Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

I had expected to see the town of my mother's memories, of her nostalgia--nostalgia laced with sighs. She had lived her lifetime sighing about Comala, about going back. But she never had. Now I had come in her place. I was seeing things through her eyes, as she had seen them. She had given me her eyes to see. Just as you pass the gate of Los Colimotes there's a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn. From there you can see Comala, turning the earth white, and lighting it at night. Her voice was secret, muffled, as if she were talking to herself... Mother.

"And why are you going to Comala, if you don't mind my asking?" I heard the man say.

"I've come to see my father," I replied.

Juan Preciado makes his way to the town of Comala at the behest of his mother, who has just died. She has told him that he will find his father there, Pedro Paramo. Juan is aided by a horseman named Abundio, and takes shelter in the house of a woman named Eduviges. Eduviges is shocked to hear that it is Abundio who has guided him, because Abundio is dead. But then, of course, Eduviges turns out to be dead, too. Everyone in Comala is dead: it's a town full of ghosts. Some seem to know it, and others not, but each gives Juan a piece of the story of his father, Pedro Paramo. Some appear as visions, and some as voices; they speak to each other as well as to him, and soon it seems they even claim him, too, as one of the dead.

Being dead, ghosts have a poor sense of chronology. The story of Pedro Paramo unfolds with little regard to the order of the action, and one often finds oneself trying to remember who in the story is dead, and who is yet to die. (Does this part come after the death of the priest, Father Renteria? No, here he comes to administer last rites...) But when taken as a whole, the story becomes one of power and seduction: Pedro, the wealthy haciendero who takes over the land of Comala bit by bit, by violence and extortion. The murder of his father, and Pedro's bloody revenge; the death of his son--a vicious rapist--thrown from a horse. And of course, Pedro's many women, some of whom are seduced by his wealth, and some who really lust for him, and the one woman he truly loved, the doomed Susana. As Pedro's son, Juan fits into this story, too, but somehow over the course of the book he seems to fade away, becoming as ghostly as his interlocutors, and eventually being absorbed wholesale into the story of his father and disappearing.

It was interesting to read this book shortly after Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo; both touch on the revolution of Pancho Villa in Romantic and expressionist ways, though the books are wildly different. Don Pedro is exactly the kind of haciendero that Fuentes' General Arroyo despises, though he manages to buy off the Villistas by offering them provisions and support. The dangers in Pedro Paramo are metaphysical--death, memory, madness--rather than political. Yet both capture the way power relies on, is created by, great violence, and the way many lives can be swallowed up by the greed and malice of few men.

I'm not sure what to make of Pedro Paramo. It's a book that seems somehow both entirely haphazard and entirely minimalist, something hewn down to its most basic parts. It is lyrical and elegiac, and rejects straightforward kinds of storytelling for a patchwork method that reminds me the way a blurred image might come slowly into view. Latin American magic realists and surrealists seem to have loved it, and one can see how it plays an outsized influence on the Spanish language literature that emerges in the following few decades, Fuentes included. And it's really like no other book in the world, which seems to me one of the highest forms of praise you can give to a book. 

The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Stories by M. R. James

I was at supper at his house, and he was not inclined to let me leave him at my usual time.  'If you go,' he said, 'there will be nothing for it but I must go to bed and dream of the chrysalis.'  'You might be worse off,' said I.  'I do not think it,' he said, and he shook himself like a man who is displeased with the connexion of his thoughts.  'I only meant,' said I, 'that a chrysalis is an innocent thing.'  'This one is not,' he said, 'and I do not care to think of it.'

I read M. R. James' collection of ghost stories, Count Magnus, around last Halloween, and figured I might as well take this Halloween as an opportunity to read its companion collection, The Haunted Dolls' House.  These stories have the same hallmarks as the first collection: they're set among stuffy British country houses and boarding schools; their ghosts and ghouls are linked to ancient and medieval objects and lithographs and old folderol like that; yet the ghosts and ghouls themselves are quite creepy.  The monsters of The Haunted Dolls' House begin to bear a tedious similarity to the ones in Count Magnus--James has a thing for monsters made of nothing but hair--but still they are in effective contrast to the stories' gentility.  James has a real knack for breaking through a fussy Victorian scene with the briefest glimpse of a horrible vision, like the friend above who admits, without any prior context, "I must go to bed and dream of the chrysalis."  The chrysalis.

My favorites in this collection all center on the British countryside.  The countryside, in British literature, is picturesque and historical, a setting for wanderers and tourists like Wordsworth.  "A View from a Hill," plays on both of those expectations: it centers on a pair of binoculars, constructed by a mad experimenter using a dead man's eyes, that allows the viewer to see the particular towns--and the gallow's pole--as they were hundreds of years ago.  Another, "A Warning to the Curious," repurposes an old legend about Anglo-Saxon crowns buried on England's eastern shore, which have kept the island safe from invasion, and which are guarded by a relentless spirit.  The best story, "A Neighbour's Landmark," is no more inventive than a spirit who haunts a certain grove of trees, but the story's protagonist learns about it first as an aside in a historical pamphlet.

James knew that monsters are scariest when they're at arm's length, not just in space, but in time.  Ghosts are the past come back to haunt us, as it haunts, in a manner of speaking, the classicist and the historian.  The stories pile veil upon veil; every single one is in some way a story reported by a friend about a friend of theirs, or some other kind of multi-layered contrivance.  There's a metaphor in there for the process of historical understanding, which passes through so many generations of understanding that you're never quite sure if you've got your eyes set on something real.  In James, the horribleness of the beasts slices through these layers of interpretation, too awful to be legendary, and too ridiculous to be real.

The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams

Watership Down is one of my all-time favorite novels. So I was excited to read something else by Richard Adams. I can't remember why I chose this book or why I decided to order it from ABEbooks.com, but I did not really see the cover or anything until I had already paid for the book. You can't see from the picture, but on the front cover right above the title is this phrase from the New York Times Book Review, "Beautiful haunting erotic love and an absolutely terrifying ghost story." I turned the book over and on the back, "Stunning. . . a novel of love and beauty, mystery and horror." Right above that blurb from Vogue, the main female character is described as "a seductress of erotic mystery and exquisite sexual genius." I remember thinking, Geez, what have I gotten myself into?

As it turns out, almost none of what is written all over the cover of this book is true. The book occasionally deals with sex, there is some mystery surround the female lead Kathe, and there is technically a ghost. However, the ghost plays such a small role in the story that I would never refer to this as a ghost story, definitely not haunting. There were a few parts that were a little spooky, but not "terrifying," "chilling," or "terrible" as the hyperbolic cover suggests. However, this is not to say that the book was bad. It was a good, slow-moving story of a man who falls in love with a woman he knows little about. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book better had the cover not set me completely on the wrong path. I know that I would have enjoyed the ending much more than I did.

So, I didn't really like The Girl in A Swing, but it was not so bad that I won't give Adams another shot.

**Update: I gave Adams another shot.

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Charles Dickens

Apparently Charlie Dickens only had a few ideas regarding Christmas. They are as follows:
1. ghosts, ghouls, or goblins
2. a large, poor family
3. someone who is either sick, dying, or dead…preferably a small child
4. a miserly old man
Nearly all of the eight stories in this collection feature at least one of these themes. On a number of occasions, it felt as though Dickens was forcing them into the story.

While I realize that it is not fair to judge Dickens by this collection alone, the poor quality of these stories was shocking. Like most, I was familiar with ‘A Christmas Carol’, but I had never heard of the other seven stories that make of this collection. There is good reason that I hadn’t. Again, to be fair, they were not necessarily selected because they were some of Dickens’ best work, but because they deal with Christmas in some way.

‘Christmas Festivities’
This was a very short article describing – you guessed it – Christmas festivities. Not bad, but nothing noteworthy.

‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton’
This short story was about a gravedigger who is working on Christmas Eve, which I am sure Dickens considered tantamount to blasphemy. As he is toiling away late in the evening, he is confronted by a group of goblins, who, based on Dickens’ description and the accompanying engraving, strongly resemble court jesters. They take the gravedigger deep into the earth, possibly to one of the outer circles of hell, although this is not clear. Then they proceed to show him various people celebrating Christmas, as they feel he should be doing. They end by showing him the family of the little boy whose grave he had been digging. The gravedigger wakes up the next morning in the graveyard and is so freaked out that he just leaves. People speculate that he was taken by goblins (the natural assumption) and stories abound about his exact demise.
Dickens’ was not quite there yet…something was missing.

‘A Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey’s Clock’
This was an extremely short story about a man who befriends a deaf man on Christmas. A deaf man…that’s close, but not good enough. Come on, Dickens. Tug at my heart strings.

‘A Christmas Carol’
A tiny, dying boy who can only walk with the aid of a crutch…bingo! This was generally well written, and it featured the most character development of any of the stories in this collection. It was also funny. The same cannot be said for the other stories.

‘The Haunted Man’
Boy I hated this story. It was about the length of ‘A Christmas Carol’, maybe even a little longer. However, it was convoluted and disjointed. Much of the problem stemmed from ill-defined characters coupled with poor use of names. Dickens would refer to the numerous characters in this story by more than one name, making it very difficult to understand what was happening.
As far as I could tell, everywhere that this old man – a professor – went, he sowed discord and strife. For some only partially explained reason, this man was haunted by a doppelganger ghost…a doppelghoul if you will. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a young lady who seems to spread cheer. She is a maid for the professor. Because their paths were inadvertently similar one evening – with the geezer always a few minutes ahead of the girl – this young girl catches the brunt of the ill will that resulted in others due to the presence of the old man. The professor realizes this and sets out to make it up to her…sort of. Along the way, he encounters a ragamuffin orphan (bingo!), an old dying man, and a young student who appears to be faking an illness (at best he is milking his recovery time for all that he can). The professor also encounters a Cratchit-esque family, sans dying/crippled child. The old man, who doesn’t really appear to be particularly mean or bad, has a “change of heart” and miraculously the story concludes with essentially every character sitting around the professor’s table.
Ham fisted to boot.

‘A Christmas Tree’
This story was the most bizarre of this collection. Dickens spends most of the essay describing a decorated Christmas tree. A tree that is adorned with bulbs, string, pictures, scary porcelain masks, books, dolls, trains, and a slew of characters from The Arabian Nights, which Dickens apparently loved. About 10 pages into this 16-page essay, Dickens begins describing places or people that are haunted or visited by ghosts. He spends little more than a paragraph on each person or place. The result is a ridiculous, unimaginative listing of haunted people and places. Feliz Navidia de los Muertos!

‘What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older’
In the same style as ‘Christmas Festivities’, this essay describes a Christmas celebration, centering on the elderly family members in attendance.

‘The Seven Poor Travellers’
Dickens describes a Christmas dinner that he planned with the expressed intent of inviting some travelers that were boarding close to his house. Luckily this was rather short.

Most of the pieces in this collection were uninteresting, unimaginative, and really quite awful. Some of them made very little sense. At best they felt like toss offs by Dickens, which I suspect they were. Read ‘A Christmas Carol’ and avoid these other stories entirely.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

When eminent critic Harold Bloom says that there are only four great living American writers (McCarthy, DeLillo, Roth, and Pynchon), it is not difficult to cry sexism and racism at Toni Morrison's omission, and I say that as a person that does not bandy those terms around lightly. Yes, those four are truly great, but why not Morrison, who's style is as vivid, inspired, and tightly controlled as any of those four, and whose works speak to something truly American? In a recent poll, Beloved was voted the greatest work of literature in the past 25 years, just ahead of DeLillo's Underworld.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, an ex-slave who now lives inCincinnati with her daughter, Denver. Eighteen years prior to the main action of the story (which has a snaking, elliptical plotline), Sethe was a runaway slave living with her grandmother Baby Suggs, when suddenly she spied her old slaveowner walking into the backyard, and instead of allowing her to return to slavery, slit her baby daughter's (unnamed, not Denver) throat--and would also have done the same to Denver and her two sons, Howard and Buglar, if she had not been caught. After Sethe was released from prison and the Civil War over, she continues to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered baby until the spirit is chased out by Paul D, a fellow slave from Sethe's former plantation who comes to live with her in Cincinnati. But then the spirit takes the form of a young girl (the age the child would have been if it had lived) who emerges from the nearby lake and comes to live with Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Lots of other crazy and magical shit happens, and all the while you learn the strange and sordid details of Sethe and Paul D's past lives as slaves. Morrison is particularly graphic about some of the details she feels have been lost in slave narratives, such as rampant slave murder and sexual abuse.

I do not think that Beloved speaks to me as it might to an African-American, and so I haven't formed an emotional connection with it like I did other books I've read this year, but it's clear reading it that it's a true monument of American fiction. It is complex, imaginative, and brilliantly but tightly conceived. Jonathan Demme made a movie about it starring Oprah, but I cannot believe that that movie is any good--partly because it doesn't seem like Beloved, which is frequently strange and obtuse, could translate to the screen, and partly because I'm not sure Oprah really has the chops to take on a character like Sethe, who is troubled, complex, and somewhat otherworldy, none of which describes Oprah.

Highly recommended.