Shadows of Tender Fury--The Novel!
Dec. 20th, 2004 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaHome with the mother and father of a cold. Had the effing foresight last Friday to email myself a huge project from work, alas, so I could actually be working right now, and I will, I will, in a minute.
But am sitting here in the sunshine, with frost all over the little Dickensian panes of my old-fashioned and rattley windows, clutching a hot cuppa and wreaking credit-card havoc on eBay. Whee! I personify the American Holiday! (Religion-free, of course.)
So, yesterday I was spammin![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lolaraincoat about my hero Subcomandante Marcos, and I learned that he is planning to cowrite a mystery novel. Now I know I am in love and must move to Chiapas and have his babies read the book when it comes out.
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 12 - What should a rebel leader with a little extra time on his hands do to get attention? Subcommander Marcos, the elusive and charismatic leader of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, has apparently decided the answer is to write a crime novel.
Two weeks ago, Pablo Ignacio Taibo II, a successful writer of detective stories set in Mexico City, received a clandestine letter from the guerrilla leader. In it, Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader who made wearing a black ski mask sexy, proposed that they team up to write a detective story, alternating chapters.
"I thought about it for 10 seconds and said 'No, not right now. I'm very happy with my Pancho Villa book, which I'm writing, and this new project will drive me crazy," Mr. Taibo recalled. "Then rapidly, 10 seconds later, I said yes. It had the enormous attraction of insanity. For a writer like me who is always bordering on insanity, it was part of my, shall we say, greatest obsessions to do something like that."
So Mr. Taibo, a liberal who sympathizes with the Zapatista movement's campaign for greater rights for indigenous people in the southern region of Chiapas, worked out the rules for writing the book in a flurry of letters with the rebel leader.
The first six chapters of the book, titled "Awkward Deaths," are to be a sort of Ping-Pong game, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos is to write chapters one, three and five, introducing his detective, Elíías Contreras. Mr. Taibo would write chapters two, four and six, using the protagonists in his previous books, Detective Hééctor Belascoaráán Shayne. In the seventh chapter, the two detectives must meet at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, where Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas are buried.
Neither collaborator knows how the book will end, or how long it will be, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos has chosen to tell the story from a future perspective, with his investigator looking back at events. Mr. Taibo's narrative will stick to the present.
La Jornada, a left-wing newspaper, has agreed to publish the chapters serially. The first effort by the masked-guerrilla-turned-novelist appeared on Dec. 5. The second chapter was published Sunday.
Marcos's reasons for writing the book, like so much about him, remain about as clear as the mists shrouding Chiapas's jungles. Judging from the first chapter, he wants to use fiction not just to raise money for charity, as the two authors have agreed to do, but also to make political points.
In the first chapter, the intrepid Eíías Contreras (which Marcos says is not the character's real name) tracks down a missing woman at the request of a Zapatista commander called, yes, dear reader, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. It turns out the woman had run away from an abusive husband. When the commander hears this, he expresses shock that a Zapatista rebel would beat his wife.
"Maybe you know someone who forgets to be a Zapatista once in a while," the investigator says.
"How long does it take to become a Zapatista then?" the commander asks.
"Sometimes it takes more than 500 years," says the detective, before riding off on his mule.
The passage appears to be thinly veiled propaganda, condemning domestic violence but also urging faithful Zapatistas not to give up the faith. It also reflects an underlying problem for the rebels - the slow pace of change in Chiapas and the flagging attention of Mexico City and the world.
Subcommander Marcos, a former philosophy professor whose real name officials say is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, led a January 1994 uprising in the name of Indian rights. Though not an Indian himself, he captured the imagination and sympathy of many intellectuals and middle-class liberals.
Many urban Mexicans were moved by the plight of the illiterate, malnourished Indians whom Marcos championed. But the rebellion also tapped into anxiety about what free trade might do to the country. Overnight the rebel leader became an international cult hero.
Yet the Zapatistas never had much success on the battlefield, and agreements made in 1996 with President Ernesto Zedillo later unraveled. Then in March 2001, President Vicente Fox let them march to Mexico City, hold a giant rally and speak before Congress.
A month later, lawmakers passed a watered-down version of their demands, and the movement lost some steam. Since then, the guerrilla leader has retreated to his hide-out in the Chiapas jungles, advocating a quieter revolution in the handful of towns rebels still control.
Subcommander Marcos could not be immediately reached for comment about the book. Javier Elorriaga, a spokesman for the political arm of the Zapatista movement, did not respond to messages sent to him by e-mail and left via telephone at the group's headquarters in Mexico City.
Bernardino Ramos, a legislator who heads a commission set up to pacify Chiapas, said the book seemed to be a clever way to rekindle interest in the problems of indigenous people the Zapatistas champion.
For his part, Mr. Taibo refuses to speculate about the guerrilla leader's motives. He acknowledges that the novel, like most Latin American fiction, will explore social problems, what he calls "the demons that walk free in Mexico," the abuse of power and corruption.
Still, a detective novel is a detective novel, Mr. Taibo said. "It will be essentially a piece of fiction, but always in a novel like this one there will be a political reflection, without a doubt," Mr. Taibo said. "We have put it forward as a fiction novel. I don't know what else he wants to say. I know what I want to say. I want to say that Mexico City is also a jungle."
As published Mr. Taibo's first contribution to the book follows the conventions of detective fiction, yet it is also laced with references to Mexican politics, past and present, opening up a wide range of possible story lines for Marcos to develop.
Luis Hernáández, the editorial page editor of La Jornada, said it should come as no surprise that the guerrilla leader was exploring a new literary genre to get his message out. Over the years, his missives to the newspapers have often been written in the form of poetry, stories and parables.
"I think here is an attempt to use a genre that he has not used before," Mr. Hernáández said. "The police novel is the best genre for describing social injustice, the abuse of power, the inequality that exists in a society."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Pause and consider the number of ways in which this book (if it ever gets written) will confuse fiction and reality. Mmm, gotta love the meta.
I blithely remarked tololaraincoat that when I write the great American novel (hah), it will be so laden with book-apparatus as to be unreadable. Footnotes! Glosses! Postscripts! Dual pagination system! Chapter abstracts!
But I'm not sure I meant it. Now I love all that stuff, but the real truth is, I like my books to be readable and to have a story I can follow. I like the ole beginning-middle-end thang. I like the Unities of Time and Place, and a hero whose downfall rips my heart out but also makes me feel better about the world. Yep. I like t00by old-fashioned, rattley, books: they are like the better sort of windows: crystalline with only a very slight tendency to distort--hardly noticeable unless you look. Jane Austen. Mishima. Recently I had a jolly time with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
So the question of the day is: Can a book be full of the pomo, the apparatus, the smoke and mirrors and the tricks of the shade, and still be clear, fluid, and readable?
Mind you, I can think of any number of wonderful books that manage to be nearly unreadable without any recourse to postmodern games, and worth all the effort they demand. Faulkner, Gaddis, Melville. Oh, Proust, Joyce. Those guys. But what of the converse? Books full of the gimmicks and tics but that are beautifully readable?
Because I am in a list-makin' mood (blame the Dayquil), here are a couple of books I really like that mess with the form bigtime. Alas, I can't call any of them easy to read:
Cortazar, Hopscotch (shuffle the chapters and read in two different orders)
Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon (puns!)
Georges Perec, A Void (written without the letter "e"--in French--and then translated without the letter "e" into English)
Ah, words, sentences, paragraphs: the drug of choice, the wassail of the season. Asjlh said this morning, it ain't your same auld same auld.
*wanders off to find more Dayquil, spacily*
But am sitting here in the sunshine, with frost all over the little Dickensian panes of my old-fashioned and rattley windows, clutching a hot cuppa and wreaking credit-card havoc on eBay. Whee! I personify the American Holiday! (Religion-free, of course.)
So, yesterday I was spammin
lolaraincoat about my hero Subcomandante Marcos, and I learned that he is planning to cowrite a mystery novel. Now I know I am in love and must MEXICO CITY, Dec. 12 - What should a rebel leader with a little extra time on his hands do to get attention? Subcommander Marcos, the elusive and charismatic leader of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, has apparently decided the answer is to write a crime novel.
Two weeks ago, Pablo Ignacio Taibo II, a successful writer of detective stories set in Mexico City, received a clandestine letter from the guerrilla leader. In it, Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader who made wearing a black ski mask sexy, proposed that they team up to write a detective story, alternating chapters.
"I thought about it for 10 seconds and said 'No, not right now. I'm very happy with my Pancho Villa book, which I'm writing, and this new project will drive me crazy," Mr. Taibo recalled. "Then rapidly, 10 seconds later, I said yes. It had the enormous attraction of insanity. For a writer like me who is always bordering on insanity, it was part of my, shall we say, greatest obsessions to do something like that."
So Mr. Taibo, a liberal who sympathizes with the Zapatista movement's campaign for greater rights for indigenous people in the southern region of Chiapas, worked out the rules for writing the book in a flurry of letters with the rebel leader.
The first six chapters of the book, titled "Awkward Deaths," are to be a sort of Ping-Pong game, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos is to write chapters one, three and five, introducing his detective, Elíías Contreras. Mr. Taibo would write chapters two, four and six, using the protagonists in his previous books, Detective Hééctor Belascoaráán Shayne. In the seventh chapter, the two detectives must meet at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, where Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas are buried.
Neither collaborator knows how the book will end, or how long it will be, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos has chosen to tell the story from a future perspective, with his investigator looking back at events. Mr. Taibo's narrative will stick to the present.
La Jornada, a left-wing newspaper, has agreed to publish the chapters serially. The first effort by the masked-guerrilla-turned-novelist appeared on Dec. 5. The second chapter was published Sunday.
Marcos's reasons for writing the book, like so much about him, remain about as clear as the mists shrouding Chiapas's jungles. Judging from the first chapter, he wants to use fiction not just to raise money for charity, as the two authors have agreed to do, but also to make political points.
In the first chapter, the intrepid Eíías Contreras (which Marcos says is not the character's real name) tracks down a missing woman at the request of a Zapatista commander called, yes, dear reader, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. It turns out the woman had run away from an abusive husband. When the commander hears this, he expresses shock that a Zapatista rebel would beat his wife.
"Maybe you know someone who forgets to be a Zapatista once in a while," the investigator says.
"How long does it take to become a Zapatista then?" the commander asks.
"Sometimes it takes more than 500 years," says the detective, before riding off on his mule.
The passage appears to be thinly veiled propaganda, condemning domestic violence but also urging faithful Zapatistas not to give up the faith. It also reflects an underlying problem for the rebels - the slow pace of change in Chiapas and the flagging attention of Mexico City and the world.
Subcommander Marcos, a former philosophy professor whose real name officials say is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, led a January 1994 uprising in the name of Indian rights. Though not an Indian himself, he captured the imagination and sympathy of many intellectuals and middle-class liberals.
Many urban Mexicans were moved by the plight of the illiterate, malnourished Indians whom Marcos championed. But the rebellion also tapped into anxiety about what free trade might do to the country. Overnight the rebel leader became an international cult hero.
Yet the Zapatistas never had much success on the battlefield, and agreements made in 1996 with President Ernesto Zedillo later unraveled. Then in March 2001, President Vicente Fox let them march to Mexico City, hold a giant rally and speak before Congress.
A month later, lawmakers passed a watered-down version of their demands, and the movement lost some steam. Since then, the guerrilla leader has retreated to his hide-out in the Chiapas jungles, advocating a quieter revolution in the handful of towns rebels still control.
Subcommander Marcos could not be immediately reached for comment about the book. Javier Elorriaga, a spokesman for the political arm of the Zapatista movement, did not respond to messages sent to him by e-mail and left via telephone at the group's headquarters in Mexico City.
Bernardino Ramos, a legislator who heads a commission set up to pacify Chiapas, said the book seemed to be a clever way to rekindle interest in the problems of indigenous people the Zapatistas champion.
For his part, Mr. Taibo refuses to speculate about the guerrilla leader's motives. He acknowledges that the novel, like most Latin American fiction, will explore social problems, what he calls "the demons that walk free in Mexico," the abuse of power and corruption.
Still, a detective novel is a detective novel, Mr. Taibo said. "It will be essentially a piece of fiction, but always in a novel like this one there will be a political reflection, without a doubt," Mr. Taibo said. "We have put it forward as a fiction novel. I don't know what else he wants to say. I know what I want to say. I want to say that Mexico City is also a jungle."
As published Mr. Taibo's first contribution to the book follows the conventions of detective fiction, yet it is also laced with references to Mexican politics, past and present, opening up a wide range of possible story lines for Marcos to develop.
Luis Hernáández, the editorial page editor of La Jornada, said it should come as no surprise that the guerrilla leader was exploring a new literary genre to get his message out. Over the years, his missives to the newspapers have often been written in the form of poetry, stories and parables.
"I think here is an attempt to use a genre that he has not used before," Mr. Hernáández said. "The police novel is the best genre for describing social injustice, the abuse of power, the inequality that exists in a society."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Pause and consider the number of ways in which this book (if it ever gets written) will confuse fiction and reality. Mmm, gotta love the meta.
I blithely remarked to
lolaraincoat that when I write the great American novel (hah), it will be so laden with book-apparatus as to be unreadable. Footnotes! Glosses! Postscripts! Dual pagination system! Chapter abstracts! But I'm not sure I meant it. Now I love all that stuff, but the real truth is, I like my books to be readable and to have a story I can follow. I like the ole beginning-middle-end thang. I like the Unities of Time and Place, and a hero whose downfall rips my heart out but also makes me feel better about the world. Yep. I like t00by old-fashioned, rattley, books: they are like the better sort of windows: crystalline with only a very slight tendency to distort--hardly noticeable unless you look. Jane Austen. Mishima. Recently I had a jolly time with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
So the question of the day is: Can a book be full of the pomo, the apparatus, the smoke and mirrors and the tricks of the shade, and still be clear, fluid, and readable?
Mind you, I can think of any number of wonderful books that manage to be nearly unreadable without any recourse to postmodern games, and worth all the effort they demand. Faulkner, Gaddis, Melville. Oh, Proust, Joyce. Those guys. But what of the converse? Books full of the gimmicks and tics but that are beautifully readable?
Because I am in a list-makin' mood (blame the Dayquil), here are a couple of books I really like that mess with the form bigtime. Alas, I can't call any of them easy to read:
Cortazar, Hopscotch (shuffle the chapters and read in two different orders)
Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon (puns!)
Georges Perec, A Void (written without the letter "e"--in French--and then translated without the letter "e" into English)
Ah, words, sentences, paragraphs: the drug of choice, the wassail of the season. As
jlh said this morning, it ain't your same auld same auld.*wanders off to find more Dayquil, spacily*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 07:17 pm (UTC)/repeating myself
And I find David Foster Wallace easy to read, and also think some of his stuff is great -- Infinite Jest! whoo! -- but people whose taste is better than mine disagree, so. And then there's Pynchon. Some of his novels are easy, some not. But is he really postmodern? I dunno.
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 07:26 pm (UTC)So where do the post-'60s experimentalists (DeLillo, et al) and the magical realists fit into the pomo equation?
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 08:47 pm (UTC)DeLillo is a jazzer; his prose is dense and complex, but he's fairly linear and straightforward, I think.
Pynchon seems more rad to me: he inserts all sorts of wacky stuff into novels in the wrong timeframe--e.g., reference to the novels of Patrick O'Brian in "Mason & Dixon," set in the 1760s. Of course, that novel also has an actual talking and flying automaton duck. Whatever. Or a whole chapter in "Gravs Rainbow" that exists primarily so that he can make an atrocious pun on the phrase "40 million Frenchmen can't be wrong." (If you care, it comes out as "For de Mille, young fur henchmen can't be rowing." Don't ask.)
As for the magical realists... well, I love them and they are sometimes anything but linear ... but I guess for me the category "postmodern," insofar as it has any real meaning, has something to do with self-conscious ironizing--offering a commentary on itself and its own enterprise as it proceeds. Books like DAve Eggars' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," which I liked very much.
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 09:00 pm (UTC)I guess for me the category "postmodern," insofar as it has any real meaning, has something to do with self-conscious ironizing--offering a commentary on itself and its own enterprise as it proceeds.
I agree with your definition. Postmodernism implies self-reflexivity and a (self-)conscious playing with the form.
*thinks*
If Pomo were a person, he/she would annoy the hell outta me.
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 11:43 pm (UTC)Ain't it the truth. And not least because this person would insist on being referred to as s/he.
The only way to explain the existence of "Tristram Shandy" is that God is a much kinder person than we have been led to think and s/he occasionally does something nice just for the hell of it.
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2005-01-05 10:55 pm (UTC)*giggles*
All very interesting as usual. I've never heard the great beast referred to as Pomo before. *fears it greatly* Detective Hééctor Belascoaráán Shayne is a great name. Yay for you and your Dickensian windows. :D
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 08:37 pm (UTC)Pynchon... well, he's one of my very favorites ev-var, but except for Lot 49 I don't find his writing easy. And that's my least fav of his books.
Re: is redundancy postmodern?
Date: 2004-12-20 08:54 pm (UTC)Similarly I could see Catch-22 as being "full of pomo," but its still very readable. Again though, I'm not sure I'd call it postmodern.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:21 pm (UTC)Ain't it the truth? <33333 Subcomandante Marcos. I'd love to read a time-travel RPS fic in which he and Ernesto Guevara... you know.
I think pomo fiction is at its most accessible when it comes packaged as a mystery. Paul Auster can be quite the theorist while spinning a good yarn, and I found "The Erasers" by Robbe-Grillet to be a fairly easy read.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 07:42 pm (UTC)In my opinion the best bio of El Che was written by ... Paco Ignacio Taibo II. So you see how it all fits together.
Of course I only think it's the best because it has the most material on Che's years in Mexico, which are all I really care about. Mexico Mexico Mexico. Damn it's cold here in Toronto right now.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:49 pm (UTC)In my opinion the best bio of El Che was written by ... Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Better than Jay Cantor's novel, "The Death of Che Guevara"? I loved that book.
But a little AU Marcos/Che slash might not be a bad thing... except I get the feeling that Marcos is directly channeling Che (and using the same PR firm), so it might be kinda, well, incestuous.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 10:43 pm (UTC)And Taibo II wrote the best biography, but my dim memory of Cantor's novel -- which I read back in the solidarity- movement day, so what would that have been, 1986? 87? -- is that it was pretty terrific. I should reread it sometime. Hmm.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 11:51 pm (UTC)But would El Sup/Che fic really be about incest, or just autoeroticism? Because autoeroticism is what the internet is all about, seems to me.
: -) The best kind, after all. So if I have this right, an El Sup/Che fic would be a self-admiring but emotionally fraught internal monologue? Yep, that sounds like Che all right.
Cold here in NYC too. What is the point of being a Mexico specialist if you cannot spend Dec - March in Oaxaca? Every art historian I know went into the field so as to be able to do tax-deductible research in Tuscany every summer. Shweet. Me, I keep wondering what job would send me to Sicily for three months every winter. Am considering formal application to the Mafia for middle-management position in their marketing and product branding dept. I hear they're hiring again.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:53 pm (UTC)Yay, book lists!!I think it's time to put away the DVD player.