Poem of the Cid

In my current quest to both read up about Spain and clear off my TBR pile, this volume did double duty. And if the question arises what book did I read this year that was longest on my TBR pile, this one will definitely be a strong candidate.

The Poem of the Cid (according to the back cover) was "written by an unknown Castilian around 1140, nearly a century after the birth of its hero." As the introduction points out, there could very well have been people alive who had known the Cid; still it feels like the world of legends.

Rodrigo Ruy Diaz de Bivar is the Cid, the successful military leader of a band of knights that fight the Islamic states at that time in the south of Spain; also he has to deal with enemies at court that poison his relationship with King Alfonso, and the beginning of the story finds him exiled.

I'm no expert and I'm a little reluctant to say much. I thought it was a good read as translated by the American poet W. S. Merwin. Only three points:

One, I was a bit surprised by the class elements in this. Rodrigo the Cid is aristocracy, but is looked down upon by the more high-born; when the king pushes his high-born enemies to marry the Cid's daughters, they're resentful and deliberately insult the Cid's daughters. I suppose it's a bit like Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well but his aristocratic enemies are much worse than Bertram is.

Two, it ends well for the Cid. Somehow that strikes me as unusual for a medieval epic. The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf all have a melancholic ending. The Cid is triumphant over his enemies. Be honorable, stick with your king, and things turn out well. That's the message.

And three, I read Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan about a year ago and quite liked it. I suppose it's not a surprise, but he really had the Poem of the Cid on his mind.  His Rodrigo Belmonte owes quite a lot to Rodrigo Ruy Diaz.

A well (?) - read book

Alas, what was it about books printed in the seventies? They finally get the acid out of the paper so the pages don't yellow, but they were still being cheap about bindings. I've had this for years (though not since its publication date of 1975) but it did not survive even one reading. Pity, because I liked it and I would otherwise keep it.

Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station

Leaving The Atocha Station is the debut novel of Ben Lerner, author at that point of three volumes of poetry. It came out in 2011, though the events take place in 2003, 2004.

The Atocha station is the main train station in Madrid, Spain. "Leaving The Atocha Station" is a poem in John Ashbery's book The Tennis Court Oath.

The novel is told by Adam Gordon who's living in Spain on a fellowship; the goal of his fellowship is to study the Spanish Civil War and produce an epic poem about the subject. Instead he seems to smoke a lot of hash and take some sort of unspecified pills. He tells us his Spanish isn't very good and maybe it's not; in the beginning he seems uncomfortable talking to actual Spaniards, though he remains interested in the girls; gradually that changes. He gets involved in the poetry scene. Towards the end of the novel the Madrid train bombings and the subsequent protests occur. Gordon's friends are involved, though he's not otherwise directly affected.

The novel is funny; it has that sort of confessional humor where you reveal embarrassing things about yourself. Adam tells us of his lies and his lusts, his drug use, his doubts. Think There's Something About Mary.

This confessional humor is compounded by the clear connection between Adam Gordon and Ben Lerner: both are young poets, both won fellowships to study in Spain, both have a pair of psychologist parents living in Kansas. You squirm and say, did he really do that?! Or is this just a novel?

This seems to be a thing these days, this flirtation with the confessional. Is it memoir? Is it a novel? An obvious comparison is Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? On a more monumental scale, there's the Knausgaard series, which I haven't read any of. The modern root of the phenomenon at least in English is maybe Chris Kraus' I Love Dick. David Shields' Reality Hunger tries to provide an intellectual defense. It does add a feeling of trueness that the character is so close to the author; the confessional adds to that sense this must be real. I think I Love Dick is the best of the ones I've read. But I also have a real suspicion of this trend.

At its worst it becomes just solipsistic, and that seems to me just a way of abandoning what the novel is best at, what it's most unique strength is: the ability to present the interior world of multiple people in conjunction.

I felt the solipsism strongly in the first half of Lerner's novel. It was probably intended; the book is funny about the limitations of an imperfectly understood language. Then later the injection of important political events alleviates it and reminds us that the Adam Gordon character is a bit jejune, that he is (possibly) coming out of a shell by the end of the novel. But it's a risk and one I don't think the novel entirely overcomes.

Book Beginning: Olga Tokarczuk's Flights

I'm a few years old. I'm sitting on the window sill, surrounded by strewn toys and toppled-over block towers and dolls with bulging eyes.

...is the beginning of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights.

This came out in English last year from Fitzcarraldo Editions (they're not spending any money on cover design, are they?) but originally in Polish in 2009, where it apparently won some awards. It's translated by Jennifer Croft.

The description on the back begins, "Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy (!) is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body."

The first section, a little more than a page long, is a rather dreamy recollection of the narrator's childhood. I'm not much past that at the moment. It's going to cover Poland for my Europe challenge at Rose City Reader.

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like.