Hilary Mantel's THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

History is always a spoiler for historical fiction, so I knew, as the virtual pages of The Mirror and the Light dwindled, that I was about to lose a beloved friend and I emotionally braced for it, but even so, I cried when it happened... in the book. Of course it really happened over 500 years ago.

Hilary Mantel definitely fills the role left empty lo these many years by the late Dame Dorothy Dunnet, and Mantel is a more than worthy successor, but she hasn't aped the mistress' achievements so much as inverted them. Dunnett wants us mystified by her heroes, guessing at their motivations and what they're going to do next, unable to penetrate their facades. Thorfinn, Lymond, Niccolo, all are observed from the outside; we get accounts of their deeds from the point of view of everbody else they encounter, spending a bit exploring the interiority of each of their friends, enemies, lovers, employers, lords. And nobody does this better than Dorothy.

This is not where she and Hilary Mantel overlap. What they share is a commitment to research and to world-building (as my friend Connor Wroe Southard explores in his latest) and an utter lack of fear of going long to create as complete a portrait of their ages and milieus as they can. Mantel just assumes a bit less erudition and command of languages on the part of her readers, is all, which can make her seem a bit more accessible than Dunnett, but beware: Mantel doesn't suffer foolish readers either. The first and, to a degree, second books in this trilogy were famously difficult for many readers (and, at first attempt, for me as I discussed on this blog long ago) due to Mantel's commitment to the tightest possible focus on her protagonist that didn't require an out-and-out first person narrator; we hover practically on his shoulder for hundreds and hundreds of pages, a bit baffled at times until it dawns on us (or is explained) that in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England, "he" means Thomas Cromwell 99% of the time, even if he is not named in a sentence or paragraph and someone else, say, King Henry VIII, actually has been. I found this incredibly off-putting the first time I read Wolf Hall, but have come to not only embrace it but possibly prefer it to the first person narrator to which authors usually resort when they want to achieve this level of intimacy with a protagonist.

And intimacy there is, right up until the moment the axe falls, and throughout the account of the last, greatest and most troublesome act of Thomas Cromwell's career. He has been intimately involved in the getting of all of Henry VIII's replacement wives. Queen 2.0, Anne Boleyn, absolutely relied on him until she found, to her surprise, that she could not, and Cromwell took advantage of her fall to take down a whole bunch of men who had treated Cromwell's original Patron (Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) badly after Wolsey repeatedly failed to get the Pope to annul Henry's marriage to Queen 1.0. Anne's reign and downfall encompass the second novel Bring Up the Bodies, which ends more or less right as the headsman from Calais executes her publicly with a sword inscribed, as we learn in this third book, "mirror of justice, pray for us," the first of many references to mirrors and lights, here.*

The Mirror and the Light takes us through the reign of Queen 3.0, Jane Seymour, whose rise together with her family from Wolf Hall owes, again, a lot to Thomas Cromwell, and who might have proven a boon to the whole country had she survived after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son, and then the campaign to find Queen 4.0 (who winds up being Anne of Cleves, but not with much success). But Queen Search is the least interesting plot here, as other events overtake the Henrician court, such as the famous Pilgrimage of Grace (the original astroturfing plot, generally thought to have been engineered by Europe's Catholics as a way to bully Henry back into the Roman fold), the future Bloody Mary's early stubbornness about her status, that of her mother, and whether or not her father could actually be the head of a church, and the continuous plots of various cadet branches of the English royal family to unseat the Usurper Henry and replace him with one of their own blueblood sons. Cromwell is in the thick of all of this, and his fierceness on Henry's, Mary's and also Margaret Tudor's (Henry VIII's niece, a princess of Scotland being raised in Henry's court) behalf earns him lots of new enemies and intensifies many old conflicts; many of his rivals, new and old, remind him throughout this book that since Cromwell owes all that he is and has (which has come to be quite a lot, as Cromwell even finishes his life with the title of Earl of Exeter -- a title that once was held by one of those cadet branches of the royal family until the last male of the line dies childless, and remember, Cromwell's dad was a scary drunken abusive blacksmith from the slums) to the king, if the king ever turns on him, he's done for. Cromwell basically just says, of course, and continues to do so right until the end, giving this book a greater air of tragedy even than the early scenes in Wolf Hall when the sweating sickness raged through his household and killed all the ladies and little girls.

Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn's family still seethes over her fate, for which they blame Cromwell, and they plant the final seeds of Cromwell's destruction with another daughter of the family, the vain and silly Kat Howard, who will be Queen 5.0 and gets married on the day of Cromwell's death. Queen 2.0 and 5.0 share an uncle in Thomas Howard (fabulously played by my beloved Bernard Hill in the TV adaptation, which showed that Hill is just as good playing a dick as he is a hero or a coward. Ahh, my Bernard!), who rages through the whole trilogy but has especially good scenes in this book as he and Cromwell occasionally seem on the verge of finally becoming friends, or at least calling a truce, until Howard's pride in his lineage always wins out; Cromwell is a Nobody and needs Put In His Place and nothing will be right in the world until he is.

Again, all of this is taking place in an immersively detailed world, which I was able to flesh out even more thanks to a lot of references to contemporary music of the time. There were enough of these for me to construct a pretty good playlist on Spotify, to which I added some other stuff that I'm reasonably sure would be familiar in Henry's court, and, of course, a selection of Henry's own musical compositions. Of course Henry composed music. He was a Renaissance Man if anybody was! Anyway, everything I could find that was mentioned by name is on there, along with some of my other favorites from Henry's lifetime in Venice, Florence, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. I listened to it a lot as I finished the book, and it was a great balm on my poor heart as I watched Cromwell arrested, imprisoned, questioned, impugned and executed.

Now, excuse me. I think I need some alone time.

*The overarching metaphor of the book is teased out there; before electricity and incandescent or LED bulbs, the light of a candle was often magnified by placing it in front of a mirror to bounce the rays back into the room. As Cromwell discusses often with his king, a ruler must serve as both things, mirror and light, setting a good example to his subjects and magnifying the benefits of good behavior into his realm. Um, about that...

Best Translated Book Nominees: Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A GIRL RETURNED, Translated by Ann Goldsmith

I understand it's a fairly common fantasy among children, to imagine (usually when they're angry with their families) that their parents aren't their Real Parents and that their Real Parents are far richer, kinder, grander people who will buy their long lost children all the toys they want and let them eat candy bars for dinner just as soon as the Real Parents sweep in and claim their suffering darlings and take them away from those wicked people who limit the kids' screen time, make them share with siblings and eat green beans.*

This isn't that story, all though we could call it that-story-adjacent. Let's say it's that fantasy meets the harsh realities of, not just the modern world, but the world as it's really always been but that privilege has allowed a lot of us to pretend isn't anymore. And also, kind of an inversion of that fantasy.

A Girl Returned (L'Armintua in the original Italian) allows an unnamed young girl to share with us what it's like to be unceremoniously ejected from a loving and comfortable home in the city and sent to a miserable hovel near the mountains to live with a Real Family she didn't even know she had, who barely even speak the same language she does,** and don't share many of her assumed to be natural expectations for what a bright young girl in Italy can have for her future.

The mystery of why this has happened is a constant pull on the narrative, and we do get an eventual explanation for it, but this isn't the focus of the novel, either. But so, what is?

For me, it's two things: what it's like for the narrator to discover she has siblings and to suddenly be thrust into close quarters (as in sharing a bedroom) with them, and how the author and translator can convey, just via the very careful deployment of articles and possessive pronouns, how our narrator's perception of her Former Family and her Real Family are shifting from scene to scene. That may sound boring, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure this book would still be a highly engaging read if the reader wasn't paying attention to those little parts of speech, as they are grace notes rather than The Point, but since I noticed this fairly early on and found myself really interested to see if it was just my imagination based on a few flukes or something deliberately done for effect, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating.

Where this is really interesting is how our narrator interacts with her two mothers, the one who raised her into her early teens, and the one who gave birth to her. For a long time, she refers to the first as "my" mother and the second simply as "the mother" of the Real Family, with all of the emotional distancing that implies and more (the relationship is difficult and often borders on hostile, even after the narrator comes better to understand the circumstances of the Real Family's mother's life and stops trying to fight her new circumstances). As the various and colorful members of the Real Family come into focus for her, then and only then are their names revealed, first her sister Adriana, just a little younger than she, then baby brother Giuseppe***, fun and disturbingly attractive eldest brother Vincenzo and another older brother, Sergio.****  All the kids share a bedroom full of rickety furniture, dirty bedclothes and many other signifiers of poverty; to the narrator's credit, she doesn't dwell on her disgust, as first she is just too shocked to register anything properly and by the time the shock has faded not only has her little sister latched on to her tightly (as the cover art depicts, the two share a narrow mattress and sleep head to toe, continuing the practice even after the narrator's guilt tripping Former Family buy them bunk beds, even though Adriana is a persistent bed wetter), but sister and the RF mother have thrust responsibility for a lot of baby Giuseppe's care on our narrator, who has been brought up with enough decently not to take out her dismay and disgust on a helpless infant.

Meanwhile, her relationship with Vincenzo, who is secretly the real man of the family, providing better for them with his odd jobs and shady dealings (about which more in a moment, and TW for some othering/racism when we get there) than the mostly absent father does, is constantly on the verge of becoming inappropriate, especially since he still sleeps in the kids' bedroom and does what young men do in the night, until Circumstances Intervene, just saving this book from developing a major ick factor, but it still had a minor one that some readers might find not so minor and that lies in the descriptions of the shady company Vincenzo keeps, called in this text not Roma but Gypsies, and pretty much every stereotype about them gets an airing here. I suspect this is deliberate, whether on the author's or the translator's part isn't clear, to convey our narrator's perception of the described people (her Former Father was a kind of policeman, and had a policeman's stereotypical tendency to stereotype others, and there is a minor educational story arc of our narrator taking baby steps toward unlearning the unconscious attitudes she picked up from him, but in the process, well, there's some casual othering some readers might not be willing to forgive in the service of a very minor arc in the novel).

I love books like this, that not only demand I empathize with the unfamiliar experiences and point of view of the character but also change my attitudes about the characters around her as her own do. A Girl Returned achieves this with what appears like effortlessness, but I suspect it was actually a lot of work. And it pays off.

*I never had it, but I happen to have done a pretty decent job of picking parents. Who are still married to each other after more than 50 years and were just cuddling on my sofa while we watched TV tonight. I know I'm astonishingly lucky and I don't take it for granted.
**(I'm not sure if this is a matter of accent or dialect but I suspect it is accent; I'm okay with not being sure because this means that author Donatella Di Pietrantonio and/or her translator into English, Ann Goldsmith, did not burden me with any attempt whatsoever to show me in dialogue how differently the Real Family and their neighbors speak from our narrator's Former Family. The narrator mentions a few times that they talk very differently, and that is fine. This is not poverty porn or armchair anthropology or anything like so tedious. There's much more interesting stuff going on.
***Interestingly, the kids born after her become people to her considerably faster than her older siblings or her biological mother and her husband (who, unless I misread, might not actually be the narrator's father but is at least Giuseppe's father?).
****Sergio never really emerges as a person and, to be honest, might not actually be a sibling; it wasn't clear to me but ultimately didn't matter.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Christos Iknonomou's GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA (translated by Karen Emmerich)

Blogger's note: this is my first read off the long list of books nominated for this year's Best Translated Book Award. I'm going to see how many of them I can read before the short list and eventual winner are announced. They all just sounded too interesting not to try out!

"Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own."

The four linked stories that comprise Christos Ikonomou's  Good Will Come From the Sea are set on a fictional Greek island that, like the rest of Greece (and the rest of the world), is still feeling the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, and of earthquakes that have been wrecking Athens. But that description, as bland as this book cover, doesn't begin to convey those impacts, which are not abstractly economical (though they are that, too) as much as they are very, very human, in the form of a new kind of migration pattern that proves the source of enough different kinds of agonizing tension to power many more than just these four excellent stories, and not just, as the pulled quote above conveys, because earlier in Greece's history the Aegean islands were where repressive governments sent uncooperative citizens to contemplate the error of their ways with a little help from jailers and torturers.

People who have lived on the island for generations witnessed that and let it form their society and grew accustomed to it, but now are suddenly having to deal with a new, semi-voluntary influx of people who, again, are just as Greek as they are, but because they come from Athens and grew up in higher socioeconomic classes above the natives' own, are referred to behind their backs and, in hostilities (which are many) to their faces as "Foreigners." The "Foreigners", in turn, refer to the natives as "Rats", perhaps alluding to the island's weird cave-riddled geography that the natives know intimately and the Athenians can barely navigate? If I'm being charitable here? Which nobody in these stories is, neither the Foreigners (not even, much, to each other) nor the Rats, all of whom are now trapped together by circumstances but none of whom are adjusting especially well.

All four stories are from the perspective of the in-migrants from Athens, who have left behind broken lives of relative privilege and prosperity and are still in shock but striving to rebuild in a new place... and finding it very, very difficult. Their prior values and cherished illusions are getting shown up as laughable and flimsy, they're facing real privation for the first time in their lives, and their support networks are disintegrated or diminished. They're still perservering, for now, but as each story opens, they're facing crises that may break them. And, I'll warn you right now, readers: don't come to these stories looking for happy endings or neat resolutions. Mysteries don't get solved. Resolutions may be fulfilled beyond the confines of a narrative but you don't get to see it.

But you do get to explore the interiority, and hidden resilience, of some very interesting characters as they struggle with the disappearance of loved ones, with vandalizing assaults on barely-started enterprises, with the question of the responsibility to act on knowledge they wish they didn't have about harm happening to a helpless other. As the protagonist of my favorite of the four, "Kill the German", a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs trying to blow up a sex shop and now uses mobility aids on an island not at all designed for his kind, observes to himself as he frets over the fate of a young girl pimped out by her family to a rich old man:

The world is constructed in such a way as to deprive each of us of the possibility of doing any personal good. No, that's not right. Let's take it from the top. Ready? Okay. The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We are all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else's affair.

We're all dealing with this right now especially, wherever we are in the world, eh? Only a lot of us have discovered that the government/social safety net/network of private charities we've always counted on to mitigate the sob stories the daily news brings us was never so robust as we thought, even in the free and prosperous West, and it maybe really is up to us to help each other out directly, even though we risk a lot in doing so.*

As we wring our hands at what the COVID-19 virus has done to and, more importantly, revealed about our world (though yeah, lots of us already knew from first-hand experience that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were very unevenly distributed), I feel like the characters, both Foreigners and Rats, from Ikonomou's stories would laugh at us, bitterly. Which is to say that these stories feel uncomfortably prophetic, especially for readers like me who live in remote places to which everybody else (*cough* Neil Gaiman *cough*) dream of or already have active plans for retreating, and have already seen the effects of decades in-migration by people who visited here once and decided to retire here but who are used to or demand "better" than what we have to offer, which is to say I was disposed to identify perhaps more with the Rats (none of whom really get developed as characters in these stories) than with the Foreigners, but Ikonomou is so damned good that he made me care about the Foreigners -- which is one of the big things that literature, that art, is for, isn't it?**

"If you're in need, if you are on the outside, you're a foreigner everywhere." another character observes. And your turn to be one might be next, is the not-so-subtle message here. So why not start being decent to one another now? Because here's the alternative, and it ain't pretty. 

So while these tales of people facing hostility, subterfuge, corruption, distrust, envy, sabotage, from people who are supposed to share the same culture as themselves, more or less, awaken empathy, they also are every bit as disturbing as any of, say, William Gibson's recent fictions of his post-Jackpot world.*** Passages observing the effect of long-term unemployment may soon come to feel a bit too familiar to a lot of people who have taken gainful work for granted , for instance. So I really can't decide if this is bad pandemic reading or good, but it's possibly the best pandemic reading? Because it is full of some sweet and amusing moments, too, like my favorite, which takes place in a new family-run taberna:

One of the ladies points at the light fixture on the ceiling. And the kid turns bright red and says no, no, no lamp, lamb, lamb, you know baaa, baaa. The old ladies start laughing and say okay okay and Petrus picks at the menus and comes over all in a huff and asks me who wrote the English menu.

And some frankly lovely prose, as when a man in search of his missing son (delivered into the employ of a shady local syndicate on his orders, no ifs ands or buts) pauses and observes the sea as he climbs to the top of the island's ridge to get a better look around: "The waves tipped with white like frothy eyebrows over the water's countless blind eyes" and wouldn't we all just kill to have sentences like that published under our names? And of course, how much of that is Ikonomou and how much is translator Karen Emmerich?

One bit that I think is mostly Emmerich comes as my paraplegic friend contemplates some old wisdom that I get from Jorge Luis Borges but think he probably got from Bishop Berkley or somebody, but phrased as succinctly and elegantly as I've yet seen in English: "Fathers and mirrors should be hated to an equal degree because they alone have the ability to make people multiply." Maybe it's really economical in the original Greek, too, but I'm thinking this is the translator's hand showing, gracefully.

So, as I said on Twitter the other day, if the rest of the books on the long list for Best Translated Book are anywhere near this good, I'm going to have an emotionally challenging but very satisfying set of reads ahead of me. Gimme!

*And, of course, in the U.S. and, it appears, the U.K. especially, we're also dealing with sizeable populations of people hell-bent on preventing us from helping each other, sometimes with the threat of deadly force.
**Not that my foreigners are going to be in quite the shape of these Athenian migrant-refugees, of course. I live in the Billionaire Wilderness.
***He seems to be buried in tweets whining to him that he predicted our current plight too damned well and maybe wasn't writing fiction but is some kind of pre-cog wizard. At least no one is mocking him for not foreseeing cellphones anymore?

Rodrigo Fresan's THE DREAMED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Late last year while I was still on my extended blogging hiatus, I snagged a Humble Bundle of Latin American Speculative Fiction that contained, among other wonders, Rudy Ch. Garcia's The Closet of Discarded Dreams, which is one of the most delightfully batshit things I've encountered in many a year, in a life that contains regularly scheduled viewings of Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, just to put that in context.

At last I have found a companion volume. I mean, besides The Atrocity Exhibition. The three books would definitely be shelved together if I ever get around to devising a personal psychohistorical organizational scheme for my library.*

The third being, of course, Rodrigo Fresan's second Tres Partes novel, The Dreamed Part.

Fasten your seatbelts, Little Buckaroos. And, uh, ware mild spoilers for The Invented Part, but I'll keep 'em light as best I can.

Where the first of the Tres Partes** gave a master class in next-level story structure and explored the inspiration Fresan took from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and The Kinks' very greatest song "Big Sky" and possibly Alan Moore and David Gibbon's Watchmen and maybe even Clark Ashton Smith/Robert Shea, and from Fresan's own biji ,all while telling the story of a Writer, his glamorous and weird parents, his mad sister who married into an even madder family, and a pair of his fans whom he maybe kind of manipulated (sort of posthumously) into becoming lovers and then maybe kind of kept trying to rewrite their love story over and over and over again, but then again maybe he didn't, it's just that kind of book?... (INHALE) The Dreamed Part, The Dreamed Part gets weird. In the best possible way, as you should expect after I brought up Rudy Ch. Garcia and J.G. Ballard.

The Dreamed Part is again divided into discrete segments, but this time there are only three of them. The first takes up our Writer, now suffering from extreme insomnia about which he waxes bilious and lyrical for many pages and seeking the help of some Sleep Professionals and no, I don't mean fancy bed salesmen. These are scientists, and while they poke around his body and psyche, one of them, whom he calls Ella, which is a woman's name in some languages and a feminine personal pronoun in Spanish, turns out to be the literal (he insists) Woman of His Dreams. She has dreamed about him, too, and they become lovers, but oopsie doopsie, in the midst of their love and her work in uncovering the causes of his insomnia*** and trying to treat it, her Institute accidentally creates a whole new sleep disorder, which proves to be highly contagious and soon affects everyone except for the Writer: nobody can dream anymore. Which means everybody is starting to go more than a little bit insane, except the Writer, although he's kind of going crazy trying to chronicle and make sense of it all. How is the world going to get itself out of this terrible pickle?

Ha, like we're going to get a resolution there, because suddenly we're back in the world of the Writer's sister Penelope, whose adventures among her bizarre clan of in-laws were my favorite bits of The Invented Part (and, I have since learned via the Two-Month Reivew boys, another Fresan novel, Mantra is basically all about that family and of course I've already got it lined up to read sometime later this year after I'm done with a quixotic little project I'll tell you about in the next post). Turns out Penelope channeled her resentment of her brother's appropriation of her in-law ordeals for his own fiction, together with her obsession with the Bronte family and especially Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and her own weird imagination and wrote a series of young adult novels that landed in the publishing calendar right after the Twilight novels and profited mightily off those books' fans' collective hangover and earned her a fortune. Her fiction gets just enough description here (in flaky pastry layers, of course) to make me, though not by any means her target audience, desperately want to read this batshittery: the Bronte sisters are reimagined as something between YouTube stars and podcasters who broadcast baroquely interesting fiction from their home on the Moon. I want to read the LunaBrontes' stories, and I want to read the story of the LunaBrontes. But, you know, tough.

I may be a tiny bit mad at Fresan for not having just written those things, but that's about as profitable as being mad that Jorge Luis Borges in his "lofty laziness" only ever bothered to spin his ideas out into sketches that sometimes barely count as short stories. Is that an Argentina thing, maybe?

Anyway, in Penelope's section further light is shed on the weird, sad core plot of these novels, which is almost completely a story of serial devastating losses in the Writer's life, all of which are still shrouded in mystery going into this section. His and Penelope's yacht-setting glamor-genius parents are legendary desaparacidos, last seen alive on Christmas Eve when they stage an armed takeover of a department store as a political statement-cum-marketing stunt; there is a little boy who was like a son to the Writer's adult, unmarried, childless self who we gradually figured out was Penelope's child by her comatose husband, who has also disappeared. We get more of an idea, again, in layers of storytelling that cast a few different people as culprits, of the truth behind the first disappearance than the second, but there is, of course, another novel to go.

The third section brings us back to the Writer, but while it has lots of funny lines and entertaining observations and amusing digressions (an account of a U.S. government agent detailed to spy on Vladimir Nabokov and his wife is a particularly fun standout) it has really no plot at all, beyond "how the Writer feels coping with all of this loss and what it has meant to him to be the Writer but to have nurtured other, lesser writers to heights of fame and fortune he'll never enjoy because he can't sell out his Art, and also what it's like to be the literary executor of his own sister who also eclipsed him" and in a lesser writer's hands than Fresan's this would be deadly, watch-checkingly dull but manages not to be because there are just So Many Good Bits.

I'll share a few, out of context, just for fun. For instance, from an excursis on a particular cultural loss, that of prints of pre-digital movies that, passed from theater to theater and country to country and end up warping, via physical wear and tear on the film, warping into something other than the auteur's original opus:

Classic and artless movies that, because of their poor condition, become avant-garde. New and involuntary versions of The Time Machine or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Movies that, when seen again in fragments, end up revealing new meaning and utility: movies about a group of kids ritually devoured by subterranean monsters and about a divorced father who invents likes to amuse his children.

Or an aphorism that should probably just be the motto for this dreadful year of 2020 C.E.: "Bad fiction can be comforting during times of bad nonfiction."

Or, perhaps, my favorite, and this is a long'un but a good'un:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf!, wolf!!, came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf!, wolf!, and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow, because he lied too often, was finally eaten up by a real best is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

A fair chunk of this longest third section concerns the Writer's mostly-internal relationship with two writers whom he blurbed early in their careers who then both became International Public Intellectuals based on their sort-of highbrow but still very popular novels, a man and a woman, both of whom he calls IKEA because of their global appeal and the essential characterlessness of their work. Snippets of remembered conversation with them are gold, as when the Male IKEA (who used his international reputation and financial resources to rescue the Writer from a bizarre and tight spot in The Invented Part), tells the Writer "I can't say I envy your books, but oh, what I would've given for some desaparacidos parents..." with an implied chiding of the Writer for not having exploited their story the way IKEA himself milked a much tamer anecdote for a whole novel "soon to be adapted for the big screen, starring Sean Penn in the lead role as moi."

So yes, ultimately, as Fresan has the Writer observe many times of himself, Rodrigo Fresan is a writer's writer, and these novels are writers' novels. Ordinarily I have little patience with writers who only want to write about writers and writing (I overdosed on metafiction my sophomore year at Bard, for a class that should have been called Forms of Postmodern Fiction but wasn't, in which we read Pynchon and Borges and Marquez and Vonnegut and Gass and I've blocked out the rest), but Fresan has kept me going on with just enough tiny, hard-to-follow breadcrumbs**** of a grandly tragic plot and lots of passages of, yes, great writing. At least part of which must be attributed to the work of translator Will Vanderhyden, though I'm too out of the Spanish language literature loop to be able to comment specifically on what Vanderhyden has brought to the table (apart from, anecdotally, coping with some 50 extra pages worth of additional text that Fresan added to the material between these books first appearing in Spanish and Vanderhyden's getting to start working on The Invented Part. of course).

But I'll have a better feel for that soon, because Vanderhyden is still at work on the third volume, The Remembered Part, which means I should be waiting patiently but upon finishing The Dreamed Part I realized I didn't feel like pausing, thank you very much, and I'm not afraid of a little hard work and the Kindle edition of La Parte Recordada was not expensive at all and so, though Spanish is my very worst language, I'm already reading the third volume. Very slowly, with the aid of a dictionary and the Kindle's often laughable but at least serviceable (usually) language translation utility. I'm still going to get the English translation when Open Letters will let me have it, and I'll read it eagerly, but you know, until then, like I said, I Am Impatient.

We'll see how far I get before the English edition is published. Heh. If I finish ahead of time, perhaps I'll blog about this third volume twice, once on what I gather from reading it badly in Spanish and once after I've read it in Vanderhyden's very good English prose.

So far it's a lot of weird meditations on the significance of the color yellow in international traffic semiotics, mostly. Seems appropriate for my reading speed in a language I last studied in high school in Saratoga, WY in a classroom full of stoners and jocks who were only interested in curse words...

*Except alas, I don't own physical copies of any of these because they're all books I fell in love with long after I lost the ability to read books printed on dead tree or type with my actual hands.
**Slight excursis here to observe that every writer or would-be writer now owes Fresan a debt of gratitude for this triptych (I guess trilogies are only for genre fiction, but since this is Literature these three more-or-less sequential and deeply inter-related novels are called a triptych instead. Whatevs.), which at least in part exists to give a comprehensive and unassailable answer to that annoying old question of "where do you get your ideas?" Now we can point to these three books, each named for a component of inspiration as explicated in incredible detail within the work, as the best possible explanation, and from there we're all set. If our interlocutor has read, or at least heard of, them, then we're all set; they'll get it immediately. More likely, though, they won't, but they won't want to look foolish to us or their viewers/listeners/readers, and so they'll bull on through with an "oh, of course" and shuck and jive through the rest of the conversation to avoid admitting their ignorance, and we can steer matters elsewhere to our liking (having probably gained a certain cheap ascendancy hereby). But what if the asker of the impertinent question not only doesn't know Fresan but also has no problem admitting it, you ask? Well, then you get to steer the conversation away from answering the question and talk about Fresan instead until their eyes glaze over and they move on to some other annoying topic. Thank you, Rodrigo!
***Which turns out to have an ulterior motive as the work on the Writer is subsumed in the Dream Institute's larger goal of turning dreaming into just another tool for performing cognitive labor with tangible economic benefits. So this first section of the book feels like the weird love child of the Doctor Who episode "Sleep No More" and Jose Saramago's Blindness.
****I'm talking approaching Gene Wolfe level of difficult to spot and follow, here, not because they're secrets well kept, but because they're scattered so widely and scantly.