Ladies and Gentlemen, pinch hitting for Faulkner, Albert Camus.

Yes, I was defeated by Faulkner, although only momentarily. I can’t continue reading his book right now, it’s too difficult and I’m in the midst of filing the first quarterly report with the SEC. Too much to handle.


I went to the bookstore the other day thinking I would get some Tagore, Solojov or someone else to help me get out of the Faulkner rut. They didn’t have most of the Laureates, Can you believe that? The best writers in the world and they don’t have their books, but ask for Palin’s, the unauthorized biography of Oprah or Obama’s audacity of… whatever, and they have them by the scores. Pathetic.

Anyway, they had Camus, and even though I’ve read “L’etranger” (in Spanish) years ago and found it an extraordinarily odd book –wonderfully written, masterful in what it conveys- that left me with a physical feeling similar to what you get when you see a dead animal on the side of the road, a mix of disgust and curiosity, I bought Camus’ book, as he was the first laureate that they actually had.

Well, it turns out that the book has three of his novels and some essays. I am now reading the first one, called “The Plague”, and it’s exactly about that, a plague that strikes the French town of Oran. It starts by killing all the rats and then it transfers to people. I’m right now in the middle of the worst of the plague, almost two hundred died just yesterday, but the most interesting thing is that the different characters' reactions run the whole spectrum from despair to resignation and everything in between.

His characters don’t really have any faith in God, the authorities, or even plain simple destiny. They are afraid to die –most of them- yet they refuse to let the plague really alter the way they live. It’s as if they had concluded that so long as they don’t acknowledge it, the plague doesn’t really exist. Sounds familiar? I think we do that all the time.

I haven’t gotten to the part where Camus makes his attack on the institutions of modern society, as all existentialists do. I know he will, he always does, but for now, I’m enjoying the read and eager to find out if… Well, I can’t give it away. You might want to read it.

Faulkner and the language barrier.

Okay, I have to admit that I’ve read two non-Nobel laureate books between Neruda and now. I won’t apologize, Perez-Reverte deserves it, and besides, I’m only skipping ahead a little bit, as I’m sure that Don Arturo will win the prize, eventually.


I thought my English was good. I mean, I grew up in a Mexican border town, some of my college classes and most of my books were in English, I’ve been in this country for six years, I barely speak a word of Spanish on a normal day –unless it’s to myself- and I don’t watch TV in Spanish (they don’t have any good channels on cable), so I thought my English was good. Good enough. It all changed when I started reading Faulkner’s “As I lay dying”.

What?

Yes, that’s the only thing I can say about the book.

What?..

Sorry, Pablo.

I wish he’d been around to see where all his beautiful communism ended. Well, it never even really made it to communism, it stayed in socialism and amounted to nothing. I wish he’d said something about that abomination called the Berlin wall. Would he have rejoiced, like I did –yes, I was 11 at the time and remember it perfectly- with seeing huge slabs of concrete fall under people’s sledge hammers? Would he have smiled at seeing long-lost cousins, maybe sons and daughters, husbands and wives, reunited for the first time in decades? Perhaps not. He would have said something about the failed promises of capitalism and the destruction of the true communist dream. And he would have said that at least they still had China. Well, Pablo, I wish you could have seen China become the most powerful force in capitalism today. And they are smart, they are playing –sometimes controlling- the world’s free markets, fueled by a seemingly never ending, cheaper-than-dirt work force. Oh, they figured it out alright, but not how to turn the system into the people’s paradise, but how to turn people into cogs of their capitalist machine.


No, Pablo, you were wrong. Always wrong. At least I know that wherever you are now, heaven, purgatory or hell, you know it. Now you know it. If only your rhetoric had gone away with you instead of leading others to error.

You were wrong.