This business of introductions presents a possible dilemma to the reader. To read the introduction first? In works of translation, or in bringing back into print a novel that has dropped out of sight (as with the excellent New York Review of Books) this decision is common. Often the introduction gives away more of the plot than one might want, or it takes away some of the enjoyment of discovery of style and thought. Why not begin reading the novel, skip the introduction; after all, if it is a worthy work of art then it should stand on its own, right?

Dream of Reason places this dilemma front and center. The writer is still a relative unknown to English speakers. At the outset the reader realizes that this novel is not plot driven. In her introduction, Maier gives a cogent explanation of Chacel’s intellectual project, that the novel tries to represent will and thought intimately joined to a person’s circumstances, a philosophical perspective from Ortega y Gasset. The voice of the narrator Santiago Hernandez is agreeable, but at times the ruminations can tax patience, unless the reader enters the novel forearmed. Not until page 268 of the novel does Hernandez explain, “One of our contemporary philosophers has said that the intimate life of ideas should be novelized. That is definitely what’s needed: the creation of a genre, a series of biographies of ideas, a thing very different from a novel of ideas.”

The novel is divided into two parts of almost equal length. In the first Hernandez is orphaned, taken in by his uncle in Madrid, has a relationship with a German dancer Elfriede who will return twice again at decisive moments to move the plot along; he attends university in Buenos Aires, marries Quitina, daughter of a wealthy Cuban. Hernandez finds an opening in his field of chemical manufacturing, which leads to his majority ownership of the factory and outright ownership of the hacienda in the country. He and his wife have three sons. Their family/social circle is expanded by the arrival as refugees of a distant cousin from Spain, Herminia, her adolescent son Miguel, and later Herminia’s husband Damien, a man troubled from taking the Republican side of the Civil War as a soldier.

The novel progresses through a series of crises, grounded in the world of action, but given real meaning and explained in the ruminations of Hernandez. In the dynamic world of people interacting we read how Quitina’s mother opposed the budding relationship and has Quitina shipped off with relatives in Cuba. Yet the more important action happens inside Hernandez’s head: he has a vibrant moment in the midst of the resulting turmoil as he focuses on a bothersome fly:

I tried countless times to hit the fly with my hand, but I’d always failed. . . . As I formulated my desire to see the fly annihilated, I did not try to hit it with the heavy instrument of my hand: I focused my intention on the fly and, and without breaking the spiral of its flight, I lead it toward the glass. There the fly fell and my energy collided with it on the glass. I heard it fry, because that was neither a buzzing nor a vibrating. . . . The blow reverberated throughout that uncommon limb of my will, the echoes of former convulsions. . . . For a few minutes, or rather, for one of those spans of time that seems impossible to divide into minutes I thought about the power that was within me, which had lived off my own life, without my noticing it.

At the same moment, as if related, Quitina’s mother is killed in a car accident, and the impediment to their relationship vanishes. Later Hernandez will repeat something of the same encounter, with different results. While in his study he notices a mounted butterfly specimen, and he sets himself the challenge that, if he would will it, he could make it flap its wings—only to end the ruminations with deciding he would will the butterfly not to flap its wings.

A second crisis that illustrates the inwardness of “action” in the novel occurs on an evening when Hernandez is staying in town at his work office and decides to tell Quitina that he has to stay too late that night to make the drive back to the country. He knows it is a lie as he tells it. The crisis he experiences is his expectation that Quitina not believe the lie. Instead Hernandez believes his relationship to his wife to be so profound that she should, she must, know that he is lying and then confront him. Her failure to do so is her failing. In uncovering the reality that he has idealized a perfect union of will and emotion between two imperfect people he asks, “And what’s left of love if love loses its sense of the absolute?”

The next move Hernandez makes in his narration is to turn to a moment of spiritual enlightenment, a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. In the modernist tradition in which Chacel writes though this leap is not one Kierkegaard would recognize. Referring to a moment of transcendence, Hernandez makes a claim that humans are self-deifying. Later he talks with Miguel about the withdrawal of God which allows all of humans to become divinized in each person’s moment of crucifixion, and the desire for each of us to become a Superman—not Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, dismissed as tiresome—but rather the Superman of the movies, a metaphor in some ways for becoming angelic.

The second half of the novel picks up the memoir six years later. While the first half of the book shows a building up of life—sense of self, marriage, work, relationships, the second half chronicles dissolution through a series of internal crises similar to those in the first, albeit with more conversation reported and events occurring in the world of action, helping to pick up the narrative pace a bit.

A significant tension remains at the end of the book. Hernandez is an ambiguous figure, intentionally presented as a not entirely likeable character. His crises of mind and spirit pale next to the war experiences of others, yet his own self absorption reverses the hierarchy of importance. His expectations of others in his life are unreasonable. The purpose of growing poppies, to produce opium, goes unstated, but reverberates. He is no everyman, nor hero. Yet he is the vehicle by which Chacel chooses to explore Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy, one toward which she was drawn.

I’ve written about this book on a few occasions, mainly because of the Javier Marias quote on the back, but there’s also a strong endorsement from Barbara Probst Solomon, who states, “Dream of Reason confirms Rosa Chacel as a major Modernist writer, the equivalent of a new-found Proust meditating on memory and selfhood, an image-driven Woolf with a profound philosophical bent. But reading Chacel is its own unforgettable experience.”

This review is written by Grant Barber, who, in his own words, is “an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston and a keen bibliophile. Maybe by the time he retires his Spanish will be good enough to try his own translations of Latin American fiction.”

Rosa Chacel (1898-1994) sculptor, novelist, poet, essayist, feminist was born and died in Spain, with Brazil as a second home. She was a contemporary with the Generation of ’27, which included Garcia Lorca and Ramon Jaminez, and she was familiar with the writings of Freud and James Joyce and the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. She claimed La sinrazón (Dream of Reason) (1960) to be her masterpiece and culmination of her fiction writing. This and much more can be found in Carol Maier’s helpful, thorough introduction. Maier is not only the translator of this Chacel book, which is appearing in English translation for the first time; she is the translator of two other Chacel novels that appear in the University of Nebraska’s European Women Writers Series; she is a scholar of Chacel’s entire writings, and she had the chance to know and explore the writer’s thought with Chacel before the end of her life.

This business of introductions presents a possible dilemma to the reader. To read the introduction first? In works of translation, or in bringing back into print a novel that has dropped out of sight (as with the excellent New York Review of Books) this decision is common. Often the introduction gives away more of the plot than one might want, or it takes away some of the enjoyment of discovery of style and thought. Why not begin reading the novel, skip the introduction; after all, if it is a worthy work of art then it should stand on its own, right?

Dream of Reason places this dilemma front and center. The writer is still a relative unknown to English speakers. At the outset the reader realizes that this novel is not plot driven. In her introduction, Maier gives a cogent explanation of Chacel’s intellectual project, that the novel tries to represent will and thought intimately joined to a person’s circumstances, a philosophical perspective from Ortega y Gasset. The voice of the narrator Santiago Hernandez is agreeable, but at times the ruminations can tax patience, unless the reader enters the novel forearmed. Not until page 268 of the novel does Hernandez explain, “One of our contemporary philosophers has said that the intimate life of ideas should be novelized. That is definitely what’s needed: the creation of a genre, a series of biographies of ideas, a thing very different from a novel of ideas.”

Click here for the full review.

This is where In the United States of Africa Waberi has inverted the globe and has managed as well to turn over the writing. By this act of inversion he has allowed us to see the absurdity of any kind of oriented globe. This novel holds a mirror up to the planet and questions the direction of spin, whether gravity is a pulling or pushing force, whether upside-down writing is even writing at all. (From the Introduction)

Although it gets much more complex as the novel advances, the primary reversal—exchanging the industrial-financial history and prejudices of Africa and the rest of the world—is a simple conceit to cotton onto and one that Waberi has a lot of fun with. In the opening pages we’re introduced to Yacuba, a “flea-ridden Germanic or Alemanic carpenter” who has fled AIDS-ridden, poverty-stricken Europe in hopes of a better life in the much wealthier and cleaner United States of Africa. Through Yacuba we’re introduced to a world where Quebec is at war with the American Midwest, where the “white trash” of Europe speak an undecipherable “white pidgin dialect,” and where the African media fans the flames of intolerance:

Surely you are aware that our media have been digging up their most scornful, odious stereotypes again, which go back at least as far as Methusuleiman! Like, the new migrants propagate their soaring birth rate, their centuries-old soot, their lack of ambition, their ancestral machismo, their reactionary religions like Protestantism, Judaism, or Catholicism, their endemic diseases. In short, they are introducing the Third World right up the anus of the United States of Africa. The least scrupulous of our newspapers have abandoned all restraint for decades and fan the flames of fear of what has been called—hastily, to be sure—the “White Peril.” Isn’t form, after all, the very flesh of thought, to paraphrase the great Sahelian writer Naguib Wolegorzee? Thus, a popular daily in Ndjamena, Bilad el Sudan, periodically goest back to its favorite headline: “Back Across the Mediterranean, Clodhoppers!” From Tripoli, El Ard, owned by the magnate Hannibal Cabral, shouts “Go Johnny, Go!” Which the Lagos Herald echoes with an ultimatum: “White Trash, Back Home!” More laconic is the Messager des Seychelles in two English words: “Apocalypse Now!”

This concept—Africa is the center of the world, not the U.S.!—is fun to play with, and great for exposing societies most awful prejudices (the letter at the end of Part One from an exile trying to reach the shores of “fat, well-fed Africa” is a good example), but is probably too thin to carry a whole novel.

Which is fine, because Waberi doesn’t rest here. Instead of focusing on the plight of a dirty European, the protagonist of his novel is Maya, an adopted white girl who seeks out her birth mother. So, in a series of intricate reversals, we have a white character set inside a world dominated by blacks, who ventures into the dark heart of France to claw through the grime to find her real mother (and to face some of her prejudices as a privileged African) instead of taking care of the mother who is ill.

In and of itself, the story is compelling enough, and Waberi’s impressionistic writing quite captivating. (And by extension, David and Nicole Ball’s translation is both readable and textured, and gracefully swings between Waberi’s more outrageous and comic bits, to his more poetic and serious sections.) But there is something strange, almost off-putting about the way the story is related that seems to go back to Everett’s initial observation about Waberi’s inversion and his questioning “whether upside-down writing is even writing at all.”

It’s almost as if In the United States of Africa is written as an inversion of many accepted novelistic conceits. In contrast to a conventional novel that might introduce a unique world through the eyes of the protagonist, Waberi intersperses objectively narrated chapters about the history of Africa’s dominance over the despicable Caucasians with more obfuscated chapters about Maya’s life and her dying mother told in the second person, a technique that, in Waberi’s prose, makes Maya feel more foreign, more removed from the reader. The narrative arc seems to loop rather than follow a traditional triangle of rising and falling action. (Even the titles of the four parts hint at something circular, or at least nicely paired: “A Voyage to Asmara, the Federal Capital,” “A Voyage to the Heart of the Studio,” “A Voyage to Paris, France,” and “Return to Asmara.”)

In the United States of Africa is not a simple book. It’s not a fun-filled romp in an imagined world turned on its head. It is a very accomplished novel though, one that definitely deserves to be part of the “French Voices” series, and that the University of Nebraska should be admired for bringing out.