Author: Lauren Roberts

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Review of Private Life in The Times Literary Supplement

Catalan Fiction
by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST

Josep Maria de Sagarra
PRIVATE LIFE
Translated by Mary Ann Newman
240pp. Archipelago. Paperback, €16.
978 0 914671 26 8

From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, which smothered what vanguardist tendencies Spain might have had, Continental innovations in literary form arrived to the country late. At worst, this gave rise to writers labouring in Zola’s shadow, forcing crude notions of class conflict and heredity onto tales peopled with stereotypes incomprehensible beyond the country’s borders; at best, it engendered a decadent, languid style well suited to the dissection of Spain’s venal elites. Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Private Life is in the second category.

A chronicle of the economic and moral decline of Catalonia’s aristocracy, the novel opens with Frederic, a drunken would-be rake, coming to in the apartment of a prostitute. He ruminates on love and gentlemanliness before recollecting his onerous gambling debts, due to be paid in a matter of days. Too poor for a life of leisure but too proud to soil his hands with work, Frederic appeals to his father, who lambasts him as a wastrel, then feigns an apoplectic fit and calls for a priest to minister his last rites. Frederic’s brother, secretly a prostitute in a brothel for the rich and dissolute, offers to pay off the debt by means he refuses to disclose. His scheme to blackmail Frederic’s creditor unleashes myriad intrigues that draw in Barcelonans from all walks of life.

The large cast of characters offers an ideal canvas for Sagarra’s withering wit. Everyone gets it in the neck: the upper classes, for whom “baseness” is a part of their “merit and grace”; the bourgeoisie enraptured by garden parties and Hispano-Suizas; and the communists, whose revolutionary fervour springs from soured religious yearnings, which, in turn, are the outgrowth of stifled sexual urges.

Private Life’s centrepiece is the 1929 Universal Exposition, when “anyone who didn’t steal simply didn’t have fingers”, and the proclamation of the Catalan Republic a couple of years later. The book’s second half is less convincing than its first; what had been a satire on manners becomes a racier, but also more mechanical, account of prurient liaisons larded with sometimes dreary philosophical divagations. Sagarra shoehorns his anecdotes into an overarching thesis about the centrality of sexual passion to social life. Thankfully, his homilies are brief, and shadow neither his ribald asides, nor his indictment of the frivolity and “mobile indifference” of Catalonia’s wealthy on the eve of the Fascist uprising.

 

TLS, May 13, 2016

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Review of Something Will Happen, You’ll See in World Literature Today

Review of Something Will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou. Trans. Karen Emmerich.

Christos Ikonomou’s award-winning second collection, Something Will Happen, You’ll See, is a thoughtful glimpse into the flawed and sometimes-comic existence of the working-class men and women living at the periphery of Greece’s capital.

In the opening tale, “Come On Ellie, Feed the Pig,” a woman molds halva into the likeness of an estranged lover and proceeds to eat him. In “Placard and Broomstick,” a grocery clerk mourns the death of his childhood friend, carrying a blank sign through the streets in protest because he’s “filled with an incredible emptiness.” An unemployed dockworker in “For Poor People” watches a strange woman paint an expression of a choking face onto a bollard, where a rope is tied from a boat like a noose. In the closing story, “Piece By Piece They’re Taking My World Away,” a couple spends their final days in an old house as the unique stones of its foundation are looted by neighbors and the government moves to expropriate the property.

This collection is a kind of Dubliners for the postcrisis generation and a lament for the marginalized inhabitants of neighborhoods around the shipping district of Piraeus. Ikonomou succeeds at immersing the reader, through a panoramic stream-of-consciousness method of narration, into fifteen lives where “pain and fear come later, when the wound cools.” Characters are increasingly preoccupied with memories or daydreams even as hardship envelops them. An undefinable dread lingers and builds steadily over the course of the book, leaving you feeling that the worst hasn’t even started yet, despite occasional glimpses of hope or closure.

Where there’s fault to be found with the book, it’s most noticeable in occasionally rigid efforts at Faulknerian tangents where the sentences struggle to find their footing at the expense of flow, though it’s unclear if that’s on Ikonomou or the limits of the translation. Still, the collection mostly shines, particularly in its clever symbolism and living characters. Ikonomou is an author of substance as much as style, and Something Will Happen, You’ll See is a stunning, if somewhat bleak, sketch of a country in flux.

Michael Kazepis
Portland, Oregon

 

 

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Our Lady of the Nile shortlisted for the 2016 DUBLIN International Literary Award

1128 The 2016 DUBLIN International Literary Award shortlist was announced Tuesday, April 12th. The list includes ten novels and Archipelago’s own, Scholastique Muksonga for Our Lady of the Nile, translated by Melanie Mauthner. The Award is presented annually for a novel written or translated into English. See the complete list here.