A review of SLUMBERLAND by Aileen Reyes

by Paul Beatty, Bloomsbury Press 2008

I like it. There’s no plot, but Beatty’s bombardment of language, fearless articulation of informed thoughts on race and music, and an eloquent non-pretentious use of English, made this a tedious yet enjoyable read.

This is not one definable story. It’s a segment of the main characters life, revealed in an almost collage like form. These “thought chunks”, leave no room for sappy sentiments, clichés or happy endings.

The vessel for this literary cyclone is the mind and life of DJ Darky. This black LA disc jockey, who, after scoring a series of porno films, leaves for Berlin, to take a job at the Slumber-Land bar, as a Jukebox Sommelier, 2 in order to find a virtuoso saxophonist, named Charles Stone, known in DJ Darky’s musical world as The Schwa. The Schwa is discovered playing “the chicken-fucking song” 3 , on the soundtrack of a porn video, sent to anonymously to DJ Darky .4

DJ Darky is quite the character, with a phono-graphic memory 5 and intriguing love for the invention of new words. His romanticized yet realistic homesickness becomes a great device in drawing the non-writing audience into Beatty’s world. In fact, nearly anyone can relate to missing even the ugliest things about the place you once called home.

As far as the mystical character known as The Schwa’, Beatty’s description makes him a elusive musical oddity, perhaps a blend of Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus and the lower eastside literary legend Orion. 6

Beatty’s invention of disposable characters, DJ So-So deaf, who is actually deaf, the female rapper, Bitch Please as well as other minor players, come and go with great timing If left to linger, they, become caricature.7

The “time frame” of the story is the tumbling of the Berlin wall, the perfect place for “black poetic literary license.” Riffs on race thrive in this revolutionary European setting. Instead what we have is a playground for racial realities and language to play freely. As a result this book reads like free jazz, from beginning to end. You might get lost if you don’t listen close, or it could get too “noisy” or cluttered with invention for the typical reader.8

There are points where Mr. Beatty, finds a great use for footnotes (which I’ve only seen in nonfiction books), as a way to elaborate on thoughts that will steer the book into countless tangents, if included as part of the text. The footnotes then become the literary equivalent to the news strip on the bottom of a T.V. screen, which on the T.V. can be annoying but in this book becomes an excellent place for humorous back-story. At times, I wasn’t sure if it was the author or the character talking to the reader.

The Female characters, mostly respectable real women with minds, mostly the love interests, but not mis-used as an excuse for a sexual interlude. The most interesting female in the book I believe is not heard from enough, her name is Fatima, she is the sister of Klaudia von Robinson, Darky’s black Berlin girlfriend.

Dj Darky on Fatima “What had been a healthy fear of white people shared by most of the country’s colored inhabitants ’had recently morphed ipnto full- blown leukophobia, fear of all things whit .It was debilitating at first . She stopped answering any mail that arrived in white envelopes. Refused to drink milk or eat mashed potatoes. Polar bears, snowstorms and Danes had to be avoided at all costs, because they were bad omens. And in blessed irony, toilet paper scared her shitless.”

The actual book, is very elegant, a simply designed jacket, that makes it impossible to judge it by its cover, making it even more intriguing ,because the title, catches your eye immediately and if you recognize the authors name ( which more people ought to do) then you know that it ain’t no half asssed attempt at a book.

It’s lazy to place Paul Beatty in a box and compare him to other writers, so I won’t , seeing as how people do that more when speaking of artists or athletes of color. Though there is no doubt of his many influences, even hints of black comedian Paul Mooney9, what we have in Mr. Beatty is a fresh, brave voice, saying things that most people may ponder but would never mention in public.10

This novel is centered on black music, Jazz, in a fresh modern voice, without beating you over the head with it, though it is clearly a black man speaking, he has created a­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ forum to share his thoughts in a non threatening manner. Though I’m not sure Wynton Marsalis would agree.10 ½

Don’t sleep.

____________________________________________________________

1..Bottom of page 114

2 .Fun word , not sure if this occupation exists or if it is another one of Beatty’s brilliant inventions

3. a play on DJ Spooky perhaps?

4.please note I did not say the fucking chicken song ,but the chicken-fucking song

5 remembering every sound ever heard

6. Orion, (A.K.A. cyanide) transient middle-aged poet who in the 1990’s frequented place like the Nuyorican Poets Café, abc no rio, and other places of words, reciting his genius sometimes undecipherable ,heavy accented use of language, this often included an assessment of his surroundings, fellow “poets”.

A speaking Rubiks Cube , sometimes the 3 minute limit that was imposed when poets became too lazy too edit never stopped him, as he often grabbed a piece of paper, and in black ,magic marker (always) scribbled the rest of his thoughts and posted them in the neighborhood, Example, one of my favorites, from, my own archives left on the lamp-post outside the Nuyorican,

“To Bassi , the crutch on your nose doesn’t give a fuck about you but since you won’t let it off the hook it makes you possessive- cyanide.” He often used that nose crutch term, I thought it was a reference to Salvador Dali’s paintings, or cocaine or a nose job though it didn’t look like she ever had one.

7. Like Tasty Taste in the 90’s hip hop spoof “Fear of a Black Hat”

8. Luckily it’s balanced with references to real world, places like Trader Joe’s, that make it accessible without cheapening the rest of the book

9. In a reference to a beer, named NEGER on the bottom of page 68 “I’ll have the gin and tonic, and the lady will have a large nigger”

10. I kept waiting for my favorite ponderance (yeah, my word) to pop

Up, “Do white people really sing “for he’s a jolly good fellow” or it it just something they do in film for a festive effect? …and if so what do they say if it happens to be a woman?

10 ½. see pages 52-53 and 96-97, that’s all I got to say.

Patricia Spears Jones’ second collection Femme du Monde is a passport into the soul of a sophisticated lady, a rich and engaging interior voice that explains her journey inward, outward.

We embark on Patricia Spears Jones’s journey at a place physically and metaphorically called “Hope,” Arkansas. The young college student with her mates on their way to a wedding, stopped at a place of seeming normalcy, a “golden arches”. The young Jones pioneers here have maternal instincts, protective of the young white girl in the car next to them:

“But who is this man to this child? Father, lover, dirty old uncle.”

Later,

“ We want to rescue this child.

But where would we take her?

And what would happen to all that money?”

Straight away, the poet makes it clear she is not a passive traveler; we find a woman always paying attention, curious, question, and full of wonder.

So many of the poems in Femme du Monde focus on self exploration as in “Days of Awe”

“I feel as if my life were held together by wishful thinking

And Krazy Glue. Somehow it works.”

Several lines down

“…God gives

and God thinks things over. And while the pondering abides,

Each of us has the time to act one way or the other.

Give, get. Build, destroy”

The poet is not just a mind in motion; being and God are equally in motion. Nothing is finite in this larger process. It is not necessarily in synch, also moving, a constant state of giving and getting, building and destroying. Process, is the nature of things, and she so eloquently and vividly ends this poem:

“As trees old and young

starve their leaves into gold, flame, rust.”

Yet, another metaphorical journey that appears in Ms Jones poems is the social and political one. In “Saltimbanque” we find tribute for those who struggle and an outstanding homage to Martin Luther King. Ms Jones chronicles the student riots, the Paris riots. And, all the progressive movements she captures, they are met with a violent response, but the people stick together:

“people make a song, new song, riot song”

Her beautiful end to the poem, the homage to Martin Luther King, I mentioned, shows again the transcendental nature of those who sacrifice for all of us. These are people who are larger than the movement they embody.

7. “Martin Luther sat bleeding in a Birmingham jail. He worked

his mind along the sacred stations of the cross and found,

if not solace, then the tattered cloth called dignity,

as he prayed for the souls of his jailers.

Tracing Alabama dust, his cross just heavy enough to bear,

Word could have been miracle, joy, power.

It was likely to have been song, people, or alone.

He made, in private, a face mimicking the fat, snuff-dipping guards.

Clown face turned towards the jail-floor dust.

His tears roll away holy laughter. Saltimbanque

In a moment of amazing tenderness and pure rage.

Under the paving stones, the beach.”

This book continues to take us all over the globe, bringing us inside the over- priced lingerie shop in SoHo, NY; the Paris underground, and wherever we go, there is music. This is a lyric collection that is engaging, honest, and with sprinkles of delightful humor.

BOOK REVIEW (Portuguese)

Ponciá Vicêncio

Evaristo, Conceição

Publicado em 2003, 132p.

Por: Thatiana Santos

O romance afro-brasileiro relata a história da infância e vida adulta de Ponciá Vicêncio, menina pobre que nasceu e cresceu em uma pequena cidade chamada Vicêncio (nome do antigo dono de terra) com seus pais e o irmão Luandi Vicêncio.

Descendente de escravos africanos, a história de Ponciá Vicêncio é um panorama entre as lembranças de sua infância (trabalho nas terras dos donos de engenho; o canto como expressão de manifesto durante as horas de trabalho; o trabalho com artesanato que realizava junto com sua mãe Maria Vicêncio; a personalidade e a presença forte do espírito do avô paternal Vicêncio que a acompanhou até a fase adulta), um presente estagnado e uma falta de perspectiva em relação ao futuro.

O relato de uma infância sofrida é um paralelo - real e imaginário - entre as experiências de vida vividas pela protagonista e a autora Conceição Evaristo. As buscas pela identidade negra e autenticidade como mulher, a luta por uma vida melhor. Evaristo, após trabalhar muitos anos como doméstica na cidade onde nasceu, Belo Horizonte, conseguiu terminar seus estudos e mudou-se para o Rio de Janeiro, onde se formou em magistério e começou a lecionar. A personagem Ponciá, após a morte do pai, deixou a pequena vila de Vicêncio e partiu para cidade em busca de trabalho para poder ajudar a mãe e o irmão, tomada pela esperança de um “mundo” melhor, já que sabia ler e escrever.

O tempo presente da vida de Ponciá é baseado nas conseqüências do passado, o qual a protagonista recorda cada detalhe com bastante intensidade como, por exemplo, a memória da fase final de vida do avô, que tentou suicídio em virtude da opressão, dos maus tratos e da humilhação sofridas pelos escravos. A estreita relação entre Ponciá e o avô, através até mesmo de gestuais semelhantes, leva o leitor a ver a personagem como reencarnação do espírito de seu antepassado.

Filha de Oxumaré (religião afro-brasileira: candomblé), orixá que representa o arco-íris e que também simboliza o transporte de água entre o céu e a terra, Ponciá Vicêncio vive a angústia de uma vida difícil, cercada pela pobreza, pela dolorosa recordação de sete abortos naturais e por um casamento infeliz, cercado de falta de compatibilidade e de violência doméstica.

Devido a todos os seus problemas, Ponciá começou a viver em um mundo imaginário onde o presente já não tinha mais significado. O marido passou a ser apenas uma figura sem importância a quem, ela como mulher, cozinhava, servia, cuidava, mas não tinha nenhum desejo sexual e muito menos amor. A busca por respostas infinitas, de uma forma poética, parece ser constante na mente da personagem. Por que os negros tinham que passar por tanta humilhação? A desigualdade social, racial e econômica seriam permanentes? Haverá esperança de mudança? Vale a pena viver para ver?

Ponciá Vicêncio é a triste história de uma mulher negra que foi além, em busca da própria identidade e da tentativa de descobrir se pertencia ou não àquele mundo onde a desigualdade e o preconceito foram, são e serão fatores que nunca desaparecerão. Dentro desse mundo interno angustiante e de um mundo social opressor, Ponciá ainda descobre que a terra, o rio e a história de vida de seus ancestrais são a base de toda sua vida.

“Um dia o coronelzinho, que já sabia ler, ficou curioso para ver se o negro aprendia os

sinais, as letras de branco e começou a ensinar o pai de Ponciá. O menino respondeu logo ao ensinamento do distraído mestre. Em pouco tempo, reconhecia todas as letras. Quando o sinhô-moço se certificou que o negro aprendia, parou com a brincadeira. Negro aprendia sim! Mas o que o negro ia fazer com o saber do branco? O pai de Ponciá Vicêncio, em material de livros e letras, nunca foi além daquele saber.”

Evaristo, Conceição, Ponciá Vicêncio

Do Tell Hotel
Review by Kevin Riordan

The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts
by Carl Watson

Autonomedia, Unbearable Books, 2008, $14.95

To read Carl Watson’s novel is to put on a pair of X-Ray glasses that do not stop at the skin, but go on to eviscerate instead of titillate, the literary equivalent of the Swedish film Travis Bickle takes his date to. From the first line, I thought I had a handle to grasp this book first published in French a decade ago: a new Jim Thompson, whose first person anti-confessionals were cherished in France and nearly neglected here, like so many other tough paperback original authors, like David Goodis, Chester Himes, or Charles Williams. This contrarian thwarted and eluded that grasp in no time. The book is as free of cliché as it is of guideposts, as he resolutely qualifies every line that might put things in the light, until, like diamonds in a seam of coal, he plants a gem of faceted brilliance.

After a succinct rant at our penchant for blaming everything on everybody, we find “Turn on the TV any day of the week and you get to see your DNA at work.” His juicy language is pungent and poetic but far from flowery. It’s of a kind that can’t be brought home to mother, or taught in college, and to even put its like in an assignment today would get you profiled and detained.

I could speculate that while in utero, the author’s mother was traumatized by either a big fish or a double feature of Roger Corman’s artist/killer/beatsploitation gem Bucket of Blood and Touch of Evil, wherein Orson Welles portrays an exemplar of depravity while maintaining total control of the direction. If you’re looking for graphic gestational metaphors, you’ll find a whole chapter of them, serving, like Esther’s Nose Job, to eliminate the casual reader.

Once we have established the rough setting of protagonist Jack’s young life, and his conversational tone has tempted you to forget he has (purportedly) killed someone, the subject is nothing less than the eternal wrestling match between thought and reality, a hot potato in Jack’s hands. Of course, there is a ripping, sometimes tense story, and it involves vivid characters engaged in irrevocable and misbegotten acts; but I came to see the whole book, even when the subject was two broken-bottle wielding drunks rolling in the gutter, as a straightforward description of storytelling itself. “Here the left side of the brain creates stories in response to the attempts of the right side to discern narrative sense from raw data.”

At about halfway through, we leave off grappling with reality long enough to dissect a specimen of it, a portrait of Uptown Chicago in the 70’s so vivid you will smell it. “All the windows in the building seemed like tombs, etched with epithets of human behavior.” This ambience is also conveyed eerily by Kit Boyce’s cover painting. Except for a few chapters like this, the world of the novel is so internal that someone just walking down the street seems like a squadron taking off in formation.

When the voice, person or narration changes, the pitch is invariably heightened, the disappointment with the failure of reality more keen, but the casual wisdom of those sudden lines is still there. “The present is as absent as the past.”

If you’ll bear with me for one more allusion (now), the compelling conclusion brought to mind Sontag’s Death Kit, whose narrator may be lying, delusion, homicidal or all three, but we go along willingly as wholly believable death comes to life on the page.

Kevin Riordan is an artist and working slob who lives in Chicago.
www.kevinriordan.com

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s recently released book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is an in-depth and entertaining study of 20th century classical music.  It describes the lives and work of composers from Mahler and Strauss all the way to contemporaries such as Kaija Saariaho, Tan Dun, and Sophia Gubadulina, with an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge not only about music, but also about history more generally.  It as been well reviewed (and rightly so) with names of famous readers expounding its greatness on the back cover: if it is promoted by as varied stars as Björk, Osvaldo Golijov, Emanuel Ax, and Richard Taruskin, it must be good.  But with all these reviewers, and the scope of the work, it is hard to figure out who this book is for, why he wrote it, or whether there is anything particularly significant to be found in it.
Part of the answer to this question can be seen by the sorts of details Ross centers on.  He makes a great effort to pick out notable pieces of music and tries to describe them with an analyst’s attention to detail, translating complex musical ideas into a generally readable instruction.  Overall, these analyses are very astute, approachable discussions of the inner workings of certain compositions, though at times they fall into overly stylized language and the problematic talk of metaphors and evocations without which, admittedly, non-technical music analysis would come to no conclusions.  In this way The Rest is Noise reads like the program notes to the biggest pieces of the century.  But program notes are things to read when the concert itself gets boring.  Is this all Ross is trying to accomplish?  When the music ceases to be clear in its meaning, as is the case with most of the music Ross discusses, the critic must step in and connect it with real people and events, to give it a meaning in the face of its seeming incomprehensibility.  Accompanied by his blog (of the same title as his book) the reader has access to a large discography for his or her “to listen to” lists, and mentions composers along with their most significant pieces, pieces with which to get a proper taste of each composer.  Oriented toward the unspecialized but educated concertgoer, it is written primarily for the same people who read the New Yorker.  In fact, its Manhattan-centric view of the world (though not unfairly; that is where all the interesting stuff happens) only emphasizes the connoisseur-oriented eclecticism which hovers slightly beneath the prose of the book.
Central to the story line are the lives and personalities of the 20th century composers, the men (and a few women) of flesh and blood, as Unamuno would say.  Full of History Channel style trivia, the relationships among the composers - who knew who, who listened to who, who taught who, who lived down the road from who - makes an interesting read and also more soberly documents the connections through which the development of the music proceeded.  Usually these peripheral details seem to be meant as tidbits for popular consumption, interesting facts to quote at cocktail parties.  However, the extreme lack of such details in other discussions of music history are equally problematic and so the biographical, day to day anecdotes and connections serve to entertain the reader as well as to ground the ideas and ideologies at work in the practices of the various composers in a more understandable manner.
For this reason, The Rest is Noise is also a valuable book for those with more specialization in music.  Musicians and Musical scholars who have been brought up in another musical historical context entirely, in the ‘music appreciation’ class or an introduction to music history, which has its own modus operandi and own narratives, will benefit from the critically examining the lives and thoughts of various composers.  Rather that going through the same interpretations and same material, Ross takes a fresh look at many historical stories, with plenty of primary sources (and for that reason a great bibliographic section) while avoiding some of the more worn anecdotes.  It is notable that, while discussing Strauss, we do not read once about his depicting silverware in music, perhaps the first discussion of Strauss in fifty years not to do so.  The ideas about music also come under Ross’s discussion, from the alleged historical inevitability of Schoenberg’s music to the political content of music in Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the ‘40s and ‘50s US, or even the sacred nature of music in Messiaen, some ideas are tacitly denied, and some are interestingly sustained.
Ross escapes a big issue in his title “Listening to the Twentieth Century” since it avoids naming what sort of music constitutes his topic.  Now, if you walked into Barnes and Noble, most of the music which Ross discusses could be found in the “classical” music section, though there is nothing classical about most of it.  And while Ross discusses the Beatles, the Velvet Underground and a variety of other ‘popular’ musical artists, this book reinforces that specific realm of music, nowadays abiding mostly in the academy, of historically conscious, self-involved specialty of writing music to be listened to, thought about, and appreciated.  Even this definition seems lacking; still, it is not all music in the twentieth century to be sure, and this limitation is significant.  Jazz is discussed at times, as well as Rock, but the central focus is this music sometimes called “high,” “legitimate,” or “classical”.  It might be described in the broader sense of music lacking self-evidence.
But if there are biases in Ross’s work, they are not those biases found in the Twentieth Century itself - which are precisely those biases which the Academic study of music inevitably fall into.  This book is an example of popular research which in many ways surpasses scholarly research through its grounded analysis avoiding impassioned commitment to one tradition or one sound.  But the book does this by forsaking the reason why the academics have such a different method: the investments towards certain traditions it seeks to uphold.  Atonality and the Schoenberg tradition is, for most official music history, the continuation of the modernist classicalism of European ‘classical music.’  Ross speaks of it from a distance, and thereby escapes the predominant understanding of20th century “high” music.  On one hand we have the bitter passion of the academy trying to keep alive the dying tradition out of which it arises, and on the other hand, Ross, his level prose situating this rhetoric along with its music and its time.  Hence the analysis in The Rest is Noise presents a high quality study in which nothing is at stake, unbiased and uncommitted.
Yet it is clear that Ross is invested in the music he describes, but not because he says as much or commits to a rhetoric of value.  The investment is at once absent from the text and immanent to the whole work.  The project of the book is no less than to establish the canon of 20th century music, to place in encyclopedic detail those composers significant enough to be known by an educated audience.  While this was tentatively accomplished already for the first half of the 20th century, one strength of this book is Ross’s astute awareness of the composers of the last 50 years.  Until now, history had been reserving judgment on these new developments, especially since they are so unpopular.  As Adorno, whom Ross has clearly struggled with, says about modern art, “What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place.”  Still, Ross gives them a place, perhaps not one which they would have liked, but still better than they could have been given by the largely unappreciative and correlatively unwanted audiences.
Music criticism has a tradition of producing excessively scathing, bombastic rhetorical tirades about composers and pieces. With both the music, and the ideas about music, Ross maintains a dispassionate- perhaps we could say Kantian-disinterestedness, which is refreshing after two hundred years of grandiloquence about the horrors and triumphs of certain composers. At the same time, these composers, historical events, and pieces of music are still under debate.  The dust has not settled on the Twentieth century, and in contrast to these debates Ross’s tone sounds as close to authoritative as one can get these days. Still, Ross really has only nice things to say about the music - he might even convince some people to actually listen to some of it, which would be good - and his authoritative tone is inclusionary and intended for the betterment of people’s general musical reception.  For both those who don’t know what to think about 20th century music, as well as for those who already have dealt with some of it, The Rest is Noise provides an entertaining read and a nice resource for approaching the difficult music of the twentieth century.

There is a general sense that, even after a hundred years of jazz, no one really has completely figured it out. We could hide behind the esoteric “if you don’t know by now, you won’t ever know” mentality, but only thereby avoiding the challenge which comes with every calling of something significant. The will to jazz lives equally in performances, recordings and, I would argue, in the attempt at interpretation. Even the Dao de Jing, beginning with saying that the Dao which can be put into words is not the real Dao, continues for a time with some manner of instruction. Some music is more open to explanation than others, and some, needless to say, is really hard to get into. It is jazz at its most difficult, that of the last 50 years, for which we have an almost traumatic relation with, a phenomenon we want at once to come out into the open and want to keep hidden, like some subconscious force which we suppress and yet which defines our socio-musical egos.
Perhaps we desire no artist to be kept hidden behind a mystical veil more than John Coltrane. His music is for the initiated, for those first, second, third generation acolytes who have transcribed and learned his solos, who hear in his music spirituality and transcendence which are transmitted unspoken from teacher to pupil. He is also reserved for literal worshippers, those who take to heart so many words to that affect: that music has always in its potential a relation to the divine, and the prophet, the seer, is placed on a special pedestal. We hear in Coltrane’s music and his suggestive statements a pursuance, a forward searching for something else, desire for a state of knowing and being not yet fulfilled for himself by any other structure, musical or religious, extant in the world. In this way he becomes the musical, or perhaps literal, oracle who has some methexis in the absolute.
Naturally, the sober minded ‘rest of the world’ who still would otherwise like to appreciate Coltrane’s music, must focus on the theoretical, technical, and biographical details which are accessible and reasonable pieces of knowledge for everyone. Even in this context, though, an artist like Coltrane is taken up into larger stories of modernism, Marxism, or civil rights, and interpreted as a character in something ‘more’ meaningful. That he comes ‘after’ Charlie Parker and before the current scene takes on various levels of meaning, but his music is always prescient enough to help define some context, some paradigm or historical theme. Without any mysticism whatsoever, Coltrane’s music requires some interpreting, if only to wallow out of the murk of the thousand stories which pre-package him for each generation.
The historian critic and the jazz theologian would equally like to work through all of this in a rigorous manner. And in more of the former spirit, New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff has written the recently released Coltrane: the Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24). Choosing to focus on issues of style more than biographical or strictly theoretical discussions of Coltrane’s music, Ratliff weaves in and out of quotes, anecdotes, analyses of recordings, and glosses of guiding concepts to attempt to come to a better understanding of the sound of Coltrane.
‘Sound’ –what does this mean? You know, a player’s sound. His tone color? More than that. His harmonic vocabulary, his participation with rhythm sections? Sort of, but… – then what? You know man, his sound. Right, I do know; I got Giant Steps when I was 14, studied music alongside Coltrane addicts, and have discussed jazz with enough self-defined hep-cat-in-touch musicians to know what people mean by ‘sound’. And I can sum up for you where Coltrane’s

came from somewhat quickly: Coltrane practiced non-stop, studied harmony extensively, listened to a wide variety of other music, and played with great musicians. That’s where it came from, and to know what it is, you just listen to Coltrane. If this book is merely a story, a story with no moral or thesis, then it accomplishes this, but little else. The mystery remains untouched.
Ratliff, I would have to guess, suspected that the central issue he wished to discuss was not exactly the details surrounding the sound itself, since this is a vague and limiting category sort of encompassing a diverse set of musical elements. And, he knew he didn’t want to cover the well-studied biographical and analytical elements of Coltrane. But the central issue which he wanted to broach continually escapes the book: each detail, each discussion of the next solo or album, the next opinion from the next critic or fellow musician moves along the periphery of a realm of truly difficult questioning into the significance of Coltrane’s music, in itself as the work of this human being and for us as students of the history of jazz these decades later. He suspected this because he felt the need to write a book about Coltrane’s music: The department of Coltrane Studies has not published its definitive statement. No unified field theory of Coltrane, or jazz itself is even on the horizon.
Ratliff’s book does help to focus the details of Coltrane’s life and work to better understand the dynamics of its development, giving, as it promises, a story of the development of the music. He does not really commit himself to the investigation of Coltrane’s sound per se, since this really is not a productive name for any part of the music. It is not always safe to play the naïve nominalist, but here it seems that nothing more central lies between the technical facts of the music and the spiritual content. A seer does not search for a tone of voice, a seer looks to articulate something through the voice. But Ratliff quickly discovers this. The book is full of discussions on the harmony, the tone color, the personnel, and the more discreet elements which make up the musical work (not artwork, but work accomplished, force over time) in which Coltrane labored. What would be necessary is not the investigation of a central focal point like sound, but a larger investigation which attempted to unify the extremes of technique and content. Ratliff works towards this, but stays a safe distance from a synthesis of any larger interpretation. But even the down to earth discussions of musical elements skirt around even local issues of significance. This seems to arise from the book’s commitment to non-technical analysis, the inevitably loquacious reconstitutions of musical meaning for those who would not be able to follow anything with more detail. But here, this commitment to the non-specialist reader drowns any true unity between the discreet technical elements and the themes of sound, whether they be historical, religious, Marxist, or what have you.
For example, when, in the end of the book, Ratliff discusses the ‘sound’ passing from Coltrane himself to the next generation of great saxophone players, this transmission is emphasized with a number of quotes, stories, and interviews which tell of the particular captivation of the many musicians who were influenced by him. In many ways, this lineage had a connection which was unique in comparison to other jazz greats and their followers. It was not merely about the transmission of technical skills (although every jazz player from now to eternity will study Giant Steps changes) nor simply about the possibilities of the small jazz ensemble, or any other number of musical legacies. The transmission was much more emotional, having to do with what personal motivations are for making music.
There is a telos which accompanies searching: a direction, a goal. And if one buys into the search at all, if one even speaks of it as searching, then one commits, if not to saying what Coltrane was searching for, at least saying what he was not. Ratliff does not commit. Chalking up all the mysticism to the ‘50s and ‘60s era hippie mentality, and chalking up all the modernism to the newly academic study of jazz and Coltrane’s role therein, discussion of Coltrane’s music returns to a safe level of historical contextualizing which fits nicely into the music connoisseur paradigm of appreciation: that Mr. Coltrane’s music is so interesting!
Still, no matter how sober a historian Ratliff or his reader may be, it is difficult to escape the fact that the figure and the music of Coltrane consummates so many Romantic notions of expressivity, subjectivity, artistic genius, modernism, and religiosity, that to not interpret him in some of these ways, at least to an extent, is to miss out on some provocative ideas concerning the possible meaning and significance of his music, or music in general. Ratliff, or anyone who wants to take up the noble pursuit of discussing Coltrane’s music, must commit not only to the details of the music, but to interpreting the music with a respect for its possible significance. This might require taking some sides, might require some different textuality, and it might require, (perhaps inevitably today) more of an academic context, or at least one willing to move beyond the market for easy-to-read, relatively brief, quick moving and elementary analyses. Unfortunately, the Story of a Sound rarely escapes this level.

Dreams from my Father, A story of Race and Inheritance By Barack Obama, Three Rivers Press

In Dreams From My Father, Obama wrote of his efforts to understand his family, the leaps through time and the collision of cultures hoping to shine light on the question of identity and race in the American experience.

He described the “underlying struggle between worlds of plenty and worlds of want, between modern and ancient cultures.” He admired those “who embrace our teeming, colliding irksome diversity while insisting on values that bind us together”. And he feared “those who seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text,to justify cruelty towards those not like us.”

The book shows how powerlessness twists children’s lives in Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way it does on Chicago’s South Side and how quickly despair slips into violence. It discusses how the powerful respond with a dull complacency until violence threatens them and they then use force,(longer prison sentences and more sophisticated hardware) inadequate to the task.

He struggles constantly to understand this problem and his place in it. He is now professionally engaged in a broader public debate that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.

If he had known his mother was dying so young, he would have written a different book, less a meditation of the absent parent and more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in his life. He shares some of the stories his mother and her parents told him when he was a child. ”

Obama feels we have all seen too much to take his parents’ brief union, a black man and a white woman an African and an American at face value. He says when black or white people who don’t know him well, discover his background they no longer know who he is.

This is the record of a personal interior journey, a boy’s search for his father and a workable meaning for his life as a black American.

Obama says, “I can embrace my black brothers and sisters whether in this country or in Africa and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak for all our various struggles.”

Much of this book is based on journals or oral histories of his family.

Obama says he tried to write an honest account of a particular province of his life.’

Without the love and support of his family, his mother, his grandparents and his siblings, stretched across oceans and continents he could never have finished it

He was born in Hawaii, lived several years in Indonesia then lived in New York City where he went to Columbia University. In1983 he was a Chicago community organizer and a civil rights lawyer.

His Aunt Jane whom he had never met called him from Kenya to say his father was killed in an auto accident. His parents had divorced when he was two years old and he had only seen his father for one month when he came to visit Obama and his mother in Hawaii.

When he went to Kenya his half sister Auma and his Auntie Zeitumi met him, they took him to meet Aunt Jane and other African family members. Family seemed to be everywhere in Kenya and Obama found himself meditating on just what is a family He sat on his father’s grave and spoke with him through Africa’s red soil.

When he returned to America he met Michelle, who had been raised in Chicago. After their engagement he took her to Kenya to meet his family there They returned to the United States and married.

This is an absorbing and moving tale of a man who takes a journey to his father ‘s home, where he lived much of his life and died. Obama re-evaluates his relationship with the myth of his father and the meaning of his own life. It is a quiet but intense examination of a man’s past and his son’s attempt to understand it.

Examining his family’s life and thinking about his own, Obama finds a certain relief reliving times and behavior that had slipped into the undifferentiated past and finally arrives at some kind of understanding.

The writing style is exciting,, a well written blend of memoir and history. The rich narrative and interesting characters keep the reader turning pages. Obama’s sensual descriptions made the reader feel he is visiting south side of Chicago, Harlem, Indonesia or Kenya. You see the people, hear their voices, taste and smell the food, feel the breeze and smell the ocean.

This is a book I would have enjoyed even if had not been written by a well-known, fascinating man beginning to put his mark on the world.

Witness This ‘Trash’: Eve Packer’s Playland: Poems 1994-2004

by Brynn Saito

Yes, trash—but not in the pejorative. By “trash” I mean what Eve means: that “glitter- / soaked rain- / wet orange / day-glo” stuff of stretch marks, pebbles and rainstorms, not “garbage,” for, according to Eve Packer, “garbage is

bits of

stink broccoli.

fleas in the

litter, urine-

stained

daily news….

Someday

i’ll be garbage,

ash

for now

tag me hard-core

Trash

In Playland—Eve Packer’s second collection of poetry, published by Fly By Night Press—Packer holds NYC’s grit and excess up to the light, then makes it shine. Everything from the cotton bikini briefs of a woman working at “Lingerie” to a pick-up full of ash-covered firefighters comes under Packer’s poet-gaze. And that’s the city for you: schizo, dazzling, destroyed, heartbreaking. Packer’s ability—her fierce intent—to take it all in makes this a brave collection of before-and-after poetry: before the ashes, before the Disneyfication of Times Square, after a love affair, after infidelity, and after September, 2001. Naturally rhythmic, sensual, and spontaneous, one can easily see why Packer performs her work with a jazz ensemble.

Playland begins “in this grey fluorescent box of wild dreams, / schlock fantasy, backstage for the suck & fuck / school of sad and horny fish.” A section called Fantasy Booth opens the book; the poems here reference 42^nd Street in the early 1990s, when Packer ventured through the doors of places like Show World and Peepworld, “intrigued, scared, and challenged” by the prospect of entering a zone constructed for the male gaze only. Packer is a watcher, too, but a compassionate one: the speaker in these poems is never voyeuristic, unless ironically and playfully so. What rises from these encounters are the voices and stories of the performers and performed-for: “i ask him / what do men want / he says freedom, freedom / & a little variety.” A poem called “peepworld (5)” begins: “what do you wish / for the new year:” A series of answers follows: “harder work… better tippers… big dicks, more sex… men treat us better….”

Packer’s voice is but a vessel for the life-sounds around her; she’s a streetwise witness whose poems deliver the immediacy of a moment without guessing at the future or dragging out the past. This position and tone work to her advantage when, in the book’s last section called window: 9/11, Packer records her experience of the days following the disaster.

2 explosions—

18 min apart:

while teaching

Ian: smoke billowing

Jet? accident?

doesn’t seem possible—

(illegible)—

Each observation is exact and situated—never general or sweeping—allowing the poem to read and feel like a document, lean in content and very precise. The reader is free to reflect on the evidence without drowning beneath rhetoric or sentimentality. Even the form accentuates the laid bare quality of the work: no capitals here, no upper case “I,” very few commas, and ampersands instead of “ands.” By this moment in the collection, we trust Packer’s voice: she’s lived this city, through both grit and shine—she’s been “cruisin’ with moxie,” contemplated shoe styles on the uptown C, and done every “filthy, nasty, sweet / thing.” She’s even posed the question “what is love” to taxi drivers, bouncers, lovers and mothers. So when we get to the poem about taking calls at St. Vincent’s Hospital, September 14, 2001, and the girl named Amaryllis who is the “first to ask / is there a list / of the dead,” we trust our writer to take us there. Packer is best when she is achingly particular with her choices; phrases like “stench of / death & / heartbreak,” bog down the clarity with abstractions. Luckily, they are few and far between.

There’s much wonder among poets these days concerning poetry about September 11. How to write into it without sounding overwrought? How to say something fresh without perpetuating newspeak or exploiting spectacle or dishonoring one’s own or another’s experience? How to find a language in the wreckage? Be like Eve: be brave and honest and tough. And listen with all of one’s senses. “i have cravings, i have desires,” says the speaker in “museum,”

to carry the colors of earth

on & in

me

& sometimes i do

I lie in her bed

like a fork on a folded napkin,

perfectly still and alone.

In these lines from the opening poem of Ellen Bass’ latest collection, The Human Line, Bass demonstrates the smooth and evocative writing that permeates her work. There’s a simile matched with feeling, stated in the last line and implied throughout. This simile, efficient and neat, allows the reader’s eye to brush past the words and take with it a sense of something larger. Bass employs this technique here, and often throughout The Human Line, in order to draw attention to the remarkable similarity between the banal and the emotionally charged. The simplicity of these poems often is louder and more striking than any bombast could muster. When Bass maintains this sort of style, the collection works beautifully.

Organized in five sections that mostly adhere to a specific theme, The Human Line works best when it focuses on private moments, as in the poems from part one. Relaying the pain of her mother’s last days, Bass takes tragic experiences and makes them seem at times mundane, at others horrifying. The deceptively subtle poems demand repeat readings in order to grasp their hidden intricacy. Such is the case with “The End,” a poem, seemingly gentle and sweet, that forces the reader to jump back and reexamine its story of euthanasia. Is this confession and if so, confession of an act or a fantasy? Unlike the work of Anne Sexton, Ellen Bass’ confessions are tricky; they only tell you enough to keep you guessing.

This is not to say that The Human Line is thoroughly ambiguous. “My Father’s Day” strikes a clear note, relating events and emotions with the preciseness of a well-wound grandfather clock. Within the same section, “Eating the Bones” arrives with a quality of observation that allows the common occurrence of a family meal to turn disturbingly macabre. Thinking of the two poems, almost on top of each, it becomes easy to see that Bass’ prowess is in her ability to relay the everyday with a reporter’s memory and find within it the compelling truth behind the façade.

Laden with quiet moments that swell into tremendous cries, part two of The Human Line is startling in its honesty and ambition. “Discovering Fire” explores the desultory nature of early sexual passion:

Though it was rash

and left chaos in its wake,

I clung to the only science I knew

“Asking Directions in Paris” takes the simple scene, outlined in the title, and builds from it a stunning analogy:

you think this must be how it is

with destiny: God explaining

and explaining what you must do

and all you can make out is a few

unconnected phrases

“Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh” addresses the problem of finding an endearing and proper pronoun to describe a same sex spouse. The frustration of having to abandon the traditional terms “partner” “wife” and “husband” manifests into mocking humor. Bass’ ability to weave such dueling elements into her poems evidences a writer with a unique touch. Rarely will either the pathos or humor sink the poem as a whole. Perhaps only “Evolution” suffers from slight misdirection, as the ambitious work (ambition always a welcome thing in poetry) full of meditations on the journey and death of every species culminates in a fascinating near miss.

This trend permeates the third part of The Human Line. With the exception of the title poem, part three of the collection seems so focused on making a point that the effortless effect Bass creates earlier in the book is lost. Writing “who will mourn / Homo sapiens?” seems not only too easy but needlessly didactic. Regardless, the poems still manage striking moments:

Great parent

who must have started out

with such high hopes.

These opening lines manage to effectively pull the eye and only display a hint of the sorrow that will ultimately develop in the poem “God’s Grief.” The opening works where some of the later evocations (Stalin, The Trail of Tears, Allende, fruit pickers and children sold into prostitution) falter. The points Bass makes are salient, their merit as poems not as much.

The problem with Bass’ lesser works in The Human Line is not that they are irretrievably bad, which they are not, but that they fail to measure up well against the nearly flawless poems. In part four’s “Lost Dog” she proves that her strength lies not in her ability as a protest poet but in the personal and emotional works that also populate The Human Line. “Don’t Expect Applause” rides the crest between a personal expression and a public address, never really succumbing to the pitfalls of either. Aside from this aptly constructed work, most of the poems in the last two parts of The Human Line strive too much toward the political or public and away from the personal expressions that make Bass so compelling. One can easily applaud the “The Big Picture” for its overreaching, though the sentiment, contemplative with a dash of arrogance, is less interesting than the private calm of “Winter Solstice.” Closing the book, “Winter Solstice” evokes a sense of quiet desperation mixed with an odd sort of comfort, as the poem’s speaker, entombed in the winter night and starring out windows, ponders mortality “as though I don’t know I’m going to die.” The poem moves from the interior to the exterior gracefully, taking the reader through charming personal quirks:

At home, I’ve propped up the head of my bed―

Ulysses and Anna Karenina keep me aloft―

to far-reaching ruminations and moments of desperation:

I am so tempted to wish myself into the future,

the night over, as though life were infinite

and I could afford to throw away the inferior bits―

This is Bass at her best. The poem strives for grandeur and hits upon it while somehow staying rooted to the private elements of the speaker’s life. As her lover and their son sleep peacefully, the speaker wrestles with questions of time and mortality. Bass eschews the preaching of “Pray for Peace”, the first poem of the final section, and in doing so bridges the gaps she has created. Didacticism breeds a sense of removal, as if the poet were far away from the sins she is reporting. Conversely, “Winter Solstice” like the best of The Human Line, places the poet and the reader in the same, quiet, meditative space, revealing the commonalities of all human experience.

Bass is undoubtedly a gifted writer capable of producing astonishing poetry, and The Human Line proves that often. If she veers off into the overly didactic or ambitiously reaches for enormous heights we can forgive her, for the collection always returns to well crafted, quiet places where her poems find their finest voice. There is much to admire in The Human Line and many moments worth returning to, finding always deep meditations rendered exquisitely in verse.

As average Americans, on most ordinary days, we wake each morning in a far away place. There might be a transvestite singing gospel right outside our window, there might be an unfortunate day ahead of us―we might lose our jobs or miss old lovers, we might be alcoholics or cripples, we might be sad or broke, hungry, heart-broken, lost, but these kinds of troubles all seem internal luxuries when held up to the government sanctioned horrors that inhabit many faraway worlds. Rarely do we imagine that a bad day might entail a band of revolutionary guards walking into our offices as we are sitting over our coffee, and taking us away to be tortured or killed.

In an impressive first novel by Dalia Sofer, we are told the story of Isaac Amin, a wealthy Jewish man, who, like many of his kind, is wrongly imprisoned during the years following the Iranian revolution after the fall of the Shah. We absorb the full picture of Isaac’s disappearance at four points of a delicate constellation: a child in Tehran, a young man in Brooklyn, a father in prison, and a woman left to answer for all of them. This of course describes a family, of which each member is at once deeply connected by the ties of blood and history, yet utterly disjointed by these very same elements, as the event of sudden upheaval plummets them into a state of disintegration, within a nation itself in violent flux.

Isaac’s wife Farnaz is perhaps most poignantly aware of this sudden change in her family’s life as a conflict within a conflict:

“…Farnaz cannot reconcile the normalcy of the world around her with the collapse of her own. That the city is short by one man this morning makes so little difference―stores still open their doors, schools ring their bells, banks exchange currency, grass-green double-decker buses―men on the bottom, women on top―follow their daily routes.”

But the state of “normalcy” in Iran (as in many nations) is a condition under continuous reformation and affliction, spawning a nation of people that grow more desensitized to chaos with each extremist movement. Sofer does not comment on the current state of affairs in her native land, but rather injects us into an earlier historical moment of drastic change, as Iran undergoes not only a transference of power, but a brutal metamorphosis from monarchy to Islamic Republic. The Septembers of Shiraz is set in the aftermath of a revolution, which in the spectrum of world history, is deemed by many to be equal in measure to such mammoth cornerstones as the French and Bolshevik revolutions. With the fall of the Shah in 1979, (a leader criticized by many Muslim nationalists as an extravagant dictator attempting to “westernize” an ancient eastern culture), an insurgence of socialist guerilla groups emerged throughout the nation, fighting against the economic and cultural infiltration of non-Muslim foreigners. Thousands of upper and middle class (and their money) left Iran in the late seventies out of fear of persecution and imprisonment. In The Septembers of Shiraz, the Amin family fall victim to the same nomadic fate.

Ms. Sofer, a surprisingly young writer for the voice she wields and the subject she tackles, fled Iran herself at the age of ten, and presumably draws upon the history of her own family’s plight in The Septembers of Shiraz. As readers, much of what we learn in this book comes to us through the mind and reasoning of a nine-year-old girl. That is, we view a revolution in part from a child’s eyes, a creature only half the height of a man, forced to both understand and participate in a very complex struggle. By this device Sofer reminds us of a world to which we are all prisoner, activists, bystanders, and children alike― in which history itself is the villain.

Refreshingly, this book does not delve too deeply into politics, but rather focuses on the inherent chaos of simply living in a nation with a perpetually changing set of ideologies. The Amin family comprises a group of people little involved in the government, but outwardly classified by their financial means and religious identity. To put it plainly, they are rich Jews living in a predominantly Muslim nation that struggles with poverty. The book does not blatantly side with any one ideology or group, but seemingly attempts to tell the story of one family (a fairly secular, wealthy and removed one), that essentially must give up its national identity in order to survive.

The title of the novel does not allude to a city or a time in which it takes place, but reminisces back to something the protagonists have left behind. Shiraz is the place of Isaac’s youthful summers, when he was still a starving poet, scaling the walls of Mausoleums and reciting poetry, in love with his young wife. As he flees the country with his family, clambering through the mountains in the dark, Isaac is reminded of those times, not the city of his home now lost: “The Septembers of Shiraz, unlike this September, held the promise of return.”

In many ways, one might say, that for the characters that inhabit it, this book describes one big reality check. When a fragile web of people is suddenly broken apart, it seems only natural that this experience position them to contemplate the moments of their lives when they were still in tact―as if they are facing one long visceral glimpse just before death. Thus the Amin family is inevitably led to re-evaluate many things―not least of all their relationships with each other. But perhaps less of a given, is that they are led to re-evaluate their relationships with their country. Isaac himself is trapped in a floating corridor between nostalgia and torture. He is literally forced into the experience of being removed from his life, utterly clueless as to whether it will end or continue with each passing moment.

“…They are all the same here, he realizes, the remnants of the Shah’s entourage and the powerful businessmen and the communist rebels and the bankers and bazaar vendors and watchmakers. In this room, stripped of their ornaments and belongings, they are nothing more than bodies, each as likely as the next to face a firing squad or to go home, unscathed, with a gripping tale to tell friends and family.”

Structurally, we are moved back and forth through the channels of memory that have brought each character to this moment. At one instant we are remembering an exotic vacation in Istanbul or recalling a wedding day, at the next we are strolling through central park on a snowy day with a pretty girl. But in reality we are burying secret files in household gardens, shredding papers, hiding jewels, living isolated in basements and prisons.

Sofer creates each of these contrasting scenes with equal poignancy and skill. As a writer, she sticks to traditional forms, but successfully examines a very controversial moment, and thus brings us a work of historical fiction that is inherently wrought with literary daring. The Septembers of Shiraz both captivates and edifies. It escapes first novel syndromes of contrived beauty and grants us entrance to a written world whose motive lies somewhere between East and West.

La más reciente novela de Mario Vargas Llosa, el laureado escritor hispano-peruano, es un “page-turner”, o sea uno de esos libros que se empiezan y no se pueden soltar.

Gran parte de ese logro es gracias una historia de amor insólita que nos hace recorrer seductoras ciudades del mundo como: Paris, Londres, Madrid y Tokio durante cuatro décadas, ilustradas con modas, colores, música y sabores. Añádale el trasfondo social de los años 50, 60, 70 y 80 vistos desde Europa hacia el Perú y la sensación, la remembranza, que es como está narrado el libro lo hará identificarse con la historia colectiva de las épocas.

Pero ya sabemos que Vargas Llosa es un genio de los entramados, sus estructuras son impecables, y aunque éste ha de ser su décimo-quinto libro es el primero que trata sobre una historia de amor. ¿Historia de amor? Eso es lo que creen, por lo menos todos los lectores y críticos que vengo leyendo hasta hoy.

Sin embargo, parece que yo he leído otro libro, algo muy distinto a lo que han leído los demás. Para mí el libro tiene una segunda lectura muy diferente a la que se le viene atribuyendo hasta ahora. Más que una novela de amor, más que una versión moderna de Flaubert y su Madame Bovary, más que los paralelos entre Emma y Lily (o cualquiera de los otros nombres de esta dama que bien podría ser un personaje de kabuki) Las travesuras de la niña mala representa a mi entender una alegoría de la realidad como la ve, la pinta y la interpreta Vargas Llosa. Una realidad donde prima la pintura social y política de su país natal y su historia personal a través de personajes alegóricos y lugares estratégicos desde dónde mirar hacia la realidad peruana.

Como poeta además de periodista y crítica, no quería pecar al ver demasiado “más allá” en La niña mala así que en la reciente presentación de Vargas Llosa en la Y de Nueva York aproveché para preguntarle si ésta podría leerse como un trabajo basado en alegorías, sorprendido me miró como si me viera por primera vez y me dio un categórico “sí, podría”, tema sobre el que no llegamos a extendernos por razones de logística aunque hablamos de hacerlo más adelante.

Pero como a mí me urge compartir esta visión de la novela y como lectora y crítica me asiste la libertad de interpretarla a mi manera, más aún, sin bibliografía previa, me lanzaré a esbozar una teoría diferente de interpretación del texto que todos ven como una historia de “amor” similar a la de madame Bovary, lo cual ha sido negado por Vargas Llosa en varias entrevistas.

Sin dejar de aceptar las posibles similitudes entre la obra de Flaubert y la de Vargas Llosa, quien además, es un rendido admirador del clásico francés, la novela de la niña mala nos presenta, a mi entender, una historia paralela a la obvia, con personajes (y tal vez lugares) si no totalmente alegóricos, creo que le atino cerca.

Para comenzar los nombres utilizados no pueden ser una casualidad ya que están cargados de simbolismo. El trabajo parece cumplir una nueva catarsis sobre la traumática experiencia política de Vargas Llosa en la que se fusionan el hombre y el escritor.

Quizás las travesuras de Vargas Llosa comienzan aquí con Lily u Otilia, su verdadero nombre, el que en su origen germánico significa: riqueza o quien posee muchos bienes materiales (¿no es una ironía y una verdad a la vez?) Lily, para llamarla como la conoce el protagonista por primera vez; es, al comienzo de la obra, una adolescente que pertenece al más bajo estrato social limeño quien inventa ser “una chilenita” para colarse en la elite miraflorina, barrio de la alta sociedad a la que pertenece “Ricardito” el protagonista y galán. Aquí Ricardo podría también ser un nombre irónico ya que en su raíz también germánica (ambos tienen nombres de la misma nacionalidad) significa: Poderoso, lo cual también es una ironía y no, ya que Ricardito como lo llama ella no tiene ningún poder sobre la niña mala pero a la vez sí.

La niña mala o Lily u Otilia… dotada de una increíble capacidad de adaptación, de histrionismo y de una ciega y egoísta ambición intenta salir adelante para disfrutar la vida pero nunca es feliz. Es por aquí que me pregunto si Lily en condición de personaje alegórico no podría representar a la patria y la sociedad peruana marginal y enorme (en números reales) y de paso sus potenciales electores quienes como la niña mala eligieron al rival de Vargas Llosa en la vida real.

Lily u Otilia es probablemente una alegoría del Perú, representado en sus habitantes más olvidados prestos a librar una revolución personal para subsistir aunque en ello se les vaya la vida. La revolución, “revolución” en el libro de Vargas Llosa está representada en los años 50´s por unos personajes simpáticos y casi infantiles miembros del MIR, quienes no son más que unos idealistas suicidas, en el mejor de los casos, o unos desesperados jóvenes que quieren ver el mundo aunque sea a costa de pasar por guerrilleros, en una guerra perdida de antemano según el narrador.

Ricardito representa el otro extremo de la sociedad, el chico bien, tal vez a clase llamada a gobernar, porque en todo caso es la que gobernó siempre, y quien muy idealistamente es desperjuiciado en todo sentido, tanto ante las diferencias sociales como raciales, lingüísticas y por último de género. Ricardito es un ángel y un mediocre, (esto de mediocre en palabras pronunciadas por Vargas Llosa en su lectura de hace un par de días la Y de la 92 de Manhattan) quien también irónicamente no tiene ninguna otra ambición que la de ser una traductor-interprete en Europa, para cumplir el sueño de vivir en Paris y claro conquistar a la niña mala. ¿Y qué o a quién representa Ricardito? ¿El enamorado eterno? Aquí me ayudan Uds. Quizás yo estoy alucinando.

En esta pareja se invierten los intereses y las ambiciones, él habiendo tenido todo no tiene nada material que ambicionar, ella no habiendo tenido nada tiene todo por ambicionar (¿son éstas las diferencias sociales tan marcadas en el Perú y que deberían reconciliarse personalizadas aquí?) Mientras Ricardo, el chico bien miraflorino no ambiciona casi nada; la chica pobre se quiere comer al mundo aunque para ello tenga que “venderse” a diferentes maridos (¿postores, inversionistas?)

Sin embargo el hombre que realmente atrapará a la niña mala en una relación que ella disfruta de manera enfermiza y que la marcará para siempre (como parece haber sido marcado el escritor) es un gángster. En manos de este cruel y perverso personaje de quien les invito a adivinar la nacionalidad, no lo piense mucho, sólo recuerde la postura del escritor frente a la política peruana, sí claro, el nefasto Señor Fukuda y ante el único hombre que se rinde la niña mala para ser torturada y abusada es nada más y nada menos que japonés. Lo que me recuerda a una opinión suya con relación a la extradición del ex presidente Fujimori al Perú hace muy poco tiempo “Estoy muy contento. Él era un terrible dictador. Mató a mucha gente, robó bastante dinero y cometió las más atroces violaciones contra los derechos humanos”, dijo al New York Times, (El Comercio, 2007) poniendo de manifiesto una opinión personal muy comprometida.

Otro personaje japonés femenino, Mitsuko tampoco tiene corazón y le hace mucho daño a un feo pero simpático amigo con el que congenia el protagonista: Salomón Toledano o el Trujimán por su apodo (o sea un traductor pero a la vez un tercero) y quien no parece posible lleve este nombre por casualidad, ¿estará aquí Toledo haciendo un papel salomónico? En la novela Toledano le avisa que la niña mala está en Japón, los reúne nuevamente como un tercero. (¿Reúne Toledo al escritor con la patria?) En la vida real, Vargas Llosa respaldó la candidatura de Toledo y este último ya como presidente lo distinguió con la importan