I despise Anse Bundren.

He’s not a man. He’s a weasel. I took up “As I lay dying” again and ended up disgusted with this wretch of a man. I will say that you should read this book because whenever a character can inspire such strong feelings in you it means that the book is good. By that standard, this book is superb. I won’t tell you why I hate him so you can read it yourself and come to hate him as much as I do, which I’m sure you will.


The book was also my introduction to the stream-of-consciousness style and while it’s hard to follow at times it’s also fascinating: “- My mother is a fish. Darl is my brother. Jewel’s mother is a horse. My mother is a fish.” Peppered in between are real issues that will leave you pondering, like “Is he really crazy or do we call someone crazy when he doesn’t think like everybody else?” The value of a promise, of life, material things… all are covered and played out through the almost Dantesque journey.

I strongly recommend you read this book. Besides, if you’re American, you have to. You just have to.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

All of Camus’ writings should start with that disclaimer. By the way, I hate it when people quote “Dante’s Inferno” because there is no such thing, so for the record, I am quoting “The Divine Comedy” which happens to be split in three: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The fact that some editor decided that people didn’t really care about Purgatory and Heaven and published the Hell section separately does not a stand-alone book make. In fact, you don’t get to the best part. Anyway, Dante is not a Nobel Prize Laureate, so enough about him.


I ended up reading more than one of Camus’ books, since I have a collection of his works. As I mentioned before, I read “The Plague” followed by “The Fall” and continuing with “Exile and The Kingdom”. It’s always the same story with different characters and set in different places, so don’t bother. His message always is “There’s no hope in life. All you can aspire to is death”. If you read reviews about him they’ll say things like “insightful” and “shows the greatest understanding of the human mind”, but I personally don’t know where they get that from, unless all the critics are as limited in vision as he is and fail to grasp that life does have a meaning. Even if you were to take the supernatural out of the equation, Wouldn’t you say that helping others and making them happier, devoting yourself to service, could be deemed to be the meaning of life? I read once that the Greek Hedonists became more stoic than the Stoics, because in due time they came to realize that the only true pleasures were those of the spirit, and sometimes I think that people like Camus just didn’t have enough time to come to the same conclusion. I don’t know if he might have, but he did die before he was 40.

If you start reading one of his books, it will suck you in, I assure you. His narrative is powerful. He’ll have you flying high just to drop you suddenly and without warning into a pit of despair and hopelessness. If you’re curious read one and you’ll know how all his books end.

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.

Off to 1971.

And off to Latin America, or as we sometimes more aptly call it, Hispanic America (Hispanoamérica), to meet Pablo Neruda. So my friend Adam knew of my idea and gave me three books, “Confieso que he vivido” (I confess that I have lived) by Pablo Neruda is the first one of those three.

Neruda is a card carrying Communist, atheist, promiscuous, selfish man… that also happens to be a genius. How is it that God showers such a man with an uncanny understanding of nature and mankind that allows him to capture the essence of places and people and put it on paper as if he were reading their DNA code? I don’t know, but that is for my friends that write about philosophy and theology to discuss, I just find myself mesmerized by the details of his life in Chile, his trips abroad as a consul of his country, his political career as a Senator representing the poorest region of Chile, his escape from his political adversaries and his seemingly un-ending love for the written word. This book is written in prose and it does not contain a single one of his poems (most of which are not suitable for the Anglo-Saxon personality, I don’t think) but it does capture the essence of this man and lets you understand his view of the world that ultimately influenced his poetry.

I don’t agree with him in anything when it comes to morality and values. Not a single thing. Sometimes I am tempted to throw the book across the room in anger (which would be rude and, possibly expensive, since I normally read at bars, sipping a beer and I would hit the stack of bottles facing the bar with it) but then I read a few more lines and he steps away from his reprehensible discourse (for whenever he talks of love, God, good and evil he is always dead wrong) and gets back to describing to me countries and people and feelings in such a way that it makes me feel like I am there, like I am smelling, touching, seeing Valparaíso, Santiago, Perú, Rangoon, Paris, Madrid, México (he even mentions my beloved home State of Sonora)… it makes me think how much richer (if that is even possible) his poetry would have been were he alive today, and able to benefit from the modern jet that can take you to any corner of the world in less than 24 hours... On the other hand, he is the fruit of the mid 1900’s, with all the turmoil of the Spanish civil war (that changed every Hispanic American country), World War II and the ideological wars of capitalism and communism. That was his breeding ground, that intellectual environment was the soil that fed him.

Read this book. Read it soon! Even if you don’t like it as much as I do, you will have learned much about my people, through the words of one of his most celebrated sons.

If you’re the kind of people that needs closure, don’t read this book.

Because the book is like people watching. Not a single storyline is concluded. The book ends completely open-ended, some characters are just left by the wayside without ever appearing again and it is unclear who is good, bad, right, wrong… It’s all left to us, readers, to decide. I’ve always said that I have a lot more respect for a staunch enemy than for a weak ally: at least I know where the enemy stands. I would have liked for the author –who definitely has a stance- to carry it ‘til the end. Some may say he does, but I don’t think so. Some may say there’s sufficient evidence to know what his stance is, what the ending should be. I say that may be true as a whole (communism is reprehensible and unsustainable as a form of government) but it’s not true as it pertains to the characters. In the end, if I wanted to read about the evils of communism in the abstract, I would have bought a political science book or a history book. I bought a novel.


Not all is lost, of course, after all, the author is a Nobel prize winner. It is still an impressively well written book, just not one that I’ll find myself re-reading anytime soon, if ever.