Book 26, Mexico: "El laberinto de la soledad" by Octavio Paz

Gracias a Dios! After half a month, I’ve finally finished this damned book – Paz’s essay El laberinto de la soledad, his postscript including the beautiful Crítica de la pirámide, and his interview with Calude Fell, Vuelta a “El laberinto de la soledad”. (I spared myself the lengthy intro and the essays on Mexico and the United States that had been added on, though. Not quite part of the same set of documents.)

I’ve read Paz’s poems before – didn’t find them too memorable – but I chose him because I feel like I’ve read a number of canonical Mexican texts and authors already: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel and Carmen Boullosa – plus I had this volume lying around in my library, bought during my student days when I was sure I was going to carry on with Latin American studies in a private capacity.


(As you can see, my copy has suffered under my care.)

But really, this is an odd book. It was tough going for me, with my rusty Spanish: Paz psychoanalyses the whole of Mexican culture and history, pre-Colombian, colonial and revolutionary, specifically outlining why he feels the intelligentsia has been inadequate, why the ideology of positivism was oppressive and the Zapatista movement was revolutionary by dint of its return to the roots of pre-Hispanic culture, and why there needs to be more international cooperation between the countries of the third world.

Jésucristo. And all I’d heard about the text before was its identification of La Malinche (Cortés’s translator-cum-lover) as La Chingada, the “fucked” or “raped” one, as well as the affirmation of Mexican identity as based in Euro-indigenous syncretism.

Y’know, it starts out very comprehensibly, and with a whole lotta poetry: a contrast between Mexicans (including Mexican-Americans) with white North Americans, settling on the image of the brutish pachuco as their iconic representative; then a dwelling on the nature of the unending festivals of the land and the notion of the ever-present Mexican mask (who knew that Mexicans were inscrutable?). A little heavy-handed with its constant reiterations of the condition of solitude, and kinda Mexicentric (seriously, women all over the world are oppressed by the virgin-whore binary, not just mexicanas), but still very beautifully written.

It’s when Paz starts tackling the subject formally through a chronological survey that things get wearisome. Still, it’s fascinating the little insights and stories you get even here: his clear respect for the Baroque writing of the 17th century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the last of the Spanish Golden Age writers, superior even to the poet Luís de Góngora because she plainly found it joyous to seek for knowledge. Also his concern for the naming of Mexico after the capital of the Aztec empire, México-Tenochtitlán – for the Aztecs were cruel and oppressive towards all the other indigenous cultures; they didn’t even represent Mesoamerican civilization at its peak (that was the 10th century theocracies, e.g. the Maya) – yet they’re now venerated as victims and evidence of the glory of pre-European Mexico. And also his insight that each of the dictators of Mexican history seem to be incarnations of the triumphant conqueror Tezcatlipoca, from Cortés to Porfirio Diáz…

It occurs to me that this will mean nothing to the vast majority of my readers, since they’re mostly from Singapore. Beg pardon. Still, I recommend this book: just read it in your own mother tongue, so you’ll have an easier time than I did. Paz calls it an “exercise of the critical imagination” rather than a philosophical essay, noting that criticism is a compromise for him between poetry and activism. Pretty trenchant thought there.

And then there’s the universality of it: the intellectuals of all the developing world are usually lost in a similar labyrinth of solitude, searching for communion. From what I understand, the remedy is either a revolution or a street festival. Singapore government, please take note: we need more parties.


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Representative quote: El mexicano se esconde bajo muchas máscaras, que luego arroja un día de fiesta o de duelo, del mismo modo que la nación ha desgarrado todas las formas que la asfixiaban. Pero no hemos encontrado aún esa que reconcilie nuestra libertad con el orden, la palabra con el acto y ambos con una evidencia que ya no será sobrenatural, sino humana: la de nuestros mismos.

Next book: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana! Yep, I'm finally venturing forth into the Caribbean!

Book 25, Belize: “Beka Lamb” by Zee Edgell

This is a bit of a step down from the national epic of Asturias, but it’s a welcome step. Beka Lamb is one of those lovely interior novels that describes a nation’s culture through a single woman’s largely domestic life. In this case, the woman is year-old Beka, a black high school student keeping a wake for her dead friend Toycie in 1960s Belize - scratch that!, I mean British Honduras.


It’s a familiar setting: multi-ethnic, colonial and faintly grubby, like ‘60s Singapore, like ‘60s Malaysia, like sometime French Polynesia. Young girls here attend convent schools with strict yet empathetic nuns, counting themselves lucky to be educated rather than confined to household servitude, dreaming of golden futures as career women while the dangers of handsome boys lurk at their fertile feet.

So yes, maybe it’s a story I’ve heard before. But Edgell writes her cultural landscape so beautifully: stories of the veiled nuns arriving with the missions; the evenings harvesting and eating mangoes and cashews; the petty prejudices of the Caribs and the Mayas and the bakras and the panias; the Creole dialogue; the crash of the waves on the lighthouse dedicated to Baron Bliss, the crippled Englishman who gave his fortune to the colony; the horror stories of the Tataduhende, the thumb-stealing dwarf; the stinking canal bordering Holy Redeemer Cathedral; the great hurricane itself. It's a whole universe. Wish I had that eye for detail.

Methinks there's too much politics, though. Sure, the arguments between the father and the grandmother about independence and Governors rounding up the people for sedition have their place in history, but they don't quite fit in with the rest of the tale - or is that my chauvinism speaking? Why shouldn't politics fit into a woman's coming of age story?

But one thing there's a pleasant surfeit of is food. I revel in the casual lists of cuisine brought about by a meeting of British, Mexican and Caribbean influences: fried barracuda crayfish foot, red snappers stewed in coconut milk, peppered oranges, breadfruit, yams, honey buns, creole bread, relleno soup, red kidney beans with rice, escabeche with hot tortillas, potted meat sandwiches, calves' liver and onions, crushed avocado, salted pigtails, roasted pumpkin seeds, custard apples, craboos...

(Yes, I did compose most of this post before dinner. Why do you ask?)


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Representative Quote:
'I know. But nothin' lasts here, Beka,' her Gran answered. Her eyes looked funny. 'Things bruk down.'
'Ah wonder why?"' Beka asked, bringing the conch and minced habanero peppers to the stove.
Her gran leaned the fork carefully against the frying pan, pushed the window over the back stairs, and propped it open with a long pole. Then she said,
'I don't know why, Beka. But one time, when I was a young girl like you, a circus came to town. I can't remember where it was from, and don't ask me what happened to it afta. The circus had a fluffy polar bear - a ting Belize people never see befo'. It died up at Barracks Gren, Beka. The ice factory broke down the second day the circus was here.'
Beka's Granny Ivy was crying. Her apron tail was over her face, and she said again and again,
'It died, Beka, it died.'
The conch fritters had burned.

Next Book: Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad, from Mexico. In the original Spanish, too! Wish me luck!

Book 24, Guatemala: "Men of Maize" by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Whoa. I wanna write like this.

The dense, fructiform imagery of the prose; the recurrence of folk myths and pre-colonial iconography amidst the master's tongue; the epic consolidation of five hundred years' history into maybe twenty years' narrative time; the seamless blending of realism and magic and poetry.

And all this twenty years before One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Sorry, Gabo keeps creeping into the picture. But that was another continent, and besides, the wench is entering dementia.)

It's shocking that so few people know about Asturias, despite his Nobel Prize, despite his life of political involvement and modernismo and exile in Argentina, despite the fact that his son actually took on the name of Gaspar Ilóm, a character from Men of Maize, and became a pro-indigenous rights freedom fighter against the genocidal government during the civil war.

(I only know about him 'cos I did my Spanish immersion in Quetzaltenango, where one of my short texts was by him: a wonderful little fable about a Jesuit trying to trick a tribe out of human sacrifice by forecasting an eclipse only to end up gutted on the obsidian slab due to the fact that they'd calculated its coming centuries ago, thank you very much.)

This book reads like a post-colonial Ulysses - kudos to the translator, Gerald Martin, who's transliterated onomatopeia and resorted to weird neologisms and had to figure out all these local plant names, amate and atole and ceiba and chayote and chichita and chilacayote and chilate and copal - glossary in the back for the perplexed.

Only difference is, instead of feeling like the guy's being onanistic with the lexicon, you feel that real third-world Marxist sorrow of being removed from your cultural roots and your means of production: he keeps hammering home the same damn eponymous point that in the old days the Indians grew maize as a sacred crop for food, and they grew just what they needed, but turning it into a capitalist plantation crop just destroys the earth and makes everyone poor.

Plus this division of the book into chapters named after people who mystically disappear: Gaspar Ilóm, María Tecún, the Deer of the Seventh Fire (i.e. the curandero) and the Coyote-Postman - yes, nagualism i.e. transformation of men into their spirit animals is a huge theme in this book. From the Indian warrior fighting back the colonial planters to the Ladino postman arguing with the Chinese storekeeper over the shawl of his runaway wife. Each generation loses some connection to the past, as well as some of that thick wonderful poetry that infused the beginning, turning instead to Wild West saloon talk, which is still pretty fascinating, nonetheless.

And yet the Coyote-Postman Señor Nicho falls into the world of magic in the end, meeting the firefly wizards and the curandero who became a deer and Gaspar Ilóm himself while in animal shape/trance, and all the figures from the previous stories reappear in the flesh or in legend, María Tecúm become an etiology for the spirited rock that lures people to plummet over the edge of the mountains, the soldier who sold his soul to the devil now plagued with a hernia, hanging out with Machojón's ever-loyal fiancée who grows old waiting for his return in his reeking sombrero as she sells butchered pigmeat in her hole in the wall.

Amazing stuff. Sad thing is, the copy of this book isn't even on the shelves of the library: you've got to delve into Repository Used Reference and pay a reservation fee to get at it. That ain't right.

(Though it is cool to see the date-due stamp chop paper still on the inside. FTW!)


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Representative quote: Not even the ash of his cigar will fall. Hands of darkness brandishing daggers will force him to suicide. But it will be only his shadow, a skin of shadow among the yuccas. The bullet will burst in his temples, he will fall to the ground, but other dark hands will lift his body, they will mount him on his horse, and will begin to shrink him horse and all until he is the size of a piece of sugar candy. The close-knit throng of yuccas will wave their daggers, daggers stained red with fire right up to their hilts.

Next book: Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb, from Belize.

Book 23, El Salvador: “Salvador” by Joan Didion

I’m feeling guilty for reading yet another book by a canonical American author instead of a local writer. (So many writers in Singapore are beginning to diss this term that I’ve decided to embrace it: it was local literature that accepted me in the first place and I’m not going to shift terms because of some PC agenda to make it sound better for curriculum programmers.)

Truth is, I could’ve borrowed something by salvadoreño novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya: our National Library stocks three books by him and his style reads really well. Reason I didn’t was:

a) Dance With Snakes, the novel I wanted (and the novel that launched him to fame), was checked out by another reader, and when I went the day it was returned the book was still in transit,

b) I was getting tired of novel after novel; we haven’t had a memoir since East Timor, and I don’t want to read I, Rigoberta Menchú for Guatemala when there’s another guy I could read who won his Nobel Prize for Literature, thank you very much, and was actually honest about his work being fiction,

c) I’ve been curious about reading Didion ever since Justin Bond made fun of her in a cabaret show of his I saw in Manhattan. And The Year of Magical Living seems a little trite.


Addendum to (b) is that I really wanted to know what had happened in this damn country for once. Broken by civil war in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and boy, does Didion make it sound like a basket case in her journalistic report (commissioned for Time magazine, I believe). No real heroes of independence, she says, and even the great precolonial civilisations of Mesoamerica and South America only barely touched the tiny country. The traditional way to make wicker, according to an interviewee, is to import it from Guatemala.

But of course, the very point of visiting the country for two weeks during a period of civil war and American-funded dictatorship is that no-one knows what the fuck is going on. All she can do is report the haze of events: the constant killings of young men in the street, the mendaciousness of the ministries, the cluelessness of the embassy, the alienated distance of news agencies, the ever-present atmosphere of danger, the irony that the only earthquake-reinforced building in San Salvador (the American Embassy) was the only one to suffer real damage during the quake, because the others were flimsy enough to ride it and the people were like, well, power’s out again, let’s turn on the generator.

No-one even knew what the population was. When 110% of eligible voters voted in the elections, they just decided to change the record of the number of eligible voters so it became 80% turnout.

Oddly, Didion doesn’t even conjure up rage against the right-wing dictator Roberto D’Aubisson because of the impossibility of gathering concrete evidence (other than widespread assent) that he is behind these killings of families and young men and indigenous villages; doesn’t even get us angry at the Reagan administration’s funding of D’Aubisson as a Cold War tactic because she portrays the US as being actually concerned with stopping the killings, and then being accused of “blackmail” by local politicians when they talk about the possibility of withdrawing it… you read it and you think, oh, it’s all fucked up, no wonder they sent all the other reporters to Beirut and Iran-Iraq instead.

But this sort of southern indifference to preciseness, the very antithesis of the agenda of a norteamericana journalist, and the lack of a real culture replaced by images of American and Mexican pulp - La Bamba in the desolate disco and teenage blonde lovers on the photo albums containing images of the dismembered dead. It’s a real downer. Maybe a little ethnically skewed, too. Really should read Castellanos Moya for his perspective. He speaks about the war’s aftermath.


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Interesting thing, though: Didion also notes that Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch is probably based specifically on Salvadoran dictator General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, that after living in El Salvador she understands that it he is not a magical realist but a social realist, that the history of Latin America is written as a non-rational tragedy because it is tragically non-rational to begin with. But things have changed, right?

Representative Quote: Even la verdad, the truth, was a degenerated hrase in El Salvador: on my first evening in the country I was asked by a Salvadoran woman at an embassy party what I hoped to find out in El Salvador. I said that ideally I hoped to find out la verdad, and she beamed approvingly. Other journalists, she said, did not want la verdad. She called over two friends, who also approved: no one told la verdad. if I wrote la verdad it would be good for El Salvador. I realized thati had stumbled into a code, that these women used la verdad as it was used on the bumper stickers favored that spring and summer by ARENA people. “Journalists, Tell the Truth!” the bumper stickers warned in Spanish, and they meant the truth according to Roberto D’Aubisson.

Next Book: Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Men of Maize, from Guatemala.

Book 22, Honduras: "The Mosquito Coast" by Paul Theroux

I'm losing steam on this project. May have to take a break for a while. Could be this book, though: it's a great novel, but it rankles with me that I've ended up reading not a book about Honduras per se but an analogy for the American entrepreneurial spirit of manifest destiny that just happens to take the form of a mad guy trying to build a utopia in the Honduran jungles.



Chose the book 'cos Paul Theroux's famous - he's also worked at the National University of Singapore, and set one of his novels, Saint Jack, in Singapore, which of course spawned the once-banned Bogdanovich movie of the same name. Plus his son, Louis Theroux, is mega-cute and mega-talented as a documentary journalist. Also because there really didn't seem to be anything written by a Honduran in the National Library.

Three reasons why the book gets me down, really.

1. Allie Fox, the megalomaniac father, is so plainly destructive towards his family with his genius and paranoia that you spend the entire book waiting in dread for everything to go to hell - and he's got a wife and a family of five kids too, transfixed by his charisma while also trying to deal with the fact that he lies about his failures to cover his ass, and these aren't small failures, these are great big destroyed-your-entire-community-with-ammonia-and-hydrogen failures, and the story's narrated from the viewpoint of 12 year-old Charlie as well, so there's all the vulnerabilty of adolescence as well...

2. Allie's language is so compellingly written and so juicy with its insanity that I know I will never be able to write something so good, and it annoys the hell out of me, since I've been trying to improve my prose-writing for the last week and a half on 750words.com. Even the way Emily, the pastor's daughter, speaks with her fixation on pop culture has me floored.

3. And of course, I learn nothing about Honduras except that there are native people in the province of Mosquitía (some are called Twahkas and Zambus) who eat a porridge called wabool, and there are guavas and alligators and missionaries and Communists, and a certain form of Indo-Spanglish that people speak. I know that might seem like a fair bit, but the soul of the place is missing. The book is not about Honduras, dammit.

Damn, I'm starting to give my book reviews in point form. What's up with that?


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Representative quote: But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left), Father said, 'I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn't been here before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese-spread in spray cans and creates of Rice-a-Roni.' He watched a monkey on a branch. 'Hershey bars.' We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. 'Diet Pepsi.' Now he turned to the kinkajous. 'Kool-Aid.' He flicked his cigar butt into the river. 'Makes your mouth water, doesn't it?'

Next book: Another impasse: Joan Didion's non-fiction book Salvador or Horacio Castellano Moyas's novel Dance With Snakes. Both from/about El Salvador.

Book 21, Nicaragua: "Azul" by Rubén Darío

As you can see, I finally managed to get a copy of Azul from Amazon for US$0.99! From the online edition here, the contents seem to be based on the first edition.



Fyi, Darío's known as the great Nicaraguan poet who invented modernismo in the late 19th century, the first literary movement to begin in the Americas and later spread to Europe.

But a couple of surprises:

1. Although Darío's famous as a poet, Azul(his first collection) is actually mostly made up of short stories, descriptive passages. There's a chunk of poems at the end, though.

2. Modernismo isn't actually very modernist. It's excessively flowery and effusive in praise of love and the beauty of young women and nature and jewels, bordering on Aubrey Beardsley-esque decadence. No sex, though. The poems are still pretty structured, too.

3. Hardly any of these pieces take place in Nicaragua. They're set in places with princesses (Italy?) or underground in the gnome kingdom or in Paris or Valparaíso - in fact, all the descriptive passages are about Chile, where Azul was published. The only piece set in Nicaragua is a weird autobiographical-sounding thang called Palomas Blancas y Garrzas Morenas, which is about him falling in love with his cousin while growing up with her and his grandmother, gawking at her 15 year-old body, with hair as blonde as German, no seriously, by the light of the silvered moon, "la luz de una luna argentina, dulce, una bella luna de aquellas del país de Nicaragua."

I'm honestly not that keen on the book. Sure, it's interesting as a cultural artefact, and some of the pieces are pretty cool - there's El Rey Burgués, a sad fable of the bourgeois king who cages the starving poet in his zoo, and La canción de oro, a crazy intense paean about gold and its effects on man. Also the descriptions of the tiger in his poem Estival. But given the difficulty of reading (my book had bizarre spellings: Js instead of Gs and vice versa, &c), I don't think I got a great payoff.

Didn't learn much about Nicaragua, either. There was a casual reference to the swamp crocodiles he encounters after his wedding in Palomas blancas, but this ain't a very nationalistic book. Which is okay, innit?


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Representative quote: Ya tenía quince años y medio Inés. La cabellera, dorada y luminosa al sol, era un tesoro. Blanca y levemente amapolada, su cara era una creación murillesca, si veía de frente. A veces, contemplando su perfil, pensaba en una soberbia medalla siracusana, en un rostro de princesa. El traje, corto antes, había descendido. El seno, firme y esponjado, era un ensueño oculto y supremo; la voz clara y vibrante, las pupilas azules, inefables; la boca llena de fragancia de vida y de color de púrpura. ¡Sana y virginal primavera!

Next book: Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast, from Honduras.

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This blows.

Book 20, Costa Rica: "The Children of Mariplata" by Miguel Benavides

Well well well, another dark horse. On the insistence of my sister, I went for the youth literature by an actual Costa Rican dude: 55 pages of Aesop-esque fables involving princesses, talking tortoises, disobedient youths and talking sturgeons.


And it's good - "deceptively simple", as the back cover states. A whole bunch of the stories are political agitprop: the eponymous story is about decolonisation and dictatorship, via the allegory of a cultural shift among the fish of the Caribbean. A small fish protests to a big fish that he shouldn't eat him 'cos he's his nephew; the idea sticks, and the big fish nearly starves by abstaining from eating small fish, until he learns to fish for humans using sunken treasure, and everyone starts doing it, but the whole practice of storing human flesh in warehouses during the winter causes the manager to become a tyrant, and then all the fish have to lead a bloody socialist revolution against him...

Yeah, it's odd. But fascinating! The stories are short and simple, so there's no time to weary of the preaching. Even the non-political ones are cool: A Story for Esteban is all about a tortoise who breaks his legs and gets bicycle wheels instead, just 'cos the other animals prayed for him! But he abuses his newfound speed and loses respect for others, and pays the price...

The moral's sometimes a little difficult to discern, though: The Twilight Which Has Lost Its Colour is about these starving little boys who steal bread and go gleaning coffee beans, but they get caught and one of them dies and the mother goes mad, and the narrator ends off by saying:

"Now Ismael is twelve and I am thirteen. We left our wretched village and came to live in the town. If anybody wants to help us, they will find us in Culture Square, working as prostitutes."


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Despite all the talk of armed revolution against the kleptocratic elites, it's a little confusing to read online that things are pretty okay in Costa Rica now. Decent human rights, democracy, economy picking up because of eco-tourism (and maybe the hot gay sex scenes being filmed there, who knows?). But then these stories were originally published in newspapers in the late eighties; things were probably rather more fucked then.

Representative quote: Also many fishes in their grief saw how their friend the sturgeon was mortally wounded by a huge swordfish, and they relate his last words:
"One life worth more than individual freedom, but collective freedom is proportionally worth more than one life. Long live freedom!"

Next book: Rubén Darío's Azul, from Nicaragua.

Book 19, Panama: "The Tailor of Panama" by John le Carré

Another winner. It took a while to warm up to this 460-page story, but it’s worth it. Was worried it was a little déclassé – after all, it’s a spy thriller, isn’t it? But the truth is, le Carré writes with real style and real intelligence: I can see the magical realism and stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences of the Latin American boom braided in with the crisp wit of classic British drawing room drama, and a real moral conscience behind everything.


SPOILER ALERT: It’s a tragedy. It starts off as an amusing expatriate narrative, with Harry Pendel the formerly-of-Savile Row tailor designing top-notch suits for the Panamanian elite; then it becomes a thriller when he’s recruited as a spy on the basis of blackmail, revealing his criminal past; then it becomes a comedy of errors when he’s forced to fabricate data to keep his employers happy, and you find out everyone’s ballooning up the data, and something’s gotta break, the truth will out and Pendel’s got to come out on top because he’s so likeable despite his deceptions, he’s just trying to rise above his Jewish working-class origins by creating these constructs that bend reality in his favour to give him that middle-class respectability and income everyone deserves, dammit.

But the truth doesn’t come out. The British embassy’s just too eager to be relevant in the world, so they latch onto the faked evidence and feed it to the United States and war breaks out, with Pendel in the middle of the firebombing watching his world go up in flames and Andrew Osnard, his fat mendacious paymaster, skiing in the Alps. SPOILERS END.


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Don’t worry: the war didn’t actually happen. The book’s written in the lead-up to the American handover of the Canal to the Panamanian government in 1999, on the basis that they would love an excuse to hold on to the power of global trade. Lots of elements are based on the aftermath of the Noriega regime, though. Great characters: former student radicals Marta with her permanently smashed-in face, courtesy of the police and Mickie Abraxas, drunken and crushed from his years of being raped in prison.

But oddly enough, the character I’m most intrigued by is Louisa, Pendel’s Zonian wife (Zonian meaning American born and raised in the Panama Canal Zone), with her schizo personality borne simply of being the less attractive daughter in a religious household in a cloistered Yankee aristocrat community, desperately trying to keep together appearances until everything snaps.

Representative quote: “Naomi, I am pleased to hear you because I have been meaning to write to you and now you have saved me a stamp. Naomi, I want you out of my fucking life. No, no, listen to me Naomi. Naomi, if you happen to be passing through the Vasco de Nuñez de Balboa Park and see my husband lying on his back enjoying oral intercourse with Barnum’s baby elephant, I would be grateful if you would tell your twenty best friends and never tell me. Because I don’t want to hear your fucking voice again till the Canal freezes over. Good night, Naomi.”

Next book: Miguel Benavides’ The Children of Mariplata from Costa Rica. Or Café Tropicana by Belinda Jones. Which one? Young people’s writing by a native guy or exoticised chick lit? Can’t decide.