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arirang's review
2.0
"The same year my father got sick I published a novel in which I killed him.
I've spent whole days, years, studying my father and resentment has often worked its way into my writing. I've had my revenge. And yet, as Amoz Oz writes in his memoir, 'he who seeks the heart of the tale in the space between the work and its author is mistaken: the place to look is not the terrain between text and writer, but between text and reader...'. Much of what I've written was prompted by my father, but I've never written about him. Those were other fathers, other people's fathers.
Now I'm writing about him."
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris was one of my favourite books of 2014, and I was keen to read more. Unfortunately neither of his subsequent novels has yet been translated into English, leaving us to date with just a short story collection, and this, a non-fictional memoir of his relationship with his father, the artist Juan Giralt.
The book reads beautifully, for which Natasha Wimmer, best known as translator of Roberto Bolano's 2666, deserves equal credit.
However, ultimately I was left feeling that while I understood why Giralt Torrente wrote it, I was less clear what I gained from reading it.
Giralt Torrente wrote this book in 2009 after the death of his father from cancer in 2007 (when the author was in his late 30s), his father having been separated from his mother since Torrente was a teenager.
The most illuminating part of the book is Giralt Torrente's detailed thoughts on the difference between fiction and personal memoir, both from the writer's and the readers' perspectives.
As a novelist, as the quote above shows, he rightly sees his books as, while being inspired by his life including his relationship with his father, not being about his life. Nevertheless, his father saw more of himself in Paris than the author explicitly intended - in a way reminiscent of the process Javier Marias (an obvious literary precursor of Giralt Torrente) describes in Dark Back of Time.
"Before I realised it, the childhood I was trying to elaborate began to take on elements of my own. The narrator, an adult narrator looking back on his childhood, was an only child, and the epicentre of his family was his mother, with whom he lived and shared the ambivalent memory of an absent father. I lent him the feeling of dread and the thought I had at the time, but that was all I took from my own experiences. Or at least so I thought while I was writing it.
My father, however, saw things differently. Just recently I found out he was very upset by it."
Even the choice of the double barrelled surname as the name under which his books appeared (his maternal grandfather was also a novelist) was seized on both by critics, and by his father's family, as symbolic of his parental relationships.
Giralt Torrente eloquently describes the difficulties of writing memoir over fiction:
"Up until now I'd never written in my own voice. I had written fictionally about reality, as one always does, but it wasn't my reality and I wasn't the one narrating. It's a new and confusing feeling. With fiction, you can say anything. In your own voice, either you're tempted to leave things out or you miss being able to make things up. I've passed through both states in previous pages
Really, though, one of my fears is not having anything to add to what I've written in other books - books that were fiction, about other people who weren't me, but into which I poured myself."
And is equally illuminating in describing the various false starts he made on this book; what forms didn't work for him:
"An elegiac portrait of my father wouldn't have been true to my feeling, would have skirted the dark corners from which glorious epiphanies might spring...; perhaps I was not so thoroughly in the wrong...; it wasn't easy to come up with an illuminating episode that didn't strain the fidelity that I had pledged to the truth...; a cold, analytic account would have left too much out...; I didn't have the capacity for a great fresco, for anything too detailed that would require me to do research and work out family trees...; nor for the interweaving of intimate scenes, of memory's microscopic flotsam, which anyway was so far from my style."
All of which ultimately begs the question that Giralt Torrente is honest enough to acknowledge: "So why persist in writing about the two of us?". He answers:
"Because I tried to go back to writing a novel that I had abandoned when things began to fall apart, and I couldn't do it, and I tried to come up with an idea for another one and I couldn't do that either. Because writing about something so intimate, so excruciatingly real, seemed a good incentive for recuperating lost routine, the habit of writing." and "it feels like the worst kind of betrayal to employ the feelings inspired by his certain death in the service of fiction."
But while the process of writing was clearly cathartic, the memoir itself is too personally specific for my taste. The best example is the running theme of the battles between the author and his father's second wife, the third major character in the book, who Giralt Torrente insists on referring to throughout as merely "the friend he met in Brazil". Were this a literary novel and she a character, the author would be obliged to have some understanding what made her tick in order to create her, but instead in this format and talking about a real person Giralt Torrente can simply dismiss this with "it's not my aim to unearth her motives ... I can judge her, but it isn't my mission to redeem her or condemn her" - fair enough, but hardly illuminating to the reader.
Overall and unfortunately, the parts about literary fiction vs. memoir aside (which would have made an excellent extended essay), one can't help but conclude that Giralt Torrente's fear, outlined above, has been realised - this book doesn't add anything to his fiction.
I've spent whole days, years, studying my father and resentment has often worked its way into my writing. I've had my revenge. And yet, as Amoz Oz writes in his memoir, 'he who seeks the heart of the tale in the space between the work and its author is mistaken: the place to look is not the terrain between text and writer, but between text and reader...'. Much of what I've written was prompted by my father, but I've never written about him. Those were other fathers, other people's fathers.
Now I'm writing about him."
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris was one of my favourite books of 2014, and I was keen to read more. Unfortunately neither of his subsequent novels has yet been translated into English, leaving us to date with just a short story collection, and this, a non-fictional memoir of his relationship with his father, the artist Juan Giralt.
The book reads beautifully, for which Natasha Wimmer, best known as translator of Roberto Bolano's 2666, deserves equal credit.
However, ultimately I was left feeling that while I understood why Giralt Torrente wrote it, I was less clear what I gained from reading it.
Giralt Torrente wrote this book in 2009 after the death of his father from cancer in 2007 (when the author was in his late 30s), his father having been separated from his mother since Torrente was a teenager.
The most illuminating part of the book is Giralt Torrente's detailed thoughts on the difference between fiction and personal memoir, both from the writer's and the readers' perspectives.
As a novelist, as the quote above shows, he rightly sees his books as, while being inspired by his life including his relationship with his father, not being about his life. Nevertheless, his father saw more of himself in Paris than the author explicitly intended - in a way reminiscent of the process Javier Marias (an obvious literary precursor of Giralt Torrente) describes in Dark Back of Time.
"Before I realised it, the childhood I was trying to elaborate began to take on elements of my own. The narrator, an adult narrator looking back on his childhood, was an only child, and the epicentre of his family was his mother, with whom he lived and shared the ambivalent memory of an absent father. I lent him the feeling of dread and the thought I had at the time, but that was all I took from my own experiences. Or at least so I thought while I was writing it.
My father, however, saw things differently. Just recently I found out he was very upset by it."
Even the choice of the double barrelled surname as the name under which his books appeared (his maternal grandfather was also a novelist) was seized on both by critics, and by his father's family, as symbolic of his parental relationships.
Giralt Torrente eloquently describes the difficulties of writing memoir over fiction:
"Up until now I'd never written in my own voice. I had written fictionally about reality, as one always does, but it wasn't my reality and I wasn't the one narrating. It's a new and confusing feeling. With fiction, you can say anything. In your own voice, either you're tempted to leave things out or you miss being able to make things up. I've passed through both states in previous pages
Really, though, one of my fears is not having anything to add to what I've written in other books - books that were fiction, about other people who weren't me, but into which I poured myself."
And is equally illuminating in describing the various false starts he made on this book; what forms didn't work for him:
"An elegiac portrait of my father wouldn't have been true to my feeling, would have skirted the dark corners from which glorious epiphanies might spring...; perhaps I was not so thoroughly in the wrong...; it wasn't easy to come up with an illuminating episode that didn't strain the fidelity that I had pledged to the truth...; a cold, analytic account would have left too much out...; I didn't have the capacity for a great fresco, for anything too detailed that would require me to do research and work out family trees...; nor for the interweaving of intimate scenes, of memory's microscopic flotsam, which anyway was so far from my style."
All of which ultimately begs the question that Giralt Torrente is honest enough to acknowledge: "So why persist in writing about the two of us?". He answers:
"Because I tried to go back to writing a novel that I had abandoned when things began to fall apart, and I couldn't do it, and I tried to come up with an idea for another one and I couldn't do that either. Because writing about something so intimate, so excruciatingly real, seemed a good incentive for recuperating lost routine, the habit of writing." and "it feels like the worst kind of betrayal to employ the feelings inspired by his certain death in the service of fiction."
But while the process of writing was clearly cathartic, the memoir itself is too personally specific for my taste. The best example is the running theme of the battles between the author and his father's second wife, the third major character in the book, who Giralt Torrente insists on referring to throughout as merely "the friend he met in Brazil". Were this a literary novel and she a character, the author would be obliged to have some understanding what made her tick in order to create her, but instead in this format and talking about a real person Giralt Torrente can simply dismiss this with "it's not my aim to unearth her motives ... I can judge her, but it isn't my mission to redeem her or condemn her" - fair enough, but hardly illuminating to the reader.
Overall and unfortunately, the parts about literary fiction vs. memoir aside (which would have made an excellent extended essay), one can't help but conclude that Giralt Torrente's fear, outlined above, has been realised - this book doesn't add anything to his fiction.
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