A Review of THE SHADOW OF WHAT WE WERE by Luis Sepúlveda

From THE LITERARY REVIEW, Review by Cassie Hay. Excerpt below:

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Translated from Spanish by Howard Curtis. New York: Europa Editions, 2010.

The legacy of Pinochet is almost physical, like a scar you can feel with your fingers, the marred tissue still very much on the surface. Chilean novelist Luis Sepúlveda served two and a half years in prison under Pinochet before being exiled to Germany, and his scar is certainly palpable, even twenty years after the regime fell.

As his fellow exile, Pablo Neruda, found a generation ago, Sepúlveda seems to have found that words are a healing salve. The question becomes: which words?  Neruda chose erotic words, epic words. Sepúlveda has chosen fighting words.  In the stunning novel, THE SHADOW OF WHAT WE WERE, Sepúlveda gives us not a tale of forgiveness, but rather an aggressive reclamation of memory. Here we have a slim novel, but not a slight one, and it even begins, quite literally, with a bang:

“All we old men have left now is Carlos Santana,” the veteran thought, remem-
bering another old man who had had the same idea forty years earlier—with the exception of one name—and had said it as he was being served a glass of wine.  “All we old men have left now is Carlos Garel,” his grandfather had sighed, looking nostalgically at the ruby-red wine. “Let’s drink to his health.”  That was all, the veteran remembered. The following day, his grandfather had blown his brains out with a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson special. . .

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A Review of THE ALPHABET OF BIRDS by SJ Naudé

From THE LITERARY REVIEW, Review by Cassie Hay. Excerpt below:

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Translated from the Afrikaans by the author

(High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015)

First signs include sudden onset of fever, fatigue and muscle pain, a sore throat that can be easily confused with the flu.  The virus, not living itself but consisting of proteins and DNA and described as an organism “on the edge of life,” worms its way through the blood.  Vomiting and diarrhea come next, the body’s attempt at expelling a killer is that is by now already too strong.  Yet the fight continues: secretions ooze from the gums, blood seeps from below, until at last the organs shut down and death arrives.

I’m speaking of Ebola here, but even as I write that description my words already seem antique.  Across the wires comes an announcement that Dr. Michael Salia has died in an Omaha hospital; his death signals that the Ebola crisis has quietly come to an end in the United States.  Active cases in this country now number zero.  As Russell Berman puts it in The Atlantic, “For now, the borderline hysteria that began with the arrival, diagnosis, and subsequent death, of Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas is resembling so many other crises of the moment, in with a bang and out with a whimper.”

Only time will tell how this era will be remembered (likely the Ebola crisis will not be) but it seems to me that the general uneasiness lurking beneath the surface is a reverberation of the old Victorian concerns.  The evidence is there: a fear of germs, general xenophobia, a certain prudishness; and it’s worth considering that Dallas has grown by over a million people in the past ten years, Texas by five million, and the old maize fields and squat mesquite trees have been replaced by ribbons of concrete.  The world simultaneously shrinks and expands, as it has since the days of Eden.  It was a cause for neurosis in eighteenth century England; in 1960s California, Joan Didion called it atomization.  Today, the rate of acceleration seems to be increasing the spaces between us, pulling us apart from every direction.

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