Flight (Eduardo Halfon)

Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona has released the seventh in a series of slim, elegant volumes by the writer Eduardo Halfon. Like the others, Tarántula explores in quasi-fictional form the complicated matter of being a Guatemalan-born secular Jew and descendent of Holocaust survivors.

Born in Guatemala in 1971, Halfon left the country as an adolescent when his family fled political turmoil there and resettled in Florida, where he temporarily adopted English as his preferred language. (He now writes in Spanish, but is apparently fully bilingual or more likely multilingual.) When he was thirteen, the narrator of Tarántula, who is also named Eduardo Halfon, was sent back to Guatemala, along with a younger brother, in order to attend a camp that taught survival skills, or, more pointedly, survival skills for Jews. The experience soon took a dark turn, and Halfon took to his heels, hiding in the countryside until he came across a sympathetic campesina. The book relates how, years later, he encountered a female fellow-camper and, eventually, had a confrontational meeting with the former director of the camp, a man with apparent ties to shadowy security organizations.

Eduardo Halfon has described how an interviewer once asked him, provocatively, which two books that he had not read had influenced him the most. In response, equally provocatively, he cited the Torah and the Popol Vuh, the latter being the foundational mythological scripture of Guatemalan indigenous culture.

When I mentioned to a friend this bizarre question-and-answer exchange with the Spanish journalist, she asked me why I didn’t just read both books now? Why did I still doggedly insist on not reading them? And I told her, with as much gravitas as I could muster, that if I did read them now I’d undoubtedly explode.

The truth, however, is that I don’t feel I need to. I already carry both of them with me, written somewhere inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I’m allowed that oversimplification, and if I can call books those two monumental works that represent and define my two worlds—the two great columns upon which my house is built. But a house that for some reason, ever since childhood, I needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why I always felt that way, as if something was forcing me to run off and disappear.

I’ve spent an entire lifetime running away from home.

Halfon's declaration may or may not be strictly accurate; for one thing, he has provided a blurb for an illustrated edition of the Popul Vuh created by Ilan Stavans (a fellow Latin American writer of Jewish ancestry). Nevertheless, the powerful centripetal and centrifugal forces of influence and flight run through all of his work.

Tarántula is so far only available in Spanish (and several European languages), but an English-language edition is planned. The text of the above excerpt is available in English at the website of Tablet magazine.

Haystacks (Martin Johnson Heade)

According to the art historian Theodore E. Stebbins, the American painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) devoted more than 120 canvases to portrayals of the salt marshes of the northeastern coast of the United States. He also painted still-lifes, tropical flowers, hummingbirds, and a few portraits, but no subject received his obsessive devotion as did these coastal scenes. There is something hypnotic about them, individually and, especially, when viewed as a series of variations on a theme. The paintings are not large — Stebbins says few are more than 15 x 30 inches.

It's the stacks of salt hay that really set the pictures apart, the way their otherwordly forms — half mushroom, half alien landing-craft — form a middle element between the vastnesses of sky and marsh and the tiny human figures who seem much too insignificant to have built them. The weather, the time of day, and the details of the topography vary from canvas to canvas, but there is a haunting stillness to them all.

Crows (Sarah Orne Jewett)

From A Marsh Island:

It was a famous day for crows: from one field after another a flight of them took heavily to their wings, and, as if unwillingly, mounted to the higher air. They cawed loudly, and appeared to have business of a public nature on hand. Some were migrating, and others were contemptuously rebuking these wanderers, and making their arrangements to winter in their familiar woods: it was all a great chatter and clatter and commotion. The affairs of human beings were but trivial in comparison. Helpless creatures, who crept to and fro on the face of the earth, and were drawn about by captive animals of lesser intellect, were not worth noticing, and the great black birds sailed magnificently down the sky, with the fresh breeze cool in their beaks and the sunlight shining on their sombre wings. Whatever might be said of their morals, they were masters of the air, and could fly, while men could not.

I liked the cover art on this University of Pennsylvania edition of Jewett's novel, but I didn't immediately get it, in part because some elements on my copy are obscured by librarian's tape. It's a cropped version of a painting by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) entitled Gremlin in the Studio I, and the round object in the left, just below the painting-in-a-painting, is in fact a gremlin. Harder still to notice is that water is flowing out of the marsh depicted in the upper canvas and onto the studio floor.

Harris for President

Since I have no billion-dollar media empire to protect, and since hardly anyone listens to me anyway, I have no hesitation in endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice-president in the 2024 election. That many millions of my fellow citizens see things differently speaks volumes about the current state of American political culture (bad) and about the open wounds of American history (unhealed, and probably unhealable), but doesn't alter my opinion. A lie is a lie, no matter how often repeated and spread about, and, bluntly put, everything that comes out of the mouth of the Republican candidates is a lie. I find little point in arguing with those who still refuse, or are unable, to understand the danger. There is no grey area; to quote Peter Case, this is "the fork in the road where we all have to choose."

We have a long, sad history in the United States of failing to do the right thing; somehow we have muddled through, more or less. A similar failure now may be more difficult to overcome. We can only hope that historians of the future — if the honest study of history survives — will not find in our actions rich cause for condemnation.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (31)

Gillian Welch:

About a month ago, my eye was drawn to a book that has sat mostly unread on my shelf for some time, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Fernando Pessoa. I picked it up and randomly read a passage of such beautiful poignancy, such exquisite human precision, that the wonderment of creative expression flooded me. I told no one about it, but kept it to myself, and the impulse to write, the need to grapple with this moment has returned to me and grown from that little seed.

(From a 2020 interview with Hanif Abdurraqib)

Woodland (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)

For whatever reason I've been listening to Gillian Welch a lot the last few weeks, and as it turns out she has a new record that has just been released. Woodland is officially credited to Welch and her longtime partner David Rawlings, probably because he takes lead vocals on a few tracks, but in any case their work has always been a collaboration.

I took a spin today to run some errands on a beautiful fall New England afternoon and put the new CD in the drive, this being probably the last car we'll ever own that has that capability. It's a pretty impressive record. Gillian's vocals are as good as ever and David's maybe better, the songs are interesting, and the instrumental textures are just gorgeous. Below is a sample track:

Woodland is available from Gillian and David's own Acony Records, as well as, of course, the usual sources.

Lore Segal (1928-2024)

The writer Lore Segal has died; the New York Times has an obituary. Two of Segal's novels have been on and off my to-read list for years, though I confess that I've never quite gotten around to them; I'm putting Other People's Houses and Her First American back at the top of the queue. What I have read, and re-read often, are her brilliant translations from the Brothers Grimm collected in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm with the delicious illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Segal was without peer in being able to capture both the lyrical beauty of the tales and their sinister horror, as in the refrain from the title tale, which I believe I first heard on the radio in the 1970s.

My mother she butchered me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Ann Marie,
She gathered up the bones of me
And tied them in a silken cloth
To lay under the juniper.
Tweet twee, what a pretty bird am I!