Dear Reader,
If you could visit the grave of any artist whose would it be? Have you made any such pilgrimages already? Ten years ago, my daughter and I went to pay our respects to Keats, Severn, Shelley and others at the Protestant cemetery in Rome. We had a picnic in a park in Testaccio and then brought flowers to their graves.
I still can’t get over how young Keats and Shelley were when they wrote their great poems.
Our book this week was also written by a great writer in her youth. Valeria Luiselli has received acclaim for her recent work, especially for The Lost Children Archive, but even in this first book, her voice gleams with a perspicacious, wry, and generous authority. As with the work of any great essayist, you finish wanting to spend more time in the company of her powerful, compassionate mind.
Review
Sidewalks
Valeria Luiselli
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Coffee House Press, 2014
110 pages
$16.95
Mother Tongue
Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her memoir Hope Abandoned of the poet Joseph Brodsky “He is . . . a remarkable young man who will come to a bad end, I fear.” When asked about this in 1979 by Sven Birkerts for The Paris Review, Brodsky, who had lived in the US exile from the Soviet Union since 1972, replied,
In a way I have come to a bad end. In terms of Russian literature—in terms of being published in Russia. However, I think she had in mind something of a worse denomination—namely, physical harm. Still, for a writer not to be published in his mother tongue is as bad as a bad end.
Brodsky continued to write in Russian, profoundly grieved not to be living and working in Russia, but he also embraced English with a wild fervor, via Auden and Frost, and ultimately wrote strong prose works in English including Watermark, his collection about Venice, and essays such as “A Room and a Half.”
The Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli traced a reverse or inverse journey. She had a transnational childhood and education. Her debut book, the essay collection Sidewalks first published in 2010 as Papeles Falsos, was part of an effort to come home, to the Spanish language and to Mexico. She explained to David Naimon on Between the Covers,
I wrote that book with a very clear intention to make Spanish my mother tongue. It hadn’t been, ever. Although it was spoken in my house, it wasn‘t a language I had grown up writing, reading, or even speaking, so I made the decision to inhabit my mother tongue, to make it really my mother tongue, but also at the same time to inhabit Mexico City in a deeper way. Because I had never really lived in my own city. So it had to be written in Spanish . . . it was very much a book that was at the same time a project of belonging.
Since Sidewalks, Luiselli has gone on to publish Faces in the Crowd, a novel which parallels the lives of a contemporary female translator with the life of the early 20th century poet Gilberto Owen in Harlem and Mexico, as well as two books about the immigration crisis in America: a novel The Lost Children Archive, and essay collection Tell Me How It Ends. Both draw on her volunteer work as a translator for children facing deportation proceedings.
Poor Brodsky never made it home to St. Petersburg where he belonged; his widow had him buried in Venice. Luiselli goes looking for him as she begins her project.
Searching for a grave is to some extent, like arranging to meet a stranger in a café, the lobby of a hotel, or a public square in that both activities engender the same way of being there and looking: at a given distance, every person could be the one waiting for us; every grave the one we are searching for.
That this book about a young writer finding her way back to Mexico begins and ends with a solitary quest to find a Russian poet in a Venetian graveyard tells you a great deal about Luiselli. She allows not just a capacious sense of irony, but also a kind of lonely, rebellious panache to flourish in her work.
Lost Rivers
We see this again as Luiselli returns to Mexico City and gets lost in a library of maps in her search for the city’s origins as an island in the middle of a great salt lake.
Dust attracts dust. There must be a scientific explanation for this, but I’ve no idea what it is. All the dust in the Valley of Mexico City accumulates in the Map Library as if this were its fate, its natural destination.
The inverse affinities with Brodsky continue. He lost his beloved rivers and canals of St. Petersburg due to exile. Luiselli’s Mexico City has lost its rivers and lake due to environmental degradation and urban sprawl. Tears well up, “an expression of resistance to the descent to a future world, which as it draws closer, becomes once again immeasurable.”
Mental Music
In his interview with Sven Birkerts, and as cited in a recent online panel by scholar Christopher Benfey, Brodsky expresses admiration for the “mental music” of Susan Sontag’s essays.
Luiselli’s writing has a very specific and compelling mental music, which often exposes her writing process and her influences. She has said that she likes to see the stitches on her work. A meditation on melancholy and the Portugese word saudade requires, for example, a bicycle ride at dusk.
Around six in the evening when that last layer of daylight begins to detach itself from the objects in our living room and the electric light serves only to blur the somewhat unclear outlines of things even further, I feel an urge to leave the apartment. I don’t know if it’s because matter itself becomes reckless with the first shadows of night—as if darkness allows objects to overflow a little beyond themselves and things are on the point of breaking their pact of silence with the world—or if it’s just I who can't find peace at that tranquil hour.
I am, alas, not able to read the original Spanish, but Christina MacSweeney has partnered with the author to create a truly musical translation. The single paragraph piece titled “Cement” about a murder in Luiselli’s neighborhood is like a tiny, terrible fugue.
Inverse Process
In an essay that jumps off from the variety of urban wilds, small undeveloped parcels of land around Mexico City called relingos, Luiselli makes connections between “the cartography of empty spaces” and the process of writing, “an inverse process of restoration. A restorer fills the holes in a surface . . . a writer starts from the fissures and the holes.” Valeria Luiselli created Sidewalks not so much to repair as to inhabit the various gaps we find in our lives and selves, and to write from them. The conclusion of this book in Venice contains both comic surprise and cosmic rightness. This little, restless, lyrical book of longing and belonging is one good way into a deeply necessary body of work.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Around the same time that Valeria Luiselli was writing Sidewalks, a trove of vintage prints by the Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo surfaced. You can discover more about her work in this New York Times Lens blog and slideshow.
Poem of the Week
Here are the final stanzas of Anthony Hecht’s translation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem about Venice, Lagoon, which he dedicated to Brooke and Strobe Talbott
For Your Reading Radar
Conservationist William deBuys joined medical missions to remote areas of Nepal in 2016 and 2018. The Trail to Kanjiroba is his account of these journeys with reflections on his search for hope when humanity is on the brink. Terry Tempest Williams says “Bill deBuys has written a walking prayer about beauty, hope, and longing in the service of human dignity and a living planet. Though set in Nepal in the high altitude grace of Dolpo, this is a spiritual pilgrimage contemplating the journey from grief toward love.”
For Your Calendar
Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, NM is hosting Bill deBuys on August 17th at 6 PM Mountain Time.
Also, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, TX is hosting a launch celebration for Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2 on August 26th at 6:30 PM Central Time. The line-up includes two women writers who were, like Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico City: Andrea Chapela, and Aura García-Junco.
Bookstore of the Week
This week I’m linking books mentioned in the issue to Word Up, an independent and collectively-run non-profit bookstore in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Buy some books from these folks!
But let’s also visit a bookshop in Mexico City. Casa Bosques in the Roma district has been on my list to visit some day. There are lots of other good bookstores in the area, and it’s not far from the Jardin Pushkin, so I like to think both Valeria Luiselli and Joseph Brodsky would approve.
I’m going sailing next week so will probably take next Friday off, but we shall see how things go! xo Nicie