First Paragraphs & Autobiographical Novels
Sunday, February 09, 2014
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| Buenos Aires, September 2013 |
El aspecto del cielo sobre el puerto era el de un televisor sintonizado en un canal muerto.
Neuromante,
William Gibson
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Neuromancer, William Gibson
As first paragraphs go that one is pretty good. Many times when I am about to select a book at a bookstore or a library I look for that first paragraph. If it is not a mystery novel, I sometimes go to the last page.
One of my favorite first lines is from the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. When I read it in the volume given to me by a
librarian at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library I realized why I
had wanted to read the memoirs for such a long time.
My
family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct
and collateral.
Sometimes I read a first line in a book in Spanish, I am wowed and then I wonder how it would translate.
This happened recently when I read Tomás Eloy Martínez’s fantastic 1995, Santa Evita
which I located in the Spanish section of the Vancouver Public Library. I soon read the English
translation as I found Santa Evita in English at the McGill Branch of the
Burnaby Public Library. Here are the two in Spanish and, in English as
translated by Helen Lane:
Al
despertar de un desmayo que duró más de tres días, Evita tuvo al fin la certeza
de que iba a morir. Se le habían disipado ya las atroces punzadas en el vientre
y el cuerpo estaba de nuevo limpio, a solas consigo mismo, en una beatitud sin
tiempo y sin lugar. Sólo la idea de la muerte no le dejaba de doler. Lo peor de
la muerte era la blancura, el vacío, la soledad del otro lado: el cuerpo
huyendo como un caballo a galope.
On coming out of a
faint that lasted more than three days, Evita was certain at last that she was
going to die. The terrible pains in her abdomen had gone away, and her body was
clean again, alone with itself, in a bliss without time or place. Only the idea
of death still hurt her. The worst part about death was not that it occurred. The
worst part about death was the whiteness, the emptiness, the loneliness of the
other side: one body racing off like a galloping steed.
The above first paragraphs
are from what I see as a curious, new and most interesting trend. This is to
write a novel in the first person that reads as an autobiography even if it is
not. Tomás Eloy Martínez magically intrudes on Evita’s words in the second
chapter:
In this novel peopled
by real characters, the only ones I never met, were Evita and the Colonel [not
Perón but a very Prussian like Colonel Moori Koenig of the Argentine
Intelligence Service]. I saw Evita from a distance, in Tucumán, one morning on
a national holiday. as for Colonel Moori Koenig, I found a couple of photos and
a few traces of him. The newspapers of the period mention him openly and, often,
disparagingly. It took me months to meet his widow, who lived in an austere
apartment on the calle Arenales and who agreed to see me only after putting me
off time and time again.
This trend now
includes Jerome Charyn’s lovely (in first person) The Secret Life of Emily
Dickinson – A Novel.
Joyce Carol Oates in a
review of Charyn’s novel in the New York Review of Books writes of this trend:
Of
literary sleights of hand none is more exhilarating for the writer, as none is
likely to be riskier, than the appropriation of another—classic—writer’s voice.
In recent years there has emerged a company of remarkably imaginative,
sympathetic, and diverse fictional portraits of literary predecessors: Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours
(Virginia Woolf); Colm Tóibín’s The
Master (Henry James); Jay Parini’s The Last Station (Tolstoy); Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream (Stephen Crane, with
appearances by Henry James and Joseph Conrad); Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë,
with sisters Emily and Anne).
Jerome Charyn’s introduction to The Secret
Life of Emily Dickinson – A Novel is most interesting and inspiring:
She was the first poet I had ever read, and
I was hooked and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke
every rule. Words had their own chain reaction, their own fire. She could stun,
delight, and kill “with Dirks of Melody.” I never quite recovered from reading
her. I, too, wanted to create “ [a]perfect – paralyzing Bliss,” to have my
sentences explode “ like a Maelstrom, with a notch.”
Because of Charyn’s enthusiasm and skill I am looking forward to reading shortly his new novel, a first person “autobiography’ on Lincoln, I Am Abraham.
The first paragraph of another first person
“autobiography” on Evita by the well regarded Argentine novelist Marcos
Aguinis, La Furia de Evita, 2013 reads as follows (I will have to translate it
into English)
Ya no temo
decir lo que quiera. Tampoco hablar en contra de mí. Sacar la cabeza de las
aguas limpias y las aguas sucias en las que nadé, rodeada de peces de colores y
cocodrilos hambrientos. Necesito compartir una montaña de dulces y basura. Es
lo que voy a hacer con este libro.
La Furia De
Evita, Marcos Aguinis, 2013
I am no longer afraid
of saying anything I may want to say. Nor to speak against myself. To come to
the surface of the clean waters and the dirty waters in which I swam,
surrounded by multicoloured fish and hungry crocodiles. I need to share a
mountain of sweets and garbage. That is what I am going to do with this book.
La Furia de
Evita, Marcos Aguinis, 2013
My translation
I think I could go on and
on with this. I will not but I will linger with one of my favourite Cuban novelists
that I read in Spanish and or in English, depending what I can find at our VPL. Leonardo Padilla (formerly in some books, Leonardo Padilla Fuentes) writes of a
contemporary Havana
in which he masks in a most subtle way the shortages of Castro’s regime. His protagonist
in the novels that most interest me is a police detective called Mario Conde. I
would describe the man as a Cuban Marlowe, not a private detective, but a
policeman who suffers that existential angst that Chandler injected into his novels. Conde is a
sort of tropical Marlowe. His novels have different titles to those in Spanish.
Four of them are listed as the Havana Quartet, Havana Black, Havana Blue,
Havana Red and Havana Gold. The latter is Spanish is Vientos de Cuaresma which
would translate as Lenten Winds. I find the first paragraph interesting as it
mimics Chandler’s Santa Ana wind.
There was a desert
wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down
through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and
your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek
little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands'
necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail
lounge.
Raymond Chandler, Red Wind
Here is Padura’s first
paragraph from Havana Gold:
It was Ash Wednesday
and, eternally punctual, a parched choking wind swept through the barrio
stirring up filth and sorrow, as if sent straight from the desert to recall the
Messiah’s sacrifice. Sand from quarries and ancient hatreds stuck to rancour
and fear and the rubbish overflowing from bins; the last dry leaves of winter
scattered, coated with the stench of the tannery, and the birds of spring
vanished as if anticipating an earthquake. The dust cloud smothered the evening
light and each act of breathing required a conscious, painful effort.
Havana Gold, Leonardo Padura
Translated by Peter
Bush
I would like to point out here that whatever merit you might see or not see in the above it is all possible thanks to our well stocked Lower Mainland libraries.
