The Hare feels longer and “earlier” than other Aira books I’ve enjoyed.  I suppose I am staying with it more because I’m now, have long been, a “fan” and so I give him all the benefits of the doubt.  With Sergio De La Pava, though, I loved A Naked Singularity but had to finally speed through the end of Personae.  But I’m still a fan of De La Pava, too.  He writes in American English and he’s terrific.  

Been thinking about the start of interest in translated lit.  Catholic childhood in western Maryland, on West Virginia line.  Everything was in Latin in church so prayer books etc were Latin and English.  That must be the “source.”  Learned to sing Gregorian chant in college just a year or two before the Vatican did away with it.  La Salle college in Philadelphia.  Standard English major with a touch of French but not enough to do more than stumble through L’Etranger and barely make sense of it.  Married Virginia a few years later, however, and she was a Spanish major and since then she has taken me to Spain lots of times and in ’98 all through lots of Latin America.  

After a few weeks in a Spanish-speaking country I can get back into it but I’ve never had more than the present tense.  Zen Spanish I call it. Strange as to why I never fully dove in and mastered Spanish enough to read the lit.  We made money on our travels by teaching English conversation classes.  Then in my teaching at Plymouth State I fell into teaching the world lit, global lit, classes in translation.  Plus I started a course in Travel Lit that I taught for years.  Somewhere along the way I decided to make a positive out of “flaneuresque” reading and decided that translated English tends to have its own tics and textures of style and even thought.  By then I had found out more about Beckett’s whole project of going into French and back into English.  And by then I had more of a sense that staying in one language could be fully justified from various (bogus and possibly valid) angles.  I could tell too from reading Spanish authors in English such as Javier Marías just how good a translator Margaret Jull Costa is.  She also does Pessoa.  etc etc

One sideline:  we took our son to Spain when he was 10-11 for our longest stay there—16 months.  He became perfectly fluent and started correcting his mother’s use of the tilde—after she hung up the phone one day.    Fifteen years later he married a French woman and now has perfect French too.  He has a musician’s ear for it.  His wife speaks English, and German too.  Those darned Europeans.  Her mother is a German teacher.  

Virginia is a scholar of Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclán—Spain’s great Modernist writer— impossible, yes, to translate.  Joyce/Pound/Yeats/Pessoa rolled up into one.  Maybe that helped keep me from trying, or confirmed me in my laziness. I had never heard the word “flaneur” until I was maybe 45? or even 50.  But I was already a confirmed wandering layabout by then.

Tuesday late afternoon

What a struggle to continue reading Personae to the bitter end.  I will take M.A.Orthofer, inThe Complete Review, at his word and say, ok, give it a B+ but I haven’t had such difficulty forcing myself to finish a book since plowing on through Salvatore Scibona’s The End.  

Why did I just not finish it, then?  Personae.  I did manage to skim the last five or six pages.  But, you know, you get so far in and then you just want to keep looking at the train wreck or whatever it is you’ve got in your hands between the front and back cover.  Besides, every so often the writing flashes and clicks, just as writing.  I wondered whether I was just old enough to have never played video games.  Was that it?  They guy is not clueless or anything.  He is doing something here, but what it is interests me less and less and less as I move through the book and then, last twenty pages? not at all.  Not at all.  Please God the third book will be as super fine as the first book is--everyone must read A Naked Singularity because it is just brilliant and funny and superb and unbelievable in all the splendid ways.  

Sergio De La Pava's expanding universe

Tuesday April 2

morning

Finishing Naked Singularity which is heartbreakingly good.  And fine.

5:45 pm  Finished the novel about twenty minutes ago, scanned some commentary on Conversational and then took a crap, unusual time of day for such and somehow related---in terms of the old thinking of the body approach.

Back to De La Pava's novel.  Real sense of Over-ness haunting me now.  hanging on.  Very powerful work.  Might be better than Infinite Jest.  Too soon to say but it comes to mind. 

Weds  April  3 

Paula came early this morning.  Final packing things.  Super bright and sunny but really cold and still high winds. 

Thinking about how thrilling De La Pava's book is.  Wonder if he took the use of swords from Marîas's Your Face Tomorrow?  Vol 2.  Even if not, he sure knows what he's doing.  If only Salvatore's first novel had been this wonderful, this splendid and spectacular.  Both took ten years to write. 

Contrast ANS with the little book of Walser's that I read a few weeks ago.  Walser's inimitable style and modes, yes, but still, early 20th C airy slightness, Peter Panism, until I read a few more of his works to get a better take on them.  Meanwhile, De La Pava's work is certainly "after David Foster Wallace"--half a generation? after it.  But perhaps greater than it.  Huge books by young men out to prove their moves.  Pava's is so much warmer and human.  Infinite Jest I read so long ago that my memory of it is not reliable, but what I do remember, and the remembered experience of it, is that exhausting sense of brilliance at high pitch, the exploding nebula of amazing brightness---and coldness.  The best scene is where the Quebec wheelchair terrorists put mirrors up across highway I-93 in the dark of night to bewitch drivers.  Of course that stuck with me because I live close to the very scene and enjoyed the whole local referentiality.  No need to go on trying to compare the works.  Better to just say that ANS does succeed in expanding itself outward and the whole "deconstruction," to use an really old-fashioned word, of what it started out to be---a legal thriller, a lawyer-esque detective work, the spiraling explosion of genres, once we've lived through the incredibly enjoyable and intense heist movements, keeps going upward into if not a sublime then a contemporary version of exaltation where love land fear embrace to erase victory and loss.  Or maybe to merge with all of those and all the other terms we can think of. 

I read one commentary yesterday that said that after the sword scenes the reader then felt let down by the remaining hundred pages or so of the novel.  But I didn't and I don't think so.  There is a natural denouement after climax, yes, De La Pava follows the conventions and he manages to break them open at the same time and the denouement moves themselves become almost a new novella/epilogue in which resolution issues morph into nearly new revelations of character and relationship and human connectedness.  We have family, children, sister and mother, love, and fear of retribution which itself becomes turned inside out into some indefinable cosmic embrace.  And it is none of it as hokey as this run-down surely makes it sound to someone who has not yet read the book. 

At key places you can say to yourself, oh boy, is Tarantino going to die to make this a movie and you also say, no, this is so much better than what mess he would make of it because I am reading it and De La Pava's implied narrator is pacing us through it in ways that only a supreme writer can do. 

Another lasting impression concerns the ways De La Pava takes the risk of describing madness and near-madness and pulls it off.  Various sorts of distortions of experience that we recognize and don't recognize, have felt ourselves or can tell others have felt, De La Pava portrays those, conveys what they are like, has his protagonist, Casi, live through them, live with them for a time, and we find them credible and moving, especially in hindsight.  As the story moves along we can look back and recognize what that was, perhaps in ways that Casi himself cannot, and yet, this might be a major achievement, our experience of these effects do not seem to involve irony.  At least not in the ways that have become standard as "dramatic irony" or "literary irony."  Nor are there the now standard "post-modern irony" or other such effects.  Instead the book hangs on a few ordinary armatures---legal procedure, the history of boxing in the 80s, crime, some violence, oh, and memorable characters, expansive, big, complex characters, like Toom and Dane. 

Casi's voice carries the rich brew.  De La Pava's incredible mastery of idiom, rhetoric, street talk, talk of every sort, rushes the book forward.  Language rich to a breaking point, never cute, never just clever, language handled so poetically it disappears, taking us into the naked singularity of poetry.  That title phrase is from physics and I assume the concept gets used and explained clearly and astonishingly---assume, because everything else I can judge gets handled that way.  The history of western philosophy, yep, in there, forgot to mention that.  Literary theory, even television theory, of sorts, without extraneous chat about pop this or that, and without superfluous big thoughts about politics or history, but they are there too. 

Melville hovers around the edges.  One character named Ballena and bigger than all get out.  Confidence men, ambiguities, uncertainties and shifting realities in which we wander enchanted isles.  

Philsophy, hence theology and spirituality.  Character named Aloyna.  Hmm, Dostoyevsky.  The list goes on.