Good evening!
As mentioned last week, this is a little late because I’ve been on holiday. I came back this morning from beautiful Mallorca and I feel ready to take everything on again.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 - but I would rather you donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians in light of the ongoing emergency in Gaza.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
A week of interesting reads, for varying reasons. The first novel I read was My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, translated by Katherine Silver (2003), which I absolutely loved. I know that it will stay with me for a long time, and I’d like to do something more longform with it I think. It is about a drag queen living in Pinochet’s Chile in the late ‘80s, who falls in love with a young revolutionary called Carlo. She allows him to store boxes of ‘books’ in her newly acquired house, which she decorates so that they become her furniture. She is known as the Queen of the Corner, because she has taken on a long-abandoned house sitting at the corner of a street in Santiago, transforming it into a home where revolutionaries, students and local children are free to use as a haven and a safe hiding place. She is referred to as ‘the Queen’ in the novel, which also refers to her being a drag queen, but I do wonder if she would be spoken of as a trans woman if this were written at another time, or even in another place, because it was dangerous enough being a gay man in Chile during this period. In either case, she refers to herself in the feminine, and it is only people who do not quite ‘get’ her (or are outwardly contemptuous of her) that refer to her in the masculine.
This is a relatively slim novel, and yet it is incredibly rich in detail and events. It captured beautifully the feelings of political tension during this era in Chile’s past through overtly political discussions and events, as well as in the everyday -- not just the Queen’s everyday, but the community that she lives in. I particularly loved how she is a seamstress, taking on commissions of detailed embroidery for rich women. The Queen starts to slowly connect her work, which she sees as an income that saves her from having to go back to sex work, to her own economic situation, and her own radicalisation becomes a direct focus of the narrative. It is shrouded in her love for Carlos, but it ultimately becomes its own thing that she can only be fond of and proud of because it has come from a place of love.
The novel also has sections from Pinochet’s point of view, which I didn’t initially think would work, but was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong about. I don’t usually like reimaginings of real people and their viewpoints, but Lemebel does it extremely well, weaving in the events happening in the Queen’s life to create a cohesive image of a Chile in turmoil. It is also a brilliant ode to Marxism and community-building, especially in a lovely scene in which the Queen replicates a Cuban practice of communal birthday parties.
The next novel I read, largely while I was on holiday, was Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies (2021), which I was not sold on. This had such an interesting premise; a woman moves from New York after the death of her father to The Hague, to work as a translator at the International Court. She becomes involved with a man called Adriaan who is separated from his extremely glamorous wife, and makes friends with the director of an art gallery, Jana. A man is mugged in Jana’s neighbourhood and the interpreter becomes fascinated with the crime, alongside her anxieties about Adriaan and her increasingly difficult work at the Court.
Ultimately, this did not deliver on its intriguing premise at all -- if it had, it would have needed to have been at least twice as long, and much more developed. I think Kitamura simply tried to fit too much in; in 225 pages, she goes over the trauma that Court workers are susceptible to as they work on human rights cases, institutional racism in the Courts, violence and its link to poverty, jealousy in both new relationships and new friendships, childhoods spent in transit, and loneliness. All of these relate back to the central, titular theme of intimacy but it did often feel like an essay in which the student is shoehorning in every conceivable way they can answer the question they are responding to. For all of the things that are covered, it needed to be much longer, or one of the strands of the narratives needed to be cut out. It simply wasn’t a feasibly effective reading experience -- especially because Kitamura has a distracting habit with punctuation. As an example: ‘It must have been like that for Adriaan, she left in such a horrible way, she went away to Lisbon for the weekend and never came back.’ These run-on sentences happen all the time -- in fact I literally just opened the book at a random page and picked out a sentence -- which do not read well to me. Sometimes, a full stop -- or even a semi-colon or dash -- is fine.
I am now reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), which I absolutely love. Roth is the opposite of a ‘sentence criminal’ (a term I have ‘borrowed’ from Julia), in that every word in every sentence is crafted but not over-laboured. So far it is incredibly compelling and I’m sailing through it.
Books on my radar
Because I can’t do anything normally, I have taken out and bought some books on Chile and Pinochet after reading My Tender Matador. I have Neruda’s Residence on Earth, translated by Donald D. Walsh (1933) as I’ve never read a whole collection of his, as well as Andy Beckett’s Pinochet in Piccadilly (2002), which is about the dictator’s arrest in London, and what led to that moment. Today I bought Hugh O’Shaunessy’s Pinochet: The Politics of Torture (2000) from Oxfam, which looks good.