booklit

I’ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra felt like the timely choice, having recently been the focus of an article in The Nation (via The Literary Saloon) and to even the score for Chilean writers, what with Roberto Bolaño getting all the attention. According to The Nation article, “its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.”

It’s a short book, weighing in at eighty-three pages, many blank as they split chapters, allowing the content room to breathe. But within there’s a complete story, a larger story, in fact, bursting to get out. In this it could be said that it resembles the titular bonsai, all the attributes of a larger work condensed into a miniature.

As openings go, Zambra makes a bold pitch, giving away the ending and letting the reader know from the off that the journey about to be taken is a metafictional one:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

Emilia and Julio are are university students that meet at a study group in preparation for their Spanish Syntax II exam and, despite initially disliking each other, their relationship quickly develops, Zambra detailing its journey, with occasional reference to previous lovers, in a beguiling mix of thick brush strokes and finely judged details.

As the opening declares, “the rest is literature:” and it’s literature that binds the couple and gives purpose to their relationship, a strange foreplay emerging whereby they working their way through Schwob and Mishima, Perec, Onetti, and Carver, amongst others, until they read Tantalia by Macedonio Fernández, a story about a couple who buy a small plant as a symbol of their love that ends in despair.

“That should have been the last time Emilia and Julio shagged,” the narrator says, but the couple continue on, having sex after reading pages of the classics (”They did terribly with Checkhov, a little better, curiously, with Kafka, but, as they say, the damage was done.”). Eventually, a shared lie between them - that they have read Proust - brings their relationship to a head:

It happened with Proust. They had postponed reading Proust, due to the unmentionable secret that linked them, separately to the reading - or to the lack of reading - of In Search Of Lost Time. They both had to pretend that their mutual read was, strictly speaking, a reread they had yearned for, so that when they arrived at one of the numerous passages that seemed particularly memorable they changed their tone of voice or gazed at each other to elicit emotion., simulating the greatest intimacy. Also, Julio, on one occasion, allowed himself to declare that he only now truly felt that he was reading Proust, and Emilia answered with a subtle and disconsolate squeeze of the hand.

In reading Proust for the first time, neither is prepared for the impact it has so their relationship breaks off, with Emilia heading to Spain - and dying! - and Julio getting on with his life. Julio’s path leads to an attempt to work for a famous writer, transcribing his latest novel and, on failing to do so, continues to transcribe the novel he imagines, based on a brief synopsis, that he would have been transcribing. In keeping with the metafictional style, he calls it Bonsai, and it bears a knowing similarity to the book we’re reading.

There’s so much more to this slight volume that comes to represent the bonsai. The authorial interjections force us to stick to the story of Emilia and Julio, with repeated messages to ignore characters for being “secondary” or observing a woman as she moves away “and begins to disappear forever from this story”, each potential thread of narrative routinely clipped so that all we have is this love story contained within the container its pages - Julio learns that “Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.”- that does represent the wider picture.

Caring for a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like caring for a bonsai, thinks Julio.

Bonsai’s story is, to borrow a line from the book,”a common story whose only peculiarity is that nobody knows how to tell it well” and Zambra’s attempt to capture this common story is wholly successful. With prose aware of its shortcomings, that takes steps to address them - pruning its loose ends and carefully shaping its narrative - it takes that common story and reduces it to its finer points, makes of itself an artform, and contains it within a flowerpot of pages. The rest may be literature, but the whole is art.

While I’ve read a number of Gilbert Adair’s recent books, the older titles from his back catalogue are out of print. One of these titles, The Death Of The Author (1992), has thankfully been given a second lease of life in the United States, thanks to Melville House Publishing’s new Contemporary Art of the Novella series, a companion to its Art of the Novella, a series showcasing the likes of Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, and Tolstoy.

But the Contemporary range is no stranger to lesser known names itself - The Pathseeker, by Nobel laureate, Imre Kertész was the flagship title So, good company indeed. And, when my copy of The Death Of The Author dropped through the door, so impressed was I by the production values (glossy cover with flaps, bold colour, and nicely tactile pages) that I made the snap decision to purchase all the others within the series, with the intention of subscribing to future releases too.

But to the book. Adair’s work - his fiction, anyway - tends to fall one of two ways: the light entertainment, like his Evadne Mount trilogy; or the heavier entertainment, erudite, but still light. All come with an element of postmodernism. And The Death Of The Author, falling on the erudite side, is a postmodern book about postmodernism.

Although my reading of the book went without knowledge of the events that inform it, I daresay it’s not necessary in enjoying the novella. The reference point is Paul de Man, the Belgian literary theorist whose work had a different light shed upon it when it was discovered  he had written collaborationist articles during World War II, including one of an anti-Semitic nature. De Man’s life story, of living during wartime and teaching in the States, is given here to our narrator, Léopold Sfax.

Sfax is a celebrity in the world of literary criticism, having published two books, the first a study of Yeats:

That book, whose appearance produced quite a commotion, I may even say a scandal, in the advanced academic circles of the day, was Either/Either - I realized I had “arrived” when the Partisan Review reviewer wrote of it as having been wildly overrated, for to be described as overrated by one critic meant after all that I had been highly rated by several.

In it, Sfax argues that literary meanings are not intentions of their authors, no matter what they say - that it’s the reader and their interpretation, be it this or that, that makes the meanings. Following on from this book is the one that makes his career, The Vicious Spiral, the book whose arguments, not given a name, become simply known as ‘the Theory’.

The more closely a text is studied the more insidiously is it drained of sense or legibility, just as the more fixedly a word is stared at on the page the more too is it drained of legibility or sense, striking the increasingly bewildered eye as a mere weird disconnected sequence of squiggles. Words are far older and fickler and more experienced than the writers who suffer under the delusion that they are “using” them. Words have been around. No one owns them, no one can proscribe how they ought to be read, and most certainly not their author.

If de Man is the template for Sfax’s life, Roland Barthes is the inspiration for the Theory, being an echo of his essay Death Of The Author. And it’s the popularity of this book that brings us to the opening scene as Sfax talks with a female student of his who would like to write his biograph. Of course, rather than have someone else tell his story, The Death Of The Author becomes his autobiography, and he meanders off on events in his life, coming each time to the moment that spurred him to sit down and write in the first place.

With any Adair book, being vigilant is part and parcel of reading him, for his texts are not without their games, and there’s always that delight on realising, one again, that he is one, sometimes two, steps ahead. In The Death Of The Author he more than delivers, his games bringing together a beautiful spoof of literary criticism and memoir that, toward the end, adds a murder mystery that fulfils the promise of its title. And, when this cauldron of fun comes to the boil, Adair adds a stinging twist that had me screaming, “you bastard!”

To read The Death Of The Author is not unlike what it must be like to have subscribed to Sfax’s Theory:

The world had been turned upside-down - what had always been true was false, what had been important was marginal, what had been meaningful was meaningless - and it made sense, it made sense!