u/WhereIsArchimboldi

Rodrigo Fresán is an author I have been wanting to read for years ever since reading his write up on Bolano in the Believer mag (https://www.reddit.com/r/robertobolano/s/z8xzBN8cz6) and learning of his cameo in 2666*. I’ve had a copy of The Invented Part for a few years but never started it. Melvill seemed like a better entry point- not just the length but because I am a Herman Melville** fanatic***. The best way to give you an idea of what this novel is, will be to quote from the back of this book where Fresán says:

“On pages 109-110 of the English edition of my 2019 novel, La parte recordada (published in English as The Remembered Part, 2022) (and in a context where the narrator is criticizing the proliferation of fictions about the lives and work of real writers), it says the following:
And, yes, hed once fantasized about writing a novella about Herman Melville's father: a beautiful loser, walking across the frozen Hudson River to return to his family and die among them amid deliriums and with his young son seeing it all and taking notes and thinking of the whiteness of the snow and the ice that'd struck down the author of his days…”****

While based on true events and including biographical details, this is no biography, this is a book of style, a book of prose poetry “a pure style of book, a book of pure style”(pg 198).

And so, Part 1 of the novel (a book of 3 parts-Fresán frequently writes in 3 parts due to the influence of The Beatles song “A Day in the Life” and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and because he does not write linear but writes in the different parts at the same time “working with 3 different playgrounds I can jump from one to the other”*****) Alan Melvill is crossing a frozen Hudson River a few nights before he catches a fever goes mad and dies with a young Herman standing by his deathbed taking in the delirious ramblings for days before he passes. This first part includes footnotes by Herman Melville, a Melville who seems to be outside of time and knows the future and destiny of his name and work. These footnotes are digressions inside of digressions but never extraneous and the digression and tangent is the story itself. Fresan’s writing is a unique experience and it beautifully rambles on. He has beautiful metaphors equal to the great Melville.

Part 2 loses the footnotes and is Alan Melvill narrating to the young Herman about his crossing of the frozen Hudson and his “Grand Tour” (his experience in Europe when he was younger). This section turns surreal and at times gothic. Reading this is a wild and truly imaginative experience. The title of part 2 is “GLACIOLOGY OR, THE TRANSPARENCY OF THE ICE” and we get a cataloguing of ice in which Alan proceeds to list and reference everything possible about ice in a similar way Melville lists every reference to Whales in the “Extracts” section of Moby Dick or his deep dive into the color White in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale”. I can’t help but think of ice (being a substance that can preserve prehistoric animals or even people who have been frozen in hope that one day they can be revived (e.g. Walt Disney)) as a metaphor for Moby-Dick and how once getting rediscovered (in the 1920s) it revived the memory and legacy of Herman Melville- his life and his other works. Fresan also gives us the (seemingly obvious) metaphor of Moby-Dick the novel being a “Great White Whale” that “won’t be spotted for years, but, oh, will it make a comeback, and when it does… there she blows!”(pg 199) finally rising one day (to breach) and spout its miraculous water.

In Part 3, we are briefly back to a story being footnoted by Herman but he soon emerges (quite literally) from the footnotes to take over the narration (rising up from the frozen waters and breaking to the surface). This section gets sentimental in a beautiful way. Exploring life and death, the timeless Father / Son relationship, last words and advice from a dying father.

This book truly blew me away. Fresán is a self professed “referential maniac” and this book is oozing with references and allusions (some obvious and some obscure). Truly a referential maniac who has gobbled up so much art and culture and spits it out in all shapes and sizes throughout this novel—-“And who was it who said, says, will say this? It happens to me more and more: the
feeling of capturing thoughts and ideas of others past or present. Of being like a kind of magnet or mouth and throat of a Maelström that pulls toward it everything it needs from other people, and uses it, and once it's chewed up and digested, sends it back up to the surface completely transformed and, hopefully, transformative.”

Like anyone closely associated with Bolaño, Fresán writes about reading and writing and Literature. Here’s one line the struck me:
“Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other Shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.”
&
“Know this: ghosts live in books. No house can consider itself really and truly possessed and haunted if it doesn't have a respectable library to respect and, on occasion, to terrorize the people who live there with the fact that the horror of everything they'll never read will always surpass the joy of the great deal they have read’”

I’m so happy I finally cracked open a Fresan novel because now I am experiencing the joy of discovering a new author I absolutely love an author you want to instantly go out and buy all of their work, I already started The Invented Part - just finished up the first part and good god it is incredible, it seems like it will far surpass Melvill in greatness!******

P.S. check out this great (podcast) read along of Melvill on the 2 Month Review podcast with Chad Post at https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2024/12/13/tmr-24-6-liquidate-it-at-cost-melvill/
(The final episode includes Rodrigo Fresán as the guest.)

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* 2666-The Part About the Critics pages 59-60, the critics are near the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens and see a young Spanish couple approach the Peter Pan statue. The man jots something down and says aloud, “Kensington Gardens.” Fresán’s novel Kensington Gardens is about the life of J.M. Barre, the creator of Peter Pan.
**Melville’s mother added the “e” to their last name after the death of Alan to avoid his unpaid debts and creditors.
***I am obsessed with all of Melville’s work and any Melville paraphernalia (I read the relatively recent: Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder & Krasznahorkai's
Spadework for a Palace).
****And I’d add another quote (relating to the idea for the novel) from a footnote in the first part of Melvill
“Since twelve-year-old Herman had been withdrawn from school the previous October, he was in the house all during the last weeks of his father's life. Whatever horror the young Herman saw and heard during the days before and after Allan Melvill's death (and what influence that might have had on someone at such a tender and permeable age) was not recorded. And yet..."
***** Rodrigo says this in a wonderful interview on the “Between The Covers” podcast (December 9, 2024 episode).
****** One last favorite quick quote to convince you to pick up this incredible book: “Lives are, really, books of stories. They are born and they die, yes, but between one point and the other they begin and end multiple times and sometimes, their discrete parts and doors are closed in order to leave their endings open.” (pg 177)

When I think of the label “magical realism” in regards to Marquez, I don’t think of the fantastical elements in his novels but the magical prose. There is something truly magical about Gabo’s prose that hypnotizes me. It is utterly unique – im thinking here of the long paragraphs of flowery prose with no dialogue, split up/ separated by a short powerful sentence or two of dialogue. Narration goes on for pages and then there’s a simple line like “Cease cows, life is short”, that hits so much harder because of the lack of other dialogue and its separation from the big blocks of texts. The “magic”  is also in the way he describes a fantastical element of his story in such a matter of fact way (famously inspired by the way his grandmother told stories and cemented by his reading of Kafka). His works are deep with symbolism and rich for analyzing but mainly a joy to read. For me, Marquez is my response to the question “what is your comfort read” (it is the closest answer I have to what the question is trying to invoke but in reality everything I read and reread is a comfort read including big challenging novels.) He mastered that fine line between being wildly popular with the average readers and critics alike in a way I can only compare to Stanley Kubrick. His sentences always seem so masterfully crafted and the writing is so melancholic and beautiful. For those not familiar- his constant themes are Solitude, Power, Time,  Love, and Death.  Below is my top 5.

 
Love in the Time of Cholera
The most masterly crafted of his novels. Every sentence and every paragraph seem perfect. Almost every page has deep insights into youth, aging, love (and of course Death).
100 Years of Solitude
His masterpiece in which nothing needs to be said. Yes of course, this should be #1 but I wanted to put emphasis on the greatness of Love in the Time of Cholera.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabo set out to make a more difficult novel after 100 Years being so wildly read and loved. Dense beautiful prose (not many paragraph breaks), this is his “poem on the solitude of power”. I read somewhere that this is Fernanda Melchor’s favorite Marquez novel. For most authors this would be their masterpiece.
A Chronicle of Death Foretold
This short work is a great “why dunnit” instead of a “who dunnit”. Based on real events and told in the typical beautiful prose.
A General in His Labyrinth
I loved the atmospheric and melancholic writing of this one and even though I am ignorant to all of the historical details around Simon Bolivar (the General) many plot points going beyond me, I was still able to ride the beauty of the prose.

** **
There is also his “perfect” short story No One Writes to the Colonel (Bolano once called this short story a “perfect work”), and with praise like that maybe it was over hyped for me because I think it was good but nothing on the level of his novels (maybe I am too biased towards long novels). I will also say that I did not enjoy Of Love and Other Demons, it’s not bad and I’ve actually saw a post with someone saying this is their favorite, but I had no interest in this one. The Gerald Martin biography is a great read, the celebrity of this man was incredible because it is so hard to imagine an author in today’s (illiterate) world to be so famous and loved. His life is full of interesting scenarios like his freinship with Fidel Castro and the incredible story behind the writing of100 Years of Solitude.

 
What are some of your favorites of Gabo and why?
Is he the great foundational stone of Latin American Lit?
The “new Cervantes” of the Americas!?

looking at my old McSweeny’s issues (this one is from 2014) and came across this gem. In it we have stories from Mariana Enriquez, Alejandro Zambra, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa. The first story is by Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru) translated by the great Bolaño translater Natasha Wimmer.