"(Not) Roberto Bolaño" by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
And some recent favorites in criticism
Last month, while wandering the online archive of Mauro Javier Cárdenas, as is my wont, in search of news on American Abductions, his forthcoming novel, I stumbled across a new (to me) magazine, Socrates on the Beach—edited by Greg Gerke, whose vision (as per his first editor’s note) is refreshingly fueled by “some personal disappointment with the mountain of political writing that has grown prevalent in so-called literary journals and Web sites of late”—a magazine in which appears an excerpt from American Abductions, “(Not) Roberto Bolaño,” a horror story as syntactically deranged as Cárdenas’s previous fictions—not about the author Roberto Bolaño, naturally, but about a boy of that name, recounting, in self-conscious fashion, his harrowing experiences in an American detention camp—alongside fictions by the likes of Garielle Lutz (“She keeps track of what she tells people, to which people in particular, but otherwise feels left out of her life”), Jen Craig (whose excerpt from Wall, my gateway, sent me scrambling for Panthers and the Museum of Fire (see also Dustin Illingsworth’s excellent interview with her in Obstructive Fictions)), and Vi Khi Nao. A friend called Socrates on the Beach a “post-Quarterly, Lish-y thing,” which feels apt, given the magazine’s experimental bent, though it seems to me (an utter noob who has not yet read The Quarterly, mind you) that Gerke allows for more breathing room, aesthetically speaking, than did Lish. This is all to say that I’m terribly excited by Gerke’s burgeoning project, and by the community of writers it is bringing into being.
J. M. Tyree, also in the pages of SotB, examines Mark Fisher’s distaste for W. G. Sebald, whom he (Fisher) finds too self-absorbed to be a good travel writer, too digestible to be a good modernist, too melancholic to be a good leftist. Tyree’s is a sweeping, poetic, rigorously personal literary criticism that distills the pleasure of thinking through thorny questions with someone you love—the intimacy of that process, the (playful) tedium of it too. One question in particular hits home for the “expat” writer (my roommate cringes):
The battle was over the meaning of travel writing, in one sense, which, at its best, contains openness to encounters between the alien and the local rather than dwelling in lopsided exclusiveness on either side of this polarity. Fisher’s frustration, seen in a more charitable light, derived from his deep care over places that contained wonders which had been neglected and abused. Sebald, viewed from this angle, was too lost in himself to really see the world around him, the lens was not so much wrapped in gauze as closed with a watertight plastic cap.
Of course, Tyree doesn’t just view Sebald from “this angle.” One gets the sense that Tyree loves Sebald and Fisher both, generously if ambivalently, despite their aesthetic tensions with each other. It’s a joy being suspended in this ambivalence for the length of the essay, which meanders like one of Sebald’s own.
A similar anxiety about obnoxious fandom animates David Kurnick’s “Games of Taste,” an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Savage Detectives Reread. If Tyree is haunted by the image of a tourist wandering through the English countryside in Sebald’s wake, Kurnick is haunted by the image of a Bolaño-loving Brooklyn hipster, as caricatured by Nicolás Medina Mora in n+1: “They were getting tired of going to magazine parties and gallery galas where they disliked most of the people. And then one day he stumbled on his old copy of The Savage Detectives and found himself thinking: Why don’t we just move to Mexico City?” Kurnick confesses to a certain embarrassment in being an American who stans Bolaño—an embarrassment in simply being American, as he puts it—yet interrogates the author’s dismissal on those grounds, skeptical as he is of Bolaño’s portrayal in the US as a sort of calculating PR whiz. (See Bolaño in “Literature + Illness = Illness”: “I was poor, lived rough, and thought myself lucky because, after all, I was free of life-threatening illnesses. My sex-life was immoderate but I never caught a venereal disease. I read immoderately, but I never wanted to be a successful author.”)
A few quick links, before I go: Adam Shatz on Richard Wright in the LRB (as Tyree does with Sebald, Shatz reclaims Wright as a modernist); Harmony Holiday on John Edgar Wideman in 4columns; Jesse McCarthy on John Keene in Public Books; and two worthwhile essays on the first biography of Sebald (by Carole Angier): one by Ben Lerner (in the NYRB), and one by Joy Williams (over at Book Post).