Felipe Alfau, Chromos, Dalkey Archive Press, 1999."A controversial finalist for the National Book Award in 1990, Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, Chromos anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along—Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis.
On one level, Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld the two worlds that just won't fit together.
While wildly comic and populated with some of the most bizarre characters, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness."
"In 1988, Dalkey Archive reprinted Felipe Alfau's neglected masterpiece of 1936, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, which drew renewed praise from the New Yorker and other magazines. Chromos, his second and only other novel, was written in the 1940s but never publishedlargely, we suspect, because it was years ahead of its time, using techniques that would later be "discovered" by such authors as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. Like these authors, Alfau turns the conventional novel on its head. An eerie frame story encloses a series of episodes and tales-within-tales, some of them "chromos"sentimental calendar-style picturesof old Spain, others blackly humorous stories of Spaniards acclimatizing to life in Manhattan in the 1930s, culminating in a saturnalian party of epic proportions, in which Spanish dancers mingle with faded actors, bizarre fantasists, mathematical wizards, singers, guitarists, and other representatives of the Spanish colony. Everything from the proper way to drink wine to theories of entropy are bandied about in this strange tertulia, which ends with a Kafkaesque episode of unforgettable power." - Bookmarks
"This kaleidoscopic novel was written in 1948 and is here offered in English for the first time after the recent reissue of the same author's Locos ( LJ 2/1/89). The focus is on a group of "Americaniards," Spaniards residing in New York City who, although healthy back home, have become hypochondriacal and readily indulge in delusions of mediocrity. Typical is the writer Garcia, who is adept at loitering in a city remarkable for its absence of cafe life and who sells to lesser Latin American reviews an article invariably about New York, a short story invariably about Spain, or a poem invariably about himself. With the hapless narrator, Garcia shares long segments of his deliberately corny novel about a merchant family of Madrid whose third-generation males fall prey to sexual perversions. Richly aphoristic, with titillating digressions into mathematics and metaphysics and with many Spanish words left untranslated, this book represents intellectual fiction at its best." - Jack Shreve
"Alfau is a self-mocking formalist whose images verge on the magical.... an experimental novel that is (was), in fact, a forerunner to the work of Pynchon, Barthelme, and others" - Booklist
"I am envious of those who for the first time will be enchanted by this genius, a curiosity who foresaw the literary tastes of the future." - Commonweal
"With a cast of thousands, intellectual as well as physical poseurs; the nobility that was old Spain, and its poor substitute in a foreign land, Alfau has created a poetic, cinematic and glittering black comedy which works on many levels. His timeless creations take the longer view of history, and attempt to decide: 'whether my ancestors were but immigrants disguised as conquerors, or whether all aliens are but conquerors disguised as immigrants." - Dublin Sunday Tribune
"This book has already made me wonder if I will read a better novel this year... [It] is beautifully written." - Glasgow Herald
"Richly aphoristic, with titillating digressions into mathematics and metaphysics... this book represents intellectual fiction at its best." - Library Journal
"This is... a remarkable book, not only for what it says, but also for what it is struggling to say, often with strangely successful insights." - Boston Review
"As entertaining as it is cerebral. Alfau's depiction of the immigrant's plight is both playful and mournful. In either case, it's the product of a fascinating mind." - Seattle Times
"There are so many interesting things to say about Felipe Alfau and his novel, "Chromos," that it is difficult to decide where to begin. There is the novel itself, of course, a complex and sometimes difficult post-modernist narrative written years before the appearance of the so-called post-modernists (Alfau was, in other words, ahead of his time). There is the history of the novel's publication, a fascinating tale in its own right. There is the fact that Alfau, a Spaniard who came to the United States at the age of fourteen, wrote "Chromos" and his earlier novel, "Locos," in English, rather than his native Spanish. And there is, finally, the biography and the views of the author himself-the former enigmatic, almost mysterious, in its obscurity; the latter disturbingly reactionary, reminiscent of Ezra Pound and forcing the reader to separate the man from his work.
"Chromos" is a series of narratives within narratives of a coterie of Spanish immigrants living in New York City sometime between the two World Wars. Among the main characters is Don Pedro Guzman O'Moor Algoracid, also known as Peter Guz and the Moor, and his close friend, Dr. Jose de los Rios, whom the Moor calls Dr. Jesuscristo. It is the Moor who first tells the novel's unidentified first person narrator to write the story of Spaniards living in New York, of the "Americaniards" as he calls them:
"You should write a book about the Americaniards, somebody should-but you have not written for a long time-anyway you could not write any more about your people in Spain-have been too long away, forgotten too much-don't know what it's all about and you could not write about Americans-don't know enough-impossible ever to understand another people. I could not understand them when I first came and every day I understand them less. We meet, we talk, but neither knows what it's all about-total confusion. My English was abominable when I arrived and everyday I speak it worse-impossible; can't understand a damn thing."
It is this request that frames the narrative, the Moor mysteriously taking the reluctant narrator to an old, dark, cockroach-infested basement apartment devoid of furniture (except for a book-filled bookcase), its walls covered by chromos-chromolithographs-"depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined."
From this place, the unidentified narrator of "Chromos" relates his close relationship with the writer Garcia. It is Garcia who provides two narratives within the larger framing story, reading aloud to the narrator from two different works-one the seemingly "corny" and salacious multi-generational saga of the rise and decline of the Sandoval family in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, the other the cinematic narrative of a Spaniard named Ramos who, in a Mephistophelian bargain, is given the ability to skip through time and emigrates to America in the early twentieth century. All the time, while Garcia narrates the stories contained in his two novels, the larger narrative of "Chromos" provides a first-person account of the day-to-day life of the Moor, Dr. de los Rios, Garcia, and the narrator. And the narrator, too, provides another narration as he sees into the mind-sees the imagination and dreams-of the seemingly forlorn, hapless character Fulano. Indeed, one of the most powerful narrative sequences of "Chromos" occurs near the end, when the narrator details Fulano's sordid, obsessive, sexual and homicidal dreams of a female store mannequin.
"Chromos" is, in short, a complex novel that reminds the reader of the post-modern writings of Borges, Calvino, Coover, Pynchon, and others. It is, in this sense, a remarkable achievement since it was written in 1948, long before such fictions became prominent. And this leads us to the next part of the story, the fact that while "Chromos" was written in 1948, it was not published until 1990, when it was nominated for the National Book Award. For this, we have an editor of the Dalkey Archive to thank. As related in a 1990 article in Newsday, reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site (http://www.centerforbookculture.org):
"In 1987, Steve Moore, [an editor at] a small publishing company, Dalkey Archive, found a copy of "Locos" [Alfau's 1936 novel] at a barn sale in Massachusetts. He paid $10 for it and after reading it, immediately found Mr. Alfau's number in the Manhattan phone book. Mr. Alfau, living alone in Chelsea, told them to publish the book if they wanted to; he didn't care what happened. When "Locos" did reasonably well, Mr. Alfau told them to use the money for somebody else's unpublished work. He had no use for money. Moore asked Mr. Alfau if he had written anything else. Mr. Alfau took "Chromos" out of the dresser where it had been since 1948."
While a native Spaniard and Spanish speaker, Alfau wrote in English and, for this reason, he has been compared to other writers who adopted another, non-native language for writing their fictions, writers like Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, and Brodsky. Indeed, the first paragraph of "Chromos" adumbrates the theme not only of the immigrant living in a foreign country, but the way that immigrant experience is further occluded by language:
"The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one's affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence."
So what is a reader of "Chromos" to make of all this? If you believe Alfau himself, not too much. When asked in an interview about the sale of his first novel, "Locos," which departed drastically from the commercially accepted novels of the time, he replied: "I got $250 for `Locos.' But you are right. In fact, I don't see how anybody could like my books or could even understand them. They are unreadable."
In that same interview, published in the Spring, 1993, edition of Review of Contemporary Fiction (and reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site), Alfau-ninety years old at the time and demonstrating his reputation as iconoclastic, opinionated, curmudgeonly, and politically incorrect-is quoted as follows: "I think democracy is a disgrace. Machiavelli was absolutely right: the difference between tyranny and democracy is that in tyranny you need to serve only one master, whereas in a pluralistic society you have to obey many. I always thought Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a trustworthy ruler of Spain, and thus supported him. Since his death, the Iberian peninsula is in complete chaos. In fact, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, I championed Franco's cause in this country as much as I could."
While Alfau's politics and personality may seem anathema, "Chromos" is a remarkable work of literary imagination and narrative structure that should be read by anyone interested in modern and post-modern writing. While perhaps "unreadable," as Alfau says, by those looking for a traditional linear narrative with an unvarnished plot, "Chromos" is a joyride for those who like experimentation, complexity and intellectual pyrotechnics." - amazon.com
Felipe Alfau, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, Dalkey Archive Press, 1997."The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young author. "For them," he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against my almost heroic opposition."
First published in 1936 and long neglected, this elegantly inventive novel anticipates works like Pale Fire and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Locos, Felipe Alfau creates a mercurial dreamscape in which the characters—the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy—wrench free of authorial control, invade one another's stories, and even turn into one another."
"In Locos, Felipe Alfau creates a mercurial dreamscape in which the characters - the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - wrench free of authorial control, invade one another's stories, and even turn into one another." - www.bigwentertainment.com
"Out of print for half a century, this wildly surreal fable mirrors Spain in moral decay, in the years before a fascist takeover. Among the bizarre characters we meet are Garcia, a prematurely white-haired poet who becomes a fingerprint analyst; Dona Valverde, a pious, necrophiliac widow who enjoys touching corpses at funerals; and Sister Carmela, a nun who seemingly elopes with her own brother. Strangest of all is Senor Olozagaolive-skinned giant, ex-butterfly charmer in a circus, who was reared by Spanish monks in China and now runs an agency for selling dead people's clothes. The sundry misfits gather at the Cafe of the Crazy in Toledo, where hard-up writers, among them the author, hang out in search of exploitable characters; mistaken identities, outlandish situations, interchangeable roles abound. Is this Pirandello? Actually, it's closer to the somnambulistic tales of the French surrealists; you keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep on dreaming. In an afterword, McCarthy compares Locos to the modernist detective novels of Nabokov, Calvino and Eco. Maybe, but surely most of the sleuthing consists of figuring out the characters' interconnections in the Byzantine plot. Alfau neatly skewers Spain's fatalism, its obsessions with death and sin." - Publishers Weekly
"First published in 1936 and unjustly ignored for the next half century, this novel anticipates the magic realism of modern Latin American fiction. Neatly divided into segments that read like short stories, it juggles a congeries of absurdist types such as pimps, beggars, and priests in what can be taken as a metaphor for Spain today. Early on, the author warns us about the uncontrollability of his characters, who are introduced en masse at the Cafe of the Crazies in the mad, fantastic city of Toledo (even though they all live in Madrid). The account of each character is a joy to read--from Dona Micaela Valverde's passion for going to as many funerals as she can find to Lunarito's money-making ruse of charging a fee to display her beauty mark. Readers careful enough to search out and accumulate the author's clues will be rewarded. - Jack Shreve
"This is a work as much about fiction's creation of places outside time as about the antics of madmen." - Times Literary Supplement
"Alfau's inventive 'comedy of gestures' is, like any hall-of-mirrors fun house, disorienting, maddening and greatly entertaining. It has everything any modern best-seller needs: murder, incest, fallen priests, lascivious nuns, a couple of suicides, several mysteries, the living dead, pimps and whores and poets, locales that shift from China to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Europe." - Washington Post
"It's the stuff of Lorca, Dali and Picasso as the interrelated cast jostle for body space in the interlocking tales that form the novel, exchanging identities as croupier Alfau shuffles the pack of human wreckage.... A lovely, funny book, completely 'loco.'" - Time Out
"Along with Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, and other experimental writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties, Felipe Alfau invented what we now call "postmodernism." Alfau, Borges, Nabokov, O'Brien: these writers explored the frightening and exhilarating space between naming and identity, between narration and story, between language and what it would describe. Is it any wonder that they wrote, themselves, from within the interstices of different languages and cultures?
Borges read and reread in English, as a child, the Doppelganger tales and detective stories of Poe, Doyle, and Stevenson; he wrote in Spanish, as an adult, his own metaphysical ficciones of doubles and detectives. Nabokov grew up in a prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg family where Russian was spoken to the servants, English in the nursery, and French at the table; he later composed or translated his novels in all three languages, while emigrating from one country to another to end, at last, in neutral Switzerland.(1) O'Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen, aka Brian O'Nolan) lived his double life in divided Ireland; "Cruiskeen Lawn," his famous column in the Irish Times, was for many years written in Gaelic and English on alternate days. Such polyglot writers challenge conventional notions of a literary canon organized according to national languages and literatures.[2]
Felipe Alfau, who began writing in English as a Spanish emigre to America, can now take,his proper place in this assembly. Alfau's case provokes similar questions about his classification within the canon: Is he a Spanish writer? an American writer? a hyphenated hybrid? Or perhaps, like Borges, Nabokov, and O'Brien, he is a different entity altogether, one of "the new esperantists'" - twentieth-century writers whose fiction is shaped by their sense of linguistic and cultural exile.(3)
The works of emigre authors are often obsessively autobiographical and "often accused of being repetitious and circular," Asher Z. Milbauer argues, because they attempt to establish an equilibrium "between the now' and the then,' between the before' and the after'"(4) - and, one might add, between the "here" and the "there." Alfau's novels certainly seek such equilibrium. Each is a dazzling series of mises en abyme, in which Madrilenos are situated in Toledo and Spaniards in America; in which tales are told and retold; and in which a multitude of characters exchange names, identities, and stories in an extravaganza of incest, metamorphosis, and what Mary McCarthy calls "rather giddy mutability."(5) It is entirely appropriate that the title of his first novel, Locos, is itself multivalent, suggesting simultaneously the craziness of his characters, the dislocation that explains their craziness, and the imaginary "Cafe de los Locos" which provides a tenuous textual space (or locus) for them to congregate. The subtitle A Comedy of Gestures - which refers to the characteristic Spanish expression of meaning through physical motions rather than words, as Alfau explains in his prologue - is equally appropriate. Of this subtitle, Alfau remarks that any reader who makes the mistake of taking his novel seriously "would only disclose, beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of a common tragedy" (xiv). That "common tragedy" might be the shared experience of exile, or the shared existential dilemma that exile embodies. Indeed, the reader who takes Locos seriously discovers that, for Alfau, individual identity - especially as it is constructed by papers," passports, and other textual documents - has a special meaning which resonates throughout the meta-fictional levels of his novel.
Alfau is an important early postmodernist, in part, because he anticipates what McCarthy calls "the modernist novel as detective story" (205), or the metaphysical detective story - a genre that is typical of literary postmodernism in its concern with parody, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and hermeneutics. A metaphysical detective story is a self-reflexive fiction which parodies detective-story conventions, especially in terms of narrative closure and the detective's role as surrogate reader. Rather than successfully solving a mystery, the detective confronts the insoluble mysteries of his own interpretation and his own identity; Patricia Merivale defines "a real metaphysical detective story," for example, as one in which the hero "becomes, by accident'or by destiny,' the murderer he has been seeking."(6) Although Edgar Allan Poe and G. K. Chesterton are important influences, this experimental, open-ended, self-reflexive genre is usually identified with fiction produced in the thirties and forties by Nabokov (The Eye, Despair, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) and Borges..." - Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
"This is all Mac Wellman’s fault. He fully admits that all his favorite writers are fascists. So when talk was starting earlier this spring about the Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival, he pulled out his copy of a little known book by Felipe Alfau titled Locos: A Comedy of Gestures—and I like to think literally threw it at playwrights Scott Adkins, Normandy Sherwood, and Richard Toth. Mac discovered the book when it was re-published by Dalkey Archive in 1988, and was at once drawn to Alfau as a remarkably odd and isolated figure in literature.Alfau migrated to the United States from Spain when he was 14. Though Spanish was his first language, he later chose to write his prose in English. He came from a family of journalists, translators, and academics, viewing his own fiction as frivolous in comparison. Locos was published in 1936, celebrated, forgotten, rediscovered some sixty years later, celebrated, then forgotten again.
In the book’s introduction, Alfau tells us there is no need to read it in sequential order (there are ten interlocking stories), and actually, in his opinion, there’s pretty much no need to read it at all. But, thankfully, we do read it and the world that opens up is that of a unique voice who is powerless over his characters’ strong will and ambitions, often allowing characters to run in their own directions while he masterfully pushes the plot forward—keeping the stories twisting and soaring.
Alfau has been compared to Calvino and Borges, though he precedes them both (and by his own admission he had “no idea what those men did”). If you left it up to Alfau, he’d say he just wrote, that’s it, and he didn’t work particularly hard at it. He told his stories completely unconcerned with criticism. In an interview in 1993 for the The Review of Contemporary Fiction, he told interviewer Ilan Stavans, “I am not a professional writer. Only by necessity have I ever received payment for my work. Dalkey Archive Press offered money for my two novels, but I refused to accept it. For my poems, I received $500 because I needed to pay the monthly payment here, in the retirement home. The truth is, I was never interested in writing, nor did I ever dream of making a living at my craft. I hate full-time authors. I hate intellectuals that make a living from abstractions and evasions. The art of writing has turned into an excess. Today, literature is a waste. It should be abolished, at least in the form we know: as a money-making endeavor.”
The reader never feels comfortable with a character in Locos because they are constantly changing into others, there is no concern for consistency. When you think you have something figured out, you are told you don’t, everyone is an unreliable narrator. But, it is in these abrupt shifts of perspective, when the stories surprise even themselves, that it becomes clear that behind all this seeming chaos lies a master puppeteer who prefers to stay in the shadows.
This year’s festival playwrights are Adkins, Sherwood, and Toth. Adkins explains that four years ago, the Weasel Festival “started off as readings—scripts in hands. But as the production side of it got streamlined, each writer started taking it further. And each director started taking it further and pushing it harder.” The only rule of thumb for the festival has been that it is produced by playwrights one year (all current and former Brooklyn MFA students of Mac), then, in turn, their work is presented the next time. Adkins, Sherwood and Toth decided to present a united front. Each of them selected a story from Locos, and all three plays will be presented together fully staged as an evening of theater.
In the madness that is Alfau’s work, each playwright had to find his own way in, to decide what sort of adaptation was necessary. “My first impulse was to stay very close to the text,” says Sherwood, who is adapting Necrophil. “I think one of the reasons that Mac was excited about this book is that the stories are already so dramatic, they’re just waiting to be adapted to theater. I found as I’ve been working on it, I’ve been getting farther and farther away from it [the original text]. For some reason that had seemed like the right point of entry, to say ok, what would it be like if we were just going to stage this… then I felt annoyed with it, started wanting to poke holes and change it.”
Adkins had similar feelings about the strength of the original text, explaining that his adaptation of The Character is “almost a literal adaptation. I didn’t write that much at all, I used most of the language from the story as much as possible. There was so much dialogue already, I just pulled all the dialogue out and was like, ok, what’s there? It’s very similar to my aesthetic anyway, there are lots of stories within the stories—so I utilized that as the key to it. I feel like it’s really important to me to say that he wrote this. I really feel strange putting my name on it. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like a playwright versus a writer.” Adkins feels like a lot of the adaptation work in The Character will come from director Meghan Finn on this piece, but he’ll be right there with her, discovering the dramatic moments in rehearsal.
Toth’s approach to his piece, Identity, was to lift the story and café setting of the initial Alfau piece, but personalize it. “My point of entry is that Alfau uses himself a lot,” he says. “He talks about his struggles as a writer. He talks about how HE wants something to happen but the characters want something else to happen. So I thought it would be interesting to use myself. So instead of Alfau talking about something, it would be me talking about something. And he uses his friends. So in my play, the characters are Richard Toth, Normandy Sherwood, and Scott Adkins. It keeps true to the story I think, the idea that the guy doesn’t have any sort of identity whatsoever, or any personality. He comes to two of his friends that say they will make a personality for him – but the guy’s got to jump off the bridge and pretend to be dead. And then somebody else takes on his identity. So there’s a former Richard Toth and a new Richard Toth.”
Playwright Amber Reed, one of the festivals producers, is also creating a short stop animation video that closes the evening and will introduce the audience to Alfau. She explains that the “text for the video is entirely from Ilan Stavans’s interview with the 90-year-old Alfau at his Queens retirement home…The video isn’t meant to do anything more than present Alfau in his own words, with all his terrible particularity, and then send people on their way.”
Finn’s role as director, as Adkins mentioned, will be crucial not only to complete the adaptation, but to present the audience with unifying themes that they can hang onto while embracing the differences between the pieces. “All three stories are clearly adapted in the unique style of each writer,” Finn explains. “It’s necessary to both support the vision of each playwright individually, while creating a cohesive journey for the audience. It demands a flexibility on the part of the actors as well. Ultimately, I think that the three different voices will be what makes the evening work. Ideally, it will work as Alfau’s novel does: just as the reader grasps a character or a relationship there is a shift that occurs to always keep them guessing. This will be the experience for our audiences. They’ll just have to go along for the ride.” - Trish Harnetiaux
"In both Locos and Chromos the narrator presents himself with very little desire to narrate anything. In the first novel the prologue blames the characters for most of the narrative decisions and the author expresses his resentment toward their behavior, always interfering with his plans. He limits himself to sitting at the Cafe de los Locos in Toledo, where he sees or meets all the characters that will populate the different narratives of the book and where the first of them starts to unfold. Chromos opens with commentaries about the difficulties of living and writing in the space of a language other than one's own, about the impossibility of recreating through literature peoples and events separated by miles and lost in the past. Faced with these problems, the narrator does not take the task of writing such a work as a challenge through which he can prove his skills as a writer. Once again, all authorial responsibility is avoided. The "inspiration" comes from another character, Don Pedro, who suggests the necessity of writing not about Spaniards in Spain but rather about Spaniards in New York, people like the narrator and himself, the "Americaniards," as he calls them. This suggestion is presented as a temptation, as a crime, that the diabolical Don Pedro lures the narrator into committing. He resists and agrees only to follow the tempter to a building in his old neighborhood. The dark room which the narrator penetrates is obviously different from the Cafe de los Locos; but like the space of the first novel, it functions as what we could call, imitating Todorov,(1) a kind of "space-recit" where the unwilling and passive narrator is provided with, almost assailed by, stories, the stories that will form the novel Chromos.
The scene of the dark room in the apartment reminds us of the Platonic cave, with the chromos that hang on the walls barely illuminated by the light of the match acting as weak copies of the true objects, places, and peoples they represent, of the figures and scenarios from the narrator's past, the only images of a Spain lost in space and time. In spite of being precarious, those images open up the memory and the narratives more powerfully than the book, inhabited by roaches, that falls open on the floor of the apartment.
Among the stories that follow, the longest is the one narrated by Garcia. As in Locos, where he was also a character, this narrator likes to make stories that recreate the materials of his memory. The fact that Garcia presents his narrative as memories ties that narrative with the scene just mentioned of remembrance in the apartment. Garcia's novel is presented in a formative state, as a rough draft that needs to be revised by his author following the comments of "our" narrator, the patient ear who listens to the prolific Garcia and who is supposed to translate the whole thing once completed.
The task is rife with difficulties and the comments about the future novel are usually unfavorable. At times the novel is accused of being too explicit, borderline pornography; other times, the bad taste falls in different territories:
"I have this part pretty well worked out. Of course, the whole story is old-fashioned and I would like to present it in some parts, especially this one," he waved the papers in his hand, "in a sort of old-fashioned - well stilted - if you know what I mean, to fit the period." He searched for the right word or explanation: "Cursi is what I mean. That is the word: cursi."
The word "cursi" is difficult to translate, its meaning almost impossible to convey with any other word, and the closest I can find to it in English is the word "corny." I told him that I knew what he meant and he went on:
"I am quite serious about your helping with the translation and if I convince you, I hope you will bear that in mind and try to create that cursi feeling in English."
Garcia wants to use bad taste, the cursi, for aesthetic, literary purposes. The cursi can be avoided either by not being cursi or, as in the case of Garcia's novel, by indulging purposely in that defect, by being consciously cursi, since one of the conditions of something corny or cursi is that the person who commits the sin is not aware of it: being ..." - Antonio Candau
Jill Adams: "Felipe Alfau: A Retrospective"
"Anonymity: an interview with Felipe Alfau" by Ilan Stavans
