Virginia Woolf, El viaje de ida (The Voyage Out)
Ediciones del Viento (A Coruña), 2021
A delicate novel, with the beauty of what is terrible.
When Virginia Woolf narrated Rachel’s illness and death, she may have had her own in mind as the foreseen end of a life marked by emotional and psychological instability. The influence of her sister Vanessa, so well portrayed in Jane Dunn’s biography, appears like a shadow in the conception of a character who is central to the novel: Aunt Helen.
It has been said that one of the young, proud readers and exclusionary members of the Anglo social set is modeled on Lytton Strachey. By then, the gallery of humanity is completed with the appearance of the Dalloway couple, in search of something more than the tomb of Henry Fielding in the English cemetery in Lisbon.
Rachel does not live long enough to rebel; she does not finish the first volume of Gibbon which, as a challenge, the impulsive Hirsch gives her as a gift. We do not foresee it, but he will later be shattered by the cruel twist of fate, almost as much as his friend and rival, the chosen Terrence—poor young man.
A classic novel, a story of wanderers, a delight of writing that slowly seeks to shed its fin de siècle garments as the beginning of a transition toward new forms—specifically the stream of consciousness we will later read in Mrs. Dalloway.
Miguel Temprano’s translation is good. The edition is decent, though there are repeated slips in punctuation and in the use of dashes in dialogue.
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Albert Caraco, Post Mortem
Ediciones Sígueme / El Peso de los Días (Salamanca), 2006
It is very likely that no book of such corrosive marrow has been written about the relationship between mother and son as this one. From beginning to end, Caraco announces his slow suicide, which finally occurred some time later after his father’s death.
Who can be sure they know a writer named Albert Caraco—a Jew born in Turkey, a traveler of the world—whose online biography barely consists of a couple of sparse paragraphs describing him as a Franco-Uruguayan philosopher? The relationship with the Lady Mother (as she is called in this book) is so important to his formation and his understanding of the world that he comes to hold her responsible for any blemish that might mark his course through life. His dreadful opinion of the feminine world is an example.
It is one of the most misogynistic books I have read, but beware: his stance is not directed particularly toward women, but toward the world itself, which he hates with all his energies. “I hate the world as a sick man and as a Jew… I love death and I do well,” he writes.
His mother, he says, inoculated him with a reasonable egoism and warned him against all intoxication. A Cioranesque spirit before Cioran, Caraco despises science—the same science to which belong the doctors entrusted with lying to a dying woman. And in the air remain a couple of memorable sentences: The cult of memory is for the people… we must forget the dead.
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James Joyce, Dublineses (Dubliners)
Editorial Porrúa (Mexico), 1989
It has happened again—and it only happens with great books. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man did not excite me. Yet the gallery of characters in Dubliners is now entirely in my room: they have all returned, conversing, quarreling, playing the piano, stumbling through the lyrics of an aria, dancing cheerfully under the influence of warm whiskey, and finally dying—only to return again, as one returns to a family chapel.
Joyce said he wanted to write “a chapter of the moral history” of his country—a country paralyzed, with Dublin as the center of that paralysis. In every story alcohol rains down; there is always a priest, or someone has gone into a convent, or someone is torn between what it means to be a Jesuit and what it means to be Protestant—or the other way around. Literature itself, Joyce also said, is a kind of priesthood.
Everything written here is the result of a contemplated death. “The story of a frustration,” Harry Levin called it. These are realistic stories, yet within them realism acquires another flesh, another density. Joyce’s narrative ars is deceptively simple: within that simplicity lies the singular complexity of Joyce. He transforms the real into something else, clothes it differently, and we sense it from the first page—without pomp or firm lights. All light is dim, flickering; it is his maneuver of stripping away, of breaking with the nineteenth-century tradition that demanded transparency, candor, completeness. Everything happens halfway: characters float, watch the snow fall, wait for a carriage, loves remain unconsummated, a broken chalice has been the trigger of a death.
How well Faulkner read these stories. Within them there is a contained violence, a catastrophe always about to happen—precisely what made the novelist of As I Lay Dying great: making vibrate the nerve of the destructive impulse that inhabits the routine, the everyday. It delays its arrival, but makes us know it will come, because the unhappiness of mortals is like evil—irremediable.
