The Way of Florida by Russell Persson

We visit our life just once. It could rain down or it could sun a string of days or an unended ease could be what days you live in but I come to believe we visit our life just once this only one time in which we live, the string of days entire from one until the end. Inside this now I live with my body underneath the stars there I would bet the stars up there in measure of what we do an pourn down from the moon is my revital. I'm as wracked as any man here and I toil more and eat less and my charge demands that I lift us to the next day and so it is I underneath the moon the other men have fallen upon each other in what could be close to giving in as a body spells its coming day and sapped to the utmost lands where it might and I the moon addresses and it is I the moon floods up with sand for what's upcoming so that I may guide in some way these rafted men who pell-mell upon each other like blown twigs I like here standed to that task our Lord I become the one who gathers them in to proceed us all into the.

In 1527, the Spanish explorer Panfilo de Narvaez made the decision to split his party in two. Half would go by boat along the coast of Florida, and the other would go over land. The two parties would never meet again. The land party traversed not only Florida but across the southern and southwestern United States and into Florida, becoming the first non-Native Americans to see these parts of the New World. We know this because the journals of one such explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, survive, recounting the story of how the party nearly starved to death again and again, encountering friendly and not-so-friendly Indians, and eventually, when there were only four left, became famous as a band of traveling medicine men and healers. As Brian Evenson notes in his prologue, Russell Persson's The Way of Florida is in one way a translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account, hewing closely to it, though in idiosyncratic English.

I got to hear Persson read from The Way of Florida at the Association of Writers and Publishers' conference last weekend. I was struck by the section he chose, in which one of the explorers rides his horse into a river and is drowned. The stark, denuded language, the collective "we" that makes it seem as if some piece of the entire body is being peeled off. And of course, the decision to eat the unfortunate horse, a decision that presages the group's future need to resort to cannibalism. The story, such as it is, is one of increasing alienation and desperation, moving deeper into the unknown world. Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow explorers get farther and farther away from the familiar, and they grow farther and farther away from themselves. Their clothes become ragged, then fall away, leaving them entirely naked. The pious Cabeza de Vaca meditates constantly on God's will; he reasons that they have been cast out safety in punishment for their sins. What to make, then, of the way the final survivors are built up again, and transformed to a kind of prestige? Other transformations are here, and I found myself wondering if the same were recorded in Cabeza de Vaca's true journal, as when one of his fellow Spaniards chooses to stay with his new companion, a Native man who lives as a woman, over another push to return to civilization.

It's the language, though, that animates The Way of Florida. If the novel is a translation from the Spanish, it's a translation that doesn't quite arrive in English, or if it does, an English that is wholly new and unfamiliar. Persson writes long stretches without periods or breaks, with few commas, or perhaps none. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives switch places; often I found him using the "right" word but not quite the "right" form, as in "the moon is my revital" above. The experimental language slows the speed of the journey, and perhaps makes it as painstaking for us as for Cabeza de Vaca. More importantly, it has an alienating effect, and captures the strange and uncanny experience of confronting a new world. If you're like me, The Way of Florida will remind you of William T. Vollmann's novels about European-Indigenous encounter. Like Vollmann, and perhaps moreso, Persson recognizes that really seeing these exchanges for what they were requires a language that presents them to us as new and strange as they must have been.