story in the anthology was preceded by a new preface from the author.  How I wrote it; how I thought it up.  Aira prefaced “Cecil Taylor” with this (not in The Musical Brain):

On CECIL TAYLOR

The genie, outside of the bottle, tall like a twenty-story building, briefly instructed the young man:

“You will have in your life a beautiful woman who you will have at your whim.”

“Beautiful?”

“More than you can imagine.  And helpless, without resources or friends.”

“For me?”

“For you alone.  She will be yours.  But there is a condition,” advised the genie with severity, “Do not think for an instant that she is an example or a metaphor for some other thing.  She is reality.  She is happening right now.  She is not a story.”   (my translation)

The nature of personal pronouns in Spanish tempts me to translate the last sentence as the Diderot-like “It is not a story.”  A Musical Brain features several genies; Taylor is himself described as a genie:

His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little genie’s suspended dwellings, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under the shade of a droplet-laden spiderweb.  (346, tr. Andrews)

I know too little about the actual Taylor’s biography to know much about what in “Cecil Taylor” is fact and what is plausible guesswork, but this bit, I assume, is taken from life.

Here you can see Aira meet Taylor earlier this year, when Aira was in New York to promote The Musical Brain.

To hear Taylor, please sample anything from Cecil Taylor in Berlin ’88, which is what Taylor was doing when the story was written, not what he was doing in 1956.  His early innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed that Jazz Advance (1956) or, even better, The World of Cecil Taylor (1960) now just sound like jazz.

A conventional musician, [Taylor] thought, is always dealing with music in its most general form, as if leaving the particular for later, waiting for the right moment.  And they did pay [Taylor]: twenty dollars, on the condition that he would never show his face there again.  (351, Andrews).

That is how Aira’s non-story ends, but In Berlin ’88 and The Musical Brain tell me what happened when these artists kept showing their faces, again and again.

Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! - César Aira embarks on the great avant-garde adventure

In one of the mad scientist stories, Leopoldo Lugones explicitly invokes Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” Poe's greatest psychological insight:

The demon of scientific inquiry, which is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit of perversity, impelled me, nevertheless, to resume my experiments. (Strange Forces, “Yzur”)

I take this as a self-description, and also as a description of his countryman, future Nobel anti-Prize winner César Aira.

Surrealism is so beautiful!  It changes everything!  (“The Infinite,” 1993, p. 226)

As if Aira’s own fiction did not contain enough self-description.  That one is about a young Aira and a friend inventing a game in which the goal is to say a number larger than the previous number, children demonstrating a philosophical exercise about representation.

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples.  I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.  (235)

My knock on Aira is that however inventive the surface variation he is always writing the same story, but perversely The Musical Brain (2015), a collection of short stories, mostly variations on the same handful of ideas, is the perfect introduction to Aira.  When surveying Aira, it helps to be able to triangulate, or at least it is easier to see Aira mention again and again, in story after story, the “fact” “that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times” (“A Brick Wall,” 2011, 18) or to wonder about the surprising number of genies.

My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs [Aira means film narrative].  It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality.  Everything was a clue, a lead.  Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories.  Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance.  (“A Brick Wall,” 7)

The movies “seemed like a super-reality.”  Sometimes I wondered is Aira was being too bald, but can I blame him if once in a while he wants someone to understand him, or, speaking for myself, pretend to understand him, since it is more than likely that I have been distracted by the savory red herrings, so good on toast.

From outside, it [contemporary art] might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest.  But when one entered the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else.  It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing.  (“The Two Men,” 2007, 272)

Aira was the impetus for and center of a week of writing about conceptual art I did a couple of years ago.  In a 2013 essay in The White Review that is only superficially distinct from a couple of the stories in The Musical Brain, Aira describes the avant-garde, his avant-garde, as “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture,” to “restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.”

We were embarking on the great avant-garde adventure.  (“Athena Magazine,” 2007, 38)

The result is, as in this story and often in so-called real life, not the creation of the thing itself, in this case a magazine, but the perfect idea of a magazine, which for Aira almost counts as a success.  Not quite, though.  Tomorrow, “Cecil Taylor.”

Even apart from this last outburst of drivel - Leopoldo Lugones invents the Argentine Literature of Doom

When I came across Roberto Bolaño calling Argentine literature a “literature of doom,” I took it in part as a joke or as a way to emphasize the place of some specific Argentine writers like the prankster César Aira, at the time almost untranslated but now universally beloved, and the “excruciating” Osvaldo Lamborghini, still untranslated because, I assume, all decent English-language translators refuse to have anything to do with him.

But no, the more I have read in the literature, the more I have seen that Bolaño’s joke was of the “funny because true” variety.  Argentina has the most doom-laden, apocalyptic canon.  Esteban Echeverría’s “The Slaughterhouse” (1838/1871), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), and José Hernández’s The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) all find themselves foundering in doom before they end.  And the tradition continues in Roberto Arlt, J. Rodolfo Wilcock, and Aira.  Much less so in Borges.

Thus the annual Argentinean Literature of Doom hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos, a connoisseur of literary doom.

This year I have finally read Leopoldo Lugones, specifically his Poe-like collection Strange Forces (1906), which I have been meaning to read in its Gilbert Alter-Gilbert translation since coming across, years ago, an enticing post at 50 Watts (and please see this interview with Alter-Gilbert).  Lugones is the key figure in Argentine Doom because he was the first writer to really see it, to pull the texts I mention above together as the central works of Argentine literature.  This was all long before he became a fascist and killed himself over a love affair.

He could see the strain of apocalypse because he shared it.  Strange Forces begins with the destruction of Gomorrah (“The Firestorm”) and ends with a scientist in an insane asylum.  If I am counting right, fully six of the twelve stories are about mad scientists, most of whom destroy themselves in their attempts to convert music into light, like Scriabin, or teach a chimpanzee to talk, or build a disintegration ray.  “What this extraordinary gardener wanted to create was a flower of death” (“Viola Acherontia”).

I guess it is an symptom of Doom – what other literature has such a high proportion of mad scientists?  They feature in Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that justifies its title, and Aira’s The Literary Conference (1997), just to pick a single example. J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts (1977) appears to contain an entire catalogue of mad scientists, making the mere six of Lugones look measly.

“I bought the ape at an auction of property from a bankrupt circus” (“Yzur”) – now that is a good first line.  The story cannot quite live up to it; none of Lugones’s scientific romances really do.  “[T]he resolution of any debate which the telling of this story may occasion will not rely, for its sole support, on my proficiency in the scientific arena” (“Psychon”), but in an all too authentically Poe-like gesture they mostly have too much science, too much scientistic gibberish.  “Even apart from this last outburst of drivel, the unbalanced personality of my interlocutor was evident to me…” (“Viola Acherontia”).  Lugones is in on the joke, although Alter-Gilbert argues that there is an esoteric side to the stories that the author meant entirely seriously.  All of that is invisible to me.

And anyways the six stories not about mad scientists are better, and less Poe-derivative, so who cares.  Tomorrow for those.

As many times as I’ve been able to, I’ve avoided looking at corpses - Horacio Quiroga looks at corpses

Lugones had a stove, which was extremely comforting to my winter debility.  We sat down once again and continued our pleasant chat concerning the insane.  (“The Pursued,” Decapitated Chicken, 25)

This is an example of Horacio Quiroga as a descendant of Poe.  Leopoldo Lugones was another Doomed Argentinean writer with a strong streak of Poe.  Maybe Quiroga was not influenced by Poe, but rather Lugones; how would I know.  Anyway, this is the kind of thing Quiroga eventually abandoned.

He never gives up on stories about how people die.  The two collections I read have examples from across his career.  In “Drifting,” a man is bit by a venomous snake.  He heroically tries to reach a doctor, but fails.  He is on the Paraná River, omnipresent in Quiroga, paddling:

The sky to the west opened into a golden screen, and the river, too, took on color.  A dusky freshness spilled from the mountain on the Paraguayan shore – in shadows now – a penetrating aroma of orange blossom and woodsy sweetness.  High overhead a pair of macaws glided silently toward Paraguay.  (DC, 72)

I believe those lines describe the moment the snake’s toxins reach the man’s brain.

“The Dead Man” has tripped and impaled himself on his machete.  He spends four pages dying:

What a nightmare!  But, of course, it’s just one of many days, ordinary as any other!  Excessive light, yellowish shadows, oven-still heat that raises sweat on the motionless horse next to the forbidden banana grove.  (DC, 124-5)

I remembered these kinds of stories as intensely concentrated on the dying man, but I note that this one occasionally shifts to the point of view of the horse, who watches the man die.  For the horse, there is a happy ending – she gets a banana.

The vision on the river suggests some sort of transcendence with death, a common idea in Quiroga’s earlier stories.  “The Dead Man” is more typical of later stories – “just one of many days.”  Meaning is found in life.  In “The Darkroom,” the narrator has photographed a corpse at a funeral.  After developing the photo (“the two of us alone in profoundly concentrated darkness”) he emerges into the dawn.

A few steps away were banana plants laden with flowers, and drops were falling to earth from their huge leaves heavy with moisture.  Farther away, a cross the bridge, the sunburned manioc was standing erect at last, now pearly with dew.  Still farther off, in the valley that went down to the river, a dim have enveloped the yerba plantation, and rose above the woods to mingle there below with the dense vapors that ascended from the tepid Paraná.

All this was very familiar to me, for it made up my real life.  And I walked here and there waiting calmly for daylight, so as to begin that life again.  (Exiles, 132)

Horacio Quiroga’s house in Misiones is now a museum.  Perhaps someday I will go see that scene for myself.  Earlier in the same story, the narrator says “As many times as I’ve been able to, I’ve avoided looking at corpses” (129), an amusing irony from the author of these corpse-filled stories.  Look, they say; look.

Too gruesome - Hiracio Quiroga and Uruguayan Doom

The Argentinean Literature of Doom, 2014 edition, is in progress at Caravana de recuerdas.  Richard has included Uruguayan literature, too, this year, because it seems Uruguayan literature is comparably Doom-laden.  I tried a couple of short story collections by Uruguayan Hiracio Quiroga, who must be one of the Doomiest authors of all time, and that is just in his fiction.  The number of violent deaths in his actual life is nightmarish.

Quiroga settled and worked in the Misiones district of Argentina, right across the Paraná River from Paraguay and also bordering Brazil and Uruguay.  It was a frontier forest region, wild and dangerous.  Every story I read was set in Misiones, bar one, which was in a similar area just a bit north.  Quiroga was a dedicated regionalist.  In some of his early stories, Quiroga shows the clear marks of Edgar Allan Poe, who he presumably read in Baudelaire’s French version, but he shed that influence and became something more original.  He reminded me quite a bit of Jack London, actually, with the Misiones forests in place of the Yukon.  Jack London with more snakes.  Way, way, way more snakes.

The two short books I read, which I believe covers most of Quiroga in English, were The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (pub. 1976, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden) and The Exiles and Other Stories (1987, tr. J. David Danielson), both published by University of Texas Press.  They include stories from a variety of Spanish-language collections, dates ranging from 1907 to 1935.

The volumes, curiously, although I assume by design, create two Quirogas.  The Decapitated Chicken has Quiroga the horror writer.  The title story – eh, I don’t even want to describe it.  By the end I was thinking, why would you even write this?  It is in the tradition of Heinrich von Kleist, of “The Earthquake in  Chile” (1807) but in particular a horrible Kleist shocker that was published by some mistake as “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” in the first (1812) edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales but was omitted in later editions because it was “too gruesome” (see note to the story in the Jack Zipes Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm).

Now no one knows what I am talking about.  “Too gruesome” describes many Quiroga stories.

The other Quiroga, the one in The Exiles and Other Stories, write about work.  Look at the titles: “The Contract Laborers,” “The Log-Fisherman,” “The Charcoal-Makers,” “A Workingman,” “The Orange-Distillers.”  Most of the rest are about labor, too, brutal, unforgiving labor, labor that kills.  There is as much death in this volume as in the other.  Maybe this is the horror volume.  Just try the scene in “Beasts in Collusion” where the two workers, one a peon, one skilled, are openly tortured (ants, etc.) by their monstrous boss, or for that matter the scene where with the help of a semi-tame puma – the one beast in the story who is not human – they get their revenge.

Quiroga makes fine Halloween reading.

I guess I need to write one more post with quotations and examples and so on, picked from stories that are not too gruesome.  I pulled the “literature of doom” line from an essay about Argentinean literature by Roberto Bolaño, and I originally assumed he was having his obscure joke, but no, it’s true, it’s true.  The more I get to know the region and its writers, the more I find it to be the most violent and strangest literary tradition I have ever seen.

How do you think it’s going? In Chile! And on foot! - Sarmiento's anatomy of the gaucho

I am leafing through Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1972, Twayne Publishers) by Frances G. Crowley, looking for curiosities and insights.  How about this one, in the chapter specifically about Facundo:

The work itself ran several installments in El Progreso from May 2 to July 28, 1945.  The purpose was not literary, but political.  For this reason, Manuel Gálvez has chosen to consider Facundo an historical novel.  (61)

To repeat: it is not literary, and therefore a novel.  He goes farther, “consider[ing] it comparable to Balzac’s Human Comedy” (75), which is superbly crackpot.  Gálvez seems to deserve an entry in the real-life version of Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (his “hero worship of Rosas led him to pen a series of five novels set during his rule” says Sr. Wikipedia – talk about the literature of doom!), so I should be wary of his opinion.

If Facundo is a novel, it is a mess, but it has other literary virtues.  Sarmiento has a knack for types.  If I am skeptical of his insistence that the types define the Argentinean national character, I still admire his eye for detail and anecdote.

The Rastreador is the tracker extraordinaire; the Cantor is the wandering troubadour, “singing of his heroes of the Pampas pursued by the law” (70); the Baqueano knows every inch of his section of the Pampas:

[I]f he finds himself in the Pampas and the darkness is impenetrable, then he pulls up grass from different spots, smells the roots and the soil, chews them, and after repeating this procedure various times confirms the proximity of some lake, or fresh or saltwater stream, and goes to look for it so as to firmly orient himself.  General Rosas, they say, knows by its taste the grass of every estancia [ranch, roughly] in southern Buenos Aires province.  (67)

Perhaps.  Possibly.  At the bottom, or at the top, is the bad gaucho, “this epithet not totally disfavoring him…  He dwells in the Pampas, fields of thistle for his lodging, living on partridges and armadillos” (68).  He is an expert with the horse and the knife, both in constant use.  Although every gaucho depends on his horsemanship:

In 1841, El Chacho, a caudillo of the plains, emigrated to Chile.  “How’s it going, friend?” someone asked him.  “How do you think it’s going?” he answered, with a pained melancholy tone.  “In Chile! And on foot!”  (73)

The central story of the book, the history of the strongman Facundo, is the story of the bad gaucho who makes it big, who is better with his knife, stronger, meaner, who is the perfect Argentinean barbarian.

Any serious reader of Latin American fiction should vaguely considering someday reading, or at borrowing from the library with the intent to read it, Sarmiento’s Facundo.  It dispels some shadows from Argentinean literature.  Even less serious readers should take a look at the first two or three chapters.  I think all of the stuff César Aira steals from Facundo in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000) is in the first chapter.

More Facundo is forthcoming soon at La Caravana de Recuerdos.

If the reader is bored by these thoughts, I will tell him about some frightful crimes - some early Argentinean literary doom

Roberto Bolaño called the Argentinean literary tradition “the literature of doom,” and he was of course joking, but it is true, it is so strangely true.  I have never seen anything like it.  Bolaño was writing about twentieth century books, but in fact the founding texts are doom-laden, too:  Esteban Echeverría’s short story “The Slaughter House” (1838, pub. 1871) is a violent, nightmarish allegorical protest against the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas; José Hernández’s epic poem The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) is a violent, nightmarish protest against the destruction of gauchos and gaucho culture; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) is a violent, angry sociological treatise and political biography of the gaucho strongman Rosas (another gaucho strongman) defeated to become dictator.

Just to get the irony out of the way:  Sarmiento was later elected President of Argentina (1868-1874.  A democratic reformer and champion of public education, he was as responsible as any single person for the destruction of the gaucho way of life that he defined in Facundo, and is thus in the great enemy of Hernández and his outlawed gaucho Martín Fierro.  Argentinean literature is bloody but coherent.

Sarmiento, in exile in Chile, planned to write an Argentinean version of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  Tocqueville’s book was so packed with insights and ideas that it has become one of the fundamental texts of political science.  Sarmiento in this sense got nowhere near Tocqueville.  The author is too angry; the fate of his country is too personal; his ideas too simple and are easy to summarize:

Argentina is divided between civilization (Buenos Aires and a few outlying cities) and barbarism (the Pampas).  The owners of the gigantic ranches and their workers, the gauchos, are barbarians.  The barbarians, headed by Rosas, have sacked the country and are looting and destroying it.  Once civilization returns, a number of boring reforms will need to be made.

A confusing innovation of Sarmiento’s is that although the dictator Rosas is the current enemy, his book is mostly the biography of another charismatic gaucho leader, Juan Facundo Quiroga, who conquered a large chunk of western Argentina before his violent death.  Facundo is emblematic because he was the perfect gaucho, expert with horse and knife and rope, but more importantly it is Facundo who was the great innovator of terror, murder, and gangsterism.  It is Facundo who invents the modern dictator, who unlike the bad king rules without tradition but just by personality and force.  Rosas merely copies (and adapts and improves upon) Facundo’s innovations.  This, to me, was Facundo’s exemplary sentence:

If the reader is bored by these thoughts, I will tell him about some frightful crimes. (Ch. XI, 170)

And does he ever, over and over again.

I have little clue how Facundo functions as history but it is imaginatively rich – it is the foundation of the Latin American dictator novel, and of the related genre of the civil war novel – I do not know what these are actually called, but I am thinking of books like Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915) or the non-fiction Rebellion in the Backlands (1900) by Euclides de Cunha.  I suppose certain sections of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1968) are now the most famous examples, although by that point we are a long ways into the tradition.

I read the recent translation by Roberto González Echevarría, University of California Press, 2003.

All of this is a kickoff for the Caravanas de Recuerdos Argentinean Literature of Doom readalong adventure!  I figured I would start at the beginning, more or less.  But there are many other, perhaps better, places to join in the fun.

We wanted only to amuse ourselves with him, but he took things too seriously - the beginning of the Argentine Literature of Doom

I am writing later than usual on this Friday evening in order to minimize the number of people reading this post at work.  “El matadero (The Slaughter House)” (written circa 1838, published 1871), the famous short story by the Argentine writer and politician Esteban Echeverría, is not safe for work.  Or play, for that matter.  It’s grisly.

We are in Buenos Aires during Lent.  A flood has prevented cattle from reaching the slaughterhouse.  No one should be eating beef during Lent except those with special dispensation for their health, but that seems to cover everyone.  A “sort of intestinal war between stomachs and consciences began.”  The stomachs are likely to win; among other things “there existed a state of intestinal flatulence in the population, brought on by fish and beans and other somewhat indigestible fare.”

I will pause to consider all the other fiction written in 1838, or published in 1871, containing such a sentence.  That did not take long.

Once cattle arrive at the slaughter house, the real action of the story, nine of its thirteen pages, can begin.  First forty-nine steers are dismembered, to great celebration and scavenging.  Maybe this would be a good place not to include a quotation.  The fiftieth and final animal is, by accident, a bull, who takes three pages to subdue.  A child is accidentally killed in a vivid and repulsive passage.

Now the butchers are worked up.  What horrors will they commit in the final four pages?  It helps at this point to know that the story was written as a protest against a specific dictator.  A civilian wanders by, an opponent of the regime, identifiable by his dress and beard and English saddle.  He is abducted, bullied, and murdered, although he may have willed himself to death to avoid torture:

“Poor devil, we wanted only to amuse ourselves with him, but he took things too seriously,” exclaimed the Judge, scowling tiger-like.

I should give some sort of sample of the writing.  The description of the bull is good: “snorting, casting reddish phosphorescent glances right and left.”  The bull is always on fire somehow.  It has escaped the slaughter house and nearly collided with a group of women:

It is said that one of the women voided herself on the spot, that another prayed ten Hail Mary’s in a few seconds, and that two others promised San Benito never to return to the damned corrals and to quit offal-collecting forever and anon.  However, it is not known whether they kept their promises.

Echeverría’s story stands at the beginning of Argentina’s Literature of Doom.  César Aira seems less peculiar measured against this particular forebear.  Those Latin American specialties, the brutal dictator novel like the recently translated Tyrant Banderas (1926) by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, or the bloody civil war novel like Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915), seem like logical outgrowths of “The Slaughter House.”   But I suppose it is the reverse that is true, that the later turmoil of Latin American history made Echeverría look like a literary prophet.

I read “The Slaughter House” in the valuable Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997), tr. Angel Flores.

They had no choice: it was, after all, that or nothing - Juan José Saer’s The Witness, a novel found on many lists

I am tempted to write more about book lists, but will restrain myself, by which I mean, save it for later, and try to write something about an actual book I recently read, Juan José Saer’s The Witness (1983), one more example of the Argentinean Literature of Doom.  The novel is, it turns out, one of the 1,001 Books I Must Read before I Die, and I am thus almost 0.1% more reconciled to my death.  I will bet you that I picked the book off of a different list, a critics’ poll of The 100 Best Novels in Spanish Language, 1981-2006, in which The Witness is #12.

A 16th century Spanish cabin boy is captured by Amazonian cannibals.  He lives with them for ten years.  The novel is his account, written many decades later, of his time with these people.  So on the surface it appears to be a historical novel that nods at Robinson Crusoe, or is perhaps a revisionist history of the conquest of the Americas.  It is not, not really.

Saer’s book is a full-fledged novel of ideas, sub-category: linguistic and anthropological.  The author makes no attempt to mimic the language or mindset of an early modern writer.  The historical details are minimal, and not the result of hours in the library.  Or not in the history section – I would guess that Saer ground through a shelf or two of ethnography and linguistics, plus an additional stack of Claude Lévi-Strauss.  If I knew what was in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), I could say that I found it in The Witness, but in fact I am just guessing.

What Saer needed from the 16th century Amazon was cannibals, so he set the story where he could find them.  He needed a society that was recognizably alien, so he could give it a special problem:

Their principal problem was the outer world.  They could not, as they might have wished, see themselves from outside. (128)

One way the narrator serves as the witness of the title* is that he helps the Indians see themselves from outside.   He helps them confirm their own existence:

There is no equivalent in their language for ‘to be’.  The closest equivalent they have means ‘to seem’…  [‘Seems’] implies an objection rather than a comparison. (130)

Saer uses this novel to explore a people and society with a epistemological problem: a radical uncertainty about their own existence, and the constant threat, with one mistake, of non-existence:

Even if it was unrewarding, they constantly worked at making that one known world real.  They had no choice: it was, after all, that or nothing.  (132)

My quotations have all been from the end of the short book.  Near the beginning is a single long scene, about a fifth of the novel, of a wild orgy that moves from roasted human flesh to alcohol to sex, all in large, life-threatening quantities, a society-wide Rimbaud-like derangement of the senses.  This strange and horrifying event is the narrator’s introduction to these people; the rest of the book is his attempt to make sense of it, to understand the problem the Indians are trying to solve.

If all of this sounds interesting, it is; if it sounds tedious, yes, a bit; if Saer’s fictional anthropological case study sounds like something other than what fiction does best, I have my doubts, as well.  But I did find the ideas and the path Saer took through them to be quite interesting.

Richard (Caravans de reuerdos) wrote some interesting things about another Saer novel, La Glosa (1986, #75 in the poll, so not as good as The Witness), and here's a Spanish literature student working on The Witness in some productive ways.

Margaret Jull Costa was, inevitably, the translator.

*  The English title, I mean.  Doesn’t El Entenado actually mean The Stepson?

We have to strike straight inland - visionary Martín Fierro

The Gaucho Martín Fierro is a political book, a protest book.  The gaucho narrator is an oppressed minority; his unique way of life is threatened, or already destroyed; his contribution to the nation ignored. 

All of this may feel a little distant to the non-Argentinean reader.  It may well be opposed by a skeptical reader.  In the introduction to the 1974 translation, I am told that the gauchos had “performed a major role in the country’s independence from Spain” (good for them, vivan los gauchos!) and “had cleared the pampas of marauding Indian bands that plagued the pastoral development of the region” (good for - hang on there - vivan los indios!).

The outlaw gaucho Martín Fierro, at the end of his verse novel, flees across the desert to live with the Indians.  If his vision of a life of indolence (“you live lying belly-up / watching the sun go round”) and happiness is a fantasy, he may be right that “We’ll find safety over there / since we can’t have it here.”

Except that his decision is also an acceptance of death.  The canto begins with a section that is the closest thing this earthy poem has to a visionary interlude.  God gave beauty to flowers and birds, and strength to beasts and the wind, but he gave more valuable gifts to men – speech, intelligence, courage – balanced by the hardships from which Martín Fierro now longs to escape:

We have to strike straight inland
towards where the sun goes down –
one day we’ll get there, we’ll
find out where afterwards (2205-2209)

Martín Fierro takes a drink, smashes his guitar, steals some horses, and disappears across the frontier.   Who knows what happened to him, the narrator tells us, but everything you have heard is true, “EVILS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT / BUT NO ONE TOLD BEFORE” (2315-2316, the last lines of the poem, capitalization supplied by the poet).

I have switched here to the plainer, more accurate 1967 translation by C. E. Ward, revised by Frank Carrino and Alberto Carlos.  The latter two also did the “cowboy” version.

The Gaucho Martín Fierro - classic 19th century knife fights

I need to slip across the border for a post or two, from Brazil to Argentina.  JenandthePen thought people should read some books from Argentina; I have made my opinions on that subject clear enough.

This time, rather than mess around with the howling lunatics and unassuming librarians of the 20th century, I went back to the root of Argentine literature, to The Gaucho Martín Fierro, the 1872 epic gaucho poem by José Hernández.

I will confess that I was expecting something – I don’t know – stiff, Longellowish.  Imitative Romantic twaddle.  What fun to discover that Martín Fierro is more of a Western. The English translators go so far as to turn it into a cousin of cowboy poetry.

When brandin’ time came
you got a warm feelin watchin’
all those gauchos ropin’
and throwin’ steers right and left.
ah, what times… there ain’t
ever been nothin’ to match it. (II.217-22)

The translators, I should say, are trying to match “substance and tone” and nothing else:

Cuando llegaban las yerras,
¡cosa que daba calor
tanto gaucho pialador
y tironiador sin yel!
¡Ah tiempos… pero si en él
Se ha visto tanto primor!

The poem is a lament for the lost life of the gaucho, destroyed by military conscription, war and settlement.  Martín Fierro narrates – actually sings – the poem to describe the loss of his home and family, his brutal treatment in the army, and his violent life as an outlaw.

When he rolled up his cuffs
I took off my spurs
since I suspected this guy
warn’t goin’ to be easy to handle.

There is nothin’ like danger
to sober up a drunk;
even your sight clears up,
no matter how much you’ve guzzled. (VII.1199-1206)

As any reader of Borges will guess, someone’s gonna get knifed.  I mean readers of Borges stories not about books, although the existence of Martín Fierro is a reminder that Borges’s stories about gauchos knifing each other are also about books.  Different books.  This book.

I have barely touched the Martín Fierro.  Maybe one more dusty, lonesome, bloody day.

SUNY Press published two editions of the poem.  The 1967 version has facing-page Spanish, extensive notes, and a longer sequel, The Return of Martín Fierro that I did not read.   The 1974 version, source of the English above, is smaller, lighter, and zippier.

Bolaño, Aira, and the Argentinean Literature of Doom

Roberto Bolaño’s contribution to the Spanish issue of The Hudson Review is flattering.  It’s a post I wrote last year, on the extraordinary riches of Argentine literature.  His essay is maybe just a little different than mine, superior in terms of knowledge, skill, breadth, depth, humor, and every other virtue associated with good writing and good criticism, but is otherwise much like what I wrote.

Post-Borges Argentine literature has become, Bolaño claims, “the literature of doom,” a “literary nightmare, literary suicide, a literary dead end.”  That sounds worse than he means – better literary nightmares than real ones.  Bolaño thinks of Roberto Arlt, for example, as a great writer, but here’s his metaphor for Arlt’s anti-novels:

Seen as a closet or a basement Arlt’s work is fine. Seen as the main room of the house, it’s a macabre joke.  Seen as the kitchen, it promises food poisoning.  Seen as the bathroom, it’ll end up giving us scabies.  Seen as the library, it’s the guarantee of the death of literature.

An aside – I would not want to argue that this is the way all literary criticism has to be written.  No, not all of it.

The strain of doom that has only recently wandered into English is that of the mysterious Osvaldo Lamborghini and his disciple César Aira.  Bolaño describes Lamborghini’s novels as “excruciating,” readable only two or three pages at a time, smelling of “blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.”  If someone could report back on this, I would appreciate it.

That is not at all how I, or Bolaño, would describe the compulsively readable Surrealist César Aira, author of dozens of little novel-like objects.  Five have appeared in English, with another coming in June.  I am surprised to discover that I have read four of them, all but The Hare.  Tess Lewis, in The Hudson Review, has put together a fine and useful, if perhaps insufficiently skeptical* overview of Aira-in-English.

I have written elsewhere, briefly, about a single amazing scene from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, easily the best Aira novellino I have read (Bolaño prefers the fluid How I Became a Nun), and also the most conventionally novel-like novel, suggesting that I am an aesthetic reactionary.  I read someone – not Tess Lewis – who claimed that Landscape Painter was Aira’s deliberate parody of the well-crafted Modernist novel.  Could be.

The Literary Conference (2006), Englished last year, is about a mad scientist – “the typical Mad Scientist of the comic books” (18) – who plans to conquer the world with an army of clones led by a clone of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.  The mad scientist is the narrator, and author, César Aira.  Of course he is.  Who else would he be?

Aira writes his fiction under a regime of self-imposed daily serialization.  My understanding is that he can polish and refine his day’s writing, but can never revise an earlier day’s work.  He deliberately inserts impossible, unsolvable situations to stymie his future self, who is stuck with whatever nonsense he had previously written.  His novels are one-man exquisite corpses.  A close canonical equivalent I can think of is The Old Curiosity Shop, a brilliant improvisatory flight, which often descends into Dadaist lunacy.  As Aira (“Aira”) thinks, watching one of his old plays at the literary conference:

What was this all about?  I didn’t recognize it, it was too Dadaist.  Nevertheless, I had written it. (55)

Now I see my attraction to Aira.  It is as if he is me, reading one of my old posts at Wuthering Expectations.

Another aside – if someone would hurry up and translate Aira’s only short story, “Cecil Taylor,” that would be great.  Thanks.**

* Aira, like Bolaño, is a straight-faced prankster; their own claims about their biographies and methods should be taken as artistic creations.

** According to Bolaño, one of the five greatest stories he had ever read.  No idea what the other four were.  According to Aira, “No es un cuento” (“It is not a story,” translation by me).  “Cecil Taylor,” accompanied by a perplexing allegorical introduction, can be found in an anthology titled Buenos Aires (1999, ed. Juan Forn).  Someone should translate the whole book.

Even so, it cannot have been good for his health - I marvel at Argentinean literature

Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy is a short book – 130 pages or so – that packs in a lot of different pieces.  They do not all mesh so well, but they all contribute to the messy energy of the novel.  The tour of Buenos Aires, circa 1910, was as interesting to me as anything else.  The markets, the shops, and the immigrants, all of those immigrants, Italians, mostly, but also Spaniards, Eastern European Jews, Turks, and who knows who else.  The novel is drizzled with Italian and even a bit of Yiddish, as well as Argentinean slang.

Buenos Aires was a rapidly growing city of immigrants.  Some potted facts, which I should probably look up, so don’t trust me: at the end of the 19th century, Argentina had a higher proportion of immigrants than the United States.  The per capita income was close to that of the U.S., too.  It was right around then that a mismanaged financial crisis (which also affected the U.S. and Australia, but less severely) led to the divergence of income that we still see today.  If the economic problems are mentioned in Mad Toy, I missed it.

To an American, by which I mean a norteamericano, by which I mean a yanqui, Argentinean history is unusually interesting.  It parallels the history of my own country in key ways – the immigrants, the frontier, the cowboys, the wars with indigenous people – that help me understand U.S. history better.  I want to learn more about it.

Argentinean literature has become best known for its fabulists and metafictionists – Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and so on – which makes the instrumental use of literature as substitute history or sociology even trickier than usual.  I’ve read a couple of the tiny novels of César Aira – Ghosts (1990) and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000).  The latter is a historical novel, set in the 19th century pampas, featuring a “real” German painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas.  But Aira is a surrealist, so even the apparently accurate map of Argentina that New Directions put in front of Chris Andrews’s 2006 translation of the novel is open to suspicion.

Part of my favorite section of that novel:

The horse began to turn beneath him. It was till turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining. The horse’s mane was standing on end, like the dorsal fin of a swordfish. From that moment on, like all victims of personalized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering, Why did it have to happen to me? The sensation of having electrified blood was horrible but very brief. Evidently the charge flowed out as fast as it had flowed into his body. Even so, it cannot have been good for his health. (32-3)

And then later an Indian pretends to make out with a giant pink salmon (p. 71).

So what I’m saying is, I want someone to organize an Argentinean Reading Challenge Readalong, starting with Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), moving on to the gaucho epic Martín Fierro (1872/1879) of José Hernández, and continuing with Leopold Lugones, Roberto Arlt, and then on to Adolfo Bioy Casares and Fogwill and so on.  There’s an Argentinean writer who just uses his surname, which is “Fogwill.”  Curious thing, Argentinean literature.

So, to whomever sets this up, thanks in advance!

Roaming the city by guess and by God - Robert Arlt and Mad Toy

At the age of fourteen I was initiated into the thrilling literature of outlaws and bandits by an old Andalusian cobbler whose shoe repair shop stood next to a green-and-white-fronted hardware store in the entryway of an ancient house on Rivadavia Street between the corners of South America and Bolivia. (21)

The first sentence of Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy (1926) tells the reader what he’s in for.  It’s got literature, it’s got bandits from serialized adventure novels,, it’s got an immigrant and his work.  Right away, it plunges you right into Buenos Aires – the colors of the stores, the ironically-deployed street names.

And it’s not just the first sentence, but the first paragraph. Mad Toy is like a punchy newspaper column.  Like a serialized novel in four short chapters.

Arlt was a contemporary and pal of Borges.  They were the young lions, tearing up Argentinean literature, disrespecting their elders and betters, running wild in Buenos Aires.  Sounds like fun.  Arlt unfortunately died young, though, age 42.

Mad Toy is an energetic mess, which fits its brilliant, restless teenaged hero.  He wants to be, and could be, a famous thief, or an inventor, or a writer.  He hops from job to job, like Lazarillo de Tormes.  The used book store in the second chapter is particularly hellish (warm thoughts to actual used book store owner Colleen), all abuse and drudgery, completely unrelated to the books that drew him to the job.

The novel bounces from episode to episode and style to style, just as the hero roams the city.  Charles Baudelaire, the great flaneur, is one of the book's presiding spirits.  Here we have an acte gratuit:

Behind those doors was money. The shop owners would be sleeping peacefully in their luxurious bedrooms, and there I was like a dog, roaming the city by guess and by God.

Trembling with hatred, I lit a cigarette and maliciously threw the burning match on a human mass that was curled up asleep in a doorway.  A small flame skimmed along the rags and tatters.  In a trice the wretch was upright, formless as darkness, and threatening me with his enormous fist.  I hit the road.

And then the next paragraph, after a break:

In a secondhand store on Ninth of July Avenue I bought a revolver and loaded it with five bullets, then caught a streetcar and headed for the docks. (110)

Is this a Cain or Hammett novel?  This is only one mode of Mad Toy, though.  The novel is a picaresque, a noir, a portrait of the young artist.  It’s hardly a tightly wound perfect work of art, but it’s good enough that I want to read the other Arlt novel that has wandered into English.

Translations by Michelle McKay Aynesworth, 2002, Duke University Press.

The soft, quiet night was spreading its peaceful influence everywhere - the surprisingly sweet The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas

The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (1910) is not well described by its title. Almost none of the gauchos in Alberto Gerchunoff's collection of stories are Jews; almost none of the Jews are gauchos. I mean, there are a few Jewish gauchos. I guess most books don't have any, so I shouldn't complain.

Gerchunoff's family had moved from a Russian shtetl to Argentina when he was twelve or so. His book consists of sketches, written for a newspaper, describing life in the new Jewish immigrant community. It all makes for an interesting book, although I should say up front that this is not a lost classic.

The clash between the Jewish settlers and the incomprehensible honor culture of the gauchos provides the conflict for several of the best, or, at least, most dramatic stories. In "The Death of Reb Saul," a Jewish farmer is murdered by his Argentinean farmhand (who knows full well that the crime makes him an outlaw) because of a slight over how to properly yoke an ox. Neither the other Jews, nor the reader, have any hope of understanding what happened. The gaucho would not be able to articulate it, either: "Don Goyo walked out of the corral as if nothing had happened and moved quietly towards the other houses. He was soon out of sight."

Although the violent stories are more exciting, some of the quieter stories are just as good. In "The Social Call," Rabbi Abraham and his family visit a local rancher. The Rabbi's Spanish is weak, and the Argentinians for some reason have no Yiddish, but somehow they make do, discussing the productivity of their milk cows and hens, and watching the night sky:

"The conversation died slowly, as if the soft, quiet night was spreading its peaceful influence everywhere. The trees were in full bloom and spread their perfume over all. The daisies that were thickly spread over the orchard looked clean and white in the light of the bright moon.

'In all the world, there isn't a sky like this one,' Don Abraham said.

He explained that he had been in Palestine, in Egypt and in Russia, but nowhere had he seen a sky as intensely blue as that of Entre Rios."

Gerchunoff's book is really about assimilation, young people adopting gaucho clothes and learning Spanish, old people becoming farmers and struggling to maintain their traditions, everybody adapting in one way or another. Most of the sketches are quite gentle and charming. I thought this was an artistic problem - despite the few exceptions like "The Death of Reb Saul," I think Gerchunoff has smoothed over some of the deeper sources of conflict, and he does not provide a sufficiently rich symbolic or linguistic setting to mitigate the lack of drama.

This smiling approach to assimilation is a rare thing in fiction, and might itself be more of an achievement than I realize. Still, this seemed like a book of much higher historical than literary interest.

A note: Gerchunoff's book is only tangentially part of my feast of Yiddish literature. It was written in Spanish, not Yiddish (which makes the book itself part of its argument). Prudencio de Pereda translated it into English for the University of New Mexico Press, 1998.