Books Burn Badly

That is the title of a very odd novel by Spanish author Manuel Rivas. Set in Galicia in 1936, it follows a number of characters whose lives are changed by the emergence of Franco’s fascist government. I say ‘a number’ of characters, because it is virtually impossible to keep track of them all. Once you embrace the fact that you’re never really going to know exactly what is happening to which character, you can sit back and let the various intertwining stories wash over you.

In a small town, down by the quayside, the fascists are burning books. We meet the motley inhabitants of the town - a judge, a gravedigger, a boxer, a painter, a washerwoman – and are whisked away into their memories and stories. (If that sounds a bit contrived, it’s partly because I’m oversimplifying but also partly because it is. But no more so than any other collection of people sharing stories, say, on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, or whatever.)

Throughout the novel books are burned, buried, rescued, bought, sold and stolen. They are treated very interestingly by the author, who clearly regards them as a form of solidified – almost personified - knowledge. Polka, The superstitious gravedigger, remarks that the burning books gave off a smell like burning flesh. The ever-rational judge suggests that this is merely their leather bindings, but Rivas portrays the bonfire and its repercussions vividly in terms of human tragedy. Book burning and physical repression merge as Rivas deliberately conflates knowledge and humanity.

The author’s concern is with words being scattered and destroyed, and this shapes his narrative. It is chaotic, with most characters not being clearly introduced and several of them going by more than one name to add to the confusion. Polka is a standout character because he is witty and entertaining and, crucially, is fully developed by Rivas. Many others are not so well developed, and remain as shadowy names and ideas throughout, which can be frustrating if you let it get to you. Perhaps my expectations are too conventional.

In the way it is constructed, Books Burn Badly seems to have a lot in common with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. They are both books full of surprising and beautiful sentences with some very interesting perspectives on mundane things. But neither of them feels like a novel. I thought that Calvino’s book seemed more like a collection of very short stories or a scrapbook full of ideas, and the same can be said of Books Burn Badly.

This is really a consequence of it lacking a central plot. Rivas has a theme – the impact of fascism – and although this affects various characters in various ways it doesn’t really bind the book together. This can sometimes make reading it a bit of a chore. Whereas Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a playful and thought-provoking 150 pages, Books Burn Badly clocks in at a meaty 550, and suffers as a result.

Rivas creates a bewildering experience for his reader, caught amid the charred fragments of dozens of separate stories. As I said, this can be difficult to follow, with the consequence that this unique book never quite draws you in or delivers all that the author is clearly capable of.

Once More With Feeling

I’ve been sans computer for a week, but on the plus side, I have done a bit of reading. I thought I’d give Italo Calvino another go, since I found another one of his books lying around the house. I wasn’t exactly harsh on him before, but I do think he has a lot of potential. 

 

The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is Calvino’s first novel, written when he was just 22 years old. On this basis at least it is impressive. It follows a young boy, Pin, in rural Italy during the second world war, charting his encounters with various local characters, resistance members and so on. Pin is not quite a child, being somewhat too aware of his older sister’s nocturnal activities, but is certainly not treated like an adult in the tavern where he goes to sing ribald songs for a free glass of wine. As village life becomes ever more disrupted by the war, Pin eventually (and accidentally) joins a rag-tag local resistance movement.

 

The first thing that struck me about this book is the narration. The narrator’s voice is that of an omniscient third person, but Calvino’s interest is necessarily in Pin’s interpretation of the world. I think this can sometimes seem awkward, because Pin’s childlike thoughts and actions are told with the voice and conviction of a much older narrator. I’m sure this can be interpreted as the author’s failure to fully align his narrator with his protagonist. I also wonder how much this curious voice is a product of the novel having been translated. Finally, I wonder whether Calvino is being subtle, and creating this confusion of childlike thought and adult expression in order to convey Pin’s limbo-like adolescence.

 

This difference between Pin and his narrator is exacerbated towards the end of the novel. There is an interlude in which the narrator focuses on the thoughts of an officer of the resistance, named Kim. Kim analyses the war and the men under his command in a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue reminiscent of Robert Jordan’s meanderings in For Whom the Bell Tolls. This is where it becomes apparent that Calvino’s young protagonist does not allow the author space to express his feelings about the complex subject matter. Kim’s interlude is slightly clumsy, and it feels odd to have intimate contact with the thoughts of a character only briefly introduced late in the novel. But in his role as Calvino’s mouthpiece, he expresses some interesting thoughts about why the men around him fight as they do.

 

This isn’t really a problem with the book, it’s just something I noticed. I do take the view that Calvino deliberately makes the narrator’s voice ambiguous to emphasise the ambiguity in the character of Pin himself. As with Calvino’s much later work, Invisible Cities, this novel is impeccably written. It has well-drawn characters and some very haunting turns of phrase. But I still haven’t quite made up my mind about Calvino, and I might have to read another one of his books.

Ubiquitous Cities

I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino a little while ago because I heard a few of my friends discussing it. Here are my thoughts.

The book is a fictional account of the travels of Marco Polo, as related by the traveller himself to Kublai Khan. His descriptions of various cities are interspersed with a dialogue with the Khan, in which it gradually becomes clear to the reader that all the cities described are really facets of a single city, Venice. I feel no compunction in spoiling this for you, because Vintage Classics, in their infinite wisdom, spoilt it for me by putting that morsel of information on the back cover.

Invisible Cities almost seems like a rough draft or a scrapbook full of ideas. Each city is unique, whether this is because of its unlikely location, bizarre architecture, or the characters and actions of its inhabitants. In one city, the citizens trail threads between themselves and all of their acquaintances, with different colours of thread symbolising different relationships; familial ties, business dealings, romantic entanglements. Finally, when there are so many threads that normal life becomes impossible, the inhabitants will abandon the city and move somewhere else, leaving their deserted, spider-webbed homes to be gradually destroyed by the elements. In another city, the residents build an exact replica of their metropolis underground in order to house the dead and make the transition from life to death less jarring. Or was it the dead who built the upper city?

Each city is a puzzling vignette, a glimpse of a different society and an entirely different way of going about one’s life. Many of them are very beautiful and thought provoking.

For me, it is precisely this that makes Invisible Cities so unsatisfying. Calvino dangles an idea in front of your eyes, and then whisks it away. Each city is given just a page or so. I’m sure the idea is to tantalise, but I found that the arrangement of the novel into single-page chapters was clunky and awkward, and many of the cities read like frustratingly abortive potential places. Somehow, they do not quite exist. Many of them cry out to be entire novels, beautiful and paradoxical ideas for societies that could be almost infinitely expanded. Why not do what Borges does, and take a philosophical trinket and stretch it to its logical conclusion? There are so many worlds that could be spun out from this book, but perhaps the elegance of these cities and ideas would be lost if they were used in this way. Their brevity and ambiguity certainly grants them a spell-like fascination.

My view of Invisible Cities is partly coloured by The Book of Dave, which I’ve nearly finished reading. Will Self calls London ‘the once and future city,’ and toys with the same kind of timelessness which Calvino does. London and Venice are both magical in the way they stretch away before and behind us, but I personally find the depth and saturation of Self’s 500-page vision of a city more enchanting than Calvino’s brief work.

This may be a little unfair though, since I’ve never been to Venice.