Enjoy! (And then order��Spiritual Choreographies, which is about a musician . . . )

/..

And to try and entice you to buy the book, here are the first two chapters. (And yes, the second chapter is 13.)

The choreography needs someone to witness its movements.

I am he.

I am he, the other, she, you, they.

He played the harmonica with his nose, pulled out his handkerchief and blew until all the pollution of the capital was expelled from his lungs in one transparent color. He finger-tapped his f lat chest like a kultrun, gargling to imitate a harp.

He thought he’d be able to escape to his tree when he could not longer bear the smog of the city.

I, on the other hand, now that I have no nostrils with which to inhale or exhale, want a melody of bows and strings and stones to still be raining down from all five fingers, onto this skin, stretched across this orthopedic wheelchair, when the sun rises.

On the table, in the sunlight, there should’ve been some kind of animal, not this screen where each movement of my pupil writes a soundless name.

*

13. CORRECTION

The choreography needs audience, needs someone to witness its movements. The damp twilight wind slammed shut the kitchen window. She was cutting leeks at the sink when the sash colliding with the frame startled her; the shards of glass turned to fragments on the floor a few meters away. The shock made her jerk the knife across the back of her left hand. When the boy entered dressed in pajamas, hair mussed—mother, what was that? his question—she was standing there, staring at the shape of that small wound under the stream of water, as if it reminded her of some profound, lost thing. One sound, two, a counterpoint, the dark night looking out at waves, she thought. And then there was just her blood, staining the water in the sink. She brought her hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t ruin the vegetable with her foul taste.

“Go shower, we’re eating soon. And bring him down,” she told the boy.

Ten minutes later they were all sitting in silence around the kitchen table. She had to quicken her breathing and open her eyes: the little wound on her hand kept her from concentrating, pulsing in the dark, like the double of another wound on the palm of the hand of a man who in her memory recoiled from a seashell, from a broken bottle, tears and sweat; she was naked, on the wave-packed sand, wet. I was another person back then, she thought.

“Life here begins many times,” the vocalist blurted out unexpectedly from his wheelchair.

He did so without solemnity, but with a voice not his own.

It was a little unsettling, according to the doctors, his neurological damage rendered speech impossible, but that was the third time in a year he’d spoken during meditation. For an instant, the boy opened his eyes too; he and his mother exchanged a glance just as a draft swept in through the broken window and caused a distant door—the bathroom door, she guessed—to slam. Then they heard the beep, beep, beep of the alarm being deactivated at the front entrance. It was the other, returning from the recording studio. He came in carrying a paper bag, set it down in the middle of the table, and went into the kitchen. Reaching out her fingers, she removed a still-warm roll from the bag and tore it open, scanning with her eyes, in vain, for the jam. The other shut the refrigerator with his foot, sat down; he grabbed the jar of jam and set it beside her plate—she gave him a grateful smile—and turned to the vocalist, offering him a sip of the beer he held in his hand.

Then the other raised the can and made a toast:

“Bless Him. I finished writing the bloody score today.”

The boy pinched an unlit cigarette between his lips as he applauded. The movement of his hands knocked over the milk carton, which, striking the floor, bounced back up and collided with the jar of jam. Suddenly irritated, she couldn’t take her eyes off the can of beer as she attempted to clean the floor with a spoon. The other brought his hands together and bent down beside her.

“The Man wanted to tell me something last night, I’m sure of it,” the boy blurted out.

The vocalist tried to grimace through his paralysis.

“Was the show any good?” she asked.

“It’s been proven: The Man is the greatest baritone in the history of humanity, Mother. His shows are always perfect.”

“That’s why he’s in the bubblegum music.”

The other burst out laughing at his own comment. She, all the while, watched her son speak, but couldn’t understand what he was saying. Were they speaking in Chezungun again to mess with her, to exclude her? All she heard was laughter and—it’s absurd, she said to herself, we’re miles from the ocean—the sound of waves breaking on the beach, swelling with wind and rain. Another spark in her memory: the beach’s thick sand clinging to her thighs as she spread her legs, the other’s alcoholic stench on the nape of her neck, his moan in the dark: leave us alone.

“I pushed through the crowd right up to the front, seriously. And there I am, transfixed, face to face with The Man, modulating the final guitar solo with the vocoder implanted in one of his molars. Then he sees me, I’m sure of it. He sees me and wants to tell me something, something only he knows, something for my ears alone.”

“My dearest, dearest lad,” the other sighed under his breath. “Do not forget the stage’s bright lights are there to blind the performers just enough.”

She carried the plates and cups to the dishwasher as the volume of the conversation rose. According to the boy, the fact that The Man was the first clone to ever produce positive sales numbers for the record company proved nothing in terms of his musical refinement, nor did it provide any credible proof as to whether or not he was capable of feeling emotions when he sang.

“Haven’t you ever seen a stranger’s face pass quickly by a window, the face of a stranger to whom you must impart some important thing, a face that never comes entirely into focus, but that you just have to speak to? I swear that’s what happened to The Man when he saw me.”

She decided to leave them to their discussion and take the vocalist in his wheelchair to their bedroom. She thought she might purchase a Quyasullu film for the four of them to watch while they ate dessert. She helped prop him up in the bed, brought a few pillows in from the living room to support his back. When she gave him the remote control, he gripped her hand, his eyes fixing on that little wound, already beginning to heal. She wanted to say, to ask him one, two, three times the same question about the words he’d babbled during meditation: if, after all these weeks correcting the book about The Band on his screen, he could use his voice again, if something had made him say what he’d said, and to what end. Then the wind blew, causing another draft to slam another door. A door somewhere in the apartment. The front door? she wondered.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll run excerpts from his novels, highlight a forthcoming interview between Labbé and his translator Will Vanderhyden, and share some of Carlos’s music.

But for today, to kick this off, I want to do something a bit unusual and rerun a post from a couple years ago �����dzܳ���.

Loquela Is the Book You Should Be Reading

This is another one of those posts. One in which I wrote a long-ass essay/diatribe that I decided to delete so as to “focus on the positive.”

In this case, I was on a roll about how sick I am of the literary field anointing four-five international authors a year and writing endless articles/listicles about them at the expense of all other books. Ģ����ý how the field has become a bunch of yeasayers who would rather join a chorus of “this book is the best!” instead of reading adventurously and actually finding out about books that haven’t been ordained in this way. Ģ����ý how reviewers don’t seem to take many risks anymore, and would rather pander, cheerleading style, for more retweets and favorites. People don’t seem as curious anymore, as willing to go out and find their own little books to champion. Maybe it’s because social media has ramped up our social anxieties to an insane degree, but it feels like people just want to be nice and safe and all in accord. Dissent is death on Twitter.

Fuck all of that. And fuck me for wasting twenty minutes trying to flesh out the argument . . . Instead, I’ll tell you about one of those books that adventurous, non-conforming readers would absolutely love: by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden.

*

I just reread this book in preparation for a conversation with him at Wild Detectives in Dallas, and was re-wowed by the multilayered linguistic world that he creates in his novels. This is a book that owes a lot to Juan Carlos Onetti’s work (especially A Brief Life) as well as to Julio Cortázar and other Latin American works that are set in universities. I’m not going to lie: It’s a complicated book, with multiple narrators, events that recur in new contexts providing the book with a certain instability (or, reversing that statement, granting it with a certain remix texture transforming scenes into motifs that Labbé picks up and plays with in increasingly interesting ways), novels within dreams within novels. It’s a book about how art is created and how it is transformative, and there’s basically nothing like it that’s being written today.

Rather than do a “normal” sort of reading and conversation—with Carlos reading for 10 minutes, then answering some general questions—we tried to create a way to introduce everyone to the text by asking questions, then, at three different occasions, reading separate bits from the book. I can’t reproduce that here, but I do think that it was a really great introduction to how to approach the book and that everyone who attended will enjoy the novel that much more, and have a new appreciation for it. Which is maybe what literary events should be?

We started by talking about the first main thread of the book, the sections entitled “The Novel,” which occurs every other chapter and are always in italics. This thread is about “Carlos,” a young writer trying to write a detective novel about an albino girl who is being stalked and hires a detective to try and protect her. That doesn’t end well though . . . From the very first paragraph of Loquela:

Carlos looked at his notebook and reread the last page: anticipating that the killer—whoever it was—would defend himself, the man had retrieved the gun. His head pounded and his knees were shaking. There’s a dead girl lying inside, he thought. He’d never fired a gun. His vision clouded over, his whole body pulsed as the door opened slowly from inside. He decided to fire first. And he did. The albino girl let out a soft cry and fell at his feet. He was the killer.

The bulk of “The Novel” sections are about Carlos trying to make this manuscript work. He talks about it with Elisa, he tries to figure out the plot holes, he rewrites certain events (like when the car tries to run over the albino girl), and he receives a letter from Violeta Drago (more on her in a bit).

In writing the novel, Labbé (to distinguish him from the fictional Carlos) wanted to include some of the thoughts and ideas that went into writing such a novel, which led to the second set of sections: “The Recipient.” These sections take the form of a diary in which a student writes about the novel he’s writing about Carlos. This is some At Swim-Two-Birds shit right there. These bits are more theoretical, touching upon the way ideas and books (like Onetti’s A Brief Life) influence your way of structuring events and writing about them. Here’s an abridged excerpt from one of these parts.

Things are happening.

I’ve been imagining a detective story. It occurred to me that I could write a novel of innumerable pages about a girl who, frightened because a man is apparently following her, contacts a detective to help her. She and the detective become friends, they flirt. He ends up obsessed with her and follows her everywhere. I want to sit down every afternoon, take advantage of the dead hours of summer to write. On one of those afternoons the inspiration comes to me. [. . .] That story of the girl who gets stalked by the same guy she is paying to protect her has been coming back to me every since my cousin told it at our uncle and aunt’s country house last Sunday. [. . .] That Sunday my cousin Alicia and I talked almost all afternoon. I told her I wanted to live alone that next year and she invited me to come check out her home-studio on Calle Bustamente, she could rent me a room there. And that’s where I’m writing this now. She also told me about her friend Violeta. Bored of living in the cesspool of Santiago (my cousin’s words), she moved to another city—I can’t remember which one—for a couple of years. She met a guy there, a classmate at the university, with whom she went out and then broke up. The guy was unhinged and wouldn’t leave her alone, calling her on the phone every night, following her through the streets, buzzing the intercom at her apartment and not saying anything when she answered. One day, desperate, it occurred to her to ask a professor friend from the university for help, and he managed to get the guy expelled, but that was worse: one time the guy, furious, almost hit her with his car, and another time he almost pushed her into the city’s river. She loved where she was living, but in the end Violeta had to go back to Santiago. What she doesn’t know is if the guy followed her here or if she just had the terrible luck of encountering another psychopath. Alicia was very worried when she told me this, her friend is receiving letters that are making her paranoid, lately she thinks she sees that guy on every corner. There aren’t many girls like Violeta, according to Alicia, and that’s why men go crazy for her. This is a story I’d love to be able to write.

The third narrator/set of sections in the book is written by Violeta and is entitled “The Sender.” (If it isn’t clear yet, these sections rotate throughout, in this order: The Novel, The Recipient, The Novel, The Sender, The Novel, The Recipient . . . ) Violeta is an albino student who is troubled by He Who Is Writing a Novel, a fellow student who seems obsessed with her.

There are two things worth noting about Violeta. 1) in her youth, Violeta invents a magic land called Neutria. This shows up in all three sections, sometimes as a paradise, sometimes as a university, sometimes as a real location.

What comes next is the moment in which my childhood multiplies into details I’d love to recount and cannot. Most of them were lost the instant we played together, the rest are still there, in Neutria, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes Neutria was the land of semi-divine emperors, of infinite cruelty or kindness, whose slothful and obese courtiers, in contrast, engaged in decadent melodramas. Other times it was a simple village where farmers, shepherds, and foreigners traded honey, cheese, bread, or fruit for a song or an entertaining story. Or it was the nexus of activity for stylized spies, convertibles, casinos, firearms, hotels, highways, and femme fatales. And in the middle of all those adult faces appears a boyish one, yours, insistently inquiring what it is that we’re playing, and coldly I reply that we’re playing the city of Neutria, not expecting you to make fun of us: you talk to yourself—my mother says people who talk to themselves are lunatics. Alicia gets up, says again that it isn’t make-believe, that Neutria exists; it’s a beautiful place, incredible, we travel there on long weekends with our parents. It’s so much fun that we like to recall everything that happened there. That’s what we’re doing, remembering all the wondrous things, not inventing them.

2) At the university, she’s involved with a professor who promotes “Corporalism,” a set of literary beliefs that are intentionally hazy, but generally involve doing extreme things with your body while a writer observes and writes your flesh into the text, and also involves some quasi-Barthesian rhetoric. From the “Corporalization Manifesto”:

The reader lives and the author has died, we’ll proclaim, though our goal will be to resuscitate him, to give him what he never had: body, flesh, presence. And what will die instead is the text, the artistic product that escapes from our hands and becomes merchandise: all the time we spent spilling our blood across the page is transformed into food for publishers, newspapers, critics. That’s why we’re anemic, that’s why we need to suck up the humors of others and end up dissolved in foreign books, that’s why we die every time we read, in handwriting that is not our own, a sentence that belongs to us.

So there’s that. The last part of Loquela starts to revolve around this group, their actions and beliefs, reflecting back on everything that came before. Like I said before, this is layered. It’s a book in which there are “rabbit hole moments,” when the spiral of narrative levels is simply dazzling. And there’s this thing that happens towards the end, where there’s basically a series of beginnings, a sort of loop of possible events. For me, it starts to read like the best of electronic music. (Or anything by )) Ideas and threads resurfacing in new contexts, textures that you can lose yourself in, spaces that seem utterly alien and exciting. (Not surprising that Labbé is a )

*

For a book that opens with an ending, I guess it makes sense for me to wrap this up by going back to the title, Loquela. It’s a strange, slippery word first used by Ignatius de Loyola way back in the middle ages, and then adopted by Roland Barthes:

Loquela is a word that designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound or the consequences of an action: an emphatic form of the lover’s discourse.

And that’s really what Loquela is: the flux of language around death and love. It’s a book I hope you buy and that I hope we can talk about. I don’t get it, but the experience of rereading it—in which every paragraph reframed the whole book, convinced me it was about something else—was exhilarating. It may never get it’s own hashtag trend, or be a best-seller, but great literature never really does.

Nine o’clock, Father. Aslan called him Father because of the difference in their ages and in token of devotion and gratitude. Nine o’clock, eh? Wacholder was now able to shout, so he shouted.

Yes, nine o’clock, Father.

What about my tea?

Leo jumped out of bed again (has he gone plumb crazy?) and picked at his molar with satisfaction as Aslan obediently brought down his own tea. Aslan can do what he likes, I’m here to work.

Wacholder warmed his hands on the lukewarm tea. They’ve been here again, Aslan, the big black ones, do you hear. They’ve visited me again, Aslan, as big as gothic letters, up and down the wall of my heart, Aslan, up and down, and the Latin letters too, as green and thick as creepers. A whole bellyful, Aslan, it turned my stomach, Aslan. And then the rats, as big as big steamships, back and forth, back and forth. What do you think, Aslan, should I call the doctor?

Call the doctor, Father.

No, I won’t call the doctor. I’ve changed my mind. Let them crawl, let them bob up and down, let them gnaw and creep and root about. Let them hollow me out. Man is a pipe.

Yes, Father.

Man is a connecting pipe between feed trough and garbage pail. Here’s the trough and here’s the pail, and across here is man and they send things through him. A hose. You see what I mean?

Yes, Father.

Do I get Würz or don’t I?

Not for the present, Father.

He’s half my mutilated soul, do you understand that at least?

There’s something between the two of you. Something. Something that cuts across the river and through all the walls. An umbilical cord.

That’s it, Aslan. An umbilical cord.

You’re twins. Still unborn.

That’s it, my dear poet.

Nibbling in your sleep at the placenta of this world.

That’s right, Aslan, that’s right.

Floating in the dark, amniotic fluid . . .

Yes, Aslan, we’re both floating. I in my bleached wood fibers, in my glue, breathless, airless, and he over there on the other side in his mattress. Have you drafted the letter?

Here it is, Father. The seventy-fourth.

Let’s see.

Wacholder stared at the large sheet of paper crowded with writing and turned it in all directions. My eyes hurt. Read it to me.

Aslan read: Now, Würz, you’ve got to go. And quick. The house is on fire. Your face is black with smoke and soot. Get down to the river. You’re on fire. Into the sand with you. Put yourself out. Make it fast. Drop your brushes. Run. The beams are falling. Hurry. The housecleaning can wait. Out with you. The fire is consuming you. You’re half charred. You eggshell. You sheet of wrapping paper. You tree-stump goblin. You tin can. Run for your life. I’ll put you out in Greenland. Don’t be afraid. Seventeen years is enough. Hurry up. Yours, Wacholder. [. . .]

•

Fire didn’t worry him. Wacholder had used more effective threats. Cats, rats, ants, dynamite, floods. What worried him wasn’t the substance or the curses. What bothered him was that people didn’t take him and his work seriously. Ossias Würz was frantically busy making preparations for his seventeenth wedding anniversary. And now comes this letter, the seventy-fourth, and the preparations have to be postponed. As usual, he first put Wacholder’s letter in an envelope. So as not to forget it, he wrote Wacholder’s address on the outside (Alsterhof, City) and affixed a stamp. Only then did he start working on the answer.

Good Lord, Wacholder, what’s got into you again, what are you driving at with your fire? I’m burning with eagerness to do my work, and you want to smoke me out of here. How often must I tell you that I want to be left in peace? I need peace to do my peaceful work. I wish to build, not to sit around, to preserve, not to destroy. I am a man of progress, a man of the future, I have values, yes, values. I am the future. The future is I. Don’t you see that? Me, a sheet of wrapping paper, an eggshell, an empty tin can? And where do you get the tree-stump goblin? I’m telling you for the last time: my home is not a cave. This is no womb, it doesn’t smell of sweat and blood, of milk and urine, of afterbirth and yesterday. Don’t make me think of those things, I’m always thinking of them. And when I think of them, I feel as I did then. It was an uninterrupted movement of the lips, eating deeper and deeper into the flesh. It was hunger, lust. If you remember, stop remembering. Those were the lip-smacking years, but we didn’t get fat. Not I. Did you? It took me a long time, but now I know. It’s no good chasing after your daily bread, don’t move from your four walls. Exertion is a waste of energy. I have all nature delivered to my back door. Here in my home it’s chopped small and grated fine, crushed and salted, boiled and eaten. I’ve got my domestic animals in jars and bottles. That’s the way to do it. And the beauties of nature aren’t lacking either. I have butterflies in tissue paper, a marten and a fox on top of the cupboard, two elks, a roe and a bear on the wall. A swallow and a sea gull under glass. And it’s all fresh and clean. Here I can breathe. I don’t need your Greenland or your river, and I can do without your caf.. What would I do in your caf.? What have you to offer me? A noise that’s always in my ears? Faces that smack their lips and talk and stare at me, that I see the whole time as it is? What have you got out there that I haven’t got in here?Neatness and order are freedom, that’s why I stay here.

�������� at checkout to get 30% off.

And then the unexpected happened. From a hole in the ground no bigger than a fox’s burrow popped a creature with his finger pressed to his lips. Pst, pst, he went, and a man, small, dark, and skinny, crawled out of the hole, shook his fist in Bachmann’s stomach and yelled: You’re caving in my entrance, you damn fool.

Get away from me, you! Bachmann was scared stiff. He hauled off and poked his stick into the ghost’s side. It writhed with pain and made faces. You’ve hurt my kidney, the critter whimpered. Good, said Bachmann and got ready to strike again. Then it dawned on him: the ghost spoke his mother tongue. You’re not a mole?

Me a mole? Are you crazy? I’m a German.

A German? Bachmann wasn’t going to be made a fool of. He was delirious with hunger. In such a state, he knew, all sorts of things can happen. The critter held his side and limped around him in a circle.

You’re a liar! Whish! He tried to shoo him away, but the little fellow kept nimbly beyond his reach. Whish, Bachmann went, get away! He spun around, brandishing the stick. How can it be a German? Must be some cross between a man and a beast, like those mongrels that sometimes get born in out-of-the-way places.

But I am a German. We talk the same language, don’t we? The argument had its effect. Standing by the entrance to the burrow, Bachmann lifted his right boot. Don’t, the other cried out. Don’t do it! That’s my home! His home? ran through Bachmann’s head, then he must be lying. That’s no kind of home for a human being. He brought his right boot down with full force. The boot vanished in the ground. The construction was frail, further proof that the whole thing must be a trap. [. . .]

What’s your name?

Xavier Schnotz, my company is over there. He pointed in the direction from which Bachmann had come. You know that? Bachmann was amazed. You know that and you stay here? I didn’t see a thing. I haven’t met a soul in a whole month. If it weren’t for the planes, I’d have thought I was dead long ago. The Elysian fields.

Don’t insult the fields, said Schnotz. Without these fields I’d have been dead long ago. Do you realize how warm it is down there?

No.

Plenty warm. You’re a stinker. You’ve wrecked my house. But I won’t go with you. If you keep on going, you’ll be at the border by tonight. Without me. I’m staying here until it’s over. Have to dig myself a new hole. It’s too risky in the hut.

Hut?

Too risky, I tell you. It’s up against the wall for the like of us, or the noose.

Bachmann stood up: I’m beginning to catch on. You’re a deserter.

Sure, what else.

And I thought you were lost. So you’re a deserter. That’s great.

Schnotz detected something wrong in the tone.

What do you mean: So you’re a deserter? What are you, a Wehrmacht patrol?

Not at all. But I’m not a deserter either. Not by a long shot. The opposite. I’m looking for my regiment.

I don’t get you.

Oh yes, you do. I’m looking for my regiment. And if I don’t find my own, I’ll join another. Been on sick leave long enough. High time I was doing something.

Schnotz was thunderstruck. He must be pretty far gone. Or he’s an informer. Crazy idea. They wouldn’t send out an informer like that. [. . .]

What Bachmann was telling him struck him as so implausible that he didn’t trust his ears. Plan A, said Bachmann, is maybe the simplest. I creep into an army camp at night and hide in the cellar. I wait for a fresh batch of recruits to turn up, and as soon as I hear them marching through the gate, I pop out. I wait till they’re in the shower room, naked everybody looks alike. Then to the quartermaster’s, I draw a new uniform, and I’m in the clear. Sure, I lose my rank, but I get a second chance. That’s worth the sacrifice. What I need is an old camp building with as many passages, rooms, and storerooms as possible. You don’t think much of it, I can see that by your face. Plan B. Combat situation. It’s hard to get there. There are sentries, patrols, and manned trenches all over. But once you’ve broken through, you’re in the clear. After that you just have to show you’ve got what it takes. I’m no coward, friend, you can take my word for it. Mortars and such things don’t scare me. The more noise there is the better I like it. You don’t know me. The only part I don’t go for is wet trenches and mud. Aside from that any kind of terrain suits me. Once the fighting is over, I lay my cards on the table. I tell them frankly who I am—but they reward me for bravery in battle. My discharge is canceled. It stands to reason; because I proved I’m a man, I showed them I’ve got what it takes. I’ll even come in for a decoration. But that’s not what I’m out for, don’t get that idea. [. . .]

Plan C, Schnotz, may sound fantastic. But it has its points. Would you kindly cut out sniffing and running around? Listen to me, you can learn a thing or two. I’ll need a military cemetery. I pick out a suitable spot between two graves and bury myself. Like you in your fox burrow. Only I can’t afford to leave such a big hole. The air shaft mustn’t be any bigger than a water-pipe with a diameter of two and a half inches. Otherwise people would notice it. So I lie in this grave and wait for a funeral. I’ll need about a dozen people in civilian clothes. Uncles, aunts, parents, and such. As soon as the services start, in between the priest’s blessing and sermon—before the visitors and relatives have recovered from their emotion—I rise up out of the grave. Anyone who sees a soldier in uniform rising out of the grave is bound to stand up for him. People can’t say no to a soldier with catalepsy, that’s a safe bet, they’re too sentimental. And what does the man want? Nothing, except to be marked fit for active duty. He wants to join his buddies at the front. It’s sure to work, there’s only one possible hitch.

Use at checkout to receive 30% off.��

(The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing introduction for our��edition of Landscape in Concrete.��Given the sales history, I’m 160% certain that the vast majority of you have never read this. Do it! Do it now! Give me this one thing! Because after you read this? You’re going to want to read the book.��

Which, brings me to today’s mini-schedule. Later today I’ll post excerpts from��Landscape in Concrete��and��Ergo.��And assuming it’s OK with NYRB,��I’ll run a bit from����next week. (The only [?] author that NYRB and Open Letter have in common?)

Read Jakov Lind!��

[Ed. Note: I��love��that cover. That’s peak Open Letter design right there. Now on to the intro!]

“Jakov Lind” was a pseudonym for a man without a name. According to the rolls of a host of long-since defunct regimes, “Lind” was once known as Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian Jew (this was back when you could be one of those), and before that he was Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch bargehand, which was the Nazi-era identity of Heinz Landwirth, Viennese. The author of Landscape in Concrete—and also of the stories of Soul of Wood, the novel Ergo, two other novels, another collection of stories, an Israeli travelogue, three memoirs, numerous stage and radio plays, and occasional poetry—might have been all of these people, and he might have been none. This is not meant “deconstructively,” however, or in a spirit of relativism. What’s being asserted here, at the beginning, is trauma. Is not knowing what to call one’s self. Is not having a private name for one’s self.

Landwirth was born in 1927, the year of the first trans-Atlantic telephone call, the year that television was first publicly demonstrated. Lindbergh flew to Paris; Trotsky was ousted from the Communist Party. This was not long after the collapse of the monarchy—the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dissolution, through the first of the wars, from a relatively unified official culture, German-speaking, German-writing, into a smattering of countries impoverished with insular nationalisms. The author’s closest affinities lay here, with the ideal Habsburgs in their tubercular, war-wounded death throes; his childhood ailment is the Proustian languor, the mourning of a past always near, strangely distant, unlived and yet, lost: “If I’m sick I vomit broken china and golden frames,” he writes in the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy. “What, if not handmade in the nineteenth century, is my Middle European soul?”

The work published under the name Jakov Lind has its deepest roots in a land—in a landscape, a Landschaft—that doesn’t exist, in a time that had disappeared a decade before the author’s birth. There’s a reason that Middle Europe isn’t a name featured on maps, since it can be anything, anywhere, in the mind. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal tells us that Mitteleuropa ends at the last Empire train station (which would mark that terminus in Lviv, now in Ukraine); Thomas Mann once proclaimed that Germany was wherever he was—a delusional, denying hope whose reification would have exiled the capital of the neighboring Reich, if temporarily, to Pacific Palisades, California. Lind offers a description of his impossible habitus in the second of his two German novels, Ergo, originally published as Eine bessere Welt (A Better World): “A town made of Liptauer cream cheese, Lipizzaner horses and Lilliputians of roast chicken, bauernschmaus, liver dumplings and liver sausage, a rhyme, a phrase, a proverb and perhaps not even that but only a waistline, a shoe size, a collar size, a hat size and perhaps not even that but only the family vault of Maria Theresa and Franz Josef and the children Kalifati, Ruebezahl, Krampus, and Nikolo Christkindl and Andreas Hofer, who died of scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and Basedow’s disease.”

(Before we go any further, it should be said that Lind’s autobiographies, written in English in London, are the only sources for information about Lind, and also about Landwirth, Overbeek, Chaklan, et al. How reliable they are depends exclusively on one’s sense of humor.) His father, their father, “was a Viennese businessman without much business in the world. Half Luftmensch and half duke.” A traveling salesman, Simon “claimed to be selling��underwear to nuns.” Patrimony lay in Galicia, far over the Tatra Mountains in Poland, which would make Landwirth père a true Viennese. By contrast, the portrait of the author’s mother, Rosa née Birnbaum, is hazier; she “had no money, four children, and no help in a three-room flat.” She was known as “the Saint. The Good One. The Strong One. The Patient One.” The marriage was relatively happy; Landwirth was mothered by sisters—he would always be surrounded by women.

The author’s war departs from this domesticity, never regained. With Hitler returning to annex his homeland, Landwirth was sent to the Netherlands on a Kindertransport, along with a sister (Ditta). His parents managed to make it to Palestine, where their ship, refused port by the British, was bombed by the Haganah. Landwirth boarded for a time at a Zionist farming school in Gouda, desultorily training for his own resettlement. When that school was shuttered amid Nazi occupation, Landwirth went underground (1943 marks the end of his formal education). Angered by the complacency of the Dutch Jews, who, he thought, were just waiting for their deportations east, Landwirth purchased appropriate papers and became Jan Overbeek; the young Dutchman explained his native German by claiming an Austrian mother, which was “true.” As Overbeek, the author found work on a barge, plying the Rhine from the Hook of Holland down to the Ruhr Valley—one of the most postcard-perfect parts of the Reich. On furlough, Overbeek contracted the clap from a prostitute, and was ordered to a sanatorium to recover. There, he was recruited by a scientist-soldier to serve as a personal courier in an office attached to Das Metallurgische Forschungsinstitut des Reichsluftfahrtministeriums, “The Institute for Metallurgical Research of the Imperial Ministry of Air Traffic.” When Allied bombs are��falling even by day, and Berlin’s being threatened, what’s a Jew passing under false papers to do? Overbeek mimicked a Nazi. It’s unconscious, Lind tells us; one nods and obeys, one adapts.��Overbeek had no way of knowing that this Nazi scientist, who refused to allow Overbeek any contact with friends (and certainly not with any female friends), was spying on the Reich’s nuclear program, making reports on the progress of the Cyclotron to the British.

In summation: A Viennese teenager turned Dutch bargeworker turned employee of the German military machine, Overbeek was also an unwitting accomplice to espionage. “I liked Berlin. My job was hardly strenuous. I had to take some letters to certain officials in the Air Ministry on Friedrichstrasse. I delivered my letters in large brown envelopes, turned about, and said good-bye.”

As “the German Empire was disintegrating faster than any empire before it,” what were Overbeek’s thoughts? “My mind was on girls and how to find them. How to find them first and how to find a place to take them to.”

In 1945, amid debellatio, the author was off to the Netherlands again, then to France, hoping to make his European escape. Palestine was the idea, but thanks to another forged passport (reading Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian)—and to his manifold languages, all stamped with an accent that seemed to be Dutch—British Intelligence, then controlling the French border, refused to believe that he was a Jew. At Maubeuge, Chaklan dropped his pants—his circumcision was, apparently, convincing. He took passage to Haifa, only to find his father ill, his mother dead, his sisters miraculously grown up. A kibbutz drove him crazy, as did the religious, and so, with his name forever converted, if not his soul, he eventually, reluctantly, vagabonded his way to London. (With Lind, flux was the norm: wandering, fleeing, life lived as a sort of refugee-tourism; before settling in London, amid émigré-rich Hampstead, alongside the likes of Erich Fried and Elias Canetti, Lind crisscrossed the Continent: Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris. Occupations: in Palestine, beach photographer, fruit picker, air-traffic controller; in Europe, acting student, actor, private detective, journalist, literary and film agent, husband and father. First wife: Ida; second wife: Faith.)

London was also where the writing began—drafts initially intended, according to Lind, less for the proof that is publication than as an experiment, an interrogation accomplished on paper. Though he’d been writing fragments for years—beginning diaries then abandoning them when the poetry became too personal and the philosophy muddled in language—could Lind write fiction, could he write fiction that was truer than fact and in German, the murderers’ tongue?

*

Which brings us to Landscape in Concrete (Landschaft in Beton, 1963), Lind’s second published book and the novel that cemented his reputation after the freak, international success of the great, short-form Soul of Wood. Landscape concerns one Gauthier Bachmann of Duisburg-on-the-Rhine, an aspiring gold- and silversmith, and an oafish sergeant in the German army. The setting is Eastertide, 1944. As the book opens, Bachmann’s just been released, or has escaped, from a sanitarium at Oppeln (known as Opole, in Poland), where he’d been recovering from a humiliating defeat at Voroshenko, a Soviet forest in which his entire regiment is said to have drowned in the mud—763 of them dead in the first five minutes of battle, as he tells it once, or within three hours, as he tells it another time, in October 1941.

Lind’s novel narrates Bachmann’s pitiful attempts to rejoin that Second Hessian Infantry Regiment, Eighth Battalion, or, failing that, to join any detachment that would have him and his formidable size (six-foot-two, three-hundred pounds; he’s often described as a bear) and talents (Bachmann is in possession of the gold star for marksmanship; for “shooting twelve Russian monkeys off a roof” at Stalino, today Donetsk, in Ukraine).

Bachmann’s picaresque takes him through the Ardennes (which turn out to be his ancestral region; his forebears had been Flemish), then to arctic Narvik, Norway, and finally back to Germany, to his original station in Honnef, all the while being fooled, manipulated, used, debased. As obedient and as loyal as a golem, intending only to serve, Bachmann acts as an impromptu executioner for a Norwegian madman, the former schoolteacher and current war profiteer (and double agent), Hjalmar Halftan. As Bachmann the soldier becomes Bachmann the multiple murderer, the absurd is reasserted. Criminality is only a question of context; after all, the Holocaust was legal, as are most wars. Individual hypocrisy is institutionalized as public chaos, through the total perversion of language: “Let me be a simple, normal, intelligent human being,” Bachmann says. “That’s plenty.”

Besides the naïve, Nazi-Svejk Bachmann, and the “angekok” Halftan (who, it’s noted, has the same first name as the president of the Reichsbank), essential characters include: Xaver Schnotz, a poisoner and army deserter; Peter von Göritz, a predatorily homosexual Major; the Elshoved family of Norse nobles; and Helga Okolek, Bachmann’s Behemoth girlfriend, “Aryan” but with a Slavic surname. Supporting appearances are made by a lesbian gynecologist-landlady (murdered) and a Bulgarian Gypsy violinist (arrested).

As Bachmann marches east at novel’s end to rejoin his regiment at the front—after it’s officially ruled that he is, in fact, not insane and will not be discharged, as he’d suspected, as he’d feared—Lind’s landscape is momentarily barren (“The sun hovers red and flat in the sky, unwilling either to rise or to set.”) and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that its author survived.

The book’s closing section concerns an air-raid, and makes glancing mention of Rhenish barge-life, a scene of near-autobiography representative of Lind’s style (and, typically, Ralph Manheim’s translation is a marvel):

In the grass by the river bank [Bachmann] opened his coat and tunic, pushed up his sweater and undid two shirt buttons. He wanted to feel his heart with his fingers. The heat of the day lay heavy, like too much tenderness, over the gray and green colors of the Rhine. The ticking he heard was the engine of a barge. Then with wide-open eyes he saw more barges floating through the mist that rose from the water. They’re carrying fuel to hell and stones for the wall of the city of the dead. Desertion leads to a quarry. Branches growing out of the clouds. Schnotz says: Your turn will come. What’s written on the barges? Basel, Rotterdam. Aha! Secret names of the gates to the other world. Cement, stones, sand. A giant is carrying them through the water on his shoulders, wading step by step through the mud. A fool. Who told him to do that? If he’d pick up the cargo and throw it all overboard, and if the other giants did the same, we’d all be saved. The chunks of red meat would be cleared away. The crime can be discovered any day. What then? Upstream and downstream they go, day after day like galley slaves, they would have the power to sweep away the danger. Only the giants are strong enough. I’m one of them. When it is all put under the concrete and the sun shines fiercely on it, nobody’ll know any more what’s underneath. The corpus delicti will be gone. Nothing is more dangerous than sitting still. I’m shoving off.

A word about style, then we’ll shove off.

One’s war became one’s writing. If the Holocaust is to be regarded as a perfection of Europe—technologically speaking, especially—then the writing of the Holocaust might represent a perfection of European culture: Accounts of the tragedy have almost always been technically sterile, stylistically orderly, factual. Classical, Apollonian, to a fault. Elie Wiesel’s memoirs, to take as example the most popular, have found, within the camps, amid the gas chambers and ovens, an order to obey the logic of humanistic experience. Wiesel’s sentences and paragraphs tried, and still try, to impose reason—a reason derived from a reverence of tradition, of continuity, in the face of diabolical incoherence. His works are resultantly direct, in-line, accounted-for; nowhere has Wiesel allowed evil to invade the flesh of his French prose. Hell is the subject, then, and not the object. But Lind’s war was not survived in a camp. There was no Appell for Lind, no line-ups, no count-offs; there was no order in his survival, and so no order in his prose. His writing is disorganized, ungrammatical (Lind’s German was brilliant but, in every respect, adolescent). His war was riven with evasions and impersonations, and so, too, is his fictional landscape. He is the one Jewish novelist of the Holocaust who, in a major European language, expressed the Holocaust not through language, but in language. As language. (One has to read in Yiddish to find anything comparable.) To be sure, this was aestheticizing horror. To be sure, this is what writers do. Or are supposed to do.

My generation (I was born in 1980) is the last to know the survivors of the Holocaust, to know them as grandparents, as great-uncles, and -aunts. I know them as rigid, parsimonious. Frightened. They are old, but they seem to have always been old. They count the matches in matchboxes, save teabags for second and third steeps. They raised families, they continue to raise grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as if to replace the dead. Lind was not like them. He could never settle down; he abandoned women, divorced wives. He scraped by, drank, smoked cigarettes, marijuana. Psychological treatment intended to exorcise wartime memory included LSD experiments intravenously perpetrated by a certain Dr. Ling; this was in an era when no English-language magazine or newspaper could refer to London without calling it “Swinging London,” the latter 1960s. Macho, mustachioed Lind was garrulous, and, once published, famous. He summered in Mallorca, negotiated unsuccessfully with Hollywood. When in New York he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. How many survivors were also hippies? How do you say “hippie” in German? Hippie. (Though “flowerchildren” sounds more menacing, archaic: Blumenkinder.)

Not all translations are so perfect, however. Lind writing in English, which he did from 1969, was yet another “Lind”—displaced from German, distant from its slangs, forced to the cooler imagination of what was his fourth fluent language (German, Dutch, Hebrew, English). If the enduring Soul of Wood was the beginning, Ergo marked the end of his fictional promise, and only memoir could follow, written in a knowing, polished version of what London’s German-speaking “expatriates” called “Emigranto”—what Lind once referred to as “DENGLISH oder ANGLO DEUTSCH.” Counting My Steps, Numbers, and Crossing were those memoirs. The other, slighter, novels were Travels to the Enu and The Inventor, which went almost unreviewed. In the 1990s Lind got sick; good friends and editors died by the year. Before Open Letter decided to bring them back into print, the only available English-language copies of Lind’s novels were used: $1 each, over the Internet; two memoirs I purchased for that sum at Manhattan’s Strand bookshop had even been autographed (“To Albert,” “To Alfred”).

A draft of this introduction was written as an essay for The Forward, intended to mark Lind’s 80th birthday; it was published a week before his death. Three or four people (older, huskily-voiced women) phoned me after that, telling me how kind Lind was to them in New York, how funny he was, how they regretted they “never got around to reading his novels.” But fiction followed by fact that must, in turn, be followed by silence, disappearance, neglect, and regret is a reduction we readers cannot accept, or allow—though that might have been the daily-felt fate of the writer. “Jakov Lind” doesn’t just deserve to be read; he’s necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work he created. His books are a late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete.

Joshua Cohen

12/2008

Brooklyn, NY

As always, for all this month, you can get of both of his books ( and��) by using LIND at checkout.

Next week we’ll run a long post (and excerpt) �����dzܳ���Landscape in Concrete��and one �����dzܳ���Ergo��the Friday after that, so for today, I just want to quote (extensively) from his fascinating . If you haven’t heard of Lind before, you’re in for a ride.

Jakov Lind, one of the greatest of post-war writers, who bore witness through his darkly surreal and imaginative tales to the madness of our time, was born Heinz Landwirth on February 13, 1927 in Vienna. On March 13th, 1938 the Nazis marched into Austria. “The war against the Jews began practically the next morning”, wrote Lind. “By Saturday all of Vienna was one big swastika.” It was no longer safe to be a Jew in Austria. In December of 1938 Lind and his sisters were placed on a kindertransport (children’s train) bound for Holland. He was eleven years old.

In as yet unoccupied Holland, Lind learned fluent Dutch in a matter of weeks. He lived in a Zionist children’s home near the Hague and was later taken in by a Dutch Jewish family. In 1941, he found himself in a Zionist training camp where young “pioneers” received agricultural training to prepare for emigration to Palestine (already forbidden by the Nazi authorities.) After witnessing the first mass roundup of Jews in 1943, Lind made the decision to go underground in June 1943 and obtained false identity papers in the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch laborer. On the way to get his papers, Lind writes: “I pinned my Nazi badge up front, put on my grey hat with the brim down, tied a black tie over my dark grey shirt, and looked like a Nazi home from a spell of duty. I put on a fierce look, and left for Line 3 . . . Office workers and labourers on the streetcar moved away from me . . .”

Several months later Lind found work on a river barge transporting goods between Holland and Germany, “sailing under a false self”, he later wrote. But when the Allied bombing attacks began on the industrial cities along the Rhine, it was time to get off the river. It was then that a miracle, as he referred to it, brought him a job as a courier for the German Air Ministry. [. . .]

In 1954 Lind landed in Dover, made his way to London and decided to stay. There he married Faith Henry and had a son, Simon, and a daughter, Oona. Settled in London, he began work on a collection of short stories. Eine Seele aus Holz (Soul of Wood), published in Germany in 1962, was proclaimed a masterpiece, became an immediate literary phenomenon, and was translated into fourteen languages. As one critic wrote: “Lind’s general theme is the destruction of European Jewry . . . He treats it with a kind of broad gallows humor, utterly grotesque and fascinating . . .”

Compared to Kafka, Grass and Gogol, Jakov Lind became an international literary star overnight. But he did not want to be a German writer. It felt like betrayal to write in German, his mother tongue which had so recently been put to such murderous use.

Lind’s second novel, Landscape in Concrete was published in 1963. Ergo, a novel, came out in 1968 and became a successful play produced by Joseph Papp in New York. In 1965 and 1968 The Silver Foxes Are Dead and Other Plays were published and performed as radio plays in Germany. And then, encouraged by his publisher, a major shift occurred. Lind wrote his first book in English, Counting My Steps (1969), an autobiography of his childhood in Vienna and his war years in the Netherlands and Germany. This was the beginning of Lind’s distancing himself from his mother tongue and the pain and ambivalence of writing in German. But it also distanced him from his roots. “Madder than anything”, he wrote, “was to think I could ever unlearn sounds I knew by heart and kidneys and replace them with other and better sounds.”

Lind was to write three more autobiographies: Numbers (1972) on his wanderings across Europe after the war; the Trip to Jerusalem��(1973); and Crossing: The Discovery of Two Islands (1991) about his arrival in England and the years in London and New York. In the 1980’s Lind published a novel, Travels to the Enu: The Story of a Shipwreck (1982), The Stove (1983), a series of short parables, and The Inventor (1987), an epistolary novel, all of them written in English and translated into many languages. [. . .]

On February 16, 2007, Jakov Lind, one of the major literary figures of our time, died in London of heart failure. He was 80 years old.

Here’s a link to his , and if you’re intrigued, I��highly��recommend staring with��, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim . . . or��his translation of��.��And remember: use LIND and get 30% off!

With so many positive comments coming in �����dzܳ���77, I thought I’d give you a little tease and run a bit of the��next��Saccomanno book we’ll be publishing.��

Here’s the description of��The Employee��from the Carmen Balcells site:

Perfectly normal men and women head to their desks every day in a city laid waste by guerrilla incursions, menaced by hordes of starving people, murderous children and cloned dogs, patrolled by armed helicopters, and plagued with acid rain. Among them is an office worker willing to be humiliated in order to keep his job – until he falls in love and allows himself to dream of someone else.

To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream?��El Oficinista��tells a story that happened yesterday, but still hasn’t happened, and yet is happening now. And we didn’t even notice, too tied up in our jobs, our salaries, our appearances. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dostoyevsky.

And if that isn’t intriguing enough, here’s a blurb that might whet your interest:

“A strange book in the best sense of the word. This is not an ordinary novel, it will surprise many.”��Rodrigo Fresán

The Employee��by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from the Spanish by Amanda DeMarco and Sebastián Pont Vergés

. . . so extreme an experience of solitude that one can only call it Russian.
—The Diaries of Franz Kafka

1

At this hour of night, military helicopters circle the city, bats flutter before the large office windows, and rats slip between the desks, all of which are plunged into darkness except for one, his, with the computer on, the only one on at this hour. The employee feels something brush swiftly over his shoes. A faint squeal rushes past along the carpet and slips off into the blackness. He turns his gaze away from the monitor and sees the winged shadows in the night outside. Then he consults his pocket watch, stacks up a few files, places the checks in a folder for the boss to sign tomorrow, and stands to leave. He moves slowly, and not only out of fatigue. Also out of sorrow.

The computer takes a long time to shut down. Finally the screen sighs, goes black. He fastidiously arranges the tools of his work for the coming day: pens, inkwell, stamps, ink pad, eraser, pencil sharpener, and letter opener. The letter opener receives preferential treatment. He polishes it. The letter opener seems harmless. But it can be used as a weapon. He also seems harmless. But looks can be deceiving, he tells himself.

He likes to think that despite his docile nature, under the right circumstances he could be ferocious. If the circumstances arose, he could be different. No one is what they seem to be, he thinks. The opportunity simply had to present itself, then he would demonstrate what he was capable of. This reasoning helped him to endure the boss, his coworkers, and his own family. Neither at home nor in the office did anyone know who he was. And when he considered that he himself didn’t know either, it made him giddy. One of these days, they would see. Just when they least expected it. It frightens him to think that just like his boss, his coworkers, and his family, he has no idea what he is capable of. Sometimes, when he copies the boss’s signature—and he could copy it perfectly—he asks himself who he is. He copies the boss’s signature secretly. The fact that someone can copy someone else doesn’t make them someone else. On more than one occasion, he had asked himself who he was, who he could be, if he could be someone else, but he was frightened to find out. On more than one occasion it had crossed his mind to forge the boss’s signature on a check, cash it, and run. If he hadn’t done it by now, he reflects, it’s because he doesn’t have anyone to share the loot with. A momentous act can only be motivated by passion. In the films, the hero always had a motive: a woman. If you were crazy about a woman, you were unwavering.

He arranges his office supplies, each in its place. Organizes them with mad meticulousness. And, after setting each one down, he glances over his shoulder. At the desk behind his, where his nearest coworker sat. Although this coworker wasn’t his subordinate and was charged with less important tasks than his, nonetheless, someday, when the employee was no longer there, the coworker would certainly sit at his desk.

On more than one occasion, he had caught him in the act of writing in a notebook. When the coworker sensed he was being observed, he swiftly stowed the notebook in a desk drawer with an obsequious smirk. Finally, he confronted him. What was it he was writing, he asked. Terrorized, the coworker answered, a diary, he was keeping a diary, a personal one. He didn’t know what to say. Keeping a diary was for girls, he thought. Maybe the coworker was a homosexual. He didn’t seem like one, but he could be. With others, you never knew. He stammered something about how keeping a diary seemed very interesting. It never would have occurred to him that the life of someone who spent his entire life at a desk could be interesting, he thought. But he didn’t say so. One night like this, alone in the office, he’d rummaged around in the drawers of his coworker’s desk. The notebook wasn’t there. Then it occurred to him that these secret writings must contain something against him. Why shouldn’t he think that the coworker had been assigned to record his movements. Were it so, he told himself, even if he had always considered himself an obliging employee and an ordinary citizen, he now found himself under surveillance. This feeling of being under surveillance persisted for quite some time. Until, after a while, he stopped worrying about it: had the coworker been an agent and he a suspect, he soon would have disappeared. The roles were reversed. No longer under surveillance, he surveilled. When he turned abruptly, the coworker rushed to close the notebook with this smirk of apology, which turned into a game that ultimately bored him. Since then he’d been certain that if he could, the coworker would take advantage of the smallest error on his part, with that same smirk, in order to move up a desk. Around here, you couldn’t even trust your own shadow. And the coworker behind him, he thinks, is his shadow. A menacing shadow, even if it smiled amicably and always proved willing to sort out whatever file he consigned to it.

The employee regards the letter opener. It would be lethal, were he to drive it into his coworker’s jugular. He reproaches himself for having this sort of fantasy. He is aware that it degrades him. It makes him feel contemptible. As contemptible as the rest of them. At heart, he is convinced that he’s better than the others. If an opportunity were to present itself, he could demonstrate that he is above them, and that his superiority lies squarely in never stabbing anyone in the back to get a raise, a promotion. He considers himself better than everyone else precisely because in all of the years he’s spent here, he’s never tried to get ahead by slandering his fellow employees. You might also say, he tells himself, that his behavior suggests a dogged desire to go unnoticed. If during his tenure he had never been the object of disciplinary action and had managed to endure at his desk, he reflects, it was only thanks to his particular way of melding with his surroundings, which guaranteed that no one took any note of him. He sometimes wondered if to convince the others that he was harmless, he would first have to persuade himself of the fact. Once his thoughts had advanced to this phase, they galled him. It was possible he had expended so much effort pretending he wouldn’t harm a fly, that he was now actually incapable of doing so. But, at the same time, he reflects, someone like him, capable of thinking two contradictory ideas at once, was not only superior to the others but also someone to be feared, someone who could commit a courageous act at the moment they least suspected, confronting them with their own cowardice. Watch out, he says. Watch out for me. Because I’m someone else. Just because I don’t show it now doesn’t mean that the others should underestimate me if the opportunity presents itself. And of all of them, the one who should take the most care was of course the coworker.

His desk now in order, he heads toward the coat rack, pulls his raincoat from its hook. He’s embarrassed to wear it. It isn’t merely worn but actually deformed with age. With the cold these past weeks, the temperature dropping day by day, he’s had no alternative but to use it. Each morning before entering the building, he takes it off, folds it, and keeps it folded under his arm with the lining facing out, which he’d paid a Bolivian tailor in his neighborhood to replace last year. In the office, he glances around slyly before hanging the raincoat on a rack far from his desk, in a nook, at the back. Then he slips away. He worries that his haste will make his uneven gait more pronounced. He generally manages to lessen his limp by taking measured strides. But when he abandons his raincoat on the rack, it’s difficult not to run away, so that no one associates it with him. Conversely, alone in the office at this hour of the night, he takes down the raincoat and slips it on calmly. Then he turns off the light and sets out, shrouded in darkness. He can make his way blindly between the desks, such is his knowledge and instinctive memory of the place, its desks, archives, and cabinets; its odd corners.

But a noise stops him in his tracks. It’s not the rats. It’s footsteps.

2

A shadow falls on the frosted glass window of the boss’s office. He watches it slip across the pane, silhouetted by the helicopters’ search lights. No one except him stays this late at the office. No one puts in as much overtime. And he doesn’t do it because he has to. Also because he wants to. He prefers to stay away from home for as long as possible. But tonight his dread makes him regret staying so long. He creeps up on the shadow behind the frosted glass window, letter opener in his damp hand, his entire body gripped by fear.

He pricks his ears. Footfalls from the other side. If these are the steps of a thief, and if he, bumbling but heroic, manages to overpower him, his actions will be rewarded by the boss, perhaps even canceling the debt incurred by the advances he takes on his salary. He clutches the letter opener, which does nothing to soothe his fears. He tiptoes, without betraying his limp, taking care that his well-worn shoes don’t squeak. He crouches to one side of the door.

The steps on the other side pause. The silence lengthens. He’s afraid that his courage will fail him. His entire life has been marked by subjugation, maybe now is his big chance. If he lets it slip through his fingers, he might not get another. And the memory of this night, he knows, would be just another disappointment among countless in his life.

He’ll wait until the intruder exits the office, charge him, catch him by the neck, and disarm him with the letter opener at his throat, for the intruder certainly had a weapon, a firearm. He will seize the firearm and, holding him at gunpoint, call the security guards.

The shadow grows across the floor as the door swings open.

3

He tenses to attack. Then restrains himself. The secretary panics at the sight of him crouching there, about to stab her with the letter opener. Her glasses fall to the ground. He’s speechless. He picks up the young woman’s glasses, a round-rimmed pair, while stammering an explanation and still clutching the letter opener. The young woman trembles. He sets the letter opener on a desk. Helicopter search lights shine through the windows. He sees the glittering of her tears. Wishing to soothe her, he takes her in his arms.

There was nothing magical about how I ended up in Lutz’s hole-in-the-wall. I’ll try to explain bit by bit.

I was bumbling along, rolling downhill. At twenty we believe in passion; we tremble. We allow ourselves the luxury of suffering for love since we have an arsenal of spasms at our disposal. The most trivial, sentimental foolishness thrills us or plunges us into despair. Our emotional repertory seems inexhaustible. But when we least expect it, when we pass fifty, the operatic mechanism of seduction gets corroded, and we stumble around at an age when passion gives way to indolence. Then we appeal to various resources to recover a feeling that has vanished: with each lust-at-first-sight pickup, a second-hand enthusiasm. And yet I can’t do without that giddiness, so I went searching for it at night, when the city became a no-man’s-land. There were few assaults. With a couple of pesos in my pocket, I would go out into the street and walk aimlessly, meandering. I would stroll along Santa Fe in search of quick comfort. A fast fuck and chau. If I had no luck, there were always the public bathrooms at the bus terminals. A major one was located at the��de Febrero terminal, near the race track. My age, dark gray suit, glasses, a few gray hairs, black moustache, I felt, made me look respectable. More than once I was stopped by a police or army barricade. There wasn’t a single night when a green Ford Falcon didn’t spot me, marking me. The guys would give me the once-over, and since I didn’t try to dodge their gaze, they continued on their way. I had gotten used to running into patrol cars, Federal police vans, carriers, armored cars. A blackout was the sign of an operation in progress. Sometimes a helicopter flew overhead. Other times, while crossing a street, I saw a display of uniforms half a block away. They would yank a family out of a house, a building, and force them into a truck, hitting them with the butts of their rifles. The city remained deaf to the sirens, the orders, the screams and sobs of the children. There were nights when the shooting and explosions deafened me. Early one morning, passing by an empty lot, I saw some guys pull a group of blindfolded young boys and girls from their vans and shove them against a wall. I heard shutters slamming. I hid. Curled into a ball, I hid. Then, the explosions. Finally, the van’s engine. And silence. In the stillness, I left my hiding place and walked toward the open lot. They were so young.

In spite of the terror, at night I walked and walked like one possessed. It would still be a while before I was diagnosed, early one morning at a hospital emergency room, with obsessive wandering syndrome. I would come to like that diagnosis, those three words: obsessive wandering syndrome. But it would still be a while till I was diagnosed. Now it was April, and I went walking through the nights and the cool early morning till the first signs of daylight. It seemed unlikely, as I said, that a respectable-looking citizen would be loaded into a green Falcon. More likely that a gang of bums would drag me to an open space, a construction site, as they did early one morning around Dock Sur.

The giddiness had just eased up when the cramp attacked my legs.Now I could return to my apartment and collapse. All I needed was a quick nap to be ready for action again, teaching my class. Although I was sleeping less and less, I didn’t feel exhausted. But I was beginning to notice some anxiety and clumsiness in my gestures, and then a lethargy to which I reacted with an unexpectedly rapid heartbeat, small memory lapses, stumbling, all signs I hadn’t noticed before. It was then, when I turned fifty-six, anticipating my approaching decline, that I consulted the inevitable I Ching. The oracle replied: “The concealment of the��light.” The power of darkness controlled everything. Light had been violated. But finally evil, because of its essentially stupid nature, would end up destroying itself. And while this prediction had its share of optimism, it was no great consolation. Like more than one depressive, I looked for solace in Taoist texts. I started going to the Kier Bookstore, as if that establishment were the anteroom to nirvana.

*

Bodhi was twenty-something. He was beyond skinny; he looked emaciated. In his gestures you could see an unaffected fragility, his delicacy. I met Bodhi one March afternoon at the bookstore. He adopted that nickname after Bodhi Dharma, though any queen hearing the name would have thought body. The boy was looking for The Hermetic Circle, the correspondence between Hesse and Jung. A pickup, a fast fuck, I thought, would help me endure my anguish. But the sensual attraction was displaced by a mutual courtesy. He always addressed me with the formal usted. I was moved by the spirituality the kid exuded because, let’s look at it this way, he was slightly over twenty, and I, an old man, fiftyish, considered his mystical arguments childish illusions. Who, in a bout of depression, hasn’t swallowed a bellyful of Orientalism? The esoteric can turn out to be an illusion of exile. Breathing the ether, you could forget what was happening right under your nose.

Any way you want to look at it, Bodhi smiled at me with the sweetness of an altar boy. Nothing is accidental. This meeting wasn’t.

Bodhi opened the book and read to me:

“Nothing happens by chance,” Hesse says. “This is the hermetic circle.”

The kid inspired a feeling in me that, I have to admit, wasn’t physical appetite. In his gullibility there was a kind of purity. And purity isn’t something you can buy at the corner kiosk.

I can see it in your face, Bodhi said to me. You’re damaged.

The conviction with which the boy said it disturbed me. It was the conviction of a pure soul, a saint who has come to reveal a truth. The physical attraction I had felt when I met him turned into the descent of an angel. It’s true that for a moment I thought Bodhi was possessed, one of those many sallow, scrawny types, overfed on Lobsang Rampa, who latched onto an Orientalist dream to escape from reality. In a few minutes, I said to myself, the boy’s gonna go all Hare Krishna on me.

You must be a vegetarian, I said.

I am, he replied.

He didn’t seem to pick up on my sarcasm. And if he caught it, he let it slide. He regarded me with a self-sufficiency that wasn’t devoid of pity. He made me feel ashamed of my condescending tone. Suddenly my desire vanished, and what I felt for the kid was envy of his principles, his confidence in his mystical convictions, as he admonished me.

When someone is damaged, he can’t find peace, he said. He blames his pain on other people’s incomprehension, he locks himself up inside, he weeps over the lack of love. He becomes a tormented soul.

Forgive me, I said. Maybe I misjudged you.

Forgive you for what, he said. You didn’t insult me. No, you’re the one who’s punishing yourself. Maybe you need to touch bottom. As soon as you touch bottom, you’ll search for the light.

I thought you were . . . I said. But I didn’t finish the sentence.

The hermetic circle, Gómez, he said. Believe or explode.

And what if I don’t believe.

If you don’t believe it’s because you still haven’t penetrated the darkness. Like the swimmer who jumps off a diving board: he needs to touch bottom in order to rise to the surface. Then the truth will be revealed to him.

We went into a bar on Calle Libertad. I ordered a coffee and gin on the rocks. Bhodi asked for a pitcher of water. And this struck me as a detail that revealed his personality. Captivated, I wondered if the virginal character suggested by each of his minimal gestures might be a symptom of repression and stupidity. A simple exchange of glances in the bookstore had been enough to reveal that the two of us liked one another, but now, as the conversation and the afternoon went on, I started to wonder if the boy was a madman or a genuine saint. With the first swig of gin, I grew bold enough to prod him:

Tell me, kid, have you lived your entire life in a test tube?

Bodhi launched into his story. My father was an anarchist, he said. And my mother was a spiritualist. They never got along. For him, going against management meant not working. He always came back to the house drunk. “House” is just an expression: we lived in a tenement near Barracas. We got by with what my mother earned as a nurse at Tornú Hospital. We all slept in the same room. The double bed, a crooked dresser, a couple of chairs, a little heater, and my cot in one corner. On winter nights, when my father came home drunk, he pushed my mother out of bed and forced me to lie down next to him. That’s how he initiated me in vice. A few minutes ago you were thinking that maybe I was a virgin. Don’t ask me how, but I knew you were thinking that about me. When a person has had transcendent psychic experiences, he acquires very keen perceptions. I remember the darkness of those nights, the red-hot coals in the heater, my mother’s sobs, and my father’s rough hands all over me. Till one night my mother stood her ground. She was waiting for him with a syringe. As soon as my father walked into the room, she surprised him from behind and stuck the needle into his neck. There must’ve been a really powerful drug in that syringe. My father barely had time to let out a shriek, turn around swearing and walk out to the patio, clutching his throat. He fell like a stone. Then, the ambulance. They took him to the Municipal Hospital. Since all the tenants came out in defense of my mother, she was released from the police station immediately. It was a little after that when she started going to spiritualist meetings. She came back from those meetings uplifted: she wore a grateful smile. I was very small when she took me to Luna Park, to the Basilio Science School meeting. My mother always said that Perón was a divine being. We owed him the possibility of divorce and the acceptance of spiritualism. Thanks to my mother, I was initiated into the Great Wisdom. Excuse me if I’m talking too much. Maybe I’m boring you. All it takes for me to communicate is for someone to show me his sensitive side. Just like I knew what you were thinking about me a few seconds ago, I know that now you’re sincerely moved.

Two possibilities, I thought: Bhodi needed a psychoanalyst or a confessor. I asked him why he was telling me his story, why me:

I learned that if you want someone to open up his heart, first the emissary has to open his own. You need to open up your heart. You need help.

And you, angel boy, are my emissary.

My derision bounced right off him.

I’m not the emissary, he said. You’re the one who’s been chosen by the circle.

You don’t say.

The circle is closing, he said.

Afternoon was winding down. The first shadows. The first lights. We turned onto Avenida Santa Fe. On this side of the city you were somewhere else: there were stylish shops, elegant women, men in smart suits. Even those who were dressed casually looked like they were strolling through the Windsor Castle gardens. Here the kids were not only blonds, but heirs. Me and my resentment, I chided myself. But by recalling Evita I was able to assuage my bitterness. If violence was the midwife of history, I thought, Evita was the bitch who had managed to cut those assholes down to size. Though the snobs had gotten even. “Long live cancer,” they had painted on walls when she developed it in her uterus. I looked at Bodhi. Out of the corner of my eye, I looked at him. What had he done with his pain, I asked myself. The theosophical jackass was walking along, lost in thought. His spirituality was the refrain of a frightened child, singing in the darkness to settle his nerves.

We were walking along the sidewalk of San Nicolás de Bari when two green Falcons stopped a few yards away. The cops got out in a rush, wielding rifles and pistols. A clicking of weapons, shouts. Some of them had long hair and headbands. The one in charge was a massive, dark-haired guy in sunglasses. I thought they were coming after us. But no. They dispersed, blocking the path of two women. Two women, one who looked like the mother and the other, the daughter. Both women ran back toward the church, trying to climb the stairs and enter the sanctuary. They didn’t make it. They were caught before they got there. The cops seemed more interested in the daughter than in the mother.

I remember the girl. Tiny, short hair, a little blue coat. All four of them grabbed her and beat her viciously. They stuck their fingers in her mouth to make her spit out the pill. The mother tried to shake them off, crying for help, till one of the guys hit her on the back of the head with the butt of his Ithaca. The girl was cursing. They grabbed the mother by the arms, threw a hood on her, and shoved her into one of the cars. The girl was dragged down the stairs. Her head started to bleed as it struck the steps. They seized her by the ankles and the hands, and they put a hood on her, too, and shoved her into the other car. No one interfered. Then, the slamming of the Falcons’ doors. The screech of tires.

We walked on without a word. Bodhi’s silence angered me more than my own. In his self-absorption there was a kind of superior attitude. He probably had an airtight explanation for what we had seen. I preferred not to ask him, not to listen to his thoughts. Bhodi was the same age as the girl who had been kidnapped. Maybe his muteness was easier to tolerate than the esoteric arguments he would use to explain what had just occurred.

We were making our way along Charcas, near Callao. I felt like smacking him. I couldn’t take any more of this young snot whose meekness cloaked a know-it-all quality that wore me down. That’s all I need, I thought. For some young kid to give me advice on how to live. That’s what I got for not having enough self-control to stay in my apartment, concentrating on my papers and on a journal where I spilled all my solitary anguish. As if writing could bring relief.

You’re suffering because of the internal chaos we live in, Bhodi said.

And he sighed:

When you can’t take it anymore, consult my Master.

Bhodi handed me a card.

Lutz, he said. He’s my Master, my spiritual guide.

Saying good night, Bodhi extended a cold, bony hand. I took another look at the card and was still looking at it when Bhodi vanished into the darkness. I turned onto Ayacucho. The shadows of the trees added to the nocturnal gloom. That street was a tunnel.

Buy it now from your favorite bookstore, online retailer, or via our .

To entice you, below you’ll find a excerpt from the first Saccomanno book we published,��.

Like��True Detective��through the lenses of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos,��Gesell Dome��is a mosaic of misery, a page-turner that will keep you enthralled until its shocking conclusion.

This incisive, unflinching exposé of the inequities of contemporary life weaves its way through dozens of sordid storylines and characters, including an elementary school abuse scandal, a dark Nazi past, corrupt politicians, and shady real-estate moguls. An exquisitely crafted novel by Argentina’s foremost noir writer,��Gesell Dome��reveals the seedy underbelly of a popular resort town tensely awaiting the return of tourist season.

Here’s a small section of the novel, translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger.

It was barely the end of March. And people could talk about nothing but Melina’s suicide. No matter how much they tried to avoid it, Melina slipped into every conversation. The weather: summery. You could still walk around in shirtsleeves. Nights were just cool enough for a sweater. It was on one of those nights. At middle school: that’s where it happened. And what happened distracted us from Melina for a while.

At night school, I was saying, a kid gutted another kid. The murderer, they claimed, was a scrawny little half-breed who kept to himself, and the other one, the victim, another half-breed, a big guy who used to beat up the whole class, including the other guy, the weakling, always teasing him. Until one night last week the bully threw a wad of paper at his target. Not a peep out of the shy one. At his desk, minding his own business. But then he stands up, walks over to the other one, and stabs him with a kitchen knife. Then he splits. A clumsy oaf looking for a hideout, he sneaks into a little shed in back of his house. And what does his saintly mother do? She hauls his ass over to the police station; she turns him in. The cop took him to Dolores, but they say the kid will go free. Because of how meek he was, they say, they’re going to let him go. Because he acted under emotional pressure. And yet they say the kid wasn’t so meek after all, nor did he come from as normal a family as some people swear. Brawlers, the father and the uncles. I was with them at a few asados. I remember a lamb we were carving up at a stand in La Polaca. A drunk hassled one of the uncles. The uncle’s knife was a flash of light. In the end they let the kid go, someone says. And when he returns to night school, the whole gang grabs him and crushes him. Not one bone left unbroken. He’s in the hospital now. In a body cast. Now it seems like there’s going to be a protest in the Villa to make them lock the kid up again. His father’s going to be at the march, too, he said. With his knife. To skin alive the ones who want the kid put away again. Mano a mano or in a mob, he’ll skin them alive, he promised.

And of course it was Moure, the veterinarian, who offered this opinion: Half-breeds shouldn’t be sent to school. They should be sent to gas chambers. He said it with conviction.

Tuesday morning, sitting at the computer as he downed another mug of instant coffee, Dante, the sixtyish publisher and only reporter for El Vocero, our Friday newspaper, after editing the story about the kid who got knifed in a classroom at middle school, wondered how to write about Melina’s suicide, the topic that had brought him there.

Solid gold, that girl. Her father, el Negro Berto, was a likeable, well-regarded guy, but he also had a strong, even irritable, disposition. He would take off his thick glasses, anticipating a fight that never came to pass. Because every outburst was over almost before it began, and he quickly reverted to his good-natured gaucho��self. These outbursts, they said, began when he lost his wife and was left alone with Melina, who was three at the time. Since then, although several females fluttered their wings at him, Berto had no romantic history to speak of. Melina was, as they say, the light of his life. My friend, my companion, my sweetheart, he called her. The light of my life. If Berto killed himself working night and day at the shop, it was because he had sworn to himself that the girl would never lack for anything. Only the best for her, he repeated. And when she finished high school, he vowed, Melina would study law. Melina would have a degree. Melina wouldn’t be some common girl like so many in La Virgencita and El Monte. Melina would be someone. And when she got serious about a boy, he would have to embody all the favorable and proper conditions to share his life with a real young lady. All the conditions. And more.

The kids at middle school. First the girl’s suicide. Then the stabbed little half-breed. Murder, Dante thought, was within the realm of normalcy. Why not? Marginality, violence, et cetera. And that et cetera contained a sort of wretchedness that wasn’t his problem, though it was what inspired the crime section of El Vocero, he had to admit, which was running a bit short today. But Melina’s suicide was something else. He couldn’t put aside the secret. The secret, an open secret, was known throughout middle school and also in the neighborhood. The suspense was growing. Not only for Dante. We all wondered how El Negro Berto would react when he found out about his daughter’s romance.

Sharpshooting champion,��El Vocero reports. A distinguished and very��large Villa crowd attended the traditional Sharpshooting Pistol Competition,��sponsored and promoted by the Chamber of Commerce and the Beer��Lovers’ Association. It should be noted that the crowd on this occasion was��larger than in previous years, which proves that interest in this contest��is growing, especially on the part of young people. More than 80 marksmen��from Buenos Aires, Madariaga, Mar del Plata, Necochea, and Bahía��Blanca were in attendance. There were seven very fluid events, consisting��of 9, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 31 shots apiece. The winner in the Unmodified��Gun Division was our dear Esteban Armada, 18. The champion��received congratulations from our mayor, Alberto Cachito Calderón, who��presented him with the trophy. A big shot, Esteban.

The end of March, the air of March, the light of March. I’m at an asado��with the Melit.ns in the park of the Transatlantic Building. Juan Melitón is a street cleaner contracted by the city lumberyard. Mariela, his wife, is the custodian of the building. The couple is there with their son, Kevin, along with guests, three of Kevin’s young friends. Like Kevin, they’re all fifteen. And there’s no way around it: it’s hard to move the conversation away from a pregnant girl’s suicide.

One of the kids makes an attempt: I’m glam, says the one in red pants. Not me, says the one with a pierced lower lip. I’m punk. But we all wear skinny jeans. Stovepipe pants—in my day we called them stovepipes. One of the kids, the long-nosed one, is an orphan, Melitón the Gaucho tells me. The pimply one, the one who looks like a wanker, has parents who are separated. We’re reggae, says the kid. And he points to Kevin: I’m gonna be Rasta, Kevin promises. With dreads and everything, he smiles.

And I’ll beat the living shit out of you, his father replies, adding soda to his red wine. He takes a swallow, returns to the grill, and brings chinchulines.��As he serves them, the conversation turns to the murder at night school. In addition to Melina’s death, the kids have been hit hard by the knifing at night school. They hadn’t yet gotten over Melina’s tragedy when they were struck by another. Struck, I say. No, grazed. Maybe because at their age these dramas seem like a novel; they get swept up in them. And who doesn’t like to feel he’s part of a novel, right?

A kid knifed another kid, they said. The murderer was shy. He looked like a wuss. And the other guy, a bully, on his case all the time. Till the nerd stuck a knife in him. The zit-covered guy reflects: You gotta watch out for the quiet ones. The one with the big nose says: That dude could really draw. An artist. Cities blown up by death. Vampires, he drew. Skeletons.

And you? Melitón asked. You wanna be like that?

What do you want me to be—a street cleaner like you?

We don’t have the money to pay for a school like Nuestra Señora for you, Mariela tells him. So you’ll have to behave yourself and do okay in middle school.

To be someone, Melitón tells him. Anyone can be a bully with a knife. In workman’s sandals, that’s how I want to see you.

For people from around here, this is the Villa, and when they say Villa, they trace this place back to its origins, the Central European pioneers. Italians, Galicians, those who came from other parts, like the majority, because the majority here came from other parts, not just from Austria, as if Austria was a big deal. Everyone, I’m saying, including the natives, calls this town the Villa. And when they say “Villa,” they feel like a superior, chosen race. The kids, on the other hand, those who were born here, almost all share the single goal of getting the hell out. The stoner snobs who want to keep on kicking back take their surfboards to Costa Rica. The blue-collar kids who are looking to earn some cash go to Spain to become dishwashers or to the States to scrub toilets. Wherever it is, they’ll be better off. Anywhere but the Villa. This damn town, they call it. They’ve got plenty of reasons. Wait till winter and you’ll understand, Dante predicts.