Franca MancinelliThe Little Book of Passage

Abstract

Mariana Dimópulos All My Goodbyes Trans. Alice Whitmore Transit Books Having written and translated multiple novels, Argentine author Mariana Dimópulos’s splintered novella is about murders that haunt a girl in Patagonia. Dimópulos constructs time as fluid, making the narrative structure of the book fragmented; however, while her voice is vivid, at times there is an emotional disconnect between the reader and the characters. Hans Magnus Enzensberger Panopticon Trans. Tess Lewis Seagull Books Hans Magnus Enzensberger, considered by many to be one of Germany’s most important living poets, offers a series of provocative essays tied to society, religion, economics, and politics . Utilizing the abnormality of his world perspective as a poet, Enzensberger captures all that is curious and captivating in our contemporary world while at the same time searching for answers and unlocking ultimate truths. Nota Bene notes between February 2010 and December 2018. In terms of that prolificacy, Impón tu suerte is more a statement than an anthology (a few texts are part of other collections or of what he calls “voluble ledgers”), and a running thread is the coolness, amiability , and matter-of-factness with which he starts every piece. What kind of reader is he? Judging by Impón tu suerte (from René Char’s impose ta chance, roughly, “trust firmly in your luck”), he absorbs twentiethcentury world literature and suffers national identity politics lightly, carefully meting out credit where credit is due, as in the pieces about his compatriot Juan Marsé. As part of the disruptive innovations in Spanish-language literature for which he is largely responsible, Vila-Matas devotes more energy to perspicacious and novel readings of classics like Kafka, Joyce, Walser, Nabokov, Beckett, Savinio, and the Oulipo group; Borges, Rulfo, Cortázar, Monterroso , and Pitol among the Latin Americans; to recent masters like Banville, Perec, and Coetzee; and to canonical forerunners like Cervantes, Stevenson, Proust, and Simenon. Thus, his epilogue asserts: “I do not devote myself to nonfiction, black or dirty realism, nor to damned autofiction; without further ado, the space in which I have always moved is simply fiction’s.” What about his contemporaries and the future he spoke about in Guadalajara? Generous to a fault with younger authors, Impón tu suerte is more revealing of what he reads thoroughly, so very few of those authors merit mention rather than inclusion, and those who feel compelled to write solipsistic Major Novels and are especially visible to Spanish-language audiences receive none at all. The exceptions are Zambra, Fresán, and Bolaño, who is the center of one of the longer pieces (and the most thorough essay on the paradigm shift of new Spanish-language writers), “Los escritores de antes (Bolaño en Blanes, 1996–1999).” The theoretical but direct scaffolding for comprehending his meticulousness at contextualizing literary developments occupies part 4, “The Idea.” Conceptually, he is drawn to Duchamp, Gracq, Dalí, and Blanchot , with some nods to Barthes and David Markson. But, even with them, he exhibits the coolness of an intellectual who “when in doubt, play[s] insane,” an attitude also useful when he devotes attention to writers who have lapsed into literary obscurity, entangling their texts to show that there is no anarchy in refuting traditions and their politics. A necessary corrective to reigning aesthetic conceits, Vila-Matas’s writing has a perfect sense of conceptual timing that avoids throwaway lines, perfectly comprehensible when considering how extensively he reads. Because his boundless tool is the dynamism of language, his narrative and nonfiction strike universal chords when he writes about the poetics of failure, authenticity, minimalist essayists, the metaliterary, Tarantino, hipsters, Facebook, and the like. Ultimately, Impón tu suerte asks readers to go with their instincts, and Vila-Matas’s cerebral coolness when facing high- cultural stakes ensures that his arguments are companionable. Will H. Corral San Francisco Franca Mancinelli The Little Book of Passage Trans. John Taylor. Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander Press. 2018. 97 pages. Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage, with facing-page translation WORLDLIT.ORG 91 Books in Review by John Taylor, exemplifies the best possibilities of the prose-poem form. As James Longenbach notes in...