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The Phantom in Love – The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

Some time ago I posted an audio file with my reading of Flying-Ears Love from The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Since then the site where the audio was originally hosted has shut down, and I decided to accompany the audio with the images of Egon Schiele‘s work. I have recorded all four letters that Dona Lucretia supposedly wrote to her husband. The Phantom in Love is the last letter, and perhaps, the most playful.

 

My Kind of Day (Go, Mario Vargas Llosa!)

Thursday was the kind of day that starts well, begins to fall through in the middle, and then takes off again towards the evening, to reach a happy climax at night.

I had a good meeting in the morning, made an unsuccessful trip home (I couldn’t get in the house!), tried to get to a public lecture but couldn’t find the place where it was held, and spent over an hour in a cafe in one of the Moscow theatres reading about cinema and writing synopses. Some time during the day I learnt that the Russian physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov who currently work at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research in graphene. As you may know, I graduated from the Manchester Uni, too, so my congratulations go not merely to my compatriots but also to people affiliated with the same academic institution.

Mario Vargas Llosa,
Nobel Prize in Literature 2010
But the most exciting news still awaited me at home. In 2006 I was keeping my fingers crossed for a certain author who has since been mentioned many times on this blog. Mario Vargas Llosa has been considered “nobelizable” for many years, but, as some argue, his political views stood in the way of his getting the well-deserved award. For the record, even in a novel as sexually charged as The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Llosa didn’t leave his protagonist void of political views.

Four years ago I said I’d be over the Moon had he won. In October 2010, when Llosa did finally scoop the Prize, I was screaming with joy and pride for some 5 minutes. As Rory Carroll reports for The Guardian, even the novelist himself thought the news was a joke. And I find it truly auspicious that so many wonderful things had happened on the same day: the Russians won the Prize, and a favourite author of a Russian writer won the Prize.

Now, the Russian writer and the author of this blog was told in the morning that she accomplished a lot for her age. If I think about it I shall agree, but I don’t feel like I did enough; and this also hints at how much I will do in the next few years. Yet I’d be nowhere had it not been for people whose examples I chose to follow. These figures don’t dominate me, and I’m not a slave to their success or status; but they DO inspire me, force me how to push the envelope, and uncover, help me me see, the possibilities in my own life. As far as Literature goes they are:

William Somerset Maugham – for insights into the life of the Artist;
Kurt Vonnegut – for “telegraphic” style and the study of war;
Mario Vargas Llosa – for “cinematographic” style and the study of an evolving human character;
Pascal Quignard – for the erudition, hard to find in a contemporary author;
Romain Gary – for maintaining several preoccupations alongside the writing career, and winning the Goncour Prix twice;
Mikhail Bulgakov – for setting the example of how to adapt himself to the stage.

These names stand out, as far as I am concerned. These people’s output has been immense. Their influence on Literature and other arts has been critical. They were all “adaptable” and sometimes even were directors or scriptwriters. Their input into their profession was huge as far as knowledge is concerned, and they all have been included in the world affairs. For the record, Maugham and Gary were both diplomats, while Vargas Llosa even ran for presidency.

Lastly, they were all successful. We often fall into this trap of eulogising and admiring the genuines who live poorly, never receive public praise, and maybe die before they hit 25. There is nothing wrong with genuises, but what about our mindset? If every genuis dies before 25, what becomes to the race of genuises? And it’s hard to create on an empty stomach. Besides, in reality nobody likes poor artists because poverty equals failure.

You can see why I am so ecstatic for Vargas Llosa. But I have to say that Romain Gary (who died a week before I was born) still poses the biggest challenge. The first time he won the Goncour Prix under his own name; the second time he won it under his pen name. If I do something similar in my career, I will dedicate my prize to him.

Blogger Julia and the Typewriter

Some of you will instantly recognise a paraphrase of the title of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa in the post’s title. I remember reading it in about 1998 in Moscow. I was a second year student, and my reading would often occur on the tube. At first I couldn’t get my head round the different stories that weaved together into a narrative; some of them were unfinished, and it didn’t quite make sense. Then suddenly I realised that those unfinished pieces were the extracts from scripts. Once I realised this, I became fascinated with the novel. It was there, as well, that I picked up on the expression “legion is their name“. Evidently, I didn’t read my Bible very well.

The post is about the picture; or actually about a typewriter you can see at the bottom right corner of the image (it is a collage, lovingly created by my mother – thank you!) The typewriter is quite old, should be well over 30 years, if not more. I didn’t get to use a computer until 1997; it took me until 2000 to get connected to the Internet. But I learnt the “qwerty” long before I got to use the PC’s keyboard, and in that the typewriter was indispensable. In fact, as I write this, I can smell the typewriter ribbon. The typewriter ribbon always had this strange smell: it was warm and homely but had a lead undertone to it, unequivocally reminding that it was used to type, i.e. imprint on paper.

These days I don’t look at the keyboard when I type; and I type fast, too. But with this typewriter it would sometimes be a nightmare. The keys would occasionally jam. This meant that I had to take the top off and unjam them. This meant in turn that my fingers and nails would be covered in ink. My fingers were also too small and delicate, so they would either get in between the keys, or their tips would hurt after some 15 minutes of exercise.

For some time I was impressed by the scene you are going to see in the video below. This is the first part (the second you can watch on YouTube) of a very famous and well-loved Russian cartoon – Film, Film, Film (1968). When I watch it today, I am almost sure I can see references to Sergei Eisenstein in the Director; and the scriptwriter, when he hides in the tube, brings to mind Marcello Mastroianni in La Città Delle Donne (1980). Of course, if there is any parallel to be found in this, it should mean that both Fyodor Khitruk and Federico Fellini were drawing from the same source for that tube metaphor.

But – back to typewriters – for a while I was fascinated with the opening scene of the cartoon, in which the scriptwriter tears the paper into pieces each time the Muse suddenly deserts him. I wasn’t typing all the time, mind you, but I would take the piece of paper out of the typewriter whenever I made an error. I calmed down when I realised I could keep typing and correct it later. Yet undoubtedly I fancied myself in the same kind of creative throes which were compounded by the awkward typewriter’s keys.

Picture on Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (Henry Gervex, Rolla)

I noted that someone was looking for “picture on The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
“. There are various editions of the book, so the covers differ accordingly. The novel itself is woven around the work of Egon Schiele, the Austrian painter, and some of his works are used to illustrate the 1999 Faber&Faber edition.

Henri Gervex, Rolla, 1878

The cover of this edition, however, features a different work: it is Rolla (1878), by the French painter Henri Gervex (left). It is an illustration of a scene from the long poem under the same name by the enfant terrible of the French literature, Alfred de Musset (1810-1857). Rolla is the story of a bourgeois, Jacques Rolla, whose self-ruin and bankruptcy come as the consequence of his ennui with his social status. Unlike what may be deduced from Gervex’s painting, de Musset’s Rolla ended his life in a romantic but noble way: he came to visit Marion to tell her of his state of affairs, drank poison, and died in her arms.

The painting went public 20 years after de Musset’s death and 45 years after Rolla was composed. It was rejected by the Salon, and Gervex went on to display the painting in the shop window, attracting the crowds of onlookers and producing the furore. The public was not altogether unfamiliar with the portraits of courtesans or the depiction of the “gallant scenes“; the latter were particularly popular throughout the 18th c. On the left is Venus and Mars by Botticelli that dates back to 1483; and on the right is Manet’s Olympia (1863), a hommage to Giorgione (Sleeping Venus) and Titian (Venus of Urbino), as far as the pose of the model is concerned. All those paintings, Manet’s included, preceded the work of Gervex. His other contemporaries, including Ingres and Degas, were producing numerous studies of the nude, so the naked form, however ‘indecent’, wasn’t necessarily the reason for a public outcry.

The entire “problem” the public would have with Gervex’s painting is literally dumped in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The protruding walking stick is, of course, a phallic symbol, but it is buried almost entirely under female clothes. The top hat rests on this heap of fabric, overturned. The walking stick and the top hat were both the symbols of a bourgeois. Rolla the painting was scandalous not because of nudity, the relaxed pose of the sleeping courtesan, or as the illustration to the work of a no less scandalous author. The outrage was provoked by the depiction of the corrupt state of the gentilshommes who in the heat of passion were bringing the entire social class into submission to a prostitute. Compared to Gervex’s work, the engraving from the edition of de Musset’s collected work looks almost impossibly demure, giving us a Shakespearean-style scene (right).

As to why this painting was chosen for Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto‘s cover, my guess is that Gervex’s Rolla would bode well for the novel’s focus on sexual fantasy and desire, often forbidden.

My Blogiversary

A year ago, on August 24, 2006, after much soul- and mind-searching and researching into the possible ups-and-downs of blogging, I took my online life in my hands and started Notebooks. I have long decided that it would be a kind of online version of my real-life paper notebooks I’ve been carrying around with me since about 1995. I could write about anything, although literature would presumably be the main subject.

The choice for the blog name that seemed so obvious immediately presented me with a challenge: I had to create a decently looking and sounding name for the blog’s URL. From what I remember, “notebooks.blogspot.com” and “notebook.blogspot.com” have already been taken, so I was offered to use “juliasnotebooks” or “notebooksofjulia”. It was a warm early morning in August, and I sat in a totally dark room because I sometimes like sitting and writing in a totally dark room. The room, however, grew darker as my spirits sank lower because I couldn’t bear having any of those cumbersome names for my blog. It had to be good, it had to be something I liked.

Somehow I remembered about The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, which is the English translation of Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto. As I didn’t (and still don’t) know any Iberian language, I did some more research, to make sure that Los Cuadernos de Julia would be grammatically correct. Once I realised that it was, that very important part of the URL was created. Naturally, I had no competition whatsoever.

Turned out, not only did I take my online life in my hands, I did exactly the same thing with my life in general. Through the blog I’ve met different people, I’ve been interviewed, Notebooks have been added to the BBC Manchester Blog, and sometimes I receive personal emails from my readers who, for whatever reason, choose to express their opinion in private. This opinion is positive, but I respect the readers’ privacy, not least because there is already quite a few comments on the blog that sufficiently satiate my vanity. And I must be honest with myself, I didn’t expect any of this to happen.

One thing I was adamant that I wouldn’t be doing was the accommodation of the immediate interest. Which is the reason why this blog isn’t about fashion, or current affairs, or entertainment, or TV, or, indeed, sex. It doesn’t mean I haven’t written or am not going to write on any of these subjects. It simply means that I wanted to create the audience by publishing primarily my thoughts, my interests, and after months of experimenting with various tracking solutions and receiving comments and emails, I know I’ve succeeded.

It’s a bit cheeky on the part of any blogger to announce the anniversary of their blog because it comes across like asking for congratulations, etc. Well, I obviously won’t mind any such (big bashful smile). But I do believe that whatever artists do, they do it for people: readers, listeners, spectators. As one such artist would sing, “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world”. So, I think on this first blogiversary it’s really should be me who says a huge “thank-you” to everyone out there who lands on Notebooks via a search engine, reads the feed, or types the URL in the browser. I write a lot about loneliness and in loneliness, but you’ve given me a wonderful gift of communication, understanding, and expressing the interest and support. What more could I ask for?

Exercises in Loneliness – III

Generally, I love sleepless nights. I love the time when I can read or write, without being disturbed. There is only one exception – I prefer when I am actually enjoying either writing or reading. At the moment, I’m about to embark on a very lengthy text on the topic of martyrdom in Sikhism. And although I already know and understand how the text should be written, I find it daunting to write because – God knows! – I’d prefer to write about something else. More inspiring. More creative.

To stay up in the night has never been difficult for me. I don’t even know how I came to develop such ability. When I was a student, however, my mates at the Uni used to ask me (quite seriously!), what to do in order to stay awake. The question would normally rise during the exam session. I could never give any sound advice, and from what I know, they never actually stayed up.

Writing daunting texts is also nothing new. Back in 2000, I was in my third year and had been writing an essay on Soviet literature between 1925 and 1935. Or, I’d better say, I’d been trying to write such essay. I knew the topic very well, but, strangely, the knowledge had put me off writing the text. The final day of submission was 15 May. 14 May was my mother’s birthday, and we had guests. They left at about 9pm, and I went to the computer. Ten hours later I had written 30 pages – exactly what was required. I took it to the tutor. A week later she told me that she absolutely loved my work and couldn’t find words to express her regret that we hadn’t discuss my essay in our seminar. Well… Perhaps, I’ll rework it for an article one day. :))

The text I need to write now is exactly a half of those 30 pages. The topic – martyrdom – borders on history, philosophy and religion, and I’m looking at the whole of the 17th c. Of course, Asia is not Europe, but the 17th c. is not something totally inconceivable. I think it’s because of him. He is Pascal Quignard. Ever since I read ‘Terrace a Rome’ I wanted to find and read as many of his works, as possible. I couldn’t start reading, but I actually found the Russian translation of ‘Tous les Matins du Monde’ (All the World’s Mornings/Все утра мира) and a couple of extracts from his essay ‘Le Sexe et L’Effroi’ (Sex and Terror/ Секс и страх). And it’s because I’d rather read these works that I find it difficult to write about those Sikh martyrs.

In my life as a reader I went through a series of very intense ‘love affairs’ with different authors. Those whose works I most hungrily devoured were Gorky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, de Sade, Henry Miller, Maugham, Sueskind, Marquez, Llosa, and Vonnegut. Oh, yes, also Wilde, Prevert, and most Russian poets. I’ve got to stop here, otherwise martyrdom will be completely forgotten.

Anyway, I know what I’m going to add to my birthday/Christmas/New Year list. It’s the works of Pascal Quignard. In English, French or Russian, it doesn’t matter.

And an extract from one of his interviews. You can read the article in full here.

Wandering Shadows or the insecurity of thinking
I certainly was not planning to embark on anything so long, I wanted to write books that did not exceed the capacity of my head, if I can put it that way, that I could skim through panoptically. But something like a wave began to get bigger and bigger and to engulf me, as though it was saying to me “Don’t be so cautious with your own life.”
Les Ombres Errantes is the book that has the greatest biographical content. It is important to me that a thought is totally involved in the life you are leading. In this book, I make clear my determination to create a hermitage within the modern world where I praise insecurity of thinking, while the societies in which we live advocate the opposite. The same thing happened at the end of the Roman Empire: in order to counter the return of religious monotheism and imperial pacification, many hermitages were created. The values that are now coming back are all the ones I detest. The return of faith terrifies me and I am filled with despair to see my own friends becoming believers and doctrinarians. We are living in 1571. This St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre atmosphere had to be described. The Wars of Religion are beginning again. Woman is being deified. Death adored. Democracy more violent and inegalitarian than in Pericles’ day. Technology, the object of all worship, and the all-pervasive cult of youth is worse than primitive – it is untamed, psychotic.
Interview conducted by Catherine Argand

In the Mood for Reading (Eco, Murakami, Sueskind…)

I shall start reading Murakami as soon as I finish Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It is a story of a man in his 60s (very much resembling the Master himself), who after an accident lost his explicit memory, i.e. the one associated with emotions. As a result, he remembers everything he’s ever read and speaks in quotes, but when looking at a wedding photo of his parents, he doesn’t remember who they are. All feelings brought up by drinking hot tea and brushing teeth are new (although he’d definitely experienced those before). The book, hence, is the story of a man in search for his lost emotional memories (shall we call it experience?)

Although I already find the book interesting, I couldn’t help pitying myself that I’m reading it in English translation. I should’ve read it in Italian. The problem with translation of this particular text (or rather, its first chapter) is that all characters speak similarly. Now and again I was catching myself on a thought that there’s not much difference between how a doctor, the protaginist (an antique book dealer) and his wife (a psychologist) speak. It’s like one person talking all the time. The wife is particularly disturbing, her speech is so scholastic and unnatural, I began to ponder if I might sound like her at times – which, if I do, is pretty dreadful. [I’m also absolutely sure that I never sound like her, but literature has indeed manifested its power by confusing me]. Anyway, I’m looking forward to next chapters. Oh, there are many illustrations in the book, some in colour.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is published by Vintage Books (London, 2006), translation by Geoffrey Brock.

For some reason, I wasn’t impressed with anything I saw on the ‘Recommended’ bookshelf in the new Waterstones in Manchester. I know I nearly bought a little book by Jerome K. Jerome, but put it on the shelf, went elsewhere, and eventually forgot to buy it. But the books on the ‘Recommended’ stand didn’t hook me. Ten years ago, when I was attending an English class with a native speaker (twice a week, in addition to my normal school hours), one of the topics we once discussed was our reading habits. One member of the group, a medical student in his final year, said that he’d normally read first 10 pages, and if they failed to impress him, he’d put the book back on the shelf.

Back then, being incorrigibly romantic and untarnished by much experience, myself and two other students protested ardently against this student’s ‘erroneous position’. Ten years later, and especially after visiting Waterstones last week, I’ve begun to feel that 10 pages is sometimes too long. Needless to say, when you read exclamations like ‘I couldn’t put the book down!!!‘ coming from a critic writing for a very old and respected edition, you kind of feel confused and even disturbed, if you fail to appreciate the book’s ingenuity. But it’s not my fault that of about seven books that I went through five (!!!) started with a similar exposition. I know definitely that in two of them a protagonist found himself waking up, and in another two the protagonist was riding or driving somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that before an author writes the first sentence, s/he has to go through their entire library, to check if this first sentence is totally original. Equally, I don’t know why those phrases and even styles in which they are written look and sound so similar to one another. I’ve recently gone through several publications of the new Russian poems, and I couldn’t help noticing that most of them are even written in the same metrical foot. This is something I have to say about The Da Vinci Code – although it was a dull and dragging reading at times, it was at least captivating in the beginning.

So, I’m looking for originality, and whilst I’m looking for it, I’m also engorging on the good old classics. I’m going to reread Das Parfuem by Patrick Sueskind. I read the novel ages ago, when I was still a student, and I know it impressed me a lot, and I’d love to read it again before I watch the screen adaptation by Tom Tykwer. I have to say, few adaptations impressed me in the past, the most disappointing being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange also wasn’t particularly pleasing.

I guess it has to do with how we read books. Speaking of A Clockwork Orange (which deserves a different chapter altogether), for me the most important part in the book is when Alex leaves prison. Everything before the book’s final is important, of course, but Alex’s rampages and his time in prison are not what the book is about. It is about human violence, insincerity and indifference, which start in the family and society and the physical expression of which is only the tip of the iceberg. Burgess’s novel (like all good works of literature) depicts – sometimes in a very detailed and painful way – the tip, but the base of the iceberg is always to be found by the reader, providing s/he is attentive to the hints and keys scattered by the author throughout the book.

So, I’m going to reread Das Parfuem, I’m reading the new book by Eco, and I’ll be reading Murakami. And I’ll also be keeping my fingers crossed for Mario Vargas Llosa who, as some tabloids have reported, is in the long list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ll be way over the Moon (and over Aisa Tanaf, perhaps), if he wins it.

Also, this Sunday I’ve been to my first rugby match at the Halliwell Jones Stadium in Warrington. I’ve seen lots of rugby on TV since 2003, but I’ve never been to the rugby stadium before this Sunday. Both teams for which I was supposed to cheer (one of them was a local team, Swinton Lions) lost, and I left half-deaf, without finishing watching the second game. Well, hopefully next time it’ll be better. In the meantime I’m following the football leagues and championships – sporadically, when I decide that the only thing I want to do in my free time is to knit and to listen to the TV.

Los Cuadernos de Julia: Meaning and Content

Los Cuadernos de Julia blog ows its title to the 1997 novel by Mario Vargas Llosa and is an open writer’s notebook.

I am sure a lot of readers wonder (or have done, or will do so) why I gave my blog a name in Spanish, Los Cuadernos de Julia. The truth is, i wanted to use it as my online notebook, but the URL containing the desired name was already taken, so I had to invent something… and here my avid readership came to the rescue.

los-cuadernos-de-don-rigobertoLos Cuadernos de Julia is a paraphrase of the title of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1997 novel, Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto. I bought the book (published in English by Faber&Faber) in the summer of 2004, in WHSmith in Blackpool, but didn’t start reading it until after September, as I had to write my MA dissertation first. When I eventually began to read it, it practically blew me away. I know some critics described the book as ‘ambitious‘ (a word I very much dislike), but to me it is simply one of the most original books of the last century. Obviously, as I know no Spanish, I have to thank the English translator for doing a fantastic job. You can read reviews and purchase a copy of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (affiliate link).
Why cuadernos?

‘Cuadernos’ as ‘notebooks’ are a normal part of life of many writers, which is what I am. These present cuadernos are, of course, slightly different, since I decided that I’d be posting here not only random quotations that I’ve been collecting for years, but also reflections on films, music, works of art, phrases I’ve heard or read elsewhere, musings about news stories, etc. I’ve been doing a similar thing on a website for several months, but sometimes there’s more to post than just a couple of quotes from my beloved Jacques Prevert.

My own mother, who isn’t a writer, also used to have two cuadernos – dark thick exercise-books, in which she had collected quotes and poems. When I was 12 or 13, she gave them to me, and some content influenced me quite profoundly. And providing you have read Llosa’s novel, you surely know that cuadernos played a crucial part in the story. So, it is from these two experiences, plus a couple of ‘tangible’ cuadernos I have already had in my life, that the idea for this blog’s title has originated.

My blog as ‘cuadernos’

For a while I wasn’t sure whether to start a blog or not. Two things have finally compelled me to do so. First, the main page of my web radio programme’s website has become way too small for everything I want to put on it. Half of those things will never make it to the programme, like The Quotes on the Front Page, or some news stories, or various other stuff. Yet I do want to share these things with everyone who is interested, hence I have finally succumbed to blogging.

Secondly, I have never managed or even wanted to write a diary, if the diary is to be understood as a narration of one’s private everyday life. However, the notebooks are different, especially because I’m a writer. So, while using the form of a diary, I’m essentially creating no more or less than a writer’s open notebook. Many things will still be left behind, for one reason or another, but I’m glad I’ll be able to do what few publications would allow me to do, not to mention the restrictions of the radio format.

As for the content, it will hardly be up for any strict systematisation, bearing in mind that its author is also a qualified historian who knows a couple of languages and has many side interests. The only thing that consoles me is that even Umberto Eco’s brilliant ideas are reportedly jotted down on small pieces of paper that are scattered around his flat or stuck in the professor’s case. At least, I’ve got ‘categories’ and ‘tags’…

Other posts in Blogs and Social Media, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julia Shuvalova: Poetry and Prose archives.

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