Scan barcode
discomagpie's review against another edition
5.0
I rated this book 5/5 stars on InsatiableBooksluts.com.
Review excerpt (from a Death Match post against [b:Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico|7258106|Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico|Javier Marías|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327998790s/7258106.jpg|8311094] by Javier Marías):
"I enjoyed this book–indeed, reading Varamo got me out of my post-holiday reading slump. (Yay!) The book started off a humorous read, but the hilarity of it didn’t click for me until halfway through, when I found myself cackling as the narrator described how, exactly, he had come by his information about Varamo to write the book. (I won’t spoil it, but oh, how I laughed.) Aira also has a knack for plunging you directly into the scene as a participant rather than an observer. The book covers only one day in the life of Varamo, but in all likelihood, this day was the only day that mattered; Aira distills and concentrates the story, giving you a perfect bite without leaving you wanting."
Read the full review at our site, and see who won the Death Match!
Review excerpt (from a Death Match post against [b:Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico|7258106|Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico|Javier Marías|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327998790s/7258106.jpg|8311094] by Javier Marías):
"I enjoyed this book–indeed, reading Varamo got me out of my post-holiday reading slump. (Yay!) The book started off a humorous read, but the hilarity of it didn’t click for me until halfway through, when I found myself cackling as the narrator described how, exactly, he had come by his information about Varamo to write the book. (I won’t spoil it, but oh, how I laughed.) Aira also has a knack for plunging you directly into the scene as a participant rather than an observer. The book covers only one day in the life of Varamo, but in all likelihood, this day was the only day that mattered; Aira distills and concentrates the story, giving you a perfect bite without leaving you wanting."
Read the full review at our site, and see who won the Death Match!
bloodless_but_inspired's review against another edition
3.0
Een bizar boek wat leest als een koortsdroom. Het bevat ongetwijfeld veel diepgang maar het gaat mijn begrip grotendeels teboven. Toch ook ironisch en vermakelijk. Het bevat dramatische en onzinnige uitweidingen over onbegrijpelijke literatuurtheorieën, maar het blijft nog enigszins kort en bondig. Best prima
bartvdz's review against another edition
2.0
Het was geniaal tot de auteur het n-woord heel vaak ging gebruiken
jasonfurman's review against another edition
4.0
The back cover of this short novella compares it to Borges, which seems to be a common comparison among Argentine authors, at least the ones more available in English translation. Although if you had asked me, I would have said the book was 80 percent Chesterton (of The Man Who Was Thursday), 15 percent Nabokov (of Pale Fire), and at most 5 percent Borges. And a reasonably well executed version of that.
It describes less than twenty-four hours in the life of a Panamanian civil servant in the 1930s, beginning with his getting paid in counterfeit currency and ending with his writing what the novella describes as the greatest Central American poem. The book explains that this entire story is derived from textual evidence from the poem itself, often a single word or syllable, which allow the precise reconstruction of the sequence of events that resulted in the composition of the book itself. A sequence that includes a bizarre but memorable car "race", descriptions of golf club smugglers, the revelation of an underground anarchist society, and much more in a paranoid, hallucinatory vision. But it all has an internal logic. All that is missing (contra Pale Fire) is the poem itself.
It describes less than twenty-four hours in the life of a Panamanian civil servant in the 1930s, beginning with his getting paid in counterfeit currency and ending with his writing what the novella describes as the greatest Central American poem. The book explains that this entire story is derived from textual evidence from the poem itself, often a single word or syllable, which allow the precise reconstruction of the sequence of events that resulted in the composition of the book itself. A sequence that includes a bizarre but memorable car "race", descriptions of golf club smugglers, the revelation of an underground anarchist society, and much more in a paranoid, hallucinatory vision. But it all has an internal logic. All that is missing (contra Pale Fire) is the poem itself.
bjr2022's review against another edition
4.0
This “experiment in literary criticism” may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the humor grew on me until I was laughing out loud.
When I first encountered academic, aka “scholarly,” literary writing, I was aghast at the practice of using as many words as possible to say next to nothing while espousing over-analysis that becomes a kind of intellectual masturbation signifying nothing. Now imagine a story by a literary analyst about a person who thinks, analyzes his own thoughts, and expresses them as convolutedly as possible in endless mind streams. When this is done unintentionally, my private editor’s definition of it is “word vomit.” But here it is done with comedic intent and it works.
Sometimes well-known and respected literary word vomiters practice their trade by writing analytical introductions to books. This fictional account by such an analyst/critic/vomiter of how a Panamanian clerk came to write a “masterwork of modern Central American poetry” is inventive and, per the book’s blurb, “unclassifiable.” The only thing that would have made it better: since it is essentially a long joke about how a critic can derive true life events of a writer from a poem, I would have loved to have read the poem at the end of the literary treatise; I imagine it to be a page of gibberish with bits of stuff that the literary critic then wildly extrapolated from to form the story he’s just told.
Thanks to Goodreader Phyllis for reviewing this book. Otherwise I’d never have found and enjoyed it.
When I first encountered academic, aka “scholarly,” literary writing, I was aghast at the practice of using as many words as possible to say next to nothing while espousing over-analysis that becomes a kind of intellectual masturbation signifying nothing. Now imagine a story by a literary analyst about a person who thinks, analyzes his own thoughts, and expresses them as convolutedly as possible in endless mind streams. When this is done unintentionally, my private editor’s definition of it is “word vomit.” But here it is done with comedic intent and it works.
Sometimes well-known and respected literary word vomiters practice their trade by writing analytical introductions to books. This fictional account by such an analyst/critic/vomiter of how a Panamanian clerk came to write a “masterwork of modern Central American poetry” is inventive and, per the book’s blurb, “unclassifiable.” The only thing that would have made it better: since it is essentially a long joke about how a critic can derive true life events of a writer from a poem, I would have loved to have read the poem at the end of the literary treatise; I imagine it to be a page of gibberish with bits of stuff that the literary critic then wildly extrapolated from to form the story he’s just told.
Thanks to Goodreader Phyllis for reviewing this book. Otherwise I’d never have found and enjoyed it.
edengabel's review
challenging
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
4.0
daphnerieke's review against another edition
3.0
Hoe valse biljetten via het opzetten van een mutanten-vis, een auto-ongeluk, de sleutels van een transmissiemachine en een dwangmatige manier van papier oprapen, leiden tot het grootse avant-gardistische gedicht De zang van het maagdelijke kind.
amandasbookclub's review against another edition
3.0
It was good! I wish half-stars were a possibility, because I’d give it 3.5. I loved the meta aspects of the sections discussing the ‘truth’ of this work, as if it were a work of nonfiction.
buta_comes_home's review against another edition
3.0
I started this book while waiting for a government-run vaccination and the very last line is my birthday (albeit the wrong year). Strangely enough this plays into the meta experience of the book. Varamo who is from Panama although ethnically from somewhere else is thrown off his normal routine by the injection of counterfeit money into his pay and the ensuing panic leads to so many digressions in the text and diversions for Varamo himself that feel Kafkaesque. It purports to be literary criticism and the narrative of how a great work of literature came to be written, it keeps its word and encompasses the moral and political situation of the day in under 100 pages. It’s impressive and giddy and requires concentration. Passages are brilliant, the whole occasional tedium interspersed with the ridiculous and reality. It won’t be for everyone this one.