Locos/Chromos
Stavans, Ilan
Hillenbrand priests in two, with Hillenbrand giving Egan a tongue-lashing at a meeting of the group. But Egan was right and Hillenbrand was wrong, in my opinion, and nothing speaks more...
...F~ LOST IN QUEENS LOCOS A Comedy of Gestures Felipe Alfau Vintage International, $8.95, 206 pp...
...Although the founding Hispanic authors hark back to 1848, when two- fifths of the Mexican territory was sold to the White House, today most people know more about the Hispanic relatives of William Carlos Williams, George Santayana, or John Dos Passos than about the art of an Hispanic-North American author...
...This country's Eurocentrism (understood as the heritage of mainly Italy, France, Great Britain, Eastern Europe, and even Russia) reduces the chance of paying attention to what goes on south of the Rio Grande...
...I l a n Slavan$ ere is a short c.v...
...It's the result of a personal, linguistic, and cultural identity that is difficult to grasp...
...The reason, I think, is rather simple: back in the twenties, he knew he was an avant-garde writer, and that to be appreciated, he would have to appear in what was then--and may not be anymore--New York City's major vehicle of communication...
...A Symposium "Contemporary Implications of The Thought of John Duns Scotus for (.lnderstanding the Hature of the Person, Free wm, and DecLslon-Making in the Private and Public Spheres" June 24-28,1992 Among the speakers: Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, Thomas Shannon, Allan Wolter, OFM Registration $25.00 Rm...
...It subsequently was nominated for the National Book Award...
...Yet none of them knew about Alfan...
...Chromos, the only other novel by the author and one which not a single publisher wanted back in the forties, only saw the light in 1990...
...That mere fact makes it even harder for AngloSaxon culture in New York to recognize as equal the inheritors of Luis de (Jongora and Lope de Vega...
...JOHN C. CORT is a Boston-area writer and frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...Full of fiction-within-fiction devices, it contains almost the same cast of characters as Locos...
...The author of Locos, who is retired and lives in a nursing home in Rego Park, Queens, has as his only interest now to leave this world as soon as possible...
...His family gave him a Catholic education and a sense of irony about things Iberian...
...Although Locos was enthusiastically reviewed by Mary McCarthy and others, it disappeared from the literary scene without a trace...
...Read before the Second World War, while John Dos Passos, E Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Chandler had their fingerprints on every kind of narrative, the book is an extraordinarily compelling experiment...
...ILAN STAVANS, a Mexican novelist and scholar, has recently translated Felip AIfau's collected poetry...
...Since they live in virtual seclusion, biographical information about them is scarce, and it seems that they actively perpetuate their own mystery...
...What I fell in love with, all unknowingly, was the modernist novel as detective story...
...The title of his volume, Locos: A Comedy o f Gestures...
...Perhaps because of its avantgarde technique and its Iberian English, people felt uncomfortable with the book...
...The move to the United States was painful: he felt misplaced, lonely...
...100.00 Conference $125.00 Sponsored by The Franciscan Institute and The Friars Minor of Holy Name Province For more information write: The Franciscan Institute, St...
...Before the flame gutters, a real novel has come to him: a tart and eloquent, sly and feisty kaleidoscope of New York Spaniards, wrought in fire amid the cante hondo of the heart by a hungry artist almost lost, unpublished, to oblivion...
...sick of the stinking individualism in our economic life that has denied to the worker his rightful place in industrial life...
...To think of Alfau's response to his literary rediscovery is to invoke J.D...
...Indeed, the contemporary reader should be thankful for this (re)discovery, and I hope the enthusiastic words in this review will encourage a few to approach the two magical volumes...
...Meanwhile, in 1929 Doubleday published his children's book, OM Tales from Spain, a compendium of invented stories about bullfighting and the Spanish way of life and imagination...
...It stands on its own as the contribution of someone living in the abyss existing between two realities, in the margin, on the edge...
...None of us who were ever moved, even mesmerized, by his lofty eloquence will ever forget him, and I cannot help but close with a quote that sums up the best in the men covered in these books, from a talk of Hillenbrand's at the National Liturgical Week in 1945: People the world over are sick of individualism, of being sundered from others, of the tragic loss that comes from thinking and acting alone...
...That is, until the Dalkey Archive Press, an imprint in Illinois, rediscovered it more than fifty years later in 1988 and brought it back to light...
...Readers who dared to open it found that it had no conventional plot...
...Hence, he belongs to that new branch of Hispanic literature, written in the United States, that must be translated into Spanish in order to be read in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, or Barcelona...
...Can they fight for freedom...
...Although a Francisco Franco supporter, he was not interested in the boredom of politics...
...The price of Locos, which finally got published in 1936 by Farrar & Reinhart, was $2.50...
...The language question is fundamental in understanding him...
...Salinger and even Pynchon...
...about an intriguing literary curiosity...
...When compared to other ethnic minorities-Jewish, African, Asian, Italian--it seems that the writers of Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Chicano background find it difficult to enter the literary mainstream...
...His odyssey symbolizes the fate of Hispanic writers in the United States...
...His decision to change languages places him in the same category with Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Joseph Conrad, the U.S...
...Alfau includes REVIEWERS NANCY M. HAEGEL is an associate professor of materials science at UCLA and a Kellogg National Fellow...
...The publisher paid Alfau $250 for the manuscript and included it as the first title of the new series "Discoverers," distributed in autographed copies to a select club of subscribers...
...In all three books the figure, or shadow, of that amazing and tragic man, Reynold Hillenbrand, distracts one's attention...
...But Egan was right and Hillenbrand was wrong, in my opinion, and nothing speaks more eloquently in Egan's behalf, or in behalf of Cardinal Samuel Stritch and his doughty chancellor, Monsignor Edward Burke, who backed him, than the losing fight those three put up against the city and the university...
...People are sickofthe individualism that has made of political life an unspeakably sordid thing...
...But not only did Alfau jump from one code to another...
...During his youth, he was for a while a music critic for La Prensa, an up-and-coming Spanish-language newspaper in Manhattan...
...Felipe Alfau, a Spanish writer born in Barcelona in1902 and raised in Guernica and Madrid, emigrated to New York City in 1916, at age fourteen...
...The three have done everything to evade publicity and escape the plight of fame...
...And indeed, as in The Brothers Karamazov and Don Quixote, within the novel there's another novel, as if art suddenly decided to stop describing life and began to imitate itself...
...Admittedly, Alfau did both texts not because he wanted to become a professional writer but in order to earn money...
...McCarthy herself, in one of her final essays, wrote an epilogue for the 1988 edition in which she explained how, when she first read Locos and reviewed it for the Nation, it changed her way of perceiving literature...
...Also, since 1492, when Christopher Columbus first set foot in what would be called the Americas, there have been two different stories cohabiting in the vast continent: the success of the North and the defeat of the South...
...A New Yorkercritic said that although "Alfau wrote with a confidence astonishing in a twenty-sixyear-old, beneath the comedy and the surrealistic effects, and the glare and shadows," the pages were inhabited by a"whispered secret," a mysterious light--as if the author was "gestur[ing] to his public from his side of the peculiar one-way mirror that is reflexive art...
...His work belongs to two distinct traditions and thus has a dual referential code...
...he actually made the linguistic dilemma one of his central themes...
...It was an immediate sensation...
...One can see Alfau's style in Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Spain's novelist Luis Martin-Santos, and the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges...
...Today, it's a revelation...
...They are sick of the individualism that has undone so many homes...
...In Italy, France, and Holland, immediate translation followed, and in Spain it was published by the prestigious publishing house Seix Barral...
...CHROMOS Felipe Alfau Vintage International, $11,348 pp...
...sick, above all, of the individualism in international life that has left the world a shambles...
...The man was flawed perhaps (who isn't...
...Paul West, one of the judges, wrote in the citation: "Finished in 1948, [the novel] sets an imaginary Alfau dreaming in front of old calendar pictures by the light of a match...
...They are sick of individualistic, subjective piety because it lacks depth and vision...
...Felipe Alfau is a product of that noman's-land reality--somehow, like Kafka's characters, he is a frontier inhabitant...
...They discuss many topics: panhandling and theft, love and violence, metaphysics and music, all parading in intertwined anecdotes, recollections, and philosophical dissertations...
...The theme now moves around a bunch of actors, fantasists, mathematicians, singers, guitar players, all of Iberian origin, who endlessly discuss life, physics, and relativity in a Manhattan that hardly notices them...
...but nobody today says it any better...
...But the value of the author of Locos transcends egalitarian feelings and ethnic qualities...
...I am envious of those who for the first time will be enchanted by this genius, a curiosity and a prophet who foresaw the literary tastes of the future...
...His relevance today comes from his disturbing, remarkable voice...
...Bonaventure, New York 14778 20 December 1991:759...
...poet laureate Joseph Brodsky, and the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante...
...The author himself meets the characters--Lunarito, Gast6n Bejarano, Don Benito, Juan Chinelato, Dofia Micaela, Garcfa, Don Graciano Bdez, Sister Carmela, and Father Inocencio--in a bizarre gathering place in Toledo, Spain, called Caf6 de los Locos...
...It was my fatal type," she wrote...
...The year was 1928...
...Why did he switch to English after having written journalistic pieces in Spanish...
...At the time, his motherland was engaged in a cruel and ultimately meaningless Civil War, and any artistic product read in Manhattan or Paris, written by a Spaniard, had to be concerned with ideology and the battle against fascism...
...and Bd...
...And after a few years, picking up the native tongue in the street, he wrote a novel in English...
...It was clearly ahead of its time...
...When trying to sell it, he found that nobody quite understood its labyrinthine structure and metafictional devices...
...758: Commonweal Sherlock Holmes in his cast, and surrounds the story with the suspense derived from the questions: Will the characters disobey their creator...
...The volume is titled Sentimental Songs (The Dalkey Archive Press...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
