Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that  very reason I'm at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in my moments of lassitude when I'm barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction for repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

Diego de Zama is a moderately powerful colonial figure in 18th century Paraguay. Unlike many of his fellow administrators, he is an Americano, born in South America, not Spain. His wife and son are back at home in (I think) Lima, while he toils in a relative backwater. He is professionally and romantically frustrated, obsessed with women of "pure" European blood, unlike his own. His amorousness leads him into several complicated relationships: with Luciana, the wife of another administrator, with Emilia, a peasant woman who bears Zama's child, and others. At one point, unable to pay for his room in the hotel (his salary from Madrid being humiliatingly delayed), he moves into the house of an old man where either one or two women are living. He grows obsessed with her--or them? The intractability of this mystery, punctuated by sudden glimpses of a woman at a window or at the end of a hall, is indicative of the strangeness and indeterminacy of Zama.

I read Zama at the beach. This was, I think, not quite the ideal choice, though some of the salt marshes recall the stinking swamps of Zama's Paraguay, which is, at the novel's opening, captured by the corpse of a monkey moving in and out with the tide. But I wasn't prepared for just how weird Zama is. I hate the word "difficult" when applied to books, because books can be difficult in different ways, but Zama is a book whose fundamental reality is subject to obfuscation and slippage. It's strange that Zama himself is an Americano, because he seems to have absorbed already a colonial's perspective on South America as a strange and exotic place where strange and mysterious things might happen.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Zama's life is a series of frustrations. He's entirely unable to get his request for a transfer sent to Madrid, and is thus indefinitely separated from his family and forestalled from professional prestige or advancement. His fellow administrators treat him with dismissal or even unexplained hostility, even going so far as to sic beggar thieves upon him. The final of Zama's three sections ends with him enlisted in a platoon tasked with hunting down an infamous murderer and thief. But Zama is the only one who knows that the murderer is actually one of the party, and the dilemma this puts him in--whom to ally with, whom to betray--is typical of a book in which the colonial apparatus appears more as a knot of shifting allegiances and alliances. There is no way for Zama, no path forward for advancement or even stability, and there is no choice that can prevent him from suffering the final destiny that meets him at the novel's end.

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin

When Sara turned back to us, the bird wasn't there anymore. Her mouth, nose, chin, and both hands were smeared with blood. She smiled sheepishly. Her gigantic mouth arched and opened, and her red teeth made me jump to my feet. I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the toilet.

In "The Digger," a story from Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin's collection Mouthful of Birds, a man rents a vacation house that comes with a digger, a man whose job seems entirely devoted to digging and maintaining a hole in the yard. In a moment when his digger has taken a break, the man accidentally caves in part of the hole, but his attempts to fix it seem to be more inappropriate than the fact that he caved it in--"It's your hole," the digger says menacingly, "you can't dig." That's the whole story. The next story, "Irman," describes a couple who stop at a late night diner to find that the proprietor, a large woman, has died and lays on the kitchen floor, while her--husband? coworker?--Irman struggles to keep the diner going, not able even to reach the ingredients on the high shelves. The couple berate Irman, force him to cook for them, and steal from the diner. These two stories, I think, have something to say about the indignity of labor, the way that people are exploited for the most trivial of needs, or perhaps no needs--simply to enforce a hierarchy of those who pay and those who work.

The digging comes back again in a story called "Underground," in which a traveler hears a story about a town whose children had become obsessed with a large pit. When the children disappear, the townspeople find that he hole has been filled in--become a mound--and they tear up the town's floors in search of their children, who have disappeared into the earth. Perhaps here the digging is a metaphor for death--the mound like a grave, like disturbed earth--or perhaps it is a symbol of the strange and terrifying world in which we are forced to send our children. 

I liked all three of these stories to various degrees: "Irman" is the best of them, with its strange unfolding of menace and neglect. The others work, though they are a little one-note; others in Schweblin's collection I thought failed to really present more than a premise. That includes the title story, about a young girl who eats birds, and stories like "The Merman," about a narrator who falls in love with a Merman. I thought these stories struggled to move past the significance of the premise, and when they tried to become slightly more complex, like the story "Onigiris," that takes in multiple points-of-views of customers and masseuses at a strange spa--more labor--became almost inscrutable. I'm thinking of Mariana Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, another collection of surreal/horror stories from Latin America. I think horror, if that's what these stories, is a genre particularly at risk of not doing enough with its premises, especially in the short story, and I found Mouthful of Birds fairly disappointing compared to Schweblin's novels, which have the space to develop and mutate in more effective ways.

Mona by Pola Oloixarac

The Swedish summer light covered everything like a soft layer of dust, white material that made it look like it had just rained chalk. It was so cruel that darkness wouldn't start to fall until close to midnight. The day would remain in this pale limbo for interminable hours. It was a writers' purgatory, the white page as breathing air, where everyone was just waiting around to see who'd receive the key to paradise. How long do bruises last on the body?

Mona, a Peruvian-Argentinian writer who has recently published an acclaimed debut, has been nominated for the prestigious Basske-Wortz Prize. She's been invited to a remote compound in Sweden where she and a couple dozen other writers from around the world will hobnob and gossip, and at the end of the week, the prize will be announced. Mona thinks she stands a chance, but maybe not as much as the mercurial Icelandic poet Ragnar, or the smug French writer Philippe. But she may not last through the week, as she seems to be falling apart: mysterious bruises, whose source she cannot remember, have appeared all over her body. 

On her phone, Mona reads about the disappearance of a young Argentine girl named Sandrita. Speculation flies about the disappearance, until, towards the end of the week, Sandrita turns up dead and raped on a beach. The reader is asked to see a parallel between Mona and Sandrita, perhaps even wonder if the mysterious bruises that have appeared on Mona's body represent a kind of mystical kinship with Sandrita. And yet, Mona is many thousands of miles away; the writer's conference could not be further than the reality of Sandrita's short life if it were on the moon. The writers who get up to speak about the political in their writing end up sounding proud and ridiculous, as with the Middle Eastern writer who claims, "I will be your voice" to the voiceless of the world, or the reactionary jerk who says things like, "Our Virgin Mary is Che Guevara." And perhaps that's the point--all this talk about the significance of writing is divorced from the world it's meant to represent. "It's not that there are no more literary personalities in our era," Mona tells another writer, "it's just that now they come to places like these thinking they're writers and end up leaving as characters. The festivals are the real novels!" But if so, they're novels that speak to no one but the characters themselves.

Man, I couldn't figure this book out. How seriously am I supposed to take the Virgin Mary-Che stuff? It's too shallow to be serious, but not funny enough to be satirical, I thought. Mona is a talky novel, in which Mona engages in short conversations with her fellow writers, and in which they say things that are inscrutable, shallow, or both, and in language that no one--not even writers--drops into in the very first moments of meeting someone. How seriously am I supposed to take this, for example:

And there's nothing as womanly as incarnation. To be a woman and write is to be trans. That's why writing is trans, being fat is trans, and this whole performance of being a woman is the most trans thing in the world. Ever since Tiresias, who of course was the first trans person ever.

It's hard to write a book about writing; it's a tall order for anyone, I think. But Mona isn't a book about writing; the act of writing barely enters into it. What Mona writes about, or what her writing sounds like, we'll never know, just as we don't know anything, really, about the writing of Marco or Akto or Shingzwe or Chrystos, or whoever. But the writers themselves aren't interesting without their writing, which ought to animate this whole farce. If the thesis of the book is that writing is divorced from the world--and I think that's meeting it a little more than halfway--Mona manages to be both divorced from the world and divorced from the writing. What's left is a series of tedious conversations. Mona wants to satirize those writer's conference, but it fails because it's too convinced that the conferences themselves are inherently interesting.

Mona is a book where nothing happens, until it does: first, Mona remembers at last that her bruises are the result of a rape by Antonio, the lover whose texts she's been ignoring all week. Second, the mysterious Icelandic poet finally gets up to speak, and in doing so--spoiler alert--summons a mythical Norse serpent from the compound lake. It's a symbol, I guess, of the real--power, death, violence--intruding upon the masturbatory writers who have ignored it, despite their pretenses. As an ending to the book it feels cheap and strange.

Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortazar

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Julio Cortazar's pieces collected under the title "The Instruction Manual" are one of my favorite creative writing prompts. Like "How to Wind a Watch" above, they employ the structures of an instruction manual with mordant humor and the language of profound things. Sometimes they are extended jokes, like "How to Climb a Staircase"; sometimes, like "How to Kill Ants in Rome," they are absurdist vignettes. Students pick up quickly on how Cortazar uses the structure to ground his more fantastical images in the everyday, and they're able to make passing imitations without much study--which I think is a testament to how well the gimmick works. But until now, I'd never read the collection, Cronopios and Famas, of which "The Instruction Manual" is a part.

Cronopios has four parts; "The Instruction Manual" is first. It's followed by "Unusual Occupations," a series of scenes about a strange family who build a gallows in their yard, take over the post office and tar and feather the mail, keep a tiger. The third, "Unstable Stuff," is a hodge-podge of unrelated shorts, which showcase Cortazar at his most experimental. Some work, and others are--rarely--a little too one-note.

The final section is the title section, "Cronopios and Famas," about the title--people? Figures? Animals? Cortazar never stops to define the neologisms; we learn little about what they refer to except that cronopios tend to be wet, and green. By their interactions we begin to learn their characters: the famas are outgoing and rigid, the cronopios hapless but sensitive. They are joined by a third group, the cruel esperanzas, doing things like getting mad at famas for dancing in one way rather than another. What emerges from these pieces is a sense of a caste system, in which people or things are slotted into narrow social roles by their disposition; there are echoes, perhaps, of the racial classifications you see in fantasy novels--proud elves, grumpy dwarves, wise wizards.

One might build a considerable interpretive apparatus on the backs of these short tales of cronopios and famas--something about social conditioning, or human psychology, or something like that. But to do that would risk missing how fun these stories are, how playfully game-like an uninhibited. It might turn you into a fama--or worse, an esperanza.

Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin

The kentuki didn't move. This was fun. Suddenly she had a clear idea of what she wanted to ask. She needed to know if the person was a man or a woman, how old they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, what they liked to do for fun. She needed to judge, urgently needed to decide for herself what kind of dweller she'd gotten. The kentuki was there looking at her, maybe as eager to respond as she was to ask.

Then it occurred to her that this crow could peck openly at her private life, would see her whole body, get to know the tone of her voice, her clothes, her schedules; it could even move freely about the room and at night it would also see Sven. She, on the other hand, could only ask questions. The kentuki could decide not to answer, or it could lie. It could say it was a Filipina schoolgirl when it was actually an Iranian oil dealer. But she had to show it her entire life, transparently, as available as she'd been to the poor canary she'd had as a teenager that had died watching her, hanging in its cage in the middle of the room.

The devices are called kentukis: plastic footballs on wheels with plastic features, made to look like animals, pandas or crows or moles or dragons. They're sort of like pets, that chirp and purr and move around, but inside each of them is a real person, a "dweller" operating the kentuki from somewhere else on the earth. When someone purchases a serial code for a kentuki, they are linked at random to one of these animals, being turned on for the first time somewhere in the world. The dwellers don't know where it is they'll end up, or who their keeper will be or how they will be treated; the keepers can do whatever they like with their kentuki--even refuse to charge it so its battery dies and the connection irrevocably sundered--but they never know who's dwelling inside their new pet.

Samantha Schweblin's Little Eyes is an allegory for a connected world. Though the kentukis are the stuff of science fiction, the ethical challenges they present are real: every day, through social media and other forms of technology, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, we let other people--little eyes--into our home. These technologies can connect us in invigorating, even life-affirming ways, as an Antiguan teenager named Marvin finds when he stumbles (in the form of his dragon kentuki) into an underground of "liberated" kentukis who have found ways to communicate with each other and epxlore independently. But, as many of the characters in Little Eyes discover, it can also breed obsessions and resentments, or open us up to the scrutiny of strangers we had no intention of letting into our lives. The opening scene, for instance, describes a group of teenage girls who discover they can communicate with their kentuki's dweller using a Ouija board, but as soon as they do, he blackmails them over the videos he's been secretly recording.

Little Eyes features dozens of stories about dwellers and keepers around the world, but there's only a small handful of recurring characters: the girlfriend of an artist in Mexico who comes to resent what she senses are her kentuki's prurient attentions; an elderly Peruvian lady who becomes protective of her young German keeper; a divorced Italian who seeks out companionship from his son's hated kentuki; a Croatian who sells blackmarket kentuki connections. The most powerful, I thought, was that Antiguan teenager, who becomes obsessed with finding away for his kentuki, living in Norway, to touch the snow he's never seen. In that story, the "liberated" kentukis have somehow built a world of their own at ground level, a world of secret charging stations and painted signs that normal people don't notice, and this feels like an apt symbol for the kinds of new worlds social technology creates for us, for better or worse.

Though there's thematic overlap, I don't know that I would have otherwise guessed that Little Eyes was written by the same author as Fever Dream, a short and terrifying novel about the catastrophic effects of industrial pollution. In Fever Dream, Schewblin is content to leave much unexplained, and the terror is produced by the forces of literary ambiguity, but Little Eyes is more conventional science fiction in the sense that it is a simple thought experiment about the future, taken to its logical conclusions. Little Eyes struck me as more ordinary than Fever Dream, less existentially frightening, but perhaps more disturbing because of the plausibility of the world it imagines.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

"I sat there looking at his dirty hands. He was using them to hold on to the table like a railing as he walked, and then I saw his wrists. He had marks on his skin, lines like bracelets around his wrists, and a little above them, too, maybe left by the rope. 'It seems cruel,' said the woman as she approached, watching my reaction and David's next step, 'but we have to make sure that only the spirit leaves.' She caressed his wrists, and as if forgiving herself she said, 'The body has to stay.'"

All of Samantha Schweblin's short novel Fever Dream is a conversation between two people: Amanda, a woman who is dying in a rural Argentinian clinic, and David, a little boy. David is the son--sort of--of a local woman named Carla; Amanda was visiting their small town with her daughter Nina when she took sick. Together, Amanda and David piece together a hazy account of the events that led up to Amanda's hospitalization. David, understanding that Amanda doesn't have much time, keeps telling her that some things are not important, but she labors over every bit of the story, trying desperately to figure out what led her here, and what happened to her daughter.

What kind of story is this going to be? The strange interlocutory form--the mix of things they know for certain and things they do not understand--gives a surreal quality to the story that reflects the "fever dream" of the title. Amanda recounts to David the disturbing story she heard from David's mother, Carla: as a boy, David drank from a poisoned stream that killed the family's prized horse. Understanding that David too, would get sick, Carla took him to a healer who gave David only one option to live: his spirit would travel to another body, and thus be saved, but another spirit would enter. Desperate for David to live, Carla accedes, but the David that returns from the ritual is strange: his skin covered in spots, his diction become strangely formal, and having developed a peculiar intuition and empathy for the many dying animals around their home. Carla tells Amanda that she has come to fear her unheimlich son, or ward, or whatever he is.

The truth, or a truth unfolds over the course of Amanda and David's conversation: what has transformed David is not the soul ritual but the toxic chemical that has leached into the grass. The small town is centered on a vague refinery or chemical plant known as "Sotomayor's," which is responsible for the poisoning. It's the chemicals that have put Amanda in the hospital, and which may be affecting Nina--who, in the novel's most intense moment, may be subjected to the same desperate ritual as David.

What sets Fever Dream apart is how carefully it controls the release of information; only slowly does Schweblin reveal that it's a novel about ecological collapse. In fact, it reminded me of nothing more clearly than Joy Williams' new novel Harrow, another book that seeks out new forms that might do justice to the magnitude of the world's crisis (right down to the horse!). Here, sober realities are mixed with ritual myths and surrealism. Among other things, it reveals the way that ecological collapse creates generational divides, and captures the utter fear and panic that brings some people to decide it's immoral to bring children into the 21st century world. Throughout it, David's refrain--None of this is important, we're wasting time--begins to feel like a call to pay closer attention to the things that really matter.

Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotls. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls," begins Julio Cortazar's collection Blow-Up, "...Now I am an axolotl." The narrator of the story describes how he had become obsessed with the axolotls--eerie salamander-like creatures from Mexico--at a Paris aquarium. He visits them every day, certain that they have a human consciousness like his own hidden behind their coin-like eyes and impenetrable expression, and that this human consciousness is beset by suffering. He's sure about this even though he dismisses the idea that the axolotls are able to communicate or connect with him, or vice versa; the consciousness of the axolotls, like the consciousness of the man, touches only the limits of itself.

And when sure enough, he suddenly finds himself looking through they eyes of the axolotl in the tank, condemned to the "liquid hell" he suspected the axolotl endures, his suspicions are confirmed. The funny and frightening thing about "Axolotl" is the way it asserts that solitude is an essential part of consciousness, and yet there is no solace in recognizing this fact; it doesn't bring humans closer to each other or allow them to enter into each others' interiority any more than it does humans and axolotls. When the transformation happens, it happens with "no transition and no surprise," the horror of one consciousness swapped for another without passing each other on the way.

Something similar happens in the story "The Distances," in which a young Argentine woman believes that she has another self who lives as a beggar in Budapest. She begs her fiance to take her to Budapest for their honeymoon, and sure enough, she meets her other self on a Hungarian bridge, and when they embrace she finds herself in the body of the beggar watching the wealthy Argentine walk away. The point of human connection, the embrace, is only a shuffling of loneliness, just as it is for the man and the axolotl.

Cortazar's stories are all about the inadequacy of the mind to meet anything beyond itself, whether that's another person, or reality itself. Many, but not all, of these stories explore this anxiety in the magical realist mode, more Borges than Garcia Marquez, as in "Axolotl" and the terrific "Bestiary," about a young girl invited to summer at an estate where a tiger is always loose. But as the collection progresses--I think the stories, separated into three previously published sections, are more or less chronological--Cortazar moves away from this mode toward a purer realism that acknowledges that the "real world" is already uncanny enough.

The best piece here is probably the novella "The Pursuer," narrated by a jazz critic worried about his friend and subject, a heroin-addicted saxophonist named Johnny. "The Pursuer," like Young Man with a Horn, which it resembles, is about genius, but both Johnny and Cortazar insist that there's nothing otherworldly about Johnny's talent. Music is easy, Johnny says; living is hard: "To look, for instance, or to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the big things, the big difficulties." Jazz, in fact, because it is non-representational--it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, or words, or anything other than itself--seems the perfect flight from the difficulty of being in the world. But that doesn't prevent Johnny, the titular pursuer, from driving himself to death looking for something that, precisely because it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, can't be described or understood.

The companion piece to "The Pursuer" is "Blow-Up," the title story and the inspiration for the Michelangelo Antonioni thriller. "Blow-Up" is about a photographer who captures a tense moment in a public square--a beautiful woman chats up an uncomfortable young man while another man watches from a car. The blown-up photograph haunts the photographer, not because it offers a solution to the perplexity of the moment--in Antonioni's film, the photographer believes he's captured a murder--but because it offers no real insight into the world whatsoever. The photograph, even though it claims to be a representative, creates its own universe, which becomes slowly but aggressively more real than the photographer's own, and threatens to shut him out. "Every looking oozes with mendacity," Cortazar writes, "because it's that which expels us furthest outside ourselves." Like a quantum physicist, the photographer knows that looking at something changes it, and that when we look at the world we are really only looking at ourselves.

One thing I enjoyed about Cortazar's story is how close they seem to a 19th century sort of realism, even as they're horrified by their own ability to capture the real, unlike someone like Borges, who sort of throws his hands up at the problem and takes it as permission to write about the fantastic. Cortazar's stories are like the mansion haunted by the tiger that everyone would rather pretend isn't there, but which they forget about at their own peril.

Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner

He should say something like: "Your god, Lueli, was only made of wood, perishable and subject to accidents, like man who is made of flesh.  He is now burnt, and his ashes are lost among the other ashes.  Now will you not see that my God is a better God than yours, and turn to Him?  For my God is from everlasting, even though the earth shake He cannot be moved."

Yes, that was the sort of thing to say, but he felt a deep reluctance to saying it.  It seemed ungentlemanly to have such a superior invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes gun-boats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the negro into an empire and tricks him of his patrimony.

Timothy Fortune is an Anglican missionary who sets out to convert the Polynesian island of Fanua.  The islanders welcome him with open arms; they are charmed by his quirky ways: his apprehension around the scantily-clad women, the strange music he plays on his harmonium.  But even though he stays many years, he gains only one convert, a youth named Lueli, and Lueli's soul is constantly a source of anxiety for Mr. Fortune.  When he discovers Lueli's god--a small wooden idol that is "his" god in the way that all the islanders have their own hand-carved gods--at an altar in the forest, he despairs for his failure to convert Lueli properly.

Mr. Fortune--actually, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, the first of two slim novels collected in this edition--begins as a particularly sharp parody of European colonialism.  Mr. Fortune bumbles around the island, as unaware of his own priggishness as only a condescending white missionary can be.  He notes that Polynesians, even Lueli, have trouble conceiving of Jesus because they are "not sorrowful enough," without, of course, thinking through the logic of that statement.  And yet Lueli, his young protege, is attached to Mr. Fortune with great ardor and intimacy and accepts his teaching with great equanimity, even when the subject is a particularly bungled lesson in geometry.  What I expected, having heard a little about this book from Brent, was a barely sublimated gay romance, a love which Mr. Fortune represses through his own staunch religion.  And it's not exactly not that.  But while Mr. Fortune's blindness is played for laughs, the intimacy between him and Lueli never is.

About two-thirds of the way through, the novel changes in a way that is both obvious and subtle.  A volcano tremor destroys Mr. Fortune's house, crushing everything inside, including the idol that he had demanded Lueli burn.  Lueli's spirit dies with his own god, and he becomes despondent.  But remarkably, Mr. Fortune's faith dies also, and in the passing of a heartbeat he gives up his Anglican mission for good.  What follows is a meditation on love that took my breath away, a long-formulating realization that Mr. Fortune must leave the island to preserve Lueli, whom he loves above all things:

"I loved him," he thought.  "From the moment I set eyes on him I loved him.  Not with what is accounted a criminal love, for though I set my desire on him it was a spiritual desire.  I did not even love him as a father loves a son, for that is a familiar love, and at the times when Lueli most entranced me it was as a being remote, intact, and incalculable.  I waited to see what his next movement would be, if he would speak or no--it was the not knowing what he would do that made him dear.  Yes, that was how I loved him best, those were my happiest moments; when I was just aware of him, and sat with my sense awaiting him, not wishing to speak, not wishing to make him notice me until he did so of his own accord because no other way would it be perfect, would it be by him.  And how often, I wonder, have I let it be just like that?  Perhaps a dozen times, perhaps twenty times all told, perhaps, when all is put together, for an hour out of the three years I had with him.  For man's will is a demon that will not let him be.  It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone--a stone to throw into it."

Guh. I'd give my hands to have written a paragraph as perfect as that one.  It reveals something shockingly true about love: when it is real it comes out of a recognition of difference, seeing someone as a discrete person outside of yourself, and yet a difference that affirms its essential similarity.  How crazy it is to encounter another being as full of spirit as yourself, yet so alien.  And the same feeling produces a revulsion, a kind of anger.  Like Oscar Wilde says, "Each man kills the thing he loves."  But Wilde's pithiness is no match for Warner's lyrical elaboration, I think.

Warner felt so attached to Mr. Fortune that she revisited him years later in a smaller standalone novella called "The House of the Salutation."  Mr. Fortune, having left Fanua, travels miserably around the world until he comes upon a widow living with a handful of servants in an old rundown mansion in the Argentine Pampas.  The widow seizes upon Mr. Fortune's appearance with a love that is more recognizably romantic than the one he had with Lueli, but no less strange or reverent.  This angers the widow's young heir, who suspects Mr. Fortune as having designs on the estate.  "The heart is like a dog," she says.  "It barks, and lies down again."  The novella is strange and dense, without the touch of irony that lightens Mr. Fortune's Maggot, but touching, because Warner apparently could not forsake her apostate priest and was compelled to provide him, at last, with love.

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

"I believe in the evil of God," Father Rivas said, "but I believe in His goodness too.  He made us in His image--that is the old legend.  Eduardo, you know well how many truths in medicine lay in old legends.  It was not a modern laboratory which first discovered the use of a snake's venom.  And old women used the mold on overripe oranges long before penicillin.  So I too believe in an old legend which is almost forgotten.  He made us in His image--and so our evil is His evil too.  How could I love God if he were not like me?"

Sometimes reading a Graham Greene novel is like ordering the newest item at Taco Bell.  It's new all right, but it's mostly the same raw materials--beans, cheese, tortilla, meat--combined in a new shape.  In The Honorary Consul, it's easy to recognize some of Greene's hallmarks, his beans and cheese.  The protagonist is once again a world-weary cynic and agnostic.  Like in The Quiet American, his foil is a bumbling civil servant.  This time it's Charley Fortnum, the alcoholic honorary consul for the UK in a small Argentinian town, who gets kidnapped by Paraguayan revolutionaries thinking they've nabbed the American ambassador.  And then of course there's the ex-priest, the conflicted man of God, who over the course of the book moves backwards into his own past and rediscovers his religion.

The priest is a man named Father Rivas, who left the cloth to marry and join up with the revolutionaries.  The cynic in The Honorary Consul is Eduardo Plarr, an Anglo-Argentinian doctor whose relationship with Fortnum and the kidnappers both puts him in the middle of the botched kidnapping.  He's also, of course, sleeping with Fortnum's wife, an ex-prostitute:

In a real love affair, he thought, you are interested in a woman because she is someone distinct from yourself; then bit by bit she adapts herself to you, she picks up your habits, your ideas, even your turns of phrase, she becomes part of you, and then what interest remains?  One cannot love oneself, one cannot live for long close to oneself--everyone has need of a stranger in the bed, and a whore remains a stranger.

I don't mean to disparage Greene's books, which often get a lot of mileage out of a very narrow set of themes and situations.  There's something comforting about their familiarity.  (Of course, it's when he breaks those molds that his books are most valuable, like The Power and the Glory and Brighton Rock.)  But The Honorary Consul never finds a way to rise above that narrow set, like The Quiet American does.  It has much to say on the nature of God and the religious life--like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, we get to watch the hapless Rivas dragged back into the life of the priest he thought he'd left behind.  And the character of Fortnum is a good and vivid one, a man who's alcoholism is self-destructive and whose life is small, but who is ennobled by the love he bears his wife.

Like those other books, it's a thriller as much as it is a religious meditation.  The kidnappers try to do their best with the honorary consul, whom they want to ransom in exchange for the release of political prisoners in Paraguay, but the Paraguayans can't understand the vast difference between the office of consul and the honorary title, which makes Fortnum such a small fish that no one--the US, the UK, or Argentina--is willing to do anything to save his life.  Everyone ends up trapped: the kidnappers, who never thought they'd have to kill anyone; Plarr, who's caught between trying to save Fortnum and bedding his wife; and of course Fortnum, who's literally trapped.  The final section of the novel, where all parties are sitting in their hut in the barrio waiting nervously for the deadline to come, is talky and slow, but manages to capture something essential to Greene's worldview: the ineluctable cruelness of international politics, and the heavy hand exerted by God.