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.