Jazmina Barrera's THE QUEEN OF SWORDS (Tr Christina Mac Sweeney)

The Queen of Swords, Jazmina Barrera's fascinating and unusual study of Mexican literary icon Elena Garro, might get shelved among the literary biographies in the rare and special kind of bookstore that will even bother to stock such a thing, as a rule, but The Queen of Swords is about as much a biography as Orson Welles' incredible F for Fake is a documentary. Which is to say both "kind of" and "not at all.*"

Furthermore, in arguing for the "kind of" side I would have to invoke the parallel or tandem biography, like Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, which simultaneously studies Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, while also giving considerable time to each Mary's equally-if-not-more famous husbands. Elena Garro's daughter is nowhere near as big a presence in QoS as Elena herself, but the child's father, Elena's famous husband Octavio Paz, takes up the space that Helenita doesn't, while Barrera's surprisingly entertaining experiences of researching and writing the book also shares the space, kind of the way some of Orson Welles' hijinks round out F for Fake. 

Moreover, both projects are complete delights, marred only by their (by modern standards) brevity -- though by saying they're "marred" implies that this is a flaw when it only really highlights the fact that they left me wanting much, much more.**

But there's no equivalent, in QoS, to the famous Chartes sequence in FfF. Barrera's work is much too intimate and personal to yield a big meditation on art and history and architecture. And Garro's life was a lot more harrowing than Welles'; several times she and her daughter were fleeing entire countries ahead of assassins, possibly vindictive ex-lovers, political authorities and penury. And Barrera has only the medium of text to convey all of this. But what text she has!

What we conserve of the dead is, above all, images and words: in that they are similar to books. We might even make the mistake of confusing the two, but no life fits in a single book. It would need several trunks, whole libraries, university and press archives to hold the vast, elusive life of Elena Garro, and what I write here doesn't aspire to that. It doesn't pretend to have the last word on anything or anybody. This isn't a biography, it's scarcely a notebook. It is a collection of stories, ideas, facts, and cats.

Garro was a woman who deeply loved the idea, if not the fact, of divinatory arts like the I Ching and the Tarot -- hence the incredible cover Two Lines Press generated for the English language edition of QoS, which takes the same iconic photo of Garro that graces the original and abstracts it into a version of a card of the Minor Arcana. Amusingly, the text itself is divided into very short chapters, some only a sentence or two long, each with a pithy title that could almost be the name of one of the Major Arcana, like "THE CRIME OF FANTASY" or "PERFUME," such that I had a working theory while reading the book that there was one chapter for each card in the Tarot. Alas, when I actually sat down to count the chapter-ettes, I got far more than the expected 78. It was still a fun theory, and while I have zero evidence that this idea was ever part of Barrera's plan for QoS, I respect that if it was, such a gimmick was not allowed to govern the presentation. Barrera's short, specific chapters (which, further arguing against the idea that this is in any way a biography, are not remotely chronological; they are firmly grouped by ideas according to a scheme that I couldn't really parse out but didn't really try because the text is far more interesting than the structure), which quote liberally from Garro's own works and those of her contemporaries, also present the reader with a pleasing run of meta-knowledge in the form of marginalia clearly identifying the precise source for its quotations, a technique I find that I much prefer to footnotes or endnotes and one that I wouldn't mind seeing catch on with other writers who are bridging the gulf between the scholarly work of formal criticism and the popular biographical one.

I've dreamed of Elena Garro a number of times and almost all those dreams have left me with brief, inconclusive pictures: a blurred image of Elena standing up, wearing a coffeee-colored, tailored suit; Elena Garro and Bioy Casares laughing at something awful, with Octavio Paz looking worried. I once dreamed that Elena entered a worm spiral of time and space that carried her from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Another night, I dreamed that Elena and Helenita were Lorelai and Rory from the television series Gilmore Girls.

Elena Garro is a brand new discovery for me. I had of course heard of her husband, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, but, to be honest, Latin American, and especially Mexican, literature is still a bit of a blind spot for me. I have read more fiction translated from various dialects of Arabic than I have from Spanish, more from the Austrian Hapsburg empire than from Spain's. Ernest Hogan, Alejandro Morales, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (does she count since she's actually a Canadian citizen?)... so I've read some weird fiction from Mexico, sure, but not any literary or mainstream stuff... and then I find that Elena Garro is at least as responsible as more familiar-to-me creators like Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the development of Magical Realism, especially in its stricter definition in which the source for the magical is Indigenous folk legend and belief***. But so anyway, I came into QoS as cold as cold could be, and leave it now determined to make up for lost time with Elena Garro. How fortunate, therefore, that my brand shiny new subscription/membership to the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press brought me, not only QoS, but also The Week of Colors, a collection of Garro's short fiction originally published in 1964 and newly translated into English by Megan McDowell. It's like these people want to make it easy for me to fall in love, or something.

I will probably never love Garro as much as Jazmina Barrera does, though. As she shares in the course of the book, QoS started out as an essay for a journal, but as Barrera, whose own great-grandparents were friends of Garro and Paz, got access to loads of archival material and re-read Garro's works for the umpteenth time, her love became all consuming until the project swallowed up all of her time and effort and became this wonderful book. I'm grateful for this love and for the fact that it is still possible, at least for a very few of us, for people with a passion to pursue it fully and come out with something this terrific to show for it. Let's hear it for adventurous editors, curious scholars, and prolific playwrights/poets/novelists. This world would sure suck without them.

*And if I had to compare it to anything besides FfF, it would have to be to something like Michel Houellebecq's "literary mash note" H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, though QoS has an entirely different tone.

**And just as FfF led me down multiple rabbit holes of wrong and crazy awesome about Elmyr de Heury and Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes, well, let's just say that I'm already falling past the levitating rocking chairs and apothecary shelves and bookcases on my way down to exploring Elena Garro's (and friends') literary wonderland, starting with a newly released translation of Garro's The Week of Colors published in tandem with QoS, just to make sure I did so.

***And in these pages I learned that one of the many reasons why authority figures of various kinds did not appreciate the treasure they had in Elena Garro was her consistent and lifelong support of Indigenous rights (and, of course, her very vocal and active support of revolutionaries in general), entitling Garro to even more of my admiration than her literary output already demands.

Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION (Tr Shawn Whiteside)

Michel Houellebecq is an author I don't particularly like but I add compulsively to my towering, teetering TBR pile the way I often shake a few drops of bitters into my plain soda water. It's just not the same without it, though it tastes like ass by itself.

I don't read a lot of him in a row, is what I'm saying.

But when he publishes a new book, I'm never not interested. 

But so, since I have Houellebecq filed in my head as an unpleasant but necessary man to read, not as bad as Robert Silverberg or Albert Cossery in that I never want to read anything else by either of those authors ever again but still as someone I kind of need to brace myself for, imagine my surprise to discover that his latest novel, Annihilation is moving, human and lovely!

This is not to say that Annihilation is not bitter or bleak -- I mean, just get a load of the title! -- as I was expecting; there's still plenty to grit one's teeth through in this story of a prosperous civil servant enduring the disappointments of middle age in 21st century France. But our man Paul, whose image first really came into focus for me in a scene straight out of my favorite Editors song, depicting him smoking outside the hospital where his father has just been admitted as a coma patient, is the most sympathetic character I've seen Houellebecq create, and it's not even close.*

We first meet him as he's beginning to tackle a worrisome problem at his job, where I imagine him as a sort of colleague of Bug's father at Not-Nutella. An unknown entity is releasing very provocative video clips on the Internet, designed to stir maximum fear and unrest in French society. One even depicts the head of Paul's department, Bernard, who is the French Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for the next President of France, being decapitated. For a while, then, Annihilation feels like it's going to be a fancy high tech thriller/crime investigation, as Paul calls in personal resources to help him unravel who is doing this and why. For instance, an old friend who founded one of the best cinematic special effects companies in the world reviews the footage so far and quickly informs Paul that nobody, not his own firm, not Industrial Light and Magic, nobody, is currently capable of creating what they have been reviewing at the level of detail and realism they are seeing.

And then things get weirder and worse.

In the midst of all of this intrigue, Paul's elderly, widowed father, a retired intelligence agent who still retains some files that his former masters have asked Paul to get back for them (possibly, somehow, related to the case Paul is currently working on, meaning dear old Dad may have one last chance to be a hero), has suffered a medical emergency that has left him in a coma. And Paul, whom we've seen so far as something of a typical cold and bitter Houellebecq character, is landed in a whole mess of family drama, involving his father's "companion" Madeline (originally a live-in nurse but now a romantic partner that it's easier to just regard as a wife), Paul's devoutly Catholic sister Cecile and her easy-going husband Herve and their daughters**, their much-younger brother Aurielle and his insufferable wife, Indy, and a whole host of compassionate but firm medical professionals who are there to ease them all through the transition from having a busy and still-active father to having one who will probably never walk or talk or do things for himself again.

All of these characters are richly realized and sympathetically portrayed enough to give the scenes between them considerable emotional heft without ever drifting into melodrama.

But lest I sound like Houellebecq has gone completely soft in his old age, there are still a few passages like this, which could have been lifted from The Elementary Particles, to remind us of with whom we're dealing: 

For some years, it's true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reflect one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears, but you can't sort everything out at the same time, Paul said to himself.

This as he contemplates the recent destruction by the mystery terrorists of a Danish sperm bank. A golden star to you if you can guess what the balls of shit are in the above.

But all of this is just camouflage for the book's true nature. Houellebecq lies in wait for us at the bottom of a sandy funnel to which he has baited us with illusions of technothrillery and heartfelt family drama. We've traipsed along these fascinating and moving edges like an ant on a patch of sand, not noticing the funnel shape the sand is gradually assuming until abruptly the sides have gotten too steep. We fall into Houellebecq's waiting jaws; he will drain us and toss our husks back onto the pile of corpses above, the pile that we also did not notice while we were distracted by Paul's rediscovery of his marriage, by his father's apparent holding of the key to the mystery. 

And at last the title of the novel, heretofore seeming maybe an ironic joke at our expense, makes sense. I won't call Annihilation a shaggy dog story as such, but it shares some of that thing's qualities, though in service of a point a shaggy dog story lacks. I will caution you that,  for a little while after finishing Annihilation, I felt a bit disappointed in it. So might you. But I suspect that on further reflection you might overcome this feeling, as I did a few days later, when I realized what Houellebecq had, in fact, achieved. 

I suppose if anyone was, with his (probable) last book, going to reveal himself as a literary ant lion, it would be Michel Fucking Houellebecq.

Now excuse me; I am dealing with my own issues with aging and also with unhipness. I have only just discovered that Houellebecq is in a film with Iggy Pop. How the hell did this escape my notice????? Oh yeah, there was a presidential election and stuff going on, even way back then.

*Not that I've read all of his novels; just most of them.

**One of whom has an encounter with Paul out in the world that is possibly the funniest passage I've ever encountered in Houellebecq.