As usual, when I am on an extended South American road trip like this, I do a lot of reading. And my expressed purpose for this post will be to highlight some of the books which have caught my attention and as such, have captured my imagination.
But before I get into that, I just want to say that my days spent here in El Tabo have been, despite the fact that I am no longer "touring" as in previous trips down here, have been most rewarding. And the rewards have been of a different sort - also because on the surface it might appear as if I´ve simply given up and gone off to do beachcombing instead of going on with my exploring...
These rewards have come from my ongoing daily contact with the Savignone family, Diego and Luisa, and their children Diego (the younger) and Constanza, aka "Connie," as well as from Luisa´s extended family who joined us for a real whopper of a New Year´s Eve celebration. These people have become very good friends, and I am amazed now at how much my Spanish-speaking abilities have grown through my daily contacts with them all. So in addition to the friendship, that´s a real reward - something to treasure. But it will certainly require me to try to find a way to keep that broadened Spanish ability nurtured, which won´t exactly be easy once I am back in the United States.
But now, on to the books. The first one I want to speak of actually was a gift - given to me by the younger Diego Savignone upon his return from an end-of-school-year trip to Brazil. In my previous stops in El Tabo I´ve always gotten into some lintersting and lively discussions with this bright young man, and these discussions have often reached into the realms of intellectual discussions, at least as far as my limited Spanish would allow. But this time we
really got to talking, and the topic quickly turned into a discussion of great Latin American writers, and it eventually became a discussion about the work of the amazing Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Eventually, Diego said to me, "Tio, I have a book for you to read. It is written by a Chileño, a fellow named Waldemar Verdugo, entitled
En Voz de Borges (which would translate roughly to "Borges in his own Words") The above picture shows the cover of this book, and the small image shows the book´s author, Verdugo, reading to Borges himself, who in his later years was quite blind.
Yes, in his later years Borges went blind, in sort of the same ironic way that the great composer Beethoven went deaf. That, of course, is a fact, but it is not the subject of this remarkable little book. Verdugo had the good fortune to get to know Borges fairly well back in the 1970´s, and he later gathered together the materials for this unique biographical revelation of the life and work of this cerebral Argentine writer and got it published, initially in Mexico in 1981, and finally, re-published in 2006 in Chile. The book delves deeply into the mind of Borges while at the same time it examines his various writings. As such, it could be seen as the perfect Borges primer for anyone interested in the poetry, stories and essays that he wrote during his lifetime, but even more than that, it opens up for us a very precious window into what exactly made Borges become the visionary writer who is today so revered in literary circles, in Latin America and in the world at large.
Verdugo brings us close to the great author´s prime influences, and elaborates on these various people, movements and subjects so that the reader can have a much better idea of the man Jorge Luis Borges. One of the people most influential on Borges had been his father, who early on had impressed upon his son the idea that, "...of all the diverse instruments created by man, the most astonishing one has been, beyond a doubt, the book. The others have been simply extensions of the body. The microscope and telescope are extensions of our vision; the telephone is an extension of our voice; the wheel an extension of our feet; the shovel and the plow are extensions of our arms...but the book is quite another thing, the book is an extension of our memory and our imagination." If time and space would permit, I would go on with the rest of that quote, but here in a cyber café time is money, and I do expect that I will need to move on as well to try to cover some other books.
But still on the Borges book, Verdugo goes into other influences, including Argentina and its culture, including the city of Buenos Aires, its poor neighborhoodsand their glorious offspring, the tango; 0ther Argentine authors and publishers, including Alfonso Reyes, Aldofo Bioy Casares (who collaborated with Borges for a time), Victoria Ocampo and others. He also delves into the books that so moved Borges, such as Dante´s
Divine Comedy as well as the works of scores of other great authors, many of whose works were available to Borges at a very young age in his father´s massive library.
The book looks at how Borges worked for a time as a film critic in order to earn his daily bread, and how deeply enchanted he had become with the actress Greta Garbo and the films she had made, while he came to believe that the "Western" genre of film was something of this era´s real epic art form, such as the fabled greek epics from Homer and other writers in ancient times because the Westerns brough back the concept of the "hero," which Borges felt had been an essential literary device which had been largely abandoned by contemporary writers.
And in that vein, Borges eschewed much of the current writing from many authors who sought to write in deep, dark, and largely obscure modes, "forgetting that clarity, besides being a form of the truth, represents a courtesy to the reader."
Verdugo also goes deeply into Borges´views of life, loove, women, politics and all manner of similar essential parts of this life, but now I must reconsider my space and time and conclude by saying that I found the book to be almost electric in its imagery, and as such, I simply devoured it. It was (and is) a very special gift from young Diego.
Now another book I have been reading (I´m not finished yet) has been a veritable epic of Russian Literature:
Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). Grossman was a Russian Jew who was one of the greatest Soviet war correspondents during World War II, covering both the battle of Stalingrad and the battle of Berlin. After the war, he molded his intimate experiences at the front into this book, which Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times has described as being "arguably the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century."
Now I could go on and recount the drift of this massive (871 pages) work in my own words, but I think that the summary on the back cover of the New York Review Of Books edition will give a much more concise overview:
"A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state,
Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope.
Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and sniper´s nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature."
It is a work often compared to Chekhov, and bears a structure loosely based on Tolstoy´s War and Peace. What I am feeling as I move towards the conclusion is a powerful feeling that I am in the midst of reading a work of clear genius - filled with great warmth and power.
As I close out this post, I would at least like to mention one other book which I´ve read on this trip, and that is Noam Chomsky´s most current offering, entitled
What We Say Goes, which is a scathing visionary look at American foreign policy and how successive U.S. governments have seen fit to throw their weight around the entire planet, as if it belonged to the USA. It is a highly disturbing and sobering essay, but it so enthralled me that I found myself reading it twice, before giving my copy away to my friend and agent in Santiago, Andres Gabor.
