Though Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances doesn't appear anywhere in this dream, I promise that's what this dream is about.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Right before I went to bed last night, I read for a while from Rivka Galchen's impressive and strange new novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008); as I read, I found myself reminded, more than anything else, of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), a book I read on its publication thirteen years ago and in a certain sense haven't stopped thinking about since. It's a giant mess of a book that partakes of nearly equal parts Kafka and Chaplin, about a pianist who is perpetually finding life interfering with life, small everyday distractions and failures of memory wreaking havoc on his efforts to be a good husband, father, and artist.

Ultimately The Unconsoled is as frustrating as it is memorable; I tend to think of it as a magnificent failure--yet one whose very ambition has shadowed all of Ishiguro's subsequent novels, showing them up for the circumscribed, disappointingly minor works that they are. {Though I should be clear that I'm in a definite minority here, as the consensus view of Never Let Me Go (2006) in particular is that it was brilliant.} I haven't stopped rushing to the bookstore to buy Ishiguro's novels the minute they're available, but so far I'm still waiting for him to write something as impressive as The Unconsoled.

Which brings me to my dream. Along with my parents, brother, sister, and rocketlass, I had decided to swim across Lake Michigan. Though the dream didn't offer an explanation, I had also decided to carry my copy of The Unconsoled with me. So I was more or less swimming one-armed, switching off every once in a while but always keeping one hand above the waves, the book--a 500-plus-page hardcover--clutched tightly. Fortunately, it turns out that not only is Lake Michigan not nearly as wide as one might think when standing on Montrose Beach looking east, but it also features quite a few spots where it's shallow enough that a swimmer can touch down and rest for a moment before plowing on. Carrying my book, and not being a particularly strong swimmer to begin with, I took full advantage of the shallow spots along the way.

When I reached the Michigan shore, I settled down on the beach to read the still-dry book as a sort of reward for my impressive accomplishment. Not wanting to damage the jacket with sand, I pulled it off the book . . . only to discover that back in 1995 when I had last read The Unconsoled, I had for some reason decided to drape a chapati around the cloth binding under the jacket; as you might imagine, after thirteen years, the chapati and the binding both were pretty gross.

And that's my dream about Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances. Maybe it makes you want to read it?

Spain and the Civil War, part two

Part one, which discusses Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow, is here.

A similar sense of uncertainty and secrecy runs through Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945), which was just issued in a new translation by the Modern Library. Written a few years after the civil war, when Laforet was only twenty-three, it tells of Andrea, a nineteen-year-old girl, orphaned by the war, who moves to Barcelona to live with her grandmother and aunts and uncles. The family has been impoverished and is clinging desperately to their run-down old house, reduced to selling off pieces of furniture to buy insufficient food. The war is rarely mentioned, but its effects are everywhere, from the poverty plaguing Barcelona to the psychological damage that has nearly destroyed the girl's aunts and uncles. Andrea's arrival at the house sets the book's gothic tone of secrecy and decay:

The old woman still couldn't understand very much, and then through one of the doors to the foyer came a tall, skinny man in pajamas who took charge of the situation. This was Juan, one of my uncles. His face was full of hollows, like a skull in the light of the single bulb in the lamp.

As soon as he patted me on the shoulder and called me niece, my grandmother threw her arms around my neck, her light-colored eyes full of tears, and saying "poor thing" over and over again. . . .

There was something agonizing in the entire scene, and in the apartment the heat was suffocating, as if the air were stagnant and rotting. When I looked up I saw that several ghostly women had appeared. I almost felt my skin crawl when I caught a glimpse of one of them in a black dress that had the look of a nightgown. Everything about that woman seemed awful, wretched, even the greenish teeth she showed when she smiled at me. A dog followed her, yawning noisily, and the animal was also black, like an extension of her mourning. They told me she was the maid, and no other creature has ever made a more disagreeable impression on me.

Over the course of a year, Andrea tries to grow up and establish a normal life, all the while watching as the family slips deeper into poverty and spins further out of control, driven apart by a variety of poorly kept secrets. Hints are dropped of betrayals, denunciations, affairs, violence, but nearly everything remains a bit cloudy, partially apprehended. As in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, characters damage themselves by intentionally closing off thought, by pretending not to know things they know--in this case, about the civil war and who did what to whom. The gravity of that hidden topic warps everything in the house and the novel, making for an atmosphere so claustrophobic that, when Andrea finally escapes, it's as if we've escaped, too.

Andrea is able to leave behind her obviously damaged family members, but in reality, Spain itself can't quite do the same. Many veterans of that brutal war survive, and Franco himself ruled until his death just over thirty years ago. Spain's almost immediate transition to democracy, spearheaded by Franco's handpicked successor, King Juan Carlos I, was remarkable, but it was built on an implicit understanding that no one would inquire too closely into the war years. Moving on peacefully, it was argued, required that there be no truth commissions, no war crimes trials, and no assessment of guilt. A silence that under Franco was enforced by law continued under democracy, enforced by custom--and of fear of what might be learned.

Yet can such important questions be suppressed forever? I think Javier Marias and Carmen Laforet would surely argue that they cannot. For a person to hide truths, especially painful ones, is to risk real psychological damage; who knows what it can do to an entire culture?