Julieta Campos and the “ephemeral eternity of an instant”

I’ve been reading a lot of crazy books for my “Readings in Global Fact and Fiction” class at Johns Hopkins University this semester. One of the books I struggled with most was Julieta Campos’ The Fear of Losing Eurydice. I had to submit an essay before coming back from spring break, so I chose to write about this book because I like a challenge… and I like writing about things that frustrate me. The essay might be a little wonky, but here it is…

  

I have no idea why these dancers are on the cover. 

As a foray into the inner caverns of consciousness, The Fear of Losing Eurydice is not an easy book to follow. While navigating my way through this literary labyrinth I found myself asking lots of questions: Who’s speaking? Where in the world are we? Do physical laws apply here? What time is it? Does time exist in any meaningful sense? Wait, who’s speaking again?

The Fear of Losing Eurydice is not an artistic interpretation of the world as Campos knows it. Rather, this “novel” is a unique blend of the literary, the philosophical, the surrealist and the avant-garde. Campos, a lifelong student of all things literary, uses an array of established forms and mechanisms to shape her own anti-form. But the resulting literary construct, however it’s ultimately defined or categorized, is of little importance. This book is about getting consumed in a maze of love, desire and the voyeurism of writing.

This text is deeply philosophical but by no means dry. Campos frequently gets lost in the expanse of her own descriptions, leading the reader into a state of sensual and intellectual overload. Here is Campos describing what I believe is a scene from a dream: “Excessive, obsessed, proliferating mirrors, which will multiply gestures many times and play with the ghosts of other presences, witnesses who will imitate the gestures of still others.” Here she is describing a Caribbean street that may or may not function as a time-space vortex as well: “The pavement, softened by the heat, gives off a light vapor that slows the speed of bodies and retards timepieces as if an invisible apparatus were projecting something that, outside of its own space and its own time, must have been happening elsewhere and in another temporal sequence.”

Identifying and deciphering a specific narrative point of view is nearly impossible — which is what I think Campos was trying to accomplish. One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand who is speaking is because Campos bestows consciousness upon everything, persons and inanimate objects alike. To follow Campos’ language is to enter a dream-like state of mind where individual consciousness cedes way to a collective consciousness. Like the raucous combination of cheers before a headlining band takes the stage, this mass voice simultaneously drowns out and amplifies the individual voice.

Campos doesn’t try to tell a single story, but a series of stories that, taken together, attempt to encompass even more. “To tell the story of the couple is to tell the story of another couple which is another story, but it is the same one,” Campos writes. However, this expansive approach, coupled with Campos’ highly stylized language, makes it hard to ascertain what, if anything, is actually happening. Cause and effect have little to no meaning in Campos’ narrative. Desire rules all. Physical actions stemming from this desire are less important.

Monsieur N. is the only real “character” in this novel. An aloof French professor, he sits at the Minos Palace café somewhere in the Caribbean, talking to himself, imagining things, grading his students’ papers (which are translations of writings by Jules Verne). One actual “event” that occurs in this story is when Monsieur N. draws a picture of an island on a cocktail napkin. This simple act of bored creation opens up a rabbit hole through which Monsieur N. and the reader fall into alternate worlds. A love story takes shape alongside the story of people shipwrecked á la Robinson Crusoe. It’s all thoroughly ridiculous.

On Aleksandar Hemon's Novel "The Lazarus Project"

Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project” is a postmodern novel that lays down two story lines and weaves them together. One is the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish man who fled the pogroms of Ukraine for Chicago. The novel starts off in Lazarus’ world like so: “The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago.” This is the date of Lazarus’ death, the day he is killed by a police officer and painted (falsely?) as an anarchist assassin. The other story line belongs to Brik, a compulsive and overdramatic writer living in post-9/11 Chicago. Brik becomes obsessed with the life and death of this Lazarus Averbuch, so he sets out to trace the dead man’s steps for clues, answers, a story.

Brik is an odd guy, a dissatisfied man who is too busy dreaming about what his life could be that he can’t figure out what his life actually is. “All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere,” Brik writes. “That is all that the world is.” Brik says goodbye (temporarily?) to his girlfriend and sets out with a former war photographer to capture the story of Lazarus for his book. The two travel to Bosnia, Moldova and Ukraine. Having lived several years in Ukraine and traveled much around this part of the world, I’m amazed at how well Hemon captures the essence of places and people. Hemon takes me right back to Ukraine when he describes driving through the fertile plains in perfect poetry: “Fields of coy sunflowers, hills reticulated with untended vineyards, hutlike houses huddles in shallow misty valleys – they all passed us as in a dream, accompanied by jumpy Russian disco Seryozha found on his radio.”

It must be nearly impossible for a writer to tell a story based in Bosnia without talking about war. Hemon offers a sober look at what happens in war, how it’s terrible legacy lasts much longer than the fighting itself. “In the beginning, every war has a neat logic: they want to kill us, we want not to die. But with time it becomes something else, the war becomes this space where anybody can kill anybody at any time, where everybody wants everybody dead, because the only way you are sure to stay alive is if everybody else is dead.”

It's tough for a writer to transition back and forth between Eastern Europe in the 2000s to Chicago in the 1900s, but Hemon pulls it off seamlessly. He’s so good at describing people and places that I always felt like I knew where I was in space and time.

I’ve always been fascinated with Chicago around the turn of the 20^th Century. (Click here to read “When Justice Kills: Love and Anarchy in 1880s Chicago,” my review of novel about the the Haymarket Square riots and the life and death of anarchist Albert Parsons.) Hemon does a great job describing the counter-revolutionary fervor of the elites in Chicago’s media and political spheres. The newspapers of the time call for the “extermination” of “the anarchist vermin that infest Chicago.” They proclaim: “every loyal citizen will be called up to achieve this job of housecleaning. The authors of seditious utterances will be prosecuted.”

I'm a huge fan of Hemon's short stories (especially his 2001 collection "The Question of Bruno"), and this book has me convinced that he's a writer to watch in the coming years. If you have any experience or interest in Chicago, Ukraine, Bosnia and Serbia, you'll love this book because it will take you to these places. Hemon is an immensely talented writer with a lot of imagination, and he shows the reader all he’s got with this book. 4.5/5 stars? How’s this: If this book were a bottle of wine, I’d give it a solid 90 points.

Style and Swagger in Junot Diaz's Prize-Winning Novel

My first thought upon reading this novel was: Oh, great, another novel without quotation marks. How kitsch.

I read on.

Then I came across the footnotes, some of which spanned three pages. Then the frequent sentence fragments. You know. Like these.

Then the change in narrators and shifts in points of view. Sure enough, Junot Diaz’s novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” contains all the gimmicks in the fiction writer’s handbook, and then some.

But these little games make sense within the context of Diaz ’s theory of the novel. This novel is all about style. Sure there are characters and a postmodern acid trip of a plot, but it seems Diaz has focused much of his time and energy on crafting a style that is uniquely his own. His writing draws inspiration from the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as the punk postmodernism of Kathy Acker. He bastardizes all sorts of literary genres and conventions to create something I call the literary middle finger. This novel is an act of literary defiance, a big “Fuck You!” not only to convention and tradition, but to the reader. I imagine Diaz sitting at his desk, reading an advanced copy of his own novel, chuckling to himself. “Well, fuckers, here it is. My artsy and profound novel. It’s clever as shit, bitches you know it! Gimme the fuckin’ Pulitzer already.”

Diaz’s overarching goal — in my opinion obviously — is to force a reaction from the reader. How exactly the reader reacts is less important than the reaction itself. Every good novel creates some sort of emotional, existential, sometimes even physical reaction in a reader. It’s what makes novels worth reading, and writing. But Diaz, in his own quirky bravado, sticks his readers right in the gut just to see how they’ll react. While not nearly as disturbing and violent as trangressive fiction writers like Brett Easton Ellis and Kathy Acker, Diaz’s novel shoots at many of the same targets. Sex, violence, gangsters, murder or bloodthirsty dictators appear on almost every page. It’s like Diaz set out to create a feeling of discomfort in the reader, to confuse the reader, and lastly to piss off the reader to no end.

Take the novel’s footnotes, for example. They serve the purpose of providing some background and historical information on the Dominican Republic, where about half of the novel takes place. But they frequently turn into continuous rants or streams of semi-consciousness. Reading a novel and simultaneously skipping around to read the bizarre footnotes is discombobulating for the reader, and I would not be surprised if many readers simply skipped over the footnotes altogether.

That said, and even though they can be frustrating, the footnotes add richness and complexity to the narrative. They just do. They become stories of their own. (Is it really a gimmick if the author pulls it off?)

Another important aspect of Diaz’s style is repetition, lots and lots of repetition. Lots and lots. Of. Repetition.

Here Diaz’s narrator…

• On Trujillo, the Dominican dictator: “Trujillo was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu.”
• On the Dominican Republic’s capital city: “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.”
• On Trujillo, again: “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated.”

Jennifer Egan's Genre-Bending Novel, "The Keep"

I’m an obsessive writer and an avid reader. And sometimes I come across a book that makes me think, “Damn, I wish I would have written that.” Jennifer Egan’s novel “The Keep” is one such book.

In an era when genre-bending has become a genre itself, Jennifer Egan does something truly new with this novel. Published in 2007, it’s unlike anything I've ever read, but at the same time it incorporates elements from a dozen different literary works.  

It starts off as a story about Danny and Howie, two young cousins. Howie is the messed-up adopted one and Danny is the good kid. At the outset, it seemed we were destined for a story of two teenagers. And, in a sense, that's what this novel is. But it's also many other things

When they're teenagers, Danny leaves Howie in a cave and Howie almost dies. It's so traumatic, it's referred to as “the incident.” From then on, Danny has serious guilt and Howie has serious anger.

But, hold on a second. Now we're twenty years in the future and we're somewhere in Eastern Europe. There's a castle with a mysterious “keep” and people with secrets. We're with Danny and Howie again, but we're in Kafka's territory now.

Wait a sec. All of the sudden, the narrator jumps out of the story and addresses the reader directly. He's in prison, and we're not sure why. He admits that “this is all some story some guy told me.” But is it? Of course not. Nothing is as it seems in “The Keep.”

This all happens before page 35. If you're not tripping by this point, you will be soon enough.

There’s a baroness of the castle who lives in the keep and says she’s descended from the people who built the castle 900 years ago. She looks young and beautiful from afar, but the closer Danny gets to her the uglier and older she gets. It's strange, but by no means the strangest thing in the novel. What exactly lies in this “keep” and why is this shape-shifting baroness guarding it?

As the castle story builds toward a powerful and unexpected climax, we learn more and more about this jailed narrator. These two elements compete with each other for the reader’s attention, but as the book moves forward, the two storylines run together in an ingenious fashion.

There’s an inherent risk in narrating from the perspective of someone with chaotic life circumstances, such as a convicted criminal. You’ve got to get the reader to believe the person who is narrating. In this case, our narrator is a man in prison for a terrible crime. His life is one of boredom, fights and more boredom. There are some times when Egan slips out of her prisoner narrator and throws in a phrase that sounds forced and fake, like: “his voice was butter melting in a pan,” and, one page later, “his voice is like a butterfly wing moving.” Still, these are few, and for the most part Egan’s prisoner narrator is believable. Egan is at her best when describing this prisoner’s attraction to a woman who comes into the prison to teach a writing class. Yes, there’s a love story element to this tale as well.

Description is lacking in some places. Egan has a great skill of describing people and places, but she doesn't use it much here. A lot of the scenes read like a screenplay. (And I'll admit it: I wondered for most of the book if she wrote this with a movie option in mind. Until the last fifty pages, when a plot turn makes me think this would be nearly impossible to film.) Egan's language is fast-paced, close-up and quick, creating an experience similar to the one I got while watching films like “Memento” and “Pulp Fiction.” This is not a book to read slowly. It almost needs to be read fast, because so much is going on, and the pace is so important, that to read it over the course of weeks would take away from that.

With whatever minor criticism I have for this book, I can not deny the reality that Egan is one of America's greatest living novelists. This is only the second novel by Egan I’ve read, the other being “Look at Me,” which was one of the best books I read in 2010. This is up there with the best of 2011. Next, I’ll move onto “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” a novel that earned Egan the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. If it’s anything like her previous two novels, I’m sure the award is deserved.