Lost—and found—in translation: Roberto Bolaño and César Aira: new works in English

When an author’s writing is introduced to a new language it sometimes happens that his body of work, which likely emerged gradually in the countries that share his mother tongue, comes over those for whom this work is newly translated like an avalanche. It can be exciting. I remember when, within a very compact space of time, everything by Paul Auster was appearing in Spanish translation in Mexico. Suddenly everyone I knew in Mexico was reading Auster’s work enthusiastically, surveying the whole oeuvre at once, gobbling it up and talking about it. Something similar is happening now with the work of Roberto Bolaño. Following the hugely successful debut of his novel The Savage Detectives in English translation last year, it seems now like everybody’s reading Bolaño. In the literary cliques of Anglophone North America, the guy’s a sudden star, with a significant body of work to back it up. Difference between he and Auster, is, sadly, that Bolaño’s not around to enjoy it.

Born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile, Bolaño lived a largely vagabond existence, residing at different times in Mexico, France and Spain, which might go some distance to explaining his late start in getting published. Yet while his published work only started to build up in the 1990s, it quickly drew attention for its striking, wicked wit, perverse invention and thematic daring. “When I read Bolaño,” wrote Nicole Krauss in a not uncommon appraisal, “I think: Everything is possible again.” He died in 2003 at the age of 50. The Savage Detectives is now in paper and Bolaño’s last major work to be translated into English, his posthumous epic 2666, is set to appear this fall. Yet a less-heralded—and comparatively slim, and thus less daunting—volume has just recently found its way to bookstores and is not only very much worth checking out but arguably makes for an intriguing starting point for the uninitiated.

Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, $26.50) is a biographical dictionary of 20th century New World fascists, varied personae of varied background and literary, social or political ambition who each is some way locate their inspiration in the heinous doomed pursuits of, among others, Hitler. These figures are fictional, entirely plausible, oddly pathetic and uniformly fascinating to track through the brief sketches Bolaño provides. The peculiar structure of the book draws upon similarly structured works by Borges or Stanislaw Lem, but pushes formal play and mythical reverie into an altogether more deeply sinister abyss.

In Nazi Literature in the Americas we meet, among many others, Luz Mendiluce Thompson, daughter to the renown Argentinean poetess, a socialite and publisher, who spent her insane, promiscuous and frustrated years treasuring a photo of herself as a baby being held by Hitler. We meet Ignacio Zubieta, polo player, great dancer and bibliophile, who might have been a beloved popular figure had he not left Colombia to fight for both Franco and the Nazis. We meet Jim O’Bannon, American football player and poet, “equally susceptible to the allure of force and a yearning for delicate perishable things,” who loved the Beats, but wound up beating up Allen Ginsberg when he belatedly sniffed out the legendary author’s homosexuality.

In every case, the point to these tales is less about sympathizing with these individuals than it is about recognizing how easily evil can slip into an individual’s unruly path through life, a theme that lines the work of Jerzy Kosinski, among others. Most interestingly, Bolaño himself, far from assuming a detached role, appears in the final, Graham Greenesque entry, in which he encounters a figure with whom he shares much in common while becoming instrumental in his execution.

My still-fresh interest in Bolaño’s writing recently led me to César Aira, a perhaps even more peculiar Argentinean novelist whose work Bolaño had praised and written prefaces for. Aira is wildly prolific, in part because his books are so very short, but only a few of them have appeared in English. The one I’ve thus far been able to sample is How I Became a Nun (New Directions, $17.50), which takes the form of a memoir focused on Aira’s seventh year of life, the period that led to “the invention of my memory.” Aira tells of moving to the city and being taken out by his father to try ice cream for the first time, an episode that ends in hysterical, hilarious tragedy when it turns out that the ice cream is lace with cyanide and the confusion builds to the point where Aira’s enraged and embarrassed father beats the ice cream vendor to death.

Religious rhetoric abounds, yet, puzzlingly, the promise of the title never comes to fruition. Fantasies, out of body experiences, dwarves and radio programmes featuring a child Jesus leading a variation on Our Gang come to vibrant life in these pages, one episode leading to the next in a way that’s at once organic, silly, insightful and feeling very much like the writer is making it up as he goes. A troubled, unusually introspective identity is taking shape, the narrative complicated above all by the unremarked-upon contention that the author is actually a girl, though everyone else refers to Aira as a boy. How I Became a Nun plays jazz with memory and perpetual storytelling, that important branch of magic realism. It’s thrilling, if perhaps so willing to slide off every conceivable template as to feel terribly slight. I for one found it absorbing from start to finish, and even if it hardly carried the weight of the work I’ve read thus far from Bolaño, I would have to agree with Bolaño’s statement that “One you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.”

Breach and the delicious duplicity of Chris Cooper

He’s played a hard-ass retired US Colonel and ball-busting father choking with unfulfilled homosexual desires that yield murderous impulses. He’s played a hunter of rare plants, deeply unsavoury, a quintessential outsider, yet the secret lover of Meryl Streep. He’s played a candidate for the Colorado governorship, grammatically challenged, neo-conservative, seemingly modelled after Dubya. He’s got thin lips, fried egg eyes, and can easily embody the pappy who never hits you but wields the threat always. These facts beg the question: who is this Chris Cooper guy, and can we trust him?

Clearly, the answer is no, and that’s precisely why its difficult to imagine Breach working as marvellously as it does without Cooper. He can be anybody in a way that keeps audiences unnerved, thus he’s so damn good as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent convicted of treason in 2001 for selling US secrets for $1.4 million, an expert on Russian intelligence for 25 years before becoming the biggest traitor in US history.

Our first glimpse has him clutching a rosary in church: an instant acknowledgement of culpability in a movie so loaded with suspicion. Hanssen’s a devoted Catholic who loves playing with the grandkids. He doesn’t like to see woman in pantsuits. “The world doesn’t need another Hilary Clinton,” he sighs. He also seems to have a fondness for porn, especially when his wife’s the star. It’s this little vice that allows the Feds to assign Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to spy on Hanssen without knowing the reality of the charges against him, thus becoming close to this conservative but weirdly charismatic man.

This is dream material for director Billy Ray, who explored another real-life double life with equal panache in Shattered Glass, his film about the boy wonder journalist who wrote dozens of fraudulent pieces for The New Republic before getting caught. Ray and co-writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko build suspense with tremendous confidence considering we know how it’s going to end.

Cooper is Ray’s biggest coup, but Laura Linney, as the Fed leading the investigation, is just as good. She’s tough: the way she slides a pager across a table at O’Neil when she could have easily handed it to him; the way she rarely moves a superfluous muscle. Phillipe is doomed to being less impressive in such company, but he keeps his performance clean and convinces, crucially so in the scenes where we see him develop reverence for Hanssen (O’Neil, schooled by Jesuits, had a soft spot for Jesus people). 

Breach opened last year, the same week as Ghost Rider, and it sort of vanished without making much of a dent at the box office. In any case, without a major star at its centre or shit blowing up, it probably never had much of a chance, and it’s a shame. It’s a very satisfying thriller.

Calling for an end to the End of History: John Gray's disarming critiques of apocalyptic misadventure

Reading John Gray’s 2002 book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals is rather like having some particularly gummed-up section of your brain scrubbed ruthlessly clean. With steel wool. For most readers, Gray’s taut, provocative, almost gleefully unsentimental attacks on certain venerated schools of liberal thought can initially feel both unnerving and unsavoury.

With surgical precision (and, to be sure, a few sweeping generalizations), he takes to task the Enlightenment-born notion of progress, which is to say the largely unquestioned belief that the accumulation of knowledge will inevitably make man better. More specifically, he attacks what we misleadingly call secular humanism, weaving in numerous examples of human activity at its bleakest to impart a clear sense of the impulses toward irrationality and conflict that make us basically similar to all other animals. His dismissal of the convention of dividing political outlooks into neat camps of Left and Right (a most welcome dismissal as far as I’m concerned) will no doubt enrage those who consider their allegiance to either side a badge of honour. I would recommend finding a copy in hardcover, not only because it is a book to be revisited but because you may find yourself compelled to hurl it across the room more than once before quickly resuming your reading of it. For this reason alone a more durable edition is quite useful.

Only gradually as you read Straw Dogs does it become clear that at the core of Gray’s argument is a realist diagnosis of our ongoing and increasingly destructive inability to recognize the abundant failings of Enlightenment philosophy and its reactionary, utopian undercurrents, persistent modes of thinking that, most notably, form the backbone of neo-conservatism as first popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s divisive but still hugely influential The End of History and the Last Man, which presupposes that history is one long march of progress ending with the entire human race adopting the same ideological model. With the catastrophe that is the invasion of Iraq –that all-too-perfect expression of utopian, neo-con delusions– having begun in the interim, Straw Dogs, whether you buy into all of Gray’s ideas or not, has become an even more essential text, one that nicely and succinctly sums up Gray’s post-Cold War perspective of global politics.

But if Straw Dogs is the ideal introduction to Gray’s philosophy, his new book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Doubleday, $29.95) functions as a more finely detailed analysis of global trends that have more fully erupted since. Much of this analysis is founded in the same contention that defined Straw Dogs: that the rationale that leads a government peopled by the Christian Right into disastrous nation building –and ironically binds it to Islamic terrorists– finds its lineage in a perhaps surprisingly diverse history of unrealizable utopian exploits, including Jacobinism, Soviet and Chinese communism and, at one particularly gruesome extreme, Nazism, all of which, however indirectly, have their roots in Christianity, which Gray purports is the mother of all mankind’s dreams of apocalypse and universal redemption through righteous violence and upheaval. Granted, to arrive at this conclusion you have to view any outspoken anti-Christian view, such as atheism, as inherently and unavoidably informed by the dictates of Christianity. Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens should love that! But anyone familiar with the work of Nietzsche, who both declared God dead while never quite slipping out of God’s grip, this theory shouldn’t actually seem so far-fetched.

Harsh critics of Gray, of which there of course many, tend to misinterpret or baldly misquote his texts. He just rubs people the wrong way, to the point where they don’t seem able to read very coherently. Writing for, oddly enough, The New Humanist, Laurie Taylor for example has protested against what she deems to be Gray’s unrelenting pessimism. “Gray is literally proposing that we should do nothing to try to change our world,” she tells us. Yet this directly contradicts Gray’s explicit appeal to simply apply more reasonable models of policy-making. Politics, he writes near the close of Black Mass, “is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances.”

But let’s look for an example of Gray at his most iconoclastic. “‘Humanity’ does not exist,” he boldly announced in Straw Dogs. “There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgment.” Am I crazy for being able to sleep nights while more or less agreeing that people are indeed diverse, unruly, passionate, unpredictable and requiring a variety of problem-solving initiatives instead of one single ideological vision of “perfect” government for all, i.e.: American-style (and violently forced) democracy?

I didn’t grow up in an especially religious household, but I do remember that as a little kid I felt at once desirous and fearful of the notion of going to heaven. The alternative described to me seemed almost too horrible to even ponder, yet heaven seemed like this eerily static place where all the pleasures and adventures of life came to a screeching halt. I didn’t know what to make of the Promised Land, only that I was afraid not to get in. Maybe Talking Heads put it best: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Not to oversimplify Gray’s ideas, but I appreciate his recognition of my childhood response to the never entirely imaginable utopian state that so many religious and political parties strive to enter us unto. Accepting mortal man with all his flaws might be more useful than endeavouring toward some great social project that will deliver us all to a realm that denies us all the sorrows and joys that make real life what it is. Of course, Gray doesn’t deny that we still might dream of such a place, he just points out that it might not be the smartest foundation for government.