Vargas Llosa: The Cubs.

Vargas Llosa: The Cubs.


The Cubs, a powerful work, gripping to read and difficult to write about, concerns a group of four boys of age 8 or 9 and a fifth boy, Cuéllar, who joins their school and their group of friends. The story follows Cuéllar through the eyes of the group of friends, as he struggles to find a place the society into which they come of age after he has been rendered impotent by a dog mauling.

Narration begins in third person but immediately shifts to first person, then alternates. Although in the beginning the narration sometimes indicates direct discourse (“taffy, lucky stiff, Choto would say to him, they give you a bigger allowance than all four of us get” p.2), later it is less clearly indicated: “and then we spent Saturday, whole Sundays, men dancing with each other, at Lalo’s house, no, at mine it’s bigger, it was better, but Choto had more records, and Manny but I’ve got my sister who can each us and Cuéllar, no, at his house, his parents already knew and one day, here, his mother, sweetheart, they gave him that hi-fi, just for him?” p. 2-3). This narration is intense. I think that, although third person narration describes the group of five (“they”), the first person narration is always one of Cuéllar’s four friends, and that there is no first person narration for Cuéllar, with the result that as a character he is both part of and outside the group.

As Cuéllar matures physically he is more and more left out of the social processes of his peers. Their cruelty feeds a growing pain and anger which his four friends don’t comprehend. In the accident Lalo slams the dogs snout in the door of the shower where Cuéllar still is, inciting the dog to rage. The four friends betray his secret with a cruel nickname that circulates to all. They fail to understand why he wants to hear about their experiences with girls, and then when he falls in love with Teresita, try to talk him into lying to her, don’t understand why he can’t. The end of Chap 5 (p. 40) depicts most clearly how separate Cuéllar’s experience is from that of his friends, when crying about life is passing him by, he tells them “and also out of pity for the poor, for the blind, for cripples, for those panhandlers …” while they insist he is feeling fine now.

I see some possible Christian allusions in the story. Cuéllar surfing in Holy Week “spread his arms, rose up” p. 37) strikes me as a crucifixion allusion, and of course the dog is named Judas.

Carlos Fuentes: Aura.

Aura: “1. Irradiación luminosa que algunas personas perciben alrededor de los cuerpos. … 4. Ave rapaz Americana, parecida al zopilote pero con la cabeza de color rojo y el pico amarillo. Sin: gallinazo. [Diccionario didactico Avanzado; SM de Ediciones, 2007 Mexico, D.F.]

In “Aura” a 109 year old Consuelo Llorente ensnares 27 year old high school history teacher, Felipe Montero to remain with her as lover/ husband by entrancing him with Aura, her projected double, the image of herself as a young girl. Consuelo works black magic culminating in intercourse with Aura ingestion of a (presumably) Eucharistic wafer that Aura first touched to her vagina.

The story is eerie and narration in the 2nd person makes it more intense. Although we guess some of the setup before Felipe, I find a number of things yet unclear: is Felipe really the double of General Llorente, Consuelo’s husband? or has the spirit of the general been called up to occupy his body (“engendered his double” p. 412). Dinner the first two evenings has four places set, Aura and Felipe, Consuelo and, I conclude, the General. When Felipe succumbs to Consuelo’s spell, the narration mentions his “true face”, he experiences “an invisible hand” ripping “off a mask he’s worn for 27 years” (p. 415).

Regarding the eating of liver, evidently goat's liver, did that have some magic element to it? Fuentes employs much animal and bird imagery, and the second meaning of Aura (vulture/ zopilote) seems to me connected with Consuelo’s hatred of/ torturing of cats. Then what was the garden Felipe saw from the roof with cats fighting and burning – a recollection of his past life or a glimpse into Consuelo’s true nature? Was the rabbit Saga what we would call her familiar?

Finally, to me the name Llorente evokes the Mexican mythic figure La Llorona, who weeps for her children (in some versions the children have died, in some version she killed them herself).

On a happier note, I stayed at Donceles #95 in a very nice hotel (Hotel Catedral) once and include 2 pictures taken from the roof terrace.

Cortázar: The Pursuer.

The Pursuer (who may be the artist who pursues transcendence or the jackals who pursue the artist) explores the gap between jazz musician Johnny Carter and his parasitic entourage, especially the narrator Bruno V, author of the definitive work on Johnny’s music. The novel sets Johnny’s search for the transcendent in opposition to Bruno’s reductive appropriation of Johnny’s work to tame his art and advance Bruno’s academic career. Bruno narrates with disdain for Johnny as a person and for African Americans in general. When Johnny wants to give up jazz for Mexico, wealthy patron and hanger-on Tica causes his death (my interpretation, strongly implied though not explicitly stated, p.55).

That the parasites are not simply greedy hangers-on but actively damaging Johnny Cortázar implies via references to Dylan Thomas, a book of whose poetry Johnny has annotated, especially “The Mask” quoted twice (p. 1, p. 55). The implication that Tica caused his death is in this vein. The setup of the novel, however, suggests to me a narrative polemic against Theodor Adorno’s, writings on jazz (esp 1933, 36, hence available to Cortázar well before he wrote The Pursuer), which claim that jazz does not partake in “progressive art” but is part of “the culture industry”. Adorno traces the origins of jazz to “Turkey in the Straw” and “Old Zip Coon” – USA folk tunes. Cortázar includes several references to straws and one to turkey when Johnny, speaking about his search for the divine and transcendence in his art (p. 51) berates Bruno. Johnny points out straws on the River Seine and mentions “Lan and the girls are waiting for you with a turkey in the oven” (p.51. I refer only to the English translation, don’t know what word Cortázar has for straw here.) Let me say as a film artist, a student of classical music and admirer of Schoenberg and Berg myself, I have even more disdain for Adorno’s patronizing Eurocentric essay than Bruno has for Johnny. Cortázar, assuming he is responding to Adorno, recasts Adorno’s categories to show the culture industry and hangers-on led by a German intellectual to be jackals bringing down the jazz artist and eventually consuming him by appropriating his work (the incident re: Amorous is illustrative).

Johnny confronts Bruno for attributing to him a concept of God foreign to Johnny’s actual belief (p. 49) and much can be said about the religious imagery especially quotations from Revelations (8:11 star called wormwood; 11:8 bodies lie unburied in the streets). The urns, however, is the image I liked the most in The Pursuer because of how Cortázar fully exploits it. I think Cortázar may be using the image of whitewashed sepulcher (Matt 23:27) from the woes against the scribes and Pharisees (Matt 23) – “woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. I love his use of the urns

Alejo Carpentier. The Chase

I find Alejo Carpentier’s The Chase to be a compelling and disconcerting work. The flowing style of the English translation full of chronologically digressive subordinate clauses I believe remains close to the original (from reading a short story in the original believe the translation conveys his style quite well – but note: the scholarship student speaks of Aztec eagle and leopard warriors – this should be eagle and jaguar -tigres o jaguars- warriors).

The novel follows four principal characters – the ticket taker-music student, the former architecture student, the old woman, his former wet nurse and later landlord, living in the house with the belvedere. Carpentier explores the deteriorating mental state of the former student as he seeks refuge with the old woman, takes her food so she starves to death waiting to extort financial and visa security from a high official, reflected thematically in the crumbling buildings of the city around him.

A pivotal moment finds Estrella (she is the only named character) the prostitute recognizing the student as a whore, though I need to ponder more what connection Carpentier suggests between Estrella and the architecture student – I think they parallel each other, in the long description of Estrella’s observance of Holy Week and how she has detached her body from her core sense of self. The architecture student has a religious revelation after he doesn’t eat for 2 days, then proceeds to take all the old woman’s food while holding on to his concept that he has religious insight. Is this an order of magnitude worse than Estrella? Or a parallel?

The passing of the thought-to-be counterfeit note has a parallel in Tolstoy’s short story The forged note, the theme of which Robert Bresson used in his remarkable film L’Argent. Carpentier, however, if he was developing Russian literary themes, strikes me as exploring Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground) rather than Tolstoy.